Sky Barons

It's been a while since I posted. Now that the air temperature in NW Ohio is above freezing, my brain has thawed sufficiently to make good words pretty. Well, mostly thawed.

I've been taking a bit of a break from design work for the last few months. I'd like to get back into it and complete some of my on-going projects. But first, here's a completely new one:

A couple weeks back, I made a prototype for a new cooperative strategy game I'm calling Sky Barons. In it, you play the leaders of a floating, steam-powered city. Once the capital of the tiny nation of Falkyria, the city is now the sole refuge of the Prince, the heir-apparent-in-exile of the Falkyrian throne. As the Prince's closest advisers, you build and expand the city's industry, culture and defenses in order to restore the prestige of the city and return the Prince to the Falkyrian throne.

The design is fairly simple. The city is made up of hexagonal tiles, each of which provides either a resource or allows a special action, such as building a new tile. Players place workers to collect resources and add new tiles to the city. Meanwhile, two threats build in strength over time -- Air Pirates and the Armies of the Usurper, the Prince's uncle who seeks to steal his throne. Periodically, one of the threats hits "critical mass" and an attack occurs, forcing players to plan carefully between expansion and defense. To keep pressure on the players, they must also reach their prestige goal before a set number of turns expire.

Sarah and Donna helped me out with some play-testing. The resource management aspect of the game works well, but the rules for the two threats needs some work. The initial design had a lot of components for the threats, and simply did not make the game challenging enough. However, I have several ideas for how it improve it. Hopefully I will have more to report on that in the future.

One of the aspects of this design that I'm excited about is expandability. Since the game board is made up entirely of interchangeable tiles, it would be very easy to create alternate tile sets that players can mix and match, similar to the model that has worked so well for Dominion. I could even have optional resource types and threats to choose from, so you would have a lot of variety from one game to the next.

Pixel Hearts

Here's a rough draft of Pixel Hearts, a tabletop rpg I've been working on. In it, you play video game characters whose game worlds have bled together through Portals in the mysterious Void between worlds. My main inspirations are Kingdom Hearts, Super Smash Brothers, and that one time Sellers played Doom Guy. ;)

You can play any character from just about any video game ever. Mario, Master Chief, a Sim, a Tetris block, an Orc peon from Warcraft, a paddle from Pong. Anything.

The real fun comes from mixing the characters and worlds together as they bleed into each other.

The writing is currently kind of bad, but all the basic ideas are there. Feedback is welcome!

Ravenstone Rules Update, and Mocha!

I have completed the first two chapters of the play-test rules for Ravenstone, my family-with-superpowers RPG. They can be found here:

Ravenstone Play-test Rules

Chapter 1 is just a short intro. Chapter 2 covers Family and character creation. It's in need of some editing, so any feedback is welcome. Chapter 3, the rules of play, are coming next.

I also finished making a prototype for a coffee-themed card game that Sarah and I designed together. "Espresso" and "Barista" are already taken as card game names, so I'm calling mine Mocha, after our favorite coffee drink. It's a simple, Uno-like card game for 2 to 4 players that can (probably) be played in about 10-20 minutes. Each player has three cups of different sizes -- Short, Tall, Vente. You start with a hand of ingredient cards (Espresso, Steamed Milk, etc.) and play them onto cups to build different espresso drinks. There's some strategy to where you place your cards, as you score points for drinks in front you, and certain ingredient types must be played in a particular order. You lose points for cards left in your hand at the end, so I'm guessing a large portion of the game is mitigating your losses as best you can. Hopefully we'll find some victims to help us try it out this weekend.

Ravenstone - Playtest Rules

It's been a while, but I'm back.

This week and next, I am working on a revision of my rules for my rpg magnum opus, Ravenstone. In it, you play a creepy, dysfunctional family that fights monsters from beyond time and space. Kinda like if the Addams Family mated with the Winchesters from Supernatural, then used their resulting superpowers to hunt Lovecraftian horrors in a decade-spanning history written by Alan Moore. Kinda like that.

My wife, Sarah, and I are also working on a cooperative board game to replace the WarhammerQuest-shaped hole in our hearts. Our goals are to speed up play, replace the randomness with decision-making, and inject more of a sense of narration, while keeping the exploration, character growth, and cooperative elements of the original game. We are also replacing the Ameritrash big-guys-with-swords feel with an epic puppy-ton of cute. Just look at this mummy:



Edit: Oh, BTW, thanks to Wil for linking me from his site!

Super Villains - New Name, Same Great Taste

We had a very productive round of playtesting of my supervillains game over the weekend. Thanks again to Jeff for his good ideas and enthusiasm for the game. I'm feeling good about the core mechanics of the game. Now its just a matter of balancing all of the variable components, like Headlines, Heroes, and Menace cards.

One major issue we've come across is that the reward for a Destroy action is way better than the reward for a Steal or Ransom. Destroy rewards more Infamy (a lot more), and has become the clear path to victory. It's important that the other choices in the game are also valid paths to victory. I could increase the reward for other types, but more Cash (Ransom) and better abilities (Steal) is never going to trump raw victory points (Infamy from Destroy). To balance the additional Infamy for a Destroy action, Jeff suggested increasing the damage taken from Heroes. I like this idea, and will try it out. In order for it to work, a bunch of other changes will have to cascade to other parts of the game. The Hero deck was working as a time limit for the game. If players draw a variable number of Hero cards for each Plot, I will need to use some other device as a time limit or else the game length will be too random. Headlines are the obvious choice. The size of the Headlines deck (it's 60 cards, way more than one needs for one game) was causing problems due to the randomness of the deck -- a game usually requires a fairly even mix of card types, or else the game can favor one player over the others. Reducing the number of cards used for one game will eliminate the possibility of drawing ten cards of the same type in a row, ensuring a more even mix. I can use a smaller Headline deck as a time limit, and basically kill two design problems with one stone.

Oh yeah, and the name of the game! I'm changing it to MENACE, which I think works better than Villains Wear Spandex. Now I've got to go back and change the labels of all my earlier posts...

Villains Wear Spandex - Ready for Playtesting

Printing and cutting is done! Now to find some victims...I mean, play-testers. Mwa ha.

Villians Wear Spandex - Almost There

All parts are made. Ready for some printing and cutting (over 30 sheets this time!), and hopefully some play-testing. Despite its flaws, Sarah and I got a lot of play out the first prototype, so chances are good that we will do the same this time around.