Three months since our last post — just awful. Anyway…

I must be obsessed with designing card games. Maybe the fact that it’s easy to proto a bunch of cards is a factor, but I just find card games appealing in general. There is something inherently elegant about a game system that can be encapsulated within cards, even if you need a few accessories to go with them like dice or tokens. Cards can act as discreet game objects, such as for set collection games; they can be used for valuation (trick-taking) or bidding; they can be used as markers, tiles (maps and boards) or resources (discard from hand, or laid upon another card); and with so much room for text, they can contain a wide variety of game effects, without the need for an extensive rulebook.

I’ve done one revision of Cold War Rummy since the end of the rummy contest, replacing 21 cards and revising the rules in a couple areas. I’ve played twice with John and I think all the changes are positive, but am at the point where I want more external testing — I’m finding it hard to play rummy over and over and make an objective call about how well it’s working. I think I will send this down to Dan’s group in Austin in our next shipment (soon?!), and I’m going to ask my judge in Canada if he’d playtest for me again if I send him just the updated cards and rules. I’ll even give a shout-out to him here, as he (Sean Ross) has a climbing game called Haggis being published by Travis Worthington’s Indie Boards & Cards, which sounds good and has terrific art by Gary Simpson.

After five passes at what I call alpha, I’m finally at beta1 with my as yet unnamed monster fighting game. The temporary title is Titan Express following the format of numerous “express” games that have been designed on BGG lately. My original goal was to get something like the Titan experience, or at least flavor, in a one-hour card game. About the only things that remain at this point, however, are the Strength/Prowess ratings (power and skill in Titan) and some theming (Ogres, Centaurs, etc.). There is no board as movement has been completely abstracted to the use of terrain cards which function exclusively as a way to meet recruit requirements, and the bands (legions in Titan) develop in a much more free-form manner. Battles now occur at the end of each round, with bonus points awarded to the winner, playing to either a total point goal or number of rounds. The battle boards are gone as well; now, creatures form opposing lines up to two ranks deep and slug it out, but using cards has given me room to add more special abilities to different creatures, which works out quite well.

The end result is a game that bears only a distant relationship to Titan but I think it is completely functional at this point. Combat works well, so now it’s time to play a full game with complete rules and see how it goes now that I’ve settled on the move/recruit system.

All three of us have been working on card-based mech games. My first pass used 72 Chessex dice as I was trying to complete an entry for a contest on BGG. It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, heh, but I may revisit it in the future, reusing some of the elements of this design. John’s is reminiscent of a pseudo-3D dice tracking system from a previous space game, and Brian’s uses damage flow diagrams that remind me of Renegade Legion: Interceptor, although it dispenses with randomness in the combat and adds it in the form of a shuffled deck of actions. Messing with that actually has me itching to revisit my Red Reticle design…

Alas, poor Biomedica, I knew it well. This has languished for a few months now. I think I simply burned out on trying different ways to handle the tech tree / development / upgrade system, which ultimately feels overly weighty compared to the fairly simple cube-placement system. Any of several methods I’ve tried has been functional, but the overall feel of the game is simply lacking, and I’m concerned the cube-placement system lacks meat. I think this will sit for a while more until inspiration strikes again.

Due to recent interest in March of War, I did some updating over the weekend.

• Edited spelling and grammatical errors in the rules and tiles.
• Updated the rules to v0.5 (incorporating feedback as well as better explanations of certain rules elements).
• Created a FAQ for the current version, based on past feedback.
• Wrote a description and min-FAQ for each unit in the game (this took a lot longer than I expected).
• Created a player aide.

I spent most of Sunday editing and writing but it was worth it. It was kind of nice to get back into a MoW mindset, after not having touched it since early last year. I’m still happy with the game, and want to play.

All updated files have been uploaded to BGG.

The final round of the BGG Rummy Design Contest judged by Mike Fitzgerald has been announced. They chose nine finalists out of (last I saw) 23 entries. Sidd’s Cold War Rummy and my World War II in Europe Rummy both made the cut. It’s exciting that both will be seen and judged by Mike Fitzgerald.

Cate108 also asked each of the first round judges to send their critiques to each designer, so we’ll be seeing a review of our games soon. That alone was worth entering.

Good luck to us!

Well, the Year of the Tiger doesn’t actually start until February 15th, so Happy Western New Year for now. Enter the Tiger just sounded like a great post title. Anyway…

Time to get back to work. Game design, that is, although the sucky kind of work has resumed as well after the holidays. I am doing a major revamp of research generation for Biomedica based on our v2b6 version playtest and feedback from the Flywheel crew. I think this will be v3a1, as the changes will be fairly substantial. I’m going away from individual research generation to a common generation method (but each person getting the full value to spend), plus adding back in improvement cards that will function as a pseudo-tech-tree to allow players to differentiate themselves from each other. This does away with much of the “dice customization” of the previous version, which players actually liked, so this will be interesting.

I’m also working on piecepack designs, for a contest at Toy Vault, but so far I have nada. I think I need to just sit down and fiddle with the pieces and see what happens (I made a little set of my own for playing/testing with).

The finalists in the rummy design contest at BGG will be announced in a couple weeks — very keen to see what comes of that, since 3 of the 20-something entries are mine, plus one from Brian. My own Artscow copies of them came in over the holidays, so I’d like to actually play them with the real cards, particularly Cold War Rummy since I didn’t get a chance to play it after my latest tweak — hopefully, it didn’t totally ruin the game for the contest.

