Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🎬 "Wasting my time in the waiting line..." The mid 90s to the mid 00s saw a huge boom in indie auteur filmmaking. Movies like Clerks , The Mariachi , and Sex, Lies, and Videotape  introduced the world to a host of new directorial voices with signature styles thanks to the growing ease of DIY filmmaking. Over the last few weeks, we've rewatched two films from that era that both take place in New Jersey, so it's time to revive an old label: "My Misspent Youth in Films" Garden State Directed by: Zach Braff Starring: Zach Braff, Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman Released: August 20, 2004 A quietly troubled young man returns home for his mother's funeral after being estranged from his family for a decade. What I Thought Then That guy from Scrubs  made a movie that turned out to be the voice of a generation. It was edgy, it was funny, it had an amazing soundtrack and some fantastically quotable lines. My 24-year-old cinephile ass ate it up! What I Think Now We...

💍 "I told you he was tricksy..." Asmodee and Office Dog are in the process of releasing a complete trilogy of trick-taking games based on the book  The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien. The first installment,  The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game , was released early this year to much acclaim, and a sequel based on The Two Towers  is scheduled to release in January—although there will be pre-launch release events this month—and you can bet your sweet bippy that I will be acquiring a copy as soon as possible. I adore the first game, and not just because it combines one of my favorite gameplay mechanics with one of my favorite IPs. It is, in fact, an excellent adaptation of the source material as well as being a very refined and inventive game engine that is heavily thematic. And if there's one thing that I love as much as trick-taking games and The Lord of the Rings , it's thematic storytelling! In fact, I would go so far as to say that this specific game...

🗺️ I Can See For Miles and Miles... A message from an entity known as "The Traveler" has lured you to an uncharted planet. While orbiting, your spaceship suddenly malfunctions. The crew jump into their individual escape pods and are sent scattering down to the corners of the planet's surface. While you're unlikely to find each other, you have radio contact and can share information and skills in order to help each other out. Gather items, vehicles, quests, and what-have-you in order to complete your mission and/or fulfill your destiny. Vantage  is a cooperative exploration game for 1-6 players from Stonemeier, creators of Wingspan  and Scythe . It just released and I happened to get a copy very quickly after orders went live, so while many people are waiting on theirs, I've managed to get a few plays in, and I wanted to share my thoughts. I want to be clear that this is not  a review. I've played it twice at two players and only feel like I've scratched t...

⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I... [SPOILER ALERT] Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts*  at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great ( Eternals ) and occasionally quite bad ( Secret Invasion ). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts*  is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks. Thunderbolts*  is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we? One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalize...

🤓 Players Gonna Play, Play, Play, Play, Play... This last weekend was another annual installment of Geekway to the West, the convention where I spend four days playing board games. The draw every year is the Play-and-Win contest, in which you play games from a library of over a hundred recently published games (multiple copies of each, so it netted out to roughly 800 games in all). Every play gives you a chance to win one of those copies. Here's what I played! Tower Up Started strong out of the gate. This was easily my favorite of the con. It's a light, puzzly eurogame that plays fast, scales cleanly, has a great tactile component, and looks gorgeous on the table. You can either gather pieces or start a new tower. When you start a tower, you must also build on anything that's adjacent to it as well. You then put a roof on one of the towers you built. Playing a roof does not keep others from playing over it, though. Once someone plays their last roof, the game ends. Score p...