Prototype revival: Skye Frontier

 It's been about 3.5 years since the last time I played Skye Frontier, my Isle of Skye/King of Frontier mashup. Of course, it's one of those "designs with so much potential" that I know so well. I seem to have a lot of those, don't I? Backburnered, or forgotten games that I think have "so much potential" every time I read my old notes about them...

Well, a little while ago it occurred to me how easy it would be to make a TTS mod for this game, as long as I could find a mod for Isle of Skye -- just add a few infinite bags with gray, green, and blue cubes, and that's it! So that's what I have done, and now I have a virtual prototype of Skye Frontier!

In addition, I noticed a comment on that old blog post (linked above) from Michael Brown, a Utah based designer who has commented a lot on my posts, done some playtesting for some of my games, and came on board as a co-designer on Automatown. The comment was saying that if he could pick up a copy of Isle of Skye, then he'd give my mashup a try. I didn't feel at all bad about that, because even if he didn't like my mashup, Isle of Skye is a fantastic game all its own :)

I emailed Michael to see if he ever did pick up a copy of Isle of Skye, and if so, whether he had tried Skye Frontier at all. I didn't expect that he would have even remembered that, but if he had, I was interested to hear about it! As it turned out, he had not gotten Isle of Skye, but had been meaning to for a few years, so he went to his FLGS and picked up a copy, then he gathered the cubes needed to try Skye Frontier, and gave it a play with his wife. He wrote a nice, detailed blog post about his session.

Now, in talking about that session with him, it seems he played a few rules wrong... they didn't take VP out of the supply when completing areas, and they doubled the points from scroll tiles. But I think the sum total of that was mostly that the game may have gone a little longer than it should have (which favored his heavy shipping strategy over Alison's more generalized strategy) - at the very least, the final shipping phase he mentioned (which netted Mike +6 points on Alison) wouldn't have happened. But at the same time, un-doubling the scroll tiles would cause a similar net loss for Alison, so the final score might not have been much different after all (hard to be certain).

From the session report in that blog post, it sounded like the game was fairly close, with two really divergent strategies, so that generally sounds good. On the down side, Mike felt like his strategy was degenerate and boring, and if a strategy is degenerate and boring, then I'd prefer it not also be competitive. However, it also sounded like perhaps Alison would have done well to stop choosing Produce once Mike got that big lake set up... but then again, leaving that to Mike means she wouldn't have gotten as many cubes. Hard to say if she could have played differently to overtake the big shipping strategy.

In any case, I've got a TTS mod for the game all set up now, and I'd love to give it a shot one of these days and see how the latest version holds up. I worry a little if the Explore action isn't still a little bit too good/juicy.