3 new ideas... 1 new game! ... Part 2: Trick Taking as a Movement Mechanism

 Continuing my 3-part post about 3 new game ideas I recently had...

Trick Taking as a Movement Mechanism

The 2nd idea I'll discuss was inspired by a comment on Twitter about trick taking being used as a movement mechanic. Here's the outline of a pretty simple game idea where you race through a web of terrains:

Give each player a matching deck, with cards like 1-6 in each of 4 or 5 suits. Use a board that's basically a square grid, where players start on the corners and race for the center space. Each round, the leader chooses a terrain (suit), then each player plays a card that moves their piece on that terrain. The winner of the trick (player who moved the most in the led terrain) gets to be the leader next round and pick the next next terrain type. If you can't (or don't want to?) follow suit, maybe you just move 1 space in the terrain that was led, or not at all. 

There could be effects on the cards (inversely proportional to card value, so low cards have stronger effects), and you get that even if you play off-suit.

I have not yet prototyped this, but I think I know just how I'd do it:

• I'd use a standard card deck for starters, so 4 suites, give each player A-6 in each suit.
• Make 44 square tiles with a card icon (spade/heart/diamond/club) on each side, randomly distributed but with each icon on each tile.
• Make 4 corner tiles, with 2 icons on each of 2 sides (nothing on the exterior sides)
• Have players race from their corner to the center space (and maybe back, depending on the theme) 

For a first draft, I'd probably have each player shuffle their personal deck an draw a hand of cards from it -- because holding 20 cards would be annoying. Maybe a hand of 6 or 7 cards would work?

... Actually, it might work to use a single deck (of 24 cards, A-6), deal out 6 to each player, then reshuffle after some number of rounds of play.

Randomly choose a start player, that player will lead a card, and move their pawn a number of spaces equal to the rank of that card. You'd have to use all your movement, going from one space to the next (adjacently) moving over icons matching the suit of the card played. With a grid of tiles the way I described above, each interface would have 2 icons (or possibly 1 icon twice), and you could move over an interface if either of those match the suit of your card. No backtracking would be allowed, and if you moved across a double-icon edge and still had more movement, I think that would be a dead end (stop there).

In addition to moving, you'd note or resolve the game text on the card you played.

Then each other player would play a card. In order to move, they'd need to follow suit, but maybe following suit wouldn't be required. When playing off suit (either because you had to, or you wanted to), I think you'd still get to do the game text on the card, but you wouldn't move at all. 

The goal of the game would be to get to the center of the board, or to a series of specific spaces (to the center and then back to your starting space, for example).

I don't know exactly how big a board would be needed, or if the format I described will really work out for the board, but at the very least this idea sounds like it would work alright!

3 new ideas... 1 new game! ... Part 1: Telescoping game idea

 Recently I've had 3 new game ideas, inspired by something I saw on Twitter or heard on a podcast, one of which has already graduated to a physical prototype with 1 test, and a TTS mod (as yet un-played) with some adjustments!

Lest this post get overly long, I'll break it into 3 parts, one for each of the game ideas...

Telescoping game idea

The first idea I'll describe was inspired by something I heard in Keith Burgun's interview with Soren Johnson on his Strategy Can Be Fun podcast. Keith had said something about how Civ games have an interesting aspect in the beginning of building up a city, but after a point, you have so many cities that it becomes tedious to micromanage them all. My thoughts went immediately to "If it's fun to micromanage a city up to a point, then after that point, what if you didn't have to micromanage it anymore?" I'm effectively unfamiliar with everything in the realm of digital games, so I wondered if there existed a game that lets you micromanage a city or something, then at some point takes control of that city away from you, essentially letting it exist as a single unit with some stats associated with it.

Of course, I think of things in terms of tabletop, so I imagined a game divided into 3 or 4 Ages, where in the first age your units are individual humans (or maybe families), and you build up a city. Then in Age 2, your units are cities, and you build up a country. Then in Age 3, your units are countries, and you build up planets. Then finally in Age 4, your units are planets, and you build up a galaxy.

• Age 1 would be kind of you-vs-the-game, like standard euro-style multiplayer solitaire (or maybe even intentionally, actually solitaire). 
• Age 2 would be kind of you-vs-your-neighbors. 
• Age 3 would be kind of you-and-neighbors-vs-other-"teams" (since countries would be made up of cities from multiple different players). 
• And (here's an interesting twist) Age 4 could somehow be your-table-vs-another-table(!). Like, maybe Age 4 is cooperative, and it's just comparing your score vs other plays of the game

I used to have an idea for a "4X" game that was actually a series of individual games that could be played independently, or in succession, where for example, the end state of EXPLORE becomes the setup/start state for EXPAND. Maybe this could be like that, where each of those Ages is actually an independent game, and you could play them in succession, "attaching" them to each other if you want.

This sounds ambitious, but for the most part it sounds to me like it could work. And if each of the ages is a separate game, then (like my previous 4X idea) they could be played individually as standalone games, or combined to create a bigger game. As for theming, a little thought on that led me to a potentially promising idea... I've always wanted to do a game based on Moana - specifically that song The Way, which describes the people as voyagers, going from island to island (and presumably setting up camp on them). So with that in mind:

Age 1-- Let's make this tribespeople building up the best island they can. There could be "stats" such as population and boats - maybe the same resources builds both boats and houses, so you either have big population and few boats, or small population and many boats, stuff like that. Also, maybe you can do some farming/fishing to get an export good type of thing. For the most part this would be a multiplayer solitaire style game, where you perhaps draft things from a common pool, but otherwise the interaction is very low as you concentrate on your own player board.

Age 2-- Your tribe starts with 1 island, with stats (like Population, Boats, maybe Export), chosen from a few possible options. The one you start with could depend on the configuration of your island board at the end of Age 1, or if you skipped Age 1, then you could just start with a random island. The map has many uninhabited islands, and during the game you'll move your boats and settle them. Maybe your tribe's Population and Boats stats inform how much/how far you can move, and how many/what size settlements you can place at a time. Maybe Exports comes into it in a set collection way (exports of new islands could be printed on board, maybe the ones that match your starting one - or that DON'T match it - are more valuable to you). Now you're competing directly with your opponents for islands but maybe the map is big enough that you're effectively only competing with your neighbors.

Age 3-- Let's divvy the ocean up into regions, where you get 1 cube for each of the islands you had in that region. The regions are now interacting somehow (trade? war?), and you are aligned - at least a little - with the players who share your region, maybe in an area control way. Maybe the goal here is to add cubes of your color to other regions via trade (swapping cubes? adding cubes?) or war (replacing a cube), and scoring is by area majority.

Age 4 -- Maybe it's a little crazy, and outside the scope of the game, but maybe Age 4 could be a cooperative game, with all the players trying to make the best "global" community they can (maybe this is just the whole ocean area where these islands are). Then other groups can compete with that via score.

