2017 year in review

A lot of stuff has happened in 2017 in general, some of it good, much of it bad. In my own life, the good stuff includes getting married in March, and now expecting a little boy next May, so I guess that's big news. But as this is my game design blog, I suppose now would be a good time to take a moment and reflect on my experiences in 2017 on the games front.

I didn't keep specific notes or anything, so I'll just go through my calendar and blog posts and see what that reminds me of:

January

I started off the year wrapping up development on Eminent Domain: Oblivion, and coordinating art with Brian Patterson for the tech card illustrations and Ariel Seoane for the graphic design. A few people have grumbled online about how they don't like the look of the new tech illustrations, but as I have said in a couple of different threads already:

The main artists we had used for previous EmDo expansions were no longer available, and I wanted a consistent look within this set. Brian Patterson did all of the illustrations, and yes, he has a sort of cartoony style.

Many of the previous cards are a little bit cartoony, and there's a mix of styles from 5 or 6 different artists in them, so I don't think there will be much of a problem adding these new tech cards into the mix.

And as for the cartoony-ness of them, I kind of wanted that -- to an extent, Oblivion is a parody of government, and most of the time government could best be described as "cartoony."

I think Brian did a great job with these illustrations, I like that the expansion art is internally consistent, and I don't think there'll be any problems incorporating this set into the base game (or playing it with previous sets) based on that, but YMMV.

Also in January, Eminent Domain was featured in a Reddit forum called Game Of The Week, Redux. And I posted about a game idea sparked by an episode of The Game Designers of North Carolina podcast -- however, that game idea hasn't gone anywhere, and I don't expect it will. However, as I describe in the comments on that post, it did spark another game design idea which I think MAY actually go somewhere.

In addition, I was wrapping up rules edits for Harvest, and coordinating with Sergi on Pioneer Days art. I was pushing hard to get all three of those into production in time for a potential GenCon release, and failing that, at least an Essen/BGGcon release.

Outside of gaming, it looks like I flew to Dallas for a friend's divorce trial, a stark contrast to the time I spent on my own wedding preparations that month.

February

After January, I took stock of The List, a sort of compilation of games I've got at the idea stage, design stage, and published titles. I posted an update to kick off February.

Other posts in my design blog this month included:

• That game idea I mentioned above, which grew from the ideas that came to mind listening to that podcast.
• A sort-of formal definition of "Deck Learning," the term I've coined to describe Eminent Domain, which I feel is a significantly different type of deck building than games like Dominion, Ascension, etc.
• A request for Q's for a Casual Q&A, like those Reddit AMA's, but in a more laid back format. Only 1 person asked any questions in the comments.
• A summary of the beginnings of a new game about Joan of Arc, a design which I'd been tinkering with since Essen. It's intended to be a sort of sequel to Orleans, and spoilers: it did go somewhere, but now I've sort of backburnered it.

Not much else notable happened this month. It looks like I recorded a podcast episode with Isaac Shalev, though I don't think it aired until September.

March

I skipped SaltCon last year because it was 1 week before my wedding, which is a bummer, because that is a nice, relaxed convention which gives me a chance to hang out and catch up with my TMG cohorts. For the previous couple of years, Michelle came with me, we stayed at Michael's house, and we enjoyed the convention. I hope we can return in the future.

I think of March as the sort of deadline to get files to the printer in time for GenCon, so I furiously tried to finish Oblivion, Harvest, and Pioneer Days to give them their best shot at that.

I continued to think about that Worker Learning game idea, and had a "Eureka" / "Duh" moment about it, and I made a prototype for that Joan of Arc idea I'd posted about in February.

April

In April I had some promising playtests of the early versions of Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans, and I updated my prototype accordingly.

I also went to Paris on my honeymoon, and unfortunately got a bit sick there. I did however get my new wife to play a game of Joan of Arc with me at a game cafe though!

May

I kicked off May by joining Lance to record Episode #3 of the TMG podcast.

Blog posts this month included:

• Progress on the Worker Learning game idea
• Follow up on the Casual Q&A post from February -- I answered the Qs from the previous post, and got a few new ones from another individual that I answered in the comments.
• Some thoughts on Minion Games' Manhattan Project dice game design contest. I ended up entering a little Roll & Write / Roll Selection game, just for fun, but that's not the scope of game James was looking for.
• Further development of the Joan of Arc game, including a significant change to the format.

I finished up the month with a trip to Birmingham with Andy, Aaron, and Daniel for UK Games Expo - a neat show, only mildly disturbed due to some terrorist activity nearby the week before.

June

I began the convention season in England at UK Games Expo, and continued in Columbus at Origins, where Andy and I had a number of meetings with designers to listen to game pitches. Not much interested me there, though we did see 2 things which we ended up signing later in the year.

My own design efforts were focused mostly on Deities & Demigods, which I hadn't tested since January, but which I revived at UK Games Expo and concentrated on throughout June, with a little bit of Joan of Arc thrown in for good measure.

