Daniel Solis

I just wrapped up the rulebook layout for The Great Dinosaur Rush , by Scott Almes and APE Games. Kevin Brusky at APE Games was generous enough to let me stream the layout process on Twitch. Now that it's complete, I made a sped up video overview covering the bulk of that whole process. There are still small tweaks to be made to a few words here and there, but the layout is pretty much settled down. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!

Here's a grid-bidding mechanism that I've had in the lab for some time and finally set down on paper earlier this week. Assume a two-player game for now: red and blue. Also assume each player has tiles numbered 1-7. Set Up To set up, each player takes turns setting one tile face-down along the top or side of the grid shown above. Play Each player takes turns placing one of their remaining tiles face-up in the 3x3 grid as shown below. Score Then it's time to score points! Reveal the hidden tiles now. Whoever has the highest total sum in a row or column in that 3x3 grid will win a number of points equal to the formerly face-down tile atop that column or beside that row. For example, in the top row, red has a total of 11 compared to blue's 4, thus winning 7 points. Strategy As players take their turns, they can infer a little about the value of each column or row based on the other tiles that their opponent is playing.   Multiplayer Scaling You ...

Oh wow, check out Dreamwell, a gorgeous game with art from Tara McPherson . I really love it when tabletop publishers give new and interesting art styles a stage to shine. Action Phase brought in Kwanchai Moriya for Kodama: the Tree Spirits , which was a really great call. Looks like they're keeping up that track record with Dreamwell . The gorgeous blend of theme and presentation that makes my inner art director so, so happy. Check out the quick tutorial below: And pledge here!

It was a snowy weekend indoors, so I decided to give deboxing another try with Codenames . My last attempt was with For Sale , in which I foolishly cut across the logo instead of along it. Doh! I didn't make that same mistake this time thankfully. I should've V-cut the corners to they're flush with each other. However, I ran out of packing tape at the last minute so I made do with tabs and double-stick tape. I hope I can do this more often with some of my other airy game boxes!

There's been a distinct trend in my recent game design, perhaps a crutch. I like designing mechanisms for players to collect a variety of resources, but negating whichever resource in which they have a majority. So far, I've only explored "majority" in the sense of an "inter-majority." In other words, having more Wheat than any other player would be considered an inter-majority. Inter-Majority Negation as a Reward In Trickster , players are trying to avoid the attention of heroes, which is represented by scoring points. Lowest score is the winner. Cards come in seven different suits, each typically scoring one point for you if they're in your possession. At the end of the game, if you have more cards in a suit than any other player, you ignore those cards in your score. As a result, players either try to have as few cards as possible or, if unable to accomplish that goal, try to get as many cards of the suits they already possess in order to ...

Long-time readers may recall a few years ago when I first started tinkering with a card game inspired by James Stowe's webcomic Sidekick Quests . It's been off and on the back burner several times since then, but I think I've finally struck the right balance of thinky game and accessible family fun. Check out the one-page rules doc along with the print-and-play files below. » Rules Doc » Print and Play PDF In the game, you're adventurers-in-training sent on a variety of quests to earn the esteem of your mentors. The better you do on your adventures, the more points you'll earn! I'm eager to hear from game-loving families how this game does with players ages 8+. I tried to keep the basic actions very simple and the teaching time very short, but there is still a fair bit of reading involved with this beta prototype. Hopefully that doesn't get in the way too much! Have fun!

As part of my ongoing development of Koi Pond into a more retail-friendly product , I'm re-evaluating some of the long-standing comments about the Cats, Cranes, and Turtles. Over the years, players have said one of these animals are overpowered relative to the value of the Koi scoring baseline. The funny thing is that no one could agree on which animals were the ones that were overpowered. Was it the crane, which let players know precisely how well they'd score? Was it the Turtle, which fed off of competition for the ribbons? Was it the cat, which though unpredictable, was still strengthened by having a secretive opponent? No one could come to a consensus. That being the case, I let the issue rest on its own and the game has done very well regardless of this possible balance issue. At the time, I observed that games that have some wrinkles draw more of a community than games that are perfectly smooth. "This will just be Koi Pond's wrinkle," I thought. But...

For the past few months, Matthew Everhart and I have been working on a two-player tactical card game called Tractor Pull, where rival teams of scrappy modified vehicles engage in a triple tug-of-war challenge. We just submitted it to the Cardboard Edison award contest , which requires a video overview of the game as part of the submission. Check it out, and find the complete rules and print-and-play prototype here . Hope you dig it!

