May 5, 2011: The Best Sort Of Review

I love reviews written by people who write for a living (or at least a major hobby). They raise points from a perspective of someone who looks at a metric ton of games, and if they've been reviewing for a while, you can get an easy idea of how their tastes match up with yours by reading their archive.

But my favorite kind of review isn't technically a review at all -- it's the spontaneous recommendation from one gamer to the next. Case in point: A thread on the Penny Arcade forums is titled "PAX Line games." If you've attended PAX, you know that everyone spends time waiting in a line. Bringing a game to pass the time and meet new people is the Right Thing To Do. As you may imagine, fast-playing games like Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice are perfectly suited for this situation. Here are some quotes from that thread:

"If you want a quick game for playing in lines that's fun as hell, never gets boring and portable and easy to learn, I can't stress [Zombie Dice] enough."

"I had Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice on me as well, since they are quick and fun games."

"[Zombie Dice] was what I saw most of at last PAX Prime."

"Some variant of Fluxx, Zombie Dice, Cthulhu Dice and Uno will probably be my go-to's for Prime."

These recommendations are pure heart-warming gold. To every one of these posters -- and to anyone who has recommended our games to their friends -- we say "Thank you!"

-- Paul Chapman

(Full disclosure: I added the bold italic formatting to the game names in the quotes. It just looked  . . . wrong otherwise.)