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The greatest game in the world is Dota 2, and the greatest event in the Dota 2 calendar is The International. Sixteen teams meet at Seattle's KeyArena to compete for a share of the tournament's $20,770,460 prize pool. The winning team takes home a cool $9.1 million.

Dota 2 made me understand the passion and obsession suffered by people who follows sports. Attending the sixth International (TI6) took this to another level. I've spent the last week feeling thoroughly drained. Empty, even. I want the International to come back. I miss it. My life is incomplete without it.

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Remember Elite's CQC (close-quarters combat) Championship, its lesser loved multiplayer arena combat mode? While it's not getting the overhaul it arguably needs—nor is the now-postponed £75,000 ($100,000) CQC tournament making a comeback—Frontier is taking some of the best bits of CQC and bringing them to the wider Elite universe as part of the upcoming Elite Dangerous: Guardians 2.2 update in October.

The big news: single-seat, ship-launched fighters based on the CQC fighter designs. The idea is that players will be able to launch one of these fighters and pilot it remotely, issuing commands back to the mothership. You could tell the mothership to stay put, for instance, to keep it out of harm's way, or tell it to follow the fighter and go in all guns blazing. You can hot swap between the two ships too, opening up some particularly devious attack patterns.

There are three fighters available. The F63 Condor federal fighter and GU97 imperial fighter are identical their CQC counterparts, the former sporting the fastest acceleration in exchange for manoeuvrability and hull strength, the latter being more fragile but more manoeuvrable. More exciting is the Taipan fighter, which is new to the game. The most tank-like of the three ships, the Taipan trades speed and manoeuvrability for hull strength and shields, making it a particularly good option for heavy combat. Plus, it has a neat swing-wing design that makes it look far more intimidating than the other fighters.

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

A bewildered American, trying to get his head around a game that regularly ends in a draw despite taking five days to finish, once called cricket “the only sport that incorporates meal breaks.” But the comment could also apply to the game many consider the white whale of board gaming: Twilight Imperium.

“Twimp,” as my group calls it, has 300 plastic ship miniatures, more than 400 cards, and thousands of cardboard counters. It comes in a box you could bury the family pet in; its rulebook runs to 44 pages. Expansions each contain more new material than most midsize standalone games, while an online subculture argues about which fishing tackle box provides the most aesthetically pleasing storage solution for the components. Fully expanded, eight players can go for—well, 11.5 hours is as long as we’ve gone, but others like to stretch the festivities over two days.

COLOGNE, Germany—Both developer Streum On Studio and publisher Focus Home Interactive seem unwilling to define it as such, but Space Hulk: Deathwing is essentially an old-school dungeon crawler masquerading as a first-person shooter. The basic setup is that your four-player squad, consisting of either human players or AI, battle through enormous space stations made up of various rooms, corridors, and doors that can be blocked off or opened up.

The layout of the Space Hulk (read: dilapidated star ship) highlights just how dungeon-like the level design goals are, particularly the overhead map I'm shown during the Gamescom 2016 demo. Pathways bleed into each other to create circuit board-like channels of parallel and intersecting right angles, while rooms have multiple entry and exit points to defend or exploit. Things get very confusing very quickly. Your location goal is indicated on the map, but how you get there is down to you.

As per the tabletop game that shares the Space Hulk name, and from which Deathwing takes its inspiration, the ceaselessly energetic Genestealers (a predatory alien species) pursue you without pause. Their presence both forces your squad of Deathwing Space Marines to keep moving, and prevents you from recklessly pushing forwards. They are reason and fear combined into one.