Crate Digging: July 2027
The best “Ring of Fire” cover maybe ever, an inviting Discord for tabletop designers, and more. This is what I’m into for July.
6 Things I’m Watching, Playing, Reading or Thinking About
🎵 “Ring of Fire,” Wall of Voodoo
Sitting on the same set where they shot the video for “Mexican Radio,” Wall of Voodoo keeps the stage and covers Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” A haunting interpretation, with its precise application of synth, percussion, guitar, and lead man Stan Ridgway’s cerebral playfulness. One-hit wonder? Not in my house. 1982’s Call of the West was a masterpiece.
🎲 Nate Tyler’s Family Board Game Vignettes
Hey, remember Lunch Money? How about GolfMania? Dad, copywriter, and Midwestern expat Nate Tyler narrates a four-generation family game table epic. The section where his Dad invents a baseball league manager game they can play together because young Nate had cabin fever got me right between the eyes. Hire this guy if you can.
📕 The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy didn’t have the best chance with eighth-grade me; I’d just finished The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Earthsea’s more contemplative approach to the fantasy epic suffered in LotR’s shadow. Now I revisit it in my 50s, grateful for a chance to break the wrestling matches with litfic, sink into a yarn, enjoy the beauty and generosity of Le Guin’s approach. I didn’t realize what Sparrowhawk was trying to teach me the first time.
🎲 Cardboard Commons
Graphic artist, web developer and small game designer/publisher Jason Katzwinkel (The Seahorse and The Hummingbird) runs a supportive and well-tended gathering place where first-time and published designers alike provide support, feedback and bonhomie for every stage of the game design process. As Katz himself says, “Feel free to come have a look, see if you vibe. We'd love to see your games!” Here’s your Discord invite.
🎲 Master of Coin from Postmark Games
Time’s almost up if you want to back the Postmark posse’s latest print-and-play. This time it’s money: Flipping coins has a bearing on which action spaces you can use to build out your own fantasy kingdom. Heads or tails will constrain your infrastructure, research, and military choices. Like everything they do, it looks tight as hell. Postmark’s 52 Realms Adventures was my buddy’s solo gateway drug. True story.
🎲 The Indefatigable Dave Roy’s Favorite of 2026 (So Far)
Dave Roy over at Dude! Take Your Turn continues to rack up an unbelievably diverse diet of play as he cuts grooves in the Canadian con circuit. Out of everything he’s tried this year, I wanted to know which one would he’d replay first IRL. It’s Speakeasy. Why? In his words: “Speakeasy is such an immersive game for theme with intricate (yet simple) mechanics that give you so many choices and yet you always feel like you just need one more action than you have to do what you want to do.”
Have a rare and beautiful recco? Hit me up.
Crate Digging: June 2026
The best music curation blog you’ve never read and the heavy metal Carcassonne tee you never knew you needed.
5 Things I’m Watching, Playing, Reading or Thinking About
✍ Hobby Games Recce
Peter Schweighofer’s Hobby Games Recce is the latest addition to the vivarium of RSS feeds I keep as a second, slower, better internet. I like peering into the vivarium and seeing Schweighofer’s work there, earnest and professorial, as indispensable as lichen on a rock, patiently spreading and enriching the landscape as this father, history buff, and lover of games diligently blogs his world.
🎵 Five Random Songs
I got to know game designer Josh Buergel first as a fellow listener. I recognized in him the valiant directive of listening broadly and keenly in service of not only the recorded work, but the act of tending to supple memory and rangy curiosity. I was gladdened to see that in April, he refitted his Five Random Songs project to include not only his usual razor-sharp capsule writeups on things that surface in his playlist, but album and new release spotlights.
🎲 The Boardgames Chronicle’s Kingdom of Heaven Session Report
Now this is what I’m talking about: A session report that carefully places you in the setting, the strategic parameters, and a carefully rendered blow-by-blow of how player decisions created the story inside the pressurized guardrails of that scenario. You can scour it or breeze it and still come away with a vivid image of this game and the rush of its decision points. I love this shit.
✍ The Public Domain Review
Give me an 1,100-page tome about history and I’ll find a way not to read it. Feed me an era by zooming into art and words that come into the public domain every year, and you’ve got my favorite vocabulary, art, lit, and historical primer, all bound up in scholarly writing and gobsmacking peeps into the past’s feverish currents. This newsletter is the titan of my inbox. Be careful. You will lose an otherwise productive morning or two when this hits.
🎲 Daniel Solis’ T-Shirt Shop
There’s no shortage of clever, graphically adroit T-shirts out there that riff on tabletop themes. Solis stands out for the breadth and quality of his designs — including a recent entry that reimagines Carcassonne as a metal band album cover. You will likely find something on his page that will have you seriously weighing the tradeoff between, say, having your next meal or wearing one of these joints.