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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skye Frontier

Image
I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here. The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup. Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle. After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state: the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled ou
Read more

More Automatown and getting ready for SaltCon

Image
Alison and I played Automatown with many of the discussed changes last night. We liked some of them, and others we did not. The game ended up ending in 6 rounds, and it took about 80 minutes. The later rounds were longer than the first few rounds. We also were being distracted by kids, so perhaps we could have gone faster. Alison ended up with 7 workers and 9 points while I had 9 workers and 28 points (more about that later). Having fewer types of resources was very good. It made the economy less confusing, and setup and cleanup much faster. The mats worked well, and during the game, we thought of more things to put on them - (the three starting workers can be added here, as well as a reminder of what level is what in terms of dots.) Here is the mat that we played with: We started with 3 scrap, which was not enough given that we were also playing with the rule that made upgrades cost a scrap. In fact, that rule made us strapped for scrap the whole game. We decided that m
Read more

Three more playtests

Image
On Friday I played another game of Skye Frontier with my dad (also Mike), brother in law (Dave), and nephew (Logan). My dad and nephew play games sometimes, but are not super big into the hobby, and my brother in law is moderately a gamer (he buys games and brings them to my game nights, but he doesn't play all of the newest games). Logan started the game (and picked the blue castle), Dave was white, my dad was yellow, and I was red. My dad and I ended up contending over the lakes, while Dave focused on building mountain regions, and Logan built some of everything. I couldn't get a shipping empire set up because boats were hard to come by, and Logan (and Dave) started grabbing cash at an alarming rate, so I instead focused on building up points using scrolls and by closing regions. With a 1 point per sheep scoring tile out there, we all tried to get sheep, and the build for free action was used a lot. I capped off my regions just in the nick of time, and Dave ended the game (wh
Read more