Beiträge von croobee im Thema „BGG News“

    New Game Round-up: Find the Replicant in Blade Runner 2049, Find New Keepers in L5R, and Find Your Wallet to Meet Your Destiny

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/699…cant-blade-runner-2049-fi

    by W. Eric Martin

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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3789901_t.jpg]Let's take a break from the recent stream of designer diaries to recap some of the non-SPIEL '17 game announcements that have occurred:

    Fantasy Flight Games

    has invited you to sell a kidney or two to keep up-to-date with Star Wars: Destiny

    , which will see two new starter sets — Luke Skywalker

    and Boba Fett

    — released in Q1 2018, along with the Legacies

    series of 160 cards that will be sold in booster packs.

    On top of these items, FFG has Star Wars: Destiny – Rivals Draft Set

    , a supplemental set of cards and dice that is meant to enable competitive drafting of Star Wars: Destiny

    . To draft, each player opens three Star Wars: Destiny

    booster packs of any type, combines the cards, drafts one, passes the pack, drafts one, etc. You repeat this for a second set of three packs, passing cards right. Then you supplement the thirty cards you drafted with the contents of a Rivals Draft Set

    , which contains an assortment of cards and dice that are meant to fill out a deck and support whatever you were trying to do in the draft.

    • In addition to that money vacuum, FFG is following the launch of Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game

    in early October with a luscious wave of content, specifically one new "Dynasty Pack" a week starting in early November 2017 until all six chapters of the "Imperial Cycle" have been released. If you want to build up a world quickly, I guess that's one way to do it. FFG has lots of preview picks from the packs

    on its website.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3790576_t.jpg]• In a vain attempt to keep up with FFG's output, WizKids

    has announced four releases for early 2018, starting with a North American version of Johannes Schmidauer-König

    's Team Play

    , which Schmidt Spiele debuted in 2015. In this card game for 3-6 people, players try to draft and pass cards with a teammate so that they can individually complete face-up goals on the table and move their team to victory.

    • That title is due out in January 2018 along with Blade Runner 2049: Nexus Protocol

    , which bears this description and no designer name in the solicitation:

    In Blade Runner 2049: Nexus Protocol, detectives, citizens, and Rick Deckard compete to figure out who is a replicant posing as a human. They know that one of them is a replicant, but not even the replicant knows who they are.

    In this deduction game, you use your influence to meet contacts, gather information, and reveal evidence to identify the replicant. If you discover that you are the replicant, you have to scramble to conceal your identity and avoid early retirement.

    Will you find the replicant, or will you be retired?

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3790582_t.jpg]• February 2018 should see the debut of Richard Yaner

    's Dark.net

    , wth the game seemingly inspired by all the sci-fi I read back in the late 1980s:

    The tech-future which mankind has been working towards is finally upon us! Sadly, the tech-future is not all we thought it was cracked up to be; technology couldn't save us from ourselves, and there are no hoverboards or floating cars in sight. Contrary to our hopes and dreams, four mega-corporations dominate and dictate every aspect of our lives.

    In Dark.net, players intercept transmissions to gain valuable information via their data network. Players use fences to buy and sell information so they can boost their ability to gather even more information, all in the service of acquiring reputation. To boost their reputation, players will accrue credits, extend their network, hire informants, install network boosters, and make contacts. Have more reputation than anyone else at game's end, and you win.

    • Also due in February 2018 is a new version of Charlie Price

    's Kung Fu Zoo

    , a dice-flicking game that he demoed in the BGG booth during Origins 2016 when he was self-publishing the game. That version had a wood board, while the WizKids production will not in order to keep the MSRP at $40. Here's an overview of the game:

    Youtube Video

    Designer Diary: The Masters' Trials: Wrath of Magmaroth, or Two Designers' Trials to Go from a City to a Dungeon

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…ials-wrath-magmaroth-or-t

    by Vangelis Bagiartakis

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3573060_t.jpg] The following was also posted in parts on AEG's website.

    In The Beginning

    Vangelis Bagiartakis (VB):

    After designing Dice City

    , I knew that the "dice-crafting" mechanism it had could find many uses in other games as well. That’s why, even before Dice City

    was actually released, I began to explore other options to see where I could go with this "system" I had come up with.

    At its core, the mechanism in Dice City

    is about "crafting" your dice. Each die is represented by six cards (one for each side) and by placing new cards on your board, possibly on top of existing cards, you are effectively changing the faces of your die. As a concept, this could theoretically apply to all kinds of games that use dice.

    The idea that I initially wanted to explore was that of a dungeon-crawler. Going with that idea would also define the first characteristic of the game: This would be a cooperative game (as opposed to the competitive nature of Dice City

    ). The players would not compete with each other, but would work together instead. In turn, this would allow the core mechanism to be tweaked a bit to give players the option to interact more with each other. For example, you could spend one of your dice to move one of another player's if needed.

    Another key characteristic also came from the theme. Since the dice would correspond to various attributes of the characters (like speed, combat, magic, etc.), why have a single board for all of them and not separate ones? If one die, for example, was the race, another one the class, another the weapon, etc., why not allow the possibility of mixing-and-matching? Not only would this increase replayability, it made perfect sense with the theme as each player would be able to create their own character as in a role-playing game, a hero with the attributes they'd want.

    I made a rough prototype and started testing the idea. I sketched some rooms with tiles, I came up with rules for their placement, I made a few quick enemies and some simple player abilities and started playing. Although way too early in the process, the experience was fun and I knew this could lead to something good. To check whether I was on the right track, I showed the prototype to some people and explained the concept behind it. EVERYONE loved the idea behind the modular boards. It was really cool and seemed very promising. However, they weren't thrilled with the dungeon board. As one friend put it: "There are actually two games on the table. One here (pointing to the player boards with the dice and the character abilities) and one there (pointing to the board with the mock-up enemies)." There was simply too much stuff going on for the game to be viable. Not only would it be insane production-wise — tons of boards, cards, miniatures, etc. with less than half of the game being more than all of Dice City

    — it would also ask a lot from the players, especially in their first games.

    Thus, a decision was made to make the "dungeon-crawling" a bit simpler. Perhaps just cards that would be drawn or something along those lines in order to keep the focus on the advancement of the character in front of you.

    So the goals of the game were more or less set:

    • Dungeon-crawling theme

    • Cooperative game

    • Modular player boards (and as a consequence variable player powers)

    • Relatively simple (card-based perhaps?) mechanism for the dungeon/enemies

    • Multiple paths to victory

    And that's how this journey began…

    The Designers' Trials

    With the goals in place, I started exploring how the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game would work. Around that time, my friend Tassos (whose full name is Anastasios, but we call him Tassos) got the chance to see the rough prototype in action and loved the idea. He has vast (and when I say vast, I mean vaaaaaaast) experience in role-playing games, so when he expressed interest in helping with the game, I immediately agreed to bring him on board. His experience would prove to be very important while designing the game.

    Anastasios Grigoriadis (AG):

    I've loved the idea of dice-crafting since the beginning. I'm a huge fun of Dice City

    and I've worked successfully in the past on many projects with Vangelis, so when I actually put into the basket the words "dice-crafting", "RPG" and "Bagiartakis", I knew that this would be an awesome journey!

    Attempt 1

    VB:

    For our first attempt, we took the rough version I had initially made and tried to adapt it. Since we were working with cards, the "dungeon" became more abstract. The enemies would be cards that would be placed on rows, simulating enemies coming to you in a dungeon corridor.

    The player boards represented the characters and the first problem we had to deal with was what the players' "resources" were going to be. In the first rough prototype I had gone with Strength, Dexterity, Mana, Cunning and Movement. For this version, some changes needed to be made (like the removal of movement as it no longer made sense) and we ended up with Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Mana and Defense. The goal was to have each player be able to specialize in one and pursue a different strategy.

    Regarding the enemies, each monster would give you XP after being killed and you would spend those to upgrade your character with new cards (abilities).

    AG:

    Basically we needed to create a board game that would simulate an RPG session in an hour. You live your adventure, you gather experience, and you upgrade your character. Sounds simple, but it is not.


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    VB:

    We did some playtests with this version, and while there was some potential in it, there were many things bugging us. The most important one was the resources.

    AG:

    We knew from the beginning that Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Magic and Defense were not working as resources, but we had to start with something to reach our goal. The basic problems were:

    • Melee Damage and Ranged Damage were almost the same thing.

    • Magic was essentially the only attribute that you could call a resource as it was producing mana, but again only to do damage.

    • Defense had the same problem as Damage as it was not a resource to be spent.

    In other words the main problem was that there was no economy based on the resources that players gathered and needed to spend in order to achieve goals and upgrade their player boards. In a sense, we had only Damage, which was not enough to build a game around.

    VB:

    Defense was the most awkward of all the attributes. It didn't help you win; it just prevented the damage you would be getting. While it could be important in the game — for example, a character could play the role of the "tank" and absorb damage while the rest of the players would attack the enemies — it wasn't very fun to play with and it also wasn't a viable strategy on its own. You couldn't play solo and win just with a "defender".

    This inconsistency in the resources also made creating new abilities problematic. While it was normal to say "I have five mana", it was weird to say "I have five Melee Damage". Damage should be the outcome of your actions, not something you accumulate to spend. What's more, the way mana worked also had a few issues. The spells you had on your character required mana to be used. That meant that not only did you have to land on them, you also had to land on mana-producing spaces with your other dice to cast them — double the work for something that should be much simpler.

    We knew we could do better, so we decided to start from scratch and try a different approach.

    Attempt 2

    VB:

    For our second attempt, we decided to examine everything from the beginning. The basic goals were still there, but the approach could be anything we wanted; we wouldn't be tied to the previous version. The brainstorming started with what was creating the most problems last time: the resources. They had to be thematic and fit with the dungeon-crawling theme, and they had to allow for different strategies. A fighter and a wizard, for example, would focus on different ones, but they should both be able to defeat enemies and win the game somehow.

    AG:

    When something doesn't work, you go back to basics. The goal now was that each player would chose a different class — basic archetypes: fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue — and all together would fight the big bad boss at the end of the game. We agreed on Combat, Dexterity, Magic, Holy, and Cunning as the resources that would be used based on what the characters could produce and what they would need to defeat the monsters. Those five attributes could create various combos and thus different sets of actions for each class, allowing each player to interact in different ways with the monsters.


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    VB:

    For the monsters, we decided to go with a very different approach. Enemy cards would be drawn each round and they would have three options on them: Evade

    , Push

    , Defeat

    . Evade (which would require few resources) would allow the players to prevent the damage the monster would deal. Push (costing slightly more) would be a temporary solution to the problem; you would scare the monster away, but you would have to deal with it later. Finally, Defeat would be a permanent solution; it would get rid of the monster forever but would require the most resources to do it.

    The concept behind this approach was that each monster would ask for different "resources" on each level, which in turn would allow each character to deal with them differently. Some of the monsters, for example, would require a lot of Combat in order to be defeated, which the fighter would be able to easily provide. The wizard, on the other hand, would have a hard time defeating them through combat, but would be able to drive them away via Magic or just evade them. Similarly, against monsters like ghosts Combat would be useless but Magic or Holy would be very useful. Depending on how you dealt with each monster, you would draw cards that would be the upgrades for the players' characters.


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    When the final boss would appear, it would be accompanied by all the monsters the players pushed. It would have to be dealt with differently compared to the monsters, but the players would still be provided with some options (so that each class would have a chance against it).

    AG:

    This implementation was closer to what we wanted and the feeling was much better. Now the players were focusing on how to advance their characters and how to interact with the monsters which was closer to the basic concept of dice-crafting: roll the dice, do something (in our case: fight the monsters), upgrade your character.


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    VB:

    We did numerous playtests with this build, but once again the actual game turned out differently compared to what sounded cool in theory. If you made the monsters easy to defeat for one class, the others would struggle too much. If we made monsters meant to be defeated by all classes (containing different combinations of all the resources), then every class would struggle since they wouldn't be able to produce everything. Therefore, there would be enemies that could not be defeated and would have to either be evaded constantly or driven away, only to make it even harder to win at the end.

    AG:

    Welcome to asymmetric balancing! In RPGs, every player usually has a different role that works in different ways from the others. Players should feel important during the game no matter the role they play, and characters must be balanced and (most importantly) feel balanced even when they do totally different things. RPGs usually are played in groups of 4-5 players plus a narrator, and in my groups when someone is missing, we play a board game or do something else because the absence of that player will have a significant impact in our game.

    Board games accommodating 2-4 players, on the other hand, must give the same gaming experience whether you play it with two or four players. That means that with two players you are lacking two characters and what they bring to the party. Usually this is not a problem, but when a game wants to be theme-driven and has different roles, then you have issues that need to be addressed.

    Another issue was the resources that our characters were producing. Although closer to our goal, the economy of the game was again not solid. Removing a class was weakening a resource. The classes that were played were trying to match up the lack of other classes but not very effectively, and that lead to weaker characters overall, characters that could not interact in a proper way with the game.

    VB:

    Essentially what we had was not necessarily resources but different types of attacks. It still was a bit weird to say "I get five Holy", but if everything else played all right, we would have worked with it. Unfortunately, everything else didn't play like we wanted. Players weren't as excited as we'd like, and it gave the impression that it was lacking something.

    Back to the drawing board…

    Attempt 3

    VB:

    Once again, we started from scratch and again the brainstorming focused on the resources. We knew that it was the most crucial part of the game, and if we could fix that, the rest would easily follow from the theme. We needed resources that you could gather, resources that made sense having a lot of them, that it was intuitive to say "I have three of X". Up to now, the only one that came close to that description was mana. With that as a basis, we decided to explore the option of having different types of mana. We could go the "elemental warrior" path which would mean four different types of mana: earth, fire, water, air. The players' abilities would then all be spells, each requiring different mana and focusing on different aspects. This also meant a change in the theme. Instead of "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy, we would go to eastern fantasy with a focus on the elements and different types of magic. That was not necessarily a bad thing since sword-and-sorcery has been overused in gaming and something different would look more appealing.

    As far as the mechanisms were concerned, we also tried another approach. Dice City

    had a system with three resources and it worked. You would spend those resources to get new cards on your board (which in turn did not require resources to use them). You could also use those resources to get closer to winning (Trade Ships). The abilities you got would grant you other things (like Army strength or VP) which would also lead you to win through other means. Was there a way this approach could be applied to this game? Why try to re-invent the wheel when you have something that works well?


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    Fire, Earth, Water, Air: The four types of mana we used



    We started with the abilities. Each would cost an amount of mana to "build" on your character just like in Dice City

    . Some of these abilities would generate damage which would be used against minions, a similar approach to the army strength and the minions of Dice City

    . This covered one way to win, but there needed to be more. An interesting thought we had was of large spells with a big effect for which you had to spend a big amount of mana in order to cast them. This was something similar to the way Trade Ships in Dice City

    made use of resources. In the end, we changed it a bit and instead of them being spells, we had the cards represent Magical Seals that granted abilities to the boss, making it uber-powerful. You would be able to break these Seals before reaching the boss, thus weakening it enough to kill it more easily. That added another strategy. Could we do one more?

    Dice City

    also has the cultural strategy, that is, building locations that don't do something when you land on them as they just grant you many victory points. Since we wanted to have a rogue-like character, we combined the two and ended up with another strategy: What if you were able to search the dungeon you were in and come up with magical artifacts? You would add them to your character and they would grant passive abilities (like deal one damage for free wherever you want, get free mana, etc.). It made sense thematically, and if you were to focus on it, you would become powerful enough to overcome even the boss.

    So the basis of the game was this:

    • Players explore a dungeon, and each round they are in a different area/room.

    • They are attacked by minions which they need to destroy.

    • They can search the rooms they are in to find artifacts.

    • They can break magical seals that make the boss very powerful.

    • After a finite amount of time, they come upon the boss and they must destroy it.

    AG:

    Abandoning the classic path of fantasy RPGs was the right call, and it was not the only one. Keeping basic mechanisms from Dice City

    actually solved most of our problems. This greatly affected the way we designed the game: If we wanted to have different roles, equally important in the game, we needed to create different ways to interact with it.

    In the end, we had four different types of resources and three key characteristics that players advanced in to interact with the game: Damage, Insight and Health. Based on that, we instantly knew that we had created four distinctive roles in the game:

    The character that would focus on damage

    — They would deal with the minions and apply a lot of pressure to the final boss, despite it being very powerful.

    The character that would focus on gathering mana

    — They would break the boss' seals and make it much weaker.

    The character that would focus on items

    — They would search each room, getting a lot of magical artifacts that would "work on their own". Effectively that character would become "Robocop" (as Vangelis used to joke) before getting to the boss, dealing damage and generating mana without even needing to roll the dice.

    The character that would focus on the group's Health

    — They wοuld ensure that the party would reach the boss in good-enough shape to have a chance of defeating it.

    Although this is almost the classic archetype of fantasy RPG with wizard, fighter, rogue and cleric, our characters were using different types of mana that they needed to produce and spend in different ways to activate their cool powers.


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    VB:

    After some tests, it was clear we were on the right path. Going with mana solved all the problems we had with resources, and the different paths to explore made each character unique and interesting to play with. That was obviously the way to go.

    Achieving Mastery

    VB:

    With the game's basics in place, it was now time to deal with the difficult part: the details. The first thing to do was define our setting and the exact way the resources would work. Having played a lot of Magic: The Gathering

    , I was aware of the importance of a "color wheel". Each type of mana should have its own identity. It would be associated with certain things, and the various classes would have different access to it.

    For example, fire mana would be used mainly for abilities that caused damage, while water would be used mainly for healing. The earth mana would be associated with mana generation/conversion, while air would be used to stun/disorient the opponent along with searching the rooms.

    Since we had shifted to elemental warriors, we spent quite some time examining what the races should be. At some point we realized that in the theme we had chosen, it made more sense to go with monastic Orders instead of races.

    AG:

    Every resource should be used differently inside the game, but at the same time they should all have equal value: Fire=Air=Water=Earth. In the color wheel, no resource is above any other. All are equal, but at the same time they have a different impact on the "world". Also, based on the wheel we could safely say that:

    • Fire is the opposite of Water

    • Earth is the opposite of Air


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    VB:

    What we needed to settle on pretty early was how the "mix-and-match" of the boards was going to work. In other words, what was each part of your board (class/order/weapon) bringing to the table? What abilities would they have?

    This was important because we wanted every combination to be viable. However, that was harder than it sounded. We had assigned some characteristics to each type of mana and as a result, each class was focused on one of them (based on the same characteristics). But what about the Orders? If we also focused the Orders on the types of mana, then there would be certain combinations that would be way more advantageous. The other important aspect that we needed to nail down was what exactly their abilities would be. The abilities between all three separate boards needed to be distinct to let them have their own identity. If we were going to focus the damage-related abilities on the fire-class, then what would go on an Order ability? And how would we make them feel different?

    After a lot of brainstorming and many playtests, we settled on this: What would define each character would be the class. That's where most of the abilities that would determine each strategy would be. Then the Orders would all have the same abilities but in different quantities. Each Order would be focused on two of the mana types, and it would offer higher quantities of the abilities that required them. It would still have the rest of the abilities (in small quantities) to give access to everyone if they so wanted.

    This solution offered some important advantages:

    • The Orders had focus but were not limiting the class you could match them with.

    • Having the same abilities in all of the Orders made learning the game easier as you had less information to overwhelm you when trying a different combination.

    • It gave us more flexibility with the design of the classes' abilities. We didn't have to worry about putting a new ability on an order.

    • When combining a class with an order that focused on other types of mana, it allowed you to play the same character differently and do new things. That was exactly what we wanted in the first place!

    AG:

    In RPGs, the races are actually templates that can be used to alter the way classes are played, e.g., Elf Warrior and Half Orc Warrior. This was exactly what we wanted to achieve with the Orders. In our game, our heroes are trained differently in each Monastery Order. They all share a basic training but focus on a different path and obtain a different mastery. In game terms, we needed to create a pool of abilities that would be bound to a certain color, then distributed to each Order based on their focus. It was again harder than we thought because we needed to create four universal (for our game) thematically driven powers. If I remember correctly, all but one changed — some of them more than once!

    We also did another cool thing with the Orders. We added a static ("ongoing") ability to each of them, which we called "Masteries". Each Order's mastery is unique, and they give a special ability that actually changes the way a player interacts with the game.

    VB:

    The next problem that we had to solve was that of scaling. Changing the numbers of minions drawn each round or the seals that the players would have to break was the easy part. The biggest problem was elsewhere, rooted in the game's design.

    The "threat" in the game consisted of mainly two parts: the minions drawn each round, and the boss at the end. The minions would have to take damage in order to be defeated, which meant having the fighter-class (which we ended up naming "Avenger") was crucial. The boss, on the other hand, was made powerful through the seals that needed mana in order to be broken, which made the mana generating-class (a.k.a., the "Mystic") very important. But what about the other two? What were they adding to the game? Moreover, if the first two classes were that crucial, was there a point into playing the other two races in a two-player game?

    We considered various solutions to this problem. One thought we had was to dictate the exact classes that the players would get at each player count. Unfortunately, that was a very bad solution as it meant that certain classes would never be played in a two-player game and it made them feel like lower-class citizens.

    What we needed was for the classes to be equal. Each of them should be able to hold its own and be fully playable, offering a different experience/playing style. They should all have equal chances of beating the game, regardless of the players' combinations.


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    AG:

    One of the most important things that we try to keep in mind when developing a game is that the number of players must not affect the experience you get from a game. In RPGs, the narrator reveals the challenge of the party following certain rules, e.g., how many are playing and what their current level is, thus keeping the session challenging. In board games, we have plenty of examples where the number of turns, the number of VP that you need to score, or the number of foes and obstacles change based on the number of players. In our case, this was more complex since classes have equal roles in the game but are totally different at the same time:

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    The Avenger

    • All classes can do damage but none can be as good as the Avenger.

    • All classes can generate mana but none can be as good as the Mystic.

    • All classes can heal themselves but none can sustain an entire party as well as the Warden.

    • All classes can try to search rooms and improve their characters with artifacts but none is as good as the Loremaster.

    We decided that since the class affects the way our players interact with the game, then the challenge rating would be created by two things:

    • The minions (in quality and numbers) are generated by the classes that participate in a game.

    • The seals (in quality and numbers) are generated by the number of players that are playing.

    VB:

    The main problem in scaling was the minions drawn. If the Avenger was in play, things were easy as he would deal with them and everyone else would be able to advance their character as needed to achieve their own goals: the Mystic would add mana-generating abilities to their board, the Loremaster would generate Insight to search rooms, and the Warden — the healer of the group — would work on those crucial healing spells. However, when the Avenger was not in play, the rest of the classes would have to compensate, but the threat was so big that everyone needed to focus on dealing damage, neglecting their previous focus. Even when they weren't losing horribly, the experience was not fun.

    Since the problem was in the minions, the solution that we settled on was based on them. The minion deck would change its contents depending on the classes present in the game. If the Avenger was present, it would include more difficult-to-beat monsters. If the Mystic and the Warden were the only ones playing, it would contain mostly small monsters which would be easier for the players to handle. They would still pose a threat, but not one that would distract them from their main goal.

    Although we were a bit skeptical to try this solution, it worked like a charm. It achieved exactly what we needed and helped the different classes to stand out. We were no longer worried about the class combinations. Each and every one of them could stand its own.

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    The Loremaster

    While the Avenger and the Mystic were quite straightforward, the Loremaster — the character that searched the rooms — was trickier to design. We had settled on having another resource in the game called Insight. Players would gather Insight and that would be used to search the rooms. It would work similarly to damage in that, if unused, it would reset at the end of the round. If a character matched the room's Insight difficulty, then they would draw Artifact cards that would grant them powerful ongoing abilities.

    Even though the Loremaster would have no trouble gathering Insight and using it to get more artifacts, the other players would completely ignore it. That wasn't necessarily a problem, but it would get worse due to another factor: After a point, experienced players would become quite powerful and near the final rounds they would generate a lot of Insight, but they would no longer need it as much.

    It was clear that we needed to find other uses for Insight as well.

    Around the same time, we had another problem to deal with. They way the Seals worked, one player had to generate enough mana to break them. More often than not, that player was the Mystic. However, inexperienced players would have a hard time generating enough mana for the more expensive Seals. Since they were the more powerful ones, not dealing with them usually spelled their doom.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779908_t.png]

    The Mystic

    During development, we examined a solution that solved both of these problems. What if you could spend Insight in order to "unlock" the Seals and allow everyone to spend mana on them? That provided another use for Insight (which all of the classes could use on the small seals) and interesting options for the Loremaster (Do I go for another artifact, or do I help the group by unlocking a seal?), while making it less demanding for the Mystic who now didn't have to generate all that mana on their own.

    AG:

    Although this is a dice-rolling game, we love the idea of "tough" decisions. During your play, you will always have to decide whether to spend the resources you gathered to remove an obstacle or to improve your character? With the new approach to Insight, it became the party tool to deal with high level seals. Insight was now an equal answer to threats and was helping the party to interact with the seals more efficiently.

    VB:

    Near the end, most of the issues had been solved and we were happy with how the game was playing. Although it was already quite challenging, we even thought of some additional hurdles to throw to the players who wanted more.

    There was now only one thing remaining: the solo game.

    With the game being cooperative, we knew that it was suitable for solo play. The problem was that it would be difficult for a single character to deal with everything that was happening in the game. Not only that, but since each class focused on different things, the experience would be different with each of them. If we were to make the game easier, one of the classes would still struggle while another one would find it way too easy. On top of that, we wanted the players to play differently with every class. If only one was present in the game, they would all have to play the same way to defeat the game.

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    The Warden



    That's when it hit me. Why not change the requirements? For each character, the goal would be different. The Avenger (who couldn't easily generate a lot of mana) would focus on killing minions and would have to kill the powerful boss. The Mystic (who could easily generate a lot of mana but had trouble with dealing damage) would not have to worry about killing the minions or the boss, but would have to break numerous Seals in order to win. The Loremaster would need to gather as many artifacts as possible, while the Warden would bring a companion along and would have to make sure they stayed alive.

    This way, not only would each character play the way they would in multiplayer, the game would offer four different solo experiences. It felt very different with each class, and we knew the solo gamers would absolutely love it!

    AG:

    Regarding the solo version of the game, I wanted three things:

    • To be fun and challenging for all classes

    • To be an excellent tutorial for new players who wanted to explore the game before playing with their friends

    • To give players the opportunity to explore all aspects of a class

    I strongly feel that we addressed all the above.

    AG & VB:

    : All in all, we are very excited with how the game turned out. It went through a lot of rough periods, with many changes and complete overhauls, but in the end we created something that we are really proud of. The work we put into this game is probably more than what we've put in any other game we've worked on, but it was totally worth it.

    As soon as you open the box, we are sure you will agree!

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    SPIEL '17 Preview: Origami, or Eric Folds Five Families

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/699…or-eric-folds-five-famili

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3731916_t.png]I love card games. I'd be fine with never playing a board game again as long as I had card games available to me. Each time you pick up a hand of cards, it's like opening a present. You have some idea of what might be inside, but the details of the thing are what's important. Which cards do you have in hand this time? What don't you have? What's possible?! The more that you play a card game, the better you get, and as your knowledge of the game increases, you start playing the same hand three times: once when you first look at the cards and imagine what could happen, again when you're actually playing, and a third time when you're assessing how things went and what you might have done instead.

    I'm not even close to that level of understanding with Christian Giove

    's Origami

    , which dV Giochi

    will debut at SPIEL '17 in October. I've played three times on a rough preproduction copy from dV Giochi, each time with three players, and I still haven't even seen all the cards in the game.

    Origami

    is for 2-4 players, and the game includes five families of animals with each family being a different color. To set up the game, choose 2-4 families — with that number matching the number of players — shuffle them, then deal each player face-up cards until they have ten or more folds

    on their visible cards. "Folds" are the currency in the game, and one of the few nods in the game toward the "Origami" name, the other being the origami-like animal images on the cards.


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    Once everyone takes their cards in hand, you lay out four cards in a face-up market, then start taking turns. On a turn you can:

    • Draw cards from the market that sum up to at most four folds. Refill the market to four cards, then add these cards to your hand, discarding at the end of your turn if you have more than eight cards.

    • Spend cards from your hand to pay (exactly!) the cost of a single card in your hand. If a card costs 6, for example, you must discard cards that feature exactly six folds. Place this card on one of two collections in front of you, making sure that each collection is no more than one card larger or smaller than the other collection.

    • Use the special effect of an animal card on top of one of your collections.

    That's it! Rinse and repeat until you've gone through the entire deck twice, shuffling discards as needed to create a new deck, which you will need to do since after the deck runs out a second time, you still complete the current round, then each player takes one final turn, then you count your points on cards played to see who wins, with some cards having special scoring bonuses.


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    Four savannah animals; the number at the lower-left shows the number of copies in the deck



    Gameplay in Origami

    is simple and straightforward, with most turns presenting you with the best kind of tension in any game: the pull between picking up more cards (i.e., resources) to give you more options in the future vs. playing cards now to put points on the table and possibly give you special powers to use.

    With every play, you want to be as efficient as possible. Don't pick up cards with only two or three folds when you're allowed to pick up four. Don't play a card with a scoring bonus if you don't plan to make that bonus worth anything. Don't play a card with an instant effect (which most of them have) if you can't make use of it that turn. The gorilla, a savannah card, lets you pick up all savannah cards on the market when you play it. Should you play it if only one savannah card is available? What if that one card is another gorilla, which gives you four folds in hand (i.e., a free draw action) and the threat of another gorilla action in the future?

    Every time you pick up cards, you're putting new cards into the market for the players that follow, something that might affect your choices during play. In one game I managed to play two chicks and pick up a third without yet having a chicken in hand, the chicken being worth 2 extra points per chick you've played. My right-hand opponent couldn't stop drawing cards completely, but he kept taking actions that would reveal several new cards at once, thus giving me greater odds of grabbing a chicken, which I soon did. Bok bok!


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    On right: Barnyard success, plus a vulture-powered butterfly



    A lot of the special actions are conditional. The spider, a lawn card, lets you draw cards from the market that have exactly six folds. If you can't do this, then you must take the boring regular draw action or do something else. The vulture (sky) lets you use the top card on the discard pile to play an origami from your hand, and while free money is nice, sometimes you don't have the cards needed to pay a cost exactly, which leaves you staring at that top card like a $5 bill just out of reach on the other side of the fence.

    Each family has their own type of powers and effects, giving Origami

    a different feel based on the cards in play. The savannah cards are all instant effects, mostly related to drawing cards in some manner. The sea cards give you discounts off the cost of a card or the ability to play a second card immediately (while still paying the cost of it). The lawn cards tend to benefit from other cards of the same family, such as the ant cards that jump from 3 to 5 points if you have at least two of them or the caterpillar that can transform into the far more valuable butterfly. The sky cards interact with other players, the cards they have, and the discard pile. I don't even know what the farm cards do as I haven't played with them yet.

    Origami

    combines the joy of card game randomness with extra variety of play thanks to the five families of cards, of which at most four will be used each time. The only downside is that the graphic design isn't ideal, with a card's cost and fold count being bunched together in the upper left corner and not differentiated enough, with the fold digit being too small for my old eyes. Aside from that, right now Origami

    is the game I'm most regretful for not having played more times before writing about it, but SPIEL '17 is almost upon us, so I wanted to give a head's up about the game to fellow card game lovers.


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    Sample critters from the other four families

    Designer Diary: Origami

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/69561/designer-diary-origami

    by Christian Giove

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3768746_t.png]The idea for Origami

    started a couple of years ago, but I'm not able to say which arrived first between the game mechanism and the setting. In my memories, it was always about origami and with its core system. I've always liked card games in which a card can be used for multiple purposes and I wanted to create something like that. Meanwhile, the correlation between origami and their folds seemed to fit perfectly.

    At first, I defined the concept of adding victory points and various kinds of special effects to the cards in order to have a lot of possible combinations and to give the player many ways of scoring and performing actions over time. I then tried some "mental playtests" — I usually play out 5-10 rounds in my mind, assuming different cards are drawn, in order to spot big errors or bugs BEFORE creating the first prototype — and I immediately discovered that the possible actions could grow too quickly due to some special effects.

    Thus, I decided each player could play their origami on only two different stacks, called "collections", in order to limit the number of special effects a player can benefit from at the same time. This arrangement of the origami also creates more timing issues for the players and makes them face harder choices.


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    Then I created my first prototype, searching for images of animal origami on the web to get a better feeling of what it could look like and to help playtesters recognize the cards. At that time, the game was a single deck of 90 cards, and I played it with 2, 3, and 4 players.

    The game worked quite well, aside from a couple of flaws, mostly due to the deck containing too many cards for a two- or three-player game. I needed to adapt the deck to the number of players, but it was hard to identify which cards had to be removed and this procedure was also very time-consuming for the set-up of a quick game like this.

    In the end, I decided to divide my cards into five different decks called "families", and each game would play with one family per player. This set-up was much simpler and also gave the game a lot of replayability.


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    Cards from the first prototype



    Because the game was fun and the rules were stable, I started showing it during fairs and events. (Its first public appearance was during IdeaG

    , an Italian meeting of game designers and publishers happening each year in Turin, Italy.) I got a lot of positive feedback and a couple of proposals from different publishers.

