Yeah it really sucks we're not going to PAX East and missed MAGFest this year for you guys to check it out.
But when this game gets going, Jeremy and I have a lot of cool ideas for the final version. Rym and I had a conversation that people tend to buy pretty games at first glance like Tsuro, Takenoko, & Hokkaido. And hopefully with the game play being good like the others, it will combine to make it a solid overall game.
But love & appreciate all the support and critiques.
I did the same treatment for the spell cards as well. I am thinking of just eliminating the player cards. Their purpose was intended to remind players of who was playing what color, but I don't think that should be too much of an issue. As far as the color scheme goes, I have it on the board I created, so I will stick with it for now, and change it once play testing is done and I am ready to move on to the art.
Now, if nothing else I would be looking for feed back on the rules, to make sure they are clear enough. The card images (and the lack of player cards) will be changed.
I feel as if I should be roleplaying a Hogwarts scenario. The colour change made a huge difference.
As far as the colour blindness issue goes, what about associating an icon for each colour, whenever you see the word yellow, there is a yellow square next to it, whenever you see blue you see a blue circle next to the word blue and so on.
Yeah my friend got me to play Tsuro of the Seas after he saw it on Tabletop, which seemed interesting till it became apparent that losing sucks ass in that game and there is too much randomness involved.
You can aim to make an amazing path and have a strategy but regardless you can be out of the game as early as turn 2 or 3.
As far as associating a color icon, that was more or less the idea with having the background be the color of the card, but it turned out to be too much. I think with the border matching the color of the Hedge that the card can be played (with a dark green for the Wild Hedges). I may try to print a cheap version of the board and glue it to an old quad-fold and test out icons, and see if they make the board too busy. I think with 64 squares, it might be too much.
I will try to take some time to really dig into this. What print service are you using, Game Crafter? Or did you work something out with Game Salute?
Just from what's been said in the forums so far though: - I was playing a game of Legendary (a game that commits numerous graphic design sins) with Stephen Buonocore (owner of Stronghold Games). Discussing the shittiness of Legendary's cards, he told me how much work they had done to optimize the font for Stronghold-published games. They ultimately settled on Palatino as their font, so if you are still considering switching it up, that would be a good choice. We often forget how hard it can be for old fogeys to read certain fonts, and although there is a wave of new blood in board gaming, old people are still a large contingent. - Ro/Rym: Absolutely correct that people are more prone to jump on a pretty game. It's even been shown in some studies of Kickstarter backing statistics. Hopefully whatever publishing deal you can get gives you the support to make it really shine, graphically.
Jeremy asked me to go over the instructions to see if there needs to be an corrections. I'll put them here just in case anyone else agrees/disagrees.
- List the contents of the game in a bullet formatting. - I thought you were getting rid of player cards (?) - "Rules for Title of Goes Here" page header/footer needs correction
Setup - I would say "The player that has most recently encountered a wizard in any shape or form goes first". - I would specifically clarify the initial placement of the Statues and Mages/Students. An example: "You can place your student next to another student. There are no set limitations to the initial placement of Statues and Students."
Starting the Game - I would list turn order/actions.
Moving and Eliminating Students - Make this into two separate sections. - Change "The destination square may not be occupied" to "cannot be occupied". May not gives a possibility, while cannot shows it's not a viable move whatsoever.
I would also add pictures/examples of movement, elimination, and spell cards. When it comes to rules, some people are better at visually learning than reading. I know I'm one of them. I also don't like reading rules, but you know this. ;^) I should learn to read rules more instead of having people teach me, but you're such a good teacher. If you intend to have this game be for players as young as 10 years old, then pictures are probably a better for them as well.
I figure you wrote the directions like this to fit two pages to compress for now when it comes to play testing. However, I suggest to look through all the rule books we have to see what works, what doesn't, and get ideas off of them.
Symbols would be fun to add, but as stated we can work on that later.
I like the idea of a short rulebook, but yeah, you could probably afford to expand to another page or two for the sake of examples.
It's better to explain the game like your audience is 5 than to assume that people will just "get" it. Beat 'em over the head with it.
I like the borders much better! Easier to deal with!
However, the orange and the yellow are very similar. This is a common issue with the ROY continuum, and print quality will only exacerbate the problem. I'd go with red and yellow, and change orange to something like grey or black. Just a thought.
