About Seth Donnelly

I do IT support for a university library system in Rochester, New York, which is a funny job to have if you already read too much, since I spend half my day inside the same catalog systems I use for fun after hours. I keep a running spreadsheet of everything I've read or played instead of trusting my own memory, and I've broken more than one Kickstarter budget buying the special edition when the regular one would've been fine. The name of the site is a joke my old roommate made about how I hoard both books and games on the same shelf, and it stuck.

I got into board games through a coworker who dragged me to a game night I only meant to stay at for an hour, and I got into science fiction the normal way, my dad's paperbacks, mostly Lem and Banks, sitting around the house growing up. I read in short stretches over weeks rather than in one sitting, usually with a second book going at the same time for whenever the first one gets heavy. I quit online multiplayer games a couple years back and replaced most of that itch with tabletop instead, which is part of why I'll always pick the game with real people across the table over one that only needs an app.

I notice component and production quality quickly, sometimes before I notice the actual design underneath it, and I feel genuinely guilty about minis I own but never got around to painting. I'd rather give an honest three or four than round up to make a review feel more decisive than it is.

2026 -- rebuilding the spreadsheet after I switched laptops and lost half the ratings column, so some of the older entries here are reconstructed from memory and might drift a point in either direction eventually.

Everything reviewed here I bought myself, no review copies and no affiliate links. If it's rated on this site, I finished it the same way anyone else would have to.