Scott StarkeyHey it's Saturday at #Protospiel #Milwaukee! Check this thread for all the unpublished games I'm playing today!
First up, "Preliminary Trials" by Anthony Ashford, a new Protospieler. It's a prison break RPG boardgame set in a dystopian future. Sprawling in the amount that one can do, it's fun but mindblowingly overwhelming. Anthony was modeling pretty much everything including the kitchen sink. Some of you hardcore tabletop game players will love this though. A little overwhelming for me but I'd try it again. He also sounded receptive to my suggestions to simplify.
(Sorry, I got crazy-busy, and could not finish the attendee live-toot session. But the posts that follow up will be a sort of diary of what happened at #Protospiel.)
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.
(That playtest only took about a half-hour including talk about it afterwards. So, at this point, I'd only consumed 1.5 player-hours, and contributed 12.5 of my hours. No, you don't have to have this level of accounting at your Protospiels, but the philosophy is to give back equal to the amount of time you take. Clearly I needed to run another game, if I could!)
Next up, another of my game designs, Café Infernal (a.k.a. "Hell's Kitchen" which needed to be renamed for... reasons.) In it, you are a restaurateur in Hell, serving the new souls their just deserts. Again, as a design goal, this is a love letter to two of my favorite games: Puerto Rico (a classic German game) and Cosmic Encounter (a classic American game from the late 70s and early 80s).
Basically, on a player's turn, they choose a role in the restaurant. Each role launches a "minigame" to give players resources & points, and the player selecting the role is given extra power during that minigame.
I played with some new players - and got valuable insights. Biggest of which, from Maxine Ekl, one of the husband-wife pair that runs Protospiel Chicago. She suggested a major streamline of one of the minigames. Much success!
[Here, I consumed 5 player-hours. (1.25 * 4) Getting closer!]
Next, I joined Andy Coon, one of my playtesters from my previous game, in testing his game of Stone Borne. It is a game where you are essentially controlling "rock benders from Avatar" (my words not his) - summoning stone golems and tossing rocks. Saying that makes it sound less than it is. It's an awesome game!
This is effectively a 2-player deck-builder type of game, with area-control. The game seems quite well balanced with respect to different strategies. Steven tried one strategy, and I tried picking an opposite strategy. We ended before the official end of the game, but it was exciting; Steven took an early lead, but I seemed to be catching up.
Steven Dast - who had playtested several of my games today - wanted to test out an 8-player version of his "Emerald Skulls" game that I had tried the day before, to see if it worked. And it mostly did.
The most fun role in the game might be the one tossing the dice, and because of that in an 8-player game, some players tossed them twice and some tossed them once. But there are things to do and choices to make on every toss of the dice, and it keeps players engaged. People who are not tossing the dice risk no money, and get zero or more coins. The dice-handler is incentivized to risk money to get greater rewards, so their result might be more money or completely bust out - a much more swingy result. As a result, pretty balanced - and fun whether you win or not. (Unpictured.)
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.
It was getting late, but I was convinced to play one more little game by JT Smith, tentatively called Alien Ant Farm - not about the band, but about literal ants fighting in a 4X environment. This was another very recent game, literally scrawled on cards during the event. Most 4X games are sprawling and lengthy things. This was intended to be small and quick. And it worked. It had a cool decision selection process. Your were limited to actions on cards, and after you took the action (simultaneously with other players) you passed your card to the left. Thus, it forced you to diversify actions. Really nice!
Even though I was dreadfully tired, Jeff wanted my feedback on his new game "First to Worst". I think we played for about 45 minutes.
It was a fantastic fun party game about one player drawing 4 person cards, and a superlative statement. "Most likely to go bungee jumping!" Then the main player ranked them, and the rest of the team had to guess how they were ranked. Fantastic party game! Worth staying up late for. (Unphotographed.)