Today on We Got Played, Isaac introduces you to a new series: The Ark Nova Design Teardown! In this lengthy series, Isaac goes through each element of Ark Nova’s design to gain some insight into how games are designed, and what makes those designs successful.
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PAX Unplugged 2025 | We Got Played: ROAD GAMES
Today on We Got Played: Road Games, we discuss the games we played in Philadelphia at PAX Unplugged 2025! From tarot to Lord of the Rings, we discuss the good, the bad, and the in between to answer the question: did we get played?
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We Got Played #2: Seven Wonders Duel VS. The Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth!
Today on We Got Played, we look at the same game… twice! We take a gander at Seven Wonders Duel and its Tolkien counterpart to determine which one is the true game to rule them all.
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We Got Played #1: Dice Hospital!
Today on We Got Played, we discuss one of the more acclaimed games on our unplayed shelf: Dice Hospital! Coming out in 2018 and winning two awards at the 2019 UK Games Expo, it’s a game where meeples treat sick dice! Will this hospital cure our boredom, or will we leave showing a lower pip »more
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Drowning in Gold: The Kickstarter Menace
Welcome back! We’re going to cover the impacts of Kickstarter on the 3-tier system in this post. You can go back and read about the 3-tier system, and the impacts of online game stores and mass-market stores on the industry in our previous posts. Scaling Up When Kickstarter launched in 2009 nobody realized how much »more
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Drowning In Gold: The Mass Market Strikes Back
In previous installments we covered the basics of the 3-tier system, and how online game stores (OLGS) began to disrupt the traditional model. This time we’ll take a look at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and Target, and how they’ve changed the industry. Amazon: Mass Market, or The Largest OLGS? In the early 2000s, Amazon »more
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Drowning in Gold: The Rise of Online Game Stores
Welcome back. In our last post we covered the basics landscape of the three-tier system of retail distribution. This time, we’ll turn our attention to some of the early disruptions to this system. Online Game Stores (OLGS) In the early 2000s, brick-and-mortar (B&M) board game retailers everywhere started facing increasing competition from online stores. Various »more
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Drowning in Gold: How Too Many Games Are Breaking The Three-Tier System
As we turn over from one year to the next, and perhaps from one decade to the next, depending one who you ask, I wanted to share reflections on the tabletop industry itself, and how that will impact consumers, designers, publishers, and everyone involved in making and playing board games. This is the first in »more
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Design Patterns: Perpendicular Constraints
There’s a useful term in project management called the Critical Path, which is defined as the least amount of time needed to complete some multi-step operation. A project manager tries to figure out how to sequence tasks in a way that is most efficient and wastes the least amount of time. Eurogames offer a similar »more
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Design Patterns: Random Reactions
The recent boom in Yahtzee-style games, known as roll-and-writes (or RnW for short) got me thinking about the genre and its underlying mechanisms. One major design innovation, that distinguishes many games from Yahtzee, is having more than one player make use of a common set of random results. Sometimes this happens in the form of »more