Pretentious Board Games

I played a game of Moar Moai recently. It went well, however we started talking afterward and came up with some interesting ideas. Here are my notes: Peek at upcoming events Add chief Removing stone Distribution of resources (claim and then distribute later) Simplify text on player mat Circle starting values Remove visible event pile Move token more than 1 The gist of the better ideas (as far as I remember them) are: Modify the explorer token to make it a 'village' token. The new token acts as the explorer token, but also the player that gains the ability to move it is declared (for that turn) the chief. The chief gets the ability to take extra resources (as if (s)he were the player with the lowest number of workers), and also can move the village token by more than one square if (s)he is winning by more than one. Another idea was to remove stone as a resource from the game. The reasoning behind this idea was that it rarely runs out and it only is used for one th...

I have continued to work on my viking game. It is less broken now than it used to be last time I posted, but still not all the way working. Hopefully I can stop modifying the components at some time, since I keep having to print more and more tokens to make the game run smoothly. Additionally, I have been really getting excited about the new Dominion: Empires expansion that is coming out. It looks like the cards are going to be pretty cool.

Alison has been sick for the last few weeks, so both the kickstarter and the robot game have been shelved for a while. At the same time, I have continued on Micronesia, and it is growing into a reasonable game. Though I have not come up with a name for it yet, it is now a viking themed 4xish game where you take over islands and deify your leaders into Norse gods. I stole the artwork from this guy , who totally drew an awesome set of Norse gods, as well as a bunch of Tolkien themed pictures as well. Obviously the artwork is a placeholder until I can get art made for me. I printed up some ships and some tokens for the game, and have had a few playtests so far. It still needs a lot of work (mostly with balancing at this point), but it is coming along. It has been fun to learn more about Norse mythology. The goddess Idunn (pictured above) is a goddess of apples (for one thing), which is a funny portfolio element for a god to have. Another interesting thing that lawyers (Logma...

I finished my design for the Dominion tokens. I like the way that they look, so I am thinking of making a Kickstarter campaign to sell some copies of them. I don't really want to do it, but I think that I should so that I can actually make my business profitable this year (that is the goal, after all). I have also finished up a first iteration of the new game (which is currently code-named Micronesia, though that is going to have to change.) It is playable for two players. I will try over the course of this week to get it to the table at work. I have also started brainstorming for the new giant robots fighting aliens game. I am excited to theme it as being in one of Sam Huge's universe (I want to sort of mash the Ed universe into the Fine Structure universe so that I can make the giant robots also come from the place where the script is from.) When I get anything done I'll post it.

I realized that I haven't posted in a while. I didn't win the Ion Award (again). The winner of the Strategy category was "the Scarlet Pimpernel", which was a really good game, so I understand why it won the competition. I had a lot of fun at the convention, so it was not all a loss. I even got a publisher looking at one of my games. I have recently started working on a new game - it is a complete remake of one of my old games based on feedback that I got from one of the other finalists in the competition (one that also didn't win). I have also played a few games of Shadows over Camelot (the card game) at work over lunch. It was pretty fun, though we have yet to be able to win. We have been playing a lot of Secret Hitler (Which I still can't really like, but have to play because it is well liked by the other people).  Finally, I have been designing replacement tokens for the Dominion Adventures cardboard tokens that were really low quality. Perhaps I ...

I have been preparing for my presentations for the Ion award. I have the beginnings pretty good, but need to practice the sample turns still. I found out that the Sandy board game design group is probably going away, since no one wants to pay a monthly fee for it. It was useful to me when I couldn't make it to the BGDG, but now that my Tuesdays are free, I don't really see the need for two groups anymore. I'm also starting to work on a new game named "Doge city". It is based on the computer game agar.io. Alison and I played a game today, and it mostly works. Perhaps I'll post it some time (after it works and has written rules) I had a dream about a game where the players each had dinosaur species that they were evolving. I woke up and wrote it down and it almost seems playable already. Some time I should make it and see if it is. I also still haven't made my new "giant robots fight alien war machines" game yet. Apparently the mo...

It was recently announced that the two games that I submitted to the ION Award are both finalists! I am super excited. I need to start preparing to present them. In order to do that I created the  ION Award finalist showcase  meetup. I got one of the other finalists to agree to present his game, and I have another finalist that might also show up, so we will practice our presentations and hopefully improve our preparation level. I have put up Moar Moai, Polynesia, and Sorcery, Inc. on to tabletop simulator. The three of them can be found here for those who have TTS, and are interested in trying them out. I also had an idea for a terrible game. Perhaps the guy that made cards against humanity could make it. In the game: each player starts with a certain number of cards that represent facial features. Players play until one player has had plastic surgery on their entire face. Players take turns getting plastic surgery (and use up their money to do so). Roll dice to see the ...