A report of the most recent Sandy board game design group meetup

I went to the board game design group meeting last Wednesday. We played three games.

The first game we played was Sorcery, Inc. It went well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. We played with my new cards (The ones that I added art to recently). Ryan said that he really liked the main mechanic of the game. :)

The second game was 'Snake Wrangler' it was a press your luck dice game, and it went fairly well (though we changed some rules during the game.)

The third game was Near and Far (A new game by Ryan Laukat (in the same world as Above and Below)). It was really fun. Probably the best game that Ryan has made (in my opinion). It was a RPG/adventure game where you have a guy that gains magic artifacts, traits, and fame.

You have a different fame score in each civilization (the humans might like you and the hog folk might hate you) sort of like Grand Theft Auto 2 (which I played once in my teenage years). Being the most well liked person wins you the game, and probably before the game is done being developed it will be culminated by a fight between your character and the bandit lord that is annoying everyone in the area.

It was very thematic, and the mechanics (though not yet entirely balanced) seemed quite well thought out and were very interesting.

I for one am looking forward to this game being on kickstarter. I know that I will back it.

I also added dual counters to my storefront. They look pretty cool, and they should allow users to track things that go from 1 to 100. Before I start really publicizing my storefront I want to have better images of the counters, and to have more colors of filament available for printing with, but I am working up to that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skye Frontier

Image
I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here. The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup. Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle. After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state: the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled ou
Read more

More Automatown and getting ready for SaltCon

Image
Alison and I played Automatown with many of the discussed changes last night. We liked some of them, and others we did not. The game ended up ending in 6 rounds, and it took about 80 minutes. The later rounds were longer than the first few rounds. We also were being distracted by kids, so perhaps we could have gone faster. Alison ended up with 7 workers and 9 points while I had 9 workers and 28 points (more about that later). Having fewer types of resources was very good. It made the economy less confusing, and setup and cleanup much faster. The mats worked well, and during the game, we thought of more things to put on them - (the three starting workers can be added here, as well as a reminder of what level is what in terms of dots.) Here is the mat that we played with: We started with 3 scrap, which was not enough given that we were also playing with the rule that made upgrades cost a scrap. In fact, that rule made us strapped for scrap the whole game. We decided that m
Read more

Three more playtests

Image
On Friday I played another game of Skye Frontier with my dad (also Mike), brother in law (Dave), and nephew (Logan). My dad and nephew play games sometimes, but are not super big into the hobby, and my brother in law is moderately a gamer (he buys games and brings them to my game nights, but he doesn't play all of the newest games). Logan started the game (and picked the blue castle), Dave was white, my dad was yellow, and I was red. My dad and I ended up contending over the lakes, while Dave focused on building mountain regions, and Logan built some of everything. I couldn't get a shipping empire set up because boats were hard to come by, and Logan (and Dave) started grabbing cash at an alarming rate, so I instead focused on building up points using scrolls and by closing regions. With a 1 point per sheep scoring tile out there, we all tried to get sheep, and the build for free action was used a lot. I capped off my regions just in the nick of time, and Dave ended the game (wh
Read more