Crate Digging: April 2026

5 Cool Stuffs to Watch, Play, Read or Think About

📺 Rules Challenge
I can’t sit through an hour-long explainer video prior to learning a board game. I have to knock around the rulebook with the thing out on the table and course-correct with FAQs and BoardGameGeek. But Rules Challenge showed me a step in my learning process that I never knew I needed — getting a well-shot quiz on a bunch of situations from a game after I’ve gained an experiential frame of reference. I strained mightily in my first few solo attempts at SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. With two games under my belt, I stumbled across this gent’s SETI quiz and watched every minute. Massively valuable for me. In the last year, he’s also done Pax Pamir, Maria, Hegemony, Molly House, Dune: War for Arrakis, Unconscious Mind, Maracaibo, Arcs, and Ark Nova. Take a spin through one of these excellent videos, you might be surprised at how many finer points you’ve actually retained. My hands-down favorite small-channel tabletop find of the year.

📺 DJ Mark 7” Throwdown Vol. 1 (Breakbeats)
This is so fucking beautiful. And a nice “rules quiz” of your own if you think you know your classic soul/funk/jazz hip hop breaks. If you like watching a guy mix really well — and love tracing samples, like I do — this is one of your better music watches. Outstanding set, DJ Mark N, sir. This is edifying and it bangs.

📕 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
This forwarded along from Breakup Gaming Society friend and contributor Fritz Godard: A reprint of a 1968 novel about a guy called “…Henry Waugh, an accountant who spends his nights running a solitary baseball league of his own invention. He conjures his Universal Baseball Association with dice, elaborate scorecards, and meticulous record books — but most of all imagination. Henry’s is a coherent, vibrant world, a closed system with its own history, genealogy, politics, and language,” writes Edwin Turner of Biblioklept. As somebody who has built imaginary campaigns and worlds of his own — and who honors the impulse in others — this looks fascinating.

📕 Burning the Days by James Salter
I first read this book at 29 and the simple — but not simplistic — bent of Salter’s lambent prose tricked me into thinking that I could write sentences of that strength about myself someday. Revisiting it at 56, I realize I never did and never will. Still I wanted to bathe again in the adventure of his life and the tender, controlled reed sound of this guy’s technique. And speaking of invented games, I stumbled across this passage from his prep school days, which I’d forgotten ‘til now:

"I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and a substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described."

🎲 Noisy Andrew’s Fantasy Flight Silver Series Games Collection
MY GAWD WOULD YA LOOKIT ALL THOSE FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES SILVER TITLES. Among his many interests, Noisy Andrew — Breakup Gaming Society’s Resident Boardgaming Big Bro — made a point of snagging every Silver Series box he could across the years. You’re looking at Magdar, Citadels, Delta V, Scarab Lords, Minotaur Lords, Drakon, Orcz, Atlanticon, Quicksand, King’s Gate, Kingdoms, Inkognito, Cave Troll, Maginor and Arena Maximus. Recently Noisy hopped on the mic with me to capsulize all of them, but we were having latency issues and we’ll prolly have to retake it. I only played one thing in this pic — Citadels — and I think we got some decent audio on that, which will be added and written up in Breakup Gaming Society’s living post on Fantasy Flight Games’ golden age, which also includes supplemental interviews with board game writer Matt Thrower and Shelf Stable cohost Kenny Katayama.

This project is burgeoning past my understanding.

He’s played ‘em all, people: Noisy and his vintage Fantasy Flight Silver Series stacks

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Have a rare and beautiful music or games recco? Hit me up.