NaGaDeMon 2013 Day -1

Today is Halloween, which means that tomorrow marks the beginning of National Game Design Month 2013.

Last year I created Dancing Robots, which I am almost ready to start pitching to publishers.

This year I have two games that I am considering making:
1) a worker placement game where you attempt to build the most Moai (giant stone statues) which ends(enters the scoring phase) when the island is stripped of all resources.
2) a single/cooperative multiplayer game thematically based on the Roguelike genera of computer games.

The first is currently tentatively labeled 'MOAR MOAI!' (though that will likely change). I have considered how I want the game to play out quite a bit, but haven't yet worked through the math behind it. I am thinking it will take a couple of mats and a bunch of colored cubes. One mechanic that I think would be cool is having the game occur over two phases - the building phase (where you cut trees, feed your people, and build stone heads), and the scoring phase (where a different civilization comes in and discovers the statues and you gain points based on how many of your statues they discover)

The second has no working title. I think that the goal will be to retrieve an item from the bottom of a dungeon which is peopled with evil monsters and traps and stuff. The equipment will be randomly generated and the monsters will get harder each level that you explore. As you explore, you will build the dungeon, and when you go down a stair you clean up the last level and use the same tiles to build the next level. Probably the item that you grab will be less than useless to you (perhaps it will nullify some of your defenses or something like that. It might even 'level you down' as you ascend the dungeon and also destroy your items.)

I will continue to post as I start up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skye Frontier

Image
I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here. The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup. Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle. After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state: the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled ou
Read more

More Automatown and getting ready for SaltCon

Image
Alison and I played Automatown with many of the discussed changes last night. We liked some of them, and others we did not. The game ended up ending in 6 rounds, and it took about 80 minutes. The later rounds were longer than the first few rounds. We also were being distracted by kids, so perhaps we could have gone faster. Alison ended up with 7 workers and 9 points while I had 9 workers and 28 points (more about that later). Having fewer types of resources was very good. It made the economy less confusing, and setup and cleanup much faster. The mats worked well, and during the game, we thought of more things to put on them - (the three starting workers can be added here, as well as a reminder of what level is what in terms of dots.) Here is the mat that we played with: We started with 3 scrap, which was not enough given that we were also playing with the rule that made upgrades cost a scrap. In fact, that rule made us strapped for scrap the whole game. We decided that m
Read more

Three more playtests

Image
On Friday I played another game of Skye Frontier with my dad (also Mike), brother in law (Dave), and nephew (Logan). My dad and nephew play games sometimes, but are not super big into the hobby, and my brother in law is moderately a gamer (he buys games and brings them to my game nights, but he doesn't play all of the newest games). Logan started the game (and picked the blue castle), Dave was white, my dad was yellow, and I was red. My dad and I ended up contending over the lakes, while Dave focused on building mountain regions, and Logan built some of everything. I couldn't get a shipping empire set up because boats were hard to come by, and Logan (and Dave) started grabbing cash at an alarming rate, so I instead focused on building up points using scrolls and by closing regions. With a 1 point per sheep scoring tile out there, we all tried to get sheep, and the build for free action was used a lot. I capped off my regions just in the nick of time, and Dave ended the game (wh
Read more