This is an odd and uneven book that's more about games publishing than game design per se. Tom Vasel is the head of the Dice Tower podcast, and in this book puts together a bunch of interviews with game industry professionals, all conducted around 2005. There's a solid cross section of the hobby here, from Avalon Hill grognard wargamers, to Essen-style German family game designers, from big publishers like Steve Jackson to people who run monthly email lists about games. There are dips into collectible card games and roleplaying games, but the focus is primarily on board games and strategy games.

Interviews are a tricky business, and at over a decade's remove this feels like a whole different universe. Not a word to be said about Kickstarter (though GMT's P-500 system for preorders before a game is published is an interesting twist), andBoardGameGeek.com is just one site, instead of an 800 gorilla. It's the internet as a faster version of mail-order businesses, not social media virality. The interviews require a fair bit of prior knowledge about games. I consider myself a hobbyist, and I was somewhat lost.

This leads to my main problem with the book, which is that in theory it's set up as one component of a college course on game design. There are study questions in the front, and an example syllabus from George Phillies in the back, but I honestly couldn't see using much more than Greg Costiyikan's essay "I have no words and I much design" as assigned reading. The rest is too unfriendly, or too uneven in quality.

Worth your six dollars, maybe not worth the hours it takes to read, an certainly hardly modern by this point.