Troy Press

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 […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Card games typically have different areas in front of the players. These areas have a variety of names, depending on their purpose: Arena – A common area to which players play cards face up to a contest, such as a “battle” or “war” in the game of War. Cascade – A set of face-up cards built on one another, with the value and suit of each card in the cascade visible. (For instance, Solitaire builds 7 cascades, from […]

This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. If you’ve never designed a card game before, it can be easier to start by adding house rules to an existing game. Here are the top 10 card games that Americans played in 2016 (excluding gambling and adult games): Uno Rummy Spades Solitaire Go Fish Euchre Hearts Pitch Cribbage Phase 10 Take a card game you like and make it better. It can be a game played with a standard deck of cards, or a game played with […]

My 11-year old niece and nephew were in town (twins) and really wanted to see Rampage. While I have no idea why they made a movie about this classic videogame, ironically, the 1986 flyer promoting the game to arcades literally imagined it as a movie: Joshua Rivera has a great history of the making of the video game: “We had come back from a trade show, and I was like ‘Hey, why can’t I do big stuff?’ Because with my pen-and-ink style, if you’ve seen the Rampage cabinet art, there’s […]

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 […]

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 […]