Protospiel 2011

In 8 years of game design I've always wanted to go to Protospiel - a convention for people to play each other's prototypes and comment on them. Three whole days of design talk. It sounds perfect, but the timing was bad - always about a week after my annual 11 day trip to Seattle (something I was unwilling to skip). This year however, with Tasty Minstrel things going strong, I figured it was a bigger deal to finally make my way to Protospiel, so I cut my Seattle trip short and finally got a chance to attend.

And it was great! I met a lot of good people, played a lot of games, gave a lot of comments, and even managed to get everything I brought to the table at some point (some of it more than once!) - I received good comments on each game as well.

Here's a rundown of what I played or saw at the con:

Thursday 7/7/11
Andy Van Zandt's goblins-bombing-buildings game
The basic idea was that players control goblins that are intent on blowing up buildings with bombs. They run around clamoring over each other trying to light a bomb adjacent to a building, then retreat far enough to survive the blast, but they want to be closest to the blast in order to claim credit for setting the bomb (even if they didn't). Mechanically, there's a nifty card drawing mechanism that essentially allows players to draw the good cards played by their opponents. I like the general idea of the game, but currently the mechanisms don't really come through the way I'd like to see them. For example, you currently get credit for setting the bomb whether you blow up or not, which means it doesn't matter if you survive, and in fact you are probably better off NOT surviving to ensure you get the points. In my mind it makes more sense for all the goblins in the area to be fleeing the blast, and if you look back and see someone behind you, you cannot refute their claim that they set the bomb... if the actual bomber dies in the explosion, then they also cannot refute any claim... so I think you should want to be closest to the blast without dieing. I think that works better mechanically as well.

Also, the action point system is currently a little cumbersome for the type of game it is, with 15 action points to spend and things costing anywhere from 1 to 8... I think the system should be a lot simpler than that for this type of game. I do like what the card drawing mechanism was going for (playing a card makes it available for later players) - and I gave Andy an idea for another way that could go.


Friday 7/8/11
I played a submission to Minion games called Wizard's Ring. It was kind of like a simplistic version of Small World. I was not impressed.

I got a game of Exhibit in - that's the Bluff Auction game I've posted about. It went over well - one suggestion was to change the Art bonus to be 1vp per tile in the set. The reason behind this was that it seemed disappointing to get a set of Art, because at 3vp bonus per tile you might prefer to break that set up and score just 1 tile at a time, the set would have to have 7 tiles in it to outscore several 1-tile sets. I tried that in a later game, but I think it just double rewards a big set! I think maybe a better reward is just 2vp instead of 3, so you only need 4 tiles to break even, and it is worth getting a 5 or 6 tile Art set. That way in the early game you have to choose between a 1 tile Art set that scores like a 2 tile set (for dice) and a 1 tile weapon/tool set for an ability. That sounds good to me.

Thursday night I was explaining to some people what I didn't like about trick taking games, and my ideas for a trick taking game I might enjoy. Francois said he had a game that sounded like exactly the kind of thing I was describing. I got a chance to try King Leech on Friday, and I was kinda disappointed - not in the game itself... it's a fine trick taking game, I just don't like trick taking games, and this was no exception. It did not really address any of the things I dislike. I also thought it was a bit fiddly (lots of exceptions and special cases it seemed).

I got Scott Slomiany's My Little Vineyard to the table 3 times over the weekend, I'll discuss it more later. I also got in a game of Dice Works with Nicholas Vitek and Kevin Nunn... Seems to be working fine. I still want to try the Martian Dice version, as soon as I get my hands on some Martian Dice :)

Exhibit hit the table, and I got some good comments on that one which might address one of the few things I am still unhappy with for that game - there's something not quite right about the feeling you get when you are outbid by 1. On one hand, that's kind of the mechanism - and if you make a bid, you have to know that you could be outbid and you should be OK with that. But it still feels crappy, and you can't really be all that accurate in knowing the true value of each auction (especially with the purples being wild). If you have a weapon, then an overbid by 1 makes the other guy's bid automatically worthless, which in some ways I feel is OK, but in other ways I don't like it either. The suggestion that addresses this is to award 2nd place a tile as well, if there's one in the discard pile for that auction.

