The Giant Brain

Hello everyone,

If you are heading down to the wonderful UK Games Expo this coming weekend then be sure to drop by and say hi at Booth 17, the Indie Games booth. I’ll be there alongside Andrew Kenrick, Matt Machell and Eero Tuovinen, selling games, talking about games design and generally having a good time.

I will also be on a panel of other RPG designers, at 12am on the Saturday. Come along and ask any questions you like of myself and my fellow panellists and hopefully will be able to answer in a vaguely coherent fashion!

I’m running a game of Reel Adventures over the weekend, honestly I am going to release that this year, and I am hoping to get a playtest or two in as well. I’ll have the finished version of Action Movie with me and hopefully Nobel Intentions and Minions.

Hope to see some of you there.

All the best

Iain

Going to take a break, briefly, from talking about Nobel Intentions to mention a few other projects I am fiddling with. The last couple of playtests for Nobel Intentions have been ok, but it is still not there yet and I need to have a rethink about how the game works. Might end up sort of Othello-y, but more on that some other time.

I have been having quite a creative period of late and am currently working on the following:

Minions: A card game where you play the lowly minions in a dungeon trying to impress the boss. The idea is that the heroes are invading the dungeon and you have to try and be the most useful minion thus gaining a promotion. Had one playtest so far, that didn’t really work. I am having a problem at the moment with my designs where they fall apart a bit somewhere between the initial good idea, and actual execution. Nothing a little testing won’t fix.

Adventure: a working title. I really want to design a good adventure boardgame. Runebound doesn’t quite do it for me and Talisman doesn’t really interest me. This will be the first boardgame I have worked on so I am looking forward to the challenge. Also if anyone has any good ideas for the title, let me know. I like play on words!

Nobel Intentions: you know about this already.

I should have a couple of these with me at Games Expo in Birmingham where I will be on a stall with some of my fellow Collective Endeavour members.  I’ll post a news thing about that in the next couple of days.

Happy Gaming

Iain

‘The Giant Brain’ is a games company based in Edinburgh, Scotland and is dedicated to making entertaining, interesting and accessible games. Our products include the ‘Revenge of the B-Movie!’ line of card games, and the forthcoming role-playing game ‘Reel Adventures’.

If you have any queries regarding anything on the site, please head over here and I’ll do my best to get back to you quickly.

Happy gaming

Iain McAllister

That’s Genius – Design Goals

So ‘That’s Genius’ has gone through a couple of playtests since I last posted. The core idea is really solid, and it has been a great laugh coming up with stupid inventions and everyone has enjoyed the basic mechanics so far. However a few things are currently in flux, but before I get to that I thought I would talk about design goals.

Whenever I work on a game I try to come up with a set of goals I want to achieve with that project. For B-Movie I wanted something quick playing and amusing, very much a “Beer & Pretzel” game. For ‘That’s Genius’ I still want the element of creation and humour from B-Movie, but I want to get a bit more tactical depth worked into the gameplay. However I don’t want it to drag on forever either so I’ll be aiming for around 30 mins as the playtime. So those goals are:

• Creation based gameplay
• Humour
• Quick to play – 30 mins maximum
• Tactical depth

With that in mind I have changed the following so far:

Card Costs: Are out the window replaced with a good news/bad news style of card abilities. By this I mean you can choose to activate a card ability for free but there will usually be a positive and a negative to that ability.

Random Element: For the next two or three playtests I’ll be playing around with the concept of removing the dice roll completely and just inflicting a cost on a player who chooses to score an invention. This may make the game too easy to win, or just plain boring but it was suggested by one of the players and I think it has some merit.

Card Abilites: These are undergoing constant flux at the moment, currently on the third printing of the cards, so not much point in telling you specifics at the moment. Suffice to say the more tactical elements I am going for will rely heavily on having interesting and balanced abilities.

R&D: The tokens you place on a card to show ownership are called R&D, and I am toying with making them a finite resource, perhaps a way to trigger abilities. Have to play with it and see.

I am off to the drawing board and will be back soon to tell you all how it went.

Iain

Back in the dim and murky past I had a game jotted down in one of my notebooks that was about creating evil plots. The ideas was that you were all Masterminds, in the James Bond sense of the term, competing to make plots whilst employing henchmen and the like to protect your plots. The main mechanic was inspired by B-Movie, but instead of each of you putting together movies seperate from the others, the plots were all interwoven in the middle of the table, a grid of EVIL!

The idea never really came to anything, and it has languished, forgotten until the other day when I wrote down ‘Laser Guided Shark Cannon’. I had been thinking about the evil plot game recently and realised I could use the core idea, that of my grid of words all interconnected, to make a game about making crazy inventions. Thus was born the working title of my new game ‘That’s Genius’.

