Daniel Solis

I'm happy to announce that DriveThruCards is officially launching today and KOI POND is already the top seller . DriveThruCards is a print-on-demand store devoted exclusively to card games and that's it. DTC's just-the-cards focus means they can provide the best-quality print-on-demand cards you've ever handled. You'll really be surprised at how nice they are. KOI POND is a fast, brainy, casual strategy game. Collect colorful koi fish and place them in your pond or your house. Keep your pond and house totals as equal as you can, because you only score points for the lower total! What’s more, your pond is public, but your house is secret. To win, you have to be... coy! What's it like? This is a quiet, fast filler game best paired with warm drinks amongst friends. Mix the elegant presentation of Coloretto with the fun decision-making of Biblios . Mix in clever scoring and garnish with lovely sumi-e inspired artwork. Details:
 2-4 Players | 20 Minutes ...

Here's a wacky idea for adding a twist to your Resistance game. I've no idea if its broken, but I suppose we'll find out! First, grab some poker chips and pool them in the middle of the table. These represent points earned by individual players. Then, write a number on each of the team assignment cards, numbered from one to five. These the point values for each team assignment, representing the I port since of that member's role in the mission. Play as normal, with the following changes. The leader must assign the "1" team card first, followed by the "2" team card, then the "3" team card, and so on. If the mission is APPROVED, team members immediately earn their team card's noted points. So a team member with the "3" card would earn 3 points if the mission was approved. Regardless of whether that mission is successful, those players keep their earned points. At the end of the game, players reveal their roles ...

It's been over a year since Fred Hicks and I have played Pitch Tag. If you haven't seen this before, one player will will tag the other with an absurd title, to which the other player must respond with a reasonable game pitch for that title. Then that player tags back with her own absurd title. This goes back and forth until everybody plotz. Here's the ongoing thread! Fred: Your turn: POTTY BREAK Daniel: POTTY BREAK "We villagers are sick of adventurers walking into our homes uninvited and breaking all our pots. Here, go to this shed where we've kept all our throwaway pots. Have at it, hero." This game is a tile-removal/mine-sweeper game with a few twists. There is a grid of face-down tile stacks, each stack containing two tiles. Each tile's face depicts treasure, hearts and other goodies. It also has a small monster icon with a number. In play, you can flip two tiles, either the top tile of two separate stacks or all tiles in one stack. ...

Last week I posted a simple casino-style game called 9 Lives . I noticed some peculiar math behind the mechanics. I bet this is one of those things mathfolk already know intuitively, but coming at it in long-hand on my notebook over a cup of coffee is still worthwhile. To review, the game involves playing pairs of cards, each showing a digit, either 0 through 9. Added together, the highest pair is the winner for that turn. The winner earns points equal to the 'ones' digit of their play. So if you played a 12 and won, you'd win 2 points. (Tied players both score.) So I wrote out the different pairs of digits that would make each sum, from 0 through 18. I also compared that to the value of each sum. This produced the following chart. (Click to enlarge.) There is only one way to make 0, 1, 17, or 18. Two ways to make a 2, 3, 15, or 16. Three ways to make a 4, 5, 13, or 14. Four ways to make a 6, 7, 11, or 12. Five ways to make  8, 9, or 10. This makes scoring str...

UPDATE: Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game is now available on DriveThruCards! I just got proofs from DriveThruCards for the Koi Pod cards. They look and feel excellent! The colors are brightly saturated. The cards are nice and thick. The UV coating makes the whole thing the best POD cards I've seen to date. I dare say they nearly rival the card quality of an offset printer. On top of that, the service has been very patient with me as I figure out this new line of business. I'm trying to ensure cards are formatted to take best advantage of the flexibility and limitations of the POD process. DriveThruCards' staff has been very informative in that regard. Right, enough of that. Here's a Vine to demonstrate the card thickness. It's good stuff! As far as I know, Koi Pond will be available for sale next week, but the product listing is will be live here. Currently only the rulebook is available for preview. Meanwhile, if you've played Koi Pond and would like ...

This will be one of those loose ideas that likely has a bunch of inherent bugs right off the top, but it's too big for Twitter so I'll note it down here for future reference. The basic idea is inspired by 7 Wonders ' unique niche as a game with enough depth for gamers to enjoy it, but accommodates group sizes that would normally fall into the domain of party games. It's rare to find that combination. Of course I wanted to make one. I thought about other mechanics and games that might fit this unique niche of group size but adequate depth. Auctions ( Felix ), voting ( The Resistance ), card drafting ( 7 Wonders ), simultaneous action selection ( Race for the Galaxy ), trading ( Bohnanza ) all help facilitate fun, rich play with large groups. In researching further, I found a write-up on Baccarat, which I must admit I've never looked at much. It has two interesting features. (Interesting to me anyway.) Baccarat can take up to 9 players, crowding around a cas...

