Daniel Solis

Dung & Dragons is one of those long, slow marinating ideas that occasionally needs to be stirred before being put back on a low heat. Right. To catch up newcomers: The game tentatively titled Dung & Dragons concerns a hippie collectivist farm that raises and cares for dragons, who in turn poop gold that keeps the farm self-sustaining. The whole idea came from an episode of Firefly where the crew was bartering various chores as currency. This struck me as a very cool idea for a game, trying to get the jobs you like while also maximizing the effect of those jobs by negotiating with the other players. Love it. I've gone through a few different models for how to design a game around this idea, but this week's exploration of trick-taking games has me thinking about a new way of doing things. Let's run through the basics. Above are the nine basic action cards. There should be one of each per player in the action deck. Shuffle and deal a hand of nine to each pla...

Tagging on yesterday's game mechanic , I had another idea for a hand management game, but this time using trick-taking mechanics instead of area control. This one is really nascent, but I think a good strong theme would give it some direction to deal with any problematic bugs. SETUP 2-4 players A deck of playing cards. 4 Players: Deal 13 cards to each player. 3 Players: Deal 17 cards to each player and put the remaining card in the center of the table. 2 Players: Deal 26 cards to each player. PLAY On your turn, play a card from your hand onto the table. The next player does the same, and so on, forming a pile of cards. When a player plays a card that brings the sum of the pile over 10, she decides which suit will be scored at that time. Cards without a number (A, J, Q, K) do not raise the sum, but they have other value as you'll see below. Then all players have a choice of discarding as many cards as they wish as long as those cards have a matching suit. Your ...

I have this odd idea for a scoring mechanic that combines hand management and area control in which each one is as important as the other for maximizing scores. If you'd like to test this out yourself, download PnP tiles here . Here's the gist: TILES There is a supply of randomly shuffled map tiles. Each tile has an arrangement of streets and four types of districts: P ARK, M ONUMENT, R ESIDENTIAL, and B USINESS. These would be replaced with icons in a real game. SETUP Draw a random tile and place it in the center of the board. Each player begins with a hand of two tiles. Hands are kept public, visible to all other players. PLAY On your turn, draw a tile into your hand. Then, play a tile from your hand onto the table, adjacent to another tile. A district is considered complete when it is completely surrounded by continuous street. If a tile completes a district, all players immediately score points in the following manner. SCORING Check if you have icons in ...

It's time for another Kickstarter/Crowdfunding poll! This time, we're focusing on the delivery/fulfillment timelines for crowdfunded projects backed between January 1 and August 31 of 2012. Answer in the questions below and I'll put together an infographic next week. Loading...

It's Thanksgiving here in the States, when we gorge ourselves on mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and, of course, a lot of turkey. Here's a new letter for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple from one special turkey's perspective. Dear Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Gobble gobble. I'm a turkey. I'm to be served to the farmer's family for the upcoming holiday! I have mixed feelings about this, as you can probably understand. This family has been so good to me through the years. When I was just a featherless chick, they kept me warm and plumped me up. Together, we won all the county fair turkey fashion shows. Oh, what a sight I used to be on the runway! Unfortunately, my feathers aren't so glossy these days. My confident stride is a little wobbly. I just need a favor from you before I head to the dinner table. I'm only a turkey, so I can't really talk to Mr. Farmer. Could you express my thanks for all the care he and his family have given...

It's Thanksgiving week in the states! A time for plenty and gratitude for food, friends and games! Alas, most board games take up a lot of space on the table, leaving little room for the bountiful meals. Here's a racing auction mashup that should only take up a narrow sliver of space in the middle of your table. The theme is that you're racing along a store aisle on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Taking time to gather the best combinations of gifts can score big points, but reaching the finish line can double or triple that score! You'll need 2-4 players A unique meeple for each player. 5 sets of uniquely colored chips, 15 chips in each set. The boards and cards in this PDF. Each player gets a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 card, as shown above. Setup Place the meeples at the start of the track. Place a stack of randomly drawn chips beside each space of the track. Each stack should have one more chip than the number of players. Play Each tur...