July

I spent the first 2 weeks of July vacationing in Dallas and then Seattle. I managed to play a few games... Werewords and Wordsy went well at Michelle's family reunion in Dallas, and I introduced some of my Seattle friends to a new favorite: Barenpark. I also showed off a full art prototype of Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done, which finally hit Kickstarter in July!

As could have been suspected, there was a slight backlash to the theme of Crusaders, but to be honest, it wasn't all that much. While the material holds potentially controversial subject matter, I think that game really sidesteps it -- it's not about the Crusades themselves, it's about the so-called "crusading orders," such as the Knights Templar. It's also not really intended to be historically accurate, though it is based on stuff the Templars did.

In July I updated The List again, since a lot had changed in the first half of 2017.

August

A lot of stuff seemed to happen in August...

• Crusaders finished funding with 4,162 backers pledging a total of $330,691 of support, mostly for the Deluxified version of the game. That's not TMG's BIGGEST kickstarter project, but it's close, and it makes the $48k we raised for Eminent Domain 6 years ago look like child's play.
• I worked with a sculptor on knight and building sculpts for the Deluxified version of Crusaders.
• I also worked with Ariel to get the art and graphic design for the upcoming Homesteaders expansion ready to go.
• I checked production proofs for Eminent Domain: Oblivion, and found (and corrected) an error with the card backs.
• And of course, I attended GenCon with TMG, where Andy and I met with a bunch more designers to listen to their game pitches, and attended 2 nights worth of Publisher Speed Dating.

Most of the Publisher Speed Dating events I've attended have been a bit of a bust for me. Out of 400+ pitches, I'd only been interested in a few games, and of those, even fewer turned into TMG products. This year at GenCon, the signal to noise ratio seemed a lot higher for some reason -- just lucky I guess. There were several games I was interested in, and upon closer examination we took several of them home with us, and ended up signing more than one!

In addition to all of that, I started a new game design (Automatown rules), I revived an old game design (Alter Ego) and enlisted a design hobbyist to do some blind PnP testing of it, I re-posted some nuggets of design wisdom from Matthew Dunstan (with his permission) from a Twitter thread, and I revisited the Casual Q&A idea again.

September

September was similarly busy. This month I...

• Submitted my Roll & Write / Roll Selection game to the Manhattan project dice game contest
• Formalized a regular weekly playtesting group and set up a google sheet to track games played
• Evaluated the various games picked up this convention season
• Continued playing Alter Ego, Deities & Demigods
• Revived the Eminent Domain dice game I made a long time ago, but hadn't touched for four years
• Revisited Casual Q&A one more time

The big ticket item here is probably getting more organized with playtesting. I have been meaning to do that forever, and now I can much more easily track what gets played and when, and by whom.

I ended September by attending RinCon (Brian had a great geeklist from RinCon this year, and I didn't so I'll just link his), for once as an attendee rather than an organizer. I took on the responsibility of running the convention because I wanted it to happen, and it was very relaxing to finally just sit around and play games rather than answer questions and put out fires. Unfortunately, this reward was short lived, because I had to fly to California for a wedding on Saturday morning, so I was only able to enjoy RinCon for 1 day.

October

By comparison to the last couple of months, October sounds fairly uneventful:

I skipped Essen this year -- TMG usually sends 4 people, and this year we had a booth, and so wanted to send someone new to help run it, so I stayed home to make space. It's too bad, because two of the games I put a lot of work into, Harvest and Pioneer Days, made their debut at Essen. I hope to return in the future.

Instead of flying to Germany, I finally started updating Terra Prime for a new life as a prequel to Eminent Domain (it will be called Eminent Domain Origins), and I kept working on the Eminent Domain dice game ("Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory"?). I worked almost exclusively on those two games in the month of October.

November

November was a big month for conventions for me. I kicked it off with a trip to Seattle for Sasquatch, and followed that up with my annual trip to Dallas for BGGcon. Michelle came with me to both of those this year, and we took a day trip from BGGcon to Rockwall for Michelle's 3 year old niece's birthday party.

I wrote a post examining variable player powers, since I'm currently working on adding them to two different TMG games, and I started testing those, while continuing to test Eminent Domain Origins and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory.

I had another new game idea as well, but this one is not as exciting or interesting as some, so it'll probably just sit in the toolbox, waiting to be combined with something else down the road.

December

I rounded out the year playing a lot fewer games than I normally do, but I did get a lot of testing done of the upcoming TMG game Embark (one of the summer pick ups) with player powers, and I worked with an illustrator and a graphic designer to get that game put together for submission to the manufacturer. I'll be wrapping that up in the next couple of weeks.

2018

I'm starting off the new year with 1 game project finishing art, two more about to start, two games in production, and two just waiting to be sent to the manufacturer. If things go well, I should see all of the following games (each of which I've had a heavy hand in) on store shelves by the end of the year:

• Eminent Domain: Oblivion
• Crusaders: Thy Will be Done
• Homesteaders 10th Anniversary Edition (by Alex Rockwell)
• Homesteaders: New Beginning (expansion, by Sean McCarthy)
• Eminent Domain Origins (Terra Prime 2nd Edition)
• Embark (in the Gullsbottom universe, by Philip duBarry)
• Old West Empresario (by Stan Kordonskiy, presented as a sequel to Pioneer Days)
• And maybe even Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory.

