Pretentious Board Games

The kickstarter edition Coup went on sale for a single day this week. Apparently the publisher got a few more copies that he thought were destroyed so he put them on Amazon. I have convinced people to play it at work using a PnP copy, and it is fairly popular. I wanted to buy it, but I had no more fun money for the month. I came up with a plan to buy it with credit card reward points. Unfortunately, when I ordered the Amazon gift card it ended up coming in the next day, after all the copies has already sold. :( Fortunately I convinced a co-worker to buy it, so it is not like I will have to wait till it is printed for real to play with a legitimate copy. Someone at work also said that they wanted to bring in Bohnanza, which I wholeheartedly approve of (resistance has been overplayed quite a bit, so any other fun game seems that much better.) I have some dancing robot animations under way. They already dance based on what moves you are performing, but they don't lose parts, a...

It has been a while without a post. I have been mostly working on the dancing animations for my Dancing Robots website (they are not in a state where they could be shown off to anyone, but they are getting closer.) I also took a first stab at composing judge cards . for Dancing Robots. Burgoo just got funded (and hit it's final stretch goal in the last minutes). I look forward to receiving my copy. I also tried out Coup  recently. It seems to have much more randomness than Resistance, but it still a fun game where deduction and deceit are paramount to winning. The player elimination aspect is annoying (except in a two player game, where it means that the game is over immediately). A game doesn't take that long as long as everyone is playing to kill, so you are not out forever, but it is still annoying to be out. I have considered the option of making a variant allowing players who are eliminated to still be able to take the three basic actions and still bother the pla...

We played some Love Letter at work today. It went pretty well, and people all seemed to enjoy it. I introduced it by telling everyone that I had a new game called 'Pretty Princess', which apparently did not turn everyone off to the game. We ended up with seven people who were willing to play (which is more than the four who can legally play the game), so we ended up having some standers by. Dwayne ended up winning after 5 rounds (despite my eliminating him hard core one round via a malicious use of the prince card (when I knew that he had the princess via deduction)). We might try Coup some time (since Ryan Hendricks rates it highly). I am not super excited about the player elimination, but Love Letter has that to some extent, so it is not the worst thing ever. The game does seem like a cool game, and one that would be fun with this group of people. We also played some more Burgoo , which is gaining popularity fast at work (people like playing it in between Pomodoros  s...

I played some more Burgoo over the weekend with a brother in law (while my wife was talking with her sister about their impending babies). After the first game he didn't even ask if we wanted to play another, he just started to set up for another game immediately. I think that he liked it (though I didn't question him like I do when we play one of my own game). It is a fun game. I also started working on the cards for the dance moves. I have a very rough approximation of what I want them to look like. Since I don't yet have all my artwork for the part cards I am making these cards without any place for artwork. When the artwork for the other cards comes in I will consider getting artwork for these cards (though the cards have some interesting requirements for text, and I am not too sure that I will be able to fit in artwork and keep the text as large as I would like). I tried to make only one of each type of card as well as the cards that were the most unusual ...

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 made a copy of Burgoo  and played it tonight (just to test it out so that I could determine if I wanted to support it). The game is pretty fast, and seems to have some strategic depth to it. My wife and I tied, with Andrea coming in third. Andrea and I both split our stacks early and Alison just played the right ingredients to maximize her relative advantage. The game seems (after only one play) to not be terribly broken, but I will play it a few more times before I make a real strong judgement. If it continues to be as fun as it was the first game I will be supporting it. I have been working on more Dancing Robots cards. A lot of my time was spent making scripts which make things look exactly identical between different cards (and basically not very different than it was before). The self destruct card is an example of a card wherein the text looks like it will be looking in the future (which is to say that it has the right amount of black around it and white overshadowin...

Today I printed up and cut out three copies of Dancing Robots and mailed one out to a blind playtester. I also played some Herd your Horses and a game of Dancing Robots with Rea. With my help she beat me by two points. In the evening I worked a bit on the new Grasp Cards, which seemed to come out pretty good. The tractor beam was the most unusual one. It had to have an extra large icon box in the corner as well as an extra large rule box on the bottom. The Multimover will be similar.

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...

Darin Shepit is the instigator of this post. It is an explanation of my recent changes to my card art. It might be interesting to others as well, so it is memorialized here. I did take a lot of Darin's comments into consideration when I made my recent changes. I also did some things of my own initiative. The following changes were per Darin's advice: The platforms. They are circles, rectangles, and ovals, colored with perlin noise and bordered with white to black gradients. The parts 'sit' on top of them, and the text floats above the parts (although I don't intend that to be apparent in most of the cards). I tried to lighten up the 'scratched metal' background to make the part stand out more. I also increased the saturation and contrast of the cards. The art does look much clearer with this change, so I thought that that really helped the overall appearance. Finally, The borders on the cards were removed entirely. The changes that I made of my own accor...