I am actually not even sure if I need the basic hedge cards... All of the spell cards place hedges, so the basic hedge cards can actually take some of the fun out of the game, especially if you get a hand of nothing but basics. It would also make my card count easier to manage, as it would drop me down to 10 spells (two of each color) for the main set, and adding 5 more (one of each color) for the expansion. I could go with 6 copies of each spell so that even if a player hordes a particular card, they won't have the majority of the copies as it is in the current version, and that would even out the cards for an even sheet count with the printer.
Played some games of "Coup" and also "Skulls and Roses".
"Skulls and Roses" is basically an quick and easy bluffing party game. It's like the essence of bluffing from Poker extracted and made into a game. You can play this with a normal game card deck just use the reds as roses and the black cards as skulls.
"Coup" has more strategy and had a lot more strategy which was satisfying. You can also play this with a regular card deck and some tokens.
The reason I added "Place a hedge" on the spell cards was to be able to have variety on the spells and at the same time, make the game play faster by having all cards place a hedge. The basic hedge cards are more or less a nod to the original game, when the only cards in it were hedges (walls in the oldest version). I added a couple of spells (teleport, move through walls, etc.) as the game evolved, but some of the cards didn't feel as useful if you couldn't really do anything with them. So, I created a spell of each color, plus a wild, and added the ability to place a hedge on them to speed things up a bit.
A few of the spells in there are new (Claustrophobia, Fireball, Run and Grow and Wind Burst), and there are 5 cards for the Statue set (Craftsman, Crumble, Levitate and Living Statue, as well as a new wild, Swiftness). I have found that with the basic hedge cards in the game (it was kind of out of necessity) could end up giving players a streak of bad luck of only getting basics, and found that there was a lot of hoarding of cards that let out escape out of tricky situations.
I suppose I could change the basic hedges to allow for placing 2 on different squares. It could, in itself, help speed up the game over all, and I can drop the spells down to 4 each instead of 6 to fill out the deck.
I used angel statues at the top and bottom of the cards for the Statue Module, but I am not sure if they are clear enough see to be able to remove the expansion cards when not playing with statues.
Well, right now it is a prototype. I can adjust the text to left justified to see if it looks good or not, but all of this is temporary until I can be confident enough in the game play to put everything in the hands of someone with graphic design experience (I barely know some photoshop) to figure out the card lay out, as well as the text layout. As Ro stated, there are many card games that use centered text, even with a wall of text on the card (like several of the later cards in Dominion.
I will take the suggestion into consideration as I have with other suggestions. The use of tiles instead of a static board came from a suggestion on here, and I think they work well.
Here are the Left justified text versions of the cards. I have made a few changes to some of the cards as well.
The Hedges can now lay 2 hedges instead of just one to make things more interesting. I added a better icon for the statue expansion cards, and it matches what I will be using for the tokens.
I am thinking about working on allowing a growing hand size mechanic (may draw instead of playing) but I want to test to see if it is an mechanic that can be abused, or if it will slow down the game too much. I also decreased the number of direct "exit" cards that will get your students out of being trapped.
I played Rococo last night, which I had never heard of before, but it's by the same designer as one of my favorite games, Lancaster, so I shouldn't have been surprised I enjoyed it so much.
Rococo seems like the game Fresco should have been. You have the same type of gameplay where you're trying to acquire different bolts of cloth, lace, and dye in order to sew dresses for Louis XIV France, but it offers more options and strategies for gaining victory points.
It's an action selection game, but like another recent game that I love, Concordia, it uses a deck-building mechanic to limit the actions you can take each turn. Overall, the theme didn't thrill me, but then again most Euro games are almost completley divorced from their theme, but Rococo is tied more closely to its theme than the typical Euro, and I enjoyed it a lot. Check it out if you're looking for a novel way to incorporate deck-building mechanics into a Euro game.
Thank you again Pete, for the suggestion to go with tiles for my game. Being able to modify the board playing area. Being able to test different sizes of layouts with different numbers if players has helped. I got to play two different 4 player games with 6 new people at table too day and got some great feedback.
On another note, I lost both games of Hedge Maze Hijinks that I played, but made top 2 both times. I won the game of Lords of Waterdeep that we played, which was quite competitive, and I also won the game of Tokaido by a significant margin.
