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    That’s Numberzwang!

    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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    Learn About Trading Card Games!

    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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    Game Analysis: Cosmic Encounter

    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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    Me Design Board Game, Use Words Good

    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…