GameconMemphis contest in two weeks...

Here are the competitors. Fourteen in all, with others maybe still to come.  Looks like a lot of interesting games.  At least three are in the hand-made prototype stage, with the rest at varying levels of polish. I'd put Yoggity in the middle there somewhere - it looks nice, but it doesn't need a ton of components, and I was limited by the parts I could get through GameCrafter.  I think it will look professional enough, though.

There are what look to be at least two wargames, with territory control and little units.  Two abstract games, both with wooden parts.  One racing-themed game - maybe a good fit for Tennessee?  One hex-tile-based space exploration game.  A couple that look like economic games.  One that seems to be entirely card-based, maybe CCG or Dominion style.  One with robots and infantry.  A huge variety, which will probably make the judging even harder for the volunteers.

One of them, Ops Mundi by Jason Roth, appears actually to be his senior geography thesis.  Pretty cool.

Awards != Sales

As I consider entering all these competitions, it's good also to heed what Tao over at Starlit Citadel writes - that award-winning game designs don't necessarily sell well.  I think that's true in a whole bunch of settings; commercial success and quality are correlated on a first-order basis, but one person's "quality" is another person's crap, and there are some pretty big second-order effects.  And what you play (and what would be fun) is very situational - I've probably played much more Barbie Uno than I have played better games that I like far more.

So, what's the key to marketplace success?  A great game, sure, and hopefully one that could win awards, but maybe more importantly, one that is eminently playable - not too long, accessible to newbies, easy to set up, visually attractive, cheap and available, and fun to play over and over again.

Hey, I just described Barbie Uno, didn't I?

More on the Hippodice contest

The Hippodice contest is one of the best from a designer's point of view - it's widely known, run by serious game enthusiasts, has a relatively low entry fee, and is open to all.  There are English rules here, and then there's a detailed entry description (English on the second page).

They wisely review these descriptions and then solicit entries from those, so they don't get a bajillion games submitted.  I think that's a recent development - I think they used to just take all entries and then wade through them, but that probably got too tiresome.

If your game is selected, it's 5 Euros plus a copy of the game sent to Germany, plus return postage if you want it back, although setting up a prepaid return and customs forms through German mail is probably pretty difficult and not worth the hassle and expense unless your game has lots of expensive components or is hand-crafted or something.

One tricky bit - if you get selected, because Germany has VAT, and because you're sending them goods, you'll have to do a customs form that describes the contents appropriately to avoid there being tax due when it gets there.  I had a variety of different experiences that way in Munich when getting sent stuff from the United States last year.  Most of it came through fine, but a couple items got held up for a while because the documentation wasn't in order, and it wasn't always clear why one thing made it quickly and another didn't.  It might be worth ponying up for one of the international shipping companies (DHL is affiliated with the German postal system) if you're nervous about regular mail.

Barriers to publication

The Boardgame Designers Guild of Utah apparently has a recurring newsletter now.  A recent issue has a neat article on the barriers to entry to the boardgame market by Benjamin Stanley - good stuff.

Hippodice

The perennial Hippodice competition is rolling around again, with a submission deadline of November 1st.  I'm thinking of entering Diggity and Yoggity, but I'll have to figure out what I want to do following the Rio Grande competition at the end of the month here.  Could be interesting; I think maybe I would try rewriting the rules in German in that case.  I regained some of my German (and designed both games) while working in Munich last fall, so that seems appropriate.

More on Spy Alley

I commented on Spy Alley yesterday.  Looking at their site some more, I found some sales figures and history:

Interesting Facts:

Spy Alley was created in 1988 under the name International Spy. It was turned down by all of the game companies that were approached for licensing. The name was changed to Spy Alley in 1992. In 1996 Spy Alley Partners was formed to market the game. The 1st year it sold 320 copies. As of 2008 it has sold over 170,000 copies in 7 countries and 3 languages.

I'd take that kind of success.  It does sound like a self-publishing deal, which gives me some hope.

Review: Spy Alley

We played Spy Alley tonight, a simple boardgame which seems to be published by a small independent game company, Spy Alley Partners LLP.  They look like they've adopted the model I'm looking to implement - they have a small line of games, and they sell through distribution and through their website.  They're bigger than I'd be starting out; the game is lots of places (many online retailers, although I think we got ours at a regular store), and it's well-constructed and appealingly designed.  It looks from the BoardgameGeek entry like there have been earlier, cruder versions in production.  So, it looks like this group has made a go of independent publishing, and may be doing well.

The game?  Eh.  We've played it a number of times.  It's fun enough, and there's an interesting mechanic at the core.  You are trying to collect all your nation's spy gear while not letting on to the other players what nationality you are.  The spy theme isn't really integrated heavily into the game play; you could be collecting four of anything.   But,  the game wouldn't be much without some kind of theme to put it on, and the spy motif fits the hidden information well, so it works.  The ending is very luck-determined, though; you roll a die to move every turn, and your choices are pretty severely limited by what squares you end up landing on.  As the game progresses, you sometimes gain more control of your movement through move cards (a mechanic borrowed from the classic Careers).

