OrcCon 2008

I went to OrcCon over President's Day weekend, and I had a pretty good time. I'll edit this post to start including some semblance of convention report talking about the people I hung out with and games I played. I'll probably do a geeklist at BGG as well, which I'll link to here.

The convention was fun all around. I played fewer tournaments, and really didn't play well or win much. I only earned 6 Dealer Dollars. I finished out of the money in the finals for Princes of Florence, Notre Dame, On the Underground, and Guillotine. The 6 Dealer Dollars I did get came from a random game of Wheedle - a short, silly game I just happened to walk in on when they were about to start.

I didn't play any Time's Up at all, but at least I played Werewolf, and it was fun!

More to come...

Airlines as a theme (instead of trains)

Someone on BGG started a thread asking why there aren’t games about the airline industry like there are about the train industry.

In the thread several plane games were mentioned, maybe the most relevant is the upcoming Aviation Tycoon from Z-Man games, but as someone in the thread said, based on the description, that could be a game about any kind of transportation system. That poster was pretty adamant that any airline game would have to be a detailed simulation of the airline industry, including things like the difference between a 727-100, 727-200, and 727-200A. Not surprisingly, he said his numerous attempts at such a game have thus far led to nothing.

I maintain that there are several different ways to go about an airplane game, and I think they could all produce an interesting game. Off the top of my head I could list a few basic structures for an airline game. Sure, maybe some of them would also work with other forms of transport, so someone interested in a plane game that couldn't be re-themed to something else wouldn't be too interested. I got news for those people though - almost every game can be re-themed.

• When I think of airlines, I think of a map with lots of lines connecting cities. I think a connection-type game could be made where you need to get your airline established in cities... it's not physically the same as laying train track on the ground, but I think it's analogous. In order to have a scheduled flight between 2 cities, you have to have some semblance of control in each of them. This version of the game would concentrate less on the specifics of that control, and it would deal with getting control of the right cities to 'build' the right routes, similar to a train connection game, but in a different way. There could even be technology, as planes could have limited range until you upgrade them.
  
• Another version of a plane game could eschew the connections, and deal more with the passengers in the airport itself. You need to get passengers through ticketing and security, to their gates and onto their flights.
  
• It was mentioned to me that the real business in running an airline is securing time slots and gates. So a game could be made which concentrates on earning/buying/bidding for certain gates and/or time slots at airports in order to put together flights that go from point A to point B. This last idea I thought about just a little bit, and here's something that might be an OK start:

I imagine a board with a number of airports, each with a list of time slots. Perhaps there are multiple spaces at each time slot (1 for each gate). During the "scheduling" round players attempt to control these slots via some method. Then, during a resolution round, passengers would take the scheduled flights to their destinations.

There could be passengers that are in a big hurry, willing to change airlines at every stop if it'll get them there faster. There could also be passengers who would rather stay on the same airline the whole way, no matter how long it takes or how many stops on the way.

I didn't intend this to be a new project to think about, so I probably won't do anything with it - at least not for a while. I just wanted to mention it and get some thoughts down where I can find them later :)

I just had an idea for Red Colony...

Since the game is about exploring and colonizing (hmm... where have I seen that before? heh) - I'm imagining a board covered with face down tiles. Probably square tiles, as opposed to hexes, but that remains to be determined. The tiles could have some kind of terrain or features on them. When you build a "building," you do so without knowing what's on the tile - you flip the tile face up and place your building marker or whatever on it. The terrain or features might be symbiotic or amenable to that particular building, or they might not. I don't imagine there'd ever be a huge penalty, maybe some additional cost, or sub par efficiency (depending on what the building does).

Then there could be an Assay action, which could cost some time/effort/resources, and would allow you to peek at a face down tile.

Thus, in general you build whatever buildings you want to pursue your strategy, and you do it wherever it's convenient. Or, if you prefer, you can spend the extra time and cost up front to find better places to build each building, and maybe your better placement will yield more efficient results or VPs or whatever.

it's not a particularly deep thought about the game, but I think I like the idea and wanted to get it posted somewhere before I forgot :)

The search for affirmation...

I did send Terra Prime off to Seattle last week, where I understand my friend's bosses may be interested in publishing a board game in addition to their main project, which is publishing a video game. They are a new company, working on their first video game title.

I don't really know very much about this publisher's motivation or how interested they really are in pursuing this endeavor. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but I'm a little skeptical that this will really go anywhere. Board gaming is still such niche hobby, it's hard to imagine that a fledgling publisher really knows what they're getting themselves into.

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe they have money set aside for just such an endeavor, and all they're looking for is a game that they think is worth it! But for the time being I'm not getting my hopes up too high. I hope that doesn't sound like an insult to them, because that's not my intent at all! Who knows, maybe they'll even hire me to seek out other good unpublished board game designs and help develop them for publication as well! I know I've got a number of candidates I could recommend...

In any case, it's exciting to think that people are interested in playing my game - whether or not they're interested in publishing it. It's a little extra exciting in this case since it's at least a possibility!

So now I find myself curious and anxious to hear - not to hear that they've decided to go ahead with publishing the game (of course that would be awesome, but as I mentioned, I don't really expect it) - but to hear that they've played it, and what they think of it.

I wonder how many designers are in it for the money - which I understand to be negligible, how many are in it for fame or notoriety, and how many are just looking for affirmation. Affirmation that what they've created is enjoyed or approved of by the target audience.

Conjunction Junction, or perhaps Reading Railroad

Scott and I have been tossing back and forth ideas on the structure of Conjunction Junction (perhaps a better name... Reading Railroad?). Scott drafted up a ruleset, and I massacred it in my usual style. The main thing I realized while discussing it with him is this... and this may be a comment on collaborative design:

I don't think we're working on the same game.

For the most part, Scott's ideas for the format of the game seem a lot better suited to the complexity level we're going for, and more elegant in a lot of ways, so I've completely adopted them over my original thoughts of buying and selling letters and placing letter tiles on the board as track. Instead, the board has more abstract regions which you can "build track through" - and you do so by spelling words with letter tiles. The words don't have anything to do with the board, you just spell words - the longer the word, the more "Track Points" you get, and it costs a certain number of Track Points to build through a region. Leftover Track Points turn into VPs.

This I like - the idea is that you can make smaller words to connect cities, with little or no Track Points leftover for VPs, or you could make bigger words so you get more VPs as you lay track on the board to connect cities. The Cities still have City Tiles in them which you'll use at the end of the game to spell other words for endgame scoring.

This is where there appears to be a difference of opinion on the purpose of the game. In order for a non-wordsmith to be able to do well, I think it's important that the words you spell with City Tiles (which you've been collecting during the game) be pre-determined, printed on a scoring card, so you have some direction when you are choosing which cities to connect, and that motivation isn't wrapped up in your ability to recognize and spell words. Scott suggests that this is equivalent to not actually spelling words with City Tiles, and instead it's like saying "make a network that connects this, that, and the other city." This is, in a sense, true - and in fact could also be represented that way, although my actual mechanic would be like having a set of different possible network connections to make. However, doing it with letters on City Tiles goes along with the theme of the game and the wordbuilding mechanic. There are a few other reasons I think it's a little different as well, but they're specific and not important to the overarching question.

Scott has thus far preferred a system where players spell whatever word(s) they want/can with their City Tiles, and get rewarded for them... basically you get points for making a 3 letter word, a 4 letter word, a 5 letter word, etc. In matter of fact, I really like the idea, for a word game. For this game however, an original design goal (for me) was that it not be a word game at all. There are plenty of word games, and building words for the sake of building words is a well established genre - the thing I thought would be interesting was to make a game that a player who hates that genre could play with a player that loves that genre.

I think both scoring systems could work very well, and they both have some very interesting things going for them - I think they both give the player motivation to connect various cities over other cities, and I think they both reward doing a "good job" of connecting cities. However, the fundamental question remains - is this a word game, or a connection game?

I'll have to see what Scott thinks of my version of the ruleset he wrote. I'm interested to see what kind of implications the difference between word game and connection game will have, because in the end both scoring systems aren't all that dissimilar. I think the key is where the tension is when it comes down to the decision as to where you want to place track - what cities do you want to connect. Should this be based on your skill at word building, or your skill at analyzing the relative positions of City Tiles and which you need for your scoring card?

I maintain that using word building as a mechanic in a connection game is the more interesting way to go, because you don't see a lot of games like that. On the other hand there are plenty of word games out there.

"Shipping vs Building" (SvB)

Games provide players an opportunity to make choices, then evaluate the results and make more choices, etc. until an end result is achieved. Many games make this process interesting by providing multiple paths to get from the beginning of the game to that end result. Multiple paths to victory as it's often called. Various strategies, or ways to approach the game in an effort to win. I refer to those paths as the game's Shipping vs Building.

