Velocimancer Games

It’s honestly shocking that I did more than two Mechanic Mondays in a row.  What’s even more shocking is that I’m going to get back on the horse after taking just one week off.  That’s a good skill to have, btw: I used to dream of perfect records, unbroken streaks, only doing things if I was a natural winner at them.  Time and a vast curriculum of failure have taught me how many things you can only accomplish after you fall off the wagon and claw your way back on again. Not that taking a week off for Thanksgiving is - you know what? That’s a whole other topic for another time. Today I want to draw on one of my favourite design inspirations - subverting assumptions.  As with so many things, I first came across this concept by following Daniel Solis.  He has an ongoing hashtag conversation about the assumptions we have about games, and how much rich material there is from subverting just one of those.  Some examples: All cards in a deck must have their card...

So today I’m just going to be a bugbear, just an absolute gremlin about a mechanic that I think is great, and which I understand other people aren’t into, and which I will die before changing.  The nice thing about designing games non-commercially is that, while I do want people to have fun playing my games, there is no force in Heaven, Hell, or anywhere inbetween that could make me care less about whether something will help a game sell or not.  I love a good design constraint, but “that mechanic is not currently popular” is not a good design constraint. So, spoiler alert, the mechanic is different cardbacks in a card game.  As implemented in my design, Cowl & Mask . Now, in this two-player game, each player has the same 7 cards, each of which has one of three cardbacks; Ranks 1 and 7 share a cardback, Ranks 2 & 6 share a different cardback, and Ranks 3-5 share the last cardback.  Cards are played rank-face down into seven head-to-head lanes, so that you g...

Today’s Mechanic Monday is a little different, because this mechanic is muuuuuch fuzzier than the last couple.  It’s got a couple different directions it could go, but that potential is less fun than for the Action Wheel or the Conflict Chips because it’s actively getting in the way of my current design.  So today’s post is as much about talking out the problem, as it is sharing something shiny and fun and new. So I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley.  As in, I bought a laptop this month specifically so that I could play Stardew, and so that my wife could play the Sims.  This is my first time buying a computer in… 12 years.  Games, they motivate us! Or something.  My sister plays, and I first tried the game on her Switch when I visited her last month, and a couple of my friends play it, and something that stuck with me was someone describing a playthrough as “I’m just building a maple syrup farm” and honestly that sounded terrific to me.  *I* wan...

Today’s Mechanic Monday is about Conflict Chips! I’ve always made fun of opposed rolls in RPGs, specifically d20’s and the natural 20 auto-succeed. Like I always picture someone standing in front of a skyscraper and going, “I want to jump over this thing, and there’s a 5% chance I will.” It’s a bonkers implication, and also, 20 sides is just SO MUCH variance, especially when 90% of that variance could mean the difference between meeting or falling short of a static target, and 10% of it represents a complete departure from how the other results compare to the target. It’s also guilty of a sin that’s very much under the popular microscope right now: output randomness. You do all your decision making, and then you roll the die to see if you succeed, fail, super-succeed, or super-fail? Good luck, I guess? I think there’s a reason so many mechanics have sprung up to mitigate die rolls - key points, luck points, guaranteed re-rolls, etc. But luck mitigation only goes so far, and the...

What a laughably ambitious title.  A new regular segment, for my regularly updated blog! Although this is my third post of the year, with two whole months yet to go.  What progress! What brilliance! Where am I these days with games? Hmm.  Well I just submitted Birch Crown , Cowl & Mask , and Oases to the Board Game Workshop's Design Contest.  Things didn't go quite as planned (none of the three moved past the first round, and I'm a trifle salty that the judging criteria weren't quite what I expected them to be) but the feedback was mostly useful, and it was a learning experience.  I don't begrudge the entry fee.  But those three, plus D.I.E. Interceptor , are pretty much in a solid state, if kind of shelved for the moment.  I'm happy with where they are, and in no rush to do the concentrated playtests that would be the next stage of development.  Also, they're all a bit fiddly, and not necessarily that fun to actually play.  Which is obv...

Ooh, two blog posts in the same year? What is this, uh (checks blog history) 2014? Anyway, Oases continues to occupy a chunk of my mind.  It's entered into the 2p PnP contest on BGG, and the rules are in a much better place, thanks to some lovely and useful feedback.  In general though, while people are intrigued by some of the mechanical innovations, the design as a whole doesn't particularly inflame the imagination.  I'll have to test the ways in which the Action Wheel ramps up the stakes and the pace, but the design might be stalling out somewhat as being too sandbox-y for me to get to the playtest table.  I'll bring it to Bonus Round (an excellent new board game cafe that just opened here on the Chicago North Side) for the Designer's Night but it may just end up getting discussed, rather than actually played to the end of a game. But the other prototype I'm bringing to the Designer Night is Runtime Error, a Legacy/Campaign style cyberpop deckbuilder. I ...

Yes yes my posts are infrequent.  No one reads these anyway, so it's fine. D.I.E. Interceptor is in a good place.  Might look at making a nice board/bag for it, with the grid, spaces for the Powerup dice, and reminders of the different moves. Cowl and Mask is still where it has been for some time.  I feel like the power-level tweaking I did based on my brother's suggestions, along with the addition of betting, has it at a place where I'm happy with it.  It might see some more playtesting, might not.  It's not as though I have a financial need for the game to go anywhere.  Might look into a budget for some art assets, although I'm decently happy with the Daniel Solis icons I'm currently using.  It's just kind of shelved right now. Birch Crown is still too fiddly.  I think it needs a whole night of playtesting, with me making sharpie changes on the fly, in order for me to get it to a real clicky place. Exploding Snap needs a slight tweak but the...