It's a new episode of Card At Work ! This time we start a multi-part lesson in how to design a more complex CCG style template for InDesign's DataMerge. This is a big topic so I first put together all of the basic placeholders and assets in this episode. The next episode will cover how to connect everything together with DataMerge. Hope you dig! Please like, share, and subscribe! Support further episodes at http://www.patreon.com/danielsolis

I'm developing some variants for Koi Pond in an effort to make it a more viable retail publishing candidate. That includes more opportunities for components and as a result significant rules tweaks. I want to keep the spirit of the game intact, which makes this a significant challenge. First and foremost, I need a new way to handle the lake that works in round 1, but cuts down the analysis paralysis of selecting from a whole pile of face-up cards. Here's where I'm at right now. The New Deck My local development has been working with the full Chinese edition of the game, which includes the Moon Temple expansion. This lets me have a bit more freedom to mix up cards and set aside other cards as future chrome bits. The new main deck is comprised solely of Koi cards; no other animals. These include the 4-rank and 5-rank cards from Moon Temple as well as the rainbow 1-rank koi. This ends up being 80 koi cards, which is a little more than enough for a full game of fou...

Watch the skies! The Fate More kickstarter is live, with Do: Fate of the Flying Temple as a headliner. If you loved Pilgrims of the Flying Temple but wanted to play with the Fate system, here's your chance! :D

Last year a lot of publishers said they liked my games, but wanted to see what I'd do next . Specifically, what games I could design beyond the realm of pure card games. Something like a medium weight euro.  So as I do my morning game design doodles, I'm dipping a toe into classic euro mechanisms like worker placement or dice placement. Here's one idea, loosely inspired by Greg Stolze's One-Roll Engine . Assume there is a pool of eight six-sided dice and a board with six numbered spaces. Also assume that this board represents six different actions you may take, in the spirit of other dice-placement games like Alien Frontiers, Kingsburg, or Euphoria. On your turn, you roll the dice pool and sort the results into groups according to their face value. Here we have 1x1, 2x3, 3x2, 4x1, and 5x1. As the active player, you get first choice from this pool to place one of these groups onto the board. You may place a group onto a space that matches the face value ...

Drew Hicks and I have been working on an isometric tile-laying game for the past couple of months in anticipation of the Greater Than Games metagame contest . The contest calls for games where the core mechanism is also the theme, for example Deck Building: the Deck Building Game, where you're actually building a deck for a house. That sort of thing. We're happy to announce that Tile-Laying: the Tile-Laying Game is now ready for public testing! Welcome to the brutal, high-stakes, life-and-death world of archeological restoration internship. Here, rival interns burn their brains reconstructing a tiled Ancient Greek plaza. Place tiles on the two walls and the floor in order to earn the most renown. Whoever earns the most renown wins! It's a two-player game played on a 4x4x3 isometric space with a floor and two walls. Players take turns placing their tile or a blank tile onto the plaza. When a line of eight tiles is complete, whoever has the most tiles on that ...

As a part of general development for Trickster, I'm taking a hard look at the 3-player and 2-player modes. The basic game has a nice sweet spot with 4-6 players, but to make the game viable at retail, we need to legitimately have a "2" on the box. So here's what I've got in the lab right now. For those of you who have at least two Trickster sets, here's what you need to do. --~-- Set Up Changes Your deck will need one more hero than normal. So, eight heroes in seven different colors, for a deck of 56 cards. (For my home tests, I liked adding the Miner from Symbiosis to the Fantasy set. She's a nice complement to the Rogue and keeps the overall effects pretty easy to remember.) Deal eleven cards to each player’s hand. For Three Players: Clear an additional section of the play area called the Timeline . Set it to the opposite side of the Trash from the Deck. Deal a row of twelve cards to the Timeline face-down.  Turn the card at the front of the...

It's a new year and a fresh chance to get started on some new habits. One habit I've kept up since becoming a freelancer is the Daily Huddle. A bunch of work-from-home freelancers and I meet every weekday at 10am EST for about 20 minutes to share three things: - #1 Priority for the Day - A question or bit of help for the group - One bit of news, which is ostensibly supposed to be a professional update but has lately digressed into Star Wars. A lot. I picked up this habit when I was working in an office, but it's an easy and convenient way to keep up human contact with fellow professionals. We have artists, writers, and game designers on a regular basis. Join us at this URL !

Happy new year, everyone! It's been a long time since I've done a proper sales report, which probably foreshadows the transitions from 2015. I kicked off the year knowing that I couldn't repeat the same pace I held in 2014, releasing one new game or product each month via DriveThruCards' POD service. That wasn't sustainable for the long-term, but it really yielded great rewards and I'm glad I did it. Without further ado, let's look at the numbers and break down some context. The Numbers Here are the sales numbers for each product in 2015 (in red) compared to 2014 (in blue). The good news is that every product that existed in 2014 sold more units than it did in 2015! Across the board growth is very positive. These are the gross sales numbers for each product in 2015 compared to 2014. As you can see with some small low-priced products like the Koi Pond promo cards, the sales numbers far exceed their actual dollar gross. These numbers fluctuat...