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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• "Giving people a customized die is very sexy." —Richard Garfield
King of Tokyo has an expansion due out in the near future, with it ideally being released at Gen Con 2012, according to the game's designer Richard Garfield. In an hour-long podcast at Games with Garfield, he talks about the complications involved with designing this expansion, which in the end does not include sexy customized dice, but does include separate abilities for each of the monsters – something he says was the most requested feature/addition by players.
One of Garfield's discoveries will working through possibilities for the expansion was that he didn't want to front-load complication in the game by having everyone start with a different power. In the base game, everyone starts from the same point, then they diverge as the game progresses, moving to attack other monsters, occupy Tokyo, or focus on cards based on the dice they roll and what everyone else is doing. If each player started with one or more abilities, (1) they'd have to keep in mind up to six abilities from the start of the game, which makes the game tougher to explain and get into and (2) they might be forced down a path they'd prefer not to take. After all, if your powers relate to gaining and using cards, and you prefer to attack, your monster works against your inclinations, making the game less fun for you.
In the end, each player will have a set of eight cards specific to her monster and these cards start the game face-down. When a player rolls three hearts, she can activate one of her cards, allowing her monster to make a one-time surprise play or level up with a constant ability.
The entire podcast would likely be of interest to anyone who cares about game design as Garfield and Skaff Elias go through the many ups-and-downs of the King of Tokyo expansion as well as other aspects of game design and submission. King of Tokyo fans, on the other hand, might want to listen for hints of what else might be published for the game in the future. (HT: Chris Schreiber)
• Michael Schacht's Call to Glory, announced the other day on BGGN, is now in the BGG database and revealed to be a new version of Crazy Chicken with a Japanese setting. While the basic game play remains the same as in that game – or rather its previous successor Drive since Call to Glory is for 2-4 players – the Q3 2012 title from White Goblin Games also includes two variants: one in which you're trying to achieve particular targets in order to score imperial tasks, and another in which the ninja cards provide an extra bonus for players.
• Reiner Stockhausen's Siberia, which I noted the other day will be distributed in the U.S. by Coffee Haus Games, will also be distributed in France by Oya, according to TricTrac.net.
• Following up on the Town Center announcement from yesterday, designer/self-publisher Alban Viard has passed along news of his Age of Steam expansions for 2012. Notes Viard, "As a big fan of Age of Steam, you can't forget it is the tenth anniversary of its release." As such, Viard has designed not one pair of expansions, but two: Age of Steam: Tibet and Cyprus and Age of Steam: Las Vegas and Korea (N&S).
"I mixed simple twists with original new rules as usual with my latest expansions," says Viard. In the former set, players can use sherpa discs to help deliver cubes through otherwise impassable Tibetan mountains, while in the three-player-only Cyprus one player controls the Greeks, another the Turks, and the third the UN, with each player having particular strengths and weaknesses. In the latter set, players build a network in Vegas while also looking for money on the game board; in Korea, the building costs and availability of cubes matches what you'd expect – cheap and sparse in the North, expensive and plentiful in the South – with rising delivery costs across the DMZ as the game progresses.
Says Viard, "These two sets can not be split, and I offer a completely new pair of expansions for SNCF (Paris Connection) for customers who order the four Age of Steam expansions. The price of the set will be €50, which I think should be around $70 including shipping to U.S." Delivery will start at the end of May 2012; email Viard at ageofsteam2012ATgmail.com if you're interested.
• Wow, this is turning into a total follow-up post for previous BGGN posts. The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, covered on BGGN here, is now live on Kickstarter. As someone commented on the BGGN post, this game is a riff on Monopoly with players playing one of eight Great Old Ones. Sculptor Paul Komoda has created GOO figures available in pewter and stainless steel at various KS levels.
(KS link)
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Designer Alban Viard has released a number of Age of Steam expansions over the years, starting with The Moon in 2005 and Mars in 2007, then moving closer to home. For 2012, however, Viard is releasing the first in what he plans as a trilogy of SimCity-style city-building games. Here's an overview of Town Center, which he plans to release in June 2012 through AoS Team, which he co-owns:
Quote: In Town Center, players build a city – in particular, the town center. They add cubes on their personal board and try to arrange them as best as possible in order to score the most victory points. Each cube represents a different type of module. Flats, shops, offices, generators, lifts, car parks, town hall can be built and stacked during the course of the game. Each module generates influence on adjacent land and on cubes directly below or above.
Each round, players will gain two cubes of different colors through a non-random mechanism, build them on their game board, then eventually stack them in order to make towers according to the building rules. If the players have done their job well, some modules will be able to evolve, becoming bigger in three dimensions. The last phase is an income phase in which players gain money from the shops and parking lots if they are supplied with electricity.
The bigger and higher your city is, the more victory points players will have at the end of the game, which lasts ten rounds – but do not forget to provide electricity to all your flats, shops, and lifts to make them more efficient.
"I will make only eighty copies," says Viard, noting that he'll have to buy more than ten thousand cubes for even that small of a print run. "It is impossible for a professional publisher to release this game due to the nature of the components. I chose 10mm cubes to stack as the cube towers are rarely above the fourth floor, and it is pretty nice to stack cubes, paying attention to which sort of cubes surround each module in three dimensions." The price will be approximately €15, and I'll post details once Viard is taking orders.
• Fantasy Flight Games has announced an expansion for Cadwallon: City of Thieves titled The King of Ashes, due out in Q3 2012. From the game description: "Rumors claim the newly-opened catacombs contain the legendary treasure of Sophet Drahas, and the thieves of the city above race to find the entrance to these long-hidden catacombs and grab their riches. The King of Ashes explores these catacombs with a new board and six adventures that can be played independently or combined into a larger campaign. Revised rules make the militia a more imposing force, and rules for experience, equipment, and mercenaries afford tremendous strategic options in your games, especially when you play them as part of a larger campaign."
