Pretentious Board Games

The small island game is getting out of hand. I played a second game of it last night, and both players found highly lucrative strategies. One of the strategies snowballed in a really fun way, the other was degenerate, and I am putting in a fix for it. The snowbally one was just crazy awesome. Here is the end state: The right player found one stupid trick to gain 6-12 points a turn (Hint: it was 2x exploring every turn and then buying points once he had 30 goods). It only involved 2 specific cards and having three or more workers, so it was pretty bad. The left player stacked his abilities up until he could labor to: draw 10 cards, settle an island, tuck 3 cards for free, gain a free worker, and gain a point. This net him about 5 points a turn, but on a really good turn he could get 12 points. His strategy reached fruition slightly quicker, and was snowballing faster, so he would have won had he not drawn the entire deck and ended the game early. It felt like a wild engine b...

I have  been working on a new island themed card game recently. It currently has 72 cards (2 decks), 5 mats, and 9 tokens. Compared to Polynesia's 195 cards (6 decks), 7 mats, and 19 tokens, it seems like a decently smaller game. I have been considering calling it Micronesia, just to call that fact out, however it isn't really related to Polynesia, so I am a little bit hesitant to do so. I have decided on some basic rules and played a solo game. It is playable, but not balanced. It remains to be seen if other people will find it fun, however I found it to be an interesting exercise. I felt sorry for my right hand player, because, although he tried a few different strategies, he just couldn't compete with the left player who got a good engine set up pretty early in the game and just raked in the points for the rest of the game. The ending score was 52 to 36. I don't like that. I think that a player that is building up their engine for longer should have a distinct ad...

I have been rule editing like a madman. My wife has been helping me (like a madwoman?). We are getting really close to having the Citadel of Madness and Grab the Loot! ready. Terran League of Defense Robots might not make it this year - but perhaps it will. We are hoping that it does anyway. I have also been making some movies for my submissions to the ION award. Here is the first one that I have completed. My PlaytestHub is in a semi-open alpha state right now. It still has a few more things I want to do to it before I open it up for a public beta. Most notably, I want to see how it is that one user was able to make two copies of themself in the database. I have also started working with Chauncy on Deception again. The new changes add some complexity to the game. I really want to retheme it as a sportsball game. The goal would be to either cause all of the opponents "ballmen" to have "career ending injuries", or to gain 5 points first. the game would still ...

I was a little bit bored. I was the only person awake, and I didn't want to edit my rules for The Citadel of Madness (formerly known as The Madness Place) any more. I wanted to play a game, but I don't own any solitaire games. I bought a pnp copy of Pentaquark, but have somehow never got around to printing it out. I have also recently been listening to the Ludology podcast, and I liked their episode on solo games. It made me think I could make one. Given this situation I decided to see if I could come up with some rules to make The Citadel of Madness a solo game. I came up with a few modifications that made the game into a pretty interesting (in my opinion) solo game: Every action you remove a time token from the game. If they ever run out you lose. Every time you pass do the following: Return all time tokens to the pool Build a new device that is not owned by you -or- modify a device that is not controlled by you (the rules are more complicated than that, but it am...

The rules editing for the Madness Place is finally calming down. The only change to the game's rules during the entire process was making it so that if you do an action it has to have an effect on the game's state for it to be a valid action. The Flavor test has greatly improved as well: They called you Mad, but could a madman have created a revolutionary living-brain extractor? Yes! You could, and you did it for SCIENCE! Not only did the fools not understand you, but The Tyrant even called you a criminal and sentenced you to repair The Citadel. A harsh sentence considering your ‘crimes’ were all for the furthering of science. No one has ever escaped this capricious, maniacal, homicidal, and irrevocably evil sentient castle. But, you will show them! After all, you were born with The Madness - a gift of supernatural understanding of all sciences. Build as many twisted abominations of science as is necessary to get the castle repaired so that you can earn your release fro...

I have gotten some great help on editing the rules for The Madness Place. They are looking much better now than they used to. I have yet to work on Grab the Loot and Terran League of Defense Robots, however. I have also been spending a lot of time working on PlaytestHub - which is nearing feature-completion. I have only one major feature to implement. After that, I will probably do some refactoring, alpha test it myself, and then open it up to a 'public' beta test (perhaps first for the people that are supporting me on patreon, and then to BGG next).

