YANGI x2, and an old game off the back burner?

In addition to Keeping Up With The Joneses, I have had a few other new ideas crop up. Unlike KUwtJ however, these other ideas haven't been fleshed out quite as much, so I haven't mentioned them. I should at least add these to The List, if not work on them to the point I could get them to the table...

False Prophet (Mancala-Worker-Placement)

Listening to an interview with Isaias Vallejo of Daily Magic Games about the new/upcoming Margraves of Valeria, I heard him say that Margraves started out as an attempt to use a Mancala mechanism in a Worker Placement game. He said he couldn't make it work, so the design shifted to what they have now... a Concordia-esque hand building game where you can move your Margrave around the board and use neutral Knight figures to help you fight monsters (one of the various aspects of the game).

I thought the idea of Mancala Worker Placement sounded really good, and I wondered how I would go about that. So far I just have initial thoughts for a structure, but I think they sound reasonable -- maybe I'm not far enough along to see how it wouldn't work :)

I'm imagining a board, maybe a grid of tiles (like Istanbul for example), with neutral "follower" pieces on it, as well as a "Prophet" figure for each player. The game would be about moving your Prophet around and doing deeds, while follower meeples tend to follow whichever prophet they most recently saw.

On your turn, you would pick up your prophet figure and all of the followers in their current space, and distribute them Mancala style (like Five Tribes), placing your prophet last. Wherever you place your Prophet, you take the action of that space, and it's more potent the more followers are there with you - perhaps there are 3 levels of the action, Level 1 for when there's only 1 follower with you, Level 2 for when there are 2 followers, and Level 3 for when there are 3 or more followers. If you land in an empty space, you'd add a follower to the board there, and if you resolve a Level 3 effect, you'd remove a follower from the board.

That's about all I have at the moment, so I don't know what these effects would be (other than manipulating the number or location of followers on the board, for example). It still sounds to me like it has potential.

Edit: Perhaps better, on your turn you pick up all the followers in the space with your prophet figure into your hand. Then you place followers from your hand onto spaces 1-by-1 from your prophet to wherever you want to go. Then move your prophet to the last space you placed a follower on and execute its action (again, the more followers there the better). This way you might keep a (presumably small) hand of followers from turn to turn, and there could be some income you collect at the end of each turn that's based on the number of followers remaining in your hand.

I-cut-you-choose Worker Placement

This is my latest idea, based on Jamey Stegmaier's "Top 12 favorite game mechanisms" video that he recently posted. His top 2 favorite mechanisms are (spoilers...) Worker Placement and I-Cut-you-Choose. Just for fun I wondered what a mashup of those two would look like.

My initial thoughts were mostly just "make piles and draft them," which removes the Worker Placement dynamic altogether, but then a structure hit me that I think could work really well:

Imagine a board with a network of big spaces (let's call them "cities") and little spaces (let's call them "towns"). At the top of each round, seed the cities with ~4 (~6?) random cubes. Then take turns placing workers.

You place a worker into a city or town that has cubes. Then you do something that relates to the number or types of cubes there. Finally, you distribute those cubes to 2 neighboring towns (divided any way you choose) that do not have workers there already. If you distribute cubes into a town that already had some, then it has more now, no big deal.

Maybe if you place a worker where there's only 1 cube, it goes away afterwards (you can't split 1 cube). After all workers are placed, I figure there could still be some cubes on the board - that's fine. Add 4 (6?) more to the cities and start again.

I think that sounds like a solid main mechanism. I have some thoughts about possible details for what you actually do when you resolve a worker spot, but it's not fully fleshed out yet.

At this point, I find it very helpful to come up with a good theme that would fit the main mechanism described above. That helps inform the rest of the design. 

Worker-ception (Worker Group Placement)

A few years ago on the inaugural BGG cruise, I came up with an idea for a game based on cruise lines. In the game, you would place groups of workers -- not individual worker pawns -- into a few areas on the board, and then when resolving an area, you sort of zoom in and play a mini-worker-placement game with the workers in the group you had sent there.

I had sidelined that idea, but recently local designer David Short showed some interest in it, and in theory we are going to try it as a co-design. David suggested a slight re-theme as competing travel agencies, where the groups of workers are families going on vacation, and the worker spaces are little brochures so you can change them out from game to game.

I came up with a list of mini-WP games that could be used, so it might be that this game is close to being ready for an early playtest!

At an impasse -- a peek at The List and where some of my designs are at the moment

I'm at a bit of an impasse when it comes to my game designs right now... I feel like I can't make meaningful progress on any of my current designs, and with playtest sessions being so few and far between (not to mention more of a hassle on Tabletop Simulator), I feel a reluctance to start anything new. Maybe if I take a look at my active designs and their current status, it'll help me figure out what to do next. Here are some excerpts from The List:

Finished But Unpublished Games:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]

- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [Art on pause]

These EmDo universe games may yet see the light of day, but due to some issues (that it would probably be inappropriate for me to talk about), they are on hold at the moment. Too bad, because I was really excited about the prospect of releasing the Terra Prime revamp on TMG's 10th anniversary, and the dice game has been done for a pretty long time now.

- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print - fix faction powers!]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]

These Crusaders 5th and 6th player expansions have been ready to go for months, but the 1st expansion (Divine Influence) has just been sitting in China, waiting to be shipped to the US and released. Crusaders continues to be talked about (thank goodness), and I hope it remains in the zeitgeist at least until Divine Influence drops, so that doesn't end up being completely wasted effort. If that works out, then it could revitalize the game, and create some demand for these 5th/6th player expansions as well as a reprint (there's already been demand for a reprint of Deluxified Crusaders).

In the meantime, I looked at the files for some reason, and noticed that we were duplicating a couple of the new factions (because Crimson and Amber Knight expansions were supposed to be identical except for player color). That didn't make sense to me, so I developed 2 more faction powers, and we just need to swap those in before going to print.

- Olympus on the Serengeti  (FKA Deities and Demigods) [Art on pause]

I was excited to have a big name artist work on this one, but due to some of the issues mentioned above, Olympus on the Serengeti is on pause now too. Also, I'm becoming skeptical of the odd theme choice, and I wonder if just leaving it "normal" Greek mythology would be better.

- Exhibit (BGG) [Unlikely to be published due to conflict] [Abandoned]
- Dice Works (BGG) [Abandoned]
- Wizard's Tower (BGG) [Abandoned]
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion) [Abandoned]
- Suburban Sprawl [Abandoned]
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]

These are all basically abandoned. I did make a TTS mod for Exhibit, and played it once with my testers a few weeks ago (and again yesterday). I think it holds up, and I'm tempted to try pitching it around. It's been several years, and the person instigating that ambiguous conflict I mentioned has disappeared as far as I can tell, so that might not really even be an issue anymore (I'm skeptical that it was ever REALLY an issue, TBH).

I also made a TTS mod for Dice Works as well, and finally gave it a partial playtest yesterday. I was surprised how well it actually worked on TTS (like, physically), so maybe this one could be tested or pitched that way now. Comments from the players led to the idea of loosening up the specificity of the board spaces (like, "[ ] < 3" as opposed to "[1]", or "[ ] < [ ] < [ ]" as opposed to "[ ] = [ ] = [ ]"). The players were also concerned about the possibility of an all-out scrap strategy being sort of dominant. I don't think that's the case, but it might ruin the other player's fun, which would be a problem all its own.

Maybe for something to do I could make a TTS mod for Wizard's Tower - that might be fun to revisit.

Current Active Designs:
- Alter Ego (BGG)

After a lot of testing about this time last year, I had made a lot of progress on this one. I had made a TTS mod for it a long time ago, and had been meaning to update it with all the most recent files, but never got around to it. I guess that's something I could be working on.

- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe)

Most of my playtesting time (such as it has been) lately has gone to updating Apotheosis. I pitched the game virtually to 2 different publishers... the first wasn't interested, but the 2nd did show interest. They have a line of games in a particular universe, and Apotheosis fits pretty perfectly into that universe, so Rick and I have (a) revamped the prototype graphics and set the game in their universe, (b) addressed some items the publisher commented on after our playtest with them, and (c) fixed a major issue that came up in our pitch. I just reached out to the publisher to set up a time to show them the game with the updates again. I'm excited about the prospect of getting a game published by another publisher, just to sort of get my name out there more, and also to see how the process goes from the designer's end with another publisher.

- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain)

I was feeling pretty good about the latest playtestes of All For One, almost a year ago at this point. I have been wanting to make a TTS mod for it and play it online, but I have been waiting for my co-designer to do some updates to the maps and missions. He had said he was working on it, but I suspect he got sidetracked, and he didn't even reply to my last email about it.

Maybe my best bet is to go ahead and either take a stab at the board/card redesign myself, or just upload a version like my physical prototype so I can at least play!

- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG)

I'm pretty happy with the status of Riders of the Pony Express content-wise, I think one of the biggest things I wanted to do was try and make it less physically fiddly to play. I had an idea for that, but I am stalled out on trying to implement it. Maybe the thing to do is to forget about that for now, and create a TTS mod so the game can be played.

- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

I had prototyped a version of this, even made a TTS mod and played it online once or twice with my testers since the Pandemic hit. But I haven't had much opportunity to get together with Dan about it, and I was starting to shift my feeling toward what he wanted for the game -- for it to be a more complex, deeper game than what I had put together. So I kind of stalled out on it and haven't thought about it in a long time. I don't really know what I could do with this one right now.

- Keeping Up With The Joneses

My latest game project, which came together pretty quickly, has taken up the rest of my recent playtest and design time. At this point I feel like the game is stable, and I don't really see how I could make progress without more, ideally more widespread, playtesting (if you want to PnP/blind test this game, leave a comment below, or email sedjtroll@gmail and let me know!). I do have a TTS mod, so I could theoretically set up more, and more widespread, playtesting, but the logistics of playtesting online are difficult for me right now, so I don't see this happening anytime soon.

That's about it for my active designs. I guess I could take a look at some of my back-burnered designs as well:

            - Automatown [Michael Brown on board]

When Michael Brown came on board as a co-designer on Automatown, the game took some great leaps forward. However, it's been quite some time since I've heard from him, and since I played the TTS mod he'd made with my testers. I guess I'm not sure what I can do for this game at the moment.

            - Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG) [a designer has showed interest]

A friend showed interest in Winds of Fate, but ultimately got busy with other life events, and the pandemic hit as well, making playtesting much more difficult. So unfortunately, this game did not get revitalized as I had hoped it might.

            - Reading Railroad

For the first time in AGES, I broke out my old prototype for Reading Railroad and not only made a TTS mod for it, but even played it in person with my wife!

I was excited to revive this game, but after a couple of tests and some consideration, I kinda realized that using word-building as a mechanism just didn't seem to be that big of a deal after all. So my interest in Reading Railroad waned again, and it's back on the back burner.

            - Moctezuma's Revenge

Nobody really showed interest in Moctezuma's Revenge, which I thought was too bad because I like the theme and idea of this one a lot -- it really sounds like something that I could imagine existing. But without someone jumping in as a co-designer, I'm not sure this game will ever go anywhere. At least not anytime soon.

            - Kilauea [a designer has showed interest]

I met online with the designer who contacted me showing interest in Kilauea. He had made a new version, and I made a TTS mod for it so we could try it. We gave it a partial play, then discussed what worked and what didn't and came up with some ideas for him to try in the next iteration. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from him since then, and I haven't really thought about the game since then either.

            - Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]

A strong design duo showed interest in Joan of Arc, which gave me some hope that it would see some real progress, but as yet they have not gotten to it. Time is in short supply, and I know they have their own projects to work on, and I'm still hopeful they'll get to it eventually. In the meantime, I have left the game on the back burner.

            - Dynasty

One of my oldest ideas that I think is any good, I've been re-reading my old posts about Dynasty, and thinking that this might be the game I work on next. As always, it seems like it would be so easy to put together a prototype and try it out... now that I'm not doing regular playtesting anymore, it might be harder to actually get the game to the table, but I could probably make a TTS mod for it fairly easily if I just got some prototype files together for it.

I'll start a new post to describe a couple of new, or recently revived games that weren't necessarily on The List.

Dice Works and Exhibit - out of the woodwork playtesting!

Today I had a chance to playtest with 2 of my regular testers, but I didn't think my latest projects (Apotheosis and Keeping Up With The Joneses) would really benefit from another 3p test with the same people because nothing's really changed on them. So I pulled a couple of older games out of the woodwork. I had made TTS mods of them a while ago, and even played one of them a few weeks ago.

Dice Works

First we played a partial game of Dice Works, a real-time dice drafting game. I had expected the real-time nature of it to be problematic on Tabletop Simulator due to how awkward it is to do anything on that format, but truth be told, it went a lot better than I had expected. But first I wanted to try the game in a turn-based fashion, just to see how it would feel. As expected, the game dragged and the draft wasn't very interesting without the time pressure (like with my iPad game, Brainfreeze, simple decisions require time pressure to become fun). After a round of turn-based drafting, we played a few rounds in real-time, and it seemed to work fine. Rick isn't a fan of the time pressure, so I didn't force him to play through an entire game that way.

I haven't played Dice Works in YEARS, and it was fun to revisit. One of the big challenges to publication is that it's a real time game, and those tend to have a more limited audience than turn-based games. Another challenge is probably a way to get around needing 80 or more dice! I have considered using tokens to block up spaces where dice had been placed so that the dice could go back into circulation. However, thinking about it, the real cost of custom dice is in the molds -- I don't think the materials are all that expensive. So it might not be out of the question to use 80-100 dice, so long as they're standard d6s.

One question that came up was whether just placing dice into scrap as fast as you can would be dominant. I don't recall it being a problem, and I recall being happy with the scrap rates as I currently have them (you start out at 4-for-1, and get better with even advancement up the tracks), so the bigger question to me is, even if it's OK as-is balance-wise, does it ruin the fun for other players if one person is just indiscriminately scrapping dice as fast as possible? If that turns out to be the case, a couple solutions could be as follows:

* Increase the scrap rate (but again, I think I'm happy with the current rates)
* Add dice to the supply so that other players still have something to choose from, at least for a few seconds, while the scrappers are scrapping
* Make the "specific" spaces where you place dice a little more flexible. For example, instead of requiring a "1", maybe require "<2" and instead of requiring "[ ]=[ ]=[ ]" maybe require "[ ]<[ ]<[ ]"

That last comment is interesting, and I should probably give it a try just to make the boards more interesting to begin with. Adding more dice might be worth doing, at least in the first round, even if not ALL the time -- just to get things sort of jump started.

Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages

Then we switched over to just play a game of Exhibit. With the exception of a tweak or two, that game is pretty much done as far as I'm concerned, so this was less of a playtest, and more of a chance to just play one of my games :)

It went well, Rick had played once, years ago, and adored it back then. Very little has changed since that game. Aaron played a couple of weeks ago, and also liked it. A tweak I tried was changing the value of the Art exhibit. Originally, an Art exhibit was worth 2 additional points, as opposed to a Weapon exhibit, which helps yo win a specific auction in the future, and a Tool exhibit, which lets you re-roll dice. When I shortened the game to 5 rounds, I reduced that to 1 extra point for an Art exhibit, worried that the power of the Tool and Weapon had gone down and I didn't want Art to be "too good" in comparison. But I wanted Art to be more of an option early game, so players didn't just ignore it early, and use it late, so I tried something that sounded more interesting... Treat an Art exhibit as if it had +1 tile in it. This amounted to anywhere from 2-5 points, depending on the size of the exhibit, which means I failed at my goal of incentivizing art early but not late!

I think I need to just go back to +2 points for an Art exhibit, and be OK with players not using it early and valuing it more in the late game.

Keeping up with Keeping Up With The Joneses

I've played a few more solo games of Keeping Up now, including a 3-player solo test to see how that would go. It went fine, but had the same issue I've been seeing in the 2p games: It went too long! This post might get a little bit into the weeds, but to be honest, I'm writing it for my benefit more than for yours, so here we go...