This term comes from Puerto Rico, arguably the greatest multiplayer strategy game of all time. In that game the extreme strategies are Shipping - loading goods on boats for victory points, and Building - spending money on buildings which are worth points. These are not mutually exclusive strategies, but in general the more shipping you do, the less building you can afford, and likewise the more building you do, the less goods you'll be shipping. These are simply the 2 major methods to gain victory points, the winning player will do some combination of the two.

That's a pretty pure example, from a well renowned game, of multiple paths to victory, and that's what I am referring to when I ask a question like "what is this game's SvB?"

When designing games I often ask myself, what's this game's SvB?

More thoughts on Hot and Fresh

I was going over my recent ideas on Hot & Fresh with a friend of mine, and looking at the board a lot. The good news is that the last time I fiddled with the board, it appears I did lay out spaces between locations. I have no idea if it's a good layout, but it's a layout - and that's a start!

The bad news is, while we talked about it, it occurred to me that the interaction and flow of the game would likely be much better if each delivery had a specific origin (not the same for all pickups) and a specific destination. So basically, instead of delivery drivers picking up pizzas from the shop, maybe taxis picking up fares from various locations and driving them around town to other locations.

This is bad news because thematically I love the idea of a young delivery driver taking shortcuts and speeding to deliver pizza on time, while the idea of a taxi driver driving around town is less exciting to me. On the other hand, the mechanics seem to fit the taxi theme much better.

The basic structure of the "Crazy Taxi" version of the game would be similar - there would be a face up display of people who've called your dispatch office for a ride. Your dispatch office has, of course, radioed this to all the drivers, and the first driver to the location gets the pickup. The display of Fare cards would be N cards (maybe 3? Maybe relative to the number of players?) face up, each card having an Origin, a Destination, and a Tip (and maybe also a Fare value). When you pick up a fare, you take the card from the display and place a number of tip counters onto it as indicated by the Tip value on the card. At the end of each "cycle" (which is a couple of turns), each Fare card loses one Tip counter. When upon arriving at a destination, you score the remaining Tip counters and discard the Fare (or keep them in a score pile perhaps).

Each player has 3 slots in their cab, so they can carry up to three people. Some fares however take up 2 slots (a guy with a bunch of luggage) or all 3 (a family of 3). The Tip value would be adjusted appropriately.

The traffic laws would work the same way, whenever you break a rule, you draw a card (or or maybe increase a track). At the end of a cycle, you roll 2d6, and if your roll is less than the number of cards you've drawn (or the value of the track), then you get a ticket. Maybe if you have a Fare in your cab, they get mad and jump out (without paying), so you lose your fare - this might make it even more dangerous to speed or break rules while you have a fare, compared to when you're on your way to pick one up. Tickets would probably be worth negative points at the game end: -1 for the first, -2 for the second, -3 for the third, etc. There could also be a Courthouse on the board, where a player could stop and pay off a ticket at the cost of 2vp or something, which would be worth doing if you have 3 or more tickets (or if you plan to by the end of the game).

It's possible the cards you draw for breaking the rules might have effect on them as well, that was the original intent. However for the first draft of the game I think I'll leave that out. There could also be event cards, introducing such things as construction or a traffic jam in certain sections of the board. I'll leave that out for now too, but it seems like a fit for a game with an emphasis on route planning.

The other thing that seems like a fit for route planning is the traffic cop pawn, which exists in the pizza game, sort of. In the taxi version though I don't think it would be player controlled, mostly because I can't think of a good mechanic for it that would fit. However I think there could be a few cops, which randomly are assigned to certain blocks (main roads between intersections), and their effect would be that you simply aren't allowed to break any traffic laws on that block.

The only player interaction in this version would be racing for the pickups. I don't know if that would be enough, but frankly it sounds like more interaction than the pizza idea!

Cooperative games - the very definition of multiplayer solitaire?

One of my least favorite things about the cooperative games I've seen so far - mostly Lord of the Rings and Shadows over Camelot, as well as various role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons - is that they can and often are more or less driven by the most dominant (or stubborn) person in the room. It's like that person is playing solitaire, and everyone else is just watching. For some people that might be OK, or even fun, but for me... well, I'd like to see a game in which each player must make their own choices, do their own thing, and yet still be encouraged to help the other players.

In Knizia's Lord of the Rings cooperative game, an attempt is made to make the game effectively multiplayer by giving each player different cards, and it's presumably up to each player how he spends those cards. It would be a much different game if the players played the game in seclusion, without being able to discuss each others' plays, and in theory, you're not supposed to tell people what cards you have, but really - where do you draw the line? What's the difference between "That next event looks dangerous, maybe we should fight our way through the board as fast as possible," and "If you have fight cards, you should advance the main track or we're going to lose," and "play your fight card and a friendship card, so player 2 can get the Heart they need, and I can finish off the board with the cards in my hand."

Shadows over Camelot adds a particularly effective deterrent for this kind of thing... namely the player coaching everyone else might in fact be a traitor! This is a novel idea, and it goes a long way toward solving the solitaire problem, but not all the way. In practice, it's still possible (easy, even) for a dominant personality to drive everyone's play, whether they're a traitor or not. Statements like "You should go to the Grail challenge and play a Grail card, unless of course you're the traitor!" can go a long way toward dominating a game. In that particular game, not working as a team is a good way to lose, so either you do what the dominant guy says, or you do your on thing and people think you're the traitor, or you do your own thing and the team loses because everyone's doing their own thing. In Shadows over Camelot you're also not supposed to discuss what you have in your hand, but to a lot of people it's just tedious to say "That's an awfully pathetic looking Black Knight" when placing a face down Fight-1 card there, or "I feel anxious to start the fight against the Saxons, but I fear I cannot finish!" Is the intent to promote role playing in order to communicate what you have in hand? Or is the intent that you're not supposed to know what people have in hand? I propose the latter would be more fun as a game, because the former leads to solitaire.

So how do you do it? How do you create a game in which players want to work together, but also have to think for themselves and make their own decisions? Here are some thoughts I've been having so far - no guarantee they'll work:

- I'd like to see team building and team dynamics, but I'd also like to see each member of the team have to do their own thing.

- I like the idea of team strategy - a discussion of who's going to have what responsibility, and that could theoretically by dominated by an Alpha player, but then in the resolution of each member's duties I'd like to see players have to act for themselves. Maybe little solo mini-games.

- The player interaction is in preparation for multiple (simultaneous?) mini-games, the result of which feeds back into the group's next strategy session.

- I also like the idea of a player not being "on the team" (i.e. a Traitor). Specifically, I like the idea that any player may become a traitor sometime mid game, and nobody knows ahead of time who or when.

The idea here is a cooperative game, where all players are on the same team (except for the potential traitor), and they're working together to accomplish a common goal. The theme I've had in mind for this is the TV show 24, where players are CTU agents working to avert a terrorist attack. Jack Bauer, being the show's hero, would make an appearance in the game, but as an NPC - a character or resource players could make use of, but not a personality any single player would play. The theme could be made generically anti-terrorist, even on a larger scale, where players control various branches or departments (CTU, Homeland security, FBI, CIA...) - but I personally think there's some value to tapping into a cool, established franchise for a theme. Most licensed games don't impress, but that's because the people doing them aren't trying to make a good game, they're trying to sell some crap based on the license. I'd like to make a good game with a licensed theme.

Terra Prime updated

I made some progress this weekend updating stuff for my Terra Prime prototype - I redid the delivery tiles so they have the point value printed on them (and I added one and changed one). I updated the Cargo Hold tiles so they wouldn't look color specific anymore. I redid the Tech Upgrade board to accurately reflect recent changes, and I even named all of the upgrades:
* Government Contract: Extra $ per delivery action
* Increased Cargo Capacity: Flip Cargo Holds to the double capacity side
* Targeting Computer: Re-roll all unsuccessful Weapon and Shield rolls once
* Battlestation: Additional Weapon and Shield
* Cloaking Device: Aliens don't attack at the end of Move/Explore action
* Hyperdrive: Additional Thruster, and Explore x2/turn

I even re-wrote the rules (still editing). The only thing I have left to do is to update the player boards to edit the action list, and to add the innate weapon and shield info.

I think I'll also add an innate capacity to carry 2 Brownium cubes, so that players can pick them up even if carrying a colony marker or other cargo. I decided to make Brownium spendable as cash when buying a module rather than having Mines provide free $ for everyone. This seems good, except that the inability to use that effect when toting goods is a little too frustrating, so I think I'll add 2 Brownium-specific slots to the starting ship. Like the innate weapon and shield, this will not count as a cargo hold, will not increase the cost of cargo holds, and cannot carry a colony marker.

I hope to get another test or 2 of this game in before sending it off to Seattle, which I plan to do on Wednesday.

Conjunction Junction (what's your function?)