As for my designs, once these are all out of the way, I hope to return to Alter Ego, Deities & Demigods, Joan of Arc, and maybe Automatown.

And of course, I'll be doing development on another couple of TMG games.

Run a game at RinCon

As you may (or may not) know, I am sort of in charge of RinCon, a local gaming convention here in Tucson, AZ.

RinCon is a 3 day convention held in October, a small, cozy con with all kinds of gaming available - open boardgaming, RPGs, minis games, CCGs, you name it. We have a great library run by our friends at Pulp Gamer, rolling raffles all weekend long, a schedule full of events, a ton of special guests, and plenty of open gaming as well.

We hold 3 fundraiser events each year leading up to the convention in October, and the 3rd fundraiser for 2015 is this weekend - Saturday, from 10am to 10pm. We're going to try and have a poker tournament (if enough people are interested).

At the event this weekend, pre-registration will open for the main RinCon event. In fact, if you pre-reg for RinCon at the fundraiser, you'll save $5 off your ticket! That's like getting into the fundraiser for free!

Speaking of discounts and free admissions, if you run games at RinCon then you can get a discount on you badge. Here's how that works:

Go to http://rincongames.com/games/run-a-game and enter the games that you would like to run. After you submit each game, you should receive the details from your submission. If you need to make any corrections, please email Tony at tcewing@gmail.com

If you run 16 hours of games that are submitted by August 1st, you will be able to register for RinCon for FREE. (8 hours is 50% off, etc.)

After you sign up to run your games, send Tony an email and he will manually create a coupon code for you to enter on our registration site.

The registration site will be open starting on July 18th at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rincon-2015-tickets-17741372924.

So spread the word! Come to this weekend's fundraiser event if you can, and make sure to schedule time for the main event, October 2-4, at the Clarion Hotel and Convention Center! It's really fun, I swear!

Rincon T-Shirts!

We've got a great artist who does our Rincon art for us, and I'm always getting compliments on our images. I have made some shirts for myself with these images on them, and people have said I should sell them at the convention, or that they'd love to buy one of those shirts.

Well, this year I'm giving people a chance to put their money where mouths are! We've got 2 fantastic illustrations for this years con, and a favorite image from last year as well. I can't afford to pre-print a bunch of various sizes, and I don't want to take a pile of shirts home with me after the fact, so they're only available as a pre-order. You can get as many as you like by ordering them from the Rincongames web store for pick up at the Registration desk at Rincon.

The T-Shirt mockups are small, so here are the images in their full glory so you can check them out:

First, our program cover for 2014 - a car chase scene featuring Our Hero, Leading Lady, and no fewer than 11 game references:

The other image from Rincon 2014 is the basis for our con game - The Case of the Maltese Meeple. 4 master thieves each attempted to steal the famous Maltese Meeple from the museum, but only 1 succeeded. Our Hero and Leading Lady have gone undercover at the thieves' game night to try and figure out whodunnit. Rincon attendees will help them solve the case!

That one's available with and without the Rincon logo.

Finally, we have last year's Indiana Jones parody from the Quest for the Golden Meeple (also available with or without the Rincon logo):

They look pretty good, right? I have one of each of these, and I love them! I wear them all the time. If you would like any of these for yourself, now's the time! Check out the Rincongames web store, get your orders in, and game in style come October 10th!

Rincon Fundraiser a big success!

Last Saturday we hosted a fundraising game day for Rincon. I was a little worried that not many people would show up, and that we wouldn't end up making much (if any) money... but I guess that's just typical me - I'm kind of a pessimist. I'm happy to report that in fact, 70 people came to our event, some from Tucson, some from Phoenix, and some from Sierra Vista. And from what I could tell, everyone had a really good time!

18 of those people played in the poker tournament, expertly run by Jeff Becker. Karl Davis came out on top after a hard fought, back and forth heads up battle with Russel Knox. Karl won a hotel room for the weekend of Rincon, while 2nd and 3rd place (Russel and Brenda Lundt) walked away with free passes to the convention.

We also had several prize drawings, sponsored by games donated by myself, Brian Poe, and Patrick Nickell of crash Games.

That day happened to be National Tabletop Day, and at least a couple of people found out about our event through the Geek and Sundry TabletopDay website. The event was bustling from 10am to 10pm, and everyone seemed to have a great time! We managed to raise significant funds for Rincon, and by any account I think it's fair to say the Game Day was a resounding success! It was so great, we're planning another similar event for June!

Thanks to everyone who came by and supported Rincon and SAGA!

Orccon bound!

By this time tomorrow afternoon I'll be in (hopefully) sunny California. Well, at the very least I'll be at a hotel next to LAX, settling in for a weekend of gaming at Strategicon's annual Orccon event.

I'm looking forward to a great weekend. Here's what I'm bringing with me:

GAME PROTOTYPES - Find me to play!
* Eminent Domain: Escalation
* Eminent Domain: Exotica
* Captains of Industry
* Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages

 ACCESSORIES
* Eminent Domain Playmats - I would love to sell a couple of these, or potentially trade for a game or two.