    The most interested publisher was dV Giochi

    , but they asked me to reduce the game length — which was very good advice, so I reduced the number of actions per turn to two and in the final playtesting this number was reduced to just one. Originally, with four players and three actions per turn, nine opponent actions took place in a round before your next turn; now there are just three!


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    Work in progress…



    In the end, we came up with a game that has fast yet satisfying turns in which players have more control, while at the same time they must face deeper and harder choices.

    I also reduced the number of folds required to play an origami and the folds given by each origami to create faster and simpler calculations when playing. This made everything much smoother and more player-friendly.

    After tons of playtesting and balancing, dV Giochi decided it was worth publishing. They did a lot of additional playtesting and we changed a lot of card abilities, mostly because we wanted to balance and differentiate the families: Each deck now focuses on a specific kind of effect: draw, play more cards, instant effects, special actions, interaction between players, etc.

    During this time, the game also got its final artwork — nice low-poly origami — and new graphics. A lot of things remained similar to my prototype, but this happens often because I'm a graphic designer, so I create prototypes by studying the card usability, too.


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    Cards from an almost-final prototype



    I ran playtest sessions of an almost finished version of the game during a gaming event in Genoa (Italy), where a lot of expert gamers had the chance to play it. This allowed me to polish the game even more, making it the one you will soon be able to play!

    Christian Giove

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    Publisher Diary: ¡Adios Calavera!, or Days of the Dead Are Different in Mexico

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/669…avera-or-days-dead-are-di

    by Channing Jones

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3106615_t.jpg]

    Gauck (r)

    Joachim Gauck, who served as President of Germany from March 2012 to March 2017, has a strong connection to Martin Luther. After all, long before he became President, Gauck served as a Lutheran pastor in Rostock on the Baltic Sea.

    Even though his time as a pastor is far behind him, Joachim Gauck still has a connection to Martin Luther, so much so that when Luther: Das Spiel

    was published by KOSMOS in 2016, he was so pleased by the game that he invited the two authors, Erika and Martin Schlegel

    to Berlin to visit the Bellevue Palace. It was a great honor and a first as never before had a game author met with the Federal President.


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    From left: Erika Schlegel, Martin Schlegel, Joachim Gauck



    Games let us explore history and different cultures in all sorts of ways, with the games also taking a multitude of forms to match their subject matter. Martin Schlegel's newest game, for example, couldn't be more different than Luther: Das Spiel

    . ¡Adios Calavera!

    , to be released by German publisher Mücke Spiele

    at SPIEL '17, is a two-player-only game with few rules. This is Schlegel's third game with Mücke, following Atacama

    and Takamatsu

    .

    From "Zócalo" to "¡Adios Calavera!"

    The game was originally called "Zócalo" because it took place on the huge square in the center of Mexico City, which is called Zócalo

    . Girls would form one team, boys the other, with each headed by a player and with each trying to make it across the square first, encountering those of the opposite sex in both friendly and less-than-friendly ways as they moved.

    While the game itself was well received, the theme was not convincing, so we looked for another one with Mexico as the place of action. The gameplay would also stay the same because it was fully developed and gave both players thirty exciting minutes of fun.

    The experienced graphic artist Christian Opperer suggested placing the game's action during "Dia de los Muertos", an annual celebration in Mexico. The first reaction to the idea of incorporating a memorial day for the dead into a game was horror and shock. A gloomy theme with dead skulls? This is not suitable for a game. However, as usual, whenever you learn more about a subject, it changes your opinion. The day of the dead in Mexico is not a mourning event, but a colorful folk festival in honor of the dead.


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    According to the old folk belief, the souls of the deceased return to their families in early November. Everywhere the memory of them is in the foreground. The streets are decorated with flowers, which are symbols of death and transience. Pastry shops produce the Calaveras de Dulce

    , which are skulls of sugar, chocolate, or marzipan. The Pan de Muerto, the dead bread, is another popular treat during these days, and during parades, calaveras — oversized skulls and full skeletons made of papier-mâché — are carried through the streets.

    After the souls of the deceased have been received in the homes on the night of November 2, a farewell to them takes place in the cemeteries, where there is eating, drinking, music and dancing. At midnight, the time has come to say good-bye, and the festival is over until the dead return next year.

    It's at this point in the story when ¡Adios Calavera!

    takes place: The living and the deceased must take leave of one another, going their separate ways until next year. You want to quickly reach the other side of the celebration area, while preventing others from leaving the farewell meeting first.


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    Powers to the People

    In the game, one player takes the role of the dead, the other the living. Each player has eight pieces and places them on the indicated positions of a roughly 9x9 board next to the starting edge of the opposing player. Players are thus not directly opposite each other, but at a right angle.

    The first player to get their eight pieces off the side of the board opposite their starting position wins. On a turn, you move a piece a number of spaces equal to the number of pieces (both yours and the opponents) in the row perpendicular to the direction that it will move. Thus, if you move a piece in your front row forward, it will move three spaces (unless it hits an obstacle).

    This is the simplest way to play, but each of the eight pieces also has a special power on its reverse side, with each team having the same eight powers. Before starting the game, each player secretly chooses which four of these eight powers they want to use, then flip these tokens to the "power" side while leaving the other ones as is. Each player then secretly arranges their pieces on the starting positions of their choice before starting play. Powers include the ability to move through obstacles, switch with other pieces, push other pieces, attract other pieces, not allow other pieces to move adjacent, move diagonally, and more.


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    Designer Diary: HUNGER: The Show

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/65604/designer-diary-hunger-show

    by Michał Ozon

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3532789_t.jpg] Hello, everyone! We at PHALANX fell in love with

    HUNGER: The Show from the first play. This fast-paced family/filler game with a catchy story and rich player interaction debuted at the UK Games Expo in June 2017 ahead of being featured at SPIEL '17 in October, and I have asked Pim Thunborg to write a few words about the design and publishing process from the author's perspective. I hope this may be inspiring for all of you who dream about publishing their first board game!

    Michał

    •••



    As a board game designer, you often get struck by game ideas many times a day. You see a game mechanism that maybe you can build a game around, or a real life happening that you think can be remodeled into a board game. From that start, it often takes months or years before you have a core game ready. Of course, some of the starting ideas may still be part of the game, but a lot has changed.

    None of this was true for HUNGER

    ...

    The main idea for HUNGER

    came right out of the blue. In just one thought, 90% of what is still the core mechanism and the game was clear. This is absolutely unique and maybe a part of why this game has been so highly appreciated by the playtesters. It was right from the start.

    But of course, there is a lot of testing and remaking to make a great game. This will be shown in this board game diary.

    2015-03-21: A New Game Is Born

    I had worked for over a year on a board game that I still haven't finished — then the idea hit me: a game on a desolate island where you have to predict what the other players will do to be successful. Simultaneous actions. No tactic is stronger than another. No advanced rules. No downtime. The game was born.

    My first working name for the game was the inappropriate "HYSTD — I hope you starve to death", which I already knew was soon going to be changed.

    2015-03-23: The First Artwork

    After two days, my first artwork and the rules were finished. All I needed was some free clip art, and I had a start.


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    The first card artwork, showing the action and the areas



    2015-03-24: Working Process

    The following month was full of playtesting and mathematical Excel sheets. I think I wrote nine versions of the rules in the first month, mostly to balance the amount of food a player should start with versus the food you got when you collected food or stole from the other players. From the beginning, the game was solely about being the player who survived the longest, that is, being the last player who still had food.


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    The first prototype of HUNGER



    2015-04-04: A New Name

    I scrapped the initial name I had, and the new name was no less than "HUNGER", which remained the name of the game.


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    The name was born



    2015-05-24: LinCon Board Game Convention

    I visited one of the bigger board game conventions in Sweden: LinCon

    . The game was something of a success from the start, and a lot of players liked it because the gameplay was fast and smooth and the game mechanism was intuitive. One skilled illustrator, Patrik Hultén, liked the game so much that he promised to illustrate some new art for the game. After the convention, I felt that I really had something going here. Maybe I had the hit I had always dreamt about.


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    Playtesters at LinCon 2015; illustrator Patrik Hultén is on the right



    2015-07: New Artwork

    Patrik Hultén illustrated new artwork for the cards that truly lifted the game. You shouldn't underestimate the importance of a good-looking game. The first impression is important, even if you are only trying to impress a publisher or test players.


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    New artwork for the actions: hunt, collect fruits, fish, guard, and steal



    2015-08-12: Making Contacts for SPIEL

    I was convinced that I had a game that was good enough for publishers to want to publish, so I contacted some publishers before SPIEL and booked meetings with them.


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    The info sheet that I sent out to land meetings



    2015-10-08: SPIEL in Essen

    I had mixed feelings after my six meetings at SPIEL. I got a lot of positive feedback, but no one wanted the game. They felt that something was missing. It was too streamlined, which I think is a rather uncommon problem in the world of board game design. Often, they have too many mechanisms, too many things going on, etc. But this time there weren't enough things going on. To play only not to starve was too morbid, and the game needed at least one more dimension.


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    A little crowded at SPIEL



    2015-11: Thinking and Not Enough Playtesting

    I was still convinced that I had a game that was something special. I just had to kick it up to the next level. I started to try a lot of new mechanisms. Here are some of the ideas:


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    Building pacts: Failure



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    Make the game last three rounds and try to build a raft during this time: Failure



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    Add coconuts if an action failed: Success (and still in the game)



    2016-02-24

    During the period of experimentation, I also sent the game out to publishers, which afterwards I regretted. The game was not stable, and I should have playtested it more before sending it out. From being too streamlined, it got too complicated. The smooth play experience was lost, and that was the most important part to save to get the game really good. You can't add mechanisms that slow down a fast-paced game because that ruins the game.

    After a lot of thinking and more playtesting, we got back to the core and added a new action that didn't impact the fast pace but still gave more dimension to the game. We added the raft. Instead of playing until just one player has any food left, a player can also win by building a raft. We had to take away something, and the fishing action was the one that got removed. Finally, we had found something that saved the fast-paced feeling but still added a new dimension. The game and I got new life.


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    New action: looking for raft pieces



    2016-05-04: LinCon Again

    For this convention, I arranged the first Swedish championship for HUNGER

    . (It was also the first ever HUNGER

    tournament, but why not make it the Swedish championship?) Again, I got very positive feedback from the playtesters and I felt that I had finally got it. Patrik Hultén also did some complimentary illustration with the tokens, etc. I did more adjustments after the feedback and was proud of what HUNGER had become.


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    The first and hopefully not last Swedish championship for HUNGER



    2016-06-06: Contacting Publishers

    Now it's time to show some numbers of the work so far, and I want to point out that this is a simple game:

    • 38 versions of the rules

    • 4 bigger changes to the game mechanism and core mechanism

    • 142 different versions of the sets of cards, tokens, and game board

    • Hundreds of mails

    • 2 journeys to Essen and 6 conventions in Sweden for playtesting

    • Many, many, many hours of cutting prototypes

    I felt ready to contact more publishers and sent this message:

    Hi, my name is Pim and I want to show you my game Hunger.

    Hunger is a fantastic family game or a perfect filler game. For 2-6 players ▪ Ages 7 and above ▪ 20 minutes. After a few years of developing I have made something I'm proud of, and I really want to share with you. I hope you will enjoy it.

    The story: You are stranded on a desolate isle, unfortunately not with your best friends. Your goal is to build a raft and get as far away from the island as possible. And you really don't care what happens to the others as long as you get furthest away from the island. But you need to find wood and rope to build the raft, and collect food to stay alive. You have a few tins of food to start with, but you will soon be very hungry. You can collect fruit or hunt chickens to get more, or why not just borrow some from your friends, obviously without their permission.

    Mechanic: This is what makes the game so broadly appreciated both of gamers but also non-gamers, families and children. It's fun, fast, smooth and have no downtime, with a lot of player interactions. The players simultaneously choose what action they will do and on which area of the island they will do the action. It's somewhat similar to stone, scissor, and paper but with more depth. To success, the players have to predict what the other players will do, but it's not enough with that. To win you have to collect most parts for the raft, but if you put too much focus on that you will start to starve. So the player has to balance these two needs to success through the game. If you play a lot of games, the best player will win most of them, but in a single game, a 6 year old can beat anyone, which makes it fun for everyone.

    The unique: I have done a lot of playtesting with non-gamers, families and game groups and on conventions. And really, everybody likes it. It is a great game for everybody's bookshelf and I really believe that Hunger will be a hit.

    More information: The link will show both the rules, info-sheet and also a full complete P&P version, if you want to know what it looks likes. The other link is to my youtube site where you can look at an introduction to the game. You are also welcome to visit my website for more information.



    If you have any questions, want a prototype or want to meet me, you are welcome to contact me. I will come to Essen (2016-10-13 – 2016-10-16).

    2016-06-20: Yoo-hoo Moment

    Suddenly, a mail from PHALANX, the mail all game designers are waiting for:

    Dear Joakim,
    We like your game and want to publish Hunger! :)
    What are your business terms?

    2016-08-20: Contract

    Some more discussions and finally...


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3562501_t.jpg]

    Happy me holding a board game contract



    2016-10-21: Changes in the Rules

    After a meeting with the publisher in Essen and a lot of mail discussions and after PHALANX's own playtesting, an illustrator is suggested. No less than Robert Adler

    . We discuss both big and small subjects about the game: Are we going to keep the theme or change it? The following themes were discussed: The Lost

    series, Robinson Crusoe, vampires, etc. In the end, PHALANX chose HUNGER: The Television Show.

    We also talked about changing game mechanisms like adding variable player powers, secret agendas, different scenarios, and a lot more.

    2017-02-01: BoardGameGeek

    Now was the time to submit the game to the BGG database. I had to submit myself as the designer as weell. There was also a first vision of the box.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3562502_t.jpg]

    The nice game designer badge on BGG



    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3562504_t.jpg]

    First vision of the box



    2017-02-01: Making Retailers Interested

    The game was shown at the Spielwarenmesse Toy Fair in Nürnberg, Germany with good results. PHALANX also added two new rules after more playtesting:

    • Events that may bring the end of the game early from the 6th to the 11th round, while making a mess on the island. This works really great as players now have to work for both food and raft parts from the very beginning of the game.

    • Different player powers to create some differences between the characters.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3441327_t.jpg]

    Playtesting kit at the time



    2017-03-02: Box and Rules

    More artwork is coming up, along with discussion about the box and proofreading the rules and info text...


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3562507_t.jpg]

    Different box designs, none of which survived to the end



    2017-04-03

    I learned that the release would be at the UK Games Expo, which took place June 2-4, 2017. It felt so great that my game would finally be released.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3532790_t.jpg]

    The final concept



    2017-06-02: UK Games Expo

    Release party, with more to come!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3601291_t.jpg]



    Thanks for reading!

    Pim Thunborg

    Printing Your SPIEL '17 Picks

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/698…nting-your-spiel-17-picks

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1068166_t.png]BGG's SPIEL '17 Preview

    is nearing one thousand listings, and given that I'll be updating the preview for one more week — and that my inbox has recently been hit with plenty of late submissions — I'm sure that we'll pass that total before SPIEL '17 opens on Thursday, October 26.

    Scott has updated the preview with an export function that generates a CSV list of whatever you're looking at. To get a concise list of your picks, use the prioritization buttons as you like, sort the list as you like, then use the filters to see only what you like, then export the list and print it.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3784156_t.png]



    I hope you've been enjoying all the designer diaries and game previews that I've been running. If so, you'll enjoy what's coming next week as I'm doing more of the same in order to give you an advance look at as many SPIEL '17 releases if possible. If not, well, I invite you to watch this fascinating video that demonstrates an unusual painting technique:


    Youtube Video

    SPIEL '17 Preview: HATSUDEN, or Energizing Found Cities

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/698…-or-energizing-found-citi

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3575446_t.jpg]I try to avoid reading or watching reviews of games that I want to play. I prefer to approach such a game with a blank slate — beyond whatever info or description inspired me to want to play the game in the first place! — because I want to develop my own opinions about a game instead of seeing it through a frame that someone else has already constructed.

    I take this same approach for books and movies, and it's served me well. Seeing both Inception

    and Interstellar

    in the theater, for example, while knowing nothing about the movies other than the director (which is what placed the movie on my "must watch" list) was ideal. Watching the trailers for these movies afterward confirmed the rightness of my approach because I would have hated to have been primed with the material included in them.

    (I realize that including this preface in a detailed preview of a game might be contradictory, but if you were like me, then you wouldn't be reading this preview anyway!)

    Sometimes, though, you can't help seeing comments about a game, and a single line might be all it takes to put that frame in place. With HATSUDEN

    , for example, a two-player card game from Naotaka Shimamoto

    and Yoshiaki Tomioka

    that was released by itten

    and New Games Order

    at Tokyo Game Market in May 2017, I saw a couple of people refer to the game as playing like Reiner Knizia's Lost Cities

    . Boom — frame established!

    When I finally got around to reading the rules of the copy I had purchased at TGM, I didn't see the connection. Sure, you're playing cards in five different columns based on the symbols on them, but that seemed like a weak link.

    Then I actually played the game, and after completing three games with the same opponent, the connection was clear. What's more, without prompting, after the game my opponent said, "That kind of felt like Lost Cities

    , didn't it?"

    So what's going on in the game to make that link? In the game, you're competing to provide more renewable energy in five types than the opponent is, while also supplying your two cities with exactly as much power as they need. Provide too little, and you're penalized at the end of the game; provide too much, and you'll have to take a power source offline so as not to blow the city's transformers, which might then put you behind the opponent in a particular energy type.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3784146_t.jpg]

    Set up for play, aside from having my cards revealed



    To set up, you lay out the five energy cards to indicate where the columns will be, give each player two cities (to show where you'll place your own cards), shuffle the four technology cards, then give each player a random hand of five cards. Cards are numbered 1-4 in the five energy types, and each number appears twice. On a turn, you play one card from hand in one of four ways:

    • Place a card face up in an empty space in the column that matches the symbol on the card.

    • Upgrade an existing card by playing a card on top of it that has the same symbol, but a higher number.

    • Place a card face down in a space as a pylon; this pylon supplies no energy, can never be upgraded, and serves only to fill one of the ten spaces on your side of the playing area.

    • Discard a card face up from play.

    At the end of your turn, draw a new card to bring your hand to five, whether from the top of the deck or any discarded card of your choice.

    In Lost Cities

    , you don't compete directly with the opponent when laying down cards and attempting to build profitable expeditions. You build yours, and they build theirs, and at the end of the game you both tally your points to see who wins. However, a large part of the tension in the game comes from you not knowing which eight cards the opponent holds. You might have two great cards to start a particular expedition, but what if the high value cards of that color are in the opponent's hands? You could be setting yourself up for failure and left scrambling for enough cards just to cover your sunk costs.

    What if the opponent has already started an expedition and you have a single middle-value card of that color? You don't want to discard the card because they'll pick it up and profit from it, yet you might not want to play it either because you're both cutting off the chance to play low-value cards and risking being stranded if they hold the goods. What to do, what to do?


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3784144_t.jpg]

    Great minimalist design



    This tension is what HATSUDEN

    shares with Lost Cities

    . Once you commit cards to both slots in a particular type of energy, your opponent knows what they need to tie or surpass you. Yes, you can upgrade those slots to larger numbers, but by doing so, you're giving up the opportunity to build something else.

    What's worse, each time you place a card in a row, you need to sum all the cards in that row. If the value is 12 or higher, then you must convert one or more face-up cards in that row into pylons so as not to overload the city. Did you just lose a majority somewhere else to gain one here? Possibly, but sometimes you are able to flip down a card that you don't need for a majority because the opponent has already committed in that type of energy and you're holding the sole card that they could use to overtake you. In addition, aside from fighting for majorities, you want the power for each city to sum to ten. Sums of 9 and 11 are also valid and don't cost you points at the end of the game (whereas a sum of 8 or under costs you 1 point), but if a city's power does sum to 10 at game's end, then you score 1 point for it.

    A point here, a point there — it doesn't sound like much, but you will likely score at most 5 points in the game overall, so every point matters.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3784145_t.jpg]

    Iconic technology cards



    Another minor similar to Lost Cities

    comes from HATSUDEN

    's technology cards. In Lost Cities

    , each color has handshake cards that can double, triple, or quadruple the value of an expedition, but they can be played only before any number cards for that expedition have been laid down. In essence, you have to increase your risk before being sure that the effort will pay off (although sometimes you already have the cards you need in hand).

    HATSUDEN

    has four special technology cards, and when you play a 4 of any type of energy, you draw one of the cards at random from the tiny deck and add it to your hand. One card ("Smart") must be played immediately, and it doubles the value of that type of energy at game's end, making it worth 2 points instead of 1. The other cards stay in your hand until you want to play them: One lets you play an energy card face down so that the opponent doesn't know your strength in that type of energy; another lets you have up to 12 energy in a city, giving you more leeway to overpower the opponent in one or two columns; and another lets you downgrade a power plant. This last card is great because sometimes you lock in a type of energy early, then the opponent uses it to bury cards as pylons or otherwise cede it to you — yet because you played high cards in that column, you have less freedom due to the city limits to play cards elsewhere. Downgrading a 4 to a 1 opens up more room for plays elsewhere.

    All of these technology cards are good, but to get them, you have to commit to an energy by laying down a 4, which locks out opportunities elsewhere.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3784147_t.jpg]



    The final point of connection between Lost Cities

    and HATSUDEN

    is the endgame. In Lost Cities

    , the game ends when the deck runs out, so you're often in the position of wanting to delay the game to play more of the cards in hand (so you pick up discarded cards instead of drawing from the deck) or you're trying to run out the clock to stuff the opponent and possibly draw cards that they might need.

    In HATSUDEN

    , once a player fills all ten spaces on their side of the board, the opponent gets one more turn, then you score points, with each 10-power city being worth 1 point and the majority in an energy type being worth 1 point (unless something is doubled). That clock in the form of your opponent's board is staring you in the face all game, and you need to keep watching it so that you don't find yourself stuck with good cards that would

    have helped you, but...whoopsy daisy, you lost, lost in the cities...

    Designer Diary: Launching the Exodus Fleet

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…ry-launching-exodus-fleet

    by Gabriel Cohn

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3720648_t.png] Exodus Fleet

    is my baby. It's the first real game I designed, and I absolutely love it.

    Now, of course, I've already lied. Exodus Fleet

    wasn't really my first game. Robbery!

    was. (Yes, it had an exclamation point.) I made that game 22 years ago as a junior in high school. My friends and I spent days creating stacks of cards and chits and a giant board, played the game once, decided it was awful, and chucked it on a shelf.

    Upon moving to North Carolina in 2009 and finding I had lots of alone-time in my new environment, and having rediscovered my love of games over my previous five years of living in the SF Bay Area — thanks to Ira Fay

    , who also happens to be the main co-designer of Robbery!

    — I decided to pull Robbery!

    down from the shelf (yes, it still bore the exclamation point after a dozen years) and try to make it a "playable" game. This was a reasonably low bar, and it let me practice some of the basics of game design. I got it to a playable state, but it wasn't moving me…

    That's when I set out to make a game that I would want to play. Thus began the journey of the Exodus Fleet

    .

    From the start, I knew I wanted to meet a few clear goals:

    (1) It had to be fun

    . I mean, I wanted it to be so fun that I would want to play it over and over. I'm not someone who buys a ton of games, so I aim for games with a lot of replayability.

    (2) I wanted a smooth integration of theme and mechanisms

    . There needs to be some degree of logic in how player actions represent something in the "real world" of the game.

    (3) I wanted a high degree of player interaction

    . In other words, players' actions need to impact each other.

    Of course, having considered these goals, I had to take them on in reverse order.

    My first hurdle was to figure out how I would keep everyone involved. A few of my favorite games sprang to mind, and I liberally grabbed ideas. Most importantly, I latched onto the ideas of role selection and auctions as methods to keep everyone involved all the time, but rather than just having one or the other, why not both? Thus, Exodus Fleet

    features role selection, in which one player chooses the phase everyone will be involved in, and auctions, with everyone bidding on how much they want to perform that action. Players are constantly tracking each other's needs and goals so that they can outsmart each other in the flow of the game from one action to the next.

    Player interaction — solved! I'm really proud that Exodus Fleet

    manages to keep every player involved in every moment of the game.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782085_t.jpg]

    A few of the ships available for purchase in a typical game.
    (Can I say that I love the way the art turned out? I guess I just said it...)



    But a game is more than just mechanisms. From the start, I was working with a vision for the world of the game. Exodus Fleet

    is set in the future. It's a grim world, one in which humanity's best hope is to escape from Earth. (In fact, the original name of the game was "Leaving Earth" — not to be confused with Joe Fatula

    's game that beat mine to the punch. Oops.) Players take on the role of the leaders of a fleet of ships setting off to explore the galaxy, and they want to take as many people with them as possible.

    From this nugget of an idea, I began tweaking the mechanisms to fit the story of the game. Eventually, the game boiled down to five actions that one can take: gather income, mine planets for resources, use those resources to build more ships, transport people off Earth, and explore deep space. Except for income, each of these actions requires hiring people within the fleet — miners, builders, transporters, or explorers — and that's where the role selection and auctions come in.

    Theme and mechanisms united — check! Yup, this part of the process came off smoothly. The actions make sense in the world of the game. If you want to mine, you need to hire miners. To do that, you need to outbid your opponents, and when you hire them, you have to have somewhere to store your resources. Did I mention that each ship has a limited amount of storage capacity? That's another factor to take into account as you look around the table.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782083_t.jpg]

    A standard array of planets displayed on the central board



    As I said, one of my main markers for whether a game is fun is the level of replayability. Exodus Fleet

    definitely packs a punch there. The game features ten different possible starting Command Ships, two different decks of ships that can be built, and a whole bunch of Explorer Cards that can range from occasionally useful to game-changing. Some of the most significant decisions lie in how you build up your fleet: Will you pick ships within one faction, which synergize for more points, or ones that work together to increase the power of particular actions? The random order in which ships are presented for purchase means that players have to reconsider their strategies from game to game. That was a strong point of the game from day one, and something that players seemed to universally enjoy.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3781038_t.jpg]

    One of the player boards for a four-player game

    At this point, all of my base game concepts were working smoothly, but alas, I had to make the game fun FOR EVERYONE, EVERY TIME. And that…well, it was more of a struggle. (Apologies to my early playtesters, especially my most frequent one, my wife.) Initial versions of the game were fun for many of the players, and I was quite happy with it, but as I watched with a better and better eye over time — remember, this was my first real attempt at game design — I realized that what many reported as fun, others experienced as misery. It all came down to how the role selection and auctions mixed. (Yes, for those of you creeped out by bidding games, this is the part where I make it a bit less daunting.)

    In the earliest versions of the game, players were forced to place face-down bids simultaneously on six different areas. One of those bids — for the "Fleet Admiral" position — gave players the right to control the order in which the other bids happened. (Imagine bidding on the Governor card in Puerto Rico

    , more or less.) This could make your day or ruin it.

    There was definitely a thrill to this version of the game, but there were a number of players who would bid a lot to become the Fleet Admiral and fail, basically ruining the rest of their round, and often their game. They would still report that they enjoyed some things about the game, but I could see that they were often checked out by the time the game ended.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782080_t.jpg]

    A mid-game set-up from what I first showed publishers at Gen Con 2011;
    I can't believe anyone showed interest in it back then!



    The auctions needed a fresh approach. First, the Fleet Admiral bidding had to go; players now rotate making decisions on phases. Eventually, the idea that all the phases needed to happen in any sort of particular order fell by the wayside, too. Players can now freely pick any of the actions when it's their turn to choose, with the exception that they can't pick the one that just happened. This frees up so much space to explore different ways to play the game that I'm shocked I didn't come up with it earlier. Some games can be income heavy, others feature a ton of exploring, but all of them feature this element: You have to pay attention to the other players. Anticipating their moves by studying the flow of actions around the table is one of the keys to winning.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782088_t.jpg]

    Explorer Cards that can
    provide hidden advantages

    And bidding! The bidding had to be solved. Bidding on six different things at once was out, but even so, placing blind face-down bids could be too chaotic for players who had trouble reading the intentions of their opponents.

    Eventually, I hit on a much simpler method: Bids are now placed face-up, one at a time, going once around the table. This solution creates interesting decisions for players to engage in, especially as positional play becomes important. For each of the actions, the lowest bidder is automatically excluded from participating. (They get their money back, plus a small consolation prize.) This means that the first player to bid plays a large part in setting the "over-under" bar around which other players base their decisions.

    What's more, this player is also going to choose which action to pursue next. There's lots of opportunities to use this to your advantage; an overwhelming bid can get you into the current action AND you get to choose the next one, or a bid that's right at the pain point of your opponents can force them to drain their reserves, setting you up for an uncontested action on the next phase. In the end, this new form of bidding and the freedom to choose among any of the actions creates a dynamic game in which every decision you make impacts the play of those around you.

    Finally, mission accomplished — a fun game! I'm excited for people around the world to be able to play it. I learned a lot along the way, but in the end, I'm just happy that I managed to make a game that keeps players so intensely invested in every moment of the game from start to finish and can be played repeatedly for years to come. (Really. I recently played Exodus Fleet

    eight times in a 24-hour period, all with new players, and several of them joined in multiple times.) I hope you enjoy the game, and I look forward to hearing the chatter about it as it hits the table at SPIEL '17 and beyond. Thanks for reading!

    Gabriel J. Cohn

    P.S.: I'm sad I won't be at SPIEL for the release — teaching doesn't allow for much time off — but I hope y'all will hit me up for a game at BGG.CON this year!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782075_t.jpg]

    A game at Pacificon 2017

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Arkham Noir: Case #1 – The Witch Cult Murders, or Crafting a Cthulhu-Free Case

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…oir-case-1-witch-cult-mur

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3601472_t.jpg]H.P. Lovecraft's work has been stripmined repeatedly by game designers and publishers around the world, and why not since the stories are rich with atmosphere, can be applied to numerous types of games, and require no royalty payments to be made for use of the work.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3783249_t.jpg]

    Don't answer it

    Designer Yves Tourigny

    has decided to reframe these stories as noir detective tales featuring Howard Lovecraft in the lead role for a series of solitaire games suitably titled Arkham Noir

    . Tourigny has self-published two of these games — The Real Leeds

    and The King in Yellow

    — and Spanish publisher Ludonova

    is bringing a third case to market as Arkham Noir: Case #1 – The Witch Cult Murders

    .

    In the game, you are confronted with a handful of victims, and you must create multiple chains of clues that lead you from their cold corpses to the discovery of puzzle pieces that will allow you to solve these cases. Your opponents in these efforts are time and your own well-being. Once five units of time pass, another victim appears on the scene; after five victims, you get to be victim #6, thus ending the game. When you encounter certain clues in the game, you're called upon to perform stability checks, and should you fail five of those, then your mind takes a vacation.

    The set-up takes a bit of finagling to get everything in the right place, but the player aid cards include lots of directions and reminders that assist during play, and they also help you monitoring the progress on each victim's case.

    In the game, you're confronted with two victim cases right off the bat, along with a line of five clues and a hand of three clues. Each clue is one of six types, and most clues have a mandatory (in black) or voluntary (in brown) action depicted on them. On a turn, you pick up the first clue card in the line, then you do something with it:

    • Play it onto an open victim case.

    • Take it in hand, then if you hold more than three cards, discard a card.

    • Discard it.

    • Discard it, then play a clue card from your hand to an open case.

    • Discard it, then close a case.

    You might notice lots of discarding mentioned above. Whenever you discard a card for any reason

    that bears an hourglass in the lower-right corner, you must place it in the time area; at the end of your turn, if you have five or more cards in this area, you place them all in the discard pile, then add a new victim to your caseload. Only five victims are available, so don't dawdle! (I'm not sure how you know that the supply of victims is limited, but perhaps someone wrote a threat backwards inside your bathroom mirror. Let's say it was that.)


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3783247_t.jpg]

    Sample line-up at the start of play



    To play a clue onto a case, the symbol on the left-hand edge of the new clue card must be present on the right-hand edge of the rightmost card in that victim's case. You're following the clues, right? An interview with someone leads to a strange object, then you research that object to find an otherworldly location, and so forth. Some clues have "any" on their left edge, so thankfully you can always enter an alley or discover a fetid odor.

    Some cards have a large "3" on them, and you can place these cards only if at least three clue cards are already in the case. Other cards have locks on them, and these can be placed on a case only if you have an unused key in the line — and while you might wonder why you're bothering with locks when you're trying to solve a murder, the lock cards are the only ones with the puzzle pieces, and you need those pieces to win.

