And So You’re Back…From Outer Space: An Open Letter to Mark Rein-Hagen
Hi, Mark. How goes it? It’s been a while. Heard you had some life altering experiences away from the game trade. That’s great. It’s good to try new things. You know, I only just heard you were back....
View ArticleTransdimensional Knightmare Chess and Other Strangeness
I’m a big fan of remixing, mashing-up, and hacking tabletop games. Sometimes I combine components from multiple games. Sometimes I make action figures an integral part of my 1,000 Blank Cards deck....
View ArticleYOU are the Hero: Mashing Up Fighting Fantasy and Dice Age
I saw a comment on the Dice Age Facebook page asking how to use them for solo gaming. I’ve been playing around with the idea for a while and was going to use them to remix Dungeon!, but then I...
View ArticleHacking the Humble D6
Break out your copy of Space Cadets and pull out those Jump Drive cards! Let’s hack some games! In Space Cadets, the player needs to roll 5 of a kind in order to Jump the ship to safety. The number...
View ArticleStikfas + 1000 Blank Cards = StikBash!
StikBash was my first frankengame. At its core, it’s just a mash-up of KootiKooti, 1000 Blank Cards and Z-G. The original KootiKooti rules form the basis of StikBash (at the bottom of the page)....
View ArticleLocksmiths & Lookouts: Role-playing in the World of Monaco
I don’t really go in for computer games, but I have fallen absolutely in love with Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. I think it’s because top-down games resemble board games. On top of that, I find...
View ArticleStikBashing Gamma World
Let’s get one thing straight: StikBash will never be finished, only abandoned. After all this talk about remixing and hacking games, I realized that I have FAR more games than I have time. I’m never...
View ArticleRisk Legacy: A Family Game?
The endgame of a poorly executed invasion of Australia. *SPOILERS AHEAD* Strange to think of a sci-fi board game with unlockable achievements and wargame-like campaigning as the sort of game the family...
View ArticleAll Your Games, Toys, and Puzzles Are Belong To Flatpack
There’s a difference between games that are modded, hacked, remixed, and mashed-up and what I call a “real” Frankengame. A Frankengame is like the Winchester Mystery House: A sprawling mass of...
View ArticleDungeons & Dice Age
Dungeon! is a absolutely gorgeous, but after a few games it gets repetitive. So, I dragged it kicking and screaming into the Dice Age. I call this variant Dungeon Punk. During your movement phase,...
View ArticleThe Madness of Game Mechanics
“Most inventions start out like this: a lot of people being like ‘That’s not the way it was before’ and other people being like ‘SHUT UP I’M DRUNK.” - Hanna Hart By Michael P.: I hacked-up my Beta...
View ArticleSticking It To The (Edge of the) Empire
By Michael P.: I don’t always do random things to dice, but when I do it’s exceptionally random. When I first tore up my Edge of the Empire beta, I completely ignored the dice stickers. After that...
View ArticleDungeon and the DRGN Operating System
By Michael: Dungeon is still too boring, and I still feel the need to add stuff to it. I have a set of rune stones. Don’t ask how I got them. Anyway, after determining that they’re not magic rocks...
View ArticleIt’s A Gamma, Gamma, Gamma, Gamma World
I miss Marvel SAGA. And I like Gamma World. And Gamma World has cards. Of course this means I have to make these things mesh somehow. I picked up some Blackmail stickers from Barnes and Nobel (instead...
View Article(This Is Not A Review of) Lego MBA
BY MICHAEL PACHECO Ok, maybe it is. Lego MBA (Master Builders Academy) is a series of kits featuring advanced building techniques. Each level has 3 kits. The first level focuses on space ships,...
View ArticleHow I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Large Hadron Collider: Mashing Up...
BY MICHAEL PACHECO I got new Dice Age dice! You know what that means. I’m not a big video gamer, but I keep tabs on video games innovations . One of which is the randomness of the guns in...
View ArticleApocalypse World + Jim Henson = The Apocalypse Show?
BY MICHAEL PACHECO The Goth Girl. The Rebel. The Wild Child. The Softie? The Apocalypse Show is what happens when you cut out the text from Apocalypse World and staple it into a Henson-themed doodle...
View ArticleThe Board-and-Card-Gamification of Roleplaying Games and the...
BY MICHAEL PACHECO (This is just me rambling about mechanics, so don’t expect a point to all of this.) I’ve written about The Five before, but I think I missed one thing. The game’s domino mechanic...
View ArticleWhy Flatpack Is A Green Game
BY MICHAEL PACHECO One of the things that makes me such a fan of Flatpack is the use of minigames. While the game itself suggests what sort of minigames to use, a Troublemaker can use just about any...
View ArticleMy Family’s (Risk) Legacy
BY MICHAEL PACHECO **SPOILERS AHEAD** It ended in blood, as all wars must. Treaties are an afterthought. Only gloating remains. I bought my copy of Risk Legacy two Christmas’s ago while visiting my...
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