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What I've been working on... Dynasty (finally!), PYL: Rondel, PU/D design with Corbin, and some rondel games by my friends
It's been far too long... an update is long overdue at this point! So here are some recent games we've been testing in my playtest sessions, mine, as well as a couple of my playtesters':
Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China (finally)
My latest design is also one of my oldest... Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China started as an idea for a game... *checks notes*... almost 20 years ago(!) I have revisited the idea many times over the years, I even have 1/2 of a physical prototype around here somewhere, but I never got around to finishing the prototype or getting it to the table.
Originally, I figured there'd be a few different actions in the game, and you'd just choose one to do each turn. The last time I started thinking of this game, I considered that just picking an action each turn might be a bit boring, or old fashioned. Nowadays, in a game of the type or scope that I expected this game to be, there's generally a logistical or personal puzzle involved in the action selection (in addition to interactive play on the board). So, I gave it some thought and came up with an action selection mechanism that sounded good to me, and then I -- finally -- got a prototype together and tried the game!
The mechanism is this: there are 4 actions in the game (Leader, Village Conquer, Invent), each color coded. During setup, you draw some random colored cubes out of a bag to put on each action space. On your turn, you choose one of the actions to do, resolve it based on your "action level" in that color, and then claim one of the cubes from that space and put it on your player board, powering up the action associated with that cube. So it's kind of like EmDo's deck learning, only you don't get better at the action you do, you get better at some other action. This mechanism adds a little bit of engine building, and a simple entangled decision -- balancing the actions you want to do with the actions you want to power up. When you get a 5th cube of a color, you get a bonus action of that type and then you discard some of those cubes, reducing your level in that action. And finally, when the last cube is taken from one of the actions, a "mini-scoring" occurs, rewarding whatever that action does, and then all of the actions reset like during setup.
At the beginning of that first play, it was immediately obvious that I'd messed up the costs of some things, there was very little we could afford to do at first. But after a few early turns and an audible on certain costs, the game actually started to feel pretty good! It's hard to describe the feeling of relief I felt when finally playing this 20 year old design, and having it actually work out alright!
Peanuts and Crackerjacks
Over in the Decision Space Discord, the host (Jake) mentioned something about boardgames evoking the decision space of sports, and it led me to think of the similarities between Baseball and the rondel mechanism. This pretty quickly led me to a design based on a "push-your-luck rondel," where your personal rondel is a little baseball diamond.
After some sketchy attempts, I figured out that I was approaching it all wrong, and pivoted a bit -- while the game could still be described as PYL Rondel, it's more of a Yahtzee mechanism now. You roll, lock, and re-roll some dice, then move your meeples around your rondel doing actions. Sometimes they get out, sometimes they get home -- scoring a run. The player with the most runs at each scoring phase gains *fans*, and at game end, the player with the most *fans* wins the game.
The theme of the game is managing a team in the golden age of Baseball. A lot of the actual baseball game stuff is abstracted away, but I tried to keep things making as much sense as possible without trying to simulate a baseball game.
I think this one is OK, not great... maybe it has potential to be better, but I've been unhappy with the occasional bad rolls. I had some ideas to modify what bad rolls mean exactly to try to mitigate that, but the game got set aside when I started playing other things.
Truck/Boat/Plane
One day when my 7-year-old was home from school for the day, I turned to him out of the blue and said "do you want to design a game together?" To my surprise, he was on board! So I got some pieces out, and started asking him what he wanted the game to be about. I tried to prompt him as much as possible rather than direct the design myself, but I did add some mechanical details here and there. In the end we came up with a dice drafting pickup/deliver game that's kind of like a really light Logistico or something. There's a game board depicting 4 islands in the water, connected by bridges, and each player has a truck, a boat, and a plane. Each island has a warehouse an airport and a dock, and all other land spaces have 2 colored cubes stacked on them. Each round you roll 3 dice per player and then draft them, picking a die and assigning it to one of your unused vehicles. So every round, each of your vehicles moves once, according to the die assigned to it -- trucks move on land, boats move on water and planes move wherever. When you stop on a space with cubes, you may load the top cube into the inventory for that vehicle on your player board. When you stop on the appropriate building, you deliver all of the cubes of that color (the islands are color coded) from that vehicle -- sliding them down to a scoring zone on your board.
When you make a delivery, you get a little upgrade card for that vehicle, making it move better, or giving it some ability. Then at game end, you get 1 point per cube delivered, 1/2 point for undelivered cube in your vehicles, and a bonus for each set of all 2 colors you have delivered.
I won't say it's the deepest game ever, but it could be a lot worse -- I actually think it's kinda fun, and I love that it was co-designed by my kid!
Henge
One of my regular playtesters is Rick Holzgrafe, designer of Villages of Valeria, as well as a couple of Railways of the World expansions: Railways of the Western US, and Railways of North America. I have known Rick for, I don't know, probably half of my lifetime by now! We met online at BGDF.com, and in person every year at KublaCon and BGG.con for a long time -- I like to tell people that if you look at the board for Railways of the Western US, you'll see Tucson, AZ on the map where most games would use Phoenix. Rick used Tucson because that's where I live :)
Rick has been playtesting with me ever since I started playing online (so about Pandemic-time), and even before that he came on board as a co-designer on Apotheosis, a game which was signed some time ago, and may eventually yet come out under the title Usurpers (so watch for that!)
Rick has had a number of designs over the years, and we've tested them at my playtest sessions now and again. Some of them I think are pretty good, and a few I think are publish-worthy... but none so much as his latest design, Henge. I *really* like Henge.
Henge is a shared rondel game -- there's a big rondel with a single pawn, and on your turn you advance it up to 3 spaces for free, or pay to advance farther ($1/space). The actions you take are to obtain stones, carve them, install them in a henge, and attract druids to check them out. One thing I like about the game (and it's something I lobbied for in development) is that the stones must be transported to the henge before they can be installed. There are a few spaces on the board or a few effects that can make your stones arrive at the henge immediately, but mostly they advance down little transport tracks automatically whenever you advance the pawn past certain lines on the rondel. I love the idea of things going on in the background while you play -- you get a stone, then while you wait for it to transport to the henge, you stop off and get income, maybe you attract some druids, spend some time ornately carving the stone so you can install it in a premium location, whatever.
Henge also includes a little engine building, and you can concentrate more on building or more on druids (though of course you'll probably do a little of each). Once the henge is mostly complete, the game ends, and the player who did the best job wins!