The game will be a single deck game, where players compete to make inventions. The central mechanic will involve players putting together inventions in the middle of the table, completing them when they think they can, then using those inventions to give them an advantage. The card design will be a bit like B-Movie in that the word on each card will be the core component. However, I have decided to try and work in a bit more tactical play into this game.

Borrowing from games you like is a good way to get a game design project off the ground, and I had thought about using a resource system to pay for each card played. This manifested itself in a borrowed mechanic from the game ‘Infernal Contraption’ by Privateer which is good fun, but I don’t like elimination mechanics that much. In that game you pay for cards you play by discarding any 1 card from your hand, thus giving you some interesting decisions to make. For now, It’s Genius will borrow from this. Each card will supply one or more resources, probably marked Physics, Chemistry and Biology, which will be used to pay for the card you put into the grid.

Each card will come with one or two words on it, like the Monster/Make-up cards in B-movie, the resources it costs to play, the resources it provides and an ability. As I was jotting down ideas for this game I liked the idea that the inventions completed would continue to have some kind of game effect. To this end each card will have part of an ability on it, and when complete inventions can be turned on in order to create a game altering effect. This will need some testing as the more cards remain on the table, the less cards there are to be drawn if I include a reshuffle mechanic. Mmmh.. will have to see how that plays out, may be that the game will last long enough with one go through the deck, but then there might be scaling issues as you add and subtract players.

Anyway, i’m going to get designing and writing. If you want to chat about this idea, or any game ideas you have and would like help with, then head over to the collective endeavour website and I’ll be happy to help out.

Iain

So I thought I would start of this spotlight section by pointing you towards the games made by a few friends of mine.

Contested Ground Studios

Home of the incredibly talented Malcom Craig and his equally creative friend Paul Bourne, who was nice enough to help me out with the art for my games as well. Their games include a|state, Hot War, Cold City and my own early effort Mob Justice.

Steampower Publishing

Andrew Kenrick’s site that offers up the insanely good ‘Dead of Night’, a roleplaying  game of recreating any horror genre you care to imagine, with some terrifying posters done by Paul Bourne. Andrew is working away on some other projects at the moment and posts regularly about his progress.

Realms

Matt Machell’s site is where you can pick up the game ‘Covenant’, a game about the fallout of a failed conspiracy. He is also working on ‘Enlightment and Entropy’ which sounds interesting and you can read more about over at the Collective Endeavour.

Omnihedron Games

If Sharpe and Hornblower are your thing then I recommend you head over to the website of Neil Gow and buy his games. Seriously go and do it now then come back. ‘Duty and Honour’ and its naval counterpart ‘Beat to Quarters’ are fantastic pieces of design and allow you to tell individual stories easily but keep the context of larger battles and campaigns. Great stuff.

Prince of Darkness

Home of the fantastic Contenders, a personal favourite, amongst numerous other RPG and card game projects the site of Joe Prince is bursting with content and innovative ideas. Check it out for some freebies and support material for all Joe’s games.

Welcome one and all to the new website for ‘The Giant Brain’ games company. Things have been a little quiet round here of late, but I have finally found some time to get things back in gear.

For starters I have redone the website and I hope you like the changes. The changes are mostly cosmetic and organisational, the only major alteration being the removal of the forums. As it stands the games we produce are not large enough to need forums to chat about them, and as such they were just standing empty. If you do want to contact the company you can do so from the appropriate Tab above or head over to the forums at The Collective Endeavour and I’ll catch you there.

I’ll be using the site to write a bit more than I used to covering my thoughts on games design as I work on new projects under the Development tab, talking about what I have been playing and enjoying under Recently Played and shining a light on games I think are worth paying attention to, but not necessarily get the time to review under Spotlight.

Revenge of the B-Movie 1 & 2 are both back in stock and we will be doing our best to make sure it remains so from now on. You can buy both of these products from our new store. Our next game in that line ‘Action Movie’ will be out later this year.

Reel Adventures is finished and ready for layout and I will be working on that in the next few months. A release date will be announced as soon as I am confident I can hit it. I have delayed that game again and again for which I apologise, but it will be out as soon as I can get the time to lay it out and get it printed.

Our next release will be a PDF version of B-Movie followed closely by its sequel in PDF form and a bundle. This is a new avenue for the company and I will let you all know how it is going in an effort to help out others who want to do small press card game printing.

Anyway, keep your eyes on the site as I will be posting regular articles on games development, printing schedules and events I’ll be attending.

Wishing you good gaming.

Iain McAllister