Long-haul travel produces a specific kind of dead time that a phone screen does not always fill well — turbulence makes scrolling tedious, battery life is finite, and a shared activity beats parallel scrolling when you are traveling with someone else. Card games solve this better than almost anything else: no batteries, no setup beyond … Read more
Building a gaming PC on a budget in 2026 costs more than it did even a year ago, and it is worth saying that plainly before getting into specific parts. RAM prices have roughly doubled since late 2025 due to an AI-driven DRAM shortage, and GPU prices remain above MSRP across most of the market. … Read more
Daggerheart, the original tabletop RPG from Critical Role’s publishing arm Darrington Press, released on May 20, 2025 and immediately sold out worldwide. Business Insider reported the launch sold out in under a week, with the company’s chief operating officer noting that a year’s expected supply lasted just two weeks. More than a year later, the … Read more
The standard couples gaming problem is well known among people who actually try it: one partner already plays games, the other does not, and most “co-op” games turn out to require one player to carry most of the difficulty while the other watches, frustrated, until the controller quietly goes back in the drawer. Genuinely cooperative … Read more
Xbox has had a turbulent twelve months. Phil Spencer, who led Microsoft Gaming since 2014 and defined Xbox’s strategy through two console generations, the Activision Blizzard acquisition, and the pivot to Game Pass, retired as Microsoft Gaming CEO in February 2026. Xbox president Sarah Bond stepped down alongside him. Their replacement, Asha Sharma, came not … Read more
Wingspan came out in 2019. It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres — the German award for complex hobby games — that year, sold 200,000 copies within twelve months, and spent the next several years being the game people pointed to when they wanted to explain what modern board gaming actually looks like to someone who … Read more
What to Buy First, How the Competitive Scene Works, and What It Actually Costs Pokémon TCG is the best-selling trading card game in the world. It has been for years, and in 2026 it is not close. As of Q1 2026, Pokémon TCG is the undisputed volume leader globally, ahead of Magic: The Gathering and … Read more
Minecraft came out in 2011. It is 2026. The game has over 212 million monthly active players and has sold more than 350 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling video game in history. Monthly active players peaked at 222.5 million in June 2025, driven partly by the release of A Minecraft Movie — the … Read more
Sandfall Interactive is a French studio that had never released a game before April 24, 2025. Their internal target for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was a Metacritic score around 80. They would have been happy with that, they said. The game ended up at 92 on Metacritic with a user score of 9.5 across over … Read more
The Nintendo Switch 2 launched on June 5, 2025. Nearly a year on, the sales picture is clear: this is the fastest-selling Nintendo hardware in history and one of the strongest console launches on record by any metric. The more interesting question — whether the library and platform have delivered on the hardware’s promise — … Read more