The board game design day at the Game Developer’s Conference has been a rousing success, if you’re judging it by its ability to produce quality talks. (In terms of interest at the conference, I suspect it’s done well since they’ve … Continued
I have to admit, I was tempted to be a bit of a snob about The Quest For El Dorado, Reiner Knizia’s Spiel des Jahres-nominated family-weight deckbuilding/race game. I was there in the early days of Dominion! I know what … Continued
I had the pleasure of sitting down (digitally) with David Libby, designer of the solo card game Anxiety to talk about the game design and his personal struggle with anxiety. This is the first time I’ve done a written interview for … Continued
As I mentioned in my first impression, Gloomhaven is remarkable not necessarily because it’s particularly innovative, but because it seems to do everything it wants to do better and more correctly than any other game in the genre. The cardplay … Continued
I am truly blessed with a great group of friends to play games with. If you listen to The Thoughtful Gamer podcast, you’ve heard from pretty much all of them. Frequently after playing games we’ll have an informal debrief of … Continued
I wanted to have a review of it up today, but the book “Characteristics of Games” has been so good so far that I keep savoring it like a particularly delicious bite of steak instead of actually finishing it. This … Continued
Hang around a modern board game hobbyist long enough and you’ll inevitably hear their critique of the behemoth of American board games: Monopoly. Central to that critique will be two arguments: Roll and move is a bad mechanism because it … Continued
With board games becoming more and more popular, I suspect many developers and publishers have spent a lot of time thinking about how to create positive first impressions for their games. In fact, this is one of the areas where … Continued