Happy 250th America!

getting froggy now. I think you'll be excited

Origins was a great time, but super exhausting! Glad to be back home. Thanks to everyone who came out to play Pirates of Port Royal!

YARR! Let's play Pirates of Port Royal at Origins! I'll be in the Unpub Room at 5:00PM this Friday, and 1:30 PM this Saturday, at the Convention Center in Columbus Ohio!

Printing prototypes for Origins

I'll be there! Who is ready to play pirates?

Am I “unc?” I don’t know, is it “unc” to relish a sunset? Is it “unc” to see the world renewed in the peal of a child’s laughter? To stand still in the ebb of a river of time and grin at the rushing parr with the wisdom of eternity? To rhyme a wilting flower with the universe? Is that “unc?”

I'll be at Origins this year with a prototype of Pirates of Port Royal

Impromptu game of pirates! Yarrrrrr! 🎲✂️

Congrats to the Artemis II Crew!

You can play Pirates of Port Royal at Origins at the Unpub room Friday night and Saturday afternoon

Try my new Ancients style game I made for the Buried Giant Studios community Game Jam: Ragnarøkkr Tabletop Simulator: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/... Rulebook: docs.google.com/document/d/1... 🎲✂

It's weird to see the criticism of SU&SD's top 100 games of all time giving a middling review for Last Will because I always took the series idea to be a tongue in cheek title for a "look back at classic games people love" rather than a literal ranking of the 100 best games ever.

This newest weird prototype cost $43 to make one copy out of office supplies, and I'm really excited for this one.

I might have accidentally started my most ambitious game design ever.

Pretty sure I played this a few years ago at Protospiel Cleveland and had a great time with it. Definitely recommend people check this one out! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwzk...

No War.

I'm calling this Pirates of Port Royal now.

@gmtgames.bsky.social Hi, I have a few P500 orders that I ordered from my old address, but I've since moved, is changing my address in the addresses tab enough to get these to ship to the correct address when they are ready or do I need to do more for them?

Newest prototype came in the mail today! 🎲✂️

I didn't want to fill Cole's replies with a giant essay, so I'll just write my thoughts here as it relates to game design🎲✂ I think these two points aren't really in as much opposition as they seem at first glance, Designers tend to underestimate their players, and learning games is difficult...🧵

While I think this is often true, it also elides another critical point: professional designers often don't realize how smart and capable people are, espeically people who don't play games. 🧵

Prototyping 🎲✂️

My favorite part of the creative process comes after all the important parts of the game have reached “fun” level. After that, once every part is fun, we can work on each part and make it better than it was before—critically analyzing that part versus how it appeared before.

Playtesting Tales from the Supernova with the Central Ohio Game Designers group at Dragon's Lair. Very cool lines of play from a new player with maxing out their loyalty and building a ton of ships. The new win condition worked well although the card itself needs to be clarified. 🎲✂️

Part of the reason I moved away from using social media and into creating things in the real world is because the distortions of digital space have this way of making people more antagonistic against each other for things they would never once feel emboldened to say in person.

A piece of #IllusionOfGaia aka Illusion of Time (PAL territories) and Gaia Gensōki (Japan) used on Famitsu magazine, issue 254 from 1993. Usual upscale/clean/retouch process applied. No clue on the artist, any info let me know!

🎲✂️ Board Game Design Research Question ✂️🎲 Looking for a cooperative TCG/LCG style game where players build their decks before the game,& do NOT require any external components/setup information beyond each player's constructed decks or a light number of Tokens/Dice that you'd expect from a MTG deck?

Quentin Tarantino made his top 20 movies of the 21st century and I did mine too. My only rule was no repeat directors.

HUGE news update for me!!!!!! High Tide, the game I handmade for Indie Games Night Market 2024 and licensed to Underdog Games in 2025… ✨ Will be releasing at BARNES & NOBLE around March 2026!!! ✨ This marks my first design to reach big box retail stores!!!!! More details as they become available!

@marcelineleiman.bsky.social Just wanted to let you know my daughter (4) said High Tide is her favorite game ever.

being a tabletop designer means sometimes you find an Untitled Spreadsheet and inside is just the numbers 1 to 100 in order

Been offline for a bit because I moved!

I think my biggest pet peeve is people saying "game mechanic" instead of "game mechanism". A game mechanic sounds like a guy who changes your game's oil.

Trying something different with the map "hexes" in Tales from the Supernova. When tiled in this way, cards are identical to hexagons. 🎲✂️

High Tide was reviewed by The Dice Tower! “This game looks incredibly cozy!” “I would argue it is a potato chip game—in the sense of ‘okay I messed up, let’s try again!’” “The discovery space in this is much larger than I expected it to be.” “Okay, I *would* play this at the beach!”

Are there any professors, teachers or home schoolers here who would be willing to write a letter about their usage of our games in an educational setting to be submitted to Customs? If so, shoot me an email to [email protected]

You're gonna see a lot more of Tales From the Supernova in the coming months! Removing player boards did a lot to speed up the teach of the game. Who wouldn't want a 1-6 player smash up of a 4X game and Pax game? 🎲✂ #boardgame #boardgamedesign

redraw

I've been sick the last four days, working on moving, and haven't really been online, but I've had to unfollow a few people for a lot of seriously unhinged violent talk following the murder of a Youtube commentator. I do not want to be associated with anyone cheerleading murder.

Looking for advice/pointers/help: How do you run a board game swap? We have an event upcoming where we could facilitate some kind of swap as a service to local gamers. I'm nervous, though, about taking responsibility for other people's inventory. Anyone have any tips?

I wonder what Ray Bradbury thought about audiobooks.

Today we're announcing a small change in plans on our fall schedule. I'm still busy with the second edition of An Infamous Traffic and Hell Raisers is making great progress, but higher demand than anticipated and the vagaries of Trump's stupid trade policies means we need to get reprinting!

Weekend playtests were great, got to see some cool new designs, one about making s'mores, two narrative card games, & a dice game about asteroid mining. Supernova got some great feedback. Still need a name for the pirate version, and a name for the cowboy game. Cowboy game imploded at 4 players. 🎲✂️

Started 3D printing organizers to collapse down some big game boxes, and the hardest part is deciding which lid gets to stay in the collection. For Splendor, I kept the OG box. For the Century trilogy, that will be a tough one.

Played Abandon all Artichokes and High Tide last week, don't play as many games as I used to but I love these little pick up games.

It's not that I think "it doesn't matter" but rather the effects of this will simply consolidate the ability to use this tech into the hands of established capital that already owns basically all IP already. LLMs exist, you can't uninvent them.

🎲✂ I've been working on a fusion 4X/Pax game for a while, and I'm running into some tension between the two "styles" of games and I'm wondering if it's a design issue on my side or an issue of misunderstanding the genres. When you think of a "PAX" game what does that mean? What does 4X mean to you?

Not board game related, but I've gotten videos from this Cart Narcs guy on social media popping up, and it is incredible how quickly people melt down because someone tells them it's inconsiderate to leave a cart in the parking lot.

Back home from the first real vacation we've had in years, and I must have caught something at the beach because I feel totally terrible. Had a ton of fun with all of the family, fishing, and even getting the little ones to play Street Fighter but this cough is kicking my butt!