I’ve been chatting over past couple weeks with a couple of game design friends — namely Grant Rodiek from Hyperbole Games, AJ Porfirio from Van Ryder Games and Chevee Dodd – about how we all met through the online game design community, and that most of  us already have almost 1000 Twitter followers (Chevee is … special ).

We wanted to have some sort of event to celebrate this and share some of our games with those who are following us on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

So, we came up with the overly silly “FreeStarter Game Design Community Group Hug Giveway,” where each of us are giving away 2 games for two different drawings:

The Serious Gamer Drawing … The entrant who wins this will receive free copies of:

• If I’m Going Down by AJ Porfirio
• Space Mission by Matt Worden
• Battle for York by Grant Rodiek
• Tuesday Night Tanks by Chevee Dodd

The Casual Gamer Drawing … The entrant who wins this will receive free copies of:

• Tessen Classic designed by Cardboard Edison and published by Van Ryder Games
• Dicey Curves by Matt Worden
• Farmageddon by Grant Rodiek
• Scallywags by Chevee Dodd

Entering the contest is easy. Follow these 2 Steps!

1. Follow each of us on Twitter:

• AJ Porfirio
• Matt Worden
• Grant Rodiek
• Chevee Dodd

2. Email Grant at grant@hyperbolegames.com. Tell him which drawing you wish to enter: Serious or Casual.

The drawing for both sets of games will take place on the morning of Friday, May 22nd.  So , make sure you are registered before then!

If you are anti-Twitter for some reason, we can make that work out as well … we each have a website/mailing list and/or Facebook page as well as our Twitter accounts — we just want to spread the online connectedness love in one way or another.  So, if the Twitter thing seriously doesn’t work for you, send me a note and we’ll find a way to go you in.

FINALLY … for those of you that DO follow us on Twitter, you’ll be seeing links to discussions and other silliness as the week unfolds … please join in and help make things even merrier.

Do you like to get free things? Do you like to participate (at least vicariously) in silliness on the way to the free things? Do you have a soft spot for folks who try really hard to be creative and witty (but the jury is still out on each of those points, of course)?

Then follow me on Twitter and see what happens on Monday! #freestarter

http://twitter.com/MattWordenGames

You can now get Jump Gate, Second Edition, for $14, from either eBay or the BoardGameGeek.com Marketplace.

Order at either of those online shops will be a direct order from me.  So, I’d be happy to add a message inside the box cover if you’d like me to.

RETAILERS (both online and FLGS): Send me an e-mail if you would like to have Jump Gate available via your store … I think you would like the wholesale pricing!

TheGameCrafter.com, which is the site I use for publish-on-demand for most of my games, has their own crowd-funding project on IndieGoGo to help them add shrinkwrapping to their offerings.

I was all set to write-up a pitch for you all to take a look at the project and offer your support if you could … but then Noble Valerian already did an excellent job of just that.

So … please read Noble’s description of the project, and why it should be funded: http://www.noblevalerian.com/1/post/2013/03/the-game-crafter-indiegogo-campaign.html

Thanks for considering it!

Alrighty! I think I may have wrestled my favorite behemoth to the ground well enough to share it this weekend at Milwaukee.  This has taken a while, and lots of twists and turns (as a couple of designers I talk with nearly daily can testify).

I still need to prepare a player reference sheet for people to use during the game, but for now the rules are ready.  You can download them here: Magistrate (21)

If you played this game anytime over the past few years (variously called “Uncivil” and “Show of Power”) at the Protospiel in Ann Arbor, Con of the North in St. Paul, or at GenCon Indy last August … this may resemble more-or-less the same thing — but I think it’s quite better now.  Certainly tighter and easier to consume, mentally, I think.  I’d definitely love to hear what you think if you give it a gander.

We’ll see how it goes this weekend!

In order to be ready for Protospiel-Milwaukee, I wanted to have written rules for each of the designs I will be bringing along to test.

Folks in a Bag

This morning, I was able to get a first, rough (rough!), text-only draft of the rules for For Goods and Honor ready.  Not sure I’ll do much more with these until after this weekend testing … they could really use some pretty pictures and some game play examples in them.  But they should be good enough to let us play the game and see how things work.

If you’re curious, you can download and read the PDF: For Goods and Honor (18)

Thanks for checking it out, and feel free to send me any feedback or questions you might have.

And, just for candy, here are a couple more pictures:

This turned out to be a longer post than I intended.  So, for the “tldr” crowd: SharkBait went out via the PPP and I got great feedback from Tom G. So, I made major changes. Feedback is appreciated.

Here are the latest rules: SharkBait Rules Booklet (21)

As Protospiel-Milwaukee gets closer, I am prepping each of the different games I plan to bring along.  As I get each of them ready, I’ll try to post something about them here.  For example, I’ve posted recently about Cosmic Critters (including rules) and For Goods and Honor (rules coming soon).  I even plan to post a full set of rules for my behemoth (relative to most of my designers), Magistrate, before I leave for Milwaukee!

One design that I had fairly far along — or so I thought — was Sharkbait … a family-style dice game about saving fish from being eaten by sharks.

I had a cool dice-rolling-and-placing mechanic that let you roll your sharks and your fish and put them on a board and get a score based on how the fish were located compared to the sharks … and I had a nifty scoring token board thing that gave some player interaction … and my subtle (and, sometimes, not-so-subtle) catch-up mechanic using “Shark Bait” tokens to upgrade your score … and it all seems pretty polished and ready.  And then I sent it out into the wild via the PPP Program administered by Grant Rodiek of Hyperbole games.

