Reavers! Incoming and Heading Straight for Us!

Bonus points if you get the title source. Most of this blog post isn't actually about that kind of reaver though, it's about Reivers. With an 'i'. Border Reivers to be precise. In 2002, after an incredibly long and unsatisfying game of Mighty Empires, I had an idea for a light civilisation/wargame that eventually became Border Reivers. Published in 2006, I made 100 copies by hand and sold them all over the world. It was the first game I designed and the first game I published, and while it obviously holds a special place in my heart, it was one of the weaker games I published, which partly explains why I never reprinted it. Over the years (as this post attests) I've toyed with the idea of doing a second edition, with some changes to fix the reported weaknesses, but nothing ever came of it. After the poor sales of Carpe Astra I lost confidence in my ability to design games and decided that I needed a checkpoint between designer and publication which I could provide for other designers but couldn't for my own designs, since I didn't have the required distance to objectively critique my own games. So Border Reivers II withered and died.

Until a month or so ago. As part of my goal to play all my games at least once this year, I played a game of Border Reivers against my boss at the end of one of my Games Nights. He crushed me like the proverbial grape, in part assisted by some lucky reinforcement dice rolls - which relates to one of the criticisms I had received about the game.

So that got me thinking about Border Reivers again and, now I'm not looking to self-publish and have the excellent Newcastle Playtest resource available to me, I've decided to brush BR2 off again and see if I can do anything with it. On Tuesday it was the aforementioned Newcastle Playtest so, as well as a new version of Zombology, I took Border Reivers along. There was lots of interest in playing it, but one of the changes I'm keen on is to switch it from 2-4 players to 2 player only, so Paul Scott and I had a game. We played the good old-fashioned rules, and then at the end I asked Paul for ideas on how to improve it, before a lengthy discussion about the criticisms I'd received from players/owners of the first edition.

Border Reivers is a light wargame with some civilisation aspects, set on the English-Scottish border during the late middle-ages. It was a time of continual skirmishing along with frequent livestock-rustling (or reiving as it was known). In the game, you start with a city and five armies and have to cultivate your territory, raise armies, build fortifications and settlements as well as going to war, ambushing and reiving your opponent. In the original rules there were two ways to win - either by annihilating your opponents (which only really happened in a 2-player game) or by being the first to accumulate 40 cash. Each turn you got to gamble on reinforcements, either armies or cards that gave you several interesting hidden tactics to assault your opponents. You spent an amount of cash between 0 & 9 and then rolled a D10, if your die roll was less than or equal to your spend, you got a reinforcement. Lots of people really didn't like this and, in fairness, lucky dice rolls early on could really swing the game. One of the ideas I've had is to keep this mechanism, but take away the chance of a free reinforcement and reduce the variability - i.e. roll a die with fewer sides. I'm also considering replacing the cash victory condition with a victory points one, where you get victory points for a variety of things throughout the game. I'll need to try some of these ideas out over the next few months and see which of them stick. Mal, I'm assuming you're up for a game?

Back to the title, after the crazy success of my BoardGameGeek collection Windows Phone app (now up to 9 downloads, that's got to be almost everyone who owns one, right?) I've now published my Firefly: The Game app too. This one is designed to streamline the Full Burn movement action in the Firefly board game by reducing the number of 'move a piece, draw a card' cycles you have to go through. It's called Keep Flyin' and is available in the Windows Phone Store now.

Finally, we played a couple of seven-player games of Zombology at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday. The new version has another card type removed, more of the new style art and a few informational changes requested by testers. It went pretty well and on the train on Wednesday down to Sheffield for my quarterly MS check up I made some more cosmetic changes to the cards. This is feeling pretty finished now, so I ought to step up my efforts to contact some publishers.

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!

Iconic

This week I've done nothing particularly relevant to the blog at all. This weekend (today is a Bank Holiday in the UK) we've had lots of family up for The Daughter's second birthday and we spent most of last week preparing for the visitors and the party.

So, what to talk about? I've arranged a playtest this week on Thursday with my colleagues at lunchtime, as much as anything to force me to finish off the next version of Zombology ahead of the next Newcastle Playtest session on the following Tuesday. There's a bunch of graphics stuff to do in InDesign ahead of printing that out, so that's how I hope to spend the beginning of next week. It's been several weeks (maybe even a couple of months) since I last played it at work, so there have been a few changes since my colleagues have last played it. It'll be interesting to get their feedback on the changes and see what they make of the new version.

The new version also features some artwork that I've actually got permission to use. The previous version featured a hotchpotch of random images culled from Google, which seeing as it was just for personal use, I figured was alright. But the game looked a bit of a mess and the lack of rights concerned my puritan views on copyright, so I've finally got around to sourcing some legitimate artwork. Seeing as it's all come from the same place it all looks similar too, which ties the game together nicely.

So what is this source of free art I hear you ask? www.game-icons.net. It's got over 1,300 icons that are freely available for use under Creative Commons, that you can even modify to better suit your particular project. These files are available as pngs or SVG vector art which make them easy to modify in a tool such as Adobe Illustrator (which I got as part of the InDesign Creative Suite while I was running Reiver Games for laying out and submitting art to the printers). I've tweaked almost all the art I've got from there, but without the starting point they provided I'd never have ended up with anything that looked half as cool. It's plenty good enough for prototyping, playtesting and submission to a publisher.

What a Blinder!

It's been a really busy week this week, both gaming and non-gaming. We're having a load of family up next weekend for a birthday party for The Daughter, so we're trying to sort the house and garden out a bit in preparation for all the visitors. On top of that, I've done a trip to Manchester for work and we've been to York for the weekend to see Paul and his family.

The week got off to a great start with some really detailed feedback for one of the two people who signed up for blind playtesting Zombology a couple of months back. He'd asked some questions about the timing of various things on receipt of the rules, which I'd given a really crappy answer to (the low quality of my answer was one of the things that encouraged me recently to address the timing resolution in the game). After that I'd not heard anything from him, so I'd assuming the shoddy response had put him off trying the game. This week I got a response from him detailing the four times he'd played with different groups and what everyone thought of the game along with some identified weaknesses and some ideas. He apologised for the delay getting back to me, he'd wanted to leave it until he had a bit more data. This was exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for when I requested play testers, so it was very gratifying to receive it, especially as he's keen to continue testing it with the recent changes.

I took Thursday off work to wait in for a tradesman, and after exhausting myself in the garden I got an hour or so to update the Zombology rule book to the newest rules that I have in my head. Now all I need to do is update the cards as well and then print out the new version. In the evening we had a great Games Night with eight (!) games played, but the late night hurt me the next day when I had to be up at 5am for a trip to Manchester. Fortunately there was copious coffee to keep me conscious and Steve (a former Games Night attendee) and an iPad full of board game apps to keep me company on the six hours of train journeys. We chalked up another nine games!

This weekend we went down to see Paul and Lisa in York. Paul was my main playtester during my Reiver Games days, so I took Zombology again. We played it twice with his friend Chris along with six other games, so another great day's gaming. 24 games in 3 days! It was a great weekend catching up and playing games, plus hanging out with the kids.

I also started knocking together the cards for the new version. I doubt I'll have time before the party to finish them off, but hopefully next week in time for the next Newcastle Playtest.

