Daniel Solis

Lots of people don't like the farms in Carcassonne because they're hard to see in play, but I've never had a problem with it and I love playing with them. We're a rare breed, we farming fans. I thought it would be funny if there were an area majority game mechanism that was designed to be obfuscated despite being clearly visible on the table with no hidden information. See those cards? Each has a 5x5 grid with a blank center cell. When you play a card to the table, you place it orthogonally adjacent to another card, thus creating an organic playing area. The red and blue dots indicate the presence of Red or Blue influence on the indicated card. The grid is designed to be relative to the card just placed, not as part of an objective 5x5 grid. In this simplified example, this card adds 1 Blue to the card above and to the left; it also adds 1 Red to the card below and to the left. At the end of the round, whoever has majority on a card will collect it into a s...

One of the persistent issues I have in Kigi playtesting is that players naturally want to grow branches below the implied horizon. There is no rule against it and sometimes the shape of branches just makes that formation most logical. I have two solutions. The first, shown above, is to start trees from the edge of the table so that it is physically impossible to grow branches below the horizon. That's a simple, elegant, understandable solution. Sadly, it took a  long time for me to figure that out and lots of exploring alternate themes to make it work. See, I first tried changing the whole perspective of the game to a top-down view. This worked mechanically, but didn't really look like a recognizable tree anymore. I explored several different themes where these patterns and organic paths would make sense. First I started with a river. Pretty bland at the moment, but I could see it working. Alas, this was an unpopular choice among Twitter followers, so I ask...

You can tell when I've had a busy month when I don't post so much, so here's a bunch of news in one big roundup! (Photo by Ashley Humphries ) Gen Con 2014 Report Reports from DriveThruCards booth say there was a LOT of activity this year. Though they decided not to do any retail sales this year, there were still plenty of walk-ups who had heard about my games and grabbing discount code coupons. DTC has been generous enough to extend the discount code for everyone to use: SP2014GC for 25% off all my games ! Light Rail to be Published in Brazil FunBox Jogos has just agreed to publish Light Rail in Portuguese! You may recognize FunBox as the Brazilian publishers of the most striking edition of COUP on the market. Really lovely sense of design and art direction on that team, so I look forward to seeing what they can do for Light Rail. Solar Senate Cover Reveal Because this month has been so busy, Solar Senate may be about a week late to launch, but for n...

I've had these very loose prototypes floating in my workshop for months and never really settled on a proper set of rules for them. I knew that I wanted it to be an "organic" game, free from a grid. I also knew I wanted it to be a game that produces a pretty picture when the game is over. Something that draws a crowd as it is played. But finally I just decided I'd whip together the minimum viable rules I could think of, just to get it down on the table and actually in action. [UPDATE October 2014: These rules are for an older prototype and are not indicative of the final game available on DriveThruCards. These old rules are just saved here on this blog post for posterity.] The Deck For context, there are 45 numbered cards. Each has a branch formation along with dragonflies , butterflies , red flowers and/or pink flowers in various combinations. There is roughly an equal amount of each across the deck, but I randomized their distribution. Each card also ha...

I've been noodling that Sudoku-based city-builder in which players create a grid of buildings, but there may be no duplicates in a row or column. Each building corresponds to a special action whose strength is commensurate with the length of that row or column. There is a tension between taking a weakened action now or risking the opportunity for that action entirely. I whipped up these mockup cards this weekend, which I often do when I only have the scarcest ideas for a game and I need to see how the information might look on a real card. I decided to use letters instead of numbers since they're less intimidating, but could still be used in an understood sequential ranking system if necessary. However, I quickly realized that the real value of using letters was that I could use the actual names as the cost of that building. Instead of acquiring bricks and mortar, you need to assemble the letters. Thus, multipurpose cards. Along the left side of the card are a randomize...

If you're going to Gen Con this week, visit the good folks from DriveThruRPG / DriveThruCards in booth 1103. There you can grab one of these cards with an exclusive discount code. That code is applicable to all Smart Play Games and many more products on DriveThruCards.com . It expires September 1st, so use it while you can! Don't forget, LIGHT RAIL still has an early bird discount so you can get an even steeper deal on my latest game! P.S. I won't be at the show, so please share pics and tweet @danielsolis if you spot any of my games being played in the big room. Thanks!

The Chinese edition of Koi Pond is going quite well. It will be published by Creative Tree and available in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It will include the Moon Temple expansion and the two promo cards and somehow a big giant playmat is involved. They sent me a sample this week and wow this thing is huge. Are all playmats this big normally? It's pretty dang sweet and I look forward to seeing how this develops. If Koi Pond does well, it might break into a new model for me: Release affordable POD games in English for a domestic audience, then license translation rights to bigger publishers in south Asia and Europe. A bit premature for that kind of thinking, but still worth keeping in mind for the future. According to Creative Tree, the Chinese name of the game is is "JinLi." There is an old Chinese legend about the beautiful and courageous fish "JinLi" (or "koi"). If they jump over the Chinese Dragon Gate, they become real dragon...

Wow, super busy during the tail end of convention season, but I'm still squeezing in playtest time for Solar Senate though! Here's an update: I haven't made any changes to the game since a few weeks ago. I've played this latest iteration several more times with different players over the last couple weeks to good response. But I still haven't tested any "advanced" variants. I just can't shake the feeling that my impulse to add endgame bonuses or special actions would make a rather elegant game needlessly complex. Discussion drifted to the topic of "modular complexity," in which a game is perfectly functional even if you ignore one particular way of scoring points or remove one particular component. For example learning to play Carcassonne without the farm scoring or adding any of the expansions. Exploring that idea a bit, I tested the game with a simpler orthogonal variation. You couldn't place or capture diagonal...

In the spirit of transparency, I release my print-on-demand card game sales numbers every month. When I started out releasing games this way, I didn't have any metric against which I could compare my performance. So here's how July went... It was bananas. First, some background: When I was just starting out, the advice from DriveThruCards told me to price my games at whatever price I wanted, but to imply that it was marked down a couple bucks from some arbitrarily higher price. I thought "that's silly, surely customers are wise to that old trick by now." For a long time I resisted that tactic, just setting all of my games at a flat price. However, the success of my tiny Origins-timed promotion and my new early bird discount contributed to quite a recovery from a weak second quarter. Given that performance, I thought it would be worth a shot to participate in the Christmas in July event. I was skeptical that it would help, but I thought I'd at least ...