Daniel Solis

Thanks for being patient with my slow posting schedule the past few weeks. I'd been preparing non-stop for BGGcon this year (and then catching up on all the other freelance work that backed up before then). I wanted to come to this con more prepared with prototypes that might be a better fit for the current market. Seemed to work out! It was certainly my most hectic and busy con in many years. Seemed like I was always bustling from one impromptu meeting to another the whole time. I arrived with about 7 prototypes and they're all now in someone else's hands. That's no guarantee of publishing, but at least it's a nice start! Always a good sign of a healthy business trip. The rest of my time was spent trying out fun new games and some old favorites with new friends. Check out the video above for a highlight reel of some of the games that hit the table.

Hey all! Quick update from Greater Than Games regarding Belle of the Ball Second Edition . It's being printed right now! Barring any unforeseen shipping problems, copies of Belle of the Ball Second Edition should be available on the Greater Than Games web store and on Miniature Market in early December. They'll be rolling into stores shortly thereafter. Cutting it a bit close, but GTG is 90% sure we'll make it! If you're a store owner and want to get Belle back on your shelves ASAP, contact paul@greaterthangames.com for info. If you own the first edition, here's a quick overview of some changes to the rules and a few bits of card text.

Tuckboxes are now live for I Can't Even With These Monsters and Curse You, Robin Hood! When you're in the checkout page, just select the third option for the item. It's entirely optional as always, but they look great. Here's a quick tour of their features!   First off, the print quality is great as always. The print is smooth, the colors are vibrant, and the consistency is top notch. When you take a closer look, you'll notice this seam along the edges of one of the panels. This is because these boxes use no glue in their construction. They're entirely secured with folds and flaps. This has the additional benefit of making the box very rigid and sturdy. When you open the box, you'll see the deck of cards you ordered without the usual order # card or cellophane band that comes with no-box or plastic box decks. The rear hinge of the top lid needs a crease here to open properly, which is why I designed the back of my box to be on thi...

Hello, all! These are the first two card games I'm self-publishing in over a year and I'm mighty proud of them. Curse You, Robin Hood! is a rowdy pub-style card game where you're merchants in Sherwood Forest trying to get as rich as possible. The only problem is that if you're the richest in a particular type of good, Robin Hood will steal it all from you. Different legendary characters will also join your game, introducing the basics of bluffing and negotiation to new players without getting in the way of gameplay. I really love the art by Molly Ostertag . » Buy it here: Curse You, Robin Hood! » Watch the video tutorial here: I Can't Even With These Monsters is the first game in the I Can't Even series. In these games, there's one major rule: Only the highest odd-numbered score will win the game. Even if four players have 22, 20, 18, and 3 points respectively, the player with 3 points will win. This edition introduces the basic concepts w...

Howdy folks! I just got back from SPX 2016, the convention focused on independent and small press comics creators. Back in 2014 I briefly mentioned SPX as a great source for artistic talent. Last year I described the parallels between the indie comics and the tabletop game design communities . This year I'm just exhausted, so here's a link to the pinterest board of artists I met at the hall . Most of these artists said they were available for freelance assignments, so if you're a publisher or art director looking for new talent, check them out! A brief overview of my exp at the show: Fri: Toured the comics vault at Library of Congress. Saw a lovely Harrison Cady piece. Talked sci-fi movies with new friends. Then hauled boxes around the hall for set up. Sat: Line mgmt duty. Met The Adventure Zine artists. Saw the Ignatz Awards. Danced at (and evacuated from) the SPX prom. Sun: Mostly special duty. Saw @careydraws on Magical Girls panel! Then teardown, lifting, h...

Laying out a card game but your team members don't have indesign? Spreadsheets don't keep character formatting either, so that's no help. How can your team call out key words for you to style? Custom tags! Using a library of customized plain text tags makes it easy to know which words need to be styled a particular way. By setting up a few simple GREP styles in InDesign, those tags will automatically highlight and style those key words like magic. All you have to do is merge the records in DataMerge as usual and InDesign does the rest of the work for you. Hope you find this useful! Support more videos at patreon.com/danielsolis !

New goodies for all my patrons! I had a request for some wireframe card designs for different types of games, so here 's a test batch for you. These are available in EPS, JPG and an IDML file. Hope you find these useful! If you'd like to see more, please comment on the Patreon post here . Thanks!

