Monthly Archives: October 2013
Monday Brews: 10-7-13
Happy Monday everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. Last week was a good one for me. My son turned 2, our group had a game night, and the weather is getting nice an Autumn-y! The downside was that I only played three games.
Since it’s Monday, it’s time to blog about the beer I drank and the games I played in the past week. So here’s the Boards and Barley I enjoyed last week:
The Barley:
2 year old boys love it! (The box art, that is!)
Sand Creek Oscar’s Chocolate Oatmeal Stout: My son chose this beer at the beer store. We walked up to the beer section and he started going bonkers over it since it had a big bear on the cardboard. So it was an easy choice. Pleasantly enough it was a decent beer that I would drink again.
Southern Tier Warlock: This is an imperial pumpkin stout and it was a doozy! It was almost like drinking a pumpkin beer shake. The smell was a little interesting, and not necessarily in a good way. I don’t think I’d drink it again, but I was glad to have had a taste.
O’so O-Toberfest: Another Oktoberfest under the belt. I think that’s the 5th or 6th Oktoberfest style I’ve had this season!
Homebrew Black Ale: I was able to enjoy a friend’s homebrewed black ale while playing a game this past week. It was delicious!
New Glarus Spotted Cow: A staple in my beer diet, this is an always enjoyable beer!
New Belgium Giddy Up: A lemon-peel espresso infused ale from New Belgium is an interesting experience. It was a little too out there for me to enjoy, but, like the Southern Tier Warlock, I’m glad I was able to try it.
Milwaukee Brewing Polish Moon: MKE brewing out of Milwaukee is a fun newish brewery located in an area of Milwaukee that is undergoing a revival! This particular beer, a Milk Stout, was enjoyable, but not my favorite milk stout that I’ve had. It is a little too earthy tasting, or at least has too earthy of an aftertaste. But MKE Brewing is doing good things!
The Boards:
Rhome: This is an awesome “rhombus” based game from esteemed designer Brett Myers (@BrettSpiel). It is a really great game that I believe will have a great published career at some point. The tile placement mechanic is awesome and tight. There is a lot of anxiety and tension in the game, which is fantastic. And like Hedeby and Baron Age that I mentioned last week, this is a game that I will be owning!
It’s Hoof Hearted making a tight first turn!
Long Shot: A horse racing game? Blegh! Oh wait… what’s this?? It’s fun? Okay. When you’ve got Pony Danza heading off Harry Trotter and the Horserer’s Stone along the final stretch, then this game can be a lot of fun. Okay… Pony Danza and Harry Trotter are made up names from my gaming group. But they make the game more fun! While there is a lot of luck in the game, it can be a ton of fun with a big group. It plays up to 8 people, which makes it a nice alternative to 7 Wonders of Robo Rally. Check it out!
Attika: My friend Jeremy got this game in the Math Trade at GenCon and we finally got it to the table. I really enjoyed it! There is a cool mechanic in it that allows players the opportunity to make some big moves. If you can chain the right buildings together you can really get ahead. I’ll definitely play this game again! And I’m not just saying that since I won.
I Rolled Three 1s: A Review of Kingsburg
In Kingsburg you take on the role of a lord sent from the king to administer frontier territories. That role involves building different structures in your territory to earn points. The game takes place over 5 years for a total of 20 turns. At the end of each year you must battle enemies that include goblins, orcs, and zombies. Building structures requires resources. Those resources are gained by influencing appropriate council members. Will you influence the right council members? Will you defeat the enemies? Will your territory be the best? Try it out by playing Kingsburg.
The board looks beautiful!
The game comes with a spectacular board, numerous dice in 6 different colors, several sets of colored cubes to represent different resources, player tokens to mark structures that have been built, cards to represent the enemies that will be faced at the end of each year, and player mats that list the structures that each player can build.
This game has a very interesting mechanic of dice placement. All the players role their colored dice. Then one at a time those dice are placed on an advisor location on the board. For example, the advisor in the #1 spot would require someone to have rolled a 1 with one of their dice. Also, the advisor in the #10 spot would require any combination of dice that total to 10. No two players can take the same advisor on any one turn. Once all the dice have been placed, then each player gains the
appropriate resources, points, or tokens. I think it is a very fun mechanic that requires you to adjust your strategy from
turn to turn based on your dice rolls.