• Gloom designer Keith Baker has a new title coming from new publisher The Forking Path. Here's a description of The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, due out November 21, 2012:
Quote: You're one of the Great Old Ones – beings of ancient and eldritch power. Cosmic forces have held you at bay for untold aeons, but at last the stars are right and your maniacal cult has called you to this benighted place. Once you regain your full powers, you will unleash your Doom upon the world!
There's only one problem: You're not alone. The other Great Old Ones are here as well, and your rivals are determined to steal your cultists and snatch victory from your flabby claws! It's a race to the ultimate finish as you crush houses, smash holes in reality, and fight to call down The Doom That Came To Atlantic City!
You and your fellow players are Great Old Ones competing to be the first to destroy the world. There are two ways to achieve this:
• Any Great Old One can win by obtaining six gates, at which point the game instantly ends. You have only five gate markers because if you open a sixth gate, you win!
• At the start of the game, each Great Old One receives a Doom card providing a shortcut to victory. If you land on one of your gates and meet the preconditions, you may attempt the action listed on your Doom. If you succeed, you win!
• APE Games will publish D. Brad Talton, Jr.'s Kill the Overlord! and has posted English rules for the game on its website. Here's a description for, as APE puts it, a "light hot-potato-passing party card game for 4-8 scoundrels":
Quote: It's good to be the Overlord. You have minions to grovel at your feet, limitless wealth, and absolute power over all the lands – but you know that your subjects are plotting. They envy your wealth and hope to steal it for themselves, specifically by removing you from the picture.
So you've decided to secure your power and eliminate these individuals by sending your executioner out with orders to kill the first person he meets. Unfortunately, your executioner is a gullible fellow who's extremely enthusiastic about his job – easy to dissuade and misdirect, if you're clever enough.
Who will be the first player with no excuse to miss his own funeral? Once the axe starts swinging, not even the Overlord is safe!
Kill the Overlord is a fun, fast-paced game of political murder for 4 to 8 players that can be played in about twenty minutes. The goal of the game is simple: Eliminate other players by sending the Overlord's executioner after them, while at the same time saving your own skin. Each time a player dies, his survivors climb another rung up the political ladder, taking the deceased's title and all the wealth and power that comes with it. The player who can secure enough wealth and the title of Overlord first will become the True Ultimate Supreme Overlord (and win the game).
APE Games hasn't yet announced a release date for Kill the Overlord!, which includes the cutest little ol' executioner ever!
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Miguel
France
Caen
(from Valencia, Spain)
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This is a summary of why and how I designed BASKETmind back in 1981, how the game has evolved over time, how I made the most recent prototype, and how things changed during the production process that has lead to its publication by nestorgames in April 2012. I only hope that if I publish a second game it will take less than thirty years!
The title of this diary says "Play" because there are a lot of league management basketball games, but few about playing the game itself, and I found those few either too simple or too fiddly. That's why I thought that, after thirty years, there was still an opportunity for my game to get published.
The Idea
In 1981, when I was 13, I began playing games, mainly wargames, and designing games of my own about WWII battles I could not find (Okinawa) or those that did not exist (a hypothetical Nazi invasion of Iceland), but then I began to think about sport simulations. I started with tennis, but it was too simple for a game, then soccer and handball, but the shots were hard to simulate: The goal was several hexes wide – yes, I only knew wargames! – and the scoring probability depended on both distance and angle.
And then I thought about basketball: The basket is just one hex, and the scoring probability depends only on the distance! So back in 1981 I began drawing hex mats on paper (if only I had thought about the circle alternative...), checking the right court size, and playtesting some rules. The size of the board was dictated by one fact: I wanted shots beside the basket to be missed only on a 1, and beyond the three-point arc to be scored only on a 6. Yes, at that time to me die=d6!
The First Prototypes
The first board was a full basketball court, drawn almost freehand, and mounted on a thick wooden base. The players were pawns, but soon I wanted to introduce players of different heights, so I glued different discs below the pawns. The ball was beside the pawns, however, so the hexes had to be bigger to hold pawn and ball, and it was not visually appealing. I added toothpicks to the pawn heads and a hole to the ball.
Unfortunately, I didn't keep the very first board and players; I offered them to the first friend that played the game with me. Everything was resolved with dice: shots, dribbles, passes, blocks, rebounds, steals... (We were used to dice at that time since we played Risk!) Passes and shots could only go through straight lines of hexes, but this limited action a lot, especially shots, since there were only three lines of shot to be defended. (The three-point arc was drawn only until 60 degrees from the center.) Therefore I extended shots to any hex, always missing on a 1 beside the basket and on one unit more every extra hex away; just beyond the three-point arc, shots were missed on a 1-5.
The turns, score and statistics were written on a sheet. (We were used to that, too.) We tracked even the individual player scores, and number of fouls. There were two replacements with poorer abilities that could enter play when important players were close to their fifth foul, or that did when one player was eliminated. Everything was resolved with a d6, but forwards got a bonus for shots.
One thing hard to implement was counterattacks as players needed two movement values: one for the normal sequence of play and a bigger one for movement from one half of the court to the other. And before the five players came back, attacks were quite easy with such a low density: hard to both cover the perimeter and block a drive to the basket with only two or three players!
Despite these difficulties, I organized tournaments with friends and my brother, and everyone loved them! Matches looked a lot like real ones, with teams exhausting possession when leading, forcing attacks on players with four fouls, decisive shots on the last turn... Luck played a role but not a huge one: the final game was often my brother against me, and I think I won all of them! The games were long enough to reward good play (looking for better shooting positions) over lucky rolls, and we were used to long games at that time (Risk again).
A few years later I got my first computer and drew the board with a program, added colors to the court and key – but then I left to the University and the game found a quiet place inside a drawer. A few years ago I came back to the boardgame hobby and discovered a lot of new games, with more elegant mechanisms than just throwing dice, that lasted less than an hour now that we are always in a hurry, with beautiful components... and I wondered about that basketball game in a drawer, which by the way I had already named BASKETmind. (I played Mastermind in the 1980s...) Could I adapt it to the present generation of board games?
