My mind actually writes a lot more blog posts than I wind up typing. Largely, this is laziness on my part. I think of some interesting theory, but never put it into the computer.

Luckily, Newsweek saved me the work in writing about the relationship between Sarah Palin's candidacy and the Discovery Channel. Now I just have to hope someone else ( Read more... )

I like lots of things in Dogs in the Vineyard. It's an amazingly well made game. But one of the bestest things in there is the initiatory conflict. At the end of character creation, you go around and do a little flashback scene for each character, to see if they learned something at the Temple before leaving on their Dogs mission. This is a ( Read more... )

John McCain hates Dungeons and Dragons, apparently:

"It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others."(bold added ( Read more... )

I'm back at work after a bit less than three months. I can't decide if the transition is easier or harder because there's absolutely nothing to do here right now. In a couple of weeks the students will return and real work will begin ( Read more... )

Well, not big exactly, but played in Italy. The first playtest of my (award winning?!?) Game Chef game House of Masks has happened. And it was on a different continent altogether. In Italy specifically.

Anyone who reads Italian or wishes to trudge through Babelfish generated Itanglish can read the promo page here. And it is scheduled to be ( Read more... )

So I apparently won Game Chef this year. I guess I should really see about gathering people together and try actually playtesting the game. Luckily my schedule is pretty open for the next eleven weeks.

We are back from the hospital, having doubled the number of our offspring while we were there. Everything there went according to plan, leaving us with a healthy newborn girl. (For those who need such details, Sophia Rose Wedig was born at 10:04 AM on 5/12/08, weighed 6 pounds 12 ounces and was 18 inches long ( Read more... )

My Game Chef game has been submitted. You can see the complete game in glorious unformatted .txt format, if you want. Maybe at some point I'll make a more readable version of the game.

The horrible illness meant that got distracted from much participating in the social aspects of Game Chef this year (not that those seemed to be working well

I think I’ve settled on an idea for Game Chef. It uses the Horstman and Shoemaker sets of art, which also are apparently the most popular sets so far. Hopefully the crazy gameplay of my game will set it apart from everyone else with the same art. I feel like last year my game got lost in a shuffle of similar games, and fear this might happen ( Read more... )

So they have posted the final rules for Game Chef, and allowed the designers to see the art threads. Now I have to pick one (or two) sets of art and write a game about them.

( art examples and thoughts about each )