We also discussed the possibility of putting a "recommended" number of players on the box, in addition to the full range of players. For example, Exhibit works for 2-5 players, but is probably best with 3-4 players. Some thought this was a good idea, so that first time players don't load up a game with the maximum number of players (as people are wont to do) if that's not the best number... others thought that it was a bad idea, because people would say "why even call it a 5 player game" or whatever. It was an interesting discussion, and in the end I think my opinion is to leave things like "best for X players" to BGG.

Next we played Andy's post-apocalyptic card drafting game called In Ruins, which I played at Spielbany in April. I think the game is pretty solid, but I'd like it to be a 1-hour game, not 90 minutes (and not 2.5 hours for advanced game, though maybe 90 mins for advanced game would be OK). I'd like to play this again and see how I like it on repeat plays.

Dice Works hit the table again real quick before a game of My Little Vineyard, where it came up that sacrificing a book as if it were a die of that number could be a good way to insulate against rolling extra dice to ensure a desirable result and then not getting a desirable result after all. I ended up trying this change in a later game and liking it, but I think the books, as good as they are (especially with this change) definitely need to cost a pair of dice (making them harder to get).

A suggestion I got for this game (via email, after the con) was that the main issue with the game at present is that while it's a neat idea to agonize over whether to roll extra dice to ensure your action is available, in reality the actual cost of doing so is too high compared to the benefit of die-starving your opponents, so once the pool drains, players tend to just roll 1 die and then use it. Andy's suggestion was to add a potential for failure - for example, instead of "any 1 die," something could cost "any 1 die with value 3+." This would mean there's a risk of rolling a 1 or 2 when rolling just 1 die, meaning you get nothing.

Another suggestion from that same email was to force a player to 'call their shot' - to choose which action they want to go for BEFORE rolling their dice into the pool. This way they couldn't fall back on a simpler-cost backup plan. I'm not sure if I like this idea or not, but it might help fix the 'problem,' it might help encourage people to want to roll more dice than the minimum.

Another idea that has crossed my mind is this: why does each player have their own 10 dice to roll? Why isn't there just 1 big pool, and on your turn you roll dice from the pool? Each round could start with 4 or 5 dice rolled into the pool, and each player could then be simply forced to roll a minimum of 2 dice or something (rather than the current 4 dice on the first turn of a round, 1 die thereafter). There is something interesting about budgeting your own dice, but I'm not sure it's really all that different from not doing so.

Saturday 7/9/11
I played a card game by TMG fan Alan Gearding. It was really not my type of game, and it was evidently based on some silly role playing world or something. I didn't feel like I had a lot of choices - the main mechanism was something like Rummy... you draw a card every turn until you think you have a 'good enough' hand, then you attempt to "go out" - other players can (in fact, must) "sabotage" you by playing a card to potentially damage your hand's strength... you have to play a sabotage card even if you'd prefer not to, which didn't sit well with me.

There was a game being played that looked like just my type of game, and I discussed some aspects with the designer without having played... later I was able to play the game (called Industrialist), having benefited from the prior day's playtest and discussion. The discussion mainly focused on the turn order mechanism, which at first was borrowing from Brass' where the player who spends the least money goes first, etc. I love that mechanism in Brass, but in this game, which is a worker placement game where the money you spend does not really correlate to the actions you take or your performance in the game, I don't think it was appropriate. When I played the game that was replaced with a simpler method to determine turn order, but one which was still lacking because it essentially still depended on money spent to buy Businesses/Factories, which all cost about the same anyway. There was a worker placement space which allows you to take over 1st player, but that was only for buying businesses, and then turn order was reset - so taking that worker space almost never actually meant you get to go first. After our test, he updated the turn order again to remove any link to money spent, which I think is the right move.

