It's nice that I was able to make a little something for the people I love and it turned out to have much wider appeal than I initially thought.

There's no such thing as bad game mechanics, only bad uses of game mechanics, and I love how much Magical Athlete shows that off.

Definitely a board "game" collector rather than a board "games" collector.

I always tend more towards collecting animation, and I prefer the weirder stuff, so Angry Beavers was a nice find. That stuffed toy sounds pretty neat though.

If I'm recalling correctly, Square Enix has enjoyed throwing itself bodily on all the stupid scams for awhile now.

I once had to have a conversation with a publisher I was working with that basically went like, "Look, you hired me to design you a game, and you signed off on the design doc, and I designed it, and now you want an entirely different game. But you didn't hire me to design you two games, so no."

It depends. Sometimes it's twenty, sometimes it's zero. Like, I'm willing to entertain reasonable changes to a design if there's decent reason for it. But when publishers start just wanting something "different" almost all of that patience has been burnt out of my soul already in my career.

I don't mind thinking out loud in meetings. I do it all the time. The make or break for me always comes down to the level of expected compliance with off-the-cuff ideas. If I say something isn't viable but then have to exhaustively prove it, well, maybe a bigger conversation needs to happen.

Hahaha, sometimes publisher suggestions are really interesting and lead a designer down new trains of thought, and other times they're clearly ass-pulls that were thought about for less than 10 seconds. It's kind of weirdly reassuring to me that even Sackson had to deal with that stuff.

It was great even before the fabulous visual update and scoring massaging.