Pretentious Board Games

We played two more games of "Magic, Inc." (as we have been calling it right now), and we have had to change some of the rules some more. It is becoming a better game, but it isn't yet super good. The 4 justice card Currently we are still trying to make lucky draws less of an issue in the game (I hate when games come down to lucky draws. If a player set up a much better strategy than their opponent then it should be easy for them to win and hard for the other player to win). We recently changed the rules to allow players to build The Universal Machine using cards from their hands. This is pretty cool since it allows the players to choose the tone of the game and makes most games different (since there are a reasonable number of combinations of universal machines that could exist (343 for 2 players, 2401 for 4 players, etc)). During our first game last night I built a machine that could convert 2 growth into 5 prestige and then I ran it two times using extra time ...

I had an idea about a game where you play cards in order to build in-game effects that you can use. An example: The smithy card in dominion would use 3-5 cards and would be modeled in the following way: [1] [Action] [→] [4] [Draw Card] For thematic purposes I am probably going to make the effects that you build be named "engines", and the game will probably be themed as a magitech game where you are building perpetual motion machines or something. I have been playing around with rules and came up with a first attempt set of rules with Alison. I refined the initial rules over a few days until I felt that it was likely that a first run through of the game could be made. Last night we played our first game and it went pretty well. Alison built a fancy engine to convert Time into Prestige and she won via a flood of prestige. We didn't like the fact that it was so hard to make engines, so we modified the rules and played another game of it tonight. We still ran in...

I came home and found that my copy of Harbour arrived. It is a fun worker placement tableau building game by Tasty Minstrel Games. I backed it as a Kickstarter project (I also playtested it, so I knew that I would like it already), and it finally arrived. I sleeved the cards and plan on playing it tomorrow. After that I got an email telling me that I was announced as an ION Award finalist today :). I submitted 5 games to be judged and two of them were chosen as finalists: Hungry Oni, and Moar Moai. I sort of expected Moar Moai to do well. It is a simple game that has a lot of strategy, but Hungry Oni was a bit of a surprise. It is really minimalist (I built it as a microgame, to see if I could), so it is not really that big a game. Either way I am really excited to go to SaltCon and see what happens. Weather or not I win I will still feel like a winner, since I already have a publisher looking at two of my games, and that was really my main reason for submitting anything to ...

As I write this I notice that Above and Below is #3 on the hotness... Sweet. I playtested Above and Below last night as the Sandy Board Game Design Meetup , and our session was cut short, so I am posting this for the benefit of Ryan (and any interested parties). Since this was played at a playtesting night, I expect that some of this review will not apply to the final game, but I thought I would post what I felt about the game. The artwork which was completed was excellent. The village that you build has a distinct feel to it. Reminds me of a nostalgic look at the fantasy Japanese countryside in a Miyazaki film (perhaps Laputa). The people tokens were not yet complete, but the sketches on them were of all sorts of people (slanted toward bearded/facial haired men ever so slightly). There was one fish person and one little girl with pigtails and a hammer. I liked that the people were unique and that they all felt a bit different (I swear that I picked up lord yupa as my first train...