OK, rules layout nitpick time! Please note that I am picking nits here - I think the game is good overall, but I'm trying to help make it perfect.
In general: The rules are very text-heavy and narrative-driven. This can create a problem where a critical rule is buried in a paragraph somewhere, and is hard to extract. Consider breaking your rules down into a list, and make the different items on the list their own line or section. Spacing really helps this a lot. Keep only the extremely pertinent information in each section.
Here's how I would do your "Setup" section: ---------------------- Setup Remove the player cards from the deck and shuffle the remaining cards; these form the Spell Deck.
Give a player card, the 4 Students of that color, and 2 Statues to each player.
Deal 4 Spell cards to each player; these form their initial hand.
For 2 players: Place Hedge tokens along one row and one column of the game board to create a 6x6 board.
For 5 players: Each player gets 3Students and 1Statue instead of the normal allotment. ----------------------
From there:
---------------------- Starting the Game The player who has most recently seen a wizard in any form is the Start Player.
The Start Player places one of his Statues on a space on the board. The player to the left then places one of their Statues, and so on until all Statues have been placed.
The players then place their Students in the same manner. There may only be one Statue or Student on a space.
Playing the Game The Start Player takes the first turn.
On your turn, you will:
1) Play or DiscardSpell cards from your hand. 2) Move one of your Students. 3) Draw cards. 4) Remove any of your trappedStudents from the board. ---------------------- You get the idea.
Yeah, I'm really not liking the orange. The reason he didn't choose green, is because the hedges are green and it's a possibility of green overkill. I think a different green could work or brown.
1) I haven't seen the board, but I'm assuming it's a random assortment of colored spaces corresponding to the colors in the game. Does it have to be a board, or could it be 64 colored tiles that are randomly shuffled each time the game is played? Could add variety. It would also have the advantage of maybe making the game more portable - a big plus in my book.
2) Following on 1, can players place their Students on any space initially, or can they only be placed on spaces of the appropriate color?
There are 5 different player colors, but only 4 tile colors I believe.
Perhaps rows of different color set ups. That could work too. The original layout that was Blockade Blitz can be seen on Rym's flickr. I don't know if brown is there anymore. I can't access the Jeremy's dropbox at the moment.
Edit: also on the previous page that Jeremy posted. Derp.
Ooh, not sure I like that. Having two different uses for colors kind of fucks with a color-coding scheme. Might cause some small amount of confusion. Could be alleviated with different kinds of pieces for each player, as opposed to colors - player colors only matter for distinguishing players from each other and have no tie to the game mechanics.
Could easily do 5 board colors if you go back to the "central 4 tiles" thing. Don't know what they'd be used for, but they could just be wild spaces. That would leave 60 colored tiles in an 8x8, enough for 12 each of 5 colors.
So my personal vote would either be 5 board colors to match the player colors, or stick with 4 board colors and differentiate the players with a method other than color.
Theme. It's not the most crucial part of a game, but having an accessible and evident theme can help give a game a bit of "charm" that keeps people coming back. Something that lets the players get drawn in.
Bohnanza would work with almost any other noun. You could completely separate the mechanics from the theme and have the same game - but it wouldn't be nearly as fun as yelling about beans.
This is a suggestion for down the road, but keep going with that "wizards fucking with each other" theme and build the whole game around it. Instead of statues, why not monsters or golems. They're not blockades, they're trying to kill the other guy! That's why you have to go around them. Maybe build them all into separate factions - minotaurs, demons, owlbears, etc.
Using terrain types as opposed to board colors would also be part of that. Removes some abstractness from the game and helps reinforce the theme. If we're building a hedge maze, then the board spaces could be different terrains: grass, rock, water/swamp/mud, and sand.
It's all the same mechanics, but a stronger theme can really bring a game together.
Yes. This is what Jeremy was originally going for. The original colors were red, blue, green, and yellow. They all corresponded to different elements for the mages and their schools of magic. I forget why Jeremy went away from this.
I think it's because of the possibly color blind possibilities. I think it could still work out.
Love all those ideas, Pete.
Jeremy also had it to where the Mage/Wizard is the player and the students are familiars of them. This could lead to high quality game pieces of familiars, which would be boss.
