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.

It turns out someone will be at Ann Arbor Gaming Group tonight, at Amer's on State Street in Ann Arbor, 7:30 PM, with a copy of Eminent Domain! (Rules on this page.) I can't miss the opportunity to finally play it-- so I plan to be there.

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.

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.

ConFusion was a successful con for me. It spent all of the time in the game room, except for the room parties Saturday night, and giving a presentation Sunday.

The printer double-folded the pocket program brochure, instead of quad-folding it as I specified. They must have been looking at my instructions for the program book. A lot of people said they liked the book this year.

A publisher asked me to bring some of my game prototypes to look at during the con. It went well. I'll blog about that next.

I playtested most of my Penguicon expansion for Dominion. (Man of a Thousand Names, Chuck, Jer; ConSuite, Joe, Sal; Tracy; Aegis, Steve; Matt. Then I ran out of printer ink.) It was popular. I need to make some changes, but I'm very pleased.

The game room closed at 10PM Friday night, because they lacked someone willing to guard the game library past that time. That meant the entire spacious Mediterranean room stood empty and locked, while gamers played in the lobby and Consuite. The next day I went to the nearby coat closet and noticed that it was lockable. At the feedback session I suggested that next year they may wish to protect the game library in there after hours, and let us use the dozens of tables unsupervised. The hotel person confirmed that coat closet is indeed lockable, and they seemed amenable to probably let it be used for that purpose.

Fortunately on Saturday night, Alex Yeager of Mayfair volunteered to guard the game library so we could game until 4 in the morning, after I was all "room-partied out".

If I would characterize my con weekend with one adjective, it would be "lucky":

1. There were a surprising number of games which I won through more luck than skill.
2. I was quite relieved to find crash space on Saturday night so I wouldn't have to drive home. I had no such luck finding crash space Friday night.
3. The AASFA Board held a session to award grant money to anyone who made a proposal for something that would make the con fun. I didn't present a grant proposal this time. Randy Bradakis proposed to buy things from the dealer room and go around the con playing a dice game with attendees to see who would win the items as prizes. I rolled three of a kind in his game and won a copy of "The Windup Girl", by author guest of honor Paolo Bacigalupi.
4. As usual, I lost things, but this time they were all found and returned to me.
5. An incident involving whipped cream was the highlight of my weekend.

Perhaps the most important thing for the comfort and social cohesiveness of a con is the quality of its Consuite. This one was kept well-stocked with quality offerings, including fruit, sandwich fixings, tomato soup, breakfast cereal, and an abundance of snacks and drinks.

My presentation on Motion Capture Animation was fun and very well-received. I enjoyed expounding on it, until the audience asked about employment prospects, which is a discouraging topic. Earning my mocap technician certificate was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done, but I will be surprised if I ever recoup the investment. For others, getting employed involves promoting themselves in ways that impress HR departments, which I do poorly. For me, getting employed always involves either a temp agency, or someone who knows me personally and already thinks I'm fantastic. Mocap work is in cities where no one knows me, so I'm not holding my breath.