I’ve been doing so many contest-centric designing lately that I sort of feel like I need to work on something “new” for myself, besides the next iteration of Biomedica. Just not sure what, yet.

My game design over the last few months has been devoted almost exclusively to contest entries. Two contests have resolved, and one has just had its submission deadline arrive as of today.

• Dragon Currents: My entry for the first Nestorgames design contest. My entry made the first cut (which only meant it met the contest rules) and placed 5th out of 6. It was the most abstract of all of the finalists, and to some degree, I think it suffered because of that.
• March of War: My entry for the second Nestorgames design contest. My entry made the first cut (again, only meaning it met all of the contest rules), and it received the most votes. But Nestor decided to pick the second place game as the winner due to possible production problems.

  I exchanged emails with Nestor about that, and his concern was that my current 2cm tiles were too small to legibly print text on (even though, in response to my question, he implied printing wouldn’t be an issue), and that the tiles would need to be much larger to print text plus a picture on. I fully understand him making decisions based on his business requirements, and knew that most votes didn’t mean an automatic win, but I still had high hopes.

  I’m still very happy with March of War, and the BGG entry even lists an owner and a user wanting it.

• World War II in Europe Rummy: My entry for the Themed Rummy Design Contest on BGG. I finished everything up yesterday (which is good, because I misread the submission deadline as 6pm today, instead of the actual 6am). I’m pretty happy with this entry, especially with the art, which is no where as good as the art Bowman did for me, but being under the gun, I felt like I had to go with what I’d produced. Even so, I like that I actually did some passable work in Gimp.

Now that the competitive season is over, I’m planning on working on a new idea I’ve had recently, called Bad Air. It’s a card game with a board, based around the idea of trying to force your opponents citizens to flee by launching stinky items at them. I’m in the late design portion of my work on it, and hope to have a first prototype by the end of this week.

Excelsior!

Well, I ended up entering three rummy designs in the contest on BGG.

• Wu Xing Rummy – for 2-4 players, themed around the Chinese “five states of change.” I feel like this is a fairly clean design, but feels rather dry compared to the other two, to me.
• Nobles of Venice – for 2-4 players, themed around Renaissance Venice. I really like the market value system here. I’m not entirely happy with Shipping and Banking scoring — it sort of does what I want it to, but the associated actions feel a little awkward to me.
• Cold War Rummy – for 2 players only, themed around the Cold War, inspired by Twilight Struggle. I like a lot of stuff going on in here, although the some of the actions feel kind of arbitrary. Of course, since I’m basing it loosely on historical events, I guess I could just chalk it up as “theme.”

After all our karping about unpublished designers with the designer badge on BGG, I am now up to 5 credits in their database, including Grand Dames of Small World, heh.

I’ve been going crazy with rummy games for a contest on BGG. Although you can make any kind of game as long as it includes the core rummy mechanic, I’ve stuck pretty much to regular card games. I posted my first entry into the BGG database, Wu Xing Rummy, and into the contest. I am working on three more right now: Cold War Rummy, Super Rummy, and Nobles of Venice.

• CWR actually works okay but it’s lacking a little something — I was originally using the DEFCON track as a gateway toward the “shutout” win condition but it’s not working the way I want, so I need to fix it or remove it.
• Super Rummy has been put on the back burner. My original vision was that each super (card) had a set of traits describing his powers, and that there is a separate stack of mission cards that are flipped over each round. Players would meld super groups for points normally, but you could also earn mission points if you could get all the required powers in play, from any melds or layoffs. What I’ve found, though, is that the traits are too dense for a rummy game. Even if I go to icons on the top/left edge, if each super has even just 3 traits and you’re trying to match, say, 5 or 6 traits on a mission card, that’s a lot of scrutinizing.
• NoV is ready for its alpha test this week. The five Goods suits don’t have fixed value. Instead, there is a market track that shows the value per card, and this goes down after every set is turned in during the end of a round. Scoring is not simultaneous; it starts with the player who went out and goes in order of fewest cards left in hand, so it strongly encourages going out. I’m hoping the price disparity between the goods will make for tough decisions on what to hold/collect and what to toss during play.

I also added Matched Blades to the BGG database, and (since I saw other designers were doing it), added my name to the designer list for Grand Dames of Small World, so I’m already up to three linked designer credits on BGG now, haha.

I got some great feedback from Dan’s group about Biomedica. They have two main concerns which overlap some of the things we’ve seen here, especially regarding the “randomness” of the dice. They want to hang on to the prototype for more playtesting with adjusted rules, so that’s a good sign, I suppose. I need to write a response and think about the next set of tweaks.

In other news, there are a LOT of game design contests going on right now. I won’t have anything at the level required to enter Hippodice this year, which is a bummer, but I feel like I’ve been productive overall so at least I haven’t just wasted a year of design time. I’m working on three different games for a rummy design contest on BGG, and trying to come up with ideas for a challenge and a contest run by Nestor of Nestorgames.

FYI, I update a short list of contests on a separate WordPress page up above.

Dragon Currents made it as a finalist in the Nestorgames Format 1 contest on BGG, along with five other entries. Of course, this only means that it met the requirements of the contest. As nestor romeral andres says: “I’ve not discarded/selected any game because I thought it was good or bad.”

Now it comes down to a public vote.