Graphic Design in Tabletop Games

Today I’m going to discuss an often misunderstood topic, graphic design. I’ll get into more details below, but very quickly: Graphic design is the conveying of information visually. Given that tabletop games are almost completely visual, it shouldn’t be surprising that graphic design is essential to a successful game. But graphic design is a subtle […]

The Cost of a Board Game: Time

Not long ago, I discussed the monetary cost of making Corporate America, an awesome political satire board game. Today, I want to pick up where I left off by discussing how much time it took to make Corporate America. I’ll get into the details in just a minute. In the mean time, this timeline will […]

Lessons from Other Kickstarters

Wow, has it really been a month and a half since my last blog post? Yowza. That’s what I call the definition of unacceptable. In my defense, though, a lot of the delay came from trying to pack as much punch into the final version of Corporate America as possible. I needed to get it […]

A Matter of Appearances

What’s Inside Matters For those of you who don’t know, I come from a computer science and philosophy background. You might think those two disciplines are really different, but they have more in common than you’d expect. For example, both are very interested in defining and understanding intelligence. But the main area of overlap I […]

Deranged Fantasy Games: The Next Iteration

For those of you just joining us, throughout the development of Corporate America, I’ve used the business card Deranged Fantasy Games to illustrate how the game has iteratively evolved. Today, I’ll continue that tradition. In the first installment of Iterative Design in Action, I used the various versions of Deranged Fantasy Games to show how […]

Being a Mad Hatter

One of the coolest things about games is that they incorporate so many different disciplines into a single experience. From game design, you have a lot of psychology, storytelling, and math. There are plenty of challenging engineering problems to solve when you’re building a game, especially if it’s a digital game. The art is clearly […]

Skin Deep

Games have a strange relationship with theming. I’m not talking about the fact that games don’t need themes and many don’t have one (like Go or Tetris). I’m not talking about the way the same game can be themed in countless ways (like Warcraft and Starcraft). I’m talking about the fact that the vast majority […]

The Iterative Saga Continues: Deranged Fantasy Games

I’ve been out of commission for a few weeks now. A move as well as some personal trips and transitions have sucked up a lot of my time, preventing me from writing. But I haven’t had so little time that I haven’t been making progress on games! In fact, my main focus has been on […]

Understanding Design

I realized I’ve been talking a lot about game design without explaining what it is. This probably wouldn’t be a problem, except design in general, and game design specifically, are relatively new concepts, and I believe many people have misconceptions about them. When people think about the design of something, they often think about how […]

Don’t Hate the Player Part II

In the first part of Don’t Hate the Player, I discussed how to determine who your player is and why you should care. Today I’m going to talk about some legitimate concerns related to making games for players unlike yourself. I’ll also be giving you some examples from my own experience about these issues, one […]