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.