Currently Active designs - Taiko Kiri, EmDo: Coalition, The Great Goballoon Race, The Sixth Realm, Isle of Adventure

 I feel like I'm overdue a blog post discussing the games I've been working on lately. Ideally, I'll revisit each of these with a dedicated post in the near future, but here are the most recent projects I've been playtesting:

Taiko Kiri

In this co-design with my friend Steve, players are rebuilding Japan during reunification. It's a tile laying game where each round you place a tile into a common grid, and then either gain resources, or spend resources to start a project. Projects are scoring opportunities who's value depends on the configuration of the shared board. 

You can have two active projects, so whenever you get a third, you must score one of them for its current value. Most of the projects can increase in value over the course of the game, so there's some juicy decisions to be made with regard to which project to take on, when to score it, and when to keep working on it.

In addition, whenever you start a project, you add buildings to the board at the corners of the tiles, creating a network. There's a global network bonus based on the size and configuration of your network.

This game strikes me as having a similar scope to something like Cascadia, or Tiny Towns. I'm excited to think the game might be that approachable, and I hope other people find it as fun as I do. My only real concern at the moment is that it seems to take kind of a long time, but maybe it's not too bad. 

EmDo: Coalition

I thought I was done with expansion content for Eminent Domain, but a few months ago I figured out a way to add a cooperative mode to the game. That seems interesting and different enough that it's worth pursuing. The way it works is that you play Emmet Domain as normal, however instead of counting influence points, there is a group project that you're working on: building is a Dyson Sphere. Anytime you flip a planet or buy a technology card, you may choose to keep it for yourself as normal, or commit it to the Sphere. The players win together if they are able to complete the Sphere in time. Meanwhile hostile aliens are hassling the players, so you must build your engine, fend off the hostile aliens, and complete the project before time runs out.

I'm happy to say that this idea seemed to work right off the bat. Of course, I had to iterate a bit to make the details work, but the general format was pretty good. Probably the biggest hurdle, which Steve helped me get over with a great suggestion, was giving players incentive to add things to the Sphere early, rather than just build up their own engines until later, then putting work in on the communal project. The answer is to make contributing to the Sphere it's own sort of communal engine - once certain groups of cards have been added, *all* players gain access to extra icons or special abilities.

The most recent change I made had to do with player scaling... In a 4-player game, with the Aliens acting as another player, I felt like there needed to be more cards in each stack, like there would be in a 5--player game (according to the Escalation setup rules). Fortunately, Rio Grande intends to put Escalation in the same box as the base game, so anyone playing the new edition would necessarily have those 5p cards to add to the stacks. However, what happens if we want to play the co-op mode with 5? Then I had a new thought: borrowing a trick from an old version of All For One, I added an Alien marker to the game. In a 4-player game, it would start with the last player in turn order. Anytime it's your turn, and you hold the Alien marker... GUARDS! You'd resolve the aliens, then pass the marker to your right, so the aliens would get one turn for every three player turns, rather than every 4 player turns. I'm not sure whether to also use it in 2p, 3p, or 5p games, but so far it's worked alright the one time I tried it at 4p!

The Great Goballoon Race

Based on a race algorithm that I originally came up with when thinking of kid's games to play with Corbin, and inspired by the recent award-winning Challengers! (which has decisions punctuated by an algorithmic resolution phase), this game is about a hot air balloon race. But the players are not racing the balloons, rather the various high fantasy denizens (elves, dwarves, etc) are racing, and they have disallowed goblins. So when it's time for the annual balloon race, the goblin clans get together and have their own contest... As chieftain of a goblin clan, your goal is to toss goblins onto the balloons that you think will win the race. However, the more goblins hanging off a balloon, the slower it moves.

I had a little trouble making this mechanism into an actual game until I got that last idea, that backing a balloon actually reduces its chances of winning, from somebody's comment on Discord. Now I think the game actually works pretty well. It's kind of swingy with wild twists of fate, but I think that's good for a game like this.

There are five balloons, and to begin each round you deal an effect card to each. Then players simultaneously choose which one balloon to toss a goblin onto. Once these are revealed, from left to right you resolve each one. Every balloon with at least one incoming goblin has its effect occur once, then the incoming goblins board the balloon. Once all incoming goblins have been resolved, race cards are dealt per my race algorithm: Flip up four cards from a deck of 10 (2 cards for each balloon). For each card that comes up, that balloon moves forward. If that balloon is at high altitude, it moves six spaces. Middle altitude, it moves four spaces. Low altitude, it only moves two spaces. Altitude is determined by the number of goblins on the balloon - 3 or more drag the balloon down from high altitude to medium, 5 or more drag it down to low altitude. This way, adding your goblins to a balloon makes it more likely you'll control that balloon in case it finishes the race, but also less likely it will finish the race first.

At the end of any round if a balloon has crossed the finish line, check to see if anybody has won. The winner is the player with the single most goblins, in total, on all balloons that have crossed the finish line at the end of any given round. If a player has the single most, they win. If not, keep playing. So far it seems at least half the games go until 2 or 3 balloons have crossed the finish line.

The Sixth Realm

Back in November when I first played the heavily developed version of Deities & Demigods, The Six Realm, I was a little worried because not only was the game a lot heavier than what I had designed originally, but it was also kind of messy. I didn't feel like it was really finished enough to be going to crowdfunding that month. 

Fortunately, they had decided to delay this game's kickstarter launch until their previous project had fully shipped, which meant there was more time. I passed on my biggest concerns and ideas to the developer, and he took most of them to heart. I recently received an updated version, the version he says went to reviewers, and it was a lot cleaner. As yet I have not played a full game of The Sixth Realm, because it's taken about 45 minutes for the rules and about 45 minutes to play the first round (of three), and I just haven't had time in my sessions to play a full game.

My original design was kind of like a deck learning game with a common deck. This version eschews the deck of cards, and instead has almost like a rondel mechanism, but the result is similar. Each turn you'll activate one of the guilds (either the active guild, or one of the adjacent guilds if you pay a resource). Each guild has its own set of actions, more or less flavored towards a particular part of the game. For example, the merchant's guild has to do with resources; resetting them, gaining new ones, etc. There are six guilds, and you'll probably be trying to specialize in some combination of them each game.

Isle of Adventure 

I've met with Dan a couple of times about Isle of Adventure, and we've spoken at length about how it could work. There are a few ways that parts of it could go, and the last time we met I think we had a good idea for something to try, now it's just a matter of getting a prototype together and trying it. Dan is working on the prototype cards, and I will be putting it all into tabletop simulator when it's ready, then I'll be able to start testing it at my regular sessions.