Visualizing Multiple Paths to Victory

If you're making a game with different strategic approaches or "multiple paths to victory," there can be various ways to make progress in your game (how you score points). In Puerto Rico your sources of points are Shipping goods and Building buildings, and because of this, I refer to a game's "SvB". In Eminent Domain it's Planet flipping, Research, and Trading.

To visualize these strategic paths, you could imagine a set of tracks, where you're going to go up some of the tracks a lot, some maybe just a little, and potentially some not at all, but you get a certain number (or range) of total track advances each game. In this way, you could end up with several very different player profiles, for example:

|-|

|-|

|----|

|----|

vs

|-----|

|---|

|--|

||

vs

|--|

|---|

|---|

|--|

vs

|--|

||

||

|--------|

etc

A hypothetical version for Puerto Rico might look like:

S |--|

B |--------|

vs

S |-----|

B |-----|

vs

S |--------|

B |--|

Importantly, I think it's good design to discourage or disallow zeroing out all but 1 track and super-specializing, because that's boring. In Eminent Domain, each time you choose a role, you go up a track for that role (your deck gets a little better at it, or more specialized towards it anyway), but in order to succeed, you can't just do the same role all game long, you have to manage your deck and pivot at the right time.

Let me know if this visualization helps you think about strategic paths, or designing games with multiple paths to victory!

Politica Galactica (AKA "Revampsterdam")

A couple of years ago I got the opportunity to work on a revamp of a classic Eurogame for a publisher: Reiner Knizia's Merchants of Amsterdam. It was a great opportunity, and I gave it a go, incorporated everything the publisher requested, and improved on the game the best way I thought I could. In the end I did create a game... but unfortunately, it was far too big a departure from the original game, it was "too procedural," and too big in scope for the publisher's line, so they found another designer to try again. The new designer appears to have done a much better job sticking with the original feel of the game. If you want to see how it turned out, check out Merchants of Andromeda, developed by Robert Hovakimyan for Allplay. (At least I contributed the Merchants of Andromeda title!)

However, that leaves me with a game that, while it was supposed to be a revamp of an existing game, it's really more just inspired by that game, but is really its own entity.

In Political Galactica, you take on the role of a Chancellor, angling to become elected Supreme Councilor of the Galactic Federation. To do so, you must earn the favor of four delegations by defending them from alien invasion, establishing trade agreements with them, supporting their political agendas, and satisfying Law cards (which you’ll vote into play). Your approval rating limits the benefits you receive from Law cards, so you must balance your goals with the need to maintain support from your people.

I was actually pretty proud of the way I'd gone about revamping this game. Since I'd only played it once or twice, and it had been 15 years or so, the first thing I did was to play the original Merchants of Amsterdam with my playtesters... One of which had also played before (over a decade ago), and the other two of which had never played before. Merchants of Amsterdam is played over a series of turns, and each turn one player draws 3 cards off a deck, one at a time, and for each one decides whether to KEEP it, AUCTION it off, or DISCARD it. Therefore, each round there will be one auction, and 2 cards will be resolved (potentially by the same person). The cards pretty simply add your influence to one of a few areas, and bump up one of 4 commodity tracks. Every few turns there is a scoring round, the turn track indicates which area scores, and players are rewarded (with money, which is both what you spend in the auctions, and how you count victory) for having the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th most influence in that area. The amount of money you get depends on how much influence total is in the area - so you want to hold majority influence in the most popular areas to score the best rewards. That's one of the unique things about the game, but it's a bit dry and mathy.

The *real* hook of the game is the auction mechanism. Merchants of Amsterdam used a Dutch auction, where the price starts high, and counts down over time until someone jumps in and says "I'll take it for that amount!" The most memorable part of the game was a plastic contraption that facilitated this auction, you would wind it up to $200,000 and it would start counting down, dropping $10,000 every couple of seconds. In order to "jump in" and claim the card for the current price, you would physically reach out and slap the device, stopping the countdown and setting the price you will pay. Unfortunately, it seems like much of the time the contraption was loud and prone to breaking, but it was certainly a catchy component, and it facilitated the Dutch auction, which was uncommon even among the myriad auction games of the 1990s and early 2000s.