This was a silly little product I was mulling a while back. It's too goofy for abstract players and too abstract for goofy players. So, probably just right for my sensibilities. :) It's deck of cards with 2x3 grid of spaces. Eight cards arranged as shown above would make the middle six rows of a chess board. Each player's home row is implied by the dotted lines. You'd set up a standard chess game and play on this modular board, using the special effects on the spaces shown above. This is obviously designed for chess, but could easily combo with the transparent card abstract game I posted as well. It's one of those little ideas that's not really marketable at anything but a niche scale, but I probably great for a POD product. It's been a long time since I've released any new product and the longer the hiatus, the more pressure I feel to make the next one really special. Perhaps instead I should just focus on these sorts of silly ideas. What do y...

Lately I've been thinking about designing card decks that act as supplements for a standard deck of playing cards you already have at home. The idea is that with one of these supplements and a deck of playing cards, you'd have a deep and extremely portable strategy game in your favorite genre. Auction games, area control games, etc. First up, a poker auction game. The idea here is that you could play out an auction using poker hands instead of money. I liked the idea that instead of a 1:1 ratio of dollars to bidding power, a poker hand could have an unpredictable bidding power. To get the alpha on the table as soon as possible, I just cannibalized a first edition of Sushi Go as a placeholder set of set collection cards. I also grabbed a Hocus deck since it had a convenient summary of poker hands. With the Game Designers of North Carolina, we play stormed the following game: SET UP Remove the chopsticks from the Sushi Go deck. Shuffle it together and deal out five lots...

It's Olympics season and I've been particularly fascinated with the game design behind the rules and formats for each sport. Here are some quick notes about how they might translate if they were rules for a tabletop game. Modern Pentathlon has a fencing round where the lowest ranked fencer duels the second-lowest. Whoever wins moves on to duel the next lowest. This continues with the winner of each duel climbing the ranks and the loser being removed from that round and earning points accordingly. I could see a Magic: the Gathering tournament being formatted like this as a casual event. Miss and Out Cycling has a large group of cyclists on a track doing laps around the course, but the last cyclist to cross the finish line is eliminated from that race. Laps continue in this manner, with more cyclists being eliminated. This is more or less how Get Bit works, replacing individual racers with 5 hit points for each player. Olympic Diving has 7 scores from judges kept sep...

Hello party people! I'm happy to show you the Belle of the Ball second edition rulebook and some of the card errata. We wanted to get public feedback before going to print, especially from fans and owners of the original edition. Here's a link to the rulebook for your review. I'll keep that PDF updated as folks find typos or errors. We're looking for feedback before August 19, 2016 ideally. There's a teeny bit of wiggle room on that deadline, but not much. OVERVIEW OF CHANGES In the basic game, start each player with one random Belle card. Swap step 1 and 2 so players can use a Belle card on the same turn it was acquired. No more waiting a full round to use it. Remove step 3. Instead, your group scores immediately when it is full, even if it’s not your turn. This might clean up a few of the awkward bits of explanation for new players. Now it’s clear that if it’s on the table, it can be added to. This also is more merciful to players who get a full gr...

After playing Wolfgang Kramer's Top Race the other day, I'm thinking about racing games again. In Top Race, each card moves several colored cars through the track as far forward as possible. Because you're betting on the race results as well as controlling your own car, you're still invested in the outcome even if your car is trailing behind. Controlling opponent's cars is very valuable and fun way to stay engaged throughout the game, which is a common problem in racing games. I got to thinking about how to capture that same versatility and engagement with a card-driven racing game without the betting element. One way I thought about was using conditional positions instead of specific colors. For example, say I establish these key terms. You: A car or cars you control. Straggler: The car in last place. Leader: The car in first place. Chaser: The car in second-place. Follower: The car immediately behind your car. Pacer: The car immediately ahead of your ...

Less than a day left to jump in on the Pod-X kickstarter! Check out the links here for the PnP preview, the rules, and a play overview. Appreciate your support!

It's a new episode of Card at Work , the video series covering the basics of designing cards for tabletop games! This time we're building on the GREP tricks from the last episode on inline icons and using similar technique to insert optional line breaks within a single cell of a spreadsheet. Using this method, you can drop a line break into a single block of text without needing a manual line break in the InDesign template itself OR using a find-replace after merging the document. This is my first Card at Work episode in HD resolution. I'm slowly figuring out Adobe Premiere so hopefully these episodes will be even higher quality as time goes on. P.S. I'll be streaming today live at around noon EST. I'll be working on a new round of layout updates for Chimera Station from Tasty Minstrel Games at http://www.twitch.tv/danielsolis81 . Support more videos at my Patreon!

It's the second episode of Coffee & Carcassonne ! Megan and I usually play Carcassonne over Sunday brunch at home. We hope you enjoy the gameplay and dorky conversation!

