Pretentious Board Games

I have been working more on the Citadel of Madness, and on Motu. I finished up another round of changes to the Citadel, and am ready to playtest it again. I also finished up a new version of Motu, and played it twice on Tuesday - once at work and once at the board game design guild. Here are my notes from the BGDG: Make it obvious that activate is bottom House, meeple and x are all the same. Taking over more islands should cost more shells Power up gather again! Swap gather to 2x and action to 1x shells. Ability to lock out cards by players Reword Marioso - to activate one card per turn max. Tie leaders and gods to strategy cards for legibility Combine worship & deify, and trade & sacrifice Use goods as cost for abilities Put worshippers in corner of blue card, and tuck that corner. Up player interaction I will work on updating this stuff as I have time to. Perhaps I will even drop the game to a 36 card game from a 52 card game if I combine the strategies toge...

We played another two games of Motu (formerly Micronesia) the other day. Here are my notes: Labor is a better Gather than Gather - Possibly make Gather also build more farms? Islands should be worth 2 points each (or 3 if they have less places to tuck cards) Laka sucks. Fix it. Arohirohi should be: activate 1 ability n times. Check the gods - they need to be weaker than the leaders without followers. Hina is totally broken. Make her say 1+(n/4) points instead of 1+n points. Perhaps some limit to the number of gods/worshipers per god is necessary. This will prevent the godsnowball of doom. During the first game, I deified Hina, and then just won the game without any contest in four or five rounds. The game ended 13-26, and was not very fair. Alison contended that Hina needed to be changed, and I agreed. She said that no strategy could overcome it, and I wasn't so sure. It seems that that there are multiple options for beating it, but they would all involve composing a g...

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...

I took a few weeks off from anything board games because after a reorganization at work, I suddenly found myself working on a far less desirable technology. All is well now, though. I went on a job hunt, and through the hand of providence secured a better paying job closer to home that allows me to set my own hours and work from home some times. I start next Friday. I played two games of The Citadel of Madness on Friday, and had a pretty good time. Here are my notes from the games (and my explanations of them): Name should be printed on both sides on part cards (I need to make it visually obvious that cards can be rotated 180 degrees, and making opposite facing names would do this. This is a really obvious solution to the issue, so I am happy that it was arrived at). Return all active workers to your mat (somehow the refresh action on the mat didn't say that, so I need to modify the action) Any ability that had an arrow takes your turn (this needs to be added to the rule doc...

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...

I met with Daniel Peterson (of Mayday games) to show him some of my games. He was not impressed with any of them. Though that was true, we still had an interesting conversation, and I gained some good insight into what Mayday wants. I think it increasingly unlikely that I will ever get a game published by Mayday, because I enjoy a lot more calculation, accounting, and heavy, repeated planning than they want in a game. The biggest take home was that I should be designing games for ADHD players, and that the math and accounting all has to happen in a very subtle way to be palatable to players. That being said, I have also determined that if Berrett likes a game, then it is possible that Mayday would like it too. Here are my notes from the meeting. The Madness Place: madness should be integrated into other costs high level machines should cost more to build all cards should be level 2, and have the ability to level up (taking actions and or cards and or something) perhaps tech t...

With the new year, there have been tons of things happening. I have submitted two games to the Cardboard Edison this year: The Citadel of Madness, and Grab the Loot. The feedback that I got from them was immensely helpful last year, so I am eagerly anticipating this year's results. I also received a large package of board game parts (which I ordered) in the mail. The most exciting parts was the blue gorilla meeple. I have designed a dexterity game based on it (for the January 24 hour game design contest). It is called "Where there's gorillas there's hope". It is fairly simple, and has a traitor mechanic. When I finally get over this cold, I will certainly bring it to work, and see how the guys like it. I also have been thinking about the 9 card design contest (I never intended to make a game for it, but one just arrived in my brain yesterday, and it is a really interesting idea. Perhaps you will hear more about it in future posts). The Icon creation thread...

