Spring Spielbany 2011

4 years ago I attended the Spielbany game design meetup and got a chance to see and play a number of prototypes as well as meet in person several people I see online all the time. Last weekend I decided to do it again. I flew out Friday and returned Monday, and over the course of the weekend I managed to play 12 games (5 of them my designs or designs I'm developing) and have some good design talk and just hang out with some people I don't normally get to. I brought the following games with me, but didn't get to all of them:

Spaghetti Western - a prototype that had been submitted which I was simply returning to the owner.
Caravan Imperative - another prototype I had intended to return, however I forgot to give it back to Andy!
Eminent Domain, with Exotic expansion
Kings of Air and Steam
All For One
Dice Works (or Dice Werx, not sure about the spelling on that)
Alter Ego - not much of a prototype really, just an assembly of cards at the moment
Jab - manufacturer's sample to show off
Brain Freeze - current (almost final) version of the iPad app
Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost Time - partial prototype of the liar's dice bluff auction game

Here's what I played and how it went:

Ice Weasels - a cute, quick kid's game about collecting sets of frozen weasels. The game was inspired by Otter Pops, you have a line of various colored Weasel cards, and on your turn you can either claim a card off of either end, or you can break the line wherever you want (minimum 2 cards in each 'half'). The idea is to get triplets of the same color and then "thaw' them (score them), giving you another turn. Everyone has a 'favorite' color which scores more points for them, and there's a color that's bad for everybody (well, bad if you don't get a whole set and thaw them).  I took a copy of this home with me to show Mike and his kids.

Eminent Domain - I got a 5 player game of Eminent Domain in - the first time I've played with 5. I did not include the Prestige, Utopian, or Exotic planets, and in fact used the Learning Game variant so I removed the 3 Advanced planets with Research icons as well. As a result I noticed that with 5 players the Planet deck ran out, which either means the 5p game needs to include expansion planets, or else for 5 players the planet deck running out should be considered a game end condition. I hadn't considered that for 2-4 players because by the time that happens, the game is over already. But with 5 players puling planets out of the deck, it can run out pretty quick. I think that's acceptable, that for 5p the Planet deck running out could be an additional game end trigger.

I also played with 1 or 2 (forget offhand) extra cards in each stack, and the game dragged on a little longer than I thought it should. I'm not sure if that's to do with using the learning Game variant, or just 5 players in general, or if I really didn't need to add extra cards to the stacks. I'll need to test that some more and find out. Generally speaking though the game seemed to go over very well.

Honor and Glory - A short, cooperative adventure game that's supposed to give the feel of an RPG. Each player has a character sheet with a Class card and a couple of Trait cards. When 'adventuring,' some encounter cards are drawn which each show a specific die result, and 1 or 2 Traits. For each Trait present, if a member of the party has that trait, they get an additional die to roll. The goal is to roll the specific number indicated on the card. Before rolling though, the group chooses one of the characters to be the leader, and therefore their leader ability is in play for that encounter.

Altogether a neat idea, though there were a lot of comments made about the leader abilities, how they work, and whether it made sense for them to only matter when that player was the leader. For example, unless chosen as the leader, the Warrior character was exactly the same as the Cleric character. Seems like they should behave differently even if neither one is the leader. I would like to see each character have a thematic "always on" ability which is a small but beneficial effect, as well as a Leader ability which comes into play if they are the leader. And I'd like to see that Leader ability be something you can count on, not a triggered ability that only works if someone happens to roll a 6. There's an opportunity cost of choosing 1 leader bonus over another, and for it to not come into play sort of cheapens that whole leader choosing decision.

Another comment that came up was that each Encounter should feel like progress toward the end goal. A solution discussed (which I think the designer implemented the next day) was to put prizes (equipment) into the Encounter deck, and when one comes up, it's replaced by another card, and it counts as the LOOT for the adventure, so the heroes will become more powerful over time, allowing them to have an easier time against the boss at the end.

Finally, each round of combat that the group doesn't defeat the bad guys, they take damage. They are allowed to choose who takes the damage. I'd like to see that be wrapped into the choice of Leader - the Leader is out front, they should take the brunt of the attack - maybe they take all the damage. Or maybe each player takes 1 and the leader takes the rest or something.

I would try that game again, with those changes implemented. I could see it being pretty fun.