    But getting the keys to then open the locks and find the pieces is not enough! You must actually close a case in order to make progress. After all, no one will believe your wild rantings about a crime victim unless you've actually closed the case. To do this, however, you need to have at least five clue types in the case (to cover every possible objection to your detecting efforts, I presume); what's more, you can score the puzzle pieces only if doing so would not leave you with fewer than five clue types. In other words, you can find the puzzle pieces only while working on a case, but the clue types of puzzle pieces can't the grounds on which your case rests.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3783242_t.jpg]

    Sample clue cards



    The game includes only six types of clues, and two of them appear only half as often as others, so you want to track them closely — but the clues are being presented to you in a random order, of course, so it will take lots of diligence to (a) match the icons on the cards while (b) putting together a full set of clues and (c) duplicating the clue types of the puzzle pieces so that you can score them and (d) suffering under the strain of long investigations. Oh, yes, the longer a case goes on, the more your mind starts going to pieces. In game terms, for each clue card you add to a case after the seventh, you must undergo a stability check, something mentioned way back in paragraph #3 that will add to your woes now.

    Each time you add a clue card to a case, you must undertake any mandatory actions on it, with these being to discard a card from your hand or the face-up clue line (losing time along the way should they bear an hourglass) or to undergo a stability check. To do this, reveal the top card of the clue deck and look for a silhouetted detective in anguishing pain. That's you, losing your mind. If you find one of these, place it out of play in the stability area. If it lacks this icon, it might still have an hourglass, so you can still suffer in a less painful way.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3783244_t.jpg]

    Deck breakdown and icon explanation



    Voluntary actions are plentiful, and they typically involve you taking a card from somewhere — the discard pile, the time zone, the stability area, a closed case — and adding it to your hand. While this sounds beneficial (and often is), if you have a full hand, then you must discard a card to do this, possibly costing you time, and even if it doesn't, you'll have to discover a clue card anyway to use a card in your hand, and that

    might cost you time instead. Nothing is good for you, and everything causes you to suffer, and that's precisely what Tourigny wants.

    I've played The Witch Cult Murders

    three times on a review copy from Ludonova, and I think I won once, but I probably goofed along the way. The gameplay seems relatively simple — take the first clue card in the line, then do something — yet the possibilities multiply like tentacles in the oven, with you from the first turn staring at two victims (each with two icons) and three clue cards in hand (with at least two icons on each) and five clue cards in a line (again, icons), with you trying to find a way to get keys into a case (should any be visible) so that locks can follow (and you always seem to get locks first) while also having at least five clue types in a case while not having cases go on too long since you have stability checks and (I haven't mentioned this yet) all cards in a closed case are removed from the game. Yes, that's the topper. Not only must you double up on clues in order to grab the puzzle pieces, but all those non-puzzle cards are out of play — and any time that the clue deck runs out, you must shuffle all the discards, then add a new victim to your caseload.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3783240_t.jpg]

    More clue cards



    Oh, and to win five puzzle pieces alone aren't enough; you must have five puzzle pieces bearing five different types of clues

    . (I had overlooked this detail earlier, so that's likely why my win needs an asterisk.)

    With nearly every clue played, your stability and time management is being challenged, and when they aren't, you're trying to figure out all the iterations of how cards could be played should you take this or that voluntary action. It's enough to drive someone mad, I tells ya!

    Publisher Diary: Nomads, or From Jeju to Luma

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…diary-nomads-or-jeju-luma

    by Anne-Cécile Lefebvre

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3017290_t.jpg]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3717815_t.png] The Beginning

    In June 2016, Cédric, Ian, and I — the three who comprise the Ludonaute

    team — first played Jeju Island

    , a game published by our Korean partner Happy Baobab

    in 2015.

    We immediately felt in love with the mechanisms and the smart style of the game, which was designed by Gary Kim

    , Jun-Hyup Kim, and Yeon-Min Jung. It is an easy to learn and very interactive game, mainly intended for families and children, about traveling around Jeju Island — the most beautiful island in Korea — and gathering specialty items. The mechanisms are based on awalé games and are very smart. The art is cute and charming, very Korean-style.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2703986_t.jpg]



    At this time, we were starting to set up The Legends of Luma

    world and game line. The idea of this collection is to tell a big story through a series of games, with the same characters appearing throughout. We have six heroes (Moon, Lys, Siana, Red, Nostromo and Ulrich) who explore a new fantasy world, trying to figure out why they have been sent there. We had a story and a world, and we were looking for games that could be integrated into the collection.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3555112_t.png]



    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3335920_t.jpg]We had the first game of the collection: Oh Captain!

    , which covers the arrival of our heroes on Luma's world. Oh Captain!

    is a bluffing game, fun and chaotic. We were looking for a more peaceful and quiet game to tell the story of their journey with the Nomads through the mountains of Luma. Play Jeju

    , to use another of the game's names, seemed to meet the main criteria we had for the range: a duration of less than one hour, not too many components, and easy to play.

    But of course we couldn't just change the title. For the first time, Ludonaute worked on an adaptation of an already-published game. It has been a very interesting experience for us, and it's what I would like to tell you about in this post.

    Moving from Jeju Island to Luma: Changing the Theme

    We first thought that instead of traveling on Jeju Island, the players could travel on Luma. But the trip is circular in Play Jeju

    , whereas our heroes travel from Kokota to Wilango, two different places in Luma. Thus, the game board couldn't be a map of Luma. Despite finding another way to transform this game into Luma's world, you'll see that we did not completely give up this idea of traveling between locations.

    Since the six characters are traveling with nomads, we assume that at night they set up camp and gather around the fire. Well, that is the perfect place to tell stories and legends. What if they sat around a huge fire with different groups? The atmosphere of such a background fits perfectly with the kind of feelings we wanted to pass on in this game.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3777944_t.jpg]



    Thus, the Jeju tiles became Story tiles and the point cards that players try to claim with Jeju tiles became Legend cards that you capture through stories. The game now tells of an evening gathering with the nomads instead of a tourist trip on Jeju Island. The game's name would obviously become "Nomads".

    That was the easy part.

    Party of Six: Changing the Number of Players

    Since the "Legends of Luma" story has six characters, we first tried to increase the maximum number of players from four to six by simply adding 2x2 additional tokens and 40 tiles. Alas, this "simple" approach raised a big problem: The game became very chaotic with six players and lasted far too long, leading to them losing interest.

    Looking at the game again, we saw another approach. Play Jeju

    has one special object, the Harubang statue, which moves on the board and sometimes triggers a bonus effect. What if the Harubang statue could be represented by one of our characters? And if so, which one? Well, Lys, the old and noble woman of the party, is the most calm and impressive character. She stands up and supervises the evening.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782357_t.png]



    With Lys represented by the game itself, the other five characters would be player options, which meant that Nomads

    would be playable from two to five players. The gameplay, however, felt very different depending on the number of players. To prevent the gameplay changing this way, we tried to have different set-ups based on the player count, but doing so meant not only having different numbers of tiles, but also a different number of spots on the game board.

    In principle, this wouldn't be an issue. We have a fixed box size and shape for this line, which means we're limited in the size of the game board that we can include, but we puzzled things out to have double-sided game board pieces that could be assembled in different ways according to the number of players. In this way, we could have six, seven, or eight spots around the fire.

    The problem was that this set-up was complicated and laborious — which is not a good way to create an "easy to learn" game.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779683_t.png]



    We then hit upon another idea that allowed us to make the set-up the same for every player configuration. The whole party travels with the nomads all the way through the story, so let's make all of the characters present for the storytelling in the game as well, but those characters who aren't being played have fallen asleep around the campfire. In game terms, the story tiles that they would collect are simply discarded. With this rule, the game lasts the same duration in any player configuration and has the same set-up. Elegant, isn't it?


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779704_t.png]



    Less Chaos, More Tactics

    The goal of the game is to collect the appropriate tiles on the board in order to take point cards. To do so, on their turn, a player sows a stack of discs (that must contain one of their discs) on the various spots. After this move, every player who has a disc on the top of a stack collects the tile next to this stack, even during another player's turn.

    Collecting the tiles can be very tactical since you have to try to stay at the top of the stacks as often as possible, while burying your opponents' discs under yours or under the neutral discs. This is the part of the mechanisms we did not change.

    Regarding the point cards, in Play Jeju

    , they are revealed at random from the deck in a row of five cards, and you have no idea which card will be available next. Moreover, some cards have special effects such as refreshing all the point cards in play or acting as an everlasting Jeju tile. We felt that this part of the game could be frustrating. For the audience we aimed at with Nomads

    , we were looking for a little bit more control.

    The first change we made was to have all the point cards available at the beginning of the game for all the players so that you know exactly what is available and when. This engages a race between the players.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3777988_t.jpg]



    In Play Jeju

    , the point cards require you to discard different

    tiles to claim them, and it was difficult to have a big picture of which tile would be of most interest for you at which moment in the game. What's more, because some point cards had joker spaces that could be satisfied by any tile, sometimes getting one tile or another did not matter, which seemed a pity.

    So we changed the requirements of the point cards into identical tiles, with the option of upgrading a card worth few points into a higher point card during the game. This brought more choices to players: Should I get this low point card now before another player gets it, or should I wait to have more tiles of this type to get a higher point card, even if I am not sure that I can collect enough tiles?

    Moreover, by creating legend tiles this way, we were able to have continuous legends with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We could really tell stories with the cards, so that is what we did.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782359_t.png]


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782379_t.png]



    The third change was to split point cards and special effect cards in order to create a dilemma over which to acquire, but this change created a pattern in the gameplay that was not so good; players simply took the effect cards during the first part of the game, then the point cards during the second part. Thus, we decided to have only point cards (songs and legends) and to instead place the special effects on the character cards.

    Tension and Competition

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779693_t.png]Scoring in Play Jeju

    is nice and encouraging. At the end of the game, you count your point cards and every pair of remaining tiles.

    We wanted to prevent players from collecting as many tiles as possible without thinking through a strategy, so we imposed a penalty of one negative point per remaining tile at the end of the game. This may seem nasty, but in fact it increased the competition and the tension at the end of the game — and we liked this change of mood in the game flow. At a certain point, players suddenly try not to get too many tiles. There is now a twist, and they play the movement phase differently from the beginning of the game.

    We wanted to introduce progress into the game. Of course the tiles that disappear and the race for the point cards give the game a smooth progression, but we felt like the game was made of two parts: before and after the twist. Then came the idea of having this twist several times during the game. What if we do not attend one evening gathering, but several? After all, the journey of the characters from Kokota to Wilango lasts dozens of days, months even.

    So we introduced new tiles, moon tiles that are now scattered among the story tiles. When four moon tiles have appeared, it's now the time of the full moon. Our characters do not change into werewolves, but rather they review their situation. There is an intermediary scoring that implies you can't afford to get behind with the legend cards too long. This new game rule brings a lot of tension and offers you choices.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779706_t.png] The Cherry on the Cake

    In Nomads

    , players are the heroes of Luma: Moon, Lys, Siana, Red, Nostromo and Ulrich. Each of them has their own personality, and we wanted to show this in every game of the collection. That means that a special ability for each character would be welcome.

    For a long time during game development, the "special effects" were available via some of the point cards. At one moment, it seemed obvious that these special effects should be the special abilities of the characters. Thus, these effect cards became song cards, the only cards in the game that you can now acquire by discarding different tiles instead of identical ones. The game includes only four song cards, and each player can acquire only one. You might not want to get one too early in the game because they are worth less than the legend cards, but if you wait too long, you'll collect only a less valuable one or even none at all, which might leave you stuck with leftover tiles.

    As for the special effects, it was easy to assign an effect to each character of the story:

    • Nostromo has an extra disc: his pet frog.

    • Siana is an acrobat, so she can jump over a spot.

    • Red is a small boy, so he slips between the other characters.

    • Ulrich is slow and heavy, so he can drop two discs at the same time.

    • Moon is Lys' daughter, so she gets the bonus of the Lys token more easily than the others.

    To conclude, after a year of playtests and design sessions, we are giving Play Jeju

    not a twin, but a brother: Nomads

    . Both come from the same family but they have quite different personalities. We thank Gary Kim a lot for his help and his kindness.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3779707_t.png]


    I think you did a really good job.
    I like Play Jeju, but also like Nomads.
    They have their own fun points!
    Thanks to all of your efforts for this lovely game!
    —Gary Kim

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!, or Buzzing Down Your Opponents

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…ney-bee-mine-or-buzzing-d

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3708221_t.png] Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

    from designer Katsuya Kitano

    and publisher New Board Game Party

    plays out like an aggressive, in-your-face version of Thorsten Gimmler's classic card game No Thanks!

    In most rounds of the game, you will be presented with a face-down card. You must either place 1-3 tokens on the card to pass it along to the next player, or you can take the card for yourself, collecting all the tokens in the process to enrich your honey stores — unless you made a horrible choice, in which you collect no honey, instead pay out honey to a collective honeypot, then die. One sting is all you get. Bzzzt!

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782115_t.jpg]

    Deck breakdown

    The game features a "partridge" deck — one 1, two 2s, three 3s, up to ten 10s — with some of those cards featuring the word "LOW" or "HIGH" on the back of them. Cards numbered 6-10 are high, with 2-4 of the cards at each number bearing the word "HIGH", and the remaining 4-6 cards at each number having a blank back. As you might expect, cards numbered 1-5 are low, with only 1-2 of each number being marked as such.

    At the start of a round, everyone receives a hand of five cards, then each person reveals a card simultaneously, with the highest number played going first. This player chooses a card from their hand, places it face down, places 1-3 tokens on it from their personal stash (with everyone having 15 tokens to start), draws a replacement card, then passes this card clockwise. Each player faces the choose-or-pay-out decision described earlier, with the initial player of the card being forced to take it — along with a now much larger pile of tokens — should everyone else pass.

    Why would you not want to take a card? Because if you collect a second copy of a numbered card in your honeypot, then you die and are out of the round. Bzzt! As a penalty for being stung, you must place a number of tokens matching the number of the card that killed you in the center of the table. The sole player who wins the round collects this sweet, sweet pile built from the collective pain of other players.

    And how does someone win? Collect three different types of "low" bees, collect 35 or more points of bees in your honeypot, or be the last bee beeing because everyone else has been stung. Bzzt!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782086_t.jpg]

    Playing the day before Tokyo Game Market



    Thus, Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

    plays out with endless bluffing and taunts. Instead of the randomness of No Thanks!

    , in which players are presented with whatever card comes off the top of the deck, you are now confronted with a mystery card of the active player's choice, a card possibly made less mysterious — and more-or-less threatening — by the word "LOW" or "HIGH" written on its back. If the card reads "HIGH" and you have only low cards, then you can safely take the card and collect the tokens — but the active player probably placed only one token on the card since they knew you would take it, so maybe they're trying to target one of the other players with this particular card, or maybe they were trying to ditch a card that would kill them if it made it all the way around the table and you wouldn't mind seeing that

    happen. It will cost you only one token to pass the problem to someone else. So what do you do?

    In the end, you have only a binary result: You die and exit the round, or else you claim the card and the tokens on it, then you're on the hook as to which card you want to circle the table. Sometimes you want that position since you're happy to be in control and have the option to play a card that will likely kill someone or get back to you, but at other points you're happy to leave the driving to someone else. Let them fight it out!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782117_t.jpg]

    Even the inside of the box is golden — honey everywhere!



    The ability to choose how many tokens you place on a card when you first send it out is a nice sweetener for being in that position, another lever to bend people in contortions as they try to figure out whether or not to take the card. If they pass, they have to place the same number of tokens on the card as you, so do you make the cost cheap to extort them slowly or make it high to take more of their tokens or convince someone late in the player order to take a card that would have killed you?

    No right answer exists; as with many such bluffing games, the choices all depend on those at the table, what their personalities are like, how much you trash talk one another, and (yes, this is important) the face-up cards everyone has in their honeypots.

    A few of the card have special powers to account for their minimal presence in the deck: If you catch a 2 or 3 bee, then you must discard a card, giving you only three cards in hand for the remainder of the round. If you catch the 1 and are later ejected from the round, you must pay double the normal penalty. The 1 is a safe catch, after all, and one-third of the way to a victory condition, so catching it must have consequences!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782120_t.jpg]

    Beelines with funky indexing



    I've played Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

    twice on a review copy from New Board Game Party, once each with four and five players, and in many ways the spirit of the game mirrors that of the TimeBomb

    titles from the same publisher (most recently TimeBomb Evolution

    , for which I wrote an overview

    recently) — not because of similarities in the gameplay, but because of the feelings generated during play, namely who can you trust.

    In TimeBomb

    and its sequel games, you want to find your partner(s) during play so that you can figure out whose information you can trust so that you know how you can use that information to your advantage. You don't have any partners in Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

    , but you're still watching to see what players do, then how that relates to the hidden info they put into play. Admittedly the choices are binary (take a card or don't) and might boil down to a crapshoot (since a player can't choose to play a card they don't have in hand), and one mistake might put you out of a round, but being out isn't all bad. After paying a penalty, you score whatever tokens you hold at the end of the round, and whoever has the most points after a predetermined number of rounds wins. Thus, losing isn't the end for you because if you manage to stay in the round but keep making bad choices, you could be bled dry, then still die before the end.

    The artwork falls somewhere on the line between cute and disturbing, with that line wrapping around to meet its own tail, so you might find yourself falling into both camps, as was the case with multiple players in my games. Most disturbing of all, though, is what awaits you if you make a fatal choice...


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3782122_t.jpg]

    Flip the deck breakdown card in front of a player when they die — bzzt!

    Designer Diary: Warriors of Jogu, or Inspired by an Accident

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…jogu-or-inspired-accident

    by Tony Chen

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3712491_t.png]Some things happen through inspiration; some things happen by accident. Warriors of Jogu

    , my second game design, is a combination of both. Inspired by Liar's Dice

    and Poker

    , the core idea for the game was developed in a couple of days in March 2009, and for a little over five years existed as a microgame. What prompted me to fully flesh out this microgame into a card game was an accident that happened in late 2014.

    The Accident

    My then girlfriend Jane had just gotten into board gaming, and I told her about this microgame I had designed. Well, she said she wanted to try it, so one day after work we went to a café and played it. The game takes only about five minutes, hence we were able to play it over and over and over again that night.

    Jane had the toughest time playing the game. The game was so simple that she felt she had "nothing to do", yet the game had enough things going on that she could tell that she was missing out on something she could be doing. I had never seen her so paralyzed before in a game, and it wasn't analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is when you have too much

    stuff to think about and can't focus on the important choices. This was kind of the opposite: Jane wanted to think about something, but had seemingly too little

    to work with! (She was the one who kept suggesting that we play the game over and over again. I think she was traumatized and really needed to figure the game out before going to bed that night.)

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3767487_t.jpg] The Core Concept

    Here is the game that we played that night. In each round, each player draws one location card and secretly looks at it. The board has six locations (numbered 1-6) corresponding to the location cards. A player has only two warrior cards in hand: a warrior 1 and a warrior 2. On their turn, a player either plays a warrior 1 to one of the six locations, a warrior 2 to one of the six locations, or passes.

    Each location has a capacity limit of three, that is, each location can accommodate at most two warrior 1s, or a warrior 2 and a warrior 1 (from either player).

    If a player passes on their turn, they cannot play any more warrior cards for the rest of the round. Theoretically, a player may pass on their first turn without having played any

    warrior cards. Once both players have passed, they flip over the two location cards they received at the start of the round; these locations are the battle locations for the round. All other locations (and the warriors thereat) are ignored. For each warrior a player has at a battle location, they gain a strategy rating of X times Y, where X is the warrior's strength (1 or 2), and Y is the number of the location (1-6). If, for example, I have my warrior 2 at battle location 5, and my warrior 1 at battle location 3, then my strategy rating is 2*5+1*3 = 13.

    Whoever has the higher strategy rating wins the round and some victory points. The number of victory points won is equal to one plus the total value of the warrior cards played by the losing player, so if my opponent played a warrior 1, then loses the round, I'd get 2 victory points for winning the round; if instead they had played both warrior 1 and warrior 2, then lost, I'd get 4 victory points for winning the round. Whoever reaches 10 victory points first wins.

    At its heart, this game is about bluffing. The warriors are analogous to poker chips. The more chips you play, the more likely you are to win the round. However, if you lose, you'll end up giving away more to your opponent.

    The Accident (Continued)

    Games like this can be very abstract, very mathematical, and seemingly very random. Jane couldn't get into it. It was too basic, too raw. A little bit about Jane as a gamer: She got hooked on gaming with Cosmic Encounter

    . It was a five-player game, hidden aliens, and she revealed Mirror on the final turn to claim a solo victory. She likes to hold a hand of cards, she likes to use special abilities, and she likes to win.

    I went home that night thinking that there is nothing wrong with my microgame per se, but how do I make it a game that Jane would like to play? And it hit me. Make a card game out of it with different decks like Summoner Wars

    , with special abilities on each card! This way, Jane would have something to strategize over. She loves having a hand of cards, and picking when and how to use them.

    However, I didn't start haphazardly slapping down abilities. As a designer, I have a particular procedure

    . I wanted the core of the game to be the master and not the slave, to be that Interesting Problem and not a mere tool for moving things along. Therefore, all the cards and abilities were designed to highlight the core of the game in a complementary way, thereby keeping the decision-point to game-time ratio extremely high.

    Within one week, I made the first two faction decks for Warriors of Jogu

    , and after trying it out we knew we had something special. Retroactively, I realized that most good card games, from Magic: The Gathering

    to Android: Netrunner

    to Blue Moon

    to Star Wars: The Card Game

    , have interesting microgames at their cores. The microgames themselves are interesting in their own rights, and the card abilities complement and bring out the interesting aspects of the core mechanisms. We didn't set out to build a great card game, but through twists and turns, a good microgame ready to serve as the base system, a little bit of love, an apparent problem, and some clever solutions, we came up with one.

    Over the next two years in 2015 and 2016, we developed many different factions, testing and balancing these over and over again. Each faction has a distinct and characteristic playstyle, bending elements of bluffing and timing to its favor in unique ways.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3767451_t.jpg]



    Ideation and Development

    For the special abilities, we drew inspiration from the races in Blue Moon

    , Cosmic Encounter

    , Summoner Wars

    , and gaming lore in general. The League of Agents, for example, is inspired by ninjas. Their cards are played face-down to a location, so the opponent doesn't know what those units are! The Gang of Mibits is modeled after the idea of rats and small creatures, having units with low strength but abilities that allow them to move from location to location even after they have been played to the board. The Ganji Resistance, Jane's idea, has units that become stronger and stronger each turn that they stay on the board, eventually exploding if they outgrow the capacity limit of the location. The Zaigas faction is, suprisingly, inspired by my dog. To create a feeling of the dog's friendly and confident personality, I designed a card with the following ability: If the opponent plays a card into the location corresponding to Zaigas' location card, the Zaigas reveal their location card to their opponent and gain three morale.

    In all, we created fifteen factions that are diverse and unique, each having a characteristic playstyle. However, they all follow the same design philosophy. A faction's theme must come through organically and contribute to emergent gameplay. No forced execution of themes, nothing ham-fisted.

    Testing and Balance

    I have a short confession to make. I used to think that games with luck cannot be deep.

    Then I played Yomi

    , a glorified rock-paper-scissors game played with decks of cards. I played for fun at first. But then I kept playing, and kept playing, and I started to notice some patterns, opportunities to leave myself in better situations, ways to set up better bets. So I started applying what I learned, and I started winning, at one point beating an opponent seven times straight.

    While Yomi

    provided no direct inspiration for Warriors of Jogu

    , it had a deep impact on how I viewed luck-based games, which in turn affected how I tested, balanced, and designed Warriors of Jogu

    .

    There is actually a surprising amount of information you can gather from your opponent's actions. In Yomi

    , is your opponent blocking a lot? Maybe their hand is short on punches. In Poker

    , if a player bets a certain way on the flop, and another way on the turn, you can actually deduce if, for example, they are sitting on a pair of kings, a flush, or something else. In Warriors of Jogu

    , the fact that your opponent played/did not play a card to a location in a specific situation could signal a lot of information.

    So while luck-based games are affected by chance, there are actually many ways a good player can affect the odds, and the tricks behind them, in a way, actually require more creativity than a clever move in a perfect information game does.

    Warriors of Jogu

    's core test team consists of seven playtesters who have diverse playstyles. Some are more aggressive, some are more conservative, some are good at managing their overall deck, some key in on specific tricks and combos, etc. But everyone has something in common: We all understand luck-based games. This makes playtesting highly effective because games are tested by people who understand Warriors of Jogu

    , the strategies involved, the balance, etc. Altogether, we've tested well over three hundred games. We also did blind playtests with strangers and open playtests with the public, but this is mainly to see whether people could understand the rulebook, to gauge how accessible the game is, etc. (The reception here has been pretty positive. At any particular convention/event, people would tell us that our game is the best they've played all day.)


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3493722_t.jpg]



    Final Stages

    In 2017, we completed testing for five factions that will be included in the base game: Guards of Keion, Gang of Mibits, League of Agents, Society of Engineers, and Tribe Wu. In the final stages of testing, most of the balance fixes involve simply altering the card count in each deck, e.g., changing the number of Conjurers in the Tribe Wu deck from seven to five, changing the number of Bomb Towers in the Engineers deck, reducing the number of Good-for-Somethings in the Mibits deck by one, etc.

    I want to talk about the Bomb Tower and the Engineers deck, as an example. In our testing, we found that the Engineers are a little weak against Guards of Keion, and strong against Mibits. A Bomb Tower destroys a card, so they are generally stronger against Guards of Keion (who have a lot of high strength cards) than they are against the Mibits (since destroying a small Mibit unit affects relatively little). Thus, we increased the amount of Bomb Towers in the deck, thereby simultaneously making the Engineers a bit better against the Guards and a bit weaker against the Mibits.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3628733_t.jpg]



    Next Step

    We believe we have created a very clever game that is filled with luck in all the right ways. Our next step is to showcase our product of love and labor to the gaming community. First up is SPIEL '17, where Jane (now my fiancée) and I will showcase and demo Warriors of Jogu: Feint

    . Please visit Monsoon Publishing

    at booth 7: D108!

    Tony Chen

    •••



    To give you more details on the gameplay, here are brief descriptions of each faction's playstyle.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3767506_t.png]



    GUARDS OF KEION
    Strength: Strong units, ability to play straight up.
    Weakness: Information disadvantage.


    The Guards of Keion have several units that can, in the right situation, secure advantage in a round despite blatantly telegraphing their battle location to the opponent. Therefore, the Guards have an advantage in playing the game straight up provided they do so at the right moment.

    However, this does not mean that deception should not be a part of a good Guard player's strategy. Because playing straight up is such a strong tactic for Guards of Keion, it is that much more devastating when they do play deceptively because the opponent will be really caught off guard.

    Guards of Keion have some of the best units in terms of Strength, but in order to make this advantage count they must overcome their inherent information disadvantage. If a Guards of Keion player can deduce his opponent's battle location with consistency and show their own battle location at the correct moments, then the Guards of Keion's high Strength units can be hard to beat.


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    GANG OF MIBITS
    Strength: Information advantage, maneuverability.
    Weakness: Small units.


    The Mibits have some of the smallest units in the game in terms of Strength. However, what they lack in firepower, they make up in maneuverability with units that can move between locations after being deployed. This mobility not only allows the Mibits to wait and observe where the opponent units are being sent to before committing their troops, it also makes it harder for their opponent to deduce the Mibits' battle location.

    Additionally, the Mibits have an ability that allows them to play multiple cards on a turn, as well as an ability that allows them to play zero net cards on a turn. By speeding up deployment, the Mibits can secure numerical advantage at a location early in the round. By delaying deployment, they can withhold commitment of their troops as they gather more information about the opponent's troop deployment.

    Due to their small size, the Mibits will have to concentrate the bulk of their force at one or two locations in order to have a shot at winning the round. Therefore, they must extract every value they can out of their information advantage, then move to the right locations, while keeping their opponent away from the Mibits' own battle location. When playing against the Mibits, aim to use their mobility against them by encouraging them to mobilize to a fake location!


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    LEAGUE OF AGENTS
    Strength: Hidden deployment, ability to reduce opponent's draw pile.
    Weakness: Poor Morale to Strength ratio.


    When an Agent card is played face down to a location, the opponent doesn't know if that is a 0-Strength unit, 2-Strength unit, or a 4-Strength unit until resolution. Armed with these hidden units, the Agents are adept at concealing their objective for the current round. Not only will the opponent be kept guessing the Agent's battle location, but they also won't know whether the Agents are even trying to win the current round or not!

    This trait allows the Agents to draw their opponents into continuing to play cards even when they have given up on the round. Since the faction draw pile is not reshuffled once it's depleted, the Agent's opponent is faced with the dilemma of conserving cards versus playing enough cards to secure a win. By using their stealth to tell an enticing "story", the Agents can leverage this uncertainty to trick the opponent into overplaying or underplaying faction cards.

    However, the Agents should be wary of playing too many cards themselves. With the worst Morale to Strength ratio out of all the factions, the Agents must pick their fights with great precision, while using their stealth to put their opponent in a precarious situation.


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    SOCIETY OF ENGINEERS
    Strength: High strength towers, high stake commitment.
    Weakness: Restrictive deployment.


    The Engineers have special placement rules for their two types of units: Towers and Engineers. An Engineer may be played to a location only if doing so does not exceed a capacity of 4, which means that they can be shut out from a location quite early in the round. A Tower, on the other hand, can ignore capacity requirement, even the default capacity restriction of 10. However, for each Tower played to a location, there must be a corresponding Engineer. Essentially, each Engineer at a location allows their faction to build a Tower at that location.

    This mechanism means that the Engineers are limited in their ability to respond to their opponent's maneuvers. In fact, they often don't bother and instead initiate the conflicts. By choosing the terms of engagement and forcing their opponents to come to them, the Engineers can use their static but high Strength Towers to overpower their opponent.

    When an Engineer is deployed to a location and their opponent does not immediately respond with a unit deployment to that location, a second Engineer can be deployed thereto. Two Engineers means two Towers, an overwhelming advantage if the location turns out to be a battle location! Essentially, the Engineers raise the stakes early and fast, immediately forcing their opponent into making a tough decision.


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    TRIBE WU
    Strength: Dangerous even when deploying units to non-battle locations, ambush.
    Weakness: Morale intensive.


    While knowing the opponent's battle location is always useful, Tribe Wu relies less on attacking the opponent's battle location, and more on keeping their own battle location secret in order to spring a big "ambush".

    Central to Tribe Wu's strategy is the Prodigy, who has 7 Strength but must be played to a location determined by the opponent. To have any chance of their opponent mistakenly placing the Prodigy into a battle location, the Tribe Wu player must hide the identity of their battle location well!

    For Tribe Wu, playing units into non-battle locations might help force an eventual Prodigy into the correct battle location. This creates an unequal situation where Tribe Wu gains more utility by playing units into the "wrong" locations than other factions do. And this is how Tribe Wu's dual threat works. Are they pulling their opponent into playing units to the wrong locations, resulting in an advantage for them? Or are they actually playing into the correct location? With units of decent Strength at their disposal, Tribe Wu can fill up a battle location pretty quickly if their opponent doesn't react.

    A downside to these powerful units is how Morale intensive they are. If Tribe Wu is not careful, it can lose over 30 Morale — and the game — in a single round.

    SPIEL '17 Preview: King of the Dice, or Rolling and Rueing

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…ice-or-rolling-and-rueing

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3757332_t.jpg]"New games are for new gamers." I've said this before

    , and I'll say it again. In fact, I just did.

    What do I mean by this? Hundreds of new games hit the market each year. Our SPIEL '17 Preview

    , for example, is nearing one thousand listings, and unless you are a crazy person with an endless bag of cash and time, you will not play all the games listed on the preview. Heck, you likely won't play even 10% of the games listed. If you did manage to do so, however, you would likely discover that many of the games listed on it are like other games that already exist.

    Take, for example, my preview choice for today: King of the Dice

    , a.k.a. Würfelkönig

    , by designer Nils Nilsson

    and publisher HABA

    . At heart, King of the Dice

    is a dice-rolling game in which you want to create certain combinations on the dice in order to claim cards and score points. Perhaps you already know of such games? I think you do. King of the Dice

    is not new in this regard, and those who have already played games along these lines might view the design as more of the same. Those who haven't, however, will find a delightful little dice game with lots of "ooh!" and "aah!" moments as you succeed or opponents fail.

    To set up, lay out the village cards as shown below, with each village having cards worth 2, 3, and 4 points. Shuffle the citizen cards, then place one under each village, with the deck placed on the left. Place the shuffled penalty card deck nearby, then give someone the six dice and start taking turns.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3780258_t.jpg]



    On a turn, you roll the dice up to three times (so familiar!), setting aside any dice that you choose not to reroll. You can stop whenever you wish (and must stop after three rolls), and if you've rolled a dice combination showing on one or more of the citizen cards, you can claim one of the cards. If the color of the citizen matches the color of the village above them, then claim the top village card as well. If you can't claim a citizen card, then take the top penalty card; if you do this, discard the rightmost card in the line. Place your citizen and penalty cards in a single stack so that only the most recently acquired card is visible. End your turn by sliding all the citizen cards to the right to fill the gap, then flip the topmost card of the citizen deck into the empty space at the left of the line.

    Keep taking turns until one village pile is empty, the penalty deck is empty, or the citizen deck is empty. When this happens, the game ends and everyone counts their points to see who wins.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3780260_t.jpg]

    Pre-production components; you probably won't have a serial number on your cards



    That's it. Well, that's mostly it, but in those short two paragraphs, you now know everything needed to play King of the Dice

    .

