It's been a furious few days of boardgaming. I've played Aqueduct, Nottingham (x2), Pit, Fairy Tale (x2), Vegas Showdown, Saga and Tongiaki. This brings me to 55 games for the year.
Inspired by a challenge on Brenda Brathwaite's web site, I was struck by an idea for a card game about assembling adventuring parties and matching their skills to dungeons/quests. Also, yesterday I practically completed a design for a new card-drafting game. When I will have time to develop these, I have no idea.
I did finally complete the newest prototype of Cattle Baron and got the chance to test it. It seemed to be a fair improvement, but I feel like the final few fence placements are anticlimactic since the board is usually too cluttered for them to be useful. I need to experiment with a few possible approaches to fix this.
Showing posts with label Cattle Baron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cattle Baron. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 12
Thursday, February 7
Design: CivDice
Although Cattle Baron is the boardgame design I've made my priority, I have several other game ideas that I hopefully will have time to work on this year. Of these, I am most excited about a design with a working title of CivDice that I came up with around April of last year. I actually went so far as to blog a few entries about it on the Board Game Designer's Forum (where I called it Civilia).
I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.
After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.
Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.
Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.
One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.
Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.
As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.
I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.
After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.
Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.
Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.
One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.
Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.
As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.
Wednesday, January 30
"I'm not dead yet"
It’s been ten days since my last post. That makes me a bad blogger and means I’ve rather quickly failed out on one of my gaming resolutions, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon it. I’ll just have to jump back on the blogging wagon and try harder this week. I’ll start back with a quick update of what’s been going on.
I had a party on Jan. 19th, and several party games were played which I can add to the game count: Lost Cities x 2, Snorta x 2, Scene It, Transamerica and the Bucket King. The new game count is 32.
Last Saturday (Jan 26th) I managed to rope a couple of friends into trying out the simple “Cattle Baron” prototype. The comments about the gameplay were encouraging and the game seemed to work well. However, the comments about the quality of the prototype were not very positive. I can’t really disagree – placing paper fence pieces on paper tile pieces lends itself to quite a bit of sliding around. My next order of business on this project is to fabricate a prototype that is a little more robust. Afterwards, we got in a game of Ticket to Ride: game count 33.
I broke down and bought Rock Band over the weekend. It’s very hard to find it for the PS2 and I saw two copies when I was walking through Best Buy. As expected, it’s a very addictive time-waster and probably has a bit to do with my dearth of posts.
I had a party on Jan. 19th, and several party games were played which I can add to the game count: Lost Cities x 2, Snorta x 2, Scene It, Transamerica and the Bucket King. The new game count is 32.
Last Saturday (Jan 26th) I managed to rope a couple of friends into trying out the simple “Cattle Baron” prototype. The comments about the gameplay were encouraging and the game seemed to work well. However, the comments about the quality of the prototype were not very positive. I can’t really disagree – placing paper fence pieces on paper tile pieces lends itself to quite a bit of sliding around. My next order of business on this project is to fabricate a prototype that is a little more robust. Afterwards, we got in a game of Ticket to Ride: game count 33.
I broke down and bought Rock Band over the weekend. It’s very hard to find it for the PS2 and I saw two copies when I was walking through Best Buy. As expected, it’s a very addictive time-waster and probably has a bit to do with my dearth of posts.
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