Finished

National Game Design Month is over. 

The first half was great - loads of progress and fast iterations. 

After Paul’s mini-convention I stalled. 

There was urgent Eurydice work to be done. 

Plus the feedback I received at the convention has left me struggling to find a next step. 

I have ideas. Thoughts. Notes. 

Nothing concrete to implement though. 

On the plus side, I’ve made loads of progress on it this month. 

First since January. 

Now I need to unblock the market. 

TGWAG was disappointing this year. 

In previous years I’ve had many players who were quite engaged. 

Only two this year. 

Mal won it. 

I’m working on a prize for him now…

TGWAG: Final Week

I'm still looking for playtesters and feedback on my roll & write design.

It's come on a lot this month! 

As part of National Games Design Month I've been running The Game Within A Game (TGWAG).

In previous years we've had several entrants and some competition for the prize.

This year it's only been two.

There's still time to be in with a chance to win the prize!

In the meantime, I need to evolve the scoring.

I'd appreciate any feedback and ideas on it.

Name	Rank	PIPs
Mal	Recycling Pipework Technician's Mate	3
Kylef	Recycling Pipework Technician's Mate	2

Theme II

The game boxes have arrived at Paul’s.

1,425 of them.

His house is rammed.

The focus now must be shipping rewards and clearing some space!

Since Wednesday’s playtest I’ve done nothing with the Roll & Write (Ursa Miner?)

But Mal’s name suggestion has given me ideas.

A slightly different theme is taking shape in my brain.

It’s percolating.

Meanwhile I’ve been going back to my roots.

Writing a little app to convert the Gamefound fulfilment spreadsheet into our fulfilment spreadsheet.

I used to do it by hand.

Silly really.

This will take some time, but save a lot.

Even more in the long run.

Now the boxes have arrived, Paul needs it now though.

Roll & Write will have to wait!

The TGWAG scores at the end of week 2 are:

Name	Rank	PIPs
Mal	Recycling Pipework Technician's Mate	3
Kylef	Recycling Pipework Technician's Mate	2

Variety

I want the roll and write to have some variety of set-up.

The players share the dice each turn. So could always choose the same options.

So I want to encourage variety between players.

Plus try to make the game less samey, so repeated plays play out differently.

Each players gets different starting resources.

And you can choose one Overlord per player from a set of six. 

So there’s some variability with fewer the six players there.

But I want more.

So each player individually modifies their maps before you begin.

But I want more.

Two different maps now!

So multiple maps, with different special rules.

I came up with a bunch of map ideas.

Now I need to draft them and include in the download.

I’ve done two so far.

The Wife is away for a few days this week. I’ll work on this in the evenings, once I’ve got the girls to sleep…

And in other news, we've got our first taker for TGWAG!

Current leaderboard (it's a bit empty - why not join in?):

Name	Rank	PIPs
Kylef	Recycling Technician's Mate	2

Play

I've played it for the first time.

Well, not the first time. But the first time with friends.

My previous plays were with myself. As fake other players.

I hate that.

But we played a 3-player game last night.

It worked.

There were some clunky bits though. And rules we never used at all.

Streamline.

I've made changes.

Hopefully they'll improve things.

But they might not.

I need to test it again.

Or some help from others to test the new version.

I've got some other ideas to try too.

But one thing at a time.

Version 0.3 is available for download.

Evolution

It's only the second of the month and I already have an update!

There's a whole new version available here.

I've changed a few things.

Simplified set-up a lot.

Added a bit more variation between players to encourage players to take different paths.

Tomorrow I have a Games Night at my house.

We very rarely play my prototypes at Games Night.

I usually hold a separate playtesting night.

I might ask my chums to indulge me tomorrow - see if we can try out the Roll & Write and the new version of Coalescence.

National Game Design Month off to a great start.

Only slight disappointment is that we don't have any TGWAG players this year.

It's been several years since I last did it, but we had several players back in those days.

Maybe I'll just end up playing by myself.

It still might work to keep me making progress...

TGWAG: The Beginning

The Game Within a Game.

All you have to do is help me out with the design of my Roll & Write during the month of November.

You can read the rules. Playtest the game. Ask questions. Give advice. Leave comments (here on the blog please). Come up with a name.

I will take all that feedback and iterate the game as quickly as I can.