The Mechanisms
The guidelines to follow were to make the game simpler, shorter and prettier! And with fewer rolls...
1) Shots: The only die roll I could not suppress was the one for shots. Players would still miss on a 1 beside the basket and 1 extra unit every extra hex away. This was the core idea of the game from the start. I added two new ingredients: Forwards use a d8 (no need of bonus), and the shot can be taken from any hex around the player, that being the Zone of Control or ZoC. (No bonus needed for easy shots either.)
2) Counterattacks: If transitions from half to half were hard to simulate, why not throw them away? The board was reduced to a half court, which in addition could be expanded and lead to bigger hexes/players. A playtest try (with circles!):
I was afraid that setting up the players at the end of every ball possession would slow down the game, but it did not; it was much faster than counterattacks.
3) Passes: There should be lines of pass but not too restrictive. I had added some "hex diagonals" to the straight lines, but they were quite complex. And then I thought about straight lines only – but from ZoC to ZoC! Passes are easy to perform but still not easy to survey for the defender. Before, any defender along the line could try to roll for interception, but I replaced this roll with one-player-only secret activation.
4) Dribbles: And this activation mechanism could be applied to dribbles at the same time! If the ball handler goes through the activated player's ZoC, the dribble fails. The failing probability was 1/6 and now is 1/5, avoiding one roll (or more). The activation mechanism is definitely modern as it adds a bluffing aspect to the game.
5) Blocks: I replaced the block roll, too. If the shooter secretly chooses the shot hex, then the defender can choose the hex(es) he will block! This is another bluffing element and very realistic. The defender marks the blocking hex(es), then the shooter places the ball for a shot. Fouls are therefore easily introduced: If you block the shooter hex but he can still shoot, you committed a foul.
6) Rebounds and Free Throws: After a rebound in the earlier version, the game continued. Offensive rebounds ended often in a slam dunk, or with all the attacker players having to leave the key, and defensive rebounds started a complicated transition. Now the team getting the rebound re-starts possession, period. Free throws were performed as in real games, with rebounds, etc. Now you just roll the die, without re-setting up players, and miss on a 1-2.
7) Press: When one team was leading and was playing long possessions, the other team could try to steal the ball always with the same probabilities: 1-2 foul, 6 steal. Now I use the secret block mechanism to try to steal the ball. One more roll avoided, one more bluffing element added! And when the ball handler is cornered it is easier to steal. The lower foul probability is compensated by the fact that you lose the activation of those players, so your team gets quite exposed after pressing.
8) Replacements: The counting of individual fouls was realistic but complicated the game, and if one wanted to play a shorter game the foul limit would have been re-scaled. And there was a "center" replacement and a "guard/forward" one, so one player could use three centers by the end of a game. The easiest solution was to eliminate foul counting, and thus eliminate replacements. Special players can still be introduced, see below.
The Components
I wanted them simple/cheap, functional and pretty, and then I found these plastic checkers' pieces:
For about €1 I had the twelve discs per color needed (six for centers, four for forwards, one for guard, and one spare), and they were indented! The ball, a wooden cylinder, would be easily carried with the ball handler. The discs were big enough to get the player movement, shooting and ball abilities printed on them. They are not hard to remember, but the discs being indented, I could add a label below the player and introduce variant players with new abilities that could balance the game against beginners or add variety for experts.
When I first thought about replacing the rolling-dice-for-everything mechanism with secret activation, I used "benches" and screens. It looked good, but it slowed down the game play and made the design incompatible with the nestorgames format. I was trying other publishers, too, but thinking about how to make the game suitable for nestorgames I realized that the dice already in the game could be used to activate players and blocks by just covering them with your hand! Bye, screens...
Aside from being better suited for nestorgames, the game play became easier and faster. You had to remove the screen every turn, and "imagine" the shooter's ZoC on the bench for the block, which was hard for some players; now you just uncover a die: the d6 to choose the activated player (1-5) and the d8 to choose the hex around the ball handler (1-7). The score sheet was replaced by a panel, with two turn markers and two score wheels, with a special d6 (numbered 0-5) to count tens of points:
No more need to photocopy sheets or look for pens! The panel has a block of fifty turns, and you can choose to play a quick fifty-turn game or four quarters of fifty – the 200 turns that we played in the 1980s! I took advantage of my computer skills to make a pretty board, with the key colored in order to remind players that attackers cannot stop inside, and with the two semicircles (decoration only) in light blue. I mounted the board on two thick cardboard panels that fold at the center. All the components would fit in a very small box.
The Game Play
Finally, the game became simpler, shorter and prettier...and with fewer rolls! But does it play better? I have been playtesting it intermittently in these recent years, and it feels (1) much more modern and up-to-date, and (2) much closer to basketball. The only problem with the activation system that I have found is that it makes solo play impossible, even with a split personality! I use to playtest solo a lot, but once I introduced activation I needed help from my brother, nephew, and brother-in-law.
Shorter games may rely a bit on luck, but this is something I do not mind when I play games now. Anyway, better play is still rewarded; I played against my nephew, letting him use all the variant players, and I beat him easily. In order to get an idea of how close it is to real basketball, check the examples of play at the end of the rulebook (zipped PDF); you will see many spectacular actions!
That is exactly what I wanted: Allow as many "real" actions as possible through few and simple rules. For example, there is no specific rule for screens, but they ARE in the game. (See "Example C" in the rulebook.)
Publication and Production: Nestorgames
And to conclude this diary, here is the final product!
The game entered the nestorgames continuous abstract game design contest with the prototype described above, and in only three weeks it got the 100 thumbs it needed to get published! I was happy about that, of course, but mainly about the interaction I had with so many users on BGG that like both board games and basketball, and the support of many "virtual" friends who I have met over the past years here.
