After several years of design and development, Forbidden Jungle is finally here! In this diary, I’ll recount the search for the setting, some of the design challenges I faced, and look to what’s next. The Setting The adventurers lift off from Forbidden Island in their helicopter to later escape in a rebuilt airship in Forbidden Desert, then power a rocket to lift off in Forbidden Sky. When I began the design of the fourth game in the Forbidden series, the first thing I tackled was its setting. Players had already encountered a sinking island, a perilous desert, and a mysterious power platfor ..read more

CMYK posted a new version of the How to Play video for Daybreak. I’m really happy with how it turned out ..read more

After more than two years of design, Daybreak is now live on Backerkit. Check it out ..read more

We’ll be crowdfunding Daybreak on BackerKit starting on 20 September 2022. Sign up to be notified when the project goes live! Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It presents an optimistic vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to decarbonize the world. I designed it with Matteo Menapace and the game be published by CMYK Games. It’s expected to ship in 2023. Find out more at daybreakgame.org ..read more

No small part of game design involves figuring out how to best explain your game. An old adage of software design was, “write the manual first” as this forces you to think about how the end user will experience your product. This carries over into game design as well: if, when writing the rules or teaching a game you find that you can’t explain it, it’s time to have a hard look at the underlying design. Below you can see a 7-minute overview of the in-progress game, Daybreak that I shot yesterday for a group who will be playing this Friday. The game continues to evolve, but it’s exciting to see ..read more

Donna and Colleen at the end of a testing session of Daybreak. In August 2019 a climate scientist named Declan Finney emailed me, explaining in great detail the gravity of the climate crisis and offering to help re-theme Pandemic to fit the topic. The idea was to help people better understand the situation and what could be done by wrapping it up into a game. This was a bit of a kick in the pants for me. I’d been thinking about doing something similar for some time, but hadn’t started on anything. I began researching. Months passed. I decided that the topic was deserving of its own game (not ..read more

If you’re like me and isolating due to Covid, you’ve probably had to find new ways to play boardgames with friends. I’ve been playing boardgames online now with two groups of friends and one of our most frequent stops is Board Game Arena. So I was happy to learn that Forbidden Island is now available to play on the platform, starting today. If you haven’t checked out BGA, have a look. They have many games that are free to play; other games require a premium membership, which will run you about $2 per month for unlimited use and it allows you to host games for others who don’t need to pay them ..read more

It’s startling to revisit this excerpt from The Game Designers showing the Lucca and SPIEL game fairs with their massive crowds. SPIEL drew close to 200,000 attendees from around the world in 2019 and Lucca—the city—fills to the brim of its medieval walls with people, elbow-to-elbow. We were carried away by the crowds. Seems like so long ago already. This clip is from The Game Designers, a feature-length documentary, directed by Eric Rayl about professional and fledgling board game designers. Available on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube Movies, Amazon, and Vimeo ..read more

The Pandemic Survival 2020 tournament season may have been canceled this year due to the need for physical distancing, but that doesn’t mean that we all can’t enjoy it together over Zoom! That’s what Rodger van den Braak and thirteen other former contestants did last month. I hosted a tournament myself last weekend to try it out—and it worked so well that I’ve written up rules and tips for all of you to try out on your own! Two-player teams compete to be the first team to find all four cures or the last team to survive. Images: Sasha Shen Johfre If you’re not aware of the format, Pandemic Su ..read more

The keynote I gave at TableTop Network just went up today. If you're interested in the importance of emotion in game design and empathy as a design skill, check it out: What’s the difference between a good and a great game? Often it’s the depth of the emotional response that it generates. But how do you know when your game is effective? Learn more about the importance of emotion in game design, empathy as a game design skill, and a technique for determining whether you’re on the right track when you design games to solicit an emotional response. Resources Research Log – Sample Research Lo ..read more