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 :-(

Timing Is Critical

As I mentioned last week, when I discussed an idea I'd had for Zombology with Dan (the other Newcastle Playtest organiser) he promptly countered with another idea which blew my idea out of the water. So, I'm going to steal his idea shamelessly. Here it is:

I've had a few problems with timing in Zombology. Each round the players simultaneously choose a card to play in secret and then simultaneously reveal them. The cards then get resolved in a rough sort of order: Upgrades, then Events and then Science cards. But within those groups it kind of all happened semi-simultaneously. Most of the time this was fine, but I'd come across a few problems with particular situations, and by far the longest part of the discussion about Zombology at the last Newcastle Playtest session was about one of these edge cases where the semi-simultaneity meant that the rules got really complicated and a little bit broken. I've also had a rather awkward conversation with one of the blind playtesters about how a particular card works if multiple people play it in the same round.

As a result of these types of problems the rules explanation is either not descriptive enough to cover edge cases, or so ridiculously wordy that it feels more like a legal agreement than a simple card game rule book.

Dan's solution? Number each card and then resolve them in number order. That's so simple that I can explain it in ten words. Ten. One of the games I've been considering as a guide while I design Zombology is 6 Nimmt! It's very quick, has simultaneous card selection and can get quite brutal as the cards are actioned and someone inevitably gets shafted. How does 6 Nimmt! solve the card resolution? You resolve them in number order. Genius! Why didn't I think of that? Seriously, why did I need Dan to point that out?

It solves all the individual problems I've been having and in a way that is simple to explain and understand and that cannot be debated during gameplay or lead to rules lawyering. Card 3 happens before card 5. Full stop. It allows me to be prescriptive about the order in which particular cards happen (if the Fatal Mistakes need to happen before Pay Rises to make sense, all I have to do is give them lower numbers) without bulking out the rules explaining that you must do A before B. In fact, it will take a lot of words out of the rules, making the explanation shorter and easier to understand.

Timing is critical to so many games - actions must happen in a particular order to make sense and to frame the game in a way that is fair to all players. I'd been focussing so hard on making the individual cards work alone and in conjunction with each other that I'd neglected to take into account the flow of the game. There had been warning signs in the form of awkward email explanations and long discussions about which cards relied on which others, but I'd brushed them aside. I really hope that when I finally get round to making a version with this improvement in it will be another leap in game quality - making things much smoother and simpler to explain.

It's Newcastle Playtest again this week, but due to the busy week last week and then guests over the weekend I've not had a chance to incorporate my new ideas into either Zombology or Vacuum :-( I'll just be going as a playtester this month instead.

In other news, my boss Ian and I played Border Reivers at the end of Games Night on Thursday. I'd not played for four or five years and it was Ian's first game ever. I was a bit rusty on the rules, but that was no excuse for the absolute beasting Ian delivered, crushing me at my own game in fairly short order. It highlighted a few of the flaws in the game that I was already aware of, and now I've got Border Reivers Second Edition in my head too. And also in Evernote. I need to finish something off and work on fewer games at once!

Space to Think

I've spent the last week in the Lake District with my in-laws (4 of them!). It's a beautiful part of the country with rugged scenery, fantastic walks and peaceful lakes. With six adults to one child, the staffing ratio was such that we could relax and chill out, and the lack of any mobile signal or broadband internet meant that there were no distractions. We had a lovely time, walking, eating, relaxing and gaming (my sister-in-law and her husband are usually up for a game, and The Wife and her brother are occasionally).

We did a few walks of around 4 or 5 miles with some decent climbing involved and it felt great to not be hampered by my MS, even though I was carrying all forty stone of The Daughter in a rucksack carrier on my back (note for Americans/Europeans: forty stone is 560lbs or approximately 250kg, she doesn't really weight that - she's only two, it just felt like it). In the past I've struggled with shorter walks on my good days so it felt great to be able to crack on without the exhaustion that can accompany significant exertion. I even felt like I could have kept going, maybe doing as much as seven or eight miles. It's an amazing feeling. It was probably better to have stopped when I did though, it was better to stop wanting more rather than run myself into the ground and risk injury through over-tiredness.

Gaming wise, we mostly played short games, with Martian Dice (only bought a week or so ago!) the clear winner - we played it a lot. On my return I also made it to Newcastle Gamers for what must be the first time in at least three months. I just missed out on a game of Splendor, so I sat and watched that while chatting to Dan and Gareth who were playing. Gareth reckons it would be a hit with my gaming group and he may well be right, though I'll play it a few times before deciding whether or not to get it. Afterwards we played K2 (another one ticked off my list of games to play this year) and then Cavemen: The Quest for Fire. We got the auction rules wrong on this one, so it's hard to form an opinion on it.

While away I had plenty of time and space to think about the games I'm designing. I'm still trying to think of cards to replace the Open Cage / Containment Facility pair in Zombology, but I did manage to come up with a solution for the confusion of who plays their cards first when multiple players play events in the same round. I'd tell you all about it, but I told Dan at Newcastle Gamers on Saturday evening and he came up with a much better idea, so I'm going to steal adopt that instead.

I also had some ideas about Codename: Vacuum while I was away. I've done absolutely nothing with Vacuum since January, struggling to think of ways to reduce the bookkeeping elements of it, while keeping the feel of the different strategies. I had an idea about how to streamline trading that I think will improve things. It also has the added advantage of simplifying the game too. Now I need to knock up another prototype of Vacuum as well...

Once Bitten

I'm on holiday this week, so here's a blog post I wrote last week and tried to post automatically, while didn't work, hence a day late. It'll take me a few days to respond to comments, since there is apparently no mobile signal or broadband where we're staying...

As many of you know, several years ago I started Reiver Games to publish my first board game: Border Reivers. Over five years I published four games (one of them twice!), to limited success before shutting the company down in 2011 and writing off a loss of several thousand pounds.

Now I'm designing games again and, for the first time, thinking about submitting games to other publishers. I'm also hanging out with other designers more too. Most of the designers I knew in my Reiver Games days were self publishers and most of them had been doing it for years. Noticeably, they are still going now and I'm not, so they were clearly better at it than me. In contrast, most of the designers I hang out with nowadays are not intending to self-publish but want to get their games published by existing publishing companies.

Getting my current crop of designs published by an existing publisher is one of the routes I'm currently considering, yet it's a route I've got no experience of whatsoever. I've never pitched a game at a publisher, so I don't really know how to do it. I know what I wanted back in the day, but that may not be representative of what a more successful company wants.

If I'm going to self-publish, or print on demand publish, then the game needs to be absolutely awesome as I'm the final gate before publishing. There's no-one else to block publishing if they don't think the game is good enough or to do any development to get it up to scratch. I look back on the games I published and although I was happy with each one at the time, knowing what I do now about game sales I don't think they're good enough. They needed more development or a gate saying 'not ready yet' to prevent me wasting money publishing games that wouldn't recoup the costs I invested in their publishing.

If I'm considering another publishing company do I need to polish it so much, or will they want to do some development and polishing themselves? I just don't know. Will they accept a game with potential that still needs some work, or do they want a completely finished product? I've still got some games industry contacts from my Reiver Games days. Perhaps I should do some investigating...

3,000

I started recording my boardgame plays on BGG back in August 2006. Since then I've religiously recorded every play of a published game I've had. During my Reiver Games I didn't record plays of prototypes, which means the actual count is much higher, but it's still an indication of just how ridiculously obsessed with board games I am.

The reason I mention this is that the number of games I've played over the last eight years according to BGG is 2,999. Which is a big number. It's more than one game a day on average for eight years!

