Star Runner and General Games Update

It occurred to me that it has been 11 days since I last posted.  There is a good reason.  No, I wasn't at Gencon or anything exciting from a game perspective.  Real life is happening, job interviews and such, and that's kept me busy.

Some news of note.  I received a pre-release copy of Wits and Wagers Party from Northstar Games.  No, I haven't hit the big time of getting free games to review.  It was a thank-you from the folks at Northstar Games for my efforts in playtesting in the summer of 2011.  Seeing the lid of the game signed by the designer was a cool thing.  I finally got a chance to play it on Friday and had a good time.  I played with a couple people who had played W&W in the past, and some who hadn't.  We liked the 7th round ability to wager the chips you already had, not that it made a difference as one player kinda ran away with things.  I liked the question variety, the chips are great in the game, but the best part is the pens with erasers on them.

This last week, I got a new prototype from Northstar to test out, so I look forward to giving that a go.  More on that to come soon.

Like I said earlier, I got a chance to play games on Friday.  That was a great thing because it was my first gameday all month.  August has just been kinda weird for games.  People are on vacation, doing summer projects before school starts, and all that.  We played more Tsuro, and I won the first game, and then was in the final 3 who all died on the same tile, so that's kinda a win.  At the end, I got a chance to show off my revisions to Star Runner, which was fun.

Speaking of revisions to Star Runner, here's the breakdown of what's changed.  I now have indented dice with stickers, rather than using standard dice and a conversion chart.  The map shape has stayed the same, but the breakdown of it is a lot simpler.  It also goes together in about 30-90 seconds as opposed to around 5 minutes.  Contracts have been revised and further balanced.  The scavenging deck has been tweaked slightly, and there's something new to the game that's yet to be tried.  I'm not sure if it will stick, or become something for an expansion/different way to play, but I want to try it out.  The game is actually coming together.  I'm kinda shocked by how quickly SR has come together.  I know there's still a lot of testing to do, and a lot to tweak, but the core mechanics feel solid, and it feels like a fun game.  I can't wait to get some of my readers a chance to try it and tell me what you think.

While we're on random musings, you can now find us on facebook. http://www.facebook.com/bitsboardgames

Head over there to see some polls, other info, and to ask some questions and get feedback asap.

Skip-Bo, Dominoes, and things from Redondo Beach

This past weekend, May 31- June 3rd, I visited Redondo Beach in the greater Los Angeles area.  I was fortunate enough to stay with a friend's family, and that led to a lot of games.  We were also lucky enough to have some friends from college visit us, and that led to even more games.  Overall, a good time spending time with friends, getting to know people better, have a lot of laughs and play games.

I took the train down to LA on Thursday, arriving late in the afternoon.  That evening we broke out No Thanks, Scary Tales, Tiki Topple, and Mexican Train Dominoes.  It had been years since I had played Dominoes, so it was nice to get an old classic to the table.

Friday wasn't much of a game day, even though it was my birthday.  I did get a chance to go mini-golfing and arcade game playing(ski-ball and the like) with my friend.  I know it's not a boardgame, but hey, it's a game, an activity, and mostly fun.  I think of mini golf as a fun dexterity game with more space to play.  After dinner, a family friend stopped by, so that gave us 6 for Skip-Bo.  We played one game alone, and then 2 games with partners.  I was able to win one of the partnership games.  It's actually a really fun game.  I wouldn't have chosen skip-bo, but now it's moved up on my list of fun games for the not as serious crowd.

Saturday was a bright and early start since games began at 10am with the aforementioned couple.  We started the morning off with Ticket to Ride Europe, including the 1912 expansion.  We didn't play depots, just the extra tickets. Early on, I got blocked off from Budapest by both of the 1 length routes.  Needless to say the workaround was extensive.  Sure I could have burned a station, but I kinda needed to go other places too, and didn't want to get caught without enough stations too early.  That basically cost me the game though.  One player was able to go from Petrograd to Madrid, in a straight shot.  This allowed her to draw a lot of tickets, and make small branches to make things work.  She ended with over 100 points in Tickets alone, and something like 194 as a final score.  I managed 2nd with 121, but that was a very, very, distant 2nd.
After Ticket, we moved on to something a lot lighter, Scary Tales.  Everyone had fun with that, since the game is not overly serious in nature, and feels very light.  The dice really do help maintain a quick pace and everyone tends to have fun with it.
One player had to depart, so we moved to Coloretto.  Yes, that's right, I finally got it played.  I really like the game.  I think there's a lot of thought that goes into your choices and there's enough interactions with different players, and ways to make the game hard on them without the screwage factor.