PROMOTIONAL STUFF
* Ground Floor Short Guides - I'll have a handful of these to hand out. Find me if you'd like one.
* Rincon 2013 Flyers and Business Cards
* Rincon 2013 Exhibitor Packets - to hand out in the Vendor room.

It has been a while since I've really participated in any tournaments at the Strategicon events, and that's one of their stronger features. So maybe this time I'll try to get into more of the tournaments, see if I can't earn some Dealer Dollars and go home with a free or discounted game.

Are you going to Orccon this weekend? Leave a comment below and let's get together for some gaming, or a trip to lunch or dinner!

Rincon 2013 - planning and a Fundraiser

Last year I hosted a game convention here in Tucson, and it was a resounding success!

This year we have a much better idea what to expect, and have started planning much earlier. We hope to make Rincon13 bigger and better than last year. We've got the same venue booked, the event will occur Friday through Sunday, October 4-6, 2013 at Holiday Inn and Suites Tucson Airport. Watch Rincongames.com for details!

In an effort to make Rincon bigger and better, we're going to hold a couple of Fundraising events, the first of which is coming up Saturday, March 30th. It's a Game Day and Poker Tournament, and I think it'll be a lot of fun. Here are the details:

Rincon Fundraising Game Day and Poker Tournament

Saturday, March 30, 2013
Barcelona Room, Holiday Inn and Suites Tucson Airport.

Game Day - 10am - 5pm

Come and enjoy 7 hours of gaming. Borrow a game from our library or bring your own. Learn a new game, or play an old favorite that's hard to get to the table. Participants also receive a Rincoin, which will be good for prize drawings at Rincon. All this for a mere $5 donation to Rincon.

Poker Tournament - 6pm - 10pm

Try your luck at No Limit Texas Hold'Em in this tournament run by Jeff Becker. A $25 donation to Rincon will buy you in with 3000 chips (donations from the game day count toward this, and an optional $10 add-on gets you 2000 more chips). Will you survive to final table to vie for the Grand Prize: 2 passes to Rincon and a hotel room for the weekend? There will be additional prizes (passes to Rincon) based on attendance, and all participants will receive Rincoins as they survive in the tournament.

So save the date - I'm looking forward to seeing you there!

Super busy + not feeling well = unfortunate combination!

When I started this blog post on Monday I was feeling feverish - my fingers were numb and I was shivering despite it being almost 80 degrees in here. I spent about 4 hours feeling this way, but then made a more-or-less miraculous recovery! I'm so relieved I didn't get sick (or, that I got better right away)!

We're inside 2 weeks from RinCon! That's both very exciting, and very hectic. I feel like there's so much to do, and everything feels like it's behind schedule - but at the same time I feel like it will all get done, and the convention will be awesome! I'm learning a lot about what I'll want to do differently for next year - making plans for that already.

In addition to RinCon planning, I've been finalizing the rules for my Eminent Domain expansion: Escalation as the illustrations for tech cards roll in. I believe we're down to the last two! [EDIT: We've got them all now!] Then the whole shebang gets sent to the excellent Graphic Designer Gavan Brown who worked wonders with the base game. I haven't heard if the cover will be done by him again, or if we're going to get an illustration done this time.

On top of that, the final pages of the Kings of Air and Steam rulebook have been popping up like wildflowers, and approvals have been fast and furious. As usual Josh has really hit this one out of the park... again! Perhaps Kickstarters will get a peek at a rules spread in an upcoming update. The rest of the graphics look as good if not better than the rulebook - with my favorite being one of the player board images - but I'll keep that to myself for now - you can place your wagers when they become public as to which one is my favorite (hint: they're all fantastic, but there are 2 I like best, the "favorite" wins by a nose, so to speak).


In case you haven't heard, the big news is that Michael and I are headed to Essen next month! TMG will not have a booth, but you can find TMG titles Ground Floor, Belfort, Eminent Domain, and Martian Dice at booth 4-230 (LocWorks). I will be in the LocWorks booth signing copies of Eminent Domain for a couple of hours each day, so if you are at the show (especially if I have any European readers who I may not otherwise meet in person), please come on by and say hello! It would make my day to hear that my humble blog is being read on the far side of the world :) I'll try to post more information (such as, I don't know, some kind of schedule maybe?) as it comes to light.

In actual gaming news, I finally got a chance to play the copy of Trajan that I picked up at GenCon. I think I like the game, but I do find something about the Rondel mechanism to be overwrought... I think I might like it better for example if instead of 6 colors, the action tokens were monochrome, and instead of a particular combination of colors, the Trajan tiles simply had a number on them, and you scored them by landing in that action bin and having exactly that number of tokens. Trying to plan ahead which color you'll want where is largely impossible, and introduces my least favorite dynamic to the game - analysis paralysis due to simply not knowing which of 2 choices could possibly be better (and trying to find some reason to pick one over the other).

