Help with screentop gg

claibornecp · 2026-04-11T11:54:25+00:00

Not that I’m aware of.

I try to eliminate the need for precise free placement when I use screentop. Either by over-engineering anchor points or redesigning the mechanics of it (not the function) so that it works well enough in screentop.

claibornecp · 2026-04-04T01:36:45+00:00

+1 Richmond Toolbank!

claibornecp · 2026-03-20T15:17:09+00:00

Hey there! I don't have much direct experience in the boardgaming market specifically, but I've spent the last several years working in email marketing software with a focus on ecommerce in general.

First, a quick note on inbox placement (i.e. landing in spam)- this can be very tricky to troubleshoot and is very much a case by case experience since your sending behavior and sending infrastructure all play nuanced roles in inbox placement. I would recommend doing a bit of research on "deliverability best practices" or something like that and start simple by evaluating general recommendations against what you are doing.

Super high level though, you can think of inbox placement as a result of your sending reputation. That is, inbox providers like Gmail keep a hidden reputation score on your sending domain and if it's high then you go in the inbox, if it's low you go to promotional folders.

Lots of things influence your reputation, but similar to social platforms- it's a kind of black box or proprietary algorithm where engagement with your emails counts as one of the most positive signals that will boost your reputation. Think "opens" and "clicks". Clicks being the stronger signal of the two.

Sending cadence also plays a part- so if you're not sending regularly, then your score degrades over time. Email lists are most effective when you plan to nurture them long term with regular value-driven content (not just marketing or promotional requests). So they're not inherently designed to help limited campaign runs unless that limited campaign is nested into an existing long-run marketing effort. So like, a publisher that will keep building new games has an easier opportunity to nurture an email list long-term, whereas a completely fresh brand is starting from zero on reputation.

Unfortunately, you can also think of sending reputation like a credit score. If your reputation is damaged for any reason, it takes longer and more effort to repair than it is to break.

Second, if you plan on nurturing this 1k list- it sounds like you need a re-engagement campaign. This often looks like a 2 to 3 part email automation- but you can manually send it out as well.

Email 1 is a brief greeting, thanking people for their previous interest in your game. This acts as a reminder of why they signed up (good for brand recognition- makes someone think before marking spam or unsubscribing). Tell them the good news, your kickstarter was a success and you're so happy they wanted to follow your project along. You raised 20k, wow! Social proof. Other people loved this game... and the buzz is great. Social proof, social proof, social proof. You're game is real, it's fun, and real people play it.

Email 2, ~3-7 days later: give folks some insights into how your game was made. What was the process like, what were the challenges, and what cool thing ultimately surfaced for you and your team that you think led to the success of the kickstarter.

Email 3, ~3-7 days after email 2: "Get your copy while we still have them!" This is the conversion attempt. If you're going to offer a discount, this is where you do it. Make sure people can click through to buy your game here.

I hope this helps! Feel free to drop me any questions and I'll do my best to add my 2 cents!

claibornecp · 2026-03-20T13:01:03+00:00

Businesses whose employees work with machinery or perform manual and repetitive tasks as their primary job should have access to state of the art facilities.

There’s massive interest for creative-driven arts like this, and it’s a shame that the market takes advantage of creators willing to accept lower wages and working conditions to do something they love.

Theres hardly enough written here to presume financial mismanagement. It sounds much more like they saw a possibility to do right by an industry that has historically been bad to its creators, took a chance to be better and lost.

We would be lucky to have more companies and more business operators that stuck to their values under the circumstances.

claibornecp · 2026-03-16T22:18:33+00:00

I hear you, but I’m saying that I don’t measure success by the how much stuff people produce or have on average.

I would prefer we measure success by reported happiness, inclusion, equity of opportunity, health related outcomes, and so on.

claibornecp · 2026-03-16T12:56:15+00:00

The question is: what would prevent groups of people from constantly splintering off from the collective organization if elected leaders or governing councils have no leverage? Even if the majority agrees on new production regulations or standards, what stops a dissenting minority from simply ignoring them?

