There are a lot of good ethical and aesthetic reasons to avoid AI Art. But, I haven't seen as many folks talk about the implications for our creative practices. When I read @Charlie_L_Hall's excellent interview, I was stuck most by how creatively bankrupt the whole endeavor was. One thing that often gets missed in this conversation is the degree to which game making is a deeply collaborative enterprise. Despite this, it's easy to talk about a game's art as simply a coat of paint applied by a professional painter. It's a service rendered and nothing more.

Over the past several months, we've been hard at work at #arcsboardgame. The work has been so intense that I haven't had time to write up new design/developer diaries to keep everyone posted. Eventually, I'd like to start doing that again, but here's a 🧵in the meantime. Arcs has been, by far, the most challenging project I've ever undertaken and I think that's probably true for the studio at large. The game presents steep demands to basically every aspect of how we make games here.

I've been thinking about this piece by @Charlie_L_Hall today. It's a nicely reported article and worth your time. But, I think it also leaves out some important things. 🧵

polygon.com/tabletop-games… Most everything written about crowdfunding these days always mentions two things: first, that crowdfunding has exploded over the past fifteen years and, second, that there appears to be some burnout--both among creators and consumers for what seems like an endless hype cycle.

Today I wanted to highlight the work of two of our previewers who looked at Arcs before the campaign and say a little about the role of previewers in our KS generally. 🧵 It's worth mentioning that the world of KS previewers is...a little goofy. There's a lot of paid-hype people out there and a lot of folks looking for ways to get easy clicks. None of this is even necessarily a bad thing, it's just the nature of that corner of tabletop media.

I had a chance to play @Koenigvonsiam's new game, Brian Boru, today. It's really wonderful and deserving of your time. It's also given me a lot to think about, so I thought I'd write a little about the experience of playing it as designer and the idea of originality in design. 🧵 I've been following Peer's work for a long time and adore it. The King of Siam (rethemed these days to The King is Dead) remains one of my most played games. But, more than that, KoS helped me think through some elements in the design I was working on at the time, Pax Pamir (1e).

For the past year, I've been working on a new title for Leder Games. It's still got a long way to go, but it's starting to take a very clear shape. Today, I want to share a little bit about what it is and what I hope to do with it. The working title is Arcs. Arcs started very differently from any other game I've worked on. Normally, after finishing a game, I feel pretty exhausted. But, after finishing Oath, I was filled with all sorts of odd ideas that didn't fit into that game. I wanted to stay in the space but design something new.

To celebrate the amazing @ShutUpShow review of Oath by @TomBrewstErr () I want to take some time today to talk about how much of a team effort the game was. Nearly everyone on staff contributed in one way or another. Surprising no one, Oath was a massive project. We could have probably built three full games in the time it took to make Oath.

Today Drew and I put up the pre-launch page for the new edition of John Company. If you'd like to know when the game goes live, you can sign up here. kickstarter.com/projects/12432… I'll be writing a lot more about the design in the coming months. But it seemed like a good time to tackle a few big questions in one place.

I'm spending the morning working on John Company. I realize it's been awhile since I updated folks on its progress. Let's do that! First, catching folks up: Drew and I started working on the design right after we finished Pamir back in 2018. Initially we thought of it as a small-scope project, but it didn't feel right. After months of frustrating, failed starts, late this past spring things started moving.

This morning I've been continuing my weekend tradition slowly working on the new edition of John Company. It seemed like a good time for a little process thread about drawing maps. First, I should say that I've ditched the region cards from the first edition in favor of a single map. I could write a long piece about this and probably will later, but for now I want to talk mostly about map drawing.

And that's a wrap on a weekend of #JohnCompany2e work with Drew. This is probably our 8th work weekend on the game. For over a year we've been kicking this project back-and-forth, and it seems about the right time to talk a little more about our progress. So, for those that don't know, Drew lives in Chicago and I live in Saint Paul, which is about six hours away. We try to work a little in the evenings during the week and then I push on development hard for about half of each Sunday and sometimes Monday nights as well.

While chatting with playtesters last night, I happened to find myself wandering through some old Oath files. Since the game is wrapping up now, it seemed a good time to share them more widely. I also wanted to share them because so much of my design writing is in the middle distance between design and publication.

A couple days ago I helped my parents clean out part of their garage and stumbled into what is likely the earliest #oathboardgame prototype in existence. I think this is from the summer of 06 or 07, right as I was starting my undergraduate degree.

A couple weeks back I wrote a long thread about including a timeline as the endpaper in #Oathboardgame 's little journal. Today, @d20plusmodifier send me the art, and it is wonderful. The idea here is that players can use these walls in any manner they'd like. They can write a list of kings and queens or a timeline or something else entirely. We also included a dial (the statue's eye) that let's you track which cards you've introduced to the game's world deck.

One of the ickiest things about the board game industry is how many publishers think of reviewers. While there's plenty of respect (and money) directed towards content that could double as marketing, there is often little respect for their voice and the critical endeavor. Part of this I think is a natural consequence of the fact that publishers need reviews to help sell games and new reviewers are often excited to get access and want publishers they like to succeed.

Just finished the last #GenConOnline game of Oath. It was a pretty wild Darkest Secret game. If anyone wants to continue the world, the seed is below. There's lots of negotiation cards in this one! #oathboardgame 03010000050BGencon2020A000100520341131E35DC07CECCE40612FFDB143034FF0DFFFFFF0AFFFFFF1AFFFFFF2DFFFFFF355B475F17D3D529237004A333181119D48875D60A0E06379610580F56D26B1FAEB81C3101712224070321262CB0781A1508252D1B28180B16140932270D2B201D022A2FBD2E5C130500613E57900C03E3E1DF

Drew and I have spent the last several months working on the second edition of John Company. What began as a small cleanup is growing to a more comprehensive redevelopment. I'm pretty excited the process, which is, in general, yielded a cleaner and more powerful central model. This morning, I've been spending a lot of time looking through some critical sources I used for the first game, history books, espeically things like K. N. Chaudhuri's astounding and detailed The Trading World of Asia and the East Indian Company 1660 - 1760.

Here's a funny #oathboardgame conundrum that has almost nothing to do with game design, but I'm finding pretty fun to work though. It has to do with the design for the game's little journal. The basic idea is simple. It'll be a smallish chapbook, with a nice embossed cover and a page dedicated to each play that allows players to record information each game. Much will be unstructured but there will be places where less ambitious players can make a quick record.

Yesterday I had a few folks ask me about the changes coming to the combat system in #oathboardgame. I don't have time this week to write a longer article, but I think I can manage a twitter thread. I should say at the start at this change is the sum of a 4 or 5 week investigation and several weeks of heavy design work that I began while performing the game's final mechanical review.

The design for Oath is very nearly done, and we've started conducting our usability studies. If you have any interest in helping us understand how people digest this game's rules, we'd love to have you along:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… A few additional points. We're espeically interested in the participation of folks from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in tabletop gaming. We will provide compensation for your time and will offer resources that might be needed to facilitate testing.

It's been really interesting seeing folks share numbers from #publishingpaidme and #TabletopPaidMe. I haven't been in the industry very long, but I've gotten to see a fair bit of the back-end and I wanted to share my experience. First, a little background. I'm a 33yo white cis man. I've got a MA and PhD in English Lit with lots of experience in the digital humanities and graphic design and an additional BA in Journalism. I started working part time on design in graduate school about 6 years ago.