A very quick note after the first day of Congress of Gamers 2012: I spent most of the day in the designers room. Detailed notes to follow in a subsequent post.
Ridere, ludere, hoc est vivere.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
Prototype photos
At last, I've finished the second prototype of "East India Company," right down to the makeshift box art and player's aids. This will be the copy that I bring to Congress of Gamers in Rockville, Maryland, this weekend. I hope to gain a lot of feedback and really refine this rough cut gem into something special.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Prototype fever
Prototype art for English galleon game piece |
This evening I cut 25 "ships" out of the 1/16"-thick bass wood. The next step will be spray painting all the wooden pieces in the five player colors. I'm having a lot of fun spending time on the physical components; my first prototype was a very rudimentary hand-drawn paper affair - functional, not pretty. It's nice to take the time to put together something that I hope will be nice looking as well as fun to play.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Favorite 2011 game
In that spirit, my Best Board Game of 2011 is Trajan. Last Will is a close second. Lots of games tied for third. Lots more unplayed.
So as it happens, I bought seven games published in 2011:
- Band of Brothers: Screaming Eagles
- Belfort
- Scrabble Turbo Slam
- Sour Apples to Apples
- Star Fluxx
- Struggle for Catan
- Trains Planes and Automobiles
But my favorite game of this list would have to be Belfort. That's a game that has some depth and potential. It's funny to find myself picking this game as my top acquisition of 2011 publications, given that Kathy and I found it less than satisfying as a two-player game. But I was so impressed with it in the five-player session after work last week that I think it deserves top billing for last year's releases.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Battle Line in the Back Yard
Back yard setting for Battle Line |
I really like this game. In fact, I'd go so far as to say Battle Line is my favorite Knizia game. It's perhaps the most knife-edge card game I know. You really never want to waste a move in this game, never want to make an unnecessary commitment of a card to a slot. It's playing the odds, it's card luck, but mostly, it's calculated risk-taking. Not exactly a push-your-luck game, BL is really a strategic game of options and opportunity cost.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Prototype progress
The last week has seen a lot of preparation for Congress of Gamers and the UnPub ProtoZone event on Columbus Day weekend in Rockville, Maryland. I've been putting together a new prototype for "East India Company" in anticipation of getting some playtesting and exposure of the game in an exhibition environment. My son helped me with the basics of Adobe Photoshop to put together a nice map layout. I've got an order in to Superior Print-on-demand (Superior POD) for a mounted version of the mapboard that I hope will be ready in time for CoG. Meanwhile I've been assembling materials to make up some nice game pieces. So it has all been coming together, and I look forward to showing off my work-in-progress.
My focus has been more on constructing the prototype than on refining the gameplay, so the rules tweaks that will be in place are the ones I identified at the last round of playtesting at WBC. I hope to get more comments and improvements out of the CoG designers room. From there I should get a sense of how close to pitch-ready the game really is. I'm getting pretty excited about EIC, and I look forward to sharing my excitement in a couple of weeks.
My focus has been more on constructing the prototype than on refining the gameplay, so the rules tweaks that will be in place are the ones I identified at the last round of playtesting at WBC. I hope to get more comments and improvements out of the CoG designers room. From there I should get a sense of how close to pitch-ready the game really is. I'm getting pretty excited about EIC, and I look forward to sharing my excitement in a couple of weeks.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Building Belfort
(c) Tasty Minstrel Games Used by permission |
Most of us are fairly familiar with the usual Euro game mechanics, and we found that Belfort is replete with those worker-placing, resource-gathering, building-constructing, area-occupying, hand-managing functions that characterize the genre. Oh, and there's elves and dwarves and gnomes. (Sure, why not?) I'd set up the game by the time the fifth of us arrived, so we launched right into rules explanation and got started. We had the occasional, "oh, I didn't know that" moments where yours truly hadn't quite explained the rules clearly (although I swear I said everything I said I said), but generally the gameplay went well.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Was Alexander the Great a runaway leader?
This afternoon, Kathy and I played Alexandros (designer Leo Colovini, art by Grafik Studio Krüger [website in German], publisher Rio Grande), which was a gift from some years ago. Although we hadn't played in a while, we've both done well against each other, so it was fun to bring back to the table.
Alexandros is a semi-thematic game of area control and card management with an interesting mechanism for moving the neutral Alexander piece around the map of his empire and carving it up into provinces for the players to occupy and tax. The map is clearly recognizable as a representation of the extent of Alexander's empire, and the roles of the players as generals fits with the historical fracturing of his empire. Beyond that and the Hellenistic iconography, the game is fairly abstract. The decision space isn't very large, but it can be a brain-burner.
Alexandros is a semi-thematic game of area control and card management with an interesting mechanism for moving the neutral Alexander piece around the map of his empire and carving it up into provinces for the players to occupy and tax. The map is clearly recognizable as a representation of the extent of Alexander's empire, and the roles of the players as generals fits with the historical fracturing of his empire. Beyond that and the Hellenistic iconography, the game is fairly abstract. The decision space isn't very large, but it can be a brain-burner.
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