UPDATE: Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game is now available on DriveThruCards! This week, I got a very good reason to hurry up and get the Koi Pond cards finalized ASAP. So the past two days have been very busy, implementing playtest-requested updates that have built up over the past couple months' testing. The game should be available for sale later this month !               Frames : I revised the face's backgrounds to not be full-bleed anymore. Each suit has a distinct corner decoration and background pattern. It's subtle, but I figured it couldn't hurt to have one more distinguishing mark for each suit to aid recognition. Ambidextrous Layout : I've also placed suits and ranks on the left upper corner and the right upper corner instead of placing them on alternate corners. This makes it easier for people who prefer to fan their cards left or right. I was going to put suits and ranks on all corners, but it became really clutte...

In this panel James Ernest describes what he calls the "crazy train," a risky option always available to the player when the more predictable path seems less enticing. The key word here is option . The crazy train shouldn't be mandatory. Chaos & Order in Deadwood James shares an anecdote from the development of Deadwood Studios. Not getting too deep into the rules, but there was once an option to take a difficult tactical path with a high reward, but it required a very high roll in order to complete. So on your turn, you'd roll and maybe you'd get lucky. Unfortunately, if you rolled poorly, you effectively wasted that turn while everyone else moves ahead with their own strategies. In essence, you were stuck on the crazy train. In the newer edition, you have the option to "rehearse," meaning that you do not roll. Instead you build up a cumulative +1 bonus to your next roll. So you could just rehearse five times until you get a guaranteed suc...

Last week I posted Noodle Roll, which had a lot of clever thematic elements like creating "strands" of identical dice results or employing sous-chefs to compensate for sub-optimal rolls. Where that theme fell down was in the big group board. Exciting. What the heck is this supposed to be anyway? Mechanically speaking, the board featured columns and rows of spaces in which you were to place cubes. Pairs of horizontally adjacent cubes in the same color-coded area granted you a 10pt bonus. One area had three columns, enough room for two pairs. The middle area had only two columns, room for one pair. The last area had only one column, meaning there was no room for any pairs. When I came up with this board, I didn't really bother thinking about a thematic reason for its layout at the time. I just liked the clever adjacency mechanic. I hand-waved that these areas represented restaurants with broad or specialized menus. You played workers at a noodle factory delivering...

Earlier this week I described how Lyndsay Peters and I got to talking about a little dice game inspired by my misinterpretation of a key rule in Martian Dice. After discussing several different themes, we settled on noodle-making. Here's the full game as it stands now. We're calling it Noodle Roll . OVERVIEW Players take turns rolling dice several times, keeping sets ("strands") of three or more identical faces, and scoring based on the face value of those sets, plus any bonuses. As play continues, the board’s columns get filled. When two columns are filled, the game ends. SETUP The game supports 2-4 players. The group shares a supply of 13 standard six-sided dice. Each player has a supply of cubes in her own color. Each player gets three Sous-Chefs cards. I imagine a different sous-chef on each card. The face shows the sous-chef standing at attention, ready to take orders. The back shows the sous-chef hard at work making a noodle dish. I'd l...

Played Felix The Cat In The Sack last night once again and I remain just as enamored with this clever take on hidden information in an auction. In the game, each player has an identical hand of cats with point values ranging from the negatives to positives, plus some dogs. During setup, one random card is removed from each player's hand. Each turn, players offer one card face-down from their hand for auction then place bids on the lot. One card is revealed to start the round of bidding. Each time a player passes, she takes a small compensatory reward and reveals one more card. The little dog removes the lowest cat in the lot. The big dog removes the highest cat in the lot. Two or more dogs remove each other from the lot. The thing I love is how information gradually gets revealed while also raising the stakes. In time you may realize you've overbid on a real stinker of a lot. If you put down a high-value cat in the lot, you may also find yourself simply bidding more than...

I had an opportunity to play Kakerlakenpoker ("Roach Poker") recently at PAX East. It's a very clever bluffing game featuring a deck of eight different vermin, eight cards of each. In the setup, you deal the complete deck evenly as possible to the whole group of players. On your turn, you pass a card face down to another player of your choice and state the identity if that card. You may lie about this.  Then that player has two options: Pass : Pass this card to another player, stating its identity. Again. That player may lie when doing so and she doesn't even have to look at the card before passing it. This passing continues until only one player has not been passed this card. Then, this last player has no choice but to proceed to the "Call a Bluff" option. Call a Bluff : When you are passed a card, you can agree or disagree with the last stated identity of that card. For example, I pass you a card while stating, "This is a roach." You coul...