Daniel Solis

Solar Senate is now on DriveThruCards! Humanity is about to join galactic society. You are an alien trying to convince the Solar Senate to ally with your civilization. Influencing humans from interstellar distances, you must rely on sympathetic Senators to convert their comrades. Through cunning manipulation and the occasional political sacrifice, you can win the Solar Senate!     SOLAR SENATE is a 2-player abstract game of spatial strategy and conversion. It's inspired by classic Reversi conversion mechanisms with some extra depth and strategy for modern players. Find it on DriveThruCards!

It's done! Almost! SOLAR SENATE is just about ready to go to print, it just needs one last quick pass from the hivemind to hunt down any typos that strayed past me. I appreciate any time you can spare to read through these few rules cards and tell me if anything is unclear or flagrantly misspelled. You can download the SOLAR SENATE rules PDF here. Thanks!

You can tell when I've had a busy month when I don't post so much, so here's a bunch of news in one big roundup! (Photo by Ashley Humphries ) Gen Con 2014 Report Reports from DriveThruCards booth say there was a LOT of activity this year. Though they decided not to do any retail sales this year, there were still plenty of walk-ups who had heard about my games and grabbing discount code coupons. DTC has been generous enough to extend the discount code for everyone to use: SP2014GC for 25% off all my games ! Light Rail to be Published in Brazil FunBox Jogos has just agreed to publish Light Rail in Portuguese! You may recognize FunBox as the Brazilian publishers of the most striking edition of COUP on the market. Really lovely sense of design and art direction on that team, so I look forward to seeing what they can do for Light Rail. Solar Senate Cover Reveal Because this month has been so busy, Solar Senate may be about a week late to launch, but for n...

Wow, super busy during the tail end of convention season, but I'm still squeezing in playtest time for Solar Senate though! Here's an update: I haven't made any changes to the game since a few weeks ago. I've played this latest iteration several more times with different players over the last couple weeks to good response. But I still haven't tested any "advanced" variants. I just can't shake the feeling that my impulse to add endgame bonuses or special actions would make a rather elegant game needlessly complex. Discussion drifted to the topic of "modular complexity," in which a game is perfectly functional even if you ignore one particular way of scoring points or remove one particular component. For example learning to play Carcassonne without the farm scoring or adding any of the expansions. Exploring that idea a bit, I tested the game with a simpler orthogonal variation. You couldn't place or capture diagonal...