Here’s What I Like:
Dice Mechanic: As I just mentioned, the unique dice mechanic is very strategically interesting. I really enjoy how you have to try and make the most of your dice each turn. Do you try to block other people? Do you try to maximize your resources? Do you go for victory points? There are many options which make this mechanic a fun one!
Paths to Victory: I should state a disclaimer here and say that the only way to win is by having the most victory points. However, I say there are different paths to victory because of the options of structures that you can build. You could play the game many different ways and still be able to be the winner. Each structure gives the player a different benefit so it is up to the player which series of benefits they would like in the game.
Here’s What I Dislike:
Replayability: Unfortunately I feel that after 10 plays or so this game begins to feel monotonous. While the game itself is very fun, I feel that it would become the same thing over and over. On the plus side, the game designers also have an expansion called “Kingsburg: To Forge a Realm,” which includes components that increase replayability drastically.
Dice Mechanic: I know that I mentioned it as something I like, so why is it here as well? I’m not a huge fan of games that can be won or lost based on luck. And this game is one of those. Sure, you can build the right structures to allow for re-rolls or other benefits, but I’ve played games where I constantly rolled low numbers and couldn’t make any progress. That’s frustrating.
Designer Perspective: What I would change:
The biggest problem for me is that the dice can go very strongly for or against you. Yes, you can use structures like the Market to adjust a die roll, but it can be better than that. One simple change could be very beneficial: If you roll less than10 you can flip one die over to the bottom side. So a 1 would become a 6, a 2 would become a 5 and so on. I think this rule would allow for more flexibility. The downside is that it could add to the AP in the game.
Beer Pairing:
Everyone loves building a kingdom. And everyone loves castles. So I’m recommending a beer brand that I learned about from the esteemed designer of Jump Gate, Matt Worden.
Matt, who lives in Minnesota, has mentioned Castle Danger brewery in the past. And since Kingsburg is based on the idea of building a territory around a castle I feel it is appropriate enough for this beer pairing. While I have not had any Castle Danger beer I know that I enjoy a cream ale. And a cream ale would go well with this lightish game. So today’s preferred beer pairing is Castle Danger Castle Cream Ale.
Overall Rating:
While I enjoy the game I’ve gotten to the point that it is very samey over and over. It’s relatively simple to learn and play. The artwork is outstanding. The dice mechanic is great. And it’s a lot of fun. But I would recommend also buying the To Forge A Realm expansion. At this point I’ll rate Kingsburg a 7 out of 10 on the BGG scale:
Good game, usually willing to play.
The Game Design Queue
What would you do with an extra hour each day?
Time only offers itself once. So you’d better use it as efficiently as possible. As every designer knows, it’s rare if you are ever working on only one project. I am just the same. I am currently working on four projects, not including Scoville.And I could certainly use a few more hours in the day. So I thought I’d give you a status update for each of the games currently in my “active” queue. My hope is that by writing this I’ll get a better idea of which game(s) on which I should focus my few game design hours per week.
And I’ve decided to set a goal: I want to have a playable and fun game by Christmas.
In the past I have set emotional goals, like “I want to send a game to a publisher by October.” How is that an emotional goal? It’s emotional because it has to do with making me happy versus making a good game. So this new goal is avoidably non-emotional. It’s all about the game. So I am going to attempt to spend the next three months hammering away at the stone to reveal a beautiful sculpture, and hope that it is a decent board game!
Let’s get started with last week’s Design Me game…
Quantum Orcas
I designed it last Friday and by Saturday evening it had already been through four playtests. I’m not sure what your typical Concept to Playtest timeline looks like but this isn’t my typical timeline. There are a few things that the game has going for it to have allowed for four playtests.
- It’s simple to prototype
- It’s simple to teach
- It plays in about 10 minutes
Quantum Orcas (Prototype)
So when I arrived at Protospiel-Milwaukee last Saturday I snagged a few of the free components that The Game Crafter had donated and threw together a copy.
In the game you are a killer whale who can jump across time, which is represented by jumping across the 4×4 grid. The game lasts 8 rounds. Each round two new boats are placed randomly into the grid using two d4s. Then each player chooses one card, which represents a location on the grid, to jump to. If there are boats there, they can eat them. If there are multiple boats, then they’ll have to discard cards to eat them. There are a few other rules, but the player who eats the most boats wins the game.
