This is a hard one for me to answer. The games that I love aren't really played by my family. I love Die Macher - a 5-hour German game about German politics. Weirdly, nobody here will play it with me. I also love Cosmic Encounter and Puerto Rico.

However this year for Thanksgiving I hope to play Love Letter: Bridgerton edition and Bouba Kiki. Also, if possible, I'd like to get my new prototype car-combat game "Vroom Zoom Boom" to the table. 🙂

#BoardGames #Thanksgiving #gameDev #BoardGameDev

After dinner on Saturday, I was convinced to try my "Vroom, Vroom, Boom" game again, this time with J.T. and my best buddy Carl.

It worked again. For this playtest, I assigned point values to the various goals: Hitting a flag, doing damage, and killing an opponent. Pit stops healed you and gave you an power-up item. Again seemed to work pretty well, and it seemed like my players were engaged and having fun. The turns go by super-quick so there is hardly any down time, unless a player launches. On launch, they get to blast their opponents and zoom off in crazy directions (sometimes missing their target) so even the downtime is pretty exciting.

Carl abused me the whole game gaining points, while JT got points by hitting flag goals. Me, I limped along until I finally found a good weapon. I strapped it on the rear of my car! And then with a lucky shot, I penetrated Carl's front armor and killed his pilot. Carl had the most score, with JT right behind him. We discussed - is it better to be the one with the highest score? Or the player with the highest score while surviving? JT was pretty adamant that Carl should win. He thought if the game was about pleasing the crowd in the arena, that Carl's name would live on with attendees singing the "Ballad of Carl". Thus it was declared so.

#gameDev #Protospiel #BoardGameDev

I like to balance out the player-hours spent playtesting my own game designs with an equal amount of me playing other game designs. So far I had only contributed to playing others' games - which I love, but it was time to break out one of my own designs.

I had done my #BoardGameDev just the week before, indeed scribbling ideas down on half-index cards at the event itself. Note to new designers, I have the opinion should be functional and cheap, so if it turns out to be crap you can start over without too much of an investment.

Here, I have my prototype called "Vroom, Vroom, Boom" an arena car-combat game. I was literally making up rules on the fly, trying to find out if the game was even playable. Short game! Some of the cards were clearly out of balance, but the core element seemed fun. On your turn, you can either take color-coded sections of road into a staging area, or launch all of your staged moves - during which you can shoot your weapons. It seemed to work acceptably well.

The movement was inspired by a brilliant underrated German game from the 2000s "Techno Witches". I feel like I've made a couple of innovations from that movement with color-coded maneuvers and simpler choice of them. TW was mostly a simple racing game, and to that I've added "Ameritrash" crazy upgrades and blowing up cars. That's kinda my favorite design recipe - take cool ideas from German-style games, and mix it up with dice-chucking & crazy-powers more typical in American games.