What will be my 3,000th play? I nearly made it to Newcastle Gamers on Saturday for the first time in several months, but was thwarted at the last minute. So it could have been anything. There's Games Night on Thursday, potentially a Zombology Playtest before then at lunchtime. Or it could even be something with The Wife one evening if we're not too knackered.

In other news, I've started my third Windows Phone app (before finishing the other two, of course!). It's based on the last plays app I came across on BGG. I've been using that web app for the last seven months to keep track of which of the games I own I've played this year, as one of my goals for the year is to play all my games at least once. The app was down for a while, which made me think of doing my own version, which is now half finished. It's as fully-featured as the web one, but has two extra things that I find useful:

• It colours things according to whether they've been played this year or not,
• It saves the results, so you don't need to query BGG every time you look at it.

It needs a few more things before I can make it available - the ability to configure the user and colouring and I want to be able to select games to ignore (i.e. hide from the results). Still, it's pretty simple, so it shouldn't take long...

Ding! Ding! Half-time. Change Ends.

We're halfway through 2014, so I figure now would be a good time to review my progress against my goals for the year. So here goes:

Games Design

Let's start with the bad news. My games design goals were to make four new versions of Codename: Vacuum, make some progress on Dragon and get Zombology ready for hawking to a publisher/self-publishing. I've done nothing with Vacuum since January, so only one new version so far this year and I've not touched Dragon (though that will probably be the focus of my NaGa DeMon efforts this year). Zombology has been my main focus for the last six months. I've made good progress, but this last week's feedback (see below) has made me think I'm not as close as I was hoping. But there's still four months to go so I might yet hit this one. Vacuum is looking more doubtful.

Blogging

My blogging goals were to get 40K page views and 10 new followers along with posting every Monday (plus more during NaGa DeMon in November). I'm at 19,200 page views, which considering the massive bump I got last November means that I should be able to hit that assuming I do NaGa DeMon. I've got three new followers, so that one is looking pretty difficult - I'll probably miss it; but I've not missed a Monday yet, so that is looking good too.

Gaming

I had two goals from a gaming of point of view: play at least 365 games this year and play every game in my collection at least once. On the first point I'm doing very well: 274 games in the first six months of the year, I'm pretty sure I'm going to ace this one! And on the second point, I've got nineteen games in my collection yet to play (excluding nine games that I've excluded for sentimental or other reasons). This should be pretty achievable too, but I think a few of those will probably leave my hands in search of more accommodating owners. Citadels, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects and Pirates of the Spanish Main are currently candidates for jogging on. Qwirkle, Tigris and Euphrates and Snow Tails have already left the stable.

In other news, it was Newcastle Playtest again this week. We started with a couple of games of Zombology and it got pretty mixed feedback this time, those people who enjoyed it last time seemed to enjoy it again, but Paul in particular really didn't like it. He felt like he had no control and no idea how to win. It's a ten minute game, so I'm ok with it feeling pretty random, but I don't want it annoying people. I've also heard back from a couple of my blind playtesters. One of them emailed with a few rules questions that will help me improve the clarity of the rules, the other has played it once. He was generally positive, but said it needed work and had a bunch of suggestions, so I think I need to go back to the drawing board and address these concerns. I'm thinking of taking a couple of types of cards out, but that leaves me with some slots to fill - ideally with cards that make it more interactive and fun without becoming more complicated. Hmmm.

Where's My Week Gone?

Seriously. I have no idea. I had hoped to make some progress on Zombology, ahead of tomorrow's Newcastle Playtest session, instead I made none - I didn't even get to play it during the week. It's been a long time since I had a week without a game of Zombology.

In fairness, my vanished week was largely spent playing rather than designing games. Tuesday I went to Manchester on the train for work, which meant six hours playing games on the iPad with my boss and Mal. Thursday was Games Night and Friday my brother and his girlfriend came to stay for the night on the way to visiting some friends. We played a few games of Rumis at the end of the evening after spending some time talking about what they could get to play as the next step on from Carcassonne - their current game of choice. Since they are about to move to Oxford, they needed some that plays well with two as they won't know anyone there initially. They really enjoyed Rumis and made a note of it.

Saturday after my brother and his girlfriend left, our friends from York: Paul, Lisa and their ten year old daughter came to stay for the night. We played a couple of games of Coup with the three of them before Their daughter went to sleep, then a game of Chinatown with the four adults. Paul had introduced us to Chinatown a few weeks ago when we went down to visit them and we'd both really enjoyed it - so much so that I'd tried to buy it the next day but it's currently out of print. When it's reprinted in the autumn by Z-Man I'll be rushing out to get a copy - it's an excellent game. After the ladies went to bed, Paul and I played a few more games. Paul was interested in Rumis (he'd never played it) so we played a few games (Paul loved it too) and then a game of Carcassonne: The Castle to round things off.

Sunday, during The. Daughter's nap, Paul taught us Hab & Gut (another great game!) and then we played four games of Coup.

All of this means that I only have tonight to prepare for tomorrow's Playtest session. I've a new version of Zombology half done on the computer which needs finishing off, printing out and assembling. It's changed a bit since the Newcastle Playtest crowd last played it a month ago - I've been playing it for a couple of weeks now with new rules but out of date cards, so it would be good to have the cards to match the rules! I foresee a busy evening ahead...

Back On The Case

I spent last week in Baltimore for work. It was a hectic week, working Saturday, Sunday and then Monday through Wednesday.

I had hoped to make it to a local games venue and get some gaming in like I did when attending the same show in Minneapolis last year. Sadly it was not to be - I was unable to arrange anything on BGG beforehand and I was incredibly busy, working 9am to 11pm several days with a 7am start one day. So I would have struggled to fit anything in.

I did have a few hours free on the Thursday morning before our flights home, so I'd been thinking I might head over to Canton Games and maybe grab a small game. Come Thursday morning I was understandably knackered, but I decided I'd drag my sorry carcass out of bed and head on over, only to find out that it didn't open until noon - when we were leaving for the airport. So that was a wash out too.

So not much gaming to speak of. Ian, my boss and travel companion for the week, and I managed to get nine iPad games in on the way over and a couple more on the way back, so I didn't go completely cold turkey.

Now I'm back and over the worst of the jet lag and I want to get cracking on Zombology again. I'm in the middle of doing some more art for another version that updates it to the latest rules I've been playing. I've also got to respond to the feedback I've received from the version I made available a few weeks ago and start collecting some win/loss statistics on the latest version. I need to get a decent number of games played so that I can begin to work out the likelihood of winning, maybe twenty games or so, but I need to do this for each number of players the game supports so 120 games or so. Time to get cracking!

Paul and Lisa are coming up next weekend, so I'll see if they are up for some more...

Not Gaming in Baltimore

I'm in America at the moment for work, like I was last summer. Last year I arranged to go to the Fantasy Flight Games Event Centre a couple of times and get some gaming in, and I did it without getting axe-murdered, which was an achievement. I had two great nights hanging out with Alfredo, Jay and Fred and got to experience the FFGEC and The Source which is a huge US games shop.

I had hoped to repeat the experience this year in Baltimore, but I'm a bit busier in the evenings at the convention we're attending, and my attempt to arrange some gaming action on BGG was unsuccessful. So no gaming for me :-(

Of course, when I say no gaming I'm not including the 13-15 hours of travel each way, during which I'm strapped into a plane seat, with my boss Ian beside me and an iPad full of games in my hand. Ian's a Games Night attendee, so we played a bunch of games on the way over and will probably play a bunch more on the way back.

