• 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 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 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…

  • Game Design

    Losing Is Fun

    It’s fairly easy to enjoy a game, even a bad one, if you’re winning really hard. Even in situations where your lead was determined by luck and it’s so unstoppable that you can do literally anything and coast to victory, there is something satisfying about smugly wishing the other players…

  • Game Design

    The Pest-sistence of Memory

    While it’s entirely possible that what makes a game fun is 100% subjective, I’ve noticed that some things are almost universally regarded as “fun” or “good design”, and some are almost always considered “bad” or “unfun”. Having to do math beyond simple arithmetic is in the latter category, for instance;…

  • Game Design

    A Perfectly Normal House! Design Diary

    The inspiration for my new game, A Perfectly Normal House!, came on the Monday before Halloween, when I was alerted to a buck-wild 3D real estate walkthrough that was making the rounds across the more online parts of Twitter. What struck me is that it was scary, not because it put…

  • Game Design - Uncategorized

    The One About Expansions

    As of now, I have not been lucky enough to experience demand for a game that pushes me to create an expansion. However, I’ve certainly played many games with expansions, and the idea of releasing expansions for successful games is universal enough that I decided to put effort into thinking…