I used to play games like Monopoly, Scrabble, chess, and so forth with my family. My mom and I spent a lot of time on the road, playing games like Botticelli and 20 Questions, and my grandfather taught me how to play license-plate poker. (For real money!)

My mom's family also has a house version of Pitch which was a perennial favorite. Learning to play this game was a part of growing up. My grandfather (the license-plate poker player) is the family champion, mainly because he's crazy enough to bid on just about anything.

I think as a kid I played games because it gave me something to do with the grownups. I was sometimes a sore loser, but in retrospect I think this happened when I was beaten by the game, not by the players. That's why I try to write simple games, to avoid that feeling that there's something you were too stupid to get.

What are some of your current favorites?

I don't play a lot of hobby games, and rarely have. Currently, my favorite games are all casino games: blackjack, poker, craps. As a designer, I'm fascinated by the apparent contradictions in a game like craps. There is absolutely no strategy to the game, aside from choosing the single best bet (or, really, not playing at all) -- yet people will play it for hours, usually without even understanding the rules. A lot of casino games behave like this: slots, mini baccarat, roulette, take your pick.

Poker is fascinating for other reasons: Poker is all about psychology. Figuring out how smart somebody else is, what they are thinking, what they are trying to make you think. Sure, there's a lot of math you can get into. But it's all tempered by the fuzzy facts about who you're playing with and what they might be holding.

When and why did you start designing games?

I designed a chess variant in high school, called Tishai (currently free on my web site). Before that, I'd come up with a few simple things, but I worked on Tishai for months. It was part of a fantasy novel which I never finished. Which explains the ridiculous name.

After Tishai, fast-forward to the mid-90s, when Wizards of the Coast released Magic. I knew some folks there, and we all decided that Wizards needed a TCG to appeal to younger kids. (Yes, a crazy idea, I know. But we were young and foolish.) I wrote a simple TCG called Hero, and tried to sell it to them. They wasted a lot of my time and eventually bought the rights, with the understanding that this game would never get published.

During the same time, I was beginning to collect the ideas which would eventually become the first wave of Cheapass Games: Get Out, Huzzah! and Kill Doctor Lucky.

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