Playing Trajan mostly made me want to revisit my own game idea using a "Rond-cala" mechanism... For those just tuning in (and for those who read my blog all the time, since it's been a while since I talked about this), here's how my idea came about:

When I first read some teaser information about Trajan, I only heard that it used the Mancala mechanism to distribute markers around a Rondel. I thought that idea was brilliant, and made some assumptions on how that must work. My guess was that on your turn you would choose an action to do, resolve that action based on the number of action tokens in that space on the Rondel, then distribute those tokens around the Rondel a-la Mancala. This sounded fantastic, as each action would sort of grow in power until you take it, then it would revert back to zero, and you'd have to build it back up again or settle for it being weaker the next time you take it. I was really excited about this idea, and waited with baited breath for Trajan to come out... only to find that I'd guessed wrong! Trajan did not work the way I thought it might, instead that game has you choose a bin, distribute the tokens around the Rondel, and then perform the action associated with the last bin you land on.

Trajan's mechanism is also interesting, but as I mentioned above, I find it annoyingly difficult to plan ahead, and a small mistake seems to not just set you back, but force you to drop all of your plans and start again (because all the bins have the wrong number of tokens now, meaning all of your available actions are different than you may have expected). I think my guess would make for an entirely different mechanical experience, one well worth pursuing. Playing Trajan has encouraged me to start thinking about this again, and so I brought my 1/2 prototype (more like 80%) to Monday's Gamesmiths meeting where I described it to a few people and got some feedback from them. One of these days I'd like to actually play the game and see what needs fixing! My next blog post will likely be new and ongoing thoughts about that game (the title of which I'm now leaning towards Templar).

Gen Con bound

In about 5 4 hours Mike and I head up to Phoenix to fly out to Indiana for Gen Con! Last year was an interesting experience... this year we will be camped out in the Game Salute booth along with a few other small publishers. As far as I can tell we'll be spending the week demoing and selling Village, Belfort, and Eminent Domain. I've also done something I've been meaning to do for several years - I've had play mats made!

I got a phone call this morning from Larry Fettinger, who we're staying with in Indiana, letting me know that the mats arrived safe and sound. he opened them up to take a look, and he tells me the quality is phenomenal. I'm excited to see them and play on them tomorrow!

I'll be bringing the following stuff to gen Con with me...

• Eminent Domain: Escalation prototypes (x2)
• Captains of Industry prototype
• Ground Floor prototype
• Kings of Air and Steam prototype
• Exhibit Prototype

After all that I ran out of space in my bag!

I'm also bringing some flyers and Exhibitor Info packets for RinCon to see if I can drum up some business for that. I don't think I've posted the flyer I'd made here, so behold:

Swing by booth 1033 to check out (maybe purchase!) Village, or the EmDo playmats, or whatever other TMG stuff we have. After vendor hours I'll be happy to demo any of the prototypes I am bringing as well!

KublaCon 2012 - Here I come!

I stayed up all night preparing a full art prototype copy of Ground Floor to bring with me to KublaCon today. If you're going to be at the convention and you would like to try out the game before deciding to pledge for a copy, find me and we'll make it happen!

I'm also bring my prototypes for the following upcoming TMG games:
* Belfort : the Expansion Expansion
* Eminent Domain: Escalation
* Kings of Air and Steam
* Titans of Industry - NOT Titans of Industry! I guess we need a new title for this one :(
* Alter Ego

As well as a couple old standbys that may or may not be upcoming TMG releases (at the moment they are not officially "on the list," but they may be soon):
* Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages
* Dice Works
* Wizard's Tower

I've been known to bring more than this in the past, but this is it this time. Unless you count Brain Freeze on my iPad :)

I posted a geeklist of stuff I might like to play, but it's pretty half-hearted this time, including mostly those prototypes I am bringing. I just want to hang out with people and play something fun, I don't even know what. I would like to play Trajan though. And of course I intend to show Ground Floor to people and encourage them to pledge on Kickstarter. David and I even made business cards with a URL and a QR code leading to the KS page for Ground Floor - they look awesome!

I'll also be promoting RinCon while I'm there - which really just means mentioning it, and potentially handing out some flyers we made.

T-minus 6 hours and counting!

RinCon 2010 recap

As has been mentioned, last weekend was RinCon 2010 - "Arizona's Gaming Mecca." RinCon started 3 years ago, and about doubled in size last year, but it seemed to me like the main thrust of the con, or the largest demographic of attendee anyway, was the Role Playing crowd. Most of the special guests were RPG authors and things of that nature. There were LARPs and RPGs left and right, people dressed up like gypsies, etc. By contrast, the board gaming seemed pretty weak. Nobody was really in charge of the board games, there were some events that people had signed themselves up to run, but there wasn't really any organization at all. Games were played, but overall it was unspectacular, and many people I talked to thought it would have been a lot more cost effective to stay home and play games with their buddies.

