Colored ships and settlements, Borromean Rings

Behold my army of colored ships and settlements! (Made by Ryan's 3D printer, painted by me.)

Also, have you ever heard of borromean rings? Maybe not by that name, but it's the three rings that you can't seperate from each other, even though none of them are actually connected to each other. If you remove any one link, the other two will fall a apart. This works no matter what ring you remove. Here's some pictures.

I mention this shape becasue right now it's my favorite 3D shape. I love how none of the rings link in with each other--it's either completely outside another ring or completely inside it. And yet they are impossible to seperate!

Anyway, more news on Newlands next week.

Research to get games published; Newlands

This last week I have been working hard on accomplishing one of my life goals: to get one of my games published.

This included, but was not limited to, doing a bunch of research and finding out which game companies were accepting submissions, and what kind of games they are looking for/what kinds of games they have already published.

Hence pages and pages of notes.

I also emailed some companies asking if they accepted game submissions, because it wasn't clear if they did or not on thier site. Three got back to me, all saying they would accept submissions: Rio Grande Games, Czech Games Edition, and Stonghold games.

I've never gotten this far in my life in my path to publishing a game.

And then I sat back, and was like, "Oh. I only have two games that are really polished and ready enough to submit."

Those being Somerset and We Three Kings. I submitted Somerset to Rio Grande games and need to make a how to play video for We Three Kings before I send that submission off.

All of my other games I have created are only, like, 90% completed. I guess I just gave up after that point and didn't put in that little bit of finishing effort to complete them.

Examples: Klidrins: I still need to make the Event cards. Arabesque: I still need to test out my new and improved rule set. Newlands: Continued playtesting to tighten the rules, and finishing up the artwork.

My brother Ryan got a 3D printer and was like, "Yo Andrew if you need any game pieces to be 3D printed let me know." And I was like, "Okay, I can't think of any right now." But then this whole I-have-to-get-a-game-published thing started, and I was like, "Ryan, some sweet ships and settlements would look sick for this game." And he was like, "Totally." 

Anyway, the idea for Newlands came from how cool olden times maps look. 

Here's an example of how the tiles will probably look. I've been doing playtesting by myself and improving the rules.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to.

In which I contribute to society... (the gaming society)

Board Game Geek now has this new thing. They're called Brief Descriptions, and are kind of like a little teaser for the game that make you want to play it.

I have moderated a bunch, but that's not what I'm here to tell you. Instead, I'm here to tell you that I have actually written many of these. And not just on random lower-ranked games either. I have contributed to society and written the brief description to many highly-ranked, well known games.

Below are some examples (all of these I wrote btw):

The ones I am the most proud of are the ones whose games I absolutely love. As you know, I LOVE the game Viticulture. And I was able to write the brief summary for it! Also, Citadels, Smallworld Underground, and Love Letter (and Lovecraft Letter, which I played with Jacob at Thanksgiving). And the classic worker-placement game Pillars of the Earth! How cool is that?

No telling how long mine will stay up there. A couple notes: I wrote a brief summary for At the Mountains of Madness which was accepted, but right now mine isn't up there because it's been replaced by a way better one in my opinion. Also, I think my Love Letter one might have been slightly changed from having just a dash - to having a cool dash — but I'm not sure. I did fix some errors in a couple of other people's, but I still count it as theirs and not mine, since they came up with the idea first. I only put one of those u examples up here, with Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, but that's because I not only changed the word "a" to the word "an" but I also added the part "and stave off insanity" into it. I fixed up Zooloretto's as well.

A list of what I've contributed so far:

• Everything mentioned above.
• Saboteur
• Spot it!
• Electronic Catch Phrase
• San Juan (Second Edition)
• San Juan: The New Buildings & The Events
• GiftTRAP
• Tenzi
• Man Bites Dog
• MindTrap
• In A Pickle
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
• Unearth
• The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game

And, some classic games that everyone and their dog has heard of:

• Bingo
• Twister
• Blackjack
• Roulette

Anyway, I'm proud of my work. It's nice to know that you, as a tiny insignificant little non-famous speck, have contributed at least somewhat to the gaming community, even if it's just a tiny little sentence that at least one other gamer will look at and read.