Sword Merchants - At BGG.con a while back I played Gil Hova's game called Pax Robotica. A theme (and title) I rather enjoyed, and I liked the game for the most part too. Players were Arms Dealers, selling weapons (in that case Battle Bots) to different sides of various conflicts. To an extent you didn't care who won the battles, you would supply Bots to whoever would pay for them. One of the biggest drawbacks of that version of the game was the combat resolution which was obtuse, and a side effect was that the theme seemed to make people think it was a game about fighting robots, not about building and selling them.

Since then Gil has changed the game a lot, stripping his unique auction mechanism (from Wag the Wolf) and changing the theme to a fantasy setting. now Orcs, Kobolds, Dwarves and Elves are at war, and each race will purchase Swords, Axes, Pole Arms, and Maces from the players. There's a dynamic by which the more battles a race loses the more desperate it becomes, and the more desperate a race is, the more money they'll pay for weapons. In addition, there's an end game bonus for having supported the team that lost the fewest battles, which Gil found a nice way to do since Pax Robotica.

I think the game was pretty solid, though some of the numbers were off. The most important changes that were suggested were to give everyone level 1 technology in each weapon (normally you have to buy that) so that no matter what you can always build at least a really crappy weapon of each type (which can turn out to be important for another part of the game), to adjust the values and rates of change of numbers (of course, in a prototype the numbers are often off), and I made an additional suggestion to start with less money so that players can't afford to do as much from the start. I find that games are cool when the players are only able to do 1-2 of 3-4 different things at the start, because then they naturally diverge in player posture - making the rest of the game interesting. I hope to see this one again soon.

Nottingham - Originally designed for the Robin Hood themed Game Design Showdown at BGDF, Nottingham has been expanded into a cooperative game with a traitor that plays 7. The players are on Prince John's side, except the traitor who's in cahoots with Robin Hood. A great theme, and an interesting take on it if you ask me!

The game had a lot in common with Shadows Over Camelot, and any coop game with a traitor will draw that comparison. I did think that this game felt different because you seemed to have more to do in it. The learning curve was a little high, as there were a TON of unique cards, but that's kind of how thematic games go. The designer (Richard James) played the game twice over the weekend, and he was telling me some of the stuff he was planning on changing. It all sounded like steps in the right direction. I'd like to try this one again once the designer gets a chance to polish it up a bit. I'm a sucker for a Robin Hood theme :)

All For One -It's been a long time since I've done anything with All For One, but I was happy to get it to the table. We played a 4 player game (the game has always been best with 4), and I finally tried it without the guards altogether. I don't think I missed them. Some of the same old comments reared their ugly head - and I'm starting to agree that the voting mechanism using the mission cards is not the best idea. Some suggestions were made, maybe the best of which was to relax the hand limit, and to allow players to play any number of cards in a duel (irrespective of which ones), and choose either Offense or Defense. So a different kind of voting, where you sort of bid with your cards to support the result you want to vote for. I might try that next time.


Another idea that came up to promote interaction between characters (which may translate to player interaction) is to forget carrying capacities and simply force a character to pick up each token he walks over. This way more often players will need to move Plot Tokens from character to character via Transfer or Demand actions. Galloping on a horse would still mean skipping Plot Tokens of course.

Another thing I noticed was that perhaps the Bonus tokens should be worth MORE VP than the Required tokens, not less. When doing a mission with only the Required token, you get more VP/token than if you also get a Bonus token - it's often not worth your time to get the Bonus tokens. Also, with the way the Story Tracks are bumped upon completing a mission (which I like), having to bump the 2nd track is often a detriment, so that's another deterrent for going after Bonus tokens. It just makes sense to make the Bonus tokens worth more, so next time I'll switch them - 2vp for the Required token, 3vp for each Bonus token, and I think still 4 VP for arranging a Meeting, and maybe 5vp for the Any Character, 2 Required token missions because they're harder. These VP values could easily be printed on the cards so they need not be remembered.

There have been a few comments along the lines of placing missions face up rather than keeping them in hand, but I think that's just begging for people to disrupt other player's multi-turn efforts, which I think would feel crappy. I'm excited to make these changes and try the game again.

Dice Works - At first I liked the goofy spelling of "Dice Werx" - but I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe "Dice Works" is better. I keep waffling back and forth. Either way, I played a 3-player game on Saturday and it seemed to work fine. I have changed the Scrap Efficiency Upgrade (for even progress on all tracks) to 4/3/3/2 for 1 rather than 4/3/2/1 for 1. I don't ever want anybody exchanging 1 for 1, that's just lame. I like the feel of 3-for-1 though, so that's a reasonable upgrade. Also, I think I'll allow players to use that new exchange rate as soon as they get it, rather than starting next round.

In Ruins - Andy Van Zandt had told me a little bit about his post apocalyptic card drafting game and I was interested to play it. I like the theme, and Andy's designs are always very well thought out and thorough. I enjoyed In Ruins overall, but the unique drafting mechanism I thought had something fundamentally inelegant about it. The idea is cool, you put new cards out, then you get a chance to place your Squatter token on something that you don't want anybody else to take. Sadly, this means you can't take it either - and I wonder if that's just something I will not like about that mechanism (not something wrong with it, just a mechanism I simply don't like). The inelegance was caused by each turn, EACH PLAYER having to be asked to reevaluate which card they want to squat on, often only to decide they liked where they were.

A suggestion was made to instead have each player move their Squatter only on their own turn. The idea behind the Squatter is to keep players from being able to topdeck the perfect card, it gives everybody a chance to stop a lucky draw. The proposal is to have the player draw the new cards at the END of his turn, and then choose to move his squatter - allowing him the chance to block one of the two cards that just came up. I think this would smooth out game play tremendously, and cut down on down time and game length. Andy said he was 100% on board, so I'd love to play the game again with that change the next time I see him.

Currently the game is something like 90 minutes, which I think is a little long for what it is. If this could help cut the length down closer to 1 hour, I think that would be great.

Kings of Air and Steam - As I've mentioned, I'm developing a pickup/deliver game with a Steampunk theme called Kings of Air and Steam. The game supports 2-6 players, though I'd never played with 6 before. I was able to do so this weekend, and it was very informative. I had forgotten the exact setup of market tiles for each player count, so I just used all the Market tiles I had (6 of each color) and drew 4 out per turn. That's what you'd do for a 5 player game. For 6 players it was supposed to be 7 of each color tile, drawing 5 per turn. The game worked well enough, but in retrospect it did seem like the board was somewhat bare most of the time. I think the proper number of tiles would have been better. I had hoped to simplify setup by using the same setup irrespective of player count, but I just don't think the game will work very well that way. As an easy way to handle it though, I am thinking that the appropriate player counts should be printed on the backs of the tiles (2+, 3+, 4+ 5+, 6), and rather than sort them, each tile can be discarded as it's drawn if it's not appropriate for the current game.


Everybody seemed to like the game, and I got a couple of questions answered. For example, everybody agreed that the requirement to ship on 50% your own track was unnecessary. As for the look of the game, everybody was all for the theme, and one player suggested unique ship molds for each player - at first I thought that would be more expensive, but then I realized we could just make 1 mold with all 7 ships on it (6 for the game, plus 1 promo ship we've got planned). Also, Andy suggested a great player power - the ability to create a new link on the board between cities. One player could be given 5 or 7 track tiles (straight on one side, gentle curve on the other), and as an action they could be allowed to place them between 2 cities creating a new link - paying $1 per tile placed. This would come with a Depot on that link, and of course other players could build depots on that link as well. I really like that idea.

Alter Ego - To tell you the truth, when I heard about Midnight Men (which I never knew existed) being picked up by a publisher, I got a little discouraged and didn't really feel like working on Alter Ego anymore. But I do like some of the mechanisms and basic ideas behind the game - of managing your Alter Ego life, and the more recent pre-programming of card play, so I brought my pseudo-prototyp with me hoping to chat about it with Andy or whoever. I ended up talking to Richard James about it, and he asked some questions the answers to which I guess I knew, but hadn't really solidified. That was a big help, and also he got me to tweak how the icons on Henchmen work - once in play, rather than giving you that icon to use, they could work more like Eminent Domain where they boost the cards you play. So if I get a $ icon into play, it doesn't give my any $ to use unless I play a job card. This is a small difference, but it has a significant impact - as Rich pointed out, I had built a mechanism which undermined my original design goal. Currently, once I have $ icons in play, I no longer need to worry about playing a Job card as much. This proposed version instead amplifies my desire to play a Job card over a Hero card, which is what I was going for.

