Month: August 2019

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  Behold, the gerrymandering board game you didn't realize you wanted: Mapmaker [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

AUSTIN, Texas—Josh Lafair hasn't even voted yet, but he probably knows more about gerrymandering than most. To start, given that his family's from Austin, Texas, politics has never been a taboo subject around the Lafair dinner table. And in 2017, after the Lafairs watched another uncompetitive congressional election play out in their oddly shaped district (TX-10), Josh and his siblings had an idea: Is there a good gerrymandering board game out there? Could we make our own?

"Political games turn a lot of people off—political games tend to be really gimmicky,” says Lafair, the youngest (18) of the three siblings behind Lafair Family Games. “So while we did want this to be a game about gerrymandering, we also wanted to make a well-designed game. We wanted board gamers to think, ‘Oh, this is a good game. I’ll actually play this.’”

Mapmaker isn't the first title from Lafair Family Games, as older brother Louis invented the popular Pathwayz as a kid (more recently while at Stanford, he even developed an AI that can literally beat him at his own game). But Josh was so young he simply served as "chief guinea pig" on that one, and he considers Mapmaker the first game he truly had a hand in designing. Recently, before Lafair debuted Mapmaker to the masses at Gen Con 2019, he walked Ars through the game's creation while simultaneously taking us to task in a one-on-one battle.

Enlarge / Amid the chaos of the Ars Gaming Week testing lab, we took a moment to snap a photo of some of our preferred gaming laptops. But are they right for you? Not necessarily! Hence, here's our careful guide on the topic. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

Putting together an ideal gaming desktop computer isn't always the easiest task, but at least it's a controlled kind of chaos. When building a PC, we can individually rank each component type—from CPUs to GPUs, from speakers to monitors—and aspiring builders can feel out their options for each within hearty system-builder guides. Barebones budgets, small form factors, pricey beasts: we can offer tips for each, then let shoppers mix and match those recommendations as they see fit.

The same cannot be said for gaming laptops. There's no simple way to break out and individually test laptops' big-ticket components, and singling out one gaming laptop is tough in a sector that has often suffered from bulk, heft, expense, and ugly designs. When you buy into one good thing in a gaming laptop, you're buying into its every other element, good and bad, with no ability to swap. How much worse does that get when you're stuck with a firm budget?