The last step before entering Néstor's contest was making the rules available so that people could find out whether they liked the game or not. That was a lot of work! The rules had always seemed simple to me because I was always there to explain them, but organizing them, making everything explicit, adding the rules that would avoid people playing the game "not as intended"... And in order to get more support I created the rulebook in English AND Spanish, so I had to correct/change/add things in both at the same time!
Some users were very important during these last steps. The first one was kduke, who encouraged me to go ahead and tried several U.S. publishers for me, and GeoMan, who built the first prototype I didn't build myself and through his playtesting comments encouraged many Greek boardgamers/basketballers to give the "final push".
I cannot say much about game production compromises because this was only my first experience, but it was a great one. I don't know how common it is on the game industry, but Néstor (n_r_a) from nestorgames has always listened and respected my opinion on the changes that had to be introduced. And most of them, though imposed by production constraints, have made the game look better!
1) The player symbols: The nestorgames format makes the scale of the board and players a bit smaller, so the small hex/die numbers were hard to read. Néstor came up with the symbol idea, which I like much more!
2) The circle grid: The new move symbols were circles, and then it made more sense to use a circle grid instead of the hexagonal one. I had used both through the years, and we liked the look of the result.
3) The score panel and team colors: Néstor proposed the hollow frames for the score, and since the background is black, a black team was not a good choice. I had used black/white in order to give the game a "classic", chess-like feel, but those bright red and blue are much more attractive!
4) Number of dice and markers: During production we realized that I had been using more pieces than needed! Not a problem for a prototype, but we found out that six gray markers – red is used for a team – and two dice were enough.
5) The variant players: Having the variant player labels below the pieces is not very "durable" as they wear out if the pieces are not indented. When Néstor decided to make separate pieces, we thought that proposing them as an expansion was a better idea. Indeed they are not needed at all; the hundreds of games I have played through the years have never used variant players! I used them only for some sample turns to see how the game would change. The game has enough variety without them, but if some want to change, balance teams, play the pre-game of drafting the players, etc., then they are available as an expansion.
6) The rulebook: The rules have not changed, but they are much clearer now. That's why I have deleted the files I had posted on BGG; now the official rulebooks are available only at the nestorgames site. The links have been added on the BASKETmind game page. Note that I have added a summary at the end that makes clear many things that can be forgotten during a first play. I am also working on a French version of the rules...
Happy End
Hopefully I don't design games for a living, only to have fun. I like games and I like creating things, but most of the time I have created alternative pieces, variants or scenarios for existing games. And believe me, creating a game from scratch is a completely different beast!
If I have to keep one thing from these thirty years, it will be the memories of the Basketball World Cups I organized with my friends in the 1980s – that and the interactions I had with the BGG users and Néstor. And the feeling that "something has been completed" when I see the game at nestorgames. Well, that makes three things to keep!
Next time I open a game and think "But why did they do it that way?", I'll remember the compromises I had to meet with BASKETmind and be more understanding... Thanks for reading, and I hope some of you will enjoy the game!
Miguel Marqués
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Dutch publisher White Goblin Games has announced Olivier Lamontagne's Richelieu for release in June 2012. Here's a description from the publisher of Richelieu, which won the annual Plateau d'or award in 2009 from Journées ludique de Québec:
Quote: Paris, XVIIth century. Cardinal Richelieu is centralizing power in the name of King Louis XIII and defends France against those he considers its enemies: the English, the protestants, the Habsburgs and French nobles scheming against him and the crown. Will you side with the cardinal, or will you be seduced by the promise of wealth and power from the queen and foreign nations? Be warned that the cardinal will hinder too ambitious intrigants. Become an influent noble in the court by accumulating prestige and favors. The player most helpful to each faction is also rewarded at the end of the game.
Richelieu is a tactical game with a lot of bluff and interaction, with intrigue everywhere. Every instance of intrigue will pit Cardinal Richelieu against his enemies. The players are nobles taking sides in these intrigues by placing agents with secret values and thus influencing the intrigues. Will you choose to side with Richelieu or the conspirators – or perhaps even help both? You can keep your support secret or make it directly known to others when placing your agents at the intrigues. It costs money to place agents, but the winning faction gives higher rewards for the players that helped them the most.
The Cardinal's mood is influenced by his success or failures, and he will become intolerant against too influential nobles (i.e. the players), who will have one fewer action to spend during a turn as a result.
There are many possibilities and opportunities to score points for the player who foresees and thwarts the plans of other players. During the game, you will constantly have to choose your side: Will you side with the Cardinal, or will you be seduced by the promise of wealth and power from the Queen and from foreign nations?
From White Goblin's press release announcing the game: "The spark for Richelieu happened in 2008", says Lamontagne. "Me and two other testers were playtesting an early version of the game Québec for the designer Pierre Poissant-Marquis. As usual, random ideas about gaming in general were discussed. At some point, I had the idea of a game where you lose all your points if you pass the zero on the scoring track, instead of receiving some kind of +X marker. Pierre suggested me that this could actually be made into a more serious game. I considered his advice and the idea soon evolved into an interactive pawn on a score track that would hinder the characters with too much prestige. I immediately thought this could only be the unique Cardinal Richelieu." (Québec, by the way, won the 2007 Plateau d'or.)
• Samurai Battles is "expected to arrive at the warehouse by May 4" 2012, according to William Niebling, who is apparently doing public relations work for Russian publisher Zvezda.
• In his May 2012 newsletter, designer Michael Schacht announced a number of forthcoming releases and rereleases of his designs, noting that for "2012 my new releases are spread over the whole year, so there is the chance between the big fairs to talk about new games." To which I say, if you have this many games published, I think you're assured of having stuff to talk about all year long! The games in question are:
-----–Call to Glory, from White Goblin Games in July/August 2012, is a "ninja-themed card game" with illustrations by Drew Baker.
-----–Quietville, from Kanga Games, is a rethemed version of Bull in a China Shop.
-----–Unravel, from SimplyFun, is a family game in which players try to figure out who is holding the string of the kite depicted on the die that turn.
