Reviews and Comments

It's a "coffee table book," so it's filled with photos and sideboxes of facts and insights. For all that it is a genre leaning toward the lighter end of narrative, Wallis was able to fit a lot of interesting insights into Everybody Wins. If you're interested at all in tabletop gaming over the past forty years, this is a great overview of the places we've been and recent trends.

This was chosen by my book club, and it is fine for what it is. I think it may appeal more to angtsy teen girls than to jaded middle-aged men, but the club spoke!

Plotting is good, the italics and bold in the text made the slam poetry appropriately hipster, and there were some tear-jerking moments, but overall the story was predictable YA romance.

Reid performs a fun balancing act of switching viewpoint characters, as well as sprinkling in ephemera from the history of the fictional protagonist. It's a very smooth and easy read, a real page-turner. While there are surprises and twists, they all feel very well-earned. It's a story of love, a story of devotion, a story of ruthlessness and of generosity.

By the end of the book, I really wished that Evelyn Hugo had been a real person, such is Reid's ability to create real characters. Monique and Harry and Celia all feel fully-realized as well, and even the characters who barely get any "screen time" act like people. The dialog is snappy and I'd love to have a snarky conversation with Evelyn.

Recommended to anyone who likes books about people and social norms.

While certainly a page-turner, the book stumbled a bit towards the end. I don't think the final revelations are truly earned by the previous text. Certainly, a thriller should throw a surprise at the reader, but upon looking back at the previous chapters, it should feel like the answer was there and we didn't see it. I don't believe that is the case here. There are also a number of grammatical choices that are counter to what we all learned in school (sentence fragments, comma splices, etc.) which pulled me from the story at times.

For practitioners of wargaming, this is a great companion book to Peter Perla's classic "The Art of Wargaming." Arts and crafts...

It is only about 200 pages of main text, with an additional 150+ pages of appendices and bibliography.

The insights from a trio of writers who are currently working in the DoD wargaming world should not be ignored. The authors include some short anecdotes to illustrate the importance of each "best practice" they espouse, and also show the pitfalls of succumbing to "worst practices."

Good book for what it is, but it won't substitute for experience - good thing it has several practical exercises!

The gold standard of wargaming, Perla's book may be the most-referenced tome in the field. There's good reason for that - his insights and historical context information are very thorough and relevant. Some of the "contemporary" context is dated, since the book was released in 1990.

Let's be clear, Rucker has always been an acquired taste. I acquired the taste for his hoopy frood style decades ago, and he continues to deliver. This latest novel is another great example of his distinctive Santa Cruz wetware fiction, written during the Trump presidency and COVID-19 pandemic - these are definitely food for his story. If you want to see a little piece of an alternate world where cars have been replaced by biomechanical beasts of burden, tele-operated by living or (mostly) dead disembodied humans from a literal and metaphorical cloud computing system - well, you're weird, and you'll love this book.

If snarky, self-aware dialog and giant alien monsters in alternate dimensions are your thing, this is your book. It's got humor (of course), adventure, and bad guys you really want to punch in the face.

It's nice to have some moral clarity in a story, and also giant monsters who breath nuclear fire.