Players will almost always "just get playing" whenever there's any friction, so players won't look at examples if they have to find them
I also believe that examples SHOULD feel optional, unless it's a really tricky rule. In that case, tell the player directly that they should look at the example!
I think the true value of example diagrams is to help readers check to see if their understanding of a rule is correct, not to help them gain understanding of the rule. Put example diagrams directly after the rule they are demonstrating, and make them clearly demonstrate a single game action.
A game of Magical Athlete. The Baba Yaga piece is standing on top of all the other pieces
baba yaga tramples all
attempting Myst for (basically) the first time. So far I've played for 45 minutes and I've found about 8 million places to input codes and zero clues about what those codes might be
You're telling me I can chuck AND pluck in ONE game??? I couldn't back fast enough!!!!! www.kickstarter.com/projects/urb...
Chicken Fried Dice cover art for Kickstarter. Includes a "Project We Love" sticker
Launching a KS tomorrow. I'm not panicking, you're panicking! (because you haven't hit the follow button yet, right??)
www.kickstarter.com/projects/urb...
Actually, I want to quote this again, because I think some of us are making the misstep of allowing this conversation to proceed on Dancey's terms.
He insists he was only talking about *ideas*, not finished products. What goofballs we are! Except...
Reposting with ALT because this kind of phenomenal disdain and disrespect from within the industry literally against two of their own titles and the designer who made them is important to recognize.
This idea looks super cool, I hope I can try it someday!!
The only app-y board game that I have no issues with is Unlock, mostly because you start the app, leave it on the table, and almost never touch it again. Search for Planet X's app makes for excellent gameplay but is suuuper fiddly to use :(
YIKES.
Upper Deck (Marvel Legendary) just announced a CCG using the Harry Potter license.
Fans of UD are rallying against this decision. Like the CGE situation last year, I’m asking for your help.
Join us. Share your disgust and frustration, and help us push UD to retract their awful decision. 🎲✂️
I work at a flgs - I think that $40 is the dividing line between small and big games; it's the price that makes you think you're buying a game-night experience instead of a filler/impulse. Therefore, $35 is the worst price for a game because it's competing with the $10 games and not the $40 games.
I'm (probably) not making it to OrcaCon this year but I will live vicariously through these posts. These are some good rating systems so far :)
Cardboard Edison interviewed me for their 2026 Best Practices handbook, check it out for some of my thoughts on submitting your game to a contest!
I'm also looking forward to helping judge the first-round submissions this year. It should be lots of fun!!
A screenshot showing a message that I got banned from editing
I clicked the link and it banned me from editing Wikipedia for a year??? I’ve never edited before so maybe it’s because this is an edit link?
A top-down 3D render of the Chicken Fried Dice board game box on a table with the game's components.
Chicken Fried Dice has been simmering for a while and I think we're almost ready for plating! Learn more at get.chickenfrieddice.com
PS. Not hating on Carcassonne even remotely, the tension as people draw tiles in the endgame and you find out if your plans succeeded or failed is, like, the best part of the game. It took the change in feeling of input randomness over the game and used it very smartly
In conclusion: the feelings of your players are always more important than following supposed "good game design". Best practices will betray you if you don't use them wisely. (Also, "one type of randomness is good and the other is bad" isn't even a good best practice.)
Trick-taking games also handle this well by having a few big sources of input randomness (dealing initial hands) rather than many small ones. The moments of input randomness are also completely disconnected from other ones, preventing lucky combos over time.
And there are games that use it without losing any agency. Cascadia avoided this trap by only increasing opportunities to score points as the game goes on, rather than making the play space tighter as many other spatial puzzle games do. It leaves every turn feeling puzzly up to the very end.
If you're making a game, and you're using input randomness because you want to give more agency to your players, be sure to use it thoughtfully because it might be doing the opposite in your endgame.
Somewhere in the game, the moment of drawing a tile went from feeling puzzly and thoughtful to creating feelings of desperation and that you're at the mercy of the tiles - input randomness is often used to increase player agency, and in this case that agency has nearly disappeared.
This is especially felt in the cities, which are worth half if you don't finish them. So at the start of each turn, you reach into the bag, often hoping for a specific element to let you finish your cities and bank a large sum of points.
But by the end of the game, you've usually placed all your meeples and are committed to how you're scoring points, and now you just need to maximize that potential with whatever you draw.
Take Carcassonne: drawing a tile at the start of your turn is input randomness. At the start of the game, every tile drawn is a puzzle to figure out how to best place it. Do I build many roads, one big city, or lay down some farmers?
An observation on randomness: in many games, as the game gets closer to ending and opportunities to get closer to achieving your goal lose flexibility, moments of input randomness often start to *feel* like output randomness.
Turnout yesterday for our local game design meetup was crazy! I think we had 14+ folks. It's amazing to see our community grow.
Video. Games. #paxwast
The board game Sky Team, which uses dice with digits and rounded corners
The dice from the board game A Column of Fire
Sky Team has them. A few games from Kosmos have rounded wood dice with numbers, the picture is from A Column of Fire.
I'm really excited to go to the PNW Tabletop Game Market at PAX in a couple weeks! There's some really exceptional designers there, selling some of the most unique games I've seen in a while - there's lots of cool stuff happening in indie board games :)
