The Giant Brain

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