Blog Archives
sA Conversation with Alexander Macris: The Sinister Stone of Sakkara
Monday , 20, April 2015 Tabletop Games 9 CommentsJeffro: Okay, why an adventure? I mean, a lot of people say they want adventures for their favorite systems. But most game companies have a hard time justifying them. Back when there was some semblance of a market for roleplaying games, Wizards of the Coast set up the Open Game License so that everybody else could […]
ACKS Dwimmermount Session 3: “Was That My Saving Throw?”
Monday , 30, March 2015 Tabletop Games 13 CommentsAs I write this, I admit that I barely have an idea of what day it is. I mean, it’s one thing to run a marathon roleplaying session once a year or so. It’s another thing entirely to do them on two consecutive weekends. I’m not sure, but I think this is normal for some of […]
A Few Observations About the Adventurer Conqueror King System
Monday , 23, March 2015 Tabletop Games 15 CommentsOkay, after spending a great deal of time with this game last week end, there are a lot of things that strike me about it. On the one hand, this is all rather esoteric… and in some cases I’ll devolve from raw opinion to pure speculation and on the generalizations based on a specific group of […]
Okay, we just sort of kept playing and playing and playing here. I don’t think this should have worked– this was an unscheduled game set up on the spur of the moment at a small town university science fiction and fantasy convention. Basically no one signed up for this, either. Well, a couple people did– […]
What is Prezcon…? Well, it’s a whole bunch of things going on at once. I go up on Wednesday and don’t stop playing games until Saturday or Sunday. Most people there seem to come for the tournaments. There are scads of them, for all kinds of games: popular euro games, serious wargames, and everything in […]
I believe this was the first tournament ever for this game. There were three full tables running in each of the two heats. The people that showed up were really excited to play this one, but that first round was a little rough. It’s still so new at this point, a lot of us needed a […]
Book Review: The Visualization of Quantitative Data
Wednesday , 25, February 2015 Book Review, Games, Tabletop Games, Wargames 2 CommentsREVIEW: The Visualization of Quantitative Data, 2nd Edition, Graphics Press, 2001 Edward R. Tufte, Author. People ask me, after I explain the layers of thought that went into the play aids I design, what kind of books I’d recommend. The first book is this one, by Edward R. Tufte. It concerns itself with the accurate display of statistical […]
Game Design: The Importance of User Experience & Interfaces
Wednesday , 18, February 2015 Games, Production, Tabletop Games, Uncategorized, Wargames Leave a commentRedmond Simonsen was an under-appreciated genius; he was cantankerous and was half of SPI when it founded, and one of the handful of people desperately trying to patch the financial holes when the iceberg of changing market conditions rent it asunder. Red worked as the marketing director, editor and in-house graphic designer for most of SPI’s […]
Game Design: The Part That Isn’t Fun
Wednesday , 11, February 2015 Games, Production, Promotions, Tabletop Games, Wargames 5 CommentsI get asked the game designer equivalent of “Wow, how do I get your job?” about twice a month, and more frequently during convention season. I usually end up trying to dissuade them. Writing games is a really bizarre form of technical writing. It’s somewhere on the Venn diagram of writing legal briefs, computer programming […]
On the Table: Car Wars Fourth Edition, 2nd Printing
Monday , 2, February 2015 Tabletop Games 8 CommentsMy review of the latest iteration of the Car Wars franchise was billed as being EPICALLY COMPREHENSIVE over on the Castalia House Twitter feed, but it was lacking something absolutely critical: an account of what it’s like to play the game just with what’s included in the new box set. Hopefully this post will rectify this […]