Pretentious Board Games

Apparently I am not very good at this blog posting right now... Most of the copies of my game have been mailed to the kickstarter backers, and they are being fairly well received. I have also finally gotten my hands on a copy of Glory To Rome, and I have been loving it. We went to SaltCon, and played a bunch of great games (Root was my favorite, but Alison like Azul a lot). Since I have played GtR, I have dusted off the ambition of making a 18 card game that feels like a Carl Chudyk game, and I have put together a game based on his GtR/Uchronia/Mottainai cycle of games. It currently is entitled "Chudyk game", but I will certainly make a better name for it some time. It took me about a month to get it to the point where it was playable (previous games of it always ended before the game got interesting because the deck ran out). With modifications of last night, I actually have something that I am excited about. I also freehanded some artwork (which took about an hour...

So, I brought the new island game to the BGDG last night. I need to get a name for it - it is that game that I mind dumped in December about. Here are my notes from the playtest: Place one worker per building Must not place more than one village per region After divvying up resources bid workers for crown Mercenaries don't count as people of your color Scarcity should be higher in 4 player game Make canoes cost people to launch Remove 3 tiles from game per person missing: 5 → 18, 4 → 15, 3→12, 2→9 Take out weird tile with middle line Make it a tile without any lines at all Money costs people? stone? something To use mercenaries: drop multiple mercenaries as free actions at the start of your turn, and then play one worker, then remove all of the used mercenaries Now, I am going to start writing up the rules as they currently stand. I will work on that here . Additionally, I am getting ready to submit Citadel of Madness to the Cardboard Edison. Perhaps tom...

I have been meaning to post for a while, but apparently I never did. I have one big announcement, and a bunch of small ones: The Perfect Moment is being published! You can find it here . Also, I had a great time at Essen. I talked with a bunch of publishers, and placed some games for evaluation with them. 5 games that is. I don't think it is kosher to say who, but some are with really cool publishers.

I got rough sketches of the first eight pieces of artwork for The Perfect Moment: I am super excited about it - I have been playtesting the new cards almost every day this week, and I am getting them nailed down right now. I don't anticipate any more major changes to them, however I am still working on tweaking the wording to make them less ambiguous, and to balance them. One funny thing that I discovered is that Jason decided that the story behind the "Kill Hitler" scenario was really a "Bank Robbery" scenario. Either way, the equipment could work for both. I have also started asking myself "How would I make a 6 card expansion to The Fatal Flaw", and I have some up with some cool ideas. The theme that I am going with right now is Bertram Wooster misadventure. Then, I could add Jeeves as a card, and have him make you always able to score, or something like that. The new ideas that Jason came up with really gave me more ideas of my own for t...

I have been working on The Citadel of Madness a lot recently. I have applied most of the changes that came from the last guild playtest, and they are working well. I also had a really helpful guy on the internet offer to create artwork for the game. The results speak for themselves: I have been making good strides toward getting the game completed. Even though it is not yet all the way there, it is moving along fairly quickly, and it is making strides toward becoming a easier to understand experience for those involved. I am preparing to submit it to Red Raven games. I think that Ryan could help to make it a better game than it would otherwise be. Perhaps he would even provide some final artwork for it. I have also been working on Micronesia. The game is undergoing major revisions. I will probably hold off on anything big until after SaltCon, but the game is definitely scheduled for some more surgery before I am through with this round of editing. The SaltCon math t...

It was announced that "The Perfect Moment" won the Button Shy wallet game design contest. I have had an idea about making a 18 card standalone expansion to the game. I spent a little while brainstorming ideas, and made up some of the cards. I just printed it up and played it with my wife, and it was definitely playable. We had some problems with it (like any first time game), but the game worked fairly well.  The expansion is right now named "The Fatal Flaw". My original ideas for card abilities were fairly good (in terms of what would make the game playable with those cards), however I had to change some of the abilities after the first play through to balance them, and to make them more able to modify the state of the game. I also had to make a few changes to the original game to work better with the expansion. One change that I had to make was to the original game colors. I needed to change cyan to blue so that I could make the other game the seconda...