You have the option of taking a very high-stakes gamble at any time - trying to guess an opponent's nationality.  If you succeed, the opponent is out of the game; if you fail, you're out.  You win either by eliminating all opponents (or letting them eliminate themselves) or by collecting all your gear and making it to your embassy (one hard-to-reach space on the board).

There's another major luck factor, though - there's one space on the board that lets you make free guesses to try to eliminate opponents.  In our games, that's usually how people are knocked out, and that's how I went tonight. There are six nationalities, and I got free-guessed three times, knocked out on the third.  Not very satisfying; nothing I did mattered much, and the end came suddenly.  That's fairly typical in our experience.  It's more fun the longer you last, though.

When you knock somebody out, you get all their stuff, which is imbalancing but makes the game go faster (and accelerate as it goes on).  There are some other clever design elements too, although a lot of it is just random.

But, the kids like it, and it's a relatively quick family game.  As an added bonus, we have fun trying to talk in the accents of the various nationalities, and the light-hearted deception mechanic is fun.

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Photo above by Chris Hawks, borrowed from BGG.com.

Diggity art

I'm making some progress getting the art completed for Diggity.  The new stuff looks nice - way better than what I was able to do, which is what I was hoping for.  I'll post some pictures when we're farther along.

Dang it!

Following my comments on one of my games, Galapagos, commenter Jay points out that the name has been adopted by a game that came out this year.  My game is completely different from the new one, which takes the Galapagos theme more literally by reenacting Darwin's visit, but that probably means the name is lost to me.  I'm not sure they'll have registered the trademark, so it might be legally possible to have the same name, but even so, it would probably be better to avoid the confusion and find a new one.

A bummer, because my game has been Galapagos in my head since I first came up with it back in the late 1990's, and it was a great fit for the evolutionary theme.  But, I'm not close to publishing that one, so I have time to cogitate.

Rio Grande contest judging standards

With my entry in the Rio Grande game contest sent out, I'm eagerly awaiting the results.  The judging is based on total points in a number of equally rated categories:

Decision Driven (How much is the winner determined based on their decisions, as opposed to luck factors?) Originality Wait Time (How much time do you spend without interacting with the game/other players?) Unpredictability (How often is the outcome of a turn/round known before it ends?) Broad Appeal (Would you teach this to someone who is not a serious game player?) Replayable (Do you want to play it again soon?) Interactive (Do the player decisions impact other players?) Equal Opportunity (Does every player have an equal chance of winning regardless of turn order/role?) Fun  Simple to Learn (the rules were clearly stated and communicated) Scale for each criterion is set at 1-5. For each criterion that does not positively or negatively impact the game (or simply doesn't apply), the criterion is scored at 3. If a criterion does impact the game, the score is adjusted positively or negatively and a note/comment is made to explain the decision.

That's actually an interesting way to judge the contest.  Obviously, the intent is to get a "good" game out of the competition.  But that's very subjective; a Scrabble fiend might hate Settlers of Cataan, and a chess player might despise Monopoly and vice versa.  Breaking it into the ratings above is maybe useful, but weighting them equally is maybe misleading; I'd value "Fun" and "Replayable" as far higher priorities than most of the others.  You could put together a snoozer of a game that scored well in 8 of 10 categories but got a 1 in Fun and Replayable, and it would stand a better chance of winning than a wildly fun game that wasn't, say, as interactive or original or balanced.

This comment by Mark Salzwedel on BGG tries to get deeper into the categories, and it sounds like he's even providing guidelines for the judges at his regional contest.  I think that's a good idea, although tricky to standardize; I have no idea if they'll do something similar to that at the Memphis regional, where my game will be.  He worries that the "Decision Driven" category is a problem - since some folks like more luck and others more strategy, maybe a 3 is the desired outcome, but I think that ignores the instructions at the bottom, where you're actually supposed to rate from 1-5 depending on the impact of luck on the game itself, not on the amount of luck actually involved.

For Yoggity, my entry, I think the framework above might actually help me, since the game's strengths are a reasonable fit with the categories.  My game is more of a family game, and some of the other entries in my regional contest (shown here) look a bit like heavier wargames, although you can't tell too much from the pictures.  Games like that, even if they're awesome, are going to be more likely to lose points in the Broad Appeal and Simple to Learn (and often Wait Time and Replayable) categories.

Of course, it will all be up to the volunteer judges and how they decide to apply the categories, so there's no sense worrying too much, but it's interesting to ponder.

Anagrams Galore, or Aroma Rage Slang

Getting working on Scryptix again, after an 8-month hiatus.  I need to get some more puzzles made, which is tricky, since they need to start with interesting phrases with words of equal length that convert into anagrams that contain the same number of words with the same length, with an understandable clue.

I've made about 160 of these.  At my best, I can make 10-20 an hour or so, but I burn out after that - it's a bit tedious to look for anagrams, and you run out of ideas.  To get the game to work as I envision it, with a daily puzzle, I'm going to need to have a good number of puzzles banked up, so I can take an hour here or there every couple of weeks to make new puzzles.

