Alien Board Game Concept: Second Post

I am embracing my Ameritrash gaming roots for this game. There are six decks included. Here is the first post, for reference.

Board Game Rough Concept

Rough game notes for Alien-esque Game. The goal is to re-create the feeling of Aliens/The Thing.

Pet Peeve in Gaming

Gammarauders comes with empty plastic bags for its own punch outs.

This is a TSR game from the 80s. Board game designers: Why don't you think of these things today? My biggest pet peeve with new board game design are game boxes that will not fit sleeved cards. Designers, you know people are going to sleeve your cards. Why should I need to buy a deck box and mess things up just to protect my game?

If TSR in the 80s could do it, you can do it too. Make my life easier.

PAX Overview and Haul

Total list below the picture; apologies for late blogging. Blame Verizon. Also, next year, more photos. For more photos, and a few of Cheers, click here. I also think I need to finally get a better camera sometime this year.

My favorite costume. Hooray Chrono Trigger. Boo Chrono Cross.

Birds!; Mice and Mystics; NaNoWriMo

Birds!

I apologize for lack of blogging, especially for the next few weeks. Here is my one-paragraph review of Mice and Mystics. First, the minis, rulebook and physical stuff is pretty awesome looking. The cards and map tiles aren't extremely durable feeling, but they held up to a day of play just fine. The rules are crisp, easy to pick up and relatively intuitive. Having only played through the first two scenarios (and only partially through the third), one thing I thought was odd was not letting everyone have access to all six heroes in the first scenario to pick from. Splitting the party in the second scenario also was awkward feeling because the player who played Lilly had a pretty boring experience until we got there. Overall, I approve. Next time I play, I'll try and take some pictures of the board and give you some more important thoughts. Below the fold is my NaNoWriMo update.

Mice and Mystics

I finally got to open my box of Mice and Mystics. From the rule book and the training video, it looks like a nice cross between Super Dungeon Explore and Warhammer Quest. This is a thing I can get behind. Pictures are below.

Measuring Success for Games

Since we're talking about MMOs lately, Guild Wars 2 has a good read. Now, I understand Johanson's point at making the grind of subscription based MMOs sound as terrible as they are. But, realistically, people are not going to plug away at their dailies and progression if they do not find it fun. Some people may choose to suffer a certain amount of indignity, provided the rest of the game is fun.

But, it does ask a really good question: "If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players?"

Play It Your Way Ethos

One of the big selling point of a lot of upcoming MMOs (and most past MMOs) is that you can play your character your way. Look at Guild Wars (1 and 2!), The Secret World, The Matrix Online, Champions, etc., etc. Even games with fairly strict character progression and talenting structure, like Star Wars, insist you can play it your way. But, I'm curious what you would need to do, from a design stand point, to really let players play it their way.

GM Secrets: Party Balance | 100th Post!

Let's talk about party balance. Party balance in a table top RPG is vastly different than in fiction. In television, you have theoretical party balance, with the main hero overshadowing the rest of the party. No one really thinks the Ronin Warriors are a balanced party. In single player games, the hero can overshadow his friends. But, as you add players, particularly MMOs, the entire content system begins to revolve around the idea of a balanced party taking on level appropriate challenges (or, raw, overpowered cheese slicing through, uh, butter... look, this got away from me). D&D has been doing this for years, with crippling over specialization common in party dynamics.

More on Fun vs. Time

Here's a very quick, unproofed post. Admitting that makes me feel a little dirty inside.

I think the fun vs. time aspect is a way people tend to measure things. That's why demos and shareware were so great back in the 90s. You could actually try before you buy. Blockbuster, for awhile, made an entire business model out of that. Now, we get very few free trials. Games that do give them out tend to be few and far between, or games like Diablo III that know they've got it made no matter what. This builds off of yesterday's post.