    Each color of characters has similar requirements to claim them. All of the blue cards require some number of dice that are the same color, while the brown cards require some number of dice showing the same number. Green cards require number combinations: two pair, three pair, full house, four-of-a-kind, etc. Purple cards require color combinations similar to the green cards, but with specific colors instead of allowing you to fill in the symbols as you wish.

    Yellow cards differ from this pattern by coming in two types: three requiring a numerical sequence, and two requiring either all odd or all even dice.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3780259_t.jpg]

    Each fairy is worth as many points as the number of fairies you collect



    Some cards have bonuses that give small twists during play. If you claim a card with a star, you take another turn immediately; the yellow cards with an arrow leaping a square allow you to roll the dice up to four times on your subsequent turn. The magician lets you claim the card to the right of it in addition to the magician itself, and the dragon, once claimed, is gifted to another player. Here's fire in your lap, pal!

    I've played King of the Dice

    three times on a pre-production copy, twice with two and one with three, and the game delivers exactly what's promised by the components and short description: Tension and angst as you try to complete die combinations of varying complexities, merged with a tetch of thumb-twiddling as you wait for your next turn. This isn't an issue in the two-player game, even when playing with a hammy eight-year-old who loves to tell complete stories between every single roll of the dice, but I can't imagine playing with four or five players except during a party situation in which you get up to refill your drink and mingle between turns. Maybe that's just me.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3780262_t.jpg]

    Warning: The purple looks similar to the brown in dim light



    The different colors on the dice — with red, blue and green spread evenly across the pips — do a nice job of pulling you in different directions during play, similar to the dice used in Thomas Sing's excellent dice game Kribbeln

    . As in so many games of this type, after the initial roll you're weighing probabilities of what to shoot for, and sometimes the colors pull you one way and the pips pull you another. You make choices and often have a back-up card in mind that you might still be able to land should plan A not come to pass.

    Of course sometimes no amount of planning will save you from what the dice hold...


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3780349_t.jpg]

    Awesome performance in my most recent game with a final score of -1

    Designer Diary: Panic Mansion, or Waiter, There's a Rolling Eye in My Haunted House

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/696…ion-or-waiter-theres-roll

    by Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710491_t.png] Panic Mansion

    — a big box design from me, Asger

    , and Blue Orange Games

    — is debuting at SPIEL in October 2017. We are very proud of it and hope you will have as much fun with the game as we do.

    Panic Mansion

    is a shaky dexterity game for families and kids ages 6 and up in which you want to place your adventurer into the room with all the gold crates while not letting in ghosts, snakes, or the odd rolling eye. The twist is that you cannot touch the game pieces, so you must shake and tilt that haunted house.

    No Pictures, Please?

    When I sit down to write designer diaries, one of the first things I do is go through old pictures of prototypes. It gives me a sense of accomplishment looking back at the early and very rough stages of what is now a published game, and to be honest it also serves to refresh my memory. It is not uncommon that my game design work is completed 12 to 24 months before a game hits the shelves, sometimes even longer. That is just the nature of this industry.

    So I started scrolling through old pictures to look for Panic Mansion

    almost in vain. This is very unusual. I have dozens of pictures of A Tale of Pirates

    , Gold Fever

    , Frogriders

    , and most of my other published and upcoming titles. Why the sudden lack of pictures? Well, Panic Mansion

    is fast and furious. It is easy to get carried away and forget to take pictures. Also, this is not the type of game in which I could analyze a picture of the mid-play game state afterwards for any great benefit. Finally, the development cycle was actually very short before Blue Orange Games signed and took over. I think we managed to demonstrate the fun gameplay and our vision with a basic prototype. To our luck, Blue Orange saw the potential.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771800_t.jpg]

    The prototype we pitched at the Spielwarenmesse Toy Fair in Nürnberg in early 2016...



    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771802_t.jpg]

    ...and what it looks like now in Panic Mansion



    A Vision for Two

    When Asger and I look for a publisher for our games, we take a lot of factors into consideration. I don't want to derail this diary too much with boring business talk, so let me just boil all those factors down to the bare bones. Essentially we are looking for publishers who share our vision for the game and who are able to deliver a quality product.

    I like to believe we have been fortunate so far, and Panic Mansion

    provides an excellent case in point for why such care matters. Let's turn the box over and look at the back:


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3773130_t.jpg]

    You can take the box from the shelf, turn it over, and play to see whether this is something you'd enjoy



    The Blue Orange team did a wonderful job of tuning our prototype and the vision we shared into what I believe is an amazing game and product. The ability to play the game while still in shrink is a wonderful gimmick for which I can take absolutely no credit. However, the crawling spider and all the other pieces inside the box is anything but a gimmick, but now I am getting ahead of myself.

    Components Matter — and Not Just for Bling Bling

    Components matter. Some of you will probably read that statement and disagree; others will say it is obvious. As a gamer, I have been back and forth on this subject myself over the years. I like nice aesthetics but not at the expense of functionality. As a game designer, I have learned that components really matter but not just for the toy factor or for the ability to set up games on a table so they look like pieces of art.

    In Panic Mansion

    , components matter. They are, in fact, a large part of the core gameplay. It is a dexterity game, after all. As you shake and tilt the haunted house to move your adventurer through the maze, you will see that the adventurer, ghost, snake, and all the other pieces serve a purpose. They support the setting of a mysterious and haunted house AND they all have interesting shapes, sizes, weights, and even textures that add to the challenge.

    The twisty snake blocks the door. The eyes roll around frantically messing up your plans. And the ghost — my archnemesis when playing this game — is a nightmare to get rid of. If this is all nonsense in your ears, I will just say that you will know what I'm talking about when you try the game.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771804_t.jpg]

    Comparison of game pieces: published game (top) and prototype; if the adventurer looks like a certain fictional character,
    it might be that the Blue Orange team was tired of all my talk about how great that IP would be...



    Thinking Inside the Box

    I do not recall the exact origin of the idea that became Panic Mansion

    , and unfortunately the lack of photos doesn't help me here, but I do know the idea came sometime in the autumn of 2015. At that time, we explored different ways to create games around the game box. After all, in most board games, you take out the contents, then put the box away, which is a shame. The box is an interesting component that rises above the table, and aside from that, it's one of the most expensive parts of producing a board game, so why not integrate it? Our prototype used both the box lid and bottom as haunted houses.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771821_t.jpg]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771817_t.jpg]



    Ironically in the published version of the game, you now take the contents out of the box, then put the box away. That was the small price we needed to pay to reduce set-up time and allow for up to four players in the game.

    Panic Mansion

    is the first game to be released that was born out of that period of thinking inside the box, and there will be more chapters to write in the next years. For now, Asger and I will demo and sign Panic Mansion

    at SPIEL '17 on Thursday and Saturday 12:00-13:00 at the Blue Orange Games booth (3: M107). Come by and say hi!

    Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Sakura Hunt, or Between Our Two Lives There Is Also the Life of the Cherry Blossom

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/697…unt-or-between-our-two-li

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3631552_t.jpg]I've traveled to Japan a few times to cover Tokyo Game Market, but I've yet to see the annual cherry blossoms since they typically bloom in early April in Tokyo and I show up in May. (I also missed out on the tulip fields in full bloom when my wife and I lived in the Netherlands, visiting the field only after they'd all been cut down, leaving us to ogle at vast fields of cut stems.)

    Sakura Hunt

    from Yu Maruno

    and JUGAME STUDIO

    showcases these cherry blossoms in all their glory and gives folks like me the chance to enjoy them from afar, as well as the chance to miss seeing them once again. Now you can be disappointed all the time instead of only once a year!

    In game terms, you're trying to collect sets of three cards, either in numerical sequence or bearing the same number. At the end of the game, you then arrange these cards in a panorama from low to high, scoring points if you have five or more cards in a row while also scoring bonus points for having three cards of the same number or three sake jokers. (Jokers can extend a panorama, allowing you to consider 1-2-3-4-J-6-7-8 as being connected, but you treat this as only a seven-card panorama since you were blitzed on sake on day 5 and don't remember it that well.)


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3778502_t.jpg]

    Huge points for long panoramas



    How do you acquire these gorgeous cards? From four hanami rows that are created over the course of the game. The rules explain that "hanami" is "a Japanese custom to enjoy and appreciate the blossoming of sakura", so you and your follow players seed these rows with cards, which you then claim on a later turn.

    In more detail, you start with six cards in hand and on a turn you can:

    • Place a card in your hand into a hanami row, then draw a new card, or

    • Swap a card in your hand with a card already in a hanami row, or

    • Pick up one card from a hanami row, then combine it with two cards from your hand to create a set, then draw a new card.

    You score points for this last action, with the most points coming when four cards are in the row. Yes, you are trying to time the viewing of sakura to just the right moment to see them at their most beautiful. When you score, your hand size is reduced by one, making it a bit tougher to create sets in future turns. What's more, once you visit a hanami row and score from it, you can't score from it again. You must travel the country and score once from each of the four rows.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3778503_t.jpg]

    Purty



    Once you've scored four times, you take only the first action for the rest of the game, thereby pushing it toward a conclusion because the game ends once all players have scored four times or all hanami rows hold six cards.

    While beautiful in design, Sakura Hunt

    doesn't quite work as I think the designer intended, something I've experienced multiple times over five playings (4x 3p & 1x 2p) on a review copy from Japon Brand, which will sell the game at SPIEL '17. The problem comes from the swapping action because if players are paying attention, they don't want to create a row with four cards since doing so gives an opponent the chance to maximize their score (after which the row will have only three cards, thereby requiring another discard before you'll want to score there). Thus, someone with, say, an 8 and 9 in hand will swap one of these cards for a 10 in a row that has three cards, then on their next turn they'll swap this 10 for the card they laid down on the previous turn. At some point someone will break the cycle, either laying down a fourth card or settling for only two points, but this spinning of the wheels is frustrating.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3778501_t.jpg]

    Points for sets depend on how many cards are in a row when you take one



    In some games, sure, you want to take a sideways step to see what other players are doing and be able to respond to their actions, but if everyone is shuffling sideways over multiple turns, then the game itself ceases to advance, at which point it begins to die. (Games are like sharks in this regard — well, like sharks that are obligate ram ventilators

    anyway.)

    The rules contain a variant in which when you swap cards, you must place the newly received card on the table. This card is still part of your hand, but you can use it solely for creating a set, not for further swaps and not for placing in a row. This small change greatly affects how the game plays out because the laying out of a card commits you to playing it in the future, giving others the chance to scoop cards you might want and thereby offsetting the benefit that comes from swapping, namely setting up a row with a card that you want to score with in the future.

    This variant complicates the table as you'll now have cards in hand, cards on the table that are to be considered in your hand, and cards in played sets, but I can't imagine playing without it as otherwise you'd just be swapping cards turn after turn until the heat death of the universe, which means you'd never see the sakura in real life.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3778506_t.jpg]

    Colored tokens let you mark a row once you've visited it

    Designer Diary: Dragon Castle, or How to Do Proper Justice to Your Mechanisms

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…tle-or-how-do-proper-just

    by Lorenzo Silva

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3683059_t.png]Here in the western part of the world, the game called "Mahjong" we're mostly familiar with is the solitaire variant. This label is since it doesn't have anything to do with the real traditional Chinese game by the same name, a set-collection game of skill, strategy and calculations, with a bit of chance involved, for four players. The only thing they have in common is the tiles used for the game.

    With that said, the tile-collection mechanism of "solitaire mahjong" has been popular for decades, especially in video game form, and it is quite good on its own merits. There is something fundamentally satisfying in searching for a couple of matching tiles to remove and slowly demolishing a huge structure of tiles! You can even start with the tiles laid down in many different shapes to greatly alter the feeling of each game. There must be a reason these video games have been so popular ever since their invention, after all!

    This is how the story of Dragon Castle

    started. During an IDEAG

    event — IDEAG being a series of Italian events where game designers show their prototypes to players and publishers — Luca Ricci

    approached me with the idea of making a board game based on "mahjong" (meaning the solitaire). I found the idea very appealing for all the reasons stated above and more, so after a couple of email exchanges we started to work separately on our ideas (me in Milan at the Horrible Games

    headquarters, Luca in Rome), comparing our prototypes every couple of weeks to decide where to bring the development next.

    The core of the project has always been to use that tile-collection mechanism. Traditional mahjong tiles are divided into "simples" (numeric tiles going from 1 to 9), "honors" (dragons and winds), and "bonus tiles" (seasons and flowers).

    One of the earliest decisions we made was to turn the "simples" into factions ("farmers" for the "bamboos", "merchants" for the "circles" that I've always seen as coins, and "soldiers" for the "characters"). The soldiers, in particular, would have to be swords in increasing numbers, like the other suits, instead of the Chinese characters. This apparently insignificant change would give us two advantages: We could start creating a setting for our (otherwise very abstract) game, and it would also make the tiles easier to distinguish for western eyes without losing that "mahjong" feeling.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3769754_t.jpg]

    For the prototype, we used a standard mahjong set with our artwork stickered on top



    From here came the idea of the "crumbling castle", that is, a place that people (i.e., the tiles/factions) are abandoning in search of a new home — a premise that has remained in the game ever since. The early prototype of the game, though, was very different from what you see today. You had a more structured player board divided into different areas: the city, the fields, the barracks, and so on. Depending on the kind of tile you collected, and the area of your realm you placed them in, you could trigger different instant effects or work towards different end-game scoring criteria (waging war against your neighbors, removing farmer tiles to harvest, etc.). We wanted the special tiles to have thematic effects, too, but none of the ideas we tested was really convincing.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3683062_t.jpg]

    A playtest of this early version of the game



    This was a phase when the development of the game proceeded slowly. It took me a bit of time to realize why, but the reason none of the iterations of the game using this system really convinced me was that we were building a quite structured and complicated Eurogame that was based on a simple and instantly recognizable mechanism with a distinct family appeal. We did want strategy in the game, but this was not the way to go.

    This realization finally became crystal clear to me one day when I casually showed the game to my mother. She instantly said, "Oooh, mahjong", and for once she was really interested to know more about a game (even though she's not really a gamer at all) — yet I knew she would never, ever want to play a game like that. That's when it hit me that a core mechanism with such a broad appeal had to be used in a more accessible game because otherwise it would feel like a waste (to me, at least). Both Luca and I were struggling to find the right direction, and with many other projects on our hands, the game was slowly falling behind in our respective development schedules, but I always kept it alive in a part of my brain.

    The project finally found new life when Hjalmar Hach

    joined the Horrible Games team. I showed him the latest prototype, and I explained the general direction I wanted the project to go, that is, a more accessible, puzzle-like game that would better fit with the core mechanism and its history. I was hoping that a pair of fresh eyes would see something new, something that me and Luca, with all our development history and layers of old ideas and game versions, found difficult to see. And luckily, that was the case! After a few hectic brainstorming sessions, we basically made a whole new game based on spatial objective cards that players needed to complete by building certain patterns with tiles of certain colors (a bit like Ticket to Ride

    ). This is when the game really started to take off.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3683071_t.jpg]

    Me, Hjalmar Hach and Luca Ricci playtesting a semi-final prototype of the game



    We quickly went through many revisions. The game became more and more accessible, and we started to finally really enjoy playing it. We had no more areas on the player boards — just a single area where you could place your tiles, score the objectives, then place more tiles on top of them to score more objectives. It now felt like you were building your own little castle. Players would compete both for the tiles they needed to take from the central castle (now finally called the "Dragon Castle") and the available objective cards. It had strategy, and it still was a very abstract game, but the improved accessibility made it way more enjoyable.


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    When I say many revisions, I mean it!



    It sounds like the pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into the right places, right? We thought the same...yet many parts of the game were still not convincing. The card system felt overcomplicated, for example, and the level of pattern recognition capabilities required to effectively play the game was still higher than what I would have liked. When you completed an objective card, you were forced to turn some of the tiles face down to avoid snowballing, but this mechanism was very prone to analysis paralysis. (If I complete this objective, this tile turns face down and I can't complete this objective anymore, but if I complete this one first instead... You get the idea.) There were many other small details and nuances in the system that were needed to fix some of the problems we had, and they all contributed to make the game more complicated than it needed to be.

    We couldn't decide whether we were in a situation where a few tweaks here and there would do, or whether we still needed major changes. Many of our playtesters liked this version of the game, despite its problems, but we ultimately felt that we needed to be bold. The game needed to go through another major metamorphosis. Striving to finally achieve that ultimate level of accessibility for which I was the main advocate, we got rid of the objective cards altogether. You would simply score points when creating sets of tiles of the same color. We made a first playtest with a very basic version of what would become the game as it is now (with no special powers and no special objectives), and something clicked. This was the way to go.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3769773_t.jpg]

    This is when the player boards started taking their final form



    The game didn't really work, and it was a bit shallow compared to the previous version, but it finally felt right. We spent a few weeks working on this version of the game, making slow but steady progress. We re-introduced cards in the form of the Dragon cards, which are common "building" objectives for the end of the game that are much broader in scope than the old ones, yet much simpler to understand, and the Spirit cards (common special powers to break the rules and trigger combos). These cards kept the essence of what was good in the old versions of the game and integrated it into this new form, while also offering a great deal of variability and replayability to the game, with that variability being supplemented further by the many different castle layouts in the final rulebook (and the fact that you can also create your own layouts). A major improvement came with the addition of another key component: the Shrines.


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    The evolution of the Dragon and Spirit cards



    Without the objective cards to constrain and guide your building possibilities, players were feeling a lack of long-term purpose in their decisions. When we added Shrines, which increase your score but also prevent you from building anything else on top of them — basically locking one of the spaces on your board forever — we made the puzzle aspect of the game as interesting as it was with the previous version, while keeping the game simple enough that you could understand what it was all about in five minutes and you could play it with your friends (gamers or not), partner, parents, children, dogs, cats — finally, a game for everyone.


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    A very close-to-final prototype



    The game took its last step towards the published form when we made one final addition: a dynamic scoring for the sets of tiles. In Dragon Castle

    , you gain more points if you complete larger sets, but the score increase is not 100% linear. This creates a tension between riskier strategies (trying to go for larger sets for lots of points, but at the risk of other players counter-drafting the tiles you need), and quality strategies (completing many smaller sets that give you fewer points, but allow you to build a higher castle more quickly and build a lot of Shrines, especially on the upper levels of your castle where they are the most valuable). You can also mix and match these two extreme opposites, of course, and you also need to make sure you have enough Shrines to put the strategy you choose to complete fruition!


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    A few of the hand-written sketches used during development



    I'm very happy with how the final game turned out, and I'm sure the same can be said for my partners in crime: Hjalmar Hach and Luca Ricci. If you'll be in Essen for the SPIEL fair, we hope you'll pay us a visit in Hall 3, booth Q106! Dragon Castle

    will be there waiting for you!

    Happy gaming!
    Lorenzo Silva


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    The final tiles of Dragon Castle; the mahjong feeling is definitely there!

    Crowdfunding Round-up: The 7th Sunset Panic Over Evil Potato Trench

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/696…nset-panic-over-evil-pota

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2648303_t.jpg]• Hard to believe that only five months have passed since Gloomhaven

    raised nearly $4 million on Kickstarter, but here we are in October 2017 with another giant, heavily immersive adventure game piling up the bucks, this being The 7th Continent

    from Ludovic Roudy, Bruno Sautter, and French publisher Serious Poulp

    . As was the case with Gloomhaven

    , Serious Poulp is funding a new edition of The 7th Continent

    for all those who missed the game in the first place. In addition, the publisher is marketing an expansion — What Goes Up, Must Come Down

    — that adds another 250 cards to this weighty game. If nothing else, a quest for this game will help you explore your wallet... ( KS link

    )

    • In the category of games bearing famous IPs, we have Resident Evil 2: The Board Game

    from UK-based Steamforged Games Ltd.

    , which last hit Kickstarter in mid-2016 to fund its take on Dark Souls

    . I guess Steamforged has its niche carved out. Any bets on what they'll adapt next? ( KS link

    )

    • Also lodged in that category is T2029: The Official Terminator 2 Board Game

    from Ian O'Toole

    and Australian publisher Rule & Make

    . As you might expect, players all take part in the Resistance against Skynet in the year 2029 while also needing to protect John Connor in 1995.

    ( KS link

    ) We recorded an overview at Gen Con 50 should you care to learn more:


    Youtube Video



    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3750065_t.png]• Okay, that's three intense co-ops from non-U.S. publishers, so let's zag in the other direction for Sunset Over Water

    from Eduardo Baraf, Steve Finn, Keith Matejka, and Pencil First Games

    . Players in this game trek through the wilderness, create landscape paintings, then attempt to sell them. No one fires guns or falls off a cliff and needs a broken leg bound. I'm not sure how such games still exist, but here we are. ( KS link

    )

    • You might experience a similarly calm sensation in Spy Club

    from Randy Hoyt and Jason D. Kingsley, which is being co-published by frequent partners Foxtrot Games

    and Renegade Game Studios

    . In this cooperative game, you channel Encyclopedia Brown and Harriet the Spy to solve mysteries in your neighborhood, whether as one-off cases or as a sequence of cases that fit together in a larger story. From the BGG description: "Throughout the campaign, you'll unlock new modules with additional rules and story elements. With 40+ new modules and 150+ cards in the campaign deck, you can reset everything and play multiple campaigns — with a different story and gameplay experience emerging each time." ( KS link

    )

    • Deduction is also at the heart of Stephen Godot's Human Punishment: Social Deduction 2.0

    from his own Godot Games

    , with each of the 4-16 players being either human, machine, or outlaw and wanting to hunt down everyone else on the other teams. The graphics seem like a modern take on the neon-heavy look of Blade Runner

    . ( KS link

    )


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3690024_t.jpg]• Japanese creators can now use Kickstarter as well, and I think the first such project from Japan is for Yota Suzuki's Space Editor

    from TACTICAL GAMES

    . The game takes you back to the dawn of time, then challenges you to create the universe (no small feat!) by taking control of one of the five elements and ensuring that element remains dominant when you and the other gods decide to knock off for the day and call it done. ( KS link

    )

    Potato Pirates

    is the latest take on a game that will teach kids how to code, with this design coming from Singapore-based technology company Codomo. More generally, this seems like a "take that" style of game that allows for loops and conditional elements to do more and take advantage of opponents in particular circumstances. ( KS link

    )

    Nothing Now Games

    is back on Kickstarter for a second go at Panic!

    , a bidding and bluffing system from James Ernest

    in which players are commodity brokers who must escape a market crash before everyone else in order to stay on top of the financial pack. As seems to be common for an Ernest design, his game system has been used to create three different designs in one box: a bidding game, a drafting game, and a trick-taking game. ( KS link

    )

    • Another game getting a relaunch is ELO Darkness

    from Tommaso Mondadori, Alberto Parisi, and Reggie Games

    , with this being a two-player customizable MOBA-inspired card game that can also accommodate four players in teams of two. ( KS link

    )

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3733753_t.jpg]• Marshall Britt and Andrew Toth's Re-Chord

    from Yanaguana Games

    places you in a guitar battle that has you trying to complete secret chords to score points while also placing the guitar picks of your hidden color in the best scoring positions. ( KS link

    )

    • After releasing multiple versions of its Evolution

    board game, North Star Games

    is now bringing the design to PC, Mac, and mobile devices. ( KS link

    )

    • Whoa, here's a blast from the past. Outer Limit Games

    is funding a new version of Rui Alípio Monteiro's Trench

    , an abstract strategy game for two players inspired by trench warfare tactics from World War I. ( KS link

    )

    I interviewed Wise Games, the original publisher of Trench

    , at the 2013 Spielwarenmesse trade show in Nürnberg, Germany, the first time I had attended that event. It's nice to be able to re-use videos for an explanation of something coming back to market. (P.S.: I still own that shirt.)

    Youtube Video



    Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Cosmogenesis, or Building Blocks for a New, Better Solar System

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/696…esis-or-building-blocks-n

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3575260_t.jpg]Are you ready to create a solar system? A solar system that includes the board game Cosmogenesis

    from Yves Tourigny

    and Ludonova

    , a game in which you create a solar system?

    While I wish this level of meta was included in the game, perhaps with a tiny image of Cosmogenesis

    being visible on an asteroid, I'll have to wait until an expansion for it to exist. For now, we have only a well-crafted game about crafting solar systems, a game that had others saying, "I thought this was Exoplanets

    at first glance" and "How does this compare to Planetarium

    ?" Apparently you can depict cosmic dust coalescing into bodies in only so many ways.

    In Cosmogenesis

    , you are the star — literally. You represent the sun in the system-to-be, and you're going to accumulate bodies orbiting around you, deciding to place a gas giant here, add some moons there, and direct a comet into a terrestrial body to form an atmosphere somewhere within your finite habitable zone. You're not the only star on this cosmic broadway, however, so you'll need to take turns drafting what you want and hope those other suns don't eclipse your choices.

    In more detail, you start with a board bearing a few orbital rings and 1-4 asteroids depending on where you start in the turn order. At the start of each of the six rounds, you set up the central board with a number of objectives, asteroids, terrestrial objects, gas giants, and "exotic objects" based on the number of players in four regions of the board, then players take turns choosing objects. Once you've chosen something from a region, you're done with the region for that round. What you do with the object depends on what it is:

    • Gas giants occupy the closest empty orbital ring to become a planet. Gas giants have no other reason for existence than to be a planet. That's all they live for. It's a simple life, but one for which they're well-suited.

    • Terrestrial bodies, which come in four sizes, can be placed as planets (in the closest empty orbital ring), or as moons for existing planets (assuming the moon-to-be is smaller), or as something to be smashed into an existing terrestrial moon or planet in order to increase the size of the smashee. Why would you do this? Because only terrestrial bodies of size 3 or 4 can have an atmosphere, and you'll likely want to create a few of these in order for life to develop beyond the bacterial stage. There's also the issue of...

    • Planetary objectives give you goals in life. Nana Nebula always said it was good to have goals, so you'll acquire four such goals over the course of the game. Once you meet the minimum conditions on a planetary objective, you can spend an additional action to celebrate this stage of existence, revealing the objective and obtaining both immediate rewards and points to be tallied at game's end.

    • Stellar objectives differ from planetary objectives in that they're always visible and you score points for them at game's end depending on how well you meet the depicted condition, whether it's asteroids as moons, or gas giants with rings, or planets of the largest size, or moons of size 2, or fifteen other things. What's more, if you outshine each other star in this category, then you receive additional points.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3775371_t.jpg]

    Most of the stellar objectives; how well can you interpret them?



    • Comets can collide with gas giants to give them rings (which can be good for both types of objectives) or collide with large terrestrial bodies to create an atmosphere.

    • Asteroids can be captured as moons of size 1 or collided with existing terrestrial bodies to increase their size or collided with a terrestrial body to place bacteria on it or combined with each other to create a comet or exchanged for more orbital rings should you desire a big family or placed in the asteroid belt for use later. For hunks of featureless rock, they're quite versatile.

    • Exotic objects offer a wide range of benefits depending on what's depicted on them, from asteroids to comets to additional actions to the ability to move intelligent life from one world to another. These objects are all double-sided, so the particular bonuses will determined at random wen you lay out the tiles to be drafted at the start of the round.

    Each time you draft an object, you do something with that object, then you can choose to use one or more exotic objects that you possess in addition to taking an optional additional action, whether revealing a planetary objective or using an asteroid or comet that you acquired on an earlier turn.


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    Time to start round two; here are your choices



    After each player has chosen four objects, you return unselected celestial objects to the drafting bag, remove unchosen objectives from the game, advance life one step up the evolutionary ladder (from bacteria to jellyfish to fish to lizards to intelligent life, which may or may not coincide with human beings), then prepare for the next round. After six rounds, you advance once more on the evolutionary wheel, then tally your points on ye olde scorepad, which is as much of a pain as it always is, especially since you need to compute three stellar objectives per player, possibly with bonus points for each. Thankfully we have already reached the evolutionary stage of having an opposable thumb, which allows us to note such things instead of having to remember all of them.

    Gameplay in Cosmogenesis

    — which I've played twice on a review copy from Ludonova, once with three players and once with four — is simple, while the game choices are not, mostly due to you needing to time everything in just the right way so that the bodies mesh in the most effective way possible. You might need a second moon of size 2 in order to finish a planetary objective, but only size 1 objects are available, so you could draft one, then ram an asteroid into it, then on your next turn play the objective, which gives you another asteroid and a bonus comet, so maybe you want to draft a gas giant first so that you can use that comet on something, etc.

    The game lasts only 24 turns in packages of six rounds, yet with a possible additional action on each turn, not to mention the exotic objects, your choices explode and expand, leaving you unsure of what's best when. On top of this, you have the standard worries of any drafting game, with you wanting A, B and C, but able to take only two of the three and possibly not even that if someone else takes an object first.


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    The rules are messier and less straightforward than they could have been because they focus on setting over systems. The rules have sections on coalescence for planet creation and on the capturing of moons, for example, instead of something more flowcharty to mirror what's described above. When playing the game, you'll think, "I took a terrestrial body, so tell me what I can do with it." Or "I took a comet; now what are my choices?"

    You want the rules to show the paths on which you can travel, not include a section on colliding that features subsections explaining what happens depending on what is being collided into what. Start with the objects, the things that will be handled during play, and tell us what to do with them. Such an approach would also make it easier to reference rules questions during play. Want to double-check something about asteroids? Turn to the "asteroid" section and you'll find everything there.

    Along similar lines, the player aids are either too large and unwieldy or too small and of less aid than one might wish. The rulebook contains image charts that show what happens when a terrestrial body collides with something or when an asteroid collides with something, but the player aid detailing your actions is merely a text list that sort of jogs your mind as to what you can do, but not enough to understand how things actually work.

    Aside from these quibbles, the gameplay in Cosmogenesis

    provides just the challenge that a young naked star needs — to surround yourself with those who will never leave you and who will satisfy whatever oddball demands you might find yourself grappling with.


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    A quartet of quirky space quadrants

    Designer Diary: Liberatores, or The True Nature of Games with a Traitor

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/691…s-or-true-nature-games-tr

    by Yan Yegorov

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3747786_t.jpg]Hello, I'm Yan Yegorov

    , and here are my designer notes on the board game Liberatores: The Conspiracy to Liberate Rome

    .

    During the past few years, I've designed several games. They are based mostly on psychology of some sort. I have a psychology degree and am a big fan of psychological games. I like games with traitors, negotiation, diplomacy, bluffing, and so forth, and I've already published a game based on the "Prisoner's Dilemma" — Swords and Bagpipes

    — and one heavily based on negotiation: Gentlemen's Deal

    .

    Theory of Traitors

    In 2016 I was up to new challenges. Onу day, my friend Nick and I were discussing the theoretical basis of games with a traitor. My main issue was that the strategy of these games is in a way pretty straightforward. If somebody does something a bit irrational, he is the traitor, right? Nobody in his clear mind will do bad things for his team, so how can the traitor ever harm his team without exposing himself?

    Most board games solve this puzzle by making some of the information hidden. You can do sneaky stuff when nobody's watching in Battlestar Galactica

    , The Resistance

    , and many other games. You will always have some kind of hidden information whether it is secret moves or just a closed hand.

    I found this approach a little bit cheap. I like classical traitor games a lot, but it is not an interesting solution to the problem. It is totally playable, but I wanted something else. Hidden information makes the game more of a puzzle in which you can combine all the evidence together to track down the bad guys. I wanted to provide players with a situation in which a traitor can act naturally and everything will be okay. The other approach has already been used in many games, so there's no need to make a new one like that.

    My friend and I came to the conclusion that it would be very interesting to make players with good roles act irrational — but how can I do so?

    The Solution

    I immediately chose a Roman Empire theme, with the players being conspirators who are going to kill Julius Caesar. The theme was chosen mostly because of the design convenience. Conspiracies often have a lot of hidden goals, betrayal, and twists, so it's easy to speculate about what's going on.

    My first attempt was to make the roles unclear. I made a game in which you had some kind of "Traitor Rating" cards, so you didn't really know if you were a traitor or not. More specifically, you were dealt several cards and the person with the highest traitor rating became the traitor. You know whether you have a high rating or not, but you can't be sure that you are the traitor.

    What did it gave us? Nothing. That was a really bad idea because in effect you're randomly thrown to one or the other side at the end of the game. It was a major upset when you were trying to play as a traitor, but then you lose because you've picked the wrong side.

    With time, the concept evolved into the following idea: the traitor inside the game with a traitor. One of the good guys becomes the "Competitor"; he wants to be the new Emperor, so he wants to kill Caesar, just as the other players, but he also wants to accomplish his personal goal.

    With this concept, the game went crazy! People within the group started fighting each other. You can't trust anyone, so you have to beat the Competitor by yourself. Everybody starts to make selfish moves, so you can't tell who is who. The goal of actually killing Caesar becomes secondary because now the conspirators have an enemy within — and it's not just a regular traitor, who basically plays for the game. One of your teammates is out there to double-cross you.

    "Has he done it because he is a traitor? Or is he a good guy who's making an action against the Competitor once in awhile? Or he is just stupid and doesn't see the better option? Or what if he is right?" — you ask yourself these questions all the time, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3747859_t.png] The Gameplay

    The basics of the game are pretty simple. You have Caesar and "Liberatores" (the conspiracy group), and both sides will gain power points during play. If at the end of the game the Liberatores have more power points than Caesar, they kill Caesar.

