Designer Diary

Designer Diary 

Luck vs Skill (Or why I like Ashes but not Destiny)

28 May 2018 FoxTaleGames Ashes, By Order of the Queen, Design, Destiny, dice, Egyptian, Japanese, Lucidity, playtest, Tiger Crab Studios, X-Com

Luck vs skill is at the core of every board game. Purely skill-based games are often described as abstracts. You

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Designer Diary 

Good Habits for Game Designing

16 April 201719 May 2017 FoxTaleGames Design, Designer, dice, Gameplay, Instagram, Lucidity, playtest

As designers, we can look beyond analogue board game design for lessons and inspiration. One of the nice side-effects of video

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Designer Diary Lucidity Previews 

Making Custom Dice

8 March 20178 March 2017 FoxTaleGames Design, dice, Facebook, Icons, Lucidity, Photograph, playtest, Tabletopia

Yesterday, we received our first look at the custom dice that we are having made for Lucidity later this year. We

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Designer Diary Lucidity 

Nightmares and Control: Design Diary

8 March 2017 FoxTaleGames Design, dice, Gameplay, Lucidity

In Lucidity, players draw dice each turn from a bag, put two back, then roll and apply the rest. Bad things

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Designer Diary Uncategorized 

Prototyping 101

23 January 20175 February 2017 FoxTaleGames Convention, Design, Designer, dice, Lucidity, playtest, print-and-play, Tabletopia

We go through a lot of game ideas here, which means we do a lot of prototyping. One of the

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Designer Diary Lucidity Tempest 

Bright Dreams for 2017

16 January 201716 January 2017 FoxTaleGames Convention, Designer, dice, Facebook, India-Lee Crews, Instagram, Kickstarter, Lucidity, Tabletopia

Happy New Years, and thank you once again for everything last year! I hope that 2016 brought you fewer struggles

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Designer Diary Lucidity Rules 

Darkly Dreaming: Deckbuilder to Dice Roller

8 December 201616 January 2017 FoxTaleGames Background, Design, dice, Gameplay, Lucidity, print-and-play

Tamara trembled, hiding beneath her desk and holding her knees to her chest. She could hear the heavy breathing of

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Designer Diary Tempest 

Tempest at PAX Aus 2016

1 November 201616 January 2017 FoxTaleGames Convention, Designer, Egyptian, Gameplay, Kickstarter, Norse, Penny Arcade, print-and-play, Pui Che

Wow, I can’t believe it’s almost been an entire year since the last PAX Australia (Penny Arcade Expo). That time

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Designer Diary Tempest 

5 Things I’ve Learned from Art Direction

27 September 201616 January 2017 FoxTaleGames Card Art, Dee McLoughlin, Design, Egyptian, Greek, India-Lee Crews, Japanese, Norse, Pui Che

Easily the most fun that I have had in creating Tempest: Shards of the Gods has been commissioning illustrations for

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Designer Diary Rules Tempest 

Experimenting with Research

31 August 201616 January 2017 FoxTaleGames Card Art, Deity, Design, Gameplay, India-Lee Crews, Norse, Shard, Tale, Tales

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was experimenting with how adding cards to your deck (“researching”) would work in

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