At some point, I'd like to crowd-source it, and let people submit their own puzzles, but I'd have to write a submission interface for that, which takes a while, and my time is currently better spent getting the game running better.  I also have no idea if people would actually enjoy submitting puzzles and would do it in enough numbers to support the game and make it worth my while to program the interface.

Anyway, though, exciting to get the project going again.

Design by iteration, and the perils of blind spots

An interesting retrospective on the evolution of a game design over at Board Game News - Gil Hova's Prolix.  I haven't played the game, but the story he tells is a familiar one.  I get this great idea, I make up a prototype, play it, enjoy it, with family or with a few friends.  It seems awesome.  I'm so stoked about this that I kind of ignore the issues that surface during playtesting.  Finally, some flaws become apparent.  Then, I try increasingly arcane tweaks to fix them, eventually ending up with an unworkable Rube Goldberg machine, where the attempts to fix old flaws have created new ones.  Then, I despair.  Eventually, I try more tweaks, some of them radical, iterating back and forth, never sure if I'm actually progressing, until eventually, I either fix what's wrong, or realize I have to give up for a while.

That's been my experience with several boardgame designs.  One example is Galapagos - I've been working on this game on and off for over ten years.  I got excited again about it last fall after playing some fun games with my family.  So I finally got it all put together in a nice package at TheGameCrafter.com, bought myself a test copy, and then tried playing it a few times with new groups.  It ended up being hard to explain, not really working, being too luck-based, and taking way too long.  It obviously needs some help, but I don't know what to do at the moment.  Totally in the despair stage, although I think it's a terrific theme and pretty good game - I just don't know what to try next, so I've shelved it and gotten focused on other projects.

With Diggity, I've been through several rounds of iteration, and I think it plays well.  I've tested it with all kinds of groups, and although there are some who like it better than others, it's worked every time, and many people like it a lot.  The game rules are pretty simple and easy to understand.  So, I'm pretty confident that I'm at the end of the iteration process here, even though it's taken way less time than Galapagos.

The blind spots are always worrying - you don't know what you're not seeing (or willing yourself not to see).  You know you design games that you'd want to play, so obviously you're more likely to enjoy your designs.  You want to maintain your enthusiasm and be excited about the game, but at the same time, you need not to ignore any problems that come up repeatedly, even if they don't bug you much.  A tricky tightrope to walk, and tough to know when you're finished.

Custom Dice

Chessex offers custom six-sided dice in relatively small quantities here.  Not too economical for a small run (a fully custom die with all six sides would be $6 per die up to 25 of them, with a minimum order of 10 or $60, and not too much of a bulk discount at $2.52 per die at 500 of them, a total order cost of $1260) but maybe worth it for prototyping or small-print-run hand-made games, especially if you only need custom sides for a few of them.

200 posts!

Rolled the odometer on the blog here again - I've been doing a post a day since March.

When I started, I expected to have my game, Diggity, in production, but what I've learned is that all of that stuff takes a lot longer than I thought.  I do have a number of quotes, a much better sense of what I'm doing, art in the works, and a brand shiny new LLC.

And a bunch of blog posts.  Thanks to everybody who's reading.

Populist Gamer Score

Dale Yu at BoardGameNews.com has a column on a (semi-silly) scoring system for how many of the most popular boardgames you have played and how many you own.  You multiply the ratios together, so to score high, you have to be a well-versed gamer and also a bit of a hoarder.  I'm not sure if both of those are good things.

Anyway, I ran through the top 100 list, and I've played 32 of them and own 24 of them, which puts me at a pathetic 0.0768.  Dale's score is 0.7735, and he's got some others listed ranging from 0.27 to 0.94.  An interesting way to measure addiction, although of course the multiplication will make those with less complete exposure have way smaller scores than people with marginally higher experience.

BGDF Results

The results are in.  My game, Caravan, came in second in a massive four-way tie at five votes, well behind the winner at 11 votes.  The winning game, Sorceror's Apprentices, was a neat idea - played on an Othello board, but with a magic contest theme.  I certainly think it deserved to win, although it would need a ton more design, detail, and testing to make a fully-realized game, and I think the victory conditions are not workable as written.

I'm curious about the voting - that huge a lead is uncommon, since most folks split up their votes among many entries.  I wonder if somebody sent all six of their votes or something like that.  The voting is kind of a game by itself.

I'll post the rules to Caravan up here soon.  I didn't get a chance to test it; one commenter worried about stalemate, which I was also concerned about, and that would be a very real danger.  I think I might give it a try - I've got a hex mat and some poker chips that would work.

Off to Tennessee

Yoggity's packed up and in the mail to GameCon Memphis.  Exciting - I hope the testers there have fun with it.  We'll see how the contest goes.

Another source for cards

Here's a link to PrinterStudio, another place that will do custom-printed playing cards.  54 card decks, come in a box, personalized boxes also available.  Probably wouldn't work for custom games that use lots of cards - TheGameCrafter.com is likely a better option there - but for standard card games, this might work, and it's not too costly.  Only 150 DPI, though, so they likely won't look as nice as some of the others.

