Pretentious Board Games

We played a memorable game of Two Rooms and a Boom today. There were fourteen players: five red, one bomber, five blue, one president, one zombie, and one nuclear tyrant. The zombie plague took the other room on the first round sparing only the president (who had held out when the initial infection occurred). Most of the blue team was infected before the first swap as only one blue guy was in the other room. During the first round the red team successfully found the nuclear tyrant and partially treated him (which also allowed him to know the bomber's identity), and cast him to the other room so that the president could finish him off. The first swap occurred: one zombie traded for one nuclear tyrant The second round the tyrant zombies up (instead of being fully disarmed by the president), and the zombie infects the bomber and the remaining blue team member through confusion. The third round the tyrant goes back to try to infect the remainder and takes over the first r...

I went to a meeting of the Sandy Board Game Design club last night. We played Ryan (of Red Raven Games ) Laukat's new game, which is based in the same universe as Empires of the Void. It was a 4x game which combined mechanics of area control, drafting, and combat similar to Cosmic Encounter , and it was pretty fun. Alison liked it, which is surprising since she has never liked a 4x game before this. I tested the combat of the game (every time I design a game like that people never really fight enough to test the combat fairly well, so I thought that would be a good thing to do), and it was pretty easy to understand and seemed balanced fairly well (with a slight bonus to the defenders that made them have enough of a boost that you had to think about attacking a planet). We also played a game of Dancing Robots, which went fairly well. After the game was over there was a short brainstorming session and we discussed how to speed up the game. A drafting mechanic was discussed for...

I entered my creative accounting game into a game contest. I rethemed it again as an Oliver Twist game, but the rules did not have to change at all. I look forward to seeing the results. Also, I ordered a high fidelity version of dancing robots to be printed up. I wanted to order it at the game crafter, but they had a wait time of a few months and so I ordered it at drive thru cards instead. Hopefully everything will go well, and I will have cool cards soon.

I have been spending a lot of time in gimp preparing the dancing robots cards to look good for my printing. I have the following to show for my efforts: They seem to be getting closer to correct, but I still am working on them a bit. Also, I am considering entering cook the books into this contest. I just need to retheme it as an Oliver Twist game.

I just got my copies of Burgoo, Templar Intrigue, and Coin Age. They were excellent quality, and I am very happy with all of them. Over lunches recently I have been not playing games because I have been working on my dancing robot cards. They are coming along quite nicely. Here is a sample of what will probably be the final look of the cards. I have a poll running to choose between a few final versions of the cards. The poll is here .

I have received word that my rewards from my first Kickstarter campaigns will arrive soon (probably Monday). This is exciting because I have been waiting for them for a while. With the small time frame between now and receiving Burgoo we have seen a resurgence of interest in it at work. It is a really fun game, especially for the small size that it is, and the simplicity of the rules. I have been working on an android app for my daughter. It is a really simple application, but since I have never created a real android app before I am still learning things. Hopefully I will be done soon so that I can focus more on finishing up all of my Dancing Robots cards. I figure that my next step is to get some high fidelity copies made up and  send them out to a publisher and some reviewers. If the publisher doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time, then I will send it to another one while setting up a kick-starter campaign (and sending it to more reviewers). If the second one...

I did not post for a week because I was at a technical conference, and did not get much gaming in. Since I have come back we have mostly been playing Resistance with the Lancelot expansion. We also played some Love Letter as well, but nothing other than that. I am thinking of starting to review some games (just for fun).