Velocimancer Games

So I didn't have Cultivate Contest-Ready by the deadline. I've been putting off posting that here, since I posted it in the contest thread, and then the entry thread.  It was the right call, as I had developed serious doubts about how far I'd taken Project Chestnut, and how quickly.  I rushed out a prototype and called it Components Ready, without having exhaustively (or even adequately) playtested it at all.  My buddy John Horton  has been working on a Flash mockup of Cultivate based off the rules - so much was missing, so much was poorly thought-out.  I'm looking back on this blog where I thought that the 8x8 board was restricting.  What? Right now it feels too big.  Which leads to examining whether Chestnut was really the right lane of development to go with... All of which leads me back to the conclusion that I should have stuck by my guns as far as the parallel development process is concerned.  Entering the Contest was a great idea, and incredibly useful.  It ga

A month of silence... I was probably busily prototyping, right? Well... no. Life got in the way, as it is wont to do.  In addition to pouring my focus into my primary passion, acting/theatre, it's been a productive writing time for me; I'm working on some pokemon fan fiction (still your vocal admiration and hold your applause) for a nerd comedy event I'm working in October, and I'm revisiting and expanding the first play I ever wrote (and finished), a long one-act from five or six years ago. All of which meant that for the last month, I had to focus on top priorities, and banned myself from BGG.  I've spent the last few days readjusting to allowing myself to read/write about gaming again, and catchin' up on my subscriptions.  And look at that, a crucial month of game development in the BGG 2013 Solitaire PnP Contest is gone.  I've got just a couple of weeks left to put together a contest-worthy entry. Woof. Well, I have two options here.  I cou

It's been a bit one-note round these parts lately, no? With Cultivate as my first serious attempt to complete a game and submit it for a design contest (albeit only a BGG one), I've been focused primarily on the umbrella design of the game.  While my mind and hand have wandered between Prototypes, I've had my eye on the prize; to the neglect of Clear Black Sky, The Plan, and the fun little idea that popped onto the page during a Cultivate doodle session: Rail Against The Machine.  The spark for that idea came from a BGG thread about under-utilized themes, wherein, of course, many folks chimed in playfully with combinations of the usual tropes.  I felt a desire to really make the behemoth snowball generic design they all nibbled at the edges of: A zombie train deckbuilding game with worker placement and hidden roles.  In space. And so Rail Against The Machine began to percolate. But percolate is all it has done, as I've tried to focus on Cultivate.  Today I tried to ch

I continue to work on the Cultivate Project.  I have two prototypes very nearly made; depending on how the rest of the afternoon goes, I might have Projects Blackberry and Chestnut completely printed out. My trouble is that I've never really been a PnPer.  I've never gotten into the craft side of things.  I'm much more a doodler.  And this project, with its current mechanics, has components and rotation, and physical play; it's fiddly, in short.  I do think I have a good game on my hands though. Trouble is, I have no way to find out until I print and cut the damn things out. Hell, I think the main reason I drafted up the Chestnut prototype was to put off building the Blackberry one. Well... Onwards, anyhow.

So! While Project Honeycomb looks like a frontrunner in viability for this contest entry, I thought I'd give a little love to Project Chestnut and Project Buckeye; Buckeye especially utilizes a dartboard, an odd inspiration for a playspace, much less a solo heady-type game. Some notes. Project Chestnut - 8x8 board, 63 possible spaces (duh). - 4 starting "stems", randomly selected out of 8 possible stems? - Number all tiles evenly 1-8 so that you can pull tiles to "roll" a d8 in order to determine coordinates for new shoots? Back and Front of Leaf Tile for Project Chestnut - (Rounded) Diamonds or Squares? I kind of like the idea of the chessboard being turned on its point, so that all the pieces are diamonds instead of squares.  I can't explain why, but it feels to me like they're more organic, even if they're just the same shape from a different angle. Project Buckeye - So Project Buckeye can't easily utilize the rotating piece t

So, as I mentioned, I'm going to try something a little different with Cultivate.  In the spirit of true Prototyping, I'm going to work on parallel development, around the different possible board types (although I may end up finding yet more types of board/playspace).  I'll start by noting what possibilities stick out to me Project Honeycomb Project Blackberry Project Chestnut Project Buckeye Project Snowdrop

So I'm taking a break from focusing on The Plan, as I am working on my first real entry into a design contest.  I did have an interesting but weak prototype entry in the Postcard Game contest on BGG, but neither my entry nor that contest ever really got off the ground.  I'm formally entered into the Solitaire PnP Design Contest 2013 though, and we'll see how it goes.  The working title of the game is Cultivate , although I'm considering doing an alliterative - B theme and calling it Beginner's Basil Bonsai.