Industrialist featured a mechanism in which players could place their workers on Factories to get goods (1 worker per Factory), or Businesses to sell them - but more than 1 worker could go on a business, and the number of times you can sell that Business' combination of resources in a turn is equal tot he total number of workers on the Business. So by going there together, 2 players could each do 2 sales. At first glance I thought that would be totally new and different, but after playing I wasn't all that impressed. It's a solid mechanism, and it works well enough, but it didn't grab my attention during play like I thought it would. It did it's job, so maybe I'm being too harsh on that mechanism here.

Maybe I just didn't like that it introduced negotiation into the game - people saying "don't go there this turn, wait until next turn and I'll go there too, and we'll sell more stuff" - and I just don't enjoy that kind of negotiation in games.

Fianlly we talked about the VP balance (vp/cube), which looked like it was a little out of whack on some cards, and we talked about changing up the factories / businesses a bit. I think the game was pretty solid, and I'd actually like to play it again sometime - but I think there are a few more adjustments that need to be made overall before I'd call it "done."

Ken (who I met at Spielbany) and his friend Quintin had a very cute kid's game called Dragon in D(u)ress. I thought it seemed like fun, but don't know if kids would like it or not, seeing as I'm not one, nor do I really ever talk to them about this sort of thing! We
talked about card balance, my opinion is that they should be fair, and that it doesn't matter if people notice that. When they are unfair, people feel screwed when they see someone else get something better than they get. With a more fair distribution of cards I thought the game was really cool, for a kid's game.

I then taught Eminent Domain (learning game) to Ken, Quintin, and 2 others. Someone asked why we were playing that game at protospiel, and I replied that #1, Ken and Quintin specifically asked for a demo, and #2, I wanted to test the Exotic expansion I'm working on, but I had to teach the game first!

After a dinner break, Ken, Quintin and I DID play 2 games with the expansion as well, and I got some comments out of them, such as maybe the translators work both ways (making the cards with Exotic translators more versatile). And Quintn would have liked more ways to use the Resources, like sacrificing them to do something. Maybe in a future expansion... I don't think that would fit into this one.

I played a game called Dice Workshop, by a BGDF member. Not a bad dice combo game, but I didn't feel like there was any real "hook." To me it felt similar to "To Court The King," another game I don't feel the itch to play. I might like it better if it had a stronger theme... the mechanics seemed solid enough. The card balance was way off, because of what I assume was faulty assumptions in the math done to balance them. he next day the designer came back with a re-balanced deck with better assumptions and I thought it was much improved balance-wise.

Another game of My Little Vineyard, this time trying some different rules:
* any 2 dice to produce wine (instead of any 1)
* sacrifice a book like a die of that value

After playing I thought I'd like to go back to producing with any 1 die, but make books cost a pair. I liked the Sacrificing a book thing, as discussed before, but I can't think of a good thematic reason for it. Gil noted that not being able to ship only 1 barrel from your cellar with a pair is annoying - that should be "up to 2" or something. Another idea for shipping barrels is to number the categories, and you pay any 1 die to ship a barrel of that category from your cellar (discount: 1-6, table: 2-6, cultured: 3-6, gold medal: 4-6, Premier: 5-6).

Note: I played with this rule last night, and the entire final round both my opponent and I simply spent 1 die at a time to ship all of the wine in our cellars. It was boring. I don't know if that was this mechanism's fault or not.

A suggestion came up that Barrels should ferment at different rates - maybe ferment 2/3/4 units at a time depending on barrel (Kentucky/Alliere/Limousine). The reason for this is to balance the power of the different barrels - currently for the same cost you get either 1 Limousine barrel or Alliere barrels, and a Limo barrel is NOT worth 2x an Alliere barrel! I like this idea, and think I will start working that in. I'd still like to try basing the market on the grapevine type (Merlot, Moscato...) rather than the wine category (Discount, Table...). I think that would be much more interesting.

I still also think fertilizer should be cheaper, maybe 3/2/2/1/1 tiles for any 2/any 2/pair/pair/triplet? Note: I tried this last night, it seemed OK, but I'm not sure there should be anything that costs "any 2 dice" - as I think that exacerbates "the problem"
The Fertilizer values could basically be 1/2/3/4/5, plus a little bit extra on the higher level wine (so like in Chardonnay, Fruit Compost is 1 point, maybe in Pinot it is worth 2... Mushrooms are 4/5/8 vp in Chardonnay/Moscata/Riesling. Etc)

And finally, I still think the VP per barrel should come from the category, not the actual value
that defines which category it is. Thus, adding Volcanic Ash does not simply add 2 points, rather it helps you get your barrel 2 steps closer to the next category for a VP bump. I also think that Fermenting should be a major way to get that bump.

