Last week was fairly busy, but I did manage to make it along to Newcastle Playtest after missing March (and possibly February?). It was a great night with a good turn out and plenty of games to try out. I ended up just playing my own games: initially a five player game of Zombology and then a three player game of Codename: Vacuum with Olly and Alex.
It was the first of two games of Zombology that week (we also had a three player game at the end of Games Night on Thursday) so I'm still slowly collecting the data I need to feel comfortable that the win/loss ratio is more or less where I want it in the new version and that it's well balanced across different numbers of players. I'm still considering a second hand-made run, though realistically this will have to wait until after the arrival of Daughter The Second at the end of May.
Vacuum also went well. I tried out the fixed number of rounds for the first time and as a result it went a big longer - the three player game with two first timers probably lasted a couple of hours including rules explanation. It worked as expected, Olly choose an end game condition fairly early in round 11 which allowed Alex and I to both adjust our strategies mid-game. In the end all three of us scored within one point of the maximum in that category, so it didn't contribute meaningfully to the scores. I chose in round 14, but that was still early enough for the others to catch up with my weak showing in that category. I'm still messing around with the end game and the scoring. I've had another idea over the weekend - allow each player to choose a (possibly non-unique) scoring condition and then score those conditions (possibly multiple times) at the end of the game. Maybe even give the person who chooses it a small bonus too (since they are giving up the chance to score more points in that category at the point when they choose it).
This week I'm unlikely to get much done - today I'm off to Manchester for work again and then Thursday we head down to Bristol for a big family get together. I'm all set when we get back though, I've bought replacement inks for the broken cartridge which stopped me printing a new version of Vacuum in time for Playtest last week (which in hindsight was just as well as I now have more changes to incorporate).
I've a load of work to do on the train this morning and probably this evening, but I'm hoping to tweak the Vacuum board before I get home.
Showing posts with label Vacuum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vacuum. Show all posts
Monday, April 10
Monday, April 3
Lots of Gaming!
It's been a fairly busy week again, with loads of gaming, if not much design and playtesting. March has been my joint best month (with last May when I went Beer and Pretzels with Terry) since I was stuck at home on my own during my radioactive period in January 2014. And this week contributed a lot to that - we played Taluva a couple of times at lunchtime games club, then another six games at Games Night on Thursday - when we also had our joint best attendance. We also had a game of Zombology. It was the first recorded game with six players, so now I've got at least one data point for each number of players. In a perfect world I'd have tens or hundreds of plays for each number of players, currently I have between one and eight plays per number of players. Three and six are least represented and four is most. Clearly I still need a lot more plays.
Finally, on Friday, a few of us ended up spending six hours on trains on the way to meetings in Manchester. We managed another eight games on those trains on my iPad.
I also spent a little time one evening working on some improvements to the Codename: Vacuum cards that were required after the last couple of weeks' tests. I intended to get those changes printed out over the weekend and cut out ready for Newcastle Playtest tomorrow. Sadly, the replacement ink cartridge I needed for my printer was broken so I couldn't print it out, let alone cut it out. I'll just have to take the last version along with me. I've missed the last couple of Playtests and obviously I'm going to struggle to make it along during the summer after the birth of daughter number two. I'm really looking forward to getting along tomorrow.
Unfortunately, ahead of that I've got to have my other wisdom tooth removed tonight. The other one was taken out about a month ago, so I know what to expect. Tonight is going to be not much fun.
Finally, on Friday, a few of us ended up spending six hours on trains on the way to meetings in Manchester. We managed another eight games on those trains on my iPad.
I also spent a little time one evening working on some improvements to the Codename: Vacuum cards that were required after the last couple of weeks' tests. I intended to get those changes printed out over the weekend and cut out ready for Newcastle Playtest tomorrow. Sadly, the replacement ink cartridge I needed for my printer was broken so I couldn't print it out, let alone cut it out. I'll just have to take the last version along with me. I've missed the last couple of Playtests and obviously I'm going to struggle to make it along during the summer after the birth of daughter number two. I'm really looking forward to getting along tomorrow.
Unfortunately, ahead of that I've got to have my other wisdom tooth removed tonight. The other one was taken out about a month ago, so I know what to expect. Tonight is going to be not much fun.
Monday, March 27
All Good Things...
It's been a hectic and pretty stressful week at work, but once all the visitors left I managed to get another playtest of Codename: Vacuum in at the end of the week with Ian, who played it last week too.
We played exactly the same version (though with different decks) and the game came in under an hour including set-up, rules refresher and explanation of the new decks. So far so good. The game went well, we got into space, there was a couple of clear strategies being followed and at the end we both scored well. For the second time Ian beat me at my own game (need to change the rules again! ;-p).
One of the things I like about Vacuum, and one of the core tenets of the game is the scoring. There are five core decks in the game that you play with every game (in addition to a few extra decks that change every game). Each of those core decks (Military, Exploration, Population, Trade and Knowledge) has a victory condition that will score each player 0-30 points depending on how well they've followed that strategy. The game ends at the end of the round that the second (with 2-3 players) or third (with 4-5 players) victory condition is selected. Selecting a victory condition is key to the game - you want to hone your deck so that it will score big in a couple of conditions (particularly a lot bigger than your opponents!) and then select the appropriate condition. Since only two or three get chosen, it's very important that you get your choice in, so there's a lot of pressure to quickly get to the point where you can afford to select a condition and then select it - thereby hastening the end of the game.
Selecting a condition uses some of the cards that gain you points in that condition, so each turn you choose whether to gain points in your chosen condition (and risk leaving it too late to select a condition and missing your chance) or selecting a condition (thereby hastening the end of the game before you can maximise your score in that condition). It's part of what I like about the game.
Unfortunately, I think the pressure is too strong, at the moment the fear of missing your chance to select means that you rush the game to an early end, before it really gets into full swing.
I'm considering making the game fixed length - 15 turns (Ian and I have played 12 and 10 in our last two games). Everything else stays the same, except now selecting a condition doesn't prematurely end the game. This will have two effects I expect: the game lasts slightly longer and the game end dynamic changes.
Now you're not rushing to end the game, but to choose the scoring. If you select early, you guarantee that your chosen scoring will happen, but you give your opponents more turns to respond - adapting their strategy to maximise points in that condition. Choosing late means that you might miss your chance, but you keep your opponents guessing and can wait until the endgame and pick the one that finally ends up favouring you the most.
It'll be interesting to give it a try and see how it works...
We played exactly the same version (though with different decks) and the game came in under an hour including set-up, rules refresher and explanation of the new decks. So far so good. The game went well, we got into space, there was a couple of clear strategies being followed and at the end we both scored well. For the second time Ian beat me at my own game (need to change the rules again! ;-p).
One of the things I like about Vacuum, and one of the core tenets of the game is the scoring. There are five core decks in the game that you play with every game (in addition to a few extra decks that change every game). Each of those core decks (Military, Exploration, Population, Trade and Knowledge) has a victory condition that will score each player 0-30 points depending on how well they've followed that strategy. The game ends at the end of the round that the second (with 2-3 players) or third (with 4-5 players) victory condition is selected. Selecting a victory condition is key to the game - you want to hone your deck so that it will score big in a couple of conditions (particularly a lot bigger than your opponents!) and then select the appropriate condition. Since only two or three get chosen, it's very important that you get your choice in, so there's a lot of pressure to quickly get to the point where you can afford to select a condition and then select it - thereby hastening the end of the game.
Selecting a condition uses some of the cards that gain you points in that condition, so each turn you choose whether to gain points in your chosen condition (and risk leaving it too late to select a condition and missing your chance) or selecting a condition (thereby hastening the end of the game before you can maximise your score in that condition). It's part of what I like about the game.
Unfortunately, I think the pressure is too strong, at the moment the fear of missing your chance to select means that you rush the game to an early end, before it really gets into full swing.
I'm considering making the game fixed length - 15 turns (Ian and I have played 12 and 10 in our last two games). Everything else stays the same, except now selecting a condition doesn't prematurely end the game. This will have two effects I expect: the game lasts slightly longer and the game end dynamic changes.
