Here's some stuff we cut out of last week's episode of Tabletop, featuring a looooooong intro by me, for your amusement.

(Please enjoy how much people complain in the YouTube comments because my intro is longer than the outtakes I'm introducing. Awesome.)

In my gaming group, I am not the guy who is good at explaining rules (that guy would be Tom D., when he plays with us, or my friend Cal M., the rest of the time) so the part of Tabletop I was the most anxious about is that segment at the beginning of the show where I explain the rules of the game.

It's a real challenge, probably more difficult than you'd expect, and thanks to clever editing and postproduction work, looks much easier and flawless than it actually is.

In preparation for each episode, my friend and associate producer Boyan and I would sit down at my dining room table and talk through the rules. The first thing we'd do is figure out what kind of game we were playing (bluffing, communication, resource-management, etc.) and build out from there. I would set up the game in front of me, just like you see on the show, and I'd "teach" the game to Boyan. If something worked, one of us would write it down on a bullet-pointed list. That list went with me to work the next day, and I used it to remember what the audience needed to hear.

I'm cleaning up my office today, and I just came across two pages I wrote for last week's 3 Quick Games episode. I thought they may be interesting to some of you, so here they are:

You can see that I was considering a running "like you do" joke. It didn't work, so I dropped it when we filmed.

Alternate way to win the game: Be Ryan Higa.

These quick casual games are so much fun to play, and they're a great infection vector for getting your friends to try out gaming.

Enjoy!

If you can't see the embed, or you want to watch it in glorious full screen, go directly to YouTube.

Oh, and if you like it, please give us a thumbs up and leave a comment at YouTube. Thanks!

One of the best times I had this season on Tabletop was playing Fiasco with John Rogers, Alison Haislip, and Bonnie Burton.

I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you that Will Hindmarch, Jason Morningstar, and I teamed up to write an original playset for the show, and we'll be releasing it when the episode airs.

This is a picture I took of my Fiasco Companion, sitting on our Emissary table from Geek Chic, the day we filmed the Fiasco episode. I was fooling around with this cool little fisheye lens my friend gave me to stick onto my cellphone, and this was one of the few pictures that turned out fairly well.