After legendary designer Sid Sackson passed, the Strong Museum of Play became the home of his personal papers. This collection includes correspondences, journals, prototypes, sketches, and a bunch more ephemera from his long career. His diaries alone spanned 35 years and were intricately indexed. It will take years to transcribe and digitize them all, but the early parts of his career are up on the Sid Sackson Portal here: https://sacksonportal.museumofplay.org/s/sackson-portal/page/welcome A year after the portal's launch, Julia Novakovic posted an update on the project's ongoing road m ..read more

Good news! I've submitted the final draft of my book "Graphic Design for Board Games" to the publisher! Of course that now leaves a void in my schedule for some other long-term project. I'm not yet certain what that would be, so for now I'll continue sharing early drafts and previews of what I've written for the book. The following section comes from the chapter on designing language-neutral diagrams. In this sub-section, I discuss the practical process of diagramming each part of a game action into glyphs and icons. Let’s make a diagram for a very simple in-game action: You take 2 apples fr ..read more

This is an excerpt from the rough draft of my book Graphic Design for Board Games. If you want early sneak peeks at the rest of the draft, including editorial comments and discussion, head over to my patreon!  Three Principles of Card Design I spend most of this chapter getting in the weeds of print production and manufacturing. That’s just where I spent most of my time in my career, so that’s where I have the most information to share. However, if you’re just getting started designing cards, you don’t have to worry about all that just yet. There are three main principles of c ..read more

I've got the rights to Trickster back in my hands! I'm considering where its future may lead.  Trickster was my first attempt at really pushing print-on-demand as a primary distributor. It was an ambitious plan back in 2015. In those days, it was a series of individual small-deck card games. The deck sizes were optimized for best margins and ease of shipping from POD. Each deck was standalone, but could be shuffled together. The core rules were the same for all of the games, but the cards in each deck had unique abilities. (I would attempt this again with the "I Can't Even" series and ..read more

(This is a rough sketch of a game from 2017, when dice placement and roll-and-writes were gaining more popularity. I was in a phase where I was just merging as many different ingredients together to see if they'd stick.  You can see some of these ideas in Pencil Park.) You’re trying to get your payloads onto rockets and into orbit. Rocket space ain’t cheap and neither is the fuel. You have to invest wisely if you want to launch! The cards on the right represent rockets on launch pads numbered 1 through 6. Setup The game comes with a deck of rocket cards. Shuffle a number of cards based o ..read more

It's the annual recap episode of the Ludology podcast. Important notes on imposter syndrome here. Host Erica Bouyouris is the designer of "Dumb Ways To Die," the best-selling new card game of the year. That should be a huge achievement for any game designer. Unfortunately, that doesn't align with BoardGameGeek buzz or lead to big awards, so she's had to come to terms with that as she continues in her career. Good discussion on feedback, mental health, and managing your well-being as a game designer. https://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-315-happy-2024 ..read more

Here are all the books I've read and reviewed over the past year. As is typical of my lifestyle, I take in more audiobooks than physical books. I'm not a purist about that sort of thing. The one hitch is that I've already burned through a LOT of the audiobooks from the library that had my interest. It's forced me to branch out to other genres, so you'll see some more non-fiction and a couple of mysteries here. Plus one or two books I'm categorizing as Fantasy, though there are no swords and sorcery in the mix. There is one very specific element that kept popping up in the sci-fi I read this ye ..read more

I often rely on set collection for my early prototypes. It's such a simple, satisfying framework to motivate players and give clear goals. The problem is how often set collection becomes a rote, emotionless task list to complete. The theme of the set collection is what set makes it more appealing to new players. An evocative theme suggests secondary mechanisms that help fill out the rest of the game. Here are a few themes I've used or seen over the years. Recipes and Shopping Lists Welcome to Stabbed! Impress the chefs, follow the recipes, and you won't be stabbed! This is by far the most c ..read more

First of all, never work (for someone else) for free! I'll break those four ideas down below, but just remember that only you can determine what your time is worth. You can always go lower, but it's hard to go higher. I recommend starting high. Never accept the feeling of being underpaid for your time and skill. You'll be surprised how quickly you can fall out of love with art. That said, both of these questions require an honest assessment of your skills, availability, the client's personality, and your enthusiasm in a particular project. Skills: Browse "open for commissions" tags on social ..read more

"One tip for you, newbie:" Tam boarded Emphasis barely a day ago and this was the fifth "one tip" Cutter offered so far. He ended sentences with colons, a prelude to some bit of wisdom. "Look at your crew. If you can't tell who is a rando, it's probably you. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course." "Thank you, sir." Tam said.  Cutter smiled and turned back to his station before Tam interrupted. "However, I *know* I'm randomly assigned."  Company policy stated that captains could only select 50% of their crew. Even those selections were filtered through a complicated run ..read more