Now you're not rushing to end the game, but to choose the scoring. If you select early, you guarantee that your chosen scoring will happen, but you give your opponents more turns to respond - adapting their strategy to maximise points in that condition. Choosing late means that you might miss your chance, but you keep your opponents guessing and can wait until the endgame and pick the one that finally ends up favouring you the most.
It'll be interesting to give it a try and see how it works...
Monday, March 20
It's All Go!
Another busy week. This time it's been Codename: Vacuum, Zombology and crazy ideas.
I didn't have any travel this week, so I managed to get a lunchtime playtest in with Ian on the new version of Vacuum. I'd made a bunch of changes since the fairly broken play at Games Night a couple of weeks ago, and we tried them out over lunch. I was pretty sure we could get a 2-player game done in under an hour, so I did a quick canvas and Ian signed up. He'd not played it before, so we had a 20 minute setup and rules explanation followed by a 58 minute game. Considering that was Ian's first play I was pretty happy with it coming in under an hour. He picked it up pretty well and ended up beating me 30-18 (time to change the rules!). The improvements I'd made last week fixed most of the problems, though there were a few graphic design/wording issues that I spotted during play. I'm happy to play that version again without changing it though, so a big step up on last time.
Games Night was pretty epic, with the first visitation of Mal so far this year and an amazing six different games played. It was a great night, and we finished up with a Zombology (which we'd not played for a while) and I was telling them about the recent pre-orders I'd taken and how I was considering another print run - at which point I took another pre-order.
I'm really torn about it. I think Zombology is the best game I've designed, and with its silly theme (mad 'scientist' hippies trying to cure the Zombie Apocalypse), wide range of players (3-8) and short play time (10 minutes) it's also my most accessible game. I'd love to see it get a wider audience and the pre-order rate for a second edition (despite the fact I'm not yet making one) has been pretty high the few times I've introduced it to people recently.
I could try pimping it to publishers, but it turns out that I really enjoy the graphic design and hand-crafting of games, so I'd rather self-publish again.
The big stumbling block is time. I travel quite a lot for work, have a young family and I'm two months away from becoming a dad for the second time. I know from last time what a wreck that leaves you, and how little free time you have when you've a new baby and are so hideously sleep deprived that 7:30pm sounds like a reasonable bed time.
What to do?
I didn't have any travel this week, so I managed to get a lunchtime playtest in with Ian on the new version of Vacuum. I'd made a bunch of changes since the fairly broken play at Games Night a couple of weeks ago, and we tried them out over lunch. I was pretty sure we could get a 2-player game done in under an hour, so I did a quick canvas and Ian signed up. He'd not played it before, so we had a 20 minute setup and rules explanation followed by a 58 minute game. Considering that was Ian's first play I was pretty happy with it coming in under an hour. He picked it up pretty well and ended up beating me 30-18 (time to change the rules!). The improvements I'd made last week fixed most of the problems, though there were a few graphic design/wording issues that I spotted during play. I'm happy to play that version again without changing it though, so a big step up on last time.
Games Night was pretty epic, with the first visitation of Mal so far this year and an amazing six different games played. It was a great night, and we finished up with a Zombology (which we'd not played for a while) and I was telling them about the recent pre-orders I'd taken and how I was considering another print run - at which point I took another pre-order.
I'm really torn about it. I think Zombology is the best game I've designed, and with its silly theme (mad 'scientist' hippies trying to cure the Zombie Apocalypse), wide range of players (3-8) and short play time (10 minutes) it's also my most accessible game. I'd love to see it get a wider audience and the pre-order rate for a second edition (despite the fact I'm not yet making one) has been pretty high the few times I've introduced it to people recently.
I could try pimping it to publishers, but it turns out that I really enjoy the graphic design and hand-crafting of games, so I'd rather self-publish again.
The big stumbling block is time. I travel quite a lot for work, have a young family and I'm two months away from becoming a dad for the second time. I know from last time what a wreck that leaves you, and how little free time you have when you've a new baby and are so hideously sleep deprived that 7:30pm sounds like a reasonable bed time.
What to do?
Monday, March 13
Ding, Ding, Round 2!
After testing the new version of Codename:Vacuum a couple of weeks ago, I clearly needed to make a raft of minor changes. The game was so broken that the rules were evolving as we played (always a bad sign!), but I was generally pretty happy with the new version (once fixed!) compared to the last version of 2015.
My travels continued last week, with a trip to Manchester on Monday after work that concluded on Wednesday night, and despite being incredibly busy (I was working late into the night Monday and Tuesday), I did manage to get make some progress on Vacuum. Firstly finishing off the board on the train on Monday night and then printing and cutting out a new version on Thursday morning (which I had off work to go to the doctor). I finished the final cutting out on Saturday night - after the mental week and a few bad nights' sleep I was too knackered to make it to Newcastle Gamers unfortunately.
What I need to do now is try out the new version (and buy some more ink!), to see if the changes I've made improve things. I'd rather not play on Games Night on Thursday as the guys played it last time and they deserve to play something that works. That leaves a lunchtime playtest session or an additional evening for a playtest (either with Games Night mates or Newcastle Playtest chums). Next week is pretty busy (we've a big company meeting with a couple of evenings out) so it's this week, or not for several. I'll have to see what I can fit in.
Here's a sneak preview of the new board:
Monday, March 6
Gaming Extravaganza
It's been a great week for my gaming. Monday went exactly to plan with me printing and cutting out all 350 cards for new Codename:Vacuum, and hand-scrawling a quick board too - for the first time in two years I had a Vacuum prototype. Admittedly, Monday ended slightly worse with my dentist extracting a wisdom tooth that's left me eating very gingerly all week!
I got a lunchtime gaming session in at work on Wednesday (Coup) and then at Games Night on Thursday we played Vacuum! The lads had all played Vacuum before many years ago, so it wasn't complete fresh to them, but they'd all forgotten how to play.
It was, as I expected, fairly broken - we hardly got off Earth due to a poorly shuffled deck and a far too slow explore mechanism, so there was no colonisation of the Solar System or vast space battles. There were a couple of other things that clearly didn't work as intended, so the rules were evolving as we played. In a perfect world the game would take around 15-20 mins per player once you know it, so I was reasonably pleased with just under 2.5 hours (including set-up and rules explanation) for a four player game where 3/4 of us were effectively beginners. Hopefully that will significantly shorten with experience (and rules that aren't in flux during the game and cards which accurately describe what they do!).
I was frantically scribbling notes during the game, so that on Friday night I could spend the 3.5 hours of train journeys to Bedford updating the cards and working on an improved board. Of course I now need to print and cut out another version!
Saturday I was in Bedford seeing Terry, Andrew and Graham who I used to game with weekly when I lived there during 2008-11, the latter half of my Reiver Games days. There were eight of us in total, so we started off with a couple of games of Zombology (five of the eight owned a copy), playtesting the new rules with large groups. It went well, with a couple of late wins and I ended up taking a couple more pre-orders from David and Richard, both of whom have bought a Reiver Game in the past I think. That's now five pre-orders from seven possible customers in the last month or so. That kind of conversion rate is filling me with a greater optimism than I previously had, if I can get to thirty-ish I may well push the button and make another hand-made run of a hundred or so. The clock is ticking though, The Wife and I are expecting a little sister for The Daughter at the end of May, so the amount of time I'll have for hand-crafting games in the evening will be severely limited by extra parenting duties and sleep deprivation!
After Zombology, we played another eight games, of which four were new to me, so it was a great day's gaming as well as a great chance to catch up with friends I see far too infrequently.
Saturday evening was also spent on trains (and replacement bus services) so I got a chance to do more work on the Vacuum board. I think the board brings a new element to the game that focuses you more on the exploration and conquest side of the 4X game, so I think that part is working as intended, what I need to do now is print out another version and see if my changes fix the issues we found. Thursday's playtesters are at least interested to play again!
