This essay contains some recommendations for where to surf on the internet.

I’m a big fan of the oldschool kind of homepage — a personal and self-made collection of static pages with lots of little nooks and cranies to explore. One excellent site with excactly those properites is the one of David Parlett, renowed games scholar and designer. If you have any interest in board or card games you must explore his material! Related but of a more encyclopedic nature is Pagat, a handcrafted database of card games from all over the world.

Another great collection of pages are those of Bret Victor. He has ideas for how to improve math education, user interfaces, and more. His visionary talk “Inventing on Principle” on how software development really should work took the programming world by storm back in 2012, be sure to check that out if you’re interested.

When on the topic of programming and math — this video series on linear algebra is really cool and accessible. If longing for something less serious the Math with Bad Drawings blog is also pretty fun.

For those who plan on travelling the long and winding road that is game programming, the free web book Patterns of game programming is a good read. The author’s new article series on how to implement a programming language is just as clear and enthusiastic. If that sounds like a nice way to spend your time, you definitely should read the best programming book ever written. Be warned though, this is a deep rabbit hole that you might never escape. Perhaps you will make something slightly esoteric.

Oh, and the first (?) wiki is also worth a visit.

Now I know I said that I like simple and static websites, but I do read some blogs too — especially those with lots of pretty pictures. My favourites are It’s Nice That, Colossal and But Does it Float.

In my practice of designing board games, The Game Crafter has been of tremendous value for producing near-professional looking prototypes. For more general game parts like tokens and blank cards I’ve also enjoyed placing big orders with the German specialist spielmaterial.de. Speaking of board games and craft, these hand made games from Crete are really inspiring and I hope to acquire some of their works one day.

If you haven’t guessed already, I’m pretty into playing cards. The japanese kind (“Hanafuda”) are some of the most beautiful ones and the article The Flowers of Hanafuda explains what flowers they contain.

Another Asian game that I really enjoy is Go. The best website about the game (in English at least) is Sensei’s Library, it has information on almost all aspects of the game and is very useful for beginners. Another one that I’ve enjoyed greatly is Gokibitz which lets you upload your own games to get comments on them. To make sense of the craziness that is Alpha Go, these video commentaries by Michael Redmond are probably the best you can do.

And if after reading all of these things you end up feeling bad about forgetting most of it — just read this article!