We also discussed how some of the Coop mechanisms would work, and in describing them to him I am more confident in exactly how I want them to be now. So I think that design is back on the front burner! I'm curious to see how Midnight Men pans out, seeing as how it's ALSO a superhero themed, cooperative, deck building game.

Hard Wired - I had seen the beginnings of this game discussed in BGDF chat, and was interested in it from the outset. I was glad I got a chance to try it this weekend. I love the idea of creating circuits and improving circuits, but in the current incarnation of this game you are able to steal the opponent's win condition, which to me feels like a long, drawn out game of hot potato. It's like Munchkin, where everyone stops the other guy from winning, drawing out the game, until someone manages to finally win.

When someone suggested that players be allowed to steal Circuits instead of the Light cards, that sounded perfect to me! you could "improve" their circuit by creating the same effect with fewer cards, thereby taking their cards for yourself - as a way to draw more cards at a time. It doesn't hurt the opponent, but it does something useful for you. In fact, if smallest circuit is tiebreaker, then it kind of HELPS the opponent, but you'd do it anyway because it gets you more cards in 1 action than drawing.

So my proposed change, which I hope Ariel tries and I hope works out for him, is that players on their turn can either PLAY a circuit (minimum 3 cards or so), adding a new light to their line, or IMPROVE a circuit by playing any number of cards to replace a longer circuit in play, taking the old circuit cards into their hand. Then they could draw 1 card (I like that as it otherwise might feel like it takes too long to build back up after playing cards). The object is still to either get 1 of each color light in play, or else have the most lights when the deck runs out.

I also liked the idea of another mode of play, where there's just 1 big circuit in play, and each player starts with a set of 1 of each colored light. You win by adding all of your lights to the circuit, or else by having the fewest left when the deck runs out. In this version on your turn you could either play a new circuit (min 3 cards?), Improve a circuit, or simply draw 1 card. Or I guess it could be the same (Play or improve a circuit, then draw 1).

I'd like to try this game again with the changes.

Love Means Nothing - I hadn't played Love Means nothing for a long time, and Ariel had a new version. The new version made the decisions a bit more strategic, but the game was much more slow and tedious. I don't think that's the right feel for a sports themed game, I missed the older, more streamlined mechanics. I was wondering how the decisions could be made more interesting with the old mechanics, and I jokingly said "maybe what it needs is a chess clock, like Brain Freeze!" - and then immediately realized that maybe that's not such a bad idea. the idea behind Brain Freeze was simple decisions + time pressure. Maybe a chess clock with 60 or 90 seconds on it would force people to make their simple decisions a little faster. I think that would feel more like a sports game. Maybe I'll dig up the old copy of Love Means Nothing that I have at home and give that a try.


On Monday morning I also got a chance to talk to Ariel about what each part of Ground Floor will look like. I originally thought the player boards would look like blueprints, but he had a different idea that's been really growing on me. I think it could come out really nicely!

Reiver Games - prototypes

As I mentioned in my last post, All For One is being sent to Reiver Games for review. Jackson Pope over there read the rules and thought it sounded interesting enough to try out at least.

On his blog, Jackson said "I now need something to slot in early next year (potentially a UK Games Expo release), something cheap to make (like a card game) is the order of the day." So I emailed him with a description of Ariel's card game: Love Means Nothing. I sent him a paragraph I wrote for my KublaCon report describing the game, which Ariel liked so much it's now the intro paragraph in the rulebook:

In Love Means Nothing you have a hand of cards, each one depicting 2 parts of a tennis court. One half can be used for defense, returning a ball that comes your way. The other half can be used for offense, sending a shot across the net. You never use both halves of the card at once, it's either one or the other. A turn consists of first playing a card to cover the shot your opponent played, then playing another card to dictate which of the 6 zones you'll hit the ball to. Finally you play a preparation card, indicating which zones you're prepared to cover. The preparation card can be used to cover a shot if the appropriate zone is highlighted. Otherwise you must cover the shot with a card from your hand, in which case the preparation card becomes the attack. So by playing cards that your opponent cannot cover with their preparation card you maintain control of the match because you'll see where the next attack will come and will be able to prepare for that. Of course if a player cannot cover a shot at all, then the point is lost. There are also combinations of cards which create a special shot. Special shots, if not covered with the proper type of card, leave a player off balance... they will only draw 1 card at the end of the turn instead of the usual 2. this will leave them with fewer options and less likely to cover shots.

