Journal

First there's a theme, in this case a request from my girlfriend for a unicorn game to go with her unicorn t-shirt. Then I come up with a basic component or concept that will make it different from other games. Next I work on scoring mechanisms so that the game is mathematically sound. Then I throw some tentative play mechanisms at it, like when you draw cards, trading, drafts, stuff like that, these will be adjusted significantly during playtesting, I'm just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Finally, I work out the details of the components in my head.

This all happens in two or three bursts of note taking. The first may happen during civilized hours, maybe triggered by a conversation. But the real meat of the work usually happens in the dead hours of the night. I'll wake up between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning and type up notes in my iPhone. Hopefully I get back to sleep, to wake up again at a more reasonable hour and polish things up. It would be nice if one day I could invent a game without the aid of jet lag or fever. We'll see.

Theme: Unicorns & Demons (should change to Shadows for religious types)

Double sided cards
Black/white/grey on one side, targets, # of dice, modifiers.
Rainbow colors on other, building sets, collections

Deck is stacked with shadow side up, draw that or from 3 color side cards.

Once a card goes into your hand you can't turn it around or look at other side. May show to other people. If need to set down cards place Player Aid facing you before setting down cards as a stack.

Score in 3 ways. Lay out set of different colors, lay out collection of same color, play white dice cards to roll 1, 2, or 3 dice per card, use grey modifier cards to match black number cards, which are scored.

Colored cards need symbols as well as colors.

Turn sequence:

1. Draw 2 cards
2. Pass 1 card (everyone)
3. Trade 1 card (with anyone)
4. Play cards - color sets/groups - white dice, grey modifiers, black goals
5. Discard down to 8 card hand limit

Scoring
Sets: cards of different colors
3 = 3 points
4 = 5 points
5 = 7 points
6 = 10 points

Groups: cards of same color
1 point per card, can add to existing groups

Black goal cards
Points scored by rolling target number.
3, 4
6, 7, 8
9, 10, 11, 12

Shadows dice game

1. Play white dice cards, numbered 1-3 totaling no more than 6
2. Roll that many dice
3. Use gray cards to modify rolls
4. Any target black card numbers matched exactly are scored

Grey cards:
+/-1
+/-2
+/-3

Colored cards
White backgrounds, color circles (inset shadow?) in corners with white shapes.

Red circle
Orange triangle
Yellow starburst
Green clover
Blue diamond
Purple square

posted by Nils Devine  # 1:11 AM 0 Comments

Dominion has emerged as our group's favorite game, with many plays of all expansions. But even more than that, this year we focused on playtesting and developing my own board game, Hunt or Gather, which I have self published on The Game Crafter, in order to print on demand copies to send for blind playtesting.

Dimes

• Hunt or Gather 66
• Dominion 39
• San Juan 21
• Cribbage 13
• Thunderstone 11

Fives

• Castle Panic 9
• 7 Wonders 7
• Coloretto 6
• Eminent Domain 6
• Elfenland 5
• Witch's Brew 5

posted by Nils Devine  # 7:24 PM 0 Comments

My goal here is not to completely reinvent Monopoly. If you want to play a good game based on some aspect of Monopoly that you link, watch Board Games with Scott 070 - Breaking Up the Monopoly. The goal here is to fix the way people play the game, bringing it back closer to the original intent of the game. I have borrowed and elaborated on ideas from one or more boardgame podcasts.

What would you change about Monopoly? Should the game look different? How would you change the rules?

I would change Free Parking to Paid Parking. This will help to discourage the house rule where people collect a pot of all paid fines when they land on that space. That way of playing arbitrarily lengthens the game, making for a bad play experience.

As a flat tax it will hurt the players who are further behind, bringing the game to a close faster, one of the primary complaints with this game.

From a thematic point of view, this change to Paid Parking will make perfect sense to our increasingly urban population. For the growing majority, parking simply is not free.

What elements of Monopoly would you keep?

I would keep the rule that states "If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder."