In theory, the countdown/Dutch auction was novel -- long-time readers of my blog may recall that I tried a mechanically identical "count-up" auction in my low-bid/route building game Riders of the Pony Express. However, as I learned in that game, the countdown auction is really just an overly dramatic way to resolve a blind bid. In RotPE, I relegated the count-up auction to a variant rule and instead codified a blind bid using cards. The same would work for Merchants of Amsterdam, though there would have to be a way to adjudicate ties. The nature of physically slapping the auction clock kind of does that (for the most part). The other thing it might do is play on the anxieties of the bidders, tricking them into jumping in earlier than they had meant to as the ticking clock makes them feel more and more like another player might pounce and get the card. I guess that can be considered "fun," unless you think about it too hard... I will note that in RotPE, while gamer types tended to prefer the blind bid, the original, verbal count-up auction tended to go over better with more casual players, probably for that very reason. 

Side note: I believe that a Dutch auction really works better when there are multiple copies of a thing being auctioned off, and as people "jump in" and claim them for the current price, the clock keeps ticking, and other people could claim them for less, until they run out. When you're just auctioning off one item, the Dutch auction may be cool and fun, but only for a second, and then someone jumps in, ending the auction. If you were waiting for a lower price, you just get nothing. That kind of killed the fun for me in that game.

Having re-familiarized myself with the game, the challenge was set -- how do you revitalize a 20 year old game, keeping the main mechanisms (deal/assign 3 cards, one at a time, and the Dutch auction), but updating or improving on the rest of the game, which was essentially just different area control battles? Well, as I said above, I missed the mark that the publisher was going for, but here's how I approached the problem:

Thought #1: Multi auction 

Waiting for one player to assign cards each round is a little boring... If assigning cards is one of the fun parts of the game, why not let everyone do it each round? 

Furthermore, it would be cool if the auction kept going after someone claimed an item. If everyone had chosen a card to auction off, then there would be more than 1 thing to go for, and the bid could be for the opportunity to pick first.

This seemed so obviously the right way to go that the idea made it from the initial thought process all the way through to the current version of the game, and I can't imagine cutting it and going back to one auction at a time.

Though I will say in retrospect that if the highlight of the game for you is that auction, then having more, smaller instances of the auction could be favorable, and that did seem to be the publisher's POV on the subject. 

Thought #2: Remove money 

20-30 years ago, auction games were all the rage. More recently, you don't see as many of them. This may be because back in the day, players didn't have a lot of other options of which game to play, and they would play the same game over and over. Auction games are difficult for new players, because you need to try and evaluate the lots so you know how much you should bid. This is doubly true in a game where you are bidding victory points, as an overbid directly costs you progress towards victory! Nowadays, games need to be more new-player friendly, and I think that accounts for a drop in popularity of auctions.

That said, I considered how else you could bid for something if not with money, and one answer that sounded good to me was action points. Instead of starting at a high money value and counting down, you could start at 1 action point and count up. Instead of saying "I'll take that card for $60,000," you'd say "I'll do that action with 3 action points." 

When jumping in early, you could claim the action you want, but a less effective version (fewer action points), or you could wait and get more action points, but have less say in what you get to do with them. This sounded good to me, and it just meant replacing simple "place influence" actions with whatever the new actions would be (I already wanted to differentiate the areas and make them more distinct from each other, see below)

Thought #3: Diversify areas

Merchants of Amsterdam has 3 areas you can influence: Colonies, Amsterdam, and the commodity tracks, and there are 4 segments of each. Each of those areas scores the same way when they score -- you rank them from most to least total influence, and then you reward money based on a chart for 1st/2nd/etc majority. I thought it would be neat to make each area unique, and give each one a different feel, maybe a whole different mechanism. Some of the ideas I wanted to try were Community Defense (like the wildlings in Game of Thrones, the defense league in Comuni, or barbarians in Cities & Knights of Catan), Laws (like in Lancaster, Warrior Knights, or EmDo: Oblivion), and Set Collection

