Pretentious Board Games

Over the last week I played three more games of Terran League of Defense Robots (which also has a lot of other names), and one more game of The Age of Vikings. TLDR is coming along nicely. The last few games have been pretty smooth. I have added character cards, and modified a lot more about the game. The game is still way too hard, but I have begun to work on adjusting the difficulty in a downward direction. I also have nothing in the rules about how to actually fight, so I need to add that stuff in. The way that I am decreasing the difficulty might be interesting to some, so I will discuss it now. The game used to get harder each time the deck was shuffled because a new alien meeple would come into play each shuffle, and the aliens would do 1 more things each round than they used to do. This proved to ramp up the difficulty really fast, so instead I decided to add a card to the deck called Alien Destruction. Players may put any number of Alien Destruction cards into the deck...

On Wednesday I published my final version of The Dragons' Game for the contest. Here are the final versions:  Rules ,  PnP Files . Playing so many games of The Dragons' Game made me remember when I made Hungry Oni (which was definately a spiritual ancestor of The Dragons' Game). I have started working on getting it ready to submit to a publisher (I have one picked out that I think would like it). I am currently trying to determine if Baffle or Repel is a better name for the final action (I have art for both, but can't determine which would be better.) Finally, I have continued working on Terran Robot Defense League, but it keeps getting interrupted by other things.

I came home and found that my copy of Harbour arrived. It is a fun worker placement tableau building game by Tasty Minstrel Games. I backed it as a Kickstarter project (I also playtested it, so I knew that I would like it already), and it finally arrived. I sleeved the cards and plan on playing it tomorrow. After that I got an email telling me that I was announced as an ION Award finalist today :). I submitted 5 games to be judged and two of them were chosen as finalists: Hungry Oni, and Moar Moai. I sort of expected Moar Moai to do well. It is a simple game that has a lot of strategy, but Hungry Oni was a bit of a surprise. It is really minimalist (I built it as a microgame, to see if I could), so it is not really that big a game. Either way I am really excited to go to SaltCon and see what happens. Weather or not I win I will still feel like a winner, since I already have a publisher looking at two of my games, and that was really my main reason for submitting anything to ...

Since coming back from our vacation in California I have continued to work on Hungry Oni and Deception. I entered Deception in a microgame design contest and have gotten a pretty good review on it here . Hopefully more people play it and it does well in the contest :). I have also rewritten the rules for Dancing Robots in preparation for the SaltCon Ion Awards . I am planning on submitting four games (dancing robots, moar moai, witch hunt, and hungry oni) this year to the awards, but I have not yet finished the rulesmithing for them. I also found a new game that I want to try out. It is named Comrade . I have printed it out and plan on shanghaiing my coworkers into a game this week.

We played a game of Hungry Oni with new people and they thought that 5 actions was too many. I agree that it can be a little daunting for a microgame, so I have reduced the action counts to 3 (the three that were used the most often). I have made no changes to the artwork. The current rules for Hungry Oni are  here . Yesterday we also made another 18 card game on a whim. We are currently calling it Deception. It was based on Diplomacy . Our first game took 2 hours (Which is unusual for a 18 card game), and had a lot of the same sort of play as Diplomacy. Making a PnP copy of the game is massive overkill, but I did it anyway. Here is the result. Print one copy of the attack and defense cards and then 2 of every other card. We changed the rules after the first game to reduce the length of play time. Perhaps we will play another game tonight to see if it is down from two hours to a more reasonable play time. My brother in-law Chauncy brainstormed it out with me. He also drew ...

After having played eight or nine more games I have changed Hungry Oni a bit more. My brother in-law told me that the game seemed a bit too simple, so I have added rules that allow players to make more strategic choices. It seems to have improved the game a bit. New rules are posted here . The artwork is also changing as well:

I have started on a new national game design month game. I am considering calling it hungry hungry ogre, or hungry oni. I originally considered the name Naga demon, however I decided that that name has probably already been taken. As of this moment it is a 18 card micro game with 8 tokens. there are 16 cards which denote behaviors that the player takes. They are divided among four categories evenly. The other two cards are a score card as well as a valuation chart. Behaviors which are performed the most often are valued the lowest and the other behaviors values are raised by over playing a behavior. No two players may have the same score at any given time. If a player arrives at the same score that another player is already at then that player adds one to his or her score to make it different from the player that they were supposed to be tied with. The theme is that of a bunch of captives attempting to not be eaten by an ogre. The game ends when the cards run out and all of t...