Celebrities, TikTok, and a Cat Bot Are Crashing Chess.com
Trending in 2023 is one of the world’s oldest games played on a 17-year-old website: Chess.com. The site, which lets people take lessons, solve puzzles, and match up against computers…
Gabrielle Zevin Believes Games Show People Who They Really Are
That was the thing I wanted to explore with Solution. Also just thinking: What could an enterprising undergraduate in 1995 make? What’s the other aspect of that game? The tech…
Let This Free App Explain How to Play a New Board Game (So You Don’t Have To)
Photo: Mike_O (Shutterstock) Learning or teaching a new board game can be equal parts challenging and maddening. Either you’re the one trying to explain the rules to an apathetic crowd,…
Tabletop Game Companies Are Rushing to Snatch Up Hollywood Names
WIRED sat down with Nepitello and Härenstam to discuss the challenges, surprises, and behind-the-scenes hustles to acquire intellectual property during this whirlwind of development. From Magpie Games’s Avatar game to…
What to Play When You’re Not Playing ‘Wordle’
So, you succumbed to Wordle. The deceptively simple five-letter online word game, which went from a one-person passion project with no players in October to a full-blown web and social-media…
This AI Resurrects Ancient Board Games—and Lets You Play Them
In 1901, on an excavation trip to Crete, British archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed items he believed belonged to a royal game dating back millennia: a board fashioned out of ivory,…
Live Dungeons & Dragons Shows Are Inviting More Players to the Table
Whether in a classroom, a friend-filled apartment, or a neighborhood game shop, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) bring gamers together to create adventure-filled worlds and characters to explore them. Ruled by…
Vintage Board Games Are Getting a Modern Revival
There is a feeling, among millennials, that the tabletop scene was in the stone age until 1996. That’s the year that Settlers of Catan made landfall in the United States,…
Teeny-Tiny Talking Mice Have Taken Over Games
The episodic TTRPG show Dimension 20 also kicked off in 2018, and though Mulligan had the idea for a murder-mystery animalian campaign from the beginning, it took until 2021 to…
Remember When Multiplayer Gaming Needed Envelopes and Stamps?
Landes began making computer games in 1980, but when missed release dates killed the company he launched his own PBM brand in 1984. Based in Oregon, his creations included Swords…