Been a while since I wrote here, eh? My time has been squeezed extra tight of late.  I've got an overabundance of theatre projects going right now, and I may finally have bitten off more than I can chew. Not that I think anyone actually reads this one of my blogs anyhow.  No worries! Today I just have some scattered thoughts about game design that I thought I'd write down. - Design a game with a lazy susan, where the tableau in the middle has cards/options accessible only to the player(s) closest to the side. - A variant of chess that takes place on a dartboard and is a race to the center, where any pawn that can make it to the bullseye is the winner.  No king, two queens, and the pawn line is behind the noble line. - Design a red v black pokercard boardgame.  Stacks of cards as warbands, Spades and Hearts are attackers, Clubs and Diamonds are healers.  Face cards are different kinds of special commander - Kings can be placed on any existing band, regardless of position, Qu

The Plan Version 0.0.1 - Prototype A Real power lies in the hands of those who choose to make something of themselves.  As a Player in The Plan, you are one of those ambitious persons of interest who has the gumption to make her or his mark on history.  Carefully cultivate Influence and back the right Proposals as you work your way up in the local political scene, first as an up-and-coming member of a Board, then as a mover and shaker of a Department, and finally as a civic leader on a Commission. Since this is the public office, your Resume is everything.  Choose when to cooperate with your fellow Players, strive to achieve different distinctions and levels of recognition, but be ready to turn on your former allies as need be.  You can get ahead with help from the Criminally Organized, but be wary as your shady dealings could come back to haunt you.  The road to political success is a steep and winding one, but with perseverance, friends in the right places, and a little lu

I finished the lengthy (for a modern-day attention-span and a time-thief in an office workplace) Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on the Plan of Chicago.  It's a great story.  I've been synthesizing ideas for The Plan (the game), not all of which can play nicely together.  Right meow I'm looking at the Player Tableau and thinking about how to lay it out so that it tracks Success, Co-Operation, and Corruption (my current three statistics) across the three Phases, and over the course of the game itself.  There may be some redundancy, but I gotta get a first draft up; hopefully that'll motivate me to build the card file for the three Phase decks, which is really all I need to do to at least have a prototype. Slan!

Another little rapid-fire scribbling of idea pings for The Plan. I've been thinking that a possible gameplay mechanic for the Proposals and their voting would be to a two-part phase: Phase 1: Put your proposal tokens on one or more slots on a d8.  You've got eight slots, each corresponding to a different result for the roll of a d8 - You're basically betting on specific results or sets thereof.  Perhaps you spread your proposal tokens on a whole bunch of faces - you'll have less payoff, but you're more likely to be one of the winners.  Each face can have multiple players' tokens on them (perhaps even an element that rewards co-op [Perhaps it rewards people you have co-operated with the least! Discourage long-term alliances.  It's all about public image]) so that the faces all represent different proposals. Phase 2: The die is rolled.  Players take turns playing cards to alter the result - +1 through +3, Surprise Budget for a second result to be added (e

In my quest to process Todd Sanders' design thread over at BGG, I've come across repeated references of his to Sid Sackson's A Gamut Of Games .  Intrigued, and with a bit of Amazon money to spend, I picked up a copy.  I've been going through it page by page, processing the game design elements, the strategies, the different philosophies of play, and the bits of colour and history peppered throughout.  The book is fairly quick going, though I've been underlining, scribbling in the margins, making comments, jotting down ideas, and in general doing all the elements of note-taking that I have always smilingly, steadfastly refused to do when required by a class. I'd recommend the book in turn to anyone getting into game design.  The current edition has author's notes at the front explaining the publication history, and the chronology of the book and its contributors.  And, as Sanders mentioned somewhere, Sackson is in many ways if not a founder, at least a keenl

