{"id":1411,"date":"2011-10-05T23:35:56","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T06:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/?p=1411"},"modified":"2011-10-06T00:00:13","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T07:00:13","slug":"indiecade-board-game-designs-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/?p=1411","title":{"rendered":"indiecade + board game designs update"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday I'll be giving a talk at IndieCade<\/a> alongside Chris Hecker<\/a> entitled A Dialogue on Depth. It's rather surreal to see my name in a list with a bunch of indie luminaries<\/a>, but hopefully I'll be able to live up to expectations. As Chris pointed out, though, we're in a timeslot opposite the Experimental Gameplay Workshop<\/a>, and pretty much everyone in their right mind will be over there, so it should be a small and intimate gathering. Thanks to that we're planning on involving the audience during the talk.<\/p>\n

Also wanted to give a quick update on my various boardgame designs:<\/p>\n

City Draft<\/b> - This 7 Wonders inspired drafting game is consistently liked in playtests and has been improving slowly and steadily. I've recently changed the rules to allow players to buy resources from any other player at the table, which opened up the possible strategies nicely and evokes a more interactive feeling in the gameplay. I'm also playing around with adding more \"build around me\" tiles that come early in the game, so that players can have a direction and get especially excited about tiles that they might be able to pick up later. At the most recent playtest, one 7 Wonders fan said that he actually liked this game better, and another player mentioned that she couldn't wait to buy it in stores, so hopefully that will happen sometime soon.<\/p>\n

Prison Break<\/b> - This is the experimental cooperative game with restricted communication (for the first half) and realtime aspects (for the second half). I thought I was onto something here after I hit a design breakthrough a few weeks ago but I'm getting discouraged again based on recent playtests. The game feels too easy, doesn't have enough strategy, and doesn't seem to quite evoke the feelings that I'm looking for. I think I need to go back to the drawing board on some of the core mechanics and try to find something that's more interesting and involved. Maybe I'll get a chance to playtest it at IndieCade and see if people have some ideas.<\/p>\n

Dungeon Game<\/b> - This 1v3 competitive game has a great core mechanic and then a thick layer of RPG elements and high variance on top of it. I'm currently torn as to whether or not the added complexity from the RPG elements is worth it. Dan Kline<\/a> was already inspired by the core mechanic to work on a much simpler version of the game with a different theme, so I think I'm going to keep this as a dungeon crawl for now, and look for ways to simplify the game without losing much of the flavor and depth. I think the greatest chance of this design seeing the light of the day is to pitch it to Wizards of the Coast as a good fit for the D&D IP, so I'll be looking to do that next time I'm in Seattle. People who enjoy RPG experiences tend to have a great time with it.<\/p>\n

I also have one more design that's currently in Cryptozoic's queue for publication, so with any luck I'll have a couple more games out in the market in the next year or two. Good times!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday I’ll be giving a talk at IndieCade alongside Chris Hecker entitled A Dialogue on Depth. It’s rather surreal to see my name in a list with a bunch of indie luminaries, but hopefully I’ll be able to live up to expectations. As Chris pointed out, though, we’re in a timeslot opposite the Experimental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1411"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1411"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1426,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1411\/revisions\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/interestingchoices.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}