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 ...

I have been splitting my time between Grab the Loot, and The Perfect Moment right now. I showed both of them at the BGDG meeting last Tuesday, and got some good feedback. I have implemented nearly all of the feedback that I got from the week before, and I also implemented most of the stuff from this last week. The game is working really well right now. The guys at work prefer it to published games on most days. Adding to the Captain's greed is really working out well. I think that the next change that I make is going to be the ability to have hidden treasure(s), and also the ability to look at some of the greed cards that were removed from the game. Perhaps I will add in a sixth player (because more players is always fun, and the game seems to scale well). I need to however re-balance the amount of loot you start with with different player counts. The captain having 8 loot at the beginning is too many with 2-3 players, and too few for 5 players. Perhaps the captain gets 2 tre...

We played "Grab the Loot!" at the BGDG tonight. The feedback I received was excellent. Since I just redesigned it from the ground up, I was really expecting big changes to come from this playtest, and I got what I was expecting. Here are my notes - and what I think about them right now: "Swap with another player" fix verbiage - Swap with the captain, swap with a player, and trade with a player are all possible actions. There should be three verbs, not two. There are not strategic decisions (all are tactical) - This one hurt, however I took it graciously and considered it as a call to increase the strategic decisions that are available in the game. Taken that way, it gives me something to work with, and I will do it. Treasure scarcity is not felt - I can easily fix this by making fewer treasures. Swapping between players should be more common - This is also an easy fix, and a great idea. Player interaction is king in this type of game. Later revealed gree...

On Friday my wife and I played Akrotiri for the first time in a few years. It is a really fun two player game. We were both doing well until the end when I pulled ahead to win by a large margin. I usually lose to my wife in such games, so this was a surprise ending. We had a fun time, and will probably play more in the near future. Yesterday we played Hanabi at lunch, and we lost all three games. It is fun to play a cooperative game with these guys (since they usually love traitor mechanic games). They liked it so much that we played a game at lunch again today. We played another game of "Grab the Loot!" last night, and also today at lunch. The game (at lunch) took 23 minutes, and people seemed to like the new changes. Dwayne (who is usually not happy to play one of my games twice in a row) even wanted to play a second game immediately. That is a win if I ever saw one. In this retheme I made changes that were much larger than I usually do when I am retheming things. I ...

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...

At work we played The Age of Vikings at lunch. It went fairly well. We nearly finished the game in an hour (which is quite a feat). If we had finished I think that I would have won, however that is not guaranteed. The game is getting its final polish before I present it to the judges for the Ion Award. It seems to be going well, however I have two more test presentations at least before I consider it all done. When I play against the judges, I want them to be able to understand the game, but not have any real hope of winning (because I know the strategy, and they don't). Here's to hoping that I strike the right balance. We also played a game of The Perfect Moment tonight, and had some things that we wanted to change and or try out. Here are our notes: Flowers should say "Swap a face up card with a card from your hand. Do this once or twice." Add 1 (or more) face up card to simulate another player. Everyone can use the ability on it that is facing the center o...

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...

I have been making good progress on The Perfect Moment, my submission to the current Button Shy contest . My wife and I have played two more games, and it is still an interesting problem to resolve. The amount of choices that you have some turns is really high, so people prone to AP might not do so well when trying this game out, however we both love puzzles, so it works for us. I came up with a really good strategy last game. It worked well for me. The strategy was to play two cards that are the same color but have no overlapping abilities. Then you have access to score all cards of that color as long as you can rotate your cards freely. Getting cards that meet those requirements is left as an exercise to the reader. I think that I will remove more attacks. They still slow down the game and don't improve your position. As a sidenote, the rules can be found  Here , and the cards can be found Here . Here are my notes from last playtest: Keys should say "draw a card...

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...