In talking this through with my friend Mohan, it occurred to me that maybe a 3-act structure would work better... Multiplayer solitaire -> Interactive -> Cooperative, and again, each of those being playable as a standalone game. For players committing to the entire 3-game "campaign." it might be very interesting to see how the culmination being cooperative affects the dynamics in the earlier games. In fact, it might be more interesting if that 3rd game were only MAYBE cooperative, so players could be presented with meta-dynamics like you see in Battlestar Galactica: "My 1st loyalty card says human, so do I try hard to make the humans win? Or hedge my bets and try to keep us on the edge, just in case I turn out to be a Cylon when the 2nd loyalty card comes out?"

I feel like this is a fairly ambitious idea, but it sounds kind of attainable - maybe more-so than the 4X series game idea. Maybe it's got some legs?

Keeping up with Keeping Up With the Joneses, take 2

Time for a status update on Keeping Up With the Joneses:

I've recently tightened up the card pool, replacing some sub-par cards with ones that feel much more useful. At present, you basically get 2 track bumps on your turn, one from your card, the other from your rondel movement. In addition, the Joneses move N times per round (where N is the number of players in the game). One concern I have about that is in a 2-player game, you get about as many track bumps as the Joneses, which might make it too easy to keep up with them. Then again, I do scale the definition of "close enough to score," so maybe I'm overly concerned about that for no reason. If it does prove to be a problem, I suppose I could just start the Joneses marker up 1 notch for 2 players.

One other thing I've never been 100% on in this game is the effect of the Charity vs Social tracks. They both directly allow you to turn money into points, although they do it a little bit differently:

Charity: You must either pay the listed cost to advance on the track (and collect some points), or else go down on the track and gain 2 money.
Social: Advance on the track, then you may pay 1 money for 1 point up to a certain number of times.
I keep going back and forth over whether those are too similar or not. Nobody has ever brought it up other than me, and while I tend to either ignore the Social track, or else advance on it without spending any money, perhaps that's just my play style (I tend to spend my money on Home and/or Kids).

I do like the dynamic of the Charity track, so if anything were to change, it should probably be the Social track. That said, I do have a few ideas for an alternate Social track effect - something along the lines of:

Score 15/9/6vp. When you advance here, each other player may pay you $3 to advance here as well.

I think this idea has the potential to really feel social. The scoring is 50% higher than standard, so there's some good incentive to get up the track - be that by landing there, or by paying money when someone else does.

One other new twist I tried was moving the Joneses pawn the same number of space the player moves, rather than a random number (from 0-3). I have always been skeptical of this due to the potentially high variance in the game length, and the possibility that it might overload the decision of which card to take by adding another potentially important factor to that decision. I have tried that once so far, and in that game it did not seem to feel like it overloaded our decisions, the length of the game ended up being within the same range as using the random numbers, and the resolution of the turn went a little bit smoother. On the down side, that decision did tend to take a little bit longer on average, and I kind of miss the possibility of the Joneses moving 0 sometimes. 

At this point, I can't make any further progress without getting more testing in to try that new version of the Social track, and make sure all the other details hold up to multiple plays.

New games discovered recently on BGA (2 hits and a miss)

 Ever since the Pandemic... really ever since my son was born (4 years ago now!) I've done most of my gaming online rather than in person. To be clear, I strongly prefer in-person gaming, but playing online is a lot better than not playing games at all, and in that respect, BoardGameArena has been a lifesaver!

In the past I've played on other online portals, such as Yucata.de, Boiteajeux.net, MaBiWeb.com, etc -- they all have good games, and good implementations, but none of them really stand up to BoardGameArena when it comes to look and user interface. When I started playing online all the time, I roped a couple of friends into playing with me, and pretty quickly decided not to try and get them all to follow 3 or 4 different portals just to play games with me. Instead, we've stuck primarily to BGA. It didn't hurt that about a dozen of my/TMG's game were being implemented there over the last few years! 

Sure, there are some titles on Yucata or wherever that aren't available on BGA, so being exclusive to one portal misses out on those, but that hasn't bothered me too much yet, perhaps because BGA is adding new titles all the time, and there are already a ton of great games on there to begin with.

My friends and I usually find a game we like, play it a bunch of times in a row (all asynch, which is the only way I like to play -- based on my situation I find it difficult-to-impossible to schedule a couple of uninterrupted hours to sit at the computer and play a game), and when we get bored of it, we move on to another for a while. Usually my friends don't care too much what we play, so they leave it to me to find/suggest/start games, and that means I occasionally browse the available titles looking for something interesting that I've been meaning to try. Sometimes a game comes up that I've never even heard of, and if it looks or sounds interesting I like to give it a try.

To be honest, trying an unknown game has been pretty hit and miss (and probably more miss than hit) -- I've been pretty disappointed in games like Quetzal (though it looks beautiful), The Ruhr: A Story Of Coal Trade, and Small Islands. I've found a couple of OK games such as Nanga Parbat (2p only), Ponte Del Diavolo (not bad per se, but too abstract for my tastes), and Marrakech (a bit of silly fun at 2 players, though short lived). As far as "hits" are concerned, of games I'd tried blind I could only really point to Sobek 2-player (based on a card game I was familiar with)... until recently.

About a month ago I tried a dice-and-card drafting entangled decision game from 2020 called Glow that I rather enjoyed.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a press-your-luck deckbuilding game from 2021 that I'd never heard of called Living Forest -- it has great artwork, plays quickly, and I think it does deckbuilding really well.

Those two hits significantly increased my track record for trying new games on BGA, but as a reminder that looks can be deceiving, I also had another big miss recently. I saw a new game go live called Little Factory, which a few people seemed to describe as Splendor + Res Arcana. Splendor is a solid game, even if it's a little straightforward for my personal tastes and has an endgame dynamic I don't care for. I only played Res Arcana once, and it was asynchronously on BGA, and I really got the impression it was the kid of game I'd strongly prefer to play in real time.

Little Factory is an engine building game with excruciatingly incremental turns - each turn you only do one thing: trade several of your lower value cards for 1 higher value card from the supply, or trade 1 of your higher value cards for several lower value ones from the supply. You can get buildings that you activate which let you do additional , specific trades, so that's the engine building part, except the building only works if the card it gets you is currently in the face up supply! Otherwise it does nothing. It's worth points, so that's good, but an engine building game where your engine doesn't work, or only works once, doesn't excite me.

I may be in the minority on this one, a couple of my friends thought Little Factory was interesting enough, but it was a miss for me. But looking at the last month or so on BGA, with regard to blindly trying new games, 2 hits and 1 miss is not a bad track record!

A Glowing Review

 I don't generally do game reviews, but every once in a while I come across a game that interests me in one way or another, and I spend some time thinking about it. Most recently this applies to a game I found on BoardGameArena.com -- 2021's Glow, by Cédrick Chaboussit.

Glow is a "stylish" looking game, with a unique theme, and bold, black and white cover art: 

To be frank, I don't care for the back-and-whiteness of the art. I saw this cover on BGA several times and sort of dismissed it. Then one day I was bored, and decided to check it out.

Very simply, Glow is a card-and-dice drafting game which employs one of my latest favorite mechanisms: Entangled Decisions. You start with a character card, which provides some permanent dice, and has some ability printed on it. Each round you draft a companion card, which has some benefits, is worth some number of points, and has an ability printed on it, and depending on which card you choose, you also get some number (and some type) of dice for the turn. Those dice are basically randomly distributed. So when you draft, you're taking a pairing of a card and some dice, and you need to consider which card you want (based on all it's attributes), as well as how many (and which) dice you want for the turn. 

The dice are colored, and have 5 different resources on them. The resource matching the die color occurs twice on the die, making it more likely to come up. This can be important when choosing your dice, because it relates to the likelihood you'll get what you want or need when you roll.

After the draft, you'll roll all your dice, then get a chance to mitigate them. There are re-roll tokens you can collect, and each one can be spent to re-roll 1 or 2 dice. You can spend 3 re-roll tokens to set a die to any face. the neat thing about re-rolls is that you can "buy" them for victory points in a really elegant way. Some spaces on the score track contain a re-roll icon. If you want a re-roll, you may move your score marker backwards on the track until you encounter one of those icons. the icons are spaced very close together in the early game, when scores are low, but once you start generating points, it'll cost more and more points to buy re-rolls.

Once you're happy with your roll results (or at least, once you can no longer re-roll anything), you get to activate all of your cards. The cool thing to note here is that each die can be used once for each card - not just once total. So you can do well to get cards with overlapping color requirements, for example you might have a character that gives you 3 points and a re-roll for every Air-Water pair you roll, and you might pick up a companion that gives you 3 points per water, and another that gives you 6 points if you roll no Earth icons. In that case, a roll of 2 Air + 2 Water (and no Earth) would generate 18 points and 2 re-rolls! 

Another interesting thing about this part of the game is that you are required to activate all of your cards, and some of them have detrimental effects, from losing points, to killing off the companion.

Finally, after activating all the cards you can, you are able to move your pawn on a board by spending your dice. Path spaces each show one of the die icons, and you advance by using an icon of that type. There's another resource called Footprints that you can get which count as wild for that purpose. There are clearings on the map which require footprints to enter, have some type of reward for entering (like a re-roll token), and show a VP value. Ending your turn on a clearing, you're allowed to move your encampment piece to that clearing, which will now be worth that number of points at game end. Perhaps in a future turn you'll upgrade that bonus by moving to a higher value clearing and setting up camp again.

There are some more details, but that's generally how the game goes, and I've noted some of the aspects of each part of the turn that I find cool and interesting. At first glance, with the black and white art, and a bunch of die rolling, I didn't really think the game would be for me. But after a handful of plays, I can say that I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit! I appreciate a lot of the little design decisions that went into it, and it's actually rather clever. That said, I've found a number of things I'd have done differently, or tried to change if I were developing the game, I'll list them below.

So if you're browsing BGA looking for something to play, and have time for a short (8 turn) game, definitely give Glow a try! 

Here are my current thoughts about how I might change Glow:

• It might be neat (though probably unrealistic) if the dice were d10s with 4 sides matching the die color, 2 sides each matching "adjacent" colors, and 1 side each matching "opposite" colors (like on a Magic color wheel)
• I've always disliked paying a resource to re-roll a die and getting the same result, so maybe that could be disallowed somehow
• For the map, I'd like to see some incentive to visit multiple villages, rather than just get to the 20vp one (or maybe the 15vp one) by the end. Currently setting up camp mid-game just insulates you from failing to reach the big ones. Like maybe a couple of points, or a reroll or something when you set up encampment
• MAYBE have that black die in the game from the beginning, not just if that one bird comes into play (I don't know if I'd actually like that)
• If you're at the bottom of the score track, the last (first?) re-roll icon could maybe just say "set all your dice exactly how you want them"
• The spells from that one card: why are they random? let the player draw N, deal out 1 to each opponent (and discard the extra) or something
• And I wonder about balance on some of the cards, though as a draft game maybe that doesn't matter
• I'm not sure, but it seems like maybe the icons are treated as if, say, clouds are more common than the others... only they're not

The List: circa April, 2022

It's been a while since I've taken a look at The List, and I've got some updates to make! Let's get right to it:  

Published Games - I got to add a little bit to this section:

- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG) [theoretically signed by a publisher!]
- Isle of Trains (Co-Design with Dan Keltner) (BGG) [new edition coming 2022/2023 from Dranda Games!]
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (Co-Design with Dan Keltner) [New edition with included expansion]
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) [now available for preorder from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [finally available for preorder from Renegade!]

- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [coming soon (2023?) from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [coming soon (2023?) from Renegade!]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze
- Amun-Re expansion [coming soon from Alley Cat Games with 20th Anniversary edition!]

Finished But Unpublished Games - in line to be published:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print] [theoretically signed by a publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [Ready for art] [theoretically signed by a publisher!]

- Deities & Demigods (Co-Design with Matthew Dunstan) [signed by a publisher!]

Currently Pitching Games - "actively" looking for a publisher (though I haven't actively been doing much of anything lately!):

- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe) [pitching to publishers]

- Sails & Sorcery [with Michael Mindes] [pitching to publishers]

- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG) [pitching to publishers]

- Exhibit (BGG) [pitching to publishers]

- Keeping Up with the Joneses [pitching to publishers]

- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain) [pitching to publishers]

"Finished" But Unpublished Games - abandoned or backburnered designs that are "done":
- Dice Works (BGG)
- Wizard's Tower (BGG) [Abandoned]
- Suburban Sprawl
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]
- Rolling Realms: Jaffee Realms (for Jamey Stegmaier's Rolling Realms)

Current Active Designs - these are the games I'm actively testing or working on:

- I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement [ICYC/WP]

Backburnered Designs - I kid myself into thinking that I'm still working on these:

- Alter Ego (BGG)

- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

- Joan of Arc

Promising Recent ideas:
- Worker-ception [with David Short]

- False Prophet [Mancala/Worker Placement]

- Come And Play [Sesame Street memory/rondel game]

- Candyland Game [Candyland/No Thanks mashup]

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, for years:
- 8/7 Central [Abandoned]
- Hot & Fresh [Abandoned]

- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG)

- Reading Railroad [Abandoned]

- Moctezuma's Revenge

- Kilauea [a designer showed interest in co-designing, but that didn't go anywhere]

- Automatown [with Michael Brown]

- Dynasty [I still think this one has potential]

Misc and Really Old Stuff - most of this I'll probably never get back to, but I like keeping it around just in case:
- 9-Ball
- Blockade Runner
- Roman Emperors (my version of someone else's game)
- Admirals of the Spanish Main (my version of someone else's game)

- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- The Untouchables
- Day labor game based on craps

- Rondel Role Selection

-Scourge of the High Seas [deckbuilding game with 2 center rows]

Here are notable comments on some of the updates I've recently made to The List:

- Amun-Re expansion [coming soon from Alley Cat Games with 20th Anniversary edition!]

I got a development gig helping Alley Cat Games create expansion modules for their upcming 20th Anniversary edition of Amun-Re. It was fun working on a classic euro, and a game that I've enjoyed for almost 2 decades. I had the opportunity to both develop some of the content created by the Alley Cat team, as well as suggest/create some additional content. I even have some leftover content that they didn't end up using, that I think could still be worthwhile - another module, and a not-quite-finished solo mode. Perhaps some of that will see the light of day in a future expansion (I feel that's doubtful), or in the variants forums on BGG.

- Eminent Domain (BGG) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]

- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]

I managed to sign Eminent Domain and its expansions to the publisher of a lot of my favorite games over the years. They haven't announced anything yet, so I won't be specific, but watch for an EmDo big box some time next year!

If that goes well, I'm told the publisher is interested in my EmDo ancillary products as well: Microcosm, Chaos Theory, and Eminent Domain Origins. I put in the contract that they have the option to publish those under the same contract, to make it easy for them to do so. I look forward to more info about this becoming available. Here's hoping the line does well for them!

- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (Co-Design with Dan Keltner) [New edition with included expansion]

I was approached by Dranda Games, who wanted to pick up the license for Isle of Trains. Dan and I had created the All Aboard expansion for the original publisher something like 7 years ago, but nothing ever happened with that outside of a little bit of artwork.

Dranda is excited to include All Aboard, and they're running a kickstarter later this year for a deluxe version! They did some development on the game, which I decided ahead of time that I was going to just be OK with. I'm excited to play the game in its final form!

- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) [now available for preorder from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [finally available for preorder from Renegade!]

- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [coming soon from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [coming soon from Renegade!]

Renegade Game Studios has picked up the Crusaders line. They are reprinting the base game, including the deluxe version, and they're also finally making available the long awaited Divine Influence expansion - the one that's been printed and sitting in China for 2+ years! They'll be reprinting the expansion as well once that stock is gone, and they've also committed to my 5th/6th player Crimson/Amber Knight expansions!

- Deities & Demigods [signed by a publisher!]

A publisher signed Deities & Demigods, and we're setting it in their own fantasy universe. They asked me to make the game a little heavier, more "4X-y," so I added a deity who's action is to explore. There are now face down tiles on each non-city, non-quest space, in 5 different colors (or "terrains"). You can use the new deity to move your troops a little bit, and/or explore these face down tiles. It came together pretty well, I think, and I've passed the game off to the publisher's in-house developer for any finishing touches they might want to make.

Exploration mechanics - revisited

 A few months ago I posted some thoughts I was having about exploration mechanics, specifically for the new deity I was adding to Deities & Demigods. In the end, I decided for that game to go with the higher level action allowing you to explore more than once at a time, rather than drawing multiple tiles from which to choose (representing better preparedness, luck, or more time searching).

Back to the drawing board?

More recently I have been asked to consult on a game, and this game has a different exploration mechanism. In the first version I saw (which I understand was far from the designer's first version) had face down tiles, and player's avatars had some movement allowance, and you'd move however many spaces (skipping over face down tiles if you like), then flip up the tile you ended up on. I commented on this s it's a personal pet peeve of mine: I hate when a game asks me to make a choice without giving me any way to pick between the different options.

The latest version of the game is structurally pretty different, but still has the same exploration mechanism, and it really gets my goat! So the other day I racked my brain and posted on Twitter and a couple of Discord channels looking for various exploration mechanics people had seen and liked, hoping to find something that I felt worked better than having to randomly pick between a few different face down things every turn (even if it's only really in the early game, until the map is mostly face up).

Crowdsourcing mechanisms

Most of the replies I got were not that helpful (and I wasn't particularly specific about the game, so I expected that), but in the end I think my crowdsourcing bore fruit, as somebody mentioned the way resources get revealed in Gold West. I had never thought of that as an exploration mechanism before, but I think in this case it would really work well. 

Gold West style exploration

The way Gold West works is that you have a board full of face-down tiles, with a few of them face-up. On each player's turn, they will claim one of the face-up tiles, which confer resources (in that game it's important that you get resources every turn, so that's mandated by rule). When you claim a tile, you then turn face up each tile adjacent to that one, making more resource options available. This easily works well with an exploration theme, imagine walking through a dark dungeon or cavern, where the surrounding area (1 tile radius) is illuminated by your torch - it's just like that! So you can see what's nearby (not just where you're standing), but the information horizon is still limited. Starcraft and Warcraft do this same thing as well.

This solves all the problems I was having with the exploration in the game I'm consulting on: It allows a player to go to the tile they want (given a subset to choose from), and it maintains a feeling of exploration. In addition, it works to kind of gate the mind- and late-game tiles, because currently you're allowed to just walk past face down tiles and skip them, and that feels anticlimactic to me.

Keep this one in the back pocket

I have not yet pitched this idea to the designer, and it's possible he prefers the feel of the current mechanism better. I will admit that I might not be in line with the target audience for that particular type of thing, and some players might prefer the feeling of discovery when you flip the tile and find out what you'll get for the turn. If that's the case, I'm going to be sure to keep this mechanism in my back pocket for the next time I'm looking for an exploration mechanism in a game!

"Space" or geography in games, and a twist on engine building? (also, YANGI)

 In the last few days, I had 2 separate interactions on twitter, which I've sort of combined to form Yet Another New Game Idea (YANGI!)

"Space" or geography in games

I was discussing "space" in games with Keith Burgun, author of Clockwork Game Design, and host of a podcast with that same name (though actually, he just rebranded the podcast to a much less good title: Strategy Can Be Fun?). Keith comes from a videogame background, and I think he was mostly talking about space in open world RPGs, or maybe grid-based tactics games, but I likened it to "geography" in tabletop board games as well. I said there's something nice about geography in a tabletop game... Otherwise, it doesn't really need a tabletop!

In many worker placement games, the board is just an array of action spaces. It's convenient to see what's been taken, because there are pieces sitting on the spaces, but in most of those games the geography of the spaces is not important at all. It could be interesting (and thematically strong) if the geography of the board mattered more.

Keith suggested that if you have "space," you need enough of it to really do something with it. Like if it's just five spaces or something, that's kinda not enough, that's more like just menu options. He cited a videogame I'm not familiar with, saying it had a 5x5 grid, and that's just barely enough to feel like space. He summed up by saying

The trick to space is, create enough space that players feel like it's a space and they can do things with it, BUT ALSO make the whole thing feel meaningful and not just like a plodding chore to move around on

I agree with that last statement, but of course I got a little semantic about the size needed to "feel like space" -- the space needs to be big enough to be interesting, but not so big as to have wasted space (whether that's a 5x5 grid, or even just 5 spaces). The amount of space you need in order to feel like it's "enough" depends on how far your units can move at a time. 5x5 is nothing if you can move 8 spaces, but it's huge if you can only move 1!

So, bottom line: I wouldn't mind seeing more non-trivial geography in board games.

A Twist on Engine Building?

Separately, I saw a twitter thread from Jeff Warrender, author of You Said This Would Be Fun, and designer of Sands of Time and his new self-published Acts of the Evangelists [BGG link], listing off some of his random game ideas, just for fun. One of those sparked my interest:

Engine-builder where cards don't synergize with each other, they synergize with locations on the board. But we share a conveyance, and thus our engines don't get "fuel" at the same rate.

 

My response off the top of my head:

This could be cool... basically playing cards to your tableau that boost the effects of different locations, then vying to get the group to visit the locations you have cards in play for Stack up a couple locations with tons of effects and risk not going to them? Or play cards everywhere, ensuring you always get a decent (if not amazing) action?

I'm not sure that actually constitutes a "twist" on engine building, but in case the common perception of it is building a tableau of cards that synergize with each other," maybe relating them to a geographic game board is somewhat novel. 

YANGI

Then I started thinking of how these concepts could apply to a boardgame. For example, I could think of a few ways that geography could come into a worker placement game... 

• Making adjacency matter 
• Limiting movement, so your options are limited (like a Rondel)
• Making resolution order matter (like Caylus)

I came up with this example structure for a game that considered some of this spatial/geographic stuff, and employed Jeff's idea about engine building that incorporates the game's geography:

• Say we as players are in a group, so we travel together in a van or something. 
• There's a board with some number of towns (maybe 7-10?), each connected to 2 others (like maybe they're in a circle, and you can only drive around the circle) 
• Say each town has a main action and a sub-action (lesser version of the main action, or just a less strong action) 
• On your turn, you may move the van to an adjacent town, then you get to do the main action of that town, and the sub-action of one adjacent town

Then I thought about combining those thoughts with the idea from Jeff's twitter thread: 

Maybe one thing you can do is play cards into your personal tableau, which make certain towns better for you...

• When you get the main action of town A, also get THING
• When you get the sub-action of town A, also get LESSER THING
• When ANYONE gets the main action of town A, get THING

Stuff like that. In general, you could stack several effects up on each of a couple of towns, making those super good for you, or you could play cards to all the towns sort of evenly, so you always get some good stuff, even if nothing super-amazing.

I haven't really got a good theme for this yet, which undoubtedly means I'm stalled until I think of one, or until someone suggests one :)

And because I feel like there aren't enough bulleted lists in this post, here are some ideas for groups that travel together:

• Traveling players, like the company in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• A band on tour
• A family or group of friends on a road trip
• A family or group at Disneyland
• Students on a field trip

A Knight in Shining Armor

Originally posted an unabridged version of this as a backer-only KS update for the Crusaders project a few days ago. Heads up... this is one of those good news/bad news sorts of things

It has been 3 years since Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done delivered to backers, and I've really enjoyed seeing positive reviews, session reports, and pictures on Instagram and Twitter of people enjoying the game!

For those of you who play games online, Crusaders has recently gone into Alpha testing on BoardGameArena.com, with a very nice implementation!

As I'm sure I've said before, I designed an expansion to the game, called Divine Influence. I may also have said that that expansion got printed over 2 years ago, and has been sitting at the manufacturer this whole time!

The Bad News

How can that be? Wouldn't TMG want to sell the product that's already been printed? Well, that brings me to the "bad news" portion of this post. I'm sad to report that the rumors you may have heard are true: TMG will not be publishing games for the foreseeable future. This has led to a number of disappointments for me, not the least of which is that Divine Influence was never released. For a while now I have been trying to find a way to make the existing copies of Divine Influence available myself, to no avail.

The Good News

But hark! I bring good news as well! I'm happy to announce that, like the eponymous (see post title) knight in shining armor, RENEGADE GAME STUDIOS has licensed the Crusaders line, as announced at their Renegade Con virtual event today (Friday, March 4th)!

If you tuned in to twitch.tv/playrenegade this afternoon, you saw a cavalcade of products announced in their G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, My Little Pony, and other lines (deckbuilding games, role playing games, and board games), you saw an unboxing of My Father's Work (a very ambitious and awesome sounding legacy-style game by T.C. Petty III), and you saw Crusaders retail, Crusaders Deluxe, and Crusaders: Divine Influence mentioned.

Renegade has the existing stock of Divine Influence (with TMG branding) available for pre-order now, and if-and-when that sells through, they'll print a Renegade version (which is the same thing, but with a Renegade logo instead of a TMG one).

They also teased more Crusaders content, which was referring to Crimson and Amber Knight (5 and 6p expansions - see below).

What's In The Box

A few years ago, the fine folks at boooored.com made a fantastic summary of what's in the Divine Influence expansion, so check that out to see what's in the Divine Influence box. I'll add that there will be only one version of the expansion, and it's compatible with both the retail and the Deluxified base game. That was TMG's plan all along, and it kept the price of the expansion way down.

If 3's Company, and 4's a Crowd, What Are 5 and 6?
[Eleven!]

And just to tease one more little thing: For those of you who enjoy Crusaders, but generally have 5 or 6 players at game night, I have also designed a 5/6p expansion, which Renegade will print a little bit later. I'm not sure when that will release, let's give them a chance to get the base game out first!

That's actually 2 separate expansion boxes, one (Crimson Knight) adds a red player color, the other (Amber Knight) adds a yellow player color. The boxes are nearly identical, so you can get one or the other to add a 5th player, or both to play with 6. Each box comes with 2 new Knight Orders as well (4 total if you get both), and they are also compatible with Divine Influence - they have all the additional stuff you'd need to play with the expansion. That's how it was set up before anyway, and the art is done, but Renegade may decide to combine them into one box or something.

Oh, and on BGA you can play with both Divine Influence and Crimson/Amber Knight if you'd like! So try them out online, then buy them to play at home with your friends!

I'm So Excited, and I Just Can't Hide It

I can't begin to tell you how happy I am, and how much of a relief it is, to see Divine Influence finally moving forward into circulation. I'm having a blast playing the Alpha implementation on BGA, and I get excited whenever I see people post about playing it on there, or signing up to be an Alpha tester just so they can play it. Now, if only I got royalties for games played online! 

Actually, my position is that the best advertising you can get for a game is people playing it, so an online implementation is only going to increase sales of the physical copies when they release later this year. So it's super-good timing that the BGA implementation will go live around the same time the game becomes available for purchase!

A random thought on making a kid's game

 Not too long ago I had the idea to make a Railroad Tycoon inspired game about moving patrons around a Disney style amusement park. Someone even helped me make a potential board draft by overlaying a hex grid over a map of Disneyland I found online, and I colored some of the hexes with different colors such as yellow for eateries, green for shops, blue for rides, pink for character encounters, and orange for shows. As yet I have not taken that idea any further.

Recently, my 3.5 year old son, seeing that draft board, wanted to "play this game" with me. So I grabbed a couple of pawns and a die, and we started taking turns ...

I rolled the die, then moved my pawn, space by space, a number of times equal to the roll result. Then I said "your turn" and gave Corbin the die. He rolled and moved his pawn around more or less at random, but the right number of times according to the die roll. Cool. So I took another turn, clearly and intentionally moving space-by-adjacent-space, trying to end up on a colored space. When I would do so, I'd say something like "I'm going to ride this ride." Turn by turn, Corbin started getting closer and closer to what I was doing, eventually moving space by space, and sometimes even trying to land on the colored spaces!