Other than that, there's not much to report, I got the first set of feedback from the blind playtesting release of Zombology just before I left, so I'll have to go through that properly on my return. I'll amend the rules to hopefully answer so of the questions they've raised and work out which ideas the play testers suggested to incorporate in the game. Interestingly, some of the feedback tallies well with the feedback I'd had from Paul last weekend, so that's nice confirmation that Paul's ideas are good ones.

Getting Some Data

Another busy week for me. It started with Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, then doing Zombology artwork while babysitting on Wednesday evening, Zombology playtesting on Thursday lunchtime, Games Night and then finally a weekend in York with Paul and his family.

The Newcastle Playtest was a really good session. We had eight people - the second highest attendance yet. We had a new designer (Graham), Olly again, my mate Dave for the first time plus the usual five of us. We started with a couple of 8-player games of Zombology (seeing as it technically goes up to eight players, but I'd not played it with eight for months and months). We lost both games, pulling the average win/loss ratio even further from my ideal 70/30, but everyone seemed to enjoy it, with Dan (fresh from having given a couple of his prototypes to a major publisher at the UK Games Expo) saying that it gets better and better each time he plays. Nice feedback, but there's still a way to go before it's awesome.

I made some changes in the version that I made available last week, including adding another card to each suit and moving the Cure from a 5 to a 10 (which is the amount of points it's worth at the end). The 5 to 10 thing was because there wasn't enough impetus to Cure a suit you weren't backing. If someone else had played the 3 and the 4 then playing the five would just hand them the victory. If the top card was a ten instead, then there's a strong impetus to Cure a suit since you'll do very well from it. Of course, once we tried it, it had gone the other way, and playing the ten was almost always a game winning move. In one of our games on Tuesday, Dan intentionally destroyed the Cure in the only suit he'd played all game because letting someone else play it would hand them the game. Clearly ten was too high.

As the week wore on I tried a couple more things out. Someone had suggested making the Cures value 8 at the Playtest session so, while babysitting for a couple of friends' sleeping kids on Wednesday, I started doing the layout for another version with 8 as the top card.

Next up was Thursday lunchtime playtesting. We played with the Cures as 8s that seemed to go ok. We played three games: a couple with six players and then another with four. We won two out of three, pulling things back in the right direction. This is the first time I've had a version of the semi co-op that there's actually a chance of it going either way. The first attempt way back in February was played twice, lost twice and there was no apparent chance of winning. I made a bunch of changes, and then through the next five or ten versions we've not had a single loss. And to be honest, it never felt like there was much chance of losing with those versions.

This version is clearly in the balance. As a scientist finding a cure is possible, there's something to strive for and work towards, while you try to work out which of the available suits could potentially lead to a cure. By the same token, there's a real risk of the zombie apocalypse leading to everyone's deaths. It is, after all, an apocalypse. There's got to be some chance of everyone dying. Is the balance right? Probably not. But I'm now at the point where I've got a version I can start tweaking to get the balance where I want it.

What I really need to do now is start collecting some hard data. I've started recording the win/loss results and graphing them, but what I really need is a lot more data - loads more games. Then, finally, I might have enough information to be able to make the correct decisions rather than just flailing around changing things at random in the hope the next game goes better than the last!

Zombology - Get It While It's Hot!

Off the presses that is. Zombology, my 20 minute card game about the science of the zombie apocalypse for 3-8 players is now available for download again. I've decided to make the blind playtest of Zombology freely available here in the hope I'll get more people to download it and give it a try. As with the NaGa DeMon versions, I've put links to the PDFs of the game cards (in A4 and A3 sizes) and the rules at the bottom of this post. It's 5 double sided sheets of A3 or 12 double sided sheets of A4. Plus one doubled sided sheet of A4 for the rules. Please feel free to print and cut out a copy and give it a bash.

Please note that this is a playtesting copy featuring basic artwork and while I'm reasonably happy with the way the game is progressing, this version hasn't been extensively tested and isn't finished - this is a work in progress made available to get feedback and for testing. I've only played this version a few times, so there are a few things that are possibly flaky. I'm slightly concerned that this version makes it too easy for a spoiler to make a player win impossible, so that's something to be aware of. The game is a semi co-op with the players trying to beat the game, but with only a single winner. In the last few versions the players always won, which to my mind was a bad thing - there was no risk and no feeling of striving to beat the zombies before time ran out - the players always won comfortably with plenty of time to spare. In this version we've played four games, and won two. I'm aiming for a 70% win ratio, so 50% is a little worrying, but based on far too little data at this point. In one of the games one of the players was acting as a spoiler, trying his damnedest to force a loss on everyone. He succeeded. I hope that experienced players would be about to overcome that (at least 70% of the time!) but I'm concerned that as it stands it might be too easy, which could make the game less fun for everyone else.

If you do download it please comment on this post letting me know that you've downloaded it so I can get some idea of how many people are taking a look and if you play it I would really appreciate it if you would take some time to provide me with feedback via email.

Please email me at jackson dot pope at gmail dot com with Zombology Feedback in the subject line and answers to the following questions:

• How easy was it to get people to play the game?
• Did you like the theme?
• Who played the game? Were they gamers?
• How clear were the rules and the examples in the rules?
• Do you have any rules questions?
• What did you like most about the game?
• What did you like least about the game?
• Do you have any ideas to improve the game?
• Did the players enjoy the game?
• Would they play again?
• Would you be interested in buying a copy of Zombology with decent art and production quality?
• If so, how much would you pay for it (in your currency)?

Many thanks in advance for taking the time to try it out and provide me with some feedback. I really appreciate it and hopefully you help will make Zombology a better game.

Here are the links to the files:

• A3 fronts and A3 backs, or
• A4 fronts and A4 backs
• Plus, you'll need the rules

Thanks again for your help, I look forward to receiving your feedback!

Next Steps

It's been a fairly quiet week. After last week when The Wife was away and The Parents were up and then last weekend when I was down at Beer and Pretzels gaming I wanted to take a few days to think about what needs to happen to Zombology to take it to the next level.

A few weeks ago I asked for blind playtesters for Zombology. I warned the volunteers that I wanted to try out some changes I'd just come up with before making it available to them. I took the version containing those changes to Beer and Pretzels and tried it out with a few friends that I only get to see at Beer and Pretzels. It didn't work as I had hoped and left me wondering whether the problems were due to a bad shuffle of a new prototype or fundamental problems with the new version.

I'd made the first deck more positive, getting rid of some of the events and adding more science cards. The extra science cards had higher values which meant that in the first half of the game you had something to aim for. The downside however was that the second half of the game became too easy. Starting the second half of the game with some value three cards in play meant you could cure a suit in one or two of the remaining four turns. This made it too easy for the players to win, taking the game back towards the previous version which had been too easy.

So I've spent most of this week thinking of ideas to address the comments from Beer and Pretzels and the previous Newcastle Playtest while not knackering the game difficulty. I've got some more ideas to try out now:

• Add another value card to move the goalposts for curing back
• End the game immediately after a cure (which will mess with whether or not to play a cure)
• Take the twos back out of the second half of the game (making it harder to resurrect dead suits)

As usual, I've no idea how these changes will work until I've made a prototype and tried it out. We're away visiting friends this weekend, so it'll have to wait until next week before I can try things out.

Let's Convene

The focus of this week has been Beer and Pretzels. Oh, and parenting. But mostly Beer and Pretzels.

