Moving time...

Hello my friends, from today onwards I will be posting on Jackson Pope's mighty Creation and Play Blog , with my games in development. I intend to keep this blog open for the forseeable future as a place to store my slightly more obscure ideas. But for now i'll see you over the road at Creation and Play.

Byeeee!

Dave

More Playtesting

After finally finding some spare time (over the weekend) I made the necessary amendments to Citywise. And even managed two solo run throughs of the game with the new rules.

I find that playtesting solo has a number of benefits and drawbacks. The most obvious benefits are that you can make slight amendments as you go and you don’t have the awful feeling of showing all your hard work to someone else to be judged on! The drawbacks are obvious as well, there is no intrigue as you have a good idea of what your opponent is going to do, you don’t have any objective feedback either.

It’s a problem being so close to the game. You can’t detach yourself sufficiently to take a fully objective view of the game on it’s own terms.

Anyway, I found the playtests to be a mixed bag. I’d constructed a ‘task’ deck so that players could choose tasks instead of having to root through the block decks, this worked really well as the characters could get straight into earning money. This seemed to give a much leaner game. However I felt that it did take a little away from the mystery of the game, but overall was a major improvement. The noticeable drawback during the games was a lack of enforced player interaction. It felt a little like the two characters were both playing solitaire. I think the way to remedy this is to include a few tasks that involve other players (e.g. Conduct a mugging to claim 100 creds). I’ve got a few ideas on this so I’ll give them a try at some point.

I also want the game to have more distinct phases. The first phase will ideally have players completing minor tasks and gaining a small amount of money to buy weapons etc, the second phase can then be the players running round robbing banks and the third phase can be people trying to avoid getting mugged by each other. Perhaps…

It’s not all been Citywise this week though. I’ve been throwing down some ideas for other games:

Steam Car Racers: This has been put on a back burner for the forseable future.

BMX game: A card based game where players compete to perform the best tricks. It’s still in the planning stage, no prototype as yet.


Space campaign game: Hmm, what to say. This is a real personal project, perhaps to be run with a few friends in the not so near future. I intend to make the most complex and slow burning Sci-Fi campaign game ever. Cue multiple boards, simultaneous moves, lots of book –keeping, etc… Should be fun!

Anyway, thats all for now, see you again next week.

Busy week...

Another hectic week at work and home has left me with little time in the evenings to have a playtest with the updated rules. So, this week, i'll show you an example of the prototype artwork from the Citywise board, just click on the photo on the left. Enjoy!

The Big Test.

As mentioned in yesterdays post I took my shiny new copy of Citywise round to visit Jack for a playtest and some development advice.

We decided to playtest before getting on to Space Hulk. We set up and started playing, a few niggles came up during the game but we sorted out as they came up and we made notes as we went along. The game played quite well (for a first play) and then we went through the points;

The first major point was bad wording! I had called the upkeep phase the ‘Admin Action’ phase which is admittedly a bad name. I’ll have to think of something sexier!

The Block and Street decks need some rebalancing and the encounters with the low life of the city didn’t seem to reap sufficient rewards for the risk that people were taking facing off against them. The credit rewards will be improved in future.

Jack also suggested making a task desk (removing the tasks from the block deck) and allowing people to take a task as an admin action. I’d initially rejected the idea of tasks as a separate deck as I didn’t want to end up with cards all over the place, but on reflection, I think it’s needed as during play characters can end up wandering aimlessly for a couple of turns waiting for a job to appear.

The rules for going to jail seemed a bit weird as well, I’m not really sure how to handle them without them becoming either unrealistic, or overly complicated. This is one of those things that I’ll have to bodge for the time being and wait until the rest of the game is more complete before finalising. I’ve got a couple of ideas for it but nothing final.

The game also needs more player interaction, that may just have been as a result of the way we played it, but I’ll keep an eye on it!

Overall, Jack seemed to think it was off to a good start and I definitely appreciated his comments. I found the playtesting process very positive and it’s given me, a bit of impetus and direction. I’ve got a lot to be getting on with for this next week, so I’d better be going.

Oh yes, forgot to mention, Jack won the game with almost twice as much money as me!

Not Yet!