And I will give out Pointless Internet Points.

For any help provided.

Players will be ranked by their points.

At the end there'll be a (sur)prize for the highest PIP total.

But we need to start at the beginning.

Here's where we start: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pS7Uz04T1lvYy456W7O2juhTQfa6p8KR/view?usp=share_link

This zip file includes the rules and the player sheets as they are at the start of the month.

The player sheet

I've already got some ideas from previous playtester feedback.

Make the set-up far simpler. Maybe fixed Overlord demands, with different 'games' with different demands. And a different map for each 'game'.

Let me know your thoughts and I'll take it from here.

The PIP ranks for this game are:

Rank	PIPs
Overlord	46-50
Vizier	41-45
Prospector Captain	36-40
Surveyor 1st Class	31-35
Assistant Surveyor	26-30
Scanner Operator	21-25
Sensor Technician	16-20
Sensor Cleaner	11-15
Recycling Pipework Technician	6-10
Recycling Pipework Technician's Mate	1-5

TGWAG

Years ago, before I started Eurydice Games I took part in NaGa DeMon a few times.

That’s National Game Design Month.

In November.

Zombology was born that way.

In the last couple of years I’ve really struggled with game design.

COVID hasn’t helped.

But a full-time job, young family and running a company in my spare time doesn’t leave much time.

I’m going to do it again this November.

Focus.

I'll be running a little competition.

The Game Within a Game - TGWAG.

Giving out pointless internet points.

To people who help me.

By playtesting. Or proof-reading. Or providing ideas.

I’ll keep a weekly leaderboard.

There’ll be a prize for the winner.

It kicks off tomorrow.

I started a Roll & Write in January

Follow along on the blog to join in…

NaGa DeMon: Week 1 Recap

Historically, during NaGa DeMon my regular Monday morning blog posts were used to record the scores in the NaGa DeMon competitions I ran for people helping me design the game by providing feedback and playtesting the early cuts.

Because I'm not designing a game this time there's no competition (known as The Game Within A Game or TGWAG for short) this year, since none of you have come to my house to help me construct the games. Thanks a bunch.

So instead, I'm just going to do a quick recap on progress during the week. My best guess is that each copy is going to take 60-90 minutes to construct, so the twenty copies I committed to are about an hour a day on average, and the thirty copies I'm getting printed are an hour and a half a day worth of stretch goal.

I'm doing this around a full time job, a family and a chunk of work-related travel, so that's going to be a challenge, but we'll see how I do.

In the first week I've done almost seven hours construction, and in that time I've completed 24 boxes and all thirty inserts. The boxes are actually taking a bit less time than I was expecting, and the fact that the new printer can print onto labels means the box wrappers might be a lot quicker than I'd bargained for (sticking the wrappers on with watered down PVA glue was a bit of a faff for Border Reivers and It's Alive!), saving yet more time.

I'm almost at the point where I've done all I can until the artwork arrives, six more boxes and I'm cooling my heels. This week I've also got a trip to Manchester for work which will swallow up an evening and Games Night which swallows another. Next week I've got a night's babysitting for friends (I can't take all my construction stuff round theirs!) and the week after a two day trip to Manchester, so things are going to get tighter still. Must crack on while I can!

NaGa DeMon 13: Finito

Well, it's December, so NaGa DeMon is done. And what a weird one it was. For the first half of the month I was kind of stuck. My first version of Dragon Dance was far better than I was expecting, reasonably well balanced and it played more or less how I was thought it would. That's unheard of for a first prototype of mine. I was playing it loads during lunchtime at work, alternating between it and By Election - my friend Sam's NaGa DeMon game. After about fifteen plays (including some from Konrad) I finally pushed the boat out and made a second version, incorporating some of the detailed feedback from Konrad and some ideas I'd had or that had been suggested by my playtesters.

That version, while a bit more interested, sucked. It was hideously broken, so heavily weighted in favour of the dragon that there was little point in playing it. So I had an idea of how to change things to fix it up, which I wrote up ready to post once I'd tried it.

Then I got sick (after it had swept through the family) then we had some bad news that put everything else on the back burner. My parents came up a week earlier than planned to help babysit The Daughter and my spare time ended up being spent entertaining guests rather than printing, designing or playing Dragon Dance. Also, after making big promises that I would get more involved with other people's NaGa DeMon efforts (including the aforementioned Konrad, who played my NaGa DeMon game one night in preference to his own) I did nothing. About which I feel quite bad - sorry Konrad!

