As I look forward to the Protospiel event in Michigan at the end of July, it’s time to get a couple of my other games back on the table to make them ready. Namely: Magistrate and Thunder Run to Gratis-3. For the most part, Magistrate just needs to get the doco finished and a little more polish … but Thunder Run needs a bit more work. That one (and Danger at the Walls) will be getting the majority of my attention over the next few weeks.
More specifically …
Magistrate … This past December, I had started a series of “Grand Overview” posts about Magistrate (linked above), intended to give readers a better idea of all of the things going on in the game. It is the most complex design I have going and I’ve been working on it for a long time. So, in addition to explaining things to everyone else, it was also a way for me to better organize my own understanding of it’s current state. The posts about it were, understandably, put on hold after all of the medical stuff that happened at the beginning of January.
At this point, I have a full prototype, my favorite set of rules so far and a pretty good player reference sheet. I see a need to continue working on the reference sheet to make it better, and to get a full rule book written all the way out. I also hope to continue the grand overview posts again now … that should help in getting the game ready for the Protospiel treatment.
Thunder Run to Gratis-3 … This one is going to have a bit more significant overhaul, and I’m guessing I’ll have some post fodder for it coming down the line. 😉
I’ll be replacing the long board with a deck of cards, getting rid of the carrier command cards, changing how attacks are delivered between carriers, and expanding what you have on your carrier status card. After testing this at GenCon last year, one of the players pushed back that if this is a game set in the Jump Gate theme, there should be some sort of exploration and resource gathering. Of course, this conflicted with my original pitch for this game to be “Thunder Road in space.”
So, it’s got me thinking about getting a better pinned-down idea of what the game should be … and that’s lead to some interesting ideas. I’ll post more on it as I get them fleshed out.
Leave a Reply