Abouts

I’m Nick Drage, these are the current projects I’m working on: All the main projects, Eisenhower Matrix1 be dammed: Working on simple online game formats to help individuals or groups think through situations more effectively. These can be used individuals personally or professionally, or by larger groups or organisations. My last LinkedIn experiment is here, my next one if overdue. Helping run SPS’s Games Experimentation And Development Group, for professional designers of serious games, there’s more here. Preparing content for the Exemplar Strategies newsletter, abstracting strategies from their originating context to give you fresh inspiration when you’re stuck. Having co-written Random The Book, a book about randomness, I’m now helping generate further content for it. Preparing Water Water Everywhere ( more on the wiki), a game about flooding in East Anglia, in 2048; I think there’s huge possibilities in players immersing themselves in different scenarios over elongated asynchronous games, to think through options and solutions in a safe-to-fail environment. “High Fantasy Football”, an overly realistic simulation of a sport that doesn’t exist. I’ve enjoyed indulging my aeipathy2 over the last few years, but now it’s time to turn this into at least one of the following: Basic version - a combat results table based game between two players. Solo version - take your Order through a season of tournaments at your own speed. Commandery version - two groups face off against other, each managing different aspects of their Order. Story version - there’s a narrative in here somewhere, I just need to tease it out. Bubbling along, I’m trying to progress these while prioritising those projects in the section above: Building a proof of concept of being able to play “text and image” games against unseen opponents over common messaging protocols. Making my Critical Friend service clearer. A fantastical influence game, expected to be invite only. Modifying existing games for solo play, and the commercial possibilities and perils of that. Modifying an existing planning game, set in a fantasy environment, so it can be resolved by LLMs or other automated processes, for the education of players and facilitators alike. Having too much Linux in my life, and trying to make all my technology easier to manage. Finding a more appropriate theme for this blog. A downloadable cyber incident response game for between maybe ten to fifty players or more, along with guides for facilitation. ( DELAYED as of March 2026 ) Assisting in playtesting an educational game on the survival of ancient tribes, that may become a more generic survival game. ( DELAYED as of August 2026 ) Studying American Football board games, especially how they abstract player locations and how they manage simultaneous orders. ( DELAYED as of August 2026 ) More esoteric things, to remind me to mention them to people, unfortunately I’m not actively working on any of these: How could Zero Knowledge Proofs be useful in enabling players to exchange assumptions without exchanging knowledge in un-facilitated games? What is the offensive equivalent of DAMROD-C3; and what are the differences in red team thinking against an adversary, and against an idea? How can we measure the appropriateness of an analogy? My work website is here. ...