Playing Scrabble for keeps

So I've been hooked on Word Play, the Scrabble-based roguelite.

I play some video games here and there, and when I find one I really enjoy, I try to squeeze out all of its challenge juice (technical term). That usually means at least getting all the achievements.

As a result, when it comes to Word Play I have been putting far too many hours into beating Ultramarathon mode specifically: 20 rounds at the most difficult scoring.

Here's how I finally beat it.

(Roguelite players will be completely unsurprised to hear that this did not involve me being particularly good at Scrabble.)

 

Cracking open this game like an egg

It's all about synergies, of course, which means you need luck plus strategy. This run had the 'more rare and legendary modifiers' modifier, and I just doubled down on the first synergy I saw, which revolved around Upgrades.

My engine is made of modifiers:

➡️ I get a random common Upgrade when I play a word with 8+ tiles.

➡️ Each Upgrade gets +1 use.

➡️ +1 bonus point each time an Upgrade is used.

➡️ I gain a refresh when an Upgrade is used up completely. (This was switched out near the end of the run)

So if I play exclusively long words, I get a bunch of Upgrades, and I get more bonus points on every subsequent word. I also get refreshes (to help me get long words), but I don't use them, because so many of the common Upgrades let you refresh selectively. I quickly build up 40 refreshes and a hundred bonus points per play.

Not crucial to the engine, but I also get a modifier for x2 score with 3+ unplayed special tiles. All the Upgrades are turning my entire bag into a mess of special tiles, so this doubles all my scores without effort.

Finally, I get my first potion tile, an 'M' worth 3 points. Potion tiles give you plays equal to their score, but break, when played. I hoarded this until I lucked out and got my final modifier: if you play a four tile word, add a copy of the first tile to the letter bag.

So now, with my huge numbers of refreshes, I can in principle just refresh until I get my potion M, play it at the start of a four letter word, and have it break but add a copy to the tile bag, for a net +2 plays. This is huge when you start the run with 20 plays and only get a few more per round. So: rinse and repeat, interspersing with long words (to get more Upgrades (to get more refreshes)).

In practise, though, that's slow and unreliable. I didn't end up spending many refreshes getting the potion M out there. Instead, I was careful to have an Upgrade slot open at the end of each round, and at about round 12 I got exactly what I was hoping for: the uncommon Upgrade which adds your refresh count to a tile's score.

You can see where this is going. I used it on my potion M three times, discovering in the process that a tile's score maxes out at 99. Now I gain 99 plays each time I put the potion M at the start of a four-letter word. Over the course of a round I gain more plays than I will ever need.

That's why the little number in the bottom right of the screenshot says "1538", not the "15" or so that you would normally expect.

 

Descent into absurdism

At this point the run is essentially won, so I rejoice, but it will clearly be a slog. Even with most of my tiles turned emerald or golden with the bounty of Upgrades, I only get something like 800 points per play with a long word, so I'm going to need to play 100 good words in the final couple of rounds.

Aware of this, I have been burning my essentially-limitless plays rerolling modifiers, and it pays off at the end of round 17. I get the 'multiply final score by number of special tiles' modifier, one of a couple that would reliably boost my scores even further.

So I wave goodbye to 'gain a refresh when an Upgrade is used up', you made all this possible. Now if I spell a word like LAVENDERS, it scores 5936 points. I can and do cruise to the finish in a handful of plays per round.

And that is how I got the hardest achievement in this damn spelling game.

 

Your mileage may vary

None of this strategy is reliably reproducible, of course, due to randomness. But I think it's interesting that it worked, because it was the first Upgrades-based build which I had tried. Part of that is luck in the early rounds, naturally.

Builds that I tried and failed with, for the record:

➡️ All gold tiles

➡️ Fast-growing diamond tiles

➡️ All the emerald synergies

➡️ Double length points, board expanders, and lots of plus tiles

➡️ Dozens of attempts that never got the smallest synergy.

 

So that's most of the challenge juice squeezed out of Word Play! I recommend this game if you're a Scrabblehead. It's on Steam.

—

Update a few days later: I translated my run into "whoops, all wildcards". 300+ tiles of golden and dotted 99-point wildcards took me to round 50.