With little time to practice the new fixed up v2, I posted it anyway and then finally another tweak right at the end of the month. The first hardly tested by me, the other completely untested. A very disappointing end to the month.

Page views were way down on last year as a result (though still my second best month in the eight year history of Creation and Play). However, I still managed to make four different versions and played it nearly twenty times. Plus, TGWAG was another huge success with nine participants, at least two people printing it out and Konrad playing it and given some excellent feedback. Thanks everyone, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. The final league table is as follows:

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Sir Konrad/@pidaysock	33	Knight Sergeant	Yes
Derek Hohls/@gamesbook	16	Squire	Yes
Eblasco/@7isprime	15	Squire	Yes
Roberto	8	Footman	No
@MTTJ_Patrick	5	Footman	No
@kimacus	4	Serf	No
Mal	3	Serf	No
@toddderscheid	2	Serf	No
@thefrugalgamer	2	Serf	No

So the free copies will be winging their way to Konrad, Enrique and Derek early in the new year. Thanks again!

TGWAG: League Table 4

Sorry to be filling my standard Monday blog post with a TGWAG League Table (usually posted on Sunday) but it's been a odd/tough week. It started off with missing a gaming weekend in the south with my old gaming buddies due to The Daughter's sickness, then The Wife got it and then finally, inevitably, so did I. Just in time to miss the special Newcastle Playtest session I'd arranged because I'd missed the previous one cleaning up after the double glazing. I was still contagious on Thursday so I was working from home (and cancelled Games Night), but then we received some bad news and everything went off track. I've only worked two days this week and not done any gaming since my Tuesday lunchtime session of Dragon Dance with Steve. Which gave me a brief chance to have a look at v2.1 and check that it is at least conceivably possible for The Knight to win this version, though how unbalanced it remains is hard to tell as it was me (15 games and the designer) against Steve in his first few games. This week's going to be another weird one as I'm off on Monday; Tuesday I'm probably going to Manchester for work and then Wednesday is my quarterly hospital visit, so I won't reach the office until 2pm. Plus, my parents have come up a week early to help out. I've gone from playing Dragon Dance 2 or 3 times a day at work to not playing for nearly a week. I'm going to have to rely on you guys for a while (though it sounds like Enrique, Derek and/or Konrad might be able to help me out recently/soon - thanks!).

In terms of TGWAG there's been steady progress across the board, Sir Konrad's continuing to race out in front, and with Roberto in Saudi Arabia for a week's work, Enrique (Eblasco/@7isprime) has been able to consolidate his third place (the last free copy!). Also, it's nice to see Dave (@thefrugalgamer) back, Dave was one of last year's winners :-) That's 3/5 of last year's winners back in the game!

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Sir Konrad/@pidaysock	29	Knight	Yes
Derek Hohls/@gamesbook	14	Squire	Yes
Eblasco/@7isprime	14	Squire	Yes
Roberto	8	Footman	No
@MTTJ_Patrick	5	Footman	No
@kimacus	4	Serf	No
Mal	3	Serf	No
@toddderscheid	2	Serf	No
@thefrugalgamer	2	Serf	No

I've four hours on trains on Wednesday morning for my quarterly hospital visit, so I hope to start making some progress again then.

TGWAG League Table 3

Another great week of Dragon Dance progress. I've played it another five times and I've had a report from Konrad who has played it three times as well. Early indications are now hinting that the dragon is possibly a little overpowered in version one of the rules.

Talking about the rules, I've been very surprised at how stable this first version has been. Usually my first version of any game is dreadful, but this one not so much. So I've been struggling to think of how to improve it. Initially the only change I was thinking of making was to make a tie count as a knight win (the dragon's dead after all) and maybe reducing the dragon's hit points a bit. But Konrad's very detailed feedback gave me a couple of ideas and then I had a couple more from Dave's feedback after our end of Games Night game on Thursday. On the train on Friday I ended up making fairly large changes, so when that version becomes available it'll be interesting to see whether it's more interesting/fun and how badly I've broken the balance!