Now, that's not really a game by any definition, as we didn't have a goal or anything, but I was thinking about how to make it into one. Today, Corbin wanted to "play" that game again, and so we did the same thing, only this time I figured maybe the goal could be to visit one of each type of attraction, then again but without repeat attractions... Imagine you left a cube on each colored space showing you'd been there, and once you have a cube on one of each type of space, you replace those with markers and start placing cubes again

Also, I had marked some spaces purple and labeled "tram" - maybe you could move from one purple space to another as if they were adjacentis that simple enough for a kid? The goal: visit all the different colored spaces! The mechanism: simple roll and move. It's not super exciting or deep, but that's not really the point of a kids game, right?

Why I don't like 18XX

 There's a genre of game out there called 18XX... for those who don't know, 18XX is a series of games such as 1830: Railways and Robber Barons, or 1846: The Race for the Midwest. There are a million of them, and to be honest, I don't know the first thing about their pedigree, their history, which ones came out first vs which are newer, and frankly I don't know enough about them to even tell them apart. The genre is big though, and it has many hardcore fans - including some friends of mine, some people I've mentioned in this blog before, such as J.C. Lawrence (AKA clearclaw) or Eric Flood (AKA etothepi).

One way you can tell that the series has become a whole genre is by looking at the titles of similar games that are not named after a year, but follow the same nomenclature, such as 18MEX, or 18Chesapeake.

Games in this genre look like rail games, where you don't own any particular rail company -- rather you buy shares in the different companies, and you sometimes build rail or upgrade engines on behalf of the companies in an effort to increase the value of their stock, resulting in your earning dividends or your holdings increasing in value.

Another, similar stock manipulation game that I found myself not loving was the rondel game Imperial, by Mac Gerdts. In that game, you bought shares of countries, and when a country's turn came up the share leader would decide what to do. One thing to note about that game (and I think they changed the dynamic a little in Imperial 2030) was that if you did not control any countries, you basically did not take any turns - you could play a good portion of the game without even taking a turns, but still be in contention to win! I love rondels, but I found that dynamic odd.

One of my favorite games of all time, Railroad Tycoon (AKA Railways of the World), could be described similarly to the 18XX games above EXCEPT in that game (and Age of Steam/Steam) you DO own a rail company, and while you "issue shares" to get money to work with, you're issuing them to nameless, faceless NPCs, and they don't fluctuate in value at all, so they're nothing like the shares in an 18XX game.

So why is it that I love RRT/RotW but I can't bring myself to even look at any of the 18XX genre? Well, there might be a few reasons... 

1. 18XX tends to take a very long time to play - I prefer games in the 1-2 hour range
2. 18XX games tend to have low production values - this isn't a huge concern for me, but it is a small one
3. 18XX games have a lot of counting, calculating and passing money back and forth - this isn't a deal-breaker for me, but it is a lot of busywork
4. Owning a rail line vs owning shares of various rail lines - the big difference between RTT and 18XX. I think I like to build up and have ownership of my own stuff
5. Stock Manipulation as the main mechanism - this is probably the biggest reason I like RRT but dislike 18XX. I'm just not into stock games
6. The promise of a train game - I'll explain below

As I mentioned above, the biggest difference between the Railroad Tycoon family of games and the 18XX family is that one is a network building game, while the other is a stock manipulation game. Yes, you build rail networks in 18XX as a way of influencing the stock values, but the heart of the game is the stocks: influencing their value, timing your buys and sells, that type of thing. I guess I'm just much more interested in the network aspect and in delivering cubes, and I like having my own personal capacity to do that.

So that's probably enough reason to like or not like a genre of game -- if I don't enjoy the main mechanism, then it follows that I wouldn't want to play the game. But there's one more aspect to it that might twist the knife just a little bit...

The promise

I've actually seen a few posts around the blogosphere lately about promises. Andy just posted today in his Prototypical blog on BGG about the promise made by box art. Jeff Warrender posted last year in Jeff's World of Game Design (also on BGG) about this topic as well. I feel like I've seen the topic of promises come up on Board Game Twitter lately as well.

The general idea is that the box cover, art, theme, and setting of a game suggest a promise to the player of what kind of experience they can expect to have while playing. When gameplay doesn't live up to that promise, it degrades the overall experience - sometimes to the point where you're turned off to the game and just don't want to play it anymore.

Stock manipulation not a mechanism I'm particularly fond of, but it's not a deal-breaker on it's own. I like Acquire, for example, which is entirely a stock manipulation game about building and merging hotel chains. So while the difference in main mechanism certainly explains why I'd prefer Railroad Tycoon over an 18XX game, perhaps the reason I don't feel compelled to play 18XX at all is that to me, the "build a train network" trappings implies a promise to me, one that is fulfilled by games in the Railroad Tycoon family: I'll be building up a rail network in order to make deliveries. That said, the focus in 18XX games on stock manipulation rather than network building or delivering fails to deliver (haha) on that promise - from my point of view anyway.

So I think that's probably why I shy away from wanting to try an 18XX-style stock manipulation game with a train theme, even if it's a game (or genre) that I might actually enjoy, given a chance.

2020-2021: A playtesting retrospective

 A couple of years ago I posted a playtesting retrospective spanning late 2017 through the end of 2019, and I thought it as interesting to see the breakdown of time spent on various games, especially while considering the state that I know those games to be in now.

Now it's a couple years later, most of which has been spent in a global pandemic. Let's see what I managed to get playtested in 2020 and 2021...

2020

January
Throughout January, after a break for a Disneyworld vacation, we iterated a few times on the All For One revamp, and I brought Apotheosis back out after 6 months on the shelf.

All For One seemed to be working well, and I remember being pretty excited about the new updates. Unfortunately I haven't played it since, though in the interim I did create a Tabletop Simulator mod for the game, and I've even pitched it to a couple of publishers that way.

Apotheosis progress was coming along, and we ended up playing it a few times a month throughout 2020.

February
In addition to Apotheosis, February saw the debut of an Isle of Trains board game. First we played Dan's first draft version. Then a few weeks later I brought my own take on his concept, which was a lighter, more straightforward game, and we played that a few times.

March
March was weird, because I had to cancel most weekends for my Anniversary, and then a COVID scare. The 1 time we did play, we tested Apotheosis one more time, and enjoyed a published game: Glen More. Beyond that, I did play Apotheosis one more time at home with my wife.

April
Sadly, I had to cancel my weekly playtest meetup indefinitely due to COVID. I didn't test anything at all in April, but I did figure out how to implement prototypes on Tabletop Simulator, starting with Apotheosis.

May
Thanks to the technology of TTS and the internet, I was able to get a test in now and again online. In May we played Apotheosis a couple of times.

We also played the Isle of Trains boardgame once, and I think I've come around to thinking that maybe Dan was on the right track wanting to make a heavier game.

