• In October 2018, Nathan Beeler and Jonathan Franklin posted a pair of articles on Opinionated Gamers about an Amazon game day that they had attended, with this being an event hosted by Amazon in the giant greenhouse spheres they'd built in Seattle, with game demonstrations courtesy of Asmodee representatives.
They write that the purpose of the event seemed unclear as surely Amazon wasn't providing this space as a mere courtesy to Asmodee and surely Asmodee hadn't rented this massive space in order to demo a half-dozen upcoming releases for a dozen-ish media people. Part two details the games played, while part one speculates on why this event was held in the first place and what it might indicate for Amazon's future place in the game industry.
• Also in Oct. 2018, Fantasy Flight Games founder Christian T. Petersen posted a long article about the "Unique Game" concept seen in recent releases KeyForge and Discover: Lands Unknown. As with the invention of calculus, the concept of unique games has two independent creators: Eric M. Lang and Richard Garfield. Garfield is understandable given that he's the designer of KeyForge, but how does Lang fit in the picture? An excerpt from Petersen's article, starting with a conversation in early 2015:
I suggested perhaps we were thinking too small. Perhaps we could create an entire game that was unique, not just a component. If the design was built from the ground up with such a concept in mind, we should be able to craft a completely unique product by clever assortment of different (traditionally produced) components.
Eric immediately took this variation of his idea and began to run with it. Perhaps each game represented a unique planet in a galaxy that would be colonized by players? Perhaps we could augment with a digital interface?
Independent of this, in 2015 Garfield approached Days of Wonder with a head-to-head card game called "Technic", and the DoW rep suggested Garfield approach FFG since Days could not do justice to what he had in mind:
What more, Richard's prototype included random name generation and procedural illustration of card backs for each deck. In other words, each deck would have its own unique name, its own unique art, and its own unique play personality!
• In September 2018, Rick Lane at PC Gamer published a long article titled "The Making of Pandemic Legacy", with lots of background detail from designers Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau.
• Designer David Smith, best known for the 1980 abstract strategy game Trax, died in July 2018. BGG user Mike Fogus posted this appreciation at the time.
• In April 2018, designer Grant Rodiek posted an overview of three models for bring a game design to market — licensing it to a publisher, publishing it yourself on a large scale, and publishing it yourself as a "pop-up" product — and explained why the pop-up model works best for what he's trying to do: