The Second Verdict, Part Two
The pencil, as promised, was not yet blunt.
The Keeper has spent this cycle back at the ledger, and reports a complication. Last time the work was straightforward crossing-out: a verdict recorded, a verdict overturned, the number amended and initialled. Honest, if a little theatrical. What has surfaced since is quieter and harder to file. These entries are not reversals. Nobody has changed their mind. What has changed is the margin — that thin column beside the judgement where everything too awkward for a single word has been waiting its turn.
There is a page here on five games the archivist genuinely dislikes, and beside each one, in a smaller hand, the thing about it he cannot help admiring. There is a page on five games nobody noticed, annotated in every case not with bad but with badly presented — a cover too cheerful, a table too grey, a rulebook that lost the argument before the game was allowed to make it. And there is a page where the amendment has been written by the reader rather than the author: five games that only became good once someone at the table took a pen to them, which raises a question about who exactly is being judged that the Keeper would rather not put in writing.
Two longer entries close the wing. A card game shelved by an entire hobby on the week it arrived, now cleared out at a price that invites a second look — its notorious rulebook is not a wall, the Keeper is assured, merely a staircase with the handrail missing. And a twenty-year companion re-argued from the foundations, with the concession, offered without the least embarrassment, that its finest parts were made by strangers on the internet and given away for nothing.
Ten exhibits below, arranged as they happened. The ledger closes on this wing tonight, and the pencil goes back in the drawer, where it can be heard, faintly, sharpening itself.
Exhibit Catalogue — second thoughts, earliest first:
- Revisiting Hand of Fate: Ordeals - A Game that Should have been a Massive Hit — Ian O’Toole’s tarot-relic art, and both the publisher and the studio now gone.
- Revisiting Bloodborne: The Board Game - This Hunter’s Dream is a frustrating one — a four-card house rule tried, the frustration undimmed, the collection listed for sale.
- Some Things I Like about 5 Games I Don’t Like — the only board game he has ever rage-quit, sold at the shop that same afternoon.
- Apocrypha: The Adventure Card Game - is it time for a reevaluation? — memorise the glossary, ignore the tutorial deck, and let the thing haunt you afterwards.
- Top 5 Games that Deserved More Attention — Myth, described as the best game he wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy.
- Top 5 games made better with house rules — Talisman movement dealt from a hand of cards, and never a die again.
- Revisiting Prophecy - A game I like more with each passing year — he forgets the fan-made event decks mid-demonstration, then rewinds the video to make amends.
- Quest for the Lost Pixel - A Top 10 Reevaluation — a NetHack loop in a print-on-demand box, with a legacy system he built himself.
- DungeonQuest (FFG and GW) - Top 10 Reevaluation — 1985 against 2014, and an apology for three fan decks that promptly vanished.
- Fallen Land 2nd Edition - Top 10 Revisit - Why is it Great? — a wasteland sandbox that plays solo, co-op and competitive without favouring any of them.
796 transcripts • 875 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that the margin is where an archive keeps everything it was too certain to say in the entry, and advises visitors to read sideways.