So I've been thinking about my earlier seed of a thought for The Plan , and reading this fascinating document , and remembering some of my favourite moments of (of all things) Parks and Rec .  Some factors I would like to include in the game: Favors from Organized Crime that equate to basic, quiet bonuses, but count as a Mark Against in your record; A separate track for each player balancing public approval and personal funds to keep you in perpetual election or re-election; A cool design challenge might be to use chess pieces on my board; the projects you work on that reach completion have a lasting influence on the City; A tableau you build of "your track record" that is useful for tracking your victories/achievements (and therefore makes a good point tracker), but also acts as a resume for certain jobs - ergo, you are rewarded phase-to-phase not only for your victory points, but how you earned them; the possibility of multiple players being in the same division for a p

Mahalo.  So I've been thinking about one of the longer-standing (and longer-winded) issues between "Euro" and "Ameritrash" games - that of (perceived) Skill vs. Luck.  The argument runs that the less luck has to do with the game, the more it reflects skill.  Chess vs. Snakes and Ladders . A thought I had to mitigate the perceived influence of Luck: Replace dice with discreet stacks of cards, to which cards do not return upon being drawn. Now, I'll bet this concept has been suggested before.  But as I'm new to all this, I'm puzzling a lot of things out myself.  I feel that it's worth musing upon. So let's compare a die to a stack: We'll have d6 (die) and d6 (stack). A d6 (die), when rolled, always has a 1-in-6 chance of rolling each of its results. Now, a d6 (stack), when drawn from, removes that result from future draws.  You can count your cards (easier with a d6 than with higher denominations) and plan accordingly, especially if yo

Another quick thing so I don't forget it.  So one of the few nice boardgames I actually physically own and can play with my friends at work is Condottiere.  It's a blast, especially since my buddy Tyler re-distributed the territories of the Italian city-states onto a Game of Thrones map of Westeros.  Nerdception. But a key feature of the game is the Condottiere token, and its corresponding Bishop token (or the Iron Token and Septon, in our games).  Players win control of each token throughout the game, and the tokens declare where the next battle will be fought, and what area is off-limits from battle, respectively. So how about if that's the elegant little remedy to what has become a theoretical rat's nest of "priority" in Skrattejagergeist.  I could then work the tiebreaker token into the special abilities for some of the Spirits.  Like the red dice of Clear Black Sky, this was kind of my last design stumbling block of over-thinking.  I think I can get re

Quick post today.  It's Friday and lovely out, and I for one would like to go out and enjoy that weather.  Even though my running mates and I have collectively blown off the 4.5-miler we'd scheduled for this evening, citing a general hangover from my birthday party last night, and postponing it to tomorrow evening. I've been thinking about Clear Black Sky (why yes, I have appended the working title) and dice denominations.  As I've outlined previously, the game involves using dice to represent different classes of ship, which is hardly original, and balancing the production and deployment of large Forces of small dice or smaller Forces of large dice, which I believe is  original. The rules are almost entirely written, as it's a relatively simple game (for a 4x), and I've even worked out my tiebreaker/simultaneity issues (see "On Red Dice" , below) but what I'm pondering now is which dice I really need.  I currently have d2's, d4's, d6&#

One of the nice things about nerdiness becoming more of the accepted norm is that the game-playing populace is increasing, and while that means that shite games are on the rise, there's more demand than ever for good games, and for a vocal populace to  recommend good games over bad ones .  I've been reading through Todd Sanders'  Unintentional, Sprawling,  92-page  93-page(currently) Ad Hoc Game Design Diary , which is a fascinating read.  Todd lists himself as a Game Designer, but also as a Game Re-Designer.  That's primarily involved streamlining games, making solo or print-and-play express variants, or graphic design reinterpretations. There's a fair number of re-imaginings of existing games because, well, as with any creative work, it's easier to use existing tools in new ways than it is to come up with new tools.  And everyone plays Checkers before they play Eclipse.  We are capable of designing games because we understand that which we have played hither

