The Clockwork Game Design Podcast

Today I spoke with Elizabeth Hargrave. After playing her game Wingspan and reading some interviews with her, I thought she’d be a great person to have on to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been exploring in terms of strategy games and their relationship to violence, both mechanically and thematically speaking. She had a … Continue reading "A conversation with Elizabeth Hargrave"

Today’s episode is not a theory-heavy episode at all. Instead, we have a lot of practical advice and other game development thoughts that may be helpful to anyone else who, like me, wants to make and try to sell their own games. On the docket for today: How to not hate marketing (partially by not … Continue reading "How to not-hate marketing, Kickstarter tips, and my next big game"

I’m deep in the weeds of setting up the Dragon Bridge Kickstarter, which should hopefully launch next week or so. But I wanted to share this quick bonus episode with you: a conversation with Jenny Bee, who has a masters in visual storytelling, is a creator of games, films and other narrative work, and—full disclosure—is … Continue reading "BONUS: Humane Storytelling with Jenny Bee"

This is one of our longer episodes, coming in at 1 hour 10 minutes, and it’s chock full of both theory and practice! For the theory bit, check out my conversation with Hopenager, a game developer and frequent chatter over at the kbgames discord, wherein we talk about binary goals versus score goals. Hopenager believes … Continue reading "Binary Goals with Hopenager, and Kickstarting an 18 Card Game with Adam Wilk"

Hello everyone! Today I come to you bringing yet another great board game designer: Rob Daviau, probably best known at this point for his Legacy series games, particularly Pandemic Legacy, which is indeed awesome, and which even inspired an article of mine. But he’s an extremely prolific designer overall who has dozens and dozens of … Continue reading "Rob Daviau"

I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but this is a big one! Clocking in at nearly an hour and twenty minutes, this is, I think, the longest Clockwork Game Design Podcast episode yet. Eric Zimmerman is a game design instructor at the NYU Game Center, where he works with other CGD guests Naomi Clark, … Continue reading "Episode 60 – Eric Zimmerman on game design theory (also, randomness with Brett Lowey)"

I can’t believe I went this long without interviewing one of my biggest game design theory heroes, Geoff Engelstein. Together with designer, game design writer and fellow game design podcaster Isaac Shalev, they’ve written a book that seems like it might be kind of a big deal in this field. To quote a bit of … Continue reading "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design – interview with Geoff Engelstein and Isaac Shalev"

Episode 58 is HERE, with the incredibly awesome and prolific board (and video) game designer Tim Fowers! This was, in many ways, a model episode of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast, because we hit so many different (but relevant) topics involving the process of game design. Yay! Here’s a few key items: Conventions/conferences – which … Continue reading "Tim Fowers"

Hi everyone! Here is episode 57 of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast, where I give a bunch of updates on the games I’m devvin’. I talk a bunch about progress on both my Gem Wizards games and many of the game design struggles, particularly with the card game, which I’m deep in the design-weeds and … Continue reading "CGD Episode 57: Smoothness in game design (and other topics)"

Today I talked to Dan Cook about competitive games, social games, and our objectives behind making games in the first place. This was one of my favorite conversations with one of my favorite game design theorists out there. His blog, Lost Garden, was literally THE blog (along with maybe some stuff from Anna Anthropy) that … Continue reading "DanC on the reasons for making games"