    • One of the players wants to save Caesar. He is Caesar's Agent.

    • Two or three players want to kill Caesar. They are Republicans.

    • One player wants to kill Caesar, but also wants to get more personal power than any of the Republicans. He is the Competitor.

    Players also get their personal power points from time to time. You will mostly need these power points to fight the Competitor, but you can also transfer them to Liberatores (or Caesar).

    The players have a "market" of citizens that they can lure to their side, and they take citizens from the market turn by turn. A player can spend money to buy the citizen for themselves to get a special ability, or they can spend money to send the citizen to Liberatores, so they gain power points, or they can send the citizen to Caesar, so that he gains power points; this helps Caesar, but the player gets to activate most of the citizen's cool abilities and this is the most common way to earn money. Thus, players give Caesar power to get money, then use this money to overthrow Caesar and prepare themselves for future turns.

    There are tons of designer decisions to make the system work, but that is the main idea.

    After some testing, I figured out the core gameplay and have been only tweaking the balance ever since. Why is it fun? Most other games in this genre disguise the traitor through a lack of information, but Liberatores

    goes another way. The game puts you in the opposite situation. You don't know who is who because you have been flooded with information, and any given move may simultaneously pursue many things.

    For example, you've bought an ability for yourself. That can mean that you just wanted that ability, or that you wanted to take this powerful card away from the market, so that it won't go to Caesar, or that you want to prevent another player from sending it to Liberatores. And what will you do with new ability? Oh, you can do a lot of things with your brand new card, and most of them can bring down players in many different ways.

    So you have all the information in the world, and you want your guesses and clues to sum up to a solid hypothesis, but you have only a limited number of turns that is barely enough to solve the puzzle, so you will often have to jump to a conclusion just to have enough time to take action.

    And it's not like you are given a bunch of irrelevant information; there are just too many possibilities. I think that it plays very nicely. Usually in such games, you barely have enough information to suspect at least somebody. In Liberatores

    you are struggling to find a player to trust.


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    I would add more early photos, but, really guys, they all look the same



    Publishing

    Liberatores

    happens to be a game with a high learning curve, though the rules are pretty simple. There is a lot to explore in this game, so I needed dedicated boardgamers to publish it. We don't have very hardcore publishers in Russia, but I found wonderful guys during SPIEL '16: Moaideas Game Design

    .

    It was an exciting adventure for me. I met a lot of foreign people, showed them my projects, didn't know what to expect. Soon after SPIEL, Moaideas picked my game. They just wrote something like: "We like the game, let's publish it?" It was very sudden. "Maybe they really liked the concept", I thought. They've made some changes and, looking at these changes, I understand those guys totally dig the game. They have this deep understanding of the game process any designer is looking for in a publisher.

    I know that Liberatores

    is not a gateway casual board game, but I hope it becomes something remarkable for experienced gamers. My story pretty much ends here, so I think that now David Liu

    should catch up with the narrative and give the Moaideas perspective on the project:

    A Word from Moaideas

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3747843_t.png]Hi, fellow gamers! David here, speaking as producer for Moaideas Game Design.

    Yan pitched some of his games to us at SPIEL '16, and I was immediately intrigued by the description of Liberatores

    . We didn't have time to play a full game, so I asked for the PnP files to test it after the show. I printed out the prototype soon after getting back to Taiwan, and we quickly discovered the most unique and fascinating part of the game: All players are forced to perform actions that will help the opposing team, yet at the same time, you have to let your teammates believe you are working on their side.

    During development of the game, me and Afong (our main developer) focused on adjusting the effects of citizen cards. We wanted to enhance the core concept of the game by increasing the interactions between players. We culled card effects that were seldom used and added more cards that require players to make a decision about who you want to interact with. If a card was usable only by one side, then it was changed so that all three roles can find a way to use it.

    Now there are tons of opportunities for you to come up with legitimate reasons to persuade someone to hire different citizens for the mutual benefit of all, while actually just advancing your own agenda. Our playtest groups never failed to amaze us with new ways to use different citizens, as well as new excuses to justify their actions.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3747847_t.png]The more interaction between players, the more you need to be sure you are working with people on your team, or the results may be devastating… However, in this game, there is no way to prove your identity to others. Thus, an interesting dilemma is created; most of the time you can't be completely sure of another player's identity, but with only seven rounds in this game, you don't have the luxury of testing everyone's reactions until you are certain. This is a social deduction game, but it is definitely not a light party game.

    For the cover graphics, considering the history and theme of the game, we decided the main topic is a power struggle. A troubled Caesar is sitting alone on a throne, and five senators (the players) are scheming behind his back with malicious intentions. There are no "good guys" in this game as you are trying to get rid of Caesar through assassination, so we hope this gets the message across.

    Although Caesar seems pretty vulnerable on the cover, he is not entirely hopeless. A well-played Agent that sows distrust among the others may stop the rebellion before it is formed. Thus, I think "suspicion" is the defining word of this game since players are always suspicious of everyone else, but if Republicans don't work together, then it is very difficult to win.

    Finally, thanks again to Yan for submitting his game to us last year, and together I believe we have refined it into an even better game. This is a fresh take on the social deduction genre, and we think the heavier elements of game are something that is rarely seen. Hope you will enjoy the frustration as much as we do.

    New Game Round-up: Devil Pig Readies Heroes of Black Reach, Renegade Revisits the North Sea, and Eurydice Explores Zombology

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…readies-heroes-black-reac

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771284_t.png]• In May 2017, I posted

    brief news of a deal between Devil Pig Games

    and Games Workshop

    to release a game line in the Warhammer 40,000

    universe that makes use of DPG's "Heroes System" from Heroes of Normandie

    .

    The base game in that line is Warhammer 40,000: Heroes of Black Reach

    , a two-player game that pits Ultramarines against Orks that includes an eight-scenario campaign and hundreds of bits and retails for $75. As with Heroes of Normandie

    , multiple supplements will be available, including Orks Reinforcement

    and Ultramarines Reinforcement

    (with these two items each having a four-scenario campaign and more units), Ork Freebooterz

    and Ultramarines Vanguard Veteran Squad

    (with these being additional bits available solely via the DPG webstore), and the Drop Zone Demo Kit

    , with this being a smaller standalone two-player game with a single scenario for $25 that can serve as an introduction to the entire line, while also being compatible with it. Chaos and Eldar armies are in the queue

    for release in 2019.

    IELLO

    will distribute the Heroes of Black Reach

    line in the U.S., and the game is part of its "Elite Release" program in which certain brick-and-mortar retailers will be able to sell these titles starting March 15, 2018, whereas other B&M stores will get the games for a May 10 release and online retailers can start selling the game on May 24. Apparently we need many more fields in which to list release dates on a game because things are getting complicated.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771543_t.jpg]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3771544_t.jpg]Renegade Game Studios

    seems to announce a new game at least once a week, and the latest addition to its release calendar is a pair of titles due out Q4 2017 that were previously funded on Kickstarter: Hall of Heroes

    and Fields of Fame

    , two expansions for Shem Phillips

    ' Raiders of the North Sea

    — and the Renegade version of that game is due to hit the U.S. market on October 11, 2017.

    • In addition to these expansions to the North Sea

    line, Renegade has announced a Q2 2018 release date for The Tea Dragon Society Card Game

    , a design by Steve Ellis

    and Tyler Tinsley

    that is based on The Tea Dragon Society

    graphic novel by Katie O'Neill. No details about the game have been revealed beyond its impending existence.

    • Designer James Ernest

    took the basics of a game created by author Pat Rothfuss for the novel "The Wise Man's Fear" and turned it into the actual game Tak

    . He's now doing something similar for a fantasy novel in the works by Sonia Lyris. Here's an overview of Rochi

    from Ernest:

    Rochi is a gambling game for 2-8 players, played with a Tarot-style deck with six suits of different sizes. It's a new deck design for us, and it's a whole new way to think about how gambling games should work. There is no betting, very little bluffing, and six different pots!

    Along with Rochi, we have developed a couple more games in the same family: another card game called Roche, and a dice game called Rugen. These are both standard self-working casino games.

    Rochi

    will be published by King of the Castle Games

    in 2018, but if you're interested in checking out the game now, you can download the rules and materials

    from Ernest's Cheapass Games website.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3634668_t.png]• Designer Jackson Pope

    used to self-publish games (and publish designs from others) under the Reiver Games

    brand, but he stopped around 2010. (He's detailed what went wrong

    on his "Creation and Play" blog.)

    The itch to design games didn't go away, though, so in 2015 he returned to the method of how he launched his first game, Border Reivers

    , and decided to sell a handmade limited edition of Zombology

    , a semi-cooperative game in which 3-8 "scientists" attempt to cure a zombie plague using "unlikely cures such as homeopathy, healing crystals and a vegan diet". He's now established a new company — Eurydice Games

    — under which to release the game, and he's making two hundred more handmade copies of Zombology

    to sell through his website

    . So retro!

    Designer Diary: Peak Oil, or From Published Game to Prototype PnP

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…r-published-game-prototyp

    by Heiko Günther Heiko

    : To call this a diary is funny at best. Sounds like we meticulously took notes and photographs something like years ago because, yes, we knew, deep in our hearts, and as a fact cold and shiny as brand new rubber boots made from the finest crude oils, that one day, not too far away, we would want to publish said meticulous notes.

    Well, we didn't, so this is more of a "Designer's retroactively puzzled-together story of how we prefer to remember the way we ended up with this game in our hands". It's maybe a bit more interesting, and, at the very least, casts a better light on our abilities as game designers. It is also very sketchy and ignores a large portion of what actually happened. But hey, water down the river et al.

    Tobias

    : Unlike Heiko, I have perfect photographic memory, so I can recall every tiny detail about the whole process. It's like I'm a machine. A sentient robot. A neural net processor, a learning computer.

    Okay, that may be a bit exaggerated. Possibly even a lot exaggerated. Or, actually, totally made up. The development of this game has been going on, intermittently, for years, after all.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1289390_t.jpg] (image by mazout)ÖL FÜR UNS ALLE

    Roughly 2005 I was sharing a flat with Tobias, and also our weekly games' night, an unhealthy obsession with nuclear tanks, and a high-sugar diet — the perfect breeding ground for stupid game ideas. If you ever played bicycle-racing board games and gave all bikes large nitro tanks, flak guns, and flamethrowers, you probably know what I am talking about.

    At least with myself I also shared my personal obsession with hunting "valuable things" at flea markets, especially obscure board games rising from the ashes of time. So I proposed to the assembled games' night folks to play this probably amazing game I just bought last Saturday. It had tankers and oil and drilling and pegs you put in holes and stuff.

    A guy on the cover, with a BP logo crudely photoshopped (probably still in a real photo shop at that time) on his safety helmet lent further credibility to this Ravensburger title.

    This obsession with getting obscure games from flea markets has, in my opinion, met with somewhat mixed success. At first glance, this game looked like an incredibly retro and incredibly clumsy piece of marketing. The second and third glance did little to change that impression.

    The "clumsy marketing" aside, we immediately liked the theme. One or two years before, the media had been full of images from the recent large oil spill on the coast of France and Spain. Obviously, this had to be a game about sinister large oil companies exploiting the environment, all for the greater good of making profit and helping the world economy grow. You probably would backroom deal with other players, try to forge tanker papers, sink enemies' tankers, and earn a shitload of money. Presumably, Ellis or Ennis would have written the script, and you could play as any James Bond villain you liked.

    It should, perhaps, be pointed out that what Heiko describes are things we absolutely love in games. I mean, who doesn't want to be a Bond villain? Who doesn't want to poison vast stretches of pristine nature just to make a quick buck? It's probably a basic human need, I guess.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1661228_t.jpg] (image by moonblogger)

    We opened the box and played it.

    While some of our hopes were indeed, and surprisingly, and probably unintentionally, correct, most were not. You could move funky tanker miniatures with holes that held oil pegs around the board, and load off oil at refinery centers. Drilling was somewhat fun; at the fate of a die roll you moved pegs on a drill board deeper and deeper into the unyielding soil, sometimes to strike a rich vein, sometimes to no avail.

    Another peg board was reserved for more cool bookkeeping stuff, and there was money and named oil fields from real life and shipping contracts and the North Sea and, to be true, a roll-and-move game at the core that happened on a track suspiciously similar to Monopoly

    . Well, it goes around a board, a rectangular board, and there is a Start spot where you collect income.

    The whole thing lacked some proper sort of ending condition, and after a few hours we decided that we had reached it all the same. We multiplied our red plastic chips with moneys and some other things happened and one of us had won. But still, cool tankers.

    The biggest problem was that everything was terribly nice. There were no morally questionable things to do, no trade wars, and precious few ways to screw another player. The company you played was totally law-abiding, responsible, and honest — which is a bit much to swallow in a game about Big Oil. Anyway, this was a huge pity because many ideas in the game were pretty nifty.

    A nondescript amount of time passed.

    We decided that the tanker miniatures were just too cool, and we needed to use them in a new version of this game, a proper version, with slush funds, weapon trading, black markets, oil spills, nuclear tanks, nepotistic regimes, general mayhem, and a real end. Over a few different versions, sometimes with a year or so in between revisiting the game, sometimes only days, we kept adding things we liked at the time and removing ones that didn't work.

    Regulars of our games' night started to fear "the oil game", and we had to come up with all sorts of annoying ploys to make them play it. Sorry, guys, but if you are reading this, that cousin of mine neither suffers from a highly contagious blood disease nor licked all of my other games.

    Over time, this game has probably used most mechanisms a game can use at one time or another. We had, at various points, roll-and-move, fixed move, everything controlled by dice, diceless, what have you — except a hex grid, which somehow never made it in. Weird.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3208736_t.jpg] (Version 1 board)BLUT FÜR ÖL

    The playtest for our great new game, lovingly dubbed "Blut für Öl", was still a mess, but it was ours, and one we liked better.

    Allowing each action to be taken in a more effective version, called "dirty", which also brought the potential of causing a PR disaster, made you feel like the bad overlords of oil dealing you were supposed to be. The roll-and-move track on the other hand decidedly did not. We kicked that out for the next one.

    The roll-and-move track also cluttered the board and was just ugly.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3209280_t.jpg] (Version 2 board and cards)ÖL FÜR BLUT

    The drilling had been abridged to a simple die roll, and there were several spots you could "control". To trade weapons, you needed to control cards (corresponding to spots) with at least one left (origin country) and one right (key market) half of an AK-47. I can't really be bothered to search for the rules on old hard drives, and, in fact, am highly surprised I even found these images. To be honest, I have no idea what the turn structure was in this version.

    What I do remember is that you had secret accounts for especially dirty deals. They did not hold any money or anything, but if you were required to pay money from such fund, you just flipped one of your "secret account" cards on its used side. Control over certain regions (South America, I guess) gave you access to more secret funds, and some money laundering action allowed you to flip them back to their active side. Hm. Tobias, remember anything more?

    The game was pretty complicated at this point, if I remember correctly. You could do a lot of things, but pretty few of them were simple, or even — gasp — automatically successful. I think it would have been very difficult to get into the game unless you had been evolving it for months.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3209303_t.jpg] (Version 5 board with some cards)

    V3 and V4 are lost in the haze that is the past. By the time of Version 5, the shipping routes had been opened to allow for less linear movement and for jockeying for good tanker positions at the refinery centers. If your tanker suffered a disaster, the place it happened was of great importance for the amount of money it cost you to get a hold on the ensuing PR disaster. A disaster around Europe or North America was quite the costly indulgence, whereas sinking your tanker around Africa or in the open Atlantic didn't really concern anyone.

    Drilling had been further abstracted into cards, and tankers had a "cool down" phase at the refineries, where you could not retrieve your tanker until all spots had been filled.

    Oh, right, to make more profit, you wanted to first destabilize regions, then take control of them. Stabilizing an opponent's region at the wrong moment could really mess with plans. Mercenaries were a central part of every thriving oil empire. Also, building pipelines for the greater good (and a lot of money).

    There's still information overload in this version. Even with Heiko's love for clean design and minimalism, there's loads of different symbols and references and little fiddly stuff. The pipelines are a good example; you had to construct the things piece by piece, and the earlier versions were so difficult to complete that the whole pipeline thing was pretty much useless.

    Ah, also, there was, I think, a really nice area-system that allowed your general influence in a larger area to filter down into a specific control over one region in that area. I have to admit I introduced it somewhat secretly, bypassing Tobias, and he never liked it. In retrospect, I totally agree, but can also relate to past Heiko being incredibly annoyed at the blasé reaction of his to my great innovation. Also, they look good. Sucker.

    /cough/ Yes, well, it was a really nice system. It just sucked. Seriously, I'm pretty certain that a lot of the sub-games from those early versions could be developed into full games on their own, actually. The area control part was something like that: an interesting new game, but too unwieldy to bolt onto this one.

    Even so, I still think we should have put a hex grid on the ocean, and added Attack, Defense and Move stats to the tankers.

    Somewhere during these versions, we also read up on oil: where it is, who uses it, and how much it costs, along with which routes it is usually shipped upon and what the dangers are. Why are oil corporations so evil? How does the pricing in refineries actually work? Is oil from the North Sea or Canada an important factor, globally, and which refinery centers are actually important, nowadays? How does all of this relate to nuclear tanks? Is "Peak Oil" actually "a thing"? That kind of boring stuff.

    It's incredible how Wikipedia has changed the way we access information. Why, when I was younger…!

    With all that research, we definitely wanted to avoid being preachy. This was a game first, after all. Still, we were (and are) impressed by games which are fun, mechanically, and also give you something to think about. We both like Soft Landing

    by BTRC, for instance. I think the final version of Peak Oil

    works very well this way. There's a solid game, with meaningful decisions and interaction — and it's also a commentary about how some things might possibly be not ideal in the real world without being in-your-face about it. I guess you can approach the game on either level. I like that.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3209773_t.jpg] (Version 6 board with some cards)

    By Version 6, oil spills in most regions of the oceans didn't concern the public any more, and the refinery centers had lost their initial price granularity. Each had only a high and low price left, and changing it was not a function of ebbing and swelling oil streams any more, but solely controlled by the evil players.

    This version introduced the current way of accumulating victory points in a crude and early stage. Playing the game involved moving around heaps of poker chip money, which you could use to buy into future techs. The little chart in the lower left corner could be influenced to manipulate your and your opponents' final scores. If you invested in, say, the tech on the right of a given row, you wanted the public to like it better than the one on the left of the same row.

    Version 6 also had the first implementation of the worker majority action system. The control concept had degenerated into "controlling pirates", which was not really a bad thing.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3209774_t.jpg] (Version 7 board with some cards)

    Not a lot changed for Version 7, with the notable exception being that the value grid for the techs evolved into a value wheel. The position of a single pawn on it at game end gave bonus points to that tech as well as the neighboring ones, although fewer. Prices at refinery centers again had a "degrading" function to them, and could only artificially be increased through the interference of companies.

    Finally, we let go of the cool tankers, and all of a sudden, things worked really well. Instead of managing your ships and moving them around the board each turn, something you'd constantly forget, you just acquired shipping contracts, and each of these was good for one shipment. Also, major saving on the components.

    It's really ironic. The tankers were one of the things we liked best initially, but removing them was a definite improvement. In the same way, most of the concepts or mechanisms which were crucial in the beginning got pruned along the way. And this made things better! I find it striking how much the final version differs from the early drafts.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3210512_t.jpg] (Version 8 board with some cards)
    PEAK OIL PNP

    This is pretty close to what we uploaded to BGG and "sold" to 2Tomatoes

    at SPIEL '15, the notable exception being that this version still used money, alongside oil, as a second resource and allow you to increase only the value of your own techs, not those of other players.

    Generally, an unholy amount of playtesting with very diverse crowds happened to this game in its various incarnations, and the most valuable thing we learned from it, I guess, is not to do what playtesters want you to. Listen closely to what they say, try to locate what makes them say it, see if that source may be fixed, and work on that, but completely ignore any direct advice on how to make your game better.

    Oh, another thing might be that if you have an idea you think is the funky shit, build it into the game and see what happens. And keep your playtesters bribed well. Beer and crunchy salty things work well. Visit different groups. Don't be shy as most gamers are delighted to play an unpublished prototype. Be nice.

    Ain't that the truth. I vividly remember one evening when we got detailed feedback, looked at each other, and thought, "Let's just not do all that." Understanding the reason for feedback is much more useful than simply implementing every bit of advice you get — just like in real life, I guess.

    The second lesson I learned is that sometimes you need to trash parts of your design. Don't be afraid to let go of things. Also, find your inner center. And consider Phlebas. Someone has to.

    This pretty much concludes this "diary". Thanks for reading. To find out what happened after we found a publisher, check this development blog: Peak Oil - From PnP to Published Game Thread

    . (Short summary: Amazement at somebody wanting to publish this, lots of talking, lots of great development by incredibly skilled game designers, new art style, graphic design, Kickstarter, production. No nuclear tanks.) Should you be interested in meeting us for a round or two on the published copies, we will be at SPIEL this year, at the 2Tomatoes booth (7:K120).


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3259102_t.png]

    SPIEL '17 Preview: TimeBomb Evolution, or Time for a Rainbow-Colored Rematch

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…-evolution-or-time-rainbo

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3708213_t.png]Whenever a sequel appears for a successful game, it is almost always more complicated than the original title. Catan

    , Carcassonne

    , Ticket to Ride

    , and Pandemic

    all have many examples of this dynamic, with each sequel following an equation like "Base Game + Somethin' Somethin' = Newish Snazzier Game". This equation shouldn't be a surprise because complicated things are less likely to become runaway hits than simpler things. Movies tend to follow the same formula as a sequel is usually "Most or All of the Characters/Things You Originally Liked + Something New". It's hard to make the soup simpler when you keep adding things to the pot.

    In mid-2015, I previewed

    Yusuke Sato

    's TimeBomb

    after being introduced to the game at Tokyo Game Market in May 2015. TimeBomb

    is a straightforward hidden identity game, with SWAT agents needing to find the right number of successes among each player's hidden cards so that a bomb doesn't go off, while being misdirected in their efforts by terrorists who are hiding on the SWAT team. You can start playing the game immediately and use the first couple of moves to teach others how to play. If someone goofs and sets off the bomb accidentally, say "oops", shuffle the cards, and play again.

    In 2016, Sato and publisher New Board Game Party

    introduced TimeBomb II

    , which used a similar formula while giving players a hand of cards that they would play to locations in a quest to uncover the terrorists' three hideouts.

    Now Sato and New Board Game Party have released TimeBomb Evolution

    , with the game having debuted at TGM in May 2017 and now being prepared for release at SPIEL '17 in October. As before, TimeBomb Evolution

    follows the formula of the original game, with SWAT members looking for 4-6 "Success" cards (with that number being based on the player count) and with terrorists hoping to survive four rounds if they don't manage to set off the bomb any earlier. In more detail, here's how the original TimeBomb

    works:

    To set up, you take as many "Success" cards as the number of players, the single "Boom!!" card, and as many "Safe" cards as needed for the deck to equal five times the number of players, e.g., thirty cards total with six players. Each player takes a secret role card at random, with four SWAT cards being in the mix for six players and three SWAT cards for four or five players. After looking at your role card, look at the five cards you were dealt, then shuffle them and lay them out in a line with the backs being face up. Choose a start player at random.

    The start player takes the nippers and "cuts" one of the cards in front of another player. This player reveals the card, then uses the nippers to cut someone else's card. This continues until 4-6 cards have been cut, with this number equaling the number of players. You then take all of the face-down cards, shuffle them, then deal four cards to each player, with players once again looking at their cards, then shuffling them and placing them in a face-down row.

    This process continues for at most four rounds. If all of the "Success" cards are revealed before the end of the fourth round, the game ends and the SWAT team wins. If this doesn't happen — or if the "Boom!!" card is revealed at any time — the game ends and the terrorists win.

    TimeBomb Evolution

    removes all the boring "Safe" cards that do nothing except draw out a sigh of disappointment when you reveal one of them instead of a "Success" and replaces them with six sets of colored bombs.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3768489_t.jpg]

    Learning the game ahead of Tokyo Game Market



    To set up TimeBomb Evolution

    , you choose as many colored sets of cards as the number of players, shuffle them, remove a number of cards equal to the number of players from the deck (without revealing them), shuffle in 4-6 "Success" cards, then deal five cards to each player. Choose someone to start with the nippers and you're off!

    The big difference compared to TimeBomb

    is that the deck doesn't have a single "Boom!!" card that serves as a terrorist victory if it's revealed; instead, if four cards of the same color are revealed before all the "Success" cards, then the bomb goes off and the terrorists win. Now instead of all the tension in the game being instantiated into a single card, the tension is spread all over the place. On the first few card reveals, the color is meaningless, but once you see the second instance of a color, everyone starts paying attention and saying things at the start of the round like, "I have a 'Success', but also two red, so don't cut any of my cards!" Do they mean that, or are they lying, perhaps hiding multiple "Success" cards so that the SWAT team won't find them?

    This simple change gives everyone more of a stake in the game because even having a hand of nothing but colored bombs gives you information about what others don't

    have, and you can sometimes use this information to get clues as to who might not be telling the whole truth.

    What's more, TimeBomb Evolution

    includes variant rules that ups the challenge even further by giving special abilities to both the "Success" cards and the colored bombs. Under these rules, when you reveal a "Success", you place that card on a colored bomb that's been revealed to provide protection. That color will no longer win the terrorists the game when the fourth card is revealed. That's good for the SWAT team, right? Yes, except perhaps when a terrorist is the one who gets to place the "Success" card and they choose a color with only one card (thereby outing themselves as a bad guy) or choose a color that will perhaps lead to SWAT members revealing cards from a player who they would otherwise ignore.

    The counterweight to this benefit comes from a half-dozen bomb effects. Yellow bombs, for example, can't have protection placed on them, and when a blue bomb is revealed, you must remove a "Success" that is currently providing protection, thereby possibly causing an immediate explosion. Green explodes when only three cards have been revealed (instead of four), whereas purple blows up immediately if two purple cards are revealed in a row. Red cards throw randomness onto the table because if someone reveals a red bomb, you don't get to choose whose card to cut next; instead you reveal a numbered card and circle around the table that many spaces, then cut a card in front of that player. You might want to have cut a card held by someone else, but too bad! (I've also played with this rule incorrectly, teaching that you pass the wire nippers to the player revealed at random. This is a less random way to play, I think, since the new player holding the nippers still chooses whose card to reveal, so consider it a variant of the variant.)


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3768485_t.jpg]

    Round four begins; only one more success to go...



    Pink bombs are the most dispiriting because for each pink card revealed, you can reveal one fewer card in the fourth round — assuming you make it that far. If you're SWAT, you find a few successes and think you're grooving, then you realize that you need to find two more "Success" in five picks. Whoops! You just revealed a pink, so now you have only three

    more picks to find that pair of successes. Good luck.

    I've played Timebomb Evolution

    five or six times now on a review copy from Japon Brand, each time with five or six people. The heart of the game mimics that of the original, with some games ending in 1-2 minutes when something goes horribly wrong in the first few turns, and others coming down to the wire, but this version has your head spinning in new directions because more of what's happening each round matters to you, especially once you start using the effects of the variant. This variance is magnified by cards being removed at random at the start of the game. Do you even have three green cards in the deck any more? Do you have to worry about that color? The only way to remove the uncertainty is to see the cards in hand, thereby verifying the threat, but whether you can get anyone else to believe you is another matter.

    Even better, the games play out differently depending on what happens when. In one game, we revealed a couple of blue cards in the first five moves, which was bad since two more blue cards would lose the game for the good guys, yet we also were thrilled that those blue cards didn't cost us any protection since we hadn't yet discovered any "Success" cards. Wait, why were we happy about not finding success? Ah, never mind — take joy where you can find it!

    •••



    P.S.: Immediately after I finished writing this preview, I checked Twitter and happened across this announcement of a new version of the original Time Bomb

    from Arclight Games. The bright rainbow colors are everywhere!

    [twitter=915053061139136512]

    Designer Diary: A Tale of Pirates, or Isn't Turn-Based Real-Time Play an Oxymoron?

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…es-or-isnt-turn-based-rea

    by Asger Sams Granerud

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3678807_t.png]I remember exactly when the first seed of inspiration for what eventually became A Tale of Pirates

    was planted. It was Easter 2012, and I had attended the Danish board and role-playing game convention Fastaval

    for the first time. While sitting around relaxing, I had a chat with Martin Enghoff, a fellow game designer and participant in the convention. He brainstormed an idea he had had for using sand timers as a "cooldown" mechanism in a board game. Basically you would place your timer on your intended action, but not get to activate it until the sand had fallen. I was immediately sold on that idea!

    Disclaimer: Before anyone beheads me for misusing the term "cooldown" mechanism, I'll add that I'm well aware it isn't really what is happening. It was just the initial thing that came to mind!

    I love working as part of a team in games, whether fully cooperative designs or other team games. Among my favorites are Captain Sonar

    , Hanabi

    , Magic Maze

    and Flick 'em Up!

    These four examples all take different approaches to handling the dreaded "alpha player" syndrome through a combination of limiting communication, adding time pressure, or emphasizing dexterity. When done successfully, such games can lead to the elusive and patented "high five moments", moments when upon the achievement of some goal the team erupts into...wait for it...high fiving!

    Celebrating achievements in groups brings the pure unadulterated joy of gaming to the forefront. I literally love it! A Tale of Pirates

    is exactly such a game for me, and I hope you will find it is for you, too. I've played it hundreds of times and seen it played almost as much. When Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    and I sit down and play it together on the hardest difficulty, we almost move together as one silent well-coordinated machine. A few sharp commands to coordinate the crew's actions can be heard across the deck, but aside from that there are just the waves crashing against the hull. And we still high five after beating a tense mission!

    The sand timers add the time pressure that is needed to curtail the alpha players, but does so without the full-on franticness that we've seen in other time-based cooperative games — and frankly a franticness that has previously scared away many "serious" gamers. I can't tell you the number of times we've heard testers say something along these lines: "I normally dislike games with time pressure, but this..."

    The 30-second wait allows just enough room to breathe, making it possible to talk and coordinate rather than just react. Moreover each scenario is (typically) divided into several chapters, which means you stop at key points throughout, again allowing you to take an even deeper breath and coordinate the next burst of actions. This is why I call it turn-based real-time gaming. It feels turn-based, and it feels real-time. Magic. Pirate magic!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3752658_t.jpg]

    Timers and everything else ready for the first mission



    But before the magic happened, hard work happened. This is without comparison the most complex design project I've been involved in. The game itself is fairly straightforward, but the ten distinct gaming experiences designed in each mission pulled out some teeth. We have worked hard to ensure that you aren't simply getting slight variations on the same theme, but actually giving varied experiences. I've been quoted as claiming that the basic scenario (#2) is something you could release as a game in its own right, but let's not stop there. Let's add that ten scenarios had to be balanced at three different difficulty levels? That each player count also poses a different balancing challenge? That testing this game became a nightmare because we wanted fresh eyes on the campaign and thus burned through testers faster than you can say "YAAAARGH!" Did I mention that all this had to be baked into an app that we didn't have access to for most of the design period? I've never had as extensive a Google docs sheet to keep track of these multiple overlapping layers, and all for the sake of what is at its core an extremely simple game. All that said, I'm super proud of what we've built and of how Cranio Creations

    lifted the challenge.


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    Ten mission packs, a sneak peek at one of them, and the insert for holding cards after a mission has been opened



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    Notes from the development of the app, scenarios, and more (A3)



    The journey to get to this point took many years. It involved bursts of intense design, long period of waiting, crazy ambitions, and much more. At the top of the list it also involved Daniel and I for the first time collaborating with a third designer: Daniele Tascini

    . Daniele is best known for Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar

    and The Voyages of Marco Polo

    , but has designed many other games. Note that those two games are very different from A Tale of Pirates

    ; I want to state that loud and clear before anyone buys it hoping to find a heavy Eurogame. Tzolk'in

    is one of my personal favorite Eurogames, so getting the opportunity to learn how Daniele designs was a great experience!

    If you want to read more about the passages we had to navigate and the rocks we hit en route, then please proceed.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3544138_t.jpg]



    A Tale of Pirates

    is a cooperative game for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up. Inside the box you will find a big 3D pirate ship, cards, and lots of counters. In addition, you get a free downloadable app, which will help you along! The game takes about 20-30 minutes per scenario, but you might not succeed at first. (If you do, consider picking a harder difficulty.) Of course we hope you want to play all ten scenarios, as the narrative, complexity, and craziness evolves at each step. The app will be available for both Android and iOS, and you can play using either a phone or a tablet.


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    Three screenshots from the app



    This Is NOT a Legacy Game

    Though A Tale of Pirates

    evolves, it is NOT a legacy game. Changes aren't permanent, and they CAN be reset at any time. However, as the campaign progresses, you DO open envelopes with new content: upgrades, enemies, and more. Each of the ten scenarios are unique, and the app helps handle the bookkeeping, introduces events, and manages reveals as you go deeper into the story. We compare it to a classic computer game in which you can always go back and replay previous levels, but you can't jump ahead until you've finished the level currently in front of you. (Well, you can, and we can't stop you, but we do recommend you try them in order as they wasn't chosen at random.) If you get far enough, you might even encounter whatever lurks beneath!