Sunday 7/10/11
Francois described to me his game called Code of the West. The game was (coincidentally) thematically similar to another prototype I'd seen before called Spaghetti Western, but I think this game might be better. It was a worker placement game with simultaneous worker placement, and a sort of combat system for when there's a conflict. At each location you can choose to Protect it or Rob it - be a good guy or a bad guy (Spaghetti Western had the same type of thing).

The cards had poker symbols on them (like 4 of hearts, or Queen of Clubs) - I suggested he use that instead of the more complicated combat system he had... when there's a conflict, all players involved play their cards (which was already the case), and then the single highest poker hand is the winner of the conflict. This system actually fit right in and worked well with several other mechanisms already in the game, and it really sounded fun and interesting to me. It worked pretty much like this:

Each card has 1 or maybe 2 poker cards on it. Your personal character card has a Joker (wild). Cowboys have an A, K, Q, J, or 10 on them. During combat you play a hand of cards - 1 cowboy (could be your character), and at most: 1 gun, 1 hat, 1 horse(?), 1 boots, 1 buckle... a shotgun has maybe 2 cards on it (low pair or suited cards) compared to pistol which has 1 low card or rifle which has 1 middling card. Make best 5 card poker hand and compare, best hand wins. Each location has a Protect and a Rob action, and each is guarded by an NPC guard. Guard's hand is represented by the 5 cowboys in the display (another space allows you to draw from them which would replace some/all of them), so you know how strong the guard is when you choose to Rob or Protect. Fights only occur if there are players/NPCs on both sides, otherwise...
... Protectors get Protect action which maybe lets you draw cards into your hand for immediate use.
... Robbers get Rob action which is probably a little bit better - but requiring you to gain cards into your discard pile to use later (as opposed to immediately)
... Upon losing a fight, the Cowboy used goes to jail, other played cards are discarded to a personal discard pile.
... Upon winning a fight, you get the appropriate action, AND, as Protector, you score points based on opponents WANTED value (which is based on their score)
... Other than that, you score points by getting money onto stage or train and protecting it, or maybe robbing the stage or train I guess. Also there are animal cards which you can score with, so there's a sort of Rancher strategy (Horse that you can use to fight might count as an animal for Ranch strat - pairs of like animals in your deck at game end could be worth vp, but they choke up your deck during the game (no poker cards on them, except horses, which are lower vp value than cows and sheep)
... Various cards like equipment for combat and animals appear at General Store for purchase/stealing

I'm not sure simultaneous worker placement is the way to go. Maybe just worker placement rounds.

Francois had another game, one I played a few years ago at Gamestorm in Portland, called Catch of the Day. I's a sort of structured storytelling game where players program their movement in secret, then iteratively reveal which location they'rey visited at each hour of the day, attempting to claim scoring tokens for various types of things (fish, birds, bugs, beasts) - or thwarting other players' attempts to collect by either having been there first, or spying on them at the same time they claimed to collect the prize. "At 11am I was at the bridge,and I caught a fish the size of my arm!" "No way, I was by the old oak tree at 11, and I saw you at the bridge! You weren't fishing, you were taking a nap!" Stuff like that. When you interrupt the story like that, you take over control of the turn, and you go on from location to location (in order) until you are interrupted or until you get to a part of the story you've already told.

The game seemed to me to have more interruption than I remembered from last time. I think it would flow better with less interruption, like the "me too" type of interruption gets you a score, but not takes over the story... I think that would lead to more continuity of story.

What if being the on-turn guy was better than "following" such that you might not "me too" because you want to play that tile later for the "leader" benefit on your own turn..? Maybe you would do that anyway to spy on someone (if the score were poor for example). I'm not sure.

