Created by Iikka Keranen and Rich Carlson of Digital Eel) (developers of, among others, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Plasmaworm and Dr. Blob's Organism -- all computer games), Goblin Slayer is an asymmetric boardgame in which one player controls a dwarf entering a cavern infested with goblins to retrieve an artifact.

The board consists of seven large hexes printed with smaller hexes, and is laid out semi-randomly prior to play. The dwarf player controls only a single dwarf, while the goblin player controls 12 goblins (or, optionally, 10 goblins and an ogre -- my advice is, take the ogre). The dwarf and move two spaces a turn (though the dwarf can't attack if he moves more than one), and the goblins move one space a turn. Prior to play, the goblin places the artifact and two "hero's stones" on the map, in a single hex; the dwarf player begins in possession of one stone.

Each large hex contains a "tunnel" hex; goblins may enter a tunnel and go into the goblin player's pool. Killed goblins also go to the pool. The goblin player can enter goblins from his pool into tunnel hexes, one per such hex.

After both sides have moved, the dwarf may kill 1D3 adjoining goblins (the ogre takes two "hits" to kill); the goblin player then rolls 1D6 and, if he rolls less than or equal to the number of goblins adjoining the dwarf (the ogre counting as 2 goblins), the dwarf dies.

Thus, the dwarf moves to the treasure, picks it up along with its two stones, then moves out, while goblins try to surround and kill him. Stones can be expended to: a) allow one extra hex of movement, b) add one to the number of adjoining monsters killed, or c) as a "saving throw" to prevent the dwarf from dying (which is probably how you'll use them).

It's playable in about 15 minutes, and not a bad little game to play while waiting for other people to take their turns in a more intense game, or while waiting for another game to start; it is, however, largely a die-rolling exercise. Yes, there's a little bit of strategy in terms of move planning by the goblins, and deciding when to use the hero's stones, but not all that much, and the winner is likely to be determined by luck rather than cleverness.

Still and all, it's free.

Fatherhood is a Rogue-like, at least to the degree of being a turn-based ASCII game, with a command-set that will be familiar to players of this type of game. However, it's certainly not a dungeon-crawler -- indeed, there's no combat whatsoever.

The basic set-up is this: on a randomly generated map (some pre-generated maps are also included), some number of rivers are about to flood their banks, and some number of forest fires are burning. You're a Dad, and your three kids are running about the game as well -- they start near you, but have a tendency to wander off. You can halt fires and floods by picking up boulders and moving them to choke points -- and you win by making sure that neither you nor any of your kids drowns or is burned to death.

You can also tell your kids to do things, and yell at them to come toward you, but kids will be kids, and they don't always pay attention.

It's not a deep game, but it's certainly a novel approach to Rogue-like design; it's also fairly easy to win on most maps, unless you crank up the number of floods and fires to a high number during map generation (though you can be screwed by initial placement -- the map is algorithmically generated).

The download includes both Linux and Windows versions -- no Mac version as of yet, but the download includes the source, so doubtless somebody will do a Mac build at some point.

In a recent comment, miwi asked what game design books I would recommend.

All have flaws, but three I think worth reading are:

Game Design, by Bob Bates (long time designer back into the InfoCom days) -- light on theory, but strong on practicality.

Game Design: Theory and Practice, by Richard Rouse -- a little heavier going, but smart and informative.

Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton -- less focussed than the previous too, but more willing to encourage experimentation.

And three that are not directly about game design, but worth reading for what they are:

Rules of Play, by Salen and Zimmerman; somewhat academic, and heavy going, but a strong introduction to design from a game studies perspective.

Theory of Fun, by Raph Koster; idiosyncratic, but thought-provoking.

Patterns in Game Design, by Bjork and Holopainen -- very dull, and tough sledding, but think of it as a laundry list of a huge number of different game mechanics. As an exercise, it's worth flipping the book over to three different pages, and thinking about how you'd create a game using those three concepts as core.

Your mileage may vary.

