General update

It's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I'd give a general update as to what's going on in the Gaming life of Seth Jaffee - to give my fans (both of them) something to read on a Thursday afternoon...

Vacation:
I just got back from an 11 day trip to Seattle in which I played a lot of frisbee, did some gaming, and hung out with a lot of friends. By way of summary...
Friends visited on my Seattle trip: Jeremy, Amelia, Emily, Aaron, Renee, Matthew, Jonah (my 13 month old nephew!), Mohan, Rif, Runjith, Chris Rao, Sean, Alex.

Games played on my Seattle trip: Magic: the Gathering, Eminent Domain, JAB: Realtime Boxing, Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, Ground Floor, Alea Iacta Est, Wizard's Tower, Fermat, Forbidden Island, Innovation, Tsuro, Train of Thought, Cyclades, Galaxy Tucker, and Alex's semi-coop prototype Witch's Coven.

People seemed to like Eminent Domain and Ground Floor, which is reassuring. I finally tried some of the new expansion stuff for Race for the Galaxy (prestige) which was not all that spectacular. The Warfare stuff never came up in our games, and I think it feels like more trouble than it's worth. I remember kinda liking Alea Iacta Est when I watched and played it at KublaCon 2009, but it seemed pretty bad this time. Fermat has been picked up by a publisher (not Tasty Minstrel, darn it!) and will come out this year under the name "Got It!" Forbidden Island is another cooperative game by the guy who made Pandemic - I'd heard good things, but nobody mentioned that it's EXACTLY LIKE Pandemic only easier! I don't think Pandemic needed to be easier, so I didn't like Forbidden Island at all. Innovation is "wild and crazy" - way moreso than Glory to Rome by the same designer. I LOVE Glory to Rome, but I don't think I love Innovation. Maybe just 2 player, after both players are super-familiar with all the cards it will become more strategic, but in the meantime it's very chaotic and somewhat silly as far as I'm concerned. Cyclades was a neat game and I love some the mechanisms at work, but the board play isn't really my type of game. I generally don't like war games much, though the war game part of this game is sort of minor. The fact that only 1 player per turn can attack (for the most part) is interesting, you could leave yourself undefended if you can expect to win the Ares auction next round... the game was cool, but the Pegasus card certainly seemed to be a game changer. I'm not sure how I feel about games in which you are forced to play around a particular card coming up, because what if it doesn't? Or what if it comes up at a bad time for you, even if you were prepared for it every other turn of the game?

Alex's prototype was interesting - I liked it a lot better than I thought I would. It's actually a worker placement game (I had thought it would be more like Battlestar Galactica for some reason) where you have 2 different types of workers - your Witch and your Familiar. The Witch actions are generally more powerful than the Familiar actions, and there are only 4 rounds in the game, meaning you get only 4 of each type of action! The goal is to collect the ingredients needed to create the Potion of Power, but the trick is that to win you must exclude at least 1 of the players from the Coven. The idea is to (a) make yourself indispensable, and then (b) try and make another player unnecessary. There's something odd about the endgame and forming that coalition of players who win, but it seems pretty solid. Alex said he'd send me files so I can print it out and try it around here.

Mohan also told me about an idea he's working on for a Solitaire game - a dungeon crawl based on the mechanics in typical solitaire games such as Spider Solitaire or Klondike. It was a pretty neat idea, and as he mentioned it would probably work even better as a digital game. We chatted about that for a while, and I also told him Jeremy's idea from last year about a World of Warcraft game - not about actually playing World of Warcraft, but rather about running a WoW guild, and dealing with all the drama involved.

Add some frisbee to that (including winning our pool at Potlatch) and it makes for a pretty sweet vacation!

Game designs:
I've been playing Eminent Domain a lot, and I'm pretty happy with it as-is. There are a few things I'd like to see though, one of which is more reports from the 30+ people who volunteered to print-and-play the game. Of all the people I gave access to the cards, I think I've only heard back from about 3 of them with any real playtest reports. In the future I think I'll try to set up a more organized process for getting access to a game for print-and-play, which will involve follow-up communication.

