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BBG.con 2007 Prototype Testing Sign-up
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As you may already know, I'm prone to bringing prototypes of games made by me and/or my friends. Some of them were played last year at BGG.con, and some even have BGG entries. I'm going to list the prototypes I'm bringing so that people who find them interesting can "sign up" to play them, and I'll organize a time for each if I can. I'm also going to try and organize a general prototype testing session for people to test games brought by other designers as well. Since these are prototypes, you'll have the opportunity to give the designers feedback on what you thought was good or bad in the game. This is your chance to be a part of the development process! If you are bringing a prototype of your own, feel free to add it to the list with a description of the type of game, length, and etc. Sterling Babcock wrote:
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Posted Tue Sep 25, 2007 10:07 am
Edited Sun Oct 28, 2007 3:25 am
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Terra Prime - Space exploration/resource management game for 3-5 players. Something of a Twilight Imperium Lite perhaps, lasting 1.5-2 hours. This one's gone through some changes recently, and still isn't quite done, though testers seem to like it anyway. Maybe you can help me put the finishing touches on it!
Interested parties:
1) Sterling Babcock (Solamar)
2) Dave Eisen (dkeisen)
3) Gil Hova (IngredientX)
4) Brian Conry (bncconry)
5) Erik Nicely (Harkonnen13)
6) Karl Gallagher (selenite)
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All For One - Athos, Porthos, Aramis, d'Artagnan, Rochefort, and MiLady DiWinter move around Paris, fighting duels and completing missions to earn the favor of the King and Cardinal. Players earn Favors throughout the game while helping the characters advance various story lines. Bonus points are scored at the end when players reveal their secret story line goals. The winner is the player who's earned the most Favor!
All For One is a pickup/deliver game for 3-5 players. Players are not tied to any specific character, rather each turn you choose which character to activate and then take actions with that character to complete missions and advance story lines.
Interested parties:
1) David Reed (deacondavid)
2) Jennifer Geske (jgeske)
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Homesteaders - an Auction and Resource Management game in which players bid on the opportunity to build certain types of buildings, then spend resource cubes to build one of several buildings of that type. The buildings confer abilities, income, and points; some automatically and some requiring a Worker.
The game lasts 10 rounds, with each round consisting of an Auction phase followed by a Building phase. After the last round, players get 1 final income phase and one last chance to buy and sell goods and use their building abilities before scores are tallied.
Players score for their buildings, bonuses conferred by buildings, and points earned throughout the game from selling resource cubes. The player who builds the best combination of buildings and best manages the 9 different resources in the game will score the most points and win, as long as they don't take on too much debt!
Interested parties:
1) Dave Eisen (dkeisen)
2) Gil Hova (IngredientX)
3) Charles Nichols (Senor Swanky)
4) Scott M (Schlotto)
5) Jennifer Geske (jgeske)
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Magical energies await exploitation from you and your fellow wizards and the apprentices you each control. Cast the rune stones to find where you may put your apprentices to work. Use them to build towers to gain powers, bonuses and points. Use them to destroy opponents’ towers. Or build your towers next to others to increase their value. Use the special abilities your towers give you to protect yourself, attack others, gain points at the end of the game.
Will you focus on building close together to make a strong base worth a lot of points, spread your towers around to win influence across the land, or focus on destroying competitors’ towers with your awesome army of apprentices?
The wizard that has gained the most power and influence at the end will be the Mage with the Most, the Sorcerer Supreme, and the Mightiest Magician.
Wizard's Tower is a fairly abstract game for 2-5 players (+/- 30 minutes play time) where you place Apprentices on the board and move them around in order to satisfy various scoring conditions. Each urn you roll some dice to determine what plays are available to you, but you can discard one of the dice to change the result of another one, so you get a fair amount of control over your actions despite the random nature of the dice.
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Blockade Runner - a game I've made with Boyan Radakovich, and which is intended to be published by Shifting Skies games. The game has a Firefly/Serenity theme.
The Alliance has instituted a blockade on Hera and the independent planets in its system. Players are smugglers racing from the blockade perimeter to Hera and back, trading contraband and trying to keep ahead of the Alliance Cruiser on their tail.
In Blockade Runner play is simultaneous so there's a big element of bluffing, intuition, and prisoner's dilemma. The game lasts 6-12 turns, so it plays fast... 2 player games take about 15 minutes, 5 player games take about 30 minutes. Each round players allocate Resource cards to the various parts of their ship... engines, weapons, bridge, and cargo hold... to be used to move, fight, bank for Prestige, or trade. For each of those areas there's a phase of the round in which each player simultaneously decides how many of the allocated cards to use for movement, fighting, Prestige, or trading. Decisions are revealed simultaneously and the action is resolved.
