Pretentious Board Games

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...

On Tuesday we played a game of The Age of Vikings  at lunch at work. We had 6 players, and we didn't get through a full game before lunch ended. It is a much bigger game than is usually playable in a lunch hour (I only rarely work on such games because it is hard to playtest them to make sure that they work properly). The game is working pretty well - people with different strategies still got similar scores and nothing seemed really broken. It took a long time, however there are a lot of important decisions that have to be made at every juncture, so it is not that surprising given that some of our players have some analysis paralysis. Since that game, we have added and tested out 6 new god cards and a new "helpful" action reminder card. I am currently working on resizing the island hexes to make them fit on a game crafter medium hex tile. I might have to scale down the tokens to make it work, but it should make the game fit in a smaller box. On Thursday we played...

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.