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    The Kraken is (almost) always lurking beneath the surface



    Getting from 2012 to the Present Day

    When the initial spark of an idea first happened back in 2012, a whole year passed before I even considered starting the design. Martin Enghoff, who had shared his idea, wanted to build a game for the Fastaval convention the following year. I was so fascinated by the idea that I even proposed a partnership with him to codesign the game, but he declined. As it turned out — and as it almost always turns out — the idea that Martin brought a year later was nothing like what I had in mind. I've since learned not to worry too much about parallel designs as they rarely end up being parallel at all. Slightly different takes on the same idea typically result in vastly different outcomes after the many iterations a board game goes through, at least in my experience.

    The spring of 2013 was also the year that Daniel and I started designing 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis

    together, and since then we have never really looked back. He was thus onboard from the first prototypes and ideas.


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    Three pictures from Fastaval 2012: Me in the white shirt playing Third Person Shooter,

    the central hall where I first heard of the idea for cooldown, and my first boardgame design: [Mental]-Football



    Is It Just a Gimmick?

    The pirate theme had solidified one step at a time in my mind. We already had the core mechanism chosen, which was cooperative real-time worker placement. I figured that a ship crew having to cooperate under time pressure was an ideal fit. Pirates face lots of different challenges, so we wouldn't run out of material midway in the design.

    The next thing this meant was building a 3D pirate ship. At a quick glance, this could look like a gimmick, but it actually had to be done for game design purposes. The ship is in the middle of the table, but is being swung around when you turn it. The sand timers fell over on early prototypes of the game, so making holes in the deck to hold the sand timers became a practical necessity to ensure a minimum of fiddliness. This is important in any game design, but putting fiddly in the corner is a prime concern when a game is played under any type of time pressure. We want players focused on the game and its choices, not lunging after bits and having their plans thwarted by a fallen timer.

    Once decided, this also allowed us to use the 3D feature for a number of other things. The mast was installed as an intuitive place to set a sail, which helps keep track of speed. Hearts were attached to the ship as hit points (or rather hull points in this game), so everyone could see at a glance how good a shape the ship was in. And, assuming you get far enough in the campaign, you might discover other features that can be added to the ship at a later point.


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    It has been a fantastic journey to get here, and I am proud of the final product the team has delivered. I think you guys are getting an innovative, eye-catching, and fantastic game with a bucket full of content. Of course I am also terribly biased, so for now I can only cross my fingers and hope to see you all make this a runaway hit at SPIEL '17.

    Happy gaming!
    Asger Granerud

    P.S.: Daniel and I will demo and sign the game on both Friday and Saturday from 14:00 to 15:00 at SPIEL '17. Come see us at Hall 1: A118!

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Herbalism, or Guess for Success

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/695…erbalism-or-guess-success

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3664861_t.jpg]Taiwanese publisher EmperorS4

    has six games and one expansion

    on its SPIEL '17 release calendar, and after the success of Hanamikoji

    in 2016, which I previewed on BGG News

    , I'll be looking closely at all of them. No, Hanamikoji

    was not original to EmperorS4, having first been published in Japan in 2013, but when a publisher releases something you love, you pay attention to their other choices in the hope that something else measures up.

    One of EmperorS4's new releases in 2017 is Herbalism

    , a 3-4 player game by Eros Lin

    and Liu Xiao

    , and the only two things this game has in common with Hanamikoji

    is the box size and the requirement that you be supremely clever with your choices, but maybe that will be enough for you.

    The gameplay is set thousands of years ago in China during the birth of herb-based medicine. As an aspiring pharmacist, you have been tasked with figuring out which herbs are required to cure sick individuals in the countryside. Strangely, though, you are competing with others to determine which herbs these are, and you all want to be secretive with the herbs you hold, lest that information help someone else more than you. I'm not sure who would be so cruel as to withhold aid that could be shared with others, but without that competitive edge, you wouldn't have much of a game, so let's roll with it.


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    The herbs comprise a deck of fourteen cards, and at the start of each round, two cards at random will be tucked away while each player receives a hand of 3-4 cards depending on the player count. You can take notes on these cards if you want, but no player has in the two games that I've played and I don't think notes would have aided our deduction. Of course, I might just be a terrible note-taker and deduction-maker...

    You want to guess the two hidden cards, and to do this, you will receive information or cards from other players, sometimes at the cost of a card of your own. Whatever these two hidden cards are, they will match one of the seven medicine cards shown below. Note that the center card represents cards that are the same color, whatever that color happens to be. (Each color has pips underneath it to remind you how many cards of each color are in the deck.)


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    On a turn, a player takes one of the available actions, and these actions can differ in each game or even from round to round (if you ignore the rule about keeping the same actions throughout the entire game). The rules suggest a few different combinations of actions, with the top two in the image below being recommended for your first game:

    Appealing:

    Place your colored marker on one of the seven medicine cards shown above, then choose a player; this player must give you all the cards they have in hand of one of the two colors on that medicine card.

    Curing:

    Place your colored marker on one of the seven medicine cards shown above to indicate which color combination you think is on the two hidden cards. Each other player in turn can pass, follow you (by placing their "follow" marker on the same card), or provide their own answer (by placing their marker on an unoccupied medicine card). Everyone who has placed their marker then looks at the hidden cards. If everyone is incorrect, they each lose 1 point, then the game continues; if someone is correct, they receive 3 points and anyone who followed them scores 1 point while all incorrect guesses are punished.


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    The other actions you can use, all of which involve you first placing your marker on a medicine card and choosing an opponent, are (from left to right in the bottom row):

    Inquiring:

    Give the opponent a face-down card matching one of the two colors on the medicine card; they look at this card, then state how many cards they hold of the other

    color on the medicine card.

    Feeding:

    Give the opponent a face-down card matching one of the two colors on the medicine card; they look at this card, then give you all the cards they hold of the other

    color.

    Brewing:

    If possible, the opponent must give you one card of each color on the medicine card; if they have only one color, then they give you only one card.

    The central medicine card that depicts all colors has special rules for each of the actions. When curing, if you choose this medicine card, then you win as long as the two hidden cards are the same color; when brewing, the opponent must give you two cards of the same color, with them choosing the color.

    If a player guesses incorrectly when curing, they take no further actions in the round, but they can still be chosen as the target for other players' actions. If only one player remains in the round due to everyone else being terrible curers, then this last player must attempt a cure on their turn. Hope they were paying attention to all of the failures!


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    I've played Herbalism

    twice on a review copy from EmperorS4, once each with three and four players, with each game lasting about five rounds. In both games, we started with appealing and curing in the first round, then something else and curing in the second round, and so on. Some of the actions are similar, but the differences do matter. With appealing in play, the cards start clumping in players' hands because someone with a blue card who's passed one more will have to pass both blue cards together; with inquiring or feeding, you can split pairs or triples to ideally divide information among your fellow players.

    One thing we haven't tried yet are the prediction tokens included in Herbalism

    as a variant. After taking a non-curing action, a player can claim a colored prediction token that doesn't match the color of a token they already have. For each token, if this color is among the hidden cards, the player scores 1 point, regardless of what they guessed or followed; if not, they lose 1 point for this token. This system is another way for a player to share information with their opponents while (possibly) profiting from doing so.

    As you might expect, the three-player game gives you more control than the four-player game because you're more frequently deciding which action is being done (once you have multiple non-curing actions) and who the target of this action is. That said, you can certainly learn information from the actions of others, and one player in my 4p experience excelled at this; at the end of a round, he would explain how he put together info gained from three other players' actions to determine what he wanted to guess as a cure.

    The thing is, however, that he would often guess when he was confident of only one of the hidden cards, with a 50% chance of the other card being correct. As with many other deduction games — such as Sherlock 13

    , which I previewed

    in October 2016 — the conflict between being right and being first pulls you in opposite directions. How sure do you want to be before guessing, especially since being first gets you three times as many points as being right, but only in the wake of someone else? With four players, sometimes you just want to for it since someone among the other three players will likely guess before you do. In practice, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing since many incorrect cures were proposed, but that itch to be first still remains. Thankfully you have herbs on hand to treat that itch...

    Designer Diary: Kaiju Incorporated, or A Kaiju By Any Other Name Would Be a Cable Car

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/623…rporated-or-kaiju-any-oth

    by Eric Vogel

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3763896_t.jpg] The Thing I Miss Most Is My Memory...I Think

    Fair warning that this designer diary may be a little vague in spots. Once in a while, a game of mine has such a long and convoluted path to publication that I have forgotten the beginning of the story by the end of it.

    According to my files, I started prototyping the game that eventually became Kaiju Incorporated

    back in September 2011. That would have been about the time that Cambria

    and Hibernia

    hit the market, and I was seeing early indicators that the company that published them was having difficulties, so I was mostly trying to design games I could potentially self-publish in the pre-Kickstarter era.

    This game began as most of my games do, with an idea for the core mechanism. Players would draft a card from a random row, then either pay to add it to their tableau or discard it to trigger income in the suit of the discarded card. This is the kind of mechanism I like to build a game around: a simple choice but with a lot of factors that influence a player's thinking about which choice to make. I think I fiddled around with the number of suits before settling on three as the most functional. The game was initially just vaguely themed around city construction.

    Because I was thinking in terms of self-publishing, I wanted to create something like my previous game at the time, Armorica

    , that is, something card-based without the need for bits to represent resources. Because of this, the first iterations of this game tried to use unconstructed game cards as money, similar to Race for the Galaxy

    . However, I recognized at a certain point that this limitation was holding me back, so I decided to let myself include game money and VP tokens as components. This let me breakthrough to the early stages of this design, with its biggest early influences being London

    , Citadels

    , Saint Petersburg

    and Phoenicia

    . I admire those designs for how much mileage they get out of an economy based solely on money and victory points (VP). It was probably London

    that had me thinking about making an economic game about city building.

    In the early versions of the game, all cards provided money or VP or both to players on their own turns, and these versions of the game were pretty dull because the game wasn't interactive enough and other player's turns were just downtime. By October 2011, I had come up with the "Your Turn/Rivals Turn" mechanism, and this brought the game much closer to its final form. Now some building cards paid off when you chose to discard for income, and some paid off when other players discarded for income. This made other player's turns more exciting because you were waiting to see whether they would give you income. It also added more decision points because you wanted to force later players into situations where they had to give you income. Thematically, too, this change better represented the action of an interactive economy. Rivals Turn buildings were initially themed as the suppliers to retail businesses, so when the retailers sell, they buy from the suppliers. I don't recall whether the idea for this mechanism grew out of the thematic desire to model economics more closely, or the mechanical need to get the players interacting more.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1260367_t.jpg] I Left My Hat in San Francisco

    At this point I was playtesting with Chris Ruggiero

    , who later became the co-designer of [company=9656]Race to Adventure[/company]

    , Evil Hat Productions

    ' first board game. Chris proposed making the game about rebuilding post-earthquake San Francisco, which I thought was a great idea. He had a lot of specific ideas about how to implement this theming, and I immediately brought him on board as a co-designer.

    Let me say at this point that I am not a natural collaborator. All my other designs are sole authorship for a reason, and that reason is that I am a control freak. I have tried and failed to co-design with others on other occasions, and it has been mostly my fault. Collaborating with Chris worked because he is an exceptionally easy-going guy, and he was happy to let me be senior partner and have final say about everything. Generally if I am going to be involved in a design process with others, I would rather be a developer than a co-author because it is easier emotionally for me to take a backseat in that situation.

    The game went through a bunch of changes that ultimately did not work out, and I don't recall which ideas were Chris' and which were mine. At one juncture in October 2011, the game had a majority control map that interacted with card placement. I believe this is when we instituted the cards having neighborhoods on them as a way to get a little more San Francisco into the game. The map went away, but the majority control neighborhoods stayed. At one stage, building cards had hit points that could get eroded, but that did not work very well either.


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    Sample new product cards



    Then in December 2011, I think it was Chris who introduced the general idea of a newspaper-themed mechanism (which eventually became new product cards and Kaiju cards). I wanted to introduce a penalty points system, similar to poverty points in London

    , and Chris had the idea that instead of scoring VP and PP (penalty points), players would collect good and bad newspaper stories about their companies. This was a big thing in early San Francisco, where corruption was rife and labor disputes were frequent, so I replaced the game money and VP with advancing tracks that eventually allowed you to collect a good headline from the San Francisco Chronicle

    or a bad headline from the San Francisco Examiner

    . (If you lived in the Bay Area back when newspapers were a thing, then you know why we themed them that way.) Eventually we arrived at the bad headlines destroying your building cards (by ruining the businesses) and good headlines awarding VP based on the building cards in your tableau at the end of the game. This helped with a mechanical issue that most tableau-building games have, that is, the tableau growing too large to manage.

    Over the next 2 years the game got playtested and refined a lot, but with no major mechanical changes. Mercifully, my friends liked it and did not object to all the playtesting. At some point between 2012 and 2014, my longtime friend and playtester [user=jonspinner]Jon Spinner[/user] suggested that I should convert the tracks into wheel shapes, to make clearer what happened whenever a track wrapped back to the beginning. It was a great idea, one that really improved the flow of gameplay.

    In this period I took the game with me anytime I might have a chance to pitch games to a publisher (which was infrequent), but it did not get any traction. In this period I worked on Zeppelin Attack!

    and Don't Turn Your Back

    for Evil Hat Productions, as well as doing game development for them on a cooperative game by Chris Ruggiero and Eric Lytle. It did not occur to me to pitch them this game, however, because an economic game didn't seem to fit their oeuvre.


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    Stop...Kaiju Time!

    Meanwhile, president of Evil Hat Productions [user=evilhat]Fred Hicks[/user] had given me a quasi-commission to create a card game around a time travel/paradox theme he had in mind. I designed a game that I wasn't entirely happy with, but that did give me a chance to create some cool alternate history gags, like: "1500: Philippine Empire colonizes Spain", "1965: Malcom X survives assassination attempt, made bionic", and "1980: Jerry Falwell elected President, bans synthesizer music and coin operated video games, American Dark Ages begin". It was a majority control game about trying to take over different centuries with your version of history. It worked mechanically, but the game feel was off; too many players found the game frustrating because their actions were constantly being undone by other players.

    My first game with Evil Hat, Zeppelin Attack!

    , debuted at Gen Con 2014, and the English second edition of my game Romans Go Home

    was being demoed by Asmodee

    at the same show, so I returned to Gen Con for the first time since Cambria

    and Hibernia

    had debuted there in 2011. I was hobnobbing with the big-time designers at the Asmodee booth (finally got to meet Bruno Faidutti face-to-face), taking a variety of meetings with Evil Hat, and generally feeling like a real game designer again.


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    I demoed the time travel game for Fred Hicks, Chris Hanrahan, and Ron Donoghue, and they came to the same conclusion I had about the problematic feel of the game. I think time travel is a tough theme for a game because it presents a very narrow range of options for representing the theme mechanically. While they were there, I showed them the other prototypes in my portfolio. To my surprise, they wanted to do the San Francsico game! Fred came up with the idea of re-theming it around kaiju (Japanese giant movie monsters), and instantly both Rob and Fred started riffing ideas for re-theming the game. The bad headlines became the kaiju, which made the destruction of player tableaus make a lot more sense. The players became megacorporations, looking to profit from rebuilding the world after kaiju attacks.

    Aside from that, I don't remember how much of the broad kaiju theming was spawned at that meeting and how much we did later. My meetings with EHP at conventions tend to be fast (between other meetings), chaotic (with conventioneers constantly stopping to talk to Fred), and conducted when I have had too little sleep. I do remember walking to dinner with the EHP crew afterward, with Fred occasionally turning to me to utter a kaiju roar and make a building squashing gesture; he was very enthused about the game.

    The new theme was always intended to be humorous, a parody of kaiju films rather than just a homage to them. I don't think we ever explicitly discussed that; it just unfolded naturally, perhaps a holdover from the humor of the time travel prototype. It eventually became clear that Fred and I were fans of different kaiju properties. He was mostly a fan of Pacific Rim

    , whereas I was mostly a fan of classic Godzilla

    movies from the 1960s and '70s. This turned out to be a good mix of influences because it made the game a broad parody of the genre as a whole instead of being a tight parody of a particular series.


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    Once we set down to work on the re-theming, it became clear that the kaiju theme was a better fit with the game mechanisms in every way. Chris Ruggiero and I had a field day re-theming the cards, both getting to indulge our senses of humor. The neighborhoods became cities in different nations, so we needed Russian, Chinese, Japanese, American, and Australian themed gag companies. Chris created hilarious card names like "Tchaikovsky Piano Cannon Factory" and "Easily Panicked Masses Stadium". I had the idea to make all of the Australian cards acronyms, like "War Office Mobile Battle Attack Tech" (WOMBAT). EHP likes to keep the humor in their games pretty clean, so some of my gags got toned down slightly, thus "Kaijumojo Male Enhancement Cream" became "Kaijumojo Male Enhancement Pills", and "The Emperor Norton Baby Kaiju Vivisection Hospital" became a "research hospital" instead. By making the U.S. city San Francisco, we were able to keep a little connection to the original theme of the game. Believe it or not, since then I have created another prototype set in the early 1900s Bay Area that also got re-themed as something else. One day I will get to make a game about my hometown…one day…

    I also added new material to the game after the introduction of the new theme in the form of the special action cards. These were created to be a KS bonus item, but also to increase player interactivity by letting them buy actions that impacted each other. I experimented with some other add-ons, like a Giant Robot, which did not work. (Giant Robots never work right.) All the add ons that did work are in the published game now. I also made changes that sped up the game so that it would run a little under an hour most of the time.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3414531_t.jpg]Fred hired Brian Patterson of d20 Monkey fame to do the art, and he really brought the humor to life. Often the sight gags were very different from what I had envisioned and much funnier. The "Banned-Die Toy Company", with its conveyer belt full of "fun hugs bear" teddy bears with razor arms sent me into hysterics when I first saw it. Sometimes he cleaned up my gags by adding a counter-intuitive sight gag, such as the "Hot Robot Maid Research Foundation" that features a very un-sexy masculine robot in a French maid costume...on fire. The art also did a great job of evoking the kaiju world in general, without mimicking anything specific. I had a little input on the art, which didn't need much because it all turned out so well. I remember for BRUCE, a card that was essentially a big public bomb shelter in Australia, the art didn't evoke Australia in any way, so I asked Brian to go back and put really big beer cans in everyone's hands. (No offense, Australians; I am sure you throw down responsibly.)

    Brian works quickly, and the game and all its artwork were pretty much done by late 2015. By that time, The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

    was also pretty far along, and EHP decided to bump that up ahead of Kaiju Incorporated

    on the production schedule. EHP decided to help promote the card game by commissioning a Kaiju Incorporated RPG

    . Rob Wieland created the RPG about the lives of post-kaiju attack clean-up crews, and I had very little to do with the RPG. I made up some additional background material about the world of the card game when Rob first started work, but I don't think he ended up needing to use that material very much. The RPG is entirely his work, and I think it's a cool RPG and am happy to have it out there. However, I must admit it bugs me when people assume that the RPG came first and I designed the card game around it; for once, it was the other way around.

    Eric Vogel

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Minute Realms, or A City-Builder By Any Other Name...

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/694…ealms-or-city-builder-any

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3721454_t.png] Minute Realms

    from Stefano Castelli

    and dV Giochi

    is billed as "the most compact city-building game ever", but I think that statement does a disservice to the game because if you're like me, you have certain expectations when it comes to city-building games. When you play something in this genre, you probably expect (1) adjacency to matter in some way, such as when you're rewarded for building a park next to a playground or punished for building a slaughterhouse next to the kindergarten, and (2) expansion opportunities for things that already exist, such as being able to place additional floors on a building or upgrade a school to a college.

    Minute Realms

    doesn't have either of these elements, and while technically each player is building their own city, they're building a city in some undefined medieval-ish time period when it might be good to have a monastery (depending on your particular circumstances in the game), but you don't care where it goes and the monastery isn't going to be altered once you plop it in whatever random spot seems best.

    Instead I'd classify Minute Realms

    — with "minute" being pronounced like the unit of time, not like something extremely small — as a set-collection game, and the elements of those sets are city buildings from some undefined medieval-ish time period. Assemble — one might say "build", but I'm not that one — the best collection of buildings, and you win the game.

    More precisely, Minute Realms

    is a set-collection game with a tight money management system. You will likely always be hustling for coins, and if you're not, then you're probably doing something wrong.

    Taking a big picture look at this minute game, each round you add one card to your city, and at the end of eight rounds you tally the points in your city to see who wins. Most cards have a fixed point value, while some score based on how many buildings of a particular category (e.g., production or clerical) you have and a handful have special scoring rules, such as the bank in the image below which is worth 1 point for each coin you hold at the end of the game or the market that nets you 6 points for each pair of the indicated categories you have.


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    Looking for nobility to maximize my market



    That's simple enough, but how do you acquire the cards? At the start of each round, one card is dealt face up in front of each player and two cards are placed in the center of the table. The round's starting player can take the card in front of them or they can swap their card for any other card revealed this round — but only if they can complete the trading requirements shown in the upper right corner of the card. (You ignore these requirements on the card in front of you, and this is important for several reasons explained later.) A red dot means you have to pay the cardholder (or the bank if the card is in the center of the table) 1 coin, a green dot means you receive a coin from the bank (since these are mostly production and residential buildings which supply resources and labor for your city), and a dude means you place an invader token face down on the round tracker board.

    Wait, invaders? Yes, you might get sacked by invaders twice during Minute Realms

    , and this element does have you scratching your beard (or clean-shaven chin as the case might be) and thinking, "Maybe this is something of a city-building game after all", before you reject that notion and plant your foot firmly in the category of set-collecting. Let us maintain rigid categories against all reason!

    At most one invader token can be placed in the round tracker each round, and these invaders have strength ranging from 0-2 so they're not overwhelming, but you're a wimpy

    city planner

    set collector, so a 2 is plenty strong enough to knock you on your back. You don't look at these tokens now; just let them set menacingly on the board while you get on with other things.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3762234_t.jpg]

    First round in a four-player game; note that the coin color will differ slightly in the final production



    Once you've decided on a card and fulfilled any trading requirements needed, you can decide to pay the coin cost in the upper-left corner and add the card to your non-city or you can flip the card face down to provide 2 units of defense against invaders while also earning 2 coins from the bank. Why do you receive money when you build defense? Perhaps the burgess is paying you to pay the people manning the walls? I'm not sure, but I think it boils down to "This makes the game better". Some buildings cannot be turned down, however, and these are typically the ones you most want to turn down, but that's life in Minute Realms

    .

    Once everyone has taken a card and either built it or faceplanted it, you throw away the two cards in the center, rotate the start player position, advance the stack of invaders on the round tracker board, then do it again. At the end of the fourth round, you reveal any invaders who have showed up, and any player who doesn't have enough defense to match the strength of the invaders must flip one of their flippable buildings face down. The invaders burnt it down, so you made the best of the situation by turning the rubble into a bastion. You then do this four more rounds, then face the invaders once again, this time summing all the invaders who popped in over the course of eight rounds.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3762160_t.jpg]

    25 points, thanks to four categories and the ? being either clerical, military, or production



    As a card game, Minute Realms

    has all the ups and downs that you'd expect of such. Sometimes your purse is empty, and a fountain that will give you four coins as a trading requirement lands on the table as a gift unto you — and then sometimes that fountain lands in front of you when the trading requirement is void. No coins for you! Sometimes you're skirting on the edge of probability and hoping that lone invader token is a 1 or 0, and you're able to take the card in front of you to remove the lone invader icon from play so that no one else can trade for it and direct the invaders to your door — and sometimes you can't.

    I've played Minute Realms

    seven times on a pre-production copy from dV Giochi — once with five players, twice with three, and four times with two — and while that number might seem excessive for someone just previewing a game, it turned out to be a great experience. The deck scales to match the player count, so with experience you always know the buildings that comprise the deck; they come out at random, of course, but after a few playings, you start to know what's in the deck and you can anticipate what might be coming out in the rounds that remain. You get a feel for the rhythm of spending and collecting coins, although I can't pretend to be good at it or even think there's an ideal way to do it.


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    Building cards you might encounter



    Best of all, I was surprised in the seventh game when one of my opponents morphed into an attack strategy halfway through the game. The other two of us initially laughed about him repeatedly choosing cards that featured invaders, but we didn't conceive of it as a strategy until near the end of the game when we both realized that we had been building defensively while he had just plowed ahead with a face-up building strategy, being content to lose one building when the horde of invaders came because that would still leave everything else standing — and even with the defenses we had built, the other player and I still

    took a hit from the invaders, giving our attack-heavy friend the victory.

    I've harped plenty of times on the value of a reviewer listing how often they've played a game, and this experience was yet another example of why that's important. After five playings, I thought Minute Realms

    a decent set-collection game, albeit somewhat dry with two as you had only four choices available each round and you were often content to take an action that would hurt the opponent as a way of helping yourself, but then I finally played it with three players and found it brisk and more lively, then again with three to discover this new approach to the game. Sometimes you just don't know what you're going to find in a game until it hits you in the face and flips your building upside down, so best not to pretend that you've figured everything out; instead, be up front with your audience as to what your experience has been and let them figure out for themselves what they think about the game.


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    More building cards

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Multiple, or Saved by Zero

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/694…ew-multiple-or-saved-zero

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3708334_t.png]Many games from amateur Japanese designers seem to be born from the notion of taking an idea and saying, "Can we make a game out of that?" Then they do it. The quality of the games can be all over the place, but I love seeing the creative spirit in action, particularly because the ideas are often ones you wouldn't find elsewhere. Plus, I love trying card games of all types, and no one delivers card games like amateur Japanese designers.

    Takashi Yamaya

    's Multiple

    from doujin publisher KUA

    seems to have been born along these lines. The number deck consists of four copies each of the numbers 0-9, the addition sign (+), and the subtraction sign (-). Players receive seven cards at random and place them face up on the table in front of them. Be the first player to rid yourself of cards, and you win the game — but you can't just throw the cards on the floor. Oh, no, you must get rid of them by creating multiples of target numbers.


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    Why are the numbers made of wood? What Japanese pun am I missing?



    How does this work? One player takes the mission deck, then reveals the top card, which shows something like "Multiples of 5". If possible, this player then creates a multiple of 5 using one or more cards in front of them, then discards those cards. You can use a single card (which isn't possible here), two cards to create a two-digit number (again not possible), or multiple single numbers that are connected by one or more addition or subtraction signs. Success! You have both 9 - 4 and 7 - 2. Which do you want to use?

    If you can't or don't want to use your cards to create a multiple of the target number — which will be 3, 4, 5, or 7 — then you draw a new card from the number deck to give yourself something else that you need to discard. That's the opposite of progress, sure, but that's how games work, by making things difficult

    .

    You can't create a multiple that someone else has already used for a mission, so if you have choices, look around the table to see who you can block. You also can't use 0 as a multiple, which seems reasonable given that while 0 is indeed a multiple of all numbers, creating a 0 to rid yourself of cards is lame.

    A couple of missions force all players to draw a card, then the active player must draw a new mission. Anti-progress strikes again!


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    I've played Multiple

    three times on a review copy from Japon Brand, which will sell the game at SPIEL '17, once each with two, three, and four players. After playing, one of the players joked that it was almost a game, yet when we played again with someone who had just arrived at the game table, I did far better than I did the first time.

    In the first game with two players, our number card counts bobbed up and down like corks on a wave, but in the second and third games I had an idea of which mission cards remained in the deck and I played to those probabilities. You can still be thwarted in that effort by the "draw a card" mission or the missions that prohibit you from using the addition or subtraction signs, but even so, you can play better than you did the first time. You realize that you can string together multiple signs to create a target, e.g., 8 - 4 + 1, or that you might want to save a 5 or 0 in case a "multiple of 5" card is revealed. Okay, you probably don't want to save a 0; they seem terrible, aside from making an easy 30, 40, 50, or 70, in which case they're golden.

    I'm probably overthinking this, aren't I?


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    Don't forget to trigger earworms when possible

    Designer Diary: 250+ Plays of Iron Curtain, or How to Measure Replayability

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/679…iron-curtain-or-how-measu

    by Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3576654_t.jpg] Iron Curtain

    is a short and brutal microgame cramped with tough decisions in a 20- to 30-minute time frame. You play as the U.S. or the Soviet Union, map out the Iron Curtain to your advantage, and control the most countries and regions on your side of the curtain.

    Playing Iron Curtain

    well is no easy ride. We have made an effort to include as many interesting and tricky decision points as possible in the slight twenty-card framework. You will play cards that aid you greatly, but also open new opportunities for your opponent to take.

    The Journey that Began 13 Days Ago

    Before I continue, let's pause for a minute. I feel this is the time to thank all of you who played 13 Days

    , our first Cold War game, and shared the love and wonderful stories. I can positively say that Iron Curtain

    (and 13 Minutes

    ) would not have existed today had 13 Days

    not been so well received. We are immensely grateful. This is why we design games, so thank you all.

    The Third Cold War Game

    When 13 Days

    came out, it was branded the Twilight Struggle

    filler game. I used that moniker myself, not knowing if it would come back to haunt me one day. I still don't know.

    13 Minutes

    , which was released in early 2017, is the 13 Days

    microgame. It boils down the experience of brinkmanship in a box.

    Following this line of thinking, Iron Curtain

    could be said to be the Twilight Struggle

    microgame. I may be going out on a limb here...again. Time will tell. Iron Curtain

    shares some game concepts with the 13 Days

    / Minutes

    titles, but it very much has an identity of its own.

    Different Game, Same Cold War

    I asked on social media for topics to discuss in this diary, and the question that came up the most was how we decided to make Iron Curtain

    different from previous Cold War games. Three games in fairly short succession will beget that question.

    The short answer is that there is no "13" in the title.

    The artistic answer is that Iron Curtain

    by intent has a distinct look with more vibrant colors and layout. The message we are trying to convey is that this is not 13 Days II

    …or III

    …or whatever! We hope Iron Curtain

    will stand on its own legs and be judged on its own merits, good as well as bad.

    The game design answer is that Iron Curtain

    offers a different core experience from the other games. I will highlight two key experiences below that were design goals of ours from the outset. There are more, but I will leave that for you to explore.

    First Design Goal: Building the Iron Curtain

    Iron Curtain

    has a proper in-game geography, something that wasn't present in 13 Days

    / Minutes

    .

    Cards double as actions and as key countries during the superpower struggle. When you play a card, it immediately goes to the table next to countries of the same region. As the game progresses, the world map is built one country at a time.

    How you build the world now matters a great deal. When you want to expand your influence later, you are limited by your current presence on the table. Except for certain events, you may move only into adjacent countries, so some countries are within easy grasp, while others will take much greater effort to reach.

    This is a feature you may — no, let me rephrase — this is a feature you should

    use to your advantage. How so? Be the first to drop two or more cubes onto a country to control it and create a temporary safe haven behind that line where you can drop cards. Play the first card of a new region so that you have the freedom to place that card where you have easy access to it and your opponent does not.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3586140_t.jpg]

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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3586137_t.jpg]

    I love how the "map" looks different each time you play



    Second Design Goal: Adding Doses of Suspension and Agony

    Iron Curtain

    has no scoring cards of the type with which you might be familiar in Twilight Struggle

    and no hidden agendas as used in 13 Days

    . In fact, every card is a potential scoring card.

    A region scores when all cards of that region are played to the table. So should you play early to jump ahead in that region, or wait to control when the scoring will happen? Or perhaps abandon the region entirely, discarding the card at the end of the round? Managing and sequencing your hand of cards is the single greatest challenge you will face in this game.

    What all this means is that you will see scoring approach all over the table — at the same time. You are constantly trying to pre-empt your opponent's moves in, say, Africa and Europe, yet you also want to put pressure on them in the Middle East and Asia. The card you want to play allows the use of only two cubes, so what do you prioritize?!


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3686536_t.png]

    Asia scores when Japan, Vietnam and Pakistan are all on the table, then again at the end of the game



    250 Plays and Counting — A Playtester's Perspective

    We always intended Iron Curtain

    to be a highly replayable microgame with layers of depth, a game you can play over and over and still learn new tricks.

    The question is: How do you measure replayability? How do you know when you've succeeded? This would be the perfect moment for me to derail the designer diary and go on an analytical rant, but I won't. Instead I sat down to talk to Sagad Al-Serjawi, a most dedicated playtester who has played an insane number of games of Iron Curtain

    .

    You could say I am turning this designers' diary into a playtester's diary.

    Daniel:

    Hi, Sagad. Thank you for joining this designer diary. So tell me, how many games of Iron Curtain

    have you played?
    Sagad:

    I don't know! I stopped counting after 250 games. I played with everyone from friends to family to strangers at a bar one time. You can say I got addicted...

    D:

    Why do you think you went on to play such a huge number of games?
    S:

    It's a fun game, and no turns are the same. There is always a new challenge to figure out. The game takes place during the Cold War, and you can really feel the pressure from your enemy; whether you play the USSR or the U.S. you will always find new ways of winning (or losing).

