I’ve taken more shots at writing this blog than most that I post. That’s probably because my nature is often aggressive and discursive, and that can be divisive, which isn’t what I want this blog to be. I want this blog to be about coming together, so I will try to make it that. There is, sometimes, a tendency on the part of some Kickstarter creators, when things go slightly wrong, which they often do, to approach their responsibility in a manner that is defensive rather than

Turing is, mechanically speaking, a relatively simple game. That’s to say, it has only a few moving parts. This is a conscious design choice in relation to a more limited play-testing regime thanks to lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. However, it does have a few interesting design challenges with very specific mechanics that I think explaining and examining might be useful to others. Specifically, the nature of obscuring choices and scoring the game, which I’m going t

At the end of mid-level television game shows when a contestant has lost and is going home with nothing of any financial value there is a popularly offered phrase of comfort, that the contestant arrived with nothing and is going home with nothing and so hasn’t lost out. This homily flies almost directly in the face of the social psychological idea of endowed loss however, which is fine for those game shows since they’re not designed to be popular as re-playable board games, b

So, the central idea for Turing is that a series of abstract images will be presented to players. I’d been knocking the concept around for a while having come up with a prototype a few years ago that worked just fine, the issue was that Turing was always going to be a little pocket game, but it was a little pocket game that needed an absolute minimum of 40 or 50 pieces of unique full colour artwork, which was never going to come close to making financial sense. I’d been kicki