Last month I posted about the possibility of using word building as a mechanic in a game that's not necessarily a word game. I've given it some thought and discussed it with a few members of BGDF, and now I've got an outline of a game which I think might not be bad at all. It's a connection game, with a light railroad theme, using word building as a way to lay track. The object of the game is to collect city tiles, which have letters on them in order to spell certain predefined (potentially thematic) words. The working title (thanks to Darkehorse from BGDF) is Conjunction Junction, which is not technically accurate, as we're not using conjunctions to make sentences, but it's got a nice ring to it, and really evokes both words and trains :)

The bullet list of important points in this game is...

• People who are good at word building should be able to excel at this game.
  
• People who are NOT good at word building but who are good at connection (or perhaps economic) games should also be able to excel at this game.
  
• There needs to be a point to building words, rather than word building for the sake of word building.

The basic structure of the game is relatively simple. Imagine a hex grid, with certain hexes indicated as cities. This is not unlike Railroad Tycoon or Age of Steam. In fact, let's just go ahead and imagine the Railroad Tycoon board. Now imagine the pile of hex tiles from RRT, only with letters on them. Also imagine the New City tiles from RRT, only more of them, and they have letters on them too. We'll call the lettered track tiles "letter tiles" and the New City tiles "City tiles". The City tiles are stacked on the cities, All the S's on one city, all the F's on another, etc.

Over the course of the game, players lay track to connect cities, collecting the City Tiles from those cities. In the end these City tiles are used to spell words on a card, and the winner is the player that spells the most, or the biggest, word on the card. Something like that.

Along the edge of the board there are a number of bins. The bottom one is empty, and the rest have pairs of randomly drawn letter tiles in them. On your turn you may choose to either get tiles or use tiles. If you get tiles then you pay money - you put $1 in the empty bin and take whatever is in the next bin for free... Or you put $1 on that bin as well (with the 2 letters), and take the contents of the third bin. When you take a bin, you get everything in it - the 2 letters and any money that happens to be with them, then the contents of each bin above that one slide down. You can actually take the first bin and just get money (nothing slides down in that case, there are never letters in that first bin).

If you choose to use tiles then you either place letter tiles on the board to spell a word and get paid $1 per letter you place, or lay generic track (from an off-board supply, like in Railroad Tycoon) at the cost of $1 per tile you place. In either case, you must place tiles from one city to another, and then you take a City tile off of either of the 2 connected cities.

That's the basic structure of the game. I've been having a steady stream of thoughts about the specifics...

It would be interesting if there were incentives to build off your network as opposed to willy-nilly all over the board. One idea is that you could have multiple networks, but building gets more expensive if you do. The advantage to building onto your existing network in that case is cost. Perhaps the standard cost to use tiles is ($1/network - $1), so no extra cost if you just have 1 network, $1 extra if you have two networks, etc.

I think there might also be a warehousing cost, like $1 to save tiles after building... and/or whenever you get tiles you pay $1 if you already have any.

I just need to be sure that taking cash and paying for track isn't strictly better than building words, and I also don't want it to be strictly worse. One of my design goals for the game is that a word builder and a non word builder should both be able to play and be competitive.

I was also thinking that you could maybe 'sell' tiles for $1 apiece, because what if you take 2 tiles, only need 1, and are stuck with the other... Do you have to warehouse it every turn until you can use it? Do you have to discard it? Are you allowed to sell it for $1? Maybe selling for $1 is fair.

Tough to use letters could have a coin pictured on them, meaning you get an extra $ for using that letter.

I think there needs to be a connection bonus or else $2/tile for building a word, or you're basically losing money. You'll get tiles for an average of probably about $1 per tile, so if you place them for $1/tile then you're not making progress... but maybe that's ok.

Discussing this game in the chat, Nando had the following to say:
10/01/2008 15:29:08 ‹Nando› freaking. complicated.
10/01/2008 15:29:17 ‹Nando› for a word game anyway

It's not really a word game. Word games are about making words for the sake of making words. This is a connection game with word building as the main mechanic :)

Of course, since I started writing this post, Doho123 has come up with a very interesting alternate format for the game, which has a lot of good things in it (though I don't know if I'm entirely sold yet). Curse you Scott! :)

Gears are turning, feels good!

I'm really happy with the feeling of progress that's come along recently with respect to Terra Prime, Dynasty, and Hot and Fresh. Heh, in the case of Hot and Fresh, gears are literally turning (almost)!

As soon as I get TP off next week, this is what I need to jump on or else the designs will stall again...

Dynasty: Brainstorm discoveries.
I need a list of Discoveries or inventions, preferably ones that were made by the ancient Chinese (such as gunpowder, hot air balloon, compass, plow...), some cost for them, and of course a game effect. Some of these I think are pretty straightforward, like the Plow could allow access to an extra resource of a couple types (the types you would harvest with a plow). Of course, for it to make sense I also need a number of resources... I think the Hot Air Balloon will allow leader pawns to move further, maybe the Compass will allow 2 leaders to move with 1 action.

If anyone has any suggestions, don't be shy! Some of the inventions will simply be for VPs, and some will have prerequisite discoveries (either by player, or in general - like Paper must have been invented by someone before Paper Money can be invented. Maybe Paper Money is a personal invention which allows you to "trade" for 1 resource per turn without giving points away (taking the other player's chit onto your board).

Hot & Fresh: Design board
As discussed prior, I need to lay out the board for the game. I have had a map section for a long time which I'd like to use...


I just need to pick locations and figure out how many spaces need to be in between different places. And I need to delete every other residential road, there's a bit more in that section than is necessary. I might also like to add more traffic light intersections, as that was the original point of the game.

If I can keep on top of those things, then I think I'll have prototypes of these games to play before too much longer!

These 4 walls closin' in, gettin' bigger...

Last night I tested Terra Prime with a smaller board. I used only 1 row of green tiles instead of 2. The net result is that the "safe zone" without aliens was condensed, and the yellow and red planets were much closer. I actually think this was a positive change. The board might be too crowded with 5 players, so it might be that the small board is the 3 player (or 3/4) player board, and the larger board is for 5 (or 4/5) players. I'll have to test it out with different numbers of players. I did go through and mark a subset of tiles to use for the smaller board, to make sure planets and asteroids were distributed well.

The game also went much quicker - a 3 player game flew by in about 45 minutes. The small board is a lot less friendly as well, there's more competition for things, and hostile aliens feel like they're right on your doorstep.

I also tried adjusting the costs of things. I started each player with $3 instead of $2, and I made modules cost $2 + $1 per like type you already have, instead of $1 + $1/like type. I was happy I did because I thought it might be too easy to get a very quick 4th Engine (extra actions) that way, but now I'm not so sure. I might go back to the old cost structure.

I started each player with a "built-in" shield but not a gun. I adjusted the combat rules such that the more guns/shields you have, the better each of them work. I think next time I'll start each player with an innate shield and gun (not the same as "built-in" because built-in stuff affects costs), so that the starting money can either buy a Cargo Hold, or a Shield + Gun - and if you go Shield + Gun then you can reasonably take on at least a single alien.

I'm excited about the progress of these playtests, and I hope to get a few more in this week/weekend, then I send the game to Seattle to see if this publisher likes it!

Terra Prime changes tested, now what?

Well, I did test Terra Prime last night, some of the changes seemed good, others not so much.

* Game Length
The game length seems good still, though it still seems to end a bit abruptly. If there were a magic way to make the game feel like it coasted to an ending rather than coming to an abrupt end, I'd love that!

* Game End Conditions - I might like to scratch the exploration trigger, and have the only game end condition be when someone runs out of markers, then I want to add that you get rid of a marker when you fill a tile (which you collect for the bonus points). I might also have that the tech upgrades get marked out of your supply of colony markers. And I'll give people like 10 markers instead of 8 (for 3 player... 1 fewer for 4 player and 2 fewer for 5p)
I didn't use counters for delivering, but I did use them for upgrades - which I liked. Eric ended the game via alien hunting, getting all his markers on the board that way. He had 2 upgrades and 3 colonies and killed 3 aliens. That seemed fine, but the rest of us each had 4 markers left... so I'm not sure if that's good or not.

* Demand Tile change - Instead of adding a yellow tile when a yellow colony is founded, I think one of the green tiles should be replaced with a yellow tile. Similarly, when a red colony is founded, the red tile should replace the other green tile. In other words, there would only be 2 delivery tiles available at any given time.
I think I liked this one, and will try it again to see how it plays out.

* Combat change - I'm going to try to streamline the combat a little.
I don't think I was happy with this version of the combat. It made early asteroid fields almost automatic hits, it made aliens very, very dangerous... Then again, in a sense they're supposed to be. Here's what I will try next:

Ships have a built-in shield (I'll print it on the ship board), with the target number 6 on it, indicating that shields work on a roll of 6. Each additional shield module allows you to roll 1 additional die and reduces the target number by 1. I'll indicate this by putting a little "-1" on the shield tiles. This way you have some semblance of defense even if you don't buy a shield, and with 1 shield the system mirrors the current one, each additional shield is even better.

