LET US TAKE A KNIFE AND CUT THE WORLD IN TWO

👀 🫶

"My Neighbor Totoro" for me. The scene where the three totoros are doing the growing tree dance and the kids join them melts my heart every time. Plus, my 3-yr-old, for a week after seeing the movie, thought every bump in the house or knock on the door was Totoro coming over to play.

Like many others, I’m missing @tinstargames.bsky.social this morning. While I can’t claim to have known Steve that well, we’ve been moving in the same online circles for, god, I have no idea how long. Gaming Outpost? Usenet? He had a genius for wickedly clever little games. I especially love this:

Philadelphia remains undefeated

Whoever owns the rights to Pit needs to put out a version with this art IMMEDIATELY.

Last round of family Christmas events just wrapped up. Gaming highlights included Madrino (draw the best floor plan, but you can only draw shapes based on dice rolls), Person Do Thing (get people to guess a concept but you have an incredibly limited vocabulary) and Just Dance (video game).

I was honored when @hopfka.bsky.social invited me to sit on this mini-panel with some incredible game designers and scholars (Sherria Ayuandini & Rilla Khaled), and now you can watch our chat here: youtu.be/_De7aXpM9lM?...

yeah man I love the mountain goats

Just updated my Betrayal fan project, "You Better Watch Out." If you play it over the holidays, let me know how it went! #🎲✂️ #BoardGames #BetrayalAtHouseOnTheHill gregisonthego.itch.io/you-better-w...

Huge thanks to @natewarren.bsky.social for including Resilience in this little stocking stuffer writeup! www.breakupgamingsociety.com/blog/indie-t... If you want to get Resilience, you can visit Gregisonthego.itch.io/resilience for instantly-delivered PDF gifting goodness

Kids found the Hyperspace Smuggler prototype on my game shelf while they were helping me clean up my prototyping supplies, so now we’re playing it. I forgot I put the @oneshotpod.bsky.social Star Wars Campaign characters in this game as little Easter eggs!

confirmed

HARD BOILED DETECTIVE: another cruel sunrise over the city of the damned. another corpse. another widow. another cup of black coffee to drag my sorry ass back to life- *sputtering* ME: do you like it? it's an ethiopian washed process single origin DETECTIVE: ME: are you getting apricot notes

Welcome to Bluesky, our leading cultural critics are the editor in chief of The Onion and the guy who wrote “No Children”

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

Great thread of vibes-based yet rigorous product research here. Thanks @dvcgames.bsky.social!

A friend texted me this question and it stumped me so I'm passing it on to y'all (#boardgames): What is a @dvcgames.bsky.social style game (could be actually DVC-made or not) for someone who loves Terraforming Mars?

Less thank one hour away! Join me and some incredible games scholars to talk about games and politics as a part of the MIT Global Humanities Forum's Public Literacies series. mit.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Bagged up and ready to go!

Roasting coffee for holiday gfits! Coffee prices are through the roof due to tariffs, but I managed to find some quality green under $6 / per pound. Two components roasted and blended, stickers printed, now to assemble and heat-seal the bags.

I love the wordmark and the dark wood of the table — looks exactly like something my grandma would bring out at a family gathering after dinner, the game box held together by yellowing scotch tape.

I made this for 2024's GENeration Analog @analoggamestudies.bsky.social conference after four presentations in a row cited Ahmed's work.

There are over 180 articles in the Skeleton Code Machine archives about game design and tabletop mechanisms. All available for free: www.skeletoncodemachine.com/archive #boardgames #ttrpg #gamedesign 🎲✂️

“You have very good sandwiches here” - @phoeberings.bsky.social’s Crystal Choi accurately assessing Philadelphia, where they opened for @thebeths.bsky.social last night, and will play Johnny Brenda’s tonight.

Thanks for the shoutout Chia @cado.bsky.social! Both Resilience and Rulebooks for Radicals are available on my Itch page: gregisonthego.itch.io/rulebooks-fo... gregisonthego.itch.io/resilience

The unintentional theme of our final day of tabletop studio was “games that are dumb (complimentary).”

I’m so excited to sit on this panel and talk about games & politics! Join us (remotely) a week from tomorrow!

I’ve forgotten this sometimes but being able to discover something you like, curate it, and make time to enjoy it *is* intelligence, connecting with art is intelligence, empathy is intelligence, the way of the dullard is to find nothing meaningful in art except for a way to seem snidely clever

University wrote up our PAXU trip! Huge thanks to @leder.games and Rio Grande Games for sponsoring student travel (we couldn't have gone without them) and to @thejaybell.bsky.social, @ritualcuts.bsky.social & Nick Brachmann for their time and expertise! www.harrisburgu.edu/news/2025-12...

Cameron has a gift for finding cool people doing cool stuff, and I’m humbled to be embarrassing myself on the same podcast episode as these folks. Give it a listen!

Great read! Makes me think about RPG's debts to wargaming -- hexes make sense if you are presenting two players with terrain for creating emergent objectives (the flank of my opponent's line; the hill where they have their cannons), but without the opposition, everything truly is pointcrawl.

Everybody’s got their limits / nobody’s found mine

Are you really drunk or is it just a

kconrod.medium.com/the-problem-... okay here

“Against Cop Shit“ is my “Tom Holland Lio Syncing ‘Umbrella’.” I see it, I repost it. Expel cop shit from your hearts.

This game rules. No prep, easy to teach, hilarious gameplay. I played this for my family, none of whom play RPGs, last Christmas. We had cocktails, dressed up fancy, and told stories of spirits running amok. Highly recommend.

Golf courses -> larp grounds (or public sex forests), Data centers -> laser tag arenas, Distribution hubs -> go kart tracks. Tell your college-age kids to start learning ARG and location-specific game design.

the primary thing that TPUSA provides to young conservatives is a blueprint for weaponizing the abject cowardice of university administrators against individual teachers and instructors, and university admins should take a long look in the mirror and think about what that says about them

Use alt text always, but specifically *to your messaging ends*! People often post guides about "color, subject, angle," etc. but I think that always going so broad does a disservice to rhetoric. Think about why you put the image on the post, then describe the parts of it that matter for your post!

“It’s an older post, sir, but it checks out.” (if you follow me and are somehow not aware of Galactic / Going Rogue, read this great piece).

These rule. I got Realm of the River Dragon for my kids and it’s remained a favorite for years.

The end! The Thieves traded roguish adventure for the stability of ruling the city, becoming like the stodgy merchants they once robbed.

Drew up a little river city with the 5-yr-old to play @possibleworlds.bsky.social’s “Beak Feather and Bone” together. Will report back tomorrow after we play (it’s bedtime now, so we paused after setup).

Did you attend the Indie Night Market and want to talk to us about how it went (and report on PAXU more broadly)? HMU

An incredible team-up. great booth, great folks, great games.

Headed to the terrace level with Keep the Faith till 4ish. Hit me up if you want to play!

A faith of holy stoners grapples with its commitment to altered states as the world modernizes around them. Will they withdraw to the wilderness or take political power to shape society in their image? (Demoing Keep the Faith this morning before the expo hall opened).

Great postmortem thread! I had to bounce before the team pic but I’m so honored to have been selected and I had a great time talked disaster preparedness and radical politics with folks