The soon-to-be-outdated "Show of Power" Game Board

I’m not exactly sure what caused it — most likely, my realization that I won’t be able to make the 2010 Protospiel get-together — but I felt the need to get my “Show of Power” prototype back out onto the table the other night.

It had been a while, and I had a few new concepts that I had been thinking about, but hadn’t actually played out.  So, it was good to get the thing on the table and play through a few rounds.

Turns out that the new concepts didn’t really work, but working through them made a few things very clear, and helps to form some new changes to the game.

I’m finding that one of the main concepts — having players able to influence both *what* gets scores and *when* scoring takes place — needs some limits put on it.  The more I’ve opened up those areas, the more I’ve found that players will tend to not trigger scoring unless it is very obvious that they will score the ultimate best possible … otherwise, they are more likely to just take another turn of trying to advance their empire and wait for the game system to trigger the scoring.  Somehow, it’s okay to have less-than-optimal scores when the game triggers the scoring than to purposely trigger the scoring knowing you will only do “pretty good”.

To improve things in that area, I am moving to a new scoring timer concept and adding a hidden element to the scoring.  To play into this new hidden scoring piece a bit, and to add a little more variety and depth, I’m adjusting the cards — going to a smaller number of actions available on a turn, plus adding in some special cards to give immediate scoring improvment or some special powers.

So … it’s up for another round of testing with the new stuff plugged in.  My goal is to have a tightened-up system ready for this fall when the Hippodice contest comes around again.

While it seems like swimming in tar at times, I actually really like this end-of-design tweaking phase that I’m currently in with “Jump Gate“.

I have the rulebook a good 80-90 percent of the way to where I want it, and I’ve been able to do a some playtests of a few tweaks … then re-tweak … then re-test.  It’s the final polish (I hope) of what works as a really nice game.

In my last post here, I linked to my BGG feedback post where I mentioned that I was going to try having players always refill their hand at the end of a turn, and that every action would cost at least 1 NavComp card … well, those changes didn’t test very well.  Refilling every turn completely lost the nice tension that was there when trying to manage your hand … and having the refill as an action choice gives players a nice way of timing that to their plans.  So, I’ve dropped both of those ideas.

Instead, the “Research” action will allow a player to refill their hand back to 5 cards.  And some actions — Research, Fly, and Harvest — do not require a player to discard anything in order to take that action (using up an action is cost enough).

Some of the Special Actions also needed some balancing.  “Hotshot Pilot” originally allowed you to land on a planet just by discarding that card — but that was too strong … so now it serves as a “wildcard” that can be paired up with just 1 of the Landing Codes to land on a planet.  “Inside Info” was simply never used when it gave a player the chance to peek at a planet’s face-down cards — it wasn’t worth burning an action for that.  I’ve changed it to now allow you to refill your hand back to 5 cards, and it gives you an extra action to use in the turn … so, you essentially can refill your hand without using up an action.

I’m going to be adding in a few more graphics, running the thing through a few more word-editing rounds, and finish off the last page of the rules (thanks and ads).  I’m shooting for the end of March as a release … wish me luck!

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.