The impending singularity for interactivity is going to be brought on by successively more powerful platforms for rapidly prototyping and designing games. You've heard of the big ones, there's MetaPlace from Raph Koster's company, and in its own way, Storytron from the Crawdaddy himself. Mockingbird is a game-making platform oriented toward casual, spatial gameplay. It has limitations, but it also has tremendous potential for social commentary. (Ed's Note: Also consider Gamestar Mechanic.)

The game pictured is The Last Super Delegate. I made it in an hour or two, it was my first game; now that I know the interface I could make something similar in twenty minutes. Before I started I got lit, figuratively speaking, and dove into the gestalt of hacking the Democratic primary process with distorted found-art and pure cynicism. I started with the background, finding via Google Images a great pic of a brochure for the Pennsylvania Turnpike (this was back when that state's primary was ramping up). The tag-line struck me as perfect for my theme, which I slowly fleshed out as I introduced objects. I decided to go for vertical gameplay, since you don't see that so much. My protagonist was Barack Obama and Raziel, with the power to throw Hillary Clinton at automobilies scrolling up the screen, and then taking the jewels as campaign contributions. I didn't realize it until after I chose the items, but I had a red jewel and a blue jewel, pretty cleanly implying a conservative and liberal voter. I added some planes and jets scrolling horizontally and added a bounce function to them, I also put some cop cars next to the civ cars, made them invincible, and gave them a ricochet effect. The titular Superdelegate was originally going to be Charlie Manson, but I decided to make it David Rockefeller, for reasons that should be obvious to students of deep power. As I playtested and tuned it out, I realized that the process of metaphorically campaigning led there to be no civilian cars left on the road; things effectively become a police state. Mission accomplished.

The next game I started has the working title of Riccitiellovania: Rondo of Cash. I wanted to make a Metroidvania game where you play the current EA CEO, exploring the mysterious HQ and consolidating the shit out of everything you can for mad profit. I was going to lampoon the schiessty-ness of him merging two studios, then buying them after moving back to EA, or the likely arbitrage move on Take Two's stock when he tried to buy them. Once the Stop ability is optimized we'll be able to design these sprawling Metroidvania games, and I'll finish that game.

The latest title I did is called Arbitrage, which was inspired by my researching the word after Micheal Patcher mentioned it in relation to the Take Two cluster-fuck. It's a great word, beautiful and wholly evil, understanding it will help you understand a lot of how power and economy works. So I started playing with this idea, figured I'd do something along the lines of La La Land 2. I started playing around and researching images, and things took off. I ended up doing something about food commodity traders, where you have to "short" the poor people and bounce the food back to the rich fat kids. As soon as a feature gets added, I'll do it.

(Ed's Note: Actually, arbitrage is an important part of any diverse market, and helps to ensure the efficient spread of price signals.)

But these are just my pretentious expressions, you might want to make a game about how your wife gets on your case, or how much airline food sucks. Whatever. The beauty of it is, it's casual, it's like having a one-night-stand and making a baby right after you finish, but then being able to edit the baby in real-time, without any bioethics concerns. As the features get more numerous and robust, I think it's going to get really interesting. Sure, you've got PopFly and Game Brix and whatnot, but these don't let you design and play in real-time. Once sound uploading becomes supported, you can hear a song you like, have it inspire a dynamic in your mind, upload a clip and then go at it. I recommend being lit; lit with inspiration.

In an intentionally provocative essay at The Escapist, Roger Travis attack game studies as a very concept. He seems not to understand what he's attacking, though, despite carefully chosen quotes from Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. His claim is that "scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture," and he begins by quoting Douglas Wilson as saying "I hate gamers."

Now, I am a gamer. I've been a gamer since before many of our readers were born, since I was, in the 70s, a board wargamer, the very people who coined the neologism, the first proud game geeks. So it would amount to self-loathing for me to say something like "I hate gamers." Yet there is no doubt that most gamers are plug-ignorant about games. Oh, they may know WoW instances like the back of their hand, or know every spot to snipe from on all the major Counter-Strike maps, but they often know very little about the historical evolution of our field, about the process of development, about the thinking of game designers, about the creatively important people in the medium, or indeed much of anything except the narrow range of genres that they themselves follow.

This is less true of other popular arts; movie fans are typically far more knowledgeable about cinematic technique, the nature of movie-making, the personalities involved, and the history of the medium.

