Welcome to thru-the-portal.com, a site that aims to promote social gaming activites to a wider audience, through this website, in partnership and via our free quarterly digital magazine.

You will need a PDF Reader to read our digital magazines - you can get one here.  

Issue 04 is now out, with a huge selection of Essen related content, reviews, interviews and more!  The file is about 6Mb in size.  Also - thanks to all the great contributors!

We had a long weekend thanks to a Bank Holiday, however the weather meant that it was going to be spent indoors.  With that in mind I decided it would be a good opportunity to try out the DC Universe Online massive multi-player online (MMO) game - set in the DC Comics universe.

A limited edition run of 500 Ticket to Ride "Hogwart Express" was announced by Days of Wonder.

Bang! is a card game that has made the transition to iPad application very well.  The tutorial is good at teaching the basics of the game - I had not played the card game when I picked this up.

During the game, a solo player takes one of four roles - the sheriff, the deputy, the renegade or an outlaw.  Each of these roles has a specific objective:

About 4 months ago, I introduced my work team to board gaming - something that some of them looked on with more horror than others.  This was a group who knew board gaming to be a Christmas event played to the annoyance of family cooped up in a tightly confined space.

As Christmas approaches the question of what to get for friends and family comes up again. 

In this short article I'm making some suggestions to get for friends of yours that are not board gamers.  Over the last 2 months I've been playing board games on Friday afternoon in the office, and it has given me a chance to try out a few games on people have never played anything more than Monopoly or Twister.

As Christmas approaches the question of what to get for friends and family comes up again. 

In this short article I'm making some suggestions to get for friends of yours that are not board gamers.  Over the last 2 months I've been playing board games on Friday afternoon in the office, and it has given me a chance to try out a few games on people have never played anything more than Monopoly or Twister.

I recently started using an iPad at work and was impressed at how much it actually does help with work - meaning you're connected a lot more often and able to thus do a lot more for the company without them paying anything extra!  A great argument to support giving people iPads at work.

However, as I needed to spend a day in the office over the weekend to support a large event taking place (where I wasn't actually doing very much) I bought the iPad versions of Ticket to Ride and Small World.

We continue to gain new followers on Twitter and I really enjoy looking through their links to see more about them.  As part 'Thank you' and part 'Sharing', I wanted to just mention a few of our followers and raise awareness of them and what they are doing - or simply to note anything we found interesting.