Daniel Solis

Yay! Here's the conclusion of the 2-part lesson in designing a CCG-style prototype card template. I hope you find this useful as I discuss inserting variable icon images into inline variable text, among other useful little tricks. The next series of videos will cover a few miscellaneous lessons like how to set up 3x3 card sheets and make variable lines separating sections of body text. Then we'll go into a deeper case study of how I designed the cards for an early version of A La Kart. Hope you enjoy the videos! Please support the series at Patreon!

I challenge Board with Life 's Chris Bryan to a duel on the fields of Carcassonne! Meeple a Meeple. Join us at my twitch channel on Friday 2/26 3pm EST and watch my glorious yet magnanimous victory or my humbling and petulant defeat! Either way, it'll be fun times on a Friday afternoon. See you there!

Back in December 2015 , I was noodling a simple turn order drafting mechanism with some random bits I had around the lab. Little did I know that a similar mechanism had been incorporated into Madeira , but I thought it worth posting about for posterity in case I explore it for future designs. A 5 player game starts here: From first to last, each player moves their pawn beside any card and takes it, along with any of its chips: Once the cards and chips are gone, the pawns remain, thus establishing a new turn order for the subsequent draft. I could see this drafting mechanism imposed onto a track, so on any turn you can move up to 5 spaces forward, collecting whatever is available on that spot. There would need to be competing but comparable motives for collecting a card, moving up in turn order, or moving along the track. I'm very curious to see a racing theme for this mechanism. What do you think?

The mailing address surveys just went out to Kodama: the Tree Spirits backers! Check your filters and respond ASAP. Eeee!

Drew Hicks and I are working on a top-secret project that calls for a solitaire variant. Neither of us has done much solitaire development yet, so I thought it would be good to talk to Willie Hung since he's an avid solo gamer. We asked about the basics of what makes solo gaming so appealing to him and how to capture that fun. Below are his responses to our questions, which I thought were very useful for anyone who ventures into the realm of solo play. Do you find "grades" a satisfying victory condition for a solitaire game? In other words, certain spans of victory points are categorized as being C, B, A, A+, etc? I find them quite satisfactory. It beats just trying to get a "high score" as many other games have done before. Good examples are Imperial Settlers , Skyline , Hostage Negotiator , and The Gallerist . Even games like Dungeon Roll have small "achievement" awards to strive for that I found amusing. In addition, the victory point ca...

I love games like No Thanks , Little Devils , For Sale , 6 Nimmt , and The Game , which use a deck of sequentially numbered cards, no suits, and barely any other components. It’s a wonderful design challenge that I return to from time to time. In that exploration, I came up with a list of “poker” hands that you could put together with a deck of 50 numbered cards numbered 01-50. These should work with any size deck, with some slight tweaks. I’m not sure how or when I’ll use this mechanism, but I share it with you here for your own games if you want to use it. These hands are ordered from best to worst. Fool’s Hand 01, 23, 45... At least three cards with an ascending sequence of digits. If tied, the highest rank in either hand wins. (This is a Star Wars joke for the fans out there.) Straight Flush Good:    0 3, 1 1, 2 8, 3 4, 4 2 Bad:     0 3 , 2 4 , 0 5 , 3 6 , 1 7 Ugly:    1 8, 2 0, 1 3 , 0 4 , 5 0 Ascending sequence of five ...

Molly Ostertag illustrated "Curse You, Robin Hood!" omg! OMG! I'm so happy with how these five characters turned out. She provided the line art and I did my best to add a few pops of color that wouldn't get in the way of her awesome work. Below is a time-lapse video of the coloring process. And check out how it turned out below: