Daniel Solis

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...

Every time I play Reiner Knizia's Poison , I want to hack it into something a little more robust. But then I realize I'd probably be re-inventing Paul Peterson's Smash Up . Surely there is a middle ground somewhere between the two extremes. After all, the Hearts family of evasion trick-taking games is vast and old, so I bet we could come up with something a little gamery while still keeping it approachable. Here's a first attempt at it. So the big thing with Poison is that you're trying to have the lowest score after a series of rounds. There are three cauldrons into which you're dropping potions and poisons. If you force the sum in a cauldron to exceed 13, you must take the cards currently in the cauldron and replace them with your new card. In the end of the round, you score 1 point per potion in your possession, 2 points per poison. You score no points for a specific type of potion if you possess the most of that potion, so you might try to "shoot ...