Pretentious Board Games

Robin and Lyle form the guild played Automatown with me last night. We used the new goal cards that I just made. Here is how I modified the game: I removed all points from automa, and gave them up to 3 symbols - bullets, hands, and top hats. they can be tapped either for their ability, or to generate a symbol, but you have to place a worker on them to generate a symbol. This automa generates either a hand or a tophat: As an action you can place as many workers as you want on an equal number of automa, and then spend the generated symbols to complete a goal. Goals have from 1 to 4 symbols, and are just worth points. (considering adding abilities to some goals). This goal requires two bullets and a hand. Here is a copy of the notes I made during the game, and a brain dump of thoughts afterward. Most of the notes are comments from the other designers, so they don't necessarily match my thoughts: Recycling station: change to generic level 2 cube symbol. (this would be sim...

Playtested infamous at the board game design guild again last night. here are my notes (and my thoughts about them now): Draw from the bottom of the deck? (no!) Can you add more than 1 material for a build? 2? (2 would be worth trying) Can you spend minions to build or tinker? (no) Gadgets cannot trigger minions - make sure to specify this strong in the rules (ok) add icons to ability names to remind you what type of card the ability is on (I'll give it a try) start with 2 minions? (that would have to be an alternate rule - the basic game needs to be simpler, not more complex!) revivification matrix - always ability is too powerful (move it to a more expensive chassis?) rename hypnotist to mortician? revivificationist? (undertaker, grave digger, enbalmer, but what action would they perform? resuscitate? reanimate? revivify?) (put names on each card of what its action is called?) Baghdad capacitor's "At the start of your turn" ability hits too often - make...

I have recently been working on Micronesia a lot. I am still trying to find a good name for it - I might just go with the Maori word for island - Motu. Either way, the game is ready to be brought to BGDG. I will have more to report about it after the 24th. Here is the end of my last game: The left player won, but given one more turn, the right player would have won. It felt really close. The game is still super unbalanced, but it is fun to make those crazy combos. I think that it plays like a Carl Chudyk game, which is really fun to me, given that I like his stuff a lot. I just have to make all of the cards broken the same amount, and then I will enjoy it even more. I have also made a website over the last two days - one that is not yet complete, but at which you can see some of my icons. I need to still add a search feature, but once that is done I will have a much easier time keeping my new icons posted when I draw them. Here it is (such as it is):  https://publ...

After being sick and Christmas and such things, I finally got back to a BGDG meeting. We played "The Citadel of Madness" with two of Daniel's ideas applied. The two ideas were: removing rounds in favor of "refreshing" periodically, and removing "madness" in favor of "device levels" Here are my notes [comments], and things that I plan on trying out in the immediate future : 1 color cards are no longer nearly as good - play a card for both energy? The low cost 4 type cost room cards might be too easy to complete - perhaps reduce their value . Time is still confusing 1 action per turn is good - it speeds up the game. Secret rooms ? Possible ways to make the game have take that element [as an aside, I don't really want to add that type of play, but I am faithfully typing up these note, so I am recording them here] wipe out one/multiple rooms as an action so that other players cannot score them, and swap point cards with other p...

I had the guild look at Grab the Loot again. We played with 4 players, and had a good feedback session afterward. Here are my notes: Not enough treasures changed hands - I need to up that! Have a player that gives an extra blocker/worker? Use a cube for the extra guy Player that steals more? More swaps to fix the treasures changing hands problem Double your lowest item value as a player ability? When cards fill up, discard them What happened to the card that removed one person's meeple and gives one coin to that person? Are coins too powerful? Perhaps 4 is a better scorepoint? Cards that pay a coin to gain 2 items, or the reverse All in all, I am ready to make some changes. I will likely have new PNP files ready in a day or two. I have also made a lot of progress on playtesthub. It has the ability to add games, look at games, and mark games for playtesting. You just now need to be able to actually playtest them and give feedback.

I tentatively made changes to The Madness Place recently, but haven't tried the game out until tonight. Here are the new rules: Turns are now one action each (With the exception of balancing a device, which happens as part of modifying the device) After players pass, the player who passed first goes first the next round. Get energy from the castle only at the start of each round. storing keeps energy between rounds. draft and rooms repair refill every round. We tried out the new rules at the BGDG meeting, and it went fairly well. Here are my notes from the playtest: Make sure to note that Any modify requires balance Balance only the worst balanced device on a swap Using time should be a free action Gain access to another player's device too? Store energy too? Add energy to the castle's output too? Balance a device too? Turns are too small Perhaps group actions? Perhaps spark increases actions per turn? Perhaps minions left on your mat increase ac...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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...

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...

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 have been preparing for my presentations for the Ion award. I have the beginnings pretty good, but need to practice the sample turns still. I found out that the Sandy board game design group is probably going away, since no one wants to pay a monthly fee for it. It was useful to me when I couldn't make it to the BGDG, but now that my Tuesdays are free, I don't really see the need for two groups anymore. I'm also starting to work on a new game named "Doge city". It is based on the computer game agar.io. Alison and I played a game today, and it mostly works. Perhaps I'll post it some time (after it works and has written rules) I had a dream about a game where the players each had dinosaur species that they were evolving. I woke up and wrote it down and it almost seems playable already. Some time I should make it and see if it is. I also still haven't made my new "giant robots fight alien war machines" game yet. Apparently the mo...

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...