Just finished my two week vacation, when Anthony spends a week in Pennsylvania, and we play ridiculous amounts of games. The three that were new to me were Aladdin's Dragons, Roll Through the Ages, and Jambo.
Aladdin's Dragons made a good first impression, a game more purely about winning auctions than Power Grid or Homesteaders, but still more complex than Knizia's auction games. Another game to add to my list of good middleweight five player eurogames, along with Hansa Teutonica.
Roll Through the Ages was disappointing, however; the two player game ends in 10 minutes, and has an undesirable ratio of randomness to busywork (fiddling with a scorepad, moving pegs around). The Late Bronze Age official variant rules make me happier, but Anthony wasn't impressed, so it's dead weight as a two player game.
Jambo is good - I'm mostly indifferent, but Anthony likes it, so it's a keeper. In a roundabout way, it's similar to Roma, another two player game where both players share a deck with a limited set of cards that grant special powers.
Thank you for the feedback and ideas. I will reply better when I get home, since it is somewhat of a pain to type on my phone. A couple of notes though; I haven't updated the rules excluding player cards or using the new card layout. I think tiles may work and may solve the symbol problem by way of the look of the square. I will have to look into the cost over a board. All of the current work is more set up so I can produce a couple of play test copies to make sure the game is mechanically sound. Colors, and tweaks to the theme can come later.
Okay, so I will try to address issues by poster as I look at the posts. @Matt... I talked to Dave at Game Salute here in WA. They have 3 options for designers. A bare bones version where they simply fulfill shipping of a Kickstarted, published game, for a flat fee. Option 2 is taking over after a Kickstarter with distribution (I forget if this includes help with publishing, but I don't think it does), and they keep 25% of profits, while the other 75% goes in my pocket. Option 3 is Pre-Kickstarter. They take the project, give it art, refine the game mechanics, rules, etc. They run the Kickstarter, publish and distribute. The designer gets around 4%. If I was to work with Game Salute, I would probably go with option B, unless I can find out how to network my game onto store shelves. It's a decision I should think about pretty soon, because if I decided to distribute through someone else, I should probably not bring my game to the Game Salute meetups any more.
As far as the prototype goes, I am looking at going through Game Crafter, but have been looking at Print & Play Productions as well for comparison shopping. As of this writing, it would cost $17 for 70 tiles through Game Crafter, and $16.75 for 75 tiles through Print and play. A quad-fold board of the proper size through Game Crafter would cost $10, but the squares would be static. I am liking the idea of the tiles, along with the idea of terrain themed squares. I think it would add a bit more replay value and makes for custom board set ups, and it could eliminate the need for symbols, as the differences in the terrain tiles (and could use icons on the cards) should serve for being able to differentiate the colors/styles of the tiles. It looks as though P&P has a discount when buying 3 or more sheets, but GC might have the better template. I will make some mock ups and post them here for review. The only downside I see to tiles is that they are a bit more time consuming to set up than just a standard board, but having the variety of boards may outweigh that downside.
Regarding the rules sheet, I was forming my rules around the document provided by Game Crafter, and ended up letting it limit my scope on how to format the rules. I plan on taking out the player cards, as they were merely used to remind players of who played what color, but I don't think it is necessary in the long run, as I can/should assume my players are smart enough to remember that kind of info. I also was going with the intention that the game could be ordered via Game Crafter through me, and shipped as a whole unit, thus needing the instructions. If I put everything together at home and ship it, I can just print instruction sheets either at home, or office depot.
To drop the costs down some, I could just print the cards, the tiles, and get the pawns, statue tokens, and hedges, then print the instructions at home, and put everything in a proper size box to send them out.
As for rules questions (and these totally help with what I missed, which is what I was looking for): Hands are secret, discard is face up, and discard pile is public. Pawns and statues can be placed on any squares. The game originally was 2-4 players, but I have play tested with 5 and it worked out okay.
As for the theme, I am hoping to keep it from going too dark, hence the reason I went with statues instead of some kind of foreboding presence. Mechanically, the statues are there to make the game faster by eliminating squares, but that could be achieved with some special tiles. With 70 tiles, I can go with 60 (15 each of 4 colors) regular tiles and 10 void tiles, or portal tiles, or something like that. It would eliminate the need for the statue tokens, though would change a couple of the cards that refer to statues. I could also have both, and only have 1 statue/player to cut down the components a bit.