Every playtest so far has taken longer than I would like on the clock, and I'll get back to that in a minute. But the game has also consistently taken more turns than I expected -- math has been failing me! The game timer is the Jones track. After each player turn, a Jones marker advances 1-3 spaces on the Jones track, depending on the number showing on the back of the top card of the deck. I figured I could control the average amount that the Joneses (TJ) move by manipulating the distribution of numbers on the backs of the cards. For example, if all the cards had a "2" on the back, then the average TJ move would be 2 (in fact, they'd move exactly 2 spaces each time), and the game would last [track length]/2 turns per lap, and currently there are 4 laps in the game. For a 2 player game, I'm using an 18 step TJ track (3 steps per rondel space). In this way, the Jones marker on each track will advance 1, 2, or 3 times each lap.

At an average TJ move of 2, one lap on an 18 step track would take 9 turns, so that's 4 or 5 turns per player. Obviously putting a "2" on every card would not be ideal, because I want the Joneses to move 1 and 3 sometimes also... so my first attempt had an even distribution of 1's, 2's, and 3's. This worked OK, but in my first playtest or two I felt like we weren't getting enough turns to make good progress. I started thinking a slower speed would be better, so I messed around with the distribution and played a few more games. My last few tests have used an average TJ value of 1.7 on the cards, but laps kept dragging out, and getting a bunch of 1s in a row felt off. Players were consistently getting 6 or 7 turns per lap, and while the card distribution had an average TJ value of 1.7, the actual average TJ move was only 1.4 or 1.5 steps per turn!   

From my experience so far, I think 5 turns per lap feels pretty good, and 4 might be OK on the low end. 3 would probably be too few. 6 would be OK, but consistently getting 6-7 turns each lap feels like too much. Overall, I've been aiming for a 20 turn/player game, plus or minus a couple. But for some reason, my card distribution is not providing that as the math would suggest.

That brings me back to the game duration on the clock. I had been aiming for a 20 turn/player game, and assuming turns would take less than a minute apiece most of the time (sometimes it's super quick, other times you have to think a bit, but I still wasn't expecting many turns to be even a full minute long). For 2 players, that's 40 turns at 1 minute or less each, the game shouldn't take more than about 40 minutes, right? Well, so far it's taken twice that long, just about every time! It's possible that I'm underestimating the amount of time a turn takes - maybe it really does take a minute or more to grok and evaluate the three options (occasionally more if you have a Minivan), make your decision, then physically resolve it by moving a card, a rondel piece, possibly some money tokens, a track marker, another card, the Jones track mover, and then the Jones' marker on a track. Geez, when you put it like that, it sounds like a lot!

So right off the bat, perhaps I need to adjust my expectations. I had expected the game to be about 15-20 minutes per player, and therefore range from 30-40 minutes for 2 players up to 60-80 minutes for 4 players. Maybe this simply isn't a "one hour wonder," but rather a 60-120 minute game to begin with. Is that acceptable for the weight of the game? Maybe, I'll have to consider that some more.

One thing I could do to decrease the duration is to lop off a lap. Instead of playing through 4 TJ laps, scoring 2 areas each time (and all of them at the end), I could make it 3 laps, scoring 3 areas each time (again, all of them at the end). This would not change the number of times any area scores in the game, just the timing on some of them, and it would reduce the total number of turns in the game to 3*18/[TJ avg move] for 2 players. So at my current theoretical TJ avg move of 1.7 steps/turn, that would be a 32 turn game, or 16 turns per player (5 or 6 per lap). And at the observed TJ avg move of 1.4-1.5 steps/turn, that would be a 36-38 turn game, 18-19 per player (on par with my initial target)!

So this sounds like an attractive move. In addition, after the first playtest, my wife suggested that scoring only 2 areas at a time seemed lame to her, so scoring 3 at a time could address that comment as well. However, it does present one challenge, but it's one that should be easy enough to overcome... One thing I liked about scoring 2 areas at a time is that each player (up to 4 players) could start at a different rondel space, give them a track bump in that space, and none of those spaces would score at the end of the first lap. This feels to me like a nice setup, differentiating players from the outset, and keeping anyone from getting a potentially unfair advantage from starting at a space that will be scoring in short order. Scoring 3 spaces at a time, that scheme still works for 2 and 3 players, but not for 4 players. What to do about 4p setup?

1. I could let someone have that advantage... I could try and figure out whether early or late turn order is "better," and compensate with that small advantage, but even if that were properly balanced, it's the kind of thing players would scoff at as obviously unfair.
2. I could stop giving players a free bump in their starting space, so it wouldn't really matter if you start in a space that will score first or not. This would simultaneously address the lingering question of which track to bump when starting at KIDS or HOME, since those spaces have multiple tracks. This might be the way to go.
3. I could modify setup for 4 player games such that only 2 spaces score the first lap, and the other 4 score the 2nd lap (and of course, all 6 score at game end). 

As I type out those options, I am leaning toward number 3, even though it involves a setup exception for player count, which is lame. In the end, number 2 (don't give players free bumps) might be the simplest solution, and I should probably just go with that one.

In any case, if I can cut out 25% of the turns, then it stands to reason that the duration should come down by about 25% as well, so those 80 minute 2-player games should come down to about an hour, which is better, if a little long.

Jumping back to my thoughts on the distribution of TJ movement numbers, there is one other issue that concerns me: In order to get the average move down below 2, I need to have a higher concentration of 1's in the deck. And by definition, there are fewer 2's, and there aren't very many 3's at all. I suppose that means if any 3's are on the first 4 cards of the deck (which aren't used for TJ movement), or the last few cards (that won't ever come up), then that could account for a much lower actual TJ average move than my calculated one. One thing I've noticed about that is that there are times in the game where a bunch of 1's come up in a row. Not only does that slow the game down a lot, but it also means the TJ markers on those tracks shoot up very quickly. Now, I'm not sure that's a problem really, but it feels a little weird to hit so many 1's in a row. I'm not sure if there's really anything I can do about that though if I want to maintain this elegant TJ move mechanism of just referencing the top of the deck.

That said, I did have an alternate thought about that. What if the TJ track didn't move a random amount, but rather the same amount that the player did. In other words, if I choose the card in slot 3, then I move 3 spaces, and the TJ marker moves 3 steps. That would add a 3rd consideration to your choice each turn: Which card do I want? Which space do I want to land on? Which space do I want the Joneses to advance on (and maybe also do I want to slow the game down, or speed it up?) In a way, that sounds interesting, however I'm skeptical of it for a couple of reasons. I think it would overwhelm the main decision point with too much information, inviting AP (and therefore slowing the game down even further), and it would have an unpredictable effect on game length - if players frequently move 3 spaces, the game will be very short, and if they often move just 1 space, the game could drag on too long. But it's an idea, and is probably worth trying at least once.

Side note for anyone following along with the math, especially if you want to tell me where I've steered myself wrong, here's the rest of the data needed:

• For 2p I'm using an 18 step track (3 steps per rondel space)
• For 3p I'm using a 24 step track (4 steps per rondel space, one of which is marked "no bump" to help avoid the Joneses getting too out of control - though maybe that's not necessary)
• For 4p I haven't tried it yet, I was going to use the same track as for 3p, but the math suggests that won't be long enough, so I'm considering making a 30 step track (5 steps per rondel space, 2 of which marked "no bump)

Unrelated to movement, the point of the Jones marker on each track is to disqualify players from scoring if they are too far behind it, and I'm considering defining "too far" as "more than N spaces behind, where N is the number of players." So in a 4 player game, you'd only have to be within 4 of the Joneses to score. Hmm... typing that I'm wondering if those "no bump" spaces are even necessary. Maybe I WANT the Joneses to advance a lot on the tracks, especially if they're only making 3 laps! I should probably get rid of that for my next test and see if I miss it!

Keeping Up With The Joneses

 In my last post I teased a new game I'm working on. It's not really a secret, I just haven't had a chance to sit down and write out a post about it.

I haven't played on that TTS mod yet, but it looks like I'm going to have to update it, because I've done 2 live playtests and a few solo tests as well (something I rarely do), and I've made some adjustments here and there. But for the most part, the game works just like I envisioned it, which is always a promising sign :)

Keeping Up With The Joneses

One-up your neighbors in 6 different aspects of life, while trying to keep up with the Joneses up the street, who really seem to have everything together!

In this rondel game, each space on the rondel has a track representing a life aspect you can compete in: Job, Home, Kids, Cars, Charity, and Social. When you land on a space, you advance that track. Occasionally, an aspect will score in a majority fashion (farthest up the track gets 1st reward, etc), but if you are too far behind the Jones marker, then you don't score any status. 

JOB: whenever you pass or land here, collect income based on your position on the Job track. When scored, you'll earn Status points for having the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd best job.

 
HOME: either maintain your home (mow the lawn), make improvements, or pay extra money to do both. You compete with your neighbors and score based on your improvements, but you get a multiplier on that score based on your maintenance (it doesn't matter how many garden gnomes you have if your landscaping is too overgrown and unkempt). If you pass here without stopping, your maintenance track goes DOWN a space as your home falls into disrepair.

KIDS: Compete in 3 areas where your kids can excel: Grades, Sports, and Popularity. You'll score in each of those, and you'll get a multiplier for evenly advancing all three.

CARS: Every couple of steps on the Cars track will earn you a new car, which comes with an ability:

* Sports cars are flashy, they earn you Status points each time you collect income

* Minivans are convenient, they allow you to add 1 to your rondel move, making you more flexible

* SUVs are powerful, but expensive, they allow you to pay money to make additional track advances

* Hybrids are efficient, they give you extra money each time you collect income [or maybe a $1 discount any time you spend money to advance a track?]

CHARITY: either decrement your marker on that track to get a little money, or you pay (more and more) money to advance on the Charity track, and maybe collect a few Status points for doing so.

SOCIAL: advance on the Social track, then you may buy Status points for $1 apiece a certain number of times according to your position on the Social track.

On your turn, you'll first draft a card from a display with three slots labeled 1, 2, and 3. You'll resolve the card's effect, and then move your rondel pawn a number of spaces based on the slot it was in. Finally, you'll replace the card from the deck, then reference a number printed on the back of the new top-of-deck card. Move the Jones pawn that number of steps around the Jones track - the Joneses take 3 or 4 steps (based on player count) for each rondel space, and they advance a Jones marker on the track where they land. You must be within N spaces of that marker during scoring to qualify for any points at all (where N is the number of players in the game).

When the Joneses complete a lap on their rondel track, 2 areas will score. When they complete another lap, 2 more areas will score. After their 3rd lap, the remaining 2 areas will score, and after their 4th lap, the game ends and every area scores one more time.

The playtests so far

So far the game has been working well, just how I imagined it would. Sure, I'm finding lots of little details and balance issues to change, but the overall structure of entangling the rondel movement with a card draft (I expect to make a blog post about entangled decisions sometime soon) works well, and the majority scoring while needing to be "close enough" to the Joneses seems to be working out in 2 player games-it remains to be seen if it holds up at higher player counts.

Here are some of the things I've cut, followed by some of the changes I've made that have worked already or that seem promising:

I struggled at first coming up with enough interesting content to scrape together a test copy of the game, and I had a couple of effects that let you move the Jones rondel marker backwards or forwards. The idea was to control the speed of the game a little bit, and possibly also influence the scoring of different areas at different times. However, it simply wasn't very useful or desirable, so I took all of those effects out.

I was worried the Joneses would be too easy to keep up with, so I started out bumping their tracks when revealing which ones will score (at the beginning of a lap, giving you a few turns to act before those areas score). It turned out in my first test that that might have been premature. I reversed the decision, and it seems like the Joneses do a good enough job on their own. At least in my 2p tests so far.

For simplicity, I started with all the tracks scoring the same amount of points: 5/3/2 for 1st/2nd/3rd place. However the Kids track has 3 separate tracks in it, and each of them scores... AND you get a multiplier for even advancement that applies to each of those tracks. That was way too lucrative, especially in conjunction with too much money floating around, so I reduced the scoring to 3/2/1.

In the first couple of games, the money seemed a little too plentiful, which may have contributed to the ease of dominating the Kids tracks. I reduced the income a bit on the Job track to try and make the whole game a little more tight.

Originally, I had the Maintenance track drop when you get income (when you pass the Job space), in an attempt to keep all the bureaucracy clumped together at the same time. However, I did not like the dynamic that created, so I switched to a more thematic (and I think more interesting) method in which you only drop your maintenance if you fail to stop on the Home space, which is the space here that track resides. Now when you stop at Home, you can either advance your Improvement track or your Maintenance track, or pay money to advance both, and if you skip the space, then your maintenance track goes down 1 (reducing your multiplier).

I thought it would be interesting to have more cross-track effects, so I added some specific home improvements that you could get as you ascend the Home track (a 3-car garage, which advances your Cars track, for example). However, I think that was overloading that track, which already had a mechanism associated with it... so I took that back out for now. That kind of thing can come from the cards, I think.

I had originally started the kids track off with a multiplier of 0, meaning to get any points at all from that track, you had to advance each of the sub-tracks at least once. I didn't like that dynamic, and it became especially obvious when Kids was one of the first areas to score -- it was too easy for nobody to be able to get any points at all. I had thought I should either have a minimum multiplier of x1, or else keep it as-is, but start the players 1 step up the track, allowing for the possibility of going down to a 0 multiplier. But the more I thought of it, the more I disliked the idea of regression anyway, and so I adjusted the cost of advancing on those tracks so that you get 1 track for free, and you never drop, and I can just start the multiplier at x1.

I put a lot of thought and math into the distribution of numbers on the card backs which control how many steps the Jones marker takes each turn, aiming for +/-5 player turns per lap. In the end I decided on a distribution that should give an average of about 1.6 steps per turn, and a longer track for 3 and 4 players than for 2. I think that should yield a good number of turns (maybe only 4/player at 4p, hope that's enough) per lap. I was hesitant to go to 4 steps per rondel space for the Joneses because it seems like at that rate, they can really shoot up the tracks if they move just 1-2 spaces a couple turns in a row. So I figured out a way to avoid that eventuality -- I put a "no advance" icon on one of the steps in each space, so every once in a while the Joneses won't advance a track.

I've got some other tweaks to make, and I really would like to play with 3 or 4 players to see how that goes. Time to update my Tabletop Simulator prototype!

Another day, another prototype on Tabletop Simulator

I spent a few hours tonight making a Tabletop Simulator mod for a new prototype of mine. I haven't posted about this one yet, but I probably will do so soon. I'm pretty excited about it, I think the theme, story, and even the rules are pretty accessible, and the inaugural playtest went about as well as I could have hoped. So far, so good! Just gotta find some time to do some playtesting...

Here's a teaser image for Keeping Up With The Joneses:

Keeping Up With The Joneses - Tabletop Simulator prototype

Keeping Up With The Joneses is a rondel game in which you one-up your neighbors while trying to keep up with the Joneses down the street - who always seem to have it all together!

Designing with competitive vs NON-competitive play in mind

No catchy title this time, just wanted to talk about how we should design games that hold up to competitive play… AND to NON-competitive play.

I've said before that all things being equal, games are better if they hold up to competitive play. That is to say that they don't break down when a player "tries to win." For many games, that's not strictly necessary, for example, many party games are not really played "to win," but just to facilitate a fun time. That's well and good, but my point still stands: the game would only be better if it did not unravel when one or more players do play competitively.

I've stumbled across a new observation that is related to this, and may be even more important. Not only should a game strive to hold up to competitive play, but it must also hold up to NON-competitive play! By this I mean simply: if one, some, or (worst case) all of the players do not aggressively pursue the winning condition, the game must not stop working, and it must still progress toward an end.

Case Study: Apotheosis

This has come up on my current design, Apotheosis. In every playtest of that game, at least one player (myself, if not my friend Dave) would treat the game as the race it was intended to be. We both strive to do tier-2 adventures as quickly as possible, as they're much more efficient then tier-1 adventures, and we press as hard as we can toward reaching the win condition (the end of a track). As a result, the duration of the game was always acceptable, and I thought the game was in pretty good shape.