My parents came up last weekend so that I would have some help looking after The Daughter while The Wife was away for work. It's been great having them up, I'd not seen them since January and they were incredibly helpful, making my period as primary care-giver much easier. I even managed to get a new version of Zombology ready for this weekend in the evenings after The Daughter went off to sleep.

The Wife got back on Thursday so I could head off to Beer and Pretzels on Saturday morning. I've been to Beer and Pretzels four or five times now, initially as a publisher trying to drum up interest and trade for the games I was making and for the last two years as a punter, just playing games with friends while drinking a small amount of beer and eating the odd pretzel.

Saturday was an early start, up at five (though actually 4:30, The Daughter was waking up early all week with her cold), then a 6am departure to get a train to Burton to arrive in time for the 10am convention start.

On arrival, I came across a few old friends, Paul, Carole and Nick and then Terry, one of my gaming buddies from the South, arrived. We started with a quick game of Zombology, using the new version I'd made last week. I think the new art was much clearer (except accidentally missing out the requirement information from some of the cards) but the new version seemed way too easy. Though this may have been at least in part to a poor shuffle of a newly printed game leaving the aggressive cards out of the deal. People seemed to enjoy it, but in a low key way, there was no-one clamouring to play it again or buy it. More work required methinks.

After Zombology we ploughed through another 9 games, mostly with the same crowd. At home we play games at my house using my collection. I rarely buy games I haven't played and enjoyed, so we mostly play games I know. Conventions (and Beer and Pretzels is the only one I go to these days) are the main way I have to come across new games. Saturday was the first time I'd played Elder Sign, Las Vegas (which we played twice), Il Vecchio, Gear & Piston and Istanbul.

Particular favourites were:

• Las Vegas - like a simple, cleaner version of Alea Iacta Est, with plenty of opportunities to screw each other over. Terry had apparently owned it for ages but only played it for the first time recently, after which he's racked up a bunch of plays.
  

• Istanbul (just nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres) - another of Terry's purchases, you're racing around the city trying to be the first to collect five (or six with two) rubies to win the game. I enjoyed its simplicity and the speed at which things proceeded and the ability to lay the tiles out differently each time you play, increasing its replayability.
  

We called it a night around 9:30, half an hour before the venue shut. I was knackered, twelve hours of gaming on top of the 4:30am start had done for me. Terry and I were staying in the same hotel so he gave me a lift and then I had an awesome night's sleep.

Sunday started at ten, but we arrived a bit early (as we had the day before). They weren't letting us in early though, so we sat in the sun for half an hour and played half a game of Stone Age on the iPad.

I'd brought two versions of Zombology with me, so I asked yesterday's victims and Neil if they'd try the other version and compare and contrast. This was a noticeably more vicious game that proceeded more quickly since almost everyone had played before. Most people enjoyed it, but Nick found he rarely had a good card to play and Paul would have liked higher cards in the first deck to aim towards.

Sunday was a much shorter day, I wanted to get the 3:30 train so I could be back in time for the daughter's bedtime, so I only had five hours of gaming. After Zombology, we played a couple of longer games: Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia and Praetor. I think Euphoria was my favourite game of the weekend a 60 minute worker placement game with loads going on, plus nice art and fantastic wooden pieces (I admit it, I'm a sucker for nice bits!).

All in all, it was a great weekend. Great to catch up with Terry and everyone else, great to learn some great new games and play some old favourites.

The only downside was that Zombology wasn't as well received as I had hoped. Needs a bit more tweaking I think, time to consider some new ideas.

Newcastle Playtest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print on Demand

One of the questions I get asked a lot is what am I going to do about getting Zombology published. In this day and age most people assume I'll KickStart it, but as I've mentioned before I have some misgivings about KickStarter.

Another option would be to self-publish it, either as a short hand-made run, or as a full professional run using my own money - both of which I have previous for. It's a card game, so it would be less effort to make by hand or much cheaper to manufacture than the games I published as Reiver Games. But my life has changed beyond recognition since I started Reiver Games. I'm now a parent to a wonderful little girl who needs and deserves a lot of her daddy's time (plus I genuinely want to spend as much time with her as I can, especially since I spend so much of her waking life at work). As a parent, risking most of our savings on a venture that I've previously failed at to the tune of several thousand pounds is also pretty irresponsible. So both of those are looking unlikely too.

That left me with a third option: find a publisher. It's notoriously difficult to get a game picked up by a publisher - hence everyone turning to KickStarter with such gay abandon. I think I've a slight head start over a newbie designer in that I know a bunch of publishers personally from my Reiver Games days. But it will still be a struggle and I'll have to find one who has space in their publishing schedule and for whom Zombology would be a good fit. So that's been my thinking and what I've been aiming for.

This weekend we've been away for a long weekend (hence the late posting) but earlier in the week, before we left, I came across Daniel Solis' monthly sales report for the games he has manufactured through Print on Demand (POD) company DriveThruCards. Which got me thinking about POD as an alternative publishing method. It would effectively be self-published, so I wouldn't be at the mercy of another publisher's schedule, tastes or editing. I wouldn't need to devote hours of my free time to hand making copies and trips to the Post Office, since they handle manufacture and shipping. I wouldn't need a boat load of cash upfront since they print copies as and when they are ordered and they just give you your royalties out of the profit they make from the sales. You'd get some free marketing just by being listed in their marketplace (though nowhere near as much as being listed in KickStarter's). Daniel has an easier job of it since he's an artist by trade, so I'd need to either seriously up my game, splash out on a (cheap!) pro artist or release it ugly.

But it's now an option I'm seriously considering...

Now Recruiting! The Blind!

My games design efforts tend to occur in waves. The game pootles on for a while and then I make some sweeping changes and then we're back to pootling again. It's usually (though not always!) the case that the sweeping changes improve things, but at the same time if they are sweeping, then they tend to break a few things at the same time as improving the overall game. So I tend to go through a cycle where I make a sweeping change and then have to spend a few weeks fixing up the various things I've broken as a result of the changes. Then the game settles down, the broken things are fixed one after another and it pootles along until it's time to make the next set of sweeping changes - and then the fixing of brokeness.

Over the last couple of months Zombology has been through this cycle a few times. I made some huge changes back in February and then spent the next couple of weeks fixing it up. The March version simplified things a bit and then needed fixing up again and finally last week I came up with the April version.

I got a chance to play the April version at Games Night on Thursday (we couldn't get a quorum together for lunchtime playtesting as loads of people were off work last week) and it kinda worked. Which was unexpected. I was expecting the usual "well that's better, but also hideously broken", but instead it seemed to go ok. Admittedly that's from a sample size of one, so I'll need to play it a few more times to get a better handle on how it really plays, but it was encouraging. One of my concerns about the March version was that the game was too easy. It's supposed to be semi co-op, either one player wins, or everyone is eaten by zombies and loses. But there are six ways of winning and in most games two to four of them happened, so it looked like everyone losing was going to be incredibly unlikely. In my head I want the everyone loses outcome to happen about 30% of the time, not 0%!

Thursday's game had only one of the six win conditions come out and it felt a lot more close to the bone, so I liked that about it.

