About Blake Ramsey

I test software for a living, mostly backend systems for a logistics company in Tucson, Arizona, which means my whole job is trying to break things on purpose before a customer does it for free. That habit doesn't turn off when I get home. Every review here is at least a little bit me stress testing the thing itself: where does the combo actually click, does the game hold up once you've played it enough times to see the seams, does it still work at the player count you'll actually have on a given night. I finish everything before I rate it, game played out to an actual ending, book read cover to cover, no exceptions.

I've spent about a decade in software QA, the last several years on backend systems for a logistics company here in Tucson, and the honest version of that job is that I get paid to find the exact turn where something stops working the way it's supposed to. I bring that same instinct home. A board game is a system, and I want to know where its edge cases live, what happens at three players versus five, whether the combo that felt clever on turn one still feels clever on turn twenty. Books get a version of the same treatment, does the idea the author's chasing actually survive contact with three hundred more pages, or does it fall apart under its own weight. I got into games the ordinary way, a friend's copy of a card drafting game at a going-away party, and it turned into a real hobby fast. My wife Priya is my usual two-player partner most weeknights, which is probably why I keep coming back to whether something actually holds up at two. I read constantly, mostly hard science fiction and the kind of dense nonfiction that tries to explain something genuinely complicated, systems, minds, civilizations, and I don't mind a slow, difficult book if it's actually going somewhere. Everything on this site got finished before it got rated. No review copies, no sponsorships, just what I actually own and actually played or read to the end.