Troy Press

Researchscape conducted a newsmaker survey of 1,074 U.S. adults to develop an overview of game-playing. The survey was fielded from April 22 to 24, 2022. The responses were weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population by the following variables: state and region, gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, ideology, and registered voter status. Videogames have long had niche appeal, but mobile games have democratized the reach of computer games. In fact, mobile games are now played by as many people as card games: 88% of U.S. adults […]

During the summer of 2016 I read the great book, Pacific Languages: An Introduction, by John Lynch, with the intent of creating a Polynesian artlang. In November that year, I named the language Gana fa Folua, and I collated 37 roots for pronouns, from Pacific proto-languages. And then I did nothing more with it. Then, the last Sunday in August, 2021, my son and I played the board game Kahuna, which has islands with invented names (in alphabetical order). The island names were so badly designed (for instance, ‘c’ is […]

The family of roleplaying games that emerged in the 1970s grew out of wargames and focused on the mechanics of combat and exploration. Fantasy PbtA games put the fiction first, the mechanics second. As a result, players have much less work to do – their primary job is to envision the situation their character is in and decide how they would react. Rather than a character sheet that lists stats common to every player, PbtA games have playbooks, which offer unique information depending on the type of character (wizard, fighter, […]

One of the great bits of tech from Apocalypse World 2e is the threat map, which provides a concise summary of campaign prep. You can adapt it for other systems as well, if your play centers on a holding or home base. Here’s an example from last year for my Stonetop campaign: D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker describe the process of using threat maps as follows: List the players’ characters in the center circle. As you name NPCs, place them on the map around the PCs, according to what […]

While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and later in Creative Computing’s bestseller BASIC Computer Games, which went on to sell over a million copies. Unlike the 1955 boardgame Jotto, where players are told only how many letters are in the mystery word, WORD plays like Wordle, but with a text interface, providing information about what letters are in the mystery word and, of those, […]

When my youngest had a random Friday off from school last October, and my wife was on holiday with our sister-in-law, I asked him how he wanted to spend the long weekend. “Playing Axis & Allies!” he said. We started with the 1984 Revised Edition of the Milton-Bradley game and played that each day. I kept winning, so I suggested we get one of the newer editions, for which I’d be less familiar with the strategies. (I played the 1984 edition a ton in high school and college.) Given the […]

I love Rob Donoghue’s idea for having a move for each PC when their player is absent: I want to write up a set of moves, one per player, that can be used once per session to represent the influence of absent characters. So “Jack knows a guy” may allow the current game to hook up with a useful NPC when Jack isn’t at the table. I doubt this is something that many games need, but for my rotating cast, I think it’ll be a nice way to keep it […]

I recently download a dozen iOS games in the Lingo/Wordle genre. As I played each, my appreciation for the original Wordle grew. Here’s a look at the design decisions of the different implementations, and what we can learn from them. The lexicon of words that can be guessed needs to be the right size, containing common words. With WhatWord there are too few words; within a few days of playing the application, I’m seeing repeats. With PuzzWord, there are too many rare words; I’ve had three mystery words in a […]

This is the introduction from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Designing a card game is messy. You will have what you think are good ideas that, when you play them, you find don’t work that well. With that in mind, start with a simple game and add complexity over time, as you play. Here are 7 steps to follow: Think of a game idea. Document the current state of your game idea. Create a playable prototype. Playtest. Apply feedback. Go back to step 2, as often as necessary. […]

TLDR: Compendium of Tactical Moves for PbtA Games Some complain that PbtA games lack tactical moves and so combat has much less mechanical support than in traditional roleplaying games. This shouldn’t be a surprise since D&D grew out of wargames with miniatures and so naturally emphasized combat. Yet I personally find fights in a PbtA fantasy game to be much more exciting, dynamic, and cinematic than fights in 5e, for instance. But there are times I want additional mechanical support from the game for tactics. One area where I don’t […]