I am nearing completion of an alpha version of the website, however I am not so sure that I will be able to work on it as often as I was planning originally, because I just realized that I need to get seriously involved in rule editing for the 2018 Ion Awards. My documents that I am working on are Terran League of Defense Robots, Grab the Loot!, and The Madness Place. So far I still have a daunting amount of editing left on them. Fortunately the kind folks over at BGG are helping me out a lot, not to mention my kind wife, who is way better at this sort of thing than I am. I am also planning on volunteering for Extra Life this year. I will be streaming board games (and some video games) for the local primary children's hospital. If you are interested in donating you can find information about how to support me here .

Alison and I played a game of the Madness Place yesterday, and we had some changes to make after we were done. I am recording them here so that I remember them. The game went well. We ended the game with me ahead by 2 points (15 to 13). Alison would have won in one more action, so it felt really tight. We played in about 45 to 60 minutes (we didn't record the exact times, but we put on a movie for the kids, and it ended about at the time that we were done discussing possible changes, which took about 45 to 30 minutes). We agreed that the recent changes to the passing mechanism (the person that passes first gains an immediate +1 time energy on the following turn for every time they are skipped) seemed to be a good way to deter the player/players that are ahead from taking tons of extra turns. We decided that the Citadel's Output mat should be double sided, and should have on one side printed a non randomized setup. This will help setup to be easier on the first few times p...

I just realized that with the ION Award coming up at the beginning of December, I need to work on my rules documents! The games that I am going to be preparing this year (if I can get them ready) are: Grab the Loot!, Terran League of Defense Robots, and The Madness Place. I expect that things will be pretty busy over the next few weeks. I have also almost finished my playtesting website. A few more features and it will be ready for an alpha release. Here's to hoping that I can get it all done.

More work has been done on PlaytestHub, and it is coming closer to completion. I have about 20 open issues with it in my bug tracker, so I am coming to a close. That being said, Google just announced a new database technology for firebase, so I might waste spend some time converting it into a newer technology. We have been playing Grab the Loot at work some more, and the new changes are solidifying into a better form. I have been trying to figure out what changes would allow the game to play the same, but have the scores tighter. I am taking pictures of people's end game situation after most games now, so that I can keep tabs on what any given change will do to the scoring. I think that I have found a scoring method that will work pretty well: Items are worth 2 points each. Coins are worth 1 point each. 3+ n bonus points are awarded to the player with the most of any given item, where n  is the number of cards in the Greed matching the item. In the game that we played tod...

I played Grab the Loot at work with the changes that Daniel and I talked about, and then the next night at the Board Game Design Guild without them. They definitely need some balancing, and I am not sure if they make the options less interesting, but I am going to work on fixing them up. My notes from the game at work were as follows: more money gain - things cheaper - top one is free most of the time.  add a few more greeds for 2 players Captain should give 2 coins.  I have implemented the first and last, and I am not sure if I am going to make the second one happen. I need another playtest before I continue with the new changes. I also made a new mat for The Madness Place taking into the feedback that I received from Daniel. Here it is in all it's glory: I also made some start cards for TMP - cards which guarantee that you start with a level 2 device, and a time card, so that removes a little bit of the fiddlyness of the setup, and balances the possibility o...

So, now I am ready to figure out how to incorporate the feedback of yesterday:  Madness Place: I have already removed the discard a meeple for a energy, and add an energy to the output. I have already lowered the number of free actions to 2: access device, and balance. I have made the person that steals a device pay an energy to the person that they stole from. This should make stealing still a deterrent to building awesome devices, but not as powerful as it used to be. Storing resources is now energy cost free, however it does cost a turn. I also have to figure how the scoring is off. Daniel said that he felt that it was off, but didn't elaborate.  Either way, these should not be horrible changes to make, and I should be able to test them fairly soon. I think that the changes to Grab the loot will be as follows: First changes (try these immediately, keep the ones that I like) Split the different finishes into setup choices: nice captain that doesn't shoot ...

I met up with Daniel Peterson from Mayday Games tonight to show him some of my games. We ended up playing two games before we finished. He liked some things about them, and provided a lot of helpful feedback. To get it down before I forget it, here is a brain dump: First we played Grab the Loot. It didn't really play well with two players. I need to play games to balance it at that point. Grab the Loot: Coins should be used as a cost and should prevent you from taking better actions. Grab a coin as a generic space. The being forced to move your meeple to a different card makes for interesting decisions I just had an idea to block the row as well as column. The randomness of the finish is not well beloved. Cards should come out faster. Talked about revealing new card each turn. I think perhaps each round could rectify the problem also. Modifying greed was very cool Exponential should stop at some point. Focus on the cutthroat element of the game if that is what ...

