This is busy week for me; launching a new website, getting some new materials printed, and lots of writing to do. In the spirit of keeping my posts mostly regular, here comes a new card game for you all; I call it Land Politics!
Land Politics – for 2 or 4 players
This is a quick, easy to play game about manipulation and domination; think of it as a territorial strategy game, but with playing cards. Once you’ve got it down, games will go quick, so I suggest playing it in rounds. (more…)
Today’s almost over! Somewhere between some graphic design work and some programming, I almost forgot to write a post for today!
So I’ve talked about different methods of randomness, here and here, and gone over some of their strengths and weaknesses. But we come back to the ‘why’ of random. Why would you want to use randomness in a game?
Like I mentioned in my first post on the topic; randomness can influence the feeling of your game a lot, and games can be ultimately measured on a scale between ‘random’ and ‘deterministic’; whether it’s luck or the player that control the game’s outcome. Very rarely is any game truly random, but there are a number of purely deterministic ones. Determining where on this scale your game lies is a vital decision in the design process.
So why do we use random, and more importantly — where? (more…)
It’s Saturday, and that means a new free game! Two weeks of posts now, mostly on time, and readership is picking up surprisingly quickly! All good news, and I’m glad to have you all here. So without further adieu; Ramble!
Ramble
Word games are great. They’re good at making people think, but require something outside of the mathematical that generally dominates games. Despite that, Scrabble and Boggle are really the only well spread word games; most games are derivative from there. There’s others, like Hangman and Probe, which take off from those ideas, but they’re less well known. Ramble, however is a bit different. (more…)
So, in the last Randomness post I went over the consistency of dice and the closed system of cards. There’s more to say about both of them, but I’ll address those some other time.
Today, I want to talk about a few more kinds of randomness: pseudo random number generation and pseudo random determination. (more…)
It’s Saturday, and we’ve got our first week of posts behind us. Amazing! Soon, people will flock, and then comes the fame and fortune; oh yeah, just you wait.
In the mean time, however, I’ve got a free game for you all! I call it ‘Fall Apart’, and it’s a card game. You’ll need a deck or two of playing cards and a couple of friends. It’s a quirky, quick game that I thought up around the idea of a card game that doesn’t have hands. (more…)
It’s Friday! Let’s talk about randomness; this is a lengthy topic, so I’ll be breaking it up in to a number of posts.
A lot of games incorporate ‘randomness’, unpredictability in order to make the efforts of the players innately risky. Games can often be measured on a spectrum as to how random they are, where on one end winning and losing is entirely unpredictable, and on the other end all elements are completely predictable and deliberate. Different levels of randomness can invoke different sensations in players, and can be very important for creating the right vibe for the game.
There’s a lot of methods used for creating randomness. Lots of games will use multiple methods for randomness in some regard in order to influence various portions of the game. (more…)
Here’s a gem for the card game lover; Bang! is a excellent table top game for any collection, representing the inevitable shootout of any spaghetti western film. It’s a charming and fast paced game that has players making alliances and enemies based on guesses and luck, generally by liberal application of bullets. (more…)
The Art of Game 