I. Dear Reader, After the success of the Finland issue of the newsletter where Petri Leinonen wrote about five games from his country, I thought it was something worth doing again. So I asked on Twitter and lots of lovely people volounteered. This week, I’ve got the first of these new set of guest contributions.…

don’t worry, it’s “rules” I. Dear Reader, Let’s talk about rules. It’s funny that in English we use the same word for “how to play a game” as “the things your teacher used to make your life miserable”. Because the word ‘rules’ has this kind of messy association, I totally understand why some people don’t…

I. Dear Reader, So a few weeks ago, I did a panel at Metatopia Online along with momatoes, Aaron Lim, Jamila Nedjadi and Logan Timmins. The panel was all about questions and how they show up when you’re playing and designing games. The basic idea was that questions are “mechanics” – in the sense, that…

I. Dear Reader, Inspired by an event in my Band of Blades game, I want to talk about twists. As a player, I love them. The moment of surprise – letting your jaw drop as you think about what has just been said. It’s great stuff! And if you’re playing a storygame, every miss or…

I. Dear Reader, It’s been a non-stop week from me – moved house, major work deadline, hosted my partners’ parents over diwali – and I am exhausted. So I’ll keep this short and shout out a couple kickstarters that are going on now. First, Anamnesis, a quiet journaling game of memory loss and trying to…

I. Dear Reader This week I want to tell you about a cool little trick I did in our last session of Band of Blades. The mission was to attack a camp of undead and blow it up. Standard stuff for this game. The players rolled badly on the engagement roll and kept their perfect…

I. Dear Reader, This week I’m excited to talk about how some advice I thought was rock solid was turned upside down. When I was running D&D, I was a great believer in Matt Colville’s advice about verbs (very good video!). Basically, he says that quests work best when at their heart there is a…

I. Dear Reader, It’s been a really busy week for me so this section is going to be short. I have my Band of Blades game on Saturday evenings and then on Sunday mornings, I run Apocalypse Keys. So I have two games in relative quick succession which sometimes let me spot patterns. And this…

I. Dear Reader, I did something different this week. Petri Leinonen, a game designer from Finland, was sharing some really cool games on his twitter account. And these were all games I’d never heard of! So I reached out to Petri to do a guest feature on the newsletter talking about some of these fascinating…

I. Dear Reader, So at the beginning of this year, I made a wishlist of games I wanted to play and I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to tick off a surprising percentage of it. I think from my original list at the start of the year only three games remain: ECH0. Songs…