Pretentious Board Games

I have been rule editing like a madman. My wife has been helping me (like a madwoman?). We are getting really close to having the Citadel of Madness and Grab the Loot! ready. Terran League of Defense Robots might not make it this year - but perhaps it will. We are hoping that it does anyway. I have also been making some movies for my submissions to the ION award. Here is the first one that I have completed. My PlaytestHub is in a semi-open alpha state right now. It still has a few more things I want to do to it before I open it up for a public beta. Most notably, I want to see how it is that one user was able to make two copies of themself in the database. I have also started working with Chauncy on Deception again. The new changes add some complexity to the game. I really want to retheme it as a sportsball game. The goal would be to either cause all of the opponents "ballmen" to have "career ending injuries", or to gain 5 points first. the game would still ...

I have gotten some great help on editing the rules for The Madness Place. They are looking much better now than they used to. I have yet to work on Grab the Loot and Terran League of Defense Robots, however. I have also been spending a lot of time working on PlaytestHub - which is nearing feature-completion. I have only one major feature to implement. After that, I will probably do some refactoring, alpha test it myself, and then open it up to a 'public' beta test (perhaps first for the people that are supporting me on patreon, and then to BGG next).

I just realized that with the ION Award coming up at the beginning of December, I need to work on my rules documents! The games that I am going to be preparing this year (if I can get them ready) are: Grab the Loot!, Terran League of Defense Robots, and The Madness Place. I expect that things will be pretty busy over the next few weeks. I have also almost finished my playtesting website. A few more features and it will be ready for an alpha release. Here's to hoping that I can get it all done.

I have been doing so many thing recently that I have forgot to write any blog posts. For one thing, I have been playtesting a new game that Seth Jaffe (creator of Eminent Domain and other fine games) is designing. The game is called Automatown, and is about building robots that build more robots for you until you have enough robots to take over the world. For an early prototype it is pretty fun and well balanced. I have had an idea that I have been sitting on for a few years about building snowmen that build more snowmen. This ends up being thematically really similar, but my ideas for mechanics were way different than his. We have played it at work a few times, and the people are interested in seeing his new changes. Being that today is Friday it might end up being a skateboarding day, so perhaps we will not get to play it, but perhaps we will. In terms of my games, I have gotten a few games of The Fatal Flaw in, and also played a game of the Madness Place. I am thinking of givi...

We played TLDR at the board game design group meeting last night. It was a solo game against three motherships. By the time that the guy ended the game, he had a robot that could defeat nearly any mothership that could exist. It was fun to watch how he built his robot (he had way more healing than I would have expected any robot to ever need, but he made serious use of it, as he also had a ton of damage providing parts). The game took about two and a half hours, but he beat the first mothership at about two hours. He said that he had had a fun time, and that the game seemed well balanced, but he did have a few ideas: Make a draft for a one player game (with starting cards). (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) Figure out how to get trade working in a one player game. (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) Make foes that move at different speeds? (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest) The ability to repair cities mig...

Last night I played a game of Terran League of Defense Robots with Alison for our date night. We turned up the difficulty and included two Motherships in the game, and I found it to be a very satisfying victory. We are getting quite good at that game. We added in ideas from last playtest, and found them to mostly work well. Here are what we changed, and what we thought about it: The minions are now integrated into the foe cards - They are on play abilities that add a "Minion" cube to the tile. Minions fight as a block, and deal (and require) damage equal to their count. They take any damage type as full damage (even generic). This felt pretty good. The minions were hard to fight, but not overpowering. The real game will want minion tokens that are like coins with a pow symbol on them. The mothership's minions and her escort's minions combined to make a stack of 14 minions. That is practically unkillable. We decided that the mothership should summon minionless ...

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...

I brought The Perfect Moment  to the last BGDG meeting. It was at Demolition Games  for the first time. The venue is nicer than the last place that we met at. We had 11 people, and only one person brought a game (which only supported two players). I presented  The Perfect Moment , which received good feedback. We decided to change the Ring card to allow players to trade cards. I also showed off my new artwork for the first time. They liked the new look better than my original look. I have gotten the laser cutter working really well. It cut out all of the cards for  The Perfect Moment . I should probably have it cut out tiles for Terran League of Defense Robots , but I have not spent the time to do that yet. I have, however, been preparing to present The Age of Vikings at SaltCon . The Age of Vikings was declared a finalist in the Ion Awards this year. That has been where a lot of my time has gone, but I have also been fine tuning my laser cutter, and cutting ou...

