Spring Spielbany 2011

4 years ago I attended the Spielbany game design meetup and got a chance to see and play a number of prototypes as well as meet in person several people I see online all the time. Last weekend I decided to do it again. I flew out Friday and returned Monday, and over the course of the weekend I managed to play 12 games (5 of them my designs or designs I'm developing) and have some good design talk and just hang out with some people I don't normally get to. I brought the following games with me, but didn't get to all of them:

Spaghetti Western - a prototype that had been submitted which I was simply returning to the owner.
Caravan Imperative - another prototype I had intended to return, however I forgot to give it back to Andy!
Eminent Domain, with Exotic expansion
Kings of Air and Steam
All For One
Dice Works (or Dice Werx, not sure about the spelling on that)
Alter Ego - not much of a prototype really, just an assembly of cards at the moment
Jab - manufacturer's sample to show off
Brain Freeze - current (almost final) version of the iPad app
Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost Time - partial prototype of the liar's dice bluff auction game

Here's what I played and how it went:

Ice Weasels - a cute, quick kid's game about collecting sets of frozen weasels. The game was inspired by Otter Pops, you have a line of various colored Weasel cards, and on your turn you can either claim a card off of either end, or you can break the line wherever you want (minimum 2 cards in each 'half'). The idea is to get triplets of the same color and then "thaw' them (score them), giving you another turn. Everyone has a 'favorite' color which scores more points for them, and there's a color that's bad for everybody (well, bad if you don't get a whole set and thaw them).  I took a copy of this home with me to show Mike and his kids.

Eminent Domain - I got a 5 player game of Eminent Domain in - the first time I've played with 5. I did not include the Prestige, Utopian, or Exotic planets, and in fact used the Learning Game variant so I removed the 3 Advanced planets with Research icons as well. As a result I noticed that with 5 players the Planet deck ran out, which either means the 5p game needs to include expansion planets, or else for 5 players the planet deck running out should be considered a game end condition. I hadn't considered that for 2-4 players because by the time that happens, the game is over already. But with 5 players puling planets out of the deck, it can run out pretty quick. I think that's acceptable, that for 5p the Planet deck running out could be an additional game end trigger.

I also played with 1 or 2 (forget offhand) extra cards in each stack, and the game dragged on a little longer than I thought it should. I'm not sure if that's to do with using the learning Game variant, or just 5 players in general, or if I really didn't need to add extra cards to the stacks. I'll need to test that some more and find out. Generally speaking though the game seemed to go over very well.

Honor and Glory - A short, cooperative adventure game that's supposed to give the feel of an RPG. Each player has a character sheet with a Class card and a couple of Trait cards. When 'adventuring,' some encounter cards are drawn which each show a specific die result, and 1 or 2 Traits. For each Trait present, if a member of the party has that trait, they get an additional die to roll. The goal is to roll the specific number indicated on the card. Before rolling though, the group chooses one of the characters to be the leader, and therefore their leader ability is in play for that encounter.

Altogether a neat idea, though there were a lot of comments made about the leader abilities, how they work, and whether it made sense for them to only matter when that player was the leader. For example, unless chosen as the leader, the Warrior character was exactly the same as the Cleric character. Seems like they should behave differently even if neither one is the leader. I would like to see each character have a thematic "always on" ability which is a small but beneficial effect, as well as a Leader ability which comes into play if they are the leader. And I'd like to see that Leader ability be something you can count on, not a triggered ability that only works if someone happens to roll a 6. There's an opportunity cost of choosing 1 leader bonus over another, and for it to not come into play sort of cheapens that whole leader choosing decision.

Another comment that came up was that each Encounter should feel like progress toward the end goal. A solution discussed (which I think the designer implemented the next day) was to put prizes (equipment) into the Encounter deck, and when one comes up, it's replaced by another card, and it counts as the LOOT for the adventure, so the heroes will become more powerful over time, allowing them to have an easier time against the boss at the end.

Finally, each round of combat that the group doesn't defeat the bad guys, they take damage. They are allowed to choose who takes the damage. I'd like to see that be wrapped into the choice of Leader - the Leader is out front, they should take the brunt of the attack - maybe they take all the damage. Or maybe each player takes 1 and the leader takes the rest or something.

I would try that game again, with those changes implemented. I could see it being pretty fun.

Sword Merchants - At BGG.con a while back I played Gil Hova's game called Pax Robotica. A theme (and title) I rather enjoyed, and I liked the game for the most part too. Players were Arms Dealers, selling weapons (in that case Battle Bots) to different sides of various conflicts. To an extent you didn't care who won the battles, you would supply Bots to whoever would pay for them. One of the biggest drawbacks of that version of the game was the combat resolution which was obtuse, and a side effect was that the theme seemed to make people think it was a game about fighting robots, not about building and selling them.

Since then Gil has changed the game a lot, stripping his unique auction mechanism (from Wag the Wolf) and changing the theme to a fantasy setting. now Orcs, Kobolds, Dwarves and Elves are at war, and each race will purchase Swords, Axes, Pole Arms, and Maces from the players. There's a dynamic by which the more battles a race loses the more desperate it becomes, and the more desperate a race is, the more money they'll pay for weapons. In addition, there's an end game bonus for having supported the team that lost the fewest battles, which Gil found a nice way to do since Pax Robotica.

I think the game was pretty solid, though some of the numbers were off. The most important changes that were suggested were to give everyone level 1 technology in each weapon (normally you have to buy that) so that no matter what you can always build at least a really crappy weapon of each type (which can turn out to be important for another part of the game), to adjust the values and rates of change of numbers (of course, in a prototype the numbers are often off), and I made an additional suggestion to start with less money so that players can't afford to do as much from the start. I find that games are cool when the players are only able to do 1-2 of 3-4 different things at the start, because then they naturally diverge in player posture - making the rest of the game interesting. I hope to see this one again soon.

Nottingham - Originally designed for the Robin Hood themed Game Design Showdown at BGDF, Nottingham has been expanded into a cooperative game with a traitor that plays 7. The players are on Prince John's side, except the traitor who's in cahoots with Robin Hood. A great theme, and an interesting take on it if you ask me!

The game had a lot in common with Shadows Over Camelot, and any coop game with a traitor will draw that comparison. I did think that this game felt different because you seemed to have more to do in it. The learning curve was a little high, as there were a TON of unique cards, but that's kind of how thematic games go. The designer (Richard James) played the game twice over the weekend, and he was telling me some of the stuff he was planning on changing. It all sounded like steps in the right direction. I'd like to try this one again once the designer gets a chance to polish it up a bit. I'm a sucker for a Robin Hood theme :)

All For One -It's been a long time since I've done anything with All For One, but I was happy to get it to the table. We played a 4 player game (the game has always been best with 4), and I finally tried it without the guards altogether. I don't think I missed them. Some of the same old comments reared their ugly head - and I'm starting to agree that the voting mechanism using the mission cards is not the best idea. Some suggestions were made, maybe the best of which was to relax the hand limit, and to allow players to play any number of cards in a duel (irrespective of which ones), and choose either Offense or Defense. So a different kind of voting, where you sort of bid with your cards to support the result you want to vote for. I might try that next time.


Another idea that came up to promote interaction between characters (which may translate to player interaction) is to forget carrying capacities and simply force a character to pick up each token he walks over. This way more often players will need to move Plot Tokens from character to character via Transfer or Demand actions. Galloping on a horse would still mean skipping Plot Tokens of course.

Another thing I noticed was that perhaps the Bonus tokens should be worth MORE VP than the Required tokens, not less. When doing a mission with only the Required token, you get more VP/token than if you also get a Bonus token - it's often not worth your time to get the Bonus tokens. Also, with the way the Story Tracks are bumped upon completing a mission (which I like), having to bump the 2nd track is often a detriment, so that's another deterrent for going after Bonus tokens. It just makes sense to make the Bonus tokens worth more, so next time I'll switch them - 2vp for the Required token, 3vp for each Bonus token, and I think still 4 VP for arranging a Meeting, and maybe 5vp for the Any Character, 2 Required token missions because they're harder. These VP values could easily be printed on the cards so they need not be remembered.

There have been a few comments along the lines of placing missions face up rather than keeping them in hand, but I think that's just begging for people to disrupt other player's multi-turn efforts, which I think would feel crappy. I'm excited to make these changes and try the game again.

Dice Works - At first I liked the goofy spelling of "Dice Werx" - but I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe "Dice Works" is better. I keep waffling back and forth. Either way, I played a 3-player game on Saturday and it seemed to work fine. I have changed the Scrap Efficiency Upgrade (for even progress on all tracks) to 4/3/3/2 for 1 rather than 4/3/2/1 for 1. I don't ever want anybody exchanging 1 for 1, that's just lame. I like the feel of 3-for-1 though, so that's a reasonable upgrade. Also, I think I'll allow players to use that new exchange rate as soon as they get it, rather than starting next round.

In Ruins - Andy Van Zandt had told me a little bit about his post apocalyptic card drafting game and I was interested to play it. I like the theme, and Andy's designs are always very well thought out and thorough. I enjoyed In Ruins overall, but the unique drafting mechanism I thought had something fundamentally inelegant about it. The idea is cool, you put new cards out, then you get a chance to place your Squatter token on something that you don't want anybody else to take. Sadly, this means you can't take it either - and I wonder if that's just something I will not like about that mechanism (not something wrong with it, just a mechanism I simply don't like). The inelegance was caused by each turn, EACH PLAYER having to be asked to reevaluate which card they want to squat on, often only to decide they liked where they were.

A suggestion was made to instead have each player move their Squatter only on their own turn. The idea behind the Squatter is to keep players from being able to topdeck the perfect card, it gives everybody a chance to stop a lucky draw. The proposal is to have the player draw the new cards at the END of his turn, and then choose to move his squatter - allowing him the chance to block one of the two cards that just came up. I think this would smooth out game play tremendously, and cut down on down time and game length. Andy said he was 100% on board, so I'd love to play the game again with that change the next time I see him.