Community Defense

To be honest, I've never really seen Community Defense work well in a game, but I thought I'd try it here. Players could send ships to defend planets from hostile alien invasions, and when an invasion event occurred, you'd get rewarded or penalized based on how many ships you sent, and whether enough ships were sent in total compared to the alien strength. Perhaps predictably, I didn't like any of the iterations I tried, and in the end, I made it area control (most ships defending each delegation gets a benefit from that delegation), with the area(s) defending against the most aliens being worth double - in a way, this is kinda like the original game, where the areas aren't worth the same amount, so you may want to control the better area, but it may not be obvious which area is better until the event happens.

Laws

I really like how some games have laws that come into play (usually by player vote) that have some effect on the game. Sometimes the effects change the rules of the game, other times they offer a scoring opportunity, either immediately or at the end of the game. In this case, I thought the laws could offer scoring opportunities at each political event. Players would vote these scoring conditions into play, and then could either try to do a little bit of each, or really specialize on one or two of them. For a specialization strategy, players would also have to increase their approval rating because that caps the number of points you can score from any given law. Players going for a diverse strategy would not have to worry too much about approval, but might have a hard time getting big scores. 

After several iterations, I believe I landed on just dealing one law to each delegation that represents a law that delegation wants. During a policy event, whichever delegation has the most senators will bring their law into play, then each law in play will score. That way, players will know what conditions are available, and may wish to support the ones they're doing a good job at by sending senators to that delegation. If the laws are diverse enough and distinct enough, then I think this mechanism works pretty well. 

Set Collection 

My first attempt at set collection was to deal tiles showing 4 different resources to each delegation. Via trade actions, you can collect these resources, thereby making a "trade agreement" with that delegation so that they like you better (bump up on their track). During a trade event, you would turn in the goods you've collected for points. The more different types of goods you had, then more points you would get. 

This worked okay, but as you'll see in a minute I changed what it meant to have points in this game, and that made me reconsider how set collection is rewarded.

Thought #4: Knizia Scoring 

Scoring victory points was okay, but it occurred to me that there are four delegation tracks, and the story of the game is to get those delegations to like you... so why not use the delegation tracks as the measure of victory? And furthermore, as this is based on a Knizia game, why not use Knizia scoring: whoever gets the most bumps on their worst track is the winner?

I liked this change, and it meant everything that you do is in service of getting track bumps. It did mean revisiting some of the rewards in the game, for example the set collection. I went through several iterations and tried different ways to reward sets: diverse sets, sets of the same resource, etc. I assigned each delegation one of the resources, and in the end, during a trade event, you could turn in one set of goods (either all the same, or all different) to gain one bump on the appropriate delegation track for each. If you turned in a set of four different goods then you could turn in an additional set. Because of how the scoring works, a diverse set is usually better than getting a bunch of bumps in one track, unless you're way behind in one track!

In addition to those 4 major thoughts, I had made a few other changes as well:

Event/Scoring Timing

In Merchants of Amsterdam, there's a time track around the edge of the board, and mixed into the deck are cards with sand timers pictured... each timer card that comes up advances the track one space. Certain spaces on the track indicate scoring rounds, so they come up at semi-random intervals, but always in the same order. That felt a little old fashioned to me, so I looked for a way to trigger the scoring rounds in a more variable order in an organic way.

Discarded Cards Affect Game State

When resolving the 3-card mechanism (KEEP, AUCTION, DISCARD), it seemed like a wasted opportunity not to have the discarded card affect the game state. So I added Event icons to each card, and then placed all "discarded" cards into event stacks by icon. This changed the 3-card decision to KEEP, AUCTION, EVENT, which I thought would make the decisions more interesting.