In terms of TGWAG there's been steady progress across the board, but Konrad's printing out, pimping, playing three times at the expense of his own NaGa DeMon game and then very detailed feedback with some cracking ideas has enabled him to race away at the front. Enrique (Eblasco/@7isprime) has also managed to nudge Roberto (during his trip to Saudi) into fourth place, currently out of the running for a free copy of the game.

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Sir Konrad/@pidaysock	23	Knight	Yes
Derek Hohls/@gamesbook	11	Squire	Yes
Eblasco/@7isprime	9	Footman	Yes
Roberto	8	Footman	No
@kimacus	3	Serf	No
Mal	3	Serf	No
@MTTJ_Patrick	3	Serf	No
@toddderscheid	2	Serf	No

Congratulations to Sir Konrad of Deutschland on his well deserved knighthood!

NaGa DeMon 5: Since Records Began

A vital part of designing any game is recording ideas, what works and what doesn't and outcomes.

In recent months I've been using Evernote on my phone, iPad and Laptop to record ideas about games along with feedback and information about game outcomes. This year I've also been using it to keep track of everyone's PIP scores (it's much better at that than the way I was using Excel last year).

I generally expect a new game to go through its first few versions very quickly, since the first time you try it there's usually something dreadfully broken that you'd not even contemplated that needs immediate attention - without fixing it the game is so broken that it's not even playable.

With that in mind my first prototype was a mixture of pen and pencil scribbles on plain white card, I only used pen for the things I was convinced wouldn't change (the names of the characters: St. George and Dragon), with everything else drawn lightly in pencil ready for frequent erasing and amending.

As it turns out after a week of playing I've not changed anything (except the name of one of the characters: now the more generic Knight). So it's time for a component upgrade: I've printed my own P&P files ready for testing this week:

A disadvantage of my assumption of horrible brokenness is that I've not been recording the outcomes of the games properly. When the components are changing on a daily basis, recording the results of the games in minute detail is a waste of time. You know there's something obviously broken, so knowing that the knight wins 53.3% of games with on average 3.45 life left isn't going to help. Expecting the worse I've made a mental note of who won (me!) and who they were playing (a fairly even mix of knight and dragon) but I've not been recording the final scores needed for tweaking to try to make the game as balanced as possible between the asymmetric knight and dragon. Seeing as I've now played five games and I've just made a new version with no substantive changes I can now start tracking the scores to the point where I accumulate enough data to be meaningful. I've also tried to work backwards and remember the scores from the five games I've already got under my belt.

Hopefully I'll soon have some more data from TGWAG competitors to add to that which I've collected and mis-remembered myself...

TGWAG: League Table 2

It's been a good week, not only have I played Codename: Dragon five times already (without a loss!), but I've also managed to get a first stab at the rules and an initial print and play version up for playtesting. And all this despite having the house turned upside this week due to the double-glazing being done. The double-glazing will be finished by the middle of next week, so things should settle down a bit then I hope.

It's also been a good week for TGWAG. In addition to last week's four competitors (all of whom have gained points this week) we have four new competitors too.

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Konrad/@pidaysock	12	Squire	Yes
Derek Hohls/@gamesbook	8	Footman	Yes
Roberto	6	Footman	Yes
Eblasco/@7isprime	4	Serf	No
@kimacus	3	Serf	No
@toddderscheid	1	Serf	No
Mal	2	Serf	No
@MTTJ_Patrick	2	Serf	No

So we have a few people raised from serfdom, and Konrad has even been made a squire! Heady heights. The big question is: will anyone get knighted next week?

NaGa DeMon 2: Codename: Dragon - Components

I've said before that you shouldn't invest too heavily in the components of your early prototypes since the game is likely to change beyond recognition and those components that you splashed out on or invested hundreds of hours of artwork in are liable to be replaced by something else in very short order.

NaGa DeMon is a slight exception to that rule for me, since at the end of the month, I've committed to sending prototypes to the three most helpful competitors in TGWAG. So I need to make my copy plus three more. Since those three competitors will (hopefully!) invested their valuable time and effort in helping me, the least I can do to show my appreciation is to give them a signed, limited edition prototype that doesn't totally suck. So I want to splash out a little and make the prize a neat little package. So I need some components. Times four.

