I know some in the board game design community consider it sacrilege, but I’m definitely a theme-first designer. I make heavy use of my Catch Sheet day to day, while sitting in meetings, walking around, or wasting time reading articles online. Usually several times a week, I’ll be struck by an interesting economic…
Category: board games
Playtesting Feedback Tips
A few weeks ago, Valour was tabled FOUR times in one weekend, with four entirely different groups. One group, after having the game significantly stalled early on by an edge case I hadn’t yet considered, soldiered on to completion late into the night. Overall, feedback was extremely encouraging. Many of the…
Short Story RPG Launched!
Posting a little late again this week… but it’s been a pretty crazy week! I rebuild the lead-gen page for Valour, now that I’ve spent the time to put together a lot of the backstory and details, but more importantly… I just flipped the switch last night on a brand-new website for one of…
Valour: The Game
When we left off last week, I had the first physical prototype of my board game in-hand. Not knowing any better, I thought I might be near the end of the road. Now, after countless hours of play testing and revising, I know two things: a) I was WAY off the…
Valour: The Process
After seeing Barbarians and being inspired to design a game in the theme. (See part one of the series), what happened next was… really nothing. I was deep in another project, and spending a vast amount of my free time doing triathlon things. So the project lived dormant in the catch sheet, waiting…
Valour: The Backstory
With all the posting I’ve done about Protospiel, board game testing, and marketing, it dawned on me last week that I have yet to actually put out a canonical post on the game I’m designing and developing. Whoops! Then I started writing it, and it got a little long, (which is…
On Marketing
A theme I see fairly often among makers, geeks, and other tech folks (three groups to which I wholeheartedly swear allegiance), is a dismissal of “marketing” as a discipline not worth committing effort against. But everything in my personal experience as a developer, “start up guy” and product creator leads me to…
The Hazard of Scheduled Posts
After jotting a note in my Catch Sheet to write a blog post about the Five Thirty Eight/Twilight Struggle article, it took a while to get it put together, which, as already noted in my post, gave time for the WSJ to drop the Green Bay Packers/Catan bombshell before it…
“Golden Era of Board Gaming” — 538
At the end of last year, this morsel came across my radar several times… (shout-outs to Andy Stone, Eric Budd, and Mitch Hulse for passing it along! I love that so many of you thought of me when you saw this). You should go take a moment to read it…
Tips for running an effective board game play-test
As I find myself deeper and deeper in the design process for Valour, the more I’ve come to appreciate how tight so many commercially-available board games are. In that vein, I’ve been doubling down on the play test schedule, because (to my mind), there is no better way to smooth the…