Daniel Solis

Couldn't sleep this morning, so I decided to make good use of my time by writing up this system overview for Rulers, inspired in part by Rob Donoghue's commentary on the previous post . System Inspiration Split Decision's rich rolling, RISK for the Rule Duel mechanic, RISK: Legacy and Unknown Armies in the endgame, the storytelling elements of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple without the writing, and a bit of Aeon Flux and M. Night Shyamalan's The Village in the setting. Premise The Crown keeps tight control over a modern kingdom. The kingdom is the only stable area within a surreal land called the DMZ. The kingdom's citizens are divided into the twelve castes to maintain order. Despite this, a random group of citizens possess a telepathic power: They can create and impose rules on the people around them. This power is called Ruling, and the Crown is the most powerful Ruler of all. Each year, the Crown hosts a televised event called Rulers in the DMZ . The...

So the big problem with the Rulers universe is that it's a potent setting, but hard to come up with a crystal-clear scenario that creates focused play and touches on all the cool aspects of the setting. I call this the Shadowrun problem. So much of Shadowrun's awesome comes from the melange of fantasy and cyberpunk, yet the focus of play is on a teeny, tiny aspect of the universe: dungeon-crawling. Folks on Story-Games came up with a lot of interesting scenarios . I eventually settled on a Prince Zuko scenario: Royal exiles in the DMZ. The king's sons and daughters are suddenly exiled, cut off from the line of succession, and cast out into the unruled zone between kingdoms. That's fine, but it still doesn't give characters a real purpose. I like it when there's one thing everyone knows they're supposed to be doing, even if the story deviates from that over time. There's still a central lane players know they're supposed to walk. (For example: P...

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to share a basic overview of costs for the Writer's Dice kickstarter campaign. Many thanks to my wife Megan who's been keeping track of this info. Our costs consider the following: • Kickstarter's cut • Amazon Payments' cut • Final product dice • Prototype dice • Baggies • Address labels • Padded envelopes • Mailbox rental • Shipping A total cost of $4375 . That's rounded up slightly to consider the stragglers we still need to ship out. The amount does not consider things like any returned packages (extra postage), printer ink, mileage, and our time/labor. We haven't found out the costs of North Carolina sales tax just yet, which Kickstarter doesn't have a way of calculating. Also, the amount of postage for parcels went up a bit before we were able to send everything out, which raised the overall cost of shipping somewhat higher than we expected. We probably could have saved a tiny bit of money by not...

I've been on the road a lot the past few weeks, which means I had a lot of time to marinate on some thoughts for Dung & Dragons . I got to thinking about ways to adapt some mechanics from San Juan, Pandemic, and Yspahan. Here are my loose notes from the road. Welcome to Dragon Ranch Co-op, a group of free-thinking dragon breeders raising the finest dragons, drakes, coatls and winged serpents in the tri-county area. No corporate stakeholders allowed here, just free-range dragons raised the old-fashioned way. There are no managers or corporate execs running the show. Every day, each rancher chooses the duty he or she would like to perform. If others join in, so be it! Of course, getting these people to work as a team can be harder than raising a fire breathing reptile! OVERVIEW OF PLAY Each player coordinates their own workforce to perform various duties on the ranch. Inspectors arrive periodically to grade your ranch's performance thus far, in one of several categorie...

January was a good month for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and possibly the start of an auspicious awards season for our favorite flying troublemakers. Thebig news is that Do won a fancy schmancy award! Check it: RPGamer names Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple as RPG of 2011 Whoa. This was totally unexpected, mainly because Do 's status as a proper RPG is so tenuous. Still, I'm delighted to share the honor with everyone who helped make the game possible. Gamehead reviews Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple This is probably the most thorough review of the game I've seen yet, with special attention paid to the long-term Pilgrimage mode of play. Generally, Do is played as a one-shot, but I'm glad to see some love for the long journey. That's where the coming-of-age vibe really comes out. And here are some international reviews! Fanzine Rolero reviews the game in Spanish. Rede RPG is a Portuguese site that will soon translate some of the free games on m...

So I really want to get some playtesting in for Superhero Audition , but it's clear that it needs some actual visuals on the cards to really get the feel of the game. The silhouettes just ain't enough, but I can't afford all that custom art just yet, so I need placeholder art. The problem is that if the placeholder art is too recognizable (Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, etc) that might distract from the game a bit. I need obscure superhero art that would be suitable placeholders for these characters: Heroes Chief Irritant Grouper Man Canine Chancellor Superior Lad Baby Hands McGee Second Wind Nightvision & Squint Scotch Ape Gold Mime Chinchiller Ultra-Lincoln Vampire Matt The Critic Rooster Jones C Everett Goop Brother Nature Bento Fox Head Count Heroines The Honey Badger Stiff Upper Whip Professor Pharoah General Lee Speaking Pixie Kicks The Pregnant Pause Martial Paw Lightning Round The Whisper Cram Ghost of Tesla Zoobot Doctor Di...

These are dice for writers, storytellers and gamers! In addition to the normal 1-6 pips, these dice are etched with six words packed with meaning: BUT, SO, AND, AS, OR, IF. Use them to plot your next novel! Roll them into your role-playing games! Gift them to your gaming buddies! » Sorry, the physical Writer's Dice are now sold out! » Download the App for iPhone/iPad , Android , or Windows Phone » Download the free Writer's Dice Guide [PDF]      

Ryan Novak, intrepid app developer, has set about programming an iOS/Android version of Pebble Rebel. It's still very early, but I'm building up an asset library for the app now. We're a two-man team, and I'm not exactly super experienced with developing graphics for a digital UI, so this might not be as flashy as some apps you've got now. But the game itself is gonna be solid in Ryan's able programmery hands.

