One board game and one book at a time, reviewed by a solitaire-blog obsessive who reads the way she plays: alone, slowly, and taking notes.https://paigescollection.com/en-UShttps://paigescollection.com/articles/savannah-in-august-is-not-a-metaphor/https://paigescollection.com/articles/savannah-in-august-is-not-a-metaphor/The humidity here does something to your relationship with the outdoors that nobody warns you about before you move. This is not a review of anything. It's just weather.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/inis/https://paigescollection.com/articles/inis/Celtic myth, card drafting, and area control combined into a game where the mid-game genuinely refuses to let anyone run away with it.Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTInisPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/the-game-i-evangelized-that-nobody-else-liked/https://paigescollection.com/articles/the-game-i-evangelized-that-nobody-else-liked/I pushed a game on my group for months before anyone else got a turn to actually try it, and when they finally did, the reaction was not what I'd built up in my head.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/alphabetizing-the-shelf-and-giving-up-by-box-height/https://paigescollection.com/articles/alphabetizing-the-shelf-and-giving-up-by-box-height/Every few months I attempt to reorganize my game shelf by a real system, and every time, somewhere around letter G, I quietly abandon the plan and just sort by how tall the boxes are.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/cascadia/https://paigescollection.com/articles/cascadia/A laid back habitat tile-layer with just enough crunch in the animal scoring to keep it from going soft, and a solo mode that's just the base rules with nothing extra bolted on.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTCascadiaPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/what-cataloging-donated-photographs-taught-me-about-house-rules/https://paigescollection.com/articles/what-cataloging-donated-photographs-taught-me-about-house-rules/A rules argument at game night reminded me of something I already knew from work: provenance matters more than most people think, and 'the way we've always done it' isn't actually a source.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/mistborn/https://paigescollection.com/articles/mistborn/A thief with unusual talents, a god-emperor who's actually beatable, and a magic system that behaves like it has a rulebook instead of vibes. I read this slower than I meant to, on purpose.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTMistborn: The Final EmpirePaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/why-i-actually-look-forward-to-playing-the-solo-mode/https://paigescollection.com/articles/why-i-actually-look-forward-to-playing-the-solo-mode/People act like solo mode is a consolation prize for when you can't get a group together. For me it's not a fallback. Some weeks it's the whole point.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/andromedas-edge/https://paigescollection.com/articles/andromedas-edge/Worker placement, card play, and battling stacked on top of each other in a sci-fi reskin of Dwellings of Eldervale that mostly earns the extra weight.Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTAndromeda's EdgePaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/neuromancer/https://paigescollection.com/articles/neuromancer/The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel, and I still don't know what half of this book means, and I still think about it more than books I understood completely.Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTNeuromancerPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/faraway/https://paigescollection.com/articles/faraway/A tiny tableau builder where you lay cards left to right but score them right to left, and figuring out why that matters is most of the fun.Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTFarawayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/heat-pedal-to-the-metal/https://paigescollection.com/articles/heat-pedal-to-the-metal/Deck construction that actually simulates cornering and overheating, and a solo mode good enough that I've raced myself more than I've raced other people.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTHeat: Pedal to the MetalPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/annihilation-of-caste/https://paigescollection.com/articles/annihilation-of-caste/A speech written for a 1936 conference that got canceled the moment the organizers actually read it. Reading it now feels less like history and more like an argument still in progress.Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnnihilation of CastePaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/why-i-still-buy-physical-books-i-dont-have-room-for/https://paigescollection.com/articles/why-i-still-buy-physical-books-i-dont-have-room-for/An ereader would solve my actual, documented storage problem. I'm not getting one, and I've stopped pretending it's a rational decision.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/arcs/https://paigescollection.com/articles/arcs/Cole Wehrle's space opera about improvising with the hand you're dealt, and being fine with the fact that it's rarely the hand you wanted.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTArcsPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/android-netrunner/https://paigescollection.com/articles/android-netrunner/One player builds a corporation full of secrets. The other player breaks in. Fantasy Flight killed the license years ago and the hobby is still not over it.Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTAndroid: NetrunnerPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/sky-team/https://paigescollection.com/articles/sky-team/You and one other person are landing a plane. You can't talk about your dice. That restriction is the whole design, and it works more than it doesn't.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTSky TeamPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/being-you/https://paigescollection.com/articles/being-you/Anil Seth's argument that what you experience as reality is your brain's best guess, constantly revised, and that this doesn't make it less real, just differently real.Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBeing You: A New Science of ConsciousnessPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/the-giver/https://paigescollection.com/articles/the-giver/I read this as an assigned book and thought it was fine. I reread it as an adult on purpose and it wrecked me in a completely different way.Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe GiverPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/war-and-peace-and-war/https://paigescollection.com/articles/war-and-peace-and-war/Peter Turchin goes looking for laws of history the way a physicist looks for laws of motion. I went in skeptical of the whole premise and came out mostly persuaded.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTWar and Peace and WarPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/the-reading-log-and-what-it-actually-tracks/https://paigescollection.com/articles/the-reading-log-and-what-it-actually-tracks/I've kept the same kind of notebook for years, and looking back through it recently I realized it isn't really a record of books. It's a record of everything else going on when I read them.Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/https://paigescollection.com/articles/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/Everyone tells you it's nothing like Blade Runner going in. Nobody tells you the empathy box is the part that actually stays with you.Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Paige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/rising-sun/https://paigescollection.com/articles/rising-sun/An area control game about feudal Japan where the Autumn round's negotiations are the entire game, and betraying an ally is not just allowed, it's how you win.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTRising SunPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/brass-birmingham/https://paigescollection.com/articles/brass-birmingham/An economic engine game where every plan you make gets ruined by someone else's turn, and somehow that's the entire appeal.Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBrass: BirminghamPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/when-a-regular-leaves-the-table/https://paigescollection.com/articles/when-a-regular-leaves-the-table/Our five-person Thursday group lost a member to a job relocation this spring, and it took me longer than I expected to admit how much that changed things.Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/the-word-for-world-is-forest/https://paigescollection.com/articles/the-word-for-world-is-forest/A slim, angry, beautiful little novella about a colonized forest world, published in 1976, that a certain blue-alien movie owes a lot more to than it ever admitted.Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTThe Word for World is ForestPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/the-insert-i-built-for-a-game-that-doesnt-need-one/https://paigescollection.com/articles/the-insert-i-built-for-a-game-that-doesnt-need-one/I spent a Tuesday night making archival-grade component storage for a card game with fourteen pieces, because apparently that's just who I am now.Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/teaching-a-new-player-and-watching-it-go-sideways/https://paigescollection.com/articles/teaching-a-new-player-and-watching-it-go-sideways/Marisol brought her sister to game night for the first time and I picked the exact wrong game to prove how welcoming this hobby actually is.Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/use-of-weapons/https://paigescollection.com/articles/use-of-weapons/Two timelines, one going forward and one going backward, converging on a twist involving a chair that I genuinely did not see coming, even braced for it.Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTUse of WeaponsPaige Ellisonhttps://paigescollection.com/articles/weapons-of-math-destruction/https://paigescollection.com/articles/weapons-of-math-destruction/Credit scores, teacher-evaluation algorithms, recidivism models, college rankings. O'Neil walks through them one by one and by the third chapter I was mentally auditing my own life.Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTWeapons of Math DestructionPaige Ellison