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Edge Magazine talks to Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Chris Hecker (SpyParty) about the state of independent games.

Salman Rushdie shares some thoughts about videogames.

This is brilliant.

Liven up your Christmas by remixing the boardgames in your house to make brand new games.

The Boardgame Remix Kit works with all the great family favourites. It’s got twenty five games that you can play using the boards and pieces you’ve already got.

As well as smoothing out or speeding up a standard game, the kit can turn Monopoly* into a family poker tournament, Trivial Pursuit* into a surrealist parlour game; Scrabble* into fight between a wasp and a robot, and Cluedo* into a zombie invasion.

This is a clever idea. It is a miniatures combat game—think Games Workshop—with an accompanying iPhone/iPad app to handle the record keeping and math. Units can gain experience, which will carry over to the later battles.

Ars Technica reviews Civilization V, which comes out today.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews Jon Shafer, the designer of Civilization V. They do things a little differently over there at Firaxis:

Well the thing about design at Firaxis is that it’s fairly unique compared to design at other companies. Most companies have a lot of specialised designers, so for an RPG you’d have quest designers and narrative designers, and area designers and maybe a lead designer that organises them all. The way it works at Firaxis is that there is a designer, and he is also the gameplay programmer who programs all the gameplay rules, and he also programs all the AI.

Harmonix responded to last week’s partial leak by revealing the rest of the setlist. Looks pretty good.

John Harris, writing for Gamasutra, talks about 20 of his favorite “real-world” games, by which he means non-electronic games.

I have a pet peeve when it comes to the fans, press, and developers of video and computer games. It’s pedantic, but I don’t care. The issue is this: so often they will refer to “gaming” as something that relates to the focus of their hobby alone. When you talk about gaming in such a manner, you are ignoring a rich tradition of culture, commercial games, and even sports, as if they were somehow of no account.

I’m not talking about cases where the meaning is obvious form context; I’m talking about people calling themselves “gamers”.Long before Pong, there was a healthy wargaming community. Professional sports has existed for centuries, and Chess has been played for thousands of years. Using the term “game” as if it related only to computer software is gross chauvinism.

A symptom of this chauvinism is that, often, video game designers’ influences come from a very small list. It seems almost like most designers have done little with their lives besides play games, read comics, and watch Hollywood movies.

Whether this is true or not, it is true that there is a super-abundance of pop cultural influence on game design. I consider this to be a grievous error, for it means that “hardcore” gaming has become insular.

Not bad as a canon of non-electronic games with which every game designer should be familiar. I would have left out Parcheesi, the Catan card game, and Munchkin. I would have included Diplomacy, Axis & Allies (or Risk), and Dungeons & Dragons.