![]() I first played Tigris and Euphrates and Carcassonne in the year 2000, and ever since then I've wanted to make a tile-laying game of my own - but I was never sure what sort of theme and mechanisms would appeal to me. Which brings me to the genesis of my latest game, Illumination. No goats here, but it does have the genius of Ryan Laukat behind the illustration and development. Haven combines press-your-luck card management and strategically hidden information with area control to create a game that feels like a weird hybrid of Condottierre and Battle Line, set in a world that feels a lot like the anime film Princess Mononoke.Dingo's Dreams is a hybrid of Bingo and a sliding-puzzle challenge lost on Walkabout with the creatures of Australia's outback.Heir to the Pharaoh has players vie to become the new ruler of Egypt, but conflict occurs from the perspective of the Pharaoh's pet cat and dog, who just happen to be the gods Bast and Anubis.Fantastiqa is a deck-builder, but among the first to use a board and thereby combines card-acquisition with traversal, all in a wild and weird landscape ruled by fairy-tale logic and 19th-century Romanticist artwork, with goats reliably returning as guest stars.Your goal is to tempt pilgrims to commit the very sins for which you then sell pardons. The Road to Canterbury is a Chaucer-inspired press-your-luck and area control game, with the catch that the areas you're vying for are the Seven Deadly Sins of yore and illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch.Trollhalla is a pick-up-and-deliver game, but one in which you play Viking trolls out to pillage and plunder while somehow keeping nasty billy goats out of your boats.My first published game, Bridge Troll, is a bidding game, but one in which you play as fairy-tale trolls competing to eat or extort travelers who wish to cross your troll-bridge, whilst fending off threats from belligerent billy goats and knights errant.a little bit twisted? A few examples might serve: with the weirdnesses of #2) can end up producing odd results, and some of these designs are perhaps. Putting all three of these design principles together (esp. I've been designing board games for two decades now, and with a Nigel Tufnel's worth of published designs behind me, I think I've detected three trends or perhaps even (to sound fancier about it) principles at work in my designs:ġ) Instead of making games with a lot of rules, I like "simplexity" - a few relatively simple game mechanisms combined in such a way that they present tough decisions and a fair bit of emergent complexity,Ģ) I like casting the major players as animals or creatures of myth and fairy tale, housing them in absurd, fantastical, or at least unorthodox narrative settings, andģ) I work hard to make sure that the mechanisms and the theme actively feed into one another - whenever possible, I don't want to just overlay a theme onto existing mechanisms.
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