New Crusaders factions?

I don't think I've posted about the extra player expansions for Crusaders, but art is done for them, and they're ready to be printed (just as soon as everything else gets sorted out)...

There will be 2 boxes you could get to add a 5th player to your Crusaders game, Crimson Knight (red player color), or Amber Knight (yellow player color). You'll even be able to play with 6 players if you get both!

These expansions contain a player board and pieces for one new player, including Divine Influence stuff, and 2 new faction powers to choose from. These new factions were ones that I had been testing originally, but had not made the cut to the final 10 in the game.

As I mentioned, all of the art for these expansions is done, and has been for some time now. As I happened to be looking at those files recently, I noticed that I apparently included the same 2 factions in both expansion boxes. I don't exactly remember why I did that, it seems like the boxes should each have 2 unique factions. In fact, I think I remember choosing 4 different ones, but in any case, the art files have the same pair of new factions, and that's not great. So I decided to come up with 2 new factions so that players who get both boxes to play with 6 players won't have any duplicates.

That said, I needed to think of new dynamics. I got a few ideas from Twitter followers who responded to a request for abilities they'd like to see, and I decided on 4 powers to try. I had hoped that at least 2 of those would be good enough to use. Here are the 4 draft factions (sorry, no fancy names yet):

1. When resolving an upgraded wedge, you may add 2 virtual tokens. If you do, downgrade the wedge afterwards. 

This one seems good so far, it might be a winner.

2. Remove an action token from the game instead of taking a normal turn. If you do, resolve that wedge based on the number of tokens on an opponent's board. Distribute your own wedge as normal afterwards.

I think it might be better to NOT distribute the bin... But this power might not make the cut anyway. With 2 players it as a little annoying to see what was available all the time, but not too bad. However with more players it would probably get too AP prone or annoying.

3. Before resolving a wedge, you may remove a token on it and set it aside to upgrade it.  When you take an upgrade turn to upgrade a wedge, you may add a token set aside that way to the upgraded wedge.

This worked pretty well, and may be a winner also. I might want to change the wording so that the 2nd clause works with Divine Influence's Upgrade actions (in the expansion there are more ways to upgrade your wedges besides just taking an upgrade turn).

4. Instead of a normal turn, choose any wedge, distribute it, and resolve the last wedge you place in.

Could call that one the Feldian Order of Trajan or something :)

This one was neat. Very different, and probably way too powerful. Next time I try it, I'll add "-1 to each action" as a drawback.

If I can balance this one acceptably, I might like to make it a promo item, because it's so unique, rather than a regular faction power in an expansion.

Having played just 1 game with each of the draft factions, it looks like I have 2 that will work, and they both deal with upgrades, which is interesting because Divine Influence adds more ways to upgrade your action wedges. And I also like the idea of using the Trajan-styke one as a promo, if I can make it fair enough :)

Just need to get a little more testing in for those, and to look up some more faction titles I could use!

Revisiting old titles -- Reading Railroad and Exhibit playtests

Every once in a while I review The List and take stock of my active, back-burnered, and abandoned game projects. Early this year, in an effort to make progress on some of the stale games, I solicited co-designers - this has borne fruit in a couple of cases:

Kilauea was picked up by Thiago Jabuonski, who follows this blog. He had some great ideas to revive that, one of my oldest designs on the list. He made some prototype files of his new version, and I imported them into Tabletop Simulator, and we're going to meet online this week to discuss it.

I've probably posted before about Mike Brown coming on board for Automatown, and he made some big strides forward. I've played his latest version with my testers on the TTS mod he made for it, and he entered it into a contest recently where it unfortunately didn't fare too well in the first round.

And I've definitely discussed how Rick Holzgrafe has helped immensely to bring Apotheosis from pretty-well-thought-out-idea to basically-finished-design (to the point I've pitched it to a couple of publishers).

In addition to getting co-designers on board for some of my old games, I have decided to revive some of my old favorites on my own as well. At the tail end of last year, I finally revisited the first real design I ever worked on: All For One. It was fantastic to get that one back to the table and fix some niggling problems I've had with it for literally years!

More recently I got another couple of old favorites back to the table: Reading Railroad, and Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages.

I had a rare playtest opportunity with Michelle a few weeks ago, so I brought out Reading Railroad for the first time since probably 2008 when I submitted it to the KublaContest (it didn't go over well in the contest as I recall). The rulebook in the box didn't sound quite like I remembered it, so we played the way I remembered -- I'm not sure that made any real difference though. The game went OK, but revealed a few things worth changing, or at least looking into:
* I could use some more buildings (like Factories) that do different things. As Factories are "size 4" (they take up 4 City Tile spaces), perhaps I should have a building of each size 1, 2, and 3 as well. I may be over enamored with symmetry :) I'm sure I could figure out 3 more effects to add... for example, "treat one of your City Tiles as wild." 
* Maybe allow buying ANY letter, not just vowels. This would make the word building even more forgiving, but it would still be much more efficient to use the tile you've drawn. This could even be a building effect!
* Instead of 1 letter per turn, players should probably draw at least 2 -- that would speed up the recharge and make the game more consistently fun, I think. You'd still get additional letters for every 4 City Tiles you have collected.
* Michelle suggested having multiple different endgame word sets, which could be worth doing, though I'm not sure if it will actually change the game at all.
* I'm unsure whether it would be better to "take 1 City Tile from each city you add to your network" or "take 1 City Tile each tine you build track" (this was the rulebook discrepancy I mentioned). The implication of the former is that you can get 2 City Tiles in a turn by starting a new network, but you can never get 2 Tiles from the same City, which might be annoyingly frustrating. The implications of the latter are that you CAN get 2 tiles from the same city, but only ever 1 Tile per turn.

I enjoyed playing this one again, and having made a TTS mod for it, I was excited to play it with my playtesters as well. Sadly, a TTS error made it so I couldn't play Reading Railroad with my playtesters after all, so last weekend when I got the chance to playtest, I revived another old game instead: Exhibit!

Exhibit is kind of a finished game, I even signed it with a publisher at one point (7 years ago!), but it never came out due to dumb reasons. At this point I think it's been long enough, it's time to revive this one, and maybe see if I can't get it signed once again!

I played Exhibit with Dave and Aaron on Saturday, first time since 2014. The game still worked, went well, and felt good. I've been hemming and hawing over the Art effect (+1vp vs +2vp), unsure whether one is too little a reward to matter or the other is so much it will destroy the set collection mechanism. During this last game, I thought of an alternative... instead of additional points, maybe art should score as if the set had +1 tile. This would make art worth +2vp on a 1-tile exhibit (on par with what I was already considering), and +3 or 4 on a bigger exhibit. This might overvalue Art in the late game, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad. I'll give that tweak a try next time I play, but other than that, I think this game could be considered finished.