Yoggity ready to go

I got my new versions of Yoggity from TheGameCrafter.  I need to put the stickers on the parts (wouldn't want to make the testers do that kind of set up) and make sure all the components are OK, and print up a nicer box label than TGC does.  But then I should be good to go to send it to Memphis for the Rio Grande regional contest.  Along with my hopes and dreams.  And return postage.

BGDF contest, again

Just got done reading through the BGDF contest entries for August and casting my votes.  Neat stuff - there are a number of them with very clever design components - mechanics, board layouts, theme ideas, etc.  No idea how I'll do.  To me, it seemed like a few of them suffered from the typical problem in this competition where the games just aren't fleshed out enough in 800 words to get a sense of how they go, or they invoke big decks of cards that you have to imagine would be carefully tested and full of cool stuff.  But others are just neat-o.

A couple also seemed not to honor the restrictions put on entries this time around, which were that you had to have shared components and two separate unique paths to victory.  For a couple of the games (in one case, one that I really liked otherwise) they seem to have ignored this completely; for others, they're technically honored, I guess, but not really in spirit (the two victors get there the same way, by following the same goals, for example).  There's not really any way to police this, other than to hope the voters see it too, but I guess it's not that big a deal for something with no real prize that you're doing for fun.

Racial stereotypes in games

Bruno Faidutti, noted game designer, wrestles with changes required in the art for one of his games over at his blog.  The game involves exploration of an island populated by tribespeople, and the tribespeople were originally drawn as black guys with really big lips.  It's interesting - he realizes the old pictures were bad because he's been told they were, but he doesn't really get at the gut level why the old pictures would be condemned here in the US.  He's even able to figure out some of the historical reasons why (especially in his note down at the bottom) but (if I read him right) he winds up thinking Americans are just touchy and too politically correct. I think that's sometimes true (see my earlier posts on the King Phillip's War game), but not in this case.

I suppose Bruno probably wouldn't want to hear that the art, even after the changes, would still be considered in bad taste by many Americans, even though it's being marketed by an American company.  Not the screaming bad taste that the outrageously swollen lips in the original art showed, but still not representing people of color in a positive light.  The bone-in-the-nose thing, which he thinks is not offensive, actually would be - see here for an example of racist thinking at work in another venue.  The feather ornaments and such, too, probably.

Caricature is tough - you want to exaggerate certain features for humor, but you don't want to slide into stereotype.  Some political cartoonists have chosen racial stereotypes drawing Obama (see the Tea Party Comix for an extreme example); others have emphasized other features, like his slight physique and his ears, to get at more humor value without awakening past racist traditions.

The solution for this game?  Easy. Make the tribesmen white (or gray-green or something) and the explorers multi-ethnic (and multi-gender).  No big deal, and nobody's offended (other than maybe white supremacists). It's not like it's an actual representation of real history, right?  It's a simple game, and the ethnicity of the people isn't important.

Boardgame Exchange

Via Purple Pawn, I learned there's an interesting new service for game enthusiasts.  It's the Boardgame Exchange - essentially, a Netflix style service for games.  You get to have one game mailed to you at a time, in custom shipping boxes with prepaid postage.  When you're done, you send the game back, and they send you the next one on your list.  They allow you to swap up to two times per month (presumably because the postage on these things will run them something like $8-$10 a shot, I'd guess).  


You pay about $30 a month for the service depending on how long a term you sign up for.  If you rapid-fire the games, sending them back quickly, I bet they end up barely breaking even at that price, since they'd have to cover four shipping costs and employees to send them out, not to mention inventory.  But they probably count on people having to keep the games for a while in order to get a group together, and then you'll probably also have the Netflix thing where you keep a loser game for a while thinking you'll play it but never doing so.  For some users, they'll probably get paid every month for not having to do anything other than having a game out on loan.


I'd be surprised if this is around in a year, unless they have a ton of venture capital behind them.  Netflix works because DVDs are cheap, easy to handle, reaonably durable, and very cheap to mail.  Games aren't these things.  But maybe they'll make a go of it - since getting into this publishing thing, I've certainly realized there's a huge and enthusiastic community of game players out there, many of whom would love to play something new every week.


I'm not sure if they're good for publishers or bad - on the one hand, you could get some exposure, and they'll have to buy at least one copy of your game to send it to people.  On the other, if your game isn't that great, people might try it here and never buy it.  But my guess is, it won't hurt sales and might help them, particularly if you've got a good game and not much marketing budget, as I think I will.

August BGDF entries up

That was fast.  Eight of them, ranging from a new card game with a standard deck of cards to a couple with over 240 pieces.  Lots of artwork in these entries - more than usual, and more complete.  Because of the restrictions, the rules are pretty complex - I need to sit down with a monster Diet Mountain Dew and wade through them all before voting.

Which is soon this time - midnight on August 30.  Exciting.  I hope more people give comments and reviews than last time - that was kind of disappointing, since only I and one other guy did.

August BGDF contest entry in

I got my entry in for the August BGDF showdown.  I think it's a good one.  The problem is, I had to rush at the end, and I never got a chance to playtest it.  I think it would work OK, but I didn't have time to find four people to give it a try.

