Game Books

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Graphic Design for Board Games by Daniel Solis

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Graphic Design for Board Games by Daniel Solis

I am an unlikely candidate to be reviewing Daniel Solis’ book. To say that graphic design is not my passion would be an understatement. I struggle to draw stick figures let alone solve the complex problems of layout and design necessary for an attractive and playable board game. However, I do have an enthusiasm for board games and like all nerds I have strong opinions on them and how they look. I am also broadly intrigued by CRC Press’ new series of books edited by Geoff Engelstein. I really enjoyed the other two books in the series, and for completeness’s sake I figured I should read this one as well, even if it was further afield from my own areas of interest and knowledge.

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Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by Sarah Shipp

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Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by Sarah Shipp

Trying to explain to someone who doesn’t play board games why this game about trading feels thematic but that other game about trading has a pasted-on theme is, in my experience at least, a ticket to a conversation that both of you lose interest in once you’re far too deep into it to easily back out. That is why I don’t envy Sarah Shipp’s task in trying to define concepts like a board game’s theme and when theme integrates well with a game’s mechanics. This is the sort of thing that is intuitive to many who have spent time in the hobby – they know thematic games when they see them – but despite what some American jurists might believe this is not particularly firm ground for a working definition. In Thematic Integration in Board Game Design Shipp sets out not only to define and explain these concepts in a manner that can serve as a foundation for future discussion, but then to also provide advice to designers on how best to effectively integrate their game’s theme with the mechanisms and rules.

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Wargames According to Mark by Mark Herman

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Wargames According to Mark by Mark Herman

It looks like we are entering something of a golden age when it comes to serious discussions of tabletop games – at least in book form. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a respectable pile of new books on the subject over the past year, including several on historical wargaming. Last year saw the publication of Maurice Suckling’s textbook Paper Time Machines and Riccardo Masini’s philosophical treatise Historical Simulation and Wargames, and, last but not least, renowned designer Mark Herman’s personal memoir/philosophy/reflections on his own design process for historical games.

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.

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Paper Time Machines by Maurice W. Suckling

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Paper Time Machines by Maurice W. Suckling

Paper Time Machines, which takes its title from a famous quote from commercial wargame pioneer James Dunnigan, is the latest volume in a burgeoning scholarship on tabletop gaming and in particular historical tabletop games. Within this new niche Paper Time Machines stakes out an interesting territory. Functionally, it is a college textbook covering a variety of aspects of the form, history, and design of historical board games. Teachers and professors will, of course, find much of value in this book for forming their own lessons, but how interesting is it for a non-academic reader?

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Historical Simulation and Wargames by Riccardo Masini

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Historical Simulation and Wargames by Riccardo Masini

Riccardo Masini’s Historical Simulation and Wargames dragged me back to memories of my undergraduate degree, but not to my history classes. Instead, this book reminded me of studying philosophy, and for that reason I believe it to be a work of philosophy first and all other things secondary. Its opening chapter is virtually pure philosophical discussion on the theory of games, including the kind of specific definitions of terms and ideas one would expect, and while other chapters do at times conform in shape to more historical analysis across the wide expanse of the book’s scope its wanderings have an altogether more philosophical flavor. This is not a criticism, merely a description - an attempt to outline what the book is so readers can set their expectations.

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

We’re living through a particularly excellent time for scholarship on Dungeon’s and Dragons, and this latest edited volume from MIT Press is a real showcase for the vibrancy of that scholarship. I’ll confess that sometimes these edited volumes make me a little concerned – it’s a real challenge to keep a book like this on theme while simultaneously ensuring that each chapter (twenty in total in this case) is interesting to anyone who might pick it up. That’s not to say that other edited volumes I’ve read have been bad – but rather that I often find myself enjoying at most one-third of these kinds of books with many of the other articles just being okay or simply not relevant to my interests. Given the range of fields on display in Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons I expected to find parts of it to be a bit of a drag, and while I cannot claim that I loved them all equally I found myself enjoying every single one of the book’s chapters. This is an excellent edited volume with plenty to offer anyone interested in the history, study, and culture of Dungeons and Dragons.

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Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

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Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

I was slightly worried when I first opened Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (Monsters from here) that what I had gotten all excited for was essentially an encyclopedia. Not that the existence of an encyclopedia of tabletop RPGs would be a bad thing, but they tend to be incredibly dry reading and I wasn’t excited to tackle one from cover to cover. Thankfully, while the format resembles an encyclopedia the contents are distinctly their own thing. The feeling that Monsters most closely evokes is that of having been invited into the basement of a genial but intense RPG aficionado to be walked through his collection one item at a time. The book oozes a sense of familiarity and enthusiasm that make coverage of even the driest, or most bizarre, RPG supplements a fascinating trip down a branch of the hobby’s history.

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Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

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Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

I was a huge fan of Jon Peterson’s earlier book Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012) when I read it back in either 2014 or 2015 – I was finishing my PhD and records from that time are hazy at best. I managed to sneak it into my thesis, so I must have read it before August 2015. I also really enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which Peterson contributed to. Given this pedigree of past works, I was very excited when I discovered that he was revisiting the subject of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in his new book, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint.