Back in the UKGE

Yesterday I attended the UK Games Expo for the first time since 2009. I attended the first three UK Games Expos in 2007, '08 and '09 as an exhibitor with Reiver Games selling Border Reivers, It's Alive! (first and second editions) and finally Carpe Astra and Sumeria. I also exhibited at Spiel in Essen in 2008 & '09. Until yesterday I'd not been back to a large games convention, just attending Beer and Pretzels a few times with my friend Terry.

In the year I last attended there were 1,800 unique attendees and 2,500 total attendees (where one person came on several days). This year those figures were approximately 21,700 and 39,000 - a growth of 12-15 times over the last nine years and 30% up on last year (again!). It's now huge and feels very different to how it did back in the day.

One of the reasons I've not attended for the last eight years is that I am not a target punter for this at all. I don't buy a lot of games - my collection hovers around 100 games, and each year I give a few away and buy a few more - usually things I've played several times and really enjoy. I am not a Cultist of the New, most of my games collection is 5+ years old and has been played tens (or even hundreds!) of times. So a big trade show where you can buy the latest games is not pitched at me at all.

I ended up just going for the day on Sunday, adding another 400 miles of driving (Newcastle to York on Saturday night to stay the night with my FlickFleet co-designer and long-time playtester and friend Paul) and then York to Birmingham and Birmingham back to York with Paul a brief snack and toilet stop at Paul's and then back to Newcastle. This was on top of a week that I'd driven 750 miles with the whole family (including notably a five year old and a one year old). It was a lot of driving. But totally worth it!

I've mentioned already that I don't buy many games, but I did buy three:

My UK Games Expo 2018 Haul

I've been looking for Santorini for a while (I think it was out of print at Christmas), so when I saw it on the Games Lore stand I snapped it up (after a brief chat with Paul, the boss who I know of old) despite the fact I've never played it. I also bought the Crime and Punishment expansion for Firefly (more stories and misbehaving cards!) and Fuji Flush (which Paul brought up last time he visited and we played a lot). Total spend just under £50.

The main thing I got from the Expo was a chance to catch up with old friends: Games Lore, Surprised Stare Games, Ragnar Brothers, Steve and Nabil from Travelling Man (who picked up another 12 copies of Zombology on Sale or Return for the other three stores - the Newcastle store has already sold four copies). Plus Brett Gilbert (designer of Elysium, Professor Evil and the Citadel of Time, and a bunch of other cool games). I also ran into the aforementioned Terry and our mutual friend Graham, who I'd not seen for quite a while (I missed Beer and Pretzels this and last year).

I also got to meet numerous internet friends for the first time: Matt Dunstan and Rob Harper from Playtest UK, Robin Bates from Coaching for Geeks, Heinze & Rachel from Semi-Coop and Chisel. It's nice to meet people for real!

The morning was spent wandering round chatting to people carting round a very heavy bag containing everything I needed for my seminar and some stock in case anyone wanted some afterwards. I was very happy to put it down before my seminar, and as soon as it was over I ran it back to the car, just taking a few copies of Zombology just in case (as it turns out it was too few, I had to go back to the car to get more for Travelling Man!).

In the middle of the day I had my Made by Hand seminar where I had intended to live craft a copy of Zombology. It takes me 42 minutes when I'm focussing on it, which I thought was doable in an hour, but then I found out I only had 50 minutes. So instead I offered the audience (only eight people, including Terry and Paul) the choice of that or more talk and definitely not finishing it. They chose the latter. As it turns out that was very wise. I wittered on and ended up with the box half-finished with only ten minutes left! I quickly did a bit about the cards and then wrapped up with a rather lacklustre 'anyone want a copy' sales pitch. I sold one, and then got a twitter DM from someone apologising for missing it and asking to meet up to buy a copy, so two in total (plus the 12 to Travelling Man on Sale or Return, so I came home with 6 of the 12 I took). Sales were disappointing, but pretty good considering the small audience (lots of whom already owned it!). The seminar was well-received and several people were taking lots of notes, so I must have done something right! The biggest wrong was joking about 'are there any first-aiders in the audience?' and then cutting myself with my knife. Things to remember for next time: black jeans hide the bloodstains!

There were a few things that surprised me. Most notably the number of stands that were just demoing a game that was on (or coming soon to) Kickstarter. I hadn't considered attending without a decent pile of stock to sell - to just write off the several hundred pounds cost of attending (booth, travel, hotel, food, etc.) as a marketing expense when you could be selling games to cover the costs didn't even occur to me. There were also lots of stands that were selling non-games (gaming tables, dice, dice bags, soap, dice towers and box inserts, etc.). Finally, probably the weirdest thing of all was that in the seven hours I was there I didn't play any games. The reason why I prefer Beer and Pretzels as a punter is that there I spend the whole time gaming with chums (mostly Terry) and very little time wandering around/schmoozing.

As a punter, one day was definitely enough for me. Hopefully next year (assuming our Kickstarter is successful and I've fulfilled it ahead of the Expo) I'll be back for all three days as an exhibitor again!

And We're Off!

I've actually made some decent progress across the board this week for a change.

Monday to Wednesday The Wife was away for work, which unfortunately meant I missed Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday. I'd been hoping to playtest a game for one of our London Playtest UK confederates on Tuesday, but seeing as I was going to miss it, and he wanted some feedback before Essen, I spent Monday night soloing his game and providing some feedback on the rules.

Tuesday was then free for work on Zombology, so I copied all the files from my old laptop onto the new one and then made the changes I'd been planning to the cards and started on the rules. I'm hoping to get Zombology finished fairly quickly now so that I can crack on with something else.

Wednesday was my weekly Games Night, and we had six people, the most for a while. I requested a try out of some new Zombology rules, which were considered an improvement across the board I think, plus a couple of games of Coup and King of Tokyo, a game of Martian Dice (on my phone after being knocked out of KoT) and another play of Kigi. Including three plays of Zombology that was eight games in total!

Friday I got to see The Martian at the cinema (I'd been stoked for this since I heard it was coming out - I loved the book). I thoroughly enjoyed the film too, though I can see that Wilka's comment that he wished it was a 12 episode season on Netflix would have meant less would have been cut.

And then to round it all out I made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months on Saturday and got a couple of plays towards my ten plays goal: Macao and Alea Iacta Est.

It's been a great week, now I just need to build on this momentum and keep cracking on with Zombology - it's within shouting distance of the finish line!

A Digital Digression II

So I've made a bit of progress on Zombology this week, posting blind playtesting copies to the Leeds and London Playtest UK groups, I'm hoping to get initial feedback from those groups in a week or two, once they've met and had a chance to get a game or two in. I also got a few games in at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, my first attendance there in a while.

I still haven't decided what I want to do re. board game publishing, so in the meantime I've been doing some work on my German learning app instead. I loved Duolingo, which I've spent a lot of time on, but I've finished the course now. I still practice every now and again when things show up as needing refreshing but certainly not every day any more. The main thing I didn't like about Duolingo was the lack of structure. You seemed to learn words in a haphazard fashion, and it was hard to see things that were related at the same time. I learn well when I can tabulate things in my head, so I've been writing another app for my phone to provide a more structured learning experience for myself.

I started it months ago, and then in the Zombology publishing related excitement I shelved it for a while. Last week I went to Manchester on the train again for work on my own (which is unusual). I had my laptop with me to use in a demo once I got there, which gave me an opportunity to do some development on the train, and since then I've been cracking on, making some decent progress. At the moment I'm focusing on getting the basic functionality in there, rather than lots of vocabulary. That can always come later once it works. Hopefully I'll find it useful as my language learning journey continues.

