Pretentious Board Games

I have been working on Dancing Robots a fair amount recently. Some blind playtest responses came back and I am trying to figure out what to incorporate from them. One thing that is guaranteed is a lot of rewriting of the rule book. Another likely change is the wording of effects on the cards. Alison and I played a game last night were we tried out an idea that a blind playtester came up with which I will call 'targeted heat'. Basically if you overheat you have to first blow up the parts that you activated during the last move before you blow up your other parts. This forces the player to consider their dance moves more carefully. About the rewording of the cards effects: I have posted a thread at BGG which should hopefully help me to get the wording issues that I have worked out. It is always great to throw things at a community of people and see what comes out of it. No more progress has been made on the Collusion or Moar Moai front, but with painting the kitchen occu

Friday we played three games of Collusion at work (the dream game). Large changes were made to the rules. As always the newest rules can be found  here . The big changes that were made cause the game to be much simpler. They include: Removing money from the game entirely. (now you just get bonus goods for selling above the average and lose goods for selling below the average). Obsolescence/Spoilage is now a rule in the game. Players lose 50% of unsold goods to give a penalty for selling too high. Increased demand: Each turn one more demand card is drawn than was drawn the previous turn. With these changes the game is faster and simpler. I will continue to play it and post how it changes. On Friday night we were invited over to a game night. We played one game of Moar Moai and a few games of Love Letter. They seemed to enjoy both of them. I think I will end up buying Love Letter. Also, a lot of people have been playing Dancing Robots and writing up reviews for me recently. I

We have had some sick girls over the last little bit, so I have not gotten into much gaming recently (That is besides the regular Resistance games at lunch, and the periodic games of the game that I dreamed up). Recent playtesting has made some changes to the game. I am not really happy right now about the pacing of the game. It takes too long to play, but I am not sure what to do to make it faster. Perhaps I will make the profit margins larger. Also, I think that the name of the game will be something like 'Collusion', or 'Price-Fixing' Right now the rules are as follows: Each player has a color. Your Goods tokens are tokens of your color. Each player starts with 4 Goods tokens. The game alternates between selling and buying phases. If any player ever has 30 money they win the game. During a selling phase: n d4 are rolled, where n is the number of players. The sum of the roll is m , or the demand. This will be used to calculate how many goods will be pur

I have played a few more games of 'The Dream Game', and it seems to be coming together a little. The biggest game played was a 4 player game that ended up being pretty fun. (We had some collusion and price fixing going on, and a player that broke the price fixing was the one who ended up winning). Right now the rules are as follows: Each player has a color. Your Goods tokens are your color. Each player starts with 4 Goods tokens of their own color. The game alternates between selling and buying phases. If any player ever has 30 money they win the game. During a selling phase: n d6 are rolled, where n is the number of players. m Goods will be purchased at the end of the sell phase where m is the sum of the roll ( m  is known as the demand). Players take turns offering one Good for sale at a price (1-6). The player with the most Goods goes first. Players with fewer goods than the player that just played are skipped (so that everyone ends in the same round of play).

I tried out the dream game three times yesterday. The game is pretty darn broken, but it does have some elements that are really cool. I think that I could rework it into a good game with some work. Perhaps I will do that over the next little bit.

I had another dream about a non-existent board game, but unlike my last dream game , this game might actually end up as a viable game. It has elements of worker placement as well as the opportunity for people to undercut each other. In my dream the game was an ancient Indian game called 'Vataya'. I will transcribe my middle of the night notes here, and comment on them. Everything I wrote at 1-1:30 AM is in normal text. Everything I add is either bold or italic. Here are memories of the game in the dream Players trying to get the most money. The goal of the game is revealed There are barges and river places. Each player owned one barge, one section of the river, and the city locations on both sides of that river section. Each district on the side of the river produces types of goods. One type of good to a district. Certain types are worth more or less. This doesn't really make sense from a balance perspective. When the barges land the goods are all sold wherever t

Since the rules for Templar Intrigue were finally posted we played a few games of it at work. (I printed up a copy since the game hasn't even been officially printed yet). The game works great as a 7 or 8 player game. It is fun to try and figure out which players are loyal, and which players are traitors to their cause. The 9 player version on the other hand is not really that good. The 9 player game is played like this: Team 1: 1 king, 2 templar traitors, 2 monks Team 2: 1 grand master, 1 archivist, 2 templar knights King asks Templar who is the grand master. With perfect play there are only two options: 1) 2 players have 2 players pointing at them and one player has one player pointing at him. 2) 1 player has 2 players pointing at him and another player has 3 players pointing at him. In either case the king knows that only players with two fingers or more pointing at them could possibly be the grand master (the two templar traitors will tell him truly the grand master)

Over the weekend we had a double date and played a few games of Love Letter . It seemed to be fairly well received. I like the simpleness of the game (your goal is clear, every turn you only really have two options laid before you, and there are not that many components), but I still don't like the fact that the game has so much randomness in it. At a family gathering on Sunday (apparently there was a large sportsball game at the same time, but we were not even considering watching it) we played some more Love Letter, and also a few games of Coup . They seemed to like Coup a fair amount. I am still sad that I didn't get a copy of it. They wanted to play Resistance, but we didn't have enough time. Scott and Sheila also brought  Mother Sheep , which was a surprisingly fun game (considering that it was made for players 8 and up) where you place tiles out in an attempt to surround sheep that are placed arbitrarily on the playing surface. I would recommend it to anyone wit