How would you sell a 3D food printer? What about a biodegradable toothbrush? Or an easy one: a lovely cup of coffee?

In this social card game, you are tasked to do just that, but with a twist. Players take turns to be a "pitcher" and sell a product from their hand to the rest of the group. However, when they finish their pitch, everyone submits a card, which is then shuffled and shown. Everyone must guess which product they think is the pitcher's and will score points for anyone they trick. The pitcher has the most difficult job, as they will not receive any points if everyone guesses their product.

Pitch Please was a board game that could only exist thanks to the iterative powers of software. Creating a React app to design cards allowed me to quickly dial in the look and feel of the game and prototype different rules and mechanics with ease.

Using AI to generate the imagery fit well with the 'startup' premise of the game. It allowed me to easily create any product, no matter how wacky. The biggest challenge with the implementation of AI was in generating a consistent style so that the game felt cohesive.

Odd Topix is a quick party game of talking and deception. The rules are simple: fulfill your prompt and include your given words. If the other players successfully guess any of your words, you're out!

I created Odd Topix as I wanted to explore the physical manufacturing process. One of the advantages in the world of software is speed to market and iteration. Having spent my career in that world, I thought it was important to gain hands-on experience with a practical project. The lead times and costs involved in physical manufacturing really highlighted the advantages of software, and I quickly realized the benefits of using software to prototype and iterate on the game design before manufacturing the final product.

After all the work of development, the final choices of card stock, packaging type, and printing process were much more nerve-wracking and difficult than I had anticipated. Once the game was in my hands, I was so excited by the result and still find it hard to believe that this real physical product was something I created.

The question is... can you guess the Odd Topix I was given for this post?

"Shout 'Em Out" is a re-envisioning of one of my childhood favorite games. The premise is simple: each card contains a category. The opposing team simply needs to try and guess the top 10 answers to that category... the catch? You're not looking for the right answers, you're looking for the ones LLMs circa GPT-3 think are the right answers.

The game was created to explore LLMs and OpenAI's API. Although far from the models we see now, I was blown away by the demos I was seeing and wanted to experiment with it myself. I created a simple app to propose categories and parse the responses into lists of answers. This tool gave me easy access to regenerate or nudge responses, as well as to correct Americanized spelling or remove duplications.

Once I had my categories and answers, I created a React app to generate the cards using print CSS queries, easily printing off the final version. This was the day I learned that I hate styling print media :). The software allowed me to easily generate over 100 cards and iterate on the design and layout with minimal effort.

The final product was a fun game that I could play with friends and family, but also a great learning experience in the power of AI and the benefits of software in the physical world. It also taught me a valuable lesson in the capabilities and dangers of AI, most importantly the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) biases that these models have and can represent.

Living through the 2008 financial crisis and subsequently reading The Big Short, Flash Boys and Liar's Poker, I was shocked. Shocked not just by the despicable actions, functions, and mechanics on show when you peeked behind the curtain, but also by my own (and, by my estimation, quite a few others') complete opposite understanding belief of the rules and regulations in place.

I made the party game "Let's Commit Fraud!?" as a direct response to these feelings, trying to capture the absurdity of how blatant problems were by using a satirical card game to make my point.

The game loosely mirrors one of the big factors in the 2008 crash. Players are dealt a hand of cards that can consist of 'resources' and 'effects'. Resources have a value, a type, and a risk rating.

Each round, players place as many cards face-down as they want into a central pot (CDO). Players are free to add or remove cards until they come to a consensus, after which all the cards are revealed.

First, all the effect cards in the pot are activated. These might return resources to a player's hand, protect a certain type of resource, or make a player exempt from any consequences.

After that, all the remaining resources' risk factors are totaled, and if they exceed a certain threshold, the CDO is 'toxic' and will blow up, forcing any player without protection to draw a consequence card. These consequence cards affect all players' assets, even banked ones, often wiping people completely out.

When all players' cards are gone, the financial year is over, and banked assets are added to the players' score.

This gameplay provides a tantalizing opportunity to bluff, lie, and cheat your way to victory and aims to mirror the risk vs. reward mentality that was so prevalent in the real world. The obvious answer is to work together, but with the ever-looming pressure to win and the constant threat of a backstab, can you be trusted not to lawyer up and go for the jugular?