Isaac Shalev

Isaac Shalev

@isaacshalev.bsky.social

I design boardgames and write about game design. Also here for cooking, the NYJ, comedy, and being neurodivergent.

448 Followers 136 Following 120 Posts Joined Aug 2023
1 week ago

Weird, I'm seeing much more, including a DT vid

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1 week ago

Did you look on YouTube? There are a bunch there

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8 months ago

Yeah the names are regrettable. I didn't much care for input and output randomness either - I like pre- and post-decision randomness. Though as @gengelstein.bsky.social pointed out to me, those don't abbreviate well. I'm just bad at naming stuff!

I agree that output randomness can be awesome.

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1 year ago

Yeah, that's a good one. Circles work pretty well too, though they can also be annoying to make.

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1 year ago

Hexagon tiles. These days I buy pre-cut birch at Michael's

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1 year ago

So they're taxing you on 500 gallons of gas, or maybe 15k miles per year. That sounds like parity w the average gas driver, no?

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1 year ago

I agree, but the biggest difference I see is guns. RW vigilantes were all about gun ownership and use as a policy prescription, but beat-em-ups rarely gave the good guys guns.

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1 year ago

I think these are better understood as fantasies about personal safety and control rather than as policy proposals for ending crime. Big cities were legit terrifying to walk through at night in the 80s.

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1 year ago

There was no conflict when the tender was issued or responded to. I agree we have to be concerned for graft. But this isn't a good example as best I can tell.

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1 year ago

Only one company responded to the Biden-issued tender

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1 year ago

Watch better vids? There are plenty of good ones. And many of them don't start with a rulebook, that start with a teach from the designer.

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1 year ago

Fortunately, videos and tutorials have gotten better and are more popular than ever. Maybe we should be making "good teaching and reference modalities" instead of getting hung up on the dead end of "good rulebooks"

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1 year ago

This was a deeply moving episode. Chad Jensen, your memory is a blessing. Thank you, Kai, for your courage and generosity of spirit in sharing about his loss.

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1 year ago

It's not strictly more options, it's just deferring the same decision to later. But it also incentivizes going for Planner, which is definitely a bad idea for beginners to chase.

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1 year ago

I'm actually deeply uncertain of how effective it is. Yes, players can skip the initial decision of which cards to buy, but it's a deferral - they'll still have to choose whether to play them. It hasn't reduced the number of options they have to think about.

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1 year ago

Terraforming Mars has the starting corporations that give players ten cards for free.

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1 year ago

Single-use flossers

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1 year ago

The f/t designers I know the to be either salaried with a big publisher, freelancers doing lots of dev and commission work, designers who had a massive evergreen hit, or designers who self-publish.

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1 year ago
Dispirited owl

Oh, are we back to work?

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1 year ago

It's not intended for your convenience, it's intended to generate more views.

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1 year ago

Tiletum inspired this exact conversation in my group. But then, did we optimize well? Or did we all play mediocre+?

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1 year ago

If you're brave enough...

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1 year ago

Shortening the optimization window is a possible solution, though. People will optimize if it's the dominant strategy and within their cognitive capabilities. So offering a shorter window for optimizing is effective. Wingspan does this by removing an action each round

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1 year ago

Excited to announce *Animal Rescue Team* co-designed with friend and real-life animal rescuer, Lisa Towell, coming next year from Play to Z. This will also be the first game in the SU&SD Presents line.

Fun to work with Zev again; we first teamed up on a game called Pandemic back in 2007.

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1 year ago
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It was wait on line for this, or the LotR trick taking game.

I chose wisely

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1 year ago
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Fabio Lopiano playtested one of my games at PAXU yesterday, in the @unpub.bsky.social room!!

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1 year ago

ASCEND, ASCEND TO THE TERRACE!

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1 year ago

My variant rules are available in the BGG variants forum for Wyrmspan

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1 year ago

I liked Wspan enough to design a simultaneous play variant for it. I like the game, but the syncopated rhythm of v short 'play a dragon' or 'draw a card' turns compared to the long 'explore' turns canb least to really long downtime for players, esp at higher counts

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1 year ago

Organizing, eg via @ttgda.bsky.social is a means of establishing clear and fair industry norms and meditating disputes in private instead of litigating them in social media

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