Tales of the Arabian Nights (hereafter refered to just as Tales) was originally published in 1985 here in the US. It was reprinted recently in Germany as Geschichten aus 1001 Nacht. Tales is one of the most famous of the “paragraph games”. A paragraph game, essentially, is multi-player choose your own adventure. The similarities are […]
Rug-Sweeping and the Party Game Problem
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 […]
Why Do We Play Games Anyway?
Dave’s out of town this week, doing whatever it is that those “gamey” types of people do, and so I’m posting a (late) Critical Threat to keep the trend. Every week he discusses a new idea or concept that comes up to him about game design, playing board games, and living in the world of […]
Mighty Adventures of Text
This started quite simply with the question, “What would Candyland look like as a text adventure?” Clearly it went a bit further than that, but as a game we’ve previously discussed as having no decisions what-so-ever and therefore not being a game, the concept is tantilizing. Is there a sole decision in Candyland, and is […]
Balticon Panel Recap / Crappy First Prototypes
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 […]
Handslap!
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, […]
The Metaphor
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 […]
Game Design, the Slacker Way
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, […]
Review: Hot Fuzz (2007)
There’s a small change of pace this week in the Librarian’s Tome section. Instead of a book review, I’ve wandered into the film section of the library (not completely of my own free will, as I still prefer books, but spouses can be persuasive) and present to you Librarian’s Tome: Film Edition. Title: Hot Fuzz […]
Boardgames That Grab
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 […]
Recent Comments