Why do tabletop sports games so often fail? That’s the question we asked ourselves when we began designing Playing Card Basketball (PC B-Ball from here on out). We think it’s because designers so often lose sight of what makes a game fun. The Challenge: A Game About a Game It seems almost ridiculous to make …
We love this game so much. And it seems as though not a lot of other people do. The design story of Yukatan Jack is pretty simple. It sprung from a desire to do a top-down design based on Indiana Jones. Of course, we couldn’t call it Indiana Jones, but at the time Kevin was …
The design goals of Money Shot were very simple. Sam wanted to design a gambling game that functioned with a 12-sided die. The execution of this came about in a slightly more circuitous fashion. First — why gambling? Stakes Gambling is fun — additively so. We know first hand the thrill of staring down a …
Okay, I admit it: I love Transformers. Always have, probably always will. So naturally, as a game designer, I’ve always wanted to see a really good Transformers game. Transformers is owned by Hasbro, which also owns Wizards of the Coast, so you would think at some point they would release a game worthy of the …
When Kevin first got interested in game design in the late ’90s and early ’00s, he was obsessed with CCGs. His favorite company was AEG, which always seemed to hit it out of the park with flavorful, innovative games like Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Doomtown, and Warlord. So when he heard they …
This post is all about our kick-ass solitaire game Matrix Solitaire. The rules are available for free here. This is one of those rare games that sprung fully birthed from the designer’s head like Athena, and worked pretty much right away. The total opposite of Baseball, Matrix Solitaire started with mechanical goals, then mechanics, and …
As promised, SpoiledFlushGames.com now features a spiffy designer diary blog! Each week, a day or two after our latest free game hits the web, we’ll be posting detailed design notes that spell out just what the heck we were thinking. In the first installment, we discuss Playing Card Baseball, the zeitgeist of 2004 in Boston, …
As part of our free games blog, we at Spoiled Flush Games have decided to give readers a peak at the actual game-design process that led to each game. We hope that somebody out there will find these things useful — or at least mildly interesting. As we’ve mentioned before, these free games are the …