Pretentious Board Games

I have been receiving artwork for The Perfect Moment recently, and I have to say - it is looking pretty good. I have also dusted off Grab the Loot, and am considering what to do with it. I want to majorly rewrite it, so I might end up doing just that. The current idea is to bring the gameplay more in line with the silly theme, and to make it lighter and easier (without taking the optimization completely out of it.) I have made a brief first attempt at that, but more has to be done before it is complete. I also just made another version of Witch Hunt - this time I dropped it down to 9 cards, and 21 pennies. The BGDG liked it, so you might hear more about it some time. Here are my notes about the play through: Adding in different types of could allow for different testimony "strength", which would add another layer to the strategy. penny = +1/-1, nickel = +2/-2, dime = +3/-3   Cheating is possible - tucking a penny under a card is prone to players looking. Use...

As I write this I notice that Above and Below is #3 on the hotness... Sweet. I playtested Above and Below last night as the Sandy Board Game Design Meetup , and our session was cut short, so I am posting this for the benefit of Ryan (and any interested parties). Since this was played at a playtesting night, I expect that some of this review will not apply to the final game, but I thought I would post what I felt about the game. The artwork which was completed was excellent. The village that you build has a distinct feel to it. Reminds me of a nostalgic look at the fantasy Japanese countryside in a Miyazaki film (perhaps Laputa). The people tokens were not yet complete, but the sketches on them were of all sorts of people (slanted toward bearded/facial haired men ever so slightly). There was one fish person and one little girl with pigtails and a hammer. I liked that the people were unique and that they all felt a bit different (I swear that I picked up lord yupa as my first train...

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.

I have recently been working on the format of my dancing robots cards. I have been changing the way that all of the cards are laid out to put heat and electricity values in the upper right hand corner. This will allow the cards to be more easily read by just looking at the top half of the card. With these changes all of the rule text at the bottom has also generally become shorter. I also went through and fixed up the judges with actual art. Now I am starting to working on the move cards. When I am done I will be ready to make some more efforts to get some Playtesters to play it. Over the weekend I got some players to play witch hunt. They liked it fairly well. I will continue to play test it and post updates.

I have been playing some more games of Witch Hunt recently. I have changed the rules to be a bit more simple and to not require as many components. It seems like the entire game for 3 to 7 players could fit into a 54 card box. This is sort of exciting since if the game were under $10 then it would be really cheap for the amount of enjoyment that you could get out of it (and it feels like $10 is a reasonable price point for a 54 card game.) I have also been working on the artwork for the game. I totally contacted Kit Cox and got his permission to use his artwork for the cards (just for prototype purposes, not for actual production of the game), so now I am in a position to send out some play testing decks and see if I can get some reviews that will help to clean the game up. I think that his artwork fits the theme of the game really well, and doesn't detract from what the cards do be being too bad (like any artwork that I would create if I were to do it myself.) Here is the ne...

We have been playing more Witch Hunt recently. With the recent modifications to the rules (mainly reducing the amount of testimony cards that players have) the game is moving along much quicker. Perhaps it is even going too quickly now. I might have to give a different number of testimony cards based on how many players there are. Probably the way that this will change is that the player will get all of their testimony cards and then discard down to the number of cards that is required. Here is a possible chart Players Cards Each Total Cards 3 5 15 4 5 20 5 4 20 6 3 18 7 3 21 8 2/3 16/24 I am also thinking that the persons are going to have to change (probably I will make fewer of them in total). Finally, I think that this game is nearly good enough to open it up to blind playtesting. Once I get some functional artwork I will put out a call for playtesters. If anyone reading this wants to volunteer to playtest, send me a message.

I have started on some artwork for witch hunt . It still is not complete by any means, but it is closer to what I want than the white paper with black writing that I used to have. The cards were designed by me, and the art was drawn by Kit Cox. I found it on the Discworld Wiki . I am currently tracking down Kit and asking him permission to use it, but I have not succeeded so far in contacting him. (He is no longer active on the wiki, and the last time he posted there was 6 years ago). I think that I have found him on Facebook, but it remains to be seen weather it really is him or not. I am trying to come up with ways to speed up the game, and I think that lowering the number of testimony cards will do that. Perhaps that will be enough, but perhaps I will have to do more. I am being quoted on another Kickstarter campaign (this time by tasty minstrel games, so a bigger campaign than last time). I have not gotten as many games of Harbour in as I would have liked recently. Wit...