Jaffee Realms comments and questions from a player

A reader tried out Jaffee Realms, my custom mod for Jamey Stegmaier's Rolling Realms roll & write game, and left me some comments and questions in the comments of that post. I responded there, but since I doubt people will see that, I thought I'd copy it into a new post:

We played the Jaffee Realms twice. Never played any of these games, so maybe that would have helped? Never 
played any of the Stonemaier games either except Wingspan, but playing the realms game encouraged me to try them out.

I definitely designed those realms with the games in mind, so it would not surprise me if knowing the games would help understand the realms better. Perhaps playing these realms could spark people's interest in checking out the games they're based on, like what happened with you and Stonemaier games :)

Crusaders:
I'm guessing that if I roll a 3/4, I could build, then the next turn, if I rolled 3/4 I could gain a star?

That's correct, the first time you use a 3 or 4 you get to circle a building, then subsequent 3/4s get you a star. In Crusaders, there are 3 enemy types. The brown ones (Saracen) give you a free building when you defeat them, and the other two (Slavs & Prussians) give you points. The Enemy tokens are circular discs in that game, so that's what those colored circles are supposed to represent.

Eminent Domain:
I assume that I can just circle the different planets whenever I roll 1-3. I had had the entire 1st column filled out, and then roll a 5, I could claim two stars...but I'm not sure if I could reuse the planets.

Close... Research (5) is based on having the SAME planet type, so your statement would be exactly correct if you had the first ROW filled out, not the first COLUMN.

If I only had two planets in a column filled, then rolled a 5, I could get a heart and a star...then after the entire column is filled, and rolled a 5, I could claim 2 stars using the same planets.

Correct (again, "row" instead of "column"). It does not "use up" the planets to do research. Same with Trade (4) -- if you have 2 different planets and use a 4, you get 2 coins and 2 pumpkins. Later if you get a 3rd different planet then use another 4 you would get 3 coins and 3 pumpkins.

I feel that there aren't so many rolls in a game, or maybe I'm not using pumpkins or hearts enough enough, but I haven't prioritized trades.

Depending on what other realms are in play, it might be more or less strong to get bunches of resources.

Embark:
This is the most confusing one, because I'm not sure what "score" means? I'm guessing it means to cross out a dice that's in one section of the island.

Correct, "score" in that context means crossing off the boxes on the island. So you fill up the boats by writing numbers in the boxes, then when a boat fills up, it "sails to the island," and you get to choose 1 section of the island, and cross off ("score") the appropriate die icons on that part of the island.

It isn't clear if I need to roll a 1 in order to score, or if after using a dice to fill a box, if I had a 1 dice, I could gain a resource of a boat that just embarked.

The latter -- you "score" automatically when the boat fills up. When you score a boat with a 1 on it, the 1 doesn't ever let you cross off anything on the island... instead it gives you another resource of that boat's type.

The five dice confused me, because I thought it meant to fill a box, but I suppose it means to cross off a box on an island, because it says "score", but I suppose if I ever had a situation where I had left over dice to cross off, I could do that.

Per the text, you normally collect a resource when you write a number on a boat. If you write a 5, you do NOT get a resource as normal, BUT, when the boat fills up, the 5 is kind of wild. This actually corresponds to one of the worker types in Embark. I wanted to label them on this realm, but it was suggested that might be more confusing (and there's not a ton of room anyway).

The six die is super confusing, because I don't see how I could score a box if a boat is unfilled, but I need to copy something from the same boat that I just used to fill

If you score a boat (fill it up) that has a 6 on it, then that 6 can be a copy of any other number on that boat. So that's similar to a 5, but instead of your choice, you have to have another one of that type on the boat. In other words, if a boat has 1, 2, 2, 6 when it scores, then that 6 can only copy a 1 or a 2, not a 3 or a 4. On the other hand, if you have 1, 2, 2, 5 on the boat, that 5 could be a 2, 3, or 4.

Bomb Squad:
It says "matching completed clue card"...none of the clue cards match, they're all different shapes. So I interpreted it to mean matching die and at one point I interpreted it as matching item.

I don't love that wording... it is referring to the number. So if you use a 4 for example, you can either get resources by marking off one of the resources on the lower left card (heart or pumpkin), AND one from the upper right card (heart or heart), OR you can instead cross off either or both of those cards IF both resources are already marked off.

This was not really my version of the Bomb Squad realm. I had a couple of ideas for it, but they sort of broke the fundamental rule of Rolling Realms in that they involved a die roll or something that wouldn't necessarily be the same from one game to the next (like if someone else played based on the same rolls later). This version sort of captures the feel of giving clues and then playing cards once you have some information about them. Bomb Squad is like Hanabi - you don't see your own cards, so players give each other clues as to what they have in hand, then you play cards to move and act with a bomb squad robot.

Thanks!

Prototypes out of the woodwork and onto Tabletop Simulator

I've spent a few hours recently modding some of my prototypes on Tabletop Simulator (is that how you say that?). Some of them are older designs that I have decided to dig up and revive a bit. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the prototypes I can currently play on TTS:

Apotheosis

This is my most recent project, a co-design with my friend Rick Holzgrafe, and I've talked about it a lot already. I even shared a screenshot of the TTS mod for it:

Apotheosis is a worker placement game where each of your workers have a type and a level. Many of the worker spaces care about one, the other, or both of those attributes. Blocking is a big dynamic in worker placement games, and in this one you are allowed to use a space as long as your worker is at least tied for the highest level there when you place it. This means there's not as much blocking at the beginning of the game, but as players level their workers up, blocking (and therefor placement tension) becomes more and more of a thing. I like that dynamic in this game.

Another uncommon (though not unheard of) twist on worker placement in Apotheosis is that it's a race to the finish line. Doing adventures advances you up three victory tracks, and the first to reach the end of any one of them wins the game. Players can spend as much time as they want collecting resources and leveling up their workers, but if they are not focused on reaching the end of a track, they will lose to a player that is.

In the TTS mod, there are little tiles indicating the worker's class, with a die sitting on top showing the worker's level as well as the player color of the worker. In my physical prototype, those tiles have squares cut in them, so the dice nestle into the tiles so there's no risk of them falling off when moving the worker. In production I could see these pieces going a couple of different ways. The two front runners in my mind are:

1. Use dice as workers to track levels as I am now, but with a molded plastic holder (much like Coimbra) to set the dice in:

Attached to the die holder could be either a sculpted mini, or a flat plastic standee onto which a full art sticker could be placed to indicate the worker type. Two potential down sides to this... the standees/minis might obscure players' view of the board, and as has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere - when given dice, players want to roll them. It's not unheard of to have dice in a game that solely track status, but there are players for whom rolling the dice is the most fun part of having dice at all, and giving those players dice that they do not roll sort of takes that fun away from them (or fails to deliver on the promise of fun die rolls).

