Thanks again to Bartoneus for filling in for me last week. (Guess this means I need to make a comic for a Random Encounter– there’s a scary thought.) As a short rebuttal to the question he posed, I generally don’t talk about fun specifically because it’s hard to design to be fun, and it’s a […]

First, thanks to everyone who came out and attended the panel I was on at Balticon. The guys with me on the panel are geniuses who I always like comparing ideas too, and I’m glad we had a good discussion with an audience that seemed genuinely interested. Some random points that I remember from the […]

In our group, if you make a rules mistake and inadvertently try to cheat, Jake will say “Give me your hand.” He becomes quite insistent until you present your hand, at which point, he will slap it on the backside like a nun’s yardstick. This is his way of enforcing the rules, and I believe, […]

I’m not talking about the kind you find in a short story- no, this is the metaphor in games. Almost every game has a metaphor of some sort, except the super driest theme-less games. Chess, for example, has a pretty good metaphor, as does Go. However, something like Blokus, with its abstract play and strange […]

First, I want to recommend some other game design blog reading that is not my own: The Importance of Being Elegant takes a good shot at attempting to define elegance in board games and providing means by which we can evaluate a game for elegance. Good stuff that I need to dive into further. Sometimes, […]

Continuing in my series of articles comparing game design to other forms of creative expression…. (don’t worry, the semester is almost over.) There’s a current trend in writing that I call “grabbiness.” That’s the ability of a piece to grab you right from the beginning: to suck you in and make you want to read […]

You’d think after attending a 10 day long convention about boardgaming I’d have lots to talk about, wouldn’t you? Well, the truth is, I spent a lot of time talking about game design, and terminology, and related issues while there quite a lot. While I have yet to become sick of talking about games and […]

I was at a party this past weekend that could at times have been described as “raucous.” Of course, I don’t go for this whole “unstructured social interaction” thing, so I was jonesing for gaming, coming off from a back to back win in drinking team foosball. Fortunately, I carry a game around with me […]

Last week, in my attempt to explain why games were art, I had to come up with a definition that I liked for art. Apparently nobody else liked it. However, I stick by it, but your mileage may vary. The only common ground josh0rfz and I could find about our definition of art involved guide’s […]