Pretentious Board Games

Not too long ago I made a survey about what people were having a hard time with when it came to designing great games. I have collected the results, and decided to make a website that connects playtesters to game designers. The biggest things that people complained of was not having enough time, not having enough playtesting, and preparing to submit games to publishers or put games up on kickstarter. This website should directly help solve the second problem, and if I make it correctly, it should also address the first and third problem as well. Designers will have to spend "points" to get their game to sort to the top of the list of games to playtest, and the only way that points can be gained is by playtesting other designers games and providing feedback. Once you have points, you can apply them to your own game, or you can sell them in a marketplace to designers. Thus people that just want to get their game playtested without helping other people out can pay for that...

I ended up only submitting two of my three games before the end of the deadline. The Dragons' Game, and The Age of Vikings. Both of them seemed ready, whereas Terran League of Defense Robots did not seem ready. I will continue to work on Tldr this year, and hopefully it is ready next year. I think it is a great game, I just hope for it to not have any major changes while I am submitting it. I am also submitting a bunch of games to Cardboard Edison, which should be a fun competition. In addition to the three mentioned above, I am submitting Moar Moai!, Polynesia, and Sorcery, Inc. Hopefully they like them. To submit my games, I need to make a five minute pitch movie for each of them. This is not my forte, so I think that that will be the hardest part. In other news, I played Talisman for the first time two days ago and thought that it was way too random to be fun. I also played Cash and Guns, and it seemed to be a reasonable party style game. Not my favorite, but certainly...

 I have begun to work on getting Moar Moai ready for a round of blind playtesting, so I have been having all the folks over at BoardGameGeek look at it. (the rules, and mats mainly). It is always so helpful to have people on the internet sanity-check your stuff, because I find that things that I thought anyone would understand are not actually all that easy to understand. If you are working on a game, it is invaluable to let people that have never played the game before look at it. You can get the best feedback that way - feedback that is the most similar to the type of stuff that actual players in the wild would have given. Your local playtesters probably like you and are not overly disposed to tell you that your game sucks, or that it is hard to understand. Here is the new player mat: It does look fiddly (it has a lot of boxes), however it makes playing the game way less confusing to people that don't love math, so it is worth it. The way that it works is: you place meep...

We played a few games of Moar Moai with reduced scores, and the balance needs some tweaking, but the game still works fairly well. Since I want players to enjoy the whole game (and not hate the scoring), I am going to work more on it. One of my play testers also had a new idea about how to rearrange the worker placement mats to make them way more easy to understand. The idea is a grid based placement area which incorporates all of the math in the shape of the grid. I haven't yet finished a mockup of it yet, but will soon. I also just went to the Viking festival in Gimli Manitoba, and am thinking about more changes to Age of Vikings.

I have been working on 'Moar Moai!' more recently. The player mats have gotten a rewrite, and we have tried out the chief idea as well as a few other ideas. I put up a poll in BGG, and learned that about %80 of the people that responded liked a word based player mat instead of a symbol based mat. This is surprising to me as I am someone that likes the symbol based mat better. Here are the two mats in question: Both look pretty good to me, but I think that I am going with a word based mat since it is better liked. I am also reworking the map, and getting art for the box, and rewriting the rules. One of the changes to the rules that I am considering is pretty large: reducing the scores in the game by a huge amount. This was requested by multiple play-testers because they didn't like the math at the end of the game. I am really giving it a shot, but I worry about how it will affect the strategy of the game. We will know soon, though, since I am going to try it out th...

I played a game of Moar Moai recently. It went well, however we started talking afterward and came up with some interesting ideas. Here are my notes: Peek at upcoming events Add chief Removing stone Distribution of resources (claim and then distribute later) Simplify text on player mat Circle starting values Remove visible event pile Move token more than 1 The gist of the better ideas (as far as I remember them) are: Modify the explorer token to make it a 'village' token. The new token acts as the explorer token, but also the player that gains the ability to move it is declared (for that turn) the chief. The chief gets the ability to take extra resources (as if (s)he were the player with the lowest number of workers), and also can move the village token by more than one square if (s)he is winning by more than one. Another idea was to remove stone as a resource from the game. The reasoning behind this idea was that it rarely runs out and it only is used for one th...

