Design Notes
-
In an earlier post I mentioned this game called Card Quest (2017), which I really love but odds are you likely haven’t played. It has some rough edges, but I think it’s worth taking a close look at. It was made by a pair of (I believe) French designers, Baptiste Dubessay and Nicolas Tobias, and…
-
I play a lot of deckbuilders. Don’t you? They’re great. I want to talk about an overlooked subgenre of deckbuilding which I think is pretty neat, but that’s sadly somewhat rare: “set-based” deckbuilders. Or that’s what I’m calling them in my head anyway. I don’t think there’s a name for any of this, so let…
-
Last year I happened to play this game called Aces & Adventures (2023), which seems like it was modestly successful but I haven’t seen anyone else mention or talk about. I enjoyed it quite a bit! It’s a deckbuilding RPG, with various classes, and each campaign has you playing through a node graph of combat…
-
I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately, a game you’ve probably heard a lot about already. I’ve been surprised at how fiddly and fussy a game it is, and I cannot believe what a massive success it’s been ‘despite’ that. It feels like a thought experiment made real, one positing that players don’t need everything…
-
So like I was saying last time, I’ve been playing a lot of the old DS game Pokémon Conquest (2012), and appreciating some unique aspects of its design. Before I was talking about how Pokémon’s shaggy type system lends some interesting complexity to grid-based tactics gameplay. But even so, while I think it’s interesting, I…