Daniel Solis

  I'm happy to say the two newest Trickster sets are now live at http://www.smartplaygames.com ! Trickster is a series of fun casual strategy card games featuring heroes from many genres and universes. You’re trying to keep those gallant chumps from meddling in your business. Lure them toward your opponents and try to keep them away from you. Whoever has the fewest heroes will be the winner! Each Trickster set is a standalone game, but you can mix heroes from different sets to customize the play to your group’s tastes. Trickster: Starship is a fast-paced and competitive set featuring the motley crew of the starship Emphasis as they explore the unknown. Art by Brian Patterson . Trickster: Symbiosis is a highly strategic set featuring characters from the biopunk setting Symbiosis by Steven Sanders . Both games are completely compatible with Trickster: Fantasy and Trickster: Tianxia . For more news on the future plans, see below. Kickstarting Trick...

Theme first or mechanic first? Tabletop game designers get asked that question a lot, but it misses a key ingredient in any analog game: Components. In this case, I've got a component in mind that I think could be really interesting as a tile-laying mechanic. Above, each card depicts the vertices of four other cards with the same dimensions. Assume that on your turn you may play one card onto the play area, overlapping only one quadrant of another card, as shown above. When I'm hashing out this sort of thing, I just fill in spaces with color for the sake of experimentation without much thought as to theme. Of course when you look at this your first thought might be the paintings of Piet Mondrian or Olle Baertling. I find the audiences for those themes are somewhat limited, and I really want a theme that can inspire some strong secondary mechanics and victory conditions. Of course there is the old standby of city-building. There's an interesting perio...

Hi patrons! Sorry about the long wait between updates. It's been a busy few months, but honestly I've hit a sort of writer's block when it comes to making new icons for different game actions. We're sitting on about 400 icons now, I kinda felt like there wasn't enough material left for me to make a valuable bundle for you. For icons of abstract concepts and simple nouns, you've got a lot of options already between game-icons.net and thenounproject.com . So I am broadening the scope of this Patreon to cover a wide range of tabletop game production assets. Videos : It's been a few years since I released my first instructional videos on card game design on an online course site. Since that time, they've shifted to a subscription-only model that has really reduced new enrollments. It's probably time to release the videos from behind their paywall. Card templates : Frames and backgrounds for cards in CCGs and euro games. Plus any more based o...

Hey y'all! I've got the rulebooks for the next two Trickster sets up and ready for your perusal. It takes  a lot of eyeballs to catch the tiny typos and grammatical vagaries that creep into a rules doc even this tiny, so I appreciate your time if you can take a look. Trickster: Starship Trickster: Symbiosis As with my other self-published games, these rules are formatted to fit onto standard size playing cards. It's a trick getting rules concisely but thoroughly explained in that tiny format. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, please share! Thank you so much!

I sometimes say I  design icebergs: Tiny at the surface, but much more to discover with time. Now, I'm not always successful , but that's the goal. That's the kind of play I enjoy most. Well, it turns out I've been designing games for parents as well, at least according to some fan mail I've been getting lately. There's a particular spike in these comments for Trickster lately. Here are a few: Gareth says : "Just received Trickster: Fantasy and played it with my sons (13 and 11). A great game that's simple to learn , but allows players to make some great choices." Robert Kalajian at Purple Pawn says "I’ve played both Fantasy and Tianxia with my kids (5, 8, and 10) and they all really enjoyed them. My 5 year old took a bit more time to learn the powers, but now knows each in the Fantasy deck by the icons on the cards. The Tianxia deck is still a bit much for him, though he hasn’t given up on it yet!" Seth Ben-Ezra shared this...

First, a quick head's up: As of this post (August 4, 2015), there's only a little under two weeks left in the public playtest period for Trickster: Starship and Trickster: Symbiosis . If you will be able to send me feedback before August 15, 2015 , please email gobi81 at gmail for PnP PDFs of the two sets. Thanks so much! Now, I thought it would be fun to show a peek behind the curtain of how I develop Trickster sets. Perhaps this will be useful for anyone in the future who is looking to home-brew their own Trickster sets with their own favorite themes. More likely, I'll look back at this post in a few years when I'm completely bereft of new ideas. Either way, useful! What's the hook? When I take on a genre or universe for a Trickster set, I try to find one mechanical thing that unites that particular group of heroes. In Trickster: Tianxia, it was the idea of high-speed, hand-to-hand movement with little house augmentation. I liked the idea of thes...

Joel Eddy, of Drive-Thru Review, just posted a video review of Kigi here . (Drive-Thru Review is no relation to DriveThruCards, the POD service I use to self-publish several games, including Kigi.) Now, I'd been under the impression that being a tiny game self-published on a POD site would mean Kigi would fall way below the radar of any video reviewer, let alone a reviewer from the Dice Tower Network. I'm happy to see that I was wrong on that point! Joel has some very kind things to say about Kigi! Check it out in the video embedded above or at the link here . Please note that the scoring example has a slight error which is corrected in the on-screen youtube annotations, which may not automatically appear depending on the platform you're viewing the video. But all that said, it's a very positive review and way more exposure I ever expected to get for one of my self-published games. Thanks so much for giving air time to the little games out there, Joel!

Big news! Action Phase Games and I have teamed up to develop a brand new game called Kodama: The Tree Spirits . Theme The forest is growing fast! As caretakers for Kodama, the tree spirits, you must keep the forest a healthy and lush home for your little friends. Over three growing seasons, you must cultivate trees with the right mix flowers, animals, and branch arrangements to make your Kodama as happy as possible. Whoever cares for their Kodama best will be remembered for generations! History Earlier this year, I realized that Kigi was my biggest hit on the POD market. It dwarfs all my other products in sales and has been successfully licensed in several other countries now. And yet, it didn't really have much presence in the US. I debated whether I should pursue my own kickstarter or team up with a publisher. Lo and behold, Action Phase Games swoops in bustling with energy and enthusiasm for Kigi. Turns out they've been playing it a lot in-house and had a ...