Board game and book reviews plus personal notes from Gavin Pierce, written after every game gets played to an ending and every book gets read to its last page.https://gavinshelf.com/en-UShttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/summoner-wars/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/summoner-wars/Chess crossed with Magic the Gathering, in a box way bigger than a two-player duel game has any business being, and a real sink for anyone who starts buying faction decks.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/why-i-wont-play-a-campaign-alone/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/why-i-wont-play-a-campaign-alone/Solo modes are everywhere now and I own a few. What I won't do is run an actual multi-session legacy campaign by myself, and I've finally worked out why that specific line matters to me.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/diaspora/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/diaspora/Greg Egan writes hard sci-fi like a QA engineer testing the outer limits of what physics allows, and this is the book where that instinct finally outruns the story underneath it.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-handmaids-tale/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-handmaids-tale/Margaret Atwood builds a dystopia entirely out of things that have actually happened somewhere, which is exactly why it's still the scariest book on my shelf.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/elder-scrolls-betrayal/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/elder-scrolls-betrayal/Chip Theory Games takes the Too Many Bones formula, opens the combat map up into hexes, and builds the best boardgame-as-RPG-replacement I've found, for a genuinely serious price.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/gloomhaven-buttons-and-bugs/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/gloomhaven-buttons-and-bugs/A genuinely tiny Gloomhaven that fits in a jacket pocket, small enough that the components fight you and the online-only rulebook fights you right back.Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-glass-bead-game/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-glass-bead-game/Hermann Hesse imagines a secular monastic order built entirely around a game that synthesizes all of human knowledge, and never quite tells you what the game actually is.Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/nemesis/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/nemesis/A semi-cooperative alien horror survival game where the tension comes from not knowing who's actually trying to help you, undercut only by how little a player can directly do about that.Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-plague/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/the-plague/Camus quarantines an entire city and studies how ordinary people actually behave under a slow, faceless disaster, deliberately flat where you'd expect drama.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/teaching-ruth-a-game-she-immediately-tried-to-redesign/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/teaching-ruth-a-game-she-immediately-tried-to-redesign/Ruth has mentored me at the firm for seven years, which apparently qualifies her to critique a board game's floor plan before she's finished her first turn.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/devons-desk-and-mine/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/devons-desk-and-mine/Seven years of sitting next to the same coworker turns into a specific kind of friendship, most of it conducted in the fifteen minutes between when the last drawing gets submitted and when we actually leave the office.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/heat-pedal-to-the-metal/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/heat-pedal-to-the-metal/A hand-management racing game that gets compared to Flamme Rouge constantly, and mostly earns the comparison, plus a tournament mode that's basically two games in one box.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/cthulhu-death-may-die/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/cthulhu-death-may-die/A cooperative dungeon crawler with genuinely great miniatures and a Cthulhu theme that's mostly cosmetic, tiles that get cramped fast once the monsters start piling up.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-duplex-doesnt-care-about-my-deadlines/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-duplex-doesnt-care-about-my-deadlines/I bought half of an old duplex specifically because it needed work, which sounded like a reasonable plan right up until the actual work started arriving on its own schedule instead of mine.Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/neuromancer/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/neuromancer/William Gibson invents the word cyberspace and then refuses to explain a single piece of jargon, and somehow the confusion is part of why it works.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/cyclades/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/cyclades/An auction and area control game about currying favor with Greek gods, good enough that the box's sheer size is the main thing standing between it and a permanent shelf spot.Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/clank/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/clank/A deck-building dungeon crawl with a push-your-luck noise bag underneath it, fun and tense right up until you notice how little the other players at the table are actually doing to you.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/dune/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/dune/A desert planet, a spice economy, and a kid turning into something like a god, still the book every other political sci fi epic gets measured against.Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/malazan-book-of-the-fallen/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/malazan-book-of-the-fallen/Steven Erikson drops you into Gardens of the Moon with zero exposition and ninety-plus named characters, and whether that reads as thrilling or exhausting seems to depend entirely on the reader.Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/what-madison-does-to-a-roof-in-february/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/what-madison-does-to-a-roof-in-february/Nothing about the games or the books this week, just an ice dam, a leak I found at 11pm, and everything I know about roofs that I wish I didn't have to actually use on my own house.Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/gormenghast/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/gormenghast/Mervyn Peake's sprawling gothic castle novel, gorgeous sentence by sentence and genuinely slow chapter by chapter, a book you experience more than you read.Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/a-wrinkle-in-time/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/a-wrinkle-in-time/A kids' book about tesseracts, three strange old women, and a math genius named Meg, still charming as an adult reread even when the religious framing gets heavy handed.Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-redline-i-did-on-my-own-rulebook/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-redline-i-did-on-my-own-rulebook/A rules argument at game night got bad enough that I did the only thing I know how to do when two people disagree about how a document should be read: I marked it up like a construction set.Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-rating-i-walked-back/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-rating-i-walked-back/I gave a game five stars the week I first played it and quietly changed my own mind a year later, which felt worse than just being wrong the first time.Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-notebook-has-graph-paper-because-i-do/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/the-notebook-has-graph-paper-because-i-do/Every game and book I finish gets logged in the same kind of notebook I use for site sketches, and I've never actually questioned why until someone asked me to explain it out loud.Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/android-netrunner/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/android-netrunner/A cyberpunk hacker-versus-megacorp card game with genuinely asymmetric sides, undercut a little by jargon that exists mostly to justify a thin theme.Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/why-i-do-the-math-before-i-buy-anything/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/why-i-do-the-math-before-i-buy-anything/Somewhere along the way, price-per-play stopped being a joke I made about my own spending habits and became an actual filter I run every purchase through, and I've traced it back to one very specific client meeting.Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/poetics-of-relation/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/poetics-of-relation/Édouard Glissant's dense, poetic theory of identity and relation, a book I picked up expecting a slog and finished underlining half the pages.Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/essays/naomis-books-always-arrive-unannounced/https://gavinshelf.com/essays/naomis-books-always-arrive-unannounced/My sister mails me books she thinks I'll like without ever asking first, and my track record of actually loving her picks has gotten uncomfortably high given how little say I get in the matter.Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalGavin Piercehttps://gavinshelf.com/reviews/marvel-champions/https://gavinshelf.com/reviews/marvel-champions/The best solo card game on my shelf right now, built for one hero at a time against a villain, and a genuine money sink the second you start chasing every expansion.Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesGavin Pierce