Might get that chance this weekend.  Anyway, we'll see what everybody else did within the restrictions.

Xinghui printing problems

James at Minion Games has given some more details about his Xinghui printing troubles (which I've discussed before) here at this BGDF post.  He also has pictures of misprinted cards at the links shown below, and I've hotlinked one at left so you can see the double printing.  I was tempted to use these guys initially, because their quote came in so far below the others, but apparently you get what you pay for.  Or rather, you get unsellable items that loosely resemble what you paid for.

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4

Lucky Train

The company my brother works for, A Bit Lucky, has produced a social Facebook game called Lucky Train, in which you build a small town and then send the population around on trains to your Facebook friends.  The game is still in beta, and they're adding more features every week.

It's interesting - although I've played it a ton, I've found myself not quite as addicted to it as some of the other, stupider Facebook games, like Dragon Wars and Mobsters II, where you develop a character over time by doing little meaningless quests over and over.  The gameplay is actually far more interesting in Lucky Train, but I think the thing that's missing is that the plot doesn't shift or reset - you end up in an apex state, where you have a bunch of trains and a fully-developed town, and then there's not so much more to do other than the same thing over and over again.

I'm sure they know this, and are planning on adding that kind of thing when they shift out of beta.  I think when they do, they'll have a real hit on their hands - the graphics, sounds, and gameplay are far more fun than the other games like this, and the social aspect is fun, seeing all your friends on your train routes and sending trains back and forth.  It just doesn't yet have an addiction that lasts past where your town is mature, which in the current beta state takes about a month or so of play, compared to Mafia Wars and its ilk, where they keep giving you missions and levels until you burn out (for me, after about 6 months).

Anyway, check it out - it's fun!

The last to know...

I'm guessing my LLC registration went through, not because I've heard anything from the state, but because I got two pieces of mail from credit card processing companies today addressed to it.  Reminds me of the time I got a speeding ticket and received eight letters from skeezeball lawyers the next day - how do they know so fast?

Ah, here we go:  http://www.secretary.state.nc.us/corporations/Corp.aspx?PitemId=9576355

Cool! Except they misspelled my middle name. My Scottish ancestors would be a wee bi' surly.

Slay

About a year ago, my brother turned me onto a great computer game called Slay (available here) by Sean O'Connor.  The game is basically a territory-capture game with different ranked units and an underlying economics system.  It's got a set of rules that are very much like boardgame rules, and it plays out on a hex map.  Although it has a boardgame feel, I think it works much better on a computer than it would on a board because of the underlying mathematics involved - the math isn't so hard that you couldn't figure it out, and you can actually do the calculations if you need to for a critical decision, but mostly it's more fun just to let the computer do the math and focus on the strategic parts.

And the strategy is fun - you've got ranked units that can capture territory or block others from capturing, and buildings that merely block capture. You do much better with bigger connected areas of territory, so the idea is to consolidate from small dispersed areas into a large area whose edges you can defend.  Each separate territory you control has its own economy, so small areas can't afford very powerful units, while with bigger areas, you can get some of the more powerful units that can defeat lesser units and take out the buildings.  Also, your guys can move to and attack from any space in a connected territory, so units fly around the board if you've got a big connected realm.  The catch is that you have to support the units (but not the buildings), so you need to have enough squares under your control to pay all your guys each turn.  If you don't they ALL die, not just the ones you can't afford, and your territory is up for grabs unless you've got buildings in place.  The unit costs go up exponentially for the higher ranked units, so they can be dangerous.  Any spare income you don't use is banked, so you can save up over the course of several turns, but your reserves are lost if your area capital is conquered.

Further complicating the game are plants that grow into spaces and cancel the income you receive from them.  There are two kinds, one of which is a pine tree, which grows slowly at apparently random intervals, while the other looks like palm trees (although when I'm playing I think of them more as weeds).  The palm trees spread each turn to an open space, so you can rapidly lose territory to a weed infestations.  You can clear a square with any unit, but that counts as the unit's attack for the turn.  When units die from lack of support, they often turn into weeds (conquered buildings sometimes go to pine trees), so a bad economic defeat can cripple a whole area and then bleed over into neighboring territories.

The strategy is interesting - you want to try to expand and connect your areas, but you also need to defend, particularly when you've got a narrow strip of territory that could be easily severed.  Often, late in the game, you can pull dramatic moves, sending a string of guys across a big area to divide it into two, which can cause somebody's whole army to die all at once.  But doing that can leave you unprotected, so somebody can do it to you right back.

You can play online with others, but the network interface is pretty old-school, so I've mostly just played against computer opponents, who are quite competent and fun.  The graphics hearken back to simpler 8-bit times, and it's clearly a one-man operation, which I'm quite familiar with through my experience writing and selling Snood. The game costs $20 for Windows and Mac, $4 for iPhone, and it's well worth the investment.

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Image above borrowed from the Slay homepage.

