Free-range thoughts about design, writing, and play
When Stonemaier Games announced Apiary, its new worker placement game about futuristic bees in space, I was all over it. I loved the theme, the highly paintable queen bee miniature, and the prospect of a flexible worker placement system. I’ve had a couple of chances to play the game since it arrived, and Apiary delivers…
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Stationfall, the “party game for hardcore gamers” in which you play several members of a wacky cast of misfits running around a crashing space station. Honestly, this game pretty much had me at “hello”. The rules get a little complicated, but bear with me as I summarize….
A while back, my family gave me some Thor shampoo. I was thrilled at the prospect of Hemsworthy locks!
Despite the dust on this blog, a lot has been happening as I stumble towards the end of 2021. here are a couple of key milestones down and a couple still to come.
This summer, I finally read Michael Ward’s 2008 book Planet Narnia, and it blew my mind. It completely changed my understanding of C.S. Lewis, but what I never expected is that it would also provide useful new tools for making games.
I’m hip-deep in my master’s thesis at the moment, but I still want to take a few minutes to write up last quarter’s games played while it’s still “last quarter”. Who says procrastination can’t also be productive?
I’ve played a bunch of good analog and digital games over the last year — Slay the Spire is particularly notable — but the last few weeks have been eaten by the critical darling of 2020: Hades. If you’ve paid any attention to critics’ best of the year lists, you’ve heard about Hades. Heck, this…
At the current progression, the next Games Played update will be in a year. Since my goal is to understand my own play patterns, though, I hope it’ll be a little sooner than that. But are there even any patterns to understand?
Intrepid had me when the cover said “hello”. My first thought was, “a Gravity board game?” followed very closely by “IT MUST BE MINE!” Once I played the game, though, I found a lot more happening than a space station in peril.
So, it’s been a few months. Anything interesting happening in the world? I’ve been busy with some things, and one of them is marveling at Slay the Spire. Trading card games and deck builders are a big part of my gaming history. I played and sold them in the 1990s, drifted away from them in…