About Gavin Pierce

I'm an architect at a small firm in Madison, Wisconsin, mostly additions and renovations, the kind of work where you spend a lot of time thinking in square footage and load paths before anything gets built. That habit doesn't turn off when I get home. Every review here is at least a little bit me redlining the thing itself: where does the box footprint actually earn its shelf space, does the structure hold up once you've read past the introduction, does the math on the price tag actually pencil out against the hours it gives back. I read and play everything to the end before I rate it, no partial credit for a good first act.

I've been an architect for about seven years now, small residential and light commercial work, mostly additions and renovations rather than anything built from bare ground. The honest version of the job is a lot of measuring, checking whether a plan actually works once you account for every real constraint, and that instinct follows me home more than I'd like to admit. I got into games later than most people I play with, mid-twenties, after a job site walkthrough got rained out and I killed the afternoon in a game shop two doors down instead of driving back to the office. It stuck fast. My coworker Devon sits at the next desk over and is my usual weekday opponent, and Ruth, the senior architect who's mentored me since I started, joins when she feels like arguing about a rules interaction, which is often. My sister Naomi mails me books she thinks I'll like without asking first, which is how a fair number of these reviews got their start. I rent half of an older duplex here in Madison that I'm slowly fixing up myself on weekends, which means I always have an opinion about how something is actually built, whether it's a house or a game box. Everything on this site got finished before it got rated. No review copies, no sponsorships, just what I bought and actually played or read to the end.