Finally, we played an updated version of Automatown which designer Michael Brown joined in on as a co-designer. He made a TTS mod and we were able to see his updates.

June
I was still getting the hang of making digital prototypes, and getting online playtests together. Unfortunately I didn't get any tests in June at all.

July
In July I pulled couple of older prototypes out of the woodwork. I played Reading Railroad at home with my wife, I played Exhibit online with my testers, and I got together with a designer who had come on board to work on Kilauea with me to check out his ideas for the game.

August

I got an online tests of Reading Railroad in August, as well as a couple games of Crusaders at home with my wife to test new faction powers I was developing.

I had an online pitch meeting for Apotheosis, which seemed promising. The publisher wanted to set the game in their fantasy universe, which was a perfect fit, so Rick and I reskinned the prototype with their art assets.

September

I kicked off the month with another test of the new Crusaders factions with Michelle. 

A few weeks later I had a prototype of a brand new game, Keeping Up With The Joneses, which I played twice with Michelle, and twice solo - and solo testing is something I almost never do!

Online I played one more game of Apotheosis with Rick and Aaron, my two main testers since going digital.

October

October was a busy month for testing, mostly on account of solo testing for Keeping Up With The Joneses - I played 6 solo games in.

I got in three online tests of Keeping Up with the Joneses as well, and three tests of Apotheosis too.

November
I revisited a couple more older games in November via digital prototypes with Rick and Aaron: Exhibit and Dice Works. I also played one of Rick's prototypes called Cwen.

December

We finished off the year with 4 tests of Apotheosis with some significant changes based on playing with the publisher who had showed interest, and the game got better and better.

2021

January
I started out 2021 playing games by a couple of my testers' latest games: Andy's Gemstone Pylons, and Rick's Stardock (later renamed Starlight).

We played Keeping Up With The Joneses once, and Apotheosis twice (once with the publisher)

February
I only had 2 test sessions in February, and we switched gears and played Sails & Sorcery, trying to figure out how to fix the issues with the Plunder action.

March
I didn't test any of my own stuff in March, but I played Rick's Starlight game a couple of times, as well as a skiing game that Andy was working on as a developer.

April
In April I revived another prototype, Deities & Demigods, to reacquaint myself and my players with the game. We also played Exhibit again, then later in the month I had the opportunity to pitch it to a big publisher (unfortunately, they passed on it). 

May
I started off the month with two more pitch meetings: Apotheosis and Keeping Up With The Joneses with one publisher; Riders of the Pony Express, Deities & Demigods, Sails & Sorcery, and Apotheosis with the other.

I played Rick's Starlight once more as well, then missed the rest of my sessions due to a vacation to Hawaii, lack of players, and technical difficulties.

June
Another tough month for playtesting... I had a first test of a new I-Cut-You-Choose game idea (later titled Division of Labor) with Rick, and a pitch meeting for Sails & Sorcery, then missed the rest of my sessions for one reason or another.

July
I got a 2nd test of Division of Labor and found some fundamental issues that would need to be addressed, and finished off the month with 3 tests of another revived prototype, Skye Frontier.

August
Another rough month for test sessions, I only got 1 playtest in: I got a gig developing expansion content for Amun-Re, a classic Eurogame from 20 years ago, and I tested some early content for that with Rick.

The rest of my sessions were canceled, but I did have a pitch meeting for Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (unfortunately that didn't go anywhere)

September
I started September with a solo test of Keeping Up With The Joneses, then spent the rest of the month working on the Amun-Re expansion - 3 live tests, and 6 solo.

October
Six more solo tests and 5 live tests of Amun-Re took up all my testing time in October.

November
One more Amun-Re test in November, then I switched gears to Deities & Demigods because (drum roll please)... it got signed by a publisher! The publisher requested some changes, and I spent November working on those.

December

I finished off the year with 3 more tests of Deities & Demigods iterations as I worked on addressing the publisher's concerns.

The switch to online playtesting was a setback in my playtesting throughput, and it cost me some of my regular testers, but TTS has allowed me to continue testing, and pitching games, through the pandemic, and I've got at least a couple of regular online testers.

I miss testing more, but the good news is that I am finally making a little headway with pitches. Over the course of the pandemic, Isle of Trains got picked up by a new publisher who's going to do the base game as well as the expansion Dan and I made what, 7 years ago now? Deities & Demigods has been picked up, and I got that development gig on Amun-Re. I've had a few meetings recently to try and find a publisher to ick up the EmDo and Crusaders game lines, hopefully one who's willing to pick up the entire line (base game, expansions, and as-yet-unpublished content). No luck with EmDo an Crusaders thus far, but I just had a promising meeting or two about them, so hopefully something will come of that.

Exploration mechanics

Exploration tiles 

I'm adding an exploration mechanism to one of my games, and iterating through a few variations on it has got me thinking about how exploration works. An obvious mechanism is to have face down tiles and flip them up when you get to them. I went this route in my first game, Terra Prime, and it worked alright. In an expansion however I modified that a bit -- set all the tiles face up so you could see where the planets are, then added a face-down exploration tile to each in order to maintain the exploration feel.

Another approach

Another approach though, is drawing multiple tiles to choose from. This could represent preparedness, or luck -- the more tiles you draw to choose from, the more likely you'll find something you like. Some years ago (circa 2007) I suggested this as a variant to the dig mechanism in Thebes, as a way to balance it out a bit, and I encountered a bit of pushback from some folks. Evidently, it can feel a lot less like exploration if you get to choose what you find.

In the game I'm currently working on, making changes requested by the publisher, the actions can be better or worse depending on how invested in them you are. In the case of this new exploration action, my first attempt allowed you to draw more and more tiles the higher your action level was. This is similar to my proposed Thebes variant - the more prepared you are to dig (or in my case, the more invested you are in that action), the more likely you'll find something you'll like. this works if you consider that the tile you choose is the one that's 'actually there,' and that you got to look at several first just means you're luckier, you tend to fid better stuff on average.

I still feel that's an OK mechanism, but I can see the point of the people who think that breaks the exploration theme... when you're making a choice, it does feel less like you're literally exploring what's there. So in my latest playtest, I just had players draw 1 tile, not several to choose from. If you were more invested in the action, you could do more than 1 explore at a time. Then I made sure that no matter what tile you draw, you get something of appropriate value, even if it's not the actual thing you had hoped to find. Also, I only have 5 tiles of each type, so in the late game, when the bags are low, you can have a pretty good idea of what you'll get.

So tell me what YOU think...

Does drawing multiple tiles to choose from break the exploration theme for you? Or do you see that as a way to represent spending more time, doing a better job, being more prepared, or getting more lucky?

In my last playtest, my players and I didn't miss the ability to draw more tiles to choose from, so I am very likely to keep the "surprise me" version. I could see adding a unique card or ability to the game that can let you draw 2 tiles to choose from when exploring, and if that breaks the theme for anybody, at least it's a specific piece of content, and not part of the game's structure.