Belle of the Ball has gone through some big changes in basic gameplay between Prototype M and now. All for the best, though! This prototype has all the same set-building strategic fun with a much clearer set of short-term tactics and take-that offense. In case you need a refresher on the premise: You and the other players are holding parties on the same night, right next to each other! Attract guests, group guests with shared interests and mess with your opponent’s party! The player with the most popularity chips at the end of the game wins! [DOWNLOAD THE RULES] [DOWNLOAD THE CARDS] SETUP Shuffle Guest cards. Discard twelve random cards. Set the rest as a Guest Deck. Shuffle Belle cards. Deal three to each player’s hand. Set the rest as a Belle Deck. Set aside spaces for discarded Belles and Guests. Give a Start Player token to the host of this gathering. Each player has implied spaces for four stacks of cards. Give each player five chips. Example of a two-playe...

It's been a while since I wrote a long "how the sausage is made" post about the process of game design. Here's one! (tldr; There are big changes coming to Belle of the Ball , but they're for the greater good.) If I'm known for anything, it's probably that I shoot off game ideas at the drop of a hat. Of course, game ideas are very different than solid games. While working on Belle of the Ball , I resisted my natural urge to make drastic changes as a result of a bad playtests. I tried to stay patient, making small changes, and testing them out with several different groups in rapid succession. Here's what I've learned over the past year. 1: Base Changes on Feedback Designing a proper game takes a lot of time for playtests, review, refinement, editing, and testing again. (I'm not talking about publishing here, just the design.) In January 2012, I decided I'd design a fully polished and working card game with Belle of the Ball 's...

I had the good fortune of playing Divinare last weekend. ("Fortune." Get it?) It's about old-timey psychics competing to prove who's the real deal. It's a clever little deduction game with an element of take-that and push-your-luck in one elegant package. As much as I love Cards-with-Numbers , I'm especially fascinated with cards that only feature art and no other game information. I'll do a post on that soon. Check out Tom Vasel's review of Divinare for details of how to play. The experience reminds me a lot of playing the classic game Liar's Dice. If you haven't played that, you should too. Here are the basic rules as I play them at home. Note that there are numerous variants, I just happen to like this one. Each player has five standard dice and dice cups for concealment. Each round, each player rolls their dice under their cups. Each player looks at their results in secret. The first player guesses out loud a quantity and a face...

For many reasons, I've been fascinated with card games that can be played with little more than a deck of sequentially numbered cards. Sometimes there are colors acting as perfunctory suits, like Uno or Reiner Knizia's Poison . The real gems are games like No Thanks or 6 Nimmt which have no suits, just numbers. There's something so seductive about the pure abstraction there. On that note, dice games are heavy hitters when it comes to abstract purity – Yahtzee and Liars' Dice come to mind. Heck, even dice games with custom faces can be abstracted back down to algebraic notation... but let's talk about cards for now. I must admit, part of the appeal is from a commercial perspective. Cards-with-numbers are easy to playtest, easy to lay out, require minimal art, and can be reproduced relatively easily. I think this creates a positive pressure on the design of the game itself. The mechanics and rules presentation must be well-executed since the components coul...

Here's one microscopic example of some of the balancing decisions I make during Belle's development. In the early phases of Prototype M, I decided that the basic Belle bonus should follow this rule of thumb. "Each Belle wants you to collect exactly one third of a particular suit. For example, there are 12 teas, so the tea Belle wants you to collect 4 teas." I chose the arbitrary point value of 20 for accomplishing a Belle's condition. It's the nearest round number higher than you could possibly earn from the most well-matched group of guests. That makes it enough to be worth pursuing, but not so much that it would tilt the whole game if your opponent matched guests well enough. Here's the problem: A guest with a red Charm requires that guest be ejected from a party in order to activate that charm. This makes a red-charm guest's suits a little bit harder to collect than others, because a red-charm guest more likely to leave the game early. Any B...