Weapons could work the same way, only I think the ships won't start with a built-in weapon. Each weapon module will give you 1 die and an effective +1 to hit on all your dice. So 1 weapon hits on 6, 2 weapons hit on 5+ each, and 3 weapons hit on 4+ each.

Aliens and asteroids can work the same way as the weapons, 6 as a base target number, roll 1 die per symbol, and reduce the target number by 1 per symbol.

This should make small aliens less dangerous but just as in-the-way as ever, and larger aliens will require work to kill (as usual) and should deal some damage (as they ought to).

Ideally, when coming out of combat with a triple alien you should have scored your points, colonized your juicy colony, and then you have to limp home battle worn.

One thing I might do which has been suggested once or twice is make shields available at red colonies as well as at Terra Prime. That way if you get in a scuffle and get beat up, you don't have to go all the way home to get more shields. Although, you're supposed to have to limp home if you get beat up, and it makes a more interesting decision as to which module to lose if you get hit. If you are near more shields, you just lose the shield and buy more. It's not supposed to be that easy.

Tuning Terra Prime - showing a publisher?

My friend works for a new company getting ready to put out their first video game title, and evidently they are interested in doing more than just video games... My friend told them about Terra Prime, and they are interested in trying it out!

That's pretty sweet, so now I guess it's time to iron out the couple of kinks that have been annoying me, and send them a copy. I'm hoping to test out some of these changes this week, make whatever adjustments are necessary, and send it out to them some time next week. In order to make myself do it, I'll try and set a deadline for myself - lets say January 16th I'm going to Fed Ex the package. So here are the ideas I want to try out...

• Game Length - I've been a little disappointed in the game end triggers and he fact that the game doesn't seem to last long enough to really get into red colonies/delivering red cubes. Red cubes are intended to be a big, late game play, you drop a colony on a red planet for a chunk of points, then you cart a red cube back to Terra Prime for a chunk of cash, and then you're pretty much done. If you're good (or lucky) you could maybe get all the way back out there and collect another red cube to deliver, but that takes a long time. I upped the value of the red cubes to 10vp (from 6) hoping the incentive would increase to go get them, but I really think 6 should be the right value. I'll have to try and find end game triggers that allow for people to get to the end game plays. I might also try going for them sooner, maybe it's a groupthink/player issue and not a game problem at all. I rather like the amount of time the game takes to play, and I wouldn't want it to get any longer.
  
• Game End Conditions - I've always been happy with the "a player places his last Colony marker on the board" game end trigger, but I've never been happy with the "certain number of tiles face up" trigger, and there's never been a trigger related to delivery. I think I might like to scratch the exploration trigger, and have the only game end condition be when someone runs out of markers, then I want to add that you get rid of a marker when you fill a tile (which you collect for the bonus points). I might also have that the tech upgrades get marked out of your supply of colony markers. And I'll give people like 10 markers instead of 8 (for 3 player... 1 fewer for 4 player and 2 fewer for 5p)
  
• Demand Tile change - Instead of adding a yellow tile when a yellow colony is founded, I think one of the green tiles should be replaced with a yellow tile. Similarly, when a red colony is founded, the red tile should replace the other green tile. In other words, there would only be 2 delivery tiles available at any given time. This way, once there are yellow and red colonies, you can't just deliver green and blue unless someone brings in the yellow. I think this will make a delivery strategy a lot more interesting.
  
• Combat change - I'm going to try to streamline the combat a little. This won't really make it any less random, which is one of the things I'm skeptical about, but it should make the die rolling a little less clunky at least. Instead of the current system, where you roll 1 die per gun or shield, and they work on a 5 or 6, you'll roll 1 die per symbol (no matter how many guns/shields you have, even zero), and on a 6 they work. Each gun you have gives you a +1 on your roll when attacking, and each shield you have gives you a +1 to your roll when defending. There will no longer be a roll for the alien's attack, just for your shields. The 'extra gun/shield' upgrade will be unchanged, and the 'guns/shields work better' upgrade will make each gun/shield give a +2 modifier instead of +1, doubling the usefulness of the guns and shields you have.

That's it for now, time to head home and try it out!

Hot and Fresh ideas for Hot & Fresh

I was chatting about this game with Nando today and I have some new ideas for it. Better jot them down before I forget!

I wasn't ever really happy about the system in which players obtain orders to deliver. There was a sort of track, where Order cards were turned up, and players would take orders from the track to deliver. If they stayed on the track too long then they got pushed off the bottom and went to the 'stale order' pile, and you could deliver one (no tip) for a Kudos marker from the boss. That was pretty lousy, and it was intended to be just a placeholder until I thought of something better. Today I thought of something better!

I think Order cards will be drawn like Tickets in Ticket to Ride- when you arrive at the store, as a free action, you may either draw 1 face up Order from the Order Rack, or draw 2 (3?) Order cards from the face down deck and you must keep at least 1 of them. Any Orders you don't keep are placed face up in the Order Rack for any player to take later. There's limited space in the Order Rack, so if it's full maybe you think twice about drawing 2 face down cards, because that means you'll have to keep them both. As a turn action a player could do the same, which I presume means you'd draw face down, and keep a card that is near another card that's already in the Rack, then you'd draw that one too so you can deliver both in one trip.

I think that change alone would probably be a decent idea, but when chatting about adding interaction to the game I thought of the following... Ovens. Suppose that there's a limited number of ovens, maybe 1 fewer than the number of players. Before an Order can be delivered, the appropriate pizza must be 'baked' in an oven. This process consists of taking the appropriate Pizza card from a stock of Pizza cards and placing it in an oven slot on the board. After some amount of time, all cards in ovens advance to the next slot. After 2 or 3 slots in the oven, the card will come out onto the shelf where any player may take it to deliver one of their orders. I think this might interject some player interaction as well as some degree of forward thinking. An important point might be that the pizza card distribution could be set, for example, more people would want plain or pepperoni than want olives + green peppers.

Dynasty revisited, also Hot and Fresh prototyping

As per my New Years Resolutions, I've been putting some thought into both Hot & Fresh and Dynasty. Ariel has been experimenting with the color wheel idea for Hot & Fresh, and says he's got something that will work, and that it's not even that tough. That's good, because even though I've known in my mind for 2 years how it would work, I have yet to produce a working prototype! I now have a deadline... create a map for him to make a board out of in time for him to produce a prototype for me before he goes to New York City this summer (so he can mail it to me from there instead of from Uruguay).

I've also been discussing some of the finer details of Dynasty with Dylan and Nando in the BGDF chatroom. I think I'm feeling more comfortable with some parts of it. Hopefully I can talk them into brainstorming tech advances ("Discoveries") with me so I can get a prototype of that working as well.

In particular, here are some of my recent thoughts on Dynasty:

• When Settling a village, perhaps a player shouldn't get points at all. I'm a little worried that all players will spend the 1st 6 turns each game just settling. That would be lame - and if it's true I guess I could simply make the setup phase include taking turns settling villages - but I think I'd rather that be part of the game. I'd like people to think about doing things other than Settle, even if they haven't gotten their 6 resources. Maybe if there weren't points involved in settling a village, then that would promote other actions sooner as you might not need further resources to get the Discoveries you want. I'm already thinking of rewarding players who get to a discovery first (see below).
  
  
• Thus far I've liked the idea of having to settle adjacent to a region where you already have a village, to keep people from just plopping villages wherever they like the resources, and to encourage trading. Dylan (dnjkirk from BGDF) thought it would be better to be able to settle anywhere, perhaps with an additional cost for not being adjacent. I just had an idea though which combines his thoughts with something that could help my previous point... players could start with a pawn on the board, and could only be allowed to Settle where the pawn is located. Thus it would take a few turns to traverse the board. This mechanic already exists in the game, but until now it's been after villages start turning into cities. No reason not to start with the Political pawn in play from the beginning though! I think this idea will add validity to Discoveries such as a cart which allows your political leader to move 2 spaces.
  
  
• I had originally figured that each culture would handle discoveries separately, irrespective of what other players discover. However it makes more sense to say that when anyone discovers, say, paper, that anyone else could build on the knowledge and discover paper money. Thus perhaps whenever anyone discovers something, everyone gets to use the benefit, and noone else can discover that thing. This way there's competition for the discoveries for points, but getting the points opens up abilities to all players.
  
  
• I have never been happy with the mechanic for conquering a city or village. Currently, you can just conquer a village with your military leader as an action. Conquering a city requires that you have more cities than the defender. It's too easy to do that, and I think the first person to get a city would likely be able to conquer everybody, and that's no fun. I would like there to be a viable strategy that involves being militaristic, but I would like taking over villages and cities to be relatively unexciting outside of that. Maybe you conquer a city so you can gain access to its resources without having to trade with that opponent every time you want to use it, but aside from that you probably don't conquer much unless you're using a military strategy and have bought the advances which make it easy enough to do so. I think I have come up with a Conquer system that better represents that. Instead of 1 Military leader total, players could get a military leader (or a political leader) each time a City is developed, and each military leader could have some 'strength' (say 2). There would be discoveries such as Gunpowder which would add 1 Strength to each military leader. In order to conquer a village or City, a player would have to get enough" strength worth of leaders in the area... where "enough" depends on how many Villages and Cities (and maybe Military Leaders) the defender has. Perhaps each village has strength 1, each city strength 2, and each military leader in the area has strength 1 for defense (or strength 2 to match their offensive strength). This has the advantage of adding opportunity cost to "going on a war path" - you have to spend actions moving your leaders around the board. It also lends validity to discoveries such as "Hot Air Balloon" (move 1 leader 2 spaces) or some other discovery which allows you to move more than 1 leader at a time.

