Artwork & a braindump

I got rough sketches of the first eight pieces of artwork for The Perfect Moment:

I am super excited about it - I have been playtesting the new cards almost every day this week, and I am getting them nailed down right now. I don't anticipate any more major changes to them, however I am still working on tweaking the wording to make them less ambiguous, and to balance them.

One funny thing that I discovered is that Jason decided that the story behind the "Kill Hitler" scenario was really a "Bank Robbery" scenario. Either way, the equipment could work for both.

I have also started asking myself "How would I make a 6 card expansion to The Fatal Flaw", and I have some up with some cool ideas. The theme that I am going with right now is Bertram Wooster misadventure. Then, I could add Jeeves as a card, and have him make you always able to score, or something like that. The new ideas that Jason came up with really gave me more ideas of my own for the game.

I also submitted Pan-galactic War-game to a contest. It is a good game that has been through various incarnations over the course of more than four years. I don't know if it will fit in Button Shy's line of games (it is really back-stabby), but it is a pretty solid game, so perhaps it will.

I am also sort of rooting for another person's game - Bojan Prakljacic's "Ragemore". It is such a good solo game, that I have been playing it a lot recently. It is random enough to make winning hard, but not so random that a victory feels like luck. If he were to win, I would be just about as happy as if I were to win because then I could get a real copy of the game.

We played a game of The Citadel of Madness yesterday at BGDG, and I was given a lot of feedback. Here is the stuff that was written down (and my ideas/clarifications):

• Gather claims 3 (make it so that the gather action drafts 3 cards from the heap - I am not sure if this is necessary, however the action does seem fairly weak right now, so perhaps it is a good idea)
• Build only gets 1 back (make it so that the build action only allows you to draw one card instead of 2. I don't really like this idea, so I am not going to do it unless another playtester asks for it)
• Junk room should take more cards (right now it drafts n cards, and costs n energy. It should draft all 5 cards and only cost about 2 energy).
• factory: gain 1 energy per mad scientist use or per something else (make a way to generate a steady stream of off-task energy. Energy that you get whenever you do something specific, like activate a room, or move your scientist off your mat)
• throne of socrates arronax: balance at discount (make this room slightly more powerful: perhaps allow it to ignore some of the balance cost?)
• remove scientist icon from anomaly (art change)
• minions operate your personal rooms - some/all (this is to say that once you own a room, perhaps you can spend a scientist OR a minion to activate it. For some rooms)
• 1 energy per player that uses your room instead of 1 per use (because he thought that 1 per round max is not powerful enough)
• adjust the point values of start rooms to make them balanced (take down the value of the paradox, or increase its cost, etc)
• utilize should be a 1x per turn free action (instead of an action of its own)
• action multipliers: (they should exist)
• place a scientist and operate a device as well (on some things)
• corner case cards (remove them or make them more likely to use)
• return
• utilize
• swap
• bloody generator
• reduce the cost of balance (pay 1 per card + all core levels?)
• room that swaps rooms for new rooms (I have rejected this idea multiple times already, but here it is again. I don't want a player to save up, and then not be able to fix the room that he wants to because someone swaps it out as an attack.)
• make this cost a lot so that it is a hard choice (this might be the doable. The player that lost his room lost multiple turns - make the player that swapped also lose multiple turns potentially. Another option would be to allow the player that got swapped out from under out energy to recover quickly)

I need to determine which of these ideas I am going to actually implement, and how to do it. I have about a month before I play it again, so I should have sufficient time.