I recently published two articles to BGG: a discussion of strategy in Modern Art and a review of the live-action pseudo-boardgame Cash & Guns: Live.

My idea for this is a little different than the solo Dice Quest.

There are 6 resources–one corresponding to every number.

Phase 1: Everyone rolls their dice in standard Yahtzee/To Court The King style. After all your rolling, you get to “harvest” any one resource; for example, if you have four 5’s, you can take four of the resource that corresponds to 5.

Phase 2: VPs are awarded. Four of the resources award one VP each. They then decay in different ways. Throwing out random ideas: one is a blind bid, one goes to the winner then the winner loses one, one goes to the winner then everyone loses half, one goes to the winner than the winner loses the second place’s total.

Phase 3: New abilities are gained. A certain number of abilities will be revealed, and they will be distributed somehow–maybe auctioned off, maybe purchased for a flat fee starting with the player with the lowest score. Resources are used as currency to buy abilities–any can be used for this purpose. Most abilities would be geared towards modification rather than extra dice; the target number of dice is 4-8 rather than 3-12.

Of the remaining 2 resources, one counts more (probably double) for buying abilities, and the other is spent to allow you to “harvest” a second number. For example, if your roll is 5, 5, 5, 5, 2, 2, you can spend one of these resources to harvest four of the resource corresponding to 5 and two of the resource corresponding to 2.

For some reason, the game is not “speaking” to me right now so I’m not going to rush out and flesh it out. One specific issue I see: In both Yahtzee and TCtK, watching other players roll the dice is boring. I would like to have everyone roll the dice at the same time, but with such a strong area-majority foundation, waiting until you saw what the other players doing would be a great advantage in many cases. One possible solution is to roll the dice in secret. Another is to roll in a specific predefined order, maybe based on score.

I’m more excited about the solitaire game because the action is nonstop! I’ll flesh out this one only if I get further inspired or bored.

Here were the parameters in my head when I started trying to hash out the design for Solo Dice Quest:

• Like in To Court The King, you start with 3 dice and gain both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities.
• Both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities should be necessary.
• Unlike in To Court the King, in the course of a single “round” the number of rolls you get is fixed. This should make dice-modifying abilities relatively more useful. One problem with TCtK is that no dice-adding ability is ever worse than “reroll all your dice.”
• The final goal will be to try to roll a large n-of-a-kind. The number required will be decided during the game.
• Half the “rounds” will be “quests” in which you try to match one of a small number of patterns. When you match a pattern, you take its card and gain the associated ability. (This is like TCtK except that not all of the patterns are available to you on any given turn.) The power and difficulty of the quests increases as the game progresses. Getting abilities from earlier in the game should make the difficulty of later quests manageable.
• The other half of the rounds will be “trials” in which you attempt to fulfill a certain condition. The catch is that this condition becomes more difficult as you get more dice, such as “all of your dice are 4 or greater”. Thus, choosing only dice-adding powers and eschewing dice-modifying abilities means you will fail at trials. Failing at trials has no immediate consequence, but it increases the difficulty of the endgame.
• The win rate should be 30-50%, increasable by some kind of “easy mode”. Winning should feel like an accomplishment even for a seasoned player.
• Winning a “round” as the game progresses should be expected but not guaranteed. Losing 0 or 1 rounds total should make the endgame very manageable–as long as you didn’t take only dice-modifying abilities and now you don’t have enough dice to win! Losing 2 to 4 rounds should make it dicey. Losing more rounds should make winning the endgame a long shot.

Near future: The outline for a multiplayer game based on the same framework, and the problems it is going to have; also, refinements of these ideas along with specifics; where it went when I started taking Sharpie to cardbord.

The exile has returned…

I haven’t even been away from boardgaming; I’ve been largely posting my thoughts at the ‘Geek, in many ways a better place to write because the audience is larger and individual writings can be smaller. But I don’t want to let Rule 0 die! After some thought, I’ve decided that I’d like to turn Rule 0 into a design journal. After making this decision, it was just a matter of waiting until I had another design that excited me…

The inspiration came when I played To Court The King. Capsule summary: Yahtzee with card that give you extra powers, like rolling more dice and changing the dice you roll. It’s a fine game, quick and playable (2+++ I think) that suffers from a couple of flaws:

• It’s pretty much non-interactive. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.
• You get so many chances to roll that die-manipulator effects are embarrassingly poor next to die-adding effects.

