Daniel Solis

Since working on the Firefly RPG and a number of other projects, I've been searching for a lot of artists lately. In that search, I've come across some common obstacles that make my job a bit difficult. Bear in mind: My job is giving artists jobs, so any help I can get in that quest from the artists themselves is very much appreciated. Here are some tips from me to all artists out there. What I'm Looking For Consistency is most important for my line of work. I'm usually hiring a single artist to make a whole series of images, so keeping a consistent style is paramount. Breadth and diversity is a byproduct of that first point. I like to see that you've depicted different subjects, diverse people, all with a consistent style that tells me you could deliver on art direction. No cheesecake, please. If the first thing I see in your portfolio is a bunch of boudoir pin-ups, I'm moving on. Even if you can do more than that, putting cheesecake up front and c...

I'll be moderating and appearing on several panels at next week's Escapist Expo . The Expo had its inaugural event last year and was by all accounts a stunning success . Durham and the surrounding Triangle community have the largest group of gamers I've ever seen, but they're usually dispersed into smaller enclaves near their local game stores or home groups. The Escapist Expo offers a central hub for all the area gamers to play in one place. Video games, RPGs, tabletop, Humans vs. Zombies, all sorts of games. It's awesome. Here are the panels I'll be on this year. It's a Hit! Now What? Dealing With Unexpected Success You've made something and people like it and want more. Or your preorder went well - much better than you expected - and you find yourself facing a bigger print run and a bigger shipping effort than you'd planned for. Success can be a tricky thing - the bigger you succeed, the harder you have to work, and sometimes there are ...

  Hello everybody! A personal note from me here, to all of you. Wow, what a party it's been, eh? Surprises right until the very end. In the very last hours, we waltzed right past every initially projected number: Over 1500 backers and over triple-funded! That's a lot of party favors! Thank you so, so much to all of you for spreading the word about Belle of the Ball! Everyone who tweeted, posted, shared, printed-and-played helped immensely. You believed in the vision for a different kind of card game and you'll soon see the results of that vision. I'd also like to personally thank Chris for running a tip-top campaign and supporting development of Belle of the Ball from its very early stages. He actively encouraged me to make a game with this theme and kept me at it for over a year! Thanks, Chris! Alright, everyone! Let's keep partying for now, because tomorrow Dice Hate Me has a lot of work to do! Thank you!

One of the trickiest parts of teaching Koi Pond is the whole idea that you're trying to keep your koi in your pond and koi in your house "balanced" with each other. So I thought I'd give a simpler card game a try, using a similar "balancing" mechanic but with a more literal metaphor. Theme Each player has an imaginary set of scales in front of them. Each player is trying to accumulate the most cards, while keeping their scales balanced. You can play with a standard set of playing cards, plus the two jokers. Setup Shuffle the deck and deal a hand of five cards to each player. Each player takes turns. On your turn Play a card from your hand onto one of any player's scales. Each player's scale is color-coded, with red cards on their left and black cards on their right. So, you may only play red cards on the red scale or black cards on the black scale. Aces are ranked 1. Jokers, Jacks, Queens, Kings are ranked 0. When playing cards rank...

This week, an odd little mechanic has bitten my brain hard and refuses to let go until I've got it firmly written down for posterity. Not sure where this idea will go, since it doesn't really have a theme associated with it yet, so here it is in the abstract. Action Replacement There are limited number of actions for you to do on your turn. In order to take one of those actions, you must replace that action with a new one, which will probably be even more useful than the one you replaced. Here's a visual example, using some cards as the form factor, which I think would be particularly interesting for their versatility. First, the play area begins with a set of four basic cards, each allowing you to acquire a specific type of resource. In order to use one of these actions, you must "pay" a card from your hand and set it on top of the chosen action-card. Then you may draw a new card from the deck at the end of your turn. If you ever cause a stack to e...

Wow, it's been an amazing campaign for Belle of the Ball so far. We just passed $50,000 in funding! Incredible! Throughout the past month, Chris Kirkman and I have been lucky enough to be interviewed on several podcasts and websites. If you've had trouble keeping up, here's a complete roundup. Podcasts Going Last : OMG! The DoubleClicks! AAHH!! *cough* ... Why, yes, enjoy this entirely serious discussion with Angela and Aubrey of the DoubleClicks (and Justin the Bard). Indie Talks : Ben Gerber catches me when I'm loopy tired and gets a bit of my casual silliness. Video BoardGameNews : Chris demos Belle of the Ball for BoardGameGeek's very own Eric Martin, live at Gen Con! Master Plan : Ryan Macklin interviews me on his brand new Master Plan series. Words, Words, Words Stonemaier : Jamey Stegmaier interviewed Chris and I about our experiences together, developing Belle over many years. Father Geek : Cyrus Kirby has a positively glowing review ...