I played Survive: Escape from Atlantis for the first time the other day. It's a very fun game that feels much more modern than its actual age. I got some flashbacks to the official licensed LOST board game, which also used hexagonal tiles, but was very, very disappointing. I got to thinking about the little thematic tweaks that would make Survive a pretty good licensed LOST board game. The most obvious one is as follows: The Smoke Monster The first shark is instead the Smoke Monster. The Smoke monster begins on an empty land space or an occupied land space if no empty land spaces are available. The Smoke Monster moves across land spaces. The Smoke Monster may not move across or land on a sea space. Otherwise, the Smoke Monster behaves as a shark. In other words, a land shark. It gives players a little more reason to move people off the island into open sea, even if no boats are available.

And because I'm a shameless capitalist, I made a t-shirt ! This graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic ( CC BY-ND 2.0 ) UPDATE: An alternate is now available, for you more verbose types.

Is the best way to fight piracy to destroy your own boats? I design tabletop games. You might think I wouldn't have a dog in the fight over internet censorship since my games are probably as analog as you can get. In fact, you'd think the nature of game piracy would actually put me in favor of anti-piracy legislation. Quite the contrary! Without the active and unhindered exchange of ideas in the game design community, I wouldn't have grown as a designer over the past ten years. Now that I'm a professional, I wouldn't have been able to reach out to dozens of artists, writers, designers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and vendors as I develop those games for the commercial market. In other words, without an open internet, my contributions to the economy would be closed. So, I join many others in standing against SOPA, PIPA, and any other legislation that would claim to deter piracy but curtail freedom. Don't destroy our boats to fight pir...

Clops are one-eyed creatures with lots of personality. You're going to move them around and collect groups with matching faces. Score points by collecting lots of Clops! Score bonus points by collecting Clops with the same likes! Clops have three main characteristics: Shapes, Faces, and Likes. First, Clops come in three shapes, either circles, squares or triangles. Second, Clops have five faces: Angry (Red), Worried (White), Serious (Blue), Bleeeh! (Green) and Happy (Yellow). And lastly, Clops have five likes: Sunshine, Apples, the Moon, Stars, and Books. » Development Status: Beta, Dormant » Illustrations: Kari Fry Stuff You Need A supply of 90 Clop Tiles [These designs are very beta.] 2-4 Players Set Up Arrange a grid of 8x8 tiles, randomly drawn from the supply. Make sure they're all rotated in the same direction. Click to enlarge How to Play Each player takes turns, starting with the youngest player. 1) Swap two Clops On your turn, choose two Clops...

Sometimes I think of game mechanics in the abstract, without a theme in mind. Actually, it happens a lot. This time, I got to thinking about a role selection mechanic that was paired with a dice pool. For context, I'm referring to "action selection" games like Puerto Rico, Agricola or Citadels. Say there are six actions, corresponding to each face of a six sided die. At the beginning of a round, a pool of dice are rolled. When you choose an action on your turn, that action might have a more potent effect if there are dice matching that result. So far, this turns out to be pretty much how Yspahan works. Now I'm mulling a slight tweak, wherein that dice pool is not rolled at the beginning of the round. Rather, each player has one die with which they secretly choose their action. All players then reveal their selection at the same time. Again, those actions are augmented by the number of matching results. So, part of the game might be coercing other players to follo...

I've been playing a lot of tile-swapping puzzle games like Bejeweled, Tetris Attack and ShapeShift HD. As is often the case when I play digital games, my mind wanders to how I can make an analog conversion, with new mechanics unique to a tabletop game. Then I started thinking about the success of Angry Birds. Now, there have been tons of missile-launching video games, but one of the big things Angry Birds had going for it was the personality in each bird and pig. (It's important to note the WORMS franchise was doing the "cute animals as avatars in a missile game" thing for a long time in the 90s.) And then I stumbled on a weird title. Swap Clops. It was going to be a Pitch Tag for Fred, but I couldn't give it up. I wanted to make something with it. A game about swapping eyeballs among cyclopses? Nah. Maybe "Clop" is a new branded name for the "floating ball with a giant eye" monster archetype. (I heard somewhere WotC has a trademark on the...

You've heard me yap on and on about card game design over the past year. Well, Fred Hicks and Evil Hat finally called me on it and hired me to do the layout for their new card game Race to Adventure , the card game set in the Spirit of the Century universe. It's an action-selection game where you play Centurions traveling around the world via jetpack, biplane and zeppelin for a global scavenger hunt. The images above are still in-progress, but give you a good sense of the direction we're heading. It's been a very fast process, starting from a week before Christmas up to the designs you see above. We're on-track to finish up the layout by the end of the month. How's that for a quick turnaround? UPDATE: I neglected to give proper credit to Christian St. Pierre for the illustrations. He's the one responsible for the all the art you see above. I'm doing the backgrounds, frames, iconography, typography and branding. "I do all the visuals the...

The winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge is Take-Back-Toe by James Ernest. It was a close, close decision. All the finalists had unique attributes that made them stand out from the rest. Whether it be sustainability, accessibility, strong community, and just straight elegance, each entry had strong showings in one category or another. Still, we found the strongest overlapping approval for Take-Back-Toe, a well-rounded abstract with a touch of randomness. We found it intriguing that the game can be played with any forty objects and no board. That mix of specificity and generality is a clever avenue for the game to survive generations as either a commoners' game (with seeds in pits) or an elite past-time (with specially crafted components). It makes the game very portable, too. While waiting in line at an author signing, a friend wanted to learn how to play. A minute later, we ripped up a sheet of paper and played on the floor. I've played with stones (as seen ...