Gil Hova had a game a while back called Wag the Wolf, but he didn't like the way it was turning out, so he took the very clever, brutal auction mechanism from that game and is using it in another game called Prime Time. Having worked on a game about TV networks (my friend Mohan's 8/7 Central), I know how hard it is to make that theme work without being too tedious. I am happy to report that Gil has done a good job abstracting the theme so that it's not tedious. On the down side, it also doesn't feel as much like running a TV network, but it seemed to me like an appropriate level of abstraction. I thought the game was pretty good, but we all thought it needed some work. The auction was too brutal, the winner reaped reward on top of reward while the losers had to pay for the privilege of getting nothing. We thought the reward for winner of auction needed to be toned down, and that bailing from the auction should EARN you money, not COST you money. We also thought Stars sghould be a little more avaiulable, since you need them for getting better shows - though I wouldn't want them to be TOO prevalent. I would like to see a couple of them for sale as turn action, maybe stars not obtained by auction are available as an action? Though, that sort of negates the Underbid mechanism, so maybe not. Or maybe all bids and underbids get a director, and winner gets a free star as well? I may be reconsidering this comment (or, auction prices might be too high). I really liked the upgradable tracks for Income, Stars, and Viewer conversion (ability to change money into VP). We all thought the Star track could be a bit stronger.

I played a game that was made for one of the BGDF Game Design Showdowns called Nightshade VS Milkweed by Chip Beauvais. It was exactly the type of game I'd expect to see in a GAMES! magazine, and hopefully Chip will find a way to submit it to them.

I also played Chip's Protospiel contest entry, Mission Control - it didn't win the contest, but it made the final round of 4 games, and I hear it was a very close finish between Mission Control and the winner. Mission Control had a little bit of deck building, and what was referred to as 'map building' - turn by turn you create a little map of cards, and you move your pawn from card to card. For an almost-winner of a contest, I fond it kind of disappointing. You build a map, but you don't really traverse it, and you start over each time you get to the end of the path.

I played a sort of connection game called Lemuria by Dave Ross. I thought it was a pretty cool game, though it lacked a real hook to make me want to play it again. However in talking about it afterward I think I liked it more and more. We discussed some little things to make the game better: allow trading (since you can approximate it anyway), remove the yellow cards (their direct interaction is a little out of place in that type of game, and they ONLY hurt an opponent, never help you), maybe add vp to cards, so trading could be more of a strategic path.

I was happy to have gotten as many games to the table as I had over the weekend, but I still had one more I wanted to playtest - upcoming TMG release Kings of Air and Steam
. Luckily I was able to get that to the table Sunday night. A lot of good comments were generated from that playtest, even if in the end I'm not sure if the comments about multicolored factories will make the cut. I have always known that the boards need to be examined, and some of the comments gave me an idea about what to look for.

Since that test I have discussed some things with the designer and updated the prototype to go back to 6 rounds, and I think we've corrected something I wasn't entirely happy with - Depots. For the next test I'm going to try depots costing $4, $6, or $8 depending on whether it's the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd+ depot on a link, and at the end of the game Depots will be worth 10 points. The fee to use the depot will also go down to $1/cube to make the balance work, but I think the value of cubes on the market board will start at $4 (not $6) and go up from there.

In order to fix some other things and normalize supply and demand, we're going to try upping the demand of cities on the board to 5-dots, while new Demand tiles will average 3 dots each - and there will be 4 of them per color no matter how many players are in the game, meaning the prices for each color will only range up to $12.

I think that with Depots being worth points, those couple of passed actions at the end of the game will turn into useful things to do, and I liked how the 6 round game felt.

LATE Sunday night I played another of Andy's games called Broker. It was intended to be a trading game that works with only 2 players - because most trading games break down with 2. In Broker there are trade cards with 2 sets of resources pictured. You can initiate a trade by taking 1 card and putting up one of the sets of resources on it. An opponent can 'trade' you the other set of resources for that set, and if they don't then on a future turn you can choose to release that trade offer and score points. I thought it was a really cool game, though a bit thinky, and it suffers from the same sort of dynamic as Kill Doctor Lucky does - when someone threatens to win, the player before them is sort of expected to stop them, so everyone can be on the verge of winning, with their right hand neighbor stopping them until someone cannot stop the win. Also, consider a 3 player game where 1 player threatens to win, the next player also threatens to win, and the 3rd player cannot stop them both - a complete kingmaker condition.