As I mentioned a minute ago, I'll need to test it a bunch more times, but at the moment I'm getting a good feeling about this version. The next stage, once I've confirmed that it's not broken and is working as I intend, is to get some blind playtesters on board to try it out and give me some feedback on:

• The clarity and completeness of the rules
• Whether or not the game is fun
• Whether or not the game is worth pursuing
• Critical feedback on what works and what doesn't
• Plus a boat load more data on the outcomes of the game from a much bigger sample

I reckon I'm a couple of weeks from sending out blind playtesting copies, so what I need now are some blind playtesters lined up and ready to go. I'm looking for people who can commit to playing the game a bunch of times and providing me with written feedback on the rules and the game and the results of their plays (e.g. score cards and win/loss ratios). For those of you that have come here from Google+ and BGG, the game is a 15 minute filler about fighting the zombie apocalypse using science not shotguns. It's for 3-8 players. If you're interested in taking part, please comment on this post stating:

• Where you heard about Zombology (if you've only just heard about it, that's preferable)
• Any playtesting experience you've got
• What groups you can try it out with (numbers, make-up)
• Whether you're happy to print and play (preferable) or you'd like a physical copy sent out to you

People who provide high quality feedback/comments/data will be listed in the rules as playtesters in the event that the game ever gets published.

Any takers?

I Fought the Flu

And I won! Eventually.

So the sickness I was winging about last week turned out to be the flu. The real flu, not man-flu. The real flu. So the beginning of the week was joyous. I spent the first half of the week in bed, able to watch Netflix on the iPad and pretty much nothing else. Unable to sleep due to a bunged up head and difficulty breathing I ended up sat on the sofa at 4:30am on Tuesday (while The Daughter slept! Wasted!) wrapped in a blanket reading the flu symptoms on the NHS Direct website and as I went through the long list, ticking them all off (except nausea & sickness, thankfully), I had to except I probably had the flu. Then I got to the bit about if you have a long term condition, e.g. neurological condition or are immuno-compromised, you should go to the doctor. Seeing as I have Multiple Sclerosis and have received an immuno-comprising treatment for it, I figured that probably included me, so I gave them a ring when they opened that morning. The returned call confirmed I probably had the flu and that I should rest and drink loads of water and I should be aware that it could take me up to ten days (!) to get over it because of my situation.

Thankfully after four or five days I was starting to feel vaguely human again (though pretty weak from not having really eaten for nearly a week). Now I feel fine, and I spent most of this weekend feeling fine too. Which was great, since Easter is a four day weekend in the UK, so I got to spend time hanging out with my family and friends lying in the sun, eating food and drinking beer and playing with various sets of kids. It was a great weekend, it felt really summery too, which considering it's only April was great. It was certainly just what I needed after the flu.

I even had the chance to finish off the next version of Zombology and get it printed out and assembled. It's the version after the NaGa DeMon winners' copies (three of which have now definitely arrived :-) ). I've tried to pare it down a bit further, hopefully streamlining the game a bit more, while at the same time boosting the player interaction and making it a bit more cutthroat. I'd imagine I'll have to tweak it a few times to get things working as intended, but I hope the new changes, once tweaked, will be a further improvement over the NaGa DeMon version. At this rate I'm going to have to start thinking of assembling some blind playtesters before too much longer. I'd imagine that BGG is the place to go for that, I can't imagine I have a large enough readership here to select from (plus, if you're reading this, you're already clued up to some degree and probably a bit biased too!).

Anyway, I'm feeling good about it at the moment. Exciting times!

Gone Cardboard

I'll keep it brief today, I've been been feeling really rough since Saturday night, wrote this in bed on Sunday afternoon and am now posting it from bed too.

Earlier this week I did finally finish off the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology which went in the post. It felt like the early days of Reiver Games again, shipping games that I'd made by hand around the world. This time they were prototypes though, but it still featured what I believe to be the first game I've sent to Africa.

As proof, I offer this photographic evidence from Frugal Dave (one of the winners) who, thanks to living in the UK, received his copy first.

With the winners' copies no longer hanging over me I was finally able to start work on the next version of Zombology incorporating feedback from the epic session at a Newcastle Playtest a couple of weeks ago.

Then I came down with something and spent an inordinate amount of time in bed over the weekend. I hope to finish off the April version shortly so I can start testing the new changes. I have high hopes for them, but they will inevitably be broken to begin with.

On an unrelated note, I've also been using my lunch breaks at work to make some more progress on my Firefly: The Board Game app. It's nearing the point where I'll submit it to the Windows Phone store where it will inevitably languish un-installed.

What a Week!

This week, I've had three nights of gaming. Three!

Newcastle Playtest

Tuesday was the latest Newcastle Playtest session. I'd missed the last one, due to my trip to Germany last month for work, so I was especially keen to make it along this time. Also, Dan the organiser couldn't make it this month, so as his understudy it was important I was there. There were going to be three of us: Alex, Paul and I. Alex wasn't due until after 7:30, but Paul was coming along early so I went over at 6:30 with Codename: Vacuum and Zombology. It turns out that Paul had a work emergency so he didn't get there until gone 7:30, so I spent the first hour on my own. It was fine though since my replacement phone - after the Great Spontaneously Combusting Nokia Lumia Event of 2014 - had just arrived so I spent the hour installing apps and setting it up just how I wanted. Once Paul and Alex arrived the three of us played five (5!) games of Zombology. I was keen to show it to them since they hadn't seen it since I made the sweeping changes, which were largely done in response to their feedback. They both enjoyed it I think, and Paul commented that it was nice to spend the evening concentrating on a single game. I've got loads more ideas now for the next version, once I've finished with the NaGa DeMon copies. As time goes on I'm finding Newcastle Playtest to be more and more useful in the development of my games.

Unfortunately, we found out after the event another designer had tried to attend. He'd hung around for an hour, but because I was sat there on my own playing with my new phone he'd not found us :-(

Games Night

Thursday was Games Night, and with enough attendees for two tables and a new phone to run my Firefly: The Board Game app, I was finally able to try it out. As with any live demo, it crashed once, but apart from that and the slightly wrong information about the number of cards in each deck, it worked.

I can't tell you how much time it saved, as we played with three instead of four, all who had played it before (unlike last time) and a different mission card. But it came in at 3 hours instead of 4 and it felt like it helped a bit.

TableTop Day

Finally, Saturday was TableTop Day, and with the father-in-law delaying his visit until next weekend, I was able to get along to Newcastle Gamers for their free all day session. I only went for a few hours in the evening after The Daughter had gone to bed, but was greeted with a cheer on arrival as I had broken the all time attendance record (I think I was the 52nd attendee that day!). I stayed for three and a bit hours, but managed to play six games including two games of AbluXXen, which was new to me. I took a bunch of games and ended up playing three of the ones I'd brought, including Sumeria, which I had a hankering for. I'd not played in ages and despite over a hundred more plays than my newbie opponents, I got my arse handed to me - the scores were 41, 33 and 21 (me).

All in all a great week's gaming, when you include the Zombology Playtest at lunch on Thursday and the game of Incan Gold after Firefly, I've played 15 games this week (and in fact in the first five days of April). That's going to help me meet my target for the year!

Bringing People Together

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

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

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

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

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

About #?@!ing Time

Many years ago, while humanity was busy learning how to craft flint axes and wondering which pelts made the best loincloths, I took part in NaGa DeMon 2013, coming up with a game I called Zomobology, a quick, vicious card game about fighting the zombie apocalypse with science not shotguns. With only a month to come up with a working game, I enlisted the help of the internets, promising free stuff in return for feedback, proof-reading and ideas.

NaGa DeMon went very well, I got loads of feedback, made 6 versions of Zomobology within the month and made them available print and play for feedback purposes. I had nearly four times a normal month's pageviews on the blog and everything was rosy. Huzzah!