I think I'm now waiting for the Zombology feedback before I make any decision on the publishing side of things. There are still three options I'm considering:

• Self publishing a run of 150 hand-made copies
• Print on demand, e.g. Drive Thru Cards or The Game Crafter
• Hawking to an established publisher

I had an established publisher who was vaguely interested, but he wanted to see blind playtesting feedback, which at the time I didn't really have. So getting the feedback from the Playtest UK network is useful for that route and will hopefully lead to a better game regardless of which route I take.

Harnessing the Power of the Network

The Newcastle Playtest group of which I'm (theoretically at least) an assistant organiser is part of a larger network of playtest groups across the UK. Playtest UK started in London and then spread to Cambridge before we became its northern-most offshoot. Since our creation, groups in Cardiff, Brighton, Leeds and Enfield have also joined, further strengthening the network. The group runs playtesting sessions at a number of UK conventions and members have published several games including Elysium, Relic Runners and Pocket Imperium. Brett J. Gilbert one of the co-organisers in Cambridge, who submitted a great game to me in my Reiver Games days, has since had great success being nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2013 and the Kennerspiel des Jahres this year.

Since my appeal for blind playtesters last week on my blog garnered a grand total of zero applicants, I've decided to harness the power of the Playtest UK group by sending copies of Zombology to a few of the other groups for testing and feedback. Leeds and London have already volunteered (thanks!) and I've agreed to playtest a game for the London group in return. Hopefully this can be an ongoing arrangement where we harness the power of the wider group to gain access to willing (and knowledgable) playtesters who we don't have a close friendship with to gain the honest, critical feedback that you need as part of your game development. Blind playtesting is important for just that reason: to get people to test the rules without you there to clear up any inconsistencies and also to get honest feedback that isn't tempered by friendship. Honest feedback is critical to get a better understanding of how your game will be received outside of the group of friends you usually play it with.

I spent Sunday evening printing and assembling their copies and will pop them in the post today. I look forward to getting an outsider's view of Zombology and using that information to help me plan my next steps.

In other news, Newcastle Playtest had to rearrange our last meeting, since very few of us could make it a couple of weeks ago. It's now tomorrow. I'm in Manchester for the day for work again but fortunately we meet near the train station, so I can amble straight over on my return, I'll just arrive a little later than usual. I'm hoping to get some feedback from the guys on the new version, which is still yet to be played!

If you'd like to try the latest version it's not too late to apply in the comments below.

Newcastle Playtest

Back in August, Dan, Michał and I started up the Newcastle branch of Playtest UK. In the beginning we expected it to just be Dan, Michał and I, the three of us were all designers, all struggling to get our designs tested enough. We advertised it in the local FLGS, Travelling Man, and at Newcastle Gamers and as a result it grew.

We've now got a hardcore of five designers, excluding Michał who moved to London in the New Year. A few extra people come along occasionally, mostly from Newcastle Gamers, but sometimes from Travelling Man and we once had nine attendees! Despite the relatively small numbers I really find it an invaluable resource in my game design efforts and I've been meaning to post about it again for a while. I play my games most weeks, either at my Games Night on Thursday with friends from work or during a lunch break in the office. It's great, it lets me try things out and fail fast, quickly iterating my designs. But the monthly sit-down with a group of other designers has led to so many step changes in the quality of my games that it's made a huge difference.

This week was the latest meetup, on Tuesday night at The Bridge Hotel from 6:30. The usual five of us were there and four out of five of us had brought games: Alex had a couple of copies of his brand new two player game of bank robbery: Swag, Blag and Goons; I'd brought Zombology and Codename: Vacuum; Dan had three games: Mainframe, Samizdat and his entry in the UK Games Expo redesign competition and Paul T had half a prototype of a new idea he'd had. We started with a really good discussion about Paul's half a prototype, he explained how he thought this part would work and then some ideas he'd had about the rest of the game. The discussion led to a whole bunch of interesting ideas and I particularly liked Alex's question:

"What's the funniest thing that's going to happen in the game?"

After discussing Paul's game we played a few games of Alex's game, two side by side games, played twice each. Considering how new it was it was a remarkably stable game, with some interesting ideas and neat mechanics. We followed those four games with another discussion before moving on to three games of Zombology. About which I feel slightly guilty, since at the last meeting all we played was five games of Zombology, so it should really have been Dan's turn, but time was tight and Dan's games were longer games and Zombology is dead quick. People seemed to enjoy Zombology quite a lot and in the ensuing discussion we discussed some small tweaks to further improve it. I'm going to try to get them done this week in time for Beer and Pretzels next weekend, but my parents are visiting this week so I might well struggle to find the time. After that the focus has to be getting the blind playtesters' copies ready for them. Exciting times once again :-)

I've found the Playtest sessions really useful, so I'm delighted that it's spreading its wings further afield. It had already reached Cambridge before we started up and since August it has since also spread to Brighton, Cardiff and Leeds. I just hope the other designers find it as useful as I do.

Bringing People Together

The Daughter was up between 4:15 and 4:30 every day last week, so I didn't get as much done as I had intended on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology. Still, the clocks have changed now, so I'm hoping that she'll be sleeping to something past five on summer time, and I can start going to bed a bit later myself - and get the last couple of copies finished off and then get them all in the post. It's Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, so that'll be a late night and then there's Games Night on Thursday, so I'll have to fit the construction in around those.

So, not much progress to report but and interesting thing did happen on Tuesday. I went to Manchester again for work (it's becoming a regular occurrence since we were bought by an American corporation whose UK headquarters are in Manchester). It's often my boss and I who go down, and since he's a Games Night attendee, I usually take my iPad full of board games to help us while away the six hours of train journeys. The boss couldn't make it this week, so I opened it up to the floor and Sam one of our two new starters came instead. Sam's also a gamer, so the iPad came too. We played a lot of games on the two journeys many of which Sam hadn't played before. The last game of the first journey was Carcassonne (new to Sam) which Sam won despite my literally hundreds of games of experience.

The second journey was very busy - the train was crammed. Fortunately we'd booked seats and so had table space to play some more games. As we pulled out of Manchester, I offered Sam another game and he chose Carcassonne again. Sam and I were sat diagonally opposite each other on a four person table and we'd been on the move for about 5 minutes before the guy sat next to me started offering Sam advice! As the game went on Mr. Random Stranger helped Sam out a few times - he could sense I was the more experienced player and so was helping 'the underdog' :-)

The game came to an end, and seeing as Mr. Random Stranger hadn't got off yet, I asked if he wanted to play too. Pat (his name as it turns out) happily joined in and we spent the next hour and a half playing three player games until Pat got off at York. It turns out Pat had been to Beyond Monopoly (the games club in York I used to frequent when I lived there) and knew Jon, the guy who runs it (who used to help me playtest games when I ran Reiver Games). It's a small world. I also felt like I vaguely recognised Pat, though that might be my imagination, I've met a lot of people through Reiver Games, and I'm often bad at remembering names and faces.

In case you ever read this Pat, it was a pleasure to meet you - thanks for joining in!

