Take your games to the next level with advice from more than 60 of the best board game designers in the world. Game design is hard. We all need sound advice to guide our work and help us become better at the craft. In this book you'll find incredible wisdom and insight from the top designers in the industry today.

Do you love gaming? Do you have ideas for games of your own and want to learn how to produce them professionally? Longtime game designer Justin Gary has the answers you seek. After 20 years in the gaming industry, creating such games as Solforge, Ascension, and the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, Justin is now sharing all his secrets in Think Like a Game Designer. Best of all, Justin’s secrets are really simple, practical, and common sense steps you can take yourself.

Good games don’t emerge out of thin air. Game design is a craft, and as in any other craft, there are skills and knowledge, acquired through study and practice, that accelerate progress toward better games. You Said This Would Be Fun explores these skills, explaining how great games exhibit qualities that designers of all experience levels can strive to emulate.

Making a great board game and pitching it to publishers are two completely different things. If you've got a game that you want to share with the world but don't know what to do next, this book will help you navigate through exactly what steps to take.

The book guides you through a step-by-step process of making a commercial game. It teaches you how to learn all the necessary skills and covers various aspects of game development: mindset, preproduction, funding, business, law, development, marketing, PR, publishing, distribution, as well as pre-launch, launch, and post-launch strategies.

Developing video games—hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius.

The annual Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) Awards are like the Oscars of the tabletop. Acclaimed British author and games expert James Wallis investigates the winners and losers of each year’s contest to track the incredible explosion in amazing new board games. From modern classics like CATAN, Ticket to Ride, and Dixit to once-lauded games that have now been forgotten (not to mention several popular hits that somehow missed a nomination), this is a comprehensive yet hugely enjoyable study of the best board games ever made, penned by one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the hobby.

In The Monsters Know What They're Doing, Keith Ammann lightens the DM's burden by helping you understand your monsters' abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don't whip out their field manuals for the first time when they're already under fire, a DM shouldn't wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat.

With increasingly sophisticated video games being consumed by an enthusiastic and expanding audience, the pressure is on game developers like never before to deliver exciting stories and engaging characters. With Video Game Storytelling, game writer and producer Evan Skolnick provides a comprehensive yet easy-to-follow guide to storytelling basics and how they can be applied at every stage of the development process - by all members of the team.

As a veteran of six successful Kickstarter campaigns (and counting) and the proprietor of the Kickstarter Lessons blog, Jamey Stegmaier knows something about crowdfunding. In this audiobook, he goes beyond the nuts and bolts of how it works to a deeper level - crowdfunding not just as a cool way to raise money but as a better way to build and run a business.

Indie Game Publishing is the essential guide for indie game developers seeking to put their game into the hands of players. Whether you decide to self-publish or find a publisher to partner with, this useful guide will take you through each step of the process and thoroughly prepare you for success. This revised edition has been redesigned and tailored specially for the audiobook listener. Hear from experienced developers and expert publishers how they successfully released their games.

Writing advice tends to be full of "rules" and "tips" which are either too broad to be helpful or outright wrong. In On Writing and Worldbuilding, we will discuss specific and applicable ideas to consider, from effective methods of delivering exposition and foreshadowing, to how communication, commerce, and control play into the fall of an empire.

If You Can't Wholesale After This is a step-by-step guide to closing your first real estate deal without needing any of your own money or credit. It guides you through the process of becoming financially free through real estate investing.

There’s a reason it’s called a tabletop roleplaying game. Taking on the personae of different characters in the story brings a richness and depth to the experience and can make your game sessions exciting and memorable. But how can the poor, harried Game Master wrangle a whole slew of unique personalities on top of all the other work that goes into preparing each week? The Kobold Guide to Roleplaying has the answers you seek.

The new era of gamification and human-focused design optimizes for motivation and engagement over traditional function-focused design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate. However, few people understand how to merge the two fields into experience designs that reliably increases business metrics and generates a return on investment.