I'd normally post here on a tuesday, but this week has been a bit busy and not much development has got done, although i've had lots of ideas for future games.

I'm visiting Jackson Pope this evening who has agreed to have a look over Citywise for me, so i'll post a report tomorrow of how my first major playtest went, hooray!

Bye for now...

Making money

After posting last week, I managed to get the map for Citywise printed out. It was really good to see it full size and in glorious Technicolor. Of course when I got it home and had a good look at it, I realised that the artwork (bane of my life) was wrong. Basically the map shows an overhead shot of a city, with various blocks drawn in a simple but colourful style, but I’d got the false perspective wrong so that the board looks best if you view it upside down. It’s only a minor problem and doesn’t interfere with the game. It’s still a pain, but I suppose that’s what these prototypes are for!

Another important lesson I learned this weekend was not to store card next to the radiator. I bought some card on Friday evening and stored it behind the sofa next to the radiator, when I got it out on Sunday morning to paste my board onto it looked like a giant prawn cracker.

I decided to press ahead with my board regardless. I had decided that the board was going to be a quarter folding board, so that it folds in half and then folds again, I needed to do this as the board was a bit too big to get away with a single fold. After a lot of messing about with knives, tape, PVA glue and heavy text books I got the board done. It now sits flat and folds away nicely, the only problem is bubbles under the paper, but they’re not too bad.

The objective of the Citywise game is to collect as much money as possible within a set time period so I had to get some play money to use. I though that this would be a lot easier than it turned out to be. Play money (for kids) comes only in UK denominations (5,10,20 and 50 Pounds) which isn’t much use in a game where people are collecting thousands. After a bit of web-searching I chanced upon the Cheapass Games website, who provide ‘Cheapass Money’ a pack of bills in denominations up to 1000, for a mere $6, fantastic! The only problem was postage; by ordering from the US, the price was almost tripled making it impractical. I found a German website (who I won’t name) who said they stocked them, but after placing an order I didn’t receive an invoice for the money. I decided to knock some up myself on the computer, which I did over the weekend just using wordart, and various basic shapes. After printing them out on coloured paper and cutting to size, I was quite impressed!

On the subject of game accessories, I must heartily recommend EM4 Miniatures. I ordered some game tokens from them one day last weeks and 24 hours later they arrived. Excellent service!

All this cutting and pasting this weekend left me with little time for further playtesting, but I mean to remedy that this week.

On other projects, I’ve had a bit more of a look at Steam Car Racers but it hasn’t progressed that much. I’ve had a couple of ideas for other games as well, but they will stay hidden for a while…

Bye for now…

Prototype board

Hello again, it’s been a good week on the gaming scene for me. Last Tuesday I went round for an evening of Space Hulk with Jackson Pope. I’d only met Jack once before at Beyond Monopoly! But he seemed like a nice chap (who lived locally) and after a few e-mails we’d arranged a gaming evening. He’s written a much better session report than I could, so check out his blog for details. Suffice to say I lost all the games I played, but had a thoroughly fun time!

Beyond Monopoly! was on last Saturday but I ended up missing it due to various reasons. I did put my extra spare time to good use though by doing further work on the Mega-City One Game, which I’ll now refer to as ‘Citywise’ until I can think of a better name.

After buying some thin card from a shop in town, I managed to print up some cards for the game. There are four decks of cards (Block, Street, Crisis, and Item) as well as character cards and money. All the cards are very rough versions with no artwork or designs, but they allow a playable game.

Until now, I’ve been playing the game on a very rough hand drawn board so I spent some time this weekend drawing a prototype board on the computer. I’m going to ask a friend of mine to print this out full size at work for me. It’s 45 x 70 cm so a large laser printer is required.

Artwork could well be an issue with the design of this (and future) games. I’m frankly rubbish at art, I don’t know anyone who is good at art, and I can’t afford to be paying people to do the illustrations for me. I think I may have to have cards with no illustrations, but I’d still hlike to have illustrations for the characters. Ah well, I’m sure something will present itself…

I played a couple of games of Citywise solo over the weekend to make sure it played okay, it did. Once I’ve got a reasonable prototype, I’ll start touting it around to get some opinion on it and some feedback on tweaking it (or just giving up and binning it!).