Playtesting Questions

It was Newcastle Playtest again on Tuesday, and now Christmas is out of the way it was better attended than it had been for several weeks. We started off with a couple of quick games of Zombology which led to a really useful discussion about ways to improve it. After that I rather selfishly grabbed Paul and Alex and we played Codename: Vacuum too while the other table played a couple of games of Paul von Scott's The Thing with the Ring and then Dan's Samizdat. I'd made some changes to Vacuum since Paul had last played it, changes that were specifically triggered by Paul's last set of feedback so I wanted to see what he made of those changes. All that got me thinking about how as a designer to get the best of out a playtesting session.

A playtest session of a game that's in development serves many purposes:

• To allow you to try out ideas and see which ones work well and which don't
• To check whether it's worth continuing with the design
• To find broken mechanisms or combinations
• To see how the game works with different play styles, numbers of players and levels of experience
• To gather feedback from other people
• To test how the market might respond to your game
• To find flaws in the rulebook (for blind playtesting)

Depending upon how mature the game you are testing is, the relative importance of those questions varies - finding flaws in the rulebook is very important near the end of the process, but less so at the beginning when you are just testing out a rough idea. Some of these questions you are the best person to answer, but usually it's the opinions of the playtesters that you are trying to gather. Your playtesters are a small sample of the game-playing market that you are exposing your game to in order to try to predict whether your game will be successful or not and to work out what changes are required to make it more successful.

In order to be successful, your game needs to be:

• Enticing
• Enjoyable
• Engaging

Enticing means that your potential customers want to play as soon as they hear about it, and after playing want to play again and again and again, despite the endless stream of shiny new games pouring onto the shelves. Enticing is a mixture of theme, attractive artwork, affordable price point and interesting mechanisms, but also replayability, fun and a lack of frustration. A game that no-one can quite conjure up the enthusiasm to play or that only ever gets played once is never going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Like successful YouTube videos, successful games have to go viral: someone buys them, plays them with lots of people who also buy them and play them with lots of people...

Enjoyable means that it's got to be fun for its target market. The market is flooded with tens of thousands of games and hundreds more go up on KickStarter every year. A really successful game has to compete in that crowded market, and win. I own 70-odd games, but only a few of them I've played hundreds of times. Those happen to be really successful games, not just with me and my friends but in the market in general. Because they are fun. Different groups will have different ideas of what makes a game fun, but if no group likes your game then it's going to tank.

An engaging game is one that draws you in and keeps you involved throughout. If you look round the table during a game and everyone is either playing games on their phone or staring morosely into their pint that's not engaging. One that keeps your attention throughout is. If you have little downtime between your turns or the ability to get involved on other player's turns then you're more engaged. If the game isn't so random that you can plan ahead for your next move or if the theme and events keep you excited then you're engaged. You're not going to rush out and buy a game if it lasted four hours, and you spent 3 hours and 45 minutes of that playing Angry Birds and praying that the game would just end.

Playtesting is your chance to see how your game performs against these yardsticks, get the opinion of people who aren't so close to the game and have the critical distance required to be objective about it and to work out what you need to do to make it perform better.

A while ago I heard that Tom Lehmann (designer of Race for the Galaxy) likes to ask two questions during playtests: 'Is there a game in here, and have I found it'. Those questions get to the nub of designing games: Is this going to be a worthwhile addition to the legion of available games - is there any point continuing working on this idea - and how close is it to being finished.

Dan, my Newcastle Playtest co-host has his own favourite questions: 'What did you like about the game, and what did you not like'. These allow you to quickly zoom in on which parts of the game are coming along nicely (and should be emulated/left alone) and which parts are potentially putting off gamers (and should be removed/re-designed).

Back when I ran Reiver Games I used to ask my playtesters after they had played one of my prototypes whether they would buy it and how much would they pay for it (useful market research when you're a newbie publisher).

Now I tend to ask my playtesters to provide some critical feedback via email after they've played my games - the slight disconnect of providing the feedback via email makes it easier for them to be critical without worrying so much about upsetting me and, with my particularly pants memory, having the feedback in electronic form means it's easier for me to revisit it and remember it later.

What are your favourite playtesting questions, and how do they help you assess the game?

Cut Out The Middle Prototype

As I mentioned last week, Codename: Vacuum has returned to the fore after a couple of months in the wilderness. I've been making some quite significant changes to a couple of the core decks recently: Trade and Population and I've finally got around to working on a version where the corresponding advanced decks reflect those changes.

When I make a new version with large changes my process tends to be two stage:

1. Make a new version with the new rules and what I think will be a decent set of cards that apply to it
2. Make a second version quite quickly after that which fixes all the problems I had failed to foresee

I started down that road last week, doing the new cards on the computer ready for printing to take to Thursday lunchtime's playtest with Dave. However, now The Daughter is back at nursery the inevitable happened and she came down with a filthy cold complete with fever and sleepless nights (I swear her nursery is actually a secret black lab for testing bioweapons), so printing went out the window.

I turned up to Thursday's playtest with the same old version as before, but a bunch of new rules and new versions of cards in my head. Dave, my co-conspirator has played Vacuum probably 70-odd times, he knows it really well. So we just played the new version. I told him what the new cards would do, and we just ignored the cards as printed and played with the new ones. It flagged up a few problems, and along with a new strategy that Dave was trying (using AI to draw lots of cards with his usual very lean deck) it flagged up a few problems - before I'd even printed them out!

This meant that I could correct the cards on the computer on Friday and Saturday during The Daughter's naps, and I've only got to print and cut them out once - saving card, ink and precious time (or so I thought...). As well as tweaking the cards to change a few things I've also added some more artwork to the player mats (which were being re-designed anyway) and the backs of the event cards. Of course, this new version will have other rough edges, so I don't want to over-invest in its artwork - I'll have to make another version reasonably soon to fix those problems...

Having an experienced playtester like Dave was really useful though, testing things out before I had printed them. I've also tweaked the AI card as well now to fix the other problem that Dave found.

Sunday night I had time to print it and get it cut out. Or at least I should have been able to do the printing. I'd bought some cheap 'Canon-equivalent' inks on Amazon. They were £18 for 15 cartridges (instead of £12 for one!). I'd already noticed that the ink bled more than the official ink (so the text looks a little blurry) but it turns out they also block up the nozzles more, so I spend Sunday evening running nozzle clean after nozzle clean with the test pages in between and ended up wasting loads of card - each time I thought I'd fixed it the artwork came out green again. In the end I replaced the (brand new!) magenta cartridge with another one, ran a couple more cleaning cycles and eventually got it printed. Now I've just got to cut it all out tonight ready for Newcastle Playtest tomorrow.

Back To Life

The Wife and The Daughter have been back for a whole week now and life is returning to a very welcome normality. Memories of my three week exile are fading as the house returns to normal levels of light, warmth and laughter.

I've spent most of the evenings hanging out with the girls, so I've not made much progress on my games designs, but I did get a bit done on Wednesday and some more on Saturday while The Wife was out for dinner with friends.

I've been concentrating on Codename: Vacuum since Christmas, which also feels like a return to normality too. I started work on Vacuum over two years ago, and it's now been strongly in development for a year and a half with frequent playtests and almost monthly versions. All that was put aside for NaGa DeMon in November, and then pretty much nothing happened in December from a games design point of view as Christmas took over.

But since I got back from our Christmas trip to Bristol I've been making progress on Vacuum again. Dave and I have been playing once a week at lunchtime, I took it to Newcastle Playtest at the beginning of the month and I tweaked a few of the cards before that - the first new version since October!