I had the guild look at Grab the Loot again. We played with 4 players, and had a good feedback session afterward. Here are my notes: Not enough treasures changed hands - I need to up that! Have a player that gives an extra blocker/worker? Use a cube for the extra guy Player that steals more? More swaps to fix the treasures changing hands problem Double your lowest item value as a player ability? When cards fill up, discard them What happened to the card that removed one person's meeple and gives one coin to that person? Are coins too powerful? Perhaps 4 is a better scorepoint? Cards that pay a coin to gain 2 items, or the reverse All in all, I am ready to make some changes. I will likely have new PNP files ready in a day or two. I have also made a lot of progress on playtesthub. It has the ability to add games, look at games, and mark games for playtesting. You just now need to be able to actually playtest them and give feedback.

Not too long ago I made a survey about what people were having a hard time with when it came to designing great games. I have collected the results, and decided to make a website that connects playtesters to game designers. The biggest things that people complained of was not having enough time, not having enough playtesting, and preparing to submit games to publishers or put games up on kickstarter. This website should directly help solve the second problem, and if I make it correctly, it should also address the first and third problem as well. Designers will have to spend "points" to get their game to sort to the top of the list of games to playtest, and the only way that points can be gained is by playtesting other designers games and providing feedback. Once you have points, you can apply them to your own game, or you can sell them in a marketplace to designers. Thus people that just want to get their game playtested without helping other people out can pay for that...

I tentatively made changes to The Madness Place recently, but haven't tried the game out until tonight. Here are the new rules: Turns are now one action each (With the exception of balancing a device, which happens as part of modifying the device) After players pass, the player who passed first goes first the next round. Get energy from the castle only at the start of each round. storing keeps energy between rounds. draft and rooms repair refill every round. We tried out the new rules at the BGDG meeting, and it went fairly well. Here are my notes from the playtest: Make sure to note that Any modify requires balance Balance only the worst balanced device on a swap Using time should be a free action Gain access to another player's device too? Store energy too? Add energy to the castle's output too? Balance a device too? Turns are too small Perhaps group actions? Perhaps spark increases actions per turn? Perhaps minions left on your mat increase ac...

I have been doing so many thing recently that I have forgot to write any blog posts. For one thing, I have been playtesting a new game that Seth Jaffe (creator of Eminent Domain and other fine games) is designing. The game is called Automatown, and is about building robots that build more robots for you until you have enough robots to take over the world. For an early prototype it is pretty fun and well balanced. I have had an idea that I have been sitting on for a few years about building snowmen that build more snowmen. This ends up being thematically really similar, but my ideas for mechanics were way different than his. We have played it at work a few times, and the people are interested in seeing his new changes. Being that today is Friday it might end up being a skateboarding day, so perhaps we will not get to play it, but perhaps we will. In terms of my games, I have gotten a few games of The Fatal Flaw in, and also played a game of the Madness Place. I am thinking of givi...

We played a four player game of The Madness Place at the Board Game Design Guild meeting last night. Here are my notes ( with my current thoughts in bold ): Perhaps the current draft mechanism should be revisited. Should we keep all of the untaken cards from the draft? (instead of wiping them each turn) Should each player have their own draft which they can work on during other player's turns? Both? I think that the mechanism definitely wants something to change. Having two players makes the down time pretty small, but with four players it was too long. Having cards to think about during other player's turns would help, but the real problem (I think) is that a turn might take too long. Perhaps I need to restructure turns to make one action per turn? that would be a huge change Why are "green glowy things" yellow? Hmm that has to change. They should perhaps be green. How does using another player's device work when it comes to meeples?  This was not well ...

It was announced that "The Perfect Moment" won the Button Shy wallet game design contest. I have had an idea about making a 18 card standalone expansion to the game. I spent a little while brainstorming ideas, and made up some of the cards. I just printed it up and played it with my wife, and it was definitely playable. We had some problems with it (like any first time game), but the game worked fairly well.  The expansion is right now named "The Fatal Flaw". My original ideas for card abilities were fairly good (in terms of what would make the game playable with those cards), however I had to change some of the abilities after the first play through to balance them, and to make them more able to modify the state of the game. I also had to make a few changes to the original game to work better with the expansion. One change that I had to make was to the original game colors. I needed to change cyan to blue so that I could make the other game the seconda...

I brought Grab the Loot! to the Board Game Design Guild again. This play was testing out buried treasure and coins being valued at 4. We played a game, and then had an excellent discussion about it. Here are my notes (and what I plan to do about them). Some cards need to be reworded: (so, I am going to reword them) Trevyn- should say "to the captain", so that it doesn't affect stolen treasures Gripe- should say "gain an item ", so that you don't just shuffle coins around. Sophia- should say "gain from the captain", so that it doesn't affect stolen/donated coins. Bribe- should say "gain an item " like gripe Trick- opposite order is more common for wording? Buried treasures should not get players shot. (This is a great idea. I am going to do it.) Do not "Texas Hold'em" in all of the Captain's greed cards. This spawned a large discussion, and more people were on the side of not "holding in" the ca...