What type of business should you start? For the past 10 years, Inc. 500 CEO and number-one national best-selling author, Ryan Levesque - featured for his work in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Entrepreneur - has guided thousands of entrepreneurs through the journey of answering this question. One of the biggest reasons why so many new businesses fail is because in the quest to decide what business to start, most of the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Three short years ago, when Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote their best seller, Trust Agents, being interesting and human on the Web was enough to build a significant audience. But now, everybody has a platform. The problem is that most of them are just making noise. In The Impact Equation, Brogan and Smith show that to make people truly care about what you have to say - you need more than just a good idea, trust among your audience, or a certain number of fol­lowers.

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

You love Dungeons and Dragons. As an experienced dungeon master, you've run dozens, if not hundreds of games. You put a lot of work into making your games great. What if there's another way to look at how you prepare your game? What if it turned out you could spend less time and less energy and have a better game as a result? It's time to unleash the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Business consultant and former MGM director of creative affairs Stephanie Palmer reveals the techniques used by Hollywood's top writers, producers, and directors to get financing for their projects and explains how you can apply these techniques to be more successful in your own high-stakes meetings.

As Palmer has found, the strategies used to sell yourself and your ideas in Hollywood not only work in other businesses, they often work better.

Big new ideas rarely make great businesses. Laboring on a business plan can be a waste of time. You are going to need dramatically more start-up money than you think you do. Counterintuitive concepts like these have helped the world's best entrepreneurs succeed. Yet most of us only learn them the hard way. Len Green, an experienced investor, entrepreneur, and business professor, shares inside secrets and proven tactics for launching a business.

It’s the flight before Christmas and Molly just got an unexpected gift: a free first-class upgrade on her plane trip home for the holidays. Bring on the complimentary cocktails! But after one too many, she spills all her secrets to the hot guy seated next to her—only to wake up mortified when her buzz has worn off. At least she never has to see Liam again ... or so she thinks. When Molly arrives at Christmas House, the festive rental home that she and her family are sharing with her sister’s fiancé and his wealthy family, she discovers that Liam is one of the new in-laws. Oops.

Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it all: men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can't shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot. Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He's charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet. Then the brutal murder of a young woman—the latest in a string of deaths across the coast—confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before he kills them.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving - every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

Do you love gaming? Do you have ideas for games of your own and want to learn how to produce them professionally? Longtime game designer Justin Gary has the answers you seek. After 20 years in the gaming industry, creating such games as Solforge, Ascension, and the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, Justin is now sharing all his secrets in Think Like a Game Designer. Best of all, Justin’s secrets are really simple, practical, and common sense steps you can take yourself.

Take your games to the next level with advice from more than 60 of the best board game designers in the world. Game design is hard. We all need sound advice to guide our work and help us become better at the craft. In this book you'll find incredible wisdom and insight from the top designers in the industry today.

There’s a reason it’s called a tabletop roleplaying game. Taking on the personae of different characters in the story brings a richness and depth to the experience and can make your game sessions exciting and memorable. But how can the poor, harried Game Master wrangle a whole slew of unique personalities on top of all the other work that goes into preparing each week? The Kobold Guide to Roleplaying has the answers you seek.

In this groundbreaking audiobook, Amy Jo Kim lays out a step-by-step system for crafting products that people love...and keep loving. The secret? Develop “impossible to put down” products by using techniques that the fast-moving games industry employs when making games that glue millions of players to their screens.

The annual Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) Awards are like the Oscars of the tabletop. Acclaimed British author and games expert James Wallis investigates the winners and losers of each year’s contest to track the incredible explosion in amazing new board games. From modern classics like CATAN, Ticket to Ride, and Dixit to once-lauded games that have now been forgotten (not to mention several popular hits that somehow missed a nomination), this is a comprehensive yet hugely enjoyable study of the best board games ever made, penned by one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the hobby.