I’ve made a serious first-pass at getting the “Jump Gate” Rulebook into shape.  I’ve put the details into my feedback thread on BoardGameGeek.

The formatting is intended to go well with how TheGameCrafter.com handles rulebooks (which isn’t great) … they print pages back-to-back on a black-and-white laser printer, and then fold them up however they can to get it to fit into the box.  Since “Jump Gate” is made up of a couple decks of cards and a few 4-by-4-inch boards, it can fit into a small box — so the rules will get folded up quite a bit.

Right now, it fits onto 3 sheets of letter-sized paper, with the back side of the 3rd page still blank … I expect to fill that up with acknowledgements, thank you’s, and some advertising.

I would appreciate to hear any feedback that you might have on the rulebook, and the game in general … just leave a comment here or on the BGG thread, or drop my an e-mail.

Castle Danger is (so far) the most popular game I’ve published.  It was originally drawn on a whiteboard one evening before leaving work, and by the time I made it home after the long, slow commute, I had the main concepts worked out in my head.

I was much more into programming computer games at the time, so the first version of the computer game was started that night and completed within a week.  There were some gameplay walk-throughs with friends at work that week to finalize things … but the core parts of the game (board shape, piece types, portal use, etc.) have remained the same since.  (You can still download the PC game at the bottom of the Free Computer Games page.) Read more

When preparing for my last “Fellow Designers” post about David Whitcher, I asked David who he thought would be good designers to put on my list to interview … he pointed me to Scott & Carl of Dogtown Games.

I first became aware of Scott Starkey in the early days at the Board Game Designers Forum (probably 3 or 4 different wiki software changes ago for that site) as a smart designer who also was a good artist.  He was just releasing “The Mother Lode of Sticky Gulch” at that time.

I met Carl Klutzke for the first time at last year’s Protospiel in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I was impressed with the clarity and directness of Carl’s feedback on the designs during that get-together.  And I had a very good time dying very quickly in a futuristic group robot-piloting game.  (Beware the vermin — they will destory your machinery!)  Carl’s “StoryCards“ is the other main product available from Dogtown.

I sent Scott & Carl a list of the same questions via e-mail and received responses from each of them.  Here is how that exchange turned out … Read more

Lately, I’ve been putting some work into a 3-on-3 basketball board game.

Originally, I was hoping to make it competely dice based, but I could never get the game flow to work out properly.  So, I switched to cards.  I came up with a card-based system when I was revamping DareBase for its 2nd Edition rules changes … but didn’t make use of it then.

I’ve modified it to work with the basketball game, and it is coming along very nicely.  Between the design of the board and these cards, I think I’m at a point that I can get a prototype created through TheGameCrafter to continue more thorough playtesting.

Now, with that distraction out of the way, back to preparing Jump Gate for release … ;-p

I updated the general “Board Games” page to include my current slate of game designs that are in-process.

There are others, of course … but none ready for me to give a quick blurb-and-graphic about just yet.  I would expect that page to stay fluid, as different designs catch my attention … and the ones shown there now either work close enough toward completion to get their very own page, or simply fade off onto the shelf.

Take a peek at what may be coming down the pipe after “Jump Gate“, and let me know which ones seem interesting to you.

I’ve known Seth Jaffee for a number of years through our interactions at the Board Game Designers Forum (he goes by “sedjtroll” at BGDF).

A few years ago, Seth started posting and chatting about a game he was calling “Terra Prime” … which was a start on a space-based pick-up-and-delivery game with some adventure, exploration, discovery and — can’t forget to mention — hostile aliens.  Over those years, the game would come back up now and then, and I know he posted about it on his game design blog … but it seemed to fade from view until it popped up on Tasty Minstrel Game’s initial game offerings.

Now that the game’s been out for a few months, I thought I would send Seth an e-mail with a bit of Q&A about the design process that the game went through.  Here’s the way that exchange went … Read more

The game Keeps & Moats Chess is my example of the phrase “oldie but goodie”.  I came up with the idea for the game sometime in 2003 and released the PC game a few months later.  I am still getting contacted every few months about the game, and the free demo keeps a pretty consistent download traffic.  It does not use any special graphics or sound libraries (like DirectX), so it should work on most Windows machines found today (from Windows98SE all the way through Windows7). 

Like with a lot of abstract games, I’m not a very good chess player.  I’m way too impatient and aggressive and don’t have a natural ability to see the whole board and envision how things will play out a few turns into the future.  This was the initial basis for the design … Read more

Tonight I added a link to the free “Castle Danger” Print-and-Play Edition that can be downloaded from the game’s page at BoardGameGeek.com.

The download is free, and it provides everything you need to play the game.  Your only cost is the ink in your color printer to printout the game board and pieces, and the time it takes for you to cut out and fold the stand-up game pieces.

You can find more info about it on the Free Board & Cards Game Page.

One area of Jump Gate that has remained relatively stable since early revisions of the game, has been the types of Resource cards, their distribution and scoring methods.

The game has a number of layers of scoring, but the Resource cards will provide the main focus.  Because, while scanning and claiming Planets provides points for players, the main purpose of getting to the claimed Planets is to be able to harvest the Resources that are found there.  I wanted the game to encourage players to specialize in which Resources they were looking to collect, while having those Resources be randomly scattered around the Planets.  To encourage the specialization, most Resources score better when a player has collected more of that type.  This approach also adds in the strategic need to pay attention to what the other players are collecting in order to try to stop them from getting what they need … a bit of tension between wanting to collect *your* favorites, and stopping others from collecting theirs. Read more

(As I post this and see the card back graphic to the left, I realize now that I’ll need to update that one to include the udpated Gem and EnerGel icons.)

I got a few minutes over the weekend to get back into Photoshop and finalize the graphics for the Jump Gate Resource Card faces.  I’ve gotten great advice between my friend, Dan, and the folks replying to my feeback thread on BGG. Read more