As far as colorblindness consideration, that is something I definitely want to go with, and could even be achieved with giving the tiles a terrain look to distinguish themselves from each other. If I go with the current design of just colors, either on a board or tiles, I would go with a colorblind friendly palette. As far as the current colors go -- Originally I went with Brown, Orange, Red and Green (those were the colored sharpies I had), I then switched the Brown to Blue and the Orange to Yellow to switch over to the more traditional board game colors. I added Purple as the fifth color, it seemed like a good color. I switched the Green to Orange recently after a suggestion by another designer, who said it would help distinguish the hedges better. I could have just changed the board/spell color and not the player color (that would make Ro happy too).
So many thoughts, so jumbled, I hope some of you made it all the way through this. I will keep working on it, and make some adjustments to the rules soon as well.
Keep the statues. I like them. It's posturing and escalation, and it allows player-directed landscape alteration. Good mechanic. Void tiles would be subject to random draw. Let the players start altering the landscape right at the start.
I think you can put in monsters without it getting too "dark." Goofy monsters are cool! Statues are just sorta there, y'know? But something with personality would be neat!
Jeremy is too lazy to pick up his iPad and asks me to ask you, "Should I make the monsters immobile like the statues? I could just replace statue with monster and keep the movement of them the same."
I think it would be interesting to possibly add the mechanic of one less movement of the player plawns if they are next to a monster, but it can't be lower than base 1 movement. Jeremy says +2 movement because monsters are scary so the pawns are encouraged to get further away from the monsters.
I disagree because giving less movement when placed next to a monster is more of a challenge and incentive for the player to not move or be placed next to one. There are 4 cards of "Levitate" that can move a statue/monster and "Craftsmen" that let's you place another monster/statue on the board. I don't think it would make Monsters with -1 movement overpowered and it compliments the cards use to help the player negate that effect on them or use that against another player.
Something to play around with.
I also think a watermark type symbol fir the color/elements would be cool. Simple symbols like the ones in Avatar: The Last Airbender. So many possibilities.
The only thing I worry about with giving the monster's a penalty move is it adds extra rules and figuring out the actual movement of a pawn for younger players.
I think also, to keep the board a little less cluttered, and actually a bit more open possibly, would be to include wild tiles instead of voids. If I have voids and statues, the board could get too cluttered, especially with random tile placement.
Make a board in four parts, and each part printed on both sides. This is what Ricochet Robots has, and it allows for enough variations in the board that nobody bothers learning every possible board, but putting the four parts together takes no time at all.
This is something he's done, but it was just heavy stock paper instead of boards. Jeremy mentioned that during play testing, the boards would easily get pushed and mess up hedge placement. I'm sure if he used an actual board it wouldn't be a problem.
We then thought about other games that do this: Kingdom Builder or Fealty. However, Kingdom Builder has zig-zag edges. Fealty seemed to work fine with the squares shaped boards.
I also suggested magnets for the bottom of the hedges with a magnetic board, but that will probably be costly. I do like the variation idea instead of one board.
Comments
A grid of symbols might get a bit too busy.
But when this game gets going, Jeremy and I have a lot of cool ideas for the final version. Rym and I had a conversation that people tend to buy pretty games at first glance like Tsuro, Takenoko, & Hokkaido. And hopefully with the game play being good like the others, it will combine to make it a solid overall game.
But love & appreciate all the support and critiques.
Light Hedges
Now, if nothing else I would be looking for feed back on the rules, to make sure they are clear enough. The card images (and the lack of player cards) will be changed.
The colour change made a huge difference.
As far as the colour blindness issue goes, what about associating an icon for each colour, whenever you see the word yellow, there is a yellow square next to it, whenever you see blue you see a blue circle next to the word blue and so on.
Yeah my friend got me to play Tsuro of the Seas after he saw it on Tabletop, which seemed interesting till it became apparent that losing sucks ass in that game and there is too much randomness involved.
You can aim to make an amazing path and have a strategy but regardless you can be out of the game as early as turn 2 or 3.