The other day I had a test with 3 other players on Tabletop Simulator, and I decided to sit out and help facilitate instead of playing because TTS is kinda fiddly, and I thought it would go faster that way. This turned out to be fortuitous because it revealed what I'd consider a fatal flaw in the game: all three players went for even advancement to obtain the "consolation" level-ups I'd added, effectively spending too many turns building up rather than pressing to get to those tier-2 adventures and racing up a track. As a result, perhaps not unexpectedly, the game dragged on and ended up taking about 2 hours -- fully twice an acceptable duration!

Thinking about this problem is what turned me on to the axiom above: games must hold up to non-competitive play. First time players will not necessarily notice that you're intended to push up the tracks as fast as you can. In fact, the current incentives kind of suggest the opposite. And many players just play games to explore their systems, and don't try doggedly to achieve victory. Therefore, it is definitely appropriate to address this game-dragging problem in some way.

Brainstorming solutions 

My first thought was to remove or reduce the "consolation" level-ups. I'd added them to ensure that simply picking one track and ignoring the other two wasn't necessarily the best path to take. To be honest, I'm not sure they were really necessary in that respect, but I did like having a reward for even advancement in a game where the goal is to advance any 1 track to the end. While that might have reduced the problem, it would not have eliminated it, as new or bad players could still dilly-dally too long and make the game drag. This might not be a practical problem, but it's certainly at least a theoretical one. The game should naturally push toward an end, no matter how players decide to play.

My next thought was to make some of the rewards on the tracks "1st come, 1st served" to encourage players to race for those. This might be good to do, but I'd also like to see players get those rewards more often, so limiting them might not be great after all.

Finally, the 3rd thing that came to mind was the biggest, and possibly best solution: add a game end condition that would trigger when players dilly-dally. Such a game timer would keep the game from dragging by definition, if players don't progress the game themselves, it will still come to an end. In general I'd say this is an obvious choice, except in Apotheosis, the win condition is reaching the end of a track. So what happens if the time runs out and nobody has achieved the win condition? How do you decide who wins? In some games it's easy to assess relative progress, and award the game to the player who's closest to winning. But here that is thematically odd because topping out a track is supposed to represent a big, momentous event.

Another option is to say that if time runs out, then nobody wins. This is an interesting thought, however it may be out of place in this type of game, and it's likely to make for a bad first play experience if players all lose in the first game.

Settling on a solution? 

What I have decided to try is this: add a game timer (the king will return, and once he does, your opportunity to steal the throne will be gone!), and if you win before time runs out, great (the king returns to find you on his throne, controlling his army, or backed by a demon, or with his court turned against him)! But if nobody has won by the time the king returns, then the player with the best reputation across all of the guilds (evenly advanced up the tracks) is the winner.

Tangentially related: game end dynamic 

In addition, I'm considering a variable, slightly random game length, something like this... When the adventure deck runs out, the king is ALMOST home. Put a King marker on a short (6 space) track that's revealed under where the deck was. Give the triggering player a marker as a reminder, and for the rest of the game, after that that player's turn each round, roll a die. On a 1-3, advance the king marker 1 space. On a 4-5, advance 2 spaces. On a 6, advance 3 spaces. Therefore when the deck runs out, you have 2-6 turns left to win by getting to the end of one of the three victory tracks. This way, if you don't think you can reach the end of any the tracks by the time the king returns, or if you think someone might beat you to it, you can advance your track markers more evenly in case nobody else achieves the win condition in time either. This gives you something to do if you feel you can't win, and it might also extend the tension (until the last minute at least) even if you know you can reach a track end before anybody else.

The game must communicate its dynamics to the players

This brings me to another recent observation, which we could put down as another axiom: The game must communicate its dynamics to the players. I have talked about this in the context of the "Alpha Player Problem" and what I call "Solitaire by Committee", or committee-style cooperative games, but it applies more generally as well. In SbC games, this axiom suggests that it's important to let players know that the game is not about making your own choices and having full agency with some incentive to coordinate with or help the rest of the group, rather in an SbC style game, the whole point is to have a little committee meeting to decide on a course of action, and then do that.

For the new perspective alternate end game trigger in Apotheosis, this axiom would suggest that it's important to make clear the "most evenly advanced" win condition is a secondary condition, and that the primary and most common way to win will still be by reaching the end of a track. Without clearly communicating this, I can see how it'd be very easy for a player to assume both win conditions are equally viable to go after, and I can just see reviewers now complaining that "the game is not well balanced, not all win conditions have the same win rates" (duh, they're not supposed to!)

I'm not exactly sure how to go about that communication outside of explicitly stating it in the rulebook, which is not ideal by itself, because it is too easy to overlook or forget about.

TL;DR summary 

Games are better if they hold up to competitive play, but they MUST hold up to non-competitive play. Don't allow your game to drag on or fall apart if players don't pursue victory as aggressively as you expected them to.

New Crusaders factions?

I don't think I've posted about the extra player expansions for Crusaders, but art is done for them, and they're ready to be printed (just as soon as everything else gets sorted out)...

There will be 2 boxes you could get to add a 5th player to your Crusaders game, Crimson Knight (red player color), or Amber Knight (yellow player color). You'll even be able to play with 6 players if you get both!

These expansions contain a player board and pieces for one new player, including Divine Influence stuff, and 2 new faction powers to choose from. These new factions were ones that I had been testing originally, but had not made the cut to the final 10 in the game.

As I mentioned, all of the art for these expansions is done, and has been for some time now. As I happened to be looking at those files recently, I noticed that I apparently included the same 2 factions in both expansion boxes. I don't exactly remember why I did that, it seems like the boxes should each have 2 unique factions. In fact, I think I remember choosing 4 different ones, but in any case, the art files have the same pair of new factions, and that's not great. So I decided to come up with 2 new factions so that players who get both boxes to play with 6 players won't have any duplicates.

That said, I needed to think of new dynamics. I got a few ideas from Twitter followers who responded to a request for abilities they'd like to see, and I decided on 4 powers to try. I had hoped that at least 2 of those would be good enough to use. Here are the 4 draft factions (sorry, no fancy names yet):

1. When resolving an upgraded wedge, you may add 2 virtual tokens. If you do, downgrade the wedge afterwards. 

This one seems good so far, it might be a winner.

2. Remove an action token from the game instead of taking a normal turn. If you do, resolve that wedge based on the number of tokens on an opponent's board. Distribute your own wedge as normal afterwards.

I think it might be better to NOT distribute the bin... But this power might not make the cut anyway. With 2 players it as a little annoying to see what was available all the time, but not too bad. However with more players it would probably get too AP prone or annoying.

3. Before resolving a wedge, you may remove a token on it and set it aside to upgrade it.  When you take an upgrade turn to upgrade a wedge, you may add a token set aside that way to the upgraded wedge.

This worked pretty well, and may be a winner also. I might want to change the wording so that the 2nd clause works with Divine Influence's Upgrade actions (in the expansion there are more ways to upgrade your wedges besides just taking an upgrade turn).

4. Instead of a normal turn, choose any wedge, distribute it, and resolve the last wedge you place in.

Could call that one the Feldian Order of Trajan or something :)

This one was neat. Very different, and probably way too powerful. Next time I try it, I'll add "-1 to each action" as a drawback.

If I can balance this one acceptably, I might like to make it a promo item, because it's so unique, rather than a regular faction power in an expansion.

Having played just 1 game with each of the draft factions, it looks like I have 2 that will work, and they both deal with upgrades, which is interesting because Divine Influence adds more ways to upgrade your action wedges. And I also like the idea of using the Trajan-styke one as a promo, if I can make it fair enough :)

Just need to get a little more testing in for those, and to look up some more faction titles I could use!

Revisiting old titles -- Reading Railroad and Exhibit playtests

Every once in a while I review The List and take stock of my active, back-burnered, and abandoned game projects. Early this year, in an effort to make progress on some of the stale games, I solicited co-designers - this has borne fruit in a couple of cases:

Kilauea was picked up by Thiago Jabuonski, who follows this blog. He had some great ideas to revive that, one of my oldest designs on the list. He made some prototype files of his new version, and I imported them into Tabletop Simulator, and we're going to meet online this week to discuss it.

