Raph Koster

ello Mr. Koster! I have a school project that requires the input of an expert like yourself

One, entitled “Tabletop Game Grammar,” was a talk at the inaugural Tabletop Network event, a game design conference centered specifically on tabletop games. This talk is centered on applications of game grammar to boardgame design, including a working through of how the addition of new resources creates the different variants of poker. But I’ve been doing a lot of tabletop design over the past few years, and finding that many of the lessons from the game grammar work and from years of doing videogame design definitely apply across the boundary. It was great to make new friends such as Isaac Shalev, designer of Seikatsu among other games (he had a great prototype of a game about running a tour bus company in Israel), and to catch up with old friends such as Jose Zagal, Jeff Ward, Geoff Engelstein, Soren Johnson, Scott Rogers (who had a new game out! ,

y new book Postmortems is now shipping. If you pre-ordered the Kindle version, it should be there for reading now

This book focuses specifically on games I have worked on, from LegendMUD up through social games, and is a book of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes. There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked. * MUDs, which has design articles about DikuMUDs, design and administrative practices material on LegendMUD, a lengthy article on the struggles with MUD governance that we went through back then, and even samples from what MUDding was like (for the younger folks out there! ). Star Wars Galaxies, including the whole postmortem series, a new overall design overview, and even materials I wrote to the players explaining our design philosophy.