I may try to print a cheap version of the board and glue it to an old quad-fold and test out icons, and see if they make the board too busy. I think with 64 squares, it might be too much.
Just from what's been said in the forums so far though:
- I was playing a game of Legendary (a game that commits numerous graphic design sins) with Stephen Buonocore (owner of Stronghold Games). Discussing the shittiness of Legendary's cards, he told me how much work they had done to optimize the font for Stronghold-published games. They ultimately settled on Palatino as their font, so if you are still considering switching it up, that would be a good choice. We often forget how hard it can be for old fogeys to read certain fonts, and although there is a wave of new blood in board gaming, old people are still a large contingent.
- Ro/Rym: Absolutely correct that people are more prone to jump on a pretty game. It's even been shown in some studies of Kickstarter backing statistics. Hopefully whatever publishing deal you can get gives you the support to make it really shine, graphically.
- List the contents of the game in a bullet formatting.
- I thought you were getting rid of player cards (?)
- "Rules for Title of Goes Here" page header/footer needs correction
Setup
- I would say "The player that has most recently encountered a wizard in any shape or form goes first".
- I would specifically clarify the initial placement of the Statues and Mages/Students. An example: "You can place your student next to another student. There are no set limitations to the initial placement of Statues and Students."
Starting the Game
- I would list turn order/actions.
Moving and Eliminating Students
- Make this into two separate sections.
- Change "The destination square may not be occupied" to "cannot be occupied". May not gives a possibility, while cannot shows it's not a viable move whatsoever.
I would also add pictures/examples of movement, elimination, and spell cards. When it comes to rules, some people are better at visually learning than reading. I know I'm one of them. I also don't like reading rules, but you know this. ;^) I should learn to read rules more instead of having people teach me, but you're such a good teacher. If you intend to have this game be for players as young as 10 years old, then pictures are probably a better for them as well.
I figure you wrote the directions like this to fit two pages to compress for now when it comes to play testing. However, I suggest to look through all the rule books we have to see what works, what doesn't, and get ideas off of them.
Symbols would be fun to add, but as stated we can work on that later.
It's better to explain the game like your audience is 5 than to assume that people will just "get" it. Beat 'em over the head with it.
I like the borders much better! Easier to deal with!
However, the orange and the yellow are very similar. This is a common issue with the ROY continuum, and print quality will only exacerbate the problem. I'd go with red and yellow, and change orange to something like grey or black. Just a thought.
OK, rules layout nitpick time! Please note that I am picking nits here - I think the game is good overall, but I'm trying to help make it perfect.
In general: The rules are very text-heavy and narrative-driven. This can create a problem where a critical rule is buried in a paragraph somewhere, and is hard to extract. Consider breaking your rules down into a list, and make the different items on the list their own line or section. Spacing really helps this a lot. Keep only the extremely pertinent information in each section.
Here's how I would do your "Setup" section:
----------------------
Setup
Remove the player cards from the deck and shuffle the remaining cards; these form the Spell Deck.
Give a player card, the 4 Students of that color, and 2 Statues to each player.
Deal 4 Spell cards to each player; these form their initial hand.
For 2 players: Place Hedge tokens along one row and one column of the game board to create a 6x6 board.
For 5 players: Each player gets 3 Students and 1 Statue instead of the normal allotment.
----------------------
From there:
----------------------
Starting the Game
The player who has most recently seen a wizard in any form is the Start Player.
The Start Player places one of his Statues on a space on the board. The player to the left then places one of their Statues, and so on until all Statues have been placed.
The players then place their Students in the same manner. There may only be one Statue or Student on a space.
Playing the Game
The Start Player takes the first turn.
On your turn, you will:
1) Play or Discard Spell cards from your hand.
2) Move one of your Students.
3) Draw cards.
4) Remove any of your trapped Students from the board.
----------------------
You get the idea.
But yeah, your suggestions match mine.
1) I haven't seen the board, but I'm assuming it's a random assortment of colored spaces corresponding to the colors in the game. Does it have to be a board, or could it be 64 colored tiles that are randomly shuffled each time the game is played? Could add variety. It would also have the advantage of maybe making the game more portable - a big plus in my book.
2) Following on 1, can players place their Students on any space initially, or can they only be placed on spaces of the appropriate color?
