Pretentious Board Games

I played roll for the galaxy and broom service for the first time on Friday. Both were interesting, however I like race better than roll right now. Broom service was quite interesting. There were elements of set collection, press your luck, and second guessing the other players. Sunday Alison and I played Forbidden Desert, which seems to me like a better Forbidden Island. My phone wanted to call the game Forbidden Dessert, which would be another game entirely. I am just about to start NagaDemon for another year. This year I have been thinking of making a Girl Genius themed game that reimplements Sorcery, Inc. But fixes the worst parts of it. It starts on November first, so I haven't done much more than mull ideas over, but hopefully I can get a lot done by the end of November. The things that I want to fix about sorcery are the the lack of a scoring method (currently you either win or lose, but you don't really have points), and the overly abstract nature of the res...

I just went to my 3rd Board Game Design Guild Meeting last night. Since there were not enough people who brought games, we ended up playing The Age of Vikings as one of the two games that were played. The people seemed to understand the game and we got through an entire game as well. The notes that I took (of the comments that people made) were as follows: When someone buys points, following players should have to pay 3 to buy points. (this is sort of against my original idea, however I see why this would seem a reasonable thing to say.) Viking games should have more warfare (This was reiterated at least twice. I need to do some theme work, apparently). Fiddly rules should be on a card (I can totally do this - I already have such a card, and expanding it into a mat wouldn't be that hard) Perhaps there should be disputed territories: when a player takes over an island half way they can block the other player from benefiting from it. (not sure if I love this. I want the game t...

Te tried out the chieftains, but they were not balanced. We had to spend way too much effort fighting them off. We have ideas about how to fix that, but I have been working on a new game that just came to my head instead of Age of Vikings. The new game is tentatively called "Extinction Events" (though that is not really that good of a name). It is about building a species of animal, and using it to survive various extinction events. The player that has the largest population by the end of the game is the player that wins. The species are collections of cards splayed in various directions (splay mechanic is taken from both innovation as well as chibi mob). The game is still not playable, but it was fun to start it out. Here are what the cards look like at the present time: I will post here if it becomes playable.

Friday we played another game of TLDR at lunch, and we did much better. We still haven't finished a game yet, but I suppose that the game is a fairly long one, so it makes sense. I also came up with a new modification to The Age of Vikings - Chieftain meeples. Instead of gaining threat, players add chieftain meeples to their islands, and those meeples reduce the defense of the islands that they are on. Once another player conquers the island the meeples are removed, or the player may spend an action to remove the meeples. This removes and replaces the 'Threat' mechanic completely. I look forward to trying it out and seeing if it works. Finally, I have been working more and more on Jurassic Galaxy, and I am getting close to making up a prototype and testing it out again. I currently have planet tiles, tech cards, plant cards, animal cards, and contracts. The animals are not completely finished, but it is coming along.

Yesterday we played Terran League of Defense Robots at work for the first time. It went really badly. One player thought it would be funny to play all of the hardest foes that he was dealt, so the players lost pretty quickly. Despite this, three of the players expressed interest in playing again. The easy mothership Multiple of them seemed to understand how to build a robot and most of them wanted to try to fight off the alien threat. The mothership that they drew (which was played on the second turn by the turncoat player) was the easiest mothership possible, so they still had a chance when it came out, but they quickly lost as more and more killer aliens appeared. I didn't learn nearly anything at all from the playtest that could help the game, so it was almost a complete loss for me. The only two take homes were the fact that I need to balance the motherships against each other, and that I need to stress the necessity of cooperation to the playtesters when I intr...

I just played a solo game with the Alien Destruction cards in. I added 3 copies to see if it felt right. It was hard, and they are so annoying, but it was doable (and probably easier than double alien meeples), so mission accomplished. I did, however come up with more balance issues. For one thing, bad draw luck made the final two cards in the part deck the two I needed to defeat five of the first six aliens. That made for a really rough start. I think that I need to genericize damage in some way, perhaps make any two attack symbols count as one other attack symbol of your choice. The mother ship was an amazing fight, and also way too hard. I had nearly every tech researched, but I still couldn't defeat her without blowing up parts. The types that the mothership required were acid fire and lightning 2x each, and there is no weapon that provides that, so I had to use 4 different weapons to get it. I ended up building a monster of a robot that had practically no healing. I bl...