Of a small island game.

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 advantage over the player that is just using their engine (at least in terms of how many points they can get per round). That being said, the player that won did set up an excellent pantheon that worked well together, added in some really good economy, and just went straight for the throat.

I need to figure out how to make various strategies viable before I ask my wife to play a game with me. Specifically: settling and exploring seem too weak, laboring seems too weak, building point cards seems too weak. I also want drawing to be able to get you more than one card if you build up to that.

Here are some cards (resource, god, island, leader):
I have also been fooling around with a sports parody game called "Sports Ball", but it is not moving along very quickly.

Also, The Age of Vikings was awarded 2nd place in the Iludo game design competition. This is the third award it has received so far. I am currently cleaning it up a little bit more (mainly focusing on the turn flow), and hope to pitch it to publishers next year. It seems like a game that is popular with industry people, and also a game that works well.

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