Have you ever answered a rules question wrong on purpose, just to see how many people would believe you? Or is that too evil for someone in your shoes to try and pull?
No; I've left questions unanswered because they were about upcoming products, and I've failed to point out a rules hole that I knew existed but which players hadn't spotted.
Were there any new playtesters for Rising Sun? If so, do you know them online or in-person? (You don't have to name them if you or them don't want it revealed.)
Man, do they want to be revealed, dz? And do I secretly know you in person? That would be creepy. You started on MCB though.
What's more boring: picking cards for recommended sets, or naming them?
Write-in for answering questions about them.
It takes way longer to pick the cards than to name the sets, so that part is worse. Then we have to test them, but that part is fine, it's playing Dominion. For naming, the main issue is just, have I used this name already?
Do you still read Mark Rosewater’s Blogatog, and have you ever asked questions and/or sent him your thoughts on MTG that way? Do you have plans of starting your own version of Blogatog?
I think this is my Blogatog. I don't read it anymore (I've glanced at it once in a great while); I still look at previews for new sets, but it's gotten so that I don't even read all the cards there. Some are so wordy that it's a chore to read them.
I've never sent a question to Blogatog, but I've played games with Mark in person uh several times. I've been to the apartment he had, then the house he had, but not to the house he had after that one. We played my prototypes, back when I was nobody, and also my Magic cards. And two of his prototypes, neither of which has come out. He's talked about one in his column. This all went down from 1997-2003.
Years later I typed up a bunch of comments about how to fix up Magic - templates / rules / design - and email'd it to him. He replied but I don't think ever read all that stuff. They certainly haven't made any of the changes, even the most blatantly correct and easy ones. Once in a while I see how the templates have fallen even further, and think, I could poke him about that.
After finishing a new board game / expansion, do you take some time off, or immediately try to get a new project going?
I try to have multiple projects going at all times. Finishing an expansion isn't such a sharp dividing line; less and less is accomplished, it feels like it's about done, but until it's printed something could still change. Even when we stop playing it, it may come up, someone notices a wording that could be better, or I pull it out for some new players and then oops I should fix this. You can always make the game / expansion better; you just have to be done at some point.
So anyway. There have been periods where I played a bunch of games that weren't mine; just, my current projects weren't ready and well I like playing games. But it wasn't like I wasn't working on new games then; I just didn't have them ready to trot out.
I prefer working on multiple projects, so that when things stall on one I can look at another, or even, I can just take a break from one by working on another. Sometimes one project demands a lot of time though, so I get nothing or very little done on other projects, and this certainly happens with Dominion expansions.
Of course any given day might be time off. There's no real time pressure until the publisher has the game and things are moving forward there.
When you run out of cards / sleeves to use for a prototype, where do you get more? Do you resort to unsleeving your other prototypes?
I do unsleeve other prototypes, and also just buy sleeves online. Clear backs are better than colored backs - the colored-back sleeves tend to bend at the corners immediately, then break eventually - but sometimes a prototype has 3 decks and sure wants different backs, and while I can print out backs (I did for Temporum) it's easier to use colored-back sleeves. I buy heavy-duty awesome sleeves online, but in the past I had tons of cheap ones, and they're still floating around in prototypes, and still get reused.
Dominion's original sleeves went out of print, and while Sir Martin always pushes for resleeving everything, that's never happening. So now it has a mix of sleeves. Which isn't so different really, you could always tell the new cards from the backs due to wear on sleeves, which eventually becomes a thing. Those sleeves were amazing though, most of them are still functioning all these years later.