And there's no question that the ignorance of gamers has pernicious effects: they lap up the same old goods repackaged with "IV" on the box, they mistake graphic trickery for advances in the state of the art, they conflate story with design, they push genres toward grognard capture. In a word they are (or many of them are) vidiots.

I have argued in the past that much of the artistic arteriosclerosis we see in today's game industry is due to a combination of Moore's Wall and publisher philistinism -- and that's no doubt true. But most gamers' ignorance of our form, and their lack of aesthetic breadth, compounds the problem.

And I've argued, as well, that disrupting the existing business model, with its relentless focus on best-sellers and unwillingness to fund creative risks, is essential to preserve the field's creative health, and our legacy of innovation; that's true, doubtless, but the other side of the equation is that we need to change gamer culture, to make gamers smarter about games.

Luckily, this is far from a lost cause; it's happening. It's happening in a lot of different ways; one example of how it's happening is, of course, The Escapist, which addresses games at an intellectual level almost unheard of in the game press of days past. But you can see it happening, too, in the level of creativity shown in student projects, in the increasing publication of books about games at every level, in the increasing diversity and level of innovation shown in games at the IGF. This website, too is, in its own modest way, an attempt to push the dialog a little farther, to cast light on interesting games outside of the mainstream -- because the mainstream is now so relentlessly focussed on a handful of genres that innovation, and a broader aesthetic, can only be found elsewhere.

One of the main reasons gamers are becoming more sophisticated, however, is, well, game studies.

Not that many gamers are ever going to read Cybertext or Game Studies; nor need they. But as the ideas expressed by scholars percolate through their students and those who read their work, they spread out into the community of gamers. Ten years ago, if I'd used phrases like "reward schedule" or "resource management" or "player skill vs. character skill" in conversation, I would almost certainly have had to explain what I meant; today, many, though not all, gamers would know what I meant without explanation.

Similarly, ten years ago, if you went looking for anything that talked about game design from a theoretical perspective, about all you'd find would be Chris Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design and one of my essays. Today, you can find hundreds of essays, and scores of books -- and yes, that's a good thing, because theory does make for better design (or if it doesn't, it's not very good theory).

The idea, in fact, that game studies is somehow antipathetic to gamers, or game culture, is absurd on the face of it; game studies is, rather, a natural evolution of game culture, a recognition by the academy that games, and game culture, are now sufficiently important enough to be worthy of, and to repay, study. And since gamers, or the more sophisticated among them, are among the natural audience for the products of game studies, game studies helps to inform game culture -- and, I believe, modify it for the better.

(Also see Ian Bogost's riposte to Travis's article.)

As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.

Dino Run is the kind of game that reminds you why you started playing games for the first time (assuming you belong to this blog's primary audience demographic). It's pure, simple, its premise has that certain geektastic wetness that games used to have before they sold out for every shade of brown and two flavors of protagonist (grizzled dude and power armor). You're a velociraptor trying to outrun the infamous extinction event. The aim of the game is focused on streamlined bio-survival consciousness. Go forward. Escape your doom. Do not let anything deter you, not the environment, not other life forms. Smaller animals are food that boost your speed. Eggs somehow magically go to a DNA clearinghouse that allows you to invest in stat improvements. Pterodactyls give you lifts. Everything can be turned to your advantage, all to that simple, inescapable reinforcement -- forward, faster.

This game is also a great psychological consolation for the troubles of our times. If you think surviving global fuel and food shortages, inflation and a looming panopticon are difficult, just think of what our reptilian masters had to go through. They outran an impact wave. Note the alien egg on level 5. It's clear that this game, like Raptor Safari, is yet another subtle exploration of the plain fact that raptors evolved into Quetzalcoatl-like avians who then cross-bred with hominids to create the shape-shifting master race currently ruling this planet. And now, I have total sympathy for them.

You're a Japanese record promoter, trying to recruit cute teen anime-style girls, train them artistically, and make them "idols" -- the Western cultural analog would be, of course, that you're hyping manufactured boy bands. Idolcraft is built using RPG Maker, though, so it's an interesting combination of a classic console-style RPG, an adventure game, and a resource management sim. You run around town, trying to make friends with cute girls and persuade them to sign with your studio, then training them, and trying to release as many successful CDs and DVDs featuring them as possible before the timer runs out.

