In case that you didn’t already think I was a cool jock, I read a lot of manga. One of my favorite manga artists is Noboyuki Fukumoto, who commonly writes series about human psychology and people at the bottom of society. Another thing almost all of his series have in…
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Chess has a term called Zugzwang. German for “compulsion to move”, it refers to a game state where someone is in trouble because they have to move a piece every turn. If they could pass and leave a strong board formation, things would be peachy, but no: Zugzwang. This is…
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Note: I tried my best to make sure that you can read this article without knowing much about TCGs. If you have some idea of what “creatures”, “lands”, and “the graveyard” mean, you should be fine. Though I only started getting into tabletop games in earnest in the past few…
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Cosmic Encounter is my favorite game of all time, and I’m having trouble understanding why. With most excellent games, you can easily point to something incredible about their design – Codenames’ simplicity and replayability, the Legacy games’ storytelling – but Cosmic Encounter is built from a lot of components that simply…
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Anyone who’s played a good Eurogame with a badly translated manual knows that solid writing is a small but crucial part of a tabletop game. Most discussion on the topic is about clear and concise rules explanations; this is fair enough, as communication of complex game topics is difficult and very…
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I first started designing board games in late 2014 after graduating from college that summer. I was already pretty hardcore about tabletop games, especially RPGs, but the thought that I could design one wasn’t in my head. After discovering print-on-demand sites and realizing that I probably wasn’t going to get…
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Oh no! The train is out of control! The only thing you and your fellow engineers can do is take all this spare track that’s in the back of the locomotive for some reason and lay it as fast as you can! Tiny Trainwrecks is a frantic co-op game of…
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Welcome back! If you haven’t read Part 1 of how to play Happy Daggers, you should go ahead and do that now. Otherwise, this part is going to get really confusing! So remember last time when I said there were five Attack and five Defense cards? That’s not quite true.…
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If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen the boxart for Happy Daggers! It’ll be out on The Game Crafter within a few weeks, and our first convention appearance with it in tow will be at GX3 in December. “But wait, Jeremy, what is Happy Daggers even about? How do I…
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Recently, I decided to heavily revise our flagship game, HAPPY DAGGERS. Playtesting feedback was mixed, but the real issue was it wasn’t capturing the spirit of the swashbuckling combat present in a lot of period pieces. The main issues were: 1. Certain gameplay elements didn’t lend themselves to the casual…