How to Curate.Games
Using Small Catalogs to explore Big Themes
Welcome to Curate Games! And welcome to 2025. You may have found this by following a link to A Shuffle For Your Thoughts. You’re in the right place!
Curate.Games is a collection of writing about digital games, tabletop games, and sports. Each week I’ll recommend a cluster of 3 (to maybe 5) games around a theme or an idea and deliver it fresh to your inbox every Friday.
You’re not going to find top 10s, the new hotness or weekly rankings here. Instead it’s going to be a weekly gallery, a small, curated list of games based around a theme around games, a piece of game industry minutiae, or a personal story.
The goal of my writing is to introduce you to games you might play and enjoy. It’s also to help people understand games and how they enrich and deepen our lives, even if they never play a single one I recommend.
While you might imagine this is primarily focused on game mechanics, the bigger idea is about what we get out of games we play and what designers do by designing them.
If you know someone who might be interested share it with them!
While my past writing might not be a perfect example, I think my best pieces have elements of the sorts of themes and comparisons I want to focus on moving forward. Here are a few examples:
Pop Game Design is changing the way we play
For as long as I can remember the concept of “being a gamer” has been deeply connected to the idea of “nerd culture”. If you played games you likely loved Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Fantasy and Sci-fi.
The Best Sudoku
Intro Two things happened within quick succession for me last summer: Zach Gage released his new app Good Sudoku and I discovered the Miracle Sudoku YouTube clip which swept the internet. What I did not expect to happen was having my preconceptions about the relationship between puzzles, games, and user design altered.
And Finally…
In the spirit of new beginnings and opportunities, I want to pick a few games that represent the breadth of “what games can be” for me.1 If I had to pick three games to show the gamut of how game design works and what it is, these are probably the ones I would pick. It’s not that these are the best of their genre, it’s because they represent the most apparent capital-D design in games.
… a list.
Three Games that show what Game Design Can Do
If I had to pick a short list of games that represent the broadest span of the magic of game design, I would want to find three that cross a variety of mediums and ideas. This list is also probably somewhat personal, as it’s three games that launched right when I was starting my journey with games and design.
Threes (2014), by Sirvo
Threes is a gold standard of the golden age of phone games. It’s built for a phone, you can play it quickly and it unfolds as you give it more time. All you have to do is swipe up, down, right or left. That simplicity unfolds into a game about working with restrictions to push a number ever higher and discover new and Its more popular clone (2048) absolutely took the world by storm on release.
Johann Sebastian Joust (2014), Die Gute Fabrik
Released as a mini game on Sportsfriends for Playstation, Johann Sebastian Joust is like what if tag was a sport where everyone was it and also not it at the same time. It took advantage of the Move controllers’ accelerometers to track how players were moving. The goal of the game is to get players to move too quickly and alert their controller, while keeping yours steady and stable. It’s compelling blend of physical and digital play. Now if only someone could make a version for Apple Watch…
King of Tokyo (2011), Iello/Richard Garfield
There’s a lot of smart elements in King of Tokyo, the few options, the repurposing of the Yahtzee. But I think the cleverest of all is the attack rules. You don’t choose who to attack. If you’re in Tokyo you attack everyone else, and if you’re outside of Tokyo you attack the person in Tokyo. This simplified version of king of the hill eliminated politicking and focused the game on risk reward decisions. It also has a clear theme that taps into pop culture while communicating the goal to players.
Welcome to Curate.Games!
And that’s all for now!
I’m looking forward to the year ahead in games and excited to share it with y’all.
Before you ask, no, this is not an exhaustive list.