Wednesday, May 07, 2014

New Eminent Domain content! Microcosm, EmDice, and new stuff!

Long time no post...

EmDo News

I have some news on the Eminent Domain front. I've posted in the past about Exotica, EmDice, and MicroCiv. The news is that TMG is moving forward with some of these!

One of our excellent artists, Ariel Seoane, is putting together art for Eminent Domain: Microcosm (formerly MicroCiv), and will then be doing art for Eminent Domain: The Dice Game.

Eminent Domain: Exotica is still on the list, and will likely be a 2015 release.

Anyone interested in playing the latest version of the game, you can print the files out here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4093/My%20Games/Eminent%20Domain/EmDo%20-%20Microcosm/EmDoMicro3.2.pdf

I've changed the language to refer to cards instead of tiles because in the final game the planets and techs will also be cards to make the game more portable.

If you play the game, please let me know what you think by leaving a comment here!

In addition to those EmDo products, I've been working on some new, fun stuff for the Eminent Domain base game: New Base Game Scenarios, and something I'm calling Emperor Avatars.

Base Game Scenarios

In Escalation I added Scenarios to Eminent Domain, and they have been very well received. People get excited about asymmetric starting positions, and really like the jump start that Scenarios add to the game. 6 of the Scenarios in Escalation used only cards from the base game so that players could play with Scenarios even if they didn't have he expansion (perhaps by looking up the details of the Scenarios online). Michael asked me to create additional Base Game Scenarios, so I've gone through and made 6 more Scenarios using cards from the base game, and so far I've really enjoyed playing with them.

Emperor Avatars

While working on the new Scenarios I had another idea that sounded interesting... so I created something I'm calling Emperor Avatars (though honestly that title doesn't make a lot of sense). Originally Avatars were going to be very similar to Scenarios, but rather than starting you with a Level 2 tech, it would simply give you an ability. The idea was to expand the Base Game Scenarios with abilities from the expansions. However, that quickly evolved into something else.

What I ended up doing was making 12 small abilities and putting them on 24 tiles - one each on "left half" tiles and one each on "right half" tiles. At the beginning of the game, player will draft these, and will end up with 2 abilities, a left-half/right-half pair. The combination of 2 abilities can lead to many different possible setups, and being able to draft them is a fun way to customize your position.

If you are interested in trying the New Base Game Scenarios or the Emperor Avatars, the files can be found here:
New Base Game Scenarios: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4093/My%20Games/Eminent%20Domain/Scenarios%20-%20new%20Base%20Game.pdf
Emperor Avatars: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4093/My%20Games/Eminent%20Domain/Emperor%20Avatars.pdf

Note that the icons in the upper left are from my old prototype files - they are a Survey icon, a Produce icon, and a Trade icon.

Enjoy!

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome news! Microcosm was the one I demoed at SaltCon, right? I really enjoyed it - glad to see it getting published.

Peter Schott said...

Looks like the Emperor Avatars and New Base Game Scenario links are disabled. They sound interesting, though. Glad to hear that there's some movement on EmDo Dice. :)

Seth Jaffee said...

Sorry, I guess I don't know how Dropbox actually works. I thought "Share DropBox Link" would, you know, share the item stored in Dropbox... but apparently there's more to it than that.

I've copied them into my Public folder and shared the public link - it should work now!

Unknown said...

Great news! I am excited to print it out and give it a whirl :-) Thanks for the update!

Peter Schott said...

Looks like that worked. I thought there was a way to share actual files from DropBox for public use, but I haven't done that in a while. The Avatar/Emporer idea looks interesting. I haven't gone through all of the scenarios yet, but appreciate the variety there. :)

MK said...

The other day we tried the Avatars. It was nice, bringing some fresh things to the base game.

By the way, is it possible to get an updated PnP of the Microcosm? It would greatly help if the planets were cards, and not the small sized rectangles.

Seth Jaffee said...

@MK - I haven't updated my prototype files, but before long I expect TMG will have PnP files with nicer artwork anyway. Watch the newsletter for that!

On that note, Ariel did a fantastic job matching Gavan's look for EmDo.

MK said...

I just saw Ariel's images on BGG. Look forward to a similar job for Microcosm!

Steeve L. said...

Hi Seth!
Have you finally decided to add the "Hand Size +1" to the SPECIALIZED scenario or not?
Just wondering… :)
I recently bought EmDo and we're having a blast with it!

Thanks,
Steeve.

Seth Jaffee said...

Hi Steeve - yes, I did add "Hand Size +1" to my prototype... but it hasn't seen much play unfortunately. Michael decided not to include that Scenario in the set included in Microcosm.

If you are playing with the Specialized scenario, please do include the Hand Size +1, and also please report back as to how it goes, and how it compares to other scenarios!

Thanks!