Did I mention the free stuff? Yes. Right. Um. So I'd offered the five most helpful feedback providers a signed, numbered limited edition copy of the final version as created at the end of the month. That version was freely available here for download, so to spice it up a bit, I said I'd get some exclusive artwork done for the winners' copies. The only slight problem with this plan was I'd spent all my hard-earned cash on nappies, so budget was limited, and I can't draw for toffee. Another call for help on the internet and I thought I'd found an artist who was prepared to do the artwork for beer money. Millennia passed, man learned to forge metal tools, wear togas and build sewers. Then the artist deal fell through.

Man harnessed the atom and discovered quantum mechanics and the whole thing was getting farcical. Instead I offer the winners (who by this point have largely forgotten who I am) a signed, numbered limited edition copy of the current version, with crappy artwork by yours truly (plus a selection of Creative Commons licensed art from the internet). This version is actually slightly more exclusive since it's changed quite a lot since the final NaGa DeMon version at the end of November and the art, such as it is, is all new. In an effort to draw a line under the whole sordid affair, the winners accept my paltry offer and everything is back on.

Did I mention it had changed quite a lot? So that version has several new mechanisms and is completely untested. So I start testing it and make a few iterations testing it until it gets to the point where it essentially works. It's not perfect (I think it's now too easy to cure zombitis), but it's playable. Let's do this!

Except I've run out of ink for my printer and I've not written the rules for the new version - they're all in my head. So I crack on with this while the winners take advantage of the singularity and download their consciousnesses to a silicate substrate, desperate to not let their failing corporeal forms deny them access to free stuff.

Saturday night the stars were finally in alignment. The Daughter was sleeping well, The Wife was out for dinner and drinks with friends and I was vaguely awake. I'd written the rules up on Wednesday and the printer ink had arrived on Thursday. Time to finally get my house in order. The copies are now seeing the light of day and will be shipping soon. Thank you all for your patience!

The Joy of S...

...leep! It's finally happened, after 18 months, The Daughter has finally started sleeping pretty well. We've had several nights in the last week where she's either slept through, or only woken very briefly and then gone back to sleep. It's been awesome.

The Wife and I have been so refreshed that we've been able to stay up very late (like 10pm!) and spend some time together - especially good since I was away for a chunk of last week in Germany for work. So, I've not made much progress on games.

What little progress I have made has been on Zombology again. We got to play a seven player game of it at the beginning of Games Night on Thursday (it seemed to go down well - I'll be sending this version to the NaGa DeMon winners as soon as I've written up the new rules). I've changed it slightly so that it's a semi-coop game. It's possible for all players to lose, or one player to win. The first attempt I made at this was way too hard (all players always lost!), and I fear I've gone too far the other way now, so it might need a little tweaking to make it a bit harder - it is an apocalypse after all - there should be at least some risk of being consumed head first.

I've ordered new ink for my printer, so I should be able to finally make the copies for the NaGa DeMon winners next week. Which gives me this week to get the rules done while I wait for the ink to arrive.

I've also been meaning to play Firefly: The Board Game again so I can try out the app I wrote for my Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone. I've been very happy with the phone until this week when it overheated while charging and melted the USB port to the point where I can no longer plug it in or charge it. So now it's died. It's still in warranty though, so I'll be speaking to Nokia this week about that. With no phone to test the app on, I might as well try to play Homesteaders (a recent purchase, as yet unplayed) instead.

I've had a couple of quiet weeks on the games design front, with Germany and then this week (which if I'm honest was largely spent watching House of Cards!), but it's time to step up things again now and get the NaGa DeMon winners copies out to them. In the meantime, I'm looking for some icons to represent the following:

• This card protects another (named) card
• This card will flip another (named) card
• This card is vulnerable to another (named) card

Any ideas?

Willkommen zu Hause!

It's been a busy week. A couple of days in the office and then three days on a work trip to Germany. It was only my third time in Germany which is a bit weird since German is the closest thing I have to a second language (which is a long way from a second language!). At school I did five years of French and three of German and by the end of that I felt more comfortable in German than French. Then both my French and my German languished for many years before I started Reiver Games and travelled to Germany to attend Essen. I tried while there to practice my paltry German and on my return I took a couple of years of German classes at evening school, ready for my second Essen and beyond.

Essen 2010 was only my second trip to Germany and with Reiver Games collapsing, it was my last until this Wednesday. My boss and I went to Tübingen for a meeting on Thursday but it took us most of the day on Wednesday to get there and then most of Friday to get back.

As I mentioned last week, in preparation for the two full days of travelling with my boss (a Games Night attendee) I'd purchased a few more games for my iPad: Small World, Settlers of Catan, Forbidden Island and Pandemic. As it turns out, we left checking in until we arrived at the airport (both times!) and ended up only spending one flight sat next to each other, so our gaming opportunities were fairly limited. We only played Pandemic of the new games I'd bought (which is a nice app that I'm glad I bought).

It was a good trip and I liked Tübingen a lot, as well as what little I saw of Baden-Württemberg (out of the window on the bus from Stuttgart airport to Tübingen, while trying to concentrate on Lords of Waterdeep and Stone Age :-) ).

Now that I'm back I need to concentrate on Zombology. I made some sweeping changes to Zombology a few weeks ago. Since then I've made a few corrective changes each weekend trying to get the new version fairly stable, ready for sending out to the NaGa DeMon competition winners. I think I'm almost there. Last week's version played well but was possibly a bit too easy, I'll see if I can make a few tweaks and then get cracking on the winners' copies. Writing the new rules is the first priority and I'll need to lay in some more printer ink for that too...

Electronic Board Gaming

As I mentioned last week, my role at work has changed slightly over the last couple of years, moving towards Project Management and away from Software Engineering. As part of that I've been making more trips for work, often with my boss, Ian. Ian just so happens to be a Games Night attendee, so when we travel, I take the iPad and its collection of board game apps.

I used to be a very keen computer gamer as a kid, mostly RPGs and RTSs with a little first-person action thrown in too. As the games became more realistic, I started getting worse and worse motion sickness, so I gave up gaming. Similarly, my hobby design efforts moved from tiny bits of computer role playing games to fully fledged board games and Reiver Games was born.

As I became more and more interested (some would say obsessed!) in board games, computer games completely fell by the wayside and I stopped playing them altogether. Board games gave you a greater mental challenge in a shorter timeframe, without the frustrating dexterity element of having to push the buttons in exactly the right order at the right time.

I was a late adopter of smart phones, but we've had an iPad for a number of years and the draw of Carcassonne on the iPad (and later Windows Phone) sucked me back in. Being able to play good board games on my own when I had time to kill and no opponent was a fun way to fill the time, without the joylessness of soloing a game (which somehow feels lonely in a way that playing against a computer opponent does not).

The last two years I've been to a big conference in North America (Vancouver in 2012 and Minneapolis in 2013), and I've been with colleagues who come to my Games Night, so I've taken the iPad and we've whiled away the airports, connections and transatlantic flights playing games. I love board games (obviously!), but there's a time and a place for physical games and, for the vast majority of them, being crammed into cattle class on a transatlantic flight isn't it. But the iPad lets you play decent, complex, strategic games with almost no space requirements and as an added bonus you get a lot of the bookkeeping taken care for you and there's no setup or packing away time.

