Skip to main content

Sid Sackson's Book, With My Half-Blood Prints All Over It

In my quest to process Todd Sanders' design thread over at BGG, I've come across repeated references of his to Sid Sackson's A Gamut Of Games.  Intrigued, and with a bit of Amazon money to spend, I picked up a copy.  I've been going through it page by page, processing the game design elements, the strategies, the different philosophies of play, and the bits of colour and history peppered throughout.  The book is fairly quick going, though I've been underlining, scribbling in the margins, making comments, jotting down ideas, and in general doing all the elements of note-taking that I have always smilingly, steadfastly refused to do when required by a class.
I'd recommend the book in turn to anyone getting into game design.  The current edition has author's notes at the front explaining the publication history, and the chronology of the book and its contributors.  And, as Sanders mentioned somewhere, Sackson is in many ways if not a founder, at least a keenly invested god-parent of Print and Play.  The book is about games as ideas and sets of rules, each being easy to assemble or sketch and begin playing immediately.  No 2-page component lists, no standees.  Very core-mechanic stuff here.  I like it.
Makes me wonder how a similar modern compilation would fare.  I'd love to put together a beautiful little book of some of the games that BGG has produced, or some of the 1000-Year Game Design contenders, or around any theme, really.  A good representation of some of the games being made today's GD and PnP hobbyists.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...

Mechanic Monday: Winding Down an Engine Builder

  Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self! Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there. Gradually Shorter Engines In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round. So engine builders (and th...

TTRPG Tuesday: The Secret Calendar

Welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Have I done any this year? Looks like no! On pace to be a pretty low-posting year I guess. Today I actually have a full-fledged one pager TTRPG to share.  I was listening to a Ludology with Camilla Zamboni as the guest and was inspired by her collection Roll for Learning.  The Secret Calendar came to me pretty much fully formed as I walked and listened to the episode, though I do want to acquire RfL to get layout inspo. Anyhow, the first draft can be found HERE .  I think this could be a fun activity for students (was also thinking of Wolfenoot) and maybe I’ll publish it or submit it at some point. Okay I’m out of practice so that's it buh bye!