This year I volunteered to be in charge of board games. I ended up taking on a lot more responsibility than I'd expected or wanted to, and while I was supposed to have a runner or someone to help out, I really was on my own the entire weekend. The bad news is that I didn't get to play as many games or participate in all the events I wanted to, but the good news is that as a result the entire board game portion of RinCon was much improved this year! At first I was worried because some of the scheduled games weren't happening because no one showed up, or because there wasn't someone to run them. I may have been overly concerned because 2pm on a Friday is pretty slow at any convention. I set my concerns aside when one of the convention organizers mentioned, in a sort of surprised and impressed way, that a whole lot of board game events were happening.

A lot of events and tournaments went down, and the board game section was fairly full pretty much all the time. There were even some interesting events like a Space Alert tournament (3 teams of 5 playing off of the same audio CD at the same time), and a Duplicate Pandemic event, where 2 teams of 2 players went head to head trying to save the world with a pre-stacked and matching Draw deck and Infection deck.

Some of the things I was really interested in were the Game Design Events I'd dreamed up and planned. I'm happy to report hat all three types of Game Design events were a smashing success! I didn't get to participate in the Gamesmiths sessions like I'd hoped to, because I had to man the Boardgame booth and make sure events were running. However I did manage to get into the Friday session and get Winds of Fate tested. I saw a ton of people participating though, and a large number of games being tested - more than we had signed up. I put David in charge of those sessions and he said they all went really well.

The Pitch your Prototype event was also successful I think, even if only 2 people were there to do it. Myself, Mike Nickoloff (of Sorvent, a sort of game agent), and James Ernest sat on a panel and listened to the pitches for no more than 5 minutes, then gave feedback and advice to help them improve their pitch for when they are actually going to talk to a publisher. One guy had never pitched his game before, but was interested in doing just that - I think we had some good advice for him as to what to say and how much detail to go into. The other guy had a much more succinct pitch, but I think we still had some useful advice for him too.

Finally there was the Game Design Workshop - and I wasn't sure exactly how that would go over. I was a little late to it because Mikey talked me into a game of Eminent Domain, and when I got there, James Ernest and a WHOLE BUNCH of people were sitting around already talking about how you go about designing a game! We talked a little about the process, and afterwards I gave people a "game design kit" with a variety of bits in it - meeples, cubes, discs, roads, index cards, pens, poster board, paper money... the idea was for them to play around with these bits and see what kind of game design they start to come up with. We had a follow-up meeting on Sunday where we talked a little more about game and mechanism design, then 4 people who had come up with a game design shared it with the group and we talked about each one for 15-20 minutes. I was impressed at some of the stuff people came up with - a few really solid starts. One group used every single piece in the bag (and no more), and even playtested their game a few times and made some revisions! The game looked pretty solid as well! Here's a breakdown of the 4 game ideas people came up with:

2 of them were based on the idea of Dinosaur Island - which was sort of the example we came up with as a group in the first session. The intent of the exercise wasn't really to design a Dinosaur Island game, but it worked out anyway. One of the Dino Island games was a roll and move, see what happens sort of affair. the other was a face paced hidden identity thing where you try and move your colored meeples off the island, or move Dinosaurs onto other colored meeples in order to eat them.

The third game was amusingly entitled "The best 4-12 years of your life" and was about the despair and frustration of scheduling college classes. There were 20 classes offered in total, on cards that were shuffled and placed into a schedule for the semester. Each player would choose classes in 4 of the 5 time blocks each round, and it was more difficult to get into classes when someone was already in there. Each higher level class had prerequisites of course, and you would have to take them in order. The player who took all of the appropriate classes first would graduate and win the game. I really liked the sound of this game idea, and could think of lots of different ways to approach it.

Finally, a father-son team made a game about couriers in perhaps Venice - there was a grid of rivers on the board, and players could use Bridges and Ferries to help them move around to pick up items which are in demand and deliver them. It seemed like a really solid game already!

This event went better than I'd hoped it would, and seemed to be very well liked all around! I was very pleased with all of the game design events at the con.

I also got to hang out with James Ernest a bit, which was fun. I did not however get into one of his demos of Lord$ of Vega$ which according to Tom Vasel is the best game of the year. I had been super excited about trying it ever since seeing a demo at Kublacon, and on Saturday night I finally played a game with Thomas and one of the Pulp Gamer guys. Sadly, for the length of the game and value of the decisions in it, I really thought you didn't have enough information to make informed decisions. in short, I can't argue too hard against people who complain of luck in the game. It's not ALL luck, but I do feel like there's too much luck of the draw for the length of the game and the depth it appears to be trying for. Or maybe the depth I was hoping it would be going for.

I think I may have given James the idea that in my mind, games have a specific definition, and that's the narrow scope of games that I like. I do recognize that games like Killer Bunnies and Flux exist, and that people play them to have fun and not to win - I'm just not interested in playing or designing those types of games. In fact, I do kind of think of those as more like a 'fun activity' than a 'game' - in my mind part of the definition of a game is that you can win, and the social contract involved in playing a game is that you're trying to win. I'm not saying that people should try to win rather than try to have fun - I don't think those should be mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I think they should be mutually INclusive - a game SHOULD be fun, or people won't want to play it, and a game should be played to win, by definition.

