Daniel Solis

Can you believe it's been almost a year since I was first signed on to the Firefly project? Egad. I've never been on a line with this much visibility, let alone as art director. But finally, we're 99.999% done with the core book. The PDF should be available for download very soon and the physical book should be going into production soon, too. That means you should pre-order the book ASAP ! UPDATE: the PDF is now live! Further news about the book's street date to come!

It's been a looong time since I've promoted my small line of t-shirts, but this one in particular seems to be making the rounds on Twitter quite a bit. Just a reminder that you can get shirts, stickers, etc. at my cafepress store !

I've got a basic mode of interaction for Alien Senate, which is pretty interesting in theory. I just don't know what the endstate means. Here's a quick overview of how it plays, in a very basic sense. The idea is that you're deploying senators who are loyal to you. This is indicated by the orientation of the card. If the little point on the card is aimed at you, that means that senator is on your side. These cards eventually form a 4x3 grid of 12 senators. So you take the first turn and deploy a senator, a relatively average influence of 3 Your opponent deploys a very influential 5. You suspect an attack is coming and you don't have many defenses, so you decide to place elsewhere and prepare for a counter-attack. And there's the opening salvo. Your opponent has bracketed one of your cards with two of his own. Now you must compare their total influence to the influence of the senator being bracketed. Alas, 10 beats 3, so as a result, that car...

One of the strengths of DriveThruCards is that it focuses on cards alone. They've got the nicest, firmest, sharpest cards I've seen on the POD market. Unfortunately, they don't offer any rules booklets yet. There are ways around this, like video tutorials and PDF rulebook downloads, but buyers usually want to get as complete a product as possible when it comes to their door. That means including the rules in some kind of analog format. So, I've made rules cards and included them in all my products. It's taken some experiences over the past year to learn how to best format these rules cards, and honestly I'm still learning. For now, I thought I'd share with you some of the best practices I've learned after releasing six POD card games over the past 10 months. You can share the JPEG below with your friends, forums, and frenemies. Or you can download it as a PDF at this link .

Carrying on some thoughts from yesterday's pub game , I had earlier revised some art I commissioned from Kari Fry ages ago for the tile game Swap Clops. I was never really satisfied with how that game turned out, but couldn't find a solution. So instead, I've been looking for ways to repurpose the art itself for a new game. I loved the clean and elegant permutations of all the different faces paired with simply shaped bodies, and double-coding the faces to color. Custom Deck So here's a thought: Imagine yesterday's pub game with this art and some adjusted rarities. Each face/color is one rank, from 1-7. Each Circle rank appears in the deck only once, squares twice, and triangles three times, for a total of 42 cards. This way, you get some variety in strategic choices. Do you chase the circle to pursue a majority, even though it's a high card? Actions One thing I loved about Dead Man's Draw was the blend of a simple pub game with real gamery and t...

Here's a simple pub game you can play with a standard deck of cards. Like all good pub games, it has a bit of risk-taking and bluffing, plays fast for big groups, and doesn't take much space. I don't have a name for this, so feel free to make suggestions. You can play with 3-8 players. Goal Get the lowest score by collecting low-number cards and collecting majority of a suit. Ranks This game uses card ranks and suits. The ranks, lowest to highest, A 2-10  J Q K. Set Up Shuffle a standard deck of cards (without jokers). Remove 10 cards from the deck face-down, they will not be used in play. Deal 3 cards to each player's hand, keeping them secret. Deal 2 cards for groups of 5-6 players. Deal 1 card for groups of 7-8 players. Place the deck in the middle of the table. Reveal the top card. Turns Start with the player to the left of the dealer take the first turn. Turns continue clockwise around the table. Your Turn On your turn, you can do one ...

I play No Thanks a lot. (Probably two or three times a week.) It never gets old for me. There are slightly more meaty variations on the mechanism in Lascaux . I also enjoy other just-numbers card games like Pairs and 6 Nimmt ! Still, it's hard to match the elegant brinksmanship and risk-taking that Thorsten Gimmler packed into such a tiny package. But because I like those games so much, I still toy with the occasional abstract card game mechanism. Here's one such notion. Straight Scoring First, assume a game in which playing straights are the primary method of scoring points. Second, your straight must contain at least X cards, where X is some number determined by other game mechanisms. For now, let's assume it's 3. You need at least 3 cards of the same suit to play a straight. Third, your score is the total of all ranks in your straight. Just add up the numbers, that's your score. So 1-2-3 scores you 6 points. 1-2-3-4 scores you 10 points. Gapped...

