Starting over for a new year - March is the new year, right?

Over the last couple of years, the board game design part of my life has stagnated quite a lot. While online game development and testing works pretty well, it turns out that I am most energised by regular face-to-face sessions of testing. Before Covid, I was visiting London for an afternoon of playtesting most months, having a monthly meetup with a couple of semi-local designers, and having occasional other testing opportunities at other times too. It was never the several-times-a-week testing that some folk manage, but it kept things moving along pretty nicely.

In recent months, I have started getting back to the London meetup occasionally (not regularly yet), and we have just reinstated the semi-local meetup, though I've not yet tried recruiting other local playtesters again. 

During an email exchange with another game designer recently, it occurred to me that I used to enjoy writing this blog as a rough journal that encouraged me to get thoughts into some semblance of order, and very occasionally being the start of a conversation with someone out there. I've fallen into a cycle of not feeling I have much to say and editing myself too much, as well as finding all sorts of excuses why I shouldn't write anything. I don't think this is a helpful situation, so maybe I should just pull my finger out and write something.

So, in the spirit of getting things going again, I'll make a quick note of a few of the projects I have been working on recently...

The Artifact is a tile-laying and some-other-stuff game that I have been working on with Alex Cannon, almost entirely online. There is a core of game play that works pretty well and there are several other bits of game that we have tried, but while the game has had many forms that have played pretty well, there has always been something that we have been unhappy with. This has been a really interesting process, and I think we are gradually homing in on a game that we can then work on refining properly, but there is still a little way to go.

Squirrel Invasion is a re-imagining of a game that I was working on long ago, that long-term readers of this blog might remember as Invaded. The idea is that players control tribes (now of squirrels) trying to get by in their homeland, which is invaded by an aggressive, non-player, colonial power (grey squirrels). The current version is very light and plays more like a wonky family game than I would like, but it plays, which is something, and I have some ideas.

City State Co-op is an implementation (with a terrible working title) of an idea I posted about on this blog several years ago. The core idea is players each control city states in an ancient world that are beholden to demands from both their populace and the gods; the problem is that some of the demands involve attacking each other, and you need everyone to survive and thrive in order to win. I was stuck on this for a very long time, but a discussion a few months ago with Rory Muldoon got some good ideas up, and I now have a functioning version which I think has some merit, but the challenge curve is currently terrible.

Now, let's see how often I can continue this blog...

Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed Invaders

If you have read some of my older posts, you may remember a game I have been working on, on-and-off, for several years now, with the working title, Invaded. It is based on being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, where players are trying to respond to the overwhelming force of the non-player invaders. I had a game that showed a lot of potential, but had various things wrong with it. For instance, it was too fiddly for its depth of play, was uneven in its experience (some plays were compelling, while others were quite dull), and I think generally insufficiently focused. All of this is potentially fixable, but it has been on a back burner for a while now while I have done other things.

Recently, though, I had another wave of inspiration about the game, largely based on a few things that have been rattling around my mind...

• A publisher I was talking to a year or so back, who said I should commit to a setting for the game rather than the generic setting I had been working with.
• A discussion from all-round top chap Adam Porter in a YouTube video, suggesting that a useful exercise is to make a "junior..." or "my first..." version of a game you are working on to try to find the simplest version of a design that is true to it's core idea.
• Squirrels. Over the last few months of working from home and/or being in lockdown, my wife and I have been taking mostly-daily walks around the neighbourhood, where there is a decent population of squirrels, and we have had a running game of seeing how many we can spot. Our best so far has been seventeen.

"Squirrel Invasion" in Tabletopia.
I think that might be the new working title.

So, challenge accepted, I guess. After some monkeying about, I have a just-about-playable game for two players as an attempt to at least try out some concepts before I flesh things out some more.  It even has some features that seemed like a good idea, but I'm not yet quite sure what to do with.

The game is now set in a woodland, inhabited by assorted squirrels, which is being invaded by a population of nasty and aggressive grey squirrels. Instead of having the assorted resources that you could gather and spend in the old versions of the game, there is just one: acorns, and you are trying to gather enough acorns to feed your "clan" before winter comes or the greys take over entirely.

The old version had a series of rounds, during which you played through a hand of cards that activate the invading force in various ways (with a system that ramped up intensity as play progressed), while also taking actions for your tribe, selected from an action menu. What I have now are cards that each require you to take one action on behalf of your own clan and one for the greys, and the way to gain more cards is to trigger an event from a selection on display, and several of the events push the game towards an end.

Initial tests suggests that this works passably at the level I expect it to -- which is to work for a few turns for two players. The balance of actions isn't right, and there are some big holes in the gameplay, but I think it is worth extending the decks to allow for more play.  As with most of this year's game design work, I'm building the prototype online (in this case, in Tabletopia), which means that I don't need to be doing printing, cutting and sleeving, and also that I can get nicer pictures of the work in progress, but it is missing the immediacy of physical components. 

With several other projects also ticking along, this is a few down in priority, but it at least has some pretty straightforward tasks to do with it for now, so it might keep moving along for a while.