 

I spent scores, maybe hundreds of rerolls trying to get the "dotted tiles multiplier increases with each play" modifier which would have given me desperately-needed multiplier scaling, and which could have taken me even further. I never got it, though, so I called it at round 50, where winning just meant typing "******************" over and over again and waiting for the scoring to finish.

 

Trying not to be a Gell-Mann Amnesiac

I sometimes wonder how much Gell-Mann Amnesia people experience. Paraphrasing Crichton, when you're a domain expert, you'll sometimes read an article that gets every aspect of your field completely and absurdly wrong, have a little laugh about it... then keep on reading and trusting articles that are about other fields, even from the same publication or writer.

As if they're some pure spring of wisdom which only coughed out a lump of mud when it came to the thing you happen to know about.

It's just an idea from a novelist, not the kind of cognitive bias that's supported by real-world studies that I know of, but you have to admit that it has a kind of... truthiness to it.

Stack this up with Dunning-Kruger and it's easy to become cynical. You might decide that actually, all the loudest voices are talking complete nonsense, all of the time. That might be too far. But I do think it pays to put deliberate hard effort into distinguishing domain experts from overconfident bullshitting pundits.

Now, anyone with their ear to the ground and a weather eye out for Gell-Mann Amnesia should have arrived at the obvious conclusion about generative AI. To wit, that the current state of the technology is that it is an overconfident bullshitter.

On being a piece of software and being confidently wrong

The case studies are easy to find, and the ones from domain experts sound pretty different from the ones from the tech industry and the reporters too busy and/or demoralised to do more than repackage their press releases as articles.

➡️ I am not a historian. The historians I've read say genAI gets softball history questions mostly right and deep ones mostly wrong. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. It just makes things up when the evidence is scarce. It makes errors of commission and omission as well as having misplaced focus and drawing weird conclusions from premises.

➡️ I am not an artist. The artists I listen to say genAI art looks bland and awful and organic because it doesn't understand composition or anatomy or separate objects (because it doesn't 'understand' anything). It can't make an image that isn't well-represented in the training data, like a camel and a steampunk automaton jousting from the backs of sumo wrestlers. Same in other kinds of media: filmmakers say genAI can't do film because it can't take direction or keep track of characters or have a consistent shot.

➡️ I am not a Wikipedia editor (except incidentally). Earlier this year there was a wretched moment when the Wikipedia editors were going to have genAI article summaries foisted on them, although I think that's turned around now. The skilled editors pointed out that the LLM summaries generally ranged from 'bad' to 'worthless' by Wiki standards: they didn't meet the tone requirements, left out key details or included incidental ones, injected "information" that wasn't in the article, and so on.

➡️ I am not a manager. The managers say genAI can't even collate timesheets reliably.

➡️ I am not a novelist. The novelists say a genAI book reads like a statistical summary of all creative writing anyone has ever done, including all the embarrassing teenage fanfiction. It sucks at originality. And because it doesn't have an internal model or understanding of its outputs, it can't keep track of things and make a coherent satisfying story. Things are vague, tropey, or contradictory.

➡️ I am not a lawyer. The lawyers are, um, well, by the sound of it a lot of them are being sanctioned for using generative AI to cite completely nonexistent caselaw. (☉__☉”)

➡️ I am not a public policy wonk. The bureaucratic wonks note that genAI can't summarise text. It shortens it and fills in the gaps with median seems-plausible-to-me pablum. The kind you get when you average out everything anyone has ever written on the internet. If you try to have an LLM summarise or draw conclusions from a study, it will usually do a bad job, fabricating statements more along the lines of what an average person would guess if they'd only read the study's title.

➡️ I am not a software engineer. The software engineers seem to have mixed opinions. They say that genAI works as code autocomplete (something that has existed for fifty years, but this new kind has pretty sophisticated lookahead, neat). At least some are saying it can't do principled software engineering, it introduces security flaws, its performance drops off for obscure languages, it overconfidently generates bad code, it plagiarises from code repositories that it doesn't have the rights to...

I could go on.

I'm no longer a domain expert in anything, this many years after my stint in academia. I think I'm halfway to being an expert in a few different areas, though. I deliberately concocted some thoughtful questions at the intersection of those areas, just to see.