Here is the swag that was given out on International Tabletop Day:
We don't own Gloom, but perhaps someone we know does or we can sell it. I'm really interested in the Wil Wheaton 7 Wonders Leader card. From what speculation on the internet guesses from the symbols the card translates to "Once leader goes into play, everyone gives you a leader and you play one for free." That's pretty crazy.
The only new game I played yesterday was Paperback. It's Dominion + Scrabble. I really enjoyed it. My friend backed it on Kickstarter and if you buy it now for $30 it comes with the base game and all stretch goals. The base by itself was pretty cool, and the stretch goals/expansions look to be interesting.
You card draft letters/letter combos to make words that lets you purchase other letters/letter combos to eventually purchase victory points. There are also actions/attacks on some of the letters that either help you or attack your opponents to where it's harder for them to make higher value words.
I bought it, but the site says it may take several weeks for it to ship out. Hopefully I'll get it before I leave for work training in Baltimore again.
Hey. I played paperback about a year and some months ago. The gent said ge was going to Kick it but I haven't seen him since. It's good to see it turned out well for him.
I won at Netrunner today and got even more store credit. I used it to buy pocket hive! I also got the Pillbug expansion. It comes with two little pillbugs and two big ones. So I can keep the tiny ones for pocket hive and Rym can have the big ones for big hive. Two complete hives!
Played two games I liked a lot this weekend: Boss Monster and Letters from Whitechapel. IDK if theyve been mentioned here before, but the former is a cool dungeon building card game where you try to lure more adventurers into your death trap dungeon (its like a card based version of No Heroes Allowed!!) and the latter is a board game where one person's Jack the Ripper and the rest are the detectives trying to catch him. That one's a lot of fun on the social end of things, the mechanics are absurdly light tho, but it was a lot of fun anyway haha.
Ahh wait my brain started working better suddenly and it remembered I only played the basic version of Whitechapel haha. There's some kind of advanced rules to it I think, can't speak to that!
I feel like the skill part of Boss Monster is using room abilities and spells really really effectively to decide where the heroes are going. We had like 6 warriors hanging out in town for like half the game cause 3 of us kept finding ways to tie up our warrior treasure haha. But I wound up losing cause I ran out of ways to change up my room treasure, since the room deck ran out. Tho it seemed to me that we should reshuffle it and the guy who owned the game said you're not supposed to, any idea if he was right?
Re: Whitechapel: Yah we definitely didnt have those rules, I was a detective and felt like it was kind of stacked against us cause Jack had carriages and alleys to use and all we could do is move one space and look for a clue or make an arrest. But we got him cornered on the 3rd night and he ran out of turns 8)
I played those two games on Saturday too. Boss Monster feels pretty luck based, but it still offers a reasonable amount of control to still give good players a win.
Whitechapel boiled down to almost a two player game for us with one guy mathing out the optimal strategy for finding Jack's hideout. I think we played with the advanced rules. One being rushing, which let the inspectors move another officer that hasn't performed their action instead of arresting or searching for clues, and the other being false clues which Jack can place down during a night saying that the Inspectors can't search for clues in that location. It is definitely most fun to be Jack in this game. The tension fluctuates so rapidly from suspense to relaxed back to suspense in one turn as inspectors search your location instead of arresting it. It was a really fun game of hide and seek.
I'm just so gunshy of most indie Kickstarter board games at this point that I haven't looked into Boss Monster one bit, despite people talking about it everywhere I go. It's falling victim to stigma in my mind, where I just assume it relies on its cute 8-bit theme to cover up lackluster gameplay.
Yeah I just saw it referred to as a bidding game on BGG, hadnt thought of it like that when I was playing it, but it basically is one and thats probably why I like it haha.
It's pretty solid. You can aim to go straight for points, sabotage your opponents, or alter your own play area to lure a hero into another dungeon to kill them off. The biggest issue is just that the room drawing can sometimes leave you in a sub optimal starting point. Otherwise it's just a bidding and buying game.
Tabletop is going indie a few interesting tiers to be had but the $40 is intreaguing me the most. However if my sister would jump at $100 for those DVDs.
