Troy Press

I’ve always been curious about what subset of board game owners log their ownership on BGG (BoardGameGeek). Jamey Stegmaier just shared the installed base of five core products. I cross-referenced that against BGG ownership stats. Game Installed Base BGG Ownership Ratio Between Two Cities 36,900 8,264 4.5 Charterstone 56,500 8,606 6.6 Euphoria 31,000 8,787 3.5 Scythe 147,678 34,777 4.2 Viticulture 54,780 7,007 7.8 Average 65,372 13,488 5.3 So sales outnumber logged ownership anywhere from a factor of 3.5 to 7.8, depending on title. This range will widen even further when […]

My card game, Civscape, is now available from The Game Crafter! At this point, I’ve played the game over 250 times (3 times today!) and still look forward to the next match. My friends were hoping that I would run a Kickstarter for the game to get the game more widely known but I decided the on-demand capabilities of The Game Crafter were a better fit. Here’s why I didn’t do a Kickstarter: If I were lucky, I’d sell about 400 copies at a $2 profit ($800). After investing maybe a […]

For the 2018 Global Game Jam, I designed a print-and-play 27-card microgame: You are dueling prestidigitators, juggling magical orbs to attack one another. The first to destroy their opponent’s Phylactery wins. You can download the PDF here. I welcome your feedback and questions. Our brainstorming group somehow took the theme of “transmission” and went from sonar (shown in the theme video) to the Battle of the Atlantic (U-boat warfare) to Napoleonic warfare to millipedes with combat boots to juggling wizards. (The theme tie-in involves the transmission of energy from orbs […]

As we discussed last time, while BASIC Computer Games became a bestseller because of microcomputers, the games themselves dated back to timesharing systems using teletypewriters. As a result, a few of this first generation of BASIC games produced printed output as the primary purpose or as the game itself. The most game-like of these was Amazing, which would generate a new, random maze that you could solve on the printout. AMAZING PROGRAM CREATIVE COMPUTING  MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY WHAT ARE YOUR WIDTH AND LENGTH? 10 ??? 10 .–.–.–.  .–.–.–.–.–.–. I        I              […]

When I first met Rick Dakan, one of the creators of City of Heroes, we talked about a class he’s teaching at Ringling College of Art and Design in the spring, “The History of Game Art.” The class starts with Spacewar! in 1962 but to my surprise doesn’t cover some of the BASIC games of the timeshare era (circa 1964 to 1976). Yes, some have “art” (in fact, some are only art). BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell a million copies, is thought of as a collection […]

I was surprised that there was no easy way to play David Ahl’s classic book, BASIC Computer Games, in your browser. You can now play them here: Play BASIC Computer Games in Your Browser BASIC Computer Games sold over a million copies as microcomputer users in the 1970s and early 1980s typed its programs into their Commodore PETs, Apple IIs, and TRS-80s (among many other machines). I smashed up Ahl’s listings with Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC emulator to make it easy for you to select any of these programs and […]

What was included and what wasn’t in the very first version of BASIC might surprise you. First of all, Dartmouth was waiting for the time-sharing system equipment from GE to arrive, but in the meantime Kemeny and Kurtz decided to write a compiler for BASIC, to have it ready once when implementation of the time-sharing system began. While the two had designed BASIC to be an interactive language, with the goal of removing students from the tyranny of interacting with computers through batch processing of punch cards, the two still […]

A friend made a joking reference to COBOL yesterday, which reminded me of the time I tried to write a COBOL interpreter. In college, I took a one-credit class in 80286 assembly language and for my course project I decided I’d implement a Tiny COBOL, which sounded like a great oxymoron in and of itself. Also, I was a big fan of Grace Murray Hopper (shown above). But I really picked Tiny COBOL instead of Tiny BASIC so I wouldn’t have to implement parentheses and order of operations in assembler […]

When my youngest was 8, I created a simple microgame for us to play instead of the classic card game of War: Melee in the Mines. We played it about 50 times, so I created a free PDF version to share with other people. (It’s light but with some decisions: it has an average rating of 5 out of 10, compared to 2 out of 10 for War.) It’s been downloaded less than 100 times, so imagine my surprise when I came across merchandise for it: Basically, TwiceTheTees.com has created […]