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!).

Now what?

As stated last week, i want this blog to contain some ideas. Ideas about what though?

Well in a word (or two?) Boardgames! I've been playing Euro-style boardgames for a number of years and have been getting into it more heavily since I joined the BeyondMonopoly! group in York.

I've always toyed with the idea of developing my own boardgame and over the last couple of months have been developing a game I have initially named Mega-City One as it is based around 24 hours in the fictional city of Judge Dredd, though the final version (if I get that far) will just have to be generic sci-fi, though hopefully with a sense of humour.

So why a blog, why not just go and do it? Well, I'm a fan of Jackson Pope's blog and others out there, so I thought i'd give it a go to see what the response was and to ensure that I keep working on the game.

Right, next step; sort out some proper links!

EDIT: Done!

Day one...

Well, first day of the blog. I intend this to be a place to throw down ideas for the time being, i've got some things to be working on, that'll start making an appearance soon.

I hope that this will turn out to be rather interesting. Hmm, it can be interesting tomorrow, i've got a hangover and i'm going for a coffee...