The following was my submission for the first round of the 2022 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. My assigned prompt was Genre: Fantasy, Topic: A Grudge, Character: A Gatekeeper. The ancient room seemed to amplify silence, in spite of the crackling fire burning in a wide hearth, and it made…
Galactic Impact
Ten years ago, I sat down to teach myself a new programming framework, and wanted a project to power that learning along, so I set about building a 4X game inspired by the likes of Pax Imperia, Master of Orion, and all that. I stood up a beta version of…
Eulogy for my Mom
I lost my mom on April 2, 2021. Below are remarks I gave during her graveside service on the 5th. My mother taught me all I know about living in this world. She taught me how to live into my creativity. She taught me how to be tough when things…
Took/taking a little break?
Seems like I accidentally took a little hiatus from board game design, and sort of from board gaming more generally, even my podcast queue is pretty deep with episodes of board game shows I’ve skipped past recently. Though I went to a bunch of game nights in Stockholm (great Meetup,…
Big News 2019!
Holy shit y’all there was so much exciting news in the last few months I totally forgot to even post about it here! Here’s the update: Last summer, I got two games under contract — I wasn’t totally clear on what the rules were about discussing what and with whom,…
Game Design by “Particles”
Something I’ve been toying with lately, is the idea of game design I’ve been calling “particles”; different than when Gil Hova describes gameplay in terms of “atoms”, where a discrete unit of play can’t be split; but a game design system perhaps orthogonal to the ideas of theme-first / mechanics-first,…
Designing from the Road: The Box of Bits
I’m spending 2019 traveling, but committed to continue to design tabletop games while doing so, with the thought that constraints might lead to some good systematization and process habits. The first thing I felt I needed in order to keep designing on the road was a way to transport and…
Component Studio is Dope
I have many weaknesses when it comes to game design, but perhaps most severe among them is an allergy to making cards. They’re such an incredibly powerful component… an arbitrary-odds randomizer, plus hidden information, plus ‘multiple use’ item, plus… plus… plus… 🤯) but the idea of designing, balancing and laying out,…
Harris Hawk Designer Diary
I think often about an older post I wrote called ‘getting out of the game room‘, and the value that comes along with doing so for a tabletop game, in order to gather experiences from the real world to draw on. A frequent travel stop for Andrea and I (owing…
Radiolab episode about finding inspiration
I recently heard an episode of Radiolab where one of their producers interviewed their top reporter on how he finds some of the more ‘out there’ stories they broadcast, and, of course, (everything seems to…) got me thinking about board game themes and mechanics. Take a second and listen to…