Category: Opinion

Fairway’s Design Tips: 3 Easy Ways to Make Public Domain Art Better

Fairway 3 GamesFeatures, Opinion

There are lots of free sources of high resolution, public-domain images out there. Many of the best pieces to use are illustrations from old books or oil paintings.  And lots of new designers try to use those in their games.  There’s usually one problem: just slapping them onto a card usually looks terrible. And while the following might not work for a retail version of the game, this will provide cleaner prototypes. In this quick tutorial, I offer three tips for “doing it better” using Gimp. This post originally ran on Fairway’s personal site.

Early Birds’ 2017 Holiday Gift Guide

Fairway 3 GamesFeatures, Opinion

Here it is, the beginning of September and Fairway’s trying to beat the major retailers in getting that holiday stuff out there. He’s got a list of eleven games that would make excellent gifts for families, kids and gamers alike. 

Component Studio: A designer’s best friend

Fairway 3 GamesFeatures, Opinion

Today, Fairway is taking a look at a brand new service from the folks at The Game Crafter that lets you “automagically” create and maintain cards and other component images with templates and a spreadsheet: Component Studio. This new service will make the lives of anyone creating or maintaining large numbers of game components lives much easier.

Fairway Thoughts: Grove’s Bag Building

Fairway 3 GamesOpinion

Today, Fairway reflects on the very clever “Bag Building” game mechanism used by co-contributors Steven Aramini and Dan Letzring in their upcoming Kickstarter game, Groves. This peculiar variation on the common deck-building or deck-optimization mechanisms results in some fantastic game play. So fantastic, it’s worth exploring in a bit more detail.

Fairway Thoughts: How to get the best possible review

Fairway 3 GamesOpinion

Fairway regularly hangs out in the chat on The Game Crafter. A very common question from new designers is how to get your new game reviewed. It’s a common question on game design groups on Facebook too.  Those discussion often answer the “who” question, which quickly devolves to linking to this list of reviewers. What doesn’t really get answered is: how to get the “best” review of your new game or your upcoming, crowd-funded game. 

Was your campaign radioactive?

Fairway 3 GamesFeatures, Opinion

We got lots of comments about Dan’s Lesson #12: 4 Reasons Your Campaign Failed. The list was not intended as exhaustive. Today, Fairway throws his hat into the ring (of fire) with the question: Was your campaign radioactive? And he explores a list of 4 Other Reasons Your Campaign Failed.