Archive for the ‘Board Games’ Category

This Weekend, at Big Bad Con…

Are you going to Big Bad Con this weekend, in currently-not-so-sunny Oakland, California? If not, why exactly do you hate adventure?

Because if you loved adventure, you would Race to it! Evil Hat Productions’ Race to Adventure, a pulp action-selection game set in the Spirit of the Century universe, is one of the events going on this weekend. Want to win fabulous prizes? Then you want to be there!

I’m quite a fan of this game[1], and am excited to see the designers getting the attention they & the game deserve. They’ll be teaching the game during an official slot on Friday at 2pm at Open Gaming, though I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll occasionally hang around Open Gaming to demo RtA more. But what’s more awesome are the tournaments, happening on Saturday and Sunday at noon, again at Open Gaming.

Did I mention this game takes, like, 20 minutes to play?

Speaking of Open Gaming…

There are some cool folks who will be working to keep the Open Gaming area at Big Bad Con active. I’ll be one of those people, where I’ll be running “Mythender Classic” (yes, the ‘way too many dice’ version of the game) on Friday from 6pm on.[2] The Race to Adventure guys will be there, my cohort Leonard Balsera will be there, it’ll be a great time. Check it out!

And I think Endgame will have a booth somewhere near there.

Did I Mention Leonard Balsera?

I totally did! So I would be remiss in my duties as a shameless promoter if I didn’t mention the Game Design Seminar Over Drinks thing we’re doing:

Lenny and Ryan are known for enjoy the finer things in life: making role-playing games, and drinking tasty cocktails. They invite you to hang out with them and talk about game design & publishing, an informal Q&A from these two award-winning Fate developers.

It should be noted that you do not need to buy us a drink to attend. But doing so will make your games more successful and you more attractive to members of the opposite sex. Or same sex. Or both. Okay, fine, we’ll just be thankful and probably talk longer. But the main thing we want is for great company who share the passions we do.

(I cannot tell you how much I enjoy writing these sorts of event blurbs.)

This is on Saturday night from 10pm on. Technically the event says until midnight, and likely that’s when the bar will stop serving, but we’ll be there as long as we have energy and there are people who want to chat. If it turns out the bar isn’t hospitable for such conversation, we’ll find another place and I’ll tweet about it. And I’ll make Sean Nittner, the con over, tweet about it on @BigBadCon.

If You’re Going and use Twitter or Facebook…

I believe Sean’s plan is to have important details announced in, among other ways, over Twitter. So follow @BigBadCon for up-to-date info. Or follow on Facebook. Maximize your fun. Stay plugged in.

Oh, and There’s an Outdoor Heated Pool

Seriously, there’s an outdoor heated pool in the hotel. I may make some use of that. Especially if it’s heated well enough and it’s raining outside.

- Ryan

[1] Which is one of the chief criteria for me editing a game. If I don’t love it, I’m not the right fit for it.

[2] Oh, fuck, I have con prep to do for this weekend, don’t I? Fuck. :)

Lately, I’ve been playtesting Zeppelin Armada, a card game being developed by Evil Hat & Jeff Tidball. I’ve playtested some other stuff for Tidball, including Fantasy Flight’s Horus Heresy. I like playtesting card & board games. And over the years, I’ve refined my process for being able to give decent feedback — and they all involve smartphones. Having a quick internet-enabled camera & voice memo device has been super useful.

Here are some really simple tips for how to capture more information during play with your smartphone. Some designers will be happy to take media, in which case this is of direct benefit. But for those who don’t — and that’s understandable, given that there’s only so much time in the day and multimedia takes more time to digest and index than text — it’ll still help you do up playtest reports.

Cameraphone For The Win

When a weird rules situation or other situation comes up, I take out my phone and take a picture of the problem. This helps me catalog the issues that came up in play, so that later when talking about the game or compiling a playtest report, I have a visual record of what issues we had.

Now, that isn’t always enough. In the last game, we took a picture of something early on and I had forgotten why. So next time I do this, I’ll also keep some note paper nearby, marking it by photo number and a note, like:

(1) order of operations?
(2) needs iconograpy
(3) does it cancel or just nullify damage?

Know that these notes are shorthand for me, not something I’m going to email to the designer. (I might email a very weird situation that comes up at the table to the designer, in which case I’ll snap a few pictures and note “(x) email to Jeff.”)

Note the Initial Game State

This is a new one, a result of the last game of Zeppelin Armada I played. I wished I had taken pictures of each person’s initial state, because you get some random cards at the beginning. That sort of data could be useful in playtest reports for games where that can vary. Such things color the play to follow.

Debrief With Voice Memo

These days, smartphones can easily take voice memos. If your playtest has a questionnaire with it (and it should), go around and record everyone in the group answering each question. You’ll get cross-talk that’ll generate more thoughts than if you just went home and wrote it up based on recollection of the post-game conversation.

