Troy Press

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 […]

During the summer of 2016 I read the great book, Pacific Languages: An Introduction, by John Lynch, with the intent of creating a Polynesian artlang. In November that year, I named the language Gana fa Folua, and I collated 37 roots for pronouns, from Pacific proto-languages. And then I did nothing more with it. Then, the last Sunday in August, 2021, my son and I played the board game Kahuna, which has islands with invented names (in alphabetical order). The island names were so badly designed (for instance, ‘c’ is […]

The family of roleplaying games that emerged in the 1970s grew out of wargames and focused on the mechanics of combat and exploration. Fantasy PbtA games put the fiction first, the mechanics second. As a result, players have much less work to do – their primary job is to envision the situation their character is in and decide how they would react. Rather than a character sheet that lists stats common to every player, PbtA games have playbooks, which offer unique information depending on the type of character (wizard, fighter, […]

One of the great bits of tech from Apocalypse World 2e is the threat map, which provides a concise summary of campaign prep. You can adapt it for other systems as well, if your play centers on a holding or home base. Here’s an example from last year for my Stonetop campaign: D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker describe the process of using threat maps as follows: List the players’ characters in the center circle. As you name NPCs, place them on the map around the PCs, according to what […]

While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and later in Creative Computing’s bestseller BASIC Computer Games, which went on to sell over a million copies. Unlike the 1955 boardgame Jotto, where players are told only how many letters are in the mystery word, WORD plays like Wordle, but with a text interface, providing information about what letters are in the mystery word and, of those, […]

When my youngest had a random Friday off from school last October, and my wife was on holiday with our sister-in-law, I asked him how he wanted to spend the long weekend. “Playing Axis & Allies!” he said. We started with the 1984 Revised Edition of the Milton-Bradley game and played that each day. I kept winning, so I suggested we get one of the newer editions, for which I’d be less familiar with the strategies. (I played the 1984 edition a ton in high school and college.) Given the […]