Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic an...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...
Armies in Warhammer 40,000 aren't meant to be static. Like the game world itself, your army is meant to be a developing force, with new recruits and veteran soldiers sharing the battlefield, learning and adapting and improving as they experience new horrors of war. To simulate that, Warhammer 40,...
Once you learn the rules to Warhammer 40,000, you're in for a nasty surprise. To play the game, you also have to learn the rules for your army. You need to know your army special rules, you need to know your warlord's enhancements, detachment stratagems, unit and character abilities, plus the core...
For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortr...
About half-way through the lifespan of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a company called Paizo was commissioned to take over publication. After the Dungeon and Dragon and Polyhedron magazines were discontinued, Paizo obstinantly continued to publish adventures for D&D. And from magazine t...
In Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant and similar fantasy roleplaying games, you go on adventures to find treasure and magical items and weapons so you can go on even bigger adventures. That's meant to be exciting. But with great power comes the potential for great boredom, because when you sto...
I decided that during 2024, I'd make one game every month. I thought it appropriate to finish it off in the way it began. This month, I've created Spelljack, another extreme remix of Blackjack.
One of my previous blackjack remixes had magic-like powers granted to players pretty much at random. Y...
I'm a hobbyist game designer, and I love looking at games for ideas on how to improve or change them for fun.
Blackjack is a simple card game played with a standard deck of playing cards. On your turn, you may draw a card from a draw deck and put it into your hand. Should you decide to abstain fro...
Tabletop gamers have come up with three ways to measure distance in games that feature movement as a mechanic. There's the grid of 1-inch squares, there's the grid of hexagons, and there's the ruler or measuring tape. Over the past few decades, it's emerged that square grids are used for roleplaying...
Continuing my effort to develop one new game a month during 2024, this month I present Camp Pain, a post-apocalyptic wasteland campaign simulator. It's a dice rolling game in which you venture out into the badlands in search of weapons and food and meds. When you find something, you gain dice you...
Browsing through the local second-hand market, I came across a rare game book called Magnamund Companion. This 100 page soft cover book was sort of a setting guide for Joe Dever's Lone Wolf RPG series. Now that I own a copy, I've read it from cover to cover, and this is my review.
Lone Wolf i...
Some board games use special proprietary dice. They're fun because they can emphasize the game's theme. However, dice can also be easy to misplace, and sometimes you lose the dice you need to play a game. Here's how to convert special dice to normal dice for your board games.
Option 1: Numbers
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This month, I decided to design a game based on what I think fantasy football is. I don't actually know what fantasy football is. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, it's "a game in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real life football players and score points based on those players'...
In the Battle Companies expansion for Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, pages 104 to 111 provide a map-based campaign for the game. It's an elegantly simple and fun system for tracking the progress your army or warband is making through any given series of battles. The book suggests that a map-...
Most wargames are designed to be played as a single game event. You play a game, the game ends, and whatever story that game told is over. The game has no "memory", and the next time you field your army it's like you're fielding a brand new army, with no battle scars or past experience beyond what's...