    D:

    Do you prefer to play a particular side?
    S:

    Hmm, I'd say U.S. for no particular reason. Both feel balanced.

    D:

    Do you recall a cool move you made during a game?
    S:

    Well, my friend had taken Cuba and invested a lot of energy in holding it. I was playing USSR and got the Brazil card at the right moment so that I could use the ability to remove his cubes from there, thereby making it possible to enter.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3687462_t.png]


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3687460_t.jpg]

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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3687463_t.png]

    The evolution of the Algeria and Poland cards from early prototype to finished cards



    D:

    With all those plays did the experience change over time?
    S:

    It sure did. To be honest, the first time I heard about Iron Curtain

    I did not believe it would be something for me, but to my surprise it is now one of my favorite games. The first time you play Iron Curtain

    everything will be a surprise. You don't know what the different cards do and what tactics to use, so the first game is usually quite slow. Then you get the flow.

    D:

    How many games had you played at that point?
    S:

    After around five games I understood how the game is built. I began planning bluffs like placing some cubes in Asia while my sole objective was to conquer Europe. At this point I also planned which cards to throw away in the Aftermath, and where to invest influence cubes. I personally loved this state since there were still room for mistakes. The best way to learn is through mistakes. That changed at a later point.

    D:

    How did it change?
    S:

    Once I hit the point of mastering the game, everything turned from kids play into hardcore thinking. It was fifty or so plays in. At this point I started thinking several moves ahead and I knew all cards in and out. I had no room for mistakes — any little mistake could cost me the game. The tactics changed as well. You start building scenarios in your head and learn when to drop off the opponent's cards.

    D:

    Thank you, Sagad, and thanks to everyone reading all the way to the bottom of this diary. Have fun with the game.

    Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    P.S.: If you are at SPIEL '17, swing by the Ultra PRO

    and Jolly Roger Games

    booth as Asger

    and I will be there to say hi and demo/sign games on Friday, October 27 at 13:00-14:00 and on Sunday, October 29 at 12:00-13:00.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3576654_t.jpg]

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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3544548_t.jpg]

    It feels kind of crazy that we now have three Cold War games

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Iquazú, or Majorities on the Falls

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/694…quazu-or-majorities-falls

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3744088_t.jpg]German publisher HABA

    kicked off its family game line in 2015

    with Adventure Land

    , Spookies

    , and Rüdiger Dorn's Karuba

    , which went on to pick up a Spiel des Jahres nomination in 2016.

    The company released more family games in 2016, and for 2017 it's going even bigger, releasing Karuba: The Card Game

    (as well as a Karuba Junior

    for its traditional audience of younger players), the somewhat traditional roll-dice-to-get-stuff King of the Dice

    (to be previewed later), the abstract-ish card-laying game CONEX

    , the firecracker-tossing Boom, Bang, Gold

    , and the game I'm talking about today: Michael Feldkötter

    's Iquazú

    .

    A glance at the cover of Iquazú

    might have you thinking of Avatar

    , but the gameplay is set in the Iguazú Falls located on the border of Argentina and Brazil. I'm guessing that "Iquazú" is how Germans spell "Iguazú", although the name change might be used to indicate that the action in this game takes place on an alternate Earth, one in which the Inox tribe — which includes you — wants to hide their gems for safekeeping behind the Iguazú waterfalls. To do this, they have called upon their water dragon Silon to temporarily block the flow of the river so that they can embed their gems in the rocky walls behind the falls.

    All of which is a familiar genre premise to set up the somewhat fiddly, yet extremely cool mechanism that represents the falls, which can be seen below in this set-up for two players:


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759535_t.jpg]



    Okay, that shows you the bits in the game: a box of gems in four colors with each player using only one of those colors, a box of wooden water droplets, cards in three colors, a scoring track, and...something in the middle that isn't exactly clear. How about we look at this close-up image instead?


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759540_t.jpg]

    Several turns into a two-player game



    Yes, there we go! The colored spaces on the rock wall represent holes where you can stash gems. Why are these spots in three colors? Because otherwise you wouldn't have much of a game. In terms of the setting, I'm not sure what these colors are supposed to represent — perhaps the different colors of vines down which you must rappel in order to reach this location — but whatever it is, these colors matter during the game, so pay attention to them.

    On a turn, you either draw four cards from the deck (with these cards showing one of the three colors on the rock wall) or you play 1-5 cards of the same color to place a gem on a hole in the rock wall of that same color. Why 1-5 cards? Because the more cards you play, the farther to the right you can place that gem.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759549_t.jpg]

    Underneath the dragon are numbers 1-5, showing how many cards you must play to place in each column



    What's the point of all this? Distracting yourself from the terrors of the outside world? Perhaps so, but more specifically you want to place gems in a better way than your fellow tribe members, and the only way such things are measured are in points.

    More specifically, each column of the rock wall will be scored once during the game, and when it's scored, the player with the most gems in that column scores the most points available for that column, the player with the secondmost gems scores the secondmost points, and so on — but note that in a game with n players, only n-1 players will score points in a column. If players are tied in gem count, then the player with the bottommost gem breaks the tie. Let's assume that they took more chances rappelling down the rock face and are now being rewarded.

    But wait, there's more! Whenever a column is scored, you also look for majorities in each row, with a bonus token being given to whoever has the most gems in that row; ties are broken by whoever has the gem farthest to the right, with the bottommost right position being the final tiebreaker. These bonus tokens net you:

    • Points, which can be hidden for now and added to your score at game's end for a "surprise" ending

    • Cards, with you spending those tokens whenever you choose

    • A joker ability so that you can fill a hole by discarding the right number of cards without care for their color

    • An extra turn, which is the best bonus of all, so fight for these!

    You can use as many bonus tokens as you want on a turn, and since the points for each column escalate as the game progresses, you'll likely want to save these for critical turns in the future.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759576_t.jpg]

    My green gem is far behind near the end of a four-player game — so sad



    That's almost the entire game. All of these components assembled in this elaborate structure are in the service of you either drawing cards or spending cards to place a gem each turn — with one exception. The last player in turn order at the start of the game holds a box of water droplets, and at the end of this player's turn, they place a droplet in the highest empty space in the leftmost column. The dragon is moving slowly across the falls, and the water is starting to drip down as it moves.

    This drip-drip-drip functions just like any other drip-drip-drip you've encountered in music or movies. It's a timing device, something to ensure that the game keeps moving; more importantly, the drips pressure you and influence what you want to do because they will fill open spaces in the current column, perhaps locking in majorities that you wanted to challenge, whether the lone vertical column that will be scored or the five bonus actions available when that scoring takes place.


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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759672_t.jpg]

    Scoring in four steps: score points & bonuses, remove part of the falls, slide the falls right, replace falls and reveal new bonuses



    As much as Iquazú

    is about majorities, the game is also about timing. I've played five times on a preproduction copy from HABA — four times with two players and once with four — and the more you play, the more you start paying attention to the rhythm of the game. You know that 0-n gems (or possibly more due to bonus turns) will be added to the board each turn, along with one water drop; you see what everyone is fighting for, whether due to intent or due to them having certain cards; you know that in at most x turns the column will fill, the waterfall will advance, and bonuses will be distributed, so what will you do in those turns?

    Timing plays out in multiple ways during the game. If a column fills and scores, and the next column is already full, then it will score as well — but only after you've slid the waterfall right, hiding the leftmost column of gems and revealing a new set of bonus tokens to be distributed. Yes, more bonuses! The cost to place gems in the rightmost columns is high, but they'll factor in to you winning bonus tokens multiple times, probably more than paying back that investment although you don't know what the bonuses will be until the waterfall moves.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759674_t.jpg]

    Bonuses during set-up before you add the falls



    The final three columns score all at once, with a huge payoff for the leftmost column and middling (yet still meaningful) points for the two remaining rock columns. The final two columns of bonuses are nothing but points since other rewards hold little interest by that point. You should have already spent your collected bonuses for cards, extra turns, or (far less rarely) color-changing joker powers. Leave nothing in reserve!


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759673_t.jpg]

    The rock wall is comprised of five double-sided game boards



    In short, Iquazú

    plays out like multiple, old-school overlapping area majority games, with the moving waterfall shifting the balance of each player's holdings over the course of the game. Despite its straightforward gameplay Iquazú

    takes a while to set up, but the waterfall structure is ingenious, exemplifying the effort that HABA puts into a design to create a particular experience during play.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3759676_t.jpg]

    Your box will likely have external graphics...and an insert

    Artist Diary: Lisboa, or "That Game Is Too Blue!"

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…y-lisboa-or-game-too-blue

    by Ian O'Toole

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3209553_t.jpg] Lisboa

    is my third collaboration with Vital Lacerda

    and Eagle-Gryphon Games

    , following The Gallerist

    and Vinhos Deluxe Edition

    .

    However, it was actually the first game I worked on for Vital. Having first started to discuss working together, Vital asked me for a sketch of the game's cover, which for almost two years was the sole indication of Lisboa

    's visual style. But I had barely started when Vital asked me to work on The Gallerist

    , then Vinhos Deluxe

    . It was a couple of busy years before returning to Lisboa

    .


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3651094_t.jpg]

    My initial sketch for Lisboa's box cover in December 2014



    From the start, it was evident that this was a game Vital was passionate about. While all of his games are well researched, the enthusiasm and knowledge with which he spoke about the history of his city was infectious. After much discussion and a perusal of the many, many reference images that Vital had gathered, I wanted to make this a visually unique and authentic game. I wanted people from Lisboa to recognize their city in every part of the game.

    For me, there was never a question as to where the visual direction of the game should go. The unique style of Portugal's Azulejos painted tiles leapt out at me immediately. I knew straight away that we weren't going to find anything that was more distinctive or authentic to the theme. There was also a striking visual link between the delicate artistry found in these tiles, and the fact that many are now chipped, cracked, and broken. This ties in beautifully with the theme of constructing a great city from the ruins of a natural disaster. In addition, the style is both historical and representative of modern Lisboa as these incredible pieces of art can still be seen throughout the city.


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    An example of the stunning Azulejos



    To help get my head around the task ahead, I printed out one of Vital's earlier prototypes and played the game with a patient friend. This is absolutely essential when designing a complex game as I need to see how the pieces interact, how the stacks of counters need to be placed, and where the sticking points in the gameplay are. While the game was running pretty well at that stage, it was apparent that development work was still to be done, so I decided not to start with the board. The Azulejos style would demand a lot of time-intensive detail, and changing it significantly as gameplay evolved would create problems. I decided to start with the iconography instead.

    The graphic designer in me always tends towards clean, simple iconography. However, it was clear that this approach would cause problems here as I wanted to stay as true as possible to our chosen style. Because of this, I approached the icons as miniature illustrations, using key signifiers to tie groups of them together. All of the resources and the icons related to them (such as Produce) have a circular base. Both of the main institutions in the game, the clergy and the treasury, share a diamond-shaped base. All of these icons, as with everything else, began life as thumbnails in a sketchbook before being fully rendered digitally.


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    Some early sketches alongside the final icons



    The next task was to work on the cards, both political and decrees. While the four decks of political cards are largely separated only by color, design elements such as the decorative flourishes vary from deck to deck to further distinguish them.


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    The initial layout for the Political cards



    As I moved on to the ship cards and began considering how they operated on the table and in conjunction with the player board, a nagging issue that wouldn't go away began to surface. The original player board (called your portfolio) was a simple rectangular shape, and cards played to your portfolio were laid beside it in two rows. This caused a number of issues for me. First, it used a lot of table space. Second, once the cards were played to the table, only the top icon was relevant. All of the other information had no further effect on gameplay.

    Mulling this over in my sketchbook, I decided to strongly recommend we make a big change to how this all worked. The idea was to obscure the information on the card that became irrelevant by tucking it under the player board, simultaneously saving on table space. This isn't a new idea obviously, and it's one that my own favorite game, Glory to Rome

    , uses well. However, I also felt that we could aid the player in learning the rules of the game by doing this.

    Each card has a benefit that the player receives immediately when the card is played to the portfolio. By making this icon the one that got tucked under the board, we were able to introduce a simple general rule: "When you cover something up, you receive it." Adding arrows to the area behind these icons to remind players where (top or bottom) each card should be tucked also helped during the learning process.


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    My first sketch to sell the idea to Vital



    Consequently, ship cards became a bit of a challenge as the original mechanism had players flip the ship cards once they sailed away after having been filled with goods. Not wanting to force players to lift the cards from under their portfolio every turn to flip them, I devised the "dock" area on the player board that serves as a space to store goods. This had a number of positive effects. First, it changed the ship cards from portrait to landscape, which serves as a clear indicator to every player of how many ship cards are currently in play. Second, it freed up most of the ship card, which goods would previously have covered, to show the illustration, as well as clear indications of the ship's hull size and selling bonus. The goods spaces also now act as a track of sorts, with the ship card itself indicating the maximum amount of goods that can be loaded onto it.


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    Ship cards in a player's portfolio



    This redesign of the entire manner in which the player's portfolio operates was probably the biggest turnaround we had during the process of creating the visuals for Lisboa

    . A lot of discussion and convincing was necessary, and a lot of rules rewriting resulted (apologies to all involved!), but I feel that the result is a good solution for the game.


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    The near-final player boards



    Then began the long process of creating the board. The first step was to lay everything out in simple shapes without any illustration or thematic elements. This creates the core functionality of the layout. The key elements at this stage are flow, clarity, and hierarchy of information, as well as ergonomics in regard to pieces that will be placed onto the board.


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    One of Vital's prototype boards



    A change that was made at this stage was to move the treasury track to the center of the board so that it was more related to the noble offices, the ship yard, and the city itself, all of which it affects. Once this bare-bones version was complete, I printed it out full size to move components around and make sure it felt right.

    Another change I wanted to try out was having a standard tile for the stores, but having a cut-out "entrance" that would indicate which street the tile faces. This would have the positive effect of reducing the number of tiles needed from 40 down to 24 (since they would no longer be color-specific) and would also make set-up easier and faster. You can see here my rudimentary prototype that I presented to Vital, who liked it enough to give it the go-ahead.


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    A bare-bones mock-up, testing the concept of the store tiles



    Once the layout was working, the process of illustrating the board began. There are no real shortcuts here; it's just focusing on each section in turn and trying not to go mad in the process. The drawing process took about a week to complete. Once the main elements were in place, the iconography was added, and I started to introduce color into areas to differentiate them. This is a fine balancing act. Too much color betrays the style we're working in and distracts from the icons during play.


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    The near-final board



    The box cover was the next big task, but time was beginning to run short. This and a number of other unrelated factors led to the cover illustration being completed in just two days — two long, long days. Thinking of the box as a single piece of design (rather than as a front cover and four sides), I liked the idea of players picking up a chunk of rubble, with the painted tiles still attached to the front. The fact that I knew the final box would be pretty heavy helped to reinforce the concept.


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    From sketch to final cover



    Once most of the elements were complete, I made a full prototype and organized to play it with a few different groups. The reason for this was to uncover issues that don't become apparent until new players sit down with the game. I always make a point of not using a player aid during these playtests at it puts the burden of communication on the board and other components.


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    Late-art prototype, using 3mm think foam core to mimic the thickness of the final tiles



    These playtests proved invaluable, and a last round of updates were made for further testing by Vital and approval by the folks at Eagle-Gryphon Games, the publisher.

    There are many, many more elements to this game that needed individual attention, such as the thematic custom meeple designs and public building illustrations, as well as the task of splitting the player board into three separate levels of cardboard before production.

    It's been a long road since that cover sketch I created in an afternoon in 2014, but a hugely rewarding one. I hope I've managed to do justice to the amount of passion that Vital has poured into his game, and it's not only one of the projects I'm most proud of from a creative standpoint, but also a game I really love to play. I hope you will, too.

    Ian O'Toole


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    Late-art prototype in play at PAX Aus 2016



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    3D render created for Kickstarter page (excluding custom meeples)



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    3D render created for Kickstarter page (excluding custom meeples)



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    3D render created for Kickstarter page (excluding custom meeples)



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    3D render created for Kickstarter page (excluding custom meeples)



    P.S.: Sorry it's so blue.

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Azul, or Tiling Up Your Hopes and Dreams

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/693…tiling-your-hopes-and-dre

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3718275_t.jpg]I've already posted an overview

    of Michael Kiesling

    's Azul

    , which Plan B Games

    will debut at SPIEL '17 in October, but now I've played the game many more times since then — ten total on a pre-production copy and a review copy, four times with four players and six times with two — so let's talk about it some more.

    In a recent preview

    of a new edition of Alex Randolph's Venice Connection

    , I talked about that game's Nim

    -style gameplay. Nim

    is extremely basic: Start with three or more heaps of objects, then take turns with another player to remove any number of objects from precisely one heap; whoever removes the last object wins. Unfortunately, Nim

    is also solved, which makes it uninteresting to play — but the framework of Nim

    gives you a great structure upon which other better

    games can be built.

    Azul

    is one of those games.

    Now, the premise of Azul

    is ridiculous. You're supposed to be a tile-laying artist who has "been challenged to embellish the walls of the Royal Palace of Evora" in order to impress King Manuel I, but at most you'll complete a 5x5 grid of tiles and in most cases you won't have more than a couple of lines of tiles on that grid with numerous holes throughout, and I daresay that only the daftest of kings would be impressed by such a half-assed display of tilery. Perhaps that 5x5 grid is meant to suggest some larger tile-pattern that will be used throughout the palace, but even then you think the king would look at your unfinished work and suggest that you'd be better off as a sheep herder.

    No matter. The premise of the game is mere window dressing on what's going to get you to the table — the wonderfully chunky colored bits — and keep you coming back to the table after that first playing, that being the Nim

    -style gameplay alluded to earlier.

    At the start of each round, you fill up five, seven, or nine discs (depending on whether you have two, three, or four players) with four tiles drawn at random from a bag, then place a first player marker in the center of the table. You take turns choosing a disc or the center of the table, then taking all tiles of one color from this location and placing them in a single row on your personal player board; if you chose a disc, then you push any remaining tiles into the center of the table. If you're the first person to choose the center, you take the first player marker along with your chosen tiles.


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    The start of a three-player game; what do you want?



    If you can't fit all of the titles into your row of choice, with the rows being 1-5 spaces in length, then excess tiles "fall" to the bottom of your player board, with you being penalized for such waste at round's end. You can add more tiles to a row you've already started as long as all the tiles are the same color.

    You take turns choosing tiles until they've all been claimed, then for each complete row on your player board, you move one of those tiles into the matching-colored space on the same row in the 5x5 grid. You score points for each of these moved tiles, and if you can cluster those tile placements, you score more points. Tiles in incomplete rows stay where they are, while all excess tiles from completed rows are placed in a discard pile. Continue to play rounds this way until someone completes a horizontal row on their grid. At the end of this round, the game ends and you score bonus points for completed rows (not much), completed columns (worth more), and completed colors (the best of all).

    That's it — Azul

    in three paragraphs, three dry paragraphs that don't get across the wonderful tenseness that develops during the game. In that first round, you're mostly trying to grab whatever seems best. Can you take three tiles of the same color? Then do that. Can you take only two? Then do that. But wait? Which tiles are being pushed into the middle, and how many of them lie on other discs? Which color did the player before you take, and are you giving them a gift of tiles on their next turn? You feel things out, take this or that, then the round ends, you score a few points, then the game picks up from there.

    Now you all have investments, whether tiles in your grid or rows of tiles in waiting, and those claimed colors — both by you and everyone else — start affecting everything else that you do. Does the player behind you need two yellow to complete a row? Take them for yourself! Make them take actions to scratch out only a single tile each turn, thereby possibly dumping multiples of colors in the middle that you can then scoop up.


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    Not a great first round, having completed only two rows — that dark blue tile will be removed



    The same number of tiles are put into play each round (except possibly in the four-player game when the bag runs low because so many tiles have been used), but those tiles needn't be distributed evenly. You want to grab great globs of them for yourself so that you can complete those four- and five-space rows quickly and repeatedly. If you let those rows drag along half-filled from one round to the next, then you have little hope of completing columns or grabbing five tiles of the same color, and that's where you land the big points, so be greedy at the expense of others, and the only ways to be greedy are to:

    1. Pay attention to who's taking what, and

    2. Take tiles from the right places at the right times.

    This latter aspect of the game only starts emerging after your first couple of rounds. You realize that if you had taken that one red tile from the center instead of the final disc then someone else would have taken a tile from that disc, possibly allowing you to grab three blue tiles instead of two since one blue was dumped into the center. Or you see three blue already in the center and realize that everyone else either already has blue in their fourth and fifth rows or is at work on some other color and can't

    take blue, so you let it sit a round to build up to four or more tiles so that you can complete a row in one go. Anyone who's drafted in Magic: The Gathering

    or other games will recognize this tension: How long can you wait to take something? Will someone else snatch it first? What's more, can you wait longer so that the pot builds?


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    Round #2 begins with you going second; what are you aiming to collect?



    I picture the ending of each round in Azul

    as the moment in The Matrix Revolutions

    when Neo and Trinity briefly rise above the clouds to spy sunlight they would have never expected to see — only to then plummet downward into the thick of battle once again where fresh tiles have been laid out and everyone is fighting and you're not sure what's going to happen. (I apologize for making you think about The Matrix Revolutions

    .) The rising tension mimics that feeling of when you're reaching for cards in a new round of a trick-taking game: What's possible this time? How can you score what you need and dodge the rest of the time?

    Azul

    is even tighter at two players because you know that whichever tiles you don't get, the other player will, and this makes the Nim

    comparison even more evident: If I take this tile, then you'll likely take those two, which means I can take these and possibly set myself up for those the turn after. I might want to take these four tiles, but if I can leave them and force you to take them when you have no room, then you'll lose six points, which is pretty much the same as me gaining six points.

    You can still do such things with four players, though, and this can be even more satisfying. You see that the next player likely wants a black tile and the person after that a yellow, so if you take this blue (when otherwise you might not have cared which color you took), then player #4 gets stuck with lots of tiles they can't use. Yay, collaborative kneecapping! We used similar tactics in my most recent game to ensure that a player couldn't grab two black tiles to complete a row and therefore trigger the end of the game. (He was the only player who had four tiles in a row.) We hadn't counted out the endgame bonuses, but that player seemed to be in the lead, so we wanted more time and took turns pushing him away from the door.


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    Possible trouble ahead



    I haven't even mentioned the gray variant game board — not advanced, mind you, but "variant", although I'd advise playing on the colored side for your first game or two. When you play on the gray board, you place tiles under the same restrictions, with each row and column of your 5x5 grid allowed to have each color only once, but outside of that you have the freedom to place a tile anywhere in a row.

    What has happened in my games is that scores are higher since you can cluster the tiles as soon as you place them, but you also tend to box yourself into corners that will be increasingly unpleasant as the game continues. In the image above, I'm on my way to completing a column — assuming that I can finish the second and fourth rows before the round ends (or the game, really) — but if I place black in the fourth spot in that column, then I'll need to place black in the fifth spot of the adjacent column, but I can't even start working on that black row until I clear out the yellow, and that yellow's not going to score my much anyway, but I've started it, so now I need to end it. If I instead place the black in the fourth spot of the middle column, then I can't place both the light blue and yellow in the second column or else I doom myself to never completing the column since black would have to go in the fourth spot and can't.

    Whenever you take tiles, as with those yellow in the bottom row, you can choose to dump them on the floor instead of placing them in a row, but that's like purposefully stepping on a nail. Better to get small points than negative points, right? Maybe?


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    83 points, despite flubbing the top row



    My only regret with Azul

    right now is that I have many more games to preview ahead of SPIEL '17, so I won't be able to play it as much as I want. I realize that might sound like bragging rather than an actual regret, but it's not. To do a good job in this space, I can't post over and over again about the same game, but thankfully Azul

    will wait for me until I call once again. That waiting time for the tiling shouldn't be a problem given the king's low expectations...

    New Game Round-up: Old Ones in AuZtralia, Explorers in the North Sea, and Sarahs in the Timeline

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/693…auztralia-explorers-north

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3713520_t.png]• I'm a sucker for time travel, so when I see a game (or a book or a movie or an opera) on the topic, I pay attention to it. The latest design spotted in this category is Sarah's Singularity

    , a Thomas Gutschmidt

    design that Daily Magic Games

    will Kickstart in October 2017 for a planned Q4 2018 release. Whether I'll ever play the game is an open question, but know about the game's existence is the first step — unless events change retroactively and this section of my post turns into an introduction to Sarah's Singed Reality

    , a cooperative game about a woman's attempts to survive an apartment fire:

    Future Sarah has fractured the timelines and it's up to you, an earlier-version Sarah, to solve missions and set things right. Bring dinosaurs to Ancient Egypt and ComiCon panelists to Feudal Japan while trying to rescue lost companions scattered in time. Put companions to work in their own times to complete missions. You've got seven time jumps to complete as many missions as possible, but watch out for paradoxes; if two or more Sarahs meet in the same time zone, everything about them will change in an instant and all your plans could go up in smoke.

    In Sarah's Singularity, players select an assortment of time periods from prehistoric Pangea to ComicCon 2012 and establish a set of missions for each period. Stranded companions from far-ranging times are scattered among the chosen periods and each player gets a "Sarah Card" with special powers. Finally, players choose two secret objective cards for hidden endgame scoring and a Chronologist is selected from the gathered players.

    Each round, Future Sarah visits a time period to strand another companion and the players simultaneously and secretly select a time period to jump to where they hope to solve a mission by matching icons on the mission card with icons on the stranded companion cards and the icons on their own hand of helpful companions. Typically, when the selected periods are revealed, they're resolved in chronological order. However, if two or more Sarahs (including the Future Sarah) land in the same time period, they paradox! Those player immediately turn in their Sarah Cards and get a new one at random, losing the special powers they may have planned to use to help solve the mission. The Chronologist then decides the order in which the paradoxing players gets to take their turns. The paradoxing player who goes last gets to be the new Chronologist.

    Players claim solved missions as victory points. They also gain bonus points and a wild icon token for rescuing a stranded companion and hidden endgame points through their secret objective cards. After seven rounds, the points are tallied and a winner is announced.

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    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2825869_t.jpg]• In June 2017, Renegade Game Studios

    announced

    that it would bring Shem Phillips

    ' Raiders of the North Sea

    to North America, and now it has placed a Q4 2017 release date for the two other standalone titles in the series — Shipwrights of the North Sea

    and Explorers of the North Sea

    — as well as The North Sea Runesaga

    , an expansion that can be used with any or all of these games.

    • Renegade also plans to release a new edition of Wei-Min Ling

    's Planet Defenders

    , which debuted from Taiwanese publisher EmperorS4 at SPIEL '16. In the game, players take turns moving characters (guided by restrictions on the board that constantly change) to collect energy and move among the planets to repel invade robots. Renegade's version of the game replaces the cardboard standees with 3D miniatures.

    • I thought that I had posted about this title, but no, that was only in my mind. In mid-2017, New Zealand-based publisher SchilMil Games

    announced a two-year deal with designer Martin Wallace

    that will include a game set in Middle-earth, a co-designed game about which no details were given, and the 2018 release of AuZtralia

    :

    Ever since 1180, for seven long centuries, the Old Ones held full sway over the riches of the Earth and the affairs of humankind. All that changed in 1888. For in that momentous year, Sherlock Holmes and a clandestine fraternity of intrepid Victorian heroes succeeded in vanquishing these monstrous tyrants and driving them from their lands. Humanity had triumphed, but the countries of Europe and America were in a terrible state. The land was poisoned and food shortages were a constant scourge.

    Other parts of the planet had not yet been explored as the Old Ones had enforced a draconic ban on exploration. Humanity, enjoying its new-found freedom, sent ships out to explore the world. A vast new continent was discovered on the far side of the world. At first called Terra Australis, it quickly became known as Australia. Brave prospectors and surveyors came to explore the new continent. They were followed by pioneers and settlers who constructed ports and built railways into the vast interior, developing farms and shipping the produce back to the hungry masses they had left behind. Untold riches in coal, iron and gold were discovered in the hinterland — but that was not all that awaited the pioneers...

    There was a reason why a ban existed on exploring this part of the world. Unbeknownst to all, hidden in the outback of the land, the Old Ones had created a secret base. Following their defeat the surviving Old Ones and some of their loyal human allies made their way to their holdfasts in the arid plains beyond the Great Dividing Range. As the colonists spread, so the Old Ones began to stir, hell-bent on driving these irksome intruders back into the sea. Terrible creatures bred by the Old Ones started to move across the land, destroying everyone they encountered, blighting everything in their path.

    Faced with this horror, the pioneers pinned their hopes on the one advantage they had: the power of modern military technology, which was now so much more advanced than in 1888 when mankind was last called upon to face against the Old Ones.

    Inspired by Martin Wallace's A Study in Emerald, AuZtralia is an economic/adventure game set in an alternate reality 1930s in which Australia is waiting to be explored. As well as riches from the land, darkness and insanity lies in the outback. The game meshes themes of exploration, adventure, and economy (farming and mining), with battles against fantastical Old One creatures who act as an in-game player. It also boasts a randomized board set-up, an innovative combat mechanism, and a surprisingly tense solo play mode.


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    RWBY: Combat Ready

    is a board game based on the RWBY animated series

    created by Monty Oum and produced by Rooster Teeth. U.S. publisher Arcane Wonders

    is handling development of the game, about which no details have been announced (as far as I can tell).

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    Designer Diary: Frogriders, or Leapfrogging from 1687 to the Present Day

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/678…-or-leapfrogging-1687-pre

    by Asger Sams Granerud

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3326905_t.jpg]Tracking a game's origin back to 1687 is quite a feat as the game would be almost as old as what we call modern chess today. It is even rarer if we limit ourselves to games that are still played to this day. The game I'm referring to, and the game that inspired Frogriders

    was Peg Solitaire

    .

    Before I'm beheaded by internet warriors, I am aware

    that Peg Solitaire

    is probably closer to a puzzle than a game, by any modern definition. However, I'll posit that at its core Peg Solitaire

    has a couple of features that makes it ideal to use as a template for a modern game. I firmly believe that Daniel Skjold Pedersen

    and I have expanded upon these core strengths of Peg Solitaire

    to make it a viable 2017 title. I hope you will agree, and if you want to learn why I believe so, read on!

    •••



    Frogriders

    is a 2-4 player family game for players aged 8+ that takes 20-30 minutes to play. Each player is a member of a different tribe of elves that also ride frogs. The game takes place around the elf's tribal pond, and represents a mock battle, reenacting the bold maneuvers of times past.

    At its core, though, Frogriders

    is a straight forward abstract, with some modern mechanisms added: shared and hidden scoring, set collection, and light engine building. Its weight lends itself to a fast filler for the hardcore gamers (best at 2) and a full game experience especially for youngsters (best at 3-4). The gameplay is straightforward, and even if you can't spot the best move, you can always jump a frog and keep it.

    The first time I remember seeing Frogriders

    was on a Thursday evening after bouldering (climbing), which is when Daniel and I had our weekly design session. He turned up with this new game called "Frog N Roll" and a very rough prototype. We went back and forth on the game for a couple of weeks, without any major breakthroughs. There were too many different card decks, and they weren't in use quite often enough, plus the game ended with some analysis paralysis because 95% of the scores were open.

    Despite all of these initial troubles, we had a gut feeling we were on to something. We have a few playtesters in our family who aren't actual gamers like the vast majority of our testers. In general, when they get hooked on one of our early prototypes, despite all its flaws at that stage, we know we have to push through with it. For this game it was Daniel's cousin Martin Holst. For Flamme Rouge

    , it was my wife Malu — though it should be said that Malu asks more often for Frogriders

    than Flamme Rouge

    , with the finished copy on our shelves.


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    Different stages of the prototype board, as it evolved; making changes is faster if we stick with pen and paper



    The next thing I remember was having a 70-80 minute car ride with Daniel in which we had decided to brainstorm solutions/changes. I can't remember exactly what was decided in this car, or more generally in the following weeks, but from there the game clearly had the identity it maintains today: a stripped back focus on set collection through the basic action of jumping the frogs.

    We definitely cut away some of the different card decks, and we also introduced hidden objectives. This last part both helped reduce AP, as the score couldn't be calculated precisely at any given point, and created the "reveal" at the end, ensuring there is excitement in the wrap-up — and possibly even surprise winners! That was the right direction to go with Frogriders

    as it is now much more of a fast-flowing tactical game for families than a brain-burning experience for gamers.

    In the first iterations of Frogriders

    , the direction you jumped in each turn also mattered, as did four zones on the board. The current version focuses your attention on your main goal much more clearly — which frog is best to collect this round, and how do I mess with everyone else — whereas the first ones simply had too many differing agendas fighting for your attention.


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    "The first evidence of the game can be traced back to the court of Louis XIV, and the specific date of 1687, with an engraving made that year by Claude Auguste Berey of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, Princess of Soubise, with the puzzle by her side. The August 1687 edition of the French literary magazine Mercure galant contains a description of the board, rules and sample problems. This is the first known reference to the game in print."
    Fake Reference — Wikipedia



    Earlier I claimed that Peg Solitaire

    had some features that were ripe for use in a modern board game. The features are the board and the basic move that removes a piece each turn. (There aren't many other features left...) As the board starts full of pieces, there are few legal moves and hence you are eased into the gameplay. A couple of turns into the game, the options explode, and each move creates numerous new options for the next player. Towards the end, however, the pieces become so scarce that legal moves start decreasing again, and you are likely looking for that one frog you need to complete your collection. It even becomes feasible to calculate a couple of moves ahead, if you're so inclined.

