On The Menu For Week 28

Yet another batch of short updates on my myriad of projects.

I have been trying to get back into Naruto and Bleach in order to get some more inspiration for my anime miniatures combat game, but it has been really hard. I will probably abandon those series and find some new ones.

The fantasy roleplaying campaign I had been working on for the past weeks that was supposed to fill the void on Tuesdays since Game of Thrones has ended have fallen apart due to lack of player engagement. A longer post with more details may or may not appear here in the future.

Project Black Valkyrie quietly stirs in its slumber. May Wōden watch over it.

The one-shot scenario for WASPcon, The Twelve Apostles, is finished with 2 weeks to spare, but due to recent events I’m no longer sure if I will be attending WASPcon or not.

I’m making slow progress with my wrestling card game. I have some rough core mechanics and some ideas for certain special manoeuvres.

My different Doctor Who board games are still drifting in time and space. None of the layouts are good enough right now.

Cryptids

Cryptid: any creature whose existence has been suggested but not proven scientifically.

The game is simple. The year is ~1900 and you are explorers trying to find unknown creatures. You play Creature cards and then try to play Evidence cards on it so that the existence of that creature will become proven. Different creatures require different amounts of Evidence and grant different amounts of Reputation as an explorer. At 10 Reputation (or maybe 15) you win the game.

The creatures in the game are varied. There are monsters from classical myths ( centaur, griffin, unicorn, dragon), modern myths (yeti, sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, mokele-mbembe, chupacabra), hoaxes (skvader) or real-life creatures that look strange (coelacanth, okapi, platypus, moa, marsupial lion)

A few examples of Evidence cards are: Footprint, Blurry Photo, Expert Witness, Good Fake, Coat of Fur, I Have A Live One

A few examples of Criticism cards are that counter or remove Evidence cards are: Gorilla Suit in a Freezer, I Made One Yesterday, Bad Fake, Fake Photo, Hoax Confession

I still have a lot of questions: What creatures should be in this game? What kind of Evidence and Criticism cards should I include? What can I do to make this a really awesome game?

Happy birthday!

Shortly after I woke up this morning I began thinking about games with a birthday theme. Unfortunately, I could only think of one, Happy Birthday Robot!, and that’s only because my friend Jenn helped playtest it. Since I couldn’t think of any other games my mind naturally started working on some new projects, and after having been awake for 6 hours I now have two kinda playable games.

The first one, Project Birthday 1, is a card game. There are two types of cards, one for the presents and one for the celebrating people. Each celebrant card have a small picture and at the bottom of the card they have ratings for some general areas (let’s go with Animals, Sports and Technology for this blog post) that show how interested they are in that particular field. The gift cards have a corresponding rating on them (computer games will have high Technology rating, a saddle will have high in Animals and average in Sports), indicating what interest area it is best suited for. At the start of the game you all agree on how many birthday parties you will attend (the number of rounds you will play) and then you randomize out gift cards equal to the number of parties plus two to each player. Each round of the game starts with somebody drawing a random celebrant from the deck and putting it in the middle of the table for everyone to see. Every player then looks at what interests that person have and try to find a suitable gift among the cards they have on hand. After every person has placed a gift face down on the table you reveal your present and everybody gets some popularity points. The points are calculated by taking a gifts rating and multiplying it with the celebrants corresponding rating (if Joe the drummer who has a 2 in Sports gets a soccer ball with 3 in Sports that player can claim 2*3=6 points). You only count the highest combination, so giving a hockey game (0 Animals, 2 Sports, 3 Technology) to Malin the hairdresser (3 Animals, 2 Sports, 1 Technology) will give you 4 points, not 7.

The second game, Project Birthday 2, is a tile placement game. You have a small board, maybe 5*5 or 6*6 squares, and two different types of tiles. The first type is the gift tiles, each with a picture and a small number indicating how popular the gift is (a +5 gift is really awesome like a new computers and a -3 gift is something terrible like a pair of dirty socks). The other type of tiles are the birthday people (one set per player), and they are what enables you to get points. Everybody takes turns either drawing a random face down gift tile or taking a birthday person tile and placing it on the board. When the game board is full it’s time to calculate your points. Each celebrant can claim points from adjacent gifts above, below, the left or to the right. At the end on the game, the players with the most points win.

I’d buy that for a dollar!

So we sat down last night and tried out Crime Lords for the first time and it was not a smooth ride. Nobody cared enough to sit and read through the 16 page rulebook before we started, almost everybody ran out of money when bidding on our starting crooks and rackets before we even knew how much that needed to be randomized out. We spent a lot of time arguing about which rules trumped which and looking for rules text that was previously read aloud but that had gone missing. In the end I gave away everything I had just so that somebody could win.

So what can we do about this? Well, next time we’ll have a better grasp on the rules and hopefully somebody will have the patience of reading through the rules a couple of times. We will probably not start the game late at night, helping our mental clarity. Another idea that came up was to act out the gangsters as they give their orders. The constant bidding wars on each and every action that every player takes will probably speed up a lot too.

Also, I have now completely lost interest in the gangster LARP that me and two others were arranging.

Hell, it’s about time…

While walking home from IKEA and trying to get in the mood for an afternoon/evening of Starcraft 2 by listning to the soundtrack earlier today I was reminded of the Starcraft card game I tried to develop a couple of years ago.

If you think of it as a clone of Magic the Gathering then you’re not that far off. You work mineral fields and vespene geysers to get the resources you need to research technologies, to build your base and train your units.

The main difference lies in the tactics cards, my way to simulate movement across the maps and using the terrain to your advantage. The cards tell you what units and how many of them you can use for the maneuver and how many enemy units you can attack. After your units have attacked your opponent attacks back, and those units may not attack more that turn.

The fact that both you and your opponent can play tactics cards and activate unit abilities in both players phases helps the interactivity and makes the combat part more exciting.

I might revisit the project on a later date, if I find a good enough reason for it.

Clash of the Gods

Due to a lack of gaming this weekend I started working on yet another game idea. Most people knows that the vikings traveled to distant lands, so what would have happened if they had gone to classical Greece or ancient Egypt and met their gods? Well, there would naturally have been a Clash of the Gods. CotG is a card game in which you try to gather up a gang gods from a certain pantheon (norse, greek or egyptian), you equip them with their typical items (Mjöllnir, golden apples, chariots) and try to defeat the other pantheons by summoning mythological creatures and killing or converting their followers.

At least, that is the goal. The team building is a bit too slow, the mythical creatures are a bit bland and the balance is a bit off on the god powers. The game still doesn’t flow good enough and the interactivity is too low. I need more beta testers.