Pretentious Board Games

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...