I learned two card games last night, both from Asia, featuring a deck of suits and ranks, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. Parade ...is designed by Naoki Homma and is a very clever combination of line-drafting and evasion-type trick-taking. The game features a simple deck of cards in six suits with 11 ranks each. On your turn, you place a card from your hand at the end of the parade. The rank of the card you play represents the number of consecutive cards in the parade you may ignore, but after that point you must collect any cards of equal rank, lesser rank, or the same suit. If you collect the most of a suit at the end of the game, you can turn those cards face-down. Score points equal to your rank, plus 1 point per face-down card. Player with fewest points wins. It's easy to learn and interesting tactics emerge within a few turns. Tichu ...is supposedly a folk game from China translated and popularized in Europe sometime between 1970 ...

The new Scoundrels of Skullport expansion for Lords of Waterdeep has a fascinating resource management mechanic that I'd love to explore a bit further. The basic game of Lords of Waterdeep is a standard worker placement game: Place a dude on a space, get whatever resource that space says you get. In Skullport, there are spaces from which you get far more resources than you do from the basic spaces, but you must also take a corruption counter in doing so. There are a finite number of corruption counters, placed along a track shown below. When one space on the track is emptied, that is the new penalty you will incur for each corruption counter you have in your possession by the end of the game. In the example above, each corruption counter is worth -8 points at the end of the game. There are other action cards which allow you to return a corruption counter to the track and some "good deed" quests allow you to return up to three counters. So really, t...

If you're a game designer, chances are you'll stumble across a word or turn of phrase and think, "Hey, that would make a really cool game!" Heck, that's the whole idea behind Pitch Tag. But there are a few things to ask yourself before you marry yourself to one name in particular. Is it searchable? Google your game title plus the words "game," "board game," "card game," and "app." Search Engine Optimization has no legal bearing, but probably has the most practical impact on your day-to-day business as a game designer. You want a title that won't tread on existing identities in the same space. Ideally, a search for your title alone should bring up your game's page, or its Kickstarter page, or its entry on BoardGameGeek. Unique spellings and made-up words are often used to maximize SEO, but there is a risk... Is it easy to say and spell? Granted, this is relative to your language, but a lot of business h...

Game designers often get asked whether they start with theme or mechanics, but I'm never quite sure what the questioner is hoping to glean about the process of game design. It seems to assume a binary, decoupled state of gameplay. It even seems to be the definitive divide in Euro/American game design. (We can address our very weird tendency to ascribe game design to either America and Europe another time, but that's worth discussing too.) The truth is, if your game is working as it should, no one should be able tell whether you thought of the theme or the mechanics first . If you focus too much on theme , the mechanics might be burdened with too much simulationist cruft. The game is inaccessible to all but the tiny demographic who really cares about how accurately you represented that theme. In my case, if I begin with a theme, I also spend a long time in development. If you focus too much on mechanics , they might be too abstract. Your game might have a lot of depth,...

While I've been exploring the mechanics of trick-taking games lately, I stumbled across this odd notion of using the trick you win to trigger a cascading series of mechanics that you would normally find in a more formal euro strategy game. Usually about farming. (Looking at Agricola here, mainly.) What if by winning a trick, you also acquired various resources and quests from that trick? It's worth exploring, if for nothing less than just pure giggles. Naturally, when I start thinking about a farming mechanic, my mind drifts back to a theme that has so far eluded a really solid mechanical framework. Dung & Dragons is about a group of people raising dragons for their valuable poop. See, dragon poop has lots and lots of gold coins in it. (Smaug was absolutely filthy, by the way.) So these ranchers raise dragons, feed them their favorite foods, and literally rake in profits. Here's a loose outline of how I think it could combine very fast trick-taking tactics with...

Many thanks to @BreadPuncher for pointing me towards this very cool idea from the classic era of board games. The Pie Rule is a method of balancing the first-player advantage present in many abstract games. It goes something like this: If I'm the first player, I take my first turn. Then you, as the second player, have the choice of one of two actions: You can let my turn stand, in which case the rest of the game proceeds according to normal turn order. OR... You switch positions with me, so that whatever I did in that first turn is now what you did. That makes me the new "second" player, then I must take my new "first" turn. The idea is that if one player gets to divide pie, the other player is the arbiter of whether the pie is divided fairly. If not, the arbiter can just take that slice instead. Knowing this, the cutter will try to keep her slice within the bounds as fair as she can. So, can this actually be used more deeply as the central philo...

I like to design games from a deck of playing cards. They're a tried-and-true set of predictable probabilities with well-studied values for various combinations. Why ignore that deep body of knowledge? I figure if the game is nascent enough, it can't hurt to start from a well-established core and develop from there. So, without further ado, Trickster Prototype A, playable with a standard deck of playing cards. TRICKSTER The tricksters of ancient lore are meeting for a legendary competition of guile and deceit. Designer's Blah Blah Blah This game is designed as an experiment in "reverse drafting." It's basically the opposite of a game like 7 Wonders or Sushi Go , where players pass around hands of cards, collecting one from the hand at a time. Instead, players in this game are discarding cards to their hands, then passing hands to the next player. This allows for a simultaneous trick-taking game wherein only one trick is visible to each player at a...