Podcast Episode Details

Episode 349 – Up and Coming Games with Clarence Simpson

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This week we’re talking to Clarence Simpson, designer of one of our family’s favorite games!

349 Fact

Pepsi Number Fever… also known as “the 349 Incident”. Story Time!

Sponor: First Move Financial

If you’d like some advice about your student loans, go to FirstMoveFinancial.com/FamilyGamers and set up a free call.

Games We’ve Been Playing

Diatoms (coming soon to Kickstarter)
Dice Hunters of Therion
Andrew’s prototype
Avant Carde (coming soon to Kickstarter!)
Shipwreck Arcana
Big Top
Beer & Bread

SNAP Review – Dice Hunters of Therion

Enter a world of fantasy animal heroes and villains. As a bounty hunter, you want to earn the most money, through warrants and rolling coins on your dice. This dice-rolling game is good for families, up to four players.

Read the transcript or watch the video of our review.

Chatting with Clarence Simpson

Clarence has designed one of our family’s favorite games (Merchants of Magick) and Andrew first met him at PAX Unplugged 2021.

Other published games that Clarence had a hand in designing:

The Wolves (Pandasaurus)
Chomp (Allplay)

Let’s talk about design and prototyping!

“Just get it to the table,” is good advice for new designers. But at some point, it’s better to work through decisions before making a prototype (or changing one).

It’s important to present players with interesting decisions. If there’s always an obvious right choice, the decisions might not be interesting.

How did you get into making games?

“Seeds planted as a kid” – crafting a solo D&D dungeon for/with his dad… and also ridiculous fantasy dungeon crawl games.

Clarence forgot about that aspect and focused more on video games for a long time. In fact, his “day job” is in video game developmen

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Published on 2 years, 5 months ago