So I guess with respect to my New Years Resolutions... I'm working on it!

SedjCon 2007 recap

I had a lot of fun with SedjCon last week. 17 people came and played lots of games. Things I think I'll fix for next time are... #1 I'm getting a new grill! My old one, while amusing to light (the closest I'll ever get to casting a "Fireball" in real life), is really crappy. It has 2 settings... Off, and Char. It's long since time for a new grill, and now I have a $200 gift card to Home Depot which is intended for a new grill!

The other thing I want to fix is to drop the poker tournament. When not playing for money, people don't play right - it's just silly. From now on, poker is for poker night, and not for game night. Here are the results:


I'm looking forward to doing it again next year. Hopefully the timing will work out such that all my friends will be able to make it!

The List

Viable game ideas to work on in 2008 (and what needs doing on them). Not all of these will be finished, or even looked at, but this is the current list of stuff I've got in mind. In no particular order:

Hot and Fresh
- Create board
- Create Order cards
- Test rules as-is
- Redesign Order mechanics and End Game conditions
- Revisit rules after testing

Dynasty
- Create list of Tech Upgrades with costs made up of 8 different resources
- Create game board dividing China into probably 16 regions, 2 associated with each resource
- Test rules as-is
- Re-examine Leader actions
- Revisit rules after testing

Time is Money
- Consider theme and scope of game
- This is more a mechanic/structure at the moment, not a complete game. Maybe find a complement game in which to use this system.

Kilauea
- Test again as-is
- Superimpose square grid on Hawaii map
- Revisit rules after testing
- Enter in KublaContest this year?

Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Create Lead and Follow-up cards of each category
- Test rules as-is
- Revisit rules after testing

8/7 Central
- Dust off and test again
- Revisit rules after testing
- Redesign auction mechanic

Red Colony
- Consider theme and scope of game
- Write rules

Rodeo Drive
- Test more
- Revisit rules after testing
- Re-examine board placement/scoring

Reading Railroad
- Decide if it's worth pursuing (see if Scott wants to pursue it)
- Write rules
- Prototype and test
Edit: I did pursue this with Scott, I entered it in the KublaCon design contest - it didn't fare too well. It could use finishing touches, but I rather like the game. I think the cross section of people who would be interested in this might be small though.

Clash of the Kingpins
- Re-imagine the game as a non-CCG
- Discuss with Tom Lehmann, see if he's interested in working on it with me (he mentioned he might be, that would be cool)

New "games played" record?

On BGG you can record games played, and I've been faithfully doing so since June 2005. I play a lot of games. By way of example, in the last 2.5 years I played an average of 49 games per month, with some months as low as 14 games played, and some as high as 89. My current record month is Feb. 2007, when I played 89 games. I went to a game convention in Los Angeles which helped, and in that month I played more games than a friend who went to *2* conventions! It's also amusing to me that my record plays occurred in the shortest month of the year.

As of right now (3:48 pm December 31, 2007) I have 89 recorded plays for the month. Some friends are coming over for New Years Eve, so it's likely I'll break the record this month. I'm actually surprised I haven't, considering all the games I've been playing this month!

89+ games in one month - that's about 3 games a day on the average. And I actually spent 6 days this month not playing games! I wonder if I'll ever break 100 plays in one month (without doing something cheesy like playing 30 games of Brain Freeze in a row and counting them all).

Edit: In the end I recorded 95 games played for December 2007!

Sedjcon 2007

My Holiday Game Party - affectionately known as SedjCon - doesn't start until tomorrow, and I've already played 8 games! Luke, Steve, Tyler, Mikey (and family), Jeremy, Amelia, John, and Nick came over today and we played

• Race for the Galaxy
• Gheos
• Goa
• Terra Prime
• Puerto Rico
• Through the Desert,
• Magic: the Gathering
• Starcraft

People will be arriving between 10 and 11 am (that's just 6 and a half hours away!) for more fun, games, and BBQ. I'm looking forward to a really fun weekend :)

Word game as a mechanic?

Word games are popular among certain types of people, and are generally maligned by others... likely the people who enjoy word games are people who can spell and have a reasonable vocabulary while those opposed can't or don't.

I happen to have a reasonable vocabulary, and I can spell alright, so I'm not frightened off by word games. I'll play Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords, Anagrams, Buyword, Quiddler, Palabra, etc. anytime anyone wants to... which seems to be almost never. My mom used to go to a Scrabble club, and sometimes I'd go with her - those little old lady's were really good, having memorized 2 and 3 letter word lists, tons of "vowel dumps," and words containing the letter 'Q' (with or without a 'U'). I couldn't match them in word knowledge, but I could stay competitive through tactical tile placement for higher scores (triple letter score on a 'J', going 2 directions for example). Also, they let me cheat sometimes and use their Scrabble dictionary computer thingies.

My friend Gil made a word game called Prolix which is interesting because rather than having to use only the letters you have, you can use whatever word you want and you get rewarded for using the letters on the board. It also has neat gamery stuff like variable point values for the tiles, so there's some incentive to use some of them over others for a better score, and sometimes there's actually incentive not to use certain tiles because it would make them more valuable to the next player. I like Prolix a lot, but it's still a word game, and word games seem to share at least one trait - they're about making words for the sake of making words. You just make words and score points.

Actually, Buyword is a little different. In that game you're trying to buy-low-sell-high, buying letters and selling words, but it still feels like words for words' sake.

I think I'd like to see a different type of word game. One where the word building - which is really just fancy set collection - is a mechanic, but not the end goal. Here are some things I'd like to see in this new type of word game:

• With word building as a mechanic, someone with good vocabulary and spelling skills should be able to do well based on that
  
• There should be tactical play such that a player without a good vocabulary or spelling skills could do well another way.
  
• Obviously a player with both language and tactical placement skills should excel at this game.
  
• The game should have a point that's not simply "make words to score points." Rather there's some game (or theme) goal, and the way you go about it involves word building as a mechanic.

I've been discussing and considering the possibility of a game which is sort of a marriage of Scrabble and Ticket to Ride or Railroad Tycoon... originally suggested by Doho123 in the BGDF chat room, probably as a joke. At first I was also joking, but the more I think about it, the more different ways I could see a train game with word building as a central mechanic working, and maybe being fun and interesting. If Doho and I can get it to work, I'm sure you'll hear more about it here or at Meeplespeak.

My first rejection letter!

I received an email today stating that Mayfair Games is "unable to accept outside submissions at this time due to a backlog of submissions."

I had sent an email about All For One to a generic email address I found on their website, addressed to "Mayfair game submission contact." I was skeptical it would be read by anyone, really. This response letter is actually a pleasant surprise, and although they are not interested in my game, I now have 2 different specific people's email addresses at Mayfair (the letter was CC'ed to someone), as well as a phone number. So I somehow feel like I've come out ahead :)

To be fair, this is really my 2nd rejection letter. I had sent a letter to Days of Wonder after All For One finished 2nd in the KublaCon design contest last year. They said they'd already done a game loosely themed around the Three Musketeers and they don't like to revisit themes.

Also, though it wasn't a submission perse, Zev from Z-man played a version of All For One about a year ago, and had some comments on it. He did say he would play it again once those comments had been addressed - and now he is

:)

Time travel is hard!

Khronos won the Advanced Strategy Game of the Year award, so my friend Jeremy was really interested in playing it. I have played Khronos a few times and I like it pretty well, so I picked it up on Friday and we played it at the Ides of Gaming event yesterday.

The verdict? Time travel is hard!

Khronos is a cool game, but it's very difficult to figure out. It's about time travel, so there are bound to be some confusing elements - time traveling in any genre will create some paradox, and in a game there have to be rules to govern that paradox. Many game rules can mirror real life physics, but that's tough for Khronos since the physics of time travel hasn't been worked out just yet....

In short, the game works like this. There are 3 Eras - Age of Might, Age of Faith, and Age of Reason. They occur in that chronological order. Each player has 2 pawns which can travel through time between those 3 eras.

On your turn you can spend cards (of which you have 4) to build buildings. There are 3 types of buildings, Military (orange), Religious (purple), and Civic (blue). When a building is built, it casts a "time shadow" onto later eras - that is to say a building built in the Age of Might is still there in the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason. This part isn't too complicated, you build a building on one board, it appears on all later boards as well, and you put your control marker on it to show you're the one who built it.

