Wesley's Hideout

October 6, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Cooperative board games are their own long list, but the co-op mode heading into Trials of MAYA deserves a look before it launches.

September 8, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Unmatched did something clever. It took asymmetric hero combat, a genre that usually demands hours and a rulebook, and compressed it into twenty minutes with about thirty cards per fighter. Bruce Lee against Medusa, decided over a coffee.

August 25, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Control is easiest to recognize when somebody says no. The harder form is the one that leaves the door open and makes you stop wanting to walk through it.

August 19, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★★

A worker placement and monster brawling hybrid that somehow packs its own storage system and a genuinely mean solo opponent into one big box.

August 14, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

A bounty hunter novel that spends most of its pages on what people do to fill a flattened world, animals mostly, and machines pretending to be them.

August 11, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

A world with the weather smoothed out of it, read during four days of cloud sitting flat on the ridge. Short book, mark it leaves is not.

August 6, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

An area-control war game with real teeth, tested two-player against a hiker who wandered up the trail with nothing better to do that afternoon.

August 3, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

A stretch in late July when the sky did three different things in three days, and I had nowhere to be but the catwalk watching it.

August 1, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

A mech war game where nobody really wants to fight, tested one player at a time against a deck of cardboard opponents in a tower with no cell signal.

July 29, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

A genuinely great solo engine builder that fights the fourteen-by-fourteen room it's in, cubes sliding everywhere the whole time.

July 25, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

A running joke that started with a bull elk on the wrong channel, and what it turned into three seasons later.

July 22, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Most people who make the climb up to the tower stay ten minutes, ask about the view, and head back down. Teresa didn't do that.

July 20, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

A duel game that fits on the fold-down table in a fire tower, King Arthur included, even when he can't quite win.

July 18, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Hank sent up a paperback western with the July resupply. I almost didn't crack it, and then I didn't put it down.

July 16, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

A long, scattered field guide to systems nobody's steering, beehives and economies alike. Read slow over three weeks between smoke checks.

July 13, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

I keep two notebooks up here. One is for games and books. The other one is for smoke, wind, and whatever the sky is doing, and it's the one that actually matters.

July 8, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★★

A spare, quiet coming-of-age story that reads like it was written for someone alone with nothing but weather and time to notice things in.

July 6, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★★

A hand-management car racing game that turns out to be one of the better solo games I've had up here, five AI Legends and me and a bag of overheating engine cards.

July 3, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

Asimov's three part novel about a tungsten bottle, a parallel universe, and the aliens in the middle section who turned out to be the whole reason to read it.

June 29, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Five months alone on a ridge, then a room in town with a landlord and a bus schedule. The gap between those two lives is bigger than the drive.

June 26, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

Dense, deliberately obscure, and about as good a match for a season with no cell signal and nowhere to be as any book I own.

June 24, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★★

A short story, maybe fifteen minutes of reading, that outworks most philosophy I've sat through on the same question.

June 21, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

Two decks of cards, no board, no tracker worth trusting, and somehow enough game in it to survive a whole fire season.

June 19, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

The board game hobby treats solo modes as a workaround for not having anyone else to play with. Five months alone in a tower a season have made me distrust that framing more, not less.

June 17, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

Heaviest book in my pack this season, propaganda model and all. Correct in a way that's hard to argue with and uncomfortable to sit alone with in a tower.

June 14, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★★

A deckbuilder and worker placement hybrid that's basically built for the tower, quiet, mostly solo, over before you've had enough of it.

June 10, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

Cordwainer Smith's collected Instrumentality stories, myths of a future sixty thousand years out, read a couple at a time across a slow August with the radio quiet.

June 7, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Twice a day, same two voices, and almost none of it is what you'd expect from the only conversation in someone's day.

June 3, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

Cole Wehrle's trick-taking space opera has no solo mode at all, so up here it's a strictly two-player game, and it mostly earns that.

May 31, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Book · ★★★★☆

A dense, plotless memoir about a government project that fails to decode a signal from the stars, and somehow that failure is the whole point.

May 27, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Board Game · ★★★★☆

A heavy card-and-board engine game about zoos and conservation, played solo through a companion app on a tower cabin table roughly the size of the game's own board.

May 23, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

Three seasons on trail crew taught me to weigh everything before it goes in the pack. I never stopped doing that math, I just started doing it about books and games instead of tent stakes.

May 21, 2026 · Wesley Hart · Note

There's no signal up there anyway, but some sunny weeks I could charge one and carry it for the camera, the clock, the notes app. I still leave it at the trailhead.