Category: Between the Episodes

Rise of Tribes and the Tragedy of the Commons

You know that feeling when you sit down to a play a game without really knowing what to expect, and then are immediately blown away by the cleverness of the mechanics, the scope of gameplay, and the overall experience you have that brings joy to your little tabletop gaming heart? I hope so. It feels pretty… Read more »

Required Reading: Game Theory in the Age of Chaos

Before you get started on this article, let me ask you two questions. Do you like game theory? Do you dislike what the current administration is doing to this country? Great. Get this book. With that out of the way, let’s get to a heartfelt blog post. PAX Dev is an incredible opportunity for game designers… Read more »

The Symmetries of Asymmetric Play

A few years ago, I met up with a group of friends to playtest a groundbreaking new game. Everyone sat at the edge of our seats as we cut out cardstock tiles and reviewed the rules, because this was going to be the start of a new craze—the asymmetric game. Each of us would be… Read more »

The Wedding Puzzle

Do you ever wish that strange and mysterious events would just… occur? As a lifelong fan of adventure stories, I certainly do. With that kind of heroic inspiration in mind, my partner Laser and I made an irrevocable decision. Exactly one year ago, in the warm, glowing moments directly after our space-themed wedding ceremony, we orchestrated a devious… Read more »

Disrupting The Spacecrime Continuum

Back in December, Renegade Games launched a solo campaign for one of my favorite games, Clank! In! Space! In this preset story, our hero is a thief who must repeatedly break in to the massive battleship of Lord Eradikus, stealing his most treasured objects while making alliances and finding secrets along the way. Each mission of… Read more »

Momentum and the Markovian Game

After writing last week about random paths and probability, Dave Chalker mentioned on Twitter that this idea reminded him of Markov Chains. In fact, a random path is one of the simplest examples of a Markovian system: given the present state of the system, knowledge of the past is unnecessary to predicting the future. In a… Read more »

Predicting The Random Path

As I’ve probably mentioned before, randomness and probability are highly unintuitive ideas. Not that we can’t understand what they are, but that their natures make it difficult to predict what will happen in specific situations. One great example of probability comes from an idea we call the random path. Imagine a person walking down the street. Before taking… Read more »