This week I've been working on another new version, incorporating a lot of the ideas I've had over the last few weeks and updating some of the advanced decks to better support the changes I've made to the basic ones. It'll be good to get the new version to the table when it's finished, it feels like Vacuum has come on leaps and bounds over the last four or five months, despite (or possibly because of) the hiatus in its testing.

On Zombology, there's not much to report, I'm still waiting for the majority of the artwork for the NaGa DeMon competition winners' copies and I want to incorporate cures into the next version, though I've not quite worked out how yet.

And no progress whatsoever on Codename: Dragon :-( Perhaps three games is an overcommitment, considering how little free time I have.

And Low He Was Welcomed Into The Fold

Well, my three weeks of enforced exile are over and I've been re-united with my family :-)

The last three weeks have been really weird. The house has been very dark and quiet. I've been living a bachelor lifestyle of constant gaming and basic food, I've been watching my daughter change noticeably between our video chats every few days. Aside: Anyone who tells you that we're not living in the future because cars don't fly, we don't have personal jetpacks and we don't live on the moon hasn't appreciated the full wonder that is video conferencing with your one year old offspring. One the phone she silently holds it then either hangs up or puts me on hold accidentally. Over video she gets really excited to see me and interacts with me as if I was there (pressing my nose on the screen and saying 'beep' is my favourite!).

It's been hard being away from them for so long, having to hear about the new skills she's learning second hand and knowing there's nothing I can do to help when she has a bad night or is ill. It's going to be tough to re-adjust to the bad nights and early starts after three weeks of late nights and lying in, but it'll be totally worth it and I'm glad it's finally over.

That's not to say I haven't put my exile to good use. I had to keep myself busy to distract myself from the loneliness, so I played a lot of games. I've made it to Newcastle Gamers twice (once all day!), Newcastle Playtest once, been down to see my mates Terry, Andrew and Graham in the south for a day's gaming and played a 10 hour game of Twiglet. In total, 54 games in 18 days!

Now that my family are back I'm going to have a break from gaming for a bit and concentrate on spending some quality time with them.

Having said that, I'm still working on getting another Codename: Vacuum version together, incorporating the ideas I've had over the last few weeks and at a lower priority I've got some more Zombology ideas to get together too.

In related news, I've started getting art for the NaGa DeMon competition winners' copies of Zombology from the artist :-)

Narrative in Games

I've had a good week of gaming this week, trying to fill the hole left in my life by the absent wife and daughter. Last weekend I made it to Newcastle Gamers for their all day session on Saturday (it was my first visit in months!) and then Dave came round on Sunday night for X-Wing minis. Monday and Thursday were Games Nights, Saturday was Newcastle Gamers again and Sunday we played Twilight Imperium :-) On top of all that, Tuesday I played Codename: Vacuum at lunchtime with Dave and then in the evening it was Newcastle Playtest.

What struck me about the beginning of the week (and Twilight Imperium!) was the stand out games had great narratives. During play you felt like you were telling a story. On Saturday I'd played A Study in Emerald, Snowdonia and Battlestar Galactica among others. Those three stood out for the clearly defined story we were telling. Sunday's X-Wing minis was a blast and Dave loved it so much that he was still singing its praises at work on Monday to anyone who'd listen. We'd played three games: the introductory game, then a 50 and finally 100 point battle. In each game there was ebb and flow, critical moments when everything hung in the balance - the crap dice roll where the battered, limping Tie Fighter manages to weave between the lasers just long enough to take out the Y-Wing, the epic dice roll where the tricked out B-Wing loses its shields and takes some damage suddenly changing the balance of power dramatically. It was great: there was a story unfolding before our very eyes, and we had (some!) control over it. After Twilight Imperium we spent a good half hour (after a ten hour game!) talking about the highs and lows of the game: massive fleets mutually annihilating each other, the cheeky action card that stops someone claiming an objective, etc.

Our group even creates narrative around games so simple that they don't even have a theme. There's Helga the imaginary milkmaid who turns up when someone sends a card round a few time in No Thanks! when only they can benefit from it, and Gunther the 70s porn star who turns up in a game of [6|11] Nimmt! when someone is about to get shafted!

I was reminded of Joe Gola's awesome Amun Re session report. The game was just a framework that the story hung off. Playing the game is a form of collective story telling.

Tuesday lunchtime Dave and I sat down for our first game of Vacuum in a good couple of months. I'd mothballed Vacuum during November while I concentrated on Zombology for NaGa DeMon and then I'd been too busy in December to do anything at all really. We were trying out a new trade mechanism inspired by Dan, my Newcastle Playtest co-host. Dave and I have played at least fifty games together, and this was the first major change to Trade. We were focussed on getting our heads round the new mechanism and a feel for whether or not it worked. At the end Dave had some concerns about the fact the you discarded the trade cards into an opponent's graveyard - he didn't like the lack of control over your deck that implied (he usually runs an extremely lean deck). Thematically it made sense to me - if you trade with someone they get a trade benefit and it fit my aim that trade be a non-combative form of interaction in the game where you do something that provides a trade benefit to both player and target. Plus it was much simpler to track than the previous mechanism.

So far so good. It was one in a long series of games of Vacuum Dave and I have played and felt much like any other. We explored the solar system, Dave captured lots of locations (a favourite tactic of his) but didn't whale on me (unusual!). I focussed on researching the tech tree and striving towards the Knowledge goal, which I brought in a few turns before the end of the game. Dave's deck was unusually chubby and he couldn't get the right combination of cards together to chose a Conquest victory, so I managed to bring in the second victory condition: Exploration which he beat me on, but not by enough to win. Like the fifty games before it there wasn't a particularly overarching story to the game - we were just cracking on with it. The only stand out moments came from the exploration mechanism.

For the first fifty odd plays, the exploration mechanism involved drawing a given number of cards from a deck and picking the best one to bring into play. It was pretty dull. In September or October last year Paul Thompson suggested spicing it up: "If I'm playing a steampunk game I expect to be finding resources or exploiting natives or being attacked". Off the back of that suggestion, I changed the exploration mechanic to bring both less randomness (you choose a location to explore) and more (each location has an event on it that could be good, bad or indifferent). In our lunchtime game I'd explored Geostationary Orbit early on and found a Silicate Consciousness, adding an advanced Artificial Intelligence card to my deck very early in the game. A few turns later Dave had discovered a Heat Ray which improved the strength of all his military units. The final stand out moment was Dave's two or three attempts to explore Pluto, all of which failed with contact lost to his probe. It was noteworthy: "Pluto is hard to explore!"

That evening I played Vacuum again at Newcastle Playtest with Dan and it was a completely different experience. In the second turn Dan sent a probe to Earth-Moon L1 and discovered a really unfriendly alien race. Each turn they attacked our strongest location with a military strength of 25! At this early point in the game our total military strength was 4 or 5 each. Dan lost control of the US (his homeland) and then I promptly lost control of France (mine). All of a sudden it was the third turn of the game, neither of us controlled any territory, had any income or any real chance of capturing territory until the overwhelming might of the alien aggressors was vanquished. Going deep underground the French Resistance and the US minutemen researched martial technologies and assembled military power. Trading (what I can only imagine were packets of fags and tinned goods - that's cigarettes and canned goods for my American audience!) between each other to gain the income we needed to fund our boffins to develop some decent military units. Slowly we accrued military strength while researching other technologies and occasionally sending out a probe to try to find something helpful. Occasionally we managed to find a seam of valuable materials which we could exploit for a turn until the aliens promptly wiped them clean of human presence. Finally I got to the point where I had a couple of warships and an armada on ready alert - only 16 military strength - but I had more armadas in my deck and a reasonable chance of drawing one next turn, so I sent out a sortie and captured Atlantis. At the end of my turn I drew a new hand: all armadas! The hand was so good I had to show Dan! My next turn rolled around, and when the aliens came knocking I had 42 military strength - an auspicious number :-) I annihilated them and then sent the two unused armadas over the scorched earth to claim the US and France. Dan meanwhile had managed to launch an orbital weapons platform, ready to defend his (as yet non-existant) territories with the threat of nuclear rain from orbit. For the rest of the game we both had the large militaries we'd acquired early on to defeat the aliens. I used mine to conquer a large chunk of the solar system, Dan used his to raid my territories, safe in the knowledge that his nuclear threat would prevent reprisal - most turns I could see off his predation, but I lost several locations to him during the game. The game eventually ended when I chose Conquest as a scoring condition and Dan quickly got Knowledge in before I had a chance to get Population as the second.

The game had such a strong narrative that I had to relate it to Dave in the office the next morning (and in fact to you here). The game lasted just under an hour (not bad for Dan's second game) and fully one third of that we were under assault, severely limited in what we could do. It was hard, but it felt like we were under assault, too afraid to show our faces until we'd built up the military we'd need to defend a territory against the alien scourge. It's rare that aggressor card turns up in a game, and especially rare to see it so early. The game was unusual and totally different as a result. It's not all good news though, in his feedback email Dan described the aggressors as 'annoying' which is probably something I need to pay particular heed to.

Dave and I have had some ideas about how to bring this level of excitement to some of the other strategies in the game. I'm really excited about Vacuum again :-D

2013: The Year in Review

2013 has been a lot less momentous than last year, no major purchases or moves. We've been adapting to life as a family and trying to make do with very poor nights' sleep (bless her, The Daughter seems to be one of the worst sleepers of her cohort of friends). It's been an excellent year, as The Daughter grows up we've got to watch her learn to smile, crawl, walk and start to talk. We're starting to meet the person too, as her personality develops. She's a very happy, giggly and affectionate girl and brings us both a lot of pleasure - which more than makes up for the nights.

Professionally, my employer (that I'm working for for the third time) that I've been employed by for half my working life was bought by a large American corporation which meant, predictably, a slight increase in bureaucracy, countered by an nice increase in benefits. I got to visit Minneapolis for work in June, my first visit to the mid-west US, and while there hooked up with a few gamers via BGG (who thankfully weren't axe-murderers) and went to the Fantasy Flight Games Event Centre for some after work gaming.

The year is ending on a strange note though, as I've come home from Bristol on my own, with The Wife and The Daughter remaining in Bristol for three weeks while I get radiotherapy for an over-active thyroid. It's strange having the house to myself - very quiet and lonely.

Games Design

I spent most of the year pressing on with Codename: Vacuum, racking up one or more plays per week, tweaking things here and there. It's getting better, slowly, but with so many cards each tweak needs careful balancing to ensure the decks are all roughly as good as each other.

In August, Dan Howard and I started up Newcastle Playtest, a bi-monthly meetup in a pub to playtest each other's games. It started off strongly with six designers getting involved, and plenty of willing playtesters. Nearer to Christmas it has died down a bit, it'll be interesting to see if there's enough interest in the New Year to keep it going. I've found it very useful, interesting and enjoyable on the occasions when I've managed to make it along.

In November, I decided to get in on the NaGa DeMon action and resurrected Codename: Proteome with a new theme and new mechanics as a game of Zombie science: Zombology. I managed to make five different prototypes, six different rulebooks and played it 16 times in the month of November. The end of the month version is available print-and-play and I'm still continuing to work on it.

After the hectic month of NaGa DeMon action, and with Christmas and its associated socialising on the cards, I had a fairly quiet December, no prototyping, hardly any playtesting and not much gaming at all until the Christmas break. I did have another game idea though: Codename: Dragon - a 2-player card game about St. George and the Dragon. It's been a long time since I last had three designs on the go.

General Gaming

I've had an un-written goal for the last five or so years to play as many games as there are days in the year. I've not managed it since 2010, but I've done it again in 2013: 370 + whatever I play at tonight's bonus Games Night. Again, I've counted iPad games against real opponents. My five and dimes were:

• 56: Codename: Vacuum - played this a lot!
• 27: 6 Nimmt! - a favourite Games Night filler
• 22: 7 Wonders - popular at Games Night and with the in-laws
• 19: Ra - mostly on the iPad while travelling for work
• 18 Race for the Galaxy - popular at Games Night and with The Wife
• 18: Zombology - almost all in November!
• 14: Incan Gold - popular at Games Night
• 13: Hol's der Geier - a Games Night filler
• 11: Carcassonne - On the iPad and with the in-laws
• 11: No Thanks! - Games Night filler
• 11: X-Wing Minis - need to play this more!
• 10: Thunderstone - popular with The Wife and the in-laws
• 9: The Resistance - at Games Night, and when Paul came to visit
• 8: Coloretto - Games Night I guess?
• 8: For Sale - another short game popular at Games Night
• 8: Hanabi - love this one, only got it in July I think
• 7: 11 Nimmt! - Games Night filler
• 6: Hey! That's My Fish! - on the iPad while travelling
• 6: The Speicherstadt - I taught this a couple of times at Newcastle Gamers
• 5: Carcassonne: The Castle - on holiday with the sister-in-law
• 5: Lords of Waterdeep - a Games Night favourite
• 5: Love Letter - learnt this at Beer and Pretzels

I also made it to a convention this year, for the first time in about 4 years: Beer and Pretzels in Burton-on-Trent in May. It was a great weekend, hanging out with my friend Terry whose Games Night I used to attend when we lived down south. I learnt several new games that weekend too.

Purchases-wise, I bought The Bridges of Shangri-La in the Travelling Man sale and Hanabi and Love Letter later in the year. I got Macao, Thurn and Taxis and Alea Iacta Est for my birthday and Coup and Galaxy Trucker for Christmas. Plus I got a boatload of X-Wing minis during the year. I also got rid of Babel, Canal Mania, Clans, Eminent Domain, Fzzzt! and Meuterer - given away to friends in the hope they get played in their new homes.

Blogging

My goals for blogging for the year were to blog on at least 45 of the Mondays in 2013 and get 20,000 page views and a few extra followers. As it turns out I've blogged every Monday in 2013 (plus a bunch of extra times in November for NaGa DeMon), got 35,000 page views and 7 new followers. A huge success. Mostly down to NaGa DeMon if I'm honest. My most popular posts this year were:

• My thoughts on KickStarting games
• Excitement building about Newcastle Playtest
• A discussion of how my games/life balance has changed over the years
• A mention of doing some Windows Phone development
• The rules to a game I ran to encourage NaGa DeMon feedback

I hope you all had good years too, and here's hoping next year will be even better!

Three on the Go

This week, for the first time in many, many years, three game designs have been in my head simultaneously: Zombology, Codename: Vacuum and my new idea for a two-player St. George and the Dragon themed game that I mentioned last week - which I'm calling Codename: Dragon.

