Nick Henning

Won the ring in lost ruins of arnak at #wsbg, proceeded to lose in the grand semifinal for a 3rd time. Mostly exciting news but very mixed journey for me

We in Vegas baby #wsbg

I stopped applying to jobs a month ago. I'm still receiving rejections 3 times a week.

Excited to share that I started a new job as a business game designer, which means I'll be focusing on serious games in my professional career, and I guess silly games in my hobby time

Hired again!!! Thrilled to announce I'll be starting a career as a Business Game Designer soon

I got my first publisher bite on Catacombs, which has just made my whole day

Pretty much finished with my gag game, Whale Baron, and I'll make a video about it someday

Inkscape for me. It requires more manual labor but the product is pretty good.

Do folks have a good recommendation for simple software to create player boards / player mats? I use nandeck for everything with a repeating template, but (still!) don't have anything I love for larger "one-off" components. Would love your recs! 🎲✂️

My latest live playthru on Lost Ruins of Arnak generated a ton of commentary even though I lost the game. I think the main reason is that it felt like one of those games where you couldn't just execute "the game plan" and the pivoting challenge was very real.

Today's playtest was fun for the players and had great critical feedback, the holy grail of test sessions

Had a blast at the first Rookscon on MT. Now back to regularly scheduled life for a bit.

Double playtest weekend and spent all my Sunday funday putting catacombs on TTS. Exhausting but fun

Yeesh, that last rejection hurt. Really thought I was going to get moved forward. It's a mess put here rn.

This is mostly meant to be a games account but....if you're American, what's happening with deportations rn is sickening and I hope you educate yourself about it. Ideally, call your reps, flood the phone lines.

Played Catacombes de Paris 3 times this past week and folks continue to really dig it. I'm still grappling with the refill and ending but the core system is just so snappy and satisfying

Got Catacombs de Paris in front of my partner last night and she seemed to dig it! I'm so pumped about this game.

Recorded my first frosthaven video in over a year. Will go up tomorrow!

YouTube video by Phoenicks Table Talk Series: Premise & Ethics

I chat about table talking in this latest video series:
youtu.be/zVWbqvW1G5A?...

Invited to a design test with a boardgame publisher. Fingers crossed for this one!

Played the gaia project expansion tonight. Fun! Still very much the core game but includes some very relevant side boards that inflate the game economy without exploding it. Sadly no one played an expansion faction - oh well guess we'll have to try it again

Finished Split Fiction. I enjoyed the whimsy and novelty of It Takes Two more, but I just love that there's a studio making co op platformers these days. More 2p games to play with my brother plz

And that's it! Until tomorrow....

A museum curator themed game that was about building scoring in rows and columns - a satisfying math puzzle if that's a thing you're into but required constant retabulating on multiple axes which became tedious. My primary though was that it was very clever...but needed a little more fun

A legacy game for children that I'm not the target demo for in any way, but a really neat realization that aspects of modern game design have not been explored in children's world and narrative control is incredibly appealing and powerful to young ones

Another party game like taboo but added some kinesthetic requirements while playing the game. Kinesthetic games are very polarizing for good reason, but this games best moment was when you and the opposing team swapped these restrictions, giving you a taste of what you'd been just watching them do

...feel like a real dead end and so the designer has the challenge of finding a way out of these tough moments for players

A party game that literally made me laugh out loud in the first 45 seconds. You want people to guess your word, like many of these, but have an extremely limited vocabulary. Almost like a reverse taboo. Led to some hilarious conversations and amazing guesses. Conversely, hitting a dead end could...

...before reclaiming but you wouldn't necessarily know what was coming next and you didn't want to just errantly but things because you needed to meet certain objectives. Core game needed some work and differentiation (the players followed the same pattern for the first actions), but promising!

A game based on bingo that I had low expectations for but pleasantly surprised me due to a wonderful resource system. You had 10 coins and would pay 1-5 to claim certain spaces. You could also swap your current $ with the money you had already spent as your turn, so you wanted to spend all of it...