Author: Jeff

My Kingdom for a Skull: A Review of Tribes of Balbur

June 11, 2017

I stumbled across this game because one of the pixel artists I follow on twitter did the art for the game and posted about it. Saint’s pixel art tutorials are a thing of beauty and to see the rich hand drawn line art in this game really conveys his range of competence as an artist.… [ Read More ]

On Birthdays and counting to 253

April 19, 2017

There is a well known math problem, that is supposed to shake our intuition about numbers, known as the birthday problem. The premise is how many people would there need to be in a room to have a 50% chance of at least 2 people having the same birthday. Before we move ahead a similar… [ Read More ]

Jack’s Friends Part III: The Long Road to Essen

March 29, 2017

In order to understand how Jack’s Friends came to be, it is important to take a step back in time, to the early part of 2015, to when my brother and I had decided to really make a play at designing board games. We had been kicking around a number of ideas for a good… [ Read More ]

Jack’s Friends Part II: Computed Fairy Tales

March 22, 2017

From that very first playtest I saw an immersive experience that was widely accessible and simple enough that it practically teaches itself. The problems however, were wide enough to drive a truck through. Every three player was won by the giant and every four player game was won by the humans. This was without exception… [ Read More ]

Jack’s Friends Part I: Origin Story

March 15, 2017

Jack’s Friends is a game near and dear to my heart and its origin dates back to simpler times. As a kid games were still a collective delusion and propriety had not yet shackled wonder. The measure of a game was not its balance or even its fun but the depths of its immersion. From… [ Read More ]




piggybank games.  Creators of Jacks Friends. Ⓒ 2023 Piggy Bank Games