Currently the game is something like 90 minutes, which I think is a little long for what it is. If this could help cut the length down closer to 1 hour, I think that would be great.

Kings of Air and Steam - As I've mentioned, I'm developing a pickup/deliver game with a Steampunk theme called Kings of Air and Steam. The game supports 2-6 players, though I'd never played with 6 before. I was able to do so this weekend, and it was very informative. I had forgotten the exact setup of market tiles for each player count, so I just used all the Market tiles I had (6 of each color) and drew 4 out per turn. That's what you'd do for a 5 player game. For 6 players it was supposed to be 7 of each color tile, drawing 5 per turn. The game worked well enough, but in retrospect it did seem like the board was somewhat bare most of the time. I think the proper number of tiles would have been better. I had hoped to simplify setup by using the same setup irrespective of player count, but I just don't think the game will work very well that way. As an easy way to handle it though, I am thinking that the appropriate player counts should be printed on the backs of the tiles (2+, 3+, 4+ 5+, 6), and rather than sort them, each tile can be discarded as it's drawn if it's not appropriate for the current game.


Everybody seemed to like the game, and I got a couple of questions answered. For example, everybody agreed that the requirement to ship on 50% your own track was unnecessary. As for the look of the game, everybody was all for the theme, and one player suggested unique ship molds for each player - at first I thought that would be more expensive, but then I realized we could just make 1 mold with all 7 ships on it (6 for the game, plus 1 promo ship we've got planned). Also, Andy suggested a great player power - the ability to create a new link on the board between cities. One player could be given 5 or 7 track tiles (straight on one side, gentle curve on the other), and as an action they could be allowed to place them between 2 cities creating a new link - paying $1 per tile placed. This would come with a Depot on that link, and of course other players could build depots on that link as well. I really like that idea.

Alter Ego - To tell you the truth, when I heard about Midnight Men (which I never knew existed) being picked up by a publisher, I got a little discouraged and didn't really feel like working on Alter Ego anymore. But I do like some of the mechanisms and basic ideas behind the game - of managing your Alter Ego life, and the more recent pre-programming of card play, so I brought my pseudo-prototyp with me hoping to chat about it with Andy or whoever. I ended up talking to Richard James about it, and he asked some questions the answers to which I guess I knew, but hadn't really solidified. That was a big help, and also he got me to tweak how the icons on Henchmen work - once in play, rather than giving you that icon to use, they could work more like Eminent Domain where they boost the cards you play. So if I get a $ icon into play, it doesn't give my any $ to use unless I play a job card. This is a small difference, but it has a significant impact - as Rich pointed out, I had built a mechanism which undermined my original design goal. Currently, once I have $ icons in play, I no longer need to worry about playing a Job card as much. This proposed version instead amplifies my desire to play a Job card over a Hero card, which is what I was going for.

We also discussed how some of the Coop mechanisms would work, and in describing them to him I am more confident in exactly how I want them to be now. So I think that design is back on the front burner! I'm curious to see how Midnight Men pans out, seeing as how it's ALSO a superhero themed, cooperative, deck building game.

Hard Wired - I had seen the beginnings of this game discussed in BGDF chat, and was interested in it from the outset. I was glad I got a chance to try it this weekend. I love the idea of creating circuits and improving circuits, but in the current incarnation of this game you are able to steal the opponent's win condition, which to me feels like a long, drawn out game of hot potato. It's like Munchkin, where everyone stops the other guy from winning, drawing out the game, until someone manages to finally win.

When someone suggested that players be allowed to steal Circuits instead of the Light cards, that sounded perfect to me! you could "improve" their circuit by creating the same effect with fewer cards, thereby taking their cards for yourself - as a way to draw more cards at a time. It doesn't hurt the opponent, but it does something useful for you. In fact, if smallest circuit is tiebreaker, then it kind of HELPS the opponent, but you'd do it anyway because it gets you more cards in 1 action than drawing.

So my proposed change, which I hope Ariel tries and I hope works out for him, is that players on their turn can either PLAY a circuit (minimum 3 cards or so), adding a new light to their line, or IMPROVE a circuit by playing any number of cards to replace a longer circuit in play, taking the old circuit cards into their hand. Then they could draw 1 card (I like that as it otherwise might feel like it takes too long to build back up after playing cards). The object is still to either get 1 of each color light in play, or else have the most lights when the deck runs out.

I also liked the idea of another mode of play, where there's just 1 big circuit in play, and each player starts with a set of 1 of each colored light. You win by adding all of your lights to the circuit, or else by having the fewest left when the deck runs out. In this version on your turn you could either play a new circuit (min 3 cards?), Improve a circuit, or simply draw 1 card. Or I guess it could be the same (Play or improve a circuit, then draw 1).

I'd like to try this game again with the changes.

Love Means Nothing - I hadn't played Love Means nothing for a long time, and Ariel had a new version. The new version made the decisions a bit more strategic, but the game was much more slow and tedious. I don't think that's the right feel for a sports themed game, I missed the older, more streamlined mechanics. I was wondering how the decisions could be made more interesting with the old mechanics, and I jokingly said "maybe what it needs is a chess clock, like Brain Freeze!" - and then immediately realized that maybe that's not such a bad idea. the idea behind Brain Freeze was simple decisions + time pressure. Maybe a chess clock with 60 or 90 seconds on it would force people to make their simple decisions a little faster. I think that would feel more like a sports game. Maybe I'll dig up the old copy of Love Means Nothing that I have at home and give that a try.


On Monday morning I also got a chance to talk to Ariel about what each part of Ground Floor will look like. I originally thought the player boards would look like blueprints, but he had a different idea that's been really growing on me. I think it could come out really nicely!

Eminent Domain: Exotic Expansion - take 2

I updated my EmDo prototype as discussed, and Michael played it 6 times with John tonight. I don't think John has grokked the game with the expansion yet, as Mike beat him every time. I was playing Carson City on the next table, but every time I looked up Mike seemed to have nothing but Exotic planets in play, and I guess he was using them to great benefit. One game he traded for 25 points - all from trading Fighters via Dr Mayhem's Weapon Emporium! This has given Mike something of a big head, as apparently he's 13-0 at EmDo with the Exotic expansion!

From those games, my current thought is that the Exotic icons do pretty much what they're supposed to, but I think they might snowball a little too quickly or easily. That might be less true with more players than it is with 2, or it might just be a perception thing, but I think I might need to nerf the planets a little bit. I might remove the Exotic icon from the planets which have the [Exotic]=>[X] abilities (and maybe add a couple of influence points to them) and put them back on the 3 planets which have no ability (but do have resource slots). I had wanted to add more icons so that people could get them and use them, I didn't want someone getting an Exotic planet and then not be able to do anything with the transform ability. But in fact, no matter which Exotic planet you get, you do have access to the Exotic technology cards - which each have an Exotic icon on them. So maybe just three planets with Exotic icons is enough. It may be disappointing to come across one of those without an ability to use the icon with, but those 3 planets will have 2 resource slots each, so they'll still be plenty useful. And maybe they'll encourage players to Survey up another Exotic planet!

Another idea I'd like to try is adding some more Tech cards. In particular, maybe a card that you play as an action which allows you to play 2 other cards, like the Village in Dominion. Amusingly, there's already a card like Smithy in this game (Improved Survey), and Moat (Survey) :)

I'm not sure if I want to add a lot of these types of things, but I'm currently thinking I could add 2 of these cards to each level 1 Tech deck. Each could have 1 of the icons in the game (so the Metallic deck would have 1 with a Survey icon and 1 with a Warfare icon). In the Exotic deck it would have 1 Exotic icon (and there might be 2 of them).

I might also like to add a Level 2 tech of each of the original types. not sure if it should be a permanent tech (and therefore double sided), or if it should relate to the Exotic stuff (like having an Exotic icon). Maybe 2 per stack, each with one Exotic icon and one native icon. I guess I get to think up another 3 or 6 Tech abilities :)

 Any suggestions for tech abilities are welcome - leave a comment with your ideas!

Eminent Domain: Exotic Expansion

Eminent Domain: Exotic Expansion

I mentioned recently that I was working on the first full expansion to Eminent Domain. For ease of communication I will refer to the Prestige and Utopian planets as a promo-pack or something, and I'll refer to the Exotic expansion as the "1st" EmDo expansion - that should be close enough for government work.

While I like the idea of keeping things a secret, I cannot ignore the benefit I get from using my blog to think things through, and the comments I get from people, though sparse, are also helpful. And let's not forget then my readership is pretty darn small compared to the gaming population in general, so when the expansion comes out, plenty of people will still be surprised by all the new stuff!

That said, here's what I'm looking at, 2nd draft now, for the Exotic expansion. I welcome comments, especially from those who have played the game before!

New Start Planets:
First off, as I'm adding a planet type, I clearly need to make a Start Planet of that type which is equivalent to the other Start planets. Therefore there's an Exotic start planet which costs 2/2 and has 1 resource slot. Currently the resource that Exotic planets make is called Unobtanium, though I suspect that will change by the time I'm done. Anybody have a good idea for what resource the Exotic planets might make?

In addition to the standard Exotic start planet, I've made an additional Start planet of each type (Adv, Met, Fert, and Exo) for a grand total of 5 NEW Start planets. Back in development I tried adding icons/abilities to the start planets, and I really didn't like it. I wanted players to EITHER flip their start planet and start doing Research, OR Survey up a better planet first to make use of it's ability. For alternate start planets I thought adding icons would be good, but to avoid the problem I had before I decided to make these 5 more expensive than their standard counterparts. Here's what they look like:

COSTS: Warfare: 6, Colonize: 5. Slightly higher than the average planets in the survey deck because these planets are a little better than the ones in the survey deck.. So far this seems ok.

ICONS: The Advanced. Metallic, and Fertile planets each have 2 icons on them - the appropriate ones for that planet type. So Fertile has both Colonize and Produce icons on it. The Exotic planet only has 1 icon (Exotic), and it also has +1 Hand Size.

