Troy Press

The fundamental tension of the Twilight Struggle series of Cold War games is that you often have to play cards that help your opponent. The strategy centers around determining when to play such cards. In Twilight Struggle, cards have two uses: You have two standard ways to get rid of an opponent’s event: you typically have one card in your hand that you won’t have to play that hand, and once a hand you can discard a card of a value of at least 2 ops points to roll to advance the Space […]

Powered by the Apocalypse games take diverse approaches to representing injury, stress, and deteriorating health. Unlike traditional RPGs with their focus on hit points, PbtA harm systems often try for other narrative consequences. Dungeon World 1e and many of its descendants are an exception: they maintain familiar territory with a hit-point system, though adding tags and debilities to create narrative weight. This approach helps transition traditional players to PbtA. (For a long discussion of the trade-offs, see In Defense of Hit Points.) Harm Clocks Apocalypse World introduced the harm clock, […]

1) You can practice the language with hundreds of people on social media, in bite-sized chunks.

2) You can make up your own words in the language, using established roots and affixes.

3) Many of the speakers are multilingual—they may even speak one or two other conlangs…

Originally pitched as a prequel, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds now has to be conceived of as a reboot on an alternate timeline, based on its own changes to the timeline and to the development of its characters. Nor should this be a surprise. The future of the 1960s show didn’t quite pan out.

In 2023, Joey D. Jones of the University of South Hampton interviewed me and over a dozen others about the authorial burden of interactive fiction. His paper on the topic is now available.

After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? Well, I’d just published Reflections on PbtA Design, so it seemed apropos to design a game from scratch rather than just hack up an existing system.

One of the things my wife and I love is the live music scene. Most weekends we can hear live music at our pizza shop, at neighborhood bars, at a food-truck fair, and so on. These are almost always cover artists, though they may play a song or two of their own as well. I’ve always wondered about the songs that they choose to cover.

Urban prep is different than traditional dungeon prep. For a dungeon, or a hamlet or keep, you might key every location, but you’re almost never going to do that for a town or city. These are typically run much more loosely, with handwaving around movement through the city.

When reviewing the electronic boardgame Dark Tower, I learnt it was programmed using one of the TMS1000 microcontrollers. I’ve since fallen in love with this little processor, discovering that it powered so many other electronic games from my childhood: Big Trak, Electronic Battleship, Merlin, Simon, Speak & Spell, etc.

Dungeon World 1e is the geomorph set of fantasy PbtAs, thanks to it being one of the first TTRPGs to use the Creative Commons license. You can cut it out and reassemble it, build on it as desired. Here are some of the many works that are compatible with Dungeon World 1e.

Dark Tower was one of my favorite boardgames as a kid. It was an “electronic boardgame,” a category that came to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dark Tower really was a boardgame, complete with a board and player pawns (nicely sculpted plastic warriors, as well as a dragon miniature) with a rotating computer assistant shaped like a black tower.

You can play Solitaire Square online on Itch.io: fill a 6×6 grid with cards numbered from 1 (red) to 80 (violet) in ascending order. Playing a card immediately next to another card costs you the difference in discards (e.g., playing 53 next to 50 costs you three discards). 

I really enjoy the premise of Enterprise: the first human deep space explorers using the first warp-five starship. It’s a fun era of Star Trek, and they handle many aspects of being a prequel right, even if they went against fan expectations. I get why people think it is one of the worst Treks and don’t want to watch all of it, but I wanted to curate the best episodes.