Month: November 2020

Categories
Space Soup

Space Soup

Starting a new project is always exciting. I finally got around to put together a few prototypes for TGC’s Anthology Challenge to Tabletop Simulator and gave them a spin.

One of the ideas is inspired by Ricochet Robots. In other words, you move your meeple around the board in straight lines until hitting an object. The player who manages to collect all his/her cubes first wins. Proof-of-concept testing with my regular gaming group went quite well: there’s some promise, but this definitely needs some spicing (and theme) before it would be a contest worthy entry.

While it has been a bit slower on the blogging front, some advances have been made in the other areas… and I guess designing is a bit of a zero-sum game: the time cake should be sliced in a way that it doesn’t cause burns. And hence the super awkward transition to the naming of the game idea: Space Soup*!

*) If you are flabbergasted (as you probably should be)… I’m thinking about space amoebas as the theme for the game. In the old days, we used to play Primordial Soup relatively often in my gaming group. And in that game, you eat cubes of your own color while floating in the ocean more or less helplessly.

Categories
General

Time Flies

So much to do… and so little time. Of course, this applies to life besides board game designing as well: the day job is carried out, bills get paid, groceries get bought (or delivered, as I use online order and home delivery nowadays), kids get schooled, baby gets entertained (and restricted for his own safety), home fixes/tunings are done, housing company shores are fulfilled… and one shouldn’t forget spending some time with your loved ones too, as that’s what ultimately matters the most.

One reoccurring topic in Board Game Design Lab podcast is that one can not manage time, but one can manage itself. Scheduling time to work on something and holding on to that schedule would be the key. Another time-related thought out there and recurring on BGDL podcast as well: “not having time” for a thing just means that there was something else more important… or more likely that the thing just wasn’t important enough in the first place.

When I started writing this blog I set a personal goal to write something once a week or so in order to keep projects moving on… but last week I wasn’t happy with this text at that point, so I didn’t post it (I probably started working on the text a bit too late). Things take time… so the lesson would be to book that time instead of just swinging it. Hence—In Schedule we trust.

Categories
General

Who Would Play This

I have been thinking about Community Anthology Challenge at The Game Crafter quite a bit… but time surely flies (40 days in this case) when you’re busy advancing other designs. Well… there’s still 70 days left to make the magic happen.

As the contest format is two sheets of paper and a predetermined component set, I’d like to proceed with two designs so that I could use both sides of the two allowed sheets. And I kind of have two concepts I’m pondering about currently:

The upper one is a turn-based abstract game in which players try to get rid of their all components. The lower one is a racing game with simultaneous action selection. The problem is that I doubt either of these designs would stand out currently from the flock… but as a design challenge perhaps they don’t need to. I guess this would be a good moment to design something, which my older kids (6 years and 8 years) would like to play… so to the juvenility, and beyond!