Pretentious Board Games

I have made great progress on my 2 week microgame. I have played about 8 games, changing the rules after each game, and have made it much more smooth (gameplay-wise, the art is still as clunky as ever) and more strategic as well. It is still not ready, but I only have till Wednesday, so I am going to have to just move ahead with it, and try to polish it as much as possible. I also made a horrible game logo (I used a dragon from khomesclip at deviantart, who licensed CC): Here are my current notes from last play session (and my thoughts as I write this) : Can you trade coins? (Yes!) Anec should like coins. (Hating treasures is weirdly out of character for a dragon.) If deck runs out, game ends too abruptly. change number of dragons revealed? (2?) With multiple players, slow the game down. How? Anger tokens? (Perhaps: When a dragon gets offended, place one anger token on it. If a dragon with two anger tokens on it gets offended, then the dragon leaves.) Check remaining chara...

I finished a rough draft of a bunch of cards for the robot game. I have weapons, chassis and reactors done. I still need repair units, single use power supplies, the aliens, and other stuff I haven't thought of yet. I would be farther along, however I discovered a design competition that I have decided to enter, and I have to finish my game by next Wednesday to enter. Since I haven't even started making it, I have a lot of work to do. The competition revolves around the box that your game has to fit in. It allows for approximately 60 poker cards in it, and it opens up into two pieces that nest inside each other. Here are my plans: 24 (1/2 sized) action cards (4 each of: Plead, Grovel, Whine, Brag, Flatter, Riddle) 24 (1/2 sized) treasure cards (6 each of: weapons, art, armor, jewels) 6 (full sized) value tracks (one for each action) 6 (full sized) dragon cards (Kih (Weapons, brag), Jafe (art, riddle), Vollys (armor, plead), Ohen (jewels, flatter), Tayr (most, grovel),...

 I have begun to work on getting Moar Moai ready for a round of blind playtesting, so I have been having all the folks over at BoardGameGeek look at it. (the rules, and mats mainly). It is always so helpful to have people on the internet sanity-check your stuff, because I find that things that I thought anyone would understand are not actually all that easy to understand. If you are working on a game, it is invaluable to let people that have never played the game before look at it. You can get the best feedback that way - feedback that is the most similar to the type of stuff that actual players in the wild would have given. Your local playtesters probably like you and are not overly disposed to tell you that your game sucks, or that it is hard to understand. Here is the new player mat: It does look fiddly (it has a lot of boxes), however it makes playing the game way less confusing to people that don't love math, so it is worth it. The way that it works is: you place meep...

We played a few games of Moar Moai with reduced scores, and the balance needs some tweaking, but the game still works fairly well. Since I want players to enjoy the whole game (and not hate the scoring), I am going to work more on it. One of my play testers also had a new idea about how to rearrange the worker placement mats to make them way more easy to understand. The idea is a grid based placement area which incorporates all of the math in the shape of the grid. I haven't yet finished a mockup of it yet, but will soon. I also just went to the Viking festival in Gimli Manitoba, and am thinking about more changes to Age of Vikings.