I’ve never made a print and play (PnP) game before. Is that ok? Well… maybe I’ve been missing out. There are lots of reasons to create a good PnP game, even if you don’t think of yourself as a ‘crafty’ person. Read part I? You can read Part II here. I have a confession – and as far as the board game industry goes, it feels like a pretty embarrassing one. Until recently I had never, ever printed a game from the internet. Not a card game, not a dice game, not an enormous eurogame. Other than a brief fumble with a 2 player Brass board which lasted all of 5 minutes (before I spilled coffee on the poorly sellotaped,...
It’s time for Magnate, a project I've been working on for nearly 7 years, to become a reality What if there was a game that felt like what you imagined Monopoly was going to be, when you were a child? Not the crushing disappointment of what Monopoly actually is: a very random, overlong and mean-spirited game of simplistic and brutal zero-sum logic. But a game the captures the magic of Monopoly in the imagination: the feel of money in your hands, of the scramble to get the best property, dropping huge piles of cash on big risks each turn, the application of your cunning and critical thinking to make the best bet and sitting back to admire the empire you...
A group of experienced games journalists are publishing a 250 page hardback boardgame yearbook and it looks very interesting. While books are not really my focus here, it seems like an interesting product of itself with a strong proposition; making it worthy of a closer look. UPDATE: "The Boardgame Book" Kickstarter campaign is now live. Essentially, it's a Britannica Book of the Year for tabletop games: mixing reviews of the 100+ biggest titles of the year and interviews with designers (including big names like Martin Wallace, Matt Leacock and Reiner Knizia). The goal appears to be to create a single compendium which will capture the essence of what was going on in the boardgame world over the past 12 months....