Starcraft II

I've been playing some of this over the last couple of weeks.  It took a while, but I've really started enjoying the single-player campaign games.  They've got a difficulty tuning problem, I think - the "normal" setting is very easy, and the "hard" setting is often extremely difficult.  Except when it's not.  It's a little frustrating to play some levels and feel completely unchallenged, and then to bump up one difficulty level and feel like there's no way anyone could ever prevail. With the tech upgrades you can keep buying, the "hard" level is becoming easier, too, which is odd.

The games against actual humans seem not to have too much depth compared to other RTS games I've played, although I've heard that this gets better the better you get. For me, it mostly seems like whoever makes a bigger wad of guys earlier nearly always wins - it's a very rush-intensive game, and there aren't very many strong defensive buildings or siege weapons, although some races have more than others.  That means most of the fights are chaotic close-quarters kinds of things, and there's less of the strategic stuff going on - there are so many units, and they're sooo rock-paper-scissors, where one is terrific against some units and horrible against others, that it's hard to come up with a good strategy other than guessing what your opponent will do.

Again, I may find it to be more tuned the longer I play, but for now, multiplayer is not so much fun - lots of work for one fight about 10 minutes in that determines the whole game.  Makes me miss Age of Empires II, which was a favorite, and appreciate Company of Heroes, which allows the use of cover and defensive structures and positions in interesting ways.

New BGDF showdown is a doozy

Lots of conditions for the BGDF design showdown this month - shared resources, at least four players, and two people have to win simultaneously.  I'm at a loss for now, but hopefully something will occur to me.

Diggity all over

My friend Jon, one of the early adopters of Diggity, shared the game with friends in Pennsylvania over the summer, and he says it was well-received.  Neat-o.  He's posted a brief comment at BGG, too - he sort of apologized today for admitting that he was my friend in the comment, but of course he can (and maybe should) do that.

I explained some of my recent rules changes - requiring three cards played down before a miner can be made, and making the high-point-value cards optional - and he seemed to approve.  I think he (like me) enjoys the more variable (and thus more exciting but also more random) scoring.

Anyway, neat to hear that it's been enjoyed elsewhere by strangers.

Stress

My daughter taught me Stress today.  Interesting game, but the design is weird.  The game is set up (and the object stated in such a way) so that it appears to be better to be faster at making matches.  However, if both players are competent (not even good, just competent), then the whole thing boils down to endgame, and who can set up the last winning play first.  The first 95% of the game is exciting but mostly irrelevant, since the faster player will nearly always end up just waiting for the slower one, who gains control of the game, because the faster player will be out of "smart" plays.  The faster player can try some tricky moves designed to hinder or trick the slower one, but it's mostly beyond his or her control.

I might have to play it some more, and play deliberately slowly, to see if the slower player can actually always engineer a win by virtue of control of the game and more options with the cards.  I suspect that might be possible, which would make the best strategy actually the opposite of how it seems upon first glance.

Yoggity help cards

I ordered copies of Yoggity for the Rio Grande competition today.  I added some informational cards - I hope they help the players at the Memphis GameCon understand the game more quickly.  TGC has shifted their card sheets to 18 cards, so I had some extra cards available for free thanks to the reformat, so luckily I get more cards for the same price.

Images are below - many games now have this kind of thing, and I think it sums up what you're supposed to do pretty well.  People will still have to consult the rules for the details, but hopefully this will help the learning curve. I'm probably going to do it for Diggity, too.  These images include a margin on the edge that would be cut off in printing, so there's not as much blue as it seems.

Argh

Got my LLC filing back from the Secretary of State's office saying they needed an address on line three.  The same address that it came from, the same address that's on every other address line on the form.  They could have just used the address, or called me and cleared it up, but instead they blow a stamp, envelope, and three days sending it back to me so I can write the address again, and then I get to blow a stamp, envelope, and three days sending it back.

LLC will have to wait until next week.  Why is this form not online?  Argh.

New puzzle game concept art

While waiting for art for Diggity, I've been thinking about a puzzle game.  I was playing some Snoodoku, and trying to figure out what made that fun, and came up with a new idea.  It's going to be a logic puzzle game, played on a computer, details still a bit fuzzy, but I've been working on some icons (see below).  Also learning Illustrator, which is a bit tricky for me.

Attack from Mars

I fixed (I hope) a nagging problem on my pinball machine today - replaced the opto sensor for the saucer trough so that it can detect balls again.  This is good, because previously, the game would pause six seconds and then flail around trying to find the ball every time it goes down there.

I managed to complete several tasks to do this:

• Figured out where to find non-Williams replacement sensor boards - non-trivial, because the manufacturer has been out of business for some time.
• Removed the broken sensors without breaking anything else
• Soldered the replacements ones into place, crossed my fingers, and turned it back on

My soldering skills are shaky at best (I won't be posting glamor shots of my silvery beads, let's say), but the game works again, and I've found that any job I complete successfully that requires soldering is one that I'm inordinately proud of - my burnt fingers are a badge of honor.

