The White Box is a book of essays about game design and a collection of generic prototyping components — cubes, dice, tokens, and more — to help you get the game idea out of your head and onto the table.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Acquisition vs. Design; Band or Album Remix
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 08:14:11 PM
Hi, White Box Backers!
I thought about all of you a lot over the spring semester. Most schooling here in the US was still remote at that point, and so I picked up a gig teaching game design via Zoom at the University of Wisconsin–Stout.
The White Box is literally part of the curriculum there — every student gets one. Although most of them are ultimately interested in creating digital games, the Introduction to Game Design course I taught focuses on design fundamentals using tabletop games. The final project is an original, group-designed tabletop game whose components are limited to ten printed, letter-sized pages plus a deck of standard playing cards and the generic components from one copy of The White Box.
Thanks again, all of you, for helping to make The White Box a reality. It made my spring-term life easier.
For Folks Who Love Social Games, Music, and High-Spirited Wordplay
This week, I launched a Kickstarter for a labor-of-love campaign called Band or Album Remix. It's a social game played anywhere and everywhere (you're playing right now, whether you know it or not), about how everything you can hear or say is the name of a band or an album… but never both.
No hard sell, here, just a pointer to the campaign and a note that if you’re someone who likes social games and has a playful relationship with language, this is a game for you.
I'd love it if you had a look! And, especially, if you thought about folks you know who might also dig it, and pass the word along to them. The domain bandoralbum.com points to the campaign; that's the best URL to spread. Thanks in advance!
Just before the pandemic got underway in late 2019 and early 2020, I picked up a book called Buy Then Build. It’s a mainstream business book that revolves around the idea that it’s smarter and safer to buy an existing, successful small business than try to build a new one of your own out of sweat, ideas, and thin air.
It got me thinking. One of the reasons that game publishing is so hard is that it’s basically impossible to know for sure, in advance, whether a new design will succeed. Whether gamers will like a game, whether stores will stock it, whether it will get good reviews, whether it will become a reliable seller. You can increase your chances and make good decisions, by all means! But you can never know for sure.
Designing new games is a lot of fun. And designing games is the specific thing that lots of folks like are interested in doing first and foremost. And that’s great!
At this point in my own career, I’ve worked on creating and developing lots of games, and my interest in stability and reliability is overtaking my excitement to build new things from whole cloth. Or, at the very least, I want to put more space between the "reliability" projects and the "let's put on a show" projects.
Anyway, I kept the acquisition idea in my back pocket for a couple of months, and started to put out feelers in the publishing community. Fast forward a year. This spring, I acquired Prolific Games from former owners Bill Sininger and John Harris. If you’re interested you can read two different versions of that same story in the announcement to Prolific’s fans, and in the press release about it.
Prolific Games’ marquee title is a card game called Flapjacks & Sasquatches. It has a reliable sales history over a long time, and is wildly beloved of its Amazon reviewers, who’ve collectively rated it 4.8 / 5 stars over a ten-year period. It’s the epitome of predictability.
I wanted to put the acquisition idea in front of all of you who backed The White Box and who are interested in publishing, but who are curious about alternate ways into the business than the traditional route of starting with a blank piece of paper and a handful of six-sided dice. Acquisition has the potential to be a fruitful way forward.
Meet the Dice Miner Designers — Interview and Livestream
over 4 years ago
– Mon, Jun 01, 2020 at 09:51:57 PM
For those of you who backed The White Box and are now working to design and publish you own projects, we wanted to let you know about two design-related pieces of content rolling out this week related to Atlas Games' ongoing Dice Miner Kickstarter:
Second, Dice Miner producer and developer Jeff Tidball — also the producer of The White Box — will interview Josh and Niko on a Facebook livestream on the Atlas Games Facebook page this Wednesday, at 4:00 PM Central US time (UTC –5). We encourage you to tune in. If you have any questions you'd like Jeff to pose, you'll have a chance during the stream, but you can also leave them in the comments here. That way, even if you can't join us live, you might be a chance to hear your question answered in the stream recording, which will ultimately be posted to the Atlas Games YouTube channel afterwards.
New: The Gameplaywright Digest
over 4 years ago
– Tue, May 26, 2020 at 11:08:56 AM
Hello! We hope your game design and publishing projects are coming along well, and that you're still finding The White Box's essays and components to be a useful part of your process.
Here at Gameplaywright, we've just launched a new weekly email digest. Inspired by the Studio Neat Gazette, we'll each share one interesting link each Friday.
Many links will be related to Gameplaywright's focus on stories, games, and the work of creating them, but one imagines that our various other broad interests will appear as well, from time to time.
Pitching and Picking Design Projects; Magical Kitties Save the Day
over 5 years ago
– Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 09:22:19 PM
Pitching Games and Choosing What to Work On
I’ve never met Nick Bentley, but last week I came across his insightful and important essay for game designers about honing concepts and pitches given the very crowded marketplace of game designs. You should really, really read it if you’re at all concerned about designing games to attract a large audience.
(But if you’re designing a game just for yourself, or for a narrow market of yourself and you friends? Ignore this! There’s a real advantage in knowing exactly what you want and setting aside the advice of people with something else in mind.)
Magical Kitties Save the Day
The White Box co-publisher Atlas Games is in the final days of a Kickstarter for their roleplaying game Magical Kitties Save the Day. It’s 1,000% funded and particularly well suited for families, kids, and folks who’re curious about, or new to, roleplaying. If that describes you, check it out!
We receive positive feedback from backers of previous campaigns who appreciate learning about new ones. But although we’ve mentioned it before, it bears repeating: Since The White Box has been successfully fulfilled for some time, if you’d rather not receive updates about future projects from Gameplaywright and Atlas Games, it’s safe to turn off notifications about this campaign. Kickstarter has a convenient help page that spells out how.
Tabletop Comedy: Gloom of Thrones
over 5 years ago
– Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 10:59:14 PM
As a backer of The White Box who's (presumably!) interested in game design and publishing, Gloom of Thrones may be worth a look for a number of reasons:
It continues the trend of recent Atlas Games Kickstarters where deluxe editions have been as or more popular than standard versions of the same game, in terms of raw backer numbers as well as the gross revenue they contribute. (Cogs and Commissars was the Kickstarter where we first noticed this trend, which we don’t generally see in retail-based sales.) Offering multiple tiers that allow backers to buy in at the level of their interest and comfort is wise, if feasible.
Funny content is everything in a comedy game.Gloom has ample space for comic text in three places per card: in its titles, subtitles, and flavor text. Not to mention in its illustrations, as well as the marketing text of the Kickstarter itself. Unleashing a team of writers and brainstormers was crucial to writing the funniest text possible. Three Cheers for Master was another Atlas Games title where this approach was crucial. If you’re creating a comic game, make sure you rope in collaborators to help brainstorm and write, as well as to make sure that what was funny to you also makes others laugh.
Gloom is a great example of how to use a novel component or production process to good effect in a design — in this case, transparent cardstock. In a poker deck, transparent cards are an irrelevant novelty. In Gloom, they’re key to gameplay that couldn’t exist otherwise.
We receive positive feedback from backers of previous campaigns who appreciate learning about new ones.
But although we’ve mentioned it before, it bears repeating: Since The White Box has been successfully fulfilled for some time, if you’d rather not receive updates about future projects from Gameplaywright and Atlas Games, it’s safe to turn off notifications about this campaign. Kickstarter has a convenient help page that spells out how.
