Games. Gamers. Gaming.

This is the personal blog of Brent Celmins. All opinions are mine.

COIN 101: Making Competent Decisions in Fire in the Lake

With 10 published titles and at least five more in the queue for publication, GMT’s decade-old CounterInsurgency (COIN) series is among the most popular the publisher has on offer. There is even a new spin-off series coming this year: the Irregular Conflict Series (ICS) that borrows a lot of ideas from Volko Runke’s incredibly influential…
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Why I Am Not A Game Reviewer

When I was 19 years old, I was offered the position as the full-time film critic at The Arizona Republic. I was a sophomore film student at the University of Southern California and a prolific writer of movie reviews on a Dot Com Boom-era website called Epinions, which served as kind of a proto-Yelp for…
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Continuing the Discussion: A Point-by-Point Response to a Reader Comment

I received a comment on my first post today that I’d like to respond to, and rather than reply to the comment, I’m going to post here because I’d like to bring the discussion above the fold, so to speak. I’ve broken the comment into pieces to make the response a bit more conversational in…
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Why I Need to Expand My Gaming Circle

The people in my regular gaming circle are generally good people. That’s important to say, because I don’t want anyone interpreting what follows as a slight on any single person’s character or integrity. Just because you and I have different gaming preferences says nothing about how I feel about you as a person. However, among…
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