For example, I asked about the (obvious) mapping of choose-your-path text adventure books onto mathematical graph structures, which the LLM chatbot identified. I followed up with technical questions about the features of those graphs in context: what would the game be like if they weren't digraphs, would you expect cyclic vs acyclic, would a finite state machine be more appropriate and if so why, etc.

And lo, the generative AI output was absurdly, hopelessly, and confidently wrong when given questions that needed expertise.

A lot of people with a lot of money would like you to think that genAI chatbots are going to fundamentally change the world by being brilliant at everything. From the sidelines, it doesn't feel like that's going to work out.

Sometimes I read posts from experts along the lines of

"I've noticed it's almost worthless at [my field], but it sounds like it's pretty useful for [other thing]."

But less so lately, maybe?

So I'm left wondering: are people experiencing massive Gell-Mann Amnesia about these chatbots? Or does everybody know that the emperor has no clothes?

(But oh no, we've invested so, so, so very much money into the emperor's finery, and all the wealthiest people at the imperial court agree: pleeeease could you keep squinting to see this amazing new clothing?)

 

Reviewn June 2025 part 3: Game books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

Part three: TTRPGs and game content

 

What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).

It's Reviewn June!

 

Tiny Spaceship

An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth 

By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)

A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).

I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0. 

Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.

 

RPG Design Zine 

A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design

By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)

Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.

Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.

The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.

I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.

 

Sinister Hovering Orb

(Sinister Hovering Orb)

By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)

A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).

For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".

There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.

PUBLIC GUEST 5

Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5

By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five) 

A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).

The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)

PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.

Writing With Style

An editor's advice for RPG writers

By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)

A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.

There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.

Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.

Dwarf Mine

A mapping game of adventure 

By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)

Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.

There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
 

The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.

A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:

• I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
• The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways, and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
• Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
• The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room. 

There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.

The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly? 

The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".

The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.

 

GURPS "Discworld Also"

A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG

By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!

Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).

It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed

• A mangled seven-clause sentence
• "almost" should say "always"
• "could" should say "would"
• "fall off" should say "falling off"
• "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
• "They not" should say "They are not"

The alternative troll stats, and the extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').

Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.

The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger and Fourecks get more space here.

• Smarlhanger is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
• Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of armour.)

The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.

'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.

Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl

By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice) 

A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.

A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.

There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.

Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:

• Satellite shamans
• Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
• Robot prosthetics
• Hive drones 
• Sky bandits
• The Spinal War
• Sindovar
• The Maze 
• Josung (game)
• etc 

Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
 

In progress

By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.

I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!

Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.

So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.

Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory

I have an upcoming weird experimental narrative solo game. It's about a harlequin demon, the fantabulous floating factory he runs, and the power of allegory.

You play as 'the good child' on the factory tour, where the other children all have minor foibles which will surely come into play. But what kind of lesson do you learn when you win a rigged game?
 

 

Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory. 

I put together my first prototype as part of the game jam, WTFjam 2025. You can check out the free demo now! https://periapt-games.itch.io/wallace-wunkles-tragedy-factory-demo

Reviewn June 2025 part 2: Fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part two: Fiction 

 

It's Reviewn June! 

In the modern melange of media that blurs the line between traditional and web publishing, it's hard to say what's a 'book'. For the sake of a clean division, I'm looking here at the physical fiction books I read in the first six months of 2025.

...But now that I come to write them up, I find that means very few are left after I take out webfiction, manga, poetry collections on Project Gutenberg, books on archive.org, and ebooks. We're left with:

A bunch of John Allison's superb comic books

Maybe ten or twelve of them: volumes of Solver, Bad Machinery, Steeple, The Great British Bump-off, etc. Most of these I'd read in webcomic form; having them in print is a little luxury and a way to support a great artist. I wish that Conan and the Blood Egg hadn't been taken down since I'd have liked a physical copy of it. I also wish there was a nice, straightforward timeline of all of John Allison's creative outputs; he has a long history of different interlocking series and I have a completionist spirit.

Game-ready ideas: This stuff is just riddled with inspiration for modern settings. There's lots of semi-supernatural stuff going on. Especially check out the mystery-solving comics; you could lift one of the premises wholesale for a game of Kids on Bikes or maybe Fiasco.

Guards! Guards! (1989) and Men At Arms (1993). Terry Pratchett

Discworld re-reads after looking at GURPS Discworld last year, and reading GURPS Discworld Also this year. I've read every book in this series about a dozen times, apart from the last few. Pratchett in his best years remains unparalleled.

