Pretentious Board Games

We played a game of Hungry Oni with new people and they thought that 5 actions was too many. I agree that it can be a little daunting for a microgame, so I have reduced the action counts to 3 (the three that were used the most often). I have made no changes to the artwork. The current rules for Hungry Oni are  here . Yesterday we also made another 18 card game on a whim. We are currently calling it Deception. It was based on Diplomacy . Our first game took 2 hours (Which is unusual for a 18 card game), and had a lot of the same sort of play as Diplomacy. Making a PnP copy of the game is massive overkill, but I did it anyway. Here is the result. Print one copy of the attack and defense cards and then 2 of every other card. We changed the rules after the first game to reduce the length of play time. Perhaps we will play another game tonight to see if it is down from two hours to a more reasonable play time. My brother in-law Chauncy brainstormed it out with me. He also drew ...

After having played eight or nine more games I have changed Hungry Oni a bit more. My brother in-law told me that the game seemed a bit too simple, so I have added rules that allow players to make more strategic choices. It seems to have improved the game a bit. New rules are posted here . The artwork is also changing as well:

I have changed the rules a little to account for a few three player games. The current rules are as follows: Each player places their colored point token on the score track in the n first slots (where n is the number of players). The player with the most points goes first followed by the player with the second most etc. Place one value token on each row of the value chart in the 1 place. Players start with 4 cards if playing with 2 players, 3 cards if playing with 3 players, and 2 cards if playing with 4 players. Discard the top card of the deck if playing with three players. Place the discarded card face down and do not look at it. That card is out for the remainder of the game. A turn consist of: Draw the top card from the deck or the discard pile. Play and resolve two action cards, one after the other. Drawn cards are added to the players hand. Hands are kept face up in front of the players at all times. Played cards are resolved like this: Determine the value...

I have started on a new national game design month game. I am considering calling it hungry hungry ogre, or hungry oni. I originally considered the name Naga demon, however I decided that that name has probably already been taken. As of this moment it is a 18 card micro game with 8 tokens. there are 16 cards which denote behaviors that the player takes. They are divided among four categories evenly. The other two cards are a score card as well as a valuation chart. Behaviors which are performed the most often are valued the lowest and the other behaviors values are raised by over playing a behavior. No two players may have the same score at any given time. If a player arrives at the same score that another player is already at then that player adds one to his or her score to make it different from the player that they were supposed to be tied with. The theme is that of a bunch of captives attempting to not be eaten by an ogre. The game ends when the cards run out and all of t...

I made a website to set up Werewolf type games. Currently it can deal out the cards for 8 games including: Two Rooms and a Boom Avalon Resistance Templar Intrigue Cook the Books Witch Hunt Dr. Boom Werewolf/Mafia It also decides who starts in games where a starting player is necessary. The website is here for those who would like to try it out. I am currently talking with the owners of the games to get permission to use their artwork, but I don't really think that I will get it. As part of making this website I created a new character for Avalon. It is the Green Knight. He shows up as evil when Merlin and the lady of the lake look at him, but he is actually loyal to Arthur. He is best played when the good characters are too powerful (like at 6 players in our play group for instance).

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...