Here's some things I've been quite interested in:

The Great Designer Search: The stuff up until now (focusing especially on the first and third rounds)
The Great Designer Search: Multiple Choice Test (second round)I find this all pretty interesting stuff, both abstractly in general and on a personal level. I'll be curious to see the updated, more ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I started playing on itsyourturn.com. It's a website with generic versions of simple abstract games like chess, othello, backgammon, battleships, scrabble, etc. There's a fairly large number of variants of each game, and some tournament-like ladders for many game variants. I like variants, they keep me from being bored. All ( Read more... )

A new magic set was (pre-)released this weekend, Time Spiral. This is a nostalgia-themed set, bringing many cards inspired by old sets and cards, as well as a new special purple "rarity" which is just very old cards, reprinted to include one out of every 15 cards (instead of a common card ( Read more... )

I'm willing to pimp a little.

I just bought Laser Squad Nemesis, from the people who made X-Com (as they point out often and frequently ( Read more... )

( I played a lot of games this past weekend. )

This is an awesome toy, and I hope to make a game based on one of these pitches someday.

OK. Maybe not seriously.

Maybe seriously.

=-)

Someone asked a little bit about designing tech trees / skill trees. ( My off the cuff, totally incomplete answer: )

There are some games which I would play a lot more of if I merely didn't have to put CDs in my drive. Games I own, games I've paid for, but which annoyingly require that I swap CDs a lot. This is often enough that I just don't play these games much at all. (Publishers, I hope you are listening ( Read more... )

Lost Garden has a decent article up about sandbox games.

It's interesting, especially considering: "A title's game design, oddly enough, is rarely seen as a key business decision."

I don't even know who this guy is, but at least some of the stuff he writes is pretty thought provoking for me, as a game designer.

I had not been intending to go to Gencon this year (and still won't), but were I going as an attendee, I would surely have have joined this Guild Wars Sealed Deck event. (They don't call it Sealed Deck, but I sure do.)

The essence is this: It's 4v4. Each team is given a set of 64 randomized skill cards to build their team.

( That's mostly it (for currently known information, and mostly the relevant part besides). )