Sandy Board Game Design club 3rd meeting
I went to a meeting of the Sandy Board Game Design club last night. We played Ryan (of Red Raven Games ) Laukat's new game, which is based in the same universe as Empires of the Void. It was a 4x game which combined mechanics of area control, drafting, and combat similar to Cosmic Encounter , and it was pretty fun. Alison liked it, which is surprising since she has never liked a 4x game before this. I tested the combat of the game (every time I design a game like that people never really fight enough to test the combat fairly well, so I thought that would be a good thing to do), and it was pretty easy to understand and seemed balanced fairly well (with a slight bonus to the defenders that made them have enough of a boost that you had to think about attacking a planet). We also played a game of Dancing Robots, which went fairly well. After the game was over there was a short brainstorming session and we discussed how to speed up the game. A drafting mechanic was discussed for...