I can’t think of a better way to start off the new year than to answer a few mailbag questions from our wonderful readers. If you’re only going to write one mailbag every four years, maybe we need to appoint a new Mailbag Postmaster General. Brian G. (St Paul, MN) Where have you been and when are you going to write again? If an angry crowd of your readers somewhere I’ll be happy to mail them my torch and pitchfork in solidarity. Aaron T. (Modesto, CA) If I were a betting man and I had to choose who would finish writing something next between George R.R. Martin, James Joyce, and you, I wou ..read more

I’ve had some downtime between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, so I pulled out my Kindle Fire and explained to my wife that I was doing “market research” for Games Precipice. Lately, both Alex and I have become interested in electronic implementations of strategy games–both in the sense of adapting existing games from the physical realm to app form and in the sense of integrating electronic mechanics into games with physical components. Rather than focus on in-depth reviews of each game application, I’d like to step back and take a look at attributes that make a game either a good or ..read more

We’ve been talking about qualifiers recently which are mechanisms and requirements in games that players must satisfy in order to have a chance to win. In part one of this series we covered the category of comparative qualifiers which included games like High Society, where the player who has spent the most money is eliminated just before final scoring, and Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, where the player who has the most corruption is thrown to the crocodiles. In this article we’re going to talk about the other major category called “Absolute Qualifiers”. When we previously covered ..read more

Not long ago, in the days of board game conventions and shaking hands, I would seek out new friends and old and attempt to play literally as many board games as possible over the course of a weekend. For all the incredible games that have come out in recent years, I often find myself finishing a board game full of fascinating mechanics that ultimately told a dazzling story of tallying points on a scoring track and quickly cleaning up the components so we could move on to something else. Storytelling is a challenging art form in any medium, and board games have made strides in a lot of areas f ..read more

All good things must come to an end and today we’re talking about the most triumphant of endings; victory conditions. As part of our ongoing series titled Game Structures, this article is going to build on some of the principles from our last segment where Matt wrote about endgame conditions and methods game designers can use to conclude games. In the first half of this article we’re going to break down the most common objective types, while in the second half we’re going to look at games that allow players to win the game by achieving one of several different objectives. As we look at objecti ..read more

We’ve been talking about qualifiers recently which are mechanisms and requirements in games that players must satisfy in order to have a chance to win. In part one of this series we covered the category of comparative qualifiers which included games like High Society, where the player who has spent the most money is eliminated just before final scoring, and Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, where the player who has the most corruption is thrown to the crocodiles. In this article we’re going to talk about the other major category called “Absolute Qualifiers”. When we previously covered ..read more

Not long ago, in the days of board game conventions and shaking hands, I would seek out new friends and old and attempt to play literally as many board games over the course of a weekend. For all the incredible games that have come out in recent years, I often find myself finishing a board game full of fascinating mechanics that ultimately told a dazzling story of tallying points on a scoring track and quickly cleaning up the components so we could move on to something else. Storytelling is a challenging art form in any medium, and board games have made strides in a lot of areas from legacy g ..read more