Pretentious Board Games

On Tuesday we played a game of The Age of Vikings  at lunch at work. We had 6 players, and we didn't get through a full game before lunch ended. It is a much bigger game than is usually playable in a lunch hour (I only rarely work on such games because it is hard to playtest them to make sure that they work properly). The game is working pretty well - people with different strategies still got similar scores and nothing seemed really broken. It took a long time, however there are a lot of important decisions that have to be made at every juncture, so it is not that surprising given that some of our players have some analysis paralysis. Since that game, we have added and tested out 6 new god cards and a new "helpful" action reminder card. I am currently working on resizing the island hexes to make them fit on a game crafter medium hex tile. I might have to scale down the tokens to make it work, but it should make the game fit in a smaller box. On Thursday we played...

I have been working on Terran Robot Defense League/Fighting Robots/Ed's Army more. I have played a few games with Alison, and it is going pretty well. The game is definitely playable, however the endgame isn't very good yet. I need to make the game have a more cinematic ending - right now it has a "mothership" that is the hardest opponent to fight, however it is not that much harder than any other ship. I am going to add rules that make you have to fight multiple opponents on the same turn. The game is turning into a copy of X-Com apocalypse, which is great because I love that game. Here are a few cards: (I spent a little time on the art because some of my playtesters at work need good art to enjoy a game). Here  are the current rules.  Here  is a gallery of the cards. I am also starting to think that I will finally join the board game design guild. I have been meaning to for years, however I just never did it.

I played a first solo game of Terran Robot Defense League last night. It went OK, however it could have been better. Here are the rules that I played by{and the rules that I want to try out now}. To start look at 10 aliens and keep 3{1}. Place two into one pile, and one by itself {place it down in a pile of its own}. Aliens in a pile have to be attacked together. First: draft from hands of 5{6} part cards your starting robot, keeping 5 cards total. Every turn either: repair 2 damage on your robot look at 5 and keep 1{2} from the parts deck, look at a number of research cards equal to the number of research tokens you have {minimum of 1} and keep 1 attack a pile of aliens {exchange 1 card with an ally} {build a researched technology} At the end of the turn: Robots heal if they have healing equipment Look at 10 aliens and play 1{a number equal to piles/2}, placing it in a pile according to an algorithm that I will try to explain: Each pile that is larger than 1 card s...

I finished a rough draft of a bunch of cards for the robot game. I have weapons, chassis and reactors done. I still need repair units, single use power supplies, the aliens, and other stuff I haven't thought of yet. I would be farther along, however I discovered a design competition that I have decided to enter, and I have to finish my game by next Wednesday to enter. Since I haven't even started making it, I have a lot of work to do. The competition revolves around the box that your game has to fit in. It allows for approximately 60 poker cards in it, and it opens up into two pieces that nest inside each other. Here are my plans: 24 (1/2 sized) action cards (4 each of: Plead, Grovel, Whine, Brag, Flatter, Riddle) 24 (1/2 sized) treasure cards (6 each of: weapons, art, armor, jewels) 6 (full sized) value tracks (one for each action) 6 (full sized) dragon cards (Kih (Weapons, brag), Jafe (art, riddle), Vollys (armor, plead), Ohen (jewels, flatter), Tayr (most, grovel),...

 I have begun to work on getting Moar Moai ready for a round of blind playtesting, so I have been having all the folks over at BoardGameGeek look at it. (the rules, and mats mainly). It is always so helpful to have people on the internet sanity-check your stuff, because I find that things that I thought anyone would understand are not actually all that easy to understand. If you are working on a game, it is invaluable to let people that have never played the game before look at it. You can get the best feedback that way - feedback that is the most similar to the type of stuff that actual players in the wild would have given. Your local playtesters probably like you and are not overly disposed to tell you that your game sucks, or that it is hard to understand. Here is the new player mat: It does look fiddly (it has a lot of boxes), however it makes playing the game way less confusing to people that don't love math, so it is worth it. The way that it works is: you place meep...

I have been preparing for my presentations for the Ion award. I have the beginnings pretty good, but need to practice the sample turns still. I found out that the Sandy board game design group is probably going away, since no one wants to pay a monthly fee for it. It was useful to me when I couldn't make it to the BGDG, but now that my Tuesdays are free, I don't really see the need for two groups anymore. I'm also starting to work on a new game named "Doge city". It is based on the computer game agar.io. Alison and I played a game today, and it mostly works. Perhaps I'll post it some time (after it works and has written rules) I had a dream about a game where the players each had dinosaur species that they were evolving. I woke up and wrote it down and it almost seems playable already. Some time I should make it and see if it is. I also still haven't made my new "giant robots fight alien war machines" game yet. Apparently the mo...