We have been playing more games of Harbour recently. I have been trying to get people to play it every day at lunch. One time they all revolted and asked to play Witch Hunt instead. This is funny because I was actively campaigning for Harbour, but they wanted to play my game instead. I cannot say that I am sad that that happened (having my game more popular than a game that a publisher is about to publish is a good step). After playing more games (of Harbour) I am still not sure what the optimal strategy is. I was able to pull off some large point margin games by picking up only large buildings, but I have not won every game. I just got a bunch of kickstarter updates (templar intrigue, burgoo, coin age, robots on the line) recently. I look forward to getting all of the games that I supported last year. Hopefully they all come in before the end of this year. I have been too busy with other things to make much progress in any of my games recently, although I have been getting a gr...

I received a playtesters copy of Harbour on Friday night. My wife and I already had a date planned, but I was able to convince her to try it out after we were done having sushi. Components: The rule book was not entirely complete, but was pretty good (I will sum up our questions later in the post). Some of the components did not look exactly as they did in the rule book (an accompanying letter explained most of the discrepancies, but the Market Board was set up slightly different than the rule book indicated that it would be). Alison wants it noted that she found the rule-book by itself to be confusing. It explains everything on the cards, but because of the lack of context it is a bit overwhelming. We did not actually realize that we each started with a symbol (a coin for me and a top hat for Alison) until after the first game was over. Andrea's favorite card was the Ranch I expect the rulebook the be cleaned up a lot before the final release of the game (Eminent Doma...

I played another game of Witch Hunt (this time with my monthly gaming group). They liked the idea of the game, but said that it needed more work. I already knew that it was a good idea that needed a lot of balancing, so I was pretty happy with the feedback. We also played Dancing Robots (which I haven't played for a long time). They loved the judges and liked the difficulty that the game presented in balancing the various stats of the robots. The game went well, but I almost want to speed up the dance off. I need to figure out how to do that. I also talked with Dave, and hopefully he will get me the last part card artwork soon.

We have been hunting witches a lot recently. We have changed the game a fair amount, and are considering changing it more. The most up to date rules can be found here . Some changes that have been made: Balancing the Governor and Magistrate to make them give a standing bonus (+3) or penalty (-3) instead of making them kill players outright. Changing the pastor to give other players point penalties for not helping him. Changing the way that the roles gain points (almost all of them) Removing 'Witches' from the game entirely. There are now 'hags', 'trollops', and 'crones', all of which still have effects that activate upon people looking at them. Split up the Accomplices and the Witch Haters into more people (they still share common point gaining mechanisms, but they are quite different now.) We have experimented with different values of claim cards (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2), and (+1, +1, +0, -1, -1). It remains to be seen which set will win out. The...

We played two games of the witch game today. It went fairly well for a first play ever. There were some complexities that need to be excised and some power levels that need to be adjusted, but all in all it was a fun game. The first game went as follows: Mike: Gossip Pastor who loved Dwayne Dwayne: Constable Witch Hater who loved Beret Bob: Defense Attorney Martyr who hated Mike Beret: Magistrate Witch TJ: Clerk Recluse who loved someone (perhaps Mike?) The game started off well with me trying to influence everyone into sharing identities with me under the guise of trying to find out the witches. I allied with bob to try to get him killed and told everyone that he was a witch, but Beret tried to defend him as an ally witch. Dwayne thought I was on his side since I was a Puritan, but I lied to him about Bob to try to convince Bob to talk people into sharing cards with me. TJ was discovered by some action cards, and I shared with Beret and got killed. The game ended with a h...

We played some games of Creative Accounting (which is currently toying with being called 'Space Scoundrels') at lunch on Wednesday. The games went well. Everyone seemed to enjoy them, and we got to test four players for the first time. We also played a five player game. We played about five games total. We have some preliminary cards for the witch hunt game, and I have written some rules, but I am not yet done with the first draft of the rules. When I finish it I will post here. We played most of a game of cosmic encounter at lunch today, but I had a meeting so we had to quit before the game ended.

We played a game of Eminent Domain  at work. They would play it again, but I have not brought it back yet since I have been working on one of my goals for the year, and I have not been playing lunch games for this last week. The games continue without me (I made the group, but it has taken a life of its own, so even when I am not there it continues). I did publish a new version of Dancing Robots online (with the mostly completed artwork), but haven't done much else on that front recently. I finally got my Dominion base set cards sleeved, and I decided to put all the cards from all the dominion expansions that I own into one box. The expansions that I own are: Dominion, Intrigue, Hinterlands, and Dark Ages (Also a copy of Platnum, Colony, and Walled Village). I measured that I could just barely not fit three rows of cards into the box (the box is 1mm too narrow), but I decided that I would build it as if I could fit all the cards in anyway, and perhaps try to compress the foa...