Monday 7/11/11
On the way to the airport on Monday, Andy and I stopped for lunch and discussed some aspects of cooperative games. In the process I think we stumbled onto a coop game design that I formalized on the plane and have since made a prototype. I don't really think this game will be "the best coop game ever," it's more like an experiment in the genre. Hopefully I'll get a chance to test it out soon!

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.

Winds of Fate, revisited

Odysseus: Winds of Fate was originally to be about "betting" on whether Odysseus and his crew would make it safely to Ithaca or not, then trying to influence his voyage to the outcome you bet on. I have been unhappy with how my first draft of the game ended up representing that, while I liked some of the ideas, it just didn't come together right. As a result, it's sat un-played and un-thought about for well over a year now.

Recently I realized that I actually had much of the game prototyped, and that I should take the upcoming Protospiel opportunities to maybe try it out again. It might be easier than trying to get together copies of Hot and Fresh or Dynasty, which require more prototyping before they can be played at all.

Today I put a little thought into making the game more directly about betting on the outcome and then influencing the outcome, and I think I like what I came up with.

Originally there were going to be 2 types of 'coins' or scoring chits, and you would win them by "winning" an adventure - you'd get White ones if the adventure outcome was favorable for Odysseus and you'd get Blue ones if it was not. White and Blue represented Athena, who hopes to help Odysseus return home, and Poseidon, who hates Odysseus and wants to see him drown. Players would collect coins in these colors, and depending on the outcome of the game - Success or Failure - only 1 of the colors would score. Or maybe 1 color would score more than the other.

I liked this mechanic so much that I also tried it for All For One briefly - King points and Cardinal points, and the ones that counted depended on which pool ran out first. One problem with the mechanic in both games was that it seemed too "all or nothing" - you could put a lot of work into collecting blue points, and if the game end is White, your efforts turn out to have been worthless. No one liked that very much. Also, it didn't correctly reflect an investment in or betting on the outcome, so it was failing the initial design goal anyway.

The latest idea modifies these White and Blue coins a bit. Instead, there could be coins with Athena on one side and Poseidon on the other. When finishing an Adventure, players would "win" some number of these coins (depending on their performance), and of their reward they could bank a certain maximum amount toward a Successful outcome and a certain maximum amount toward a Failure outcome - basically investing in the game end. They could also withhold some of the coins to be spent during the game, presumably to influence the outcome. Ideally, if you thought the outcome would be Success, you'd always invest the maximum possible into "Success," and you'd withhold some or all of the coins you could have invested in "Failure" to spend trying to influence the game toward a successful outcome.

Originally, the game had cards, and you would play these cards to try and influence which of 2 paths the boat takes each round. Then you would play these cards to influence the outcome of the adventure, which would have an effect on the overall outcome of the game. Now I think the path choice will be based on a blind bid using these coins. I think players will also buy more cards with these coins. Then the card play could work as before (similar to card play in Taj Mahal), with the rewards being coins... more for the 'winner' and fewer for 2nd/3rd place, etc.

At the game end, players will score for all banked coins, where the coins invested in the 'correct' outcome will score a return of 1 coin for every 3 invested - in other words coins in the 'right' bank will be worth 1.33 points while coins banked toward the 'wrong' outcome will only be worth 1 point each.

I think this better represents an investment into the game outcome and then influencing the outcome. I also like the decision of whether to bank the coins for points, or keep them to buy more cards or influence the path of the boat and thereby the Fate of Odysseus.

I'd like to go through the Encounter tiles I made and modify the events that occur, and maybe the powers on the cards that exist. Some will have to be changed to work with this new structure - others could stand to be more fun or interesting. Hopefully I can get this done in the next couple of weeks so I can actually play the game at Protospiel West when i go to GameStorm at the end of the month!