Troy Press

Obsidian Portal, an online campaign management tool for RPGs, shares stats on the number of campaigns run in its system. I’ve created a Google Sheet with this data. This represents the 129,098 campaigns created over the lifetime of the software (12 years, as it was created in 2007). As a result, you’ll see Pathfinder in second place at 18% of campaigns, due to its historic strength: it is doubtful that 18% of campaigns played today are in Pathfinder, given the loss of players to D&D 5e and the release of […]

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 board are explored rather quickly (e.g., Clash of Cultures) or the board starts out as fully visible (the first and third board games based on Sid Meier’s Civilization […]

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 […]

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, […]

My nickels and dimes, for the year, were: Boardgame Plays Unpublished Prototype 45 Innovation 25 Secret Hitler 19 One Night Ultimate Werewolf 15 Battle Line 13 Civscape 13 Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn 12 Avignon: A Clash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Your Own Adventure: House of Danger 5 Covalence: A Molecule Building Game 5 Last year, like most years, I played unpublished prototypes (my own and my friends’) more than any single […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. 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 […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. The purpose of playtesting is to collect real-world experiences with your game that you can use to help you modify your game so that it better achieves your goals. Early on, you might playtest the game by yourself (solo playtesting or self-testing) to make certain that its basic framework works or to test individual parts of the game. Your friends and family members will want to play a more workable version of the game, though it is best […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Here’s another card-game design challenge and a case study for you: Design a game that can be played with a regular deck of cards. You don’t need to use all the cards in the deck. You can use each suit as a separate type of card, if you want to limit yourself to four types of cards. For instance, you could use the numbers to differentiate levels, so if hearts represent health, you can have 1 (Ace) through […]