I think I might be able to design this into a complete game by next week, let alone by Christmas. It could also easily be rethemed. In fact, during Protospiel-Milwaukee I did retheme it based on some components available there. Several people playtested it with the theme of Space Monsters eating asteroids. So maybe I’ll have the game be dual-themed. If you like the killer whale idea you could play on that side of the tiles. If you like the Space Monsters theme you could play on that side.
The bottom line is that this game was fun, plays quickly, and comes in a small box. That’s an awesome combination.
Conclave
I’m not typically an area control/area majority kind of guy. However, Conclave is all about area control. In the game you represent one of the Preferiti, the cardinal’s on the short list to be the next pope. You are also representing a order of Catholicism, which can allow me to do some interesting things with the design.
The current state of the game is that it isn’t very fun. While I think there are some interesting mechanics in the game, they just don’t seem to work together to make something that is fun. That’s not good.
But I have some ideas. Since the game revolves around holding the control of different tables, with varying numbers of cardinals sitting at them, then I can add in objectives to the game while keeping it reasonably thematic. The idea would be that the game can be won if a global victory condition is met, otherwise it will be won by a combination of points, which represent how well you manipulated the college of cardinals.
There would be both shared and secret objectives. Once a player completes a shared objective, they place a pawn on it and will earn those points at the end. When a played completes a secret objective it must be revealed. This card will remain in from of them and will be scored at the end.
So I have some good paths forward with Conclave. Now I just have to decide where it actually resides in my priority queue.
Trading Post
Call me Ishmael, for I have discovered a white whale by the name of Trading Post.
Trading Post was my first experience with trying to design a really heavy game. I failed miserably. However, I love the theme and some of the core mechanics so I’d like to do a third complete reboot. Note, however, that the first two reboots were more like retrofitting rather than redesigning.
To redesign the game I want to achieve the following things:
- Make it more historic
- Make it focused on Trading, explicitly about trading furs for European goods.
- Make it fun.
- Make it complex.
So I sat down at the end of August and came up with what I think will be a really great game. The idea of the game is that you are a Trader working for a Trading Post. Your objectives in the game (read: “Ways to score points”) are to go on hunting excursions to collect furs, trade furs for goods, use goods to help build the Trading post. That’s the 10,000 foot view of the game.
There are a few other things going on in the game that I think are unique and interesting. There is a time-dependence for being able to do things in the game. For example, when you send furs to Europe, they have to ride on the boat, which takes time. There is also a concept of chopping wood and floating it down the river towards the Trading Post. So players would have to set themselves up to receive the large amounts of wood when they arrive.
Overall I’m pretty excited to be able to think about this game from a fresh perspective. It’ll be interesting to see how it comes along.
Brooklyn Bridge
This is a very recent game design of mine. As you can imagine, the theme is that of the Brooklyn Bridge. In the game you represent a crew of workers that are helping to build the bridge. It is similar to Stone Age in that you place workers in different areas of the board one location at a time. It is different from Stone Age in that one player cannot remove all their workers and take all their actions at once. Instead, players will remove their workers and take the actions one location at a time.
What that introduces is an interesting dichotomy about placing and removing workers. You might be able to get a good spot in the Materials office, but someone might beat you to building a section of the bridge. You might get lucky and not experience the bends when working in the caisson, or your worker might have to undergo a stage decompression.
This game will be a balance between obtaining goods and earning money. The goal is to contribute the most to the bridge and that will ultimately be the player who earns the most money.
As of today this is still a pretty rough concept. I’ve mocked up some tiles so that I can test a few things. I’m not sure this one (or Trading Post) could really be a full prototype by Christmas, but we shall see.
The Path Forward
So those are the four concepts currently in my active queue. This gives me enough variety and enough challenges to work on while not being overwhelming. But if I try to work on all four then I’m afraid none of them will be ready before Christmas. So I present my first ever poll, for which I am sure to get thousands of votes. Please vote for the game design you would most like to see fully prototyped:
Thanks for reading and voting! I’m hoping to bring you good game design updates over the next three months!
Boards and Barley 