I have a collection of about 150 board games. There are many themes, mechanisms, and point styles in these games. This post is about the style or method of tracking points in games. What are “points?” They are the measurement of success in a game. In the game…
Continue readingI work in Java and Swift very often. Swift lends itself to writing fewer lines of code, which appeals to me because maintaining fewer lines of code always seems easier. But more importantly, fewer lines of code to do the same thing is more elegant, in my humble…
Continue readingMany years ago, I created a messaging system for a puzzle hunt (AKA puzzle race) and I utilized Twilio for SMS text messages. Twilio provides a way for their customers to send SMS text messages through cell phone carriers to their devices. In other words, you can text…
Continue readingWhy did no one ever mention to Thanos that killing off half of everyone would just be a 60 to 70 year delay and after that time has passed, the world and the universe would be exactly where it was when he decided to snap his fingers? Was…
Continue readingUndergrove is a modern board game by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton. Elizabeth Hargrave also designed Wingspan, a wildly popular game, so I had high expectations for Undergrove. After a single play with everyone at the table playing it for the first time, I saw that it has…
Continue readingAfter playing the board game Arcs recently, I realized that no matter how well a game’s theme is developed, that theme can be weakened if the action selection mechanism feels unthematic. In board games, “action selection” refers to the process of choosing what to do on a turn….
Continue readingAt work starting about 12 years ago, I was tasked with porting an old Android app to Windows phone. Then I ported that to Windows a year or two later. Many years after that, and after making many changes to those apps, I wrote an iOS app from…
Continue readingMuch of this post is written and/or edited by ChatGPT 4 based on my prompts. Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to simulating complex mechanical systems by representing mechanisms as collections of individual components that interact to form functional units. A key focus of the method is…
Continue readingThe editor has a lot of missing features, but a lot of it works. You can create mechanisms, save them, and load them later. There is no simulation and no undo feature. Feel free to try it, and let me know how it works for you. I would…
Continue readingI’m working on the Linkage app for Mac, and I’m a little annoyed at the online comments about installers in general and Windows in particular. I appreciate many of the shortcomings of the Windows MSI files and how a simple drag-drop action to install an app is simple….
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