Pretentious Board Games

I took The Citadel of Madness to the Board Game Design Guild meeting, and played it again. This  time with entirely new playtesters, so I got to see what a first time player feels again. I asked for first time players, so I am glad that I got them. Here are my notes (*** means that I am going to do these things first) Level up converters? Feels slow to take one action at a time Keep track of who to pay? Swap white cubes for brown*** End score: 17-1-2-6 Encourage people to build more machines - how? Award points for more machines? *** Hiding actions in rooms failed - the game is just complex Drafting one card feels lame*** take multiple cards as an action *** pay extra to take extra cards *** free cards every turn? drafting (or crappy actions) yield time balance energy felt more valuable than others remove balance balance costs 2 generic energy don't make start device give specific energy starting device not able to upgrade? minions that can upgrade ...

We played another two games of Motu (formerly Micronesia) the other day. Here are my notes: Labor is a better Gather than Gather - Possibly make Gather also build more farms? Islands should be worth 2 points each (or 3 if they have less places to tuck cards) Laka sucks. Fix it. Arohirohi should be: activate 1 ability n times. Check the gods - they need to be weaker than the leaders without followers. Hina is totally broken. Make her say 1+(n/4) points instead of 1+n points. Perhaps some limit to the number of gods/worshipers per god is necessary. This will prevent the godsnowball of doom. During the first game, I deified Hina, and then just won the game without any contest in four or five rounds. The game ended 13-26, and was not very fair. Alison contended that Hina needed to be changed, and I agreed. She said that no strategy could overcome it, and I wasn't so sure. It seems that that there are multiple options for beating it, but they would all involve composing a g...

I have recently been working on Micronesia a lot. I am still trying to find a good name for it - I might just go with the Maori word for island - Motu. Either way, the game is ready to be brought to BGDG. I will have more to report about it after the 24th. Here is the end of my last game: The left player won, but given one more turn, the right player would have won. It felt really close. The game is still super unbalanced, but it is fun to make those crazy combos. I think that it plays like a Carl Chudyk game, which is really fun to me, given that I like his stuff a lot. I just have to make all of the cards broken the same amount, and then I will enjoy it even more. I have also made a website over the last two days - one that is not yet complete, but at which you can see some of my icons. I need to still add a search feature, but once that is done I will have a much easier time keeping my new icons posted when I draw them. Here it is (such as it is):  https://publ...

I took a few weeks off from anything board games because after a reorganization at work, I suddenly found myself working on a far less desirable technology. All is well now, though. I went on a job hunt, and through the hand of providence secured a better paying job closer to home that allows me to set my own hours and work from home some times. I start next Friday. I played two games of The Citadel of Madness on Friday, and had a pretty good time. Here are my notes from the games (and my explanations of them): Name should be printed on both sides on part cards (I need to make it visually obvious that cards can be rotated 180 degrees, and making opposite facing names would do this. This is a really obvious solution to the issue, so I am happy that it was arrived at). Return all active workers to your mat (somehow the refresh action on the mat didn't say that, so I need to modify the action) Any ability that had an arrow takes your turn (this needs to be added to the rule doc...