3) Hands are secret? Discard is face-up?
2) Any space initially.
3) Hand is secret. I believe discard face-up.
Jeremy is not fortunate to have a job around computers, so I'll answer for him!
How do you get an even color distribution? There are 5 colors, right?
EDIT: Tiles would also offer the ability to easily generate an expansion.
Perhaps rows of different color set ups. That could work too. The original layout that was Blockade Blitz can be seen on Rym's flickr. I don't know if brown is there anymore. I can't access the Jeremy's dropbox at the moment.
Edit: also on the previous page that Jeremy posted. Derp.
Could easily do 5 board colors if you go back to the "central 4 tiles" thing. Don't know what they'd be used for, but they could just be wild spaces. That would leave 60 colored tiles in an 8x8, enough for 12 each of 5 colors.
So my personal vote would either be 5 board colors to match the player colors, or stick with 4 board colors and differentiate the players with a method other than color.
Theme. It's not the most crucial part of a game, but having an accessible and evident theme can help give a game a bit of "charm" that keeps people coming back. Something that lets the players get drawn in.
Bohnanza would work with almost any other noun. You could completely separate the mechanics from the theme and have the same game - but it wouldn't be nearly as fun as yelling about beans.
This is a suggestion for down the road, but keep going with that "wizards fucking with each other" theme and build the whole game around it. Instead of statues, why not monsters or golems. They're not blockades, they're trying to kill the other guy! That's why you have to go around them. Maybe build them all into separate factions - minotaurs, demons, owlbears, etc.
Using terrain types as opposed to board colors would also be part of that. Removes some abstractness from the game and helps reinforce the theme. If we're building a hedge maze, then the board spaces could be different terrains: grass, rock, water/swamp/mud, and sand.
It's all the same mechanics, but a stronger theme can really bring a game together.
Again, down the road.
I think it's because of the possibly color blind possibilities. I think it could still work out.
Love all those ideas, Pete.
Jeremy also had it to where the Mage/Wizard is the player and the students are familiars of them. This could lead to high quality game pieces of familiars, which would be boss.
Aladdin's Dragons made a good first impression, a game more purely about winning auctions than Power Grid or Homesteaders, but still more complex than Knizia's auction games. Another game to add to my list of good middleweight five player eurogames, along with Hansa Teutonica.
Roll Through the Ages was disappointing, however; the two player game ends in 10 minutes, and has an undesirable ratio of randomness to busywork (fiddling with a scorepad, moving pegs around). The Late Bronze Age official variant rules make me happier, but Anthony wasn't impressed, so it's dead weight as a two player game.
Jambo is good - I'm mostly indifferent, but Anthony likes it, so it's a keeper. In a roundabout way, it's similar to Roma, another two player game where both players share a deck with a limited set of cards that grant special powers.
A couple of notes though; I haven't updated the rules excluding player cards or using the new card layout. I think tiles may work and may solve the symbol problem by way of the look of the square. I will have to look into the cost over a board. All of the current work is more set up so I can produce a couple of play test copies to make sure the game is mechanically sound. Colors, and tweaks to the theme can come later.
It's a very modular/expandable base, hence the proliferation of ideas.
@Matt... I talked to Dave at Game Salute here in WA. They have 3 options for designers. A bare bones version where they simply fulfill shipping of a Kickstarted, published game, for a flat fee. Option 2 is taking over after a Kickstarter with distribution (I forget if this includes help with publishing, but I don't think it does), and they keep 25% of profits, while the other 75% goes in my pocket. Option 3 is Pre-Kickstarter. They take the project, give it art, refine the game mechanics, rules, etc. They run the Kickstarter, publish and distribute. The designer gets around 4%. If I was to work with Game Salute, I would probably go with option B, unless I can find out how to network my game onto store shelves. It's a decision I should think about pretty soon, because if I decided to distribute through someone else, I should probably not bring my game to the Game Salute meetups any more.
As far as the prototype goes, I am looking at going through Game Crafter, but have been looking at Print & Play Productions as well for comparison shopping.