2. Instead of dice, in production I could see the game using a mini or standee with a Heroclix style dial at its base.

This would resolve the concerns above about using dice, it would make leveling p workers a little easier (no searching the die for the next number up), and it would also open up some design space with the adventures, because the max level wouldn't need to be 6 (currently I'm using 6-sided dice, so the max level is 6, and that works out well for this game, but I could open that up if I wanted to).

Automatown

Automatown is another game for which I took on a co-designer. I had largely stalled out on the game, and Mike Brown has taken it to the next level. He also implemented the game in TTS:

Automatown is another worker placement game. In this one your workers are robots, and you use them to get, swap, and upgrade parts to build more robots (more workers), in an effort to raise a robot arm to take over the city!

The twists on worker placement in this game are that the workers you build can have abilities, and so there's some combo-building or engine building going on, and the worker placement spots cycle through from round to round, so each spot will only be there for a few rounds, and then will disappear.

Dice Works

An older design, from 2011, Dice Works (FKA Eureka!) is a real time dice drafting game ostensibly about building different inventions. Your player board has 4 columns, each representing a different possible invention, and the winner is the first player to make ANY discovery. This is kind of the same win condition I used more recently in Apotheosis (see above). The way that you advance on these "victory tracks" in Dice Works is by drafting sets of dice - in real time. Each round you roll a handfull of dice, and players, at their own pace, grab them one at a time and place them onto their board. When those dice are gone, you check your board for errors (in case in your haste you accidentally placed a die in an illegal space), then advance your marker up the columns if the next space is complete. You win by reaching the top of any of the columns, but there's a reward for advancing evenly on all columns.

This one might be difficult to play on Tabletop Simulator due to the real-time nature, and the physical fiddliness of the virtual environment. Then again, it may be even MORE challenging in that environment! However, I suppose a turn-based version could be played... I suspect it may be less fun than the real-time game though. Now that there's a TTS mod for the game, I may be able to find out!

Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages

Many years ago (2007!), I discussed the idea of using Liar's Dice as a main mechanism in a larger game with a then-friend of mine. We worked together to try and build a game based on that main mechanism, and in the end we never finished. A few years later (2011), I decided that the main Liar's Dice mechanism (which we were calling a "bluff auction") was going to waste just sitting in that unfinished game, so I started over and made a different game using it. That game is Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages:

In Exhibit, you are bidding for artifacts at auction before their true value has been assessed, and if you bid more than the assessed value, your funding will not come through, and you bid won't count! So the goal is to bid highest without going over the true value... but you only have partial information about that value, and you'll have to deduce the rest from the behavior of your opponents.

I think this game is great, and it was even signed by a European publisher at one point (circa 2014, I believe), but never got published due to that "friend" claiming I'd stolen his intellectual property and was trying to claim it as my own :/

At the time, that person was a big deal in the game industry, and the publisher didn't want to piss him off even if he didn't have any legal standing (and though he used legal sounding language, I am unsure he would have pursued any legal action if they'd published the game). That is no longer the case now, so maybe one day this game could potentially get published after all.

In any case, now it's on Tabletop Simulator, so maybe I'll rustle up a game of it sometime, so at least *I* can enjoy the fruits of my labor, even if nobody else will get to!

Isle of Trains boardgame

Dan Keltner and I took 3rd place in a game design contest, some 6 or 7 years ago now, with a multi-use card game called Isle of Trains. The prize was publication, and the game did well enough at the time that the publisher had asked for an expansion. Dan and I submitted something, but as of 2020, the expansion has not seen the light of day. In fact, a couple of years ago the publisher asked if we could do something a little bit different, they were interested in a bigger-box version.

So Dan and I set about making a board game version of Isle of Trains. We did some brainstorming, and after a little iteration I think we've made some headway... we're unsure whether to try and keep the game on the lighter, more accessible end (like the card game), or make it a deeper, more complicated game. I made a TTS mod of the "simple/accessible" version, but I think I'm coming around to agreeing that it ought to be different (specifically that the train car effects might ought to be more unique):

Kilauea

Another really old design of mine that is being given new life by way of a co-designer is Kilauea. In Kilauea, you use a Mancala mechanism to spread your tribesmen around the island of Hawaii, and make sacrifices to the volcano goddess Pele in hopes that she'll spare your tribe when the volcano erupts. In the original version (pre-2006), you scored points for all the spaces your tokens occupied, but spreading out made your tribe (a) more vulnerable to attacks from opponents, and (b) more vulnerable to the lava flow. Moving tribesmen onto a Altar allowed you to sacrifice them, and the player with the biggest sacrifice each round got some control over the direction that lava turned when the volcano erupted at the end of the round. The game might have had some potential, but it had been on the shelf for so long that I really haven't considered working on it anymore.

Thiago Jabuonski liked the sound of the game, and offered to jump on board as a co-designer when I put out a call for them at the beginning of this year. He has proposed a big change in how the board works, but the game still features most of the same details it always did. I haven't had a chance to play his version yet, in fact i'm not sure he's even written down the rules, but he sent me some files, and I made a TTS mod so that maybe one day I'll be able to give it a try:

Reading Railroad

Yet another one from the back catalog... I've always been enamored with Reading Railroad, a connection game with word building as a mechanism:

Since deciding to try and revive it recently, I've been describing it as "Ticket to Ride meets Scrabble," but that's not terribly accurate - the word building is simpler and more forgiving, and you don't place the letters on the board like yo do in Scrabble. Rather, you spell words to get coins, then spend those coins to build track connecting cities. When you add a city to your network, you collect one of the Alphabet blocks in that city, which you ill use to score points in the endgame by spelling specific words (i.e. collecting a specific set of Alphabet blocks). The number of Alphabet blocks you can use to score is limited by your largest network, so it matters a bit where you build (or at least hat you connect up your network before game  end), and you can build a Factory, which blocks up spots to store Alphabet blocks (limiting your endgame scoring potential), but allow you to draw more letter tiles to make words with - and longer words pay out much better than shorter ones, and leftover coins are worth points, so if you're good at word games, you could pursue that strategy and end the game with a bunch of points from coins saved up.The point of the game however is that if you're NOT particularly good at word building, you can still get along fine (so long as you can at least spell some short words!).

Don't kill the messenger! A game about the post-funding KS process?

TMG in in the process of manufacturing and fulfilling 5 different Kickstarter projects right now. They are delayed, some much more than usual, and as I have taken it upon myself to handle Kickstarter updates and comments, I am pretty familiar with the kinds of things some backers post when a project is overdue, or when a project update is overdue.