There are a few rules as to where you can build a building such as "you can't build on a river except with a blue building," which aren't a big deal, but there are 2 rules which must be followed that are very difficult to wrap your head around and recognize on the board:

The Rule of Dominion: You may not connect 2 domains except with a Civic (blue) building.

A domain is a clump of adjacent buildings. If you want to join any 2 clumps, you can only do so with a blue building, not an orange or a purple one. It sounds simple enough, but on practice it's relatively easy to accidentally break this rule.

The Rule of Hierarchy: The most prestigious Military and Religious buildings in a domain must be unique.

Each type of building has 3 sizes, 1x1, 2x2, 3x3. The larger the building, the "more prestigious" it is. So the Rule of Hierarchy is saying that there can be only 1 building of the largest size in each domain... if there's already 1 2x2 orange building in a domain and no 3x3 orange building in that domain, then you're not allowed to build another 2x2 orange building in it. You can build a 2x2 orange building elsewhere, you can build a 3x3 orange building in that domain, and you can build a 2x2 purple building (as long as there's not already a 2x2 purple and no 3x3 purple there already)... and you can always build whatever size Blue building you want.

You see how confusing that is? There can be only 1 of whatever is currently the biggest orange building in the domain. Same for purple.

Once you have those 2 rules down, you can build buildings and reasonably know what will happen... until someone builds on the Age of Might and the "time shadow" of the building in the Age of Faith would break the Rule of Hierarchy... than what happens? Well, in that case the building just doesn't ripple. Same for the Rule of Dominion. You're allowed to build a building as long as it's a legal play on the board you're building on, and if the ripple of the building would break the rules, it just doesn't ripple.

One more thing... There might be a building on the age of Faith board that isn't also on the age of Might, because it was built later. If someone builds in the same space on the Age of Might board, what happens to the building in the Age of Faith? Well, since there was a building there already (because someone went back in time and built it), they would ever have been able to build the Ag f Faith building, and therefore it comes off the board (as well as it's time shadow in the Age of Reason, of course).

The game lasts 7 rounds, and at the end of your 4th and 7th turns you score your position. You score where your pawns are, so you can only score for your position on 2 of the 3 boards. On the Age of Might board, you score points for all the blue buildings in any domain in which you own the largest Military (orange) building. Same for the Age of Faith, except on that board you score if you one the largest Religious (purple) building. The Age of Reason is altogether different, on that board you don't build buildings at all, but instead you spend blue cards to put cubes on the blue buildings, and you score for the orange and purple buildings in any domain in which you have the most (tied for most is ok) cubes.

...

So you see, even though there's only 2 rules to the game, the Rule of Hierarchy and the Rule of Dominion, there are all kinds of specifics that govern those rules, and it's tricky to (a) learn them, and (b) follow through with them while also trying to formulate a strategy.

TIME TRAVEL IS HARD!

Idea for Hot & Fresh - traffic light operation

First thoughts on Hot & Fresh in quite some time!

In H&F players are driving around town to deliver pizzas, and they are in a hurry because as time goes on their tip (score for delivering) goes down as well. The idea is to (a) be efficient in your path when making deliveries, and (b) press your luck by breaking traffic laws.

One of the main aspects of the game - the original thought that started it in fact - was a system of traffic lights which serve to create a dynamic board. As lights change over time, routes also change. Originally I was going to disallow running a red light, so the available routes on the board would literally change, but when traffic laws entered the game it made sense to allow breaking that rule - at a high price.

I had some grandiose ideas for a gimmicky way to represent the status of the traffic lights at different intersections around the board, as well as making them change at different rates. It was a really neat idea which would take care of everything very simply for the players. It involved a "color wheel" beneath the board with circular strips of color alternating Green/Yellow/Red. Holes in the board at the traffic light locations would reveal the color beneath, and rotating the wheel 1 notch would change some of the lights as the strip of color would either continue, or change color, at that location.

While novel, that particular idea has posed a problem in prototyping. I had come up with a proxy solution using 6 sided dice, 1 per intersection, labeled with color (G/Y/R) and an arrow. At the appropriate time the dice would be flipped in the direction of the arrow and the new face would indicate the state of the light. I didn't love the solution, because (a) you could see whether a yellow light would stay yellow or turn red next time, and (b) I realized each light has 2 states, really - depending on direction of travel (a potential downfall to the color wheel as well).

I came up with another, better proxy - which may well be the best solution for the game. Square tiles that look something like this:


These tiles indicate the state of the light (G/Y/R) in each direction. when it's time to change the lights, you either flip (maintaining orientation) or flip and rotate the tile as indicated, so green changes to yellow, yellow to red, and red to green.

I think it's relatively important that the traffic lights aren't on a strict schedule. I want players to wonder just how long that green light down the street will hold out, or whether the yellow will still be there next turn or if they need to stop at the light. Today I had a further thought as to how to make the lights progress properly but not calculably:

Let's say there are 12 intersections in the game, each labeled 1-6 (2 of each number). When it's time for lights to change (maybe at the end of a round), roll 4d6 (maybe 6). Each intersection who's number comes up advances (flip or flip/rotate as appropriate). The Flip/Rotate side could have a "+/-1" on it, meaning intersection 5 if green/red would advance if at least 1 5 was rolled, whereas that same intersection if yellow/red would advance if a 4, 5, or 6 was rolled.

Thus yellow lights are more likely to change than green lights. Lights have a pretty good chance of changing each time, but there's no guarantee. It might well be that the numbers are off - maybe yellow's too likely to change that way, or maybe there should be more dice rolled, or maybe there should be 9 intersections and d10s should be rolled... but the theory I think is sound.

I've resolved (or will resolve in a couple weeks) to finish this prototype and play it, so I'm sure I'll be posting more about it in the near future!

Welcome!

I've noticed a lot more people reading my blog lately, some due to searches for Magic: the Gathering stuff, and some linking in from BoardGamegeek.com - several people check regularly from across the world - Vienna, Netherlands, even as foreign a place as Texas!

I just wanted to say "Hi" to whoever it is that's reading my blog, and encourage you to post a comment telling me at least who you are, if not how you came across my blog or whether you enjoy it.

It's good to know I have an audience :)

Recent Gaming

Yesterday I played games for about 12 hours...

Starting with a 5+ hour 5 player game of Starcraft. We randomly selected teams and I ended up with Aldaris. I started with my base on the 2 Conquest point area of a planet with 4 areas. My other planet option was resource rich, and had much fewer ways in, so I likely should have started there. My plan however was to rush to 15 VPs, and I thought I might be able to protect my base long enough to get there. I did protect it for 2 or 3 rounds, and oddly I didn't build a single unit for 2 or 3 rounds. eventually Jim Raynor successfully took over that base, but I had set up 2 others on the Conquest areas of 2 other planets (1vp apiece). When the game finally got to Phase III, I had 14 Conquest Points - just shy of victory. Jim Raynor ended up fulfilling his Special Victory condition - and surprisingly no one else did.

All game long, the Queen of Blades did nothing but complain that Raynor was going to win, and I maintain that the best way to have kept that from happening would have been for the Queen player to have built a transport adjacent to Raynor (in any of the 3 build orders he did on the planet), which would have put some pressure on Raynor's back door. In some respects that would have been a bad play because it would have put the Zerg in a 2-front war, but then again, without doing so the Zerg player was sure Raynor would win... maybe that's a catch 22. I personally would have liked it if the Zerg had done something to distract the Terran at all, as that might have bought me 1 more turn of 2VP from the conquest area on my home base. As it was I as fighting a 2-front war the entire game.

Oh, and I could note that without an event card that allowed Jim Raynor to place 2 Marines on my home planet for free, I don't think he could have attacked my base for another whole game turn - thus I would have gotten 2 more points and would have won.

I am not a fan of long, so called "epic" games, and Starcraft is no exception.

Next we played a turbo-quick game of Puerto Rico while waiting for John to arrive with pizza. We decided ahead of time to only play until he arrived, then finish out the round and see who's got the most points. Tyler (who played Jim Raynor in Starcraft) adopted his strategy and played for the game to end early. Jeremy and I (the 2 Protoss players from Starcraft) played more as if the game would end normally. I thought we'd be able to get through it. it turns out we didn't and Tyler wrecked us! He had 3 Big Buildings (2 manned) and a total of 36 points. I had 27 and Jeremy had 26.

While we ate pizza, John explained his new game, Amyitis. Jeremy took an Irrigation strategy, earning 2vp for Irrigating, and mooching a couple points off of most of the planting for the irrigation bonus. I only planted 1 tree - I tried going for improved income right off the bat. I thought however that the 3rd level offered an income of 3 instead of 2, so I was disappointed when I bankrupted myself to get the 3rd advance in a particular round, expecting my income to increase, and it didn't. I also tried to pile on the cards which give you more and more VPs as you get them. I got to the 4th level there, not too amazing.

