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A major step forward for my football game

DragonsRunFourOffense

In this blog post, I'm going to discuss the evolution of my playbook cards to try and solve the issues of how to target individual players in plays and how to motivate players to choose one pass or run play over the others.

Monster descriptions on cards

Heroes & Treasure Troll card

Instead of putting them in the rule book, I have my monsters (and players) described on tarot-sized cards (120x70mm). This provides easy reference during play, plus it's very clean to extend the set of monsters (or players) in expansion packs -- the deck just gets bigger.

I know I've said nice things about GIMP, but I actually bought Photoshop this week and it's indispensable for final layouts before things go to the printer.. (among other things, GIMP only works in RGB, not CMYK). Plus I can trade files easily back and forth with the artist.

New Board Game Pieces - 30mm x 15mm Cylinders

The Game Crafter - Board Game Pieces - 30mm x 15mm Cylinders in 5 colors at The Game Crafter

Some of you have wanted taller options when it comes to Cylinders. Well, you’ll be pleased to see that we’ve added 30mm x 15mm Cylinders to our online parts shop! They are 30mm tall, 15mm wide, and come in 5 colors: Blue, Green, Red, White, and Yellow. Available at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/search?q=cylinder%2C%2030mm%20x%2015mm&hP...

Fun fact: We now have over 1,500 board game pieces and parts in our shop!

New YouTube Series - Board Game Blueprint

Check out our new YouTube series, called the Board Game Blueprint. We’ve also created a shortcut to get there: www.boardgameblueprint.org

This video series will show you behind the scenes of various industry events, take you to conventions, and chat with designers in the community about how and why they make the choices they make when designing their games.

New Board Game Pieces - Crab

The Game Crafter - Board Game Pieces - Crab

Summer is officially here, and to celebrate we are releasing these new Crab game pieces! They come in 8 colors and are perfect for ocean or beach-themed games. Depending on how you use them, these parts could go well with our treasure chests, merchants & captains figures, and gold doubloons!

Or how about a chef game where you’re trying to cook up the most crab? We’ll leave the designs up to you and keep adding parts to make sure you have freedom to create. Happy designing!

Get the crab pieces at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/search?q=crab%2C%20acrylic&hPP=25&idx=pro...

Lots of Updates to Component Studio

The Game Crafter - Component.Studio - Board Game Design App

We’ve just made a bunch of updates to https://Component.Studio:

* Added several new template functions: sin(), cos(), sqr(), hexstr().
* Enabled shards and stickers.
* Allow literal curly braces to be escaped in templates.
* When you upload a font it will automatically set the name based upon the file name if you don’t set one.
* Allow searching/display of only my fonts.
*Allow bulk uploading of fonts.
* Documented the x operator.
* Documented the \t and {’ ‘} methods for leading white space.

I Thought It'd Be Easy, Then I Tried It

How many of us have thought that designing the cards would be nice and quick, since we already knew what layout we wanted?

No one? Really? Well fine, just me then.

When I created the first card's layout on paper, I thought, "Oh nice, this part'll go quickly and I can start illustrating the cards!"

Boy was that a lark!

It has taken me 8 full days to just type out each card, the abdomen, body part, character, and action cards. Look like there are...87 individual cards. All typed out. Whew that was more than I imagined!

That's next in my designing of my game, you ask?

The Game Crafter Now Offers Card Sleeves

The Game Crafter - Board Game Accessories - Card Sleeves Now Available at The Game Crafter!

We are pleased to announce that we now offer Card Sleeves in 5 different sizes! This has been a popular request in our community and we always try to give you folks what you want. :) You can add packs of sleeves to your game or you can purchase the packs separately in our Game Accessories Shop at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/game-accessories?q=sleeve&hPP=25&idx=prod...

Please note that we only sell sleeves in packs of 100 and we do not put cards in sleeves when we manufacture games that include them.

1st Game, Mechanics and Rules (Even a picture!)

First Game Iteration

Well, Hello Again!

Time for my second blog post.

In this post, we will be diving into greater details of my game.

Just get on with it, you say! Fine fine; and away we go!

Let's see what kind of game mechanics my unnamed game with be using:
-Deck Building
-Character Building
-Conflict, Construction, and Escalation
-Hand Management
-Player Elimination
-Set Collection
-Take That

Quite a bit of mechanics going into one little game, isn't there?

Here are the rules I have written so far:

SETUP:
1. Shuffle cards really well.
2. Deal Character card to each player.

My second prototype, one step forward and two steps back

TerransRunOffenseCard2

In my first prototype, I was testing to see if my Tecmo Super Bowl concept would work as a game. It did but was lacking motivation to pick one card over the other. The cards didn't have any sense of spatial mapping to the board either.

I attempted to fix these problems by breaking up the cards into zones that showed the players going to in the playbook cards. I also added positions to the plays, so individuals can be targeted.

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by Dr. Radut