Entangled Decisions

 A while ago (gosh, I think it's been over a year now!) I was mentioning how enamored I was with a particular game mechanism. I had mentioned using it in Keeping up with the Joneses (and even kind of promised a blog post on them), and I brought it up on Twitter as well.

I've always named multi-use cards as my favorite game mechanism (the Rondel is up there as well), but lately a new challenger has arisen... I'm starting to think Entangled Decisions are making a run at my favorite mechanism.

Multi-use cards are great because of the inherent opportunity cost every time you play one. They're compact and versatile, and can do almost anything! Entangling two unrelated decisions though-that's a compact way to ratchet up tension, agony, and decision space without adding content.

Entangling decisions is where you take 2 things a player might want (or not want), and connect them such that choosing one necessarily means choosing the other. This is sort of the opposite of an opportunity cost, if you think about it. When you play a multi-use card for one effect, then by definition you are giving up access to its other effects. When you make an entangled decision, it's like playing a multi-use card and being forced to take all of its effects, like it or not.

Cascadia is a great, pure example of what I'm referring to as an entangled decision. First you pair independent tiles and tokens, then choose which tile-token pair you want. "I like THIS tile, but I want THAT token!" makes for an agonizing decision with very little design effort.

Kingdomino does this a little bit as well by having you draft a tile plus turn order, which sometimes means you're drafting this turns tile and next turn's tile. You might take a less good tile this turn in order to go first next turn to get an even better tile.

Coimbra's dice draft counts too. You might want a die because it's a 5, or you might want the die because it's green.

Concordia's cards appear to have a similar feel: you might want the card for the action, or you might want the scoring condition... though to be honest, I've always felt like those scoring conditions are a little same-y, so I don't usually feel like I'm buying a sub-par card just for the scoring condition. Also, in that game if you have a bad card, you can just choose to not play it, so you don't lose much by taking a card for the scoring condition.

In Keeping Up With The Joneses, I entangled the effect of the tile you draft with the amount you'll move on the rondel (and therefore the effect of the rondel space you'll get). If both of those things are compelling, then it should create agonizing decisions between 3 pairs of effects, while still being a fairly simple game: just choose one of these 3 options. 

What games have you played that make good use of entangling two (or more) disparate, independent decisions?

Post -Scarcity (YANGI?)

 Jamey Stegmaier sometimes posts interesting thoughts on his blog, and today he posed the question: "What Sci-Fi project would you pursue as an eccentric billionaire?"

On twitter, a few folks responded, and my personal favorite answer to that was teleportation. I've long been a fan of teleportation, I've always said it's my favorite impossible ability -- if I could choose a super power, that would be it!

Jamey described portals that you could step into in one location and out of in another (like in the video game, I guess). That's almost verbatim something I used to think about when I was young. Someone else mentioned food replicators like on Star Trek, another awesome prospect!

Like many things do, this of course made me think of a board game. Suppose there's a worker placement game, but you can only move your workers to an adjacent space each turn, and you have to feed them every round, etc. Then imagine you can invent technologies to get around that tedium and those drawbacks... first maybe something that lets you move 2 spaces, or cuts your food costs in half. Then later, teleporters (move anywhere) and food replicators (no more feeding). During the game, you spend time and effort inventing these technologies, which earn you victory points, but once invented, all players gain their benefits!

I've seen games like Antike where being the player to make a discovery is expensive, and worth VP, but then the discovery becomes cheap for other players to obtain (though they don't get the points). I'm not sure if I've seen a game where the technology is automatically useable by all players, though it wouldn't surprise me if such a game exists.

This sounds like an OK premise for a game, but really it's just a backbone. There'd have to be something for players to actually do. Also, I think there would need to be a few more inventions to make life easier.

Perhaps the theme could be creating a post-scarcity society. A utopia where people don't need to spend so much time toiling away just to pay bills and feed themselves, and can instead spend more time and attention on the arts and their loved ones. That would be a pretty upbeat theme for once.

I don't have any further thoughts about this at the moment (hey, maybe this could work into that I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement idea I had a while back), so I'll just file it away to possibly revisit later. If you have any thoughts about this game idea, please feel free to leave them in the comments!

Rolling Realms - Jaffee Realms update update

 A couple of weeks ago I posted about updating the realms I'd made for Jamey Stegmaier's roll & write game, Rolling Realms. Well, since then I have gotten ahold of the published version of Rolling Realms, and I have played my updated realms a couple of times each. Here's the news...

Crusaders

This one works well. I went with the edit I made in the footnote of the previous post: for the odd numbers, you get 1 resource per dot, for the even numbers you get 1 star for every 2 dots. One game it felt kinda easy to get 6 stars (plus a handful of resources), so I considered changing that to 3 dots per star... but I'm not convinced that's necessary yet, so I left it alone for now.

I like the way this one works, and I think it feels on par with the published realms.

Eminent Domain

After that last post, I preferred the previous version of the EmDo realm, the new one seemed more fiddly. So I reverted to that, but added stars for each row or column of planets, so you can get some stars for just getting lots of planets. This continues to be based on the thematic feel of the game, not the mechanical feel, which could be bad for players unfamiliar with the game, and it could be forcing the realm to be too complicated.

Today I played a game with this version, as well as the published Pendulum realm, and they happened to be in the same round, so I actually played them side by side. This was fortuitous, because it highlighted an observation I made to myself when reading how the Pendulum realm worked. To put it bluntly and succinctly, I don't think I could have boiled my EmDo  realm down and condensed it half as well as the Pendulum realm does! The Pendulum realm is just like my EmDo realm, if you combined Trade and Research into 1 action, and indicated what you get for Trading/Researching on the planets themselves.

...which is cool! I like the Pendulum realm. But if that published realm is so similar (and more simplified) than my EmDo realm, then I probably need to go another route with EmDo. As I mentioned, maybe evoking the deck learning rather than the thematic or strategic aspects would be better anyway. So here's the new version:

1 column per die value. the first time you use a die of that value, you get 1 resource as indicated. the 2nd time you use that same value, you get 2 of that resource. The 3rd time, you get that resource plus a star. And the 4th time you get 2 stars. In this way, it's like you get better at using any given number in that realm the more you use it.

I was wondering if that would be enough, or if I should try and add just 1 more thing somehow... like maybe awarding a star for using 1 of each die value (nah!), or something crazy like "mark off a box in this realm when you use a die value -- whenever you use that die value again (in this or any realm), get the indicated reward in addition" - then award nothing, 1 resource, 1 star or something like that. So using a number in the EmDo realm would make you better at using that number everywhere, not just in the EmDo realm. That's a neat idea, but I think I'll try the basic version first. The neat thing about Rolling Realms is that the complexity comes from the combination of realms available and the opportunity cost of using a die in one realm instead of another. So the individual realms can (and in fact really should) be very simple and straightforward.

Jaffee Realms 2021, v2.0

Please feel free to try these out and let me know what you think in the comments! I'm going for realms that evoke Crusaders and EmDo, but that fit in with the existing realms in the published game.