But I found the actual playing pretty compelling, so I set off to create a design that meets the following parameters:

1. Solitaire. This will be an explicitly solo game.
2. Will follow To Court The King’s basic pattern of starting with a small number of dice, and using them to make ever-bigger patterns and gain additional powers
3. Both die-adding and die-manipulating powers should be important
4. The game should be winnable/losable; not just a score but a binary yes/no. The ending should be tense. Even a good player should not always win. A way to “dial down” the difficulty should not be difficult to add.

My working title for this game is “Solo Dice Quest”–something non-inane to follow–and there should be more updates in the days ahead.

I’m not dead!

In fact, I have a new toy. A staple from my childhood that’s actually even more fun than I remember.

Pattern blocks are little wooden blocks (about 1 cm thick) that come in the following shapes:

• Equilateral triangle, side length 1 unit (green)
• Rhombus, angles 60-120-60-120, side length 1 unit (blue)
• Hexagon, side length 1 unit (yellow)
• Trapezoid, half of a hexagon (red)
• Square, side length 1 unit (orange)
• Rhombus, angles 30-150-30-150, side length 1 unit (white)

The only really fundamental shapes are the triangle, square, and white rhombus; the blue rhombus, trapezoid, and hexagon can all be built from triangles. Having them handy makes the patterns attractive, though.

(The link and the pattern therein does not do them justice. There is also a linked Java applet that really shows a tiny fraction of the neat things you can do, because of limitations as to where the pieces will snap to. Try using the white and green ones together and you’ll quickly see.)

Anyway, I highly recommend them as a gift for everyone you know, especially kids in grades 1-3 and adults that remind you of me.

If you get some, try this riddle: How many (different, rotationally symmetrical) ways can you make a regular dodecagon (12-sided polygon) of side length 1? I was a little surprised to find you can do it at all, but have found at least 3 different ways already. I guess you can do this riddle even without the blocks in front of you, if your spatial/geometrical imagination is much better than mine…

 1960: Making of the President: One of the designers is Jason Matthews of Twilight Struggle fame. This game is obviously mechanically inspired by Twilight Struggle but looks to have some potentially important advantages:

• 90-minute playtime (vs. 180)
• Cards have a secondary value, putting a number of “rest cubes” into a Shogun-esque bag, ready to come up and be helpful later. This balances the inherently higher power of certain cards vs. others.
• A cost (political “momentum”) for your opponent to use his own event if you play the card
• Fewer “gotcha” cards that can cost you the game if you don’t know about them beforehand; important cards to know about will be explicitly mentioned in the rulebook
• Published by Z-Man vs. GMT; will probably still be overpriced, but better produced.

And the theme looks only slightly less compelling. This could be a real winner.

Cuba: A bold choice for a theme–like making a movie set in some random town in Morocco in 1944. Will it stand up to comparison with Puerto Rico? Unfortunately all the excitement and reading of the rules can’t tell us how the game will feel to play. Exciting and tense? Or like a random mashup of the mechanics of Puerto Rico and Pillars of the Earth? My unsubstantiated hunch is that this will be forgettable.

Municipium: Well, it’s Knizia, so there is cause to be hopeful. On the other hand, Dr. K is hit-and-miss even for his fans, and the publisher (Valley Games) doesn’t have a track record. Is this the next smash hit? Or is the Doctor unloading a medium title on a rookie publisher?

Valley Games is also publishing two other original games in the near future, Container (looks dull) and Supernova (looks interesting). Both seem to have gathered quite a bit of attention.

Kingsburg: Pointed out by reader Beaker–thanks! After 1960 this might be the game that looks most appealing to me of the upcoming titles. I like the mix of resource and risk management  (some will complain about luck) and important timing decisions. I may forgive it the fact that it contains yet more cathedrals to build.

Agricola: I have no idea why anyone is excited about this game. The theme–I am not making this up–is that you are a dirt farmer in 1600’s Germany who lives in a tiny shack with his wife. Your goal is to build up a prosperous farm. Are you excited yet? It’s designed by Uwe Rosenberg, the creator of Bohnanza, which I guess is in its favor.

Im Jahr des Drachen: (In the Year of the Dragon): By the designer of (awesome) Notre Dame and published by Alea. Alea is batting 8-for-11 in their big box line but 1-for-4 in the last 4. Can Notre Dame and this pull them out of the slump? I’m curious and cautiously optimistic.