Maybe I can make a game out of this dynamic! I don't think this is limited to KS projects, but for starters let's use that as a setting:

Play as a publisher working on crowdfunded projects. Get info on those projects, make progress toward completion, and post updates to your backers. Each of those steps informed by the real-world dynamics of running a post-funding Kickstarter.

PROJECTS
This game would be from the POV of a publisher, so the logistics of design and development, even the quality of gameplay, could be abstracted away. Perhaps there's a way to pick up future projects (representative of taking submissions or pitches). And maybe the more effort you put into it, the more possible points the project could be worth in the end (representative of quality/sale-ability of the game).

These projects, maybe tiles or cards, could show a combination of different types of work that needs to be done (development, rules editing, blind testing, art, graphic design), represented by different colored cubes. One thing you could spend time or effort on (worker placements/action points) is getting those things together, and the more you have before launching a crowdfunding campaign, the better prepared you are, so the more backers you garner, and the more money you collect.

This could be an interesting sub-dynamic. Ideally, you'll have all the pieces in place, so you'll get the maximum cash when you launch crowdfunding (in this game, your project would automatically succeed, but the extent to which is exceeds would depend on how prepared you were when it launched). However, you may need money to do other things, so it might behoove you to launch early, a little less well prepared, to get less-than-the-max money, but get it now.

The other consequence of launching a project early could be the time it takes to deliver... if you've already completed everything but the manufacturing, and you have everything else lined up nicely before launching, then you'll deliver the game in the minimum amount of time, which would result in a maximal score for it. The more stuff you need to do after crowdfunding, the longer that delivery takes, and that could end up reducing your score (or some other attribute, such as backer satisfaction? Probably easier to just say "score").

Again, the ideal situation would be getting everything ready before launching, however the crux of the game could be finding ways to manage launching early, so that you can afford to do more things.

WORK FORCE
Worker Placement is an excellent mechanism because it encompasses a few different things: it offers interaction with regards to blocking (as players take the actions that other players were hoping to use), it provides a user friendly way to represent budgeting of actions/effort, and it does an excellent job of introducing opportunity cost.

Action Point Allowance is similar, but without the interactive blocking. Depending on the theme, it might not make much sense to have limited access to actions anyway - Agricola and Stone Age famously having the "Family Growth" space limited to 1 player per round, which just doesn't make any real-world sense.

In either of those cases though, it makes sense to be managing your own personal work force (whether or not they directly interact with opponents' workers). One extreme could be a company with a minimal work force, that concentrates on 1 project at a time, maximizing gains from it. The opposite extreme could be a company with a bunch of employees, that take on many projects at a time, even if they launch the early (to get faster income) and therefore don't score the maximum for each. Many economic games have this sort of "quality-vs-quantity" dichotomy, and in those I sometimes refer to the "quantity" side as a "Wal-Mart strategy" :)

CROWDFUNDING
As I alluded to above, the main (only?) source of income in this game would be launching crowdfunding projects. When doing so, the project would automatically "fund" -- so you would immediately receive money. The amount you get would depend on the project itself, and how "prepared" you were to launch it (how many of the required cubes are already on the project).

In an ideal world, you would have all the possible cubes at launch time, thereby maximizing your income for the project. However, just like in the real world, the realities of scheduling and of stretch goals and things like that mean you seldom see projects launched wen they are 100% ready to print. In this game, the abstraction would be that you need money to operate, and the only way to get it is by launching a project, so you may have incentive to launch early if the economy of the game is nice and tight.

POST FUNDING
I think the crux of this game would be managing your projects post-funding. This means continuing to get the necessary cubes to complete the project, and posting updates to backers to keep their satisfaction high. Perhaps some of the required cubes are only for after-funding, and you can't possibly get them beforehand, but of course you might also still need to collect whatever you didn't already have before launch.

The flow of these cubes would be that they first go below a project card, representing information about the next step in the process for that project, then from there they go onto the tile, representing that progress being made.When posting an update, the relevant thing is the info gathered for the project -- perhaps backers want a particular combination of cubes in the "info" position when you update. If you don't have the correct combination of info to share, then your backers may be less satisfied. If you wait until you do have more info, then your update may be "late," and again, backers may be less satisfied. And as a weird quirk of this game, if you "spend" the info cubes (by making progress, thereby moving those cubes onto the tile) then maybe that actually works against the info you need to update (unrealistic, but could help make the game interesting). Maybe this represents that you had the info, but didn't update until the progress was made, so it's akin to being "late."

WHAT'S THE HOOK?
To be honest, it's been about a week since I thought of this and started writing this blog post. I hadn't gotten far past what I'd written above, and while I can see some game mechanics that might work, I can't really see a hook yet. The idea was to make a game inspired by how the post-funding KS process goes. I guess the management of information and progress, as well as the timing of it, while having to also maintain backer satisfaction would be what the game is all about -- is that interesting enough on its own?

This feels like one of those ideas I'll file away, with little-to-no confidence I'll ever get back to it, so if it does sound interesting to you, then be sure to let me know in the comments below. And if you're a designer who wants to work on a game like this with me in a co-design capacity, feel free to let me know that too!

Recent gaming, online edition

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss face to face gaming - even though I haven't been doing nearly as much of it these last few years. But as I've mentioned before, I've been able to scratch that itch by playing online at portals  like BoardGameArena.com and boiteajeux.net. Here are some of the games I've been playing online lately:

Yokohama

This popular TMG title is in private Beta right now, and I've been able to get several games in. It's nice to be able to play before the general release and give feedback about not just bugs, but suggestions to make the implementation better.

La Granja

I played this "modern classic" when it came out, and thought it was fine, but I wasn't sure what all the hype was about. It has recently been released on BGA, and the implementation is pretty good. I've gotten a few games in so far, and while I am enjoying it, I'm still not sure it's worth the fuss. So far, the more I play it, the better I like it.

Teotihuacan

I very much enjoyed Tzolkin, so I had automatic interest in Teotihuacan by one of the same designers, as it was touted as a "spiritual sequel" (I hate that term!). When it came out, I never really had a chance to play it, and pretty soon I stopped hearing about it. When I recently found out it was in Alpha at BGA I was excited to finally get a chance to play! I'm currently about 2 games in  and I am enjoying it pretty well. Interestingly, Teotihuacan sort of scoops 2 of my own designs! It has dice "workers" that level up when you use them, which is the main mechanism of my worker placement game Apotheosis, and it is a big rondel made of tiles, like the latest version of the Isle of Trains board game that Dan and I are working on.

In addition to those newer titles, I have been playing some old standbys on BGA as well:

Stone Age

Every time I play Stone Age, I remember how good a game it really is. I haven't played in a while, so it was fun to explore a starvation strategy again (some say in competitive games starvation isn't viable, but in a casual game I crushed everyone with it), and in another game I did the opposite -- I managed to get a bunch of farms right away.

