I watch a lot of TV, and I can suspend my disbelief quite easily. I’ll watch MgGyver (the new one) build an energy-beam weapon out of a junked microwave oven and a car battery. But sometimes a TV show is written in a way that totally breaks the…
Continue readingI was playing a complicated board game, Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, and I noticed something about another player that I’ve noticed before; They are Game Rules Optimistic. I’ll explain: The game has a map, and on the map are some tiles. The tiles are double-sided, with very different…
Continue readingI’ve been posting videos on YouTube () showing some working features and some failing features of the Linkage app for the Mac. Here is one of the latest: Even though this looks like a simple mechanism with a sliding quick-return that makes a link oscillate, thus moving a…
Continue readingA few decades ago, I remember, probably incorrectly, a court case where the police wanted to (or did) track people using GPS units that they stuck in the suspects’ cars. The case boiled down to this: a court order is needed to place a GPS unit on someone’s…
Continue readingWith the mechanism in the image, there are three sliding connectors affecting link 1 (on the left). This is an interesting mechanism to simulate. In this situations, the calculations are easy because D and E both have the same slide radius. With the same slide radius, we can…
Continue readingI have a Mac App Store “page” for the Linkage app. “Linkage” was a taken name so I opted for “Linkage CAD”. let me know if that’s a bad name. You can’t see the app yet because it needs to be releasable before I can submit to Apple…
Continue readingMany modern board games incorporate card-based mechanics to introduce variety, surprise players, or offer small bonuses that can impact gameplay. Often, these cards give the impression of receiving something extra—an unexpected perk or tactical edge that breaks from the standard flow of the game. In Galactic Cruise, players…
Continue readingMany tabletop games devolve into a race to get points before the game ends. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a unique game that, like many others, devolves into a point collection process with little or no theme left by the end of the game. I won’t be…
Continue readingIn the interest of full disclosure, ChatGPT wrote the title of this post and helped with grammar issues in this and other posts. I was watching a movie review, or rather a review about movies, and it struck me that board games don’t receive the deep analysis that…
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