Troy Press

Castle Conquests is a one-page print-and-play game where 2 to 4 players try to besiege and capture castles worth the most victory points. Players start by drawing roads between castles and adding symbols to castles to give each a special effect. After all the castles are connected in one road network, players take turns laying siege to roads. When all the roads around are a city are besieged, the player with the most roads claims the castle for its gold (points) and special effect. Acknowledgements: This game was inspired by Eric B. […]

“I played it two times, once I died and once I ended the game in Blackhill, living happily ever after. I had great fun both times. I really liked the adventures you told.” – Aleksandar Saranac Winner of Best Dungeon Crawl in the 2018 Solitaire Print-and-Play Contest. A modern alternative to the great gamebooks of the 1980s, Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain is a 99-section, 16,000-word gamebook. You pick the path, and your decisions shape the story. Unlike many classic gamebooks, Hero’s Arc has story arcs, so losing a […]

According to many surveys I’ve conducted over the years, Uno is the most popular card game in America. For instance, in our recent Nation of Gamers survey, 23% of U.S. adults who had played a card game said the last card game they had played was Uno, outpacing even games that can be played with a standard deck of cards (e.g., Spades, 12%; Solitaire, 9%). I think one overlooked aspect of Uno’s popularity is that it plays well with larger groups, with the publisher saying that it is good for […]

This afternoon we played Dialect, by Thorny Games, a game about coining words as part of telling the story of a community. The game comes with four types of isolated communities, including a Mars colony, but we picked a 1980s cult, because of course we did. (And there are many third-party frameworks for different types of communities as well.) Unlike role playing games, storytelling games such as Dialect typically involve more player negotiation about directions of the story. This is akin to the collaborative worldbuilding at the start of some […]

In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language and how they are combined (phonotactics). Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a problem with Denju, my naming language that I […]

I concluded my post Printouts as Games with “Next time, we’ll look at the primitive visualization tools that were packaged as ‘games’.” That was five years ago! So past time to write this. However, it turned out there were fewer visualization programs than I realized: Bounce, Life, Sine Wave, and 3D Plot. Bounce was a physics simulator that plotted the course of a red rubber ball. For Life, a user enters an initial pattern, which the system then iterates on repeatedly, emulating a changing population, without further input. The Wikipedia […]

Five years ago, Yochai Gal compiled the first version of the Dungeon World Syllabus as a tool for new DW GMs. Alex Leone has since taken over as editor, keeping nearly 180 links current. While I had read many of these articles over the years, I decided to systematically read every single link, to improve my own GMing. I then began to compile those that were licensed under the Creative Commons into a single, easy-to-read volume, as a supplement for others to use. While most PbtA games have small fan […]

Axis & Allies & Zombies is a well-designed crossover game that is just missing some final polish. While it can play up to five, the amount of downtime makes it a poor game for more than two players. The significant randomness makes it the least strategic of the Axis & Allies line, which can be a pro or con, depending on your taste—pro: fun battles between two players of uneven skill; con: bad luck can cost you the game. If you’re interested, buy it now, though, as it is no […]

In Christmas of 1979, my dad bought me Dungeons & Dragons. This was the Holmes edition, first published in 1977, covering levels 1 through 3. It was a dramatic simplification of Original D&D, intended specifically for use by those as young as junior high school. Amusingly, it was still surprisingly complicated. One of the breakthrough innovations of OD&D was the wide range of types of dice, and the mechanics seemed design to center and celebrate using all those different types of dice: Character creation was a minigame, rolling 3d6 seven […]

Tl;dr: Seven-card stud, low card in the hole is wild, follow-the-queen is wild, suicide king has to fold, face-up joker means you have to shift your hole cards to the right. Whenever we get together with my brother-in-law and his family, we inevitably play poker. This time, we started with 7-card stud, then played follow-the-queen, then low-card-in-the-hole. At that point, I was ready to fully embrace chaos, and I combined them! I added that if you were dealt the suicide king face up or in the hole, you had to […]

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 […]