RESOURCE SLOTS: None of the alternate Start planets have any resource slots.

INFLUENCE: Each of the alternate Start planets are worth 2 Influence.

Exotic Planets:
The main thrust of this expansion is the new planet type and the associated icon and technologies. I've created a 9-card cycle of Exotic planets similar to that of the other planet types.

COSTS: Each of the Exotic planets cost Warfare: 5 / Colonize: 4.

ICONS: Six of the Exotic planets have an Exotic icon (my prototype uses a cute little 1-eyed alien face) on it, as well as a new icon in the Game Effect box (where the Hand Size +1 icon appears in the original planet cards). This new icon looks like:

[Exotic Icon] => [Other Icon]
Meaning that all Exotic icons can be used in place of that specific other icon. So if I had a planet that said [Exotic]=>[Warfare], then (a) because it's got an Exotic icon, that counts as a Warfare icon already, and (b) if I get another Exotic icon in play, that icon would ALSO count as a Warfare icon! So [Exotic]=>[Warfare] means "all of your Exotic icons count as Warfare icons."

The implication here is that if you get multiple Exotic planets in play they sort of build off of each other, making all of your Exotic icons more flexible and more powerful.

RESOURCE SLOTS: The other 3 Exotic planets do not have any Icons. Instead they have TWO resource slots. Unobtanium is pretty rare, only produced by 4 planets (one of which is a Start planet), but when you find some, you find a lot of it!

INFLUENCE: The 6 Exotic planets with icons are worth 2 Influence. The 3 Exotic planets with Unobtanium are worth 3 Influence.

Exotic Technology:
To go along with the new planet type, I have a new Technology stack for the Exotic planets. In it there are 6 Level 1 technologies (3-cost, 0-Influence), 4 Level 2 Technologies (5-cost, 2-Influence, 2 of them are permanent and back-to-back), and 2 Level 3 technologies (7-cost, 5-Influence, permanent and back-to-back).

Level 1: Each of the standard "Improved" technologies occurs 1 time, with the appropriate icon as well as an Exotic icon. So the Improved Survey card has a Survey icon and an Exotic icon, and its action is "Draw 3 cards". Obviously it'll have the same illustration as other Improved Survey cards as well. The Exotic icons on these cards are not useful unless you have a card in play that allows you to use Exotic icons as some other icon.

Level 2: There are 2 Level 2 techs that go into your deck (with 2 Exotic icons on them), and 1 double-sided tech card that stays in play. The ones that go into your deck have 2 Exotic icons on them, which are useless unless you have a card that translates them into another type of icon, and then they are pretty good. If you have multiple translators then they become really good.
Deep Space Probes (Exo/Exo): Action: Search the Planet deck and discard pile and choose 1 planet card. Shuffle the rest to create a new planet deck and put the chosen card on top.
This is to be used before a Survey role in order to get exactly the planet you want.
Cryptology (Exo/Exo): Draw 3 cards, then place up to 2 cards in hand back in their respective Stacks.
Sort of the opposite of Artificial Intelligence. It allows you to thin your deck, as well as maybe lengthen the game a little bit.
Coalition Victory (Perm): If you have 2 of each (Adv, Met, Fert) planet face up in your empire, you win the game.
Alternate win condition, a bit harder than it sounds as you need 2 of EACH planet type - the three listed as well as 2 Exo planets in order to play this card!
Thorough Survey (Perm): Survey Role: You may draw 2 fewer planet cards. If you do, keep 1 additional planet.
Allows a player to obtain 2 planets at a time, at the cost of requiring larger Survey roles.

Level 3: There is 1 double-sided tech card that stays in play:
Cult of the New (Exo): Each Exotic icon in your Empire is worth 1 additional Influence.
Bonus points for Exotic icons on planets in play (tech cards in your deck do not count). This one is actually worth 4 Influence in stead of the usual 5, because it also gives you an Exotic icon, which will score a bonus point at the end by itself.
Premium Product: +1 Influence for each Unobtanium that you trade.
The name on this one is really just a placeholder (that's true of several of these, actually). This one rewards you for trading Unobtanium, which is something you might be able to do a decent amount of if you specialize in Exotic planets. For the 2nd version I'm considering adding an Unobtanium resource slot or two to it.

5 Player Support:
In addition to the new stuff, I'm planning on providing additional cards and potentially a game end or rules tweak to make a 5 player game work. I haven't gotten a chance to play with 5 players yet, but I think that adding enough cards for another 10 card starting deck, and 1 or 2 more cards per stack would be good - and probably keeping the game end trigger on 2 piles (I think 3 would be too many, though I suppose it's worth a try). The rules tweak I am considering is only allowing players to Follow/Dissent Roles led by their neighbors. The main thing here is that I think I don't like players being able to Dissent 4 times in a row and then start their turn with 9+ cards. I'm also not sure I like so many opportunities to Follow, although in reality you only have so many cards in your hand, so maybe that's a self limiter. I'm curious whether players would be upset or not if they were hoping to follow Survey (saved cards for it), and one of the 2 players that they're not adjacent to called Survey - would that be an interesting dynamic? Or just annoying? I'd like to try it and see.

I welcome any comments on this. At this time I have still not assigned any meaning to the different sized Fighter tokens, I believe that will be part of another expansion. My early thoughts on that are Hostile planets, which must be flipped with Warfare, and perhaps Peaceful planets as well, which must be Colonized and not attacked. I think the medium sized token will become a Destroyer and the largest one a Dreadnought. There will probably be some mechanism to upgrade some number of fighters into a Destroyer, and etc... and for certain things you'll need Destroyers or Dreadnoughts. I haven't got that fully worked out yet, one thing at a time :)

Alter Ego - beaten to the punch?

It appears one of the Game Artisans of Canada has sold a coop superhero deck building game to a (as yet undisclosed) publisher. This is good news for him and for GAC - maybe bad news for Alter Ego. I'll have to figure out if I care to continue working on it, or shelve it given that a game of similar scope and theme will be coming out...

Then again, maybe superheroes will be 2012's wine theme.

Alter Ego - should it be a cooperative game?

A few people have suggested, presumably based on the theme, that Alter Ego might ought to be a cooperative game. A team of superheroes defending the city from arch villains does sound like it would lend itself to the coop genre. I hesitated at first because as yet I have not seen a good way to make a cooperative game, at least one that wasn't Solitaire by Committee. Coop games ARE somewhat popular though, even if they are SbC, and the theme DOES suggest cooperation... Maybe deck building will force each player to be in charge of their own contribution at least a little, as their deck is their own and would differentiate them from other players.

So if I were to revisit Alter Ego as a coop game, what would have to change? Maybe not that much. How does this sound?

First off, there could be a supply of Civilian (CIV) tokens. Villains would take CIV tokens out of the supply, and when that supply runs out, the villains have taken over the city, the game is over, and the players lose. Each turn a player turns up a Villain card, and place a CIV token from the supply onto it. That villain could be said to have taken that CIV token hostage. Upon defeating that villain, the CIV token could go back into the supply.

After the new villain arrives, the player gets to resolve the cards they have in play (from last turn, see previous blog post). It could be the case that villains show fewer symbols, corresponding to the 'cost' to knock a CIV token off of them, and they could take multiple CIV tokens at a time - removing the last CIV token would be how you defeat the villain. Defeating the villain would still give benefits to the player who did it.

Arch Villains
It might still work to say a player must collect enough of an Arch Villain's icons (on villains they'd defeated) in order to go after that Arch Villain. But perhaps rather than 'qualifying' to attack an Arch Villain, there could be a tracking board as well, and when 'enough' henchmen of the proper type are defeated, the Arch Villain of that type arrives. The Arch Villains would be big, bad versions of the regular ones, and would take a larger number of hostages, or maybe permanently remove CIV tokens from the game, or something similarly dastardly and difficult to deal with.

Winning the game could be defeating all (3?) of the Arch Villains before they and their Henchmen overrun the city (by removing all of the CIV tokens from the supply).

Flavor
For additional flavor, the CIV tokens could be tiles or cards which have various TYPES, and it could matter if too many CIV of a particular type are hostage - making different reasons to go after particular henchmen at different points in the game. Like you've got the cards to defeat this guy, or you like the abilities you'd gain, but THAT guy has the MAYOR hostage, so you need to save him first.

This is still very rough draft-y, so please feel free to chime in with comments! Does this version sound better than a competitive version of the game?

Alter Ego - doubts on structure

I've been concentrating on the idea of needing to neglect your Alter Ego life in order to become stronger as a hero in order to win the game, and I thought that in a deck building game your deck could represent your overall life, and as you swap out AE cards for Hero cards, the composition of your deck is literally changing away from your AE life and toward being a hero. Therefore over time the hands you draw would be more and more concentrated on Hero cards. However, I'm concerned because in my early tests it does not feel like I'm neglecting my Alter Ego aspects. I would like the player to really experience a feeling of having to give up something in order to do the requisite crime fighting.

Perhaps what I need is a more direct, in your face representation of choosing the Hero path over the Alter Ego life. For example, if you had to choose between a "Hero turn" or an "Alter Ego turn." Thunderstone does that, and I don't love the way it works in that game. Another possibility that I've been considering all day is this:

Suppose the game were restructured such that you had your deck, and you had 5 card 'slots' in front of you. In a given turn you would first resolve any cards already in front of you, clearing them out, and then you would play up to 5 new cards into those slots. You would also take a new Hero card and place it in a virtual 6th slot reserved for that purpose.

The idea here is that in the beginning, players would only have Alter Ego cards in their decks, and could pretty much play their entire hand. But before long, players will be able to draw more than 5 cards, and will have to choose a subset of their hand to play each turn. This could more directly make you choose between playing an Alter Ego card or a Hero card. If the AE cards are good/strong enough, then this could be a properly agonizing decision. In this case you wouldn't be removing AE cards from your deck and replacing them with Hero cards, instead you would have to choose each turn which ones to play. The game might flow a little better this way too (thus far it's felt a little klunky to me).

