The Golden Ages: An Epic Civ Light

Designer: Luigi Ferrini Publisher: Stronghold Games, Quined Games, et al Players: 2-4 (2-5 with expansion, Cults & Culture) Ages: 12+ Time: 90-180 minutes Times played: 10, with purchased copy I missed The Golden Ages by Luigi Ferrini when it came out in 2014, among the thousands of games that came out that year. I stumbled across it in reviews of Sid Meier’s Civilization: New Dawn among players who said they preferred it. Ten plays later, I can see how it compares favorably. In most civilization games, any hidden elements of […]

The Fall of the Gamebook and the Rise of Interactive Fiction

One out of five adult Americans with online access (90% of the population) have ever read any gamebooks, such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series. These books definitely reflect the 1980s, when publication peaked: those 35-44 years old (kids in the 1980s) are most likely to have ever read a gamebook (39%), compared to just 18% of those 45-54 years old and 30% of those under 25. While classic gamebook lines are being relaunched (e.g., Endless […]
numerical-sequence

A New Sequence

I discovered an interesting numerical sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, 39, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 34, 39, 44, 49, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41, 47, 53, 59, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 55, 62, 69, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 71, 79, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, […]
Tasty Minstrel Game's Coin Age

2018 Most-Played Boardgames

My nickels and dimes, for the year, were: Boardgame Plays Unpublished Prototype 45 Innovation 25 Secret Hitler 19 One Night Ultimate Werewolf 15 Battle Line 13 Civscape 13 Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn 12 Avignon: A Clash of Popes 11 The Golden Ages 10 Sushi Go Party! 9 Homeworlds 8 Brew Crafters: The Travel Card Game 5 Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger 5 Covalence: A Molecule Building Game 5 Last year, like most years, I played unpublished prototypes (my own and my friends’) more than any single […]

Floored – Floor Plans for RPGs

I’ve been running an open-table Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign since September at my FLGS. One of the players earned enough loot that he wanted to buy a house in the city at the center of our campaign (Melvaunt, on the Moonsea, in Forgotten Realms, using 9 great modules from Baldman Games). I searched for some house floor plans for RPGs, and most that I found looked like something from Zillow rather than something from a medieval setting. One from Wizards of the Coast even had indoor plumbing (not sure […]

Popular Themes for Tabletop Games

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. The following are common themes for tabletop games, derived from BoardGameGeek‘s categories. Pages shows the number of pages of games with this theme (out of date now, but intended as a relative indicator of popularity). Pages Theme Game Examples 50+ Economic Terra Mystica Caverna Through the Ages 50+ Educational 1775: Rebellion Freedom: The Underground Railroad Evolution 50+ Fantasy Terra Mystica Caverna Mage Knight 50+ Fighting Mage Knight Star Wars: Imperial Assault Eclipse 50+ Movie / TV / Radio […]

Game Development: Developing for Gameplay, Theme, and Manufacturing

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. In many game companies, developers are different than designers. They will take a game designer’s working game and adapt it for publication. These changes might be intended to: Improve gameplay To better fit the game company’s customers To meet manufacturing constraints or goals. Developing Gameplay The developer will first continue to refine the game. Dale Yu – the game developer for Dominion, Suburbia, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig – relates how he played Suburbia solitaire hundreds of […]
Noun Project icons

Guide to Prototyping Card Games

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. The secret of prototyping is to do the least amount of work you can to test the next iteration of your card game. If it’s for the first play, simply write on a collection of index cards. Just worry about the broad strokes of the game play, not all the little details. Don’t worry about naming specific cards or accurately simulating the theme. Or getting all the cards you plan to have. Just get a game that is […]
Under-the-Blood-Red-Mountain-cover-illustration

Under the Blood-Red Mountain [2018]

My entry for the 2018 solitaire Print-and-Play contest is a 99-section, 14,000-word gamebook, Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain. You pick the path, and your decisions shape the story. I was inspired to create a modern alternative to the great gamebooks of the 1980s. Unlike those books, Hero’s Arc has story arcs, so losing a battle won’t always result in death, but may result in a setback of a different kind. You’ll need pen and paper and three six-sided dice, each a different color or different size. One will be […]
Rummy Duel setup

Design Challenge: Standard Deck Adaptation of a Published Game (Rummy Duel)

Your design challenge is to take a published card game and adapt it to use only a traditional deck of cards. If you ever end up stuck somewhere with only a regular deck of cards to play with, you’ll be able to use that deck to play the game you invented! Example: Rummy Duel Rules Premise Rummy Duel is a fast-playing version of Rummy for just two players. It is adapted from the game Schotten-Totten, by Reiner Knizia, in which two players compete while assembling 9 separate hands of poker, […]