I got a lunchtime gaming session in at work on Wednesday (Coup) and then at Games Night on Thursday we played Vacuum! The lads had all played Vacuum before many years ago, so it wasn't complete fresh to them, but they'd all forgotten how to play.
It was, as I expected, fairly broken - we hardly got off Earth due to a poorly shuffled deck and a far too slow explore mechanism, so there was no colonisation of the Solar System or vast space battles. There were a couple of other things that clearly didn't work as intended, so the rules were evolving as we played. In a perfect world the game would take around 15-20 mins per player once you know it, so I was reasonably pleased with just under 2.5 hours (including set-up and rules explanation) for a four player game where 3/4 of us were effectively beginners. Hopefully that will significantly shorten with experience (and rules that aren't in flux during the game and cards which accurately describe what they do!).
I was frantically scribbling notes during the game, so that on Friday night I could spend the 3.5 hours of train journeys to Bedford updating the cards and working on an improved board. Of course I now need to print and cut out another version!
Saturday I was in Bedford seeing Terry, Andrew and Graham who I used to game with weekly when I lived there during 2008-11, the latter half of my Reiver Games days. There were eight of us in total, so we started off with a couple of games of Zombology (five of the eight owned a copy), playtesting the new rules with large groups. It went well, with a couple of late wins and I ended up taking a couple more pre-orders from David and Richard, both of whom have bought a Reiver Game in the past I think. That's now five pre-orders from seven possible customers in the last month or so. That kind of conversion rate is filling me with a greater optimism than I previously had, if I can get to thirty-ish I may well push the button and make another hand-made run of a hundred or so. The clock is ticking though, The Wife and I are expecting a little sister for The Daughter at the end of May, so the amount of time I'll have for hand-crafting games in the evening will be severely limited by extra parenting duties and sleep deprivation!
After Zombology, we played another eight games, of which four were new to me, so it was a great day's gaming as well as a great chance to catch up with friends I see far too infrequently.
Saturday evening was also spent on trains (and replacement bus services) so I got a chance to do more work on the Vacuum board. I think the board brings a new element to the game that focuses you more on the exploration and conquest side of the 4X game, so I think that part is working as intended, what I need to do now is print out another version and see if my changes fix the issues we found. Thursday's playtesters are at least interested to play again!
Monday, February 27
Back in Boston: Naked but Productive
Oh, so not naked exactly, but unclothed. I spent last week in Boston, MA for work. I lived in Boston for the winter of 2000/01 and hadn't been back since. Despite many trips through Boston (my employer's head office is about 40 miles outside Boston), I'd not set foot in Boston since we lived there. So I was quite excited to be going to a meeting in the Boston harbour, a short water taxi ride away from old haunts.
The reality was a little different from what I expected. My luggage turned up 84 hours after I did (and only 11 hours before I left), so while I did get to go into Boston and Cambridge, the majority of that time was spent shopping for clothes.
On the other hand, as it often the case when I travel to the US, I was awake early most mornings, so I had a decent chunk of time each day to work on Codename: Vacuum.
I finished off the cards and got them all laid out ready to print today (I've a day off to recover from my travels). I'm hoping to have a playable prototype by the end of today. I'm sure it'll need a big chunk of improvement after I've tested it once or twice, but I've got a good feeling about this version at the moment.
Exciting times!
In other news, I'm off to Bedford this weekend to spend Saturday gaming with Terry, Andrew, Graham, Johan and a bunch of other gaming chums. I used to play weekly with Terry, Andrew and Graham and now see them once a year if I'm lucky - so it'll be a great chance to catch up.
In other news, I'm off to Bedford this weekend to spend Saturday gaming with Terry, Andrew, Graham, Johan and a bunch of other gaming chums. I used to play weekly with Terry, Andrew and Graham and now see them once a year if I'm lucky - so it'll be a great chance to catch up.
Monday, February 20
Concrete Progress
I'm off to Boston this week for work (posting this from the airport!) so it's been a busy few days, but I've not let that get in the way of progress. Last week I was mostly focused on implementing some of the things recommended by my German language app beta testers and adding a bit more vocabulary in preparation for sharing it with another private beta tester. I'm hoping to have that ready to go not long after I get back from Boston.
The big news is on the Codename: Vacuum front. I placed an order for some wooden pieces from Spielmaterial.de which arrived on Friday (in my office, while I was working from home :-( ), and during my home day lunch break I made a new box for it (I gave mine to Konrad in Berlin when I was over there nearly two years ago). On Saturday I popped over to the office during a trip out and collected the Spielmaterial order and then bagged and stowed that in the box.
I've done most of the cards for the next version, I've just got the event cards left to do. Fortunately, I've got the jet lag hours of 3-6am every day this week to finish off the cards and get everything ready for printing.
I get back Saturday lunchtime, and then I've booked Monday off work to help recover from my jet lag. I can use that day to print out the cards, player mats and boards and then cut all the cards out. For the first time since I gave my copy to Konrad I'll have a copy of Vacuum ready to playtest again. And it will need testing - I've made some sweeping changes, which will likely need a decent chunk of fixing before they are ready for sharing with others.
I'll also try to get a blog post done in the jet lag hours, spelling out how the game works in a bit more detail.
The big news is on the Codename: Vacuum front. I placed an order for some wooden pieces from Spielmaterial.de which arrived on Friday (in my office, while I was working from home :-( ), and during my home day lunch break I made a new box for it (I gave mine to Konrad in Berlin when I was over there nearly two years ago). On Saturday I popped over to the office during a trip out and collected the Spielmaterial order and then bagged and stowed that in the box.
I've done most of the cards for the next version, I've just got the event cards left to do. Fortunately, I've got the jet lag hours of 3-6am every day this week to finish off the cards and get everything ready for printing.
I get back Saturday lunchtime, and then I've booked Monday off work to help recover from my jet lag. I can use that day to print out the cards, player mats and boards and then cut all the cards out. For the first time since I gave my copy to Konrad I'll have a copy of Vacuum ready to playtest again. And it will need testing - I've made some sweeping changes, which will likely need a decent chunk of fixing before they are ready for sharing with others.
I'll also try to get a blog post done in the jet lag hours, spelling out how the game works in a bit more detail.
Monday, February 13
Codename:Vacuum - The Premise
I started work on Codename: Vacuum back in November 2011. I wanted to make a fairly quick sci-fi card game - something like Race for the Galaxy but with more direct interaction (don't talk to me about the conflict rules in the Rebel vs. Imperium and The Brink of War expansions - or you're dead to me).
The Wife and I talked about the popularity of deck-builders (we liked Thunderstone for the theme - Dominion not so much) and the speed of Race. And a sci-fi deck builder started talking shape in my head. I bought and tried a couple of the competition (Eminent Domain and Core Worlds, neither of which stayed in my collection for long).
At some point, to keep things simple and different, I decided to set it in our Solar System and then the crazy idea of a Steampunk sci-fi deck builder popped into my head. What if you were playing a sci-fi game set in our solar system over two hundred years where humanity expanded off Earth and filled the solar system with people. But not quite our solar system, the solar system of Jules Verne, HG Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You start in 1898 with a world not unlike our own in 1900 - a world ruled by the British Empire, the German Empire, the Russians and the Qing Chinese. A world on the brink of World War One. Where 20,000 leagues under the Sea, The Lost World, Deepest Africa and the North and South poles are yet to be explored. A world where the discovery of cavorite allows man to leave the Earth at the turn of the 19th Century, not in its second half. Those intrepid explorers head off to a Moon that could be our dry, dusty moon, or HG Wells' inhabited one. Mars could be the frozen Red Planet, or Edgar Rice Burroughs one swarming with Martians. Is Venus a hellish hot-house? Or is it a balmy university world? Will the asteroid belt be full of untold wealth or ravening hordes of aliens hell-bent on the destruction of mankind?
The only way to find out is to go to those places and explore them. All the while you are trying to build a fleet to protect your population from each other and the ravening hordes. Build your wealth to support development and military, build your population and advance your knowledge.