Race For The Galaxy

Another solid title that I haven't really played much since Eminent Domain came about, RftG is a great game. I still think I prefer it 2-player because of the additional agency and ability to sort of combo plays.

Hanabi

I've even tried some Hanabi on BGA. I doubt I'd enjoy that with random people, but with my two Hanabi friends it was a blast. We played a bunch of games, but kinda stopped when we got a perfect 30 points (including the multicolor suit), with no bombs, and almost all of our clues left -- can't possibly do much better than that!

Tabletop Simulator, digital prototypes, and online playtesting

A Virtual Tabletop

Tabletop Simulator is a virtual tabletop with working, realistic physics, which exists to facilitate tabletop gaming over the internet. There's a similar app called Tabletopia that is browser-based, while TTS is a $20 app on Steam.

People have created TTS "mods" of many tabletop games. Somebody even made a mod for Crusaders!

Unlike online portals such as BoardGameArena, Boiteajeux, and Yucata, Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator do not enforce the rules to these games. They are literally just a digital version of the game on a table, and players can move the pieces around however they want to. So to play a game on TTS, you need to know the rules.

I am not too familiar with any of these programs yet, but designers all over the world are turning to these or other online options in order to accomplish much-needed playtesting, since gathering in groups is ill advised these days (for future readers, we're talking about COVID-19 here, a worldwide pandemic that has people self-quarantining for the most part).

About a year ago I tried to make a TTS mod for my game Alter Ego, and while I got it set up, I did not know how to play it with anybody. By now, the game not only has pretty much finished art, but there have been significant rules and structural changes, so I really need to re-do that one before I can try to test it out. At the time, I was playtesting weekly, so the pressure to create online versions of my games was not there. For the last couple of months though, I have been able to make no progress whatsoever with my games, and that's just not going to work for me!

My Digital Prototypes

I currently have three digital prototypes that are ready to go:

* Apotheosis

I often feel uncomfortable trying to do something I'm not familiar with, and I've been really strapped for time lately anyway, so the first thing I tried was paying someone to make a TTS mod of Apotheosis. It was a snap for him to implement the game, and while the cost was more than I would have wanted to pay, I consider that it essentially included some TTS consultation, which has helped me gain the knowledge and confidence to try the next one on my own.

Once implemented, I was able to get online with my co-designer and my main playtester and give it a play. It worked! We spent some time familiarizing ourselves with the user interface, and fumbling with the components was more fiddly and took longer than simply grabbing things with our hands, but we were able to do the actual game in about 2 hours, and it went pretty well, all things considered!

One nice thing about a portal like this that doesn't enforce rules is that I can change the rules on the fly, or between games, and nothing has to be done with the prototype before playing again.

* Isle of Trains boardgame

Now that I had gained some familiarity with Tabletop Simulator, I thought I'd try my hand at inputting another prototype myself. I chose the Isle of Trains boardgame [side note: this needs a good title. I am fond of Isle of Trains: All Aboardgame, but it's a bit silly for a real title, and also that implies passenger trains, whereas this game is about freight trains], because I thought it'd be the simplest one to do. It wasn't too bad, and I had the whole thing ready to go in a couple of hours...

...until I realized that I did not have updated prototype files for the most recent changes after the last playtest.

Last night I spent another couple of hours updating some of those files and re-creating the TTS mod, and now it's just about ready to play. I haven't added uncoverable bonuses for building (like Crusaders has), which is something we might want to have, but the game is technically playable without that, and that would be pretty easy to add to the mod (once it exists).

* Automatown

I took on a co-designer for Automatown a few months go, and nether of us have had much time to focus on Automatown lately. However, Michael had done some work re-configuring the structure of the game, and I think he even got a test or two in before Stay At Home orders came into effect. Since then, he created a TTS mod of his new version of the game, and I'm ready to give it a try, as soon as I can carve out some time!

Free Roll & Writes for Quarantine-time (including a custom mod of one by yours truly)

These are crazy times we live in. Almost everyone's life has been flipped, turned upside down by a zombie apocalypse. Seriously, COVID-19 is a lot like those zombie apocalypse movies, only the zombies are invisible, and you don't know right away if or when you've been bitten.

Almost everything about these crazy times has been difficult and terrible, but it's nice to catch a glimpse every once in a while of something good. Every now and again you see people doing something nice to try and help their fellow man through this situation-sometimes it's a big, impactful, important thing, and sometimes it's something trivial, but still nice.

This being a game design blog, I assume that any readers, just like myself, are involved or interested in the world of hobby gaming and maybe game design. For most gamers, anything that happens in that realm probably falls into the category of small-but-nice things rather than big-important things. Nevermind those in the industry who are having a much bigger issue, because for us, games are more than just a pleasant diversion. Me personally? I'm lucky, I still have my engineering job which, for the moment anyway, is still going strong (though that could turn in a hurry if our clients stop building houses!) But I digress...

My intent for this blog post is to point out a couple of those trivial-but-nice things I've seen done recently for gamers. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I was happy to see a few designers and publishers making available some free PDFs of games. Roll & write games are particularly good for this, as you generally just need to printout a scoresheet and scrounge up a few dice. Here are a couple of R&W games that have been made available for free recently that I took the time to print and play, and found to be pretty darn good (in no particular order):

Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade: Carniball

Geoff Englestein has a R&W game coming out soon called Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade, which has 4 different pinball tables, each one a different R&W scoresheet. With just the score sheet and a coupe of tokens, you can play a decent approximation of pinball-minus the physicality, of course.

Publisher WizKids has made one of those tables, Carniball, available as a free print and play so you can try it out.

Tiny Farms

I haven't tried this one, but the competent design team of Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback, now known as Motor City Gameworks, have posted a R&W game featuring a variation on their "Rolldel" mechanism (a combination of dice and rondel). You can download Tiny Farms (with graphic design by DiceHateMe Games) from PnP Arcade or from BGG and give it a shot. How bad can it be?

Rolling Realms

Designer and publisher Jamey Stegmaier (Stonemaier Games) has designed an infinitely scaleable R&W called Rolling Realms, which, if I'm being honest, might be my pick for his best design yet. It features 9 Realms, each based on one of the games that Stonemaier has published. Each round you use 3 of those realms, and roll 2 dice... use those dice in 2 different realms to mark off boxes and collect resources (pumpkins, hearts, and coins) in an effort to score stars.

Jamey has been doing "Teach & Play" sessions on FaceBook live, where he basically plays the game, and you can print out the single sheet PDF and play along with him - you can even play along after the fact with the videos on YouTube. He's iterated through 9 versions at this point, which is basically how game development goes (you play, then you tweak, then you play again).

