Troy Press

As I developed the pantheon for Cycladic League, I gradually evolved away from the Classical Greek era towards primordial goddesses.

My youngest son and I have met and talked to Andy Looney, the designer of the Fluxx family of games, a few times at PAX East shows. One year he taught us Homeworlds, another year Time Breaker. So I was eager to interview him about card game design.

My speed-run through The X-Files to come up with a list of the best episodes that form a cohesive whole.

You as GM can certainly handle factions solely through the fiction and the regular rules, but it is great when the game supports factions mechanically. Your characters help this faction, but in doing so run afoul of that faction, and the GM tracks this in some way.

The current IMDB ratings, including the top 3 episodes (the last four of the arc of Paul Giamatti’s villain). Bonus: The 10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek All Time (where one SFA episode has been unfairly consigned).

Skills aren’t commonly used in Powered by the Apocalypse games, and take different forms when they are used.

The episodes of A History of Rock Music by Andrew Hickey aren’t just histories of a song, but broader histories that might be epitomized by the background behind the song, especially the evolution and collision of different music genres and the constant exploitation of African American musicians.

When asked what kinds of exercise or fitness activities they do, 19% of Americans said cycling. It’s well behind walking/treadmill at 61% and behind the next three: hiking or trail walking at 34%, strength training at 32%, and running at 28%.

Pravic is a constructed language, even within its setting, where it was created as part of the settlement of the moon Anarres by refugees from Urras. Here are links to the pages that I found most useful to learn more about Pravic.

With free time being precious, I tried to apply lessons from my past as a professional programmer to speed development of my BASIC game, Cycladic League. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t.

Cycladic League is a browser-based BASIC pixel-art civilization game where you lead the people of your island to explore more of the Cyclades archipelago, to construct buildings, and to recruit sailors, warriors, priestesses, and more. You can play it in about twenty minutes.

In 1956, to implement chess on the MANIAC I, Paul Stein and Mark Wells reduced the size of the chessboard from 8×8 to 6×6. Their Los Alamos chess variant is possibly the first bit of chess ever programmed.

With the release yesterday by Office Dog of The Two Towers: The Trick-Taking Game, the sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game, I reached out to interview their design, Bryan Bornmueller.