Last weekend I built a laser cutter. I intend to use it to make higher fidelity hex tiles than I used to be able to make (and also square, and round ones as well.) I bought some cardboard, but haven't yet tested it against cardboard. It cuts through paper like nothing, so I think that it should work. Now I need to make up artwork for the tiles for TLDR. I have just also discovered a new contest, and hope to enter it (in addition to all of the other contests that I entered this year. It is the Button Shy Wallet Game Contest , and it looks pretty interesting. They limiting factors make it quite a constrained game design, which really tends to focus my mind and make things move along more quickly for me. As a side note, I really respect Button Shy for inventing an idea that I totally also invented (albeit a little after them). Also, the published Avignon (which I totally play-tested and provided feedback for). They are one of the companies that I would like to publish a game throu...

Yesterday at lunch we played Terran League of Defense Robots again. We tried out all of the new rules that were invented in the brainstorming session that happened at the end of the last BGDG meeting. The game seems to have improved quite a bit because of it. The Aliens moved all around the mat, and attacked the cities, and the players had to chase them around. After the game, one of the players said that I should just use 2d4 to place the aliens, and also use 2d4 to determine which cities are face up. That was pretty good feedback. I have come to expect much more and much better feedback from the guild, so it is great to also receive good feedback from my co-workers. I am not entirely sure that I like the way that minions work right now in the game. They don't feel real enough, so I think that I will separate them from the cards that they are a part of (so that minions are associated with a stack of aliens, not just a card.) One player seemed to think that they made the game...

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 ...

I ended up only submitting two of my three games before the end of the deadline. The Dragons' Game, and The Age of Vikings. Both of them seemed ready, whereas Terran League of Defense Robots did not seem ready. I will continue to work on Tldr this year, and hopefully it is ready next year. I think it is a great game, I just hope for it to not have any major changes while I am submitting it. I am also submitting a bunch of games to Cardboard Edison, which should be a fun competition. In addition to the three mentioned above, I am submitting Moar Moai!, Polynesia, and Sorcery, Inc. Hopefully they like them. To submit my games, I need to make a five minute pitch movie for each of them. This is not my forte, so I think that that will be the hardest part. In other news, I played Talisman for the first time two days ago and thought that it was way too random to be fun. I also played Cash and Guns, and it seemed to be a reasonable party style game. Not my favorite, but certainly...

With the Ion Award submissions deadline looming I have been editing my rules documents pretty consistently every day of the month so far. That hopefully means that I will get done on time, but you never can tell. The Age of Vikings  is coming along quite nicely. The document is much better than it was on the first of the month. I have pretty high hopes for this one. The game plays well, and is strategic and fun, however it does tend to take a long time. I think that this is definitely the year to submit it to the contest. The only problem that remains (as far as I can tell) is the unification of modes of speech - Sometimes I tell the reader of the document to do things (e.g. "If you have 3 coins, Move your ship"), and sometimes I tell the reader that the players will do things (e.g. "Any players that have three coins must move their ship"). I need to make it all the same, so that it isn't jarring when I switch between both modes of speech In the past I hav...

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...

Yesterday we played Terran League of Defense Robots at work for the first time. It went really badly. One player thought it would be funny to play all of the hardest foes that he was dealt, so the players lost pretty quickly. Despite this, three of the players expressed interest in playing again. The easy mothership Multiple of them seemed to understand how to build a robot and most of them wanted to try to fight off the alien threat. The mothership that they drew (which was played on the second turn by the turncoat player) was the easiest mothership possible, so they still had a chance when it came out, but they quickly lost as more and more killer aliens appeared. I didn't learn nearly anything at all from the playtest that could help the game, so it was almost a complete loss for me. The only two take homes were the fact that I need to balance the motherships against each other, and that I need to stress the necessity of cooperation to the playtesters when I intr...

I just played a solo game with the Alien Destruction cards in. I added 3 copies to see if it felt right. It was hard, and they are so annoying, but it was doable (and probably easier than double alien meeples), so mission accomplished. I did, however come up with more balance issues. For one thing, bad draw luck made the final two cards in the part deck the two I needed to defeat five of the first six aliens. That made for a really rough start. I think that I need to genericize damage in some way, perhaps make any two attack symbols count as one other attack symbol of your choice. The mother ship was an amazing fight, and also way too hard. I had nearly every tech researched, but I still couldn't defeat her without blowing up parts. The types that the mothership required were acid fire and lightning 2x each, and there is no weapon that provides that, so I had to use 4 different weapons to get it. I ended up building a monster of a robot that had practically no healing. I bl...

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 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...