Pretentious Board Games

Dead Drop  is a 2-4 player micro card game. It takes 2-15 minutes to play and could have been named "Clue - the good parts" were it not for copyright reasons. That last statement is not entirely accurate. It has a similar deduction requirements, but the mechanics are different. I have played about 30 games so far (given that I printed it on Friday of last week this is a pretty decent amount of games). About 8 were 2 player, 8 were 3 player, and 14 were 4 player. In the game one card (the drop) is placed face down in the middle and all players attempt to deduce what card that card is by finding out what cards all the other players hold. There are cards that are visible to all of the players (one per player), and cards that each player holds (1/nth of the remaining cards). There are three possible actions that players have allow them to swap cards with other players, with the visible cards, and to ask other players if they have specific cards. A round of the game co...

We played a memorable game of Two Rooms and a Boom today. There were fourteen players: five red, one bomber, five blue, one president, one zombie, and one nuclear tyrant. The zombie plague took the other room on the first round sparing only the president (who had held out when the initial infection occurred). Most of the blue team was infected before the first swap as only one blue guy was in the other room. During the first round the red team successfully found the nuclear tyrant and partially treated him (which also allowed him to know the bomber's identity), and cast him to the other room so that the president could finish him off. The first swap occurred: one zombie traded for one nuclear tyrant The second round the tyrant zombies up (instead of being fully disarmed by the president), and the zombie infects the bomber and the remaining blue team member through confusion. The third round the tyrant goes back to try to infect the remainder and takes over the first r...

Over the past few days we have been playing some more "creative accounting". I still haven't gotten in a three player game, but we have played a fair amount of two and four to six player games. It seems like the cut off for two companies might want to be at six players. That decision hasn't been made yet for sure, but it seems like a good place. With two players it is mostly a game about second guessing your opponent, and it ends up playing similar to paper scissor rock (sigh). Cook the books > play it safe > audit. With four players the game is pretty hard for the auditor. It is possible that I should make the scoring different (something like the more book cookers that are caught on an audit the more points the auditor gains). If I do that then perhaps the book cooking should be scored the same. (The game would have a whole new scoring system, but the remainder of the game would stay the same) I entered SaltCon's Prototype alley. I am still trying ...

I decided that in order to judge what font size was acceptable for the cards I needed to have all of the cards done at least in part.  Here  is the gallery with the current appearance of the cards. Obviously there is still work to do, but until the art gets done I can't really do it. We played four or so games of Burgoo over lunch. I decided that I am going to support it. It is pretty fun. The best part is the end of the game when you can judge what every move will do to your chances of winning. We also played some more Avalon as well as some Two Rooms and a Boom (both of which ended up good). During one of the games of avalon we had two spies on the final mission (which was way fun). No-one knew that I was a spy apparently, and we also had the other spy known to Merlin on the mission.

I have published a new version of Dancing Robots to the Windows Azure website. There are minor UI improvements (the biggest one was showing cardx2 or cardx3 instead of duplicating the cards). I also made a post to BGG attempting to invite people to playtest Dancing Robots (The post is here  for those who are interested (if you want to join in, I'll mail you a copy of the game if you post a response)). Finally, I spent a few minutes making color semi-high fidelity versions of the chassis cards (Since Dave has finished all of the artwork for the chassis). I will probably make some grasps tomorrow, and perhaps I will finish all of the artworkless cards as well. In other news, this week we tried Two Rooms and a Boom with Zombies. It was pretty fun, and I was one of the three not infected at the end of the game. Only 2 people won (since the president died I lost, and since I did not die at the end of the game the zombies lost). All of the red team who did not get conve...

Yesterday at a family get together we played a game of each of Two Rooms and a Boom, The Resistance, and Bang (With the Wild West Show expansion). For the first time ever (that I have seen) Two Rooms was won based on solid logic and not just guessing what was going to happen. We had the bomber, the president, and two other good guys in the room on the second round. We kept both the bomber and the president in the room so that we could send out the bomber on the last round and save the president. For the game of Bang, we had never tried the Wild West Show expansion before, and it ended up being super overpowered, but still very fun. I ended the game with a volcanic and a card that allowed me to convert any card in my hand to a bang (any number of times). I killed the outlaws and got three more cards and repeated. It was pretty silly. I talked with Dave about my Dancing Robots artwork. He is still finishing up the other pieces, but then he might make me backgrounds for the car...

I have been working a lot on the AI for my game. Specifically I have been making the AI better able to plan a dance. It now considers all possible combinations of the dance cards that it has, and it will dance the moves that give it the most points, and it will also dance them in the order that gives it the most points as well as damages its robot the least. I have been sitting on the artwork changes until I talk to Dave tomorrow. I figure he will have something to say (him being a graphic designer and all). At work we have played more Resistance. We finally combined Avalon with the plot cards of Resistance (that made the game different). I also convinced them all to play 2 Rooms and a Boom, which was well received. Seeing as tomorrow is Christmas it is possible that I will have a gift worth reporting here. If so, I will report it in my next post.

Today is the end of National Game Design Month. Over the course of the month I designed Moar Moai and Roguelike . I would say that Moar Moai is pretty darn playable, and that Roguelike is at least barely playable. Moar Moai has one open point of contention right now, and that is the exact way in which artifacts turn into control over the adventurers. I think that I will end up with players having perfect control over what 'cards' they get (although they might end up as tokens on a specific part of the mat instead of cards), but not know what 'cards' other players have until the scoring round actually starts. Roguelike is still largely unbalanced, and I have never played games with the new weapon cards that I have invented because I have never printed them up (here in California I do not have access to my card creation equipment). Perhaps next week I will do that. It does seem to work without the tokens (+1 etc), but needs a mat to be printed up to make it reall...