-----–Dino Minis, from Ravensburger, is a new version of Schacht's Mampf, but he notes that the game is "hard to find because in the minis series you can't see what game is inside the box". Yikes! Randomized games and toys!
-----–Wort & Fort, which Schacht describes as "a game released by the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the big newspaper of the Cologne region", is due out in June 2012.
• In the forum of German publisher alea, developer Stefan Brück answers a question about the release date of Saint Malo – which he had announced as delayed in late March 2012 due to problems with the erasable pens – as follows: "We're still 'fighting' with the ink of the pencils, but we're getting closer to a solution ... slowly... So the release date of Saint Malo will be probably not before next September."
• On a Kickstarter update for Omen: A Reign of War, designer John Clowdus notes that "1,400 pounds of Omen cards are on a truck heading our way", which means that games will be packaged and shipped roughly mid-May and in stores sometime after that.
• Designer Frank Branham notes of his Battled Beyond Space: "Pinged Zev for an update. The game is in the middle of production, and the current release target estimate is looking like late July, assuming no major production or transport issues." And we all know that games never have major production or transportation issues, so July it is!
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doug eckhart
United States
INDIANAPOLIS
Indiana
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My friend Aaron Lauster invites me over to the house one evening. I show up, he smiles, reaches behind him into a big plastic box, hands me sheets of printed pages and a pair of scissors, and tells me to start cutting along the lines. He and this other guy, Max Michael, have designed a board game, but there are what seems like a couple hundred scraps of paper that need to be cut out. That game was Legend of the Flying Canoe and was the first game in ten years to roll out under the StrataMax Games label, a company Max had started previously.
Little did I know, but I'd now become a part of StrataMax Games and would for the next couple of years playtest, count bits, and join them on the trip to the Origins game convention in Columbus, Ohio. After that first year at Origins, Max called me out in an interview and said something to the effect that I was due to come out with a game, and that led to my first train game: Congo Line. Of course, I didn't know that in standard train games, trains don't move because you see, I had not played many games, so I didn't have any context to work from.
It's Origins 2006 – my first Origins actually – and I'm back at my hotel room. It's late, my kids and girlfiriend are asleep, and I have small tubs of cubes around me. Earlier at this con, we released Aaron's Iroquoia and Congo Line, which Max and I had put together. I've been wanting to make a voting game, but none of my designs have quite worked out yet. My first shot led to Aaron and Max suggesting a retheme: Salem Town Counsel, where various goofy issues would come up and be voted on by the counsel. I was not happy.
I spent maybe half an hour trolling through my mind for historic scenarios in which voting and, in particular, politicking were significant – and out jumped New York. I remembered those scenes from Gangs of New York in which that actor was asked whether he'd voted yet and he responds, "Twice this morning already." It seemed perfect. I went to BGG and searched for games about New York and voting and Tammany Hall and to my absolute shock there weren't any. I couldn't find a single game from this time or context.
I spent another half hour looking for maps that could serve as the basis for my idea and found two that seemed great: One was the Mitchell map, and the other was the map I was able to use, a much plainer ward map. As beautiful as I felt the Mitchell map was, I knew that we were a white-box, small print company and that I was far better off to start with the other where there would be less simplification for me to do.
The map not used...
The next morning, I was excited to tell Aaron and Max that I thought I'd found what I was looking for and gave them the name Tammany Hall. They were supportive, but still a bit skeptical as voting games rarely come off well. It didn't matter, as for the first time in a year I'd felt I had the right direction.
That convention was held at the end of June/start of July, and we were all going to be together for a game-focused weekend at the end of year for our "winter retreat", so I spent the next couple months thinking about how to make Tammany Hall. I'd had a wider scope of ideas at first, wanting to include taverns and fire brigades as a mechanism to increase electability and add influence; I wanted to use gangs as electoral campaigners ready to do battle with one another between the wards of lower Manhattan, but it just wasn't gelling in my mind. I'd sketched out parts of an economic system but couldn't see the game in where I was going.
I'd met with Aaron a couple of times to swap prototypes, and he suggested that I focus on the election part since that was the game I kept saying I wanted to make. This helped immensely. I came away with a new focus toward how the actual politicking would happen as opposed to how to raise money and influence for running.
It wasn't long after that the idea of political favors came into play and the immigrant function came into being. I'd picked up the book Five Points by Tyler Anbinder and saw the immigration tables that showed over the rough timeframe of my game how the immigrants had shifted from Irish with English and German to Italians and thought I could capture that by preloading the board and having a draw bag for new immigrants. I put an Ellis Island on the board for a draw set randomly taken from the bag. Aaron's Iroquoia game was inspirational to me, but we had taken some review hits for the randomness factor, so I wanted Tammany to be player-determined. Elections would be straight-forward affairs and the bluffing element (because I LOVE BLUFFING games) would be where people could distinguish their play. Now I needed something else, some way to introduce balancing and variation – we'd also been criticized for a game without progression – and that's where the idea of roles came into being. Again, meeting with Aaron, we came up with the basic ideas of roles and what they would do, and made it the job of the mayor to give them out – all the better. We didn't have anything too specific then, but it got the ball rolling.
For the next month, when I walked my dogs in the evening, I'd think about how the game would work. I'd kept running through my mind the way the voting would happen, how the roles would work, and mentally playtest the game over and over. I'd felt it was there! I was sure it all worked and made sense. I was excited and ready to get together to show what I'd made.
When we got together for our winter retreat, I got out my board and bits, and we gave it a go. We pounded out the basic roles and powers: Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Chief of Police, Counsel President, and then Max suggested the near-mythical role that had slander power: the Dog Catcher. It was the perfect name. One of the special bits in Tammany to me is how "winners" are treated: the Mayor gets no power, but the Dog Catcher can effectively spread lies and get ahead.
