Notes on Play

How I sold my Colossi to through a consolidator named Quartermaster Direct.

Stealing is a superpower if you do it well.

David Gordon (co-designer of Finspan, and many others) gave me an insight into why it's so much harder than it looks to design simple games.

Kim Swift, of Portal fame, shared that Valve uses this simple tool to inform what they design next. I found it immensely helpful.

Codenames lures you in as a family friendly party game, but it is deep, sophisticated, and difficult. 

Frank Lantz's book The Beauty of Games blew my mind. And so I made a little book report. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLW8ZvKjmko

I had a big combat system that I didn't feel good about. I finally ripped it out, and it left a vacuum that inspired my best idea yet. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgcoyz9HFY

Gen Con was an awesome experience. I got third place in a Cat in the Box tournament. Tabletop gaming is the opposite of doom scrolling.

I'm building something that doesn't have an obvious precedent, and it's been very tedious to figure out the right shape.

You can have one action in 3 different form factors, and you've got 3 essentially different games. It's worth iterating a lot to find the one that unlocks the biggest design space.

I want to be generous, not chintzy with the coolest parts of my game. But that does not mean I should be generous with all the parts of my game. Brian Moriarty's talk linked here . 

I learned a lot by calling some people up on the phone. Most notably: physics matters.

Canticle came to life, and to my exact specifications. But my exact specifications were wrong. Fixing it led to an explosion of great ideas.

Mark Brown made a great video about finding great ideas. And it made me wonder: where did my best ideas come from, and how do I set myself up to have more?

Brian Bornmeuller's talk at NYU Game Center helped me finally articulate a question I've been wrestling with: what is Catacombian Games, exactly? In this episode I map out the five layers of the board game industry — design, publishing, manufacturing, distribution, and retail — and share how I'm approaching 2026 like a product manager: setting clear experiments, defining success criteria, and actu...

A framework for deciding what needs to change next in a game prototype that I developed with my friend Walter Somerville. I used this recently to make some huge improvements to Canticle.

Games feel immersive and grounded when they are familiar and legible -- even from a distance. 

How do you give the emperor a sense of epiphany? How do you give the board a feeling of organic ideas-based growth? I picked the experience first, and designed around that.

This is a game that takes place in the past and the present. And I've never been so excited to work on something. Many more updates to follow on future episodes.

2025 was a creative explosion for me. Now it's time to focus up, and pick which prototype I will try to take to the finish line.

I tried (and failed) to make a basketball board game. I came up with some ideas that I loved, but ultimately decided to set it aside. 

Try to lose. It's a faster and more effective way to learn.

Sometimes players show you exactly what they want to do. You can either fight them, or learn from them.

Games don't need written narrative to be great games. The best stories in games are the ones that organically emerge from the gameplay itself.