2-player abstracts are really hard to make commercially viable, but that's never kept me from noodling them a bit. This is one idea that I've had on the back burner for a long time while I was focused on card games, but I'm pushing it forward a bit now that Onitama and the Duke are more prominent. The basic idea is using transparent cards like Gloom or Mystic Vale with an abstract movement UI as seen in Onitama, the Duke, and Tash-Kalar. Each player has identical set of unique pieces. Call them A, B, C, D, and E. To set up the game, each player draws five cards from the deck. Each player simultaneously secretly picks then reveals a card to assign to each type of piece. In the above example, player 1 picked Elephant and player 2 picked Crab. For this game, A has the traits and powers of Elephant and Crab. Then you do the same for B, C, D, and E. Then you play the remainder of the game using those movement rules. I'm imagining the game played on a 9x9 board, I ca...

Button Shy's been teasing the release of POD-X, coming to Kickstarter in July 5 through July 16, 2016. It's their 3-4 player adaptation of my microgame Suspense, using the original "Escape the spaceship" theme I had waaaay back at UnPub 3. I'm super excited to see how it turns out. Hope you dig it too! In Pod-X, players are trying to escape a fallen spaceship on the last escape pod. One player knows its  location, but is keeping it secret to themselves. What a jerk! All the other players are trying to deduce and bluff their way to the secret location in this quick parlor-style card game. Fair warning though, this is basically the Dark Souls of deduction microgames. It rewards repeated play and familiarity with the card deck. We hope you'll play again and again, developing your own mini-meta within your group. Look for POD-X next month!

Most professional tabletop game designers I've met have a day job. This is just anecdotal, but it seems a full time game designer is VERY rare. I’m more of a pro today than I’ve ever been, but most of my household contribution still comes from an aggregate of freelance projects, Patreon, DriveThruCards, and SkillShare. Only a fraction of comes from traditional game design work. And all of that totaled together is still only about a third of what my wife makes at her normal day job. When I'm working on any game eventually I have to ask myself the scary question: “Is this game worth designing?” Is this game costing me too much money? Is it costing too much time? With this series of short articles, I want to share how I figure out whether a game I'm working on is worth designing and, if so, how much I can expect to earn for my time and expense designing it. First up... How much money has this game cost already? The most common expense is material costs. My prot...

I've been noodling a push-your-luck game themed around investigative journalism for a while now. At first I was exploring a reverse-auction mechanic , but the push-your-luck aspect of Circus Flohcati, Incan Gold, Dead Man's Draw, and Abyss seemed to make more sense. The idea of "digging" into the deck as a mechaphor of investigation sounded really compelling. I also really love games where the only prep you have to do is shuffling one deck of cards. Here are the basic ideas I have right now, which haven't entirely gelled yet into a real game, but are close enough to get to the table by next week. Cards have ranks and suits, noted by the number and large symbol along the top corner. Each suit represents different subjects your reporter is following. Below the suit is a little arrow pointing at another suit. Lower ranks have more arrows than higher ranks. 1s are "?" and have an arrow pointing to "?" Setup Shuffle the deck. De...

Here's a new time-lapse video of a recent logo design for Catty B's , a comedy series from Angela Webber and Lucia Fasano. They were very kind and generous to let me record and share this design process. Patrons $10+ also get a version of this video with commentary about how I designed this logo and some of the decision process. Hope you all find that useful! Thanks to Angela, Lucia, and all my patrons for making these videos possible!

Huzzah! Molly Ostertag just wrapped up a new batch of art for Curse You, Robin Hood! These are the legendary characters Robin Hood, the Sheriff, Maid Marian, Will Scarlet, Little John, Friar Tuck, and the Prince. Here are Molly's final pieces with some of the art direction. I wanted a more ethnically diverse retelling of the Robin Hood myth, set closer to the Iberian peninsula than Britannia. That flipped things around with casting a bit as the Sheriff would end up looking more like Errol Flynn. Maid Marian was the only prominent female character in the lineup originally, so I asked Molly to model Will Scarlet on a roguish Ruby Rose. Little John was modeled on the Rock. Friar Tuck was modeled on Kristian Narn's portrayal of Hodor on Game of Thrones. The Prince was modeled on Brad Dourif's portrayal of Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. My art direction initially called for the Prince and Sheriff to be flipped here, but Molly's renderings were so...

Woot! BoardGameGeek just posted Branching Out from Kigi to Kodama, my designer diary outlining the history of how Kigi 's international licenses eventually led to domestic development for Kodama: the Tree Spirits . Check it out!

