C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

The French illustrator Naiade is my favorite game artist. FunForge has started cranking out games that immediately grab my attention with his art. So naturally, Tokaido caught my eye.

This is a game that moves quickly, and only takes about forty-five minutes.

It has a very light and non-violent tone. This is a game of vacation planning. You attempt to have as good a trip as possible along the East Sea Road ("Tōkaidō") in medieval Japan. Eat sumptuous meals, view gorgeous panoramas, buy beautiful souvenirs, and meet interesting people. Each stop along the track gives you one of these in the form of a card, which you keep face-up in front of you. Mostly, you are trying to collect combinations of cards.

The gameplay is simple: if your pawn is the farthest behind on the road, it's your turn. Move it forward to one of the tourist attractions, and take a corresponding card. Whoever is now in the back of the line-- even if that is still you-- takes a turn.

The attractions can get too crowded. Each attraction can only accommodate one or two guests at a time. In order to make sure nobody crowds you out of an attraction that is important to completing a set of cards that you need, sometimes you should pass an empty attraction and skip ahead. You can usually have exactly what you want, if you are willing to sacrifice.

The first question you will hear during an explanation of Tokaido is "So, as my first move of the game, I can go all the way to the end of the road?" There are inns at the conclusion of each of the four legs of your journey. You are required to stop at each inn and wait for all the other players to catch up. Besides, you wouldn't want your first move to go as far as the game rules permit, because your first leg of the journey would score you only six points (your meal at the inn), while your opponents would soak up all the luxuries you skipped. Probably the most subtle and crucial decision in the game is when to skip an attraction.

Be advised, each player starts with a different character who confers a unique advantage. The tacticians among you may wonder if your choice of character at the beginning of the game has an undue influence on who wins. This is also a game in which you are unlikely to win if you focus on yourself. Observe which sets of cards your fellow travelers are attempting to build.

The production values make the equipment a joy to use, the play is suitable for children and adults, and it's short enough that I found myself wishing the East Sea Road was a little bit longer.

I programmed this dice game to teach myself the JQuery library for Javascript, and to improve my Javascript skills. There will be many more features. If you think the current version is neat, you're really going to like it. I'm excited. And oh, yes, the visual design will also improve. But you know what they say: launch with the mimimum viable product.

Shout-outs go to my friends on the Lojban #jbopre IRC channel for their patience in answering my questions: rlpowell, chrisdone, kpreid, and Tene. Thanks to _jer for his professional tutelage and for hosting the webspace.

Click through, and click the magnifying glass for high-res versions.

Canyon detail:

A laser-cut prey figure:

I'd like to make some different-colored jigsaw-puzzle game tiles with a visible color on the edge when another tile is stacked on top of it. They could be wood, pressboard, plastic, or any stiff material; but unfortunately these usually only come in one color. Painting them before milling would only color the surface. Painting them after milling would cause drips that would be distinguishable by touch, when you pull the tile from a bag.

I have not found any type of laser-cuttable stiff sheet, at least 1/4" thick, that is pigmented all the way through the material, not just on the surface. Google and Google Product Search did not avail me.

My first thought was Sculpey. But safety reports say "when polymer clay is overheated enough or accidentally burned, the PVC will break down and release highly toxic hydrochloric acid gas." So much for laser-cutting Sculpey.

I also thought of asking to use the MakerBot, but the plastic it extrudes only comes in black.

Then I thought, if it comes down to it, perhaps print the 3D models with the MakerBot, cast them, and mold Sculpey with the casts.

This robot, laser-cut from 3mm plywood, is a pawn I designed for an entire boardgame made with the laser cutter. I'm still waiting for laser cutter time, to see how it comes out, but I don't mind showing you the schematics now.

The key on the robot's back is just for decoration, but the gears on the board really turn. I used this gear template generator. The gearteeth form a track along which the pawns move, and you can change where everyone is on the track simply by turning the gears. Here are the schematics for the gears and board. Red is cut, black is engraved.

"GEARBOX GRAB" is a working title right now. I'm considering some other titles.

I think you can't really laser-cut cards, because it burns the edges as it cuts them. But you can laser-cut chips and draw them from a bag. So that's what this game uses.

In an act of amazing and utter coolness, Rio Grande Games has re-iterated their friendly policy toward fan cards. In so doing, they also asked fan creators help them out, by formulating the name "[My Expansion Name], a Fan Expansion for Dominion" and avoid the formulation "Dominion: [My Expansion Name]" which is reserved for official expansions. This is to prevent confusion. My original three disclaimers still apply as well.

This card can make draw piles as open as the recipe for the OpenSoda that Penguicon serves in the ConSuite. Your deck remains face-up, even after you shuffle it. The only way to get it face-down again is to play another OpenSoda. But you can only use each copy of OpenSoda once, and it will throw itself out of the game. There are only ten copies in the supply.

Sometimes you want to know "Should I play this card which will draw the next card in my deck?" Well, with OpenSoda, you can put your draw pile face-up. Now you're drawing from what used to be on the bottom, and you will always see what's next.

