Social deduction games are one of those game genres that have a built-in audience almost separate from other hobby gamers. Entire clubs are formed around Werewolf and Resistance variants, and basic forms of the game like Mafia are found often on Internet forums and at camps. However, today I didn’t…
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Up until last year, I didn’t really pay much attention to the You Don’t Know Jack series of video games. The trivia questions were cleverly written about 60% of the time, but the 90’s Kool Attitude tone of the jokes got old quickly. However, in 2015, The Jackbox Party Pack…
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In case that you didn’t already think I was a cool jock, I read a lot of manga. One of my favorite manga artists is Noboyuki Fukumoto, who commonly writes series about human psychology and people at the bottom of society. Another thing almost all of his series have in…
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Chess has a term called Zugzwang. German for “compulsion to move”, it refers to a game state where someone is in trouble because they have to move a piece every turn. If they could pass and leave a strong board formation, things would be peachy, but no: Zugzwang. This is…
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Note: I tried my best to make sure that you can read this article without knowing much about TCGs. If you have some idea of what “creatures”, “lands”, and “the graveyard” mean, you should be fine. Though I only started getting into tabletop games in earnest in the past few…
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Cosmic Encounter is my favorite game of all time, and I’m having trouble understanding why. With most excellent games, you can easily point to something incredible about their design – Codenames’ simplicity and replayability, the Legacy games’ storytelling – but Cosmic Encounter is built from a lot of components that simply…
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Anyone who’s played a good Eurogame with a badly translated manual knows that solid writing is a small but crucial part of a tabletop game. Most discussion on the topic is about clear and concise rules explanations; this is fair enough, as communication of complex game topics is difficult and very…
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I first started designing board games in late 2014 after graduating from college that summer. I was already pretty hardcore about tabletop games, especially RPGs, but the thought that I could design one wasn’t in my head. After discovering print-on-demand sites and realizing that I probably wasn’t going to get…
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Oh no! The train is out of control! The only thing you and your fellow engineers can do is take all this spare track that’s in the back of the locomotive for some reason and lay it as fast as you can! Tiny Trainwrecks is a frantic co-op game of…
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Welcome back! If you haven’t read Part 1 of how to play Happy Daggers, you should go ahead and do that now. Otherwise, this part is going to get really confusing! So remember last time when I said there were five Attack and five Defense cards? That’s not quite true.…