Free-range thoughts about design, writing, and play
Summer is in full swing! It’s a great time for biking, hiking, and swimming in the pool. Here in San Marcos, it’s also 98 degrees on a cool day, so biking and hiking are sweaty affairs and there’s only so long you can spend in the pool before you get all wrinkly. With that in…
Last week I wrote about a game that uses mobile mechanics in some unexpected ways. But what happens when a more traditional game company brings its intellectual property into the mobile space?
Our game group had a fun opportunity at yesterday’s meetup. We got to play Molecular, a new chemistry-themed game that will be launching on Kickstarter on June 28. So… did we form a strong chemical bond with it, or is it a little too free radical?
Paid apps are a tough sell. There are enough good free games being released every day to keep any gamer entertained, so how does a game like You Must Build a Boat beat the odds?
For a guy who doesn’t much care for MMOs or RTS games, I think about Blizzard a lot. Some of that is Diablo, which is one of my favorite games. Some of that is Hearthstone, which is the game I most wish I had designed. And most of it is my fascination with how Blizzard…
There’s a trap to look out for when you design a word game: it can’t be about the words. That sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? But avoiding that trap has been key to the success of word games from the classic Scrabble to the recent iOS release Capitals from Nimblebit.
I’m spending some time up in Massachusetts consulting for HitPoint Studios, and one of the many things I like about the company is its game night. They get together every other week to share new games and old favorites, which gave me a great excuse to introduce them to Bohnanza.
How old do you have to be to play Wits and Wagers Family Edition? It’s hard to say, but yesterday my preschooler beat the pants off the rest of this family in this “age six and up” game from North Star Games. She had a blast doing it, too. So what’s the formula that makes…
My daughter and I played a pile of games at Board Game Bash a few weeks ago, and Tales of the Arabian Nights is the last one on my review pile. Oddly enough, the weakest game we played may have been the most fun. Tales of the Arabian Nights is a dinosaur revived for the…
Splendor is one of the hot games of the year, with lots of buzz on various podcasts and videos, plus a prestigious Spiel de Jahres nomination. So when I ran into a game being set up at Board Game Bash 2014, I jumped at it. But was Splendor worth the wait? The set-up is deceptively simple. You get…