Pretentious Board Games

I recently got a copy of Space Cadets: Dice Duels. I played it a lot at SaltCon last year and enjoyed it so much that I got it for Christmas. It is a frantic team game where you attempt to quickly (since there are no turns) maneuver your spaceship around a board and shoot the other spaceship. Each player controls different ship functions (such as weapons, movement, or sensors) and the team must coordinate their efforts in real time to effectively combat the other ship. The core mechanic is rolling dice and placing them on mats that control the various ship systems. For instance, a player that has control over the weapons will roll red dice that have missile part symbols on then in an attempt to get the three parts that are necessary to build a missile and then he places them on the missile bay that corresponds to the direction that he wants to shoot. At the same time the shield player would be trying to move the shields to point in the direction of place that the opponent ship is l...

I brought a second chess set to work. We often play chess variants, and are now playing Bughouse Chess . For the uninitiated, Bughouse Chess is a variant where there are two games going on at the same time and the players of opposite colors on opposite boards are allied with each other. When a piece is captured it is given to the teammate of the player who can then drop the piece on his (in our case the only players that choose to play Bughouse are male) board instead of taking a normal move. This allows coordination between the players who are on a team because you can request a piece from your ally and if they can reasonably get it then they will probably get it for you. I love playing chess variants, but of all chess variants I have tried this is a really fun one.

This week I have been submitting games to be judged for the Ion Awards. I am going to submit four games probably. I am also thinking about reviving Polynesia and making a new game out of it. We played some Moar Moai as part of finalizing the rules, and we had a fun time. Perhaps I will play more at work. It is a pretty good game. We also just bought Space Cadets Dice Duel. I played it at saltcon last year, and our was pretty fun. Hopefully Alison likes it as well.

Since coming back from our vacation in California I have continued to work on Hungry Oni and Deception. I entered Deception in a microgame design contest and have gotten a pretty good review on it here . Hopefully more people play it and it does well in the contest :). I have also rewritten the rules for Dancing Robots in preparation for the SaltCon Ion Awards . I am planning on submitting four games (dancing robots, moar moai, witch hunt, and hungry oni) this year to the awards, but I have not yet finished the rulesmithing for them. I also found a new game that I want to try out. It is named Comrade . I have printed it out and plan on shanghaiing my coworkers into a game this week.