Jaffee Realms - custom modules for Rolling Realms

This may be burying the lede, but as Jamey mentioned in today's (4/20) Facebook Live video (v9), I enjoyed the concept of Rolling Realms so much that I have been working on my own custom modules based on games that I have designed or developed! If you're interested, you can download the Jaffee Realms PDF and give it a try.

One of Jamey's Stonemaier Champion supporters was kind enough to help me put the PDF together graphically, and in doing so he helped me simplify the realms a lot, since they can't afford to be very complicated (and as per usual, I started out too complicated on most of them). I'm not 100% happy with all of the realms at the moment, so I may tweak them a bit-but I'll be sure to use the same filename so that the link doesn't break :) For those too lazy to click the link, here's what they look like currently (as of v3, 4/20/20):

So take it easy, have some fun when you can, and stay safe!

Modular vs Integrated expansions

Having recently done an expansion for Crusaders, and having done 3 expansions for Eminent Domain and one for Isle of Trains as well, I have noticed a particular style I like to use when creating expansions, and I've identified two distinct types of expansions: Modular and Integrated.

Modularity

A modular expansion is one with several distinct modules that can be added in various combinations. These can be good because they allow the players to use the modules they enjoy, and simply ignore the ones they don't care for. It allows players to customize their experience. Undoubtedly, this is something that some players will appreciate.

However, it also requires playing each module at least once to determine if it works well for your group, and it requires some effort to curate the expansion content to provide that perfect customized experience. For a group that loves a game and plays it all the time, one that's willing to put in the effort and plays to find the perfect combination of modules, this could be fine. But in today's market, I wonder if players will put in that time and effort? Or would they prefer to just buy a curated expansion, where the "best combination of modules" is the only thing provided?

Another down side to a modular expansion is that because of that modularity, the pieces of the expansion may feel bolted together and disparate rather than feeling like a seamless experience.

Integration

An integrated expansion is one where the new parts play off of each other and off of the original content. When done well, this type of content fits seamlessly with the base game, and it can be difficult to differentiate the new stuff from the old.

This loses the opportunity for customization provided by a modular expansion, but it gains the curated feel, and doesn't require any work on the part of the player to get to the "best" configuration.

Another down side to integrating an expansion is that it may be more difficult to remove the content when you want to play the game with new players. For an insular group who plays the same game many times, an integrated expansion may be preferable, while for a group where new players come and go with each play, it may be more difficult to pop the expansion content in and out.

My personal preference

It's probably clear in the above paragraphs that modular expansions aren't my preferred format. Well integrated, expansion content fits together with the base game in such a way that it feels like it was always there, or like it belongs. I find something attractive in the thought that the expansion integrates so well that a new player might not be able to identify the new content from the old.

Looking at the expansions I've done, I think it's clear I've attempted to go for integration over modularity:

In the Eminent Domain expansions, you simply add the new tech cards, shuffle the new planets into the deck, and the Fleet, Mining, and Political Influence tiles tie it all together.

When I first played Isle of Trains: All Aboard (which hasn't been published... yet) with the publisher, they were skeptical going into it that the game really needed an expansion. After we played, they said they were surprised how well integrated the expansion was, and that it was not obvious the expansion content wasn't just part of the base game in the first place.

Crusaders: Divine Influence is about to ship from China, so not many have played it yet, but my goal with that one was to seamlessly integrate the new content with the old. I replaced the Influence action with something more involved, and I added new buildings and a few factions. If you know the rules of the base game already, then playing with the new content should be easy to pick up. Learning the game for the first time with the expansion content included will be a bit more complicated than learning just the base game, but I have had some success teaching the game that way most of the times I have played the expansion with strangers.

Conclusion

There might be a temptation to make expansions modular, because as a designer it can be easy to think that's what players want, and it abdicates the responsibility of curating the expansion to the players. My advice for designers is to consider the game you are expanding, and that game's audience. In this day and age, with thousands of new titles coming out every year, is modularity really the best format for your expansion? Or would your audience be better served with a well integrated, curated expansion? For most of the games I work on, I think it's the latter.

Apotheosis - recent challenges and possible solutions

I have been testing Apotheosis quite a bit lately, and on a coarse grained scale, I think it's going pretty well. The structure of the game works and has improved with iteration, and the game action is fun (for me at least). One of my regular testers doesn't seem to love it (I don't think it's really his type of game), but the others still seem to enjoy it.

But games don't get finished on a "coarse grained scale." At least, they shouldn't! When talking about some of the finer details of the game, there are some challenges I'm still facing with it. Until these challenges are overcome, I cannot call the game finished. However I do think these challenges are overcome-able! Here are some of the bigger challenges I'm currently facing, and what I'm planning to try to do about them:

Challenge number 1: The Endgame

One of the biggest problems this game has been facing is an end game dynamic that is disappointing. The game is basically a race up some tracks, and players can see how many turns it will take them to "finish" the race, and can sometimes tell whether anybody can stop them. It's super anticlimactic to hear your opponent say "I can win in 6 turns. Can anybody do better than that, or should we just stop now?"

In an effort to keep this from happening, I was looking for a way to add uncertainty to the end game. I thought I had found something, but in my first attempt I implemented it wrong so it didn't work. But after trying it, I started to think it wouldn't be quite right even if implemented better.

My next attempt was a more subtle thing, which won't stop a player from figuring out how many turns it'll take them to "finish," but might obfuscate whether or not someone else can beat them to it (thereby keeping the game interesting enough to play out the last few rounds):

1. Give players a face-down adventure which they could do instead of one of the face-up ones. This way you can't be sure whether your opponent can advance on a track, or what they need to be able to do so.
2. Try player screens to hide resources, so it's harder to tell what your opponents can do.
3. With player screens, maybe add more instances of getting things at random (resource cubes, equipment, Side Quest cards, etc) so that it's not all Hidden Trackable Information (HTI). There are already random equipment draws currently, and we could easily hide the Side Quests in hand, maybe that's enough.

In addition, we required a Tier 3 adventure to actually win the game. That way the final push to win couldn't be sort of cheesed with a surprise bump from a side quest (because that's kind of anticlimactic), or using the worker space that inefficiently moves you up a track (because that's not only anticlimactic, but also basically unblockable, which means you can see it coming several turns ahead, leading to the problem I'm looking to solve)

Having tried this format once so far, I think it has helped a little bit, but may not have completely solved the problem.

One thing that occurred to me as I was thinking about this challenge is that there are games -- popular, well received games -- that have a similar dynamic. Just about every time I played the 2014 title Istanbul, by Rudiger Dorn, I was able to see that I could "finish" the race to 5 gems in 4 or 5 turns, and often I could see whether or not anybody could stop me or beat me to it. That made the last 4 turns or so feel like something of a slog, but the game hasn't seemed to suffer from it.