So maybe a turn structure more like this would be good:
1) Turn up a Villain card and place it in the center of the table. For each Community card in your display, you can draw an additional Villain card to choose from. This villain is now available for each player to fight.

2) Resolve all cards in your display. Community cards already explained. Family cards = Draw 1 card (not 2 as before). Job cards allow you to buy or activate Equipment. Hero cards can be placed on a Villain from the center of the table, claiming that Villain as 'yours' and taking it into your play area.

It would still be cool if Villains had some static bad effect that hindered you while they are in your play area so that once you claim a Villain card you really want to defeat it. Perhaps "letting him go" is an option, but it should come with some penalty as well.

3) Having cleared out your board, now you may play up to 5 cards from your hand into your card slots, and choose a Hero card from the stacks to place in a virtual 6th slot.

4) Reset your hand to the your hand limit (probably starting at 4) Or maybe better: discard all cards and draw to your hand limit.

The Villain cards would be about the same as they are now - they would have a 'cost' in hero symbols which needs to be 'paid' in order to defeat them, they might have an Arch Villain icon, meaning they count toward being able to go after that Arch Villain, and they might have some game benefit: Hand Size increase, extra card slot, extra Hero icon (only counts against the Arch Villain), or extra $ icon for use in activating (or buying?) Equipment.

Another tweak might be to say that you're allowed to play an Equipment card ON TOP of a Job card in your display, meaning that you do have to have both the equipment and the $ to activate it, but it doesn't take up an extra slot. If you have a Villain that gives you $ then you can place Equipment by itself and still activate it. Right now all of the Equipment works without $, just stronger effect if you pay to activate it.*

*Note to self: Check out the effect of Equipment when activated - 1 EQ card + 1 Job card should = better effect than 2 other cards!

I think this turn structure might be a little better. Maybe I'll try it out. I think it still leaves room for (and maybe even emphasizes) players building up to become strong enough to take on an Arch Villain. It moves a little away from the original idea of neglecting your Alter Ego, but it does make you directly choose whether to play AE cards or Hero cards, so maybe it'll be good.

Deleterious effects of Villains
I'm not certain what deleterious effects Villains could have, but thematically it makes sense that they attack your Alter Ego in some way - like taking Mary Jane hostage, or threatening a train full of innocent people. Perhaps an acceptable abstraction of that (which could actually matter) is that when they come into play you have to put some number of cards from your deck face down under the Villain, and you don't get them back until you defeat him. You can always get a new Hero card each turn, so you can always defeat the Villain eventually.

Insignias
I'm not entirely opposed to using some kind of player counters in the game, but I admit the impetus behind that is mostly that I like the idea of each player having a set of tokens with an Alter Ego logo on one side and their own hero's insignia on the other. These could be parodies or similar to the Bat Signal or Superman's 'S' for example.

I'm not sure this is necessary in this game at this time, but perhaps it might be better to use tokens to record damage on Villains rather than leaving the cards on them. Thus players could leave the Villains in the center of the table rather than 'claiming' them, and 2 players might sort of rush to defeat the same Villain - with their Insignias indicating which Hero icons they've played on that Villain so far.

Dice Werx and Alter Ego updates

I have been working on three things in the last week or so:

Eminent Domain Expansion: Exotic planets

The FIRST EmDo expansion will be the 9 card set of Prestige and Utopian planets, but that's a mini expansion, the first FULL expansion is what I'm working on now. I've made a first draft prototype, and once I get it where I'm more comfortable I'll offer PnP files to TMG fans to test it out. The expansion adds the following:

* Additional Role Cards to accommodate a 5th player
* Additional Planet Type: Exotic
* Additional Technologies (to go with the Exotic planet type)
* Additional Start Planet tiles: 1 each Advanced, Fertile, and Metallic, and 2 Exotic

I have first draft versions of all this, and have played with the Exotic stuff, but not yet with 5 players. So far it looks promising, though of course there is room for improvement over the first draft!

Dice Werx

It may be favorable to use the word "Dice" in the title for marketing purposes, so I'm probably going to have to rename Eureka! to Dice Werx. Please leave a comment with which spelling you like best, or with a better name for the game (or argument to keep calling it Eureka)... possible spellings:

Dice Works
Dice Werks
Dice Worx
Dice Werx
Diceworx
Dicewerx

Anyway, after playing the game a number of times and considering packaging and cost concerns, I have come to some conclusions about what the game will look like:
80 dice in 4 colors (still not sure if they should be standard or custom with icons)
4 two-sided player boards with 3 columns on one side and 4 columns on the other
Additional dice required at the high end of the columns, with more cross pollination of colors.
Some reward for advancing to the 2nd/3rd/4th spaces in ALL columns.

My current thought, and what I'll try in the next incarnation, is to make the Scrap exchange a little worse to begin with, like 4-for-1 rather than 3-for-1, and then when a player advances every column to the 2nd level, their Scrap exchange for all colors will go up to 3-for-1. Advancing everything to the 3rd level will earn you a 2-for-1 Scrap exchange rate for all colors. Advancing everything to the 4th level will earn you a 1-for-1 scrap exchange, which should be pretty darn good, but by the time you get all 3/4 columns to level 4, someone should probably have won already!

Alter Ego deck building game
I made some first draft cards for Alter Ego, and ran through a couple 2 player tests with Mike. The rules are very skeletal, but I think I was able to see a few things that for sure needed to change, and how to change them. Since then I tweaked all of the Equipment cards and re-printed them. I have a pretty good idea what I need to do with the Villain cards as well. A few notes for my own benefit that probably won't make sense to anyone else:
* The Arch Villains need to require more of their specific icons (which appear on the regular villains) - or else those icons need to be more sparse on the villain cards.
* The Villain cards need to give fewer benefits (like additional hero symbols), and/or the hero symbols they give should only apply toward the Arch Villain, not additional interim villains.
* In order for the game not to crash, there needs to be a way to add Alter Ego (AE) cards back to your deck. I'm thinking that instead of fighting crime (and trading in an AE card for a hero card) a player could NOT fight crime and instead add an AE card BACK to their deck. It was suggested (thanks Andy) that in that case a Villain should come out - the top one from the deck perhaps, or maybe there should be a supply of the most basic bad guy, who gives you no benefit whatsoever, but who must be defeated before you can attack an Arch Villain. Thematically, as you spend more time with your family (and not patrolling the streets), the crime rate goes up.
* I am still concerned with the low level of interaction in the game, but for the scope of the game maybe it's acceptable to not have any player interaction.
* I'm a little concerned about the turn structure as well, I want the game to have a nice, simple flow to it.

Deckbuilding Discourse

What with Eminent Domain coming out soon, and a rash of other deck building games popping up left and right, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Deck Building mechanism. What is so interesting about it?

I think the single most interesting thing about deck building is that the iterative small scale decisions you make throughout the game have a direct relationship with your late game position. Every card you add to or remove from your deck has a lasting impact on the game for you. Which means that you need to consider long term ramifications of short term decisions, making even somewhat trivial choices more interesting.

What does this mean in terms of designing a deck building game? It means that for one thing, the end game goal should be clearly stated from the outset, so you have some way to reasonably know what cards you'll want in your deck later on. How do some of the existing, well known deck building games do this, and are they successful?

Dominion does this by allowing you to determine what you want your endgame plan to be. How will you attempt to win? Do you want to draw 8+ Gold and buy a province each turn? Do you want to be drawing your entire deck every turn to buy multiple Victory cards? You can look at the set of Kingdom cards and make that determination, and every card you choose to put into your deck can either work directly to that end, or might be a step toward a deck that will create that endgame situation for you.

Thunderstone does NOT really do this, which is why I do not like Thunderstone as much as I like Dominion. In a game of Thunderstone there are 3 different Monster types, and each one might have it's weakness, but due to the nature of the "hallway," it's not feasible to really specialize in any given monster type. You pretty much want to make a deck that produces more and more power, and it doesn't matter much what kind or how much more, just more = better.

Ascension also does not do this at all. The center row, similar to the hallway in Thunderstone, makes it impossible to really plan ahead on what you might need. The best you can do is specialize in one of the 2 currency types and hope that there will be good options for you when it's your turn. Ascension does offer you the ability to sort of build combos in your deck, by going after, say, Machina Constructs, or Lifebound cards... but considering you can't tell when those cards will come up, you don't really get to build those synergies on purpose. Every card in Ascension is worth points, and mostly at about the same efficiency. I've had a lot of success at that game simply buying pretty much whatever I could afford - I almost don't care what it is. Given a choice, a card that says "draw a card" on it is better than one that doesn't. I don't have any long term plan which I want my cards to fit into.

So how does my game stack up? I'm not going to preach from my soapbox that my own creation is perfect, but I will say that I am pleased with how it turned out. One of the design goals of Eminent Domain was to provide a late game goal which players need to take into account when choosing their role each turn in order to have a strong endgame. In EmDo cards enter your deck as a side effect of taking actions, which is in itself very different than other deck building games. But with reference to the topic at hand, your strategy in EmDo will influence your role choices so that late in the game you will be able to have big, useful turns. For example, if your plan is to research out some level 3 technology in the late game, you can't neglect research and then all of a sudden score a 5 point Tech card. you'll have to take the Research role or otherwise collect research symbols in your Empire in order to score well off of research.

The next deck building game I'm working on, Alter Ego, will also provide a clear end game goal. The Arch Villains you must defeat in order to win will be face up from the beginning, so that you know what you need to go for and which intermediate villains you need to pursue in order to get there.

I really think this is a key element in deck building games, and I think despite their popularity and sales levels, many of the Dominion clones and other new deck building games out there are failing at this aspect.

What do you mean "failing?" You just said they were popular and are selling well!"

