Launch Exactly When Ready

I listen to the Board Game Design Lab podcast, but I’m pretty behind. I was recently listening to an episode about a game that I’d at one point tried to sign up for the playtesting of. I won’t mention its name, I apparently didn’t make it through the stringent playtesting selection criteria, but I did qualify to be signed up for a mailing list that I didn’t request to be put on. All of which meant I wouldn’t ever pick the game up, but that it stuck in my head. The reason that I bring it up is that this game has been knocking around in development and production as far as I can tell now for over three years, and it has had a mailing list in the tens of thousands all that time, along with a la

Why Roll and Move is a Bad Idea

That might sound like a weirdly simplistic subject for a Kickstarter/game design blog, but stick with me here. Every week I see a handful of Roll and Move games released on Kickstarter, they tend to fail pretty badly, but they keep coming. Generally, I write them off as being people who haven’t done enough research into games, or Kickstarter, or anything really. Then I got involved in a BGG thread from a creator who was about to put out a roll and move game, they were pretty adamant in their position and despite some pretty solid arguments to re-consider left with the intention to go ahead with their game. Which got me to thinking, Roll and Move is probably the single most pervasive mechanic

The Dunning kruger effect and Kickstarter creators

There is a psychological phenomena much quoted in relation to the worst kind of Kickstarters, its something called the Dunning Kruger effect, and if you intend to become a Kickstarter creator its probably a good idea for you to do a little self-analysis in relation to it. Strictly speaking the Dunning Kruger effect is a combination of two viewpoints of the world, namely that smart people assume that they are average, and so that by extension that around half of all other people are smarter than them and that dumb people lack sufficient understanding to know how dumb they are. That is to say, both smart people and dumb people inaccurately judge their own intelligence, and that maps over to ot

The Legacy of Legacy games

This is probably best described as an opinion piece rather than a specific set of advice, so I apologise if you’re looking for Kickstarter or game design advice, but I’m sure we’ll get back to it next week. For now, I want to express some opinions on what I’ve thought for a while to be one of the most interesting developments in boxed tabletop games in some time, the Legacy format of games. For those who are unaware, ‘Legacy’ is a catch all category of game genre used to describe games that are in some way permanently altered during campaign play, originating with the release of Risk: Legacy and largely centring on the output of Rob Daviau and coming to prominence when Pandemic Legacy Season

CE marking – Responsible Agents

I’ve had some creators reach out to me and ask about Responsible Agents in relation to CE marking, specifically paid Responsible Agents. As such I’ve tried to look into the subject and form some conclusions that might be helpful. Traceability Firstly, to explain why you would need a Responsible Agent. CE marking, and the general regulations for selling in the EU anyway, require that you have a business address of a business in the EU on your box. Technically it requires that you have it on every single element of whatever’s in your box also, but that is left up to the individual producer to achieve as far as is practical. It also requires that you have the address of the ‘manufacturer’, slig


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