So let's talk about Black Sky.  4x Space bag game, which feels supremely unoriginal now that I've seen the Kickstarter for Burning Suns.  But I feel that my game, which arose from a free-ramble based on mechanics, is a different enough game that I'd like to keep pursuing it.  I could re-post the original stream of couscous that lead to the game, but enough has changed since then that it seems off-topic.  What I want to examine today is a problem I'm facing with a particular subset of ships in my game: the Reds. From the current Living Rules Document for Black Sky: "Conquest Red “Armada” dice are used to subdue Hostile Planets, and to defeat enemy Forces.   When a Hostile Planet is encountered, the Planet has a Defense rating.  The total amount rolled by your red dice must match or exceed the Defense rating in order to subdue the Planet.  If the Planet is not subdued, your blue dice are destroyed, and your green dice, if they have not already Produced, ca

Well now.  Here we are again.  In case I have any readership, I'd like to say firstly, thanks for your time, and secondly, regarding my last post, I moved on to the next round of the sketch-writing competition, and finished my submission for Week 2 on Saturday.  So the writing's done, and the nerves of Friday are yet a ways off.  So let's talk some Game Design Theory. Simultaneity: What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages? Let's start with what BBG forum user Eric Jome "cosine" said in response to my inquiry: "This is a really pivotal concept. Games that use drafting, phasing, and simultaneous action selection to distribute the waiting have raised the bar considerably on what makes a good game. No one likes waiting forever for your turn. The more you can make your game avoid long downtime, the better off you'll be in the marketplace... I'd call it a design imperative, frankly . One overlooked trick is to make people decide what

As anyone reading this will likely know, I make art in a number of different disciplines.  My writing "portfolio" (I don't have a goddamn portfolio) includes plays, comedy sketches, the beginnings of novels and screenplays, music journalism, travelogues, some really terrible poetry, some halfway decent songs, reams of personal journaling, and, among other, other things, gaming rules and prototypes. Tonight, though, a sketch of mine is entered into a competition over at the Second City, here in Chicago, where I make my home.  After a decade of performing and writing, I still get restless and anxious as these things approach.  I don't want to write any sketches today, I don't want to edit the short play that some very talented actors workshopped for me last night (and which desperately needs the edits), and I don't want to listen to my friends be happy and excited for me. So today all I'm going to write about is Flect. Flect , as I've mentioned before

I've been looking at games like Werewolf and Space Sheep, as well as Bang!, where there are secret traitors.  It's an interesting mechanic; my favourite role in Bang!, for instance, is the Renegade.  The person whose identity is usually secret for the longest, and whose moral imperative is the most mysterious. I think that were I to explore this semi-cooperative mechanic, I would want to retain the moral fuzziness of the Renegade.  In Werewolf, my understanding is that we have a very classical understanding of Ontic Good and Evil.  I've always liked the green-skinned races, the lonely monsters, the noble villains and the flawed heroes. Mechanically, it would make no difference, but I think it would have an appreciable effect on player psychology if, instead of playing a "Traitor", they were playing "The Double Agent".  Martin of the Fellowship of Saint Giles, in the Dresden Files, type of thing.  You're not the monster in the midst; or if you are,

There are a number of gaming trends currently in vogue right now.  There's a wave of 4x games, deckbuilding is a mechanic that's getting a lot of love (thanks Vaccarino), and Euro Games in general are currently being touted by gamer-types as the superior style of game to design.  Low-variance, skill-focused games, often with real world themes, and usually tied to European ideas. Despite the huge diversity of morphology in games right now, then, there are still a number of dominant motifs.  I aim to understand and work with popular ideas and mechanics, but am also interested in trying new things for their own sake, and attempting to create games that are more experimental than they are commercial. When a game idea comes to me, it could be any one of a number of different starting pieces to the puzzle.  It could be a theme, a board shape or image, or simply a mechanic. Theme This is probably the most common way in which a game concept presents itself or occurs to me, and

Abstract: Another Fin Coe blog, this one focusing on collating my ideas in game design.  I have a number of thoughts regarding themes and design mechanics, and they're all going on here, along with ludolessons I pick up along the way.  I hang out at the Board Game Geek Game Design Forums, and follow the blogs of Daniel Solis, Michael Nguyen, and others.  I steal knowledge (but not ideas) shamelessly.  And since I'm in the habit of starting companies; Velocimancer Games is the precious little title for this enterprise of mine. Development ramblings to come.