At other times, you have a deck-inspection attack like Pirate Ship, Thief, Swindler, or Saboteur, and you're wondering whether it's worthwhile to play it. If you play OpenSoda against everyone else's decks, you can see if they have some delectable goodies on top, just waiting for your destruction. If someone else does that to you, you can play OpenSoda to put your deck back face down.

I wanted to see if I could design a card that would actually motivate players to buy Curses (a negative one victory point card, which doesn't do anything). Normally no one buys Curses. They exist only to inflict on other people. Kimba's "+1 Buy" lets you buy an extra card on the turn you play it. I'll bet you'll use that Buy to get a Curse card, which only costs zero dollars. This card uses Curses as an incredibly powerful fuel. The question is, can you get rid of them by the end of the game?

Say what you want about Kimba, she did some things that we don't have anymore, in ways that sometimes went unnoticed. This card is useful too-- if you bite the bullet, make the hard choices, and accept the damage of Curses to your deck. I dare you!

They say each good Dominion card tells a little story. The story is about what the card does in the start of the game, what it does in the midgame, and what it does in the endgame. Let's just say the Kimba card had too much of a story on it. I just couldn't fit all the effects I wanted to have. At one point I had Kimba trashing everyone else's Potion cards, because she's a teetotaler. And so on. I was doing too much with one card. So I split some of the effects to their own cards. Like this one:

This card will throw itself out of the game at the absolute last minute. (Perhaps even at one AM on the morning of the convention.) Everybody's holding onto their copies of this, holding out hope, because the earlier you play it, the less it's worth. Finally someone will throw one in the trash to get rid of Gold or Platinum from their opponents. (Canceled plane tickets.) Then all of a sudden everybody is trashing Hhhhhhwil Hhhhhhhwheaton. It's like an extravaganza of Hhwheaton-trashing.

Keep in mind that the trashing effect happens when your card gets trashed for any reason, not just when the card trashes itself. If someone hits your Hhwil with Thief or Saboteur, it attacks everyone other than you even though it's not your turn.

I didn't have the heart to put this person on the card. Suffice it to say that when you take on a job and are never heard from again, it is vitally important that we at least get one message from you, acknowledging that you got our email firing you. Otherwise, no one else is able to do your job, because they don't know what arrangements you might be making behind the scenes.

Last night, playing Dominion with Eric and Rob, I scored 78 points in one turn! To call this a personal best is an understatement. A six-point turn is considered a lot.

( How is it possible? )

The winner of U-Con's local semifinal of the 2010 Rio Grande Game Design Competition is "Verlatical"! Congratulations to the designer, Ross Atkinson.

Here is the feedback I received for the game I entered, "Ingeniators".

Scoresheet criterion, on a scale of one to ten. Each column is 1 of the 7 playtesters.	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
1. Decision Driven: How much is the winner determined based on their decisions, as opposed to luck factors?	4	4	4	4	5	4	5
2. Originality	3	5	5	3	5	4	5
3. Wait Time: How much time do you spend without interacting with the game/other players?	3	3	4	3	5	5	5
4. Unpredictability: How often is the outcome of a turn/round known before it ends?	3	3	4	4	5	3	4
5. Broad Appeal: Would you teach this to someone who is not a serious game player?	1	1	2	1	5	2	4
6. Replayable: Do you want to play it again soon?	2	2	3	2	4	4	5
7. Interactive: Do the player decisions impact other players?	5	4	5	4	5	5	5
8. Equal Opportunity: Does every player have an equal chance of winning regardless of turn order/role?	5	4	5	4	4	3	5
9. Fun	2	2	3	3	5	4	5
10. Simple to Learn: The rules were clearly stated and communicated.	1	2	2	4	5	2	4
Total	29	30	37	32	48	36	47
Tie Breaker: How would you rate the overall game & game playing experience?	3	3	5	5		7	9

• Fairly simple, but there are some gray areas requiring the clarification of a designer or experienced player.
• Not saying it's a bad game, just not my thing. Was difficult to grasp all the rules/possibilities on a first play.
• I like the originality of game. I feel a little overwhelmed with the number of patterns & powers. I could see some gamers over-analyzing what they should do & taking a lot of time. I wonder how easy it is to self-exploit his own invention for points but that might be resolved with others flipping/clearing the tracks... so might be OK.
• There are some little tweaks that would be very helpful, like the scoring mechanism and the stacks of tiles. Both are very easy to knock over.
• Definite potential.
• The pieces were kind-of hard to tell apart. It was fun but it hurt my brain a bit.
• Very cerebral, almost to the point of causing brain malfunction.
• Overall this was fun!

The message is unambiguous. While the game I designed appeals strongly to its own target market (such as playtesters # 5 & 7), there is clearly a need for a more casual version. Many of the playtesters were grandparents and teens who didn't seem engaged.

After I received this feedback, it didn't take me long to condense Ingeniators down to its purest recognizable form. Unfortunately this version loses the thing I liked about it the most: self-interested co-operation. But it's still fun.

The other thing I learned is that few people are confident in how Ingeniators should be pronounced. (In-Jee-Nee-Ay-Ters.) This feedback came exclusively from folks who I know to be highly literate.