Once or twice, as a young kid, I played an old board game at my grandmother’s house. I recall very little about it except that it involved taxi cabs picking up little round passengers. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to find out its name and discovered copies for sale on eBay. I contemplated buying one for nostalgia, then decided to ( Read more... )

A fellow on Twitter pointed out a few problematic things with the Child’s Play charity.

1. It’s strongly associated with Penny Arcade, a webcomic whose creators have been front and center in a number of misogyny and intolerance scandals.

2. The original goal of the Child’s Play charity, stated as a matter of public record by one of its creators, ( Read more... )

We played only one game this week: a four-player round of Castle Dice. I Kickstarted it at the Print-and-Play level: enough to get a set of its custom dice but not the entire game. The rest required supplying my own tokens and printouts.

It’s a dice drafting game. Players select which custom dice to roll based on the resources they want that turn ( Read more... )

Since they became commonplace, free-to-play games have been criticized as unethical, greedy, manipulative, pathologically damaging…you name it. (And the more famous ones are.) It’s something that I’ve been dwelling on for months, given that for the last year and a half, my job has had me making exactly the sort of game that hits all the low notes: ( Read more... )

Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Markus “Notch” Persson (Minecraft) conspired to bring some game freakonomics to Twitter.

Take two hypothetical games. They’re identical except for how they’re supported. Game A doesn’t cost any money to play, and there’s nothing to buy within it either, but it includes ads. Game B has no ads, but you have to buy it to ( Read more... )

TSR originally made Dragon Dice back in 1995, in the midst of a collectible-things-that-aren’t-cards-game wave that followed in the wake of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast acquired the game when they bought TSR, then later, on the verge of discontinuing the game, sold the license and backstock to a tiny company in Evanston, IL which has ( Read more... )

Between me having viral bronchitis for a whole frickin’ month and the usual host being away at WorldCon, weekly gaming has been on hold for a while. But no more.

Game one was a two-on-two team match of Krosmaster: Arena. It’s a tactical board game from the makers of the online RPGs Dofus and Wakfu. Shaterri and I saw it for sale at PAX and ( Read more... )

Here an issue that truthfully stymies me. Time and again I hear that video games don’t need to be made less violent because research has perpetually failed to find any causal link from game violence to real-life violence. But time and again I hear how games do need to be more inclusive and representationally respectful toward women and other ( Read more... )

If this is crazier than normal, I can blame it on my fever.

There are arguments about how innocent-until-proven-guilty, freedom of speech, protection from unlawful search & seizure, and so on give disproportionate benefit to people with little influence in politics because big, connected majority groups would still have the wherewithal to protect ( Read more... )

Two Game Nights ago:

I had the honor of gaming with bard_bloom and family, including their precocious offspring. I ended up dominating in King of Tokyo (with five or six reserved players, going aggro gets you pretty far). Then we did two rounds of 7 Wonders by popular demand. First game went 33-37-46-53 with me on top by virtue of strong military ( Read more... )