DR Games

Never has the concept of luck been driven home to me more than recently when I have been designing my own tabletop games. What role does it play in the…well the game play? Does a game become weaker because of a dependence on random nature? Can this cause anxiety or fatigue? Should we rely on luck less? Make more of the choices ourselves? Be in control? I wanted to lay some of this out in this latest blog post as it is becoming a particularly important part of how I design games. Making my way across a map...with only a die to guide me With the design of Dark Force Incursion, I created a game that heavily depended on the roll of a dice. Every turn you are bound by the result of your roll and this leads you in a direction, for which there are a set of consequences. Is this too much to ask of a player to be so bound by a one in six chance? Yes, because how can they influence the outcome? This is what gamers will often strive for, a controlling element. I introduced the option o...

It is Tuesday the 5 th of May and a week after the Kickstarter ended. It feels like a month! But we have another week until Kickstarter completes the transactions and I can send out all the Dark Force Incursion Expansion goodies. I have been working on the stretch goals and their design, much of which is finished, although the wasteland designs are taking a bit longer. I have been pleased to see that we have had some coverage on several blogs: Charmstone Games were first to the post with their article “A Non-RPG Review? Dark Force Incursion,” which takes an interesting look at how DFI could be used in an RPG setting  https://charmstonegames.com/a-non-rpg-review-dark-force-incursion/ Lightheart Adventures put together an excellent interview where I talk about DFI and our collaboration: https://www.lightheartadventures.com/product-spotlight/interview-with-dark-realm-maps/ A positive article appeared at Boards and Bees: https://boardsandbees.wordpress....

DFI came about through an unusual set of circumstances at a strange time, that I discuss in a previous post. But it was solid and reliable with a core set of rules and maps and could be download for free from my website. Yet, as if out of control, the game began to take on a life of its own in my mind. I imagined new land features, hex tiles, expansion rules and maps. I think that, for me, any creation is never truly complete, they just keep on growing, expanding, and ultimately opening new gaming choices.   Pretty quickly I set about writing the rules and drawing the land features for the new maps and expansions. It presented as a series of updates with new landscapes that would be interesting to experience in their own hex maps. This presented as four distinct expansions that would work nicely as pledge levels…yes, I began to think Kickstarter. I had established a presence on Board Game Geek and the free core rules were out there for people to play and they had. I w...