The small island game is getting out of hand. I played a second game of it last night, and both players found highly lucrative strategies. One of the strategies snowballed in a really fun way, the other was degenerate, and I am putting in a fix for it. The snowbally one was just crazy awesome. Here is the end state: The right player found one stupid trick to gain 6-12 points a turn (Hint: it was 2x exploring every turn and then buying points once he had 30 goods). It only involved 2 specific cards and having three or more workers, so it was pretty bad. The left player stacked his abilities up until he could labor to: draw 10 cards, settle an island, tuck 3 cards for free, gain a free worker, and gain a point. This net him about 5 points a turn, but on a really good turn he could get 12 points. His strategy reached fruition slightly quicker, and was snowballing faster, so he would have won had he not drawn the entire deck and ended the game early. It felt like a wild engine b...

I have  been working on a new island themed card game recently. It currently has 72 cards (2 decks), 5 mats, and 9 tokens. Compared to Polynesia's 195 cards (6 decks), 7 mats, and 19 tokens, it seems like a decently smaller game. I have been considering calling it Micronesia, just to call that fact out, however it isn't really related to Polynesia, so I am a little bit hesitant to do so. I have decided on some basic rules and played a solo game. It is playable, but not balanced. It remains to be seen if other people will find it fun, however I found it to be an interesting exercise. I felt sorry for my right hand player, because, although he tried a few different strategies, he just couldn't compete with the left player who got a good engine set up pretty early in the game and just raked in the points for the rest of the game. The ending score was 52 to 36. I don't like that. I think that a player that is building up their engine for longer should have a distinct ad...

I have continued to work on my viking game. It is less broken now than it used to be last time I posted, but still not all the way working. Hopefully I can stop modifying the components at some time, since I keep having to print more and more tokens to make the game run smoothly. Additionally, I have been really getting excited about the new Dominion: Empires expansion that is coming out. It looks like the cards are going to be pretty cool.

Alison has been sick for the last few weeks, so both the kickstarter and the robot game have been shelved for a while. At the same time, I have continued on Micronesia, and it is growing into a reasonable game. Though I have not come up with a name for it yet, it is now a viking themed 4xish game where you take over islands and deify your leaders into Norse gods. I stole the artwork from this guy , who totally drew an awesome set of Norse gods, as well as a bunch of Tolkien themed pictures as well. Obviously the artwork is a placeholder until I can get art made for me. I printed up some ships and some tokens for the game, and have had a few playtests so far. It still needs a lot of work (mostly with balancing at this point), but it is coming along. It has been fun to learn more about Norse mythology. The goddess Idunn (pictured above) is a goddess of apples (for one thing), which is a funny portfolio element for a god to have. Another interesting thing that lawyers (Logma...

I finished my design for the Dominion tokens. I like the way that they look, so I am thinking of making a Kickstarter campaign to sell some copies of them. I don't really want to do it, but I think that I should so that I can actually make my business profitable this year (that is the goal, after all). I have also finished up a first iteration of the new game (which is currently code-named Micronesia, though that is going to have to change.) It is playable for two players. I will try over the course of this week to get it to the table at work. I have also started brainstorming for the new giant robots fighting aliens game. I am excited to theme it as being in one of Sam Huge's universe (I want to sort of mash the Ed universe into the Fine Structure universe so that I can make the giant robots also come from the place where the script is from.) When I get anything done I'll post it.

I realized that I haven't posted in a while. I didn't win the Ion Award (again). The winner of the Strategy category was "the Scarlet Pimpernel", which was a really good game, so I understand why it won the competition. I had a lot of fun at the convention, so it was not all a loss. I even got a publisher looking at one of my games. I have recently started working on a new game - it is a complete remake of one of my old games based on feedback that I got from one of the other finalists in the competition (one that also didn't win). I have also played a few games of Shadows over Camelot (the card game) at work over lunch. It was pretty fun, though we have yet to be able to win. We have been playing a lot of Secret Hitler (Which I still can't really like, but have to play because it is well liked by the other people).  Finally, I have been designing replacement tokens for the Dominion Adventures cardboard tokens that were really low quality. Perhaps I ...