Pretentious Board Games

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 doing so many thing recently that I have forgot to write any blog posts. For one thing, I have been playtesting a new game that Seth Jaffe (creator of Eminent Domain and other fine games) is designing. The game is called Automatown, and is about building robots that build more robots for you until you have enough robots to take over the world. For an early prototype it is pretty fun and well balanced. I have had an idea that I have been sitting on for a few years about building snowmen that build more snowmen. This ends up being thematically really similar, but my ideas for mechanics were way different than his. We have played it at work a few times, and the people are interested in seeing his new changes. Being that today is Friday it might end up being a skateboarding day, so perhaps we will not get to play it, but perhaps we will. In terms of my games, I have gotten a few games of The Fatal Flaw in, and also played a game of the Madness Place. I am thinking of givi...

We played a four player game of The Madness Place at the Board Game Design Guild meeting last night. Here are my notes ( with my current thoughts in bold ): Perhaps the current draft mechanism should be revisited. Should we keep all of the untaken cards from the draft? (instead of wiping them each turn) Should each player have their own draft which they can work on during other player's turns? Both? I think that the mechanism definitely wants something to change. Having two players makes the down time pretty small, but with four players it was too long. Having cards to think about during other player's turns would help, but the real problem (I think) is that a turn might take too long. Perhaps I need to restructure turns to make one action per turn? that would be a huge change Why are "green glowy things" yellow? Hmm that has to change. They should perhaps be green. How does using another player's device work when it comes to meeples?  This was not well ...

It was announced that "The Perfect Moment" won the Button Shy wallet game design contest. I have had an idea about making a 18 card standalone expansion to the game. I spent a little while brainstorming ideas, and made up some of the cards. I just printed it up and played it with my wife, and it was definitely playable. We had some problems with it (like any first time game), but the game worked fairly well.  The expansion is right now named "The Fatal Flaw". My original ideas for card abilities were fairly good (in terms of what would make the game playable with those cards), however I had to change some of the abilities after the first play through to balance them, and to make them more able to modify the state of the game. I also had to make a few changes to the original game to work better with the expansion. One change that I had to make was to the original game colors. I needed to change cyan to blue so that I could make the other game the seconda...

I brought Grab the Loot! to the Board Game Design Guild again. This play was testing out buried treasure and coins being valued at 4. We played a game, and then had an excellent discussion about it. Here are my notes (and what I plan to do about them). Some cards need to be reworded: (so, I am going to reword them) Trevyn- should say "to the captain", so that it doesn't affect stolen treasures Gripe- should say "gain an item ", so that you don't just shuffle coins around. Sophia- should say "gain from the captain", so that it doesn't affect stolen/donated coins. Bribe- should say "gain an item " like gripe Trick- opposite order is more common for wording? Buried treasures should not get players shot. (This is a great idea. I am going to do it.) Do not "Texas Hold'em" in all of the Captain's greed cards. This spawned a large discussion, and more people were on the side of not "holding in" the ca...

I joined the Haba kids game design contest this week. As part of the contest you get a bunch of parts that they had lying around and have to make a game that uses the parts. I got the following: I have tried out two designs so far. The first (which the younger kids liked the most) was a game where you visit the zoo and try to become brave enough to befriend a spooky shirt that is also at the zoo. In the second game the players are trying to catch a bunch of gnomes. The older kids liked that one better. I might combine them into one game - perhaps you are going to visit a fantasy zoo and need to gather all the small magical animals so that you can return them to the (scary) warden. My two year old son is about to have his birthday, and he asked me to design him a game for a present. We got into discussing the theme, and from this was born "Robots fighting Aliens and saving Princesses". His design considerations were the following: Has to have good robots One robot...

I just had an idea (which I totally didn't steal from Carl Chudyk (not really, I pretty much stole it from him)) for a new game. I think I am going to polish off the old Polynesian theme and mock something up some time. I should be working on The Madness Place, but doing what I feel that I need to do to it will be hard. I really dislike simplifying games, and always worry that I will simplify them too much.