As of this writing, it would cost $17 for 70 tiles through Game Crafter, and $16.75 for 75 tiles through Print and play. A quad-fold board of the proper size through Game Crafter would cost $10, but the squares would be static. I am liking the idea of the tiles, along with the idea of terrain themed squares. I think it would add a bit more replay value and makes for custom board set ups, and it could eliminate the need for symbols, as the differences in the terrain tiles (and could use icons on the cards) should serve for being able to differentiate the colors/styles of the tiles. It looks as though P&P has a discount when buying 3 or more sheets, but GC might have the better template. I will make some mock ups and post them here for review.
The only downside I see to tiles is that they are a bit more time consuming to set up than just a standard board, but having the variety of boards may outweigh that downside.
Regarding the rules sheet, I was forming my rules around the document provided by Game Crafter, and ended up letting it limit my scope on how to format the rules. I plan on taking out the player cards, as they were merely used to remind players of who played what color, but I don't think it is necessary in the long run, as I can/should assume my players are smart enough to remember that kind of info. I also was going with the intention that the game could be ordered via Game Crafter through me, and shipped as a whole unit, thus needing the instructions. If I put everything together at home and ship it, I can just print instruction sheets either at home, or office depot.
To drop the costs down some, I could just print the cards, the tiles, and get the pawns, statue tokens, and hedges, then print the instructions at home, and put everything in a proper size box to send them out.
As for rules questions (and these totally help with what I missed, which is what I was looking for):
Hands are secret, discard is face up, and discard pile is public. Pawns and statues can be placed on any squares. The game originally was 2-4 players, but I have play tested with 5 and it worked out okay.
As for the theme, I am hoping to keep it from going too dark, hence the reason I went with statues instead of some kind of foreboding presence. Mechanically, the statues are there to make the game faster by eliminating squares, but that could be achieved with some special tiles. With 70 tiles, I can go with 60 (15 each of 4 colors) regular tiles and 10 void tiles, or portal tiles, or something like that. It would eliminate the need for the statue tokens, though would change a couple of the cards that refer to statues. I could also have both, and only have 1 statue/player to cut down the components a bit.
As far as colorblindness consideration, that is something I definitely want to go with, and could even be achieved with giving the tiles a terrain look to distinguish themselves from each other. If I go with the current design of just colors, either on a board or tiles, I would go with a colorblind friendly palette. As far as the current colors go -- Originally I went with Brown, Orange, Red and Green (those were the colored sharpies I had), I then switched the Brown to Blue and the Orange to Yellow to switch over to the more traditional board game colors. I added Purple as the fifth color, it seemed like a good color. I switched the Green to Orange recently after a suggestion by another designer, who said it would help distinguish the hedges better. I could have just changed the board/spell color and not the player color (that would make Ro happy too).
So many thoughts, so jumbled, I hope some of you made it all the way through this. I will keep working on it, and make some adjustments to the rules soon as well.
I think you can put in monsters without it getting too "dark." Goofy monsters are cool! Statues are just sorta there, y'know? But something with personality would be neat!
Down the road, of course.
I think it would be interesting to possibly add the mechanic of one less movement of the player plawns if they are next to a monster, but it can't be lower than base 1 movement. Jeremy says +2 movement because monsters are scary so the pawns are encouraged to get further away from the monsters.
I disagree because giving less movement when placed next to a monster is more of a challenge and incentive for the player to not move or be placed next to one. There are 4 cards of "Levitate" that can move a statue/monster and "Craftsmen" that let's you place another monster/statue on the board. I don't think it would make Monsters with -1 movement overpowered and it compliments the cards use to help the player negate that effect on them or use that against another player.
Something to play around with.
I also think a watermark type symbol fir the color/elements would be cool. Simple symbols like the ones in Avatar: The Last Airbender. So many possibilities.
I think also, to keep the board a little less cluttered, and actually a bit more open possibly, would be to include wild tiles instead of voids. If I have voids and statues, the board could get too cluttered, especially with random tile placement.
No effects = basic / kiddy version.
You can see it here:
We then thought about other games that do this: Kingdom Builder or Fealty. However, Kingdom Builder has zig-zag edges. Fealty seemed to work fine with the squares shaped boards.
I also suggested magnets for the bottom of the hedges with a magnetic board, but that will probably be costly. I do like the variation idea instead of one board.
Drill holes into the board. Hedges have tiny pegs on the bottom.