Pretentious Board Games

By the end of NagaDemon "The Madness Place" was playable, but not finished by any stretch of the imagination. Alison and I played a game right at the end where we finished the entire game, and though it all worked, the game definitely was too big to take a proper swing at in one month with a full time job and a family. With NagaDemon over, I have been trying to clean up my rule documents for submission to the Ion Award. I have three games that I will probably be submitting this year:  Terran League of Defense Robots ,  The Age of Vikings , and The Dragons' Game . I think that I am furthest along with Age of Vikings, in that one I have finished moving all of the rules around, and I have caught a lot of the grammatical errors. I will still have to do more work, but I am feeling like this one will definitely make it in time. The rules for Terran League of Defense Robots are currently being shuffled around. I need to look them over for grammar still, and I am not sur...

Contrary to popular belief, I am not dead. I just took a vacation and totally worked on my cards a whole bunch during that time. My wife and I got through two entire games of "The Madness Place" (my NagaDemon), so technically I have already won, however I still need a lot more work to make the game play smoothly. Currently the rules are as follows: There is a hexagonal board composed of a center room, and 6 surrounding rooms. The board grows during the game. Players have a pawn that starts in the center room, and also a set of completion tokens. Players start with 7 cards from the deck, and a character card. Every player gets three actions a turn, and for their actions they can do any of the following: Move your pawn to any room that there is a clear path to (must be either unnocupied or fixed) Draw a card from the deck Play a card (either build a construct/machine/clank/device or impress a spark/minion). Pay the cost on the bottom of the card to play it. Science! (...

Things are going at full steam right now (ha ha). I think that I will print off my first version of the cards tonight and try the game out some time this weekend. I have given each player unique abilites, combined clanks, minions, constructs, and sparks into one type of card (so the rules for them are all identical), and I have now only three types of cards: ambulators, machines, and devices. The ambulators are built by paying the cost on the bottom of the card, and activated by paying the cost on the left. They provide the benefits listed in the on the right, and have the abilities listed in the center. Ambulators have a Spark modifier of 0. Machines are built in the exact same way as ambulators, however they have a modifier of -2, which makes them easier to build than ambulators. The other difference is that machines cannot be moved unless the person moving the machine spends 1 strength per output symbol on the machine. Devices are built in the same way as ambulators, howeve...

I sort of took a few days "off", so I am a little behind. I have given stats (but not abilities) to all of the 148 cards in the main deck, and the 12 character cards that currently remain in the game. I haven't yet made all of the room cards, so I still have work on that front. I also have a lot of mechanics dreamed up, which I will outline here: Players start with a player card that has stats similar to any other normal card. Each player card has a generic backside that gives them +2 "Spark", and perhaps other generic bonuses so they can remain hidden until they want to reveal who they are (and still have a bonus). Each player card has a special objective that they can complete for bonus points, most of which has them repairing the castle in order to complete it. Each player can build clanks and add cards to clanks and other core parts by using "build points" which they get based on their cards in play, and which refresh each turn. Clanks have s...

I have 294 card names created... All of them are based on actual things from the original comic (people, things, places). Perhaps I bit off more than I can reasonably chew, but I going to try making as many of them as I can. I will probably end up throwing out half of them. At least I won't have to come up with that many names of my own :) Todo: make game abilities for them all... This is going to be a hard NagaDemon

I am beginning to work on my idea - turning it into a game. Right now I am in the "throw all of the ideas together, and then figure out how the mechanics will work. I am thinking that powerful cards will produce 3x the stuff that they take to make, and the weak ones will go nearly to producing 1x as many things as they take. I haven't yet started on the naming of the rooms. I am just brainstorming all of the cards right now.

I played roll for the galaxy and broom service for the first time on Friday. Both were interesting, however I like race better than roll right now. Broom service was quite interesting. There were elements of set collection, press your luck, and second guessing the other players. Sunday Alison and I played Forbidden Desert, which seems to me like a better Forbidden Island. My phone wanted to call the game Forbidden Dessert, which would be another game entirely. I am just about to start NagaDemon for another year. This year I have been thinking of making a Girl Genius themed game that reimplements Sorcery, Inc. But fixes the worst parts of it. It starts on November first, so I haven't done much more than mull ideas over, but hopefully I can get a lot done by the end of November. The things that I want to fix about sorcery are the the lack of a scoring method (currently you either win or lose, but you don't really have points), and the overly abstract nature of the res...

I just went to my 3rd Board Game Design Guild Meeting last night. Since there were not enough people who brought games, we ended up playing The Age of Vikings as one of the two games that were played. The people seemed to understand the game and we got through an entire game as well. The notes that I took (of the comments that people made) were as follows: When someone buys points, following players should have to pay 3 to buy points. (this is sort of against my original idea, however I see why this would seem a reasonable thing to say.) Viking games should have more warfare (This was reiterated at least twice. I need to do some theme work, apparently). Fiddly rules should be on a card (I can totally do this - I already have such a card, and expanding it into a mat wouldn't be that hard) Perhaps there should be disputed territories: when a player takes over an island half way they can block the other player from benefiting from it. (not sure if I love this. I want the game t...