I joined the Haba kids game design contest this week. As part of the contest you get a bunch of parts that they had lying around and have to make a game that uses the parts. I got the following: I have tried out two designs so far. The first (which the younger kids liked the most) was a game where you visit the zoo and try to become brave enough to befriend a spooky shirt that is also at the zoo. In the second game the players are trying to catch a bunch of gnomes. The older kids liked that one better. I might combine them into one game - perhaps you are going to visit a fantasy zoo and need to gather all the small magical animals so that you can return them to the (scary) warden. My two year old son is about to have his birthday, and he asked me to design him a game for a present. We got into discussing the theme, and from this was born "Robots fighting Aliens and saving Princesses". His design considerations were the following: Has to have good robots One robot...

I just had an idea (which I totally didn't steal from Carl Chudyk (not really, I pretty much stole it from him)) for a new game. I think I am going to polish off the old Polynesian theme and mock something up some time. I should be working on The Madness Place, but doing what I feel that I need to do to it will be hard. I really dislike simplifying games, and always worry that I will simplify them too much.

I finally finished working on Terran League of Defense Robots and submitted it. Phew. Since then I have come up with a few modifications Grab The Loot. The first is adding hidden treasure cards to every player (which makes it less of a perfect knowledge game), and another is making treasures have an effect (like you can return them to the captain to do something). We played today at lunch, and had a few ideas: one was to make coins worth more, another idea was to make the player that loses a treasure places the captain meeple instead of the player that gains the meeple. I should probably also spend at least a little time on the art work some time. I have also been making a whole bunch of icons for people on BGG as a means of giving something back to the community. It has been going fairly well so far, and I have had a lot of people request icons.

I have been working on TLDR more and more. The rules are getting closer to being complete, but they haven't yet arrived there. I also played The Dwarf King for the first time yesterday, and Rock Paper Wizard today. Of the two I liked The Dwarf King more. I am a bit of a Bruno Faidutti fan. The Dwarf King is an interesting take on a Trick taking game. I like the changing rules, and the special cards. They often add an interesting twist to the game. Rock Paper Wizard was a really simple game that can be explained quickly. I didn't love it,  but with how fast it went,  the game does definitely have a place. The "take that" without player elimination ends up being fun. I hope that we play it many times when other people are voting for Bang :)

We played TLDR at the board game design group meeting last night. It was a solo game against three motherships. By the time that the guy ended the game, he had a robot that could defeat nearly any mothership that could exist. It was fun to watch how he built his robot (he had way more healing than I would have expected any robot to ever need, but he made serious use of it, as he also had a ton of damage providing parts). The game took about two and a half hours, but he beat the first mothership at about two hours. He said that he had had a fun time, and that the game seemed well balanced, but he did have a few ideas: Make a draft for a one player game (with starting cards). (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) Figure out how to get trade working in a one player game. (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) Make foes that move at different speeds? (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) The ability to repair cities mig...

Last night I played a game of Terran League of Defense Robots with Alison for our date night. We turned up the difficulty and included two Motherships in the game, and I found it to be a very satisfying victory. We are getting quite good at that game. We added in ideas from last playtest, and found them to mostly work well. Here are what we changed, and what we thought about it: The minions are now integrated into the foe cards - They are on play abilities that add a "Minion" cube to the tile. Minions fight as a block, and deal (and require) damage equal to their count. They take any damage type as full damage (even generic). This felt pretty good. The minions were hard to fight, but not overpowering. The real game will want minion tokens that are like coins with a pow symbol on them. The mothership's minions and her escort's minions combined to make a stack of 14 minions. That is practically unkillable. We decided that the mothership should summon minionless ...

I have been splitting my time between Grab the Loot, and The Perfect Moment right now. I showed both of them at the BGDG meeting last Tuesday, and got some good feedback. I have implemented nearly all of the feedback that I got from the week before, and I also implemented most of the stuff from this last week. The game is working really well right now. The guys at work prefer it to published games on most days. Adding to the Captain's greed is really working out well. I think that the next change that I make is going to be the ability to have hidden treasure(s), and also the ability to look at some of the greed cards that were removed from the game. Perhaps I will add in a sixth player (because more players is always fun, and the game seems to scale well). I need to however re-balance the amount of loot you start with with different player counts. The captain having 8 loot at the beginning is too many with 2-3 players, and too few for 5 players. Perhaps the captain gets 2 tre...