Jackson said the game sounded interesting, so I sent him the latest copy of the rules which I got from Ariel today. I just received an email from Jackson requesting a prototype of LMN too!

While I hope he likes and decides to publish All For One, I think the chances are better that he'll want to publish Love Means Nothing, as it fits his plan of a cheap-to-produce game. Hopefully he'll go with both - but I'd be pretty happy and excited if he goes with either one. I'm a big cheerleader for Love Means Nothing, even if I didn't have as much to do with it as I did All For One.

GameStorm weekend

Last Wednesday I flew to Portland to visit my friend Jeremy from college and to attend GameStorm. GameStorm is a convention with lots of stuff going on, but I was only interested in 2 things, board games, and Protospiel West. In fact, I didn't do much except the Protospiel stuff for most of the weekend. Protospiel is a convention for playtesting prototypes by other designers and giving feedback. Protospiel West is being put together by Travis Ball and Mike Nickoloff from Los Angeles. Mike has a company called Sorvent which is intended to help designers get their games to market. Here's how it went:

First, I spent Thursday with Jeremy and Amelia in their apartment in Salem. We played 2 games of Pandemic, which I'd gotten them as a gift for putting me up all weekend, and Jeremy and I played some Rock Band, Culdcept Saga on the Xbox, and even drafted a couple packs of Magic. We also played a game of his design called Arena, which he'd thought up when he was in Tucson over the holidays. He'd put together a prototype and so we played a game. It took a long time, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I'll give more details on the game later.

Friday morning Jeremy and I drove up to Portland where he has a condo they're going to move into soon. The condo is brand new, and has absolutely no furniture, so we were "urban camping" all weekend. After a stop there and a quick lunch, we ended up at the convention in time for the first Protospiel West event of the day. Both Jeremy and I played a game called Catch of the Day by Francois (I didn't catch his last name) from Canada. I'll describe the game later, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Much more than I thought I would. I also played BrainFreeze! with Jeremy, and showed Love Means Nothing to him and Francois.

In the Friday night session of Protospiel I ran Terra Prime with myself, Travis, Jeff, and Jonathan playing. The game went well, and the players seemed to like it. Many of the comments afterwards focused on things that could have improved the prototype, and about how many games should be played to test balance. Having played 50 games of Terra Prime I think the balance is pretty good. there were some good, meaty comments made as well, one in particular which I'd like to explore is making the blue and green planets in the further reaches of space produce more than 1 resource at a time. this might help increase their value. Other questions I'm pondering are whether there needs to be a VP given when someone uses your colony (though I like that, even if it doesn't necessarily do anything), or whether to change the way movement works, as some players feel that many of their actions are "wasted" moving from sector to sector.

Jeremy played Arena with Mike, and got some interesting feedback there.

Jeremy and I checked out the main board gaming room as well, and in particular we learned how to play Wabash Cannonball by watching the explanation. Since the game is short, we stuck around and played it after the first group finished. I'm not sure I love the game, but I don't think it's bad either. I don't like that the production quality is so low... I'd left the prototype room and here I was playing a game on laminated cardstock...

In the interim between some of these things I talked Jeremy into playing some Race for the Galaxy, which I know he hates, but which I though he'd like better after playing some more.

Late Friday night we played a few games of Werewolf, which is always fun. There were 32 people though, which means it's a little crazy, and people pretty much avoid logic and go by mob-rule often. Nonetheless, the first game we played I was a Werewolf, and if I do say so myself, I did a really good job :) I threw a fellow werewolf to the wolves (?) for the good of the team, and I convinced several people I was a villager... In the second game I was a werewolf again, but frankly I didn't stand a chance - partly because of he previous game, and partly because (as Jeremy noted) if I were a villager, the werewolves would likely have eaten me very early. They of course did not, and that was something of a giveaway I guess. In one other game I was a villager, and we were down to the wire - one more incorrect lynching and we would lose. It so happened that the seer knew who *2* of the werewolves were, as well as 2 villagers, but she didn't say anything! Needless to say we lost that one.

