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

I have updated the online game I am developing, Falconers. This time with greater variation... and challenge!

Protospiel was fantastic. I got a lot of excellent feedback on Falconers. I also played several extremely promising games-- including one which will be published, to which I am now attached as illustrator.

One of the highlights of the weekend was a Q&A with a representative from LudoFact, a game manufacturer in Kalamazoo. I got to ask questions I have wondered about for years. ( Read more... )

...and so on. He sent me several amazingly detailed documents.

I invented a clever technique to paint nests very fast. I should write a tutorial.



At Origins this weekend, I repeatedly playtested a strategic dice game I invented, about falconry. I kept getting comments about the uniqueness of the theme, so a big thank-you goes out to Jody Raiford for that idea. I have been playtesting it with the local gaming groups for a few months, with a good reception, but it's always advisable to find strangers to give you the straight dope. The Origins gamers liked it enough that I decided to spend the extra time on illustrations.

The dividers are corrugated plastic. The thickness of the plastic takes up more space than I would have liked, but holds up better than mat board.

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.