Yeah, that's true - it's hard to argue with success. And more power to them! I'm not saying they're not enjoyable, but it's kind of a shame because I think most of the deck building games out there could probably be better than they are. It's like they're missing the point, but since deck building is hot right now, it doesn't even matter. A good theme and the deck building mechanism will only carry you so far, I predict that before long people will get bored and the hype will die down, and the only deck building games that will remain will be the ones that do more than merely put cards into your deck. I don't know how long it'll be before that really comes to pass, but I hope that Eminent Domain will be one of those games when it does!

Alter Ego deck building - what a difference a day makes

OK, that title is unnecessarily dramatic, and probably misleading. I just mean that it has been 1 day, and this morning I did get a chance to attempt a dry run of an approximation of Alter Ego, using an Eminent Domain prototype! Andy Van Zandt is here at GAMA and he tried it with me. The prototype was limiting in a few ways, and I didn't have all aspects covered by the rules yet, but it actually went pretty well! I was able to fix one or two things on the fly, and it gave me a good idea about which parts were working which weren't. One major-ish thing I changed was to swap the order of Training and drawing cards- making the card draw the first thing you do on your turn.

Another thing that I didn't change on the fly, but that I think might need changing, is whether you have to discard your hand at the end of your turn. At first I figured people would just be playing their entire hand every turn, and so you'd draw a new hand for next turn. In practice of course there are times when you'd want to build up a certain type of card in your hand. So should you be allowed to hold cards from turn to turn? Or does the Alter Ego card mechanic sort of want you to rely on the composition of your deck?

There were a few other details, but overall a successful first run I think, at least enough to warrant continued work on it. Just so I don't forget, I'll jot down some notes about it here. This might not make much sense to you, so feel free to skip it:

* I thought the Patrol action would have to say "draw 1+N villains, keep 1 to attack" 1+N because otherwise you could have a situation where a player removes all Patrol cards from their deck, and then cannot Patrol at all. That is really not necessary, I'd rather have wimpy guys of each suit which give you partial (1/2 or 1/3) credit toward beating a specific Arch Villain.
* I played with the villains all just increasing your hand size by one. I think the abilities from defeated villains could be more varied than that.
* I need to think some more about exactly how Equipment should work.
Edit: Maybe some equipment should have ACTIVATION cost as well, so that neglecting your Job aspect really does hurt, even after you've used it to get some better cards into your deck!
* There needs to be some semblance of interaction, and I think being able to swoop in and finish off an opponent's partially defeated villain may be the way to accomplish that.
Edit: Then again, Ascension and Dominion don't have much if any interaction... maybe it can be solitaire and still sell well! Leave interaction for an expansion!

Alter Ego - new form factor

The other night Mike and I were at dinner discussing what it might take to come up with another deck building game, one on par with Ascension (with regard to scope). We brainstormed some themes, and one that sounded promising was superheroes. At first we were talking about each player's starting deck representing a hero and a sidekick, with one or two of several abilities (which would work like the icons in Eminent Domain). The "kingdom" cards would be Hero cards you would get by "training" - they would add icons to your deck. Then you would fight Villains, like you fight monsters in Thunderstone. They would have various costs to defeat, comprised of those ability symbols. Once beaten, maybe TMG's Villains would go in front of you and give you some static effect, like the planets in EmDo.

Then we thought another way to do it would be to have a sort of Legion of heroes, rather than 1 per player. Say there were 5 abilities, there could be 10 heroes, each with 2 of the abilities on them. This would be your starting deck (one card for each hero). You would add cards to your deck such as Sidekick cards, or training cards, or equipment cards, in order to make you strong enough in the various icons to defeat the villains. Mike was very enamored with this idea, and maybe it could be made to work, but I wasn't feeling it.

Thinking about heroes I of course remembered Alter Ego. It occurred to me that the thoughts I'd had about the format of the game were really actually PERFECT for a deck building game... If you start with a deck full of Community, Job, and Family cards, and have to literally lose them to get Hero cards in order to fight Villains!

I think that could work really well, and here's how I see it going down:
Players start with a deck of maybe 6 or 8 each of Family, Job, and Community cards, and possibly a couple of Hero cards (or possibly not). The turn order would follow this outline:
1. Train - remove any one Alter Ego card in hand from the game and replace it with a Hero card.
2. Support - play any number of Family cards and draw two cards for each.
3. Equip - play any number of Job cards to purchase one equipment card into your deck. Equipment cards could be like EmDo's Tech cards or Dominion's Kingdom cards (different selection each game).
4. Patrol - play any number of Community cards. For each one, draw a card off the Villain deck. Then choose a Villain to fight. This could be one of the drawn cards, or one of the standard wimpy villains, or one for the Arch Villains available for the game. Defeating an Arch Villain is how you win the game. In order to qualify to take on an Arch Villain though, maybe you have to defeat several of that Villain's henchmen (villains of that type or 'suit'). I also think if would be cool if you NEEDED to defeat villains to even have a feasible shot at besting an Arch Villain. As such, I think the villains you defeat should come into play in front of you and give you a static ability, like planets in EmDo.

The basic idea here is that you must weaken your deck in one or more of the three basic areas in order to make progress toward winning. I hope to try this idea out, and I think I can do so using an EmDo prototype. Maybe I'll do that while I'm here in Vegas.

Creative Writing - Steampunk

I'm working on a project that I'm finding very fun. That project is a little different than things I've done, but not so different from things I've considered in the past. 2 of my favorite classes in college (and this was something of a surprise at the time) were writing classes - one was the dumb-ass class you have to take if you don't pass the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Exam, and the other was a Creative Writing class I took in my last semester for something to do alongside the single required class I had to take. My current project is a creative writing one.

What's that, Seth? ANOTHER project? Aren't you an engineer, a board game designer, a board game developer, helping your friend with a board game publishing business, and still playing frisbee a couple times a week (plus traveling to tournaments)? Well, this one is related - I'm writing a background story for an upcoming Tasty Minstrel release, and I'm having a really good time doing it!

It's not set in stone yet, but it's highly likely we've found a game to release for Essen/BGG.con 2012, and I wanted to apply a Steampunk theme to it. Steampunk, for those unfamiliar, is really not a theme so much as a setting - generally speaking it's like "retro sci-fi." Often alternative history, with today's advances powered by Victorian era technology. Like a steam powered rocket ship for example, or a clockwork robot. Based on the time frame, and because they are cool, you often see dirigibles, pilots with goggles, and mechanics with over-sized wrenches. Here are some pictures showing the typical Steampunk look:

(Taken from Google Image Search)

I like the idea of the genre in general, and I thought it would be a good fit/excuse to explain some of the mechanisms of this game. Like most Science Fiction, it gives a plausible excuse for anachronistic technology in a realistic setting. In the Fantasy genre just about anything can be justified via magic. While I have no problem with that, I kinda like how Sci Fi and Steampunk attempt to describe things in a way that could actually happen in our world.

In short, the game in question is about using your Airship to pick up goods from factories and drop them off at your depots, then using virtual trains to ship the goods along rail lines to cities that want them. This 2-stage delivery process, and how you orchestrate your Airship movement, is something I found fun and interesting, but thematically it didn't make a lot of sense. It's been fun writing a story that justifies the game action:

The game takes place at the beginning of the second industrial revolution in the US, about the same time frame as Railroad Tycoon - as rail barons were laying track across the eastern U.S. - only in the game world, the British won the war of 1812, so instead of the "United States of America," it's "British Colonial America," and the style of Victorian England spread throughout the country. Airships were used (like in real life), but they were not fast enough nor maneuverable enough to replace trains for the shipping industry. Our story begins with an inventor named Samuel Diamond, and his invention, the Diamond Engine. It's an engine which can increase the speed and mobility of an airship. Though it works, the design is imperfect, and if not handled carefully the engine can overheat, potentially causing catastrophic failure (like, the airship exploding), so laws quickly disallowed the use of the Diamond Engine in cities. The engines became somewhat widely used on the underground Airship Race circuit, but due to their sketchy nature they had not been used for commercial purposes until years later.

Which brings us back to the second industrial revolution and the Railroad Tycoon -esque track building. As a handful of rail barons laid rail across the country, cities sprang up along the tracks, and for them to thrive they were going to need industry to supply them. One baron was ambitious, and while the rest laid infrastructure, Lawrence Golding (I would like to find a better name for this guy) sought out an Airship outfitted with a Diamond Engine and began using it to deliver goods. Because he couldn't enter the cities with his airship, Golding built depots along the rail lines, dropped the goods off there, and used trains on the existing lines to deliver the goods. This turned out to work very well, and while his competitors tried to follow suit, Golding had already dominated the shipping industry. The Golding Empire was strong and prosperous, but eventually Lawrence grew old and died, leaving his company to his eldest son. Caring little for the family business, decided to make a quick buck by dissolving the company and selling it off part by part. This is where the players come in - each player is one of 12 characters (6 pairs) who is trying to make a name for themselves now that the Golding Empire has fallen.

I've also enjoyed writing back stories for the characters...
 * Golding's other son and his business partner, who didn't want to see the company crumble, so their trying to salvage it.
* A retired Airship racing champion and his mechanic, who have taken up this opportunity to put their Airship piloting skills to good use.
* A rival shipping magnate who has always been in Golding's shadow, and now wants to claim their "rightful" throne as the Kings of Air and Steam.
* A pair of Mafiosos. Even the Mafia couldn't touch Golding's empire, but now that it's fallen they want in on the lucrative shipping business.
[Edit: I think these guys might be too directly interactive for this game, so they will be a promotional item if anything. They are replaced by an inventor and his (her?) clockwork assistant ISAAC (Intelligent Steam-Automated Airship Captain)]
* A shady gambler and his partner, a con man, looking for a decent payday, and this opportunity promises to pay off.
* A brother and sister who's father was a rail baron, trying to augment their rail line business with an airship and a chunk of Golding's empire.

Some of these back-stories are better developed than others, and some are better than others to begin with, but I've enjoyed coming up with each one. The player boards will depict 1 of the characters on one side and their partner/teammate on the other. Each team will have a specific airship, and some have slightly different than average stats. Each team will also have a movement deck for their airship, which contains a standard set of cards plus a special card that is unique to their team. And finally, each character has a special ability which will give them some benefit in some aspect of the game. I think the variety of these abilities and differences from character to character will add a lot of fun and replay value to the game, as well as adding to the theme.