I have been thinking that I would like to add some Warfare cards to the supply to bring the number up to 18 or 20. I think that especially with 3 players, it's too easy for that stack to get burned through too quickly. There's something attractive about just having 20 of each card, but I don't know if that's the most economical thing. The only other thing I would like to work on is the tech abilities - especially the level 2 techs. There are some I really like and that I think are appropriately powerful, and there are others that never seem to be chosen. I want to make sure they are all potentially useful, even if not in every single circumstance. Ideally they'd all be situational. On the other hand, they're all worth 2vp, so once you get the tech or 2 that you really want, maybe you still want to research for the VPs, but I would like to make sure all the level 2 techs are useful and attractive. It's possible one or two of them are TOO powerful, but currently I haven't had a problem with that. Michael suggests that the "take 2 Role cards into hand" is too powerful, but I haven't seen it used in any way I don't like yet. I'd also like to have names for all the tech cards, but I don't know how easy that will be. In a separate post I might solicit names for the techs (Didn't I do that already?)

I haven't been working on any of my other designs, the most recent of which was Alter Ego. I would like to get back to that, and of course Winds of Fate, Dynasty, and Hot & Fresh... isn't that always the case?

Game development:
Belfort and Ground Floor are pretty much good to go. I am supposed to (and would like to) write up a Development Diary sort of thing for them, talking about the development process, maybe the specific things I did to change each of those games and why. This info will be published around the time of each game's release. Mike and I are working on developing a better process for internal stuff at Tasty Minstrel so that hopefully things will go more smoothly and we can be more efficient and put more programs into place!

Holiday season playtesting and gaming

I usually like this time of year because my friends are in from out of town. I end up playing a lot of games and having a lot of fun. Lately I've been playing a lot of games anyway, but I'm still really looking forward to seeing Luke and Mohan and any other friends who will be in town that I don't already know about. I'm hoping that especially with Mohan around I'll get a chance to playtest some prototypes - both Terra Prime, on which I'm told Loose Cannon should be making real progress starting next month (after the holidays), and on Winds of Fate, which I need to shape up to send to New York in January.

I'm sure there will be a lot of Battlestar Galactica as well. I'm liking that game a lot, and with the thoughts on Cooperative games being on the surface I'm returning to the ideas I've had now and again about making my own - trying to solve the problems I perceive with the genre.

I'll be sure to post about any playtesting that is done in the upcoming weeks...
Stay tuned!

Living in the past?

I actually haven't been living in the past for once - but in some respects I wish I were. In particular, I'd really like to revive and "finish" an old game design... well, I'd love to revive and finish several old game designs, but right this minute I'm thinking of one game in particular...

I've always been interested in game design, I just didn't always know it. The first game I really worked on with any kind of success was an idea by a friend of mine about competing television networks. The idea was sort of like Magic, where your TV shows are the creatures, facing off against each other each day (for a very loose description). Mohan had this idea for some time, and he told me about it one random Thursday when he was in town for the summer. At the time he didn't really have any plans on how the game would work, just an idea of the general scheme of the game. All weekend I could think of nothing else, and on Monday he was at my house again, I described in great detail how I thought the game could work. I'd dreamed up an entire game's worth of mechanics based largely on what he'd described to me the other day, and my experience with Magic.

The game was called 8/7 central, and Mohan and I worked on it all summer. It changed tremendously from one iteration to the next, and by the end of the summer we had a prototype of a game that certainly worked - though I think we both thought it could be better. Mohan went back to school, but I kept working on the game and corresponding with him about it. I posted about it on the Board Game Designers Forum - it was one of the first games in the Game Design Workshop over there.

After some time though, things sort of stopped. That was all several years ago now, and once or twice I stumbled across old cards and brought the design back to life, but those times were short lived, and he game has been relegated to the back burner ever since.

When I visited Mohan in Seattle last month, we mentioned the possibility of reviving 8/7 Central and thinking about "finishing" it and maybe trying to get it published. Since Jackson Pope at Reiver is looking for a card game or something cheap to produce, I got to thinking about 8/7 Central again... I suppose now is as good a time as any to revive the game. So I sent Jack a short description of the game, and if he thinks it's interesting then I'll be hitting up Mohan to think about the game again.

I just re-read the rules and remembered a significant change I thought of the last time I'd looked at it*. I remember being unhappy with certain rules**, but I'm sure with a little thought and some testing those can be ironed out in no time.

So watch for some posts about this, my first ever "real" game design prospect that I seem to have avoided posting about thus far...

* There is a deck of cards in the game that is 50% Ads and 50% Events/Modifiers. This can lead to getting a draw of too few or too many ads. The brilliant idea to fix that is to allow ANY card to be an Ad - just play it upside down. Then the deck doesn't have to have any regular ads in it - maybe just a few special or better ones.

** In particular the rules for moving programs, as well as perhaps the auction for programs, though I kind of like that, as it's a somewhat unusual auction mechanism.