Tag Archives: Fluxx

My youngest son and I have met and talked to Andy Looney, the designer of the Fluxx family of games, a few times at PAX East shows. One year he taught us Homeworlds, another year Time Breaker. So I was eager to interview him about card game design.

If you were invited to a beer-and-pretzels game night, but you’re the designated driver, here are my favorite “non-alcoholic” beers to consider, though technically some of these do have up to 0.5 alcohol by volume (ABV). Or perhaps you’re thinking of abstaining or limiting your alcohol consumption.

Deck hunting is an unsung mechanic that injects anticipation and unpredictability into card games like Go Fish, Fluxx, and Magic: The Gathering. Deck hunting isn’t listed in BoardGameGeek’s index of mechanics; it involves trying to look through a deck to find specific cards. Go Fish is the easiest example. You’re trying to form pairs of cards, and if you can’t, you ask a player if they have a match or draw a card from the deck. In the Fluxx family of card games, you typically win by having two cards […]

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 […]

My 14-year old son asked me to teach him to play Solitaire last weekend. This made me question my life choices: how had we never taught him Solitaire?! I can remember playing Simultaneous Solitaire all the time with my maternal grandmother and brother and sister before I was even ten. So we got out three decks and each played traditional Solitaire, my wife and I guiding him along. I even queued up a soundtrack (“Solitaire” by Suzanne Vega).  I explained to my son that when Windows 3.0 came out it was the […]