That's about it so far. If you know a legitimate Steampunk author who might like to help with this story, please let me know. Also, if you know a graphic novelist who might like to translate this story into a graphic novel, let me know that too - I'd be interested to see how much that would cost.

And finally, all of this story is nice, but I think this game will really shine if the artwork stands out. Does anybody know a great artist that works in the style of the pictures above (especially the second one, with the little robot guy), and who might be interested in illustrating a board game, please let me know that too!

Hope you enjoyed this different-than-usual blog post!

The Dice Game Cometh

Mike, enamored with the success of Zombie Dice for Steve Jackson Games, thought Tasty Minstrel might ought to look for a simple dice game. In his mind it would be packaged like Fluxx, would sit on the counter by the register at game stores, and with a Pirate or Zombie theme people would buy the crap out of it. With that image in mind, Mike posted on the Board Game Designers Forum that he was actively looking for such a game, and I thought I'd make that the theme of this months' Game Design Showdown. With the knowledge that a publisher will be looking at the dice games, people came out of the woodwork to submit a record high - 38 entries! I haven't read them all yet, but they have been posted for voting.

I started thinking of my own dice game as well. I didn't enter the GDS, partly because I don't think it's kosher to enter and also run the contest, and partly because I haven't finished my idea yet. I was thinking about how some other good dice games work, like Yspahan, and some more recent titles Macao and Troyes - I like the idea of rolling a large number of dice in a common pool and then having players draft subsets of dice out of that to make sets.

I also like tech trees, and player boards where you advance your "technology level" like in Goa or Ted Alspach's new Perpetual-Motion Machine.

ASIDE: I kinda like that part of PMM, but the rest of it left something to be desired. In short, you draw cards from a face down deck and a display of 4 face up cards. You can upgrade how many cards you draw from each, how many cards you can hold in our hand, by collecting particular sets (poker hands) and then turning them in to add cubes to your board. In addition to upgrading your abilities, adding cubes to the board is how you actually win - the first player to place all of their cubes on their board is the winner. The problems I have with that are that especially in the midgame when you've upgraded your card drawing, you pretty much draw all (2-3) of the face up cards and several face down cards at a time. This means there's no point in planning what you might draw at all, because none of the cards you want will be there when your turn rolls around (this might not be entirely true for 2 players, but for 3 and 4 it sure is). It's also kind of annoying to shuffle the deck as often as you need to, and the deck itself is not very exciting. It's a 52 card poker deck. the suits are custom, but there are 4 of them, and the cards are A-K... you could play the game with a regular deck of playing cards bought at the dollar store. I would have enjoyed it more if the theme of PMM were more identifiable. Instead of poker hands, why can't the cards have gears and levers (machine parts), and the sets necessary are various combinations of those? I understand that in reality, Ted had a bunch of extra decks from a prior game, Rapscallion, lying around so he decided to make a game to use them up - that makes sense, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't have liked it better if the theme were addressed more.

So I thought, why not make a dice game where you put together machines - Doodads, Whatzits, Thingamajigs, and Whirligigs for example. And the way you do that is by building sets of machine parts (Gears, Pulleys, Spindles, Motors, Belts, and Switches perhaps) - which appear on the faces of the dice? After rolling a large pool of these custom dice, players would take turns drafting out dice or groups of dice that combine to make the next piece pictured on their playing board - which is like a tech upgrade chart. As you ascend various columns, you could gain powers or abilities (like in PMM or Goa), with the goal of completing your Doodad or Whirligig first - or completing the most Widgets over the course of the game, or something.

Then I had a better idea. I recently played Factory Fun, and in that game players each flip up a tile, then in real time they assess the tiles and grab one - once grabbed you must place it on your board and connect it up properly or suffer the consequences by paying points to discard it. So you want to rush a little to get the best tiles, but you also have to make sure you can use the tiles you get. I wondered whether it wouldn't be more fun to do my dice game like that. Instead of taking turns drafting dice, players could grab dice in a free-for-all, and once grabbed, the die would have to be placed on your board before you could take any more. this could introduce some frantic tension and interaction as you need to figure out what piece you need, find it, and grab it before someone else, and further, you don't need just 1 piece, but a set of several.

So here's my current rules draft:

Eureka!

A fast and furious dice game of invention and innovation for 2-X tinkerers.

Components

XX Custom six-sided dice (Gear/Pulley/Spindle/Motor/Belt/Lever)
  Y each in 5 colors (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, White)
X Player boards
9-ish markers per player

Each player board shows several Upgrade Tracks as well as progress tracks for inventions. Each track space is labeled with some combination of die faces. Sometimes only the color of the die will matter, sometimes only the symbol on the face, sometimes both and sometimes neither. One track will exist for each color of die in the game, and there will be a track for each type of invention as well as some other tracks that tend to give you better abilities.

Round Structure

1. Roll Dice
    Each player notes the number of dice of each color that they contribute, and takes that number from the supply. All of these dice are rolled together.

2. Draft Sets
    Players grab dice to complete sets on their player board. The following rules apply:
    2a. Only 1 hand can be used to grab dice
    2b. Only 1 die can be taken at a time
    2c. Once a die is touched, it must be taken and placed on your board before another die can be taken
    2d. Dice may only be placed in the lowest possible space in each column.

    2e. Once placed, a die on your board may never be moved.

3. Resolve Round
    After all dice have been drafted and placed, players advance markers on their player board for each column that qualifies.

4. Discard / Store Dice
    Dice on unfinished spaces on your board are discarded EXCEPT for the number allowed to be carried over from turn to turn (see player board).

Any thoughts on this?

What's new?

It's been about a month since I've posted anything. So what's new?

Eminent Domain
The art for Eminent Domain is about done. Gavan got a rulebook draft together and this morning I posted it for comments. Pretty soon it'll be done and the game will be off to the printers!

Travel
I just got back from OrcCon in L.A. where I had a great time. I played a bunch of games, including All For One for the first time in a LONG time!

I also saw a sort of show, a group called Dungeon Master. It's kinda like interactive dinner theater. they call up 6 audience members to be an adventuring party, and the actors play the roles of all NPC's - and it's basically like a live action game of D&D. It was a pretty cool idea. I liked how anyone could 'cast spells' by saying a rhyming couplet that described the spell they wanted to cast. The party was limited to 10 spells total, and if your spell didn't rhyme or was otherwise deemed no good by the DM, then it wouldn't work. I didn't get there in time to put my name in, but it was fun to watch.

I picked up a couple new games at the con:
London by Martin Wallace - I had some Dealer Dollars from getting 2nd at an Ascension tournament, and I chose to spend it on London. I don't really know anything about the game so it's kind of a gamble, but since I've gotten it I've heard three different people speak highly of it, so that's promising.

Wok Star - I arranged a trade over the internet which resulted in my getting a copy of this hard to get (at the moment) new cooperative game about running a Chinese restaurant. I've played it just twice so far, but it seems like it might be one of the best coop games I've played to date.

Perpetual Motion Machine by Ted Alspach - I read about this one and thought it sounded like my type of thing, It's basically a tech tree, you collect sets (poker hands) and turn them in for advances in the various branches, and as you ascend each branch you get better at one aspect of the game. I've played it twice so far, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. First off, it would be cooler if the card deck weren't basically a standard deck of cards. I would like to see cards with machine parts - gears, levers, pulleys, etc. It's a set collection game, I don't see why the pieces of the set have to be playing cards. The answer of course is that Ted had a bunch of decks left from a prior game: Rapscallion, and he decided to make another game using them. Whether I think anyone should make a game with custom cards that are exactly equivalent to a standard deck of cards (4 suits, 13 ranks per) is another question...

Ultimate Werewolf: Compact Edition - This seemed like a decent deal. I prefer Ultimate Werewolf to the version(s) of Werewolf that I have, though honestly I don't play WW as much anymore, and almost never at my house.

All For One
I get a chance to play A41 with OrcCon's special guest Bruno Faidutti, which was fun. He didn't enjoy it so much though. Some basic concerns at the table were that the game has no story arc - the early turns are the same as the later turns. This has come up before, and I'm not entirely sure I agree with it, but if it comes up repeatedly, there's got to be something to it. I'll tell you one thing, I'm pretty sure I'm sick of the patrolling guards in that game. I used to love the idea of them, but lately I've just found them annoying. I don't know if I want to remove Guards from the game altogether, but they definitely need to change.

Another thing Bruno didn't like about All For One is that you cannot really tell what your opponents are up to. He'd have liked to be able to see what people were doing, and then be able to mess with their plans.

To do with the story arc comment, maybe it's possible to incorporate some kind of mega-missions, or some way to relate missions done to each other. I'm not really sure how, but maybe some story arc would help the game out.

Other Prototypes:
TMG Submissions: I've got 2 promising submissions right now: one economic game, and one that's like a cross between Railroad Tycoon and Roborally. I'm enjoying both, just have to see if people like them and if they'd be sale-able before I can decide if they'd make good 2012 TMG releases.

Michael has decided he's interesting in a light, quick playing dice game, potentially with a pirate theme. I decided to use that idea as the basis for the BGDF Game Design Showdown this month, to encourage people to think about games like that - maybe one of them will catch Mike's fancy enough for him to publish it. I'm tossing around a few dice game ideas myself.

Money Auction in Liar's Dice game

Talking about this game idea with Andy Van Zandt, here's a way that might be more elegant than adding money to the game...

After each round of Bluff auctions, the winner of each is determined and, on the spot, they may choose to either:
(a) Keep the item for their display
(b) Sell the item to the game in exchange for 1 color die
(c) Offer the item for open trade to an opponent.

Upon seeing who's won an item, players can freely offer any number of their dice or artifacts in exchange for the artifact just won by the player. The player is welcome to entertain any such offer, or ignore them in favor of keeping the item for themselves or discarding it from the game and collecting an extra color die.