And if your playtest doesn’t come with a questionnaire, allow me to riff of the Zeppelin Armada one for some basic things to ask:

Date you played:

Names of all players (as they would like to be credited):

How long did the game(s) run?

How did the game end?

Did you try out the alternate rules/victory conditions? How did that go, compared to the regular rules/conditions?

Did any eliminated players wind up sitting around for a un-fun length of time? About how long was that?

Was there lots of table-talk during play, a moderate amount of table-talk during play, or little to no table-talk during play? Why do you think that was?

Which parts of the game were the most fun? Why?

Which parts of the game were the least fun? Why?

Were any particular rules or cards confusing? Which ones? What was confusing?

What else should we know?

Some designers will happily take your recorded debrief (and others even recorded actual-play). Some only want a text debrief. Some will take the audio but still ask for a text debrief. What’s important for you, as a playtest coordinator, is that you’ve captured information. So even if the designer doesn’t want the audio file, it’ll help you give what’s asked for.

Not an Excuse to Slack

Just because you have all this captured data doesn’t mean you get to slack off. Do your playtest report up as soon as you can. Otherwise, your data points won’t be fresh; even if you’re able to vaguely remember what happened, you’ll have lost some of the emotional context that would also be useful data.

Hope this helps, and happy playtesting!

- Ryan

So, I am still recovering from the very kick-ass RinCon ’09 in Tucson, AZ. Man alive, it was awesome. I mean, we got to meet…

…wait, a video is worth a thousand words.

Some of the stuff that got mentioned that you should totally check out:

• Houses of the Blooded (tabletop game available, LARP being developed as we speak)
• A Penny For My Thoughts (which I edited! whee!)
• Castle Panic (which is holy crap fun)
• The Stars Are Right (which I have yet had the opportunity to play, but I totally should rectify)
• Sea Dracula (which will bring out the hardcore in you)

Yes, I just did show notes for a One Cool Thing. My production technique is unstoppable!

- Ryan

Also, this dude named Wil also talked a bit about RinCon.

While hanging out with two of my three local Race for the Galaxy crew on the 4th, I had a weird idea for a hack. We played it last night, after playing two disappointing games of Race (disappointing to everyone, including the winners) and one okay game. (I’ll get to the disappointment later.)

The hack comes from the Eastern Front expansion for Memoir ’44 — the Russian player has to play his orders in a queue, so that on any given turn he’s playing whatever orders he placed last turn and playing orders for the following turn. This causes all manner of chaos in a game, because while you know what your next move is, you don’t know what other people will do before that turn is played and how that will change what you’ll do with the orders you’re about to play next — and if what they do completely invalidates or makes impossible that move.

In a word: exciting.

I wanted to see what happens with you take that to Race. The hack works thusly:

• Each player takes all the phase cards for their color, including the two-player cards
• At the beginning of the game, after you have your initial hand of four cards, place two phase cards face down — one at the edge of the table and one just further in towards the center.
• At the beginning of each round, reveal the further-in phase card as your play for that round.
• At the end of each round, put the phase card just played back into your hand, push the remaining face-down phase case further  in towards the center. Then place your next phase card face down in the just-vacated spot.

We played with this variant, and within a couple rounds I found a new joy with Race — it was this sense of beautiful chaos that left us playing a game more based on hope than on reading each others’ faces and situations to draft off their likely choice. “I have no idea what any of us are doing! This is awesome!” I exclaimed. My comrades felt a similar sense of excitement.

This isn’t the sort of thing we would play often, but it seriously took me out of a funk with the Race games we played earlier that evening, giving it a refreshing feeling and making me rethink habits I’ve fallen into with the game. If you’re looking to mix it up a little, try this variant — and see how it reveals things about how you play Race that you night not have otherwise done.

One of the players, Aaron, said something interesting about this variant after we played. We’ve become so used to playing the game as a competitive display of mind-reading and predicting that by engaging in this variant, he felt like it became a true solitaire game again. We were playing so strongly to our next draw because we couldn’t really predict what someone else would play. I would agree, at least with the first time play — not dissimilar to first times playing Race. What didn’t feel like solitaire was the shared sense of awe and chaos that we all felt, and since we all seemed to enjoy that to one degree or another, I accepted that the mutual sense of bewilderment we all had made it feel less solitaire, and more of a “we’re all in this crazy mess together” sort of experience. Take that how you will.

(Onto the disappointment. We decided to pick starting worlds from the nine rather than do a random draw, and because of that we wanted to focus our play in a particular direction. Naturally, our card draws didn’t support that, so we all felt disappointed by the game. After that, we played a game with random draw and the game felt a little better — cleansed some of the funk from our earlier games.)