books – Obsolete Gamer

Writing What You Want to Read

The Dark Jessings details the plight of two teenage brothers, Eric and Kevin Jessing, and the unexpected way they discover that they have no souls. They go on to find that they can also control ghosts because of it. “It was a concept that began as a simple story of demonic possession like (Stephen King’s) The Shining,” he says. “It was the dad who became the victim. But then I thought what if it were the boys that got into trouble? And what if they had powers that enabled them to control dark forces and still be nice guys?”

Game Reviews

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Blood Bowl

What impressed me the most, was that the author actually managed to create a Blood Bowl setting, that -despite its contradictory self- fits nicely in the Old World’s … er … world. For example: having an undead team fighting the Chaos All-Stars on imperial soil under the watchful eye of a Skaven bookie, just doesn’t sound as implausible as it should. Quite an accomplishment that. And the characters seemed like normal people too, devoid of most heroic-fantasy cliches and definitely sporting quite a few dimensions more than Dan Brown’s abominations.

Game Reviews

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Little Wars

Playing with toy soldiers in a modern context, on the other hand, is -as expected- a rather more recent development, and as such a more cruel one too. The whole thing, you see, didn’t start as playing per se, but more of as a way to train Prussian military officers in the subtleties (?) of war (Kriegspiel they called it, and it used dice to simulate random battlefield events). The concept didn’t actually evolve into something less blood thirsty till H.G. Wells decided that a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books would be a nifty idea.