Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Recruiting Co-designers / Assembling a Design Team

Ever since I recruited my friend Rick to work on Apotheosis (FKA Worker Learning), that game has made a lot of progress where it would certainly still be sitting in my notebook otherwise. That arrangement is working so well that I would really like to recruit other designers to help me progress my other stalled or (or un-started but promising) designs.

Here are a few of the designs I could imagine handing off to another designer at this point and letting them run with for a while, or working together with another designer on...

Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
* Automatown - worker placement/resource management game about building an army of robots (which are your workers)
* Odysseus: Winds of Fate - Adventure game about Odysseus on his way from Troy to Ithaca. Play as the Fates, who don't care what happens to Odysseus, but pass the time by betting on his progress (and then influencing it)

Established designs that still need work:
* Reading Railroad - Build words (a la Scrabble) to earn coins, spend coins to build track. Connect cities to earn pieces of set collection scoring

* Moctezuma's Revenge - push your luck / deduction game about looting temples, but some are cursed

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
* Rondel Role Selection - Shared rondel / resource management / Role Selection game about splicing DNA to make hybrid creatures such as Hippogriffs
* Kilauea - Mancala game about spreading your people across an island, and sacrificing them to the volcano gods to control the lava flow
* Joan of Arc - Bag building game with shared piece movement. Play as a voice in Joan of Arc's head, vying to get her to accomplish your goals.

Idea stage designs that sound promising:
* Dynasty - Spread your villages across China, upgrade them to Cities, and fill your player board with Culture. You'll assimilate other players' culture, and they yours. When someone becomes Emperor, the winner is the player who's culture is best represented.
* Scourge of the High Seas - Deckbuilder along the lines of Ascension, with 2 buy rows (Tortuga, where you buy crew, equipment and ship upgrades, and the High Seas, where you spend crew and equipment to plunder ships)


Any takers?

3 comments:

theTrueMikeBrown said...

I would happily help you out with automatown - it as reasonably fun to play, and I could bring it to the board game design guild to have it tested fairly regularly.

Zachary Eagle said...

Hi Seth,

I am interested! I designed the game Go Nuts for Donuts. We have a regular playtesting group here in Seattle. I would be most interested in working on one of the less developed games.

Zach

Seth Jaffee said...

@Zachary - which of the less developed games catches your interest the most?

Email me (sedjtroll at Gmail) and we'll talk!