Craghold: Kinda Failed, Kinda Succeeded

If you've been reading this blog over the last few months, you're probably aware that I have been working, on and off, on a game for the Board Game Geek Print and Play Wargame contest, and made some decent progress, ending up with a game that is playable, but a little wobbly in some areas and has some serious balance issues.  I feel it's OK for my first attempt at a wargame, even though it needs a load more work to be considered "done".

Well, I kinda lost track of dates and deadlines, and a couple of days ago I checked the contest details and, to my horror, I found I was a day away from the submission deadline rather than having several weeks as I thought.  I don't know why I got mixed up about this, but I clearly fell foul of the cardinal sin of not putting important dates and deadlines into my calendar.

The end state of a recent playtest where the defenders got a far-too-comfortable victory.

So this left me with a decision to make: do I throw in the towel and maybe submit a more thoroughly developed game next year, or do I just go for it and submit what I have?

I decided to make a few corrections to the rulebook that I had discovered recently, and then go for it.  This being effectively an incomplete game, I am pretty much throwing away any realistic chance of winning in any of the contest categories, unless it turns out that I am the only entry in one of them! I am OK with this though. As with the regular 24 hour contests, I'm taking the main benefit as being an incentive to make something that I probably wouldn't have done otherwise, and learn something from the process. 

If you fancy checking out the entries for the contest (and maybe voting when the voting page comes up in November), here's the contest thread.