Velocimancer Games

Ding ding ding, time for a fresh new helping of MECH AN IC MO N DAY! All aboard “fin heads”, if there’s any ROOM left ABOARD this very full BANDWAGON! Got a chance to playtest R2I Games’ latest project a couple weeks back, and it was a particularly good design. Did some playtesting at @BonusRoundCafe last night, and at one point there were four sets of designers there, and half of us were POC. Pretty rare, pretty nice. Good joint, gracious hosts, great environment. — The worst name for this frog would be Fin Coe (@FinCoe) February 8, 2019 The term “elegance” continues to be a fuzzy, mercurial one that defies meaningful definition, but this game checked off all its points for me in spades.  There’s nothing wasted in that game - it is a series of interconnected, limited systems, with resources, battle cards, and contracts flowing naturally through a player’s engine and back and forth between opponents.  Everything is intuitive and the theme meshes beautifully with the...

Happy Monday fam! Sorry about missing a post last week, it’s been busy at the theatre company, and those issues came first.  Streak broken, but time to start a new one! Not gonna do the long rambling “my earliest memories of my grandmother were of flour-dusted fingerprints showing stark against the dark wrought iron of her teapot” intro today, just gonna dive right into this floating mechanic. Jumping Across Action Tiles In GREEM, a grid of Action tiles is laid out in the center of the play space.  Each player starts in a different corner, their pawn covering up that corner’s tile.  On a player’s turn, they move across as many tiles as they choose, provided they pay the energy cost on each tile.  That can either be a fixed starting amount, or it can be accumulated, or it could come from an Action Wheel.  But to move over a tile, you pay its cost and take its action.  The tile you land on does not require energy, nor does it grant its action.  Only ...

Traditional Salutation! Self-deprecating re-affirmation of the obvious: Title of Segment [Mechanic Monday]! I really like board game apps.  I like that they clean up the bookkeeping, I like the speed with which you can play, which is coupled with the option for guided tutorials over rulebooks.  I really like being able to play without any other humans (Fin Fun Fact! One of Fin’s Fun Catchphrases is: “I’ve always longed for a massively singleplayer online role playing game.”  Fun!) And I like that I can do it all on a mobile device, without a surface, starting and stopping within or between games.  Some implementations I recommend the most? Jaipur, Splendor, Maquis, Medici, Star Realms, Hive, Onirim - to name just a handful.  They’re great, with many positives! They’re also, simultaneously, kind of not great for me.  For all the same reasons.  The faster I learn and get a bunch of plays in, the quicker the novelty wears off.  The staler the play ...

There's this design contest going right now, for games based on Grant Howitt's Honey Heist and Crash Pandas.  The goal? Design a game, digital, tabletop, or text, where animals commit crimes.  I think that's absolutely terrific, and in the next two weeks I'm going to explore three game ideas and see if any of them are worth submitting. Here's my initial framing for each idea: Bootloggers - Beavers diverting goods and floating contraband down the river to distribute for cheap. Footgoose - Dancing is illegal! But these Canadian waterfowl DON’T CARE. Squeak Easy - Prohibition is tough, but these enterprising mice provide a safe spot to enjoy some moonshine and rough company. Today, I'm going to focus on Grant's favourite of these ideas: FOOTGOOSE.  Here's his recommendation: Just replace Kevin Bacon with a flock of squawking geese and whack a dice pool mechanic on there, that’s what I’d do — Grant Howitt (@gshowitt) February 1, 2019 So let...