We played more Archipelago tonight at the board game design meet-up. It went poorly. That is a good thing because it revealed a flaw in the game. A player got to play way more cards than the others, and ended the game in three turns. This was unexpected. I need to figure out how to fix that. The new art was well received though.

I have played my game 4 times so far. Right now it looks like the picture on the left, but I am making artwork like the picture on the right, so perhaps the next play will be easier to explain to people. Somehow I find that people find games with more finished artwork to be easier to understand. I found an island generator here  which I am using for the card art. I am currently considering how to change scoring, and also trying to make the splay mechanic more obvious. I will write up the rules some time soon.

I skipped day 1. I am in the brainstorming phase. I want to use the splay mechanic like innovation or chibimob. I think that sorcery, inc. could be a good theme. If a card were arranged as follows: RR1 234 Or: 1R2 3R4 Where R is the rule text, and 1-4 are symbols then they could be splayed multiple directions for interesting results all around. The question is, what rule text makes sense to put? Similar ones to the ones that Sorcery already has? Then you could have an engine core that is either a converter or a producer, and then you would build around that and gain benefit by stacking your cards correctly. If cards could be both, then the rule text could allow for weird interactions like "the output of this card is doubled", or "this card needs 50% less justice." I guess it is bed time.

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 changed the rules a little to account for a few three player games. The current rules are as follows: Each player places their colored point token on the score track in the n first slots (where n is the number of players). The player with the most points goes first followed by the player with the second most etc. Place one value token on each row of the value chart in the 1 place. Players start with 4 cards if playing with 2 players, 3 cards if playing with 3 players, and 2 cards if playing with 4 players. Discard the top card of the deck if playing with three players. Place the discarded card face down and do not look at it. That card is out for the remainder of the game. A turn consist of: Draw the top card from the deck or the discard pile. Play and resolve two action cards, one after the other. Drawn cards are added to the players hand. Hands are kept face up in front of the players at all times. Played cards are resolved like this: Determine the value...

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...

Today is the end of National Game Design Month. Over the course of the month I designed Moar Moai and Roguelike . I would say that Moar Moai is pretty darn playable, and that Roguelike is at least barely playable. Moar Moai has one open point of contention right now, and that is the exact way in which artifacts turn into control over the adventurers. I think that I will end up with players having perfect control over what 'cards' they get (although they might end up as tokens on a specific part of the mat instead of cards), but not know what 'cards' other players have until the scoring round actually starts. Roguelike is still largely unbalanced, and I have never played games with the new weapon cards that I have invented because I have never printed them up (here in California I do not have access to my card creation equipment). Perhaps next week I will do that. It does seem to work without the tokens (+1 etc), but needs a mat to be printed up to make it reall...

I have made good progress on my NaNo games (both Moar Moai and Roguelike) over the last two days. We played a few games of Moar Moai, and we had some modifications to make. First of all, roads have been removed from the game entirely (they seemed to just slow down the speed at which people get their statues out, and they give later guys in the turn order an advantage that doesn't seem to help the game balance out). Additionally the explorer cards seem to be too random for some players (they do not seem powerful enough, and if you don't get the ones that you want it can suck). We have considered a few possibilities for fixing it: 1) Draw two cards for each token and discard half the cards right before playing the explorer phase. 2) Exchange tokens for cards on a one for one basis, selecting which cards you get (making AAH cards not have additional effects, but making it not known what you can do) 3) Discarding tokens for one of the three explorer effects (Explore, Dig, ...

We are in the final stretch. I have been changing the rules of Moar Moai a lot, and I was pretty happy about them. After two games last night I am wondering if the penalty of road building is a little too steep (having your roads used by everyone for all time). Perhaps road building should be removed completely. I will test that option out over the next few days and see how that affects the balance of the game. I am also trying to figure out a way to remove the tokens from Roguelike completely. This will allow for the game to be much smaller. I will test that out some time today and see if I can figure it out. We played some games of Moar Moai  last night as well as The Resistance and Forbidden island. Everything was pretty fun. Hopefully we can end up playing more games tonight as well.

Yesterday we played a 3 player game of Moar Moai. With only 6 fish per player the fish ran out too fast. I have to figure out a happy medium (we are working with a very narrow range, since 8 is too many and 6 is too few). Perhaps I will tweak the equation so that I don't have to go to 7 (7 is a messy number since the fish should be divided in half and placed in two zones). I am sort of getting worried about finding a dominant strategy in this game. It seems  as if the person with the most people always wins, and if that is the case, then this game is a very boring one. I need to figure out if there are other viable strategies. Also, I have been working a little on Roguelike, but it keeps making me play game after game of UnNethack. Perhaps I will be able to focus more on it over the thanksgiving break. By the way. I really like chess variants. Some of them end up being pretty small (the last one I played was that you could capture your own pieces and that pawns could move bac...