Pretentious Board Games

I have made great progress on my 2 week microgame. I have played about 8 games, changing the rules after each game, and have made it much more smooth (gameplay-wise, the art is still as clunky as ever) and more strategic as well. It is still not ready, but I only have till Wednesday, so I am going to have to just move ahead with it, and try to polish it as much as possible. I also made a horrible game logo (I used a dragon from khomesclip at deviantart, who licensed CC): Here are my current notes from last play session (and my thoughts as I write this) : Can you trade coins? (Yes!) Anec should like coins. (Hating treasures is weirdly out of character for a dragon.) If deck runs out, game ends too abruptly. change number of dragons revealed? (2?) With multiple players, slow the game down. How? Anger tokens? (Perhaps: When a dragon gets offended, place one anger token on it. If a dragon with two anger tokens on it gets offended, then the dragon leaves.) Check remaining chara...

I have have been able to play 3 more games of Jurassic Space since I last posted here. The game is progressing along nicely, although it still needs a lot of work. I am about to start doing more research so that I can make the plant growth smoother (right now you plant large monocultures of plants, but really I want to have a way that you can build ' guilds ' of plants, and then just have them grow all together.) I also intend to replace the map of the solar-system with a randomized map. In other news, I have been getting a good amount of orders for twist counters at my storefront website (linked in the upper right). I am working on making smaller counters for people that are interested in smaller counters, and also making the dual counters smaller (because most people will use them as a score tracker in my opinion, and so they will only need to print 10 numbers on each to reach 100)

After talking with my coworkers about the new Jurassic World movie I had a dream about a new game. It is 'Jurassic Universe'. Basically the players try to build themepark space habitations that have balanced ecosystems (full of dinosaurs obviously, since the people all like seeing dinosaurs) and attract lots of tourists. I am not quite sure of the winning condition, but I think that the game could be fun to make. Probably I am going to be drawing some space dinosaurs soon. Also, I am making a Kickstarter campaign for the twist counters that I have been 3d printing recently (pictured to the right). I hope to launch it this week, so hopefully that goes well. I will post here when the campaign goes live to keep you all  updated.

This week we had a meeting of the Sandy Utah Board Game Designers group. We played some Moar Moai, some Polynesia, and a game that Ryan Laukat started making (it was named something like 'Tale of the Swords'). It was lighter than most of his games that he has made so far, and Alison and I both liked it a great deal more than his previous games (we like light strategy games, so it was closer to us as an audience.) The game seemed pretty much like a redwall adventure/strategy game. You get a race of sentient furry/slimy animals and go around gathering mystic swords and other artifacts and then you destroy 'monsters' with them (where monster is defined as a predator animal). We actually finished an entire game of it (which has never happened in the game night time frame that we set up.) When he finishes this game I am looking forward to the kickstarter. I picked cats (figuring that I'd be playing as feisty tom cats, but they ended up being fat lazy lap cats), Aliso...

I went went halfsies with my brother in law on a RigidBot 3D printer. We built it yesterday and I fooled around printing for a few hours. The first few prints were pretty rough, but I think I am getting the hang of it. The full sized ones are 1 inch tall. The leftmost one was the first 'successful' print, and the second one is an average print. The next two are printed 63% of the normal size and the upper right one shows that if I set the extruder too hot there are consequences. the lower right one is 50% size. I think that I'll go with the 63%, as they seem to fit on my MOAR MOAI board best. The sale that we bought the printer on ends at noon. Get yours fast.