From a game design standpoint, this is a really well-designed pinball game.  It's fun for beginners, because there is obvious stuff to hit, lots of forgiving help, including a long ball saver, and a great sense of humor in the graphics and sound. Even people who've never played any pinball before end up having fun, laughing, and scoring hundreds of millions of points (the point scoring is ridiculous - my high is about 34 billion).  It's also really fun for more experienced players, because it's got six big goals (some relatively simple, some really, really hard) to complete to get to the final battle with the Martians, which I only manage to do about once in every 30-40 games or so, making it quite elusive.  Lots to learn there about designing other games, too - depth, theme, humor, and a variety of well-balanced overlapping goals.

Sandcastles rules

The rules to my entry for the BGDF contest are here.  Pictures, too.  It shares some elements with Diggity what with the map building, but I think it would play completely differently.  I might have to make up cards and test it to see.

Sandcastles wins!

My entry in the July BGDF showdown won!  Yippee.  I had fun thinking this one up.  I went with simultaneous movement for one phase the game - not sure how that would actually work, but I give the players something complicated to do with a common set of resources to draw from, so I think it would be fun to play.  It might be like Set, though, where I've found that natural ability is a big factor - it can be hard to enjoy a game where the emphasis is on a skill you just don't have.

I'm really enjoying these contests.  I've entered four times now, and won three of them, so that's gratifying - the games are always creative, and it keeps me active thinking up a new game each week.  And condensing the rules into 800 words is good practice!

Stratego reordination

I learned last week that the makers of Stratego have reordered their pieces in the recent games, so that the good ones are now the higher numbers, and the worse ones are lower.  I suppose that sort of makes sense for people learning the game anew, if the higher ones are better, but the curmudgeon in me will always think of miners as 8's, not 2's.

Ridiculous, I say.  If you're number one, you should be able to beat everybody, right?  Not in the new version - number ones are the feeble scouts.

Artist on board?

BoardgameNews.com reports on a new small Italian game company called Albe Pavo, which consists of a designer plus an artist.  That's something that could be really useful to me - an artist on board.  The art for the game looks neat - very ancient Rome.

It seems like you need three components to make a successful small game company:

1. A game designer
2. An artist
3. A business person

Now, these roles can be combined into one person.  I've known of folks who were 1 and 2 combined, although it's rare to see somebody who can do both well.  My guess is that if you were 2 and 3, you'd be running a graphic design shop and not worried about games.  I'm trying to be 1 and 3 together and outsourcing my art, which I hope will work. Tasty Minstrel seems to have a separate #1 and #3, although they're now outsourcing #1 some.

It looks like Albe Pavo have #1 and #2 - I wonder how they're covering #3?

And of course, there's

    4.  A pile of money to light on fire

Possible source for marketing/distribution help?

On the most recent edition of Paper Money, Ben and Rett talked with Rob Boyle, a guy who has done a lot of work on the Shadowrun RPG but is now working with a new company called Posthuman Studios.  The show was interesting - he's been in the game industry for years and years, but he's founding a new company now after leaving Catalyst Games, a company which I gather suffered a setback from some accounting irregularities.

One of the things Rob mentions in the show is working with Sandstorm LLC, a company that purports to handle the business end of the games industry, allowing the designers to spend their time designing.  That might be something worthwhile for me.  Their website is pretty barebones, and some of the links don't work, and others are pretty cutesy for a supposedly professional company, but they seem to have some clients, and their services would be right up my alley. I think I'll try to get in touch with them and at least see what their terms are.

Big step

I filed the Articles of Organization for Plankton Games LLC today.  Not a huge step in terms of what I had to do, but a big psychological step, and one that left me $125 poorer.  But if I'm producing manufactured goods, I really can't afford to be personally liable for problems or issues.

There's a $200 annual report fee for the LLC, so I guess this starts the bleeding - my games have to make more than $200 in the next year to cover that expense.  Of course, I also have already paid for the web hosting, artwork, samples from TGC, etc.  But some of that I'd have done anyway.

Exciting stuff.  Next step (assuming my LLC application is approved) will be to get a state sales tax ID and a local business license, and then I'll need a federal EIN so I can get a business bank account.  And I'll have to figure out how to collect, report, and pay state sales tax for in-state sales.

This is the part that's not so glamorous, but it's still part of the journey, and even a little fun at this point because of what it represents.

July BGDF entries up

The entries for the July BGDF Design Showdown are up here.  Voting ends soon.  Only five entries this time, and they took a variety of different paths with the wide-open topic choice.  Some interesting ones in there.  I'll reveal mine next week when the voting is done (it's supposed to be anonymous).

Game design blog

Here's a new blog, Inspiration to Publication (http://inspirationtopublication.wordpress.com) that looks at bringing a game to publication.  The author, whose name actually doesn't appear in the blog other than in the first post, is Jay Cormier, who (with his design partner Sen) has a few games coming out over the next year or so from Tasty Minstrel Games, who I've written about some before, and ToyVault, who I hadn't heard of but who seems to be a combination licensed-toy/boardgame manufacturer.

Some interesting ideas, and some good advice, but not a lot of specifics yet.  I've added him to my feed list.

