David Wilkinson is the designer of Castles of Caladale, a unique tile-laying game, designed with family play in mind.

Castles of Caladale was published last March by Renegade Games. We were first introduced to it at PAX Unplugged. The original design was inspired by Dave’s youngest son, who was using big chunky wooden blocks to build towers and castles while Dave was thinking about tile-laying games like Carcassonne.

Three themes: stone castle, Tudor manor, and fairy tree. Players draw tiles from a face-up set of 9; themes have to match themes (much like Carcassonne). The goal is to make the biggest castle and have a complete castle (sky all around). You are allowed to re-arrange your tiles at any time – an idea that came directly from Dave’s kids.

Available at Barnes & Noble – “the national friendly local game store”. Look for it there!

Time Cross Arena: A real-time card-based game for 2 players. Two gladiators are fighting to impress the crowd and gain the most glory. The time-keeping mechanism is “the time cross” – two sand timers mounted perpendicularly in a frame. When one timer is running, the other one is paused. Each round is only 2 minutes long!

In the Blink of an Eye: a fast-moving social deduction game for 4-8 players. Each player has a “target” to contact, but someone is also trying to target you! There is a 90-second window in which you try to make contact (winking, nodding, talking, etc), while also looking out for who else is trying to contact each other. The person who can deduce the most connections correctly wins the round.

Dice Runners: real-time dice rolling game. Escape an alien ship, running through several (randomly-selected) rooms to make it to the escape pod. Starts cooperative and usually devolves to semi-cooperative (depending on how much space there is in the escape pod). Each player has five dice, to be rolled until you get the result you want. Then grab an initiative token and choose how to use the dice result. If the aliens catch you, you become “infected” and exchange a normal die for a green “alien” die. If you are infected too many times, you become an alien and start working against the rest of your (former) team. Still in early play-testing.

We are The Family Gamers, so we have to ask you what a family game night looks like in the Wilkinson household.

Mrs. Wilkinson prefers abstract games or old-school classics such as Scrabble, Yahtzee, and Quoridor.

Dave and the boys like Pandemic Legacy, King of Tokyo, Tokaido, Takenoko, and Carcassonne (of course), among others.

Dave’s website: wilkgames.weebly.com

Twitter: @wilk1dave

Email him: [email protected]

 

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