About
About The Vaughn Dispatch
Spencer Vaughn
Columbus, Ohio
I'm Spencer Vaughn. I work as an actuary in Columbus, Ohio, so I already spend all day turning risk and cost into numbers, and apparently I can't turn that off when I get home. Most nights it's me and my wife at the table, two players, sometimes a third when our regular game night friend can make it. Everything I own eventually gets measured in dollars per hour of actual fun whether I mean to or not. I read whatever's next to the bed, fantasy doorstops and dense nonfiction back to back with no real plan. I started writing these up because I kept losing track of what I actually thought about something a month after playing or finishing it, and because somebody's got to say out loud when a two hundred dollar pledge isn't worth it.
What this is
Everything here eventually gets run through the same math I use all day at work: what did this actually cost against the hours it gave back. The rating's the last thing I write, after the review, not the other way around, and it's as much about whether something earned its spot on a two-player table as whether it was any good in the abstract.
I don't take review copies, and I'm not chasing whatever just launched. Half of what's here I bought secondhand or waited out to a clearance bin, which is its own kind of honesty, nobody's sending me anything hoping for a nice number.
Some posts aren't reviews at all, just something from the day job that bled into how I think about a game, a specific night at the table, an opinion I used to hold and don't anymore. Same feed, no separate section, because it's all the same habit of writing things down before I forget what I actually thought.
No newsletter, no affiliate links, nothing tracking what you click.
Recent posts
- Gardens of the Moon Nearly Broke Me (Then I Loved It)
- The Market Row Clogs at Two Players and Nobody Warns You
- The Game That Invented the Genre Still Owes You an Apology for the Saboteur
- Picking The Game For Someone Who's Never Played One Of These
- Marvel Champions Is the Best Two-Handed Solitaire on My Shelf, and I Mean That as a Compliment
- What Scientific Forestry Taught Me About Spreadsheets
Get in touch
Email [email protected].