Comments
"Skulls and Roses" is basically an quick and easy bluffing party game. It's like the essence of bluffing from Poker extracted and made into a game. You can play this with a normal game card deck just use the reds as roses and the black cards as skulls.
"Coup" has more strategy and had a lot more strategy which was satisfying. You can also play this with a regular card deck and some tokens.
A few of the spells in there are new (Claustrophobia, Fireball, Run and Grow and Wind Burst), and there are 5 cards for the Statue set (Craftsman, Crumble, Levitate and Living Statue, as well as a new wild, Swiftness). I have found that with the basic hedge cards in the game (it was kind of out of necessity) could end up giving players a streak of bad luck of only getting basics, and found that there was a lot of hoarding of cards that let out escape out of tricky situations.
I suppose I could change the basic hedges to allow for placing 2 on different squares. It could, in itself, help speed up the game over all, and I can drop the spells down to 4 each instead of 6 to fill out the deck.
I used angel statues at the top and bottom of the cards for the Statue Module, but I am not sure if they are clear enough see to be able to remove the expansion cards when not playing with statues.
Now, I just have to tidy up and adjust the rules, and I can get the new version printed.
I will take the suggestion into consideration as I have with other suggestions. The use of tiles instead of a static board came from a suggestion on here, and I think they work well.
The Hedges can now lay 2 hedges instead of just one to make things more interesting. I added a better icon for the statue expansion cards, and it matches what I will be using for the tokens.
I am thinking about working on allowing a growing hand size mechanic (may draw instead of playing) but I want to test to see if it is an mechanic that can be abused, or if it will slow down the game too much. I also decreased the number of direct "exit" cards that will get your students out of being trapped.
Rococo seems like the game Fresco should have been. You have the same type of gameplay where you're trying to acquire different bolts of cloth, lace, and dye in order to sew dresses for Louis XIV France, but it offers more options and strategies for gaining victory points.
It's an action selection game, but like another recent game that I love, Concordia, it uses a deck-building mechanic to limit the actions you can take each turn. Overall, the theme didn't thrill me, but then again most Euro games are almost completley divorced from their theme, but Rococo is tied more closely to its theme than the typical Euro, and I enjoyed it a lot. Check it out if you're looking for a novel way to incorporate deck-building mechanics into a Euro game.
Just need to figure out what games to bring. Mo' games, mo' problems.
On another note, I lost both games of Hedge Maze Hijinks that I played, but made top 2 both times. I won the game of Lords of Waterdeep that we played, which was quite competitive, and I also won the game of Tokaido by a significant margin.
We don't own Gloom, but perhaps someone we know does or we can sell it. I'm really interested in the Wil Wheaton 7 Wonders Leader card. From what speculation on the internet guesses from the symbols the card translates to "Once leader goes into play, everyone gives you a leader and you play one for free." That's pretty crazy.
The only new game I played yesterday was Paperback. It's Dominion + Scrabble. I really enjoyed it. My friend backed it on Kickstarter and if you buy it now for $30 it comes with the base game and all stretch goals. The base by itself was pretty cool, and the stretch goals/expansions look to be interesting.
You card draft letters/letter combos to make words that lets you purchase other letters/letter combos to eventually purchase victory points. There are also actions/attacks on some of the letters that either help you or attack your opponents to where it's harder for them to make higher value words.
I bought it, but the site says it may take several weeks for it to ship out. Hopefully I'll get it before I leave for work training in Baltimore again.
Re: Whitechapel: Yah we definitely didnt have those rules, I was a detective and felt like it was kind of stacked against us cause Jack had carriages and alleys to use and all we could do is move one space and look for a clue or make an arrest. But we got him cornered on the 3rd night and he ran out of turns 8)
Whitechapel boiled down to almost a two player game for us with one guy mathing out the optimal strategy for finding Jack's hideout. I think we played with the advanced rules. One being rushing, which let the inspectors move another officer that hasn't performed their action instead of arresting or searching for clues, and the other being false clues which Jack can place down during a night saying that the Inspectors can't search for clues in that location. It is definitely most fun to be Jack in this game. The tension fluctuates so rapidly from suspense to relaxed back to suspense in one turn as inspectors search your location instead of arresting it.
It was a really fun game of hide and seek.