I went through a few iterations of how exactly to trigger events based on this, and took input from the publisher on how frequently events should occur (how many events should occur each round). What I ended up with was that the event (or events) with the most icons occur, then those cards are discarded, and now the other events that have cards building up are more likely to have the most next round. In addition, to make sure each event did occur at least once, and so you could plan for them a little bit, I added scheduled events: each of the four different events would occur once in rounds 1-4 (in random order, decided in setup), then at the end of round 5, all 4 events would occur once more.

For the most part, that was it. At the time I had been playing games like Ark Nova, and thinking that maybe I ought to try my hand at a heavier game, and that particular thought may have contributed to this game being out of scope for the publisher, but the feedback I got during the process sounded positive -- I failed to read between the lines though, and when the publisher started to balk at how the game was going, I didn't take as much note as I should have. 

Fate of the Game 

So there you have it, a game intended to be a revamp of Merchants of Amsterdam, but turned out really very different in every aspect than the original game. At this point I would describe it more as "inspired by" than "revamp of." 

Seeing as how this did not meet the needs of the publisher, what can I do with the game? Well, with their permission, I have added it to my pitch list, with some further development:

Cutting the 3-card Mechanism

The 3-card mechanism was in the game because it was a key mechanism from Merchants of Amsterdam, and the publisher wanted to maintain it. To be honest, that's not my favorite mechanism in the world because I hate the idea of choosing to keep a card, only to draw one I like better next, or discarding an OK card in hopes of drawing one I like better, then only drawing worse cards.

I do see the appeal of the mechanism though. I even used it in a game jam design more recently (18 card point salad). I tested a "more strategic" version where you just draw all 3 cards at once and assign them freely to KEEP, AUCTION, and EVENT, but it just didn't seem as fun. Now that I'm not tied to using the mechanism, I have decided to streamline the game a bit by removing it altogether! Instead, I'll just deal out N+1 cards into a draft pool, auction off turn order with the count-up multi-auction, and rather than building up Event icons, simply resolve the event on the one remaining card that doesn't get chosen. This is a trick lifted from a TMG title I helped develop by designers Matthew Dunstan and Chris Marling called Pioneer Days (which I used again in the thematic sequel by Stan Kordonskiy, Old West Empresario). Removing the 3-card mechanism reduces duration by a lot, and focuses the game more on the auction.

So that's where I'm at... looking for a publisher to pick up this galactic politics themed game inspired by Merchants of Amsterdam (but in the end, very fa removed from MoA). Know anyone for whom this would appeal?

Recent BGA plays (10/24-4/25)

 Lately I've been playing some board games with Corbin -- he's almost 7 years old now. He has even played some grown-up games, like Puerto Rico, and he's played a couple of my prototype as well. One day maybe I'll make a blog post about playing games with him...  But outside of those games with Corbin, I haven't really played much of anything in person since before COVID. I'd be lost if it weren't for online portals such as BoardGameArena.com! I've played some games on Yucata.de, MaBiWeb, boiteajeux.net, and Brettspielwelt in the past, but I never liked it as much as playing with my friends face-to-face across the table, and manipulating the tactile game pieces with my hands, etc. More recently it seems that some or all of those portals have died off or shut down. 

Board Game Arena is another online portal, and one which focuses more on the look and user interface... when the pandemic hit, they became very popular, and eventually sold themselves to Asmodee, one of the biggest forces in the boardgame industry! Ever since the pandemic started, I've been playing games on BGA regularly with some of my oldest friends, like Jeremy in Seattle and Steve in California. I like to play games I know on there but nowadays I also try to discover new games. I often enter a game without even reading the rules first, and just sort of "kludge" my way through it (no ideas where that term came from, but it basically means to stumble through the game and figure it out as you go). That's one nice thing about an online implementation, since it enforces the rules, it'll tell you what you can do, and it won't let you make illegal moves :)

Every once in a while, I compile some mini-reviews of games I've played on BGA for my friend David, but I think it would be smarter to post those here for a wider audience. So here's my latest round of mini-reviews for new-to-me games played on BGA:

Apiary

Finally getting to try this worker placement game where your workers level up! It's pretty cool... not sure if I like it as much as I thought I would, and it's maybe a bit more fiddly thank I expected for a Stonemaier game? Or maybecnot? I dunno --- it's pretty cool so far though (midway through a 2p and a 3p game)

Architects of Amytis

Fairly abstract game that kind of uses Tic-Tac-Toe as a mechanism. Place tiles on your 3x3 grid, try to make the configs on scoring cards, but tiles also score based on type and where you place them. Draft the tiles from a 3x3 display and leave a pawn there, and if you get 3-in-a-row, gain a bonus scoring condition. Cute, not bad. Was annoying when I couldn't get the building that lets you gain scoring cards, but I don't know how common that is

Azul Duel

2p specific Azul game, seems worse than just playing Azul with 2 players. I get the impression that these 2p "duel" versions of games are meant to be... smaller, more compact. Maybe that's a mistaken assumption though. Meh.

Bonfire (on Yucata)

Played some games of Bonfire on Yucata, and while it's pretty opaque, and the theme does not help much, and the costs/requirements are kind of arbitrary... once you get the hang of it, the game is pretty cool!

Botanicus

A not-too-bad game about gardening, where you maneuver your gardener for access to spots on your board, then plant and tend flowers. The action selection is kinda like Kingdomino - you're drafting actions as well as turn order for the following round. It's a little bit flexible, as you can pay money for otherwise blocked actions, but that's not trivial to afford. There's a side hustle of collecting animal tokens, and so far I think that might be a bit "overcentralized" because they seem to be worth a ton, and you can't really be blocked from getting them, so it seems like you kind of have to make sure you get your 5 animals to be competitive. I've enjoyed my first few games, not sure if it'll have legs, but it's at least a nice new game to consume
Edit: There's an "advanced" game that makes the animals more than just a set collection mechanism and gives players more variety in unique gardens and endgame goals. I think I probably like that better. It's a decent game!

Carpe Diem (on Yucata)

I've played a couple games of Carpe Diem on Yucata now, and so far - while it's not my favorite Feld title - it's also not my least favorite -- I kinda like it. Maybe like, B-tier Feld for me, where In the Year of the Dragon and Notre Dame are S-tier, and Trajan and Castles of Burgundy are A-Tier...

Dead Cells

This cooperative rogue-lite game with a videogame IP was... well, I didn't really grok it very well, and I didn't really enjoy trying. Maybe better on the tabletop, in real time, live with other players would be better so you could discuss what to do like, out loud.

Eternitium

A very straightforward deckbuilder, where taking better cards makes you negative progress. Every turn you have to take a bad card into your deck, then you get to make some progress, then you may optionally take a Basic or Advanced tech card into your deck (at the cost of -1 or -2 progress). There's a sort of PYL option on the progress as well, which may be interesting if you are tracking the contents of card piles/decks adequately. So far (1.5 games in) this game isn't knocking my socks off. the card effects are few and uninteresting, the game is very straightforward, and it's just not that fun for me

Finca

I played a couple games of Finca and was thoroughly unimpressed. As one player said after the game: "this was not fun."

Forum Trajanum (on Yucata)

I stumbled through a game on Yucata.de, without reading the rules first, and it did not work out at all! That game is done, and I only understand about 20% of it! What I do understand doesn't really excite me much... you take two tiles pretty much at random from your board, think about the one you might want, and pass the other to your opponent... then you get what they pass you, and you have to think about whether you want that more than what you already decided you wanted (seems like double effort to me). Then you do stuff that I don't fully understand, and I'm sure some of it is worth points... In fairness, I should really learn the rules properly and not try to just kludge my way through, and I'd be happy to try it again (hopefully after at least watching a how-to-play video), but I don't expect this to be my new favorite Feld or anything

Garden Rush

I enjoyed a couple of games of this cute little head-to-head abstract, and I'd play again. You draft vegetables from a common pool, but there's a strong geographic element to it as you place them into your garden grid.

