Company Name, Part 5

This is my last attempt before outsourcing the design.





Is this any better?

Company Name, Part 4

Everyone hated this logo, so how about this one?





Thoughts?

NYC BGD Meeting - August 2010

Last week was the August meeting of the New York City Board Game Designers. This time we were down at the NYU Game Center. It was a nice space, though with a tad of an echo.

The first game I played was a combat game with a space theme it was very dice heavy. Very. Dice. Heavy. Even the ships were represented by dice. The type of ship you had was not a choice, but the random result of a die roll. Needless to say, it was a painful experience for me. However, I can say that the others at the table seemed to enjoy it. It was a rules test and I had no difficulty in learning the game, so that is what counts.

Municipality was up next. This playtest was . . . unique. The players' behavior was a distinct deviation from every other playtest of any even remotely recent version. It took over twice as long to complete and player behavior was completely unexpected. Players were routinely passing up opportunities to advance the game forward and their choices were mathematically negative.

This worries me.

I need to find way to point players back onto the path when they so drastically depart from self-interest. I don't want to dictate choices to players, but the game went so badly I need to do something to prevent the experience from bogging down so dreadfully.

Of course, this could have been a one-in-a-million aberration. Perhaps I can discount it. I don't know.

Last on the day was another test of Mark Salzwedel's Master Spy. The change Mark made to the game improved it, but didn't solve the problem he intended it to. However, in post-test discussions another tester came up with a way to eliminate that one-sided stalemate problem.

Municipality - Week 38

Back on July 31st, Andrew Parks took another look at Municipality for me. I already considered the game to be "done", but wanted him to take one last whack at it before I start shopping it around to publishers.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. There were just a couple of tweaks needed to streamline the rules.

Instead of a complicated initial selection meant to balance out the advantage of whoever goes first, we decided to simplify the setup and just reduce the starting money of the first player. It had an almost identical effect with about 1/30th of the complexity and overhead.

Andy liked how the new Endorsement mechanic works. It meets his previous suggestion of making every role valuable, but it also avoids making the endgame too mathematical.

There were also some visual suggestions on how to make things more obvious to the players which I am going to adopt.

With these changes I am closing the book on the game mechanically. It is done. Now I am just looking to test how best to present the rules and components to lower the learning curve.