In any case, James recommended to me a book called Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. I haven't read the book in full, but that preview I just linked gave me a pretty good idea of what it's about - breaking down the common, narrow "definition" of what a "comic book" is and understanding how much more extensive the medium can be. It seems really interesting and neat and I might just pick up a copy and read it in full. Thanks for the referral, James! (I wonder if he ever reads this blog)

A little love for Terra Prime :)

At RinCon last weekend, a member of the RTEAM Gamers (Bill Andel) ran a game of Terra Prime. I walked by during the game and people seemed to be enjoying it, and afterward I described the expansion for them, and explained how I'd like for that to be published but until more copies of the game sell we can't justify it. they all seemed to like the expansion ideas as well.

I had noticed that Game Daze had a copy of Terra Prime in their booth, as did another vendor who'd come in from L.A. On Sunday I noticed that both of those vendors had sold their copy! One of the guys who was in Bill's game bought the copy from the L.A. guy, who mentioned that I'd sign it if he wanted, so he came and found me and asked for my autograph on the game. He also gave me the best compliment I could have gotten - I forget the words he used. but the general gist was "thanks for making this great game, it's the most fun I've had in a long time!" I later found out that a third copy also sold - one of the other players in that game had gone home and ordered the game online.

So overall, a good convention for Terra Prime! Thanks to Bill for running that game, and for all the players for having a good time and supporting Tasty Minstrel by picking up copies of the game!

The Pros of Cons

Last week I attended Strategicon's Labor Day offering, a convention called Gateway. It was so much fun I already bought plane tickets to L.A. and registered for February's installment of OrcCon!

Speaking of conventions, I am in charge of board gaming at RinCon 2010, right here in Tucson, AZ! I've got a lot of great events lined up for the board game section, and there will also be plenty of RPGs, LARPs, Minis, CCGs, and even video gaming going on. I'll be spending my time in the Board Game area though, making sure everything runs smoothly, and trying to get some gaming in myself.

If you would like to run any games at RinCon, PLEASE EMAIL ME (or leave a comment here)! I have plenty of events that need running and time slots to fill! I've got 4 types of events on the schedule:

Scheduled Games: One-off games being run by someone who can teach the game. Sign up, show up, learn the game and give it a try!

Demos: A special case of Scheduled Games is a Demo of a new or upcoming game such as Mayfair's new Lords of Vegas to be demo'ed by Special Guest James Ernest, and Tasty Minstrel's upcoming Belfort, being demoed by none other than myself, Seth Jaffee.

Tournaments: A more competitive format, where the winners of the first round advance, and the winner of the tournament gets a prize! Prizes will be RinCoins, good for discounts in the prize booth and at the vendor booths, as well as ribbons for notoriety.

Game Design Events: Being as interested in game design as I am, it only makes sense that I try to promote Game Design events at a con where I'm in charge of board games! I've got 3 different Design Events on the schedule, and I have high hopes for each one.

* Gamesmiths Prototype Testing: Designers play each others' games and offer feedback.
* Practice Your Pitch: Pitch your game to a panel and receive feedback on how to improve the pitch itself (not the game). This is important for any designer who wants to pitch their game to a publisher.
* Game Design Seminar/Workshop: On Saturday night a panel of professional game designers will begin by discussing some of their creative methods, how they go about designing a game or developing it once they have an initial design. After a Question and Answer period, interested participants will receive a Game Design Kit with some general Euro-game bits in it (meeples, dice, cubes, roads, discs, sharpies, cardboard, scissors, etc). They can think about that and play with the bits over the weekend, then on Sunday's Workshop they can present what they've come up with so far to the panel and each other and get feedback on that.

I think all three of these events would be interesting and fun for an aspiring designer, and I hope that members of nearby thriving design communities make the trek to Tucson October 8-10 for RinCon, I think they could get a lot out of these events! So if you're nearby (a cheap plane flight away), you should really consider coming to RinCon - the convention is cheap, Tucson is cheap, and I think you'll find a lot of benefit from attending this particular convention.

Ides of March

SAGA's Ides of Gaming event occurred on March 15th this month, the Ides of March. It was also the 1st anniversary of the event, so it was 12 hours long, had scheduled stuff, and was also the official announcement of RinCon, a full gaming convention which the group will be putting on over Halloween this year.

As a side note, the convention sounds pretty cool, and it's only $20 to pre-register. Check out RinConGames.com for more info.

I had a good time, and got a lot of games in. Here's what I played:

Pandemic
I'd been under the impression that Pandemic is a neat attempt at a cooperative game, but it suffers from some of the same shortcomings of all cooperative games. Namely that it's solitaire. Jim Cote wrote up a nice post on Pandemic, and my comment on that post says a lot of what I had thought of the game after 2 or 3 plays.

Until yesterday I hadn't really lost the game. Since it had seemed easy, we decided to play in "Heroic" mode, which means using 6 Epidemic cards instead of 5, making the game harder. What I didn't realize is that the game also gets harder the more people you play with. So when we played 4-player in Heroic mode, we got thoroughly squashed by the game twice in a row. Then we decided to step it back to Normal mode (5 Epidemic cards). With 4 players in Normal mode we lost twice when we would win the very next turn. Later we tried one more time, determined to win a game... we played with 3 players on Normal mode, and not only did we win, but it felt like a foregone conclusion.