Saturday we returned and found that Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games was scheduled to meet for 15 minutes at a time with designers so they could pitch their games. I hadn't signed up, and the list was long, but the reality was that there could be time in the schedule as some people may finish early or not be there on time, and it seemed like a bad plan to pass on this opportunity to show my games to a publisher. Jay doesn't accept submissions, he'll only consider games shown to him in person. So I set up Terra Prime and Wizard's Tower on one of the tables in case I got a chance to pitch it. While we waited, we played 2 games of Wizard's Tower. First a 2 player game between me and Jeremy, and then a three player game with Jeff, another designer who had playtested Terra Prime the day before, and who had just pitched his abstract game to Jay right next to us. The 2 player game was incredibly close, a 1 point game, after Jeremy destroyed several of my towers. The 3 player game was good too, with towers destroyed all around.

Unfortunately the session ended before I got a chance to pitch my games, but Travis had set up a time in the morning for me and for Bo to meet with Jay for a longer period of time, since we each had several games to pitch. With about an hour before the next official Protospiel session started, I began to show Jeremy and Jeff my copy of Lost Adventures, the Indiana Jones game by Jeff Warrander and Steve Sisk. we went through the rules and started to play, so when the session started we just kept going. The game ran longer than I'd have thought, but we were talking and sort of messing around part of the time. The turn before the Nazis would find the temple, Jeff revealed it's location to draw some cards. This allowed me to actually dig for the temple before the Nazis found it, earning me the point for that. Jeremy and I headed into the temple with some cards in hand, while Jeff decided to hang back and draw for a few turns. Instead of leapfrogging Jeremy and entering the next room, I decided to let him blaze the trail. This turned out to be a bad idea, as he collected all of the torches strewn about the temple while I got nothing. In the end I delayed the Nazis from finding the grail for one last turn, hoping I'd have a chance to get to the grail room and find the grail, but all that did was allow Jeremy the time to get his pick (he had a 50-50 shot) of grails to a Font and test it... it turned out to be the true grail, so he scored about 5 or 6 extra points for that, finishing the game with 14 points to my 8. Jeff didn't fare as well, scoring only about 4 points. I enjoyed the game, as usual, and I think they did too. we discussed a couple ways to make it better, and the biggest comment was probably to get rid of the revelation mechanic.

At the end of the game Jay was in the room again, and I asked if he had time to look at another game. I had Homesteaders with me which I thought would be a much better fit for Rio Grande, but I wanted to use my allotted time to show him my own games. He said sure, but he had to get back to the main board game room. Unfortunately when I went over there, I couldn't find him anywhere. Meanwhile, Jeremy ran his Arena game again with 2 playtesters.

Later in the evening we saw Jay again, and he said he'd teach Stone Age to Jeremy, Jeff, and I. We had seen the game being played and got a lowdown on the rules earlier in the day, and it looked pretty cool. We sat down to play along with Rachel (the person who taught us Wabash Cannonball), and after about an hour of just talking with Jay and asking him questions, we finally began.

The next morning I didn't want to be late for my scheduled meeting with Jay, so we made sure to get there in time. I pitched Terra Prime and Wizard's Tower to him, and also talked about All For One (but I didn't have a copy with me to show him). As expected, he was not at all interested in Wizard's Tower, as it's an abstract game. However I was surprised at just how disinterested he was in Terra Prime. I'm something of a pessimist, so I didn't expect him to jump at the chance to publish it or anything, but his response was "it just doesn't excite me *shrug*" Maybe for the best, as that game is being reviewed by a different publisher at the moment anyway, so if Rio Grand was all of a sudden interested I'd have other problems.

It had been a while since Jeremy and I had been to a Magic tournament, so we decided to play in the booster draft that was on the schedule: Lorwyn-Lorwyn-Morningtide. We ended up sitting next to each other, and Jeremy passed me good red card after good red card. I passed him a number of good black cards as well. I ended up playing a mono-red deck with a lot of very good cards in it, and I won the whole thing. Frankly though, that's not saying much, as the competition wasn't exactly pro caliber or anything. After one match, my opponent mentioned that there was no need to have more creature D in the deck than your opponent has creatures, and evidently he was passing terrific creature D cards up in favor of mediocre creatures which weren't even in his main color. I didn't feel the least bit bad beating that guy.