Across the board, almost everyone who has tested Blockade Runner has had a positive reaction to it. We're looking into getting a license for Firefly or Serenity, but if it's too expensive we'll set the game in a universe of our own design. One tester liked the game so much he said he'd buy 2 the minute it comes out, license or no... That's about the best praise the game could get!
Interested parties:
1) Sterling Babcock (Solamar)
2) Bruce Keeney (deckhand)
3) Charles Nichols (Senor Swanky)
4) Erik Nicely (Harkonnen13)
5) Sean Tompkins (seanp)
6) Karl Gallagher (selenite)
7) Kevin Nunn (kgnunn)
8) Debra Joyner
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Lost Adventures by Jeff Warrender and Steve Sisk, has a hidden information element which is clever and frankly very cool. The game is fun, and who doesn't want to play Indiana Jones? It's for 2-4 players (though 5 should work as well), and takes about 2 hours.
In Lost Adventures, players play adventurers a la Indiana Jones, visiting Theme cards (such as Sallah, Henry Jones Sr, and the Grail Diary) to gather information on 3 hidden Relics, the Lost Temple and how to navigate it, and the Holy Grail. Meanwhile, a relentless enemy is searching for the Temple as well ("Nazis... I hate these guys.")! The more information the players get, the more Enemies are added to the board and the faster they approach the Temple. Once the Temple is found (either by a player or by the Enemy), the game moves to the Temple phase where players navigate the Lost Temple in search of the Grail Room (to find the Holy Grail), and then a font to test the Grail in. Again, the Enemy is also searching for the grail, and the game ends as soon as either a player tests the True Grail in a font, or the enemy finds the Grail. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins. Points are earned by finding and delivering the Relics, finding the Temple and the Grail Room, testing the True Grail in a font, and beating up the most Nazis.
I have been excited about this game ever since it was described to me on the BGDF a few years ago. The way the game handles hidden information is very clever. The game "knows" the location of the hidden items and some other information, and by visiting the Theme cards and then looking up clues you learn that information. The more Theme cards you visit before looking up a clue, the better the information you receive. There is a time pressure from the Enemy's relentless search for the Temple and then the Grail, and as the players gain information, the Enemy (game clock) accelerates toward its goal. Every part of the game is highly thematic, as it feels like the Indiana Jones movies.
Interested parties:
1) skippen (cscottk)
2) Lynette Jagoda (Meerkat)
3) Philip Reed (PhilReed)
4) Dana Nichols (DanaLee)
5) Jennifer Geske (jgeske)
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Memphis - A pickup-and-deliver themed around building monuments in Egypt. Players traverse a modular river system to and from the quarry to pick up blocks, then deliver them to the desert via sleds pulled by workers, horses, or oxen. Placing a monument further from the river scores better because it's more likely that it will stand the test of time. Players earn influence that they can use to help themselves or hinder others.
After last year's playtesting at BGG.Con, it's now been converted to an action point system. The game seems to be fairly balanced between 2-6 players and just needs to be "broken". Also, a clarification needs to be made concerning how to handle blocking in other players and the best way to handle the "influence" cards.
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Three-Fingered Lefty - A "Take That!" card game for 3-6 people wherein you have to bluff your way into being average, because having the most or least points in a round isn't good. The rules are pretty much hashed out and are really, really short. The game takes between 30-60 minutes.
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Supernova is a game of space expansion and exploration. 5 civilizations are abandoning their solar system to escape the upcoming supernova of their sun.
Conquer new solar systems by taking over planets, mining moons, and building the most powerful fleet of ships by upgrading your Weapons, Shields, Communications or Engines. Capture the most space by the time the star goes Supernova to be proclaimed the winner!
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10.
Board Game: Bellhop
[Average Rating:6.88 Unranked]
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Bellhop is a strategy game where players play as competing shift managers in a hotel. The year is 1939, in New York; the guests in the hotel are leaving for the World's Fair. Each player controls a team of bellhops in the hotel and attempts to earn the most tips by helping the guests off of the elevator and with their luggage as they arrive in the lobby.
You can backstab your friends' bellhops and reduce his/her tips by stopping their elevator. Be careful, though, as you might not be able to get your guests to the lobby without help! The player who has received the most tips at the end of the game wins. Maximize your points by collecting guests of all types or try to get a bonus by helping the most guests of any one type.
Bellhop plays well with 2-5 players and lasts between 45 and 60 minutes.
