Home-made Stratego, Newlands playtesting

 Last Sunday we went to grandma and grandpa Johnson's house. The aunts, uncles, and some of the older cousins played Codenames and Blokus.

On Saturdays there have been an estate sale that has sold a ton of games. I got two copies of Stratego. One Henry and I play all the time. With the other one I cleared off the pieces so that I can put my own stickers on them for my own game. I think it's going to be a Stormlight Archive theme, with the red Parshendi fighting against the blue Alethi soldiers on the shattered plains, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Speaking of Stratego, I think I inspired Henry, because today he and I made a home-made Stratego game out of paper and cardstock. Below is a picture of us playing.

With my wife's help, I contacted the game designer I met at the boardgame day. He sent me his number and I called him. We talked for a while and he asked me about what game I wanted to playtest with the group. The game we talked about was Newlands. He asked me a bunch of questions about it, including what type of data I wanted to get out of the sessions, and I told him I wanted to see if I could balance the different paths to victory, i.e. building sails or cannons or anchor spots, and building a bunch of tiny islands vs. just a few big ones. They meet on Wednesdays. I wasn't able to make it this last Wednesday, but I'm going this upcoming one. I'll let you know how that goes.

Scythe, Wingspan, no one to extensively playtest with

 

Went over again last Friday and played another game of Scythe. I came in second again. It was another six player game, yet it still went by fairly quickly. maybe because everyone was familiar with it and knew what they were doing. 

My goal is to improve to the point that come Christmas or late November I'll be able to beat Alex at a game of Scythe. I cannot remember for the life of me if the Scythe my family owns still only has the tiny board or if they got the board piece that expands it into the giant board. If not, then the next Scythe thing they should get is the giant board addition. It's only $12 on Amazon and way worth it.

My cousin Alicia Marr sent me this article the other day: How Wingspan became a Surprise Blockbuster. It's an awesome article and got me to introspect. In the article it talks about how the designer, Hargrave, spent four years working on it and playtesting it every week. A quote from the article states, "The numbers work in Wingspan. What seems at the beginning like a set of coincidences or accidents reveal themselves by game's end as a cleverly designed system that ensures everyone finds a way to score points."

And therein lies my feelings of hopelessness. How am I ever going to get a game published, or be the very best it can be, if I can't playtest it? I want my games to be the very very best they can be. Wingspan took hundreds of iterations to be where it is now. Look at this prototype for Scythe: 

How many different prototype stages did that game go through? Hundreds and hundreds, probably. Getting the different land masses to produce the right thing and having the different factions and boards balanced--it probably took an entire army working on it to get everything right.

And I have nothing.

I have game ideas, sure. And I can make prototypes, sure. But that's where it hits the wall. That's all I can do. Some games, such as We Three Kings and Newlands, I playtested with myself dozens of times, being all the players and going around the table. But what about games where there's secret information? 

What about games that have multiple paths to victory (the kind of game I love and want to make)? Jamey Stegmaier says everyone plays slightly differently, and if I only play games with myself, I'm only getting one perspective. When I made Somerset I made the magic system but never really used it. It was only when I played with other players that they used the magic system and cast spells and did really well that I thought it could be a viable strategy.

*Sigh* If I seem really down in this post, it's because I don't know what to do. There is one hope, and that's if there's a group in Mesa that gets together to playtest games, I could hopefully join in and hopefully do something more. There is that guy Jay from a few weeks ago. I now know his actual last name now (I was wrong in my other post) and so I guess my next steps are contacting him and going from there.

Otherwise, I'm stuck being unable to playtest in a world where playtesting is the single most important thing to creating a great game.

Deluxe Scythe, games with Ryan

On Friday night I went over to a friend's house to play Scythe. They had upgraded everything: upgraded metal coins, the huge board, and had either metal or 3D-printed pieces. And everything was painted. It was legit. We played a six player game, and only one person had never played before. I ended up coming in second place. Ryan and I played a bunch of two player strategy games on boardgamearena last night. We played Onitama, Patchwork, and Santorini. We both won about the same number of games in the end.

Cosmere, and Andrew reviews some games!

So I have this crazy idea, right? Years ago when I was at BYU I made a card-game called Cosmere. It was about the, uh, Cosmere. The fictional universe where a lot of Brandon Sanderson's novels take place. There were four decks you could choose from: Allomancers, Elantrians, Awakeners, and Surgebinders. And you would put out characters onto different location cards of places in the Cosmere and use magic and equipment to try to get shards. First player to get 16 shards wins. 

Anyway, Brandon Sanderson's agent was all like "Brandon already has an idea for a game so this is a no-go" and I was like, okay, that's fine. 

But now I'm like, I should make it anyway. Only instead of trying to publish it, which would be impossible because of IP issues, I'd just make it a print-and-play. And just put it up online and say, "Hey do you love the Cosmere and always wanted a game based on it? Well, here you go. Print it and play it for free and enjoy." 

And then from there hopefully it will get a lot of attention and people will think it's awesome and fun and it will become popular and then Brandon Sanderson will hear of it and look into it and also think that it's awesome and fun and want to do something more with it.

Wow, that plan sounds a whole lot crazier written out than it did in my head. 

In other news, school started and this upcoming week will be the third week of school. Two weeks down, I don't know how many more to go.

Not yesterday, but the Saturday before that, there was a big board-games playing event at a board-games store. I'm part of the Facebook group Adventures in Board Gaming which is how I found out about it and I went. 

Here are the games I played: Dive, Letter Jam, Savage, CuBirds, Point Salad, Cryptid, Clank!, and Calico. 

Now for reviews on all of them:

Dive is a game with a bunch of transparent sheets with pictures of turtles, sharks, etc. on them. They are stacked on top of one another and you have to figure out what layer the pictures you see are on. More or less. Wasn't the type of game I'm into. I rate it a five out of ten. (5/10)

Letter Jam

Letter Jam is a game which in my opinion logically shouldn't work yet somehow does. And I loved it. The main idea is the cards all have a letter on them. You can see everyone else's card, but not yours. It's co-op, so you are trying to give them clues so they know what their letter is and they are doing the same to you. How it works is you spell words with those letters, laying down number chips. So if I see an L, a T, an E, and an R, I can put the 1 chip in front of the L, the 2 chip in front of the E, the 3 and 4 chips in front of the T, the 5 chip in front of the E, and the 6 chip in front of the R. So the player with the T is like, huh, the word is LE**ER, is it lesser? letter? And the other players are doing so as well, narrowing down what their letter is. (9/10)

Savage is a game still in the prototype stage by a player there who designs games (not me, though, his name's Jay). Savage is kind of like a mix between The Resistance and Dead of Winter. You are all survivors after an apocalypse, but some of you are traitors. Each round you go around and can contribute food to a stash (the stash is shuffled so the cards you put in are anonymous so if you're a traitor you can sabotage it) then an event occurs, in which the leader picks a team to contribute an item (done the same way so the traitor can sabotage). Everyone has three health, once a player goes down to zero the game ends. Survivors win if only a traitor dies, and the traitors win if at least one survivor dies. In my opinion this prototype was well put together. The ratio of medicine to disease cards was just right, and I had a really good time playing this. I'm not normally a party gamer, but I enjoy games like Coup and the Resistance, and this fits that niche. I could definitely see it being professionally published. (8/10)

CuBirds is a small little set collecting game. There are birds in four rows and you pick up birds by sandwiching them between birds of the same type. Once you have enough birds of one type and you can make a flock. The first player to a certain number of flocks wins the game. Others enjoyed this a lot more than I did. It didn't really resonate with me. (6/10)

Point Salad

Point Salad is a fast card game where every card has one of six types of veggies on the front, and on the back of every card is a completely unique scoring condition. On the table are six cards veggie side up and three scoring condition side up. Turns are fast: either grab two veggie cards or one scoring card. If you grab veggies, the card with the scoring on them get flipped to their veggie side to take their place. I enjoyed this one a lot. The game is fast, fun, with lots of options, cool scoring conditions, and clever plays. I highly recommend this one. (9/10)

Cryptid is a game that I saw on the Dice Tower and looked intriguing. Unfortunately, it is for a specific type of audience and the time and place weren't right for me to get it out that Saturday. For starters, I had never played, so I had to try to read through the rules and explain at the same time, plus it is a logic deduction hard thinking game, which would have been better at a different time or place. I could tell from the first few turns I had bitten off more than I could chew. No one really knew what they were doing, were just guessing randomly, and just when I thought I had made a terrible mistake, a miracle happened and a player guessed the exact spot the cryptid was hiding, ending the game and mercifully allowing us to move on to one more suited for our group. Ranking is ? out of 10, because I don't feel I can give an accurate rating on one playthrough, especially if it was that one.

Clank!

Clank! is a game I've always wanted to play and give it a whirl. Two of the people playing had played it before, but I had the rulebook too to clarify, which I had to so a few times. Man, that rulebook isn't really well written. I had to scour it and still had questions. anyway, it is a deck builder and I love deck builders! In this one we also had a board and one piece which we moved throughout this dungeon to grab treasure and then escape back above ground. All the while adding Clank! cubes to the dragon bag, which were drawn out every so often, and if your cube was drawn out you take a damage. 10 damage and you're done, so either buy cards that cancel Clank! or heal you or just buy cards that allow you to move faster or give you attack points to defeat monsters to get gold to get treasures. It was enjoyable. Not nearly as mind-blowing as I thought it was going to be after hearing lots of stuff about it, but it was still good. (8/10)

Calico

Calico is a game which boils down to this: there are hexagon tiles that have a pattern and a color. There are six colors and six patterns. Each turn you place a tile onto your board. You get points based on colors connected and patterns connected. Plus, each player has three bonus tiles in play that they start with that gives you bonus points depending on which tiles you play next to them. I don't know what it was about this game, but I was sold. The cat theming and button theme is just pasted on, but the game is still awesome. (9/10)