Pandemic

We played our new copy of Pandemic earlier this week.  Four players, the easy version (with four epidemic cards).  It was a lot of fun; we caught on quickly, I thought, but then we got creamed, not by disease showing up everywhere, which we were on top of.  We had cures to all four diseases and were managing to get them eradicated, we didn't have too many outbreaks, our epidemic level was only up to three cards.  No, despite our valiantly beating back the tide of disease, we lost because we ran out of city cards to draw, which was kind of unsatisfying. We need to try again to see where we went wrong - it seemed like we were doing good things every turn, but I suppose there's a more optimal way to move around and avoid outbreaks than we were able to spot.  I wish there were some rules that covered that kind of ending (infection rate increases when you're out of cards or something) rather than just losing by default, but I guess that's kind of like cheating at solitaire.

The game actually felt to me like a creative computer puzzle game - the cooperative element was fun, but it would work just as well as a solo game with one player controlling everything.  It was an interesting and different way to play a boardgame - I could see why it was so lauded.  I'll try it some more to see how it goes.

Starship Catan

I played a couple games of Starship Catan today.  It was pretty fun, but it's very tippy - it seems like somebody who gets ahead early will stay ahead.  There are a number of mechanisms that reinforce this (nearly every way to get victory points also is moderately to very useful for other purposes).  The biggest is the construction of the super-modules for your spacecraft.  These are not terribly expensive, but they provide a pretty good bonus ability plus a victory point plus there is only one of each, so you block your opponent from both the victory point and the bonus ability.


The other thing that's interesting is that the two sides are fundamentally unequal - the Sun player starts building fuel cells, while the Moon player starts building carbon.  Carbon is used for weapons, fuel cells for engines, but that part of it isn't too bad - both engines and weapons are useful, and they're not entirely central to the game, so that's not a big deal.  What seems more unfair is that carbon is needed for the modules, which are very useful, especially early on, while the fuel cells are needed for trade ships and colony ships.  The trade and colony ships are nice, because they let you grab more planets, but they don't seem as useful both immediately and long-term as the modules.  This is compounded by how they're used - you need to find a planet to use a trade ship or colony ship on, while you can build a module whenever you can afford it.


In my second game, I was the sun player, and I was swimming in fuel cells but never had any carbon, so I got way behind with the modules, and then never was able to catch up or mount any kind of challenge.  The first game was more even, but as the Moon player, I had a tremendously powerful ship and most of the double-upgrade modules. 


I do applaud the effort to differentiate between the two sides, and the game is strategically rich and very complex in other ways.  I haven't played enough to know how it goes all the time, and there may be a counter strategy I haven't stumbled upon yet for the Sun player, but it does seem pretty slippery-slope, where the early leader will usually win.  There aren't any catch-up mechanisms built into the game - not one that I can see, anyway - so there's nothing holding back the snowballing effect.


I enjoyed it, though, and would recommend it to others.

Sample CPSIA statement

Here's a copy of the CPSIA statement that Koplow Games has posted on ACD (acdd.com), a game distributor.  Koplow makes a ton of dice, dice games, and educational game parts for schools, so they're not directly parallel to what I'm doing, but it's interesting nonetheless to see what they've come up with for the new regulations.

Games People Play

I recently visited a game store I've been going to since my college days back in the late 1980's - The Games People Play in Cambridge, MA.  Great store - a huge selection of really neat stuff.  I bought my copies of Wiz War and Swashbuckler there back in college, along with some other games. This time around my father-in-law picked us up Pandemic, which I'm eager to try.

I spoke with the guy there (I think his name was Hank?) about how they acquire their games.  He said they get most of them through distributors, from Alliance and ACD, about whom I hadn't yet heard but probably should have.  But he said they also make some purchases for their big wall of single-copy games (i.e. games where they have only one copy in stock) directly from designers at trade shows, and that they'd sometimes buy games directly from producers.  So, there's a chance there to avoid paying the distributor's mark-up and get into stores directly, but it's going to be in very small numbers and require a lot of effort.  But it did sound like the trade shows were maybe worth doing.

Interesting stuff!  It was great to see the store again (they've moved across the street from where I remember them, but little else has changed) and to get good information from a knowledgeable source.

Even more on the CE mark

James from MinionGames.com implies, in response to my question over at BGDF.com, that the CE mark isn't a big deal.  I think I still need to do some research to make sure I meet the standards for card games, but I don't need to prove that independently to somebody in Europe, at least not until I get called on it by somebody over there.  So, my current understanding is, if I can figure out the standards for games, and figure out if I meet them, and do any requisite testing myself, then I can assert that I meet the standards and put the CE mark on without filing anything with a government agency.

Sound right?

Kickstarter

I've talked about several games that have used Kickstarter to raise funds (see here, here, and here), and (to my surprise) they've been successful.

Others are getting into the act, reports the Purple Pawn, and it's not apparently all roses and sunshine.  Some of the game projects they list are way below their targets, even as they approach their target dates.  I think for Kickstarter to work, you have to have a network of folks who are willing to get you started, and who know a bunch of other people who might be willing to contribute to the friend of a friend. Being willing to set a lower goal for funding is important, too, since Kickstarter only pays out if you surpass your goal.