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.

Crate Digging: February 2026 (YouTube Music Edition)

6 YouTube Music Videos I Watch Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over

Dave Lombardo -- War Ensemble -- Yankee Stadium

“There’s no joy here,” Augustus Crimes said during one of our drunken phone calls when I asked him to check out the video. He was right in a way he didn’t know: Lombardo left Slayer because he was turning in shifts like this with constant touring and not even breaking $100K/year. But still, what power and efficiency. Talk about setting up your workspace for optimized thrash. I love watching how the arrangement of his kit enables his technique, no motion wasted for those fills and rolls. Hell of a shift, even if it was exploitation.

Mountain - Don't Look Around (1971)
You’re missing out on what music is if you haven’t lost a night in Beat-Club’s feed. It looks like this German music show started out as a goof-ass lip sync thing, but became a font of incredible live studio sets by the late ‘60s. I think stumbling around Thee Oh Sees’ work at random over the course of the 2020s primed the ear tissue I needed to revisit heavy acid/blues rock minus my usual prejudices. My personal highlight: Right around the bridge when the camera pans left and you can see bassist Felix Pappalardi’s authoritative, lightning fretwork and how he’s working inside drummer Corky Laing’s Operation Barbarossa-level assault on those skins.

Giant Steps Coltrane Solo on Banjo
I still remember the night around 1999, coming home sweaty, drunk and stoned from the club with Rachel; we were just going to pass out, but I threw on Coltrane’s Giant Steps with only the slatted light from the street in the room, gaping at the speaker with my head at the foot of the bed, unable to turn away. I’m still learning about what those giant steps were composed of and why they were giant. Seeing others return to it — a kid with a banjo whose peers are coughing irradiated blue Taks on their phone screens in time with the algo — is a nourishing morsel on a night of compulsive Tubing, when you’re running out the clock before bed, looking for nothing, and then something finds you.

Cherry Wainer & Don Storer - Peter Gun (1966)
Beat-Club again, this time found through Dust to Digital’s supreme curation. The immediacy of this, Wainer mugging eccentrically in that trim dress with white piping as she and Storer unlock the power of this spy chestnut. You’ll crave Hammond organ tones for a month after this. It might be a detour into a whole new analog second life or give weight to the suspicion that you were born in the wrong time.

The Pirates "Lonesome Train" 1977
I’ll trade you all the phones-up arena shows in the world for this night at Dingwalls in 1977. The Pirates, after innumerable lineup changes and mutations since Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ 1960s smash “Shakin’ All Over,” sweating like pigs with legend Mick Green hammering the holy piss out of his guitar, absolutely owning their lane in a punk-crazy London.

The Cramps - Tear It Up (Live - Urgh! A Music War) 1980
Over the years I backed into an appetite for what this band did, roistering in that locus of rockabilly power and the panting sex- and death-drive of the genre with transgressive theatrics. Lead creature Lux Interior is a natural for this exercise and I never get tired of when the camera moves between his obscene cavorting and Poison Ivy chewing her gum and looking bored as hell. This expertly cleaned-up VHS footage told me in one document why I’d been quietly loving this band more and more over the 2000s.

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Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.

You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.