YOUR SOUL IS THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND ... Dungeon Solitaire: Devil's Playground is a fantasy adventure card game. Fight monstrous diabolisms, overcome obstacles, and endure misfortunes as you delve into the darkest dungeon in a quest to defeat three powerful demons. Along the way you will collect treasure and unique magic items, encounter strange locales, and acquire three divine graces. But beware, the dungeon is deep and even if you survive all immediate dangers, a fate worse than death awaits those who linger too long. You may face starvation and insanity, terrible curses and demonic possession, forever haunted, in the darkness of the pit. Includes the Devil's Playground stand-alone game and a two-player cooperative mode, multiple expansion rules for the Dungeon Solitaire: Labyrinth of Souls tarot card game, four variants of Dungeon War, and guidelines for fortune telling using the Devil's Playground card deck. For one or two players. Most of the games require the Devil's Playground cards, available separately. Expansion rules also require the Labyrinth of Souls rulebook and cards. Dungeon Solitaire books and cards are available for purchase through matthewlowes.com/games.

DARE TO ENTER THE LABYRINTH OF SOULS ... Dungeon Solitaire: Labyrinth of Souls is a fantasy game for tarot cards. Defeat monsters, disarm traps, open doors, and navigate mazes as you explore a dangerous dungeon. Collect treasure and magic items, gain skills, and gather companions. But beware, the dungeon is vast, and death awaits those who linger too long. If your torches burn out you will be lost forever in the darkness. If your rations run dry, you will starve or go mad. And the dungeon itself is a force of corruption, threatening all who enter. Includes Basic, Expert, and Advanced Rules, as well as six game variations: Two-Player Cooperative, Dragon's Lair, Undead Hordes, Mega-Dungeon, Campaign Mode, and Cartomancy. For one or two players. Playable with any tarot deck. Labyrinth of Souls tarot cards are available for purchase through matthewlowes.com/games. REVIEWS FOR THE ORIGINAL GAME: "It is called Dungeon Solitaire ... and it is brilliant." -- John Payne, Sycarion Diversions "It's an amazing game ...." -- Tim Snider, The Savage Afterworld LABYRINTH OF SOULS BACKER QUOTES: "An extremely awesome, super fun game." "Amazingly detailed and well thought out .... Absolutely fantastic." "I have been consumed by this game and overjoyed at how much clever thought went into the making of this project." "There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of solitaire variants out there, but this is exactly what I've been looking for since the dawn of time. It's amazing something like this hasn't been created until now." "Received my book today and absolutely love it." "Arrived and I couldn't stop playing it ....: -)"

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin From the Paperback edition.

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery -- from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.

A licensed professional counselor shares how he conquered his out-of-control compulsion to exercise and starve himself which led to multiple hospitalizations and how he overcame a shaming inner voice, which he calls "IT," that convinced him to become thinner.