I write about the books and board games I finish, long after the initial hype has worn off, in whatever order I actually get around to them.https://grahamkeller.com/en-UShttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/rereading-light-and-changing-my-mind/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/rereading-light-and-changing-my-mind/I gave this book four stars the first time through and meant it as a compliment with reservations. Reading it again this year, the reservations mostly disappeared and I'm not totally sure why.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/nemesis/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/nemesis/Everyone's got a hidden objective, nobody trusts the person walking next to them through the vents, and there's something loose on the ship that can hear you.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTNemesisGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/too-like-the-lightning/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/too-like-the-lightning/A 25th-century mystery narrated in 18th-century Enlightenment prose by a convicted criminal, and I still don't fully know what to make of it.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTToo Like the LightningGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/inis/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/inis/An area-control game about Celtic clans fighting over an island, and the art is carrying half the reason I keep bringing it back to the table.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTInisGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/light/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/light/Three timelines, a serial killer with a physics degree, and a cosmic singularity that doesn't care about your plot expectations. Light took me two tries to finish and I'm still not sure I understood all of it.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTLightGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition/Once a year I clear an entire Saturday, invite six people over, and we play diplomacy, bribery, and interstellar war until somebody's empire collapses.Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTTwilight Imperium (Fourth Edition)Graham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/dwellings-of-eldervale/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/dwellings-of-eldervale/Worker placement, area control, and a dice-chucking combat brawl all stacked on top of each other, and it somehow doesn't collapse under its own ambition.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTDwellings of EldervaleGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-piano-nobody-wanted-to-throw-out/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-piano-nobody-wanted-to-throw-out/A house call for a piano that was, by any reasonable measure, not worth fixing. I fixed it anyway.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/starfish/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/starfish/Peter Watts sends a crew of psychologically damaged people three kilometers down to run a geothermal plant on the ocean floor, and it goes exactly as well as that sounds.Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTStarfishGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/godel-escher-bach/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/godel-escher-bach/A 750-page book about a mathematician, an artist, and a composer that's actually about consciousness, and I took most of a summer to get through it.Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTGödel, Escher, BachGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/cloudspire/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/cloudspire/Somebody called this the essence of a MOBA in a box, and once I understood the terminology, that's exactly what it plays like, towers, spawn waves, and all.Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTCloudspireGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-foray-into-the-worlds-of-animals-and-humans/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-foray-into-the-worlds-of-animals-and-humans/A 1934 biology essay about how a tick experiences the world differently than you do, and somehow it ended up quietly reshaping twentieth-century philosophy.Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTA Foray into the Worlds of Animals and HumansGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/gloomhaven/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/gloomhaven/A box the size of a small suitcase, a card-based combat system that ditches dice entirely, and a campaign that ate about four months of my Tuesday nights.Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTGloomhavenGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/lotr-duel-for-middle-earth/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/lotr-duel-for-middle-earth/Let's not dance around it, this is a 7 Wonders Duel reskin. The question isn't whether it's derivative, it's whether the theme they bolted on actually earns its place.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earthGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/what-my-reading-log-actually-looks-like/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/what-my-reading-log-actually-looks-like/It's a plain notebook, not an app, and half the entries are just a title, a date, and one word.Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/dune-imperium/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/dune-imperium/Deck building and worker placement stitched together shouldn't work this cleanly, but every card you draft here actually changes where you can place a worker next turn.Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTDune: ImperiumGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/race-for-the-galaxy/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/race-for-the-galaxy/A card game with almost no words on the cards, all icons, and either that clicks for your table or it becomes the thing nobody wants to relearn every time it comes out.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTRace for the GalaxyGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-friend-who-hated-the-game-i-wouldnt-shut-up-about/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-friend-who-hated-the-game-i-wouldnt-shut-up-about/I pushed Race for the Galaxy on a friend for two years before he finally tried it. He does not see what I see, and I've had to sit with that.Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-river-doesnt-care-what-season-it-is/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-river-doesnt-care-what-season-it-is/I've lived near the Ohio River my whole time in Cincinnati and I still stop and look at it more than someone who's been here this long probably should.Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/invisible-cities/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/invisible-cities/Marco Polo describes fifty-five imagined cities to Kublai Khan and none of them are real places, and somehow that's the whole point.Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTInvisible CitiesGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/ficciones/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/ficciones/Seventeen short stories that each pretend to be something else entirely, an encyclopedia entry, a footnote, a book review, and every single one is lying to you on purpose.Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTFiccionesGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-saturday-with-nothing-scheduled/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-saturday-with-nothing-scheduled/No house calls, no game night, nobody expecting anything from me. I didn't know what to do with myself for the first hour.Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/summoner-wars/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/summoner-wars/A quick card-and-dice skirmish game between factions trying to destroy each other's summoner, and the dice are doing more of the deciding than I'd like.Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTSummoner WarsGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-paradise-built-in-hell/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/a-paradise-built-in-hell/Solnit's thesis is that disasters bring out the best in ordinary people and the worst in the officials meant to protect them, and once you notice the pattern you can't stop seeing it.Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTA Paradise Built in HellGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/The book that gave us the phrase paradigm shift, and reading it straight through made me realize almost nobody who says that phrase has actually read this.Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/ventus/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/ventus/A thousand years after nanotech terraformed it, the planet Ventus doesn't let its people touch technology, and the reason why is the whole book.Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTVentusGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/on-owning-more-kickstarter-games-than-i-should/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/on-owning-more-kickstarter-games-than-i-should/I counted the shrink-wrapped boxes on the bottom shelf the other night. It was worse than I expected.Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/teaching-dale-twilight-imperium-was-a-mistake/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/teaching-dale-twilight-imperium-was-a-mistake/My neighbor asked to sit in on my one big game of the year. Eight hours later I understood why nobody teaches this game to a total beginner on the day of.Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-piano-bench-and-the-board-game-table/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/the-piano-bench-and-the-board-game-table/Fourteen years of listening for a string a fraction of a turn off apparently rewires something, because now I can't sit down to a game without noticing the print register is crooked.Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Kellerhttps://grahamkeller.com/articles/why-i-wont-play-games-solo/https://grahamkeller.com/articles/why-i-wont-play-games-solo/Every box I own advertises a solo mode these days, automated bots, AI decks, the works. I still can't make myself sit down and play against cardboard.Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayGraham Keller