The game has five different score tracks: military, exploration, population, trade and knowledge. In each game only two or three of those count towards your final score - the players choose which ones during the game. So you are trying to build points in your chosen tracks, ensure you are keeping an eye on your opponents so they don't crush you on their chosen tracks as well as fighting space battles and land wars against each other and the aliens as the game unfolds. Each time you play the locations will be different. In one game the Moon is like ours, in another full of vast mineral riches, next time it's swarming with aggressive aliens.
That's the premise. Early versions fulfilled a lot of that promise, but took a bit long. Hopefully this new version I'm working on will be a big step forward (once I've ironed out the inevitable kinks).
How does that sound?
The Wife and I talked about the popularity of deck-builders (we liked Thunderstone for the theme - Dominion not so much) and the speed of Race. And a sci-fi deck builder started talking shape in my head. I bought and tried a couple of the competition (Eminent Domain and Core Worlds, neither of which stayed in my collection for long).
At some point, to keep things simple and different, I decided to set it in our Solar System and then the crazy idea of a Steampunk sci-fi deck builder popped into my head. What if you were playing a sci-fi game set in our solar system over two hundred years where humanity expanded off Earth and filled the solar system with people. But not quite our solar system, the solar system of Jules Verne, HG Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You start in 1898 with a world not unlike our own in 1900 - a world ruled by the British Empire, the German Empire, the Russians and the Qing Chinese. A world on the brink of World War One. Where 20,000 leagues under the Sea, The Lost World, Deepest Africa and the North and South poles are yet to be explored. A world where the discovery of cavorite allows man to leave the Earth at the turn of the 19th Century, not in its second half. Those intrepid explorers head off to a Moon that could be our dry, dusty moon, or HG Wells' inhabited one. Mars could be the frozen Red Planet, or Edgar Rice Burroughs one swarming with Martians. Is Venus a hellish hot-house? Or is it a balmy university world? Will the asteroid belt be full of untold wealth or ravening hordes of aliens hell-bent on the destruction of mankind?
The only way to find out is to go to those places and explore them. All the while you are trying to build a fleet to protect your population from each other and the ravening hordes. Build your wealth to support development and military, build your population and advance your knowledge.
The game has five different score tracks: military, exploration, population, trade and knowledge. In each game only two or three of those count towards your final score - the players choose which ones during the game. So you are trying to build points in your chosen tracks, ensure you are keeping an eye on your opponents so they don't crush you on their chosen tracks as well as fighting space battles and land wars against each other and the aliens as the game unfolds. Each time you play the locations will be different. In one game the Moon is like ours, in another full of vast mineral riches, next time it's swarming with aggressive aliens.
That's the premise. Early versions fulfilled a lot of that promise, but took a bit long. Hopefully this new version I'm working on will be a big step forward (once I've ironed out the inevitable kinks).
How does that sound?
Monday, February 6
To The Internet!
Libraries are so old school.
With Zombology V2 all done except for the billions of playtests required, and my German language app awaiting beta testing feedback (it's taken me three attempts to get it my mate Mal), I've moved on, like a grown man with the attention span of a four year old, to Codename: Vacuum.
Over the last couple of months I've been considering coming back to Vacuum, and over the last week or so it's taken shape in my head. So much so that I was drafting cards towards the end of last week and designing a board in my head on the weekend. The weekend also involved quite a lot of research about country and continent populations in 1900 (it's set in a steampunk universe) and projections through to 2100 (it's a sci-fi game).
I originally wanted Vacuum to be a pure deck-builder (i.e. only cards) that played in about 45 minutes. I slowly weakened my resolve and some play mats and score tracking cubes crept in, but it was still pretty card-focused. The downside - with play mats, lots of card locations (that moved around!) and the decks spread out in the middle of the table it covered a lot of table top. A lot.
This time round I've relaxed my personal rules for what the game can contain in terms of components and I'm embracing a board (smallish), plastic ships (which I'm substituting wooden discs for at the moment) and a metric ton of wooden cubes (or 50,000,000 people as I like to think of them).
I've not made any bits for this version yet - I've not printed anything or tried anything out. When I do, it will inevitably be spectacularly broken, as all significant re-writes always are, but I've got a good feeling about this. The board for locations, the ship movement and conflict and the probes for exploration all work much more 'realistically'. The core mechanics (deck-building, direct conflict, multiple possible end game conditions of which only a few count) are all the same, but it just feels more right.
I'm off to Sheffield on Wednesday for a check up for my clinical trial. I'll use the four hours of train journeys to start knocking together the cards (with so many of them it's actually quicker to edit the pretty ones from the last version on the computer rather than scribble them all by hand).
I'm feeling pretty excited about Vacuum again after the two year break, maybe a fresh approach was what was needed...
With Zombology V2 all done except for the billions of playtests required, and my German language app awaiting beta testing feedback (it's taken me three attempts to get it my mate Mal), I've moved on, like a grown man with the attention span of a four year old, to Codename: Vacuum.
Over the last couple of months I've been considering coming back to Vacuum, and over the last week or so it's taken shape in my head. So much so that I was drafting cards towards the end of last week and designing a board in my head on the weekend. The weekend also involved quite a lot of research about country and continent populations in 1900 (it's set in a steampunk universe) and projections through to 2100 (it's a sci-fi game).
I originally wanted Vacuum to be a pure deck-builder (i.e. only cards) that played in about 45 minutes. I slowly weakened my resolve and some play mats and score tracking cubes crept in, but it was still pretty card-focused. The downside - with play mats, lots of card locations (that moved around!) and the decks spread out in the middle of the table it covered a lot of table top. A lot.
This time round I've relaxed my personal rules for what the game can contain in terms of components and I'm embracing a board (smallish), plastic ships (which I'm substituting wooden discs for at the moment) and a metric ton of wooden cubes (or 50,000,000 people as I like to think of them).
I've not made any bits for this version yet - I've not printed anything or tried anything out. When I do, it will inevitably be spectacularly broken, as all significant re-writes always are, but I've got a good feeling about this. The board for locations, the ship movement and conflict and the probes for exploration all work much more 'realistically'. The core mechanics (deck-building, direct conflict, multiple possible end game conditions of which only a few count) are all the same, but it just feels more right.
I'm off to Sheffield on Wednesday for a check up for my clinical trial. I'll use the four hours of train journeys to start knocking together the cards (with so many of them it's actually quicker to edit the pretty ones from the last version on the computer rather than scribble them all by hand).
I'm feeling pretty excited about Vacuum again after the two year break, maybe a fresh approach was what was needed...
Monday, January 30
Productive Couple of Weeks
It's been a productive couple of weeks since my last blog post. I've started playtesting in the office (still focusing on checking the balance of Zombology 2nd Edition at the moment), done a bunch of work on my German language app and made it to a second consecutive Newcastle Gamers!
The Zombology playtesting has been going fairly well. I'm recording the number of players, and which round we won in (or whether we all lost). Ideally, the distribution would look something like this:
Regardless of the number of players. To see how close the game actually is to this, I need to play it a lot with each number of players. The chart above is for 128 games! And there are six possible numbers of players (3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8). That's 768 games. Clearly, Zombology is going to outstay its welcome long before we've played it nearly 800 times. But I'd like to get as much data as possible. So far I only have this:
Which isn't looking too bad, but is clearly pretty sparse on the ground and very uneven between numbers of players. This could be because the game is very different with different numbers of players, or it could just be a sampling error due to the small number of games played. The solution? Play the crap out of it and hopefully get enough data to make a call.
Zombology hasn't been my main focus though, I've been trying to finally get my German language app (two years in the making!) finished off. I've got enough in there to gather some feedback and made it available in the store (last night!) for people in the private beta (you'll only be able to see it if I sent you the link). Hopefully I'll get some useful feedback and be able to make a better version available more widely in a month or two once I've made some improvements.
Finally, I made it to Newcastle Gamers again on Saturday, that's two consecutive ones for the first time in years. Last year I only made it once all year! It's been great to get along and play some of the games I play less frequently, and it also gives me another chance to playtest Zombology and get some feedback from other people.