It was recently announced that the two games that I submitted to the ION Award are both finalists! I am super excited. I need to start preparing to present them. In order to do that I created the  ION Award finalist showcase  meetup. I got one of the other finalists to agree to present his game, and I have another finalist that might also show up, so we will practice our presentations and hopefully improve our preparation level. I have put up Moar Moai, Polynesia, and Sorcery, Inc. on to tabletop simulator. The three of them can be found here for those who have TTS, and are interested in trying them out. I also had an idea for a terrible game. Perhaps the guy that made cards against humanity could make it. In the game: each player starts with a certain number of cards that represent facial features. Players play until one player has had plastic surgery on their entire face. Players take turns getting plastic surgery (and use up their money to do so). Roll dice to see the ...

I have been making some changes to MOAR MOAI recently. I posted a copy of it on Table Top Simulator, but haven't gotten any comments yet. I am really thinking of submitting it to a publisher (apparently it was ineligible to be submitted to the ION Award since it was a finalist in the past). I added back in the explorer token and also made the effects of the event cards more powerful. I am thinking of making changes to the start of the game where each player selects how many workers they want to start with and gets more statues of they select the fewest (and fewer if they select the most). I haven't been working on any other board games (I have been programming a tower defense game to serve as a competition for my coworkers, and that has taken a lot of my time.)

I submitted my Ion Award games. It was a lot of work getting them ready, but I am pretty happy about how they ended up. Moar moai received a massive rules makeover, also a big visual makeover as well. I think that it is better because of it. Dave even got me new board art, so I have been trying to rework my mats and cards to match the new look. Sorcery had it's rules rewritten as well, and the artwork was slightly tweaked. The biggest change was in the rules themselves, however. We added in rewards for adding cards to the Universal Machine, and changed the effects of Love back to its historic effect. Polynesia didn't change much, but it has better rules. I think that I will be working on space game again, or perhaps this 4x that I have been thinking of.

I guess I sort of let the NaGaDemon die this year. I am not really happy with my game, but it is playable. I have still been preparing my games for the Ion award. I had some materials printed up at The Game Crafter. They look really good. Over the next few days I will submit them. I have been watching a kickstarter called "secret Hitler". It seems pretty similar to Resistance.  I don't think I will back it because after having played a few games it seems too random. We played a game where I should have lost the game for my team, but we won anyway. I also got Alison to play eminent domain with me on Friday. We tied even though she did a production trade strategy and I did a tech strategy. I really like the game.

Just last night I got a rough draft of the new Moar Moai board artwork that I commissioned. So far I like the direction that it is going. Honestly I haven't played the game in a few months, so hopefully this will encourage me to spend some more time on this game. I like how that the artwork is simple. It seems that that is how people like to brand things at the present time. I am excited to see what it will look like next iteration. Most of my time over the last few weeks has been being spent on the game that I am currently calling Space Game (formerly known as Jurassic Space). I have revamped the cards and reworked the rules. I played four more games, incorporating feedback from each game. I am just ready to rework from the ground up for the second time (v0.3, I suppose). Here are some cards as they stand before the next rewrite: The game is decent, although it is really complex. That is what this rewrite is about. Trying to maintain the feeling of the game while cutt...

After some 3d printing, painting, and working on boards I showed my games off at a talent show. It was fun and people seemed to be impressed with them. This upcoming Wednesday we are meeting at the Barnes and Nobles for game playtesting. A link is here . Join us if you are interested.

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.

Though I haven't yet got my cards back, a few things of interest have been happening recently, so I thought I would post. I played Acquire for the first time. It was really great. I intend on playing it again. It is exciting to find an old game that is still really fun. I drew a new map for MOAR MOAI. I tried to combine the score tracks with the resource tracks for the first time. I think that it looks awful. For this reason I talked with Dave about drawing me a better map. He has some good ideas, and I like his art style, so I am looking forward to his product. I set up a new game night for the Sandy board game playtesting group. It is next Wednesday. We are meeting at the Barnes and Noble near fort union, so come if you can. I also found out that my Uncle is an artist . I like his artwork style, and I could see hiring him in the future.