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I'll be bringing the two games I've been running at cons for the last couple of years.
The first is my current "number one" game, Prolix. It's a word game that I designed when I got fed up with other word games. Currently in the late tweaking stage, and being seen by publishers.
30-45 minutes, 2-4 players. Players come up with words based on letters on a central board. The nice twist is that all the letters on the board don't need to be present in your word. You just score for all the matching letters. This means that instead of rewarding knowledge of obscure 2-letter words or words that have a Q and no U, you can use common words that are longer than those used in other games.
To put it another way, in Prolix, you can use all those words you always wanted to use in other word games, but were always one tile/card short...
If you want to know more about the game, I have a barely-coherent blog here.
Note: I won't be scheduling a time for this. It's quick enough that we should be able to get it to the table multiple times, if necessary.
Interested Parties...
Seth Jaffee (sedjtroll)
Bruce Keeney (deckhand)
Dave Eisen (dkeisen)
Sean Tompkins (seanp)
Kevin Nunn (kgnunn)
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The other game I'll be bringing is another game close to completion, Wag the Wolf. It combines a nifty information-disclosure mechanic with a brutal auction. The learning curve is steep for a game of its length, but my biased opinion is that there's some good gaming to be done here. It made the "recommendation" list at Hippodice 2006.
90 minutes, 3-5 players. The players are media moguls trying to profit from news of the impending end of the world. Each player has a tiny "scoop," and they can score by learning the identity of the other players' scoops. But the big points are reserved for the players who are able to have their media outlets correctly report on The Big One. The catch is that spending money often leaks information; the more you spend, the more other players will learn.
Interested Parties...
Seth Jaffee (sedjtroll)
Kevin Nunn (kgnunn)
Jennifer Geske (jgeske)
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Mediaocrity - 90 to 120 minutes, 4 to 5 players
It's the 1980's and you're the program manager for a crappy, low-powered UHF station. But good news! There's a new fourth network forming, and they want you to be the local affiliate! Or maybe one of your opponents instead. You've got one year to prove that you deserve to be the affiliate.
Buy and program shows, negotiate discounts, manage your line-up to retain lead-in, run infomercials when nobody's watching and take their money anyway, woo the best shows away from your competitors, and generally just be very evil. Featuring "The World's Bloodiest Dutch Auction Track™."
In this game, when it's your turn, you name the price at which you want to buy something. The problem is, when you name your price, you also name when you get to take your next turn. If you have read the board right, you might get to buy what you wanted, or even bid lower and try to get an even better deal. Or, you may find that someone was willing to pay more than you, and the turn you wanted so badly never came!
The target audience for this game is not those who like to stab and then twist the knife. Instead, this is for those who like to stab, then find a brick to hit the knife with to make sure it's in there really good.
But other than that, I think it's pretty fun. It's show a lot of constant improvement over its development, and I'd really like to get it in front of some new people (and maybe some old ones too!)
Interested (or at least mildly bemused) parties:
Gil Hova (IngredientX)
Zach Mandeville (zachboyofdestiny)
Aaron Cappocchi (agentzen)
Kevin Nunn (kgnunn) -- what... again?
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I've got an untitled starship combat game that I'm bringing with me. The disks represent starships that move across the board (flip end over end, different speeds based on size) and combat is resolved by flicking dice. (Yeah, this is a dexterity game.) A card deck adds variety to the game (stellar hazards, hyperspace, shields, etc.).
The board is a 30" felt-covered octagon with raised sides that was built out in the garage. It's very likely that this thing is to big for me to ever sell to a publisher but I'm having fun and would like to get some more playtesting.
I'll be at the con Friday and Saturday. I don't plan to play this the entire time that I'm there but I assume there will be a place I can set it up and trust people not to destroy or steal the game.
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Botanica, Inc. – As a landscape architect, you compete to design the best landscape. You must consider your client’s specific needs, what types of plants are available, and your limited water supply as you create your landscape. Increase the value of your landscape by attracting wildlife. Botanica is a resource management/tile laying game for 2-4 players.
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Salvage. 2 to 6 players. 30 - 45 minutes. The world is is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. As scavengers, players are digging amongst the rubble to find salvageable material in order to rebuild their lives.
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Monkey Lab. 2 to 4 players. 30 minutes. As former lab monkeys, players cooperate and compete to free imprisoned monkeys from a testing facility while a security guard chases them around. Of course, since the monkeys don’t have any keys, they must use their creativity and the items found around the lab to pick, pry, and smash the cages open.
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Posted Tue Sep 25, 2007 9:45 am
