Blogs

One of the requests I KEEP getting after play testing with a new person or when observing new playtesters is their almost immediate desire to add more players to the game. While they enjoy the game and usually want to play more than once. A multi-player version is the MOST requested/asked about change that comes up. It would seem to be eminent.

More players means different (or more) boards to accommodate the extra pieces.

The 3 player version was easy to make and FUN to playtest. It did extend the play-time by almost 100% oddly enough.

The second game that got playtested last game night was Sint Maarten, which has the dubious honor of never having had a complete play of the game (other than the one time when the ten-year-old purposefully threw the game, just to get out of the playtest).

After the great success of Disaster!, Mark and Gerald were willing to playtest another of my games. The ten-year-old solemnly informed us that he would not join us, since the store owner has invited him to play a demo of Flames of War.

According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter not so long ago was six word stories. In the past several months I've asked people to say six words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, casual games, innovation (and plagiarism) in games, and zombie games.

This time the challenge is this: say six (interesting or amusing) words about chance/randomness in games.

An amazing number of teenagers dream of making games for a living, if my informal surveys at local schools and colleges can be expanded to the entire generation.

There are all kinds of individual delusions (see http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2010/09/student-illusions-about-... ), but I’m talking about the big dream: “I’m going to be famous (and rich) as a video game maker.”

We want to create player tension in our games, and one way to do this is to create limited public objectives.
Auctioning is one way to go, but I wanted purchasing features to be a little more free-form, and objective based on costs and resource gathering/management based on the dynamic map and player decisions.

On the Bazaar mat is a Tavern Section where some Knights are available for hire. Any player may hire any knight in the Town Phase of their turn, but each knight is slightly different and adds differing perqs to the player who hires her.