Zombology

At Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday we played Zombology. I'd missed the second Newcastle Playtest in November, so it was the first time any of them had seen it since the very first version/play at the beginning of November. Dan had played in those two early games and Alex and Michał had turned up during the second of those two early games so they had seen the early version, but not played it. We were playing a four player game, so I tried out one of the ideas Konrad had provided via email during NaGa DeMon: taking out one of the suits with fewer players. It seemed to work well.

The scoring still feels pretty clunky though, so I've been thinking about how to make that a smoother experience. I think the next thing I'm going to try is numbering the cards from 1-10 again, instead of 1-5. I switched to 1-5 in the first place to make it easier to count up the value of the cards you had collected. But since then, I stopped scoring the face value of the cards you collected and just counting the number of cards. The downsides of having low numbered cards is when working out which suit was the most successful. You end up saying: 'Which suit has a five? Those four, right, which of those four has a four? Three of them do, ok, so that rules one out, how many fours do those three have? That one has two, so does that one, but that one only has one - right now we know suits suits are scoring.' Seamless! Clearly this is a right chew-on. If the cards went 1 to 10 then it would be easier to see which had the high cards, instead of two 3s and two 4s per suit there would be a 6, 7, 8 and a 9 which would mean you'd be able to spot the differences more easily (I hope!).

I'm also considering making the requirements for higher numbered cards a number of cards played. Currently, to play a 5, for example, any player has to have played a 3 or a 4 in that suit. If instead, the 5 (or will it be 10?) required a certain number of cards out in that suit it might make them easier to play (while still meaning that you need to play the low numbered cards first). In fact, while I type this, I've had another idea, maybe you score face value of your cards in the most successful suits and -1 point per card in the rest (a bit like Coloretto).

Anyway, I've now got loads of ideas of further things to do with Zombology over the coming months. I'm also speaking to an artist about getting some exclusive art done for the NaGa DeMon winners. I've started contacting them to get their shipping addresses, but with the art to sort out it's going to be at least January before I ship them.

Vacuum

During NaGa DeMon I'd pretty much shelved Vacuum - I didn't play it during November at all, a noticeable break from the usual once or twice a week - so that I could concentrate on making headway with Zombology. Last time I played I got some really good feedback from Dan, my co-host for Newcastle Playtest. He pointed out there there are effectively six resources in Vacuum (the five card symbols, plus cashy money), and that the Population and Trade mechanics are a bit dull - just get as much as you can. It's made me think about several things, but the one I'm most keen to try is that you get points for your income, rather than your stockpiled cash. That would mean that you no longer need to keep track of the money you've accrued, just how much you can make in a turn. I'd need to change several things to interact better with that idea, but I'm going to try it out first to see if it's worth the effort. I meant to play Vacuum last week at lunchtime, but had to blow it off after leaving work just after lunch on Monday to take The Daughter to the doctors after a fall at nursery and a bumped head :-( She's fine, but that stuffed my hours for the week.

Dragon

Dragon popped into my head just over a week ago. I was trying to think of another quick and simple game that I could do for NaGa DeMon next year. I was thinking that instead of trying for a game that plays lots of people, I could go for one that plays two, that would be easy to get playtests lined up for. The idea in my head was a simultaneous action selection game with dice-based combat and uneven player powers (clearly, George can't breathe fire). With the thought so quickly established, I decided to give up on getting it done next November and instead crack on. I've installed Evernote on my phone and started sketching out ideas for how the game could work. I'm not that far from making my first playtest copy I hope, though this close to Christmas I'm struggling to find much time for games design.

With three games on the go I worry that I'll struggle to make decent progress on any of them, especially with limited free time. Still, if you've got the ideas in your head, you just have to run with them!

NaGa Demon: A Retrospective

I work in software engineering and at the end of a project we hold a 'retrospective' to answer three questions:

• What went well, that we would want to do again?
• What went badly, that we would want to avoid next time?
• What else should we do?

Seeing as this was my first NaGa DeMon, my first game I'd designed entirely in the public domain and at the last minute I decided to run TGWAG, there's lots of things that I could look back on and evaluate the performance of. So, without further ado:

What went well?

• I got a lot of page views on the blog. November was my best month by far, outstripping the reddit month (which I honestly though I'd never equal) by 50%
• By posting the rules online I got a lot of useful feedback as the month went on, letting me iterate the rules very quickly
• Several people said they would/had print out a copy
• Someone (thanks, Konrad!) not only solo'd it three or four times, but also played it at least three times with friends, and then sent me very detailed feedback.
• I managed to design a game within a month, from ideas to reasonable game (with room still for improvement of course)
• I iterated the rules six times, made five different prototypes and played Zombology sixteen times in a month!
• Lots of people got involved (possibly due to TGWAG and free PIPs, possibly not)
• I wrote loads of blog posts in November
• I chose a simple, short game to design - something complex and hard to balance would be very difficult to develop in only a month

What went badly?

• I over estimated. I offered five free copies (and for the first three weeks there were only three TGWAG players!) and I set the achievement levels too high (or I was too stingy with my PIP allocation)
• I designed the rewards badly - a free copy of a game you can print out yourself? Pants!
• I decided to fix that by adding exclusive artwork, but far too late in the day - the winners are going to have to wait a month or so for their prizes
• I didn't advertise it very well - just a link from BGG

What else could I do

• Raise awareness about TGWAG earlier to try to drum up some interest - make the prize more enticing and offer fewer of them so there's a sense of competition
• Find out better ways to publicise it, beforehand and during the game.
• Try to attend more sessions to try it with more people - I missed one of the two Newcastle Playtest sessions in November and both of the Newcastle Gamers sessions :(

Overall, I felt it was a great success. I took a game (not Vacuum!) that I had an idea for and turned it into a playable game in only a month! Is it the best game ever? No, of course not. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. I'll continuing designing this in addition to Vacuum, and hopefully it'll get better and better. I definitely want to do NaGa DeMon again next year.

In other news, I've had another idea, which initially I considered for NaGa DeMon next year, but I think I'll get cracking on it shortly. It's a two-player game about St. George and the Dragon. :)

NaGa DeMon 7: A 7 Player Game and Major Changes Afoot

On Saturday, I went to York for six and a half hours of gaming :): my friend Paul had hired a church hall for the day to celebrate his birthday. Attendance was good with about forty-odd people, a mixture of friends from his games night (that I used to attend twice weekly for four years so know well but see very infrequently), people from Beyond Monopoly the local games club (which I used to attend once a month or so for four years, so I know pretty well but in most cases haven't seen for years) and friends of his daughter and their parents, of which a recognised a surprising number.

I'd taken Codename: Vacuum and Zombology, plus a few rarely played sci-fi games from my collection. In the end the only game I'd brought that we played was Zombology: a seven player game with a bunch of old friends (plus a couple of new ones!). The game lasted slightly longer than I had expected, probably about 20 minutes. There were lots of rules queries, plus a few people were taking it quite seriously (it's a game about zombie science featuring the healing powers of crystals - it's clearly not a serious game!). Afterwards we discussed it briefly and the feedback was generally positive, though again the scoring proved a bit tedious and people struggled during the game to identify the strongest suits, which made their choices slower as they tried to determine what was their strongest move.

Two interesting bits of feedback were:

• Robert's suggestion to put a time limit on the individual rounds to avoid people over thinking their turns and to keep it moving quickly.
• John's disapproval of the way the mechanics didn't fit the theme, since people played the best cards in the second or third round and then after that your spend the last five or six rounds playing the dross cards that are left - why if someone has already run a successful human trial would you bother trying to prove it in a Petri dish again?

