The ongoing tale of rules editing

With the Ion Award submissions deadline looming I have been editing my rules documents pretty consistently every day of the month so far. That hopefully means that I will get done on time, but you never can tell.

The Age of Vikings is coming along quite nicely. The document is much better than it was on the first of the month. I have pretty high hopes for this one. The game plays well, and is strategic and fun, however it does tend to take a long time. I think that this is definitely the year to submit it to the contest.

The only problem that remains (as far as I can tell) is the unification of modes of speech - Sometimes I tell the reader of the document to do things (e.g. "If you have 3 coins, Move your ship"), and sometimes I tell the reader that the players will do things (e.g. "Any players that have three coins must move their ship"). I need to make it all the same, so that it isn't jarring when I switch between both modes of speech

In the past I have had the document tell the reader to do things, and I like it better, so I am probably going to do that again this year.

The Dragon's Game needs some more artwork to finish it up. Mainly the treasure cards have too dark a background. I'll probably also do the above mode unification, however I am feeling fairly good about the game, so there will probably not be that much more to do.

Terran League of Defense Robots is the game that I am the least sure about. At the present time I am not ready to submit it, and I question that I will be by the end of the month.

I just had a cool idea about how to modify the game and my first playtest of it didn't pan out. I fear that the time doesn't exist to balance all of the changes that my modification would need, and I don't really want to submit the game unless I can get this change in (because I like it a lot).

If I don't submit it, that means that I will be submitting only two games this year, which is way fewer than I have in the past few years.

It will, however, mean that next year I will have two killer games (as long as I finish up TLDR, and The Madness Place).

In other news: I went to the BGDG of Utah on Thursday, and played a game (I think it was "Knights at War"), and it turned out to be pretty fun. I have considered making my own spin off and retheming it to play with my kids.

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