Guild of Merchant Explorers

Still figuring it out (might need to check the rules), but so far the hype seems justified -- seems like a solid twist on the roll & write genre

Edit - just finished my first game, and I like it! Probably the best R&W I've seen an a long time!

Edit again - OK, this game is SOO GOOD! I really like the main mechanism, and the whole thing just works really well. I've played on all the different maps, and they're all interesting and a little different. Great game!

Let's Catch the Lion

This game was a little abstract that I did not care for at all. You have 3 units, with specific move patterns, and like Chess, you want to capture your opponent's Lion. Do not recommend.

Let's Go To Japan

I'm really enjoying this drafting/set collection (sort of) game! I've played a handful of times, and it's pretty great.

Living Forest Duel

New 2p spinoff of the really good Living Forest... not really much like LF at all. Reminds me of RA a bit --- the PYL card draw in this Duel version is from a shared deck, and on your turn you either add a card, or use an action. You get 2 actions per round, and the round ends when both players are out of actions, OR when 3 solitary animals show up. After a couple of games I'd say it's alright, pretty good even, but I think I prefer the base game personally.

Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game

Cute little area control game where you spread out tokens at random, then surround areas such that you have a majority in the area... you just take turns placing 4 border pieces on the hex grid until all the areas are 4-7 spaces big. Not really my kind of game, but it wasn't bad for a simple, light game, I think

Mesos

I heard this compared to In the Year of the Dragon, which I love, so I gave it a try. Turn order draft like Kingdomino or Viticulture... events you have to prepare for... I can see the comparison to ItYotD, but this feels "smaller" somehow. I enjoyed a few games of it 2p, haven't finished a 3p yet.
Edit: I like ItYotD better, but this ended up being pretty good (especially head-to-head)

Middle Ages

Aside from a boring title, I think I like Middle Ages (after 1 play, where I learned as I went). It feels a lot like Kingdomino as you are drafting tiles for your board as well as turn order for next round, but there's no geographical element (kind of a bummer), and the tiles are a lot more sophisticated - they each have an effect, and then you collect income for that tile's type. I look forward to playing it some more, it's definitely grabbed me more than Moon River (another Kingdomino-like game)

Mythicals

This little 2p rummy variant left much to be desired

Naishi

card game - don't re-order your hand, try to get cards in the best place to score well. This one was hard for me to grok at first, it's not very intuitive, but after 1 game I think I've got it now. This is not my favorite type of game, so I don't think I'll play much more, but I do want to play at least once now that I've got the rules down

Revive

Took a minute to really figure it out, and the implementation benefits from a big screen and tooltips (so harder to play on my phone), but now that I think I know what's going on I think I kinda like it. Not sure if it'll have legs though. Basically you have 3 resource types, and 3 main actions (each costs 1 of the resources), and you have multi-use cards (one of my favorite things in games). Beyond that, it's kind of like Concordia or something -- you play your cards and take some actions until you're out of juice, then you "hibernate" and reset things a bit.
Edit: I almost didn't remember this one even reading he description! But now I remember it, I think it was pretty fun, and I'd play it again

Stonespine Architects

This is a solid booster draft game (like 7W) where you build a dungeon and populate it with monsters, traps, and treasures. There are various goals to compete over and while it's nothing earth shattering, it seems like a very solid game to me
Edit: after a handful of plays, I really like it!

Tower Up

Solid game mechanically, and production seems like it's probably very nice (I've only played on BGA) -- but feels very abstract to me, no thematic consonance at all. Therefore I'm not sure how 'fun" it is

Toy Battle

Simple, quick head-to-head game from Repos -- and it's really good! Either draw 2 tiles, or play one - each tile has an ability and a value. You can always cover your own tiles, and you can cover an opponent's tile IF yours is bigger. Some spaces have an effect when you place there as well. Surround areas to gain stars, 50%+ stars wins. OR, win by placing a tile on the opponent's HQ. If someone runs out of tiles, most stars wins. A little bit of tug-o-war style back and forth, a touch of card advantage, two routes to victory (maybe 3), and the ability to pivot between them... great game!