Meeting and recruiting each girl (there are 12 possibles) requires solving adventure game-style puzzles -- some inventory based, and some more convoluted (there's even a Sokoban-style puzzle in which you need to shove fans surrounding a girl out of the way in precisely the right order to get to and talk to her). Even once you've signed some "idols" however, you still need to train them up, which requires money, which you can gain by exploring the map and performing odd jobs at various places there.

RPG Maker is not a sophisticated development environment (move with the arrow keys, space for all object interactions, 16x16 sprites), but this is a quite original and sophisticated use of its limited capabilities (only Aveyond, of games I've seen, exploits it better); and, begorrah, it's fun to play.

Though the graphics and sound are Japanese, used with permission of their creators, the developer is American; I suspect Americans will find it "very Japanese," though I suspect Japanese people will find this American reflection of their own culture off-kilter in an amusing way (just as Miyazaki's depiection of European culture is, to my eyes, charmingly not quite right). But that's a digression; Goodman is using the tropes of an alien culture, but producing his own offbeat gameplay as a consequence, and good for him.

Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.

Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.

Because the world is, literally, such stuff as dreams are made of, you can attempt to shape it, creating 'dreams' within it, and moving from one 'dreamscape' to another. There are, naturally, monsters -- both Dreamers' nightmares, and 'dreams from outside,' Lovecraftian extrusions into consensual reality. And there is danger -- the danger of dying, of losing your memories and ultimately your lucidity -- and perhaps the danger of 'waking.'

As with many short RPGs, Lucidity offers little more than a character generation system, a conflict resolution system, and an evocative background -- but the background here is very evocative, and something that, in the right GM's hands, could easily create a compelling and disturbing campaign. Something more is needed, I think -- an story arc, secrets of the dreamworld to uncover, the connection between this world and the waking one but Prahl, perhaps sensibly, does not try to provide that here -- after all, if it's in the game rules, then it's canonical and available to the players, which obviates the mystery of discovery.

Unlike many indie RPGs, Lucidity is not playing with the nature of narrative and its expression through play; instead, it's taking roleplaying into the world of dream-logic, the sense of epiphany just around the corner, always delayed by the stream-of-conscious permutation of one event into the next through a sort of magical connection that defies logical analysis.

This past Game Developers Conference, Synaesthete took home the Independent Games Festival's award for Best Student Game.

Synaesthesia, for which the game is most likely named, is a rare condition in which different sensations run together. Basically, a person with synaesthesia may be able see a word in colors or be able to taste a sound. Mind blowing, isn't it? True to its name, Synaesthete's visuals achieve an almost blurring interpretation of the synaesthetic process in its unique combination of both audio and visual stimulus. The game's abstract quality perhaps surpasses that of Rez, the acclaimed trance rail shooter that Synaesthete so fondly reminds me of.

Fans of the beat game genre will instantly recognize the familiar look and feel of the cascading note style at the core of Synaesthete's game play. This mechanic itself is very reminiscent of Konami's Beatmania IIDX series in both style and pacing. For gamers who are acquainted with the home brew Dance With Intensity and Stepmania games, binding the controls for the notes to the directional pad may come more naturally than the default J, K, and L keys.

Hitting the three different beats is only half of the game play. Players must navigate their Zaikman through various platforms, avoiding the enemies they encounter while simultaneously zapping them with well timed key clicks. Only after clearing every enemy available on a plane are players allowed to progress further or regain their health. While this all may seem daunting at first, there's a handy tip to know about hitting the notes. Though players are obviously penalized for hitting notes off key, they are not necessarily penalized for omitting them altogether. Players can choose to hit only one track, rather than attempt to nail all three. Even though this makes the game more accessible and allows players to avoid any combo penalties for mistakes it does limit the player's fire power. Players who are able to hit the maximum amount of notes are greatly rewarded for their effort.

The rest of the game is neatly tied up by an entrancing sound track, lovable names like Count Stabbington, and glitzy, euphoric special moves.