 |
| Still no Turner Prize, but the cards are coming along. |
The rules have not changed much, though I have added some "wizard" equipment, which provides magic, which sweeps out the contents of the armoury (dealing with the "stale cards" issue that got mentioned during playtests) and allows you to steal a piece of equipment from another player (some playtesters were wishing for more ways to "stuff" other players). I had considered not allowing the blind draw from the deck, but decided to leave that in for now.
The big changes are in the cards themselves, most significantly in the balance of the cards. There are now a lot more challenge cards, including ones which allow you to choose a target, and a new class of challenge which makes for a grand contest between all players at the same time.
I have started overhauling the artwork of the equipment cards, so many of them are now in a new form which is closer to the "mix & match flipbook" idea that I have for the presentation; it's still rough, place-holder art, but hopefully it gets the idea across. I wanted to get this set of cards made sooner rather than later, though, so I haven't yet finished this new art, meaning that some of the cards just don't look right together, but the next version should be more consistent. Also, I decided to drop the card title for equipment, relying solely (for good or ill) on the illustration. Unfortunately this means that some of the cards have a touch of "WTF is that meant to be?!", but hopefully that won't matter too much right now.
As an aside, artwork is always a thorny issue for prototypes. Most of the old hands at game design say that you shouldn't invest in artwork for an unfinished game, largely on the grounds that most publishers will want to arrange for their own art as part of the process of preparing the final product. I would definitely agree with this, and won't be spending money on art any time soon, but I've actually been really enjoying applying my limited artistic talent to this game. As I want all the graphics to line up, I made a simple template to use as a base for all the different figures that get split into three parts. I have so far made four of the planned eight figures as very simple line art, and when they are all done I plan to add some colour to liven things up a little.
Something I haven't done properly for version 0.2 is to ensure that there is an appropriate balance of bonuses for disco and combat, so that is a task I will definitely need to do for 0.3. I don't think it's too far off right now, but I may be proved wrong on that. I have also left some "neutral" (no bonus) cards in the set, which is probably not ideal, but we'll see how that works out.
Now, I think I am probably in a place to start a Work-In-Progress thread for Boogie Knights on BoardGameGeek in the hope of getting a little more external input.
In case you would like a look at the current state of the game, you can download the print and play materials...
Boogie Knights v0.2 Rules on Dropbox
Boogie Knights v0.2 Cards on Dropbox
No comments:
Post a Comment