• Uncategorized

    Avalon

    On November 1st, I begin my job as a designer on Magic: the Gathering. This is, of course, immensely exciting, and I’m looking forward to working with other incredibly talented designers on a game that’s captured my imagination for 15 years. However, this time of joy and new beginnings is also…

  • Game Design

    Gimme Your Lunch Money

    Being mean to other people is actually really good and cool. Sorry, I meant in board games. I should have been more clear about that. Being mean – significantly and intentionally setting back other players – has developed an unfair reputation as being a universally bad thing in board games.…

  • Game Analysis

    Under the Hood of Downforce

    The phantom exterior like fish eggs interior like suicide wrist-red. I could exercise you, this could be your phys-ed. Cheat on your man homie AAGH I tried to drive through the narrow space that can only fit one car man! Can’t make it. Can’t make it. Car’s stuck! Outta my…

  • Game Design

    Stacking Your Decks

    The concept of the deck of cards has benefitted tabletop gaming since before the invention of the printing press. Every game that has a deck of cards employs it differently; sometimes it’s the whole game in a tiny package and sometimes it’s only a minor part of an enormous set…

  • Game Design

    Incentives!!! On Ice

    Richard Garfield wrote an article in The Kobold Guide to Game Design advising game designers to play as many different games as they can – not even board games, but video games, traditional games like tag, and even sports, as well as watching things like game shows and analyzing them as…

  • Game Analysis - Game Design

    Balance, On Average

    When you think about game balance, you probably think about making all possible player options be as equitable as possible; about maintaining a fragile balance between each player’s starting position so everyone has an equal chance of winning every game. But what if I were to tell you that there…

  • Game Design

    Board Games and the Attention Economy

    The “attention economy” is a sociological and economic term that has gained increasing relevance as users gain near-constant access to media channels via smartphones. Herbert A. Simon summarized the concept as “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the…