After the Magic tournament, the convention had pretty much cleared out. There were a handful of people in the main boardgame room, but that was it. Mike had said he'd play Homesteaders with us after the Magic tournament, but he was nowhere to be found, so after getting some food, Jeremy and I ended up talking to Jay some more as he had just finished teaching Stone Age again. That guy is full of amusing stories! I told him that I had a game to show him that was likely more up his alley, and that we were going to play it as soon as Mike got back, and he said he'd take a look. When Mike arrived we set up the game and I started explaining it. Jay said he had just 1 question... could he bring a copy to the Gathering to test.

...

I had kinda watched Jay's reactions to the games he was looking at earlier, and he didn't seem very excited about any of them (I heard he was at least a little interested in Catch of the Day). His reaction to Homesteaders looked entirely different, he really seemed interested, and he did ask for a copy of the game to test. Now this game isn't mine, it's my friend Alex Rockwell's, but he's told me before that if I wanted to help get it published, he was all for that. So I left my copy with Jay to take with him, and I look forward to hearing his thoughts on it after the Gathering. It's a good game, and it's the kind of thing Rio Grande would publish, so maybe he'll be interested... who knows? :)

Finally, I ended my weekend by getting up at 5am to make my 7:00 flight. after 5 hours on a plane I went straight in to work, and was so tired by the time I got home that I skipped frisbee practice, fell asleep early, and slept for 11 or 12 hours straight!

I'll post some details of the games I played in another post since this one got long.

I'd like to one day publish a game!

I emailed Zev from Z-Man games to see if he'd like to look at All For One again (he played it once at one of the Spielbany meetups)... he got back to me the other day giving me the go ahead to send it in. So this weekend I'm making new cards and a new board (I hope) and I'll be sending it to him next week! That's exciting, though I have a pretty good feeling he will not want to publish it. Hopefully I'm wrong about that!

In addition to that, I have this new BrainFreeze! game that everyone seems to like. It's fast and fun, but it requires a chess clock and I'm afraid that might make it prohibitively expensive to produce. I plan to talk to Mike Nicholoff and see if his company Sorvent can help find a publisher for it.

Blockade Runner is intended to be published by Shifting Skies Games, but that's in a holding pattern for a couple of weeks, and there are funding issues that may or may not take a while to resolve. Sadly, I don't really have money to throw at it.

And finally I have Wizard's Tower which is ready to be shown to publishers, I'm just not sure how to go about getting it there. A friend in Seattle who works in the industry has shown Wizard's Tower to a new game company, but I haven't heard anything about that company at all yet - i know it's tough to get a new company off the ground.

I have some game prototypes by other friends that are worthy of publishing... Ariel's Love Means Nothing tennis card game, Alex's Homesteaders heavy strategy game... As far as I know they wouldn't mind if those games were published, and if I could help them achieve that I think it would be cool.

As for my other games "in development," I have Terra Prime which is probably "mostly done" and could be made ready for a publisher if, say, one were to ask for it. Kilauea might also be more or less done, though I haven't touched that in forever.

Of course I have a bunch of other designs in the "idea stage" - the most promising of which are probably Dynasty and Hot and Fresh.

So if I'm to uphold my new years resolution to get a game in line to be published, I'd better get to work on that!

Playtests at Spielbany

I attended Spielbany, a meeting of game designers from the Board Game Designers Forum, last weekend and I managed to get some playtesting done. Of the games I brought, All For One, Terra Prime, Blockade Runner, and Wizard's Tower were played. I also managed to play games by other designers:
Acts of the Disciples by Jeff Warrender
Push and Shove by Tom Kiel
Prolix by Gil Hova
Love Means Nothing by Ariel Seone
Othberon by Tom Kiel

I also saw but didn't get a chance to play Wag the Wolf by Gil Hova and Lost Adventures by Jeff Warrender and Steve Sisk.

Since this is my game design blog, I'll only post about the games I'm working on here. If you want to know about the others, check out BGDF! The only game I have
extensive comments on is All For One...

