Pretentious Board Games

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...

At work we played The Age of Vikings at lunch. It went fairly well. We nearly finished the game in an hour (which is quite a feat). If we had finished I think that I would have won, however that is not guaranteed. The game is getting its final polish before I present it to the judges for the Ion Award. It seems to be going well, however I have two more test presentations at least before I consider it all done. When I play against the judges, I want them to be able to understand the game, but not have any real hope of winning (because I know the strategy, and they don't). Here's to hoping that I strike the right balance. We also played a game of The Perfect Moment tonight, and had some things that we wanted to change and or try out. Here are our notes: Flowers should say "Swap a face up card with a card from your hand. Do this once or twice." Add 1 (or more) face up card to simulate another player. Everyone can use the ability on it that is facing the center o...

I brought The Perfect Moment  to the last BGDG meeting. It was at Demolition Games  for the first time. The venue is nicer than the last place that we met at. We had 11 people, and only one person brought a game (which only supported two players). I presented  The Perfect Moment , which received good feedback. We decided to change the Ring card to allow players to trade cards. I also showed off my new artwork for the first time. They liked the new look better than my original look. I have gotten the laser cutter working really well. It cut out all of the cards for  The Perfect Moment . I should probably have it cut out tiles for Terran League of Defense Robots , but I have not spent the time to do that yet. I have, however, been preparing to present The Age of Vikings at SaltCon . The Age of Vikings was declared a finalist in the Ion Awards this year. That has been where a lot of my time has gone, but I have also been fine tuning my laser cutter, and cutting ou...

I have been making good progress on The Perfect Moment, my submission to the current Button Shy contest . My wife and I have played two more games, and it is still an interesting problem to resolve. The amount of choices that you have some turns is really high, so people prone to AP might not do so well when trying this game out, however we both love puzzles, so it works for us. I came up with a really good strategy last game. It worked well for me. The strategy was to play two cards that are the same color but have no overlapping abilities. Then you have access to score all cards of that color as long as you can rotate your cards freely. Getting cards that meet those requirements is left as an exercise to the reader. I think that I will remove more attacks. They still slow down the game and don't improve your position. As a sidenote, the rules can be found  Here , and the cards can be found Here . Here are my notes from last playtest: Keys should say "draw a card...

Last weekend I built a laser cutter. I intend to use it to make higher fidelity hex tiles than I used to be able to make (and also square, and round ones as well.) I bought some cardboard, but haven't yet tested it against cardboard. It cuts through paper like nothing, so I think that it should work. Now I need to make up artwork for the tiles for TLDR. I have just also discovered a new contest, and hope to enter it (in addition to all of the other contests that I entered this year. It is the Button Shy Wallet Game Contest , and it looks pretty interesting. They limiting factors make it quite a constrained game design, which really tends to focus my mind and make things move along more quickly for me. As a side note, I really respect Button Shy for inventing an idea that I totally also invented (albeit a little after them). Also, the published Avignon (which I totally play-tested and provided feedback for). They are one of the companies that I would like to publish a game throu...