Pretentious Board Games

With the new year, there have been tons of things happening. I have submitted two games to the Cardboard Edison this year: The Citadel of Madness, and Grab the Loot. The feedback that I got from them was immensely helpful last year, so I am eagerly anticipating this year's results. I also received a large package of board game parts (which I ordered) in the mail. The most exciting parts was the blue gorilla meeple. I have designed a dexterity game based on it (for the January 24 hour game design contest). It is called "Where there's gorillas there's hope". It is fairly simple, and has a traitor mechanic. When I finally get over this cold, I will certainly bring it to work, and see how the guys like it. I also have been thinking about the 9 card design contest (I never intended to make a game for it, but one just arrived in my brain yesterday, and it is a really interesting idea. Perhaps you will hear more about it in future posts). The Icon creation thread...

The rules editing for the Madness Place is finally calming down. The only change to the game's rules during the entire process was making it so that if you do an action it has to have an effect on the game's state for it to be a valid action. The Flavor test has greatly improved as well: They called you Mad, but could a madman have created a revolutionary living-brain extractor? Yes! You could, and you did it for SCIENCE! Not only did the fools not understand you, but The Tyrant even called you a criminal and sentenced you to repair The Citadel. A harsh sentence considering your ‘crimes’ were all for the furthering of science. No one has ever escaped this capricious, maniacal, homicidal, and irrevocably evil sentient castle. But, you will show them! After all, you were born with The Madness - a gift of supernatural understanding of all sciences. Build as many twisted abominations of science as is necessary to get the castle repaired so that you can earn your release fro...

I have gotten some great help on editing the rules for The Madness Place. They are looking much better now than they used to. I have yet to work on Grab the Loot and Terran League of Defense Robots, however. I have also been spending a lot of time working on PlaytestHub - which is nearing feature-completion. I have only one major feature to implement. After that, I will probably do some refactoring, alpha test it myself, and then open it up to a 'public' beta test (perhaps first for the people that are supporting me on patreon, and then to BGG next).

I am nearing completion of an alpha version of the website, however I am not so sure that I will be able to work on it as often as I was planning originally, because I just realized that I need to get seriously involved in rule editing for the 2018 Ion Awards. My documents that I am working on are Terran League of Defense Robots, Grab the Loot!, and The Madness Place. So far I still have a daunting amount of editing left on them. Fortunately the kind folks over at BGG are helping me out a lot, not to mention my kind wife, who is way better at this sort of thing than I am. I am also planning on volunteering for Extra Life this year. I will be streaming board games (and some video games) for the local primary children's hospital. If you are interested in donating you can find information about how to support me here .

I just realized that with the ION Award coming up at the beginning of December, I need to work on my rules documents! The games that I am going to be preparing this year (if I can get them ready) are: Grab the Loot!, Terran League of Defense Robots, and The Madness Place. I expect that things will be pretty busy over the next few weeks. I have also almost finished my playtesting website. A few more features and it will be ready for an alpha release. Here's to hoping that I can get it all done.

More work has been done on PlaytestHub, and it is coming closer to completion. I have about 20 open issues with it in my bug tracker, so I am coming to a close. That being said, Google just announced a new database technology for firebase, so I might waste spend some time converting it into a newer technology. We have been playing Grab the Loot at work some more, and the new changes are solidifying into a better form. I have been trying to figure out what changes would allow the game to play the same, but have the scores tighter. I am taking pictures of people's end game situation after most games now, so that I can keep tabs on what any given change will do to the scoring. I think that I have found a scoring method that will work pretty well: Items are worth 2 points each. Coins are worth 1 point each. 3+ n bonus points are awarded to the player with the most of any given item, where n  is the number of cards in the Greed matching the item. In the game that we played tod...

I played Grab the Loot at work with the changes that Daniel and I talked about, and then the next night at the Board Game Design Guild without them. They definitely need some balancing, and I am not sure if they make the options less interesting, but I am going to work on fixing them up. My notes from the game at work were as follows: more money gain - things cheaper - top one is free most of the time.  add a few more greeds for 2 players Captain should give 2 coins.  I have implemented the first and last, and I am not sure if I am going to make the second one happen. I need another playtest before I continue with the new changes. I also made a new mat for The Madness Place taking into the feedback that I received from Daniel. Here it is in all it's glory: I also made some start cards for TMP - cards which guarantee that you start with a level 2 device, and a time card, so that removes a little bit of the fiddlyness of the setup, and balances the possibility o...

I had the guild look at Grab the Loot again. We played with 4 players, and had a good feedback session afterward. Here are my notes: Not enough treasures changed hands - I need to up that! Have a player that gives an extra blocker/worker? Use a cube for the extra guy Player that steals more? More swaps to fix the treasures changing hands problem Double your lowest item value as a player ability? When cards fill up, discard them What happened to the card that removed one person's meeple and gives one coin to that person? Are coins too powerful? Perhaps 4 is a better scorepoint? Cards that pay a coin to gain 2 items, or the reverse All in all, I am ready to make some changes. I will likely have new PNP files ready in a day or two. I have also made a lot of progress on playtesthub. It has the ability to add games, look at games, and mark games for playtesting. You just now need to be able to actually playtest them and give feedback.

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...