I am taking action into helping game designers out there with Game Design Doctor. Lots of things on the ideas box, but the first one is providing direct help. Not by typical consulting but with coaching techniques.
Five weeks ago I started to work with my first coachee and today we did some evaluation and revised the objectives. The experience is great and it really feels good to help others doing something I like to do. It's also very valuable learning since I have to make an effort into taking myself out of the equation and not giving easy and cheap advice based on my experience. I's interesting to hear, ask and lead the other to find his own questions and answers.
Now it's time to find one more coachee.

This box was a present from some friends who filled it with lots of tokens, bits, paper, cards and some different things useful to make physical prototypes for board or digital games. Since then I have added some more content on my own and it is always ready to help me represent or test a new idea. It's a great tool for every game designer!

Whe I read the random words: Gnome Curtain Graduate. I instantly imagined this. The strange little man dancing in the red curtains room in the tv show Twin Peaks, but with a graduation hat. Simple.

The three random words are: Sparrow, cry and publicity. The outcome: this cheap try to get to your heart.

The three random words have been obtained with: http://creativitygames.net/random-word-generator/randomwords/3

The three random words are: Rudder, tragedy and cruise ship

The three random words are Loom, guitar and observation. I mixed this image of a class observing of a version of the game Loom featuring a guitar instead of a magic musical distaff.

Sources; Loom game screenshot (from wikipedia.org), guitar (from www.learninghub.ie), class image from (www.hawaii.edu)

This simple prototyping conceptual tool have served me countless times when approaching a new development in the preproduction phase. It is based in four areas of investigation: Game mechanics, Kinesthetics, Aesthetics and Technology.
The areas are nicely covered in the book Game Design Workshop: A playcentric approach to create innovative games (2nd ed) and the concept was first made public in EricTodd's presentation Spore: Preproduction through prototyping (ppt) at 2006 GDC.
Follow me while introducing this great tool. To start, let's ask: What do I need to prototype?

Random words are: Vote, Decorator and Word. After thinking hard I imagined a feature in Office Word to upvote or downvote style decorations. How many downvotes would get Comic sans based styles?
And yep, the arrows are from reddit.

Creativity exercise, a drawing inspired by three random words from Creative Random Word Generator