There might need to be a rule that the player cannot accept an item they cannot display. there will be 5 different colors of items, and players will each be able to display only 3 of them. Then again, I think that restriction might be a dumb one. I had planned on making different types of items: Weapons, Tools, Art, etc. and a player could make a Green (Mayan, for example) exhibit, or a Weapons exhibit containing a Mayan weapon, a Roman weapon, and an American weapon. That seems better, and would obviate the need for a restriction on what you can accept in trade.

This might be a more elegant way of adding a supplemental auction to the game without adding money to the game. I'll keep it in mind!

I also need a name for this game. I like the subtitle Museum of Lost History, but I need a catchy name with a hook for the actual title. Perhaps Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost Time?

Feel free to chime in in the comments with a better title!

Time travel... revisited (ha ha)

I watched a LOT of Dr Who over the holiday season - I haven't ever really seen that show before. And that's kind of weird because I love a good Time Travel story. I never saw the old ones, and only now have watched the most recent couple of seasons, but I was impressed by how much planning ahead they seemed to do in the writing. They put things in 1 show deliberately which would be a part of a later show, and you wouldn't even notice until you saw the later show. They also did a good job avoiding paradoxes.

Yesterday I was thinking that it would be fun to do a board game based on Dr Who, or a time travel sort of game in general. I've put some thought into this in the past, but haven't progressed on any of it lately. Here's some of the stuff I thought of yesterday, followed by some thoughts on reviving one of my time travel themed games from before:

One thing that's amusing about Dr Who is that while he's a Time Lord, and has a fancy spaceship that can travel through time, he often doesn't end up where he was planning on going. Also, he keeps saying something about not being able to travel back and forth within his own time line (never mind that he seems to do it anyway). Then there's this thing called a Vortex Manipulator, which allows a person to sort of teleport through space and time as well, but the Doctor knocks it as being a cheap or tacky way to travel through time. Imagine a board, at the center is a sort of spinner - maybe a disc, with a TARDIS depicted on one side (at an oblique angle such that it comes to a point, and can be used as a pointer). Surrounding this disc, radiating outward, are several paths, each representing a different location in space, each 'location' path having some number of spaces on it leading away from the TARDIS. Each of these spaces represents a different time. So you have maybe London on one path, and the spaces along that path correspond to (1) ancient history, (2) somewhat recent history (Winston Churchill's era maybe), (3) something contemporary (2010), and (4) some time in the future. I like the idea of sometimes when travelling through space and time in the TARDIS, a player simply spins the spinner and randomly determines where he ends up. If the spinner also had a mechanism for randomly determining which point in time the TARDIS lands, that would be cool.

These locations need to have the various different times associated, because events would occur in those locations, and they'd have an overall chronological order. Taking some liberties, I think it would be cool if the TARDIS can basically move you from one location in space time to another, different one, and a Vortex Manipulator only moved you through time at the same location.

One of the main thoughts about time travel that came into my mind was this - how do you represent when one character in a time travel story knows what will happen in the future of the other characters? Like in Dr Who, when they keep bumping into River Song, another time traveler who comes from the Doctor's future, and often knows what will happen later on in the Doctor's time line. Suppose there's a small deck of cards for each location depicting events that may occur there. These events would be numbered so they could be put in relative chronological order, but not all of them would come up in a given game - there would be more than enough. The event cards would be shuffled and some removed, and when needed they could be drawn and placed in their appropriate relative order. To represent a player knowing what event will happen in the future, that player could simply draw an event card early, thereby knowing one of the things that will occur in the future (or the past I guess, depending on your point of view).

Each of these events could have some sort of challenge or condition that must be met in order to resolve or move past it. As an example, in the Dr Who Episode The Big Bang, the Doctor has been imprisoned in The Pandorica. A future Doctor pops in via Vortex Manipulator and tells Rory to get him out of the Pandorica and put the mortally wounded Amy Pond in it, and then disappears. Then he pops back in and says "you'll need this" and hands Rory his Sonic Screwdriver. Later, you see the other side of this exchange, when the Doctor pops back in time to tell that to Rory, then realizes he needs his screwdriver back, so he pops back again and tells Rory to leave the screwdriver in Amy's jacket. Then, in the 'present', he reaches into Amy's pocket and retrieves his screwdriver. Similarly, a player might need a tool in order to pass a challenge or deal with an event card. Maybe they have a Sonic Screwdriver card, but don't actually have the screwdriver on them (another player does). Maybe they can play the card to the location they're using it, and put a Paradox counter on it, representing that they managed to get ahold of the screwdriver somehow. Then they use it and move on. Before the end of the game though, all Paradox counters must be removed - meaning someone later must go to that location on or before the screwdriver was needed and leave it there.

I was thinking perhaps a cooperative game is the way to go, with some soft timer - some amount of time in which the players need to save the world (from Dalek attack, or from total event collapse, or whatever). Before that timer runs out, the players will have had to satisfy the win conditions AND removed all Paradox counters from the board. Though it might be hard to track if, say, the Doctor uses the screwdriver at time t=5, and Rory uses the screwdriver at time t=3, and to facilitate that, River at time t=6 meets up with the Doctor at time t=2, takes the screwdriver, and delivers it to Rory... that actually creates a paradox because now the Doctor doesn't have the screwdriver when time t=5 rolls around!

Anyway, it's amusing to think about, and I like thinking about time travel. it reminded me that I have a couple game ideas involving time travel on the back burner.One of them I like a lot, involving the "bluff auction" - multiple simultaneous games of Liar's Dice as a mechanism to drive a bigger game:

With the advent of Time Travel, museum curators have procured prototype time machines, and will use them to go back in time and "save" precious cultural artifacts that - until now - have been lost to history (damaged, destroyed, or lost forever). But it's very important not to cause a paradox, or let people know the item still exists - so only the player who arrives closest to the time the item is thought to have disappeared will be able to take it!

Thematically though it's a bit strange that a player couldn't simply go back in time 1 hour further than the other guy and swipe the artifact out from under the player who wins the bid. Perhaps instead of each museum getting a time machine, there could be a sort of governing body (the Worldwide Historic Authority on Time?) which controls the machine and attempts to ensure that people don't muck up history with their time travel antics. This body has decided to allow the museum curators to display these long lost artifacts, but in an attempt to make sure history is impacted as little as possible, they will only allow the player who's research indicates the latest possible opportunity to get the artifact to go back in time and fetch it - or perhaps they send their own time agents. Whatever. In any case, the WHAT rewards the player who does the 'best' research to display the artifact in their museum.


This might tie up some silly plot holes in the story (not all of them, I'm sure), and still fit the theme well. It might be easier to say that players want to go back as far as possible, but after the item was created in order to take it, but thematically, doing so would erase all trace of importance from the object, and nobody would care to come see it!


Perhaps there's a way to make an item's value variable, based on how long it is around before it's collected by a time traveler... so there's an incentive not to go back any further than you need to - but I think that's a whole different game and wouldn't work well with the Liar's Dice auction.


... And with that garbled mess above, I conclude this post about time travel. I fully expect following everything in this post will be appropriately confusing considering the subject matter! :)

Better Late then Never: BGG.con 2010 report

It's been a full month, but I have FINALLY gotten around to finishing and posting my BGG.con 2010 convention report geeklist!

Enjoy!

New horizons... beautiful new, frozen-brain, iHorizons!

So last night I ran out and bought myself a new toy - I got an iPad! I thought they were cool when they came out, but mostly they seem like the next evolution of the Laptop. I didn't think I'd get one since I'd just gotten a laptop, I didn't really see the point. However, something's changed recently which has given me a reason to own an iPad... if I'm going to design games for them, then it stands to reason that I have one!

I've been hemming and hawing for 3 years (almost 4!) about the possibility of publishing my "two player Toppo with strategy" game - BrainFreeze. I've seen in a retail store a plastic timer with a digital readout and a start/stop button retailing for $10. I figure if that exists, then it should be possible to get a similar timer made, with 2 digital readouts, start/stop and a toggle button, cheap enough to sell with a deck of cards for $20. I haven't looked into that though , as I don't know who to go to for such a device.

I was having this exact conversation at BGG.con a couple weeks ago, but this time the conversation took a more modern turn - I realized that BrainFreeze would fit the iPad format perfectly! It happens that I don't really know who to go to for iPad development either, but I was introduced to a couple different people at the con that do exactly that kind of thing for a living. Mike and I are working with one of them now to implement BrainFreeze on the iPad (and potentially iPhone/iPod touch perhaps)!

So there's my excuse, I ran out last night and picked up a top of the line iPad, got home and installed the first draft of the app. It was awesome to play my game on the iPad, even if just solo practice mode with parts missing!

I'm looking forward to this project being finished (which looks like it will be VERY soon, relative to the April release date of Eminent Domain)! If this works out I'm sure I'll be looking into doing more games on the iPad.

Hot and Fresh, revisited

One of my older designs, formed and mostly finished before I even started to work on Terra Prime, is still one of the favorite game ideas I've ever had. That design is Hot and Fresh, and if you've been following my blog you've probably seen a reference to it now and again. The long and short of the idea is that players are pizza delivery drivers, making deliveries along routes that change over time due to changing traffic lights. There's also a press-your-luck aspect though, because tips (points) diminish the longer you take to make your deliveries. So you're encouraged to break traffic laws and risk getting busted in order to score better!

This idea has been on a shelf because I just never got a prototype together and finished it. This week my friend Steve was in town, and he likes to discuss game ideas with me. The other day we were driving to Red Robin and I took a side street (like I do every day to get to work), and mentioned that that's the kind of thing I wanted people to experience when playing Hot and Fresh - taking side streets because you know that particular light is always backed up...

