Current (and recent) designs and where they stand

I'd like to take stock in my current (and recent) active designs and see where they're at, what they need, and which I should be concentrating on. So here we go!

Colony Collapse

My most recent active design is a co-design with Aurore Inara, a friend from the Decision Space podcast Discord. Colony Collapse started out as if a sequel to Apiary -- imagine if the spacefaring bees from Apiary found a new home world to settle, and decided to rebel against their Queen in favor of a more democratic form of government... only to immediately fall victim to corruption in the form of gerrymandering to become elected mayor!

We're still taking big swings on this one. The game has been working fairly well in my opinion, with a few fiddly bits, but my co-designer and I disagree on how well certain things are working. Aurore's trying a new version that's got some significant differences and an added dynamic of a pawn moving around the board and rallying hexes to vote for you. That version did away with player influenced turn order, which is one of the major areas of disagreement we've got. I understand the first playtest of that version was weird because it was the first try with a new prototype and a new version, for example the cards weren't included in the prototype, so they just didn't use them (and Aurore didn't seem to miss them!) I like the cards in general, and it gives us another action to use (we need 6-8 actions that players will want to take each round).

We have yet to try the old version with the latest changes:
* 1st player to get to turn order track prizes doesn't get them
* Rally action (pawn moving on the board -- I'm very skeptical of this)
* Change to card display (4 card display, or you can draw N, keep 1)

I'm looking forward to trying another version (or two!) of this game

Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans

Before I got started on Colony Collapse, I had revived another of my old designs: Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans. I finally tried a proof of concept of some dynamics I'd wanted to add a decade ago...
* Arrival Effects on the board spaces, so you have reason to move places
* Increase battle costs
* Add training track status to the goals
* Add a geographic element to the goals

Some of that seemed like a step in the right direction, but it all still needed work. unfortunately, the game got set aside at that point. Hopefully I'll remember everything the next time I get the game to the table!

Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China

Before I'd revived Joan of Arc, I had revived an even older design: Dynasty. This game went very quickly from prototyping and first play to actually being signed by a publisher! Since it's been signed, I'm not actively working on it at the moment -- until or unless the publisher asks me to make some kind of change to the game.

I'm pretty happy with how this game turned out, which is a relief after a full 20 years of thinking "that idea seems good" every time I thought about it :)

Division of Labor

Colony Collapse has been set aside for a couple of weeks now in favor of bringing Division of Labor back to the table. Not too long ago I had updated the building effects in this game and made a few other tweaks (no backing yourself up at an islands space, only 1 building per action, increased building costs, increased cube count per island space (though I forgot about this when I played again later). I took the game back off the shelf to show it to Shem Phillips of Garphill Games and get his opinion. He seemed to like it quite a bit, and had some great ideas for it in general.

The biggest issue is certainly downtime, especially in a 4 or 5 player game. Some other niggling complaints include arbitrary limits (such as only using 2 colors/actions per turn rather than just using all the cubes in your pile). These are all complaints that have been coming up in every iteration of the game, and I've finally gotten around to making a big change to try and address them. The other night I played a 2p game with Rick and tried a proof of concept of a version that does away with rounds in favor of a continuous flow of turns, and it showed promise! Now I want to try it again, with some tweaks and with more players to see if that's the direction I really need to go, or if the previous version feels better

That's about all the games I've been working on lately... feel free to weigh in on which is the most interesting to you in the comments. If I can get up the impetus, I ought to do a detailed update post on each of these games, with links to rules and everything. That would probably be a good idea!