Figured I'd finally say hello :)

Hi there!
I was going to participate in the Dec. game design showdown, but since that's not happening I guess I'll participate in the forums for the first time ever. :)
I'm a longtime board gamer who started finally designing some a few years back while I was still in college. Those initial games were kinda broken in incredibly different ways:
1) my first game design EVER was a cooperative Zombie-survival game based on the "holdout" end-of-scenario climaxes in Left 4 Dead. Ended up being fun to play, but not balanced at all - I couldn't get the difficulty where I wanted it, and eventually left it on the shelf.
2) The second game was my attempt to make a war game where the players can control any of the forces on the map if they can buy control of them - ala Imperial - but set in a future world with a bunch of Merc factions being used as pawns. Players could either go to the Warzone to bid on merc factions and fight to get resources or develop their Nation to grow their economy and gain access to unique national powers. I balanced the player and merc abilities better for this one, but the economic system was broken. There's potential for it still, but I was thrown into shock at how bad my math was with the economic design and it's still sitting on the sidelines.

Then I took a break from designing for a year or so, graduated, went to Russia, and finally started up again this April on the plane back from the Gathering. My ever-patient friends have been playtesting the following 3 games regularly for a while now, and I'm pretty proud of these:

1) Space empire dice game - "Eternum Empire" [?]
This game started as an attempt to make a "TI3 Express" that I could publish as a PnP, and it crams all of the primary concepts behind TI3 and other 4X space games into a dice-based resource-management game (ala Roll through the Ages) that plays in about 20-30 minutes per player: combat, differentiated ship types, trade, politics and negotiation, reputation, a varied and branching tech tree, merc factions to ally with, ancient artifacts to find....I squeezed lots of stuff in. :) I've been working on this for about a year now, playtesting for months, and finally trying to get a good-looking prototype (thanks to my very generous friend who knows her way around Adobe Illustrator).

2) Pirate Dice - "Blackbeard's Treasure"
I saw Indie Boards and Cards' post on BGG that they're looking for a "pure dice game," so I thought I'd give it a shot. It'd be a fun challenge. You have 5 dice [d6] that represent your pirate crew: 3 crewmembers, 1 first mate, and 1 captain. Your crew, and many others, have gotten their hands on the map leading to Blackbeard's famed treasure hoard and you all set off on a race to get there first, while staying a step or two ahead of Blackbeard who got wind of the leak and is heading there to move it to a more secure place. Pretty simple game - there's a track of 30 spaces with values from 7-15. Each turn you roll your dice and try to add them up to equal the next spot on the track. If you do, you move a placement marker up and choose to stop or keep going, losing all your progress this turn if you can't make the next move. You can move to the second space away from you, but you can't roll one of your dice for the rest of the turn if you do. When you choose to stop, you move your marker up and pass the dice. First one to reach the 30th space wins. The twist is that the 1 side of each die has a special effect instead of counting as it's value: the crew dice all have their Rum, getting drunk and disorderly and generally getting in the way, while your First Mate is a Pathfinder and gives you more options for movement, and you have your trusty Parrot on the captain die that acts as a wild. There are some other twists, like Blackbeard steadily approaching you faster and faster as you near the end, islands to pick up extra worker dice that can help but also might mutiny against you, etc. It plays in about 30 minutes with 5 players, it's full of piratey fun, and there's plenty of cursing at your crewmen who are always getting sloshed at exactly the wrong time. But then again, you can always throw one of them overboard. That tends to sober the rest of them up pretty quick...

3) Blind-bidding game
You're an up-and-coming quest-giver in a generic fantasy MMO, and you need to try and attract adventurers to go and do quests for you so that you can gain prestige and influence. Or you can just trade them to another desperate quest-giver for a fair profit in return. Either works. One player managed to gain the title of "The least respectable 'Admiral the President' ever" while simultaneously putting on a festival and saving a princess. Going for more humor with this one. I'm a couple months into it so it still needs balancing, but I think I finally did the math right for the design of a relatively mathy game! (yay!)

And there are a couple other projects I'm still fleshing out, too:
-A 2-player game where both players use hidden movement, and they have to use the reactions of the board's set routines to try and guess where the opponent is, otherwise they can just ignore each other and race to the objective. The theme is rival Agents infiltrating some corporate Facility for a sinister/noble purpose. Love the theme and while I'm skeptical that the total hidden movement mechanic might not work, I'm holding out hope.

-A puzzle game where each player controls a cult worshipping an Ancient One, and you have to manipulate the stars to complete rituals and summon your master, with the stars being a 5x5 grid of different colored cubes and each ritual having a certain pattern of these cubes you have to find). It was fun, but still needs a lot of work. This was my attempt at a light puzzle game.

-Co-op Arkham Horror-themed deck-builder. The general idea for this was you have a mindmap, with sections for motor function, creativity, tactics, etc, and in order to buy cards you have to pay with your sanity. You cover up X number of spaces of your mind with Insanity, limiting your base abilities. Sure, you could buy that card any time you want, but then your hand size would be reduced to 2 or you wouldn't be able to move very fast. So you have to balance buying/using cards with healing and keeping yourself sane. It's also played on a board, with different locations to buy cards from, so the basic deck is made of movement (to buy cards) and healing (to remove insanity), ala copper and vp. All the while, the Ancient one is opening rifts that monsters are coming through, and things are generally going downhill. The mechanics could work, but might fail miserably. Still need to test it, but I'm working on getting a playable card set together first.

As for questions I generally have: I really need advice on what avenues there are to get a game published and would love to learn more about how to find artists that might be willing to help with a game without breaking my wallet in half. Also, I love learning about any nifty prototyping tricks.
I love space games (SPAAACE!), and my dream is to see a good, fully-realized 3-D space civ game, either a video game or board game. The video game medium is more suited for the task, but I firmly believe that it is possible to transfer it to a tabletop (like "Web and Starship" so valiantly tried to do, and maybe there're others I'm not aware of...)

And that's me and all my little projects, both active and dormant. Long read, but hopefully not too terribly boring. I made the resolution try to be more active on forums like this, because it's the kind of community I absolutely love. :)