My new position on this game is that the discrete difficulty levels are kinda weird. It appears that there's a significant jump in difficulty going from 3 players to 4, and of course there's a big jump going from Normal to Heroic. 4 player Heroic seems neigh impossible, while 3 player Normal seems too easy. many 4 player games on Normal appear to be lost on the last turn, which seems likely the best outcome (intense, but maybe winnable). I'd like to try 3 player Heroic to see how that goes.

I'm a little unsettled by something which I suspect is true (and which I hear has been mentioned on BGG) - that there's a certain percentage of games which, based on the order of the cards in the deck, are simply unwinnable no matter what the players do. This wouldn't be a problem if the percentage were low, but I get the impression that the number is likely pretty high with 4 players. I'd be curious to know what that value is for 4 players on Normal, and if it's "too high" (I'm not sure where I'd draw the line) I'd probably not want to play with 4 players anymore.

In the Year of the Dragon
I played another game of ItYotD, and I continue to really enjoy the game. This time I started out with a first turn Double Dragon, a play which people on the internet appear to think is the obvious first play, and is likely unbeatable. I do not agree with them, but it seemed like a good play to make anyway, so I did it. Tyler on the other hand started with a Court Lady and a Craftsman. He struggled some in the midgame while I did pretty well, so I thought I would end up beating him. In the end though I had struggled with space constraints and had to fire some people, and Tyler ended up winning by 5 points. There's some more evidence that the Double Dragon is not unbeatable!

Race for the Galaxy
I played 4 games of Race for the Galaxy yesterday, with Tyler winning most of them. They were all 3 or 4 player games, and I think I really prefer the game with 2 players. The best news was that I found out that I didn't lose a card last week at the restaurant after all :)

Qwirkle
I had played Qwirkle once before, and I met the designerl last year at a convention. I loved the idea of the game, but playing it yesterday made me think 2 things...
1. It takes a long time for my opponent to take their turn. This means my opponent is probably thinking the same thing. Maybe it was just that opponent, as I don't recall this from the last time.
2. (and this is a much bigger deal) I'm not sure how 'fair' the game is. It seems like the luck of the draw can be very swingy. In yesterday's game I didn't have a play in the world for the first half of the game, and i was getting trounced. Then later, every tile I drew seemed to match up with the board, I scored 3 Qwirkles in a row! I just wonder if the luck of the draw doesn't play too big a role in the game. I still like it, and I might like to get it as a gift for my mom (who likes Scrabble) or my sister (who likes pattern matching stuff like Set and Tetris).

Puerto Rico
I'm pretty good at Puerto Rico. I've played a lot, and I've put some effort into studying strategies and improving my play. In this game it was me, my friend John (who's also very good), Bill who plays once in a while, and his wife... who despite playing once in a while, seems to not remember what actions do what from one turn to the next (let alone from one game to the next). We also had a new player at the table, who seemed to pick things up very quickly.

Bill went first and chose Builder. As player 3 I made an unusual play (for me) - based on the thought that player 2 (the newbie) would choose mayor to get her Indigo running I chose to build a Hospice so I could then Settle a manned quarry. I felt this would be an interesting start, and since the number of 'inexperienced' players was high, I figured anything could happen and I'd have a fun and interesting game trying to keep on my toes. I spent most of the game trying to make sure I was staying ahead of John, who I figured would be my main competition. John was doing a very extreme strategy as well, he had nothing but corn plantations, a small market, and a Wharf.

One turn the new player was going to take a Prospector with 1 gold on it so she could get 2 gold. There was also a trader with 2 gold on it, and no one had any goods at all. I recommended that she take Trader instead, and explained that it's the same 2 gold for her, but taking trader makes the trade action less good for whoever ends up doing it later. In the following round, who ended up choosing Trader? Me of course :) Way to talk yourself out of 3 gold, Seth!

In the end, when John was scoring 5-7 points per Captain phase, I looked around the board on my turn and saw that everyone had 1 or no goods (John had none) so I chose Captain. While we were loading goods, I found out that Bill's wife had 3 more gods that I couldn't see before, so she made out with even more points than I did during that captain phase. If I'd seen her other goods, I would have chosen the more obvious play at the time: Prospector. In fact, when this happened, Tyler walked up and said "Who doesn't pick Prospector?"

When final scores were tallied, I had beaten John handily, but it turns out that Bill's wife (who had built 2 large buildings) had scored the same as I had... I counted up my goods plus money and looked at her huge stash of production and they were equal! Then there were a couple coins beside her player mat, which turned out to be he final tiebreaker.

Age of Gods
I have not played Age of Gods, but I won it in the raffle. I'm not too sure about it though, I have only heard that you own one of the factions, but you don't know which - and you control any faction on your turn. Over the course of the game, faction control is revealed. So maybe in the early game you don't want to damage any faction too much or build anything up too much because it might/might not be yours. I'll probably geta chance to try it on Thursday.