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…
Category: Games
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…
Protospiel 2014
Since last year’s Protospiel, a lot has changed for me, both with regards to the state of my prototype, as well as my level of contact within the board game designers’ community. So this year, trepidation and rookie mistakes were replaced with excitement to see some other designers (whom I know…
Vercingetorix on NPR! The guy, not my game ;)
My number one objective this holiday break was to make some definitive progress on the next revision of my board game about Gaul. I researched a lot of battle locations, tuned a lot of game mechanics, assembled a folding cardboard base to mount the next prototype board, and sat down…
Protospiel 2013
A few weeks ago, I attended a Board Game Developer’s conference called Protospiel. As luck would have it, it was in my hometown of Ann Arbor, MI, so the trip got to double as a visit to see the folks and an old friend or two. I got some shocking…