Guards! Guards! and Men at arms are comic fantasy detective books that I think anyone who likes even just one of those genres would enjoy.

Aside: I noticed there's a few lines in Guards! Guards! that appear almost verbatim in Shrek (the movie, not the book) in what one must charitably assume is convergent evolution.

Game-ready ideas: It's hard to make a comic fantasy TTRPG. Comedic elements develop in practise, at the table, unless everyone involved makes a dedicated effort to prevent that. Part of Pratchett's comic genius was taking ideas to their humorously logical ends (retrophrenology, the rate of million-to-one chances coming true in genre fiction, animal responses to their own reflections, etc).

I think 'taking ideas to their natural conclusion' always helps with verisimilitude, including in TTRPGs. Suppose X is a fantastic element true of your setting. Then you really ought to take what we know about how worlds / people / processes operate, puzzle out as many consequences that follow from X as possible, then add those to your setting or modify X to remove the ones you dislike. Otherwise some of these will inevitably be explored in play and come up short, revealing the world as shoddy papier-mâché.

Pick of Punch. William Davis (ed). (1975)

Punch had a surprisingly long history. I have a few of the really old compiled volumes, so old that they don't list dates (I'm guessing early 1900s), which I should dive into some time. This particular book is comparatively recent. It suffers from a boatload of unfortunate 'signs of the times' (racism, classism, misogyny...)

Game-ready ideas: Reading this was being immersed in British culture of a specific period; it was not always easy to parse. It's interesting that even things close to you in time (less than a century ago) and culture (English-speaking Commonwealth country) can end up almost incomprehensible; you don't need huge gulfs for a text's meaning to become eroded and for a different culture to seem strange. Corollary: If you pick up a book like this and discard the parodic and inappropriate elements, you'll be left with a mass of very specific setting content and tone you can borrow.

More

There's a few novels on my table that I have no hope of finishing before the end of June. Fingers crossed for getting them over the finish line by Christmas!

I may have to change how I approach reviewing in the long term, if my slow shift towards reading more digitally continues.

That's been especially true of my TTRPG reading, so next time, as I wrap up with part 3 (game books reviews), I'll be looking at digital publications too.

Reviewn June 2025 part 1: Non-fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part one: Non-fiction 

 

I read a medley of materials.

The modern melange of media blurs the line between traditional and web publishing. Most books are available online; many bloggers edit their writing into self-published volumes; plenty of web texts are book-length or longer. News and commentary and user content and blog posts and tutorials and metafiction all start blurring together.

For the sake of a clean division, I'm only going to look at the physical books I read in the first six months of 2025. It's Review[i]n[g] June!

 

I externalise my memory by writing reviews every so often. 

 

Games and decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. R. Duncan Luce & Howard Raiffa (1985)

A game theory textbook.

Do you ever dive into something thinking you'll be able to hack the technical writing because you have semi-relevant education? One of my majors was in formal logic, but I still couldn't really parse large chunks of this book.

Game-ready ideas: Any sufficiently technical work can be a good source of esoteric jargon to cram into a wildly different domain, like wizardry or mythos occultism or sci-fi engineering. By the way, a dryad and their tree are a dyad: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyad

A brief history of mathematical thought. Luke Heaton (2015)

An introduction to maths through a history lens. 

Brilliant, but dense going in parts. The rare book where I wish it had been twice as long so that some of the inferences and arguments could be laid out in more depth.

Game-ready ideas: Everything is weirder than you thought. 'Non-Euclidean' has a specific meaning which is not just synonymous with 'unknowably eldritch'. Geometry was useful to ancient societies for e.g. recalculating field boundaries after seasonal flooding moves markers. Mathematics has historically intersected massively with religion and spirituality.

Paradoxes from A to Z: Second Edition. Michael Clark (2007)

An encyclopedia of paradoxes with a weird design.

The gimmick is that the paradoxes are arranged in alphabetical order; this makes it almost impossible to read. The introductory entry on 'paradox' is under P, more than halfway through. The implication is you should be using this as a reference work, but the audience for that has to be miniscule! Reading it cover to cover, I was told constantly to flip elsewhere to get necessary background information, because of course all the formal approaches to paradoxes are interlinked. There are no page references. 😡

Seriously, why not just present the paradox in a sensible, mostly-chronological order? Introduce concepts as needed and build from there? Luke Heaton's book may have spoiled me.

