Card Brain

Card game design has become my hobby. When I need a break from doing roleplaying design, I work on a card game. The pieces of the brain involved in card game design are different enough, for me, that I get to relax.

      I recently designed a fierce little two-player experience that has become my wife Lisa’s favorite game. You know a design is going well when you get trash-talked in the first playtest session. Lisa handily won the first game. As we were shuffling cards to play again, she patted my hand. “You played very well,” she said, meaning the opposite. 

      It looks like I’ll have news about the game’s publishing-arrival in a couple months. 

Alarums & Excursions #500 arrives this Sunday!

[[art by Lee Moyer]]

Lee Gold is putting out the 500^th monthly issue of the Alarums & Excursions roleplaying fanzine on May 21^st.

A&E is an amateur press association. Each issue contains pages from two or three dozen contributors who discuss rpg systems, write-up sessions and entire campaigns, review newly acquired games, share game mechanics ideas, and comment on everyone else’s writing. Yes, it’s a lot like a play-by-mail version of an all-rpg-topics-considered online discussion folder. You can find the details and contribution guidelines here.

Back in high school, I found my clan when I followed a plug from Dave Hargrave in the Arduin Grimoire and sent Lee money to get hold of A&E #67. Over the years the clan has included most all the people who helped me enter the gaming industry and a powerful ring of lifelong friends. If this is the first you've of the fanzine, see A&E's Wikipedia page for a small slice of the past and present contributors.

I haven’t been contributing lately, but in honor of the anniversary, I arranged for a color cover from my comrade Lee Moyer. I’m also going to contribute a zine to the issue, including notes on some of the campaigns played in my 19-years-and-running Wednesday night gaming group.

Former A&E contributors who read this: Lee would love to hear from people with short updates, mentioning how you heard about A&E, when you started reading or contributing to it, and what you are up to now. In fact, Lee would love to hear more than that from former contributors; issue #500 isn’t necessarily a reunion but it could be. You can go the full-fledged contribution route at $1.75 a page, or you can send Lee your update by email at lee.gold@ca.rr.com and she’ll get it into issue #500 as a filler if it reaches her at by 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 21^st.

Home Art Gallery: Tyger Tyger

I loved this painting when I saw Heather Hudson working on it years ago. When Heather sold it as a print several years ago, I jumped at the chance. The print blazes to the left of my desk.

Heather and I met when she was illustrating M:tG cards and then painted some of the most fun cards in Shadowfist. Of course this painting is neither of those things. It's drawn from William Blake's poem The Tyger. If you haven't read it recently, follow the click trail.

I admit that I haven't spent much time with Blake's writing. Maybe I'll get reacquainted after Steve Dempsey unleashes his Gumshoe game on English mysticism, which I hope ends up with the name Fearful Symmetry.

You can find the prints and cards that Heather sells now here.