Pretentious Board Games

I haven't been working on Archipelago very much. I have added colors to the cards, but I realized that I needed to start getting my card games ready for an ION Award submission. I have been rewriting rules and editing artwork. It is a lot of work, but it it going along fairly well. I need to work harder on the sorcery rules, but the game is a pretty big concept to deal with in the beginning, so the rules are hard to write up.

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.