ars ludi

Of course not every game of In This World has been magical, but when I hear about sessions that dragged, they often have one thing in common: Only two players. In a high creativity game, the difference between two and three players is bigger than it seems. When there’s only one other person in the […]

“This was the first time someone said, ‘I wish this was our world.’” The playtest reports for In This World keep rolling in and I could not be happier with them. Playtesters, you’re doing a great job. I don’t respond to every email unless I have some questions or don’t understand some of the feedback, […]

I blame Caroline, for making a world where God decides your social media feed based on your virtues or sins, but is also totally cool with virtue signaling.

Updated rules for In This World has gone out to playtesters! If you signed up and didn’t get an email, scream and shout! (Unless you just signed up in the last day or so, in which case you get a link when the next batch goes out in a day or two) And if you […]

I’m preparing a new revision of the In This World rules. No major changes, mostly clarification and text tweaks. I’m also opening up the playtest for more volunteers. So if you want in, sign up! Playtest Sign-up for In This World If you signed up for the last round, you don’t need to fill in […]

The Sunday night crew took a break from Kingdom to playtest some In This World. Our topic? XMAS!!! So much fun! And only 50% dark! Check out this write-up by Caroline: less than three blog: In This Christmas And next xmas eve, remember to douse the holiday lights so Santa can’t find your house and […]

We playtested a slight variation on the rules for In This World: instead of just picking one topic, you pick two that relate or intersect, then make statements about one or both of those things. For example: family + nations war + technology food + ecology I think there are generally two cases you’d see. […]

I love how after you’ve played In This World, just hearing real world statements gets your brain juices churning: Pet owners outlive their pets Priests believe in god Food is made of plants and animals Space is mostly empty People apply for jobs Those are totally innocent, factual statements. But once you’ve got In This […]

The playtest for In This World is chugging along nicely. We’ve got over a hundred volunteers, which should do very well, so I’ve closed the sign-up for now. I’ve already started getting great feedback. Some very interesting worlds being made, and also a few places where I clearly need to tighten up the game text. […]

In This World is out! For playtesters anyway. If you signed up to playtest you should have gotten an email with a download link Friday night. If you don’t see it, and it’s not in your spam, drop me a comment below to make sure you get hooked up. If you signed up after Friday, […]

My new game, In This World, is ready for outside playtesting. I’ve played it a bunch, made some tweaks and refinements, and now it’s ready for you: Playtest Sign-up for In This World It’s a very accessible game, probably more than any other game I’ve made. I think it would work great even for people […]

Just played two fantastic games of In This World, back-to-back, with Story Games Seattle veterans Ace and Joe. Yes, we played one game, and then got so excited we jumped right back in and played another. Why? Because after the first game, which got us chatting a mile a minute, Ace made a comment which […]

Police carry badges… Dragons breathe fire… Nations have borders… In our world, things are a certain way. Sometimes ways we don’t even question. But In This World — the world we make together — things can be different. We can see how the world would turn out if we examined our assumptions… and maybe turned […]

I had this idea for a game. Been kicking it around for ages, but couldn’t figure out how to make it into something you could actually *play*… until I had a breakthrough a few weeks ago. With that new wrinkle the rules wrote themselves, so I recruited some brave souls to try it out: First […]