I'm in Manchester today and tomorrow for work, I might be able to do some work on Codename: Vacuum in the hotel now that I've got the app off my plate...
If you have a Windows Phone and fancy having a look at the German language app or you want to playtest Zombology, please leave me a message in the comments.
Monday, January 16
Newcastle Gamers!
2017's strong start is continuing :-)
During the week I spent time on Codename: Vacuum, working out a new card mix and designing a new version in my head which will hopefully improve on some of the problems with the last version (from early 2015!). At the same time I was continuing to work on my German language Windows Phone app and got a five-star review for my BGG Last Plays app (now the new version is in the store). I think I'm close to the point where I can put out a beta version out for the German language app for feedback - I'm going to run a private beta first to see if I can work out some of the kinks. That's probably only a week or two away. I've been meaning to finish this one for a couple of years, so that's quite a big deal!
But that's not the best bit, on top of all that I made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in six months! Newcastle Gamers is on at least twice a month and yet last year for a variety of reasons I only made it along once, in July. When I turned up on Saturday it was the busiest I'd ever seen it and I had to wait a short while for a game. When a table finished they invited me to join them and then asked what I wanted to play. I was happy to play anything in the cupboard (except Fluxx!) or I could teach any of the games I'd brought along: Ave Caesar, Gipsy King, Hansa Teutonica and Zombology.
The group wanted to try Zombology, so we played a game and after that they felt like they understood it, and wanted to play again. After John sank our desperate attempt to save humanity from the ravening hordes we opted for a third game to try and win and then Deji from the adjacent table wanted to try it, so we played a fourth time (and finally won). It wasn't until they'd had enough and wanted to move on to something else that I told them I had designed the game. The last couple of times I've played with strangers I've tried this approach, it's not blind playtesting (since I'm teaching the rules) but it does give you more honest feedback during the games, since the players aren't afraid of hurting your feelings as the designer.
They were all surprised and impressed and were asking where to get it, at which point I had to say: 'It's only available print on demand in the US and shipping is pretty expensive', which kind of killed the enthusiasm a bit.
I did ask if any of them wanted to give me their email addresses in case I made another version and they were all very keen - so I now have a mailing list of potential Zombology pre-orders. Their enjoyment and excitement was also very encouraging. I'm considering another run again!
During the week I spent time on Codename: Vacuum, working out a new card mix and designing a new version in my head which will hopefully improve on some of the problems with the last version (from early 2015!). At the same time I was continuing to work on my German language Windows Phone app and got a five-star review for my BGG Last Plays app (now the new version is in the store). I think I'm close to the point where I can put out a beta version out for the German language app for feedback - I'm going to run a private beta first to see if I can work out some of the kinks. That's probably only a week or two away. I've been meaning to finish this one for a couple of years, so that's quite a big deal!
But that's not the best bit, on top of all that I made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in six months! Newcastle Gamers is on at least twice a month and yet last year for a variety of reasons I only made it along once, in July. When I turned up on Saturday it was the busiest I'd ever seen it and I had to wait a short while for a game. When a table finished they invited me to join them and then asked what I wanted to play. I was happy to play anything in the cupboard (except Fluxx!) or I could teach any of the games I'd brought along: Ave Caesar, Gipsy King, Hansa Teutonica and Zombology.
The group wanted to try Zombology, so we played a game and after that they felt like they understood it, and wanted to play again. After John sank our desperate attempt to save humanity from the ravening hordes we opted for a third game to try and win and then Deji from the adjacent table wanted to try it, so we played a fourth time (and finally won). It wasn't until they'd had enough and wanted to move on to something else that I told them I had designed the game. The last couple of times I've played with strangers I've tried this approach, it's not blind playtesting (since I'm teaching the rules) but it does give you more honest feedback during the games, since the players aren't afraid of hurting your feelings as the designer.
They were all surprised and impressed and were asking where to get it, at which point I had to say: 'It's only available print on demand in the US and shipping is pretty expensive', which kind of killed the enthusiasm a bit.
I did ask if any of them wanted to give me their email addresses in case I made another version and they were all very keen - so I now have a mailing list of potential Zombology pre-orders. Their enjoyment and excitement was also very encouraging. I'm considering another run again!
Monday, January 4
2016 Goals
We're four days into 2016, so it's about time I set myself some goals for the year. I've done it for the last three years and I'm doing the same again this year. As before, there are four categories: blogging, gaming, game design and app development.
Blogging
Since my page views tanked in May last year I've no idea what is an achievable page views goal any more, so I'm just not going to set myself one, instead just these two:
Not sure what to do for NaGa DeMon at this point, we'll see how I get on with the remaining games in my stable (Border Reivers Second Edition, Codename: Vacuum and Dragon Dance) before I commit to anything.
Gaming
For the last few years I've set myself the goal of playing at least one game for every day of the year (i.e. 366 in 2016). I usually nail this one (over 400 plays last year), but if I pull this off I'll reach 4,000 plays recorded in BGG (since August 2006), so well worth going for again.
Over the last couple of years I've also set more structured goals: play every game in my collection at least once in 2014 and have played all the games in my collection at least ten times by the end of 2015. I found this to be a real bind last year with it taking over the games played at Games Night to the exclusion of others' preferences so I'm not going to do anything like that this year. I'll still use my app to keep track of which games I've not played in 2016 and which ones I've not played ten times for honing my collection purposes, but it's not a goal and so I'll not be sucking the fun out of Games Night with it.
Instead, I'm going to aim to play 24 new to me games in 2016. That's a 50% increase on the 16 I managed last year. Because the vast majority of my gaming is either on my iPad or at my Games Night, we almost always play games I know. Time to broaden my horizons. Trips to visit gaming friends and Newcastle Gamers will also help with this I hope.
Game Design
Finish him! I need to finish off the Zombology hand-made run I started in November for NaGa DeMon and get the art up on Drive Thru Cards for the Print on Demand version. Let's say end of January for making the hand made run and end of Feb for the Print on Demand version. After that, get back into game design, either on one of the other games mentioned above or something new.
App Development
Finish him II: Revenge of the him! I've just finished the expanded Duolingo German track, so I need something new to get my teeth stuck into, and the app I have in development should be that thing. I meant to finish it last year, but didn't get round to it, so let's get it out the door in 2016.
That should be plenty to keep me out of trouble, let's see if I can actually finish them all this year!
Blogging
Since my page views tanked in May last year I've no idea what is an achievable page views goal any more, so I'm just not going to set myself one, instead just these two:
- Blog every Monday in 2016
- Do something for NaGa DeMon
Not sure what to do for NaGa DeMon at this point, we'll see how I get on with the remaining games in my stable (Border Reivers Second Edition, Codename: Vacuum and Dragon Dance) before I commit to anything.
Gaming
For the last few years I've set myself the goal of playing at least one game for every day of the year (i.e. 366 in 2016). I usually nail this one (over 400 plays last year), but if I pull this off I'll reach 4,000 plays recorded in BGG (since August 2006), so well worth going for again.
Over the last couple of years I've also set more structured goals: play every game in my collection at least once in 2014 and have played all the games in my collection at least ten times by the end of 2015. I found this to be a real bind last year with it taking over the games played at Games Night to the exclusion of others' preferences so I'm not going to do anything like that this year. I'll still use my app to keep track of which games I've not played in 2016 and which ones I've not played ten times for honing my collection purposes, but it's not a goal and so I'll not be sucking the fun out of Games Night with it.
Instead, I'm going to aim to play 24 new to me games in 2016. That's a 50% increase on the 16 I managed last year. Because the vast majority of my gaming is either on my iPad or at my Games Night, we almost always play games I know. Time to broaden my horizons. Trips to visit gaming friends and Newcastle Gamers will also help with this I hope.
Game Design
Finish him! I need to finish off the Zombology hand-made run I started in November for NaGa DeMon and get the art up on Drive Thru Cards for the Print on Demand version. Let's say end of January for making the hand made run and end of Feb for the Print on Demand version. After that, get back into game design, either on one of the other games mentioned above or something new.