The most important part of Saturday was talking to a good friend about Star Runner.  He had a lot of good ideas to add more secrecy to the game play, and while that will add a little bit of time, I think it enhances the feel of the game, makes it feel more like you are moving things in secret, and gives the patrols a better reason to exist.

Overall I had a good time.  Some of the social aspects were not as good as they could have been, but I wouldn't change a thing.  I got a lot of games played, I think I'm completely back on track for the goal of 300, plus, Star Runner will be worth the extra work.

Star Runner Part 1

Sample box holding all
the components.

Friday marked a completely new experience for me in my board game life.  I played a game of my own design.  Yes, that's right, a design of my own creation and a lot of help from a few friends came together in paper and cardboard to make a board game.  If you hadn't guess from the title, the game is operating under the name Star Runner.  Star Runner stared as a rough concept in the summer of 2009.  I wanted to design a game based on Firefly, so my first thought was to use different elements of that universe and figure something out to make it work.  As I worked on it, I realized I wanted some more creative freedom, so the Firefly cannon was dropped, but some ideas still exist from that.
Some of those ideas are found in the set-up of the game, which is get a ship, get a crew, find a job, try to make money, and stay out of trouble.

Focus on the various types of cards
From left to right we have
Tech in orange, Passangers in blue
Runs in green, Crew with the black bar
and colors at the bottom, and
resource cards in the TTR deck facedown.

It's still very early on, but I spent 3 hours printing everything (thanks to my generous aunt and her color laser printer) and then the better part of a week gluing, cutting and sleeving everything. As my friends will attest, I kept telling people I was cutting something for my game, and I felt it was all I was ever telling them.  I would cut while watching TV or listening to podcasts, and use my friends as nice breaks from the strain of scissors.

I think the components look pretty good, especially for testing. I'm using old Star Trek CCG cards as backers for the big cards, and the US Ticket to Ride cards as backers for the small cards. Fortunately, they don't detract from the game play, though the sleeves get annoying for shuffling at times.  The good news with shuffling is that most of it is done in the beginning, and after that, there's very little, so it keeps things moving.  It took us about an hour to go through set-up and teaching, but that's because I was the only person setting up, and next time it should go faster, at least I can hope.

Game in progress, about 1/3 done.

One of my biggest fears going in, besides the fear of complete rejection and not having a fun game, was that the market system would crash and burn.  As it turns out, it was a pretty clear system with two players monitoring it.  Everyone ended up having a job or two of their own. One player was the banker for money, two managed the market, and helped with cards. One also helped manage the movement arcs, and I took care of drawing market and inspection tokens.  Several other things crashed and burned, but we tweaked what we could while playing, and wrote down changes that we think will work better next time. Next time is also the best news I could ever get, because it means they liked the game.

Speaking of the fear of rejection, it really is unnerving to place something you've created in front of other people for the first time.  I've invested parts of the last 30 months into this, and a good portion of the last 3 months, so to have that go to waste would be deflating.

The crucial thing I learned with testing this was how to make adjustments on the fly.  We saw that something wasn't working, and we came up with a way to fix it.  Some other things are design elements I have to go back and rework, but I have a much better idea on how the game plays, and thus how to design it how I want it to play.

I hope this post also clarifies why I've been a bit sparse with my postings.  Trying to get a design to prototyping was a big push, and once I could see it close, I just had to get there.  My original plan was May 1st and I'm proud to say I beat that arbitrary deadline by 2.5 weeks.

If you'd like to know more, leave a comment with any questions, and I will answer them to the best of my ability in Part 2.