Daniel Solis

Regime is one of those games that would really do best with a retail scale production. It needs too many cards to be a profitable POD product, but I didn't realize that when I first published it. It's still on DriveThruCards, and you can buy it right now, but it's pretty much at-cost. Since BGGcon, I've been taking the advice that I should work on more middleweight games with more components. Regime seems like the best fit for this new evolution. I've been working on updates to the components, which in turn led to some gameplay updates as well. None of these changes are final, they're just things I'm testing. 1. Faster Scoring So, our game design guild has a rule of thumb for game design we call Vicki's Law: A game shouldn't take longer to score than to play. That seemed to be Regime's main weakness. It doesn't break Vicki's Law, but it is most certainly a misdemeanor. At BGGcon, there was some talk of modifying the deck so so...

I'm happy to say that " Curse You, Robin Hood! " is now ready for public playtesting. In the legendary days of Sherwood forest, the regular Joe merchants trying to earn an honest buck keep getting robbed by Robin Hood. They quickly learn that the trick to getting rich in Sherwood is to just not be the richest merchant, otherwise you're the biggest target for the Merry Men. Find the complete rules here along with a PnP PDF of the 50 cards. This is the next stage of development of Sharewood, the original light tavern card game a bunch of us playstormed at BGGcon this year. ( The story behind that is in this post. ) Curse You Robin, Hood! expands from 1 to 6 players, uses a custom the deck, simplifies scoring, adds shooting the moon and multi-round rules. I'm pretty proud of the solo rules as well, since they're not exclusively limited to one-player games. The bots can be added to a group of any size. It's pretty fun! Hope you get a chance to play...

For the past few weeks, I've been practicing streaming my work on Twitch. You can see some of the archived broadcasts on my profile page here: http://www.twitch.tv/danielsolis81 I'm still learning the ropes and trying to figure out the technical issues. For now, I'm saving some archived highlights publicly on youtube, as you can see above and on my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMiK5E4VEq7FPCNBsw1hJQ My main issue at the moment is that my archived streams are cutting off upwards of 20 minutes early for some reason. If anyone knows how to fix that, I'd be very grateful. For now I'm recording a local copy of stream. I will save those archived videos to youtube as Unlisted videos. That means only people who have the URL will be able to watch the video. So that brings me to my well-buried lead: I have a new $10 tier on my Patreon page! I'll post archived twitch streams for $10+ patrons, along with as many files from that strea...

Hello, last-minute holiday shoppers! Today is the last day to order my games from DriveThruCards in the continental US and be pretty sure they'll reach you by December 24. Stuff those stockings!

I just recently finished Monument Valley , the gorgeous and brain-boggling Escher-inspired puzzle game. It's been around for a little bit, but seems to have had a resurgence since it was a free download last week. Naturally, it got me thinking about how we might use rhombuses and isometric grids in a tabletop game. Looking at some existing examples, Rome: City of Marble makes some clever use of these grids and emergent patterns, but Monument Valley has that lovely interaction with implied perspective that I really wanted to capture on the table. The Rocca line of games from Japan is closer to what I wanted to see, but still feels relatively linear compared to Monument Valley's three-dimensional gameplay. All of this converged on two different games I've got on my docket: Tile-Laying: the Tile-Laying Game This is a co-design with Drew Hicks. We're both members of the Game Designers of North Carolina and we got to talking about an upcoming "meta" ...

I was very lucky to sit down with Beth from BoardGameGeek at the Action Phase BGG.con booth to do an overview of Kodama: the Tree Spirits . Action Phase says Kodama was a very popular demo at the show with a lot of customer and retailer interest. You can still pre-order Kodama: the Tree Spirits at the Action Phase Games website here. On a personal note, I've seen so many of these convention overviews on the BGG youtube channel that it's a little surreal seeing myself on one. I was a little nervous, which you can probably tell, but hopefully it's a clear enough overview of how the game plays. I'm really looking forward to seeing Kodama hit many game tables soon.

Good news! I have a few more copies of the Chinese edition Koi Pond and Kigi direct from Joy Pie. Order ASAP if you want it at your doorstep before the holidays. These are the actual Chinese editions of both games and are normally unavailable in the US. I got a few complementary designer copies and now I'd like to send them to you! Find them at my Etsy store! Thanks!

It's time for a new episode of Card at Work, this time covering how to design a deck of playing cards in Adobe InDesign's DataMerge. This mostly follows the same techniques established in the previous episode, but the latter half also covers some troubleshooting you may need to do when you're designing your own deck. The last episode drew some feedback asking for more supplementary assets to go alongside the video content. I'd love to hear more about what you would like to see, especially as exclusives for patrons. For now, here's an oldie-but-goodie posted back in 2012, but goes along well with this episode. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bzba7Uiit9gpSlJyOVR0cGN6SGs That contains an InDesign file and support for a simple deck of playing cards using Noun Project icons. Hope that helps get you started on your way!