The Giant Brain

Well Games Expo was as good fun as ever and it was great to meet some B-Movie fans and general indie games enthusiasts over the course of the con.

For the majority of the con I was on the Indie games booth but I also managed to get in a game of Reel Adventures.  It was called ‘On her Majesty’s shrunken service’ and was a James Bond style story where one of the protagonists was only a few inches tall. It was a really fun game and I’ll try to write it up soon.

Of course no con is complete without a few purchases and I picked up Survive: Escape from Atlantis, Ascending Empires and some old school gaming in the form of Swords and Wizadry and Vornheim. Vornheim especially is worth a look, a beautifully produced handbook for running city adventures. The one other product I saw that I really want is Operation:Fallen Reich. An exquisite production with a crazy board game attached to it that is used for character creation. May see about picking this up later in the year.

It was really nice to be back at Games Expo this year and to meet Eero and Mark from Arkenstone. Also good to catch up with Andrew and Matt, whose imprints you can find links to under our Spotlight tab.

The expo reignited my enthusiasm for roleplaying which had been waning a bit recently, and I am hoping to back next year with a few new products including Action Movie, Reel Adventures and Nobel Intentions, which I think I fixed on the way back up from Birmingham.

All the best

Iain

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

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