Magazine Madness 44: Senet Issue 18

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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Senet is a print magazine about the craft, creativity, and community of board gaming. Bearing the tagline of “Board games are beautiful”, it is about the play and the experience of board games, it is about the creative thoughts and processes which go into each and every board game, and it is about board games as both artistry and art form. Published by Senet Magazine Limited, each issue promises previews of forthcoming, interesting titles, features which explore how and why we play, interviews with those involved in the process of creating a game, and reviews of the latest and most interesting releases. Senet is also one of the very few magazines about games to actually be available for sale on the high street.

As its cover suggests, with the publication of Senet Issue 18, the magazine reached its fifth anniversary and as its cover hints at, there is an Ancient Egypt in the issue. Or rather, the article in the issue that explores a theme in board games is Ancient Egypt. Which is appropriate given the name of the game magazine and it should be no surprise that alongside that article, the magazine explores the history of Senet, the Ancient Egyptian game that inspired the magazine and its name. That the magazine has lasted so long and appeared on the magazine shelves on your local high street deserves to be celebrated and so Senet Issue 18 feels just a bit special.

Published in the spring of 2025, the issue adheres to its tried and tested format. Thus it opens with ‘Behold’, highlighting some of the then forthcoming games with a preview and a hint or two of what to expect. The most intriguing of the titles previewed here is Onada, a solo wargame that tells of the story of Hiroo Onada, a Japanese soldier who held out in the jungle of a Philippine island for almost thirty years after World War 2 ended. The player has to gather resources to survive, but doing so alerts the local inhabitants and eventually the authorities. Plus, he must deal with the problems of being alone for so long. The most cute title is Knitting Circle, Flatout Games’ cosy game about knitting in which the cats get to collect the stitches and the most fun game is Interstellar Adventures: The Sincerest Form of Flattery, an ‘escape room’ style game from Minty Noodles Ltd. that combines the play of solo adventure books and looks like a comic book. The other opening sections of the magazine are surprisingly good. The regular column of readers’ letters, ‘Points’, continues to be disappointingly constrained to a single page, waiting for room to expand and build into something more, yet covers a diverse range of matters including the lack of books about board games. Or rather the lack of books about board games on the shelves of bookshops. Actually, there have several such books that have made it to the those shelves, but they are not always easy to find. That said, coverage of such books might be a welcome addition in the pages of Senet. With ‘For Love of the Game’ the journey of the designer Tristian Hall continues towards the completion and publication of his Gloom of Kilforth—and beyond. In ‘At Your Service’, he discusses logistics and fulfilment and dealing with the companies that provide such services, including shipping and delivery. This is informative and gives the publisher’s point of view when normally we only experience this part as customers.

Every issue consists of two interviews, one with an artist and one with a designer, plus an article about a theme in games and an article about a mechanic in games, and of course, Senet Issue 17 is no exception. The tried and tested formula begins with ‘Family Value’, Alexandra Sonechkina’s interview with designer, Ellie Dix. She is perhaps best known for The Shakespeare Game and The Jane Austen Game—both from Laurence King Publishing Ltd. and both of which can be found on the shelves of high street shops—and having won the Hasbro Women Innovators of Play contest in 2023. As well as discussing her gaming background and her favourite mechanism, deduction, Dix gets to explain her high regard for the family game. Or rather, the good family board game, since too often, she feels that the games that families play are terrible. It would have been interesting to have had her suggest some suitable games, but otherwise this is a solid interview with a designer that it is perhaps not as well known as the names that the magazine usually interviews. Dan Jolin interviews the artist Jeremy Nguyen in ‘New York State of Mind’. It is a less interesting piece because the artist has to date only illustrated three games—Inner Compass and Santa Monica, both from Alderac Entertainment Group’, and WizKids’ Rebuilding Seattle. Nevertheless, Nguyen’s striking artwork, inspired by the ‘ligne claire’ or ‘clear line’ style defined and used by Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of TinTin, is shown to good effect that you expect a Belgian reporter and a small white dog to step into view.

