Pretentious Board Games

After some 3d printing, painting, and working on boards I showed my games off at a talent show. It was fun and people seemed to be impressed with them. This upcoming Wednesday we are meeting at the Barnes and Nobles for game playtesting. A link is here . Join us if you are interested.

I went went halfsies with my brother in law on a RigidBot 3D printer. We built it yesterday and I fooled around printing for a few hours. The first few prints were pretty rough, but I think I am getting the hang of it. The full sized ones are 1 inch tall. The leftmost one was the first 'successful' print, and the second one is an average print. The next two are printed 63% of the normal size and the upper right one shows that if I set the extruder too hot there are consequences. the lower right one is 50% size. I think that I'll go with the 63%, as they seem to fit on my MOAR MOAI board best. The sale that we bought the printer on ends at noon. Get yours fast.

Though I haven't yet got my cards back, a few things of interest have been happening recently, so I thought I would post. I played Acquire for the first time. It was really great. I intend on playing it again. It is exciting to find an old game that is still really fun. I drew a new map for MOAR MOAI. I tried to combine the score tracks with the resource tracks for the first time. I think that it looks awful. For this reason I talked with Dave about drawing me a better map. He has some good ideas, and I like his art style, so I am looking forward to his product. I set up a new game night for the Sandy board game playtesting group. It is next Wednesday. We are meeting at the Barnes and Noble near fort union, so come if you can. I also found out that my Uncle is an artist . I like his artwork style, and I could see hiring him in the future.

I have been preparing to print off some new high fidelity Polynesia cards for a talent show. It has been quite a task, but I did discover a way to mass modify the color profile of cards. With imagemagick installed you call: mogrify -format tif -colorspace CMYK -profile ISOcoated_v2_300_eci.icc *.png Which converts the source pngs to tiffs with the chosen color profile (drivethrucards requires a profile that has less than 300% ink coverage, so this is necessary.) Here is an after and before of a farm: After that, I had to use scribus to build a pdf out of them, and then I could upload them to get them printed. I don't yet know when they will arrive, but hopefully it will be before the show.

I have been modifying Polynesia a lot recently. We have renamed strategies to leaders (and changed the way that they work), re-instituted the god draft, changed the attacks to favor the defender, removed the military deck, changed the way that attacks work entirely (they are penalties for gaining points now), rearranged the cards, and rewritten my card generation website. I need to figure out a better leader symbol. The current symbol is on the card to the right (it is a guy with a big hat. That says leader to me.) One of the biggest recent changes was moving the text that you care about when the card is in play to the top of the card, and the text that you care about when it is in your hand to the bottom. The way that the cards are stacked up during the game necessitated this (and having Ryan Laukat tell me that sort of cemented it in my mind.) Here are the most recent cards. Here is the card generator website.

Over the last weekend we went to SaltCon. I didn't win the Ion Award (my two finalist games were moderately well received, so perhaps next year I will do better and win). One thing that I learned was that there are actually publishers that want finished art (which is one thing that I have never spent the time to do since I am not really an artist). On Friday we had a Sandy board game designers meetup. We played Moar Moai and Above and Below. Ryan has cleaned up the visual aspects of the game quite a bit (it looks pretty beautiful right now). He also changed it so that there were more buildings that could be bought (which was one of our complaints about the game before). It is good that he is so responsive. There were still a few little things that we wanted changed (one symbol was confusing, one card had things in reverse order, and the new versions of the adventure cards have not been printed up yet), but all in all it is looking like the game is coming together quite nicely...

We played two more games of "Magic, Inc." (as we have been calling it right now), and we have had to change some of the rules some more. It is becoming a better game, but it isn't yet super good. The 4 justice card Currently we are still trying to make lucky draws less of an issue in the game (I hate when games come down to lucky draws. If a player set up a much better strategy than their opponent then it should be easy for them to win and hard for the other player to win). We recently changed the rules to allow players to build The Universal Machine using cards from their hands. This is pretty cool since it allows the players to choose the tone of the game and makes most games different (since there are a reasonable number of combinations of universal machines that could exist (343 for 2 players, 2401 for 4 players, etc)). During our first game last night I built a machine that could convert 2 growth into 5 prestige and then I ran it two times using extra time ...