REGIME 's fast development taught me something about playtesting in general. First off, if you have a bunch of playtesters offering a bunch of ideas, this is good! You have something your testers find worthy enough to grant their time and energy into helping create. But should you take all suggestions at face value? What if they're contradictory? Which do you listen to? Here was my three step process for dealing with this feedback paralysis. Step 1: Identify a problem before testing, but don't get married to it. Early on, I tested a simpler version of the game. Perhaps too simple, I feared. I wanted to run some playtests and see if players felt that the game didn't have enough meat to it. All the while knowing in the back of my head that what I believed to be a problem wasn't necessarily the actual problem. Step 2: Let playtesting reveal the real problem. In the early version of REGIME, players simply ousted one faction card at a time until one...

Attention, Citizens! REGIME is now available on DriveThruCards! I'm really happy with how these cards turned out. The color is bright, the details are sharp, oh, and the game itself is alright, too. :) Check out these product shots! You are the first diplomats allowed into the turbulent nation of REGIME. Your goal is to secure an alliance with the nation's leadership and win the support of the people. The problem is that revolutions are constantly deposing one faction and replacing it with another. Choose your allegiances wisely, avoid unrest, and win the power of the people! Get REGIME today!

Ever wish you had an icon for an oft-repeated line of game text like "Rotate a card" or "Place a card face-down onto another card in a tableau." Me too! That's why I'm running a Patreon for tabletop game icons ! Now I want to make game icons available for you – the people! This project is simple: I design icons for you – the people – and I get to keep eating ramen. Deal? Awesome. Specs Here are the deets for the icons: All black and white, so you can add textures, colors, themes, whatever you like. Or just keep them plain as-is. All vector EPS, so you can scale them to any size and they'll retain their gorgeous, mysterious allure. All released on a Creative Commons Attribution license. Be free, icons! Free? Why pledge? "But hey," you might ask, "if these icons are going to be available on Creative Commons Attribution license, why should I pledge now instead of six months from now when the archive is six times as big?...

There are some games that so completely define their genre that any other games with similar mechanisms (or themes) will inevitably be compared to them. As I've pursued a more ambitious game design schedule, I've noticed some games casting long shadows over their genre. This is just my own perspective, based on my own game-playing experience. These are not necessarily the "first" games in the genre, they're just the most prominent. In an effort to subvert these definitive games, I don't try to "fix" them. That way lies frustration and bitterness. Instead, I try to find another flavor of fun that can emerge from that genre if I apply different constraints, or remove existing constraints, or draw new mechanisms from a different theme. But most importantly, if you're going to design a game in any of these genres, you pretty much have to play these games. To avoid doing so is to have a glaring blind spot in your own gaming career. --- Tile-...

If you're in need of some high-quality artwork for a prototype or even a full-scale production, check out the Digital Comic Museum . There are over 15,000 golden age comics released to the public domain, free of charge, complete with high-res scans of covers, interiors, even the ads! If you dig deep enough, you'll find work by Ditko, Schuster, and others. So many genres, too: Westerns, Romances, Space Adventures. Literally, a comic called Space Adventures. I'm definitely going to tap it for some scifi game in the future.

I had a long discussion on Twitter this weekend about the pros and cons of including Sushi Go-style score cards with REGIME. The cons mainly focused on how POD cards can sometimes be slippery, so you lose track of your score. I eventually decided to use the card system anyway, since it didn't hurt to offer a complete package for the game. But that got me thinking, what if there were a game where slippery cards were a feature? I got to testing with some playing cards I had on hand. And of course I asked myself, "Really?" Is this enough to make a game? What would the theme even be? Olympic Curling? Archery? Pro Bending ? But finally I settled on sliding Penguins and called it Ten Pen , as a pun on ten pin bowling. Each player gets cards four cards with 1, 2, 3, or 4 penguins on them; ten total. You're trying to slide your penguin card so it touches a fish card randomly dropped in the center of the play area. Whoever has more penguins touching the fish will w...

It's time for February's sales report! February is a short month and I'm still about two weeks slower on my release schedule than I would like, which lead to some slightly weaker sales numbers than January. But Penny Farthing Catapult sold very well in its first month, month doubling the sales for last month's release. 2-2014 8x Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game -11 from Jan 3x Koi Pond: Four Walls (Promo Card 2) -2 from Jan 3x Koi Pond: Four Winds (Promo Card 1)   -3 from Jan 9x Koi Pond: Moon Temple +2 from Jan 7x Suspense: the Card Game -4 from Jan 2x Nine Lives Card Game -9 from Jan 16x Penny Farthing Catapult (New!) $379.96 Retail $144.56 Royalties Grand Totals for 2014 (to date) 107 Products Sold $908.85 Retail $348.37 Royalties Well, that's more red than I'd like to see, but I've got a good feeling that REGIME 's release will make a big splash. Folks on Twitter are excited about the art, the gameplay, and the theme. T...