The aforementioned theme in Senet Issue 18 is Ancient Egypt and Dan Thurot’s ‘Pyramid Schemes’ gets off by making a startling point that not all board games treat the subject matter very well and this view comes from an expert, Doctor Julia Cromwell, an Egyptologist who specialises in tabletop games as a medium. She is critical of certain games, such as GameWorks SàRL’s Sobek that oversimplify Ancient Egypt, which either results in the flattening of the history or in the depiction of the people as stereotypes. Equally, she is positive about titles like Amun-Re from Alley Cat Games and Ankh: Gods of Egypt from CMON Global Limited, which acknowledge the differences between the Old and New Kingdoms, and Ergo Ludo Editions’ Pyramidice which brings the gods into play. It is clear from the piece that Ancient Egypt is a very popular theme with designers such as the prolific Reiner Knizia who has created multiple titles based on it with Tutankhamen from AMIGO, Ra from Alea, and Amun-Re amongst them. What these games all benefit from is familiarity. The pharaohs, the pyramids, the river Nile, hieroglyphics, mummies, and more are all undeniably well known and that makes games based on this theme all the more accessible.

As part of the article and for its anniversary, Senet Issue 18 also examines the history and significance of its namesake, the Ancient Egyptian board game, Senet. It is a fascinating article as much for what it cannot say as what it does. It suggests a possible theme to the game, but the absence is really the lack of rules to its play because nobody knows what they are. The other celebration in the issue is the ‘Fifth Anniversary Top Choice Special’ which collates ‘Senet’s Top Choice’ from each of the previous seventeen issues. It is nice to be reminded of them.

For the issue’s mechanic, Matt Thrower’s ‘Little Wars’ looks at skirmish games, board games and war games that are played at a smaller scale with a limited number of miniatures of figures per side. Their origins lie in H.G. Wells’ Little Wars rules and in more recent decades in roleplaying and Games Workshop’s War Hammer Fantasy Battles. Joseph McCullogh, the designer of Osprey Games’ Stargrave and Frostgrave provides an apt definition, “A skirmish game is wargame where you think about naming everyone on your team.” Although it looks at games as such as Star Wars: X-Wing from Fantasy Flight Games and Atomic Mass Games’ Star Wars: Shatterpoint, both based on a very popular intellectual property, it also devotes space to other and as it admits, stranger designs, like Max Fitzgerald’s Turnip28, Napoleonics-inspired post-apocalyptic rules that are in part about root vegetables, and Necromolds: Monster Battles, a game of modelling and squishing your miniatures from Necromolds LLC. The article though is not really about a mechanic, but a type of game, one that is examined here from outside of the wargaming hobby.

Senet’s reviews section, ‘Unboxed’ includes a look at Reiner Knizia’s then latest, Rebirth, published by Mighty Boards, a tile-laying design that is actually two board games in one and described as his elegant best. Survive the Island is Zygomatic’s update of Escape from Atlantis! from 1982 and described as an “’80s throwback”, whilst ‘Senet’s Top Choice’ for the issue is War Story: Occupied France, a game from Osprey Games with an interesting heritage. It is a collaboration between the designers of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and the Undaunted series. It combines elements of the war game with the solo gamebook to help drive the story along with the game play, which has elements of roleplay as much as guerrilla tactics.

As per usual, the last two columns in Senet Issue 18 are ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For the former in ‘All for one and one against all’, James Nouch explores the ways in which different players view the play of games, especially in the face of skill imbalance between them. Lastly, the DJ, Andy Bush pulls a game from his ‘Shelf of Shame’. He delves back into gaming history to examine Magic Realm from 1979! He finds it thoroughly old-fashioned and overly complex such that he actually downloads a fan version of the rules for clarity, but still has fun.

Senet magazine always shows off the board games it previews and reviews to great effect, and Senet Issue 18 is no exception. It seems fitting as an anniversary issue that it a rather good read with the celebrations nicely understated. All of the articles are interesting and worth reading, with even the instalment of ‘For Love of the Game’ having something useful to say. Both ‘Pyramid Schemes’ and ‘Little Wars’ are informative and the standout articles in the issue.