Daniel Solis

Wow, so that just happened. Wil Wheaton's been live-tweeting his playtest and selection process for the next season of Tabletop. With so much stiff competition from many great, camera-friendly games I knew it was a long shot for Belle of the Ball to make the cut. I'm just glad Wil enjoyed it and recommended it to his followers.

Sometimes I come across sketches on my hard drive and I have no idea what I was thinking about designing. In this case I was clearly in that phase where I was exploring the fact that you could make a 2.5x2.5 tile out of a standard card, with a hanging 1" tab to block off one area. I must have wanted to make some kind of Go or Pente game out of it, but I don't know how that would work. Is your goal to make a line of five? Perhaps to surround opposing pieces? Maybe it's an area control competition for each column and row? UPDATE I remembered what the heck I was thinking about! The idea is that you're terraforming an alien planet to order. In the process, you're raising big islands, little islands, or leaving certain sectors as empty ocean. Each card has four sectors which may have either of those three features. Meanwhile, the 1" tab at the bottom of each card determines how many points the line is worth. To be specific, this is the perpendicular...

Lately I've wondered if I have advocated too strongly for elegance in game design when I really want to see more eloquence. The difference? "Elegance" has, ironically, built up a lot of minimalist dogma around it. It strays from one general design philosophy to design aesthetics. These days, I wonder if "elegance" is the beginning of a strong design, but not necessarily the end. "Eloquence" in game design allows for abstractions, complexities, and general grit on an otherwise perfectly faceted gem. Think of it as the organic flaws in an perfectly symmetrical rug. A master could have made this rug or game perfectly but where they chose to place those flaws says more about their intent than if it had been absolutely perfect. The trick is knowing where and when to implement "flaws" to best suit your play experience. That brings us to the classic dilemma of theme, mechanisms, and components and how all three affect the game. I find these ...

Solar Senate is now on DriveThruCards! Humanity is about to join galactic society. You are an alien trying to convince the Solar Senate to ally with your civilization. Influencing humans from interstellar distances, you must rely on sympathetic Senators to convert their comrades. Through cunning manipulation and the occasional political sacrifice, you can win the Solar Senate!     SOLAR SENATE is a 2-player abstract game of spatial strategy and conversion. It's inspired by classic Reversi conversion mechanisms with some extra depth and strategy for modern players. Find it on DriveThruCards!

( Photo Source ) This weekend we attended the Small Press Expo (SPX), a convention devoted to independent comics creators at every level of the industry. This year was the 20th anniversary of the show and my second year volunteering alongside my wife. She's the real fan of the two of us, with a long-standing love for indie comics and creators. I came into the fandom a bit late, but it's such a welcoming and vibrant community that I never felt out of place. After weeks of awful news coming from gamer culture, it was such a positive experience at SPX seeing diverse creators and fans in a niche community all supporting each other. It can happen, people! I've seen it! But I really recommend SPX to tabletop game designers because it is an excellent place to network with lots of undiscovered and rising talent. You can check out the artists I talked to at SPX on my pinterest board here . Specifically for "SPX 2014" tag in the description. Also check out the SP...

Most Saturday mornings, I volunteer at the local animal shelter, socializing puppies so they are more adoptable and family-ready. When I come home, I post pics of the puppies I work with under the hashtag #pupdate on Twitter. Naturally, I've been asked many times if I'll ever turn the #Pupdate into a card game, but the theme has always been a challenge to me. You may recall I was working on a dog-themed game over a year ago and never fully settled on the theme. Should it be about individual dog training? Should it be about operating the shelter as a whole? In the end, I decided to make it more about "matchmaking," in the sense of finding the right home for a dog. Here are some ruff outlines of where the game is presently. It's a trick-taking deck building game. Cards in your hand represent waiting homes eager to adopt a pup. While in your hand, you only look at the suit and rank. You can ignore everything else on the card. Lay out one card per pl...

This weekend I ran a table at the inaugural tiltEXPO in downtown Durham, primarily a video game show. It's my first experience running my own table for my own card games. I have a bit of experience volunteering at other booths at tabletop conventions or sharing a table at video game conventions, but this was my first solo show. Here was my mental flowchart/script: "Howdy! Feel free to take a look at any of my card games. I'm running demos all weekend." Pause for response. If they stick around or ask about anything in particular, proceed to a fast, clear pitch. Direct attention with body language and eye contact. Remember, you're competing with the Smash Bros tournament right next to you: " Monsoon Market is a fast-paced economic-themed game where you're trying to get rich fast. Magic players like it because there is a lot of opportunistic combo play." (Add a line about the historical context if they seem interested.) " Koi Pond i...

I've never been one to set myself a goal of making some huge, groundbreaking new mechanism. Instead, I like to tease out bits of mechanical data from a small set of interactions and components. So, I posted this little thought-experiment on Twitter: How much game information can you derive from a stack of colored chips? Check out the Twitter responses here . Some really clever stuff that I didn't think of originally, like diversity of colors in the stack, size of an individual run, and certain Poker-style combos. What comes to mind for you?

It's done! Almost! SOLAR SENATE is just about ready to go to print, it just needs one last quick pass from the hivemind to hunt down any typos that strayed past me. I appreciate any time you can spare to read through these few rules cards and tell me if anything is unclear or flagrantly misspelled. You can download the SOLAR SENATE rules PDF here. Thanks!

Every month, I share my print-on-demand sales numbers so you can keep track of my year long experiment releasing one new game each month of 2014. The Bad News, Good News This was an odd month because it's the first this year in which my freelance obligations forced me to miss a release deadline. I also incurred some steep expenses hiring an artist for a future release and ordering inventory for the upcoming local convention tiltEXPO . However, these unfortunate setbacks were greatly mitigated by the joint promotional push by DriveThruCards at Gen Con and me from home on social media. On top of that, the Chinese edition of Koi Pond is far into production and the Brazilian edition of Light Rail is quickly gaining steam. Let's look at the numbers! Two MVPs Carry the Team You recall last month how my skepticism about promotions was totally thwomped, right? Well, consider it double-thwomped because August performed very well. All credit to DriveThruCards' aggressi...