The game found it’s way to Tom Gurganus (he’s also a good Twitter follow), who was able to try it out a number of times with a couple different groups, including folks square in what I want to be the game’s target market, as well as some other experienced designers I know and trust.  Tom’s feedback was thorough, thoughtful, and pointed out both things the player liked as well as things that needed some work.  (I will now badly summarize and paraphrase my interpretation of Tom’s nicely detailed points.)

For the most-part, players liked the theme and the dice-play allowed for some interesting decisions to be made, along with the scoring tokens and Shark Bait token upgrade. But some of those things — such as the decisions allowed when placing dice — actually contributed to too much downtime between turns, especially for a rather casual game.  Turns took too long and some of the things were complicated enough to make the written rules overly-long (again, for a lighter family-style game).  The biggest kicker was that there really was no magic in the end-game … scores were tracked with pawns on a track, and there was no end-of-game bonus or other scoring elements to give something of an aha! at the end.  So, it was pretty anticlimactic.  And since it was obvious if you were too far behind the leader, it would lead to players disengaging.

So, I felt a mix of some bigger and smaller changes were need to fix the different issues here:

• Bigger — I’ve completely changed the scoring method altogether … from a pawn-on-a-track approach, to hidden values on tokens that are collected.
• Bigger — A new player-interaction element … although for now it’s labeled as being the “advanced rules,” I expect I’ll be switching it to being standard (with a “simpler rules” option for those that need it) … the same tokens used for scoring are used by players to place the sharks on a neighbor’s turn.
• Smaller — Fewer dice to roll (down to 6 from 8), sharks are placed ahead of time (tokens determine the sharks’ locations instead of the player rolling the dice), and a simplification on which dice can be placed … in fact, I may have over-corrected here (we’ll see from more testing).
• Smaller — Simplify the components and terms … this cut by components by about 75%, and my rules pages in half.

The new tokens-from-a-bag are going to be fish-shaped … I think that adds a fun element. You’re not literally saving fish by pulling them out of the water (a blue draw bag) based on how well you do in avoiding the sharks with your dice.

In any case, I’ve rambled enough here … the rules are linked at the top of this post, if you care to give them a read.  As always, I really appreciate any feedback you might have!

I’ve been thinking for a while now of repackaging the TGC edition of Jump Gate.  I’ve been updating the graphics with an eye to getting everything to fit into TGC’s new Small Pro Box (which is their best packaging option at this point, hands down).

But with the new edition, there are a number of other things I am thinking of tweaking in the game.  Here’s a quick list — and I’m looking for feedback and thoughts on these changes …

• No 6th Player – I’m planning for the third edition to be for 2 to 5 players. A 6-player game in the 1st and 2nd editions of the game has proven to be overly tight … it’s over very quickly and you really have not time to make or recover from a mistake.
  
• No Special Actions (replaced with wildcards) – Instead of having special actions listed on some NavComp cards, I’m including some cases of wildcard values instead (just like Schmidt Spiele did with Space Mission). That accomplishes nearly the same thing as most of the special actions much more efficiently.
• “Nothing” Resource Replaced with “Sand” – The “Nothing” cards were originally included to make it so that you didn’t exactly know how valuable each planet was going to be. Instead, I’m converting that into “Sand” (draft card pictured above) which is very low valued, unless you have the majority of what’s available … then it can be a bonus.
• Tweak to How “Scan” Works – I rather like the way scanning works in Space Mission, where you mark a single resource to be received later when the planet is claimed. So, to integrate it into Jump Gate‘s fully open resource information, a hybrid approach would work like this: Flip over 1 card of the still-hidden resources … this will give you 2 unmarked resources to choose between … mark one of them with your marker. When the planet is claimed, you will get that resource.
• New End-of-Game Timer – The current way that Jump Gate ends is either having enough Black Hole resource cards collected by the players, or having only Black Hole resources being what *hasn’t* been collected. This can lead to a never-ending game if players refuse to collect 1 last non-Black Hole resource card (annoying, but I’ve heard of it happening). So, I look to another thing in Space Mission for a possible answer. I plan to use the new “Sand” resource cards to drive a new timer (yes, a “Sand Timer” … sorry).  Once a certain number of Sand cards have been *revealed* (not collected — just revealed), there will be one more round of turns and the game will end.

Okay … so, is that too much? Just right? Something else that needs to be tweaked as long as I’m poking at things?

Let me know your thoughts.  You can comment below, or e-mail me, or comment via Twitter or Facebook. Thanks!

I’m very proud to announce that the big & beautiful 10th Anniversary Edition of Castle Danger is now available at TheGameCrafter.com!

This new edition comes with a gorgeous 18×18 inch quad-fold board with the look of an ancient hand-sketched parchment map on an old wooden table.  The majority of the pieces are hybrid wooden/plastic tokens with classic-style icons.  The rule booklet is full-sized, full-color, saddle-stitched and glossy (take a look at it here).

I still plan to have a short how-to-play video out in the near future … keep an eye out for that.  In the meantime, please spread the word on the new version of this classic game!

I now have the Cosmic Critters artwork updated with the illustrations from my friend, Dan Higgins … cute little suckers, no?

I also took a first pass at the rules. You can download them here: Cosmic Critters Rules (30)

Please give them a read and let me know what you think.  I plan to have this game with me in Milwaukee in March at the Protospiel event.  Of course, I’m happy to give it a whirl before then!