Pretentious Board Games

With the new year, there have been tons of things happening. I have submitted two games to the Cardboard Edison this year: The Citadel of Madness, and Grab the Loot. The feedback that I got from them was immensely helpful last year, so I am eagerly anticipating this year's results. I also received a large package of board game parts (which I ordered) in the mail. The most exciting parts was the blue gorilla meeple. I have designed a dexterity game based on it (for the January 24 hour game design contest). It is called "Where there's gorillas there's hope". It is fairly simple, and has a traitor mechanic. When I finally get over this cold, I will certainly bring it to work, and see how the guys like it. I also have been thinking about the 9 card design contest (I never intended to make a game for it, but one just arrived in my brain yesterday, and it is a really interesting idea. Perhaps you will hear more about it in future posts). The Icon creation thread...

This last weekend was SaltCon. It was pretty great. I got 11 new games, played about that many games which I hadn't played before, and met a lot of great people. Thursday I presented The Age of Vikings to the judges for the Ion Award. It didn't go very well, so I wasn't surprised when (on Saturday) it was announced that I didn't win. I went into the finalist judging with presentiments, because Dan announced that the highest scoring game scored an average of an 8, and that matched my highest score (which means that my average was lower than that). I had also talked to another of the finalists, and he said that he had gotten calls from two of the judges asking for more info about his game. Fortunately I held back on submitting Terran League of Defense Robots this year. I have made so many good changes to it since I submitted all of my games that I know that it will have a much better chance next year. I got to play the game that won the Ion Award this year - Paloo...

Much of my time recently has been spent gearing up for SaltCon. If you don't have tickets yet buy some now, it starts on Thursday! We played a game of The Perfect Moment, and also Avalon at work on Friday. Avalon is a fun lying game. I like it much better than the other lying games that they all love, because you can actually deduce things. I was the Assassin once, and we totally aced the entire game, and then I guessed Merlin as well (though we won the game). On the second game, we won as the good without them guessing Merlin, and then on the third game the good guys won hard core until the Merlin guess, which made the bad guys win. So, I won two out of three games. On Friday night we had a local game group get together, and we played The Perfect Moment as well as Age of Vikings. I practiced teaching it in preparation for my presentation on Thursday. We figured out some parts of the presentation that need more work, and my wife engineered a killer game engine that blew the com...

I have made some of the movies that I needed to for Cardboard Edison, however they are pretty hard to make. I don't have any skill in movie editing, or in movie filming for that matter. At work we have been playing a lot of Bang: the dice game, which is not my favorite (even if it fixes a lot of the problems with the original Bang. I just can't get behind games with player elimination. I went to a BGDG meetup last night, and we played Terrna League of Defense Robots. They had a lot of good feedback (which I will include here, and then sum up some ideas of ways to change it. Mechanic/theme disconnect: the idea with this comment was that the game feels puzzley, but should feel frantic. Build the perfect robot through engineering, when it should feel like "crap! why is aliens all over my face?!" Aliens are inactive: Aliens should do stuff when the come out. They just sit there. the aliens should deal damage to cities based on attack level: This is a possible ...