It’s been a wild one. 500+ Magic players met in Madison, WI to draft some cubes. Some were in it for the competition (top prizes provided by WotC and Daybreak Games), but I was there to draft the weirdest cubes I could. I’m a serial cube designer myself, and more than anything else I wanted to see some of the creative energy that other prominent designers were putting into their environments.

Another year, another Gen Con! I think if I had to classify this year, it’d be a Small Game Year for me: I picked up a few big boxes, but many of the stand-out games were smaller, less expensive titles. It certainly made packing my bags on the way back a bit easier!

It’s been a whirwind of a few weeks, but I’m now back home after having braved the crowds at Gen Con! I saw some old friends, escaped some rooms, ate at some food trucks, and played a lot of games. As is tradition, I didn’t get anywhere near completeing my list of games to demo, but I still managed to fill a second checked bag with games I absolutely do not have room for in my Kallax.

Here we are again a whole entire month later, and I’ve found a little more time to make some progress on Cardboard Where we last left off, I’d written an extremely simple layout model for prototype cards, and I was looking to expand it and then write a renderer. This weekend, I added a notion of Shape elements, which have a fill and stroke, and I defined one type of shape: a Rectangle.

Bit of a longer than ideal break due to Gen Con, but I returned from the con buzzing with ideas for various board/card game designs. So I turned my mind to prototyping. I’ve used a few different tools in the past (most notably Squib), but I’ve long wanted to build my own card prototyping tool (this is definitely the programmer in me). I’ve messed around with writing an iPad app in Swift, with card rendering in Quartz, but the level of effort required to get a nice interface for desinging layouts was more than I could devote to it.

The website launched! This week I published this very website, after doing a little fighting with git submodules, DNS, and git submodules again. Let’s get into it: AWS Amplify Setup I’ve used AWS Amplify in the past for static sites built with Hugo, and I’ve found it to be one of the simplest publishing platforms to set up sustainably (as long as you’re familiar with git and DNS configuration). The biggest upsides from my perspectives are that I don’t have to maintain the infra: Amazon sets up the underlying storage, a CloudFront distribution to handle traffic, and SSL setup.