When I get the wonderful opportunity to art direct for new characters, it's like opening a big awesome toy box. I have to remind myself of some things so I approach this job responsibly. This isn't necessarily a "tips" list, or in any order of priority, it's just what I try to keep in mind. Hopefully it's something you might find useful, too. An inclusive mindset is a crank, not a switch . It isn't a one-time flip from ignorance to enlightenment. It's an ongoing process of checking self, looking back on mistakes, and making assertive efforts to do better. I've never been and never will be 100% " woke ," but I must keep trying to "wake up." I will make (and have made) mistakes, but that isn't an excuse to stop putting in the effort to be more inclusive. This has real practical impact when I'm working on a project as an art director. As an art director, I have so much freedom to guide artists in certain directions ...

I'm trying out something a little different for this series. I want to break down the big giant scary subject of graphic design into the tiniest possible pinches so they're a little less intimidating. I don't know how long this series will last, I only have a few topics lined up so far: Which colors are best to avoid color-blindness issues? How do I lay out light text on a dark background? What's a good font size? If you have any other topics you want me to discuss in a

I'm in the process of updating Monsoon Market to make it more suitable for publisher pitches. I still enjoy this little game, but a few wrinkles have shown more prominently over the years of feedback and I am taking this opportunity to smooth them out. Check out the current live rules doc here. There haven't been any changes to the cards themselves, so if you own a POD copy already you're still good. It's mainly procedural tweaks and streamlining. Bonus Goods are spent, no longer permanent. When you spend a good, you note its expenditure by upgrading the Order to silver. Replenish the Market or Orders display at the end of your turn instead of immediately. You only get Bonus Actions if you fulfill an Order at Gold or Silver accuracy. The game ends immediately when someone achieves the point threshold, but you can adjust that threshold for longer games. Hope you get a chance to test these changes at home and offer your feedback! Thanks for your suppor...

I'm so honored to see Rodney Smith teach how to play Kodama: the Tree Spirits . He really sets the standard for all other video tutorials for clarity, brevity, and thoroughness. Check out the video embedded above to see Rodney teach the game far better than I could. :D

Wow, I'm finally starting to recover from the wild pace of preparing for UnPub. I had two games I was primarily showing, the main one being Curse You, Robin Hood! You can find the full rules for the game on this Google Doc. Overall the response was very good and I made some procedural tweaks after several tests that really streamlined the game significantly.  Check out the scores and responses out of 28 feedback forms. I've bolded some of the more representative comments as well. (Image Source: Lauren Woolsey ) Was this game predictable? No 100% Yes 0% Will you play this game again? No 10.71% Yes 89.29% Will you buy this game? (The responses to this question had a lot of "YESNO" responses, so I think there was something wrong with the form. In either case, the results were inconclusive.) What was one thing you would change? Maybe the option to add the AI with 6+ players nothing comes to mind art Some of the suits look a little similar an...

Come to UnPub in Baltimore this weekend, where you can find me and a bunch of other game designers demoing our latest creations. Details are at the UnPub site. I'm at table 3G, right by the feedback area. I'll be bringing a lot of prototypes in various states of development, but the big headlines are Koi Pond Second Edition and Curse You, Robin Hood! Hope to see you there!

Howdy! Looks like I forgot to post the latest episodes of Card at Work to the ol' blog here. Sorry about that! For new folks, Card at Work is my video series covering the basics of designing cards for tabletop games. I figured, what could be more appropriate for Episode 9 than to talk about making 3x3 card sheets ? :) Check it out at the video above. The previous episode covered variable front-and-back card designs . Thanks for watching! I hope you find these videos useful. Support more videos at my Patreon !

Action Phase is at GAMA this year promoting their line of really cool games, including my own Kodama: the Tree Spirits ! Check out the recorded Livestream at the link above or click here . Starting at 1:56:55, you can watch Nick Little and Eric Martin from BoardGameGeek talk about the history of the game's development and design. It's really cool! You can pre-order the base game from Action Phase directly here or the deluxe edition here . As an added bonus, you can see them enthusiastically discussing Trickster right after that demo!

Unpub 6 is in just under a month! I'm bringing almost all of my self-published games to pitch and present, but here are 6 games I'd like to highlight in particular. You may have seen my last post on the subject of "sale sheets" or "summary sheets" , but I've since expanded this to a whole series of at-a-glance summaries for handing out to publishers. Curse You, Robin Hood! You’re a merchant of Sherwood Forest trying to get rich while dodging those thieving Merry Men. Get as much treasure as possible, but not so much that Robin Hood notices you as a target! Koi Pond A zenlike, fast-flowing card game. Collect colorful koi fish and keep your pond as balanced as possible. Monsoon Market In 1405, a Chinese emissary sails the Indian Ocean, reporting the quality of each market along the way. It’s time to get busy! Earn a reputation for accurate orders or rush off any old goods in bulk. It’s a race to earn the fastest fortune in the Monso...