Sammy

Club Spooky & That's the Spirit Assemble the coolest group of ghouls in Club Spooky and find the culprit of your accidental death in That's the Spirit

Its alive!

Checkout Club Spooky & That's the Spirit on KS now!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/alw...

A top-down 3D render of the Chicken Fried Dice board game box on a table with the game's components.

Chicken Fried Dice has been simmering for a while and I think we're almost ready for plating! Learn more at get.chickenfrieddice.com

PS. Not hating on Carcassonne even remotely, the tension as people draw tiles in the endgame and you find out if your plans succeeded or failed is, like, the best part of the game. It took the change in feeling of input randomness over the game and used it very smartly

In conclusion: the feelings of your players are always more important than following supposed "good game design". Best practices will betray you if you don't use them wisely. (Also, "one type of randomness is good and the other is bad" isn't even a good best practice.)

Trick-taking games also handle this well by having a few big sources of input randomness (dealing initial hands) rather than many small ones. The moments of input randomness are also completely disconnected from other ones, preventing lucky combos over time.

And there are games that use it without losing any agency. Cascadia avoided this trap by only increasing opportunities to score points as the game goes on, rather than making the play space tighter as many other spatial puzzle games do. It leaves every turn feeling puzzly up to the very end.

If you're making a game, and you're using input randomness because you want to give more agency to your players, be sure to use it thoughtfully because it might be doing the opposite in your endgame.

Somewhere in the game, the moment of drawing a tile went from feeling puzzly and thoughtful to creating feelings of desperation and that you're at the mercy of the tiles - input randomness is often used to increase player agency, and in this case that agency has nearly disappeared.

This is especially felt in the cities, which are worth half if you don't finish them. So at the start of each turn, you reach into the bag, often hoping for a specific element to let you finish your cities and bank a large sum of points.

But by the end of the game, you've usually placed all your meeples and are committed to how you're scoring points, and now you just need to maximize that potential with whatever you draw.

Take Carcassonne: drawing a tile at the start of your turn is input randomness. At the start of the game, every tile drawn is a puzzle to figure out how to best place it. Do I build many roads, one big city, or lay down some farmers?

An observation on randomness: in many games, as the game gets closer to ending and opportunities to get closer to achieving your goal lose flexibility, moments of input randomness often start to *feel* like output randomness.

Turnout yesterday for our local game design meetup was crazy! I think we had 14+ folks. It's amazing to see our community grow.

Video. Games. #paxwast

The board game Sky Team, which uses dice with digits and rounded corners

The dice from the board game A Column of Fire

Sky Team has them. A few games from Kosmos have rounded wood dice with numbers, the picture is from A Column of Fire.

I'm really excited to go to the PNW Tabletop Game Market at PAX in a couple weeks! There's some really exceptional designers there, selling some of the most unique games I've seen in a while - there's lots of cool stuff happening in indie board games :)

Coming soon: Club Spooky & That's the Spirit The Ghost Party Bundle: A bundle of 2 spooky card games

So in October I’ll be launching my first ks! It’s a bundle of two spooky card games: Club Spooky and That’s the Spirit. I’ve talked about them before, but I wanted to finally do a proper introduction and talk about my goal for all this. 🧵1/6 www.kickstarter.com/projects/alw...

Thank you Jeff!! I hope to try Branching Out someday, the table presence is amazing!

Thank you so much!! Your and @jonathanbovee.bsky.social 's feedback and enthusiasm for the game was the fuel that gave me the motivation to finish the design in its rockiest moments :)

Also I want to play Invasion!! Let me at it!!

Thank you so much, and congrats to you as well! Pip It stood out to me among the finalists, it looks super fun so I hope I can try it sooner than later :)

I can't believe that Dot Com won the Cardboard Edison Award, it's a huge honor!! Massive thanks to the judging team for all their hard work and feedback, and to everyone who playtested the game. I hope to play all the finalists' games at some point, they all look super fun :)

a photo taken from inside a train car on the Seattle 2-Line. trees and rails can be seen out the window

had a crazy week so I’m finally checking out the new 2 Line extension. shout out to trains fr

Tip for anyone who wants to get a contest submission together: set aside a couple of weeks to make the video, then get the flu for those weeks so you end up with only three days to make the video, then when the video comes out 30 seconds too long just speed it up until it fits the time limit 😉🙃

I'm late to this bc I haven't been on social media for a bit, but I'm beyond honored that Dot Com is a finalist for the Cardboard Edison Award! All the entries look crazy fun and I hope I can play them someday, best of luck to everyone!

Burning through cash in real time in Dot Com by Sammy Salkind

Burning through cash in real time in Dot Com by Sammy Salkind. Finalist details at cardboardedison.com/award

A photo of my game Spy Moles. There's a sheet of paper with a grid on it, and a blacklight shining on the paper reveals markings made by the player with an invisible ink pen. Surrounding the paper are cards and stencils

A photo of my game Dot Com. In the center of the table is a game board, with player pawns and cards on top of it. Each player also has their own personal board showing the actions they can take. Not pictured is the companion app for the game that keeps track of your money!

Hi Bluesky! I'm Sammy, a board game designer from the Seattle area. I plan to mostly post about game design along with other various life things on here :)

Two of my fav in-dev games: Spy Moles, a roll-and-write played with invisible ink pens, and Dot Com, a frantic real-time economic strategy game

I think it might be time to actually use this site?