The Touch Table

Supermarket

Based off a free, print-to-play solitaire game. Manage a grocery store and its customers.

Blackjack Tower

I was watching a game show, and the final game had some interesting press-your-luck mechanics. I modified those rules a bit, added multi-player solitaire elements, and added limited scoring tokens to make the game more exciting.

Bubble Pop 2

Dungeon Raiders 2

This is currently my favorite creation. It's a press-your-luck game in the style of Incan Gold, with rules that are best handled by a computer: dynamically changing rooms, adventures, computer players, and helpful stats. Plus, it only takes a few seconds to learn, so it's a great way to introduce the table.

I'm really proud of the insanely detailed rules I wrote.

Pair Soup

All you do is touch, at the same time, any two pictures that match until time runs out. This game is stupidly addictive, especially with its high score table. This game has been both a blessing and a curse at conventions: it quickly draws people in and gets the crowd excited, but I once played the game for 20+ hours in one weekend!

Fire Platoon

BioInfiltrators

There is a board game called Break the Safe where players cooperate to find the four keys in 30 minutes. There's a guard who can see in straight lines and a dog that can smell six spaces away. I added keys, a logic puzzle, and five different player roles. One of the technical things I was attempting was integrating virtual tablets onto the table. Players can connect to a web page either with their own tablet or one of the virtual ones on the tablet. We beat it on the hardest difficulty I created so the game doesn't get played much anymore.

Bubble Defender

This was the very first game for the first prototype of the Touch Table. That prototype was a web cam inside a box looking at a piece of glass that had a sheet of paper taped to it... it wasn't even a display, it just input touches. The game itself was a joke based upon a failed Shark Tank idea. Because it was one of the first games, it got played a lot. As a result, I tend to keep this game hidden.

Concentration Sweep

I tried combining Minesweeper with the classic card-matching game Concentration. I mixed up some bomb cards into the deck, and each player is trying to find the most matches while avoiding the bomb cards. It's an okay game, made with an older game engine. I plan to modernize this some day.

Fighter's Empire

As a teen, I loved playing Space Spartans. I got some ideas on how to turn it into a 4-player cooperative game and took a crack at implementing it. The first versions turned out to be a little too easy. I turned up the difficulty and added larger battle zones. I was able to beat the game with 1, 2, and 3 players, so it doesn't get played anymore.

I feel like I made a faithful recreation, so I'm pretty happy with the result. The feature I like the most is the save system. There are 10 levels, your problems carry between levels, but the game saves your progress after each. You can load the game at any previous point, and the save system create a branch starting from there. I got the idea from the game I was playing at the time, Papers, Please.

Heroes of 2073

Light Screens

Murderdrome

Spin Mummy Spin

There was an arcade game called Scramble, and TomyTronic made a handheld version in 1982. "Spin, Mummy, Spin!" is based off the final battle in that version. The basic idea is that there is an enemy behind rotating walls and if you completely destroy one of the walls, it rebuilds itself. My version allows 6 players, adds scoring and curses! Killing the mummy gets you 4096 points, but the bricks in the previous wall get you 1024. Be careful! If you hit a nearly destroyed (red) wall then your score halves, the wall rebuilds itself, and you take a curse. After 3 curses, you are eliminated from the game. If you hit the mummy, you remove a curse. If anyone hits the mummy with no curses then the game ends and highest scorer wins the game.

Twenty Questions Wrong

I watched a YouTuber named Tom Scott play a game called 21 Questions Wrong: answer 21 questions wrong in-a-row and if you get an answer correct you start over from the beginning. (The video doesn't appear to exist anymore.) I thought it was a pretty fun concept and implemented it. I wrote over 1000 questions by hand plus some code that automatically generates other questions (like simple math problems). This required me to also input the correct answers and one to five incorrect answers. The first version which had players starting over turned out not to be very fun because some people would be stuck on the same question. I later changed the penalty to going back two questions. This used the player's short-term memory which allowed them to recover more quickly.

