Author: Ars Staff

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

While the worldwide board gaming community has plenty of awards ceremonies, arguably the most important is still the "Spiel des Jahres" (Game of the Year) award issued by German-speaking game critics from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Past winners have included everything from Catan to Qwirkle, and winning ensures solid sales and (very occasionally) fame and fortune.

Nominees aren't necessarily guaranteed to be everyone's favorite games from the past year. But as far as the influential German board gaming establishment is concerned, these are the best of the best when it comes to games that everyone can enjoy. We decided to put all six nominees to the test by rounding up some past coverage, adding some new reviews, and rolling the whole thing together into a massive one-stop shop for all things SdJ.

The second half of Magic: The Gathering’s return to Innistrad, Eldritch Moon (EMN), will be released on July 22—but we've been lucky enough to play with the set already. Read on for our review of the newest addition to the Magic line, as the mystery of the madness infecting Innistrad is revealed...

Moving on from the brooding sense of horror in Shadows over Innistrad (SOI), EMN is the big reveal, with the last Eldrazi titan—Emrakul—arriving on the plane to wreak havoc. For people who missed our other Magic reviews, Emrakul is one of three giant reality-warping creatures with clear Lovecraftian influences, and her tentacled touch is what’s behind the events in SOI.

From a game mechanics sense, this means the end of Investigate from the first set, as the mystery is solved, and the addition of several new mechanics—Emerge, Meld, and Escalate—to represent things going from bad to worse. In general, follow-up sets in Magic can be a little more experimental, as players now have had some time to get the grasp with the foundations, and EMN really delivers on the “new and weird” front.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we've got a bunch of deals from Dell's Black Friday in July sale. One of the best of them is a bundle deal: you can get a Vizio P-Series 50-inch 4K LED home theater display with a $250 Dell gift card and a 6-inch tablet remote for $999. The display alone is worth $999, so you're essentially getting the remote and the $250 gift card for free. There are also great savings on Skylake-powered desktops, powerful laptops, monitors, and much more, so grab those hot-ticket items before they're sold out.

Check out the full list of Dell's Black Friday in July deals below.

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The original Ghostbusters came out around the same time as Real Genius, Weird Science, and Revenge of the Nerds. Those ‘80s films happened to share a theme: geek underdogs triumph over bullies and idiots while inventing bizarre contraptions. In 2016, of course, geeks who started a small tech company in a tiny loft space would be showered with venture capital rather than scorn.

So it's a good thing that the new Ghostbusters film remixes the idea of geeks in tan jumpsuits hunting down poltergeists. Rather than try to recapture the exact glory of the original Ghostbusters, this new movie reflects how geek culture—and our relationship with the paranormal—has changed. That in turn is what makes it worthy to bear the name Ghostbusters.

I'll admit that I was apprehensive about the idea of a new Ghostbusters film. It's a "reboot" of one of the all-time great science fiction/fantasy comedies, up there with Back to the Future, so it had a lot to live up to. The trailers didn't look great, and I know I’m not the only one fatigued by Hollywood's compulsion to remake everything, from RoboCop to Total Recall. Plus Spy, the previous collaboration between Ghostbusters director Paul Feig and star Melissa McCarthy, didn't wow me, even though I liked their other films, Bridesmaids and The Heat.

After assembling suicide bomb vests for the attacks that slaughtered 130 people in Paris last November, Najim Laachroui went underground in his native Brussels.

The 24-year-old explosives expert wasn't just hiding from the biggest manhunt in Europe's recent history. He was plotting. In a dingy apartment converted into a bomb factory, Laachroui exchanged a series of messages in French with Abu Ahmed, a shadowy commander in the Islamic State based in Syria.

If law enforcement agencies had intercepted the communications, they would have been immediately alarmed. Laachroui asked militants in Syria to test chemical mixtures so he could assemble powerful bombs. He discussed his hopes to strike France again and disrupt a soccer championship there. He reported that he and half a dozen other fugitives from the Paris attacks had split up among three safe houses, according to Belgian and French counterterror officials.

For all Apple’s obsessive secrecy, even its senior managers acknowledge these days with an on-stage wink that much of what they announce has already been predicted. In the run-up to WWDC, I saw developers on Twitter wishlisting "Xcode for iPad"—a way to write apps on an iOS device, rather than in the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) that Apple makes available exclusively for the Mac. One suggestion was that this could be an iOS version of Playgrounds, the interactive test builder that Apple added to Xcode when launching its new programming language, Swift, in 2014.

Sure enough, 45 minutes into the WWDC keynote on 13 June, Tim Cook—not an SVP, but Tim himself, so that we knew it was important—unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, "a new way to learn to code." And, because I’d been thinking about this, I tweeted: "I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs—it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. But let’s see."

Later, John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog is to Apple what BBC Radio 4’s Today show is to British politics, tweeted: "Swift Playgrounds = the new HyperCard?"

Greetings Arsians! Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a list of some of the best Amazon Prime Day deals. Today only, you can take advantage of all the deals below if you're an Amazon Prime member. Some of the best ones are 40 percent off open-box laptops, desktops, monitors, routers, and more. You can even get a $10 Amazon credit when you purchase a $50 Amazon gift card. Prime members also get free two-day shipping, so anything you buy today will get to you as quickly as possible. Snatch up all the deals that you want before the day ends!

To see full coverage of the deals with up-to-date Lightning Deal releases check out TechBargains.

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We're in the midst of a major change sweeping the Web: the familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. That extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and that it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's Web, everyone wants to see what you're doing.

HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the Web, but it has been primarily used by sites that handle money—your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks, and webmail services like Gmail. But these days Google, Mozilla, the EFF, and others want every website to adopt HTTPS. The push for HTTPS everywhere is about to get a big boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' Web browsers begin to actively call out sites that still use HTTP.

The plan is for browsers to start labeling HTTP connections as insecure. In other words, instead of the green lock icon that indicates a connection is secure today, there will be a red icon to indicate when a connection is insecure. Eventually secure connections would not be labeled at all, they would be the assumed default.

Want a job in infosec? Your first task: hacking your way through what many call the "HR firewall" by adding a CISSP certification to your resume.

Job listings for security roles often list the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) or other cybersecurity certifications, such as those offered by SANS, CompTIA, and Cisco, as a requirement. This is especially true in the enterprise space, including banks, insurance companies, and FTSE 100 corporations. But at a time when the demand for good infosec people sees companies outbidding each other to hire top talent, and ominous studies warn of a looming cybersecurity skills shortage, experts are questioning whether certifications based on multiple choice tests are really the best way to recruit the right people.

"I give that bit of advice to listeners who ask me for career advice to get their foot in the door," Jerry Bell, who runs the Defensive Security podcast and leads the internal security strategy team for a large global IT services company, told Ars. "Indeed [I do] describe it as getting through the 'HR firewall.' So, I suspect this is common advice given and used by many people."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of deals to start your weekend. One of the highlights is a discount on a powerful Dell laptop: now you can get the Dell XPS 15 laptop with a Core i7 processor, 512GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM for $1,479. The XPS 15 is one of Dell's best notebooks, featuring a powerful CPU as well as a gaming grade GTX 960m GPU, an Infinity Edge display, and a small frame that weighs just 4.4 pounds.

Check out the rest of our deals below.

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