All For One
Of course I'm always happy to play this game... I've been working on it with Scurra (David Brain) for something like 3 1/3 years - my first email correspondence with David is from March 2004. In that time, this game has gone through waves of development followed by waves of sitting on the shelf. For the last 2 years there have actually been 2 different versions, "my" Identity (ID) version, and "David's" Story version. The main difference being that David's crew added Story tracks instead of the secret identities in order to try and (a) separate the players from the characters in a more complete way, and (b) make for a more thematic, King vs Cardinal feel overall (maybe adding some story arc to the game). His 3 Story tracks had a player goal at each end, and each player got a goal card indicating which goal they wanted each track to lean toward. Points were scored depending on the position of the tracks... you would earn points for each track if it were further toward your goal than the opposite one.

When I visited London in November I finally had a chance to play the Story version, and while I like the results it tried to achieve, I did not like the way it went about trying to achieve them. After some thought and some discussion with other testers, I came up with a sort of hybrid Story Track version of the game - one which attempts to achieve the same goals (fixing some of the more common complaints about the game), while preserving the good things about the ID version that I liked and that have earned compliments from many testers. This Hybrid version was the version I brought on Saturday, and Saturday was the 2nd time this new version had ever been played. Important to note may be that we played a 5 player game, and I'm happy to report the potentially unfair distributions of goals did not appear to be a problem at all. I had originally forgotten about the handicap I intended to give the players who started at a disadvantage until someone suggested the exact thing I had in mind...

Of the 5 players, 3 had played once or twice before and 1 was brand new. I of course have played more than probably anyone else on the planet. I was very interested to see how the people who'd played before fared this game, and what they thought of the new version.

I didn't take any notes, but from what I recall the consensus was that the Story Tracks were an improvement over the secret IDs. Everyone managed to do 3 or 4 missions (which is typical) except for Jeff. I couldn't figure out what was holding Jeff up, but according to his report it appears he was trying some longer term planning. Unfortunately, this game with 5 players doesn't really allow for much long term planning. With 4 players it's ore possible, and with only 3 players it's VERY possible to plan long term plays (spanning 2, 3, or 4 turns), but with the chaos introduced by 5 players it's simply not a viable strategy to plan much more than 2 turns out. 2 turns is still very possible, because a player can get 2 turns in a row using their One For All card. That being the case, it's not impossible to really plan a 3 turn play if people don't seem to be using the character you need... beyond that, all bets are off - too much stuff happens between your turns to count on the board position more than 2 turns down the road.

Since the chaos is a feature of the 5 player game, and the game still works as a tactical game that way, it doesn't concern me too much. That said, Jeff's suggestion of a 7th character for the 5 player game is an interesting one which deserves consideration. I'm not sure how that would work in, perse, but it may be worth trying anyway. I'm not sure it would really help the situation though. Perhaps a hand size of 3 instead of 4 (so there are fewer mission cards out there) may help, but I doubt that would be a net gain either because 4 Missions sees to be the sweet spot with regard to having a play you can reasonably work toward without having way too many options.

I'm fairly happy with the game as is, and wouldn't mind sending it off to publishers this way. The only thing I'm currently considering as a change is trying to find a way to inject some long term strategy into the game. So far I've had 2 ideas to do this, one of which I didn't like when I tried it, and the other of which has sounded pretty bad to the testers I've mentioned it to...

I had tried a system (the last iteration) in which you got Blue points or Red points depending on which character did the mission (Musketeer or Agent), and then only counted one of the two depending on how the game ended. I thought it was too swingy or "all-or-nothing" for my liking, but it does offer the benefit of a long range plan. I'm not entirely sure how this would jive with the story tracks, but I think it can work - maybe I'll try that again.

The more recent idea had to do with set collection - I didn't want to change the game at all, so I was looking for some way to reward stuff players already do if they plan ahead to do it. Since at the end of the game you can see which missions you've done (they're lined up in front of you on the table), it would be easy to give a bonus for some configuration of missions. The regular scoring rewards doing any mission, and the Story Tracks reward using the same character a lot, so I wouldn't want to reward, say, 3 missions by the same character. Nothing in the game rewards using a variety of characters... so my thought was to give a bonus for using each character at least once (with "any character" missions counting as wilds). The down side there is that you really only do 3 -5 missions per game, and there are 6 characters... I suppose there could be a reward for 3 different characters, and a bigger reward for 4 different, but that sounds a little weak to me, and as Jeff mentioned there's already a lot of functionality to the mission cards.

If anyone can think of a reasonable way to add long term planning to the game, please let me know - or if you think it's really not necessary, let me know that too.