Quinns Quest is making Dragon killers out of indie games, one episode at a time

“One of my favorite bits of trivia about ‘media’ is that the root of the word is the same as the word ‘medium.’ As in somebody who speaks to ghosts.” Quintin Smith, who goes by Quinns online, is reclining in his office chair, amid a respectable collection of board games and books—dozens of neatly arranged ghosts within arms’ reach. “Like a medium is a vessel who sits between the afterlife and our world, right? And that's what the media is. It exists between you and the actual art that you might be enjoying.”

Critics, he said, are like contemporary mediums. Helping interpret art and media through a learned, analytic, critical lens. 

This is an excerpt from about halfway through an hour-long interview that spanned games journalism, how Quinns plans to kill Dungeons & Dragons one player at a time, and what makes a game dangerous. Quinns has just launched Quinns Quest, a new late-80s-themed tabletop roleplaying game review channel where he goes through a game and dissects all its different parts–vibes, rules, art, layout–and then relates what he and his table of players thought of the game at their table. His first review—focusing on Felix Isaacs’ Wildsea–was released February 1. It currently has over one hundred thousand views, and according to Isaacs, there are only about 200 copies of the first edition left. Quinns Quest nearly sold them out.