The only problem with this rule is that most people don't seem to know it. To encourage people to learn the rule, I would add a new space to the center of the board titled "Auction House", to make people ask the quesion, "what is that?" and look it up. The rule could even be written directly on the board.

posted by Nils Devine  # 3:33 PM 0 Comments

I tried out using Ubuntu for a couple weeks, and I must say it's pretty awesome. But there are two show stoppers. First, I need Photoshop, Gimp is just, well, gimpy. Second, Netflix streaming does not support Linux. We could watch from the Wii in the living room, but the LCD in the office is so much nicer.

So I tried formatting the drive NTFS, FAT32, but nothing worked, Windows just couldn't see my hard drive. I located my drivers CD and pressed F6 during the initial setup. No luck. Finally, when I was about to resort to setting up a VirtualBox, I found this barely intelligible post in a dell forum:

Its a common problem with Dim 8400. what you can do is enter into BIOS and expand drives and goto sata operation and change it to RAID AUTO/ATA.

Posted by karthiktkv1 on 20 Dec 2008 3:00 AM

That solved it!

posted by Nils Devine  # 1:22 PM 0 Comments

Dimes

Dominion (22)

Now technically I ought to include all of the expansions along with this base game, which would bring the total to 53, but I prefer to record it under the set which played the most significant role in the game.

Cribbage (15)

Of these plays probably 2 or 3 were proper competitive games against one or more live opponents. Many were solitary games on my iPhone, others were cooperative games, which are great fun but much shorter than traditional Cribbage.

Dominion: Prosperity (15)

This is the latest expansion and by far the greatest. If you own the base game and are trying to decide which expansion to get, this is the one.

Race for the Galaxy (11)

I haven't found a live opponent for this one. It's a brilliant game, but the learning curve is a real bitch. I just play it on my netbook against AI.

Ca$h 'n Gun$ (10)

A party game, with guns!

Snow Tails (10)

A crazy little race game, best played fast and reckless, have to try it with a timer sometime.

Sorry! Sliders (10)

Bowling in miniature, fun dexterity game.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (10)

This is easily the game with the longest playtime on this list, but made the list because I lugged this enormously heavy game to Ireland and Maine.

Nickels

Dominion: Alchemy (8)

The only expansion I don't own. But it's still good, it is Dominion after all.

Dominion: Seaside (8)

I still haven't mastered the multi-turn combinations this expansion enables, need to play it some more.

Guillotine (8)

Nice light game of chopping off heads.

Zombie Dice (7)

This one's probably under-reported. It's a simple little craps/blackjack style press your luck game, only own it on my iPhone I'm afraid.

Forbidden Island (6)

Wow, got this one for Christmas and it's already made the list. Maybe a little easy, but it plays fast and is probably the best introduction to cooperative games.

Small World (6)

It's rare that a light war game plays equally well during a lunch hour and at home with my girlfriend, but this one hits the spot. And there are even a couple expansions out that we don't own yet.

Catacombs (5)

A dungeon crawl dexterity game, this one is ready for some custom scenarios and I hope they come out with an expansion.

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game (5)

Loving the trend of packing more game into less time, this is a D&D style dungeon crawl that plays in about an hour. And I've only played the first couple adventures...

Formula D (5)

I don't know how the game designers did it, but every time we play this game the person who is in the lead midway through the race gets passed in the last corner. You'd think there would be runaway leader problems without any obvious built in catch-up mechanisms like Snow Tales, but there aren't.

Prophecy (5)

A fantasy adventure game somewhere between the pure storytelling of Arabian Nights, and the other dungeon crawl games. We've modified the rules to make it play faster and reduce the role of luck. This is a slightly older game, pre-dating the trend towards shorter play times.

Honorable Mentions

These games are among my favorites and should have made the cut.

Citadels (4)

Nice easy game to teach, but once you get into it one of those head games where you're trying to anticipate what other players are thinking. The meta game is constantly evolving as the group gets better at playing.

Fairy Tale (4)

Like Citadels this also has a card drafting element, but without the down time as you're waiting for other players to pick their roles. Hard to say which one I like more, though this one is slightly less torturous on the brain-part.

posted by Nils Devine  # 10:21 AM 0 Comments