But when it came to actually playing, it was miserable. We couldn't even get past two rounds, and it was clear the game wasn't working. In the original draft, once-placed Campaign Workers didn't leave, and the board was a dense and confusing pile of bits. It was tough to keep track of scoring, and the analysis was overwhelming. Max and Aaron tried to suggest changes, but nothing made sense. I left the room and sat down, frustrated and knowing it should work.
About ten minutes later: "Max, I know how to fix it. After the election all the campaign workers except one from the winner leave the board." We tried the game again, and there it was. The board became clear, scoring was easy to track, the game worked.
We made a few more decisions; we formalized how slander would work – I'd taken it out, Aaron insisted it go back in – to simplify things we made all the immigrant populations available at all times, and that was that. The game worked, it was non-random, it had a clear ending (Round 16), and it forced people to engage in direct conflict. Max thought it was fiddly to have the immigrants come in randomly, so in the first edition we made them all available to buy, that is, another player choice.
We released it the next year in 2007 in the white-box format at Origins and it did all right. That next year, though, we were prepping to do our first full-production game since Max's Rebs & Yanks, that game being Days of Steam. We had some trouble and a few challenges, but the amazing happened – Valley Games licensed the game after seeing a prototype at Gen Con. We'd already decided to print it on our own and were actually meeting with Valley to discuss Tammany, but that game never made it out of the bag once they saw Days of Steam.
Components of the first edition of Tammany Hall
Another year, and now we were looking to produce Tammany as our "First Real Essen Game That Makes It to Essen". There were new questions and problems, however. Early feedback from our friends in the UK told us no one there would care about this bit of American political history. Suggestions started floating about changing the time period or theme. Aaron had gone so far as to develop a "Tammany Hall in Space" retheme that put it on a space station and introduced the board expansion rules for 3-4 player games to keep the game tighter from the start, while also adding special spaces that gave bonuses and powers. The Dog Catcher role was out (because there are no dogs in space).
I wasn't real involved when Aaron and Max (and special pinch-hitter Dave Duffield from the Indy Gamers) were playtesting what we were calling THiS, and my first reaction was hurt. Space games were hot, Europeans won't care about Tammany Hall, etc. I disagreed. I met with Max and lobbied hard. The original theme needed to stay! It's unique, there still is no other game from this time period. Space games are popular, but there are already too many! Nobody really knows about 2 De Mayo either, but that's what makes it great; it's a compelling story that gives you a chance to become interested! It worked. We kept Aaron's improvements, while also keeping the original theme.
Max's friend Martin Wallace agreed to manage the production for us. His artist of choice, Peter Dennis, rediscovered the Mitchell map, secured an actual copy, and used it for the board. Peter drew the new art for Castle Garden, Tammany Hall, and that amazing cover, but it wasn't done yet. Out of the blue, Martin actually sent us back an alternative way to play the game that he and the Warfroggers had put together and offered to let us run with it as a revision/rewrite. In it, there were only two factions duking it out in Tammany Hall. It was an interesting new design, totally unsolicited, for us to look at.
Max was torn. Here we were, about to make another big push for a big box game with the chance to print a Martin Wallace design of our own. Another round of lobbying with Max, and the eventual agreement was that we were happy with the design we had and believed in it. One thing did make it in from Martin's redesign: He had the immigrants coming in a random pool drawn from the bag. Max saw this as a great improvement – even if it was part of the original design – which makes sense because as he likes to point out, "It's one thing if an idea is yours and quite another if it is Martin's!"
Essen came, and we sold a few, although were far from a sellout. Initial reviews were favorable, but the people playing the game were having trouble going past the first round if they felt they were too far behind. At Essen, the Germans, Dutch, and Belgians seemed to expect a solitaire optimization game – more along the lines of a typical Eurogame – and why shouldn't they? It was Essen after all. Max also has pointed out that folks at Essen are often only there for a day or two and want to try as many games as possible, so after that first election if someone looks like he is behind, the prospective customers are in a hurry to move on to try something else. Little could they know that the player elected mayor first really isn't way ahead...
So Tammany Hall is not a good game for someone in a hurry to evaluate a game or someone not expecting the direct conflict it creates. I wouldn't call it a flop, but our sales were disappointing. We shipped copies back to the States, added them to the webstore, and kept looking for the next step.
We brought Tammany back to Origins in the summer and were excited to see we had finally found our audience! A great review by Joe Steadman, and Tammany sales picked up; a few more great reviews were published, and Tammany moved into the top 900 games! Then, a few months ago, one of our fans and game publisher Nathan McNair approached me about a reprint under his company Pandasaurus Games. We'd been interested in licensing the game, but Nathan really came to the table with plans, enthusiasm, and what we think is the right spirit to the game.
I'd like to add a couple closing thoughts. If you're new to Tammany Hall, you should be warned that it's not really a game for players who don't take control of the board – or at least you won't win if you don't try to do so. If you expect the games rules and mechanisms to keep everything in balance, you're in for a surprise. Tammany Hall is not a game of solitaire – it's political theater, a challenge between players. This is the game I wanted to make.
Doug Eckhart
The Mitchell map reborn, thanks to Peter Dennis!
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• From now through July 31, 2012, you can vote on the games you feel should receive the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the annual award run by Spiel organizer Friedhelm Merz Verlag and voted on by gamers around the world. Click on "Hier geht's zum Abstimmformular" to cast your vote, with your #1 game receiving five points, #2 game four points, and so on. You can view previous DSP winners on that website for a taste of what the voting audience prefers.
• New Zealand gaming site Seriously Board has posted a 38-minute interview with designer Martin Wallace, where among other things he discloses that he's moving to New Zealand.
• At TEDxPhoenix, Brenda Brathwaite talks about her artistic project/game design Train and, according to the YouTube description, "what it means to design games that can truly teach us culture, and change our perceptions about the events that have molded our society":
• While Toy Vault publishes games, such as the newly released Abaddon from Richard Borg, it also sells toys, including several that clearly fall on the Geek end of the scale. The most ridiculous item yet, however, might be the Cthulhu Knitted Ski Mask, now looking for funding on Kickstarter.