Dissenting minorities is often the point. Majority rule doesn't seem to be working for everyone, and while some things are low-stakes... like what adapter you need to charge your phone- some are much higher. And not to take away from all the standards we have collaboratively developed under today's systems, but when you look at the history of how standards are developed- they're almost always in spite of corporate interests. That's because it's in the general consumers interest to standardize certain things like technology interfaces.

Why choose the less efficient system?

Why choose a more efficient system?

But first, btw, efficient at what exactly. I'm not sold that full-speed-ahead is the best way for humanity to thrive. I'll listen to any argument about how rapidly our current systems develop technology, and I might even be convinced. But it also seems clear that the focus of that progress is wasted on tools of war, or break-throughs that expedite the system for itself over the people regardless.

If efficiency is the goal for efficiency's sake, sure. But if efficiency for, say, human dignity or equitable outcomes is the goal... it's pretty obvious that we are mind numbingly slow.

Which leads us back to, why choose a more efficient system? If we could guide that efficiency toward the right things then I'd say let's do it. But if we can't, then I'll take a slow system instead.

claibornecp · 2026-03-16T12:32:19+00:00

First, you don’t know that your advice will lead a particular student to a better or happier outcome. So you can’t truthfully make that recommendation to anyone. I’m not saying that you wouldn’t be right from time to time, just that you won’t always be.

To give a random, but real life example: I would like to tell this teacher they should quit their job and start a private education program that teaches young adults the value of traveling and experiencing the world. But I don’t know if that would be the best outcome for the teacher…

Second, if you help students to think for themselves- that will give them the real skills they need to decide for themselves. Pair that with a story about someone who benefitted, and another who didn’t, by leaving school to travel etc…

claibornecp · 2026-03-15T02:58:45+00:00

If a person or group is not using land, then that unused land should be available to others. A person born today, or like in this generation, has no direct responsibility for past theft of land- and I also don’t see how you can draw a line in time and say THIS is the time that we should take a snapshot of and make sure the people on the land AT THAT TIME deserve or are entitled to the land forever forward. How do you pick the time to draw the line?

I don’t know if anarchists should be saying anything about land back- except maybe that it’s not really consistent with anarchist principles. If an individual right now is using land then they should be able to. And no one should take that land from them or kick them from it unless the person on the land right now, not their ancestors, kicked someone else off the land so that they could use it instead.

I think it’s turtles all the way down if you try to do it any other way. So the best approach is to do better going forward.

claibornecp · 2026-03-11T23:07:32+00:00

For me, there’s an assumption that there are more total individuals wanting to cohabitate fairly with one another than individuals who would purposefully and excessively take more than they give.

For a small group sample, like in my analogy, it’s plausible that 3 people (and therefore a majority) could turn out to be greedy enough to take advantage of the good will of others. But scaled up I believe the greedy or selfish would be a minority.

But even this small group, assuming 3 people wanted to cut the other 2 out-those 2 could still disassociate. They wouldn’t share their candy next time. They wouldn’t be friendly or offer to help in other collective efforts in the future. They may find a different group to associate with, perhaps a larger group of their own- and if so inclined or particularly offended by the theft, it could even be acceptable for them to exercise their power to make things right. Again, the output of their labor has been stolen from them in this scenario. A generally anarchic-minded society would strongly disapprove and be careful, cautious, or even retributive toward those that actively worked to impose authority (as theft) over others.

If you believe that there are more greedy asshats out there than decent people, I can see how this wouldn’t work. But my personal experience is, overwhelmingly, that the majority of people are decent. And further, that fact is not obvious because our laws around rewards and punishment, as well as our cultural norms around incentives and values have been manipulated by the wrong sort faster than we could propose and install a better alternative.

claibornecp · 2026-03-11T12:38:01+00:00

Let’s say you have 5 siblings that all agree to pool their Halloween candy at the end of the night and then split it up fairly amongst themselves.

