Pretentious Board Games

I finally finished working on Terran League of Defense Robots and submitted it. Phew. Since then I have come up with a few modifications Grab The Loot. The first is adding hidden treasure cards to every player (which makes it less of a perfect knowledge game), and another is making treasures have an effect (like you can return them to the captain to do something). We played today at lunch, and had a few ideas: one was to make coins worth more, another idea was to make the player that loses a treasure places the captain meeple instead of the player that gains the meeple. I should probably also spend at least a little time on the art work some time. I have also been making a whole bunch of icons for people on BGG as a means of giving something back to the community. It has been going fairly well so far, and I have had a lot of people request icons.

I have been working on TLDR more and more. The rules are getting closer to being complete, but they haven't yet arrived there. I also played The Dwarf King for the first time yesterday, and Rock Paper Wizard today. Of the two I liked The Dwarf King more. I am a bit of a Bruno Faidutti fan. The Dwarf King is an interesting take on a Trick taking game. I like the changing rules, and the special cards. They often add an interesting twist to the game. Rock Paper Wizard was a really simple game that can be explained quickly. I didn't love it,  but with how fast it went,  the game does definitely have a place. The "take that" without player elimination ends up being fun. I hope that we play it many times when other people are voting for Bang :)

On Friday my wife and I played Akrotiri for the first time in a few years. It is a really fun two player game. We were both doing well until the end when I pulled ahead to win by a large margin. I usually lose to my wife in such games, so this was a surprise ending. We had a fun time, and will probably play more in the near future. Yesterday we played Hanabi at lunch, and we lost all three games. It is fun to play a cooperative game with these guys (since they usually love traitor mechanic games). They liked it so much that we played a game at lunch again today. We played another game of "Grab the Loot!" last night, and also today at lunch. The game (at lunch) took 23 minutes, and people seemed to like the new changes. Dwayne (who is usually not happy to play one of my games twice in a row) even wanted to play a second game immediately. That is a win if I ever saw one. In this retheme I made changes that were much larger than I usually do when I am retheming things. I ...

Much of my time recently has been spent gearing up for SaltCon. If you don't have tickets yet buy some now, it starts on Thursday! We played a game of The Perfect Moment, and also Avalon at work on Friday. Avalon is a fun lying game. I like it much better than the other lying games that they all love, because you can actually deduce things. I was the Assassin once, and we totally aced the entire game, and then I guessed Merlin as well (though we won the game). On the second game, we won as the good without them guessing Merlin, and then on the third game the good guys won hard core until the Merlin guess, which made the bad guys win. So, I won two out of three games. On Friday night we had a local game group get together, and we played The Perfect Moment as well as Age of Vikings. I practiced teaching it in preparation for my presentation on Thursday. We figured out some parts of the presentation that need more work, and my wife engineered a killer game engine that blew the com...

Last weekend I built a laser cutter. I intend to use it to make higher fidelity hex tiles than I used to be able to make (and also square, and round ones as well.) I bought some cardboard, but haven't yet tested it against cardboard. It cuts through paper like nothing, so I think that it should work. Now I need to make up artwork for the tiles for TLDR. I have just also discovered a new contest, and hope to enter it (in addition to all of the other contests that I entered this year. It is the Button Shy Wallet Game Contest , and it looks pretty interesting. They limiting factors make it quite a constrained game design, which really tends to focus my mind and make things move along more quickly for me. As a side note, I really respect Button Shy for inventing an idea that I totally also invented (albeit a little after them). Also, the published Avignon (which I totally play-tested and provided feedback for). They are one of the companies that I would like to publish a game throu...

I just went to my 3rd Board Game Design Guild Meeting last night. Since there were not enough people who brought games, we ended up playing The Age of Vikings as one of the two games that were played. The people seemed to understand the game and we got through an entire game as well. The notes that I took (of the comments that people made) were as follows: When someone buys points, following players should have to pay 3 to buy points. (this is sort of against my original idea, however I see why this would seem a reasonable thing to say.) Viking games should have more warfare (This was reiterated at least twice. I need to do some theme work, apparently). Fiddly rules should be on a card (I can totally do this - I already have such a card, and expanding it into a mat wouldn't be that hard) Perhaps there should be disputed territories: when a player takes over an island half way they can block the other player from benefiting from it. (not sure if I love this. I want the game t...

Friday we played another game of TLDR at lunch, and we did much better. We still haven't finished a game yet, but I suppose that the game is a fairly long one, so it makes sense. I also came up with a new modification to The Age of Vikings - Chieftain meeples. Instead of gaining threat, players add chieftain meeples to their islands, and those meeples reduce the defense of the islands that they are on. Once another player conquers the island the meeples are removed, or the player may spend an action to remove the meeples. This removes and replaces the 'Threat' mechanic completely. I look forward to trying it out and seeing if it works. Finally, I have been working more and more on Jurassic Galaxy, and I am getting close to making up a prototype and testing it out again. I currently have planet tiles, tech cards, plant cards, animal cards, and contracts. The animals are not completely finished, but it is coming along.

Yesterday we played Terran League of Defense Robots at work for the first time. It went really badly. One player thought it would be funny to play all of the hardest foes that he was dealt, so the players lost pretty quickly. Despite this, three of the players expressed interest in playing again. The easy mothership Multiple of them seemed to understand how to build a robot and most of them wanted to try to fight off the alien threat. The mothership that they drew (which was played on the second turn by the turncoat player) was the easiest mothership possible, so they still had a chance when it came out, but they quickly lost as more and more killer aliens appeared. I didn't learn nearly anything at all from the playtest that could help the game, so it was almost a complete loss for me. The only two take homes were the fact that I need to balance the motherships against each other, and that I need to stress the necessity of cooperation to the playtesters when I intr...