Amyitis: Ystari could make the rules of Coloretto fill an eight-page rulebook. On the other hand some people seem very enthusiastic. I’ll let them try it out.

To decide who goes first:

• Pick a spot on the board
• Grab a marker from every player and drop them all on the board
• Closest marker to the designated spot goes first

Mini-Reviews:

Vikings: Lots of fascinating, quirky, novel mechanics. The trouble is I think they have all been added together to come up with a very ordinary game. Verdict: 2+. I would play again.

Conquest of the Fallen Lands: Neat mechanics in a solid, elegant game. I see a big flaw in that it can be possible for a player to get “stuck” with little to do for many turns at a time. I would feel uneasy about demoing it to new players for this reason. Verdict: 2+++. Would definitely play again, but someone else has to take the blame for suggesting it.

Quo Vadis?  The name means “Where are you going?”, evidently a Biblical allusion. “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” Negotiation is the heart of the game, and for such a game, it plays very quickly. There’s opportunity for treachery and betrayal, but it doesn’t seem to be integral–our winner won without it. I suspect it has great value as an icebreaker or to play with new folks, but less replay value than most games. Verdict: 2++.

Here are the design goals I have for Invasion. Hopefully, my intuition and playing-in-my-head has taken taken the game most of the way and playtesting and brainstorming can finish this into a great, enjoyable design.

Summary: Area-control game with emphasis on risk management and bidding for opportunities.

Weight: Light, just north of filler. I would like the playtime to be 20-30 minutes.

Players: 3-5. If it can fit a 6th without descending into chaos or dragging that would be great. Likewise, if it happens to work well with 2 that would be gravy. If tweaks to the map are required to make it work with 3 or 5 that would be OK but inelegant.

Feel: The game should feel chaotic–players should be able to plan for the current turn and a general strategy for the future, but not specific actions for next turn. However, the feeling should be chaos: “Events are going to come up that we’re all going to have to deal with” rather than favor “I got a bad roll, player B got a good roll.”

Inasmuch as it would be possible for a player to get a good roll or bad roll, it should be a deliberate risk-management choice: for instance, a player is falling behind on score so he narrows his focus to a certain small area, ignoring all others. Then in the unlikely event that region is scored several times in a row he can win; more likely, his hopes don’t come true and the plan falls flat.

Here you go. First, most of the components (not pictured: the Move/Deploy deck and the smaller size of scoring tokens)

A close-up of the game board, showing off my sketchy photographic skills as well as my sketchy graphic design skills:

In my defense, I deliberately put as little effort as possible into the graphic design of this first prototype to avoid emotional attachment. Here’s the “playmat” where the state of the turn is tracked… you can see that this whole thing is a work-in-progress…

And finally, when I was looking through the components I happened across my old idea for a board: hexes that could be arranged into any one of several shapes. In theory, this is a far superior design for a board, because it adds to the variety of possible games and is generally far more versatile. In practice, I can’t get as excited about the hexes as about the world map. Also, I kind of think that coming up with a good map is my job as the designer… the players shouldn’t have to do that work.  Besides: Expansion!

Just in case you were interested. Luckily:

• I have a day job
• Buying fiddly things makes me happy
• Many of them aren’t used up and can be applied to another prototype

And the list:

• $3.50: 9″x12″ foam board
• $5.50: 20″x30″ blue foam board (cut up, only about 1/3 used)
• $2: printing
• $17: plastic centimeter cubes (I got 1000–they’re hard to not get in bulk. And will be easy, I hope, to use for other games.)
• $2: blank white cards
• $7.50: Utility knife for cutting foam board (High-quality; should last for years; I could have got a cheap one for $2)
• $2: Dice (approximately–6 are used, plus a couple that I had laying around as generic counters)
• $4.50: small zinc washers (scoring chits)
• $3: large zinc washers (scoring chits)
• $4: gold spray paint

Total: $51, about the cost of a new game. (And this discounts probably $10 worth of bits I probably won’t end up using–colored paperclips and cardstock.) I’m definitely not complaining; I’ve had a great time putting Invasion together, I plan to have a great time refining and playing it, and I’m very pleased with the way it looks and feels. And maybe this will be the one that wins me the SdJ. Just reflecting a little on what goes into it.