The Ludology site is about providing an analytical discussion of the how's and why's of the world of board games. Rather than news and tgreviews, Ludology explores a variety of topics about games from a wider lens, as well as discuss game history, game design and game players.
Dice Tower Network Podcast: Ludology
Ludology Episodes
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Sen and Gil chat with game designer Carol Mertz, senior game designer at Exploding Kittens. Carol has worked on many Exploding Kittens games, like Hand To Hand Wombat, Exploding Kittens: Recipe for Disaster, and Exploding Kittens: 2-Player Version. She's also known for her own designs, especially the wildly creative HELLCOUCH, the only couch co-op that uses an actual couch.
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Scott rassles up the tangled history of the Western-themed social deduction game Bang!
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Gil and Sen sit down with game designer and chronicler Aaron A. Reed to talk about his project 50 Years of Text Games, in which he covered one important game for each year between 1971 and 2020. The project will be made into a book.
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2m21s: The Oregon Trail
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Geoff tells us about MENACE; not Phantom or Dennis, but the Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine, which Donald Michie designed in 1961 as a relatively simple AI that would allow anyone to see how a machine could be trained to get better at a task.
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Erica and Gil chat with returning guest Banana Chan and our own Sen-Foong Lim about designing their game Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. What's it like making a game about a specific demographic, and who is this game for?
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Scott takes us through the history of the classic word game Scrabble.
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Gil and Sen chat with game designer, developer, and polyhedral dice addict Sydney Engelstein of Indie Game Studios about how to pitch your game to a publisher, the process of designing and developing Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, coming up with new narrative for Aeon's End, and what kinds of theater would best be adapted into a board game.
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Geoff chats with Mikael Le Bourhis of Asmodee Research and Game In Lab about the work they are doing studying the impact of tabletop gaming on society and life.
You can find out more information from Game In Lab here.
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Erica and Sen chat with localization expert, "gaming handyman," and occasional street busker Matthew Legault of Scorpion Masqué to discuss what it takes to move a game from one language to another.
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In this classic Biography of a Board Game, Scott takes us through the sweet history of the kids' game Candyland.
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