    This simple core mechanism allows for three distinct phases when you play Frogriders

    . It naturally and gradually changes from opening game through midgame and onto endgame. Now I don't want to oversell this point as the game moves so quickly that you might miss these phases if you blink, but they are certainly there. On the first move, only four options are available; on the second, six moves; then eight, etc. It doesn't actually progress in a linear fashion, though, and then there is the tipping point. When you get into the endgame, the options start decreasing, and thinking ahead to influence how rapidly is certainly feasible.

    When the basic action you're doing each turn is the same, it is important that the game evolves in other ways to keep it interesting and varied, and Frogriders

    (in my opinion) achieves that without introducing extra rules to force the issue. I also think it is a huge plus for a family game that when you're trying the game for the first time, the options up front are quite limited.

    One of the things Daniel and I are most proud of with Frogriders

    is the pace at which it plays. Of course there might be gamers out there for whom analysis paralysis becomes an issue, but we haven't quite experienced it yet. When we pitched the design to publishers at SPIEL 2015, we played a three-player game in all the meetings where we showed it, despite having only 30 minutes AND showing other games. The first review that was live on BGG

    also shows this well as it has both a brief rules explanation, a two-player playthrough, and a mini-review in under 15 minutes!


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    We don't linger on making changes — cross it out, replace it, and move on. Pretty is for published!



    Frogriders

    is published by Eggertspiele

    , and the game wouldn't have been anywhere near as polished without the work of their excellent lead developer [user=vittorioso]Viktor Kobilke[/user] and illustrator Alexander Jung

    . They did an outstanding job on both the illustrations and the graphic user interface, and we are proud to work with these talented people on new projects. Of course, the ever fantastic Stronghold Games

    is the U.S. publisher.

    Asger Harding Granerud

    SPIEL '17 Preview: Bandido, or Close That Loop

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/692…iew-bandido-or-close-loop

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3118226_t.jpg]Game designer, escape room expert, and director of the Brantford Games Network

    Scott Nicholson recently tweeted the following:

    [twitter=908449006031970306]



    How true! Rare is the game that includes rules like "The player who just opened the box has won." or "Whoever has the largest hands wins." (Exception: Start Player

    ) After all, a game that doesn't push you around is hardly a game at all. The rules of the game constitute an artificial environment, and when you undertake the playing of a game, you submit yourself to those arbitrary, yet ideally internally consistent rules that comprise that world. You lay down cards that punish you, move into spaces that deny you, and contemplate choices that discomfort you — all in the service of trying to come out ahead of your fellow travelers.

    Almost every game presents you with choices, and your willingness to engage those choices is what it means to play a game. Even the simplest games — in this case Bandido

    , by Martin Nedergaard Andersen

    and Swiss publisher Helvetiq

    — are driven by a designer's choice to make your life more difficult. An (apparently invisible) bandit is attempting to tunnel out of jail, and you and your fellow players need to stop him.


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    "Hi there."



    Why would you do this? This bandit doesn't even exist, and even if he did, you're probably not employed by a law enforcement agency and have no responsibility for maintaining this person's incarceration. On the off-chance that you do belong to a fictitious police agency, you'd probably gas the tunnels with a sleeping agent or tear gas to render the bandit unable to attempt any further tunneling.

    But no, that's not your way. Instead you will each take three cards in hand — cards that represent both the tunnels being created and the dead ends that prevent further movement — and you'll take turns laying down a card to extend (or stymie) this tunnel network. You might not want to play one of the cards, but you must. You have engaged this game, perhaps even on your own since solitaire play is possible, and now you must follow through.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3753222_t.jpg]

    Initial choices



    Naturally as you take turns, the tunnels must observe some minimal level of verisimilitude. You can't abut a tunnel with a wall of dirt. If you could do that, you could negate play by stacking the deck of cards on top of the bandit and asphyxiating him. Follow the paths, narrow the routes to freedom, and hope to plug the holes.


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    Don't do this



    As the game progresses, you realize that in some ways you're simply counting holes. How many ways can this guy reach freedom? Five? Can I make a play to cut that number down to four? Can I keep the holes close to one another so that someone else can bring that number down to three?

    Bandido

    is a simple game, marketed for players aged six and up, and I've now played the game on a purchased copy a half-dozen times, with players counts from 1-4 and with players as young as five. You might think about figuring out the odds of making this play or that, but I've hardly memorized the deck after six plays, and you're just playing the odds over and over again anyway. Maybe the next player has a card perfect for the situation and maybe they don't.


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    "What now, brown cow?"



    The rules are silent on whether you should talk about what's in your hand or indicate where someone might want to play, and while that absence will surely annoy some, I figure that each group will do whatever it prefers, which might be what they would have done anyway. I've played with adults in silence and with kids in total cooperation with face-up hands. It doesn't matter. You do what you want to do, and as long as all the players agree, then you're taking on the burden of those difficult lives together, each suffering the same burdens and part of the same world.

    The number of tunnels shrinks and grows. You might see the net closing, then someone shrugs — perhaps you — and says, "Oh, well" as they triple the number of tunnels in play. Sometimes you benefit by narrowing the bandit's options. If everything becomes gnarled underground, you might be unable to play at all, in which case you can place your hand of cards on the bottom of the deck and draw three anew. Will you find better choices or a tunnel you'd never want to play, but must?


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    Caught!



    If your life wasn't difficult enough previously, you can give the bandit six starting tunnels instead of five. Why didn't he dig six starting tunnels in the first place? I don't know; why'd you lock him in a jail surrounded by loose dirt? I suppose you just wanted to make things difficult for yourself...


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    Designer Diary: Dragon Island, or From Wyvern to Dragon Island, a Very Short 23 Years

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/692…and-or-wyvern-dragon-isla

    by Mike Fitzgerald

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3587105_t.jpg]In 1994, my first game, Wyvern

    , was published. It was a trading card game with a mythological dragon theme. I loved doing the research for that game and told myself I would revisit this theme sometime.

    All of a sudden it is twenty years and sixty published games later when I finally decide to get back to that dragon theme. I wanted to design a game in which all players are focused on the same thing rather than multiplayer solitaire with individual boards or hands of cards for players. This led me to do my first game that is not card driven: Dragon Island

    . I wanted to create a game state that changed with every player's turn and in which every player's strategies would be altered by each play. To do this, I chose tile-laying as the mechanism. The tiles are double-sided and players start each turn by adding a tile to the island.

    Each player is a wizard involved in discovering Dragon Island. Players get energy from the island to help them build things and capture dragons, and they tame some of the dragons to help them explore the island. They also discover treasure maps that can lead them to hidden treasures on the island.

    In my first version, I had a movement system I really loved. Each wizard had one terrain as their native terrain, and they could move through these tiles for free. Then I made a wizard pay a gold piece to get through a tile that was not their native terrain. It is an important lesson in game design that sometimes you have to give up on something you like a lot to help the real "fun" in the game come to the fore. Figuring out where a player could move on their turn became a tactical chore. Players would want to do some of the fun things in the game without having to brain burn to figure out the movement. It was the playtesters who showed me that the game had plenty of things to ponder without adding the movement complexity. I went through a period with no movement restrictions at all. I knew I would come up with some movement restrictions eventually, but I wanted them to come from the theme of the game and not just a mechanism.

    Gold led me to the answer. After all, dragons love gold. This love was at the center of the Wyvern

    design, and I wanted to make sure it was in Dragon Island

    as well. I came up with a way that wizards can maneuver the dragons around the island by tempting them with gold. You pay 1 gold piece and can move a dragon from one tile to any other tile. The only thing you can do with gold is influence dragons.

    Then it hit me: What if you could make a dragon your pet? Then the dragon could fly you to its own native terrain from anywhere on the board. This became the key to movement. If you do not have a pet dragon, you can move only one tile on a turn. (This was later amended to allow you to teleport to the Wizards Keep starting tile and stay there or move one tile from there.) To tame a dragon to be your pet, you must be on a tile with only one dragon and offer the dragon three gold pieces. They will always become your pet for the gold. You place the three gold on the pet card and put the dragon on the card. Each pet offers the flying service to its native terrain as well as an ability to help you in one of the strategic areas of the game. At the end of the game, each gold on your pets is a game point, and there are ways gold pieces can be removed from your pets. I am happy with how the movement in the game turned out and very glad I listened to my playtesters.

    All the tiles have actions you can do when you are on them. The problem is that first you must deal with any dragons that are on the tile. In addition to making them your pets, you can capture them, spending 10 active energy in order to capture all the dragons on that space. You get fame and remove the dragons from the board. Once you are on a tile with no dragons, you can now do the action the tile allows you to do. Then, you still can discover treasure there if a treasure map you hold shows that treasure is located there. I was inspired by Takenoko

    when coming up with how you would know where to find a treasure. It is not the same idea but comes from loving that game.

    As you can tell, there are a lot of things you can do on a tile. The fun comes from the fact that you can do them all on one turn. You will find yourself trying to set up a few big turns in the game by maneuvering dragons around so that you can deal with them to get fame, do the action on a tile, and discover treasure all at the same time.


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    The one part of the game that never changed during the design process was how you get your energy. I did not want a separate system of gaining resources; I wanted it to come out of one of the basic actions in the game. I did this by making it part of your tile placement, which is the first thing you do on a turn. You place a tile on the board and gain one energy of the tile you placed and every tile that is touching it. This makes where you place tiles critical because every time you are doing something in the game that requires energy, you can pay only energy of the tile on which you are doing the action or every tile touching that tile. This is what "active energy" means. This creates lots of interesting decision space in where you place tiles and where you travel on the board to take actions.

    I have not told you everything that happens in the game, so some surprises still await you. At its heart, Dragon Island

    is a midweight Eurogame that gives you an adventure theme and treats dragons with the respect I believe they deserve.

    Mike Fitzgerald

    Designer Diary: Bios: Megafauna 2

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/686…er-diary-bios-megafauna-2

    by Andrew Doull

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3493249_t.png]I've never designed a game, and I don't consider myself a game designer. The closest term I'd agree to is game developer, but what I do to games isn't really developing them in the traditionally understood way as much as modding them.

    So when Phil Eklund

    approached me about doing a design for an intermediate game between his Bios: Genesis

    and Bios: Megafauna

    series — called at various points during the design process "Bios: Paleozoic", "Bios: Pangaea", "Bios: Fauna" and "Bios: XX" — I was initially cautious. For a start, I had already designed a "Bios: Paleozoic" which was a mod to Bios: Megafauna

    that allow you to start the game earlier in the Paleozoic era. More importantly, I didn't have the confidence to build a design from scratch.

    However, I do have some previous experience with procedural map generation, so I decided to concentrate on building a game which procedurally generates the map by using craton movement instead of tile-laying. Jon Manker

    also came on board the project with the offer of mentoring me and acting as a co-designer, but our actual contributions would evolve substantially throughout the course of the project so that Jon ended up in a developer as well as designer role.

    My initial proposal to Phil was as follows:

    ... I've figured out a non-climax based tableau. I'm going to attempt to model plate tectonics instead :)
    The idea will be cards consisting of super continents (spanning two cards), mountains, landmasses (reverse side is ice), archipelagos (reverse side is ocean). Each card will have a drift number and direction and represent a plate. Colliding plates will either subduct or form mountains or super continents. Rules to be determined.

    My reasoning for eliminating climaxes was to cut down on the recognition factor of having to read climax numbers off the map. This part of the original Bios: Megafauna

    makes creeples ( Megafauna

    's creature meeples) on the lowest climax location significantly more vulnerable to elimination by a new biome being introduced. Improving game state legibility became a central tenet of the new Bios: Megafauna

    game, and we eliminated DNA, acculturation, roadrunner genes, and a separate size chart for very similar reasons.

    Phil insisted very early on that we were going to model skeletal types rather than dentition, and that there be six named cratons. This meant I was working with 2x2 cratons to keep to approximately the same playing area size as Megafauna

    . I built an event-driven craton movement model that allowed for the formation and separation of a Pangaea supercontinent by giving cratons a direction and using rotation and advance actions to move them on an underlying tile map.


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    This system was ultimately abandoned as it was prone to have the cratons fly off in any direction and never collide. To fix this required carefully stacking the event deck so that cratons would move in similar directions with a bias to collide and that any variation in movement order was tightly controlled.

    But stacking the deck made getting the events work in such a way that Jon and Phil never completely understood it. (Knowledge transfer over the internet is a hard thing to do.) Phil recommended that we go with a horizontal collision model with some vertical movement, and the craton movement has been much more robust and largely unchanged since that suggestion.

    Going to a horizontal collision model was driven by another Phil requirement to use hex instead of square cratons, and that requirement was driven by something that had become more and more obvious as development for Bios: Genesis

    wound down and we began working on the new game in earnest: There wasn't enough design space for a Bios: Genesis

    that ended up with terrestrial creatures, Bios: Pangaea

    which did something with those creatures, and a planned Bios: Megafauna 2

    that allowed those creatures to grow to enormous sizes.

    We made the call to fold Pangaea

    and Megafauna

    into a single game. This decision effectively meant that we would be redesigning Megafauna

    almost from the ground up instead of keeping it largely unchanged. Adopting hexes allowed us to dynamically generate the hex-based Bios: Origins

    map by using craton movement in Bios: Megafauna 2

    .

    Being a direct sequel to Bios: Genesis

    meant we could do a lot of the simplification by simply adopting the decisions that had been made in Bios: Genesis

    and extending them into the new game. This meant organs instead of DNA, with Phil deciding to introduce a fifth organ type to represent cold resistance, and promotable mutation cards, although we innovated by having the promoted side in one of two possible origins to represent specialization of base organ types in various ways (with a large amount of latitude in how this occurs in practice).

    One mechanism that survived a long way into the game design process but which was ultimately cut was the intended replacement for BMF 1's acculturation abilities which were called ecomorphs. These would have allowed for everything from the development of various tools (now subsumed into the emotion system) to acting as a keystone species such as a beaver or prairie dog as well as a variety of hunting methods. But a third row of cards in the market made ecomorphs problematic to begin with, and they were completely eliminated when we realized that putting special rule text on the cards ran counter to the improving the legibility of the game state.


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    Oxygen, clouds and trapped carbon



    Contrast the elimination of ecomorphs about midway through the design process with the carbon cycle tracking. As a part of the craton movement, I had suggested that we eliminate event-based CO₂ modeling and go with a counter-based system with CO₂ reservoirs being placed on the map by outcomes such as continents colliding to form mountains. Phil expressed cautious interest in the idea, then ruled it out, preferring a more conservative event-based CO₂ system that was recognizably similar to the first edition of Bios: Megafauna

    . But in one of many redesigns of the event system (no other system had more changes to it), Phil adopted my initial suggestion, adding the tracking of O₂ (which I had abstracted out) and water, which could fill up the atmosphere (representing greenhouse gases) or clouds (causing precipitation).

    Given I am in the most junior of the designers involved in the creation of Bios: Megafauna 2

    , it is remarkable how many of the systems I initially proposed survived in the final game. However, Phil has definitely owned the design in this instance, which he should do given that he ultimately lives by the success of his games. And he would often pose me a challenge, such as coming up with a way of defining emotions or horror plants in the game, then take a seed of my initial suggestion and take the design in the direction he wanted to go. The tempo of development largely seems to have been that I would build version 1 of something, Phil would flesh out and build the final version, and Jon would ensure that the fun has been put in the game.

    I am quietly optimistic that we've been successful in ensuring that Bios: Megafauna 2

    is more fun and more of a game than its predecessors. The collision of species expanding on the map is incredibly enjoyable, and lends a "knife fight in a phone booth" feel to the whole proceedings. The climate and tectonic engine lends enough randomness and arbitrariness to feel like a Sierra Madre

    game, and the personification of Medea as player controlled means that the microscopic world of Bios: Genesis

    never feels too far away. There are simulationist elements that were in Bios: Megafauna 1

    that are missing in the successor game; the climax and biome interactions are simplified and abstracted and that is the loss I feel most keenly, but the games of Bios: Megafauna 1

    I played during the development of Bios: Megafauna 2

    just highlighted how little direct control players had in the first version.

    The art by Johanna Pettersson is beautiful and evocative, and Phil's collaboration with Karim Chakroun continues to pay off in information design and display. I hope you will enjoy playing Bios: Megafauna 2

    as much as I have enjoyed making it.

    Andrew Doull


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    SPIEL '17 Preview: Venice Connection, or Close That Loop

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/691…-connection-or-close-loop

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3728946_t.jpg]When we think about minimalist game design, we often point to Seiji Kanai's Love Letter

    as the source from which a thousand envelope-sized games were delivered. While to some degree that's true, if we want to honor the grandfather of game design minimalism, we need to look to the works of Alex Randolph

    .

    I've played only two handfuls of Randolph's games, but each of those games can be described by at most four words:

    Big Shot

    — use ties to attack

    Mahé

    , a.k.a. Die heisse Schlacht am kalten Buffet

    — hop on opponents

    Die Osterinsel

    — count the rocks

    Raj

    — bid without tieing

    Ricochet Robots

    — move efficiently

    Schachjagd

    — race with chess moves

    Square Off

    — build a path

    Twixt

    — build paths with horses

    Worm Up!

    — block other worms

    Xe Queo!

    , a.k.a. Museum Heist

    — dupe or be duped

    The secret to Randolph's design principles is no secret at all, as he explained to Bruce Whitehill in a 1999 interview

    :

    I asked him what a game needs to have in order to be good. "It must be easy to enter into the game immediately…(it must) offer surprises…(it must have) a clear objective, (clear enough so there is) no arguing or questioning…(it must be) endlessly repeatable, always different."

    For some of the games above, the action described is both how to play and what will win you the game: If you move robots most efficiently, you will win. If you hop on opponents, you will win. If you build a path first, you will win. Whereas some designers take the skeleton of an idea, then dress it up before presenting it to players, Randolph offers the skeleton directly.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic295228_t.jpg]My latest experience with one of these atomic Randolph designs — Venice Connection

    — mimicked my earlier experiences with his games. Venice Connection

    was released in an earlier edition in 1996 by Drei Magier Spiele, winning a special Spiel des Jahres award for being a beautiful game, and now new Korean publisher OPEN'N PLAY

    has brought this two-player game back to market while keeping the graphic design of that Drei Magier edition.

    As with the other titles mentioned above, Venice Connection

    has a short description: Make a loop. The first player to do this wins. If you make a move such that a loop is impossible, you lose.

    Venice Connection

    consists of only 16 tiles, each of which features a straight canal on one side and a canal with a 90º turn on the other. On a turn, a player takes 1-3 tiles, places them in a straight line with canals not intersecting buildings, then places this line of tiles adjacent to at least one tile already in play (again, with the canals not intersecting buildings). On the first turn, you simply place the tiles on the table since you have nothing else to place next to. Possible starting positions include the following:


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    Some of these positions are better than others. The position second from the left is terrible since the opposing player can win instantly by mirroring these tiles and completing a canal loop:


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    So let's not start with a C-shape; start with something else:


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    If your opponent were to make the following move, you could then respond in a way that would guarantee your victory. Can you see it?


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    Your opponent is no fool, however, so they have actually made this move:


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    So what do you do now?

    In case you haven't recognized it, Venice Connection

    uses the same style of play as Nim

    : You want to make moves that force the opponent to respond in a particular way. You want your hand up their back so that you control what they do and force them to make moves that are advantageous to you. Nim

    is an interesting game to learn because it presents this system in so skeletal a style: Have three or more heaps of objects, and take turns removing any number of objects from one heap; whoever removes the last object wins.

    Unfortunately, once you learn more about Nim

    , the game becomes less interesting. Based on the number of heaps and objects in those heaps, a winning strategy exists for one of the two players, and it's (relatively) easy to see how if you start from the winning condition and work backwards. If only one heap exists, the active player wins, so don't make a move that leads to only one heap. If two heaps exist, the second player can mirror my moves to force me to remove one heap before they have to, which means that I want to be the second player when the third heap is removed. And so on. All the moves in Nim

    lead to an empty table, so the goal is fixed, and everything else is working backwards from that goal to see whether you have a winning strategy or not.

    Venice Connection

    lacks this fixed endpoint because any closed loop wins the game for the player who made it, whether it's made from four tiles, six tiles, eight, etc. on up to sixteen tiles. If an opponent makes a move that would require more than sixteen tiles to close that loop, then you say "Impossible!" and wait for them to fail to make the loop to claim your victory.

    I've played Venice Connection

    seven times so far on a review copy from OPEN'N PLAY, and that probably constitutes no more than twenty minutes of playing time. The game isn't something you'll do for an evening, but it does fit on an airplane tray or fill time while waiting at a restaurant. Even with its more flexible endzone, I would imagine that if you apply yourself, you can work out all the possible tile configurations and find Venice Connection

    as dead as Nim

    . Randolph did aspire for designs to be "endlessly repeatable", but with only sixteen tiles, clearly you have limits in what you can place where.

    I have no idea where I might be on the scale of full knowledge of Venice Connection

    , but if I ever get there, I can just ship the game to someone else....


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    Designer Diary: Five Fable Games, or What Was I Thinking? I Am a Stupid Idiot — So Much Work!

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/688…-games-or-what-was-i-thin

    by Friedemann Friese

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3086825_t.jpg]I am used to being involved in time-consuming and exhausting projects (and even to finishing them): I did 504

    , for example, and I had a five-year project called " Freitag

    ", but...

    After finishing Fabled Fruit

    , which already was more work than expected (because it is "only" a 25-minute game, but needed 59 different card actions to be designed), I was ready for the three games I had in the pipeline for SPIEL '17. But Fabled Fruit

    became a big success and the fable concept cried for more, so I moved the planned projects to 2018 and had the idea for the " Fast Forward

    " line: Fable games without a rulebook that can be learned while playing.

    But this concept needed to be started as a series with at least three games at once. (IMO)

    The main problem with fable games: Testing is more difficult. You have to play the same game several times in a row with the same group, and you cannot recreate the effect of a surprising change with the same group. You need a lot more different gaming groups.

    Classical games you can test a few times, make some changes, test again, and so on. With fable games, it is difficult to see how a small change in the first game might influence the game five games later. You have to test this change a lot more — and I do not want to lose all my testing players (a.k.a. friends).

    But "Fast Forward" is awesome!!!

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3652028_t.jpg]The inspiration came to me one evening while playing Dead Man's Draw

    . I was a bit exhausted from the day and just wanted to start to play. I said to my gaming group, "Just start this one, it is easy enough to be learned while playing. Starting player, please turn the top card face up." Without realizing it, we were suddenly in the middle of a game. Afterwards I was thinking that games should be designed that way — and having the fable concept, I could start with a very simplistic idea and from game to game add more "game" to that idea.

    Starting was kind of easy. I designed a mixture of Dead Man's Draw

    and Diamant

    . The first test was amazing: My gamers played the game nine times in a row and did not want to stop playing (but had to because of some minor changes I needed to do). But I needed to promise them that they could continue to play it during the next game session exactly where they stopped.

    So after that start, I needed two more "Fast Forward" games to have the series of three titles I wanted to release. The first of these two new games became FEAR

    , and the other did not progress any further than being an idea in my computer; it was never tested. But I already had two games in the pipeline! I then had an inspiration to make a game about "capturing the flag" and this turned out to become FORTRESS

    , which is not about capturing a flag anymore, but if you know where it came from, you can still see that connection.

    Thus, three "Fast Forward" games were developed. I was happy.

    But there was a problem with the three games: One of them was weak. The first one and FEAR

    were creating very similar experiences of the three, but FEAR

    was better. I managed to look at it as objectively as possible and accepted that I needed to not publish the first one. There are too many press-your-luck games, and the game was not better than Dead Man's Draw

    , so it was removed from the line. It was early in 2017 and once more I had only two "Fast Forward" games. I was about to accept releasing only two games when I got the idea for FLEE

    , which is completely different from the other two and very appealing. It had to be done.


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3745668_t.jpg]



    Now, I am happy to have three very different "Fast Forward" games, all three connected by one great concept. The easy game FEAR

    is very good to learn the "Fast Forward" concept, and a great game to play with the complete family and casual gamers. And FORTRESS

    is the next step, more complex without being complicated, a game with a lot of great surprises. And finally FLEE

    , a game in which you really have to focus to solve the cooperative puzzle. This game feels a bit like an escape room — a really difficult escape room!

    But I said five fable games, not only three...

    The series of three fable "Fast Forward" games seemed not to be enough, three games to be tested hundreds of times in ever-changing game groups. But the game starting it all was still successful, so I needed to expand Fabled Fruit

    . One gamer in our group played it a lot with his daughter and after finishing, they demanded more. Why not? Let‘s make an expansion!

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3666296_t.jpg]In theory, Fabled Fruit

    is easy to expand; you need only to add more locations, but I already designed 59 different locations and I ran a bit out of ideas — and the end game of Fabled Fruit

    was designed to be a real end game, with no chance to "open" that again to continue with more locations. That said, giving gamers only twenty new locations to play a separate set of games of Fabled Fruit

    was boring.

    Adding limes to the game was the central idea. Green fruits, very good. Now every fabled juice card must be paid for with at least one lime. At the start of each game, limes are not shuffled with the other fruit cards and must be acquired differently. Adding these new location cards after the second half of the normal Fabled Fruit

    locations was the connection to the base game.

    Twenty new locations meant that you could play 8-10 consecutive games to finish this new campaign. Thus, this has the same problem as with all fable games: A single game itself is short, about half an hour, but the campaign is loooong. You need about three hours to play it once.

    Keep smiling, it could be worse!

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3668676_t.jpg]I smiled and it got worse. The annual question came up: How to expand Power Grid

    this year. Easy, just make a fable campaign for Power Grid

    , a campaign with only three consecutive games (with fifteen cards to be revealed during the three games) could not be too difficult, right?

    But the Power Grid

    base games each have two maps (classic or deluxe both use similar regions of the world: Europe (or Germany) or North America (or USA)), so why not develop three games per map with two separate sets of fifteen cards? Let's see: 3 games per map and 2 maps = 6 games to play. A single game of Power Grid

    in this campaign is played in two hours (a bit longer than normal because you're changing the rules while playing), so I needed to test two new prototypes with six hours of playing time each...

    At least I was happy that our sixth release for 2017, the solitaire game Finished!

    , was already finished as of April 2016. No further testing of that game!

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3666307_t.jpg] Finished!

    is a game in the vein of a classic "patience" game like Klondike

    , just a game about sorting a deck of 48 cards with a twist, played with a cycling deck. Discarded cards are placed under the deck to be drawn again later. After seven cycles, you need to have sorted the complete deck. The name of the prototype was "Bubblesort: The Game". It is not an implementation of the well-known bubblesort algorithm, but you sort cards in bubbles of at least three cards.

    Now, all six titles are in print, so new topics on my schedule include work on the new games for 2018 and some plans to be realized for the 25th anniversary of my company, 2F-Spiele

    .

    The most important thing for now: I like the resulting games and expansions, and whoever wants to play them all needs only 25 hours net playing time.

    -> It's your turn now.

    Friedemann Friese

    Crowdfunding Round-up: Consenting to Board Vasty Rockets

    Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/691…nting-board-vasty-rockets

    by W. Eric Martin

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710609_t.jpg]I haven't posted a crowdfunding round-up in weeks, perhaps even months although I'm not going to check.

    Let's press forward! Time to dump the inbox filled with hopeful messages from designers and publishers who wanted to tell me about something that might or might not have succeeded — messages that I shooed aside in the run-up to Gen Con 50 and the subsequent frantic buzzing of SPIEL '17 that's been expanding to fill every centimeter between my ears. Sorry, folks! You missed out on hearing about the "Lycans vs Vampires" fantasy backgammon collection

    , but perhaps you'll have another chance to back this game of the future in the future.

    At least you can still back

    Fog Monster, a miniature fog machine that makes "continuous real fog that creeps and crawls across your game terrain". Every playing of Kingdomino

    can benefit from that!

    • In any case, let's kick this off with Tim Fowers

    ' Now Boarding

    , which features the damn coolest logo I've seen in recent days. Beyond that, the graphic design of the box itself is a winner, copping a movie poster look that's selling an aesthetic and not merely a game. I've seen more than my share of game covers over the years, and at this point I'm most excited by game covers that don't look like game covers. Graphic designers should take a wider variety of approaches to their work. After all, we know that something is a book because it has pages that you can flip through; you don't need every book to adopt the same style of graphic design so that you know at a glance that it's a book. Game publishers should take a similar approach. ( KS link

    )

    As for the game itself, here's an overview:

    Now Boarding is a real-time cooperative game in which you work together to fly a fleet of airplanes. You must to deliver all the passengers to their destinations before they get too angry — and new passengers are constantly arriving! Upgrade your plane to fly faster and carry more passengers to handle the load. The twist: All players take all their turns at the same time! This allows for clever hand-offs of passengers. It's a whole new level of pick-up-and-deliver game.

    • And even should you not care about Now Boarding

    , you might want to check out that project since Fowers is also funding a third edition of Wok Star

    , another real-time cooperative game that he first released on his own in 2010 and is now bringing back to print through his Fowers Games

    brand.

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2716343_t.jpg]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3694371_t.png]• Chuck Stover's Vasty Wilds

    from his own Made by Wombat

    has one of the gentler post-apocalyptic settings out there. Humans have faded away from Earth, and now tiny woodland creatures compete for space with their neighbors, apparently having learned nothing from the misfortune of man. So it goes. ( KS link

    )

    • And why might humanity disappear? You might find that subject discussed in Steve Jackson

    's Conspiracy Theory

    from his own Steve Jackson Games

    . This game mimics the black card/white card format of Cards Against Humanity

    and its endless sludgepump of copycats, but with a PG-friendly approach so that kids can also suggest reasons that Bigfoot has never been captured. (Answer: Ninja training.) ( KS link

    )

    • Our obligatory miniatures game in this round-up is Champions of Hara

    from Walter Barber, Ian VanNest, Andrew Zimmermann, and Greenbrier Games

    , with this game having both competitive (arena-style combat) and cooperative modes of play, with the latter challenging you to defeat monsters to contain destructive energy so that the world doesn't die. ( KS link

    )

    • Another competitive/cooperative creation on Kickstarter is Ragnar Brothers

    ' Darien Apocalypse

    , with this being the second "Quantum" game from Dicken, Kendall, and Kendall, a Quantum game being one in which you're meant to relive multiple versions of actual history events, affecting them along the way with your actions. The history in this case is the Kingdom of Scotland's ill-conceived efforts to found a colony on the Isthmus of Panama. ( KS link

    )

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3677319_t.png]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710115_t.jpg]• I wrote about

    Flatlined Games

    ' new edition of Mark Gerrits

    ' SteamRollers

    in July 2017, noting that Flatlined is adopting a unique approach to its crowdfunding efforts. If a project succeeds, that game will not be available to retail outlets — other than those that back the KS campaign — for at least one year after the end of the campaign. Flatlined's Eric Hanuise is essentially saying that you can get it now or you can lament your reluctance to do so, although the game will be available from Flatlined directly or at conventions. Will this matter to backers? Is this a negative approach meant to spur a supporter's FOMO? A positive approach to reward those who do support the game's existence with something unavailable on the general market?

    As for the game, SteamRollers

    is a dice-based, network-building, pick-up-and-deliver game that originated from Gerritts' attempt to make something that would resemble a dice version of Age of Steam

    . ( KS link

    )

    • Babis Giannios' Alexandria

    from LudiCreations

    has a great premise: The Great Library in Alexandria has been set ablaze, and you must try to save as many works as possible. ( KS link

    ) BGG shot an overview video of the game at SPIEL '16, at which time it looked far different than it does today:


    Youtube Video



    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3719798_t.jpg]

    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3683645_t.jpg]Gil Hova

    of Formal Ferret Games

    is funding The Networks: Executives

    , an expansion for his well-received game The Networks in which you attempt to land new programming for your television network. Now, in addition to two other modules, you'll get to have a unique executive on your team with advantages and disadvantages specific to this individual. ( KS link

    )

    Grail Games

    has released several titles new and old from Reiner Knizia

    , most notably a fabulous looking version of Medici

    , and currently the publisher is funding a new version of Knizia's excellent rail-and-stock game Stephenson's Rocket

    , a game that will likely be new to 95% of the people reading this post. It's amazing sometimes to think of how many people have entered the hobby since this game first debuted in 1999. Heck, I didn't enter it with gusto until 2003! What's old is new again... ( KS link

    )

    • I've written to designer Naomi Clark

    several times to ask whether Consentacle

    , a two-player game "that represents consensual sexual encounter between a curious human and a tentacled alien", will ever be available again and have yet to receive a response. Imagine my surprise when I discover that Consentacle

    is on Kickstarter now, and if you pledge high enough, you can receive two tentacles from the game's debut exhibition in 2014. Few games offer such treats. ( KS link

    )


    [Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3744283_t.png]



    Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM