Hello everyone! I’m nearing the final work on my designs for Color Space (formally titled “A Colorful Game”), a two-player tile-laying strategy game.
In Color Space, players compete head-to-head to be the first to collect five of each of the three secondary colors (15 secondary colors total) represented as diamonds in the picture below.
Assets are subject to change. Move primary color tiles to create secondary color diamonds. Create a qualifying path of these diamonds to be able to collect some!
This game has been a year-and-a-half in the making, and the journey’s not over yet! I’ve got a lot more playtesting to do. I’m also working on a Tabletop Simulator version of Color Space. There’s YouTube videos, advertising, getting the kickstarter page going—aaaah! I’m stressed. I should play some Color Space to relax.
Here’s a sneak peak of the box art.
Box art is subject to change. I’m happy with what I have here, but I’ll add some texturing to make it stand out more.
What’s next? My immediate next steps are to lock in all of the designs and get some beautiful prototypes printed. Then I’ll be able to make gameplay videos with assets that better reflect what the game will look like.
After that, I’ll work on an estimate with manufacturers and fulfillment facilities, and create a minimum budget for the kickstarter!
Then it’s marketing, marketing, marketing.
Look out for some more fall updates on Color Space.
Hello everyone, it’s been a minute! Sorry for not posting in a while. I am, as we all are, navigating the virus and other passion projects. (I’m working on a creative writing career—go figure.) Now, my project has entered a phase where I’m playtesting the same build heavily to make sure that it’s balanced. This is important to a strategy game. Both players should be on the same playing field and players executing a fun move shouldn’t be defeated by random chance.
Every game—not just strategy games—needs to make sure that a particular player doesn’t have an unfair advantage. Sometimes this could mean that designers might need to tone down the benefit of a mechanic. You can sometimes have an unfair advantage just by being the starting player, though. I aim to make sure that isn’t the case in A Colorful Game.
I’ve got four things on my plate right now for A Colorful Game:
More balance playtesting
Design for physical game assets
YouTube tutorial video
Tabletop Simulator version (with scripting)
The bottom two items are still in their infancy, and I don’t have much to show for them. As for the top two:
More balance playtesting
This is from a most recent playtest. The grey meeple signifies the tile that was just moved. (Players can’t move the tile that was recently moved.)
I’ve been rigorously playtesting with my wife or sometimes playing against myself. It’s coming along smoothly. My big worry right now is that there’s a first player advantage. More testing will see if that’s the case.
Design for physical game assets
I’ve been wanting to make the components out of wood for the longest time. But I’m warming up more and more to the idea of making them out of resin (similar look and feel to modern sets of dominos). Resin is typically heavier than wood, and may have better longevity. Also, resin is typically less expensive to manufacture and generally easier to work with. The difference would mean more rounded corners as well versus wood. Here’s a quick side-by-side.
Resin mockup (left) versus a wooden mockup (right) of the assets for A Colorful Game.
The differences might look minor in Illustrator, but they’ll feel major when holding the physical components. I’ll still stand by my love of wooden components though. I just think they look neater and more unique.
It’s been a minute, let me catch you up on what I’ve been up to. COVID-19, the Coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), whatever we’re calling it—as long as we’re not calling it something prejudiced and hateful—has absolutely delayed plans. I had weeks worth of playtesting on the schedule. All of it erased. These things happen, I know. No one could’ve predicted this, and I’m well aware that my plans to develop a tabletop game being pushed out a bit are the least of everyone’s worries. I can weather the storm.
This doesn’t mean that A Colorful Game is cancelled. Far from it. This means that I’m rearranging my plans to develop a Tabletop Simulator version of the game. My plan was to learn a bit about Lua and scripting later, after I had mostly secured the game mechanics and design and the game was more or less in manufacturing. I’m shifting gears on that.
Uh…what?
Let me reveal a hypocritical anecdote about myself: I currently work in the tech industry and love technology but I severely dislike the efforts to bring tabletop games to the digital realm. Yeah, I’m one of those. I play board games to get away from screens. I don’t judge people who enjoy playing digitalized board games, I just don’t enjoy doing it myself. The only exception to that rule was TheCodingMonkeys digital version of Carcassonne (RIP). Even that was killed off by the horrid gimmicky 3D version that Asmodee vomited all over us. Have you ever bought the perfect piece of clothing, only to have the vendor come back to you ten years later and say, “can we replace that with this designer trash bag?” It’s like that.
Digressions aside, this isn’t about me or my curmudgeon tendencies, this is about getting a game out there that I think is quick, fun and can work on a digital platform. It’s not done, but here’s a sneak peak:
A Colorful Game features limited quantities of tiles that you have to strategically add or move
But what about a version for that whatcha call it…physical realm?
I’m working with someone on the material design for A Colorful Game. I’m leaning toward using wooden assets, but I’m keeping my options open. I want to make sure the game looks good and feels good, but it also needs to last. What’s great is that this game has been whittled down to a few components, so I predict that I can keep the price reasonable while seeking high quality assets.
Here’s a look at what (aside from the rules sheet) is likely to be included in the physical version.
There’ll be 30 roads and 10 tiles included, along with a rules sheet—compact but fun!
What’s next for this puppy?
Getting the game into tabletop simulator will allow me to ramp up my playtesting schedule more. A few things that I need to focus on:
Rules sheet layout and design
Box design
Settling on general game design
Then I can start advertising the game more and setting up preorders. All-in-all, I’m looking at this winter or likely early next year before a kickstarter. I’m OK with that. And, hopefully, we’ll be healed enough to be able to seek some good ol’ fashioned tabletop games fun.
Sorry for taking so long to write this. I’ll try to make more frequent updates.
I’ve been heads-down refining the mechanics for A Colorful Game. Here are some of my discoveries from the 10 playtests that I’ve had so far:
Issue
Games were way too long. (1+ hour)
Resolution
I took care of this by minimizing the card count. Put the game at a smooth 30ish minute playtime. That’s the goal!
Issue
The game was also far more complex with decisions than I wanted it to be. You have to place AND move a tile—ugh! Too much brain juice to spend on what to do best. (I watched a player’s life flash before their eyes for more than 10 minutes, hoping to glean some forgotten wisdom to help them make a decision.)
Resolution
This was advice from another designer: Don’t make players have to add a new primary color tile to the play area AND have to move another tile. That’s a lot to deal with during a turn.
Note that doing this also helped to reduce the playtime to around 30 minutes.
Issue
Scoring points is just altogether difficult sometimes.
Resolution
Wild cards and bonus points! I added some cards to the game that let you fill in any blanks with a color of your choice. For example, if you have a contiguous path — orange, orange, green, purple, purple — you could play a wild with that to treat the green as a part of your path.
Also, if you scored with three or more cards, you get a bonus point; four or more and you get three bonus points!
Wild card; but no bonus points for you!
This new format for the game helped shape it into the quick abstract strategy game that I was looking to make. That’s a huge milestone!
I’ve playtested this new version quite a few times and have found some new challenges to work through:
Games are a little too short now. It’s difficult for a player that’s behind to see a chance to come back and try to take the win.
Idea to test: I’m going to add cards to the point deck or have the discard shuffle back into the deck.
With the introduction of wild cards, games feel like they’re not strategic enough (a little too luck of the draw).
Idea to test: I’m going to add more wild cards and make them have a greater negative impact on players who use them.
Once you score a path, you remove all of the roads that you used to score that path with. That reduces momentum and gives too great an advantage to the first player to score.
Idea to test: I think a “pick a color, remove all roads for that color” method can give the right balance of changing the play area in a fun way and not making players feel like they’ve got to start from scratch.
I need to work out how the game ends a little more. Right now, the game ends once the point card deck is depleted and neither player can score on their next turns…it just feels like an odd way to end the game.
Idea to test: A “first player to x points” win condition should fix this. I just need to test whether this is fun and try to discover what “x points” value is best.
The my favorite thing about the holidays is that it brings people together…for board games. Here’s what I’ve been digging this holiday season.
Mysterium
Mysterium is a cooperative murder mystery party game. Psychics conduct a séance to divine how someone died in a mansion. One player plays a spirt that can only communicate to the other players (the psychics) through abstract, surrealist imagery. Players must work together to formulate the suspects, locations, and objects that were involved in the ghost’s demise.
The key challenge to Mysterium is that the ghost is not allowed to speak or signal through expression any indication of the correct answers to the other players. They can only hand abstract and surrealist depictions on cards to the players to help clue them in. (For example, if the school teach is a suspect, the ghost may hand me a card that depicts a mechanical, letter delivering turtle with a helicopter propeller on its shell.
La Mancha
La Mancha is a fun party game—if you were to only invite Lit majors to it. (Which sounds like a dreadful party.) It’s based on the classic Spanish novel penned in 1605, Don Quixote. In La Mancha, everyone plays a self-appointed knight errand that must woo women, gain powerful weapons, ride their trusty steed, and of course: tilt at windmills.
Where La Mancha shines is that there are different types of event cards (Romance cards, Encounter cards, etc.) and the player who draws that card becomes a judge for other players. Other players must use cards in their hand, which have excerpts from the novel, to construct a story or poem depending on the situation that convinces the judge to give them that card or an item card! This leads to an atmosphere of knowing a bit about what makes your fellow players tick. The judge also gets a slight bonus for just being a judge.
Shobu
Shobu is a two player abstract strategy game in the spirit of Go. Players control their own set of stones on four small boards, each board with a 4×4 grid. Your goal is to push all of your opponent’s stones completely off the board.
They must make two moves on their turn, in this precise order:
Passive: Move your stone up to two spaces in any direction without pushing another stone.
Aggressive: Make the same exact move with one of your other stones on another board. (This time you can push your opponent’s stones around.)
This game requires a lot of domino-effect style thinking. Most of the strategy revolves around positioning your opponent in a way that prevents them from making their own aggressive moves.