App Development
Finish him II: Revenge of the him! I've just finished the expanded Duolingo German track, so I need something new to get my teeth stuck into, and the app I have in development should be that thing. I meant to finish it last year, but didn't get round to it, so let's get it out the door in 2016.
That should be plenty to keep me out of trouble, let's see if I can actually finish them all this year!
Monday, March 30
Like A Phoenix From The Ashes
I've spent half of this week in Germany for work, on a flying visit which left me with little time to see anything of Berlin. I did however get to see Konrad, one of my core playtesters and a friend who's supported me since the earliest Reiver Games days, who just happens to live in Berlin. Convenient.
I knew that Konrad was interested in Codename: Vacuum, and I'd promised him a copy of it after he was so helpful during my NaGa DeMon 2013 competition. It wasn't quite ready to send then, so I tweaked it a little and then got completely distracted by Zombology and later Dragon Dance.
It's been over a year since I'd played Vacuum, and until recently I hadn't even really thought about it at all either. About a month or two ago I had some ideas to streamline some of the clunkier bits and simplify a few things (I was also intending to complicate some others!). I started work on those changes on a recent train journey, but then I've run out of time to finish them off.
Seeing as Vacuum comes in a box the size of Race for the Galaxy, shipping it to Germany wouldn't be cheap, so it made sense to take Konrad a copy while I was over. Konrad kindly invited me to his flat one evening and offered to cook me dinner, so we had a plan.
Like all the best-laid ones, it all went to pot. I had little time before the trip to finish off making the changes I had in mind for Vacuum (and what little time I did have I spent programming my new German language app), so I didn't have a finished copy to take with me. Instead I crammed my personal copy (with the cards from Feb 2014 and the rules from August 2013!) in my suitcase, and told Konrad I'd leave it with him and send him updated cards when I'd finally got around to finishing them.
We had a great evening, a lovely meal followed by a game (and great discussion) of Vacuum and then a couple of games of Alchemy, one of Konrad's designs, which I really enjoyed. Konrad was even kind enough to give me a copy of that (which thanks to a smaller box than Vacuum meant that I had room in my suitcase for a little souvenir for The Wife and The Daughter). The game of Vacuum was a little embarrassing (it had been so long since I'd last played that I'd forgotten a number of rules until halfway through the game), but really useful, refreshing my memory of what works and what doesn't. Afterwards we had a lengthy chat about what Konrad liked and didn't like and my ideas for the next version, which Konrad's input has already simplified further.
A great trip all in all, and it's good to get back into Vacuum, the game that started my second wind of games design, post Reiver Games debacle.
I knew that Konrad was interested in Codename: Vacuum, and I'd promised him a copy of it after he was so helpful during my NaGa DeMon 2013 competition. It wasn't quite ready to send then, so I tweaked it a little and then got completely distracted by Zombology and later Dragon Dance.
It's been over a year since I'd played Vacuum, and until recently I hadn't even really thought about it at all either. About a month or two ago I had some ideas to streamline some of the clunkier bits and simplify a few things (I was also intending to complicate some others!). I started work on those changes on a recent train journey, but then I've run out of time to finish them off.
Seeing as Vacuum comes in a box the size of Race for the Galaxy, shipping it to Germany wouldn't be cheap, so it made sense to take Konrad a copy while I was over. Konrad kindly invited me to his flat one evening and offered to cook me dinner, so we had a plan.
Like all the best-laid ones, it all went to pot. I had little time before the trip to finish off making the changes I had in mind for Vacuum (and what little time I did have I spent programming my new German language app), so I didn't have a finished copy to take with me. Instead I crammed my personal copy (with the cards from Feb 2014 and the rules from August 2013!) in my suitcase, and told Konrad I'd leave it with him and send him updated cards when I'd finally got around to finishing them.
We had a great evening, a lovely meal followed by a game (and great discussion) of Vacuum and then a couple of games of Alchemy, one of Konrad's designs, which I really enjoyed. Konrad was even kind enough to give me a copy of that (which thanks to a smaller box than Vacuum meant that I had room in my suitcase for a little souvenir for The Wife and The Daughter). The game of Vacuum was a little embarrassing (it had been so long since I'd last played that I'd forgotten a number of rules until halfway through the game), but really useful, refreshing my memory of what works and what doesn't. Afterwards we had a lengthy chat about what Konrad liked and didn't like and my ideas for the next version, which Konrad's input has already simplified further.
A great trip all in all, and it's good to get back into Vacuum, the game that started my second wind of games design, post Reiver Games debacle.
Monday, March 16
Impromptu Holiday
The good news is that on Thursday evening, after Games Night, The Wife and I decided to take a long weekend away, so we were in a little cottage in rural Northumberland enjoying an impromptu short break for the last few days - hence the late blog post. We had a lovely time and even got some gaming in (it's been ages since The Wife and I have played games together, the sleep disruption caused by The Daughter has left us too tired in the evenings to do much other than slump).
The bad news is that I'm not making any progress on anything this week due to the holiday and work commitments so I'm not going to have Vacuum ready to take to Germany next weekend. I'll have to post a copy to Konrad on completion after my trip to Germany :-(
Still, I'm on holiday! Yay!
The bad news is that I'm not making any progress on anything this week due to the holiday and work commitments so I'm not going to have Vacuum ready to take to Germany next weekend. I'll have to post a copy to Konrad on completion after my trip to Germany :-(
Still, I'm on holiday! Yay!
Monday, March 9
They Tried and Failed?
... They tried and died. That quote seems somehow appropriate this week.
It's been another busy week. Monday I was travelling for work with Ian again, so there was iPad gaming on the train (complete with another game of Galaxy Trucker, towards my ten plays goal) and then Tuesday was Newcastle Playtest.
I was pretty knackered though, so I left about nine o'clock after three games of Zombology and one of Dan's Ming Voyages. It was a really good turn out with eight of us including two new people and it was good to get some games of Zombology in with more players than the usual three or four we manage in my work lunchtime sessions. We played two games with six players and then when the new members arrived we played an eight player game. Because I'd missed the session last month it was the first time these guys had seen the most recent (and fairly large) changes. They liked some aspects of it, but weren't so keen on others, especially the reduction in control. The previous version let you keep a card between rounds. This gave you a lot more control as you could prevent a card going to an opponent, and could keep a card that would potentially let you complete one of the suits, thereby controlling which suits were scored at the end of the game. The downside was that all the good cards were being kept by players, completely knackering the drafting element.
I'm ok with it not being a very strategic game, it's supposed to be a 10-15 minute filler like 6 Nimmt! which also has very little control. I also like the way the drafting gives you increasing information about which cures are possible as the game plays out.
Between us we had a few new ideas to try out, and on Thursday lunchtime I got to try out one of those - dealing all the cards up front. This was a spectacular failure. It tried, and died! With only three players and all the cards dealt at the beginning of the game you know by the end of the third turn which suits can be cured (in our case: none!), which sucks a lot of the fun out of it.
I've some other ideas from Tuesday to try out, but they need new components, so will take a little longer to organise.
Thursday was Games Night which included a couple more games of King of Tokyo (which is fast becoming a favourite) towards my ten plays goal. Both our games were six player and we found there was very little incentive to stay in Tokyo till the start of your next turn for the two points. The winners of both games never went in to Tokyo at all! We're considering trying a house rule next time to encourage Tokyo hogging ...
Finally, on the weekend I did a bit more work on my German app. A bit of refactoring and adding some new functionality. It's slowly coming together.
This week I really need to crack on with Vacuum so I can try it once before I go to Germany. Ideally, I need to get it printed and playtested during the week...
Good progress on my goals for the year this week, but not on my more pressing aims regarding Vacuum and Germany. I need to sort myself out!
It's been another busy week. Monday I was travelling for work with Ian again, so there was iPad gaming on the train (complete with another game of Galaxy Trucker, towards my ten plays goal) and then Tuesday was Newcastle Playtest.