All this got me thinking, along with the feedback I'd had during my lunchtime playtest, and gave me an idea.

On the weekends I tend to take The Daughter on a couple of walks to get her to have decent naps (and hence be chipper for the rest of the day). During the morning walk on Sunday I spent the hour working out in my head a new version to address those points. I've got a new version now to try out that makes use of the existing cards (pretty much!).

I'll try to play this version at work again, and also take it to the Newcastle Playtest session on Tuesday, it will be interesting to see if it's any better...

The other games I played at Paul's party were Oregon, Dominant Species The Card Game and Homesteaders (all new to me) and Ave Caesar. Of the three new ones, Homesteaders was my favourite and seeing as I think it was one of Tasty Minstrel Games' first games I can see why they got off to a flying start. It's a great game with worker placement, city building and auctions set in the Wild West. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

NaGaDeMon 6: Local Minima

In my last post I made available a Print and Play version of Zombology. Seeing as NaGa DeMon is only a month long, I need to get the game playtested as many times and by as many people as possible, to find the wrinkles fast and iron them out, but also to crowdsource new ideas and incorporate them into the design.

For the first version I'd made a quick (though admittedly not quick enough!) prototype and taken it along to Newcastle Playtest. We'd played a couple of six-player games back to back. The feedback from the first game was that there were too many suits (each of which represents a potential treatment for Zombyism), so in the second game we discarded five of the twelve suits and it was much better. Of course this left me with only 70 of the original 120 cards, so I could only play with up to six players. I want the game to go up to ten players and be a quick filler like 6 Nimmt! So clearly, I needed to make another prototype. This one has only six suits, but with more cards per suit, so the game still goes up to ten.

With the limited opportunities available to me to try the game out myself, I posted this second version as a print and play game before trying it out, which I wasn't particularly comfortable with, but needs must - the clock is ticking. In fact this whole NaGa DeMon thing has taken me out of my comfort zone from start to finish. With my previous game design efforts (and in fact the games I published on behalf of others) I kept things fairly close to my chest while the game was in development. Of course, I tried to play them a lot, and with lots of different people, but I didn't widely publicise the theme or mechanics or anything until I was pretty much ready to go. With NaGa DeMon, I've been posting the rules (and multiple versions thereof), and making the prototypes available P&P which is a first for me.

To avoid wasting the time, expense and effort of my willing P&P playtesters (who has downloaded the PDFs, printed them out or played it? Anyone? ... Anyone?) I want to try to keep changes to the components to an absolute minimum, so they don't need to print out a new version (and cut it out, etc.) every few days. Because of the short window of NaGa DeMon I'm turning things around far quicker than normal. So I'm trying to limit myself to improvements that change the rules rather than the components.

Anyway, back to the point. I got a chance to try the new version out during my lunch break yesterday with a couple of my Games Night attendees. There were potentially eight of us, but three weren't in the office, one was prepping for a quality audit and one couldn't spare the time, so that left only three. In theory the game plays with 3 to 10, but until now it had only been played with six. A couple of the changes I thought would improve the game with fewer players, so I was interested to see how it would go.

The good news was that it worked as a game, nothing broke spectacularly and it played in the right sort of timeframe. We played two games, one lasted 12 minutes (including scoring) and the second eight minutes. Scores were 14, 13, 13 in the first game and 13, 6, 4 in the second.

The bad news was that both Dave (one of my core Codename: Vacuum playtesters) and His Nefariousness (my boss) didn't like the way that the cards went round so quickly. It's a drafting game played over 8 rounds, so with 9 or ten players you will never see all the cards in play. With eight players you'll have seen all the cards at the start of the eighth round and with fewer players you'll have seen them all sooner. With three players, you've seen all the cards in play at the start of the third round, and you'll see each card two or three times. They didn't like that. Dave also raised the point that it was possible to start a round with a handful of cards you couldn't play, since some of the cards have pre-requisites that might not have happened yet. It didn't happen in either of our games, but came pretty close at one point.

So now I need to think of solutions to those problems, ideally without changing the cards as provided in the P&P PDFs. One idea for the first one is to make the game 5 to 10 players instead of 3 to 10, another is to somehow get more cards into play as the game progresses if you're playing with fewer players.

Any ideas? There's PIPs for good ones...

NaGa DeMon 4: Rules and Revisions

I took the first version of Zombology to the Newcastle Playtest session on Tuesday night. We played with these rules (note, draft quality!):

Zombology!

The Science of the Zombie Apocalypse

3-10 players, 20 mins

It finally happened. The Zombie Plague has arrived, decimating entire continents and turning the masses into drooling, stumbling, brain-munching hordes. You're not that bothered though, you live and work in a high security government facility, and for you the plague is an opportunity. It's your chance to finally prove that you're a world-class genius in the field of curing diseases, not like that chump Dr. Gimlet at the CDC, what a tool! Seriously, the guy's an absolute fool, as if DNA retroviruses are a credible cure for anything.

You've got a few weeks to come up with a cure before you run out of the test subjects needed to show that your cure is the best. Choose a method or a few different ones and then quickly gather the evidence you need to prove your genius.

Contents

The game comprises of 120 cards, 10 each in the following 12 types:

1) DNA Retroviruses
2) Stem cells
3) Herbal extracts
4) Radiotherapy
5) Snake venom
6) Vaccines
7) Vegan Diet
8) Leeches
9) Pharmaceuticals
10) Crystals
11) Surgery
12) Chemotherapy

For each type there are cards numbered: -5 (forged results - flip 1-10), -3 (bad science - flip 1-5), -1 (strong rebuttal - flip 1-3), 1 (theoretical description), 2 (computer model), 3 (petri dish proof), 4 (works on mice), 5 (works on monkeys), 7 (successful small trial), 10 (successful large trial).

Aim of the Game

The aim of the game is to score high in the three most successful treatments and low in the two least successful ones.

Setup

Shuffle the cards and deal ten to each player, place the rest back in the box they will not be needed this game.

Play

The game is played over 8 rounds. Each round the players secretly choose a card and play it face down in front of them. Once all players have chosen a card, the chosen cards are revealed and added to the players' collections.
If the card played was negative, chose a face up card in play of the same type belonging to another player, it must have a value within the range shown on the negative card. Flip this card face down - it will not contribute to the total when determining the highest and lowest scoring types, but will contribute to that player's score.

The players pass their remaining cards to the player on their left and receive the cards from the player on their right. Another round is now played as before. Once eight rounds have been played, the remaining cards are discarded and the game is scored.

Scoring

Work out the total score for each type of cards across all players - do not include the values of any face down cards. The three types with the highest and two types with the lowest totals will score, the cards for the rest can be discarded.

Flip any face down cards back face up. Each player earns positive points equal to the total of their cards in the highest types and negative points equal to their totals in the lowest types. Add the positive and negative points together to get a final score. Highest score wins.

Revisions

The feedback I received was mainly to do with too many suits and too complicated scoring. We played another game with five suits removed, but what I really need to do is make more cards rather than just remove some, so that there are still enough cards to play with 10 players.

What I'm thinking is that I'll cut it down to six suits (DNA Retroviruses, Stem cells, Herbal extracts, Vegan Diet, Crystals and Surgery) and up the number of cards to 20 per suit. To make the counting easier I'm using a smaller range of numbers:

• 2x -2 Forged Results (flip 1-4)
• 3x -1 Bad science (flip 1-2)
• 5x 1 Theoretical framework
• 4x 2 Petri dish proof
• 3x 3 Works in mice
• 2x 4 Works in Monkeys
• 1x 5 Successful human trial

I'm still not sure how to simplify the scoring while keeping the concept of getting points for backing the most successful treatments. I think I'll cut out the negative points for the least successful treatments and just score the two most successful ones. I need to think on it more. Any ideas?