As I mentioned on Friday, I'm expecting the game to feature cards (which I'm a dab hand at, if I do say so myself), dice and counters. Some dice for St. George and some for the dragon, plus some counters for St. George and some for the dragon.

When I think dragons I think big scaly red beasts guarding a vast hoard of gold (thanks J.R.R. Tolkien!) and when I think St. George I think white and red - the colours of the flag of St. George, the national flag of England which is incorporated into the Union Jack of Great Britain.

So, to separate the dice between players, I've gone for white dice for St. George and red ones for the dragon (the dragon is a bit wordy, he needs a name. Bonus PIPs for the best suggested name in the comments). I went to Travelling Man after work on Friday to get the dice and they had some nice Chessex ones in two different sizes. Since I need more white than red (I think!), I've gone for smaller white ones (bonus: St. George is smaller than the dragon) and nice marbled red and gold ones for the dragon.

For life counters, I recently bought some red wooden hearts from BoardGameExtras.co.uk for pimping my copy of Love Letter. Thinking ahead I bought a load more for Codename: Dragon purposes. That's St. George sorted, and it fits well since lots of computer games use hearts as the iconography for lives. Which just leaves the dragon. Dragon = hoard of gold. As it happens I've a load of yellow wooden disks left over from the limited edition of It's Alive I published back in 2008. I've hung onto them knowing they'd come in handy sooner or later. Their time has come!

Which give me this:

TGWAG League Table 1

We're only two days into NaGa DeMon and already The Game Within A Game is off to a good start. We've got four competitors so far competing for three signed and numbered limited edition copies of the NaGa DeMon version of Codename: Dragon.

Konrad and Derek both took part (and won a copy) last year, with Roberto and Todd new participants for 2014.

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Konrad/@pidaysock	4	Serf	Yes
Derek Hohls	3	Serf	Yes
Roberto	2	Serf	Yes
@toddderscheid	1	Serf	No

My father-in-law is visiting at the moment, but I've managed to bag up the components I think I need for my first copy, and last night I made some basic cards for it too. The cards are hand-scribbled with pencil to enable easy editing when the first version inevitably turns out to be horribly unplayable. I'm going to try to get some games in at lunchtime this week, since I'm pretty sure I can't make Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday after all - it'll be cleaning up after the first day of double-glazing instead.

NaGa DeMon 2014: TGWAG

Last year I took part in (inter-)National Games Design Month (or NaGa DeMon for short): during the month of November you are challenged to design a game. It's extremely unlikely that you'll be able to make a decent quality game in only a month, but like its fiction counterpart NaNo WriMo, the idea is to get a first draft completed. Last year I worked on Zombology, a drafting card game that has ended up being my main focus in the months since I 'finished' it during last November.

I was very keen initially to take part again this year and then umm-ed and ahh-ed a bit as various impediments appeared in my calendar in November, but some of them have disappeared and I've finally come down off the fence on the side of taking part. Yay!

My focus this year will be Codename: Dragon - a 2-player card game about St. George and the Dragon. It'll be a game of bluff and simultaneous action selection with dice and only 18 cards (so fitting with the Good Little Games ethos). Which makes it easy to test (I only need one playtester) and easier for others to print and play. I'll be posting the rules here along with print-and-play files as I make them and would really appreciate your help in testing and refining the game.

As with last year I'm going to run the game within the game (TGWAG) to encourage you, my internet audience to take part and help me make progress in the very short timespan available to me. During TGWAG I award Pointless Internet Points™ to people who help out and at the end of the month the three (down from five last year) people with the highest PIP totals will get a free copy of the NaGa DeMon version of Codename: Dragon, signed and numbered by my good self. Though probably not until January, if last year is anything to go by!

I'll be awarding PIPs to people who help me out by promoting the game or the TGWAG competition (e.g. retweeting my tweets, Google+ shares, etc.) or proofreading the rules that I post here, or giving me ideas or suggestions for new rules or mechanics or, most importantly of all, for printing out the print and play files and actually playtesting the game for me and providing feedback on what you liked and didn't like.

No PIP competition would be complete without Pointless Internet Achievement Levels (PIALs), so here's this years goals:

1 PIP: Serf
5 PIPs: Footman/Footwoman
10 PIPs: Squire
20 PIPs: Knight Errant
30 PIPs: Knight Sergeant
40 PIPs: Knight Commander
50 PIPs: Patron Saint

Interested? Sign up in the comments below and start your arduous journey to Patron Saint.