I've probably posted before about Mike Brown coming on board for Automatown, and he made some big strides forward. I've played his latest version with my testers on the TTS mod he made for it, and he entered it into a contest recently where it unfortunately didn't fare too well in the first round.

And I've definitely discussed how Rick Holzgrafe has helped immensely to bring Apotheosis from pretty-well-thought-out-idea to basically-finished-design (to the point I've pitched it to a couple of publishers).

In addition to getting co-designers on board for some of my old games, I have decided to revive some of my old favorites on my own as well. At the tail end of last year, I finally revisited the first real design I ever worked on: All For One. It was fantastic to get that one back to the table and fix some niggling problems I've had with it for literally years!

More recently I got another couple of old favorites back to the table: Reading Railroad, and Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages.

I had a rare playtest opportunity with Michelle a few weeks ago, so I brought out Reading Railroad for the first time since probably 2008 when I submitted it to the KublaContest (it didn't go over well in the contest as I recall). The rulebook in the box didn't sound quite like I remembered it, so we played the way I remembered -- I'm not sure that made any real difference though. The game went OK, but revealed a few things worth changing, or at least looking into:
* I could use some more buildings (like Factories) that do different things. As Factories are "size 4" (they take up 4 City Tile spaces), perhaps I should have a building of each size 1, 2, and 3 as well. I may be over enamored with symmetry :) I'm sure I could figure out 3 more effects to add... for example, "treat one of your City Tiles as wild." 
* Maybe allow buying ANY letter, not just vowels. This would make the word building even more forgiving, but it would still be much more efficient to use the tile you've drawn. This could even be a building effect!
* Instead of 1 letter per turn, players should probably draw at least 2 -- that would speed up the recharge and make the game more consistently fun, I think. You'd still get additional letters for every 4 City Tiles you have collected.
* Michelle suggested having multiple different endgame word sets, which could be worth doing, though I'm not sure if it will actually change the game at all.
* I'm unsure whether it would be better to "take 1 City Tile from each city you add to your network" or "take 1 City Tile each tine you build track" (this was the rulebook discrepancy I mentioned). The implication of the former is that you can get 2 City Tiles in a turn by starting a new network, but you can never get 2 Tiles from the same City, which might be annoyingly frustrating. The implications of the latter are that you CAN get 2 tiles from the same city, but only ever 1 Tile per turn.

I enjoyed playing this one again, and having made a TTS mod for it, I was excited to play it with my playtesters as well. Sadly, a TTS error made it so I couldn't play Reading Railroad with my playtesters after all, so last weekend when I got the chance to playtest, I revived another old game instead: Exhibit!

Exhibit is kind of a finished game, I even signed it with a publisher at one point (7 years ago!), but it never came out due to dumb reasons. At this point I think it's been long enough, it's time to revive this one, and maybe see if I can't get it signed once again!

I played Exhibit with Dave and Aaron on Saturday, first time since 2014. The game still worked, went well, and felt good. I've been hemming and hawing over the Art effect (+1vp vs +2vp), unsure whether one is too little a reward to matter or the other is so much it will destroy the set collection mechanism. During this last game, I thought of an alternative... instead of additional points, maybe art should score as if the set had +1 tile. This would make art worth +2vp on a 1-tile exhibit (on par with what I was already considering), and +3 or 4 on a bigger exhibit. This might overvalue Art in the late game, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad. I'll give that tweak a try next time I play, but other than that, I think this game could be considered finished.

Jaffee Realms comments and questions from a player

A reader tried out Jaffee Realms, my custom mod for Jamey Stegmaier's Rolling Realms roll & write game, and left me some comments and questions in the comments of that post. I responded there, but since I doubt people will see that, I thought I'd copy it into a new post:

We played the Jaffee Realms twice. Never played any of these games, so maybe that would have helped? Never 
played any of the Stonemaier games either except Wingspan, but playing the realms game encouraged me to try them out.

I definitely designed those realms with the games in mind, so it would not surprise me if knowing the games would help understand the realms better. Perhaps playing these realms could spark people's interest in checking out the games they're based on, like what happened with you and Stonemaier games :)

Crusaders:
I'm guessing that if I roll a 3/4, I could build, then the next turn, if I rolled 3/4 I could gain a star?

That's correct, the first time you use a 3 or 4 you get to circle a building, then subsequent 3/4s get you a star. In Crusaders, there are 3 enemy types. The brown ones (Saracen) give you a free building when you defeat them, and the other two (Slavs & Prussians) give you points. The Enemy tokens are circular discs in that game, so that's what those colored circles are supposed to represent.

Eminent Domain:
I assume that I can just circle the different planets whenever I roll 1-3. I had had the entire 1st column filled out, and then roll a 5, I could claim two stars...but I'm not sure if I could reuse the planets.

Close... Research (5) is based on having the SAME planet type, so your statement would be exactly correct if you had the first ROW filled out, not the first COLUMN.

If I only had two planets in a column filled, then rolled a 5, I could get a heart and a star...then after the entire column is filled, and rolled a 5, I could claim 2 stars using the same planets.

Correct (again, "row" instead of "column"). It does not "use up" the planets to do research. Same with Trade (4) -- if you have 2 different planets and use a 4, you get 2 coins and 2 pumpkins. Later if you get a 3rd different planet then use another 4 you would get 3 coins and 3 pumpkins.

I feel that there aren't so many rolls in a game, or maybe I'm not using pumpkins or hearts enough enough, but I haven't prioritized trades.

Depending on what other realms are in play, it might be more or less strong to get bunches of resources.

Embark:
This is the most confusing one, because I'm not sure what "score" means? I'm guessing it means to cross out a dice that's in one section of the island.

Correct, "score" in that context means crossing off the boxes on the island. So you fill up the boats by writing numbers in the boxes, then when a boat fills up, it "sails to the island," and you get to choose 1 section of the island, and cross off ("score") the appropriate die icons on that part of the island.

It isn't clear if I need to roll a 1 in order to score, or if after using a dice to fill a box, if I had a 1 dice, I could gain a resource of a boat that just embarked.

The latter -- you "score" automatically when the boat fills up. When you score a boat with a 1 on it, the 1 doesn't ever let you cross off anything on the island... instead it gives you another resource of that boat's type.

The five dice confused me, because I thought it meant to fill a box, but I suppose it means to cross off a box on an island, because it says "score", but I suppose if I ever had a situation where I had left over dice to cross off, I could do that.

Per the text, you normally collect a resource when you write a number on a boat. If you write a 5, you do NOT get a resource as normal, BUT, when the boat fills up, the 5 is kind of wild. This actually corresponds to one of the worker types in Embark. I wanted to label them on this realm, but it was suggested that might be more confusing (and there's not a ton of room anyway).

The six die is super confusing, because I don't see how I could score a box if a boat is unfilled, but I need to copy something from the same boat that I just used to fill

If you score a boat (fill it up) that has a 6 on it, then that 6 can be a copy of any other number on that boat. So that's similar to a 5, but instead of your choice, you have to have another one of that type on the boat. In other words, if a boat has 1, 2, 2, 6 when it scores, then that 6 can only copy a 1 or a 2, not a 3 or a 4. On the other hand, if you have 1, 2, 2, 5 on the boat, that 5 could be a 2, 3, or 4.

Bomb Squad:
It says "matching completed clue card"...none of the clue cards match, they're all different shapes. So I interpreted it to mean matching die and at one point I interpreted it as matching item.

I don't love that wording... it is referring to the number. So if you use a 4 for example, you can either get resources by marking off one of the resources on the lower left card (heart or pumpkin), AND one from the upper right card (heart or heart), OR you can instead cross off either or both of those cards IF both resources are already marked off.

