This may come as a shock to anyone reading this, but I play a lot of board games. Gasp! I know. This holiday season, I’ve had the chance to play a lot more board games with my close friends and family. I cherish the holidays. But enough about me, let me talk about how my board game designs are coming along…
Untitled Nation Manipulation Game
I’ve got a solid prototype that I’ve been playtesting with people. It’s balanced enough at this point that I’m going to start long form playtesting. (Playtesting the game at least ten times before weighing any feedback-based changes.)
Why haven’t I done that already? Well, the game wasn’t balanced AND I haven’t had the time to playtest the game that many times as of yet. The game is still lo-fi (image of some cards below for reference) but I’ve got it to a place where I can just bust it out and people can enjoy a long, mostly uninterrupted by rule confusion, session with people.
I’m also mostly finished with the one asset that hasn’t dramatically changed in theme during my construction of this game, the War Hero.
Early this January, I’m going to be finally hitting the playtesting scene hard for this game, and I’m excited for it to get torn a new one by strangers.
A Colorful Game
I made this game for the Button Shy 18 Card Game challenge, originally, but didn’t get picked to be a finalist. I later realized that for the most part, the challenge is based more on pretty designs and less on unique, fun game mechanics. I won’t be participating in another challenge, at least not for a while.
But something good did come out of it. I created a primary/secondary color creation game where you create secondary colors in sequences to score points. Here’s what that looked like for the challenge. (I threw the design together in like 5 minutes, so it’s pretty messy.)
Well, I like the idea of the game but not the idea of it existing in cards like this. So that game evolved into this…
Now in A Colorful Game, you take certain placement or movement actions to generate secondary colors. Each primary color has different rules for how you can place and move it. You create paths of secondary colors through this, and in this, you score points based on the pattern of paths you created.
It’s taken me three weeks to redesign this game from the ground up, but it’s also ready to hit the playtesting circuit more heavily. Funny out that works, my Untitled Nation Manipulation game has taken almost two years to get to where it is right now. So it goes.
