Bene Factum

My third game, Sultans of Karaya is a game of intrigue, deception and memory for large groups. It works best, I’ve found, with between 8 and 11, though it can be played with as few as 5 and as many as 15.

Although the game bears superficial resemblance to games such as Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow or The Resistance, it differs in three important ways.

Firstly, it breaks away from the “informed minority vs. uninformed majority” paradigm by making both teams approximately equal in power, and equally uninformed at the start of a round.

Secondly, and more importantly, a given player is not stuck with a single character (and alignment) for an entire round. Rather, cards are exchanged, and thus the objective of the game is not so much to identify one’s teammates and cooperate with them as it is to collect information for one’s own benefit and then connive, maneuver, and share information selectively in order to end up on the winning team at the end of the round.

Finally, the game is played in a series of rounds, with players accumulating points for siding with the winning team of each round, so there is one final winner – the one with the most points!

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Picnic Blitz is a dice game that I released shortly after Insidious Sevens. Like Insidious Sevens, it was loosely inspired by several classic dice games, such as Yahtzee and Nada, both of which my friends played a lot of in our university days, and Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop, which proved that a game can be mostly about rolling dice, yet still have a significant skill component.

Players control teams of six ants, one for each of the six tracks on the board, which in turn correspond to the six numbers on a standard die. At the end of each track is a food item, worth from 2 to 4 points depending on the length of the track. When an ant reaches a food item, the points are awarded to that player, and no other ants can progress on that track; however, the ant may be dethroned by the other players, in which case the player loses the points and the food is back up for grabs. The number of points needed to win depends on the number of players, but it can be very tricky to hang on to enough different food items simultaneously to reach that goal.

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Insidious Sevens was my first commercially published game. It’s a trick-taking game loosely based on the classic card game Oh Hell, which has been a family favorite for at least a couple of generations on my mother’s side. It made the GAMES Magazine Top 100 for 2012.

Insidious Sevens was born out of a desire to improve on Oh Hell, as despite my love for the game, it has many flaws that were apparent to me long before I started thinking of game design as a career. Although I started thinking about ways to refine the rules while still using a standard deck of cards, certain ideas led me to think it would be easier to work with a different distribution of cards, which in turn led to the decision to try to get it published commercially. The deck I settled on contains the numbers 0-7 in each of 5 colors, for a total of 40 cards.

Like Oh Hell and many other games in the genre, the basic goal of Insidious Sevens is to predict how many tricks you’ll win in each hand. You earn points for being exactly right, and lose points for being wrong, regardless of whether you take too many or too few.

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