• Don Dehm and Scott Forster at Pulp Gamer Prime have posted an interview with High School Drama! designer Boyan Radakovich, who also happens to be Associate Producer of Wil Wheaton's new web series TableTop.
• Nate Straight has a fun blog post here on BGG titled "Ten Exciting Designers Doing Exciting Things", and while I don't think he's referring to Néstor Romeral Andrés' hand jive, I could be wrong...
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• In addition to Ali, which I covered in yesterday's new game round-up, French publisher Libellud has a number of other releases lined up for 2012, such as a French version of Dong-hwa Kim's Help Me!, which Korean publisher DEINKO debuted at Spiel 2011. Here's an overview of the game:
Quote: Polar bears, koalas, emperor penguins, cute little panda bears – they all need your help to survive, but alas only one species (and one player) can come out on top in Help Me!
The game includes 30 animal tiles, with six different types of animals, each valued 1-5. To set up the game, randomly create a 5x6 grid of animal tiles. Each player secretly chooses one of the six animal character tiles to see which animal they want to save.
On a turn, a player chooses any tile or stack of tiles and moves the tile/stack orthogonally onto an adjacent tile/stack. You can't move a tile to an empty space. When no more tiles/stacks can be moved, the game ends. Each player then reveals his animal character and takes all stacks that have that type of animal on top. The player scores one point for each tile he collects; in addition, if any of the type of animal are within a stack (not on top), the player scores points equal to the value of that buried animal tile.
The rules include a team variant in which players combine their scores at the end of the game, but don't know which animals their teammates are trying to save. Watch for tears and other clues of sadness when particular animals disappear from the board...
Libellud's Help Me! is due out in the second half of 2012. As you might see on the box, Libellud's version of the game is labelled for two players only with a playing time of 45 minutes, both of those elements differing from the 2-6 player range and 10-minute playing time listed on DEINKO's version. The Libelled release will also contain variant rules for play with three and four players.
• Another title from Libellud is Le Petit Poucet, a cooperative game from Corentin Lebrat (co-designer of Ali) and Gilles Lehmann (co-designer of Ystari's Mousquetaires du Roy) in which players must bring Tom Thumb and his brothers through the forest and back to their cottage home while avoiding the wolves and not making enough noise that they rouse the ogre, from whose house they just escaped. Le Petit Poucet, for 3-6 players ages 7+, is due out in June 2012.
• In July 2012, Libellud will release a new edition of Dave Choi's Sticky Stickz, which Korean publisher Happy Baobab showed off at Spiel 2011. (Hmm, didn't I just write a nearly identical sentence above? Korean publishers! Check out Libellud for future co-publication opportunities!) As with Help Me!, Libellud is redoing the artwork for its edition of Sticky Stickz, presumably to make it as lush and inviting as every other game it releases.
• English rules are now posted on BGG for Régis Bonnessée's Seasons, due out from Libellud in August in North America and Europe. With the rules now avialable, who's up for rewriting this game's description?
• As I noted in a February 2012 BGGN post, Libellud will release Dixit 3 – an expansion set of cards for Dixit – in Sept/Oct 2012, whereas Asmodee will release these same cards in a standalone game titled Dixit: Journey for the U.S. mainstream market in July 2012.
• Finally, scheduled for late 2012 is Loïc Lamy's Ladies & Gentlemen, with artwork by Mélanie Fuentes. Libellud's description of this game is brief but intriguing, and I've translated it as follows: "In the unusual and asymmetric game of Ladies & Gentlemen, players compete in teams of two to make their lady look as good as possible." More details on this and other releases when possible...
"See something you like, ladies?" (non-final artwork)
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• In August 2012, French publisher Libellud will release Ali from Antoine Bauza and Corentin Lebrat. Here's a short description of the game:
Quote: In Ali, players re-enact the story of "Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves" – but as a push-your-luck memory game.
Each round, one player takes the role of Ali while the other players are all thieves. These thieves must repeat, in turn and without error, an ever-growing list of objects – these objects being the treasures that Ali Baba covets and wants to steal. The question for Ali is whether to stop or not before he covets too much and ends up stuck in the cave, with the treasures falling into the hands of the thieves.
• Rui Alípio Monteiro's Trench, originally projected as a Spiel 2011 release, is now available for preorder through Portuguese publisher Runadrake with an expected release date of May in Portugal and June elsewhere in the world.
• On April 22, 2012 I published a short note about Anyways, a new word game from the Ragnar Brothers that will debut at UK Games Expo on May 25. This game, which will have a discounted launch price of £20, will be produced in an edition of 500 copies and has a homemade look that will invite flashbacks to the good ol' days of the 1990s and early 2000s when many such games were indeed limited and homemade. Ragnar's Steve Kendall notes, "We can take advance orders at the same price"; check out the Ragnar website for info on ordering and shipping costs.
• Wizards of the Coast has announced a new version of Dungeon!, the light boardgame version of a dungeon-crawling D&D session. The game carries a $20 MSRP and has a U.S. street date of October 12, 2012. (HT: Chris D'Andrea)
• Fantasy Flight Games has announced an expansion for Corey Konieczka's Rune Age titled Oath and Anvil that introduces two new race factions to that deck-building game: dwarves and orcs. Clearly dwarves have the anvil, so I'm guessing the orcs take an oath to pummel you. Oath and Anvil is due out Q3 2012.
• On its daily Illuminator blog, Steve Jackson Games has posted a retailer sell sheet for Ogre: Designer's Edition, as well as a preorder form that interested buyers can take to their local game store, if they're uninterested in buying the game or unable to buy it via Kickstarter. Sell sheets aren't normally distributed to customers since they're meant to inform distributors and retailers, but as SJG's Phil Reed has noted on BGG: "The really important bit I want to point everyone to is the fact that the game is limited." From the sell sheet:
Quote: It's highly underpriced for the huge amount of material it contains, and we expect to print it once and only once.
