The Giant Brain

Hello everyone,

Hope you are all well and enjoying the wealth of new games coming out from Essen and Gencon. Some very tasty looking things on the horizon and I’ll post about them should I pick any up. The last couple of months have seen me journey to Norway, Ireland then back to Scotland and play a bunch of games that I can recommend to readers of this site.

7 wonders

One of the hits of last year, I finally picked up a copy in Norway. Really good fun, beautifully presented game with enough to think about during play to keep you constantly on your toes. Not the deepest game in the world, but a good family game which I am looking forward to playing more over Christmas.

Mansions of Madness

Probably the best game that FFG has produced in sometime. You all play investigators arriving at a spooky mansion, but the reason you are there can change with each scenario. There are 5 scenarios, each with 3 possible outcomes so every time you play the game, even if you have played that scenario before, you can never be entirely sure how things will play out.

The game seems well balanced allowing the Keeper, the person running the scenario, to really lay into the investigators without fear of it being imbalanced. If you are a fan of the horror genre and fancy a quick playing boardgame that justifies the large number of components it comes with, I suggest checking it out.

Dreadfleet

I picked myself up a copy of the latest boxed game from GW and I am really happy with my purchase. The system relies heavily on the random but is a lot of fun and comes with some beautiful miniatures and a really lovely sea mat. I may look into picking up some other naval games just to use it.

Other Games..

I am still running old school Dungeons & Dragons and really enjoying it. I am going to work on some articles about what my group have gotten from the experience, it has been an interesting game to run.

In development news at the moment, I am planning to release a PDF version of Revenge of the B-Movie and am looking forward to getting some more playtests of Nobel Intentions in, though that might not be for another month or so as my work takes up a lot of my time in November/ December.

I hope you are all well, and wish you happy gaming.

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

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