Balanced Play in Social Deduction Board Games

You’ve been carefully observing the actions of the players around you, knowing full-well that they might not be who they claim. No, you’re not a character in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” or stuck at a speed-dating event. You are playing “The Resistance: Avalon,” a social deduction board game. Players in...

Scrabble Strategy: Board Position, Leaves, and Bingos

Scrabble was my greatest passion for many years. I played in many national and international tournaments during Middle School and High School. Throughout this time, I was immersed in an intriguing and vibrant community of Scrabble players, where I witnessed the game and its various strategies. What I found most...

On Trading Games

We talk a lot on this site about how various games are related to trading. Poker is our favorite example, but we’ve also mentioned Agricola, Magic: The Gathering, fantasy drafting, and even video games. One may notice, however, that we’ve never mentioned a board game that involves trading. Why is...

Fighting Games & Trading: The Game within the Game

At SIG, we most often compare trading to games of imperfect information, such as poker, where players possess different sets of information. This is in contrast to games of perfect information, such as chess, where players know everything about an opponent’s position and can respond sequentially to each of the...