Overdue update

It's been almost 2 weeks since I posted anything! Not terribly much has been going on. Here's a brief summary of what's going on with my various endeavors:

Tasty Minstrel Games
The question on everybody's mind is probably "how's the publication coming?" Or if I'm lucky it's more like "When will Terra Prime and Homesteaders be in stores?"

Well, I'm currently working on rulebooks while Michael is soliciting quotes from manufacturers. Research is leading toward some good news for both price and schedule, so that's good. If everything goes as planned, the games should be out in plenty of time for BGG.con (see below)

Another thing that's new is that we received some submissions:
* a space themed worker placement/area control game,
* a colonization game,
* and a railroad game

I've had a chance to play each of those, one of which we've decided we're not going to pursue now, though we may be interested next year, one we're fairly interested in, but it needs some work, and one we can't really consider yet because another publisher has first dibs - if they decide they're not interested then we will decide if we are :)

I got an email about a submission as well, and we will be receiving yet another from someone we met at the GAMA trade show. I'm looking forward to the latter, because I liked it a lot when I played it before.

Game design
Nothing doing on the game design front at the moment. Concentrating on TP and HS publication, and notes on the prototypes I've been playing.

On a plane recently I read through some of my design notebook, and put a little thought into an old Pirate game idea. Actually, it's a game about trade where you can pursue victory by being a merchant (facilitating trade with pickup/deliver trips around the board), a pirate (attacking merchant ships and ports), or privateering (attacking pirates, and interdicting trade). It occurred to me that some of the mechanisms from Terra Prime could be used here - some of the bookkeeping and mechanical actions I mean. It would be an entirely different game with different decisions and different motivations, but some of the mechanisms could be similar to Terra Prime.

Gaming
Lately I've played a lot of Glory to Rome. John came over and we played 8 or 9 2p games - I won all but one of them. I even beat Tyler 2 out of three yesterday.

I've started going to a new friend's game night once a week, and I've tried some new games there: Municipium, Giants, Castle for all Seasons, and Jet Set, among other games like Space Alert, Goa, Princes of Florence, and Yspahan.

I'm playing in an online In the Shadow of the Emperor tournament, and I'm doing terribly. I also lost an online game of In the year of the Dragon - by 2 freaking points!

Conventions
Kublacon is coming up in about 2 weeks, and I fully expect to go to that. I seem to have slacked on buying a plane ticket, so I might have to pay too much to get there. Also, Southwest.com hasn't been working the last couple times I tried it, which is getting pretty annoying. I'm sure I'll also go to Strategicon's Gateway event in September, and of course BGG.con in November.

In fact, Tasty Minstrel Games has plans for BGG.con! We will have a booth, and we will be having a sort of launch party for our 2 games. We call it the Tasty Minstrel's Winner Cleans Up event - participants will gather for a presentation style rules explanation, then random groups of 4 people will be given a copy of the game to play in the open gaming area. The winner gets to keep the copy of the game! We plan to run one of these events for each game. I'll be posting on BGG about it, and I'll probably put up a sign-up sheet so we can get an idea of how many people will want to participate.

I Finally Lost At Yspahan

As yet I have not lost a face-to-face game of Yspahan... that is, until last night. I haven't played as much Yspahan as I have Pillars of the Earth, and I wouldn't say I was "as good" as it as I am at Pillars, but I was still undefeated. Last night I didn't fare so well though, and ended up losing to Eric (the same guy that beat me at Pillars!) by something like 9 points.

I must be losing my edge!

Yspahan - better than I gave it credit for

Evidently you can download Ystari's Yapahan for the PC and play against computer opponents. My original assessment of the game was that the different choices and strategies weren't really different enough to make much difference. After a couple games, I was undefeated but didn't feel like I'd done anything worthy of winning the games. My friend Ray says that with the die roll mechanic, sometimes the strategy you've chosen must be sidetracked because your actions aren't available to you when you need them, and then your plan B ends up getting sidetracked for the same reason. All this switching of plans amounts to the same thing I was thinking - that everyone does a little bit of everyhting, and there's really not much to the game.

Now that I downloaded it and played 25 games, I'm starting to see some subtleties of play. I wouldn't go as far as to say I really love the game, or that it's the deepest game out there, but I think Yspahan deserves more credit than I had originally given it.

Really nice implementation, too!