Umbrella

This is a weird little abstract that, TBH, I didn't love. You draft marbles from the left, right, top, or bottom... left and right are shared pools with your neighbors, everyone shares the top pool, and the bottom pool is just for you, but it's bad to have marbles in there at game end. When you pick a marble, you "push" it onto your board from that side, pushing other marbles in that row, and sending the last one off into the next pool. Your goal is to make specific arrangements of marbles to satisfy cards

The White Castle

A VERY short (9 turns) dice-drafting/worker placement game that feels a bit like it's procedurally generated. Lower valued dice tend to trigger your lantern income (which is upgradeable), but they potentially make you pay more for actions, while larger valued dice gain money instead of losing it. You can end up connecting multiple actions in a big chain sometimes which is always fun and satisfying

Zenith

2nd release from PlayPunk (Captain Flip was great!), thought I'd give it a try. I like it pretty well so far. Can be a bit dependent on drawing the right suits at times, or if you need money, sometimes you need specific types of cards and if they don't come then that's rough, but that seems to be just occasional so far and goes with the territory of a card game.

I'd like to see a Diplomacy option that cost any card type, gave you Leader, and let you draw 5 cards, keep 1 (like RftG's Explore+5) OR maybe just the ability to optionally discard 1 card at the end of each turn before refilling hand

Quick check-in for the new year

 I've been meaning to post more in this blog, like I used to. Some of the stuff I would normally have posted in here has instead gone into game channels on the Discord server* I set up for playtesting, but that's dangerous:

Tangent: I had been using Slack for exactly that purpose before, and a few years ago they decided to change how they do their free accounts: instead of a limited number of posts that last forever (which was plenty for me and my game notes), they changed to an unlimited number of posts, but only accessible for 90 days -- to see posts beyond that you need to have a paid account. There's a bit of a loophole in that threads appear to be visible, and if I'd known that, I would have replied to all of my posts, even if it was with a nonsense reply, just so I'd be able to see them now. I did try to export the info before I lost access to it, but there's really no good way to do that, so it wasn't very successful. I lost a lot of thoughts and info on a lot of game ideas!

I don't expect Discord to go that route, it seems a lot more established and set in their ways, but it never hurts to have a backup, and it can help to write things out in different ways. So I would like to make some catch-up posts here about some of the game projects I've working on. Let's call that a New Year's Resolution.

* Apparently, the Discord link expires after a while, so if you want into the server, leave a comment here that the link is bad and I'll edit a new one in or something

It's been a while since I've made any resolutions, or explicitly thought about ambitions, and I think it's a good idea. So here are a few:

Progress on signed games 

I have 2 games that are signed but still haven't come out yet: Apotheosis (to be called Usurpers), from a small publisher, so I don't know if or when it'll finally come out, and Eminent Domain re-release, which includes Eminent Domain: Coalition (a solo mode that I should probably expand on, TBH), from Rio Grande so I feel good about it, but it's a year late at this point. I'd like to see those both come to fruition. 

More games signed

I've had a few pitches recently, but none of them led to anything. I do have one promising lead currently for Division of Labor, so hopefully that'll pan out. Taiko Kiri (co-designed with my friend Steve) is under review by a publisher, so hopefully they'll choose it over their other options (and I just got word that it got a step closer, edging out one of two competitors!). But I've got a pretty big list of games to pitch, and I'd love to see some of those published.

Seth Jaffee Development

I have been doing some development projects for a few publishers, but it's been a while. I have recently picked up 2 consultation gigs, which could turn into full-on design/development projects. I'd like to do a little more of that this year.

One of the games I did freelance development on hasn't come out yet, and I wonder what its status is. It would be good to see that in the wild as well.

More blog posts going forward

And as I said above, I plan to post more in this blog going forward. I find it useful to write out my thoughts on a game, and I like being able to go through old posts and revisit (and sometimes revive) old ideas.