Stay ConnectedWelcome to Ludology, an analytical discussion of the how’s and why’s of the world of board games. Rather than news and reviews, Ludology explores a variety of topics about games from a wider lens, and discusses game history, game design and game players.
Ludology is part of The Dice Tower Network, the premier board game media network.
Copyright: © Geoff Engelstein, Sen-Foong Lim, and Erica Bouyouris
Scott takes a deep dive into the twisted and fascinating history of the game Othello.
Gil and Geoff are delighted to be joined by Anthony Giovannetti, one of the designers of the popular video game Slay the Spire, a deck-building rogue-like dungeon crawl.
How did the board game concepts of deckbuilding translate into a computer game? What advantages did the solo roguelike format give the designers?
Geoff takes a look at the long history of drinking games.
Gil and Geoff welcome Mikael Jakobsson and Rick Eberhardt from the MIT Game Lab to discuss their research into colonial themes in board games, and the game design workshops they run in former colonial countries.
Scott Rogers is back with a new Biography of a Board Game, this time looking at Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity.
Gil and Geoff welcome guests Allison Parrish and Tim Szetela, designers of Rewordable, to discuss word games. What particular design techniques are required for this type of game?
In this GameTek, Geoff explores the connection between Ritual and Play.
Gil and Geoff discuss valuation within games - what are the different ways of determining resource value? How does value flow and change over the course of play?
In this new interview, Geoff talks with Nolan Bard from Google Deep Mind and Jakob Foerster from Oxford University about their proposal to use the card game Hanabi as the next frontier in Machine Learning and AI research.
The original paper can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00506.
Gil and Geoff are live at ToyFair NY with the designer of Fog of Love, Jacob Jaskov. What was his development process like for this innovative design? What does that tell us about creating narrative inside games?
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