NaGa DeMon 3: The First Play

Before making Zombology available to the PIP-hunting masses I wanted to play it at least once first to give me a chance to iron out the worst of the problems.

I'd worked hard over the weekend to get the first prototype's graphic design done on the computer, then get it printed and cut out ready for the first of two Newcastle Playtest sessions in November, last night. I was excited to see how it plays, but a little concerned about the complexity of the scoring.

As people started to arrive it was easy to sell them on a ten minute game that we could all play, so we sat down to a six-player game. After a quick run through of the rules that made it clear that the scoring was too complex (lots of questions along the lines of 'run that by me again', 'so which cures score?' And 'hoojamawhatnow?'), we set off. The game played as quickly as I had hoped and was as chaotic and vicious as I had intended. People seemed to get their heads round the rules pretty quickly.

I had first had the idea for this game nearly two years ago, it was going to be themed around the science of proteomics and would be something that we could possibly have as a scientific conference giveaway for my employer. The initial idea was played once and really didn't work so it died a death and stayed that way.

However, I've been toying with how I could transform it into a working game and on my weekend walks taking The Daughter for a nap in her buggy I've occasionally considered Proteome as well as Vacuum. In the last couple of weeks I've thought that card drafting à la 7 Wonders might be a good fit for the science theme. As the game progresses you'll get to hear on the grapevine/at conferences what sort of things people are interested in and build up an idea of what's hot and likely to be successful. I ditched the proteomics theme and instead though of curing a disease. And that led to Zombology - curing zombyism.

I created a game with 12 different possible cures, each containing the same range of evidence (positive valued cards) and attacks (negative valued cards). Seeing as you'd never play with the full deck, even with the posited maximum of ten players, some of the cures would end up more powerful than others. The more powerful ones would change every game and at the beginning of the game you wouldn't know what would be best - it would be a journey of discovery that you could shape as you choose cards to play. Much like science.

I wanted players to score points for backing the most successful cures, and I thought it would make things interesting if they lost points for backing the least successful cures. So my initial scoring idea was that at the end of the game you would add up the total of each cure across all players and the ones with the highest totals earnt their players positive points and the ones with the lowest totals earnt their players negative points. The attacking cards earnt you negative points so if you attack the winning cures you lose points and attacking the losing cures won you points. In addition, the attacking cards cancelled a positive card in the same suit.

Before I went to the playtest session I was concerned the scoring was over complicated, and my fears were realised - it took almost as long to score the game as it did to play it! Afterwards I asked for feedback, and in addition to a load of interesting ideas, the main complaints were the complicated scoring and that twelve suits was too many, making it hard to keep track of how the game was progressing.

So we took out five of the suits and played again, and it went much better. The scoring was still too complicated, so I need to think on that. What that reminds me of is prototype decay, the idea that prototype components have a lifetime that changes rapidly at the beginning, so it's not worth investing too much effort in them. I've now got to make a new prototype with all new cards in six rather than twelve suits, and re-think the scoring.

I've only got a month though, so I'll need to move quickly...

NaGa DeMon 2: The Premise

As I mentioned last week, and in Saturday's post, this year I'm going to try to take part in NaGa DeMon. Last year I thought about doing a game themed on the old Populous computer game, but gave that up as soon as I heard they were try to make a new Populous via KickStarter. I've decided to go zombie science, with a working title of Zombology: The Science of the Zombie Apocalypse. So here's the premise:

I feel the Zombie genre tends to focus too much on the survivalist with a shotgun (or axe or chainsaw). As I'm sure you're aware, the real heroes of any zombie apocalypse will be the scientists who slave day and night over a lukewarm microscope, trying to discover a cure to this dreadful plague. But the poor scientist doesn't get any love, no - no shotgun, no genre representation. So I've decided to redress the balance and come up with a game about the science of the zombie apocalypse.

Scientists are a competitive bunch, and come the zombie apocalypse, their preferred yardstick (peer-reviewed publications) will have disappeared - it's hard enough to get a decent review from an unpaid scientist who considers the work he's reviewing direct competition, so imagine how hard it'll be when the only thing the editor, reviewer, typesetter and printer care about is where their next brains are coming from. In the absence of publishing, there's only one way to prove yourself the best scientist: cure the plague! Ideally, before you run out of test subjects.

I'm aiming for a 6 Nimmt!-like experience: a short game (under 20 minutes) for up to ten players with lots of shafting each other and getting hosed.

Here's the exposition as it stands now:

It finally happened. The Zombie Plague has arrived, decimating entire continents and turning the masses into drooling, stumbling, brain-munching hordes. You're not that bothered though, you live and work in a high security government facility, and for you the plague is an opportunity. It's your chance to finally prove that you're a world-class genius in the field of curing diseases, not like that chump Dr. Gimlet at the CDC, what a tool! Seriously, the guy's an absolute idiot, as if DNA retroviruses are a credible cure for anything.
You've got a few weeks to come up with a cure before you run out of the test subjects you need to show that your cure is the best. Back a method or a few different ones and then quickly gather the evidence you need to prove your genius.

This is actually based on Codename: Proteome, but since the theme has changed beyond recognition and the mechanics are also totally different, I figure I can count it as a new game, which I started making on the weekend - safely within the November window. I've got a copy ready to take to the Newcastle Playtest session at The Bridge Hotel this Tuesday for its inaugural outing. Once I've tried it out I'll post the rules and a P&P download so you can start trying it out yourselves and earning some playtest PIPs.

I'll keep you posted about how it's going, in the meantime, any feedback on how to make the exposition more enticing? There's PIPs available...

A Weird Week

It's been a strange week, this one. The daughter was ill last weekend and the early part of the week and on top of that we're changing childcare providers. The Wife and I are both very busy at work with deadlines looming, so we split up the childcare while we introduce her to the new nursery. So Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I was in charge. On my own.

Thankfully, we'd had some practice at the beginning of September when The Wife had a conference to attend for work so I was in charge for a few days, but then I had the help of my friend Paul who we were staying with, who has a nine year old daughter of his own, and hence is far more experienced than I. But this time it was just me.

It was lovely, especially once she got over her illness and was much happier, I wish I had more holiday so I could spend more time with her, but sadly, I've used this year's allowance up :(

As a result of the sleepless nights while she was ill, we didn't have a Games Night to give us a chance to catch up. Seeing as I was off work with The Daughter at the beginning of the week, I missed Tuesday lunchtime's Codename: Vacuum playtest session too. My parents came up last night, so I skipped Saturday's Newcastle Gamers session to prepare for their visit. So from a gaming point of view it's been a dry week.

The new Vacuum has had a lot of changes, so I really need to focus on trying them all out and finding and improving the weaknesses, so next week I hope to get back to lunchtime playtesting and then there's another Newcastle Playtest meetup on the 5th, so I'll take it along to that too.

In other news, I've been thinking about Codename: Proteome again, and in my head have made some sweeping changes. I'm considering giving it a go for NaGa DeMon, the game designer's equivalent of NaNoWriMo.

So not much to report this week, but stuff is afoot!

In other news, 700th post! Who'd have thought Creation and Play would last so long?