This was not really my version of the Bomb Squad realm. I had a couple of ideas for it, but they sort of broke the fundamental rule of Rolling Realms in that they involved a die roll or something that wouldn't necessarily be the same from one game to the next (like if someone else played based on the same rolls later). This version sort of captures the feel of giving clues and then playing cards once you have some information about them. Bomb Squad is like Hanabi - you don't see your own cards, so players give each other clues as to what they have in hand, then you play cards to move and act with a bomb squad robot.

Thanks!

Prototypes out of the woodwork and onto Tabletop Simulator

I've spent a few hours recently modding some of my prototypes on Tabletop Simulator (is that how you say that?). Some of them are older designs that I have decided to dig up and revive a bit. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the prototypes I can currently play on TTS:

Apotheosis

This is my most recent project, a co-design with my friend Rick Holzgrafe, and I've talked about it a lot already. I even shared a screenshot of the TTS mod for it:

Apotheosis is a worker placement game where each of your workers have a type and a level. Many of the worker spaces care about one, the other, or both of those attributes. Blocking is a big dynamic in worker placement games, and in this one you are allowed to use a space as long as your worker is at least tied for the highest level there when you place it. This means there's not as much blocking at the beginning of the game, but as players level their workers up, blocking (and therefor placement tension) becomes more and more of a thing. I like that dynamic in this game.

Another uncommon (though not unheard of) twist on worker placement in Apotheosis is that it's a race to the finish line. Doing adventures advances you up three victory tracks, and the first to reach the end of any one of them wins the game. Players can spend as much time as they want collecting resources and leveling up their workers, but if they are not focused on reaching the end of a track, they will lose to a player that is.

In the TTS mod, there are little tiles indicating the worker's class, with a die sitting on top showing the worker's level as well as the player color of the worker. In my physical prototype, those tiles have squares cut in them, so the dice nestle into the tiles so there's no risk of them falling off when moving the worker. In production I could see these pieces going a couple of different ways. The two front runners in my mind are:

1. Use dice as workers to track levels as I am now, but with a molded plastic holder (much like Coimbra) to set the dice in:

Attached to the die holder could be either a sculpted mini, or a flat plastic standee onto which a full art sticker could be placed to indicate the worker type. Two potential down sides to this... the standees/minis might obscure players' view of the board, and as has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere - when given dice, players want to roll them. It's not unheard of to have dice in a game that solely track status, but there are players for whom rolling the dice is the most fun part of having dice at all, and giving those players dice that they do not roll sort of takes that fun away from them (or fails to deliver on the promise of fun die rolls).

2. Instead of dice, in production I could see the game using a mini or standee with a Heroclix style dial at its base.

This would resolve the concerns above about using dice, it would make leveling p workers a little easier (no searching the die for the next number up), and it would also open up some design space with the adventures, because the max level wouldn't need to be 6 (currently I'm using 6-sided dice, so the max level is 6, and that works out well for this game, but I could open that up if I wanted to).

Automatown

Automatown is another game for which I took on a co-designer. I had largely stalled out on the game, and Mike Brown has taken it to the next level. He also implemented the game in TTS:

Automatown is another worker placement game. In this one your workers are robots, and you use them to get, swap, and upgrade parts to build more robots (more workers), in an effort to raise a robot arm to take over the city!

The twists on worker placement in this game are that the workers you build can have abilities, and so there's some combo-building or engine building going on, and the worker placement spots cycle through from round to round, so each spot will only be there for a few rounds, and then will disappear.

Dice Works

An older design, from 2011, Dice Works (FKA Eureka!) is a real time dice drafting game ostensibly about building different inventions. Your player board has 4 columns, each representing a different possible invention, and the winner is the first player to make ANY discovery. This is kind of the same win condition I used more recently in Apotheosis (see above). The way that you advance on these "victory tracks" in Dice Works is by drafting sets of dice - in real time. Each round you roll a handfull of dice, and players, at their own pace, grab them one at a time and place them onto their board. When those dice are gone, you check your board for errors (in case in your haste you accidentally placed a die in an illegal space), then advance your marker up the columns if the next space is complete. You win by reaching the top of any of the columns, but there's a reward for advancing evenly on all columns.

This one might be difficult to play on Tabletop Simulator due to the real-time nature, and the physical fiddliness of the virtual environment. Then again, it may be even MORE challenging in that environment! However, I suppose a turn-based version could be played... I suspect it may be less fun than the real-time game though. Now that there's a TTS mod for the game, I may be able to find out!

Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages

Many years ago (2007!), I discussed the idea of using Liar's Dice as a main mechanism in a larger game with a then-friend of mine. We worked together to try and build a game based on that main mechanism, and in the end we never finished. A few years later (2011), I decided that the main Liar's Dice mechanism (which we were calling a "bluff auction") was going to waste just sitting in that unfinished game, so I started over and made a different game using it. That game is Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages:

In Exhibit, you are bidding for artifacts at auction before their true value has been assessed, and if you bid more than the assessed value, your funding will not come through, and you bid won't count! So the goal is to bid highest without going over the true value... but you only have partial information about that value, and you'll have to deduce the rest from the behavior of your opponents.

I think this game is great, and it was even signed by a European publisher at one point (circa 2014, I believe), but never got published due to that "friend" claiming I'd stolen his intellectual property and was trying to claim it as my own :/

At the time, that person was a big deal in the game industry, and the publisher didn't want to piss him off even if he didn't have any legal standing (and though he used legal sounding language, I am unsure he would have pursued any legal action if they'd published the game). That is no longer the case now, so maybe one day this game could potentially get published after all.

In any case, now it's on Tabletop Simulator, so maybe I'll rustle up a game of it sometime, so at least *I* can enjoy the fruits of my labor, even if nobody else will get to!

Isle of Trains boardgame

Dan Keltner and I took 3rd place in a game design contest, some 6 or 7 years ago now, with a multi-use card game called Isle of Trains. The prize was publication, and the game did well enough at the time that the publisher had asked for an expansion. Dan and I submitted something, but as of 2020, the expansion has not seen the light of day. In fact, a couple of years ago the publisher asked if we could do something a little bit different, they were interested in a bigger-box version.

So Dan and I set about making a board game version of Isle of Trains. We did some brainstorming, and after a little iteration I think we've made some headway... we're unsure whether to try and keep the game on the lighter, more accessible end (like the card game), or make it a deeper, more complicated game. I made a TTS mod of the "simple/accessible" version, but I think I'm coming around to agreeing that it ought to be different (specifically that the train car effects might ought to be more unique):

Kilauea

Another really old design of mine that is being given new life by way of a co-designer is Kilauea. In Kilauea, you use a Mancala mechanism to spread your tribesmen around the island of Hawaii, and make sacrifices to the volcano goddess Pele in hopes that she'll spare your tribe when the volcano erupts. In the original version (pre-2006), you scored points for all the spaces your tokens occupied, but spreading out made your tribe (a) more vulnerable to attacks from opponents, and (b) more vulnerable to the lava flow. Moving tribesmen onto a Altar allowed you to sacrifice them, and the player with the biggest sacrifice each round got some control over the direction that lava turned when the volcano erupted at the end of the round. The game might have had some potential, but it had been on the shelf for so long that I really haven't considered working on it anymore.

Thiago Jabuonski liked the sound of the game, and offered to jump on board as a co-designer when I put out a call for them at the beginning of this year. He has proposed a big change in how the board works, but the game still features most of the same details it always did. I haven't had a chance to play his version yet, in fact i'm not sure he's even written down the rules, but he sent me some files, and I made a TTS mod so that maybe one day I'll be able to give it a try:

Reading Railroad

Yet another one from the back catalog... I've always been enamored with Reading Railroad, a connection game with word building as a mechanism:

Since deciding to try and revive it recently, I've been describing it as "Ticket to Ride meets Scrabble," but that's not terribly accurate - the word building is simpler and more forgiving, and you don't place the letters on the board like yo do in Scrabble. Rather, you spell words to get coins, then spend those coins to build track connecting cities. When you add a city to your network, you collect one of the Alphabet blocks in that city, which you ill use to score points in the endgame by spelling specific words (i.e. collecting a specific set of Alphabet blocks). The number of Alphabet blocks you can use to score is limited by your largest network, so it matters a bit where you build (or at least hat you connect up your network before game  end), and you can build a Factory, which blocks up spots to store Alphabet blocks (limiting your endgame scoring potential), but allow you to draw more letter tiles to make words with - and longer words pay out much better than shorter ones, and leftover coins are worth points, so if you're good at word games, you could pursue that strategy and end the game with a bunch of points from coins saved up.The point of the game however is that if you're NOT particularly good at word building, you can still get along fine (so long as you can at least spell some short words!).