Steve had an idea that revived Hot and fresh for me - he said it would be neat if players knew shortcuts that other players didn't know. We talked about it a bit, and came up with the idea that while the board would have main streets, the 'neighborhoods' (side streets between main blocks) could be empty grids for tile placement. Tiles placed by players would represent routes known only to that player, so another player would not be able to use that route. Originally I was imagining that the map would be set - after all, every delivery driver would have access to a map or might know the streets... but in retrospect it's probably more accurate that each player knows some streets and not others after all!

So we discussed how that would work into what I already had, and in the process I streamlined the 'traffic laws' which I think will make the game simpler. Originally I had an economic system of 'gas' as well, which was probably too much - not really necessary. Here's the new version:


HOT & FRESH 2.0
Contents:
1 Game board
15 Traffic Light tiles
100 - 125 route tiles (25 per player - should this be for 4 or 5 players?)
30+ Building tiles (extra House tiles, not sure how many)
60 Delivery cards
XX Tip counters
XX Demerit counters
4 (5?) Player pawns (plastic cars?)
40/50 green "safe" cubes (10 per player)
40-50 red "danger" cubes
4 (5?) draw bags

Setup:
Place the board in the center of the play area.
Give each player the car pawn and route tiles in their color, and a draw bag with 10 green "safe" cubes in it.
Place the tip counters, Demerit counters and red "danger" cubes in supply piles near the board.

Shuffle the Delivery cards and turn a number of them face up depending on how many players are in the game (turn up 1 more card than there are players).
Distribute the 15 Traffic Light tiles to the 15 intersections, each with a randomly chosen orientation.

All players place their Car at the Pizza Shop location on the board. Each player draws 3 Route tiles into their hand. The game is ready to begin.

On your turn, you may spend up to 9 Movement Points. In general, moving your Car 1 space costs 1 movement point.

For a cost of 3 Movement Points you can place a Route tile onto the board and then draw another to replace it. Route tiles go in Neighborhood spaces, not along main roads [addition off the top of my head: Each player has 1/some Traffic tile(s), which is placed on a main road space instead of on a neighborhood space].

Some Obstacles (Stop Signs, Crosswalks, Traffic lights) may increase the Movement Point cost of entering a space on the board. However, instead of paying these additional movement points, you can "break the law" and risk getting caught. For each "infraction" (tile for which you paid less than the full amount) you add some number of red "danger" cubes to your draw bag - that number depends on the offense:
- Crosswalk = 1 "danger" cube
- Stop Sign = 2 "danger" cubes
- One Way Street = 2 "danger" cubes
- Red Light = 3 "danger" cubes

At the end of your turn you must draw 1 cube out of your bag for each of the additional movement points you didn't pay. If you draw any red "danger" cubes, then you have been busted! You get a Demerit token for having gotten a ticket.

Originally I was going to have your orders expire as well, since the ticket makes you late, but that seems like such a harsh penalty that players may never break any laws - and that's no fun! So maybe just the Demerit token is better, and then the effect of the Demerit token needs to be such that you're not too worried about taking one or 2, but then you start to really worry about getting another after that.

When you pick up an Order card from the display, it comes with a number of Tip tokens (indicated on the card). The first thing you do on your turn is to remove 1 Tip token from each order in front of you. Thus, you want to deliver the orders as quickly as possible, because when you deliver an order you claim all remaining Tip counters for your score.

Also, each Order card has a Building tile depicted, and when delivering an order, a player gets to place a building tile of that type. Building tiles act as routes that any player can use, but more importantly they modify people's existing routes... A School adds to the delay value of all adjacent crosswalks (because the crosswalks are more busy near a school than otherwise). A Police Station increases the delay value of adjacent Stop Signs and Traffic Lights. A church also makes Crosswalks worse, but not as much as a school does. And a Shopping Mall affects Stop Signs, Crosswalks,, and Traffic Lights.

So by making deliveries players score points and place buildings.

Whenever an Order is picked up, it will be replaced with a new card from the deck. Order cards also indicate which Traffic Lights advance - each card will have 1 or 2 lights listed, and those lights change (green->yellow, yellow->red, red->green).

Kickstarter campaign a resounding success!

I guess this news is almost a week old by now, but I thought I ought to post about it. Tasty Minstrel (Mike and I) put on a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to publish my latest game, Eminent Domain. It went much better than I ever imagined it would! Within 2 weeks we'd reached our funding goal, and when all was said and done we'd raised $48,378!

I wanted to thank all of my friends, family and fans for supporting Eminent Domain, we obviously wouldn't be enjoying this success without you! I hope to impress everyone come April when the game should be available. :)

Holy crap! 100%+ funded, and 2 weeks to go!

Last night we officially funded Eminent Domain! Our kickstarter campaign hit $20,000 on day 14, just under 1/2 way through our 30 day window! I was skeptical at first that we'd raise that much, then optimistic that we would make it by the end of the 30 days... I never thought we would hit our goal so early! Now Mike and I are debating whether in the end we'll have raised only $30,000, or as much as $50,000! I still say Mike is overly optimistic about his $50,000 prediction, but so far I've really underestimate things!

What have I been wrong about so far?

* Number of $200 Platinum Supporter pledges - I underestimated by a factor of 10... so far.

* Amount of money total that would be pledged - I clearly underestimated that as well.

What's left for me to be wrong about?

* I thought (and still think) that nobody will go for the $2500 "TMG UberFan" pledge.

GO AHEAD, PROVE ME WRONG ON THAT COUNT, I DARE YOU! :)

I'm seriously amazed at how well this fund raising has gone for us, and I can't thank our supporters enough! The reaction to our invitation to print and play the game has been overwhelming as well. Literally - I'm overwhelmed with email requests! At least I've gotten 8 more gigs of free space on DropBox from people joining up to see the files :) Evidently that's the maximum I can get from referrals.

I'll tell you what touches me the most though. It's the positive reviews and comments all over BoardGameGeek, from people I've never met or heard of, who not only pledged money for a copy of the game (or several copies), but have also gone ahead and printed out a copy to play it, and have decided that they love the game!

This is truly better than I ever hoped, especially after the manufacturing issues with Terra Prime and Homesteaders were such a joy-kill. I've actually had several people writing me about Eminent Domain and mentioning how much they love Terra Prime, so either they're just stroking my ego, or TP was better received than I thought!

Thanks guys, for supporting me, my game, and Tasty Minstrel Games. You've got 2 more weeks to get your pre-orders in, and to get ahold of a Limited Edition version of the game, and a copy of the Prestige planets (which I maintain WILL be available in a future expansion, but you can get them NOW if you pledge via Kickstarter).

So, what are you waiting for? Go pledge! :)

Living on a Prayer

This morning the Eminent Domain kickstarter campaign hit 50% funding!  Oooooooh... we're half way there...

 

But there's a long way to go, so keep spreading the word! Here are a few notes about pledging, by the way:

1. You can change your pledge at any time, so  if you get someone to go in with you, you can upgrade your $35 pledge to a $60 pledge. Better yet, if you get 1 more taker, then you can make it $90 and get Limited Edition copies!

2. If you are overseas (or in Canada), you should include the $40 (or $20) shipping premium in your pledge (i.e. if you are in the UK and you want 6 copies of Eminent Domain, you should pledge $190, not $150)

There have been a couple questions or concerns, understandably, about the production quality of Eminent Domain based on some bum copies of Terra Prime and Homesteaders. I assure you, the quality of Eminent Domain will be top notch - we plan to use Panda Game Manufacturing, a high quality and well respected manufacturer which we've also used for Train of Thought, Jab, and Belfort. We expect high quality production from here on out!

So pledge with confidence!

Additional Eminent Domain possible expansion thoughts - Fighting with other players!

I'd considered once that maybe Warfare, since it was allegedly 'easier' than the Colonize, could be a sort of Scorched Earth thing - when spending armies to attack a planet, you leave one of them on the resource slot, blocking it up so it cannot produce. Rules-wise this means when you flip a planet via Warfare, it gets -1 resource slot. I decided against this because there aren't a whole lot of resource slots, and I wanted Warfare + Trade/Harvest to be viable.

However, today it occurred to me that there could be a Technology ("Scorched Earth Policy" perhaps) that says "Warfare costs are reduced by 1. When attacking a planet, leave an Army token on it."

The standing rule could be that armies on planets reduce the storage capacity by 1. I tossed around the idea that an army token could reduce capacity, but be worth 1 VP... I didn't like that at first because thematically it should be bad to have scorched earth policy, not good (for scoring).

But then I had another thought. Suppose you were allowed to attack other people's planets. people always want to do this at first, and some complain in games like this and Race for the Galaxy that you cannot attack an opponent. So I thought, what if you could - what if an ATTACK action allowed you to attack YOUR face down planets, or ANY face up planet in play. The "cost" to attack a face up planet would be the VP value of the planet (maybe), and the effect would be to leave an army on it, which as has been discussed, would keep it from producing as many resources. That could be enough right there - your opponent is trading like crazy, maybe you want to go blow up his Silicon silo and reduce the amount of VP he's getting.

With that in mind, it might be neat if the Armies on planets WERE worth 1vp, because then you could attack your own face up planets for a benefit (if you're not planning on harvesting anyway), and it would be a deterrent to attacking other people's planets - you could take away their production capacity, but it would give them a VP. I'm not really sure this is necessary though, just spending your turn hurting someone else and not helping yourself might be a good enough cost (those Armies could have flipped a planet for you). Also, it doesn't hurt your opponent's score if you attack their face up planet, it just hinders their trading ability. Perhaps if you get another army on there the Icon could be disabled or something.

Anyway, I like the way the game works without attacking each other, but I think I might add this in, maybe as an optional rule, for the expansion - that is to say if I test it out and like how it works.

Summary:
Rule: An army token on a planet card reduces the storage of that planet by 1
Attack: You can attack a face-down planet in YOUR empire, or ANY face-up planet in play. Attacking a face-up planet costs 1 Army per VP that the planet is worth. When you Attack a face-up planet, put an Army token on it.
Tech card: Scorched Earth Policy - Warfare costs are reduced by 1. After Attacking a planet, place an Army token on it from the supply. (Planets have -1 Storage per Army token)