Darkana Games

09/18/2021

11/22/2018

I work in the board game publishing industry, for North Star Games. Until recently, business has been good for publishers, due to years of rapid market growth. Now, everyone’s nervous. Sales are softening. Companies that seemed invincible are buckling. CMON, one of the strongest of the young gun c...

02/12/2018

Updated craft icons for Glyphmaster's Gateway. Which one is your favorite?

02/10/2018

Wrote a fine blog post on the lessons learned from a successful Kickstarter campaign.

It’s been a while since I ran a Kickstarter campaign, so I’m sure some of the features and limitations have changed, but I’m going to share with you some of the lessons I learned from running a successful Kickstarter. There are hundreds of these articles out there, but this one may shed some a...

02/09/2018

Sometimes I write blog posts and tutorials. This one is a little of both.

No, I don’t mean mechanisms in your game that simulate brainstorming by a player character, although that might be pretty interesting. I’m talking about my process for coming up with potential mechanics for a game while I’m designing it. I like to have as many options as possible during this p...

02/06/2018

Prototype game board and cards came today for Betaori. Super cool.

01/30/2018

Updated the Disaster Outpost board to reflect some of the changes. Much better. Old one on the left. New one on the right.

2 permanent Landing Zones, 1 resource grid, and 1 dropbox. Brig is now a Casualty Collection Point, and the Spread Meter in the top left is nicer.

01/24/2018

Also see: Disaster Outpost.

01/24/2018

Rehashing the mechanics for Track Attack. An oldie but a goodie.

01/22/2018

My little prototype kit. Tons of dice, tokens, meeples, gems, fake money, blank cards, sleeves, stickers, and other tools I use to make initial versions of games. - Dan

01/22/2018

This is how we play test games at Darkana studios. Prototypes are typically basic materials until we hash out the mechanics.

01/22/2018

Disaster Outpost game board