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.

Columbus Day is just around the corner! I’m taking the day off work.

Did Columbus discover America? Certainly not. People had been here for thousands of years before he arrived.

Did Columbus discover America for the Europeans? Well, probably not–the Norse were in Newfoundland probably and Greenland definitely before Columbus.

What Columbus definitely did was bring back the idea that the New World could be exploited. And without European exploitation of the rest of the world, where would we be? Certainly without such fantastic games as Puerto Rico, Goa, and Taj Mahal, just to name a few. So let’s pause for a moment to remember… well, I’ll call him Lolumbus, in honor of the fact that rape and exploitation is actually nothing to base a holiday around.

Notwithstanding! Speaking of exploitation, I have finally finished the prototype of Invasion. The tables are turned, and aliens are exploiting Earth. The Earthlings try to fight back, but not with much success.

The story of the design is this: The original design for the game had about 7 separate decks of cards, one each for each of seven different game mechanics. Well, it turns out making cards is actually kind of a pain, what with creating a custom script to output a PDF, printing them, cutting them out, sleeving them… and I was in eternal procrastination mode. Well, then I bought these awesome plastic centimeter cubes in 10 different colors from an educational supply place (highly recommended) and it made me want to finish the game so I could play with them. But how to make those irksome cards? I was thinking about ways to substitute a die roll for the card draw when it finally occurred to me: the die roll is better because all the possible outcomes are right there, no need for players to be surprised when a card comes up! The dice are color-coded so you roll them all at once and then put them in the appropriate place on a playmat (printout taped to foamboard).

Photos will follow in a day or two.