Torres

Dawn Under

Fits

Silver & Gold

Echidna Shuffle

Glux

Tikal

This was one of the first board games I purchased, so I've played it a lot. Once I got comfortable with 3D in the Unity, I had to try making this game. This has a lot of features that the board game doesn't. While the players could calculate when the volcano might erupt, the game does the work including calculating the probability. The game notes when you can't move between hexes by placing small bushes between the hexes. Each player area shows the actions (like the board game), but it also includes a rule summary and the list of hexes that haven't been placed. When dragging workers between hexes, the game finds the shortest path (sometimes with surprising results given how tents work). Finally, and most important to me, it keeps track of how many actions you've taken and allows you to undo them without making any mistakes.

T'zolkin

Pixel Glory

Hansa Teutonica

This was the first board game conversion that was licensed and sold. I only had a 5-year contract (with the promise of renewal), but the whole concept of the Touch Table for casual board gaming never took off so I stopped selling the game. I upgraded all of the graphics in 2019 to support the new 4K TV. I hired a voice actor who had a good time recording the lines in an accent. The interface can feel clunky, but it does play faster and more accurately than the physical copy.

Princes of Florence

Caylus

Claim It!

Escape

Starship Factory

This is my retheming of the game Hollywood Blockbuster. Instead of making movies, you're building spaceships. The new theme fits so perfectly, you don't know it wasn't the original. I'm really happy with the audio effects I found and made for this game. I should probably take another pass at some of the tiny icons: they don't affect the game, but they get the most questions.

Starship Factory 2

This is my retheming of the game The Builders: Middle Ages. Instead of constructing buildings, you're building spaceships. The original game is fun, and I knew I could re-use my spaceship graphics for this game. While the game mechanics are quite different from Starship Factory/Hollywood Blockbuster, they share a theme where you have to match all the colors of a ship to finish it. Together, they make a cute pair of middle-difficulty games.

Tsrio

There's a fun, casual game called Tsuro where players move their ships through the waters by placing paths in front of their ship. If your ship leaves the board, you are out of the game. The winner is the last survivor. A friend took this game, modified the grid, made multiple boards, and added a space theme with wormholes. I took his game and made it for The Touch Table. Players have to connect with their phones, which stalls the beginning of what should be a casual game. I have plans to make the phone optional in the future.

Nexus

Ocean Raiders

Pet Store Detective

Power Grid

Yacht

Blockers

Can't Stop

Code Names

Gem Thieves

Quixx

Race to Klondike 5

Sparks! 3

This is a game that's really just for me. I designed and built a 3D version in Blitz Basic in the early 2000s. Years later, I wanted to use Unity to export a game to Android and as a web page, so I chose to remake this game. I play the Windows and Android versions a fair amount.

For the rest of the world, the game is in limbo. I have plans to upload a new web version and Android version, but I already have and play this version. With the dozens of things I still want to do, these new versions will take a while.

Solitaire Dice

This is one of the very first games I made... this video even has the older interface. This was a game by Sid Sackson that has some interesting strategies. I had made it twice before as a single player game, but the Touch Table provided a place for 6 people to get together to play one game. It's a hard game to learn, but everybody always wants a second crack at it after their first!

Bowling Solitaire

Poker Squares

Word Hunt

Ricochet Golf

Bubble Pop

Egyptian Ratslap

High Score

The Battle Home

In addition to Pair Soup, I made 4 other games as a commercial product with Mesa Mundi. The Battle Home is two ancient versions of the game Parcheesi. Bloody Hearts is the card game Hearts. Fas' Jack is 10 rounds of Blackjack with some very player-friendly rules. Got It! is a shooting game where you target dangerous cells for points. The first three games all have artificially intelligent players, allowing for as little as one human player (technically zero). These games don't get a lot of play, but they were fun to make and design.

Bloody Hearts

Fas' Jack

Got It!