Laurel Mercer writes about the books she finishes, the board games her group actually plays, and the life in between, on her own schedule, no affiliate links.https://laurelinthemargins.com/en-UShttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/mechs-vs-minions/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/mechs-vs-minions/A programming co-op that taught two people who'd never played anything like it in under ten minutes, which is the whole reason I'm rating this as high as I am.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTMechs vs. MinionsLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/secondhand-time/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/secondhand-time/An oral history of the USSR's collapse told entirely through other people's voices, and the thing that stayed with me wasn't the misery, it was how many of them still miss it.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTSecondhand TimeLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/seeing-like-a-state/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/seeing-like-a-state/Why so many well-intentioned government plans, from scientific forestry to the Brasilia city plan, quietly strip out exactly the local knowledge that made the original thing work.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTSeeing Like a StateLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/kemet/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/kemet/A relentlessly aggressive area-control game with real teeth and a real kingmaking problem, and I've never landed on a firm answer for which one wins out at my table.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTKemetLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-player-of-games/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-player-of-games/A master gamer from a post-scarcity utopia gets sent to play politics through an actual board game, and it's the most fun I've had reading a novel about a rigged system in a long time.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Player of GamesLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-same-pencil-for-manuscripts-and-rulebooks/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-same-pencil-for-manuscripts-and-rulebooks/Nine years of copyediting other people's sentences for a living, and it turns out I can't read a rulebook without doing the same thing to it.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-elder-scrolls-betrayal/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-elder-scrolls-betrayal/A dungeon crawler built on the Too Many Bones chassis with a licensed setting that mostly earns its keep, minus the exploration the games actually built their reputation on.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Elder Scrolls: BetrayalLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-walk-to-doreens/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-walk-to-doreens/Three blocks to the used bookstore, uphill both ways depending on which way I've talked myself into believing, and the actual reason I still walk it instead of driving.Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/a-manuscript-about-the-fires/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/a-manuscript-about-the-fires/I finished a book about disaster and mutual aid during a stretch of actual wildfire smoke, and then went straight to work editing a chapter about the same fires.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/dune-imperium/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/dune-imperium/Worker placement and deckbuilding fused so well the combination has become its own little sub-genre, and I don't even need to have read the books to love it.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTDune: ImperiumLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/a-paradise-built-in-hell/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/a-paradise-built-in-hell/Rebecca Solnit's argument that ordinary people mostly rise to the occasion in disasters, and it's the elites who panic, told through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Halifax, and Katrina.Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTA Paradise Built in HellLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/ventus/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/ventus/A hard sci-fi novel dressed up as a medieval fantasy quest, which is either a clever trick or a structural problem depending on which chapter you're in when you notice it.Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTVentusLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-trouble-with-reading-this-on-a-screen/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-trouble-with-reading-this-on-a-screen/I own an ereader. I use it maybe four times a year, always on a trip, always a little resentfully, and I've finally worked out why.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/lost-ruins-of-arnak/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/lost-ruins-of-arnak/Deckbuilding and worker placement stitched together well enough that I stopped noticing the seams, though I noticed the theme thinning out somewhere around round three.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTLost Ruins of ArnakLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/out-of-control/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/out-of-control/A book about hive minds, distributed systems, and swarm intelligence that's now old enough to be dated in its specifics and somehow more right than ever about the shape of the argument.Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTOut of ControlLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/unmatched-tales-to-amaze/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/unmatched-tales-to-amaze/The Unmatched combat system, which I already loved as a head-to-head skirmish game, turned out to translate into a co-op boss fight better than I had any right to expect.Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTUnmatched: Tales to AmazeLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/vantage/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/vantage/An entire planet folded into a deck of cards, and the scale of it is the thing I keep coming back to, even after the novelty of the first few sessions wore off.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVantageLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/why-the-log-stays-on-paper/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/why-the-log-stays-on-paper/Every board game app I've tried does the counting better than my notebook. None of them has convinced me to switch.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/what-we-actually-do-on-a-bad-game-night/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/what-we-actually-do-on-a-bad-game-night/Not every Tuesday produces a good session, and I've started to think the bad ones tell you more about a group than the good ones do.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/hyperion/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/hyperion/Seven pilgrims, seven stories, a monster made of blades, and a cliffhanger ending that I resented for about a day before admitting the whole book earned it.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTHyperionLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/sleeping-gods/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/sleeping-gods/An open-world storybook game that asks for your full table and your full evening, and rewards both, once you accept that the reading is the game and not an interruption of it.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTSleeping GodsLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/priyas-lunch-break-verdict/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/priyas-lunch-break-verdict/My editor at the press reads this site on her lunch break and has developed opinions about my ratings that she does not keep to herself.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/teaching-marcus-the-wrong-game-first/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/teaching-marcus-the-wrong-game-first/Our downstairs neighbor always wants to play whatever just arrived, and the one time I actually let him pick, it went about as badly as I could have predicted.Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-two-stars-i-owe-an-apology/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-two-stars-i-owe-an-apology/I gave Dune two stars the first time I read it, mostly out of impatience, and it took a second read a decade later to figure out the impatience was the actual problem.Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/lotr-duel-for-middle-earth/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/lotr-duel-for-middle-earth/A reimplementation of 7 Wonders Duel wearing Tolkien's setting, and the streamlining actually improves on the original in most of the places I'd complained about it before.Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earthLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/diaspora/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/diaspora/Greg Egan builds a post-human future out of pure mathematics and mostly forgets to give it characters, and somehow the opening chapter is still one of the best things I've read this year.Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTDiasporaLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/The book that put the word paradigm into everyday use, read fifty years late and still humbling, even if half of it is quietly about the sociology of scientists arguing with each other.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/echopraxia/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/echopraxia/Peter Watts' Blindsight follow-up made me feel a little stupid for two hundred pages, in the specific way I've come to associate with a book I'll still be thinking about next year.Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTEchopraxiaLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-winter-the-ridge-road-closed/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/the-winter-the-ridge-road-closed/A week of ice shut down the road out of my neighborhood, and I got a strange, small preview of what it actually takes to keep a household running on almost nothing.Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal_essayLaurel Mercerhttps://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/spirit-island/https://laurelinthemargins.com/articles/spirit-island/The best co-op on my shelf and I'm not close to done with it, though it took a bad first teach and one honest look at the theme before I understood why.Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTSpirit IslandLaurel Mercer