Board games

I’ve been into modern board games since 2012. I play games for the drama: bluffing, combos, sudden upsets. Deduction games and economic puzzles mostly feel like chores with nicer components. More recently I’ve also gotten into tabletop role-playing games, for much the same reason: a small set of rules can produce unexpected situations once several people start making decisions inside the same fiction.

I also have a habit of looking at published games and thinking, “this could be better.” Sometimes the box is mostly air, the reference material is awkward, or the visual design makes a perfectly good game harder to teach than it should be. Depending on how much this bothers me, I might make a smaller box, redesign the reference cards, replace components, or rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Most of these projects started because I wanted the game on my own shelf to be easier to carry, easier to teach, nicer to handle, or simply less ugly.