We’ve finally figured it out with years of study. The hardest part of designing a game is not coming up with the idea, or original mechanics, or balance, or any of that stuff. It’s figuring out how the darn game ends satisfactorily. This problem, by the way, is not left solely to boardgames. Movies, comics, […]
Critical Hits Gift Guide #4: Everything Else
First, how about some shameless pimping! Did you know you can buy a wide variety of products from the Critical Hits Amazon Store? It doesn’t cost you any extra to buy what you were going to anyway, and a little bit gets kicked back to us so we can pay server costs and keep the […]
Inq. of the Week: More Games!
This week’s inquisition is more of a follow-up to our Third Gift Guide that focused on Games. There are just too many games out these days, whether they’re videogames, boardgames, or tabletop RPGs, we here at Critical Hits can’t possibly play them all and much less know which ones out of each category are going […]
Set Collection
Sometimes… ok, most of the time… you won’t have a complete game. You’ll have a type of game, or a theme, or a mechanic. And sometimes with that mechanic, you’ll need some other mechanics to actually make a game. This happened to a game designer friend of mine recently who had a group of crazy-good […]
Critical Hits Gift Guide #3: Games
First, let me give a big shoutout to Ogrecave and their yearly Holiday Gift Guide on games. I’ve found quite a few great games through there and the guys who put it together are very knowledgeable. They focus on a few specific areas of games and list a bunch for each. Also, Boardgamegeek has their […]
Too Busy Photoshopping Boardgames (Poorly)
Sorry, too busy to write a full column this week. But here’s one of the many projects I’ve been working on lately: (source) (source) (source) This all is for the Boardgamegeek/Mattel Photoshop Contest. If you have a BGG login you can check the other entries so far and whether you have a login or not […]
Departures / Some Playtesting Principles
I just got my Wii flown in, and boy are my arms tired! No seriously, I’m sore. It’s probably due to going a bit nuts with Wii Sports Baseball, and having done a lot of lifting yesterday, but my right arm really does hurt. Still, so far, a lot of fun with the games. Apparently […]
Werewolf Tilt
Over the last weekend, I was at Philcon. In the past, I have really enjoyed the game room there, but over the past few years, it’s gone down drastically in quality. This year I had the choice of playing Dork Tower, 12 player Apples to Apples, 8 player 10 color Zendo, or the Vampire CCG. […]
Inq. of the Week: Holiday Gift?
I now have learned, after a long ordeal, that the holiday shopping season now begins the weekend before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to use a Best Buy coupon that was valid only last weekend to purchase my Wii, but that failed for a few reasons. And Toys R Us was the busiest I’ve ever seen […]
Geekery Collision / Brainstorming from constraints
Not much of a column this week. Between a fast-approaching finals season and various events at home, I’ve been pretty busy. One piece of news: two of my favorite things are colliding. Alan Moore is going to appear on The Simpsons. The episode is going to feature competition between Android’s Dungeon and a new, “cool” […]
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