So maybe I'm overly concerned about this "problem" in my game. I think if you can call the game in 4 turns or so, it wouldn't be so bad, but 6-8 turns out i maybe too much. So maybe I don't need to solve the problem 100%, but rather make sure that if it DOES happen, it only happens within 4-5 turns of the end of the game.

Challenge number 2: Equipment not pulling its weight

Equipment in this game is basically a secondary resource, a little harder to get, and useful mostly for one particular aspect (an aspect that players could mostly neglect if they wanted to, but theoretically is more efficient if they don't). I think Equipment is nice thematically, but the mechanisms for getting it are a bit overblown and maybe too random for the relatively small role they play.

One solution is to cut Equipment altogether, reducing the number of resources (by 4, technically, since there are 4 types of equipment). Some of my testers seem to think there are too many resources in the game, and cutting equipment would certainly help that. But I fear that would just mean you use the stuff you're already collecting to pay for the valuable stuff Equipment was supposed to buy you, which seems lame to me.

Another solution is to make Equipment a bigger deal in the game. My first attempt at this, partly to try and salvage Equipment, and partly because removing it would mean I'd need to do more updating to the prototype and design work before testing again (and I had other things to test), had to do with the attempt mentioned above to add some uncertainty to the end game. That may work in some format, but having tried it, I'm not sure I like it as much as I'd hoped.

My next attempt was to add Equipment as a cost for the 3rd adventure tier. The 3rd tier requires a few worker levels of any type in addition to what's needed for tier 2, and currently has no additional resource cost (but I think it should). The rewards are a handful of Blessings (which are a flexible commodity), and a track bump (vp) of your choice. Originally, instead of Blessings, the reward was a Spoils -- a special resource you need to do a certain thing (it's kind of like 2 points and a power). The only other way to get those is by (a) Side Quest cards, which cost Equipment, or (b) spending a large number of blessings (which is hopefully inefficient by comparison). So maybe putting the reward back to a Spoils instead of Blessings (which is kind of thematic anyway), and adding an Equipment cost, then it makes some sense: Equipment is always for getting Spoils -- if you do it through an Adventure, then you also get VP, if you do it through a Side Quest, then you maybe get something else with it.

In addition, I added some worker placement spaces that care only about your worker's class (that was partly to address some other issue I was worried about), and one of them lets you get Equipment, so now there are a few ways to get equipment, and a few ways to spend it. Since you can't always guarantee you get the TYPE of equipment you want, I also added the option at one of the worker spots to trade in any 2 equipment for the one you want.

So far I think this is promising, so I'll try it again. I'm sure those same playtesters will still complain there are too many different resources :)

Related to Spoils, it might be nice if  there were 1 more thing you could do with it. Because currently you only need a maximum of 4 or 5 in the game, and you can technically finish (though I don't know if you could realistically win) with only 1. I don't know if I like being able to buy them with Blessings, because that means you can avoid dealing with Equipment altogether. Is that OK?

Making steps forward ("killing your darlings")

In a few of my games I have started with a specific mechanism or idea that, over the course of the game, has had to drop out, or change significantly. I'd venture a guess this happens in many, if not most, designer's games.

For example, in my first published title, Terra Prime, I began with a "great" idea for a supply/demand mechanism for the value of resources you deliver. Based on Power Grid's fuel market, you would get paid more for delivering Bluium if there hadn't been any delivered yet than you would if there were already some Bluium sitting there on the ships, ready to send back to Earth. Every once in a while, the ships would take off, and the resources on them would clear off, resetting the demand (and therefore the price). Each resource was supposed to have a different curve - maybe Yellium was worth 7 the first time it's delivered, then 4, then 1... so it's super valuable, but goes down fast. On the contrary, maybe Bluium would range from 5 down to 3, and be a lot more steady:

I forget the exact details, but the bottom line is that while I liked the idea, the mechanism just wasn't working in Terra Prime.

In the end I (thankfully) decided to replace the whole thing with a Demand Tile mechanism. Much more simply, each resource had a price, and tiles indicated how many were required. Once all the blue spaces were filled, the demand for Bluium dries up, no more can be delivered. As soon as one of the tiles fills up, it goes away and a new one comes up, which may bring back some demand for Bluium.

This worked a LOT better, and I'm happy that's how I ended up going in that game.

The point of that story is to show how a major mechanism that I really liked ended up changing because it wasn't right for the game. Recently, that dynamic has showed up again on one of my current active designs: Apotheosis.

One of the instigating ideas for Apotheosis was that your workers would level up when played, like the cards in Solforge. The crux of the game was intended to be whether you play out all of your workers before recalling, and leveling up your entire workforce evenly, versus playing just a couple of workers then recalling them and playing them again, and ending up with a few high level workers while the rest remain at low level. That idea being the whole point, survived the first several revisions, and many playtests. However, as of last week, I tried a new version -- instead of leveling up every worker you have played when you recall them, we said you could only level up one worker.

I was hesitant to try this, but I was hopeful it would fix certain issues I was having with the game. As we began the first game with that rule, I missed being able to play an extra worker before recalling in order to level them up, but pretty quickly I could see how certain aspects of the game seemed to be tighter and work better. All told, you're still choosing whether to recall early to level more often, or play more workers first for their effects.

One concern with only leveling one worker at a time was that it slowed things down, but that's just a matter of balancing costs, and could be easily fixed. However, in an effort to try something in between "level one worker" and "level all workers," we tried something that amounted to "level some workers." I had expected that to be better, with some of the benefits of the restricted leveling, and some of the benefits of the original idea. But in practice I found that it didn't really work as well, and it became clear that just leveling once per recall (and maybe a few special rewards for things could get you an extra level-up) is the way to go.

So there you go -- once again I've had to "kill a darling," so to speak, and remove or significantly change an instigating mechanism for a game.

As a side note on this topic, my friend Gil Hova (of Formal Ferret games) has a particularly aggressive auction mechanism from an old, unpublished game of his called Wag The Wolf (one which I thought was good!) that he keeps designing games around. He used it in Battle Merchants, but in the end cut the mechanism. He used it again in The Networks, and again cut the mechanism before the game was finished. And I believe he started his latest game, High Rise, with that mechanism, and eventually cut it from that game too!

