It’s time once again for another installment of Michael’s Magical Mailbag! Sadly, I don’t have a real corker like that guy taking me task for my positive (!) AGRICOLA review, but there’s a couple of good ones here that I’ve accumulated over the past few months both from the Gameshark feedback address at the end of every one of these articles and also at FortressAT.com, where we usually have a long, rambling, profanity-laced discussion about these articles. So let’s get it underway and answer some mail.

I started reading CrackedLCD way back when it was first around, but after a while I just forgot about it (probably cuz I stopped going to F:AT). Anyway, a day or two ago I saw a link to it (probably on BGG) and decided to read it. After I read it I went through the archives and read about 20 more crackedLCDs that looked appealing to me, to catch up. After reading several of them, I realized that you have a real passion for both gaming and writing about gaming, and that comes through in your writing. You're not writing for any reason other than to let people know what you feel on any given (usually boardgame related) topic. You're not doing it for money, or geekgold, or anything else. You're doing what you're doing because you want people to hear what you have to say............and even then not because you just want to hear your own voice, but because you do have something to say. Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say thank you. Keep the passion and keep writing (you've got lot's of good stuff to say!) -- Mark

Well shucks, Mark, I appreciate your kind words and I’m glad that the fact that I really care about this crazy hobby comes through, that has always been a key motivator for me. I think that if you’re passionate about something and you share that passion with others than it can be infectious. And I have continued to write Cracked LCD and elsewhere because I feel like I do have something valuable to say, if only to small minority within a niche hobby. I love to share ideas about the hobby and discuss them, and to be honest I’m surprised I’ve been able to keep it up as long as I have. Every time I think “man, I just can’t muster up the excitement to spill out 1000 or more words about games this week” something clicks and it just flows. But when that well runs out and I feel like I don’t have something funny, critical, or interesting to say about games, then you can expect this column to come to a screeching halt. The bits of used masking tape and broken seashells they pay me to write this stuff wouldn’t be enough to keep it going, I assure you.

I am concerned with your back-to-back reading of 20 or more Cracked LCD articles. This is well above the recommended allowance, and if you begin using highfalutin terms such as “executive theme” or you find yourself imagining copies of TOMB in various states of, say, burning then please cease usage of the column at once and seek medical attention.

As for ANDROID, I have given it another shot if only in my head. Of all the games I’ve played over the past couple of years, it’s the one that I think about the most. I’m always thinking back to the games I played of it, not so much because they were any good, but because it really felt like the game wanted to go places that games just aren’t going. It was a courageous design; one that completely failed yet made a damn good attempt at blowing open the storytelling potential of board games. It had some really fresh mechanics but there were just too many of them, too much clutter for it to work. In time, I think we’ll all be looking back to ANDROID as an “almost” game, it could have changed the way we play games but it missed the mark. That being said, I’d be a very happy games critic (and gamer) if every design disaster were as glorious or as ambitious as it.

After reading your recent article wishing board game designers would come up with some new and unique THEMES, I was wondering what you thought of Eagle Games' BOOTLEGGERS?

Bill, it’s been a long time since I played BOOTLEGGERS and it was actually one of the first “review copies” I ever received. Eagle Games sent it to me along with BLOOD FEUD IN NEW YORK, a game I dislike almost as much as TOMB (and it was probably my first really negative review, actually). But I did play several games of it back at Atlanta Game Factory, an by and large we thought it was pretty fun stuff. It’s interesting to look back on it today, some five years on, because these days it’s pretty common for games to have both Ameritrash and Eurogame mechanics. Back then, it wasn’t.