Ross McKinley reviews science fiction and literary novels alongside the board games in his regular rotation, and writes the occasional personal essay about reading and gaming life -- no review copies, no sponsorships, just what he actually read and played.https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/en-UShttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/reading-the-seams/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/reading-the-seams/A year of reading translated fiction for this site turned into an accidental habit of reading two translations of the same book side by side, hunting for the places where the seams show.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/guards-of-atlantis-ii/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/guards-of-atlantis-ii/A board game genuinely trying to translate MOBA design, lanes, leveling, champion builds, into cardboard, and the five-card hand system it lands on is the cleanest solution to that problem I've seen tried.Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuards of Atlantis IIRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are/Frans de Waal spends less time proving animals are smart than dismantling the rigged tests we built to make sure they'd fail, and the chapter on an elephant recognizing itself in a mirror sized for elephants is the one I keep bringing up unprompted.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTAre We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals AreRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/three-body-problem/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/three-body-problem/A first-contact novel that spends its opening third in the Cultural Revolution before it ever gets to the stars, and Ken Liu's translation is doing at least half the work of making that structure hold together.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Three-Body ProblemRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/we/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/we/The dystopia that Orwell and Rand both quietly owe a debt to, told through a mathematician's disintegrating diary entries, and it holds up better as a document of a specific 1921 anxiety than as a novel of character.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTWeRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/spirit-island/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/spirit-island/A colonization narrative inverted, where you play the land itself pushing invaders out rather than settlers pushing in, and the asymmetric spirit powers are deep enough that we're still finding new combinations after two years of Tuesdays.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTSpirit IslandRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/left-hand-of-darkness/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/left-hand-of-darkness/A first-contact novel where the alien world's political geography ends up mattering as much as its ambisexual biology, and the ice-trek that closes the book is still the best sustained piece of writing Le Guin ever did.Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Left Hand of DarknessRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/what-the-estate-sale-left-behind/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/what-the-estate-sale-left-behind/Cataloging a stranger's entire personal library after his family asked us to make an offer on all of it, and what it means to spend three days learning the shape of someone's mind after they're already gone.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-ledger-in-the-back-room/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-ledger-in-the-back-room/A donation box turned up a bound ledger of another shop's decades-old inventory records, and cataloging it taught me more about this trade's actual history than anything I learned in a classroom.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-man-who-kept-buying-the-same-book/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-man-who-kept-buying-the-same-book/A regular customer bought the same paperback four times in two years, and it took me most of that time, and one honest conversation at the counter, to understand why.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/ark-nova/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/ark-nova/A zoo-building engine with more interlocking systems than I expected to enjoy, and a card database dense enough that I ended up cataloging it the same way I'd catalog a reference collection at the shop.Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTArk NovaRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/at-home-in-the-universe/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/at-home-in-the-universe/Stuart Kauffman argues that natural selection isn't the only source of biological order, that self-organization does real work too, and the book is at its best when it stays close to that claim and gets shakier the further it reaches toward a general theory of everything.Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt Home in the UniverseRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/index-glossary-appendix/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/index-glossary-appendix/Why a board game's back-of-book apparatus tells me almost as much about the designer's respect for the player as a scholarly edition's footnotes tell me about an editor's respect for the reader.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/lotr-fate-of-the-fellowship/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/lotr-fate-of-the-fellowship/A Pandemic-system reskin that earns its license by actually understanding the geography and pacing of the source material, and it's become our group's answer for a night when someone needs to leave early.Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Lord of the Rings: Fate of the FellowshipRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/earthborne-rangers/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/earthborne-rangers/A living-card-game engine repurposed away from combat and toward exploration, foraging, and building relationships with a place across a campaign, and the seasonal calendar mechanic is the most quietly ambitious thing I've seen a card game try recently.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTEarthborne RangersRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-plague/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-plague/Camus tells a story about a quarantined city through a narrator who withholds his own identity for four hundred pages, and the choice to write plague-time heroism as unglamorous, repetitive administrative labor is the whole argument of the book.Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe PlagueRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/mechs-vs-minions/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/mechs-vs-minions/A programming co-op with the kind of component production I usually only see in books I'm appraising for auction, and the rulebook, unusually for this genre, has a real index.Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTMechs vs. MinionsRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/invisible-cities/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/invisible-cities/Fifty-five imagined cities, none of them real, all of them describing the same city, told across a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and it's the book I most often put in a stranger's hands without knowing whether they'll love it or bounce off it entirely.Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTInvisible CitiesRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/rent-went-up-again-on-westminster-street/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/rent-went-up-again-on-westminster-street/A third rent notice in six years, a coffee shop two doors down that didn't survive the second one, and some honest math about what keeps a used bookstore in business in a neighborhood that keeps getting more expensive.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/gloomhaven-buttons-and-bugs/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/gloomhaven-buttons-and-bugs/A solo-only spinoff that strips the Gloomhaven system down to something you can play on a slow shift, and it's a genuinely different, smaller-scale game rather than a lesser version of the original.Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTGloomhaven: Buttons & BugsRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/dune-gf9/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/dune-gf9/A forty-year-old design reprinted almost untouched, and it's a genuine testament to how far ahead of its time the original negotiation-and-betrayal structure was, treachery cards and all.Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTDune (GF9)Ross McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-tuesday-table/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-tuesday-table/Nine years of the same rough group on the same rough night, and how a folding table borrowed from the shop's storage room turned into the most reliable fixture in my calendar.Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/other-peoples-marginalia/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/other-peoples-marginalia/What twelve years of pricing used books teaches you about the strangers who owned them first, told through three sets of handwriting I've never been able to sell alongside the rest of the shelf price.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/vast-the-crystal-caverns/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/vast-the-crystal-caverns/Five players, five completely different rulesets, one shared board, and a rulebook that has to be read almost like five separate short stories set in the same building.Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTVast: The Crystal CavernsRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/teaching-dana-the-hex-grid/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/teaching-dana-the-hex-grid/Frosthaven showed up on a Tuesday and it took three hours just to get through setup and the first scenario's rules, and somewhere in hour two I understood something about why I actually like teaching this stuff.Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/frosthaven/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/frosthaven/The sequel that adds a town-building layer on top of an already dense tactical combat system, and the rulebook now genuinely needs the reference tabs and index it ships with, because you will use them constantly.Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTFrosthavenRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-overstory/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/the-overstory/Nine strangers, a continent's worth of trees, and a structure that asks two hundred pages of patience before it starts paying interest, which is exactly the kind of patience Powers is arguing trees themselves require of anyone paying attention.Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTThe OverstoryRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/malazan-book-of-the-fallen/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/malazan-book-of-the-fallen/Ten volumes, a decade of my own reading life spread across them, and a series that refuses to explain itself until it's earned the explanation, which is either the most respectful thing epic fantasy has done for its readers or the most exhausting, depending on the week you ask me.Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTMalazan Book of the FallenRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/poetics-of-relation/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/poetics-of-relation/A slim, difficult, genuinely strange work of theory built out of the Caribbean's history of forced movement, and Betsy Wing's translation makes no attempt to soften Glissant's insistence on opacity as a right rather than an obstacle.Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPoetics of RelationRoss McKinleyhttps://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/two-years-in-one-advisor-gone/https://rossmckinley-net.pages.dev/articles/two-years-in-one-advisor-gone/How a program committee's silence after my advisor left for another university turned into twelve years cataloging other people's libraries, and why I still don't think of it as the plan falling apart.Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayRoss McKinley