I like the tech tree represented by the cards, but the game felt pretty dry and not terribly fun.

Finally, we played a game of Railroad Tycoon. There was a Service Bounty to Jacksonville available first turn, and I bid 4, willing to take 2 shares. i should have bid 9, to take 3 shares - which is what Tyler did. I decided I didn't want to go with 4 shares for that bonus (though perhaps I should have bid up, as there was also another Service Bounty in the area). I decided instead to try something I've been meaning to try - I took a total of 5 shares to upgrade my train all he way to level 4 in the first round. next round I built on to Jeremy's route and delivered a 3-link delivery. That cost me a 6th share, but I took no more the rest of the game. We play where you get your choice of 2 Tycoon cards, and I declined the "New York to Chicago" tycoon card, thinking Io wouldn't be building near New York. Instead I held onto the "Most Money" tycoon card - a bad idea if I was intending on taking 5 shares on turn 1!

In the end I did complete the New York - Chicago Major Line for 10vp, and made a number of 5 and 6 point deliveries, but I did too much building and not enough delivering, as I had a number of potential deliveries left at the end. Tyler delivered all the cubes on his network except 1. But Jeremy ended up winning with his 2 shares, fewest Shares bonus, and fairly uncontested Northeast network. John got third place with his mid-western track, and his Mobile-Minneapolis Major line for 10vp. I ended up dead last.

That's the third game of Railroad Tycoon in a row where I've done miserably!

Holiday Game Party

I love the holiday season for a number of reasons. things are often laid back at work, people are generally in a holiday mood, and many of my friends are back in town for Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year.

For the past few years I've had a big-ish holiday game party the day after Christmas with board games, a poker tournament, and other assorted fun and games. This year Christmas day falls on a Tuesday, so due to the Tuesdayness of the holiday, this year's game party will be the weekend before.

The party is generally (or was originally) an all night thing, and it feels almost like a mini-convention. This year I'm trying to be just a little bit structured about things. The poker tournament seemed popular before, and I like it as a chance to play poker for a prize without having to put up actual money, so I'm going to do that again. I'm scheduling that for sure. I'm going to try and schedule some Werewolf and/or Time's Up! for late Saturday night, and there's a fun party-ish game that I've never actually tried called 1000 Blank White Cards which I think I'll try and schedule as well. Those are all fun party games for late night... during the day I hope to play more strategy games. Maybe since it's a long party I'll play some longer games I don't normally get to, like Warrior Knights or the new Starcraft board game!

There may well be Guitar Hero and/or Karaoke as well :)

Since it amuses me, there will be prizes for the Poker tournament as well as the following categories:

• Most games played
  
• Most unique games played
  
• Most games won
  
• Most unique games won
  
• Most hardcore - most hours spent at the party!

The first year I kept track of everyone who came, about how long they were there, what games they played, who won each, and I actually did have a prize for the winningest players... myself not included... I have an unfair advantage, being there the whole time while other people might leave and come back. I hope this year it's at least as much fun as previous years :)

Lorwyn Constructed decks

It seems I have visitors!

I'm getting a lot of hits from people searching the net for Llorwyn Constructed decks. Block Constructed was always my favorite format, I like building decks, and I like the openness of building whatever you want but the restriction of having to use cards from one set - which presumably have been designed to go together in some way.

In Llorwyn they seem to have really set that up by overlapping the colors and the tribes - so now you can play a "Black/Blue" deck, or you can play a "Faerie deck" which is Blue with Black, or Blue with white, or you can play a Merfolk deck... the possibilities are many, and there are lots of ways to go about each type of deck. Do I want my U/w deck to be about Merfolk? Or just good U/W control cards? Do I want a WW deck? Or do I want a Kithkin deck (similar, but concentrating more on the tribe stuff)? Do I want to fill my Green/Black deck with Elves which synergize, or just a lot of big creatures and creature D?

I'm not as into Magic as I used to be, so I don't scour the 'net looking for who's playing what, or what decks have won which tournaments. I'd be interested to see what people are building though. A while ago I posted 5 decks I threw together out of the cards I had from the prerelease. Most of them turned out to be pretty bad. One of them though seems very strong and it wouldn't surprise me if a deck like it were starting to win tournaments here and there.

That is if there are tournaments here and there for Lorwyn Block Constructed... I was very disappointed to read that they didn't plan for or test Lorwyn for Block Constructed at all. I guess there will be no "official" LBC tournaments, though I'm sure there will be plenty of local ones. I'm annoyed that such an interesting format is categorically ignored by the entire Magic design team. I guess they were too busy wetting themselves over their big secret that they're changing the block structure to 2 big sets and 2 small sets per year, which are distinct but related. Yipee.

So if you're reading this based on a search for Lorwyn Constructed stuff, leave a comment with a deck idea you're working on - preferably one you think could be a tournament winner or would dominate the format (if there were a format to dominate). My money's on G/b Elves.

BGG list of games worth publishing

There's a geeklist on BGG about unpublished games that are worth publishing. If you've played All For One, Wizard's Tower, or Terra Prime and think they're worth publishing, please feel free to add it to that list with your comments!

BGG.con geeklists

I posted a series of geeklists at BGG about my convention experience, broken up day by day. Much of it is a repeat of what I've said here, but if you're interested then go look, thumb, or comment!

Hippodisappointment

Well, both Terra Prime and Wizard's Tower were not accepted into the next round of the Hippodice contest. However the response has been so good on those games that I almost don't care - I'm going to pitch them to Jay at Rio Grande and Zev from Z-man rather than send them to Germany for months.

I do have some friends that made it, most notably Scott's game Sir Reginold's Fabulous Country Estate. It's costing him $117 to ship the game to Germany - I hope that investment turns out to be worth it. the game is a really cool idea!

1 post about Magic and now I'm a resource?

I posted a few initial thoughts about Llorwyn constructed after playing around with the cards a little, then promptly forgot about it. Lately Internet searches for Llorwyn Constructed have been generating hits on my blog left and right!

Well, if you're coming here for Magic info, you're probably in the wrong place. I haven't played much except a little limited Llorwyn, and outside of that I haven't played Magic in forever. But if it helps, here's what my little Llorwyn Constructed experiment taught me:

Play Black/Green. There are tons of good creatures, there's tons of good removal. It's a solid, solid deck I'm sure. If there are Llorwyn Constructed tournaments, I fully expect to see B/G decks at the top tables. And I'm saying this without any real clue as to what the format looks like.

there is one other deck I'd like to try sometime. A deck with the Seige Tower guy, 3cc 0/5 Legend who makes creatures deal damage according to their toughness instead of their power. That along with the Treefolk Harbinger seems pretty freaking amazing, and in general defensy creatures are undercosted, so I'm sure there's other good stuff that can go in the deck. Oh, and of course it's the right colors for Oblivion Ring and Nameless inversion, the 2 best spells in the set. I drafted a Deathrender the other day, and it seems that might be good in he deck (though probably unnecessary) - maybe to replace a Legendary Siege Tower when they kill one, or else to crap out a 5/7 Trample, Vigilance monster once in a while.

BGG.con report - Events

Puzzle Hunt
The puzzle hunt last year was very cool, but took way? too long. This time was much better time wise, even if the puzzles weren't necessarily as cool. I was recruited onto a team before the con by Stephanie K along with Chris Johnson and Edward Roske. I felt like we had a really good team and I was looking forward to solving puzzles.

We ended up 6th behind some really accomplished puzzle solvers - tanga regulars, people who construct puzzles and crosswords for a living, and generally really sharp people.

The puzzles each indicated some item, which was to be placed into a box and brought to the judges. The highlight of the entire puzzle hunt was when one of the clues indicated "underwear," so I turned to Steph and said "Ok, strip 'em off!" I mean, she was wearing a skirt, obviously easier for her than anyone else, right? She balked at first, and Edward said "C'mon, take one for the team" and then she shrugged and said "Alright" and ran off to the bathroom. At the end of the event I told the guy running it (Dave Arnott, a good friend of Steph's) "That puzzle hunt was a lot of work to get Steph's underwear off!" - something which amused me to no end.

Game Show
For the last 2 years the Game Show has been based on the Family Feud. This time they based it on The Match Game, a show I'm not entirely familiar with. I didn't like it at all though - the questions had multiple answers, and the idea was to match what the panel of 6 said. It seemed so impossible to score. Every time we had 2 options to go with, we'd pick one, and invariably the other would have been right.

I could have done without the Game Show this time.

BGG.con report - Publishers

One of the main things I wanted to do at the convention was connect with Zev from Z-man and Jay from Rio Grande, to show them my games and talk to them about the possibility of publishing them. I've heard that both Zev and Jay are extremely nice and approachable. I had met Zev once at KublaCon over a year ago, but I'd never met Jay.

Zev Shlasinger (Z-Man)
I talked to Zev via email before the convention, and despite his being extremely busy he said he'd try and make time for me to show him All For One and Wizard's Tower, which he said he'd read about a bit on either BGG or BGDF. I thought that was really nice of him, and I intended to take him up on that. In addition I was supposed to be delivering Lost Adventures to him for Steve and Jeff.