On Tuesday I went to the Layton BGDG meeting a bit early and played a few games before the meeting started. I got some good feedback, and thought that I would record it here. Deception: The game should be bigger. When you lose armies, you should gain things to offset the loss of armies (abilities?) Secret goals? More players? - attack the people near you only Grab the Loot: Calculate scores differently - add greed cards into everyone's loot to simplify it. Make a game over card to add to the bottom of the greed deck. Add to the rules the "do everything that you can" rule, so that when an ability is impossible, you still get to use it Double sided greeds that are rotatable Record scores to see if they are too swingy, and recalculate to make them tighter Slots should not be the same Make players have a secret treasure (or greed) that other players do not know about. Spend your loot for abilities. Spend treasure to flip up a card? Break the scoring t...

I just played Akrotiri for the second time, and I think that I should write a review of it. Akrotiri: 2 players, about 30 minutes This game combines multiple mechanics: tile laying, pick up and deliver, and secret goals. During the game you are playing as ancient Greek explorers who are trying to discover the locations of forgotten temples based on clues that you were given in ancient maps. I first played the game right after it came out, and told myself that my wife would enjoy it. I never saw it in a store, so I never got it until a recent BGG math trade. The game starts with a large tile (the island of Thera) being placed in the center, and everyone receiving starting maps and goals. The maps are cards that give you requirements for building temples (I will explain more about that later - it is the coolest part of the game to me). Goals are things like "Score 2 points for each of your Temples that are on an island with a volcano", or "Score 2 points for each...

We played "Grab the Loot!" at the BGDG tonight. The feedback I received was excellent. Since I just redesigned it from the ground up, I was really expecting big changes to come from this playtest, and I got what I was expecting. Here are my notes - and what I think about them right now: "Swap with another player" fix verbiage - Swap with the captain, swap with a player, and trade with a player are all possible actions. There should be three verbs, not two. There are not strategic decisions (all are tactical) - This one hurt, however I took it graciously and considered it as a call to increase the strategic decisions that are available in the game. Taken that way, it gives me something to work with, and I will do it. Treasure scarcity is not felt - I can easily fix this by making fewer treasures. Swapping between players should be more common - This is also an easy fix, and a great idea. Player interaction is king in this type of game. Later revealed gree...

On Friday my wife and I played Akrotiri for the first time in a few years. It is a really fun two player game. We were both doing well until the end when I pulled ahead to win by a large margin. I usually lose to my wife in such games, so this was a surprise ending. We had a fun time, and will probably play more in the near future. Yesterday we played Hanabi at lunch, and we lost all three games. It is fun to play a cooperative game with these guys (since they usually love traitor mechanic games). They liked it so much that we played a game at lunch again today. We played another game of "Grab the Loot!" last night, and also today at lunch. The game (at lunch) took 23 minutes, and people seemed to like the new changes. Dwayne (who is usually not happy to play one of my games twice in a row) even wanted to play a second game immediately. That is a win if I ever saw one. In this retheme I made changes that were much larger than I usually do when I am retheming things. I ...

This last weekend was SaltCon. It was pretty great. I got 11 new games, played about that many games which I hadn't played before, and met a lot of great people. Thursday I presented The Age of Vikings to the judges for the Ion Award. It didn't go very well, so I wasn't surprised when (on Saturday) it was announced that I didn't win. I went into the finalist judging with presentiments, because Dan announced that the highest scoring game scored an average of an 8, and that matched my highest score (which means that my average was lower than that). I had also talked to another of the finalists, and he said that he had gotten calls from two of the judges asking for more info about his game. Fortunately I held back on submitting Terran League of Defense Robots this year. I have made so many good changes to it since I submitted all of my games that I know that it will have a much better chance next year. I got to play the game that won the Ion Award this year - Paloo...

Much of my time recently has been spent gearing up for SaltCon. If you don't have tickets yet buy some now, it starts on Thursday! We played a game of The Perfect Moment, and also Avalon at work on Friday. Avalon is a fun lying game. I like it much better than the other lying games that they all love, because you can actually deduce things. I was the Assassin once, and we totally aced the entire game, and then I guessed Merlin as well (though we won the game). On the second game, we won as the good without them guessing Merlin, and then on the third game the good guys won hard core until the Merlin guess, which made the bad guys win. So, I won two out of three games. On Friday night we had a local game group get together, and we played The Perfect Moment as well as Age of Vikings. I practiced teaching it in preparation for my presentation on Thursday. We figured out some parts of the presentation that need more work, and my wife engineered a killer game engine that blew the com...