Over the last weekend we went to SaltCon. I didn't win the Ion Award (my two finalist games were moderately well received, so perhaps next year I will do better and win). One thing that I learned was that there are actually publishers that want finished art (which is one thing that I have never spent the time to do since I am not really an artist). On Friday we had a Sandy board game designers meetup. We played Moar Moai and Above and Below. Ryan has cleaned up the visual aspects of the game quite a bit (it looks pretty beautiful right now). He also changed it so that there were more buildings that could be bought (which was one of our complaints about the game before). It is good that he is so responsive. There were still a few little things that we wanted changed (one symbol was confusing, one card had things in reverse order, and the new versions of the adventure cards have not been printed up yet), but all in all it is looking like the game is coming together quite nicely...

I came home and found that my copy of Harbour arrived. It is a fun worker placement tableau building game by Tasty Minstrel Games. I backed it as a Kickstarter project (I also playtested it, so I knew that I would like it already), and it finally arrived. I sleeved the cards and plan on playing it tomorrow. After that I got an email telling me that I was announced as an ION Award finalist today :). I submitted 5 games to be judged and two of them were chosen as finalists: Hungry Oni, and Moar Moai. I sort of expected Moar Moai to do well. It is a simple game that has a lot of strategy, but Hungry Oni was a bit of a surprise. It is really minimalist (I built it as a microgame, to see if I could), so it is not really that big a game. Either way I am really excited to go to SaltCon and see what happens. Weather or not I win I will still feel like a winner, since I already have a publisher looking at two of my games, and that was really my main reason for submitting anything to ...

This week I have been submitting games to be judged for the Ion Awards. I am going to submit four games probably. I am also thinking about reviving Polynesia and making a new game out of it. We played some Moar Moai as part of finalizing the rules, and we had a fun time. Perhaps I will play more at work. It is a pretty good game. We also just bought Space Cadets Dice Duel. I played it at saltcon last year, and our was pretty fun. Hopefully Alison likes it as well.

Since coming back from our vacation in California I have continued to work on Hungry Oni and Deception. I entered Deception in a microgame design contest and have gotten a pretty good review on it here . Hopefully more people play it and it does well in the contest :). I have also rewritten the rules for Dancing Robots in preparation for the SaltCon Ion Awards . I am planning on submitting four games (dancing robots, moar moai, witch hunt, and hungry oni) this year to the awards, but I have not yet finished the rulesmithing for them. I also found a new game that I want to try out. It is named Comrade . I have printed it out and plan on shanghaiing my coworkers into a game this week.

I am getting ready for SaltCon's Prototype alley , but can't figure out which game I should bring. Which one would you be most likely to want to play (given brief descriptions and rules): Dancing Robots : A game where you draft part and dance cards to build the ultimate dancing robot. You need to balance concerns to build a good robot that can dance a lot of moves. Finally, you must defeat all the competition in a judged dance off. 2-4 players, 20-40 minutes Collusion : A game where you buy and sell goods in an attempt to make more money than others through price fixing and undercutting. Alliances can be formed but no agreement is binding. 2-8 players, 10-40 minutes Creative Accounting : A team game where you are either a bean counter who tries to cook the books to give your company an unfair business advantage or a whistleblower who is trying to catch companies cooking the books. It is sort of Werewolf like, but there is no player elimination. 3-12 players, 10-30 minut...

I finished my first read through of all of the rules. I have not yet read all of them enough to feel comfortable playing them all. (Also, I was unable to find the rulebooks for a lot of them online.) The Following seemed to be impossible to find the rules for: Misty Ruins Other World Stadium Stella Nova: Journey of the Magi Superpowers The Demise of Dr. Frankenstein UFO Hunter Where Chickens Dare! Here are my thoughts on the others: Paradise Fallen: Seemed to be fairly simple to understand. More examples of cards would be nice. The game felt fairly simple, but it seemed like play might uncover some hidden complexity Rialto: A fun sounding game. I will probably play this one time or more at the con. SlapShot: it is a hockey game. There seems to be some randomness to it, but also the possibility of winning through strategy. It is possible that I found some old rules for this because it seemed very old. Space Sheep: a simple game that could be fun based on...