The List - January 2020

Last month I reviewed The List, but I think I have enough of an update that it's worth taking another look. I'm adding a new section for games I've recruited (or am recruiting) co-designers for:

Published Games:
- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG)
- Isle of Trains (BGG)
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG)
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze

Finished But Unpublished Games:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Olympus on the Serengeti  (FKA Deities and Demigods) [Art starting]
- Exhibit (BGG) [Unlikely to be published due to conflict]
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [In line for art]
- Dice Works (BGG)
- Wizard's Tower (BGG)
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion)
- Suburban Sprawl
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]

Current Active Designs:
- Alter Ego (BGG)
- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe)
- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain)
- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG)
- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

Designs I'm Recruiting A Co-Designer For:
Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
- Automatown [a designer has showed interest]
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG) [a designer has showed interest]

Established designs that still need work:
- Reading Railroad
- Moctezuma's Revenge

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
- Rondel Role Selection
- Kilauea [a designer has showed interest]
- Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]

Idea stage designs that sound promising:
- Dynasty
-Scourge of the High Seas

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

Old Ideas that Haven't Gone Anywhere (Yet) - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- Cruise line game
- The Untouchables
- Day labor game based on craps

Misc and Really Old Stuff:
- 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)

Let's take a closer look at some of the updates:

Crusaders expansions:
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
The first expansion to Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) has been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer. The 2nd/3rd expansions are almost identical to each other, they each add one additional player: a red player, and a yellow player. The retail version art is done for both of them, and they're expected to release in October, 2020. I'm not sure exactly how we will support those who got the Deluxified base game, we will either make Deluxified versions of these expansions, or we'll offer some kind of upgrade pack.

Isle of Trains: the Board Game:
The publisher of Isle of Trains told Dan and I that instead of (or possibly in addition to?) an expansion to the card game, they would like to do a bigger box board game that's like Isle of Trains. So Dan and I have been working on a re-design of the game given the new constraints. We've made a little progress so far, and Dan has a prototype under construction, it'll probably see play soon.

Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG):
A designer friend of mine in Seattle has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. After so many years and iterations, I'm excited to see if he can help get this one across the finish line. He tells me he's got a prototype built and plans to give it a try soon!

Automatown:
A designer in Utah who had printed and played an earlier prototype of Automatown has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I'm excited to see this one move forward, because I'm sure it would have taken me a long time to get back to it. I got word that he'd played the latest version already, and has some specific changes he's going to try next!

Kilauea:
Based on my blog post, a designer I'm not too familiar with has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I've sent him my descriptions of the game and the rules I had written... we'll see if he can do anything with that.

Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]
Another designer I'm not familiar with expressed interest in Joan of Arc. I need to revisit that one and see what info I can send him on it.

2018-2019: a playtesting retrospective

Back in late 2017 I started formally tracking my weekly playtest sessions in a google doc. One up-side of this is that I can go back now and review what was played each week, by whom, and what aspect I was looking to test that day. It's also interesting to see how much time we dedicated to each game, or how much time passed in between playtests of a game.

I'd like to use this post as a sort of retrospective on the last two years (or 28 months) of playtesting. Let's take a little trip down memory lane...

2017

Late August 2017 was the first session I'd logged, and that day we were evaluating 3 games I'd brought home from GenCon for TMG: Margrave, by Stan Kordonskiy, which turned into Old West Empresario, Rolled West, by Daniel Newman, and Embark, by Philip duBarry. Not only did we end up signing each of these, but all three are on store shelves now!

In September of that year we continued evaluating games: Pixel Factory was a neat one, but ultimately TMG did not sign it. Back to Earth was also neat, and we did sign it, but due to unrelated circumstances we ended up releasing it later. Railways is a game by some British designer friends of mine, and I liked it, but it needed some work. We did suggest the new title: Railblazers. My understanding is that at this point it has improved greatly, but the main mechanism which I was interested in (like the Mancala-rondel in Crusaders) has changed completely.

October saw us switch gears a bit. We spent a lot of time playing my games: Eminent Domain Origins (a Terra Prime reboot) and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (a dice game version of EmDo -- I should add those to the BGG database). This went on into November as well.

December was spent almost entirely on a dozen games of Embark, which had been signed by that point. I also see a lone play of Eminent Domain Origins at about Christmas time.

2018

We started off the new year with 2 more games of EDO, but then spent the rest of January, February, March, and half of April playing about 3 dozen (!) games of Old West Empresario, working on game balance and player powers. The only other playtests in those months were a few games of Harvest to test some potential expansion characters (unfortunately, we never did do an expansion to Harvest).

Late April through mid-May we tested the Crusaders: Divine Influence expansion, which was in pretty good shape to begin with, but we hammered out a few details. That one has now been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer in China and should be out later this year.

My son was born at the end of May, and my playtest sessions went on  hiatus. The only other testing that happened in 2018 was at Rincon -- Michael was in town and we played a game of Deities & Demigods (now Olympus on the Serengeti), and several games of Imminent Domain (now Sails & Sorcery, but that title might not be final either), which is the game Michael designed based on the deck learning of Eminent Domain and the area control of El Grande.

2019

After an extended hiatus, I finally got back to regular playtest sessions in February of 2019, and we spent that first month back playing Eminent Domain Origins some more, fine tuning some last details.

March was spent on Emperor's Choice. TMG is doing a Deluxified version of that game, and we developed a 2 player variant which went over well with Richard Ham of Rahdo Runs Through, who famously only plays games with his wife.

April and May were dedicated almost entirely to developing Sails & Sorcery, changing up the format so it would play better, but keeping the core ideas of the game.

June was spent working on a new design of mine, Apotheosis. We iterated through several big changes as we quickly honed in on what worked and what didn't.

We started out July with a quick couple tests of a 5/6 player expansion to Crusaders. This worked out well, and we've got art done, but this won't come out until October. Then it was back to Sails & Sorcery through August. Most of the game was pretty solid by that point, but we were trying to fix this one niggling dynamic that just didn't work right.

We switched gears again and spent September and half of October playing Alter Ego, my co-operative deck learning game. We played quite a few games considering that one of my main testers doesn't like co-op games!

We ended October and spent most of November working on expansion content for Pioneer Days that we got from the designers.

We revisited Alter Ego once in November and once in December, and spent the rest of December testing Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory, and another one of my games: Riders of the Pony Express. Riders was in pretty good shape, but was a bit fiddly. We fixed a couple of small issues, and brainstormed how to remove some of the process a little bit.

In addition, we played a few non-playtest games including Tapestry (which did not go over well), In the Year of the Dragon (my favorite Feld game), and we tested a game for one of my playtesters (we actually did this a couple of other times, but I hadn't recorded those). Also, I took my players out for an annual Playtester Appreciation Day to see the new Star Wars movie (we saw Solo last year, and Episode VIII the year before that) -- only one of them could make it though.

Finally, we capped off the year reviving my oldest game design that was any good: All For One! I initially got involved in that co-design 17 years ago, and it had been so long since the last playtest (2012?) that I didn't try any changes, we played straight from the rulebook. It was great to revive this old classic, and we started off 2020 with some significant changes to All For One, which worked well and felt great!