-
Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
-
I went to the Games Designer Day at (the new) Surprised Stare Games HQ in Nailsworth (aka Alan's House) on Saturday. Quite a sturdy attendance from the usual suspects (Bleasdale, Vincent, Fisher, Breese) and the relatively new (Ratcliffe, Harris).
I kicked off with a couple of strong coffees and a round of 'Top Banana' - Mr Bleasdale meets Dr Professor Lord Sir Reiner of Knizia in a sweet, if slightly-overlong, dice-rolling/saving filler. Literally, 30 seconds to learn the rules but upwards of 30 minutes to actually play...more work needed (and requisite, if copious, feedback from us other players also provided).
With a couple of hours before the usual delicious buffet lunch, the congregation split into two groups for a 5 player Mountain Railway (Un Jouer D'Antoine Boydell) and "Key Seven" (tantalizingly un-named candidate for an upcoming R&D slot) - I'm not sure, but I think K7 is 'From the stable of Sebastian Bleasdale' - it's hard to know on account of Seb appearing at this kind of do with a van load of prototypes...
The Mountain Railway test pulled in to completion after approximately 1h 45m (including rules explanation) and the slight over-run was due to quite the most horrible chain of in-game 'weather' I've seen so far - add to this: my forgetting to insert an extra event cube into the 'bag', and we could've clawed back 15 mins. Not unduly worried by any of this. All feedback was positive and the scores were pleasingly close (lots of 'ifs' and 'buts' in the post-match punditry): 104, 99 (me), 80, 79 and 75. I shall be bringing this along to Spiel'11 for anyone who'd like to give it a birrova blind test too...
Lunch intervened and then it was time to hammer some smaller, shorter fayre. I took on Rob Fisher's Cockatrice (Rob = Monkey Dash) with Robert Harris (sometime UK BGGNews correspondent and playtest group pioneer). Scarily, Rob shares his name with my dearly departed pal (see a prior article) and so I was reminded of him every time _this_ Rob's name came up.
Alan Paull had a game to test (cue: trumpets, cue: ticker-tape parade!) - a revamped version of his published 80's classic City of Sorcerers; I didn't get to see it being played, but I heard that Sebastian took a heavy-duty metaphorical sledgehammer to it, forcing Alan back into his laboratory. Alan also has a new 2 player wargame ready for further battering - this one I need to have a go at sooner rather than later as I'm trying to want it ready for UK Games Expo next year!
Anyway, back to the quiet table for three upstairs in the sunny living room: Cockatrice (not the final name, I'm sure) is a race/chase game about Gnomes stealing treasure and being chased by a big, old monster. Fun, quick-ish and very much in the EARLY EARLY stages of development, this was creaky BUT fun!
Looking at my watch, it seems that seven hours had passed with uncanny haste and the final event, at least for me, was a round of a deduction game (no name yet) presented by Rob - quick, clever and easy to explain. Ian Vincent (Ticket To Ride: India map designer) arrived, following the completion of another game test, so I challenged him to take (no name yet) apart and then left!
Home in time for baked pasta, irritable children, a nervous wife (she would be doing a triathlon the following morning) and, but of course, Doctor Who.
|
|