In other news, this week was mostly testing and releasing an update of my BGG Last Plays app. It now supports loading over close/restart, landscape support and sideways scrolling of the game name for games with longer names. Plus a couple of minor UI tweaks and fixing a crash found four times by various users.

In yet further news, my latest Windows Phone app (a super secret, unlicensed board game app that I've been developing as a training exercise and for my own amusement) has been approved by the physical game's publisher. So I now need to get it finished off so that I can add it to the store. It's approved for non-commercial use, so like my other apps it'll be free and ad-free.

Holding Forth

It's been a busy week with, thankfully, a boat load of gaming. During the week I got to playtest my secret game app with some friends, which gave me some great new ideas for improving the UI (plus revealed a bunch of bugs I'd not found by myself). Thursday lunchtime we played a couple of 3-player games of Zombology, and despite my fear that the new version (with the ability to hold over a card each round) was too easy we managed to lose both, so the 3-player win/loss ratio for this version stands at 1/2 which to my mind is about right! I still need to make some changes, but maybe not as sweeping ones as I first thought.

My November has also resolved itself. I had been hoping to do NaGa DeMon again, but with the major work being done on our house slipping back into November and my parents planning to visit for a week during November (both during the week of Newcastle Playtest, effectively ruling that out) it was looking like I'd really struggle to make enough progress to make it achievable. My parents have now delayed their visit to the start of December, so I think NaGa DeMon is go again :-) I've an idea for a game I'd like to try to make (Codename: Dragon that I mentioned at the end of last year), and I'll run TGWAG again.

To top the week off in style we drove down south to spend the weekend with my mate Tim and his family. Tim and I go way back, so it's always good to catch up and spend some time playing with our families, plus Tim and I get to game late into the night (or at least what I call late, so gone 10!). This weekend was no different we played lots of games during the day with Tim's son (I was whooped at a surprising number of games by a six-year old - clearly I'm not quite as bright as I like to think!), and then in the evening we played a game Tim is designing, then Thunderstone and finally Tim and I played Firefly until just gone one am. It was a great weekend and Firefly came in around 2.5 hours with the two of us, despite Tim not having played before.

Tim and I spent most of the weekend talking game publishing. Tim's game is coming on really nicely and he's considering KickStarting it. By day he writes computer games for a living so he's got a great understanding about what makes a good game and he know loads of great artists. (As an aside RH Aidley who did the art for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra for me and also Ice Flow for Ludorum Games is someone I met through Tim). Tim wanted to ask loads of questions about the process of publishing a game, so I got to hold forth, wittering on about my experiences with Reiver Games and what little I know about KickStarter. I wish Tim all the best with his game (and now have a copy for playtesting :-) ), but I'm still not sure if I'd want to go back into publishing if ever I consider one of my designs ready for the world. Still, it reminds me that I know a load of contacts and still have a bunch of knowledge about the process and finances of running a game company. I hope I can use that knowledge to help Tim out.

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. :)

TGWAG: Final Scores!

The Game Within A Game (TGWAG for short) is now over, huge thanks to everyone who took part - your feedback was really useful. In the last week there were a couple of new entrants (GamesBook and Mal) and a huge rush for the finish line from @pidaysock, the only person who has actually given me feedback from games they've played. Congratulations to @pidaysock (the overall TGWAG winner) and Tiffany Ralph, Frugal Dave, Derek Hohls and boardsandbees - free copies are yours!

I'm now in negotiations with an artist about getting some exclusive artwork done for the five TGWAG freebie winners. I'll be in touch with you all for a postal address. What with Christmas and all, and having to get the art done I think it'll be the New Year before the freebie copies are shipping.

Playtester	PIP Score	Level	Free Copy?
@pidaysock	17	MSc	Yes!
Tiffany Ralph	15	MSc	Yes!
+Derek Hohls / GamesBook	11	MSc	Yes!
Frugal Dave	8	BSc	Yes!
boardsandbees	6	BSc	Yes!
@spdesigntwit	5	BSc	No :(
Mal	2	Intern	No :(

Amended to fold GamesBook's score into Derek Hohls's score!