Games: Blog

I endlessly discover cool digital tools, apps, and websites for enhancing board games and roleplay games and needed an excuse to try them. So I wrote a blogpost!

How can playing roleplaying games help development teams work together better? Chris speaks with Karthik Nagarajan to find out.

Learning to code with a board game? Sounds too good to be true.

Close the laptop and break out the dice...after you read this post about how board games can help ease your troubled dev mind.

It's been a while since my last update pertaining to the Chip Shop board game. After realising that board games isn't that lucrative of a business, it slipped down my priority list somewhat. I also had a lot of feedback from the UK Games Expo (thanks to Carrie and Tyler for running the booth for me) to process and that took time...

Chip Shop has been a labour of love for me over the past two years. It has been through many changes and revisions and isn't yet 100%, but I have always needed to get something live before it becomes a never ending process of 'polishing'.

After making many changes, some of which I will get around to blogging about soon, play testing for Chip Shop is open again!

I spent some time this week finishing off a lot of the changes from my last round of playtesting, most of these have resulted in changing Chip Shop from a somewhat random card game with a board (for no particular reason) into a more rounded actual board game.

A few more changes from my first play testing session.

After my first constructive play test session, here is the first wave of changes to the game.

I just had my first play testing session for Chip Shop and returned with lots of feedback. The three players helped me identify a lot of small problems with the game as well as a couple of larger issues that need some refining to make the game work better. None of them so big to break the game, but some important ideas to ponder. Depending on the decisions I make, they may change move the game in a slightly different direction.

Pushing forward to play testing (which has now begun, more on that later) I have been busy cleaning, tidying and streamlining game components after Essen. Here are some updates...

Chip Shop is ready for play testing! Find out how to get involved.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I have been traveling with work the past few weeks.

Over the weekend thanks to Berlin Games Week I attended the <a href="https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/" target="_blank">Berlin Computer Spiele Museum</a> for free. It was a small exhibition but great research for Chip Shop and the visit combined with several other events during the week inspired me to work on some of the product cards on Sunday.

Last week I presented Chip Shop at an event here in Berlin. I was woefully unprepared and just had my laptop, showing a few screens and telling people about the idea.

This week I have added rules to the 'Playing the Game' section of the manual to cover the following:

I spent today drawing together the disparate parts of the game manual and concepts into something more cohesive and readable, it can be found here. I used the Drupal module <a href="https://drupal.org/project/menu_block" target="_blank">Menu Block</a> so that the manual can be organised as pages and sub pages (with associated menu links) and the structure then shows correctly. This will enable me to add and edit more in the future and everything will fit together nicely.

Bill Kunkell helped create "Electronic Games Magazine" in 1981, the first magazine dedicated to video games. It seemed a great research resource for Chip Shop to get some anecdotes and atmosphere for the era.

A few small updates in this blog post, however, they have a large impact on the game.

I spent Christmas undertaking some more general board game theory and computer history research, this has been helped by a slew of book bundles over the last month covering the topic.

This update is more behind the scenes updates I'm afraid, I have been working on the product release and event cards, making very good progress. However I am currently using real names in the cards and I have no clearance for any of them, that will be a big task in the new year, but for now it's easier to just keep them private. Sorry, but the research has been a lot of fun, follow the twitter feed to see a few highlights.

Chip Shop has had quite a busy week and I have a few updates to tell you about.

Just a small update, with a much larger one coming next week.

Along side getting the Chip Shop website online (needing a lot more work of course!) I have started defining the core game concepts, i.e. what you are aiming to do in the the game and what components will help you achieve this. I have also spent some time trawling through 80s US computer history pulling out products, personalities and events that will form the game cards.

Are you looking for smart answers to dumb questions? Then you might enjoy 'Answers Against Humanity', based on that 'award' winning game, Cards Against Humanity.