I had hoped to play some games with Zev over the course of the weekend. He had one that I saw just as they were packing up which looked really good (and they said it was really good), I was sorry I missed out on that. I saw Zev and Simon Hunt playing a submission that I recognized from the BGDF, so I really would have liked to get into that game, but i was about to start a game of Kingsburg which I was waiting all weekend to play. In retrospect I wish I'd bailed on Kingsburg in order to play Genji with Zev and Simon.

I never got a chance to play All For One with Zev, but I did play a game of Wizard's Tower with him when he had half an hour before the dealer rooms opened on Saturday. Later that day I handed off Lost Adventures, and showed him All For One. He even recognized the board :) I briefly described the differences, but it would be difficult to glean the details without playing. He took the game with him, and hopefully he'll try it soon and I'll see if he likes the changes that have been made since the last time he saw it (which are significant). I advised him to play with 4 first, as that's the best player count. First time players sometimes complain about chaos in the 5 player game.

Finally, I showed him the bits and described Terra Prime. He didn't seem turned off by it, and I think I'll be emailing him about sending that and Wizard's Tower for further consideration.

Jay Tummelson (Rio Grande)
I didn't see Jay all weekend, which disturbed me a little. I guess it wasn't rocket science, he was in the Rio Grande booth all the time. I had a few different friends that know him and they were going to introduce me - I was iffy about just walking up to him out of the blue even though I've heard he's open to that kind of thing. I was telling this to someone on Sunday, and Jay walked nearby, so the person I was talking to called him over and introduced me. It turned out Jay wasn't leaving until Monday, so he said we should get together after the convention officially closed and I could tell him about my games. Later I went to approach him about it, but he was engrossed in conversation with Derk and Aldie. When I mentioned a meeting, he suggested wqe do it later. At the end of the day I was (finally!) playing a game of Cuba, which I had thought would be my favorite game of the con, and Jay came back from dinner and started teaching Cuba at an adjacent table. Sadly, when Cuba was over it was pretty much time to go, and Jay was still in the middle of his game anyway. I told him it was nice to meet him and asked if he didn't mind my emailing him about the games, to which he said that was fine. I'm a little bummed I couldn't manage to meet with him. I guess I'm just not aggressive enough.

I guess I'll be sending him email as well.

BGG.con report - My games

Terra Prime
I believe Terra Prime is about as done as it's going to get except for whatever fine tuning a publisher might require. I wouldn't mind the game end trigger being a little better defined, but I think I actually know how to do that with components - basically an Exploration track which advances whenever a Yellow or Red tile is explored (the Red tiles are worth 2vp to explore, the Yellow tiles aren't). When it hits a certain number (currently 12) then the game is over.

On the one hand, the game has a space/Sci Fi theme, which could be a difficulty for a publisher since at least in the Euro market, I hear Sci Fi doesn't sell well. On the other hand, Race for the Galaxy, Galaxy Trucker, and Starcraft came out this year, which are all Sci Fi themed. Last year there was Space Dealer and Battlestations. Does this mean the market is flooded with space games? I personally don't think so, but then I'm not the publisher. Does Terra Prime provide something that the other space themed games don't? I think it does - a solid, medium/heavy Eurogame that encompasses Exploration, Colonization, Alien combat, and Resource delivery, all in under 2 hours. It has proven to be a good mix of theme and euro-style mechanics. Some will discount the randomness of the die rolls for Alien attacks, but you can better your odds by preparing, and you can play the whole game without rolling a single die. Some will discount the swingy scores as you score 13 or 15 points at a time, which is why I refer to it as medium weight (if it were heavy then people would expect 2 point victories) - its a silly point, but people argue it. From my perspective, if you win by 1 colony, or 1 delivery, or 1 Alien kill, that's a close game, whether it's 4 points, or 14.

I ran 1 game of Terra Prime at BGG.con, and everyone seemed to enjoy it a lot. Here's what some of them had to say:

Gil Hova (IngredientX): I met up with my buddy Seth Jaffee at this point, and we were able to play his prototype. Why this game isn't published yet is a complete mystery to me. It's a space-exploration game with incredibly streamlined mechanics. You'll hear players say, "Oh, it's my turn already?" a lot. Seth puts a lot of thought into his games, and it really shows with this one.

One of the playtesters had a problem with the relative lack of player interaction, and it's true that you can't blow up another player's spaceship (though there are plenty of aliens willing to do that for you). I suppose that's a question of aesthetics. If you think a spaceship game should involve lasering other players into oblivion, then maybe this game isn't for you.

But there's plenty of interaction in picking up resources just before your opponent, or getting VP for having your opponents make deliveries to your colonies. If that sort of thing sounds like it appeals to you, then try this game if you get a chance. Spread the word and get it in print!

John Lopez (Godeke): My son and I then went over to try out one of Seth's prototypes. Terra Prime feels very much "feature complete". The action point system keep things rotating around the table quickly and there appears to be multiple viable paths to victory. Even though each player took different approaches to the game, the final scores seemed quite reasonable and reflected the success with those approaches to the game. With a nice rulebook and components would be an easy sale in our house. Recommended.

Kevin Felker (kevinfelker42): As space explorers on the outskirts of known space from the Terra Prime spacestation, one attempts to win by attaining the most victory points. The closer hexes are green, then yellow, then red. Green is mostly safe, with less hostile aliens and asteroids.

Your ship card has upgradable modules and starts with only a cargo hold/no weapons/no shields, so you'll have to earn some money to make your ship deep space worthy.

First, create some colonies by taking cryogenically frozen people to a planet (or asteroids which produce a unique good for the tech chart). These start producing goods. Pick up and deliver these goods back to Terra Prime to make money (or to go up on the tech chart for some special abilities like cloaking or increased revenue on deliveries). You'll have to weigh the options based on your strategy.

Combat is fairly forgiving as you roll again if your first roll is a failure, stripping of a ship component. There's even a political option to eject goods as an offering if your ship isn't combat worthy.

There are many ways to generate VPs. Money translates into VPs. The further out the created colony is, the more VPs generated. People picking up goods from your colony nets a VP. Being the first to defeat each Red tile nets 2 VPs.
I played the merchant strategy, and VPs were similar to someone on combat/colonize strategy.

Some tweaking is still needed as Seth noted to us in that by the time we got to the furthest Red hexes, the game basically ended.

Player interaction is distilled to being a race since all are on the same side (humanity), but the turns move very fast so there is little downtime.

As I typed this, I realized how multi-leveled this game is and kept bumping up my rating.
It feels like a Runebound in space, except better and more streamlined.

I would like to see this published, curious on how the final artwork would be...quirky/cartoony or serious.

All for One
I ran a game of All For One as well at the con. The reaction of the players this time was less enthusiastic than I'm used to. The thing about All For One is that it's pretty hit or miss. Either you love it or you hate it. The players said they liked it alright, but I got the impression they were just being polite. I still think it's a solid game, and looking at all the feedback I've ever gotten from players at cons, its been overwhelmingly positive. So that's good!

I sent this one home with Zev Shlasinger from Z-Man games, I'm hoping he'll have a chance to play it again. He's played it once before, and he had some comments, some things he would have liked to see addressed. The recent changes will hopefully serve to address those items, as well as improve the game overall.

Blockade Runner
In theory, Blockade Runner will be published next year by Shifting Skies Games, so I've got that to look forward to :) I ran two games of it at the con, and the reactions were positive. There were some comments with some ideas for variants or variations of rules I'm going to look into.

Wizard's Tower
Wizard's Tower was a big hit at the convention. I played it 7 or 8 times with a total of 8 different people, and I think they all liked the game very much. One of them explicitly said that it felt like a real game (or something to that effect).

One of the people I played it with was Zev, who said that abstract games aren't really his thing, personally. I believe he said I could send it to him for further review, so I'll be emailing him about that. I think the production costs would be pretty low for that game, considering it's got fewer (and similar!) bits than Masons or Carolus Magnus.

Brain Freeze
I always like to bring Brain Freeze along to play while waiting. The whole game takes about 1 minute to play, so it's the ultimate filler. On the down side, it requires a chess clock, so it's probably imminently unpublishable. The people who played it this time seemed to like it. Edward and Eduardo played for over 1/2 an hour straight!

I found a better way to handicap myself in that game - before I was giving myself less time, but that wasn't the best handicap, even if only because it meant resetting the clock all the time. This time I tried playing left handed. Now that is a handicap!

Rodeo Drive
The new prototype Rodeo Drive s still in its infancy, but I wanted to see how certain friends liked it, because I know they like Liar's Dice. We played a partial game just to see how the mechanics worked. I couldn't really tell if the players were into it or not. The auction works really well, I'm not sure about the scoring part yet. In any case, I think its a really good start, seeing as only a couple days thought has gone into it so far.