Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column about card games, board games, and everything else non-digital.

I'm a little late for Halloween, but that shouldn't mean I have to miss out on all the spooky fun. Luckily, Looney Labs have sent along Zombie Fluxx, a standalone expansion to their ever-popular card game with the ever-changing rules.

Zombie Fluxx isn't just a clever re-skinning of the original, but rather a new set of rules and cards built on to the existing mechanics. The base game remains the same: 2-6 players amend and append the game's starting rules, while attempting to win by collecting Keepers to meet the conditions of the goal, which is constantly in a state of, well, you know.

This time around, Looney Labs have included some new mechanics to spice up the gameplay. Zombies enter the fray as "Creeper" cards. Unlike the helpful Keepers the Creepers can actually prevent players from winning, as some goals dictate that a player needs to be zombie-free to claim victory. Unlike all other cards, Creepers go immediately into play once drawn, rather than into the player's hand, making every draw from the deck a possible immediate zombie encounter.

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

Looney Labs -- makers of Fluxx and those bizarre Icehouse pieces -- are once again in their element with Chrononauts, a time-traveling card game that is almost too clever to work. Almost.

Unlike other games, it's the complexity of Chrononauts that saves it from mediocrity. With a heady central "timeline" mechanic, and a 44-page booklet of rules that reads like an operations manual for the Flux Capacitor, it would be pretty easy for the crunchy game to fold under the weight of its own ambition. Luckily for Looney, time travel was never meant to be easy, and it's too damn fun hopping through history to allow a little bit of complexity to get in the way.

Shortly after Joystiq reviewed Pink Godzilla Dev Kit, the game went out of stock (Coincidence? We think not!). In the interim, Pink Godzilla Games have been working on a brand new version of the video game-themed card game, with higher quality printing and packaging, and some slight tweaks to the rules. The brand-new, revamped version of PG Dev Kit is now available for purchase, either at the funky Pink Godzilla game store in Seattle, or online.

For the un-initiated, Pink Godzilla Dev Kit is a card game about developing video games. Published by the video game store (and ping-pong players) Pink Godzilla Games, the game features a central "game development" mechanic, and parodies a variety of existing video game properties.

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

We've been paying a lot of attention to James Ernest over the past few weeks. As the founder, president, and lead game designer at Cheapass Games, he's responsible for a slew of analog games, including Diceland, Enemy Chocolatier, Kill Doctor Lucky, and many others. Despite his busy schedule, Ernest was able to answer a few questions for Off the Grid, and allow us to pick his brain on a variety of topics.

Let's talk a bit about your history. How did you start doing game design? What brought you into the field?

There's probably a fine line between "designing" and "making up" games. I've been making them up forever. In high school I actually designed a chess variant as a key plot element in a fantasy novel. It's not so much a chess variant as a "game you can play with chess pieces," since all the pieces have different moves and different names. I was so interested in making sure the game worked that I spent most of my time testing the game, and not much time working on the novel. I eventually published the game as "Tishai" through Cheapass Games, first as a stand-alone title and later as part of a Chief Herman collection. The novel is, well, pretty much nowhere.

From what I understand, you left Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast to start Cheapass Games. What sort of work were you doing at Wizards, and what prompted the change?

I did work for Wizards of the Coast in various jobs from 1993-1995, but it was never the job I wanted. There was a round of layoffs in 1995 and I volunteered to be among them. At that point I'd designed one CCG that Wizards had optioned (they never published it), and I was building up a collection of original games that I was pretty sure I'd never sell, either to Wizards or anyone else. So I took some of those games and a couple of new ones, and started Cheapass Games in 1996.

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

James Ernest's games are nothing if not creative. Give me the Brain!, from way back in 1997, is a card game set in a fast-food joint, which just happens to exclusively employ zombies. Oh yes.

Each player acts as one such undead employee, as all players compete to be the first flesh-muncher to leave at the end of the workday. At first glance, it's a simple card game concept: the first player with no cards remaining is the winner. The catch is the brain -- there's only one of them between all of the players, and you're going to need it to get a lot of the jobs done.

Still on the topic of card games, it's really become tough keeping track of them all. You have your TCGs (the card game), CCGs (collectible card games), and CSGs (constructible card games), not to mention the CCGs of Star Trek: TNG (The Next Generation). Probably. Whenever we sit down to play a card game, whether it be Magic: The Gathering, or the World of Warcraft card game, or even Go Fish, we get bogged down by certain rules. Printed instructions like, "Must tap to save before using. Tap once to use, or double tap to reuse. Rinse wash repeat," usually lead to arguments, fist fights, and games abandoned halfway through.

Not so with Sony Online Entertainment's new deck of PC-based card games.

As with the wildly popular Uno, Xbox Live Arcade is once again becoming a safe alternative for those that love card games but are utterly terrified of coming into contact with actual cards. This Wednesday, May 16th, sees Soltrio Solitaire sliding onto the service, offering "a collection of 18 compelling solitaire games" at 800 MS Points ($10).

We feel particularly compelled to tell you about the game's "Voyage Adventure" mode, which has you traversing a map and playing different versions of Solitaire to unlock new card designs. Naturally, no Xbox Live Arcade game is complete without mutliplayer options, and so Soltrio Solitaire defies its lineage by providing two-player cooperative and competitive modes. Why not grab a friend and spend a quiet afternoon playing virtual cards? It's not like there'll be anything else to play.

[Via Xbox 360 Fanboy]

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

Rules are awesome. If you're a fan of games, this is an inescapable truth for you. Every game you play is comprised of a set of rules, ranging from elementary to near-incomprehensible. If it's a digital game, the rules are there; you just can't see most of them. If it's an analog game, though, it becomes your job as a player to know the rules. How else are you supposed to play?

Certain clever game designers have recognized the sheer importance of rules in game design, and have even recognized design itself as a sort of game. The result is games that are about rules – games that make and break their own rules as they're played. The most well-known of these rule-based games is Richard Garfield's Magic: The Gathering. But we're not dealing with that right now.

The most accessible of these rule-based games, however, is a little family game called Fluxx, designed by self-proclaimed hippy Andy Looney over at Looney Labs.

Thanks to the thunderous celebration and endless trumpeting that accompanied Microsoft's announcement of XBLA Wednesdays, not many became aware of an UNO patch sheepishly arriving on the scene. The update fixes a rather glaring fault in the game's ranked matchmaking system -- the glaring fault being that it didn't actually work.

The update (downloaded automatically next time you play) also addresses "other bugs" and improves theme deck support. Though the game remains a Joystiq favorite and is amusingly inexpensive, developer Carbonated Games still deserves a specially designed + 32 card for letting these errors slip through. We might have been more forgiving had the game supported voice recognition. Seriously, it just has to recognize one word. Just UNO.

[Via GameSetWatch]