I was pretty knackered though, so I left about nine o'clock after three games of Zombology and one of Dan's Ming Voyages. It was a really good turn out with eight of us including two new people and it was good to get some games of Zombology in with more players than the usual three or four we manage in my work lunchtime sessions. We played two games with six players and then when the new members arrived we played an eight player game. Because I'd missed the session last month it was the first time these guys had seen the most recent (and fairly large) changes. They liked some aspects of it, but weren't so keen on others, especially the reduction in control. The previous version let you keep a card between rounds. This gave you a lot more control as you could prevent a card going to an opponent, and could keep a card that would potentially let you complete one of the suits, thereby controlling which suits were scored at the end of the game. The downside was that all the good cards were being kept by players, completely knackering the drafting element.
I'm ok with it not being a very strategic game, it's supposed to be a 10-15 minute filler like 6 Nimmt! which also has very little control. I also like the way the drafting gives you increasing information about which cures are possible as the game plays out.
Between us we had a few new ideas to try out, and on Thursday lunchtime I got to try out one of those - dealing all the cards up front. This was a spectacular failure. It tried, and died! With only three players and all the cards dealt at the beginning of the game you know by the end of the third turn which suits can be cured (in our case: none!), which sucks a lot of the fun out of it.
I've some other ideas from Tuesday to try out, but they need new components, so will take a little longer to organise.
Thursday was Games Night which included a couple more games of King of Tokyo (which is fast becoming a favourite) towards my ten plays goal. Both our games were six player and we found there was very little incentive to stay in Tokyo till the start of your next turn for the two points. The winners of both games never went in to Tokyo at all! We're considering trying a house rule next time to encourage Tokyo hogging ...
Finally, on the weekend I did a bit more work on my German app. A bit of refactoring and adding some new functionality. It's slowly coming together.
This week I really need to crack on with Vacuum so I can try it once before I go to Germany. Ideally, I need to get it printed and playtested during the week...
Good progress on my goals for the year this week, but not on my more pressing aims regarding Vacuum and Germany. I need to sort myself out!
Monday, February 23
Stay On Target!
If you've been following this blog for a couple of years you'll know that Codename: Vacuum was the first game I started designing when I got back into Games Design, a couple of years after I wound up Reiver Games, having lost a ton of money in the process. Reiver Games had been a great experience and a lot of fun and I'd met some fantastic people through it that I still consider good friends, but watching your company slowly wither and die kinda sucks the fun out of things and I'd gone off games design for a bit. As the highs and lows of Reiver Games faded from my legendarily poor memory, I started thinking about games design again, and Vacuum was the first of those ideas to be realised in actual cardboard.
I started working on it back in November 2011, and after a couple of years of frequent changes and regular playtests it took a back seat as I focused on Zombology in 2014. I've not really touched it since February last year and despite a couple of ideas during the year, I've done nothing. So much so that this year it didn't make an appearance in my goals at all. Had I not even thought about it once all year, that wouldn't get in the way of my goals at all.
With the NaGa DeMon winners' copies all posted I'm finally in a position to crack on with achieving this year's goals, the largest of which is to become a hobby publisher again.
But instead, I've spent the week working on Vacuum again. I had another four hours of train journeys on Wednesday, this time down to Sheffield and back for my quarterly hospital check-up. I spent that time designing in my head and then starting the graphic design for a new version of Vacuum. The last version was alright, but a couple of the strategies were quite dull and the game took up too much space for what it was.
I've started on a new version which I hope to finish in a week or two so that I can make a copy to take with me to Germany at the end of March. I'm off to Berlin for a conference with work, and I hope to meet up with Konrad, my NaGa DeMon winner two years on the trot and a keen supporter of Reiver Games from back in the day. Konrad has expressed an interest in Vacuum and his feedback on Zombology and Dragon Dance has been really helpful, so it'll be great for both of us If I can get it done in time!
But, I also need to stay focused on my goals, with two months down already, I'm going to have to crack on. In the words of Gold Five: Stay on target!
In other news, Robin David is interviewing me via email for his blog. I'm famous again! ;-p
I started working on it back in November 2011, and after a couple of years of frequent changes and regular playtests it took a back seat as I focused on Zombology in 2014. I've not really touched it since February last year and despite a couple of ideas during the year, I've done nothing. So much so that this year it didn't make an appearance in my goals at all. Had I not even thought about it once all year, that wouldn't get in the way of my goals at all.
With the NaGa DeMon winners' copies all posted I'm finally in a position to crack on with achieving this year's goals, the largest of which is to become a hobby publisher again.
But instead, I've spent the week working on Vacuum again. I had another four hours of train journeys on Wednesday, this time down to Sheffield and back for my quarterly hospital check-up. I spent that time designing in my head and then starting the graphic design for a new version of Vacuum. The last version was alright, but a couple of the strategies were quite dull and the game took up too much space for what it was.
I've started on a new version which I hope to finish in a week or two so that I can make a copy to take with me to Germany at the end of March. I'm off to Berlin for a conference with work, and I hope to meet up with Konrad, my NaGa DeMon winner two years on the trot and a keen supporter of Reiver Games from back in the day. Konrad has expressed an interest in Vacuum and his feedback on Zombology and Dragon Dance has been really helpful, so it'll be great for both of us If I can get it done in time!
But, I also need to stay focused on my goals, with two months down already, I'm going to have to crack on. In the words of Gold Five: Stay on target!
In other news, Robin David is interviewing me via email for his blog. I'm famous again! ;-p
Monday, December 29
2014: The Year in Review
2014 has been a pretty good, if slightly strange, year. It started on New Year's Eve in the house on my own. Thanks to radiotherapy for my overactive thyroid I had to keep my distance from The Daughter for three weeks. With her only 16 months old it was going to be very unfair for me to always be around but never come near her or give her a cuddle, so The Wife and The Daughter stayed in Bristol after Christmas and I came home on my own and got nuked. I got the dose on New Year's Eve in the afternoon, that evening I was at my most radioactive - so I didn't even go out and see friends. Definitely the second crappiest New Year's Eve of my life.
The next three weeks I was home alone, so I got to live the bachelor life style: eating like a student and playing games all the time - I even got a game of Twilight Imperium III in! On the way to rescue The Wife and The Daughter I stopped in at Terry's and had a day's gaming with my old Bedford group. I used to see them for games every week, but since moving to Newcastle (about 250 miles away) I don't get to see much of them at all. The rest of the year was busy but good fun, with a trip to Baltimore for work (but no impromptu gaming this time!), a convention (Beer and Pretzels in Burton again with Terry). But in November we had some bad news which derailed my NaGa DeMon efforts a bit.
My five and dimes for this year were:
My most popular posts of the year were:
That's enough wittering for now, so until next week's Goals for 2015 blog post; I hope you all had good years too, and here's hoping next year will be even better!
The next three weeks I was home alone, so I got to live the bachelor life style: eating like a student and playing games all the time - I even got a game of Twilight Imperium III in! On the way to rescue The Wife and The Daughter I stopped in at Terry's and had a day's gaming with my old Bedford group. I used to see them for games every week, but since moving to Newcastle (about 250 miles away) I don't get to see much of them at all. The rest of the year was busy but good fun, with a trip to Baltimore for work (but no impromptu gaming this time!), a convention (Beer and Pretzels in Burton again with Terry). But in November we had some bad news which derailed my NaGa DeMon efforts a bit.
Games Design
I'd set myself a few goals in 2014 for games design:- Make four more versions of Vacuum
- Get Zombology ready to submit to a publisher
- Do NaGa DeMon again
General Gaming
My goals for gaming in 2014 were:- Play at least as many games as there are days in 2014
- Play every game I own at least once*
My five and dimes for this year were:
- 63: Zombology - the joy of designing a short game is that you can test it quickly, over and over again
- 28: Ra - mostly on the iPad on the train
- 27: Martian Dice - including testing my Windows Phone app with friends
- 26: Coup - a Games Night staple
- 25: Hey! That's My Fish! - on the train
- 23: Dragon Dance - all since the beginning of November!
