Pretentious Board Games

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).