Pretentious Board Games

Over the last week I played three more games of Terran League of Defense Robots (which also has a lot of other names), and one more game of The Age of Vikings. TLDR is coming along nicely. The last few games have been pretty smooth. I have added character cards, and modified a lot more about the game. The game is still way too hard, but I have begun to work on adjusting the difficulty in a downward direction. I also have nothing in the rules about how to actually fight, so I need to add that stuff in. The way that I am decreasing the difficulty might be interesting to some, so I will discuss it now. The game used to get harder each time the deck was shuffled because a new alien meeple would come into play each shuffle, and the aliens would do 1 more things each round than they used to do. This proved to ramp up the difficulty really fast, so instead I decided to add a card to the deck called Alien Destruction. Players may put any number of Alien Destruction cards into the deck

On Tuesday we played a game of The Age of Vikings  at lunch at work. We had 6 players, and we didn't get through a full game before lunch ended. It is a much bigger game than is usually playable in a lunch hour (I only rarely work on such games because it is hard to playtest them to make sure that they work properly). The game is working pretty well - people with different strategies still got similar scores and nothing seemed really broken. It took a long time, however there are a lot of important decisions that have to be made at every juncture, so it is not that surprising given that some of our players have some analysis paralysis. Since that game, we have added and tested out 6 new god cards and a new "helpful" action reminder card. I am currently working on resizing the island hexes to make them fit on a game crafter medium hex tile. I might have to scale down the tokens to make it work, but it should make the game fit in a smaller box. On Thursday we played

We played a game of Terran Robot Defense League yesterday. We lost horribly. I am thinking of making the game easier (with adjustable difficulty) I have also started printing more tokens for age of Vikings. I hope to work on it more soon. Finally, we had a game night where we played some published games yesterday: splendour, pandemic, and a new game (to us at least) " fast flowing forest fellers ". It was pretty fun. We stayed up way too late, but that is how game nights go.

I have been working on Terran Robot Defense League/Fighting Robots/Ed's Army more. I have played a few games with Alison, and it is going pretty well. The game is definitely playable, however the endgame isn't very good yet. I need to make the game have a more cinematic ending - right now it has a "mothership" that is the hardest opponent to fight, however it is not that much harder than any other ship. I am going to add rules that make you have to fight multiple opponents on the same turn. The game is turning into a copy of X-Com apocalypse, which is great because I love that game. Here are a few cards: (I spent a little time on the art because some of my playtesters at work need good art to enjoy a game). Here  are the current rules.  Here  is a gallery of the cards. I am also starting to think that I will finally join the board game design guild. I have been meaning to for years, however I just never did it.

I played a first solo game of Terran Robot Defense League last night. It went OK, however it could have been better. Here are the rules that I played by{and the rules that I want to try out now}. To start look at 10 aliens and keep 3{1}. Place two into one pile, and one by itself {place it down in a pile of its own}. Aliens in a pile have to be attacked together. First: draft from hands of 5{6} part cards your starting robot, keeping 5 cards total. Every turn either: repair 2 damage on your robot look at 5 and keep 1{2} from the parts deck, look at a number of research cards equal to the number of research tokens you have {minimum of 1} and keep 1 attack a pile of aliens {exchange 1 card with an ally} {build a researched technology} At the end of the turn: Robots heal if they have healing equipment Look at 10 aliens and play 1{a number equal to piles/2}, placing it in a pile according to an algorithm that I will try to explain: Each pile that is larger than 1 card s

On Wednesday I published my final version of The Dragons' Game for the contest. Here are the final versions:  Rules ,  PnP Files . Playing so many games of The Dragons' Game made me remember when I made Hungry Oni (which was definately a spiritual ancestor of The Dragons' Game). I have started working on getting it ready to submit to a publisher (I have one picked out that I think would like it). I am currently trying to determine if Baffle or Repel is a better name for the final action (I have art for both, but can't determine which would be better.) Finally, I have continued working on Terran Robot Defense League, but it keeps getting interrupted by other things.