A Breaking Change?

Not much to report on the game design front again (apologies to those of my readers who are coming here for game design!). I've not played many games this week, just Eclipse (for the second week on the trot) at Games Night. I tried to arrange another Zombology for lunchtime during the week, but yet again couldn't raise a quorum for it.

I have had an idea for Zombology though. Ok, that's a little disingenuous. Several of my playtesters have had the same idea, and after months of brushing it off as something that would over-complicate the game, I've finally decided to give it a try.

It's all been sparked by The Wife's criticism that she didn't feel like she had any control. When she said it it made me think back to a bunch of other people who had had the same criticism. So I thought about it, and 'I've had' this idea that might help. Zombology is a drafting game, like 7 Wonders, where every turn you play a card from your hand and pass the rest on to the player on your left. I like the fact that the draft gives you some knowledge about what's available in this particular game (since not all the cards are dealt in each game), and it allows you to play cards based on the knowledge of what you've passed to your neighbour. The downside is that if you're dealt a handful of great cards that can't be played yet, you have no choice but to give them to someone else.

The idea I've shamelessly stolen from my playtesters is to play a card, and keep a card, from each hand, passing all but one of the remaining cards on. Suddenly there's twice as many decisions to make in the game, which card to play and which one to keep each round. Do you keep the same one over many rounds and play it at the end, or play the kept card and chose a different one to keep next round? Do you keep an event card to prevent another player from playing it, or keep an excellent science card for the end game?

The pros of this idea are hopefully:

• You feel a lot more in control
• Twice as many interesting decisions
• Opportunities to block opponents' attacks
• No changes to the cards necessary

The cons are likely to be:

• The cards going round are more crap as everyone is hogging the good ones
• More decisions means longer play time
• Might require sweeping changes to the cards

Notice something about the last item on each list? The change is an incredibly minor one, just a couple of new lines in the rule book, no card changes or new artwork required. But I fear it will drastically change the dynamic of the game, making it far easier to win and unbalancing all the strategies I've spent nearly a year balancing to a fine point. Once I've tried it a few times I should know whether I need to go back to the drawing board again, re-building the decks from the ground up to fix the balance again. Of course, it might not even help with the control aspect, so at least I don't need to make any changes to try it out.

In other news, this week's free time has mostly been spent making a board game app for my phone. I make a trip or two a month to Manchester with my boss (usually) on the train. That's six hours that's often spent playing games on my iPad. I'm making an app for my phone for a simple game that I can't get on the iPad. It's not something that I'm going to publish, seeing as I don't have the license to do it, but it'll be fun for my own enjoyment and I'm learning new stuff as I make it. It's already playable if you know the rules, but it doesn't restrict you at all, so it's very easy to make illegal moves. That's the next step - make it force you to play by the rules!

Gone Digital

Not much progress this week on Games Design, because I've been focussing my efforts in the digital realm. Last weekend we got a new PC, replacing our knackered old laptop (I think it ran on Windows 1885) with something a bit more modern. It came with Windows 8.1, which has the added bonus of being able to develop Windows Phone apps on it. I also got my phone back on Monday (with a new motherboard!), which meant I was in full digital flow again.

Early in the week I released a new version of my BGG Last Plays app which fixed a crash found by my mate Mal, tweaked a couple of things in the UI and included games in your collection you'd never played (an oversight - since I don't have any unplayed games I didn't think to check!). That also meant that expansions were included now too (though as before you can hide any games you're not interested in).

The rest of the week was focused on developing a recording app I'm making for Zombology. Now that Zombology is fairly stable what I need to do is play it a lot of times and see whether the win/loss ratio is where I want it, and check it's consistent across different numbers of players. So I've written a little app to record this information and present it graphically for quick reference. It's nearly done, just the graphing of the results to finish off.

After that I've a couple more app ideas that I'd like to knock up, one which is a little project that I doubt I'll be able to make available for license reasons, but it'll be a fun little project and I'll use it, the other is an idea that might actually be saleable! But that's a bigger job, and further off.

On the games front, I've not even played Zombology this week, I was unable to form a quorum (of three including myself!) for a lunchtime game during the week and at Games Night we just played Eclipse (another one ticked off my games to play this year list).

However, The Wife played Zombology last week and found it a little too random for her tastes, she said she didn't feel like she had enough control. I'm fine with some of that in a ten minute game, but thinking about it that tallies with a similar criticism from Paul Scott at Newcastle Playtest, so perhaps I need to address it after all.

Zombology: Evolution

As most of you know, Zombology started life as my attempt to do a NaGa DeMon game. In November last year I set myself the goal of designing a game in a month!

Of course, I knew it wouldn't be finished by the end of November, but I wanted to make something playable in that time. I decided on a quick card game as that would be the easiest thing to make. With only a month I wanted something that I could iterate quickly: both the rules and the components, posting new versions of the rules, playtesting the game frequently and incorporating the feedback quickly into new versions that could then be tested too.

By the end of the month I'd been through five versions of the rule book and I'd played it sixteen times. And, as a bonus, it kind of worked as a game. But that's not the end of it. In the following ten months I've played it another sixty odd times, there have been another five major updates to the rules and the components have gone from incredibly basic to slightly more polished (with basic art and everything!).

The games has morphed from an every-man-for-himself drafting game for 3-10 players to a semi-co-op drafting game for 3-8 players. It's morphed from sensible science to ridiculous science (Vegan Diet as a potential cure for Zombies!?). But at its heart it's still the same game - a quick, silly, science-themed drafting game with some take that and some collective suit building.

It's now at the point where I've got to make a decision what to do with it. I think it's a fun little game for playing at the beginning or end of a night - perfect filler material. The options I'm considering at this point are:

• approach one of the publishers I know from my Reiver Games days
• or, make it available print on demand through Drive Thru Cards or the Gamecrafter

There's a few publishers that I'm comfortable approaching, though I've no idea whether it's the sort of thing they are interested in. Perhaps that needs to be my first step.

On a related note, before I sent my new phone off for repair (the camera stopped working when I upgraded to Windows 8.1), I starting working on another app for my phone. This one is for personal use: it's to record games I've played of Zombology and the win-loss ratios by number of players. Now the game is settling down I need to get a better idea of how well balanced it is. I've also invested in a Windows 8 laptop to replace our archaic, glacially-slow one. This means that I can now do Windows Phone app development at home, rather than just during my lunch breaks.

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.