After Hours
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about this site
A line cook's personal blog about the board games and books that get him through the wind-down after a late shift — honest, first-person, written closer to 1am than to a press release.
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Book Aug 19, 2026
What I Owed the Kitchen Sink
★★★★☆
The opening thirty pages are worth the whole book on their own, the rest is a good idea that keeps stopping to lecture you about Sumer.
Board Game Aug 17, 2026
Too Much Game for One Night Off
★★★☆☆
A MOBA in a box with poker chips instead of minis, gorgeous and dense and, honestly, more game than one night off deserves.
Personal Aug 16, 2026
The Night I Almost Walked Out
A Friday in July when the walk-in died, a server torched a ticket, and I stood in the alley for four minutes deciding whether to go back in.
Personal Jul 23, 2026
The Guy Who Wanted to Send Me Low Water
A two-man game company out of Lafayette offered me a free copy ahead of their Kickstarter. What saying no actually cost me, and what it didn't.
Board Game Jul 12, 2026
The one game that eats a whole night and I let it
★★★★☆
Jamie Jolly's boss-battler with a narrated companion app and a genuinely clever cooldown combat system, if you can get past the footprint and the rounds where you're just trudging to a foregone conclusion.
Book Jun 19, 2026
A History Book I Didn't Expect to Finish
★★★☆☆
A guy who does math tries to find actual laws behind why empires rise and fall, good idea, thin evidence once you leave Europe.
Board Game Jun 4, 2026
Wrecking Yard on a Tuesday
★★★☆☆
A Mad Max dice-chucker that delivers on theme every time, but the insert fights you at teardown and six players sit around too long between slams.
Personal May 19, 2026
What Actually Happens Between Close and Sleep
People hear I read every night and picture some kind of discipline. It's closer to the opposite. I read because I can't sleep yet and the book is what gets me there.
Book May 9, 2026
Reading About Consciousness at 2am
★★★★☆
A retired anesthesiologist at the bar wouldn't shut up about this one, so I finally read it, and it's changed how I think about the parts of the job I do without thinking.
Board Game May 6, 2026
Backwards Is the Only Way Through It
★★★★☆
A fifteen-minute set collection filler where you score your tableau in reverse, right to left, and the twist is dumb enough to be genuinely clever.
Book Apr 22, 2026
Reading About Herring Gulls at 1am
★★★★☆
An old book on animal behavior, picked up on a whim, that turned out to be more than worth the effort, shows its age some but stays captivating anyway.
Book Apr 19, 2026
Rereading A Wrinkle in Time After a Double Shift
★★★★☆
The book I did an unassigned book report on at ten still holds up at thirty-something, sagging middle and all.
Personal Apr 16, 2026
What the Dishwasher Left
Most of what's on my shelf didn't come from a list, it came from a guy named Marcus clearing his station like he clears the rest of his life.
Personal Mar 23, 2026
Nobody's Grading Me On This
Why a guy with a GED and no college keeps reading philosophy of mind books he half understands, and what it actually feels like when the sentence lands late.
Personal Mar 16, 2026
The Kitchen Doesn't Have an Undo Button
On watching a guy at the after-shift table sit on a lunch-special decision for fifteen minutes, and catching myself doing the same thing, and what ten years of calls that don't get a redo does to a person.
Book Mar 4, 2026
The Ticket Rail Is Doing Half My Thinking
★★★☆☆
A philosophy book about where thinking actually happens, read on the porch after a slow close, and it turns out a kitchen line is a decent argument for the thesis.
Book Mar 2, 2026
Permutation City, Read Between Closes
★★★☆☆
Egan builds a universe that runs forever on no hardware and never tells you how he pulled it off. First half's the good half, and I still don't trust the ending.
Book Feb 27, 2026
Reading About My Own Bad Decisions Between Tickets
★★★★☆
A Nobel-winning psychologist spends five hundred pages explaining why your gut is lying to you, and knowing that doesn't stop it from lying to you again tomorrow.
Board Game Feb 19, 2026
Cyclades Made Our Third Player the Kingmaker
★★★☆☆
A gorgeous bidding-and-conquest game that runs long, drags when someone overthinks their offer, and gets ugly fast at three players.
Personal Feb 12, 2026
What I Do on a Slow Tuesday
Tuesday's the slow night in this business, not Sunday like people guess, and it's turned into the one night a week the job loosens its grip enough to actually read or play something.
Book Feb 9, 2026
The Kind of Book That Stays With You Days Later
★★★★☆
Somebody left this on the shelf above the coffee machine and I got through it in three nights. It's the small stuff, the pencil case fights, the missing cassette tape, that ends up doing the real damage.
Board Game Feb 2, 2026
Two of us, one plane, no talking allowed
★★★★☆
A two-player cockpit puzzle you can teach at the bar in five minutes and be packed away again in twenty, which is exactly why it's become my after-shift default.
Personal Jan 23, 2026
His Name Is Walt
The AP-prone regular from four reviews finally gets a name, and a reason he sits on every decision like it's the last one he'll ever get to make.
Board Game Jan 16, 2026
What I Learned Clearing Plates During Someone Else's Turn
★★★★☆
A co-op where you play the island instead of the invaders, and nobody at the table can quarterback it, but give it a real setup window and watch your AP-prone friend.
Personal Jan 7, 2026
Why I Read Standing Up
Ten hours on my feet at work and I still don't sit down to read at home. Tried a chair once. Gave it up inside a month.
Personal Jan 1, 2026
Percy's
The bar two blocks from work isn't a good bar by any real measure. It's a close one, and some nights that's the only quality that matters.
Board Game Dec 28, 2025
Order stacks and the guy who won't stop counting cards
★★★★☆
Fantasy Flight's 40K conquest game earns its order-stack tension, but three-player kingmaking and long combats mean it only comes off the shelf on nights with real time to burn.
Board Game Dec 19, 2025
Rattling the cubes
★★★★☆
A deckbuilder with a dungeon bolted on, and a noise mechanic that makes you hear your own bad luck coming before it lands.
Board Game Dec 12, 2025
Ten Minutes to Learn, All Night to Regret Losing
★★★★☆
A fast two-player duel that teaches itself in ten minutes, though it only ever stays a game for two, and it'll expose the slowest thinker at your table fast.
Book Dec 10, 2025
Three Closes to Finish It
★★★★☆
A regular left this on the bar and said it scared him more than anything he'd read in years. He wasn't wrong exactly, though it's not that kind of scared.