Aside: It's interesting that many famous paradoxes are either resolved by the things mathematicians do to make mathematics useful (define countable and enumerable infinities, specify axioms of set theory, etc), or become trivial once you understand that human language isn't and can't be some perfect mirror of reality.

Game-ready ideas: I'm not a 'riddles' guy when it comes to puzzles. Don't use paradoxes for that. You could reskin some paradoxes as challenges that academics in a fantasy world are working on. Preference intransitivity might be turned into an interesting game challenge, e.g. some group prefers A > B > C > A under certain circumstances.

Zeus grants stupid wishes. Cory O'Brien (2013)

Myths from various cultural traditions, retold.

Absolutely redolent with early 2000s internet era writing style, down to ending with an insufferable take on science and religion. There's a line break after almost every sentence clause, like a text conversation or a certain type of free verse.

The author admits to having two orthogonal premises, and vacillates between them. Paraphrasing:

1. "Modern retellings of myths are bowdlerised; I will tell you the weird nasty original bits [implied: and lean into the troubling stuff by making unpleasant jokes]"
2. "I will just make stuff up to make myths more exciting"

Can't recommend it. I counted seven jokes that actually got a grin, out of (~20 'funny' lines × 275 pages) maybe 5500 stabs at humour. (Lots of typos, too.)

Game-ready ideas: When a cultural tradition is admired, it can end up reflected through massive gulfs of history into art, scholarship, etc. I also like (a) a more adversarial relationship with one's pantheon; (b) living in a magical gourd; (c) a sun that's capable of making mistakes and suffering retaliation for them.

Battle castles: 500 years of knights and siege warfare. Dan Snow (2012)

The story of a set of specific castles.

This was written in the wake of a TV series, and reads like television travelogue narration. The prose is sort of breathless and sometimes borders on legitimising tyranny (letting all the 'divine right of kings' slash 'conquering warlords should have a monopoly on violence so that they can govern' stuff go unexamined).

A useful primer on castles. The actual history content is decent, e.g., addressing the common misconception that a fight goes until you're dead or the enemy is wiped out. But I noticed a few absolute howlers too, old debunked canards like: "Beer was then a basic necessity of life because, unlike the water supply, it could be trusted not to cause disease."

Game-ready ideas: Castles are a specific response to a specific kind of socio-military-economic situation, and might not plausibly crop up in your fantasy world. If they do, there's enough info here you could just lift out a castle and its context entirely.

How to. Randall Munroe (2019)

Pop science with a twist: silly ideas taken seriously. 

'The xkcd guy' has written some books, and now I think I've read them all. Pretty light reading until the physics gets heavy. Covers how to play tag (against champion sprinters and marathon runners), how to power your house, how to decorate the world's tallest tree, how to land a plane on various surfaces, etc.

Fairly interesting stuff, but not the sort of thing that geared my mind up to go down some research rabbit hole. If I had any criticism, it's that it's a little America-centric.

Game-ready ideas: A lava moat is surprisingly near-feasible in real life, so in fantasy it should be even more of a staple.

 

AI Morality. Edited by David Edmonds (2024)

A modern collection of philosophical essays looking at AI and its implications.

The essays are about AI in the broad sense, not just 'generative AI' or 'LLMs', as people are increasingly misapplying the term (which is bewildering to me, like if some specific advancement in orthopedy for hockey injuries led to an explosion in popularity and people just started using the umbrella term 'medical care' to mean 'orthopedy for hockey injuries').

The book's anchors – philosophy, computer science, and writing – are at the intersection of my university study and brief academic career. I picked up a few places where a writer just obviously didn't know what they were talking about, but those were few and far between, so it didn't sap my respect for established academics too much. The book covers a lot of interesting topics, but I found myself skimming a lot due to the curse of existing familiarity with them.

Game ready-ideas: Nothing specific, but lots of inspiration for near-future science fiction. The ethics of insurance denial, cyberattacks, and Asimov's Laws. The chapters on faceless algorithms might be good for Cyberpunk / Shadowrun.

Tune in for Reviewn June parts 2 (fiction I've read) and 3 (game books I've read).