The Party of One series is a third party supplement for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box (Beginner's Box). All three gamebooks are mini solo adventures designed to teach the basic Pathfinder RPG system, introducing players new to paper RPGs. Since the Beginner's Box only includes a six-page, 23 section, solo adventure, the Party of One series fill the need of a full Pathfinder RPG tutorial.

The Party of One series comprises of:

• BB1: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls through the Breach –- The undead break into the dwarven halls. It's up to you and your warhammer to repel the intruders and find the cause of the breach.
• BB2: Elgar Fletch and the Dark Army –- You must be stealthy, cunning, and sometimes forceful as you travel secretly to warn the capital of an incoming invasion. Can you save your love and the capital?
• BB3: Alosar Emanli and the Creatures from the Fallen Star –- A falling star brings strange creatures into the forest. This is no game but a true rite of passage as a young druid.

Bunni, like Triple Town, is a Dan Cook design (in this case with Andre Spierings), but the gameplay is quite different, though the graphics are equally cute.

It is, at its core, an aufbaustrategiespiel, that genre of builder game more popular in Europe than the US, and typified by the Anno series -- but, of course, vastly stripped down and simplified for a casual game audience.

You are a sort of bunny-king; at game start, you're given a bunny house, a forest, and a lumbermill, and instructed to place them, then put your bunny in the lumbermill. It starts to produce wood. Then you receive your first store, which allows the purchase of additional houses, lumbermills, stone hills, and quarries; wood and stone are, obviously, the main resources of the game. You must also plant flowers to feed your bunnies.

Paradox often releases games in a fairly raw state, basically at a beta level, depending on input from their community of fans to rapidly iterate and polish the game post-release, with multiple patches. Crusader Kings II is, however, quite polished and playable out of the box (though there have been several patches since its release) -- doubtless, the fact that it's a sequel helps (although it didn't help Victoria 2, which was a bit of a mess when first published).

As with most of Paradox's games, Crusader Kings is a grand strategy game spanning a long stretch of history -- from 1066 through the 15th century. The game engine is based on Europa Universalis, but the gameplay is quite different, because the concerns of Medieval rulers were quite different from those of Early Modern ones.

Set is a match-three puzzle cardgame. Set was inspired by the designer's day job as a population geneticist. Marsha Jean Falco was keeping track of traits in the population of German Shepherds, sort of a simple database on index cards. Since many of the traits were the same, she created symbols for traits. One day as she explained her card system to a veterinarian...inspiration came to her. A few years later, we have Set.

Game play is simple; you lay out twelve cards in a 4x3 grid. Each card has the following features:

• Color: red, green, or purple
• Symbol: ovals, squiggles, or diamonds
• Quantity: one, two, or three symbols
• Shading: solid, open, or striped

Like Spelunky, A Valley Without Wind is a procedurally-generated platformer, meaning levels are algorithmically generated and no two plays will ever be the same. But Valley is more than a platformer; it has elements of crafting, character advancement with a huge number of paths, and an adventure game-like narrative arc.

Once you complete the tutorial, you start in a town surrounded by many available wilderness squares; you select one, and transition to a sidescrolling level, with monsters to fight and with some elements, like trees and rocks, that you can destroy for resources. But within most wildernesses are buildings and dungeons, each a series of levels in their own right, in which you can find resources that provide you with powerups, or that can be used to craft better spells, or to create "guardian powers."

Update: Was here, is over.

This Saturday, starting at about noon PST, I've agreed to do an "ask me anything" on Reddit. I'll post an URL here later when it starts.

You can -ask- me anything, although I don't promise to actually answer, say, questions about my sex life. Or, for that matter, to talk about any of the (unfortunately) myriad things that are covered by the many NDAs I've signed over the years. That still leaves a great deal, to be sure.

Also, to be clear, I totally do not speak for my employer, which in descending corporate hierarchy, are currently Disney, the Disney Interactive Media Group, and Playdom, Inc.

However, I'm happy to discuss:

....Roleplaying games, including my role in Paranoia, Toon, and the (original) Star Wars RPG.
....Boardgames, including The Creature that Ate Sheboygan and Pax Britannica.
....My role as an online and mobile game pioneer.
....My two failed startups (Unplugged Games and Manifesto Games)
....My reputation as the sort of angry middle aged man of the game industry (Scratchware Manifesto, Death to the Games Industry [Long Live Games], GDC Maverick Award, etc.)
....My independent game scholarship (I Have No Words and I Must Design, Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String, etc.)
....How to cook gourmet meals for a family on a budget and in an hour or less.
....Why you should get on your fucking bike.
....How to tell the difference between a quality Oriental carpet and a cheap Belgian knock-off.
....And just about anything else that arises.

The Republia Times is a cute, graphically crude and snarkily cynical game about press censorship.

You are the editor of the eponymous newspaper; the war is over and the rebellion has been crushed. The authorities are holding your wife and children to ensure your compliance.

The game tracks only two stats; loyalty to the regime, and readership. Each "day," you are presented with several news items, and must choose which to run in the paper, and how much prominence to give them. Your wife and children will suffer if you do not increase loyalty to the regime.

It's a simple scheme, and this bald description will perhaps make it seem banal; but there is a twist, which it were a spoiler to discuss, and the result grimly entertaining.

Ubongo is a competitive puzzler, a blend of Blokus and 'Take It Easy!'. Each player draws a unique random mini board with set of puzzles. A caller rolls a six-sided die to determine, via an index, which puzzle the players must solve individually, under a one minute sand timer. The games rewards players who solve the puzzle faster by giving them priority choice on victory point gems.

The puzzles are like tangrams in which the player fits three or four pieces from a twelve identical polyomino pieces into an outlined shape. There are thirty-six double sided boards with six puzzles on each side, totaling 432 different puzzles.

Korner Entertainment "ported" the boardgame to Win, Wii, DS, PSP, PS3, and iOS. It is the same game with addition of a solo campaign mode where you solve puzzles versus various villains for gems.

Abobo's Big Adventure is a crackpot homage to the NES, featuring Abobo, a boss from Double Dragon. It's a pretty vast game, for all its 8-bitness, given that it's Flash freeware.

Over the course of many levels, Abobo deals with a huge number of enemies -- seemingly every damn character that ever appeared in a NES game, though I'm sure that's not the case. The controls are NES-simple -- arrows to move, attacks with A and S -- but the gameplay changes drastically from level to level. At first, you think it's basically a Streetfighter-style game -- but the next level is more like an underwater Mario level.

Flying Sheeps is a pleasant little game with somewhat awkward controls. You control a hot air balloon; scattered in the skies above you are sheep attached to helium balloons, along with explosive mines, and the occasional flying wolf or biplane. Your goal is to avoid the enemies, intercept the sheep, and guide them back to earth, alighting in an enclosed pasture.

Your controls are to turn on and off the flame of your balloon; when on, your height increases, with increasing velocity over time; when off, your vertical velocity slows, and eventually you start to fall, again with increased velocity. Hovering is possible, by tapping the control. In addition, you can move left and right, but your craft has considerable momentum, so it's very hard to position yourself precisely.