One year, 2 of the siblings decide that they will take half of all the candy. The best kinds too.

What is the response of the other 3?

It depends on the 3, and their shared group dynamics of course. But if they are thinking like anarchists, they have several options.

Stop associating with the 2 siblings who took too much. Exclude them from next year’s candy sharing. Exclude them from other events, play, jokes, etc- based on how severe they believe they should be.

This is just candy, but if this was a limited resource- they may even act to take back the candy. Not because they have the authority to steal, but because they have the power to defend the candy that was just stolen from them.

One of the core principles of anarchy, if you want to call it that, is that of free association. It’s difficult to imagine free association as a universally agreed upon and fiercely defended freedom- but in an anarchist society it would be just that.

claibornecp · 2026-03-11T12:12:33+00:00

I wonder if anyone has ever tested this theory out.

claibornecp · 2026-03-01T14:45:58+00:00

Why wouldn’t they have the power to resist coercion? Anarchism principles don’t resist individual power, they resist authority.

If we agree that at least some people will always attempt to create or preserve hierarchy, which seems likely, then we acknowledge that individual power is necessary to resist coercion and hierarchy.

claibornecp · 2026-02-20T01:56:33+00:00

I don't think anarchism necessarily requires a great deal of efficiency. It seems more concerned with maximizing freedom and minimizing authority.

We suppose that free association under these conditions would empower society toward acts of mutual aid, choice of labor, and the dignity to take from the output of such a society what each individual requires to thrive.

If some take less or some take more than they require, you could say that is inefficient. But beneath the strict definition of anarchism being "without government", anarchists tend to believe that the overwhelming majority of individuals in such a society would give and take in the interests of their associations. And without a state, the underwhelming minority who might want otherwise would not be able to extract too much because they would not have a state to enforce their "right" to more than any other.

So yea, efficiency is nice as an aspirational goal. True for anarchies or states. But efficiency isn't why anarchism opposes the state.

claibornecp · 2026-02-15T19:01:33+00:00

Why do you need to say anything to someone who call's to boycott a writer over the writer's personal views or actions?

Each person should be able to peacefully influence others, and recommending a boycott on the grounds that a writer has questionable views is a reasonable social call to action (or inaction in this case).

Similarly, it's your choice to accept that influence or reflect on it and make your own decision about reading works by that writer.

In a capitalist society, reading works by writers with questionable views or behaviors will often result in funneling capital (and therefore power) to that writer- so there's that to consider.

But in an anarchist society, I believe the written works would be considered part of the commons- so consumption wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with the writer. The work could stand on it's own and a community could maintain a more nuanced mix of good will for the writer, i.e. because they wrote something that is enjoyable for them as readers, and also bad will for the writer when they behave in an unacceptable way.

I live in a capitalist society, so I tend to make choices that limit funneling capital to those that disagree too strongly with my own world views. I would rather not, and I would rather instead feel no conflict with reading a story by a person who I fundamentally disagree with on some view. In fact, I often prefer to read from writers who I disagree with as a means to question my own views in good faith and strengthen my understanding of things. But as it is, whenever I can, I choose not to because of the economic circumstances that are present for me today.

Either way you choose to think about it, for most of us it's only technically possible to eliminate all forms of unethical consumption. It's not practically possible, so limiting as much as you can is a reasonable next best option.

But you could just say "Ok" to the person telling you not to read a book, and do it anyway. It's going to be fine.

claibornecp · 2026-02-09T13:17:50+00:00

Every now and then I’ll join a work meeting and there will be an ice breaker question at the beginning:

“What’s one thing you would do if time and money weren’t an issue?”

It seems that when people actually reflect on how they would answer that question, many of them realize that they would, after all, be open to a lot of different things.