Don't kill the messenger! A game about the post-funding KS process?

TMG in in the process of manufacturing and fulfilling 5 different Kickstarter projects right now. They are delayed, some much more than usual, and as I have taken it upon myself to handle Kickstarter updates and comments, I am pretty familiar with the kinds of things some backers post when a project is overdue, or when a project update is overdue.

Maybe I can make a game out of this dynamic! I don't think this is limited to KS projects, but for starters let's use that as a setting:

Play as a publisher working on crowdfunded projects. Get info on those projects, make progress toward completion, and post updates to your backers. Each of those steps informed by the real-world dynamics of running a post-funding Kickstarter.

PROJECTS
This game would be from the POV of a publisher, so the logistics of design and development, even the quality of gameplay, could be abstracted away. Perhaps there's a way to pick up future projects (representative of taking submissions or pitches). And maybe the more effort you put into it, the more possible points the project could be worth in the end (representative of quality/sale-ability of the game).

These projects, maybe tiles or cards, could show a combination of different types of work that needs to be done (development, rules editing, blind testing, art, graphic design), represented by different colored cubes. One thing you could spend time or effort on (worker placements/action points) is getting those things together, and the more you have before launching a crowdfunding campaign, the better prepared you are, so the more backers you garner, and the more money you collect.

This could be an interesting sub-dynamic. Ideally, you'll have all the pieces in place, so you'll get the maximum cash when you launch crowdfunding (in this game, your project would automatically succeed, but the extent to which is exceeds would depend on how prepared you were when it launched). However, you may need money to do other things, so it might behoove you to launch early, a little less well prepared, to get less-than-the-max money, but get it now.

The other consequence of launching a project early could be the time it takes to deliver... if you've already completed everything but the manufacturing, and you have everything else lined up nicely before launching, then you'll deliver the game in the minimum amount of time, which would result in a maximal score for it. The more stuff you need to do after crowdfunding, the longer that delivery takes, and that could end up reducing your score (or some other attribute, such as backer satisfaction? Probably easier to just say "score").

Again, the ideal situation would be getting everything ready before launching, however the crux of the game could be finding ways to manage launching early, so that you can afford to do more things.

WORK FORCE
Worker Placement is an excellent mechanism because it encompasses a few different things: it offers interaction with regards to blocking (as players take the actions that other players were hoping to use), it provides a user friendly way to represent budgeting of actions/effort, and it does an excellent job of introducing opportunity cost.

Action Point Allowance is similar, but without the interactive blocking. Depending on the theme, it might not make much sense to have limited access to actions anyway - Agricola and Stone Age famously having the "Family Growth" space limited to 1 player per round, which just doesn't make any real-world sense.

In either of those cases though, it makes sense to be managing your own personal work force (whether or not they directly interact with opponents' workers). One extreme could be a company with a minimal work force, that concentrates on 1 project at a time, maximizing gains from it. The opposite extreme could be a company with a bunch of employees, that take on many projects at a time, even if they launch the early (to get faster income) and therefore don't score the maximum for each. Many economic games have this sort of "quality-vs-quantity" dichotomy, and in those I sometimes refer to the "quantity" side as a "Wal-Mart strategy" :)

CROWDFUNDING
As I alluded to above, the main (only?) source of income in this game would be launching crowdfunding projects. When doing so, the project would automatically "fund" -- so you would immediately receive money. The amount you get would depend on the project itself, and how "prepared" you were to launch it (how many of the required cubes are already on the project).

In an ideal world, you would have all the possible cubes at launch time, thereby maximizing your income for the project. However, just like in the real world, the realities of scheduling and of stretch goals and things like that mean you seldom see projects launched wen they are 100% ready to print. In this game, the abstraction would be that you need money to operate, and the only way to get it is by launching a project, so you may have incentive to launch early if the economy of the game is nice and tight.

POST FUNDING
I think the crux of this game would be managing your projects post-funding. This means continuing to get the necessary cubes to complete the project, and posting updates to backers to keep their satisfaction high. Perhaps some of the required cubes are only for after-funding, and you can't possibly get them beforehand, but of course you might also still need to collect whatever you didn't already have before launch.

The flow of these cubes would be that they first go below a project card, representing information about the next step in the process for that project, then from there they go onto the tile, representing that progress being made.When posting an update, the relevant thing is the info gathered for the project -- perhaps backers want a particular combination of cubes in the "info" position when you update. If you don't have the correct combination of info to share, then your backers may be less satisfied. If you wait until you do have more info, then your update may be "late," and again, backers may be less satisfied. And as a weird quirk of this game, if you "spend" the info cubes (by making progress, thereby moving those cubes onto the tile) then maybe that actually works against the info you need to update (unrealistic, but could help make the game interesting). Maybe this represents that you had the info, but didn't update until the progress was made, so it's akin to being "late."

WHAT'S THE HOOK?
To be honest, it's been about a week since I thought of this and started writing this blog post. I hadn't gotten far past what I'd written above, and while I can see some game mechanics that might work, I can't really see a hook yet. The idea was to make a game inspired by how the post-funding KS process goes. I guess the management of information and progress, as well as the timing of it, while having to also maintain backer satisfaction would be what the game is all about -- is that interesting enough on its own?

This feels like one of those ideas I'll file away, with little-to-no confidence I'll ever get back to it, so if it does sound interesting to you, then be sure to let me know in the comments below. And if you're a designer who wants to work on a game like this with me in a co-design capacity, feel free to let me know that too!

Recent gaming, online edition

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss face to face gaming - even though I haven't been doing nearly as much of it these last few years. But as I've mentioned before, I've been able to scratch that itch by playing online at portals  like BoardGameArena.com and boiteajeux.net. Here are some of the games I've been playing online lately:

Yokohama

This popular TMG title is in private Beta right now, and I've been able to get several games in. It's nice to be able to play before the general release and give feedback about not just bugs, but suggestions to make the implementation better.

La Granja

I played this "modern classic" when it came out, and thought it was fine, but I wasn't sure what all the hype was about. It has recently been released on BGA, and the implementation is pretty good. I've gotten a few games in so far, and while I am enjoying it, I'm still not sure it's worth the fuss. So far, the more I play it, the better I like it.

Teotihuacan

I very much enjoyed Tzolkin, so I had automatic interest in Teotihuacan by one of the same designers, as it was touted as a "spiritual sequel" (I hate that term!). When it came out, I never really had a chance to play it, and pretty soon I stopped hearing about it. When I recently found out it was in Alpha at BGA I was excited to finally get a chance to play! I'm currently about 2 games in  and I am enjoying it pretty well. Interestingly, Teotihuacan sort of scoops 2 of my own designs! It has dice "workers" that level up when you use them, which is the main mechanism of my worker placement game Apotheosis, and it is a big rondel made of tiles, like the latest version of the Isle of Trains board game that Dan and I are working on.

In addition to those newer titles, I have been playing some old standbys on BGA as well:

Stone Age

Every time I play Stone Age, I remember how good a game it really is. I haven't played in a while, so it was fun to explore a starvation strategy again (some say in competitive games starvation isn't viable, but in a casual game I crushed everyone with it), and in another game I did the opposite -- I managed to get a bunch of farms right away.

Race For The Galaxy

Another solid title that I haven't really played much since Eminent Domain came about, RftG is a great game. I still think I prefer it 2-player because of the additional agency and ability to sort of combo plays.

Hanabi

I've even tried some Hanabi on BGA. I doubt I'd enjoy that with random people, but with my two Hanabi friends it was a blast. We played a bunch of games, but kinda stopped when we got a perfect 30 points (including the multicolor suit), with no bombs, and almost all of our clues left -- can't possibly do much better than that!