Pretentious Board Games

I haven't been working on Archipelago very much. I have added colors to the cards, but I realized that I needed to start getting my card games ready for an ION Award submission. I have been rewriting rules and editing artwork. It is a lot of work, but it it going along fairly well. I need to work harder on the sorcery rules, but the game is a pretty big concept to deal with in the beginning, so the rules are hard to write up.

We played more Archipelago tonight at the board game design meet-up. It went poorly. That is a good thing because it revealed a flaw in the game. A player got to play way more cards than the others, and ended the game in three turns. This was unexpected. I need to figure out how to fix that. The new art was well received though.

I have played my game 4 times so far. Right now it looks like the picture on the left, but I am making artwork like the picture on the right, so perhaps the next play will be easier to explain to people. Somehow I find that people find games with more finished artwork to be easier to understand. I found an island generator here  which I am using for the card art. I am currently considering how to change scoring, and also trying to make the splay mechanic more obvious. I will write up the rules some time soon.

I skipped day 1. I am in the brainstorming phase. I want to use the splay mechanic like innovation or chibimob. I think that sorcery, inc. could be a good theme. If a card were arranged as follows: RR1 234 Or: 1R2 3R4 Where R is the rule text, and 1-4 are symbols then they could be splayed multiple directions for interesting results all around. The question is, what rule text makes sense to put? Similar ones to the ones that Sorcery already has? Then you could have an engine core that is either a converter or a producer, and then you would build around that and gain benefit by stacking your cards correctly. If cards could be both, then the rule text could allow for weird interactions like "the output of this card is doubled", or "this card needs 50% less justice." I guess it is bed time.