$whoami

Elliot Rhodes

I've spent close to ten years as a residential home inspector in Kansas City, which means my actual job is walking through someone's biggest purchase and telling them, in writing, exactly what's wrong with it before they sign anything. That habit doesn't stay in the crawlspace. Every review here gets the same treatment a house gets: does the thing work the way it claims to, where's the part that's going to fail first, and is the price actually defensible once you account for what you're really getting. I don't round a 3 up to a 4 to be nice about it, same as I don't soften a report because a buyer's already fallen in love with the kitchen.

Nine years doing residential home inspections around Kansas City after a few years in general contracting before that. The job is mostly pattern recognition under time pressure, an hour and a half to find every real problem in a house before somebody's earnest money is on the line, and writing it up in plain language a first-time buyer can actually use instead of jargon that just protects me. I got into games and books seriously about six years back, my coworker Priya trained me on the job and got me hooked on cooperative games during a slow stretch between inspections, and it turned into a standing Thursday night at my place with a small rotating group, usually my longtime friend Dale, who used to run his own contracting crew and treats a rulebook the way I treat a code violation, plus whoever else is free that week. My partner Maren mostly reads over my shoulder rather than plays, but she's the one who actually made me start keeping a real log instead of just a mental tally, spreadsheet, columns, the whole thing, which is probably the most on-brand habit I own. I paid for every book and every game on this site myself, no review copies, no publisher freebies, and I rate everything the same way I'd write up a house, plainly, and without worrying whether the seller likes what I found.