- 23: Carcassonne - on the train again
- 18: Love Letter - at Games Night
- 16: Rumis - great fun
- 16: Race for the Galaxy - mostly with the Alien Artifacts expansion (sans orb bit)
- 13: 6 Nimmt! - at Games Night
- 12: Stone Age - on the iPad
- 11: X-Wing Minis - with Dave mostly
- 10: Lords of Waterdeep - on the iPad and in the flesh
- 10: Pandemic - on the iPad mostly
- 10: Stormy Seas - all on Christmas Day! This is straight onto my wishlist
- 9: 7 Wonders - still popular at Games Night
- 7: Hive - no idea when I played this!
- 6: Codename: Vacuum - early on, before I focussed on Zombology
- 6: Coloretto - Games Night filler
- 6: No Thanks! - Games Night filler
- 6: Hol's der Geier - Games Night filler
- 6: Die Speicherstadt - Games Night
- 5: Firefly - Love this, just wish it was shorter, so it fit comfortably in a Games Night
- 5: Puerto Rico - on the iPad
- 5: Forbidden Island - iPad, I don't own the cardboard version
Blogging
My goals for blogging this year were:- Write a blog post every Monday
- Get 40,000 page views
- Gain 10 new followers
My most popular posts of the year were:
- A discussion of timing in games
- What are your favourite playtestion questions
- Picking up Border Reivers again and launching my Firefly: The Board Game app
- (Some of) the Zombology NaGa DeMon winners' copies arrived
- My iPad gaming
Windows Phone Apps
In addition to playing, designing and writing about board games, this year I started developing board game-related apps for my Windows Phone, a few of them are personal apps for helping me design or test my games, but three of them seemed of interest to others, so I made them freely available this year. Between them they've only had 60 downloads, so they're not wildly successful, but I did them for my own interest and as programming exercises, so if they are useful to anyone else at all that's an added bonus. I'd like to keep up the app designing next year too.That's enough wittering for now, so until next week's Goals for 2015 blog post; I hope you all had good years too, and here's hoping next year will be even better!
Monday, September 1
I'm Published!
But not in the way the you might think. On Friday I submitted my first app to the Windows Phone Store. It was accepted within the hour and was available to download two or three hours after that. A twitter, BoardGameGeek and Google+ announcement later and it's got 5 downloads! 5! As far as I can tell that means that about 80% of the worldwide Windows Phone ownership have installed my app. How's about that for market penetration?
The app, BGG Last Plays, is available for WP8 and 8.1 from the store as we speak. It's a Windows Phone port of the excellent http://lastplays.herokuapp.com, with a couple of improvements that I wanted from the web original: it caches your BGG collection, so you don't need to wait for the download every time and it allows you to set a date, any games that you haven't played since that date are highlighted in the UI and on the live tile. More info is available here.
In addition to publishing that at lunchtime, I also finally got the next version of Zombology finished on the computer on Friday night, plus got it printed and cut out. I didn't get it done in time for a potential Playtest session on Thursday, but it is ready for Newcastle Playtest this coming Tuesday. It's been ages since I last made a prototype, it felt good to be crafting something again.
Talking of Newcastle Playtest, I'm thinking of taking Border Reivers along with me this week. I've had some ideas for things I could do for a second edition, so it would be good to try those out with the team and get some fresh ideas from them for further improvements.
I've also got four hours of train journeys on Wednesday for my quarterly hospital check up that I'm going to spend on the laptop writing blog posts and probably doing some Codename: Vacuum work. After a week of nothing gaming related the week before last, I'm back!
The app, BGG Last Plays, is available for WP8 and 8.1 from the store as we speak. It's a Windows Phone port of the excellent http://lastplays.herokuapp.com, with a couple of improvements that I wanted from the web original: it caches your BGG collection, so you don't need to wait for the download every time and it allows you to set a date, any games that you haven't played since that date are highlighted in the UI and on the live tile. More info is available here.
In addition to publishing that at lunchtime, I also finally got the next version of Zombology finished on the computer on Friday night, plus got it printed and cut out. I didn't get it done in time for a potential Playtest session on Thursday, but it is ready for Newcastle Playtest this coming Tuesday. It's been ages since I last made a prototype, it felt good to be crafting something again.
Talking of Newcastle Playtest, I'm thinking of taking Border Reivers along with me this week. I've had some ideas for things I could do for a second edition, so it would be good to try those out with the team and get some fresh ideas from them for further improvements.
I've also got four hours of train journeys on Wednesday for my quarterly hospital check up that I'm going to spend on the laptop writing blog posts and probably doing some Codename: Vacuum work. After a week of nothing gaming related the week before last, I'm back!
Monday, August 11
Rush Job
This week was Newcastle Playtest again on Tuesday, but with guests visiting last weekend, I'd had no time to prepare for it so I went along with Zombology and Vacuum with none of my intended changes made to either. Newcastle Playtest is going from strength to strength, we had seven people, six of whom were regulars and designers and Olly, who's been a few times before as a tester.
To begin with Paul T wanted to try out a few mechanic ideas he'd had that he wanted to test. He'd brought a load of brightly coloured dice and matching Hot Wheels cars, which made it much more fun! We tried a few ideas, and suggested a few of our own, which hopefully will help.
After that, there were five of us, so someone suggested Zombology. I'd not made the changes I wanted to try out, but Graham had a pen and I had 100 cards, so I quickly put the two together and scribbled a small number on the top of each card, allowing me to test the idea that Dan had suggested the previous week. No sooner had we finished that game than Dan arrived, so we played again with six players. We won both games, and in fact in one of the games two players tied on points, needing the Cure as a tie breaker, so reducing the cures to value eight meant the scores were much tighter.
The timing thing seemed to work, there were a few suggestions for how to make it more obvious that all cards with the same effect happened together and that number was there only to break ties. I've had another of my own for clarifying that too.
Afterwards we split up and I finally got play Graham's flower nursery game, which was very interesting, and extremely well crafted considering how few times it has been played.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to struggle to find time to update my games as The Daughter's second birthday is fast approaching and we're having a bunch of family up for a party. The house and garden need a bit of attention so that's taken priority over games design.
In other news, I've 'finished' my Last Plays Windows Phone app, in the sense that it does everything I want it to do now. It need polishing before I could put it in the Store, but essentially it works. Unlike my new phone. I updated it to Windows Phone 8.1 and the camera stopped working. Everything else is fine, but the camera won't work from any app. I've tried rebooting the phone and even a factory reset, but to no avail, so I guess I'm going to have to send it off to the shop :-(
To begin with Paul T wanted to try out a few mechanic ideas he'd had that he wanted to test. He'd brought a load of brightly coloured dice and matching Hot Wheels cars, which made it much more fun! We tried a few ideas, and suggested a few of our own, which hopefully will help.
After that, there were five of us, so someone suggested Zombology. I'd not made the changes I wanted to try out, but Graham had a pen and I had 100 cards, so I quickly put the two together and scribbled a small number on the top of each card, allowing me to test the idea that Dan had suggested the previous week. No sooner had we finished that game than Dan arrived, so we played again with six players. We won both games, and in fact in one of the games two players tied on points, needing the Cure as a tie breaker, so reducing the cures to value eight meant the scores were much tighter.
The timing thing seemed to work, there were a few suggestions for how to make it more obvious that all cards with the same effect happened together and that number was there only to break ties. I've had another of my own for clarifying that too.
Afterwards we split up and I finally got play Graham's flower nursery game, which was very interesting, and extremely well crafted considering how few times it has been played.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to struggle to find time to update my games as The Daughter's second birthday is fast approaching and we're having a bunch of family up for a party. The house and garden need a bit of attention so that's taken priority over games design.
In other news, I've 'finished' my Last Plays Windows Phone app, in the sense that it does everything I want it to do now. It need polishing before I could put it in the Store, but essentially it works. Unlike my new phone. I updated it to Windows Phone 8.1 and the camera stopped working. Everything else is fine, but the camera won't work from any app. I've tried rebooting the phone and even a factory reset, but to no avail, so I guess I'm going to have to send it off to the shop :-(
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