This edition will be printed to order. We will take advance distributor orders, print them, and ship them. We will have few, if any, available for re-order.
Even with 2,443 backers on Kickstarter as of me writing this note on May 1, 2012 at 10:51 a.m. (GMT -4), Reed suggests that the total print run might still be under 3,000, which would make the game tough to find later – other than from all the speculators among the KS backers who are stuffing copies in their closet for sale in 2015...
• Pandasaurus Games has launched its Kickstarter project for the third edition of Doug Eckhart's Tammany Hall, first published by StrataMax Games in 2007, then reissued in a pretty edition with art by Peter Dennis in 2009. The Pandasaurus edition also uses this Dennis artwork, and the company is promising on KS to add a funding level so that existing Tammany Hall owners can acquire an extras produced as a result of the KS campaign. (KS link)
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Mensa has announced the five winners of the 2012 Mensa Mind Games competition with 300 "judges" rifling through 68 games in 48 hours to vote on their favorites. The winning titles are:
-----–Coerceo (Coerceo Company)
-----–IOTA, by Gene Mackles (self-published)
-----–Mine Shift, by John Forte, Jr. (MindWare)
-----–Snake Oil, by Jeff Ochs (Snake Oil, LLC)
-----–Tetris Link (Techno Source)
• Z-Man Games posted a short interview with designer Shadi Torbey (Onirim, Equilibrion) on April 24, 2012 in its news section. (Oddly, that section doesn't have direct links, so you'll need to scroll to the correct date.) In the interview, he mentions two more games in the "dreams" series started with Onirim as well as a game about opera that is "finally starting to take shape".
• In mid-March 2012, I posted a video of designer Reiner Knizia giving a presentation on "Maximum Impact Game Design" at the Digital Games Research Association conference in September 2011. Turns out that wasn't the only conference at which Knizia spoke around that time. In late October 2011, Knizia spoke at the NYU Game Center for "Practice: Game Design in Detail" with an hour-long talk that focused on the creation and publication of Whoowasit?, his Kinderspiel des Jahres winning design from 2007. Here's that talk:
(HT: JugamosTod@s)
• From designer Daniel Solis on his blog:
Notes Solis on the blog post in question:
Quote: So, a little background: John [Stavropoulos] made some observations about RPG rules presentation on a Google Plus thread. Luke Crane suggested this could be modeled as a hierarchy by some designerly folks. I took the case and made slight slight tweaks broaden the scope to board games, too. Feel free to use this in your discussions. I'm not really interested in getting into game theory debates though.
(HT: Purple Pawn via Tim Moore)
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Designer Steve Finn says that a new print run of Biblios from IELLO has been finished, but still needs to ship from the manufacturer, which means the game won't be available for a couple more months.
• Coffee Haus Games, which is bringing a number of European releases to the U.S. market, has received Wiraqocha (Sit Down!) and Arnhem '44 (MDVC Games) and will offer those titles through U.S. distribution soon. Reiner Stockhausen's Siberia (dlp games) is expected to arrive in a few weeks.
Eric Price at Global Games Distribution says that like Japanime Games, Coffee Haus Games is owned by GGD. "The idea is that we needed a new brand to publish our European titles." Some of the releases from Coffee Haus are multilingual editions bought directly from the publishers and imported to the U.S., while others are new printings produced specifically for Coffee Haus. Says Price, "Arnhem '44 has been out for a few years, and we are now importing into the states. Siberia is a brand new game, and we have the North American rights. Vanuatu is a French game that we have the English rights to. So there are different circumstances to each game. Some we are actually publishing, and some we are acting as the publisher in North America." My spidery BGG database completionist sense is tingling like crazy. Which games are imports? Which are actually new editions? Can the database artifice ever match reality?!
• Stronghold Games has announced details of the 30th anniversary edition of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! in its April newsletter. In addition to new cover, tile and game board artwork, the wooden meeples in Stronghold's 2011 edition of the game led to complaints from some that you could learn which wood grains corresponded to which point values on the meeple bottoms, so those figures are now plastic, with white numbers instead of black to make them easier to read. The tiles are now of uniform thickness, instead of being different thicknesses depending on the landscape they depict. The optional dolphin and dive dice components have been removed, and this change – likely along with the change to tile thickness and the licensing of the game for release in Europe by Asmodee – has lowered the MSRP from $50 to $40. This new edition of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! has a release date of June 6, 2012 in the U.S., with its European counterpart The Island set to debut in late May.
• ICv2 has reported that Bryan Pope's Mage Wars, which was solicited as a two- to four-player game, will be released as a two-player-only game with the MSRP lowered from $75 to $55. From the news item: "This new two-player configuration will include everything that had been already planned for the base game: four Mages, 330 Spell cards, Spell Books, the full gaming experience originally designed. The only exception is that if four players wish to play together, two base sets will be required. But with a lower initial price, Arcane Wonders sees this as a fair trade off." Multiple expansions are planned for release starting in 2013, with a new expansion every 2-3 months that will include two new mages, 110 spells, and spell books.
• For Kickstarter this time we have something in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" department, that being the self-published MEGAcquire by Lloyd Solon. Game play appears to be the same as in Sid Sackson's Acquire – with players creating companies, buying stocks, and merging companies in order to get payouts to fund future stock purchases – but set on a hexagonal game board with more spaces and more companies. In response to a backer's request as to whether he obtained a license for this game from Hasbro, Solon wrote:
Quote: I tried to get Avalon Hill to create this idea in the mid 1980's and they said that there wasn't enough interest in the game. Then I tried to get Hasbro to do this idea about six years ago but they had already regulated the game to their subsdidiary, Wizards of the Coast. I hired an agent and was told that Wizards was not interested in paying royalties to two different inventors for the same game. Therefore I significantly changed the shape of the tiles, parts of the rules and artwork and names to make the game of MEGAcquire my own.
Sounds like another case for SAZ... (KS link)
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