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…
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…
Recovering from Setbacks
It finally happened — I overcommitted. I thrive on driving the throttle right to the edge, week in and week out. I despise the word ‘busy’, so I don’t use it, but on balance, I’m not sure what people generally do with downtime, so I fill it with things: pet projects,…
Canterbury: FOR SALE
It’s finally happening. I’m putting my house in Michigan up for sale. Since I bought it in 2006 while working at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, & Dance, the Canterbury house played witness to countless memories, a few bad, but mostly in the good to great range. Dozens of cookouts, get togethers, and…
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…
Fortune Favors the Prepared
On Friday, my MacBook Pro (nicknamed “Rockhopper”) started acting up. After a trip to the Cherry Creek Apple Store…at 6:15…on a Friday…from Boulder… I found out that the coverage window for this known issue ended in 2013, and I was one of the un/lucky ones who didn’t have the issue present until the Yosemite…