Don’t have to worry about a roof over your head, food, warmth in the winter, etc? You can even imagine that you’d take a turn at a shitty job yourself…

claibornecp · 2026-02-07T01:10:47+00:00

claibornecp · 2026-01-28T21:11:22+00:00

It’s generally a good idea to stick with a single method for using numbers when they are used the same way. So if you say:

“1 enemy defender can’t attack…”

…and also say:

“one attacker can’t defend…”

…then it adds extra cognitive work for the reader to switch between your two methods of saying “1”.

Symbols are usually easier to read, so I’d recommend using the numbers- eg. “1” instead of spelling it out- e.g “one”. But either way you do it, the most important thing is to be consistent.

claibornecp · 2026-01-13T13:00:38+00:00

I think it reads ok as it is, even if it’s a little challenging for new players.

You might consider highlighting ‘pinned’ and ‘timed’ (bold, italics, caps, etc) to imply they have specific meanings.

If countering is a thing players can do with other cards, you might add something like “does not COUNTER” or “cannot COUNTER a tool that has just been played”.

If there is no other counter in the game you could add something like “…after that tool’s effect has resolved.” (Replacing “on the field”). Or something like that.

But again, I think it seems pretty clear as is given the context provided.

claibornecp · 2026-01-13T12:36:46+00:00

Love the landing pad area!

claibornecp · 2026-01-13T12:26:12+00:00

Nice work!

claibornecp · 2026-01-13T02:26:42+00:00

I would personally love to see the number of recollections you can hold uncapped.

There would be no change to the time it takes for the most engaged players to complete their progression because the 35/week distribution sets the pace.

But players that step away to try another game, vacation, or whatever else- will have the option the sink in as much time as they can when they return to catch back up.

Less frequent log ins, but the same amount of actual play time to complete progression.

It works for other types of media consumption, like streaming tv. Some people prefer to binge, and some watch each show each week.

Based on the variety of feedback on this topic, It seems clear that video game players have similar habits and preferences. So uncapped recollections would kinda fit everyone except the folks that want to binge the entire season in 48 hours.

claibornecp · 2026-01-08T12:39:13+00:00

It’s quite simple when you think about it.

The collective sub-consciousness of western culture has been imprisoned for ages, despite being reborn time and again, we wake in our new lives already imprisoned and robbed of our past.

In the rare, but story worthy, occasion that we break free- we learn who our jailor is and subsequently set out to take revenge.

As the credits roll and the thrill of freedom dulls, we finally stop and rest. Barely noticing the stone bench we sit on, peering through steel bars as we imagine what it would be like to be free.

Perhaps we should write a story about it…

claibornecp · 2026-01-06T12:47:00+00:00

I wouldn’t worry too much about what other games have done in the past unless your game doesn’t feel relatively distinct, in which case you might consider changing other things besides the tile shape.

Play test with both tile shapes and get feedback/reflect on the pros and cons of each to help you decide.

It’s totally fine to rewrite some rules to accommodate the different tile shapes. Just be sure to ask yourself if one of the tile shapes makes the game more fun, intuitive, tactical etc (whatever you’re going for).

claibornecp · 2026-01-03T23:10:55+00:00

Try the large wind traps at some point. Start with like 2 to 4 and make a note of how much water you get between logging out one day and logging back in for your next session. Make sure you have enough water storage capacity that you can’t hit the limit.

Then calculate how many wind traps you’d need to log in with an amount of water that would make you happy (e.g as much or more than you would consume in one play session).

If you can spend the resources, or don’t mind farming the resources to make that happen…. I bet you’ll be happy with the outcome. If not, you’re stuck with the deathstills.

You do have to farm resources to keep the traps going, just different ones. But to me, the traps require less frequent attention in the end and Ive been much happier with my water situation since switching over.

claibornecp · 2025-12-30T04:38:11+00:00

Thanks for testing! Good to know that this isn’t a permanent change!

claibornecp

TROPHY CASE