So what exactly is a non-review?
Short answer: it’s commentary on a product that in no way should be taken as thorough, complete, or authoritative. Examples:
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My non-review of the Alien RPG presumed I’d be raiding the game for ideas, not playing or running it.
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My non-review of Coriolis, a game I quite like and actually wanted to play, nevertheless picked out cool mechanics and aspects of the setting but didn’t address if all of that was actually a fun game. Having not played it, I really can’t say.
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My “quasi-review” of Numenera focused on the basic mechanic, which I thought was cool, and brushed off the majority of the book as a bit too much like D&D. That part was demonstrably wrong, as I found out when I played. (Then again it’s also kinda true.)
And so on.
My reluctance to call something a “review” stems from an actual review I wrote for a Web site. I really like the game, yet the text of the review obsessed about the lack of a useful table of contents or index. My instinctive negativity kept me from describing what I thought was actually good about the thing. The authors of the game (and others) called me on essentially writing a useless and overly negative review.
Hence I’m not going to call these things I dash off based on a quick reading of a game “reviews”. They’re more impressions, or notes for a review, or something.