Daniel Solis

Here is the rules doc for LIGHT RAIL if you'd like an early look. I appreciate any clarifying questions or notes you might have since this was a very tricky game to present in print. Explaining the city limits was the hardest part since I'm so accustomed to explaining it in person, where I can use body language and verbal cues to communicate much more easily. Here is a screencap of the two pages which explain city limits:   I tried to convey a physical space first by using one human hand as a frame of reference. From there, I introduced a simple, legal placement. Then I examined two other options for placement and explained why they were illegal. Finally I wrapped up with two other legal placements which would have more complicated consequences for other spaces on the board. I imagined this as a spiral, taking the simplest situation and spinning out to progressively more distant edge cases. I hope that was all clear! Again, if you'd like to review the whol...

Back in March, Chris Kirkman shared this photo of a paragraph from the rules of the Capitals : "In all cases, once Tourists have been awarded and then placed during the Executive Phase, all Tourist Markers remain where they were placed (normally on a Building Tile) until at least the next Tourism Phase. If the Tourists situation, verified at the beginning of this phase, remains unchanged from the previous turn (i.e. the same player that surrendered their Tourist Marker last turn will once again surrender it), the Tourist Markers will remain in the same City, and on the same Building Tile. If a different player's Tourist Marker is to be surrendered, that player removes their Tourist Marker from their City, places it next to the City that has the highest Culture Level. The player who previously surrendered their Tourist Marker may recover it, and place it next to their City. This indicates that they are available to activate any Building Tile during the following Executiv...

One of the strengths of DriveThruCards is that it focuses on cards alone. They've got the nicest, firmest, sharpest cards I've seen on the POD market. Unfortunately, they don't offer any rules booklets yet. There are ways around this, like video tutorials and PDF rulebook downloads, but buyers usually want to get as complete a product as possible when it comes to their door. That means including the rules in some kind of analog format. So, I've made rules cards and included them in all my products. It's taken some experiences over the past year to learn how to best format these rules cards, and honestly I'm still learning. For now, I thought I'd share with you some of the best practices I've learned after releasing six POD card games over the past 10 months. You can share the JPEG below with your friends, forums, and frenemies. Or you can download it as a PDF at this link .

You've heard me talk about Writer's Dice before, but I decided this week I'd bite the bullet and launch a Kickstarter in November, hopefully with enough time to ship out the dice in time for the holidays. Above is the design for the prototype. As you can see, these dice are still usable as standard d6s. The prototype should be in around the 27th at the latest. If you have some feedback on this design before then, please leave a comment! Be on the lookout for more updates. This will be a very short campaign, maybe only three weeks. $5 a die. Nice and simple stocking stuffer for the writer/gamer in your life. Get excited!

Becky Chambers' recent article " A Few Good Chells " is an honest, refreshing perspective on third- and first-person gaming. Specifically, the importance of protagonists' gender and how that importance is diminished or enhanced depending on third- or first-person interface. It's a great read. Of particular note is her childhood experience of choosing female video game characters even though they didn't fit her preferred style of gameplay. The best parts are when she's trying to explain video games to her mom and why this all means so much to her. Mom sums it up wisely: “ It’s not so much about wanting to be female as it is about wanting to be you. And you are female. ” In general, I try not to start big, serious internet discussions about race or gender in gaming. The subject draws a lot of heat, but little gets produced. Many of my friends dive vigorously into those discussions, but I'm content to sit out. I find it much more satisfying to just m...

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Many, many thanks to those who generously spent time scouring the PDF this week to find typos and grammatical errors. The overall sentiment has been "This book looks great! It was lots of fun to read! Now, here are twenty typos I found." Hey, at least you had enough fun reading the book to bother finding those typos! I have a hardcopy printout of the document, with handwritten notes for consolidating all the edits in one place and each typo-hunter's name written on the front page. Not a super high-tech process, but it works. There was surprisingly little overlap between people's edits, so I'm very confident that the final book will be mostly error-free. Tonight is the last night to submit any typos and claim a star next to your donor credit. My apologies if I don't reply to you, but a LOT are coming in really fast. I'll do my best to make sure all typo-hunters are accounted for and credited.

It's my birthday on the 8th, so permit me to be a little introspective. I felt a distinct difference between my creativity and productivity, to the point where they're mutually exclusive. Now, this is just for me, your personality may steer in a totally opposite direction. It's a semantic distinction at that, to the point where I wonder if it's peculiar to the English language to have two words for what some cultures might consider the same concept. In any case, you might recognize some of these habits and attitudes in your daily life, too. Creativity Distract Connect Rock Out My creative state is info-absorbent, constantly synthesizing all inputs into varied combination. It's a fun, exhilarating way to be, which is why I tend to view this as my "normal." My daily access to content just encourages this aimlessness. The convenience is also what makes the state so unproductive. I check refresh my email, twitter feed, RSS reader, forums eagerly waiti...

Draft 2 is complete. The word count for this draft roughly 35,000 words, mostly comprised of examples of play, advice, inspiration tools to improve your game. Now it's in Ryan Macklin's capable editing hands. Here's the current schedule: Draft 0: The 80,000 word behemoth I wrote a year ago. Goal: Get all the possible content for the game in one document. Status: Done, December 2009 Draft 1: A from-scratch new draft written with several months' hindsight. Goal: Review and revise the main text to only the bare procedures. Trim fat. Post those procedures online and play as much as possible . Status: Done, September 2010 Draft 2: A re-organized draft based on Ryan's first high-level edits. Goal: Add examples of play and advice to make the text truly complete. Status: Done, November 2010 Draft 3: A final draft deeply edited by Ryan. Goal: Ryan's edits scrub every pore, pulling out blemishes in the text. Schedule: December 2010 or Jan...

There's a discussion on Story Games about how to go beyond minimum instruction in game texts. The primary problem, at least in my view, is the increased word count necessary when entering the realm of advice and strategy guide. Player A wants just the reference text, not to be bothered with advice on this and that. Player B wants to know why he's doing what he's being asked to do, even if it reveals otherwise emergent elements of play. Heck, Players A and B may in fact be the same player at different times in their learning of the game. Here's one way I'm trying to reconcile the tastes of both players: There is a section explicitly called out as non-procedural "advice" text. It is set apart from "instruction" text by a variety of layout conventions (smaller font size, leading, number of columns, etc.). Example: You're in a part of the book where there are are a number of branching options, some of which will call on you to describe a s...

Got Ryan Macklin's high-level edits for Chapter 1 of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple . Thus begins the process of shaping the slippery text into something firm. Once I come back with a revised draft, plus the new Actual Play chapter, Ryan'll do the deep edits. We still see the end of 2010 as our goal for the final text. Got any questions about Do and how it's developing?