The Wife would tell you otherwise, but I'm actually a fairly conservative board game purchaser. I don't buy many games, and those I do I'll get rid of if I don't like them or stop playing them. I rarely buy a game without playing it a few times first (Firefly the Board Game and X-Wing Minis are a couple of recent exceptions to that rule). Strangely, the same is true of iPad board game apps, despite the much lower price point. Until recently, almost all the apps I bought were games I owned the physical version of, and I've only ever bought one game I'd not played before (Army of Frogs, and that was because I am big fan of Hive which doesn't have a native iPad version). Since the start of the year I've done two trips to Manchester for work (3 hours on the train each way) and next week I'm off to Tuebingen in Germany - pretty much 8 hours of travelling each way - again with my boss Ian.

We usually play Ra a lot, plus Hey! That's My Fish! and more recently Lords of Waterdeep and Puerto Rico. For the German trip I've also invested in Catan (I've previously owned a physical copy), Pandemic (I own a physical copy), Small World (I've played it a few times, but don't own it) and Forbidden Island (played quite a lot, but don't own). It would appear that I'm loosening up a bit.

With all this choice, the two games I play the most solo are Carcassonne (when I've got a few spare minutes) and Eclipse (which I own) when I'm on a journey and I've burnt out my travel companions!

While I'm very happy to play board games on the iPad pass-and-play with friends, I never play online games - either real-time or turn based. There's something about board games that I think is lost in translation if you're not all interacting in the same physical space.

Do you play electronic versions of board games? Which are your favourites?

Playtesting Success and Mobile Development II

One of last year's most popular posts was entitled Playtesting Success and Mobile Development, which is an apt title for this week too.

I'll start with the playtesting. Last week I'd come up with a new version of Zombology on the train to Sheffield and then constructed it last weekend. Games Night was cancelled due to The Daughter being ill again (I'm thinking of suing the nursery ;-) ), but I managed to arrange a playtest session at work on Wednesday lunchtime. Six us of sat down to play Zombology and because it's very quick we played a couple of games.

I'd made a bunch of changes to Zombology to combat some of the most frequent criticisms:

• It's not very zombie
• I've no idea how many rounds are left
• The two different types of cards are confusing

The games went quite quickly and it was clear that introducing a round track and the events and upgrades had boosted the theme quite a lot (though at the detriment of the science theme, which was much less evident). There was much less confusion about the types of cards too.

As with any major change to a design it introduced a bunch of new problems which I addressed over the weekend - I've a new new version now which I'll be testing this week:

In related news, I've given up on the artist for the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology, I'm going to send the the new version as a prize instead - they all seem happy with that.

On the app development front, I've started a new app too.

Last year I got a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone. As far as I can tell The Wife, Hoops and I are the world's only three Windows Phone owners. There aren't anywhere near as many apps for it as there are for iOS and Android, but I bought it because in the day job I write software in C# and XAML and I could write apps for it in C# and XAML.

My job title is technically Project Manager and Software Engineer, and since our takeover by a large American corporation last August it's been leaning more towards Project Management. Coupled with the chronic and acute sleep deprivation my programming skills are fast atrophying, so being able to do some app development in my spare time to keep my hand in has been a good thing. Last year it was an app to help set up and record games of Codename: Vacuum, this year it's an app to try to streamline games of FireFly: The Board Game.

While The Wife and The Daughter were away in January I got a chance to play Firefly: The Board Game. I then bought a copy and played it again at Games Night with my chums. I'm a huge fan of the TV series and the game is incredibly thematic, but one of the biggest criticisms I've heard of it is that it goes on too long. My two plays have been 2:20 and 4 hours, which seeing that Games Night only lasts four hours is a bit long for me really. Experienced players say they've got it down to under two hours (like it says on the box), but it'll be a struggle. especially while people are learning the game.

One of the clunkiest bits is movement. Each round you have a choice of 'moseying' one space (way too slow!) or going 'full burn' and moving up to five spaces, at a cost. The cost comes via a deck of Nav cards that tell you what happens in each space. So if you want to move five spaces you move a space, flip a card and resolve it, move a space, flip a card and resolve it, five times! Most of these cards are 'Keep Flying' which you can ignore - they have no effect. But just the act of moving then flipping slows you down.

So I've written a little app which I hope will streamline things. It shows Alliance and Border Space as two columns and you just click on the number of spaces you want to move and it will colour the spaces in between green (Keep Flying) or Red (something else). To use it, I'll have to take all of the Keep Flying cards out of the two Nav decks so you can just draw when the space goes red.

There's been some interest on Twitter about it (though not of course from Windows Phone users, I've got that market covered) and I'm hoping to try it out this week at Games Night assuming I can find some willing Browncoats...

Major Changes Afoot

This week involved my quarterly visit to Sheffield as part of the clinical trial that I'm on for a new MS drug. It means four hours of train travel one morning, as well as the hospital visit, which leaves me stuffed for hours for the week at work. So no Vacuum playtest this week :-(

Of course, the wonder of modern trains is that you can sit in a fairly comfy seat, with a coffee and your laptop (plugged in, so you don't run out of battery after fifteen minutes!) and actually get something useful done. I choose to use these days to write blog posts (including this one) and do prototype graphic design :-)

Last week's blog post was my most popular so far this year, with the most interest on Twitter I've ever had - 5 favourites, 5 retweets and three shout outs - so there's some pressure on this week to keep the quality high! I had hoped to do an analysis of Reiver Games sales over time, but unfortunately I'd failed to copy the relevant files to my new laptop when the old one died, so I can't (at least, not today, I still have them backed up somewhere).

So instead, I'll be talking about Zombology again. At last week's Newcastle Playtest I'd played Zombology for the first time since the very beginning of December - it had sat unloved on the shelf for a couple of months awaiting the artwork for the NaGa DeMon winners copies (and my playtest copy of course). We played two games and afterwards I got a couple of pages of suggestions and criticisms from the very thorough discussion.

There was more criticism about the lack of zombie theming (which I've heard before from other people) plus criticism of the complexity:

• Multiple decks - it's not clear when to draw from which one
• I was the only player who knew how many rounds we had left and I had to count it each time someone asked
• Having two different types of cards in hand, some of which you were only allowed to use in specific rounds

Seeing as I'm pitching this up against games like 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! this complexity is a major problem, 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! are both very simple games that you can explain in a few sentences and are easy to pick up, even for non-gamers. Theme is less important in a 10 minute game (I've no idea what the themes of 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! are, despite loads of plays). I think the zombie-flavoured artwork will go some way to alleviate the lack of theme, but there's more I can and should be doing in that arena.

One thing did get positive feedback though, the new scoring was much simpler which was a good thing - everyone was able to calculate their own scores (as opposed to earlier games where I worked it all out for everyone).

I spent most of Wednesday's train journeys working on a new version that addresses these complaints by:

• Adding a round tracker so everyone can see how far through the game you are
• Adding some zombie-themed events to theme it up a bit
• Removed the two types of cards complication
• Simplified the drawing of new cards

I've added some upgrade cards and some event cards to tie the theme in tighter (you can now get hazmat suits or suffer a zombie monkey ravaging your lab!) plus I use the round counter to introduce some urgency with decks that are named after how bad it's getting out in the real world. I'm hoping to add some art to the back of the cards which also brings that home.

It's a major departure from the last version, but at its core it's still a 10-15 minute game for 3-10 players that features drafting as its core mechanism. I printed it out on Saturday, now I just need to see if it works!

Playtesting Questions

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

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

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

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

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

• Enticing
• Enjoyable
• Engaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut Out The Middle Prototype

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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