So, in case you didn’t notice, I have a board game out!

Prolix came out in September, and I couldn’t be more excited.  Now the challenge is to spread my excitement to others.

I’ll let you in on one secret of being a published designer: the angst doesn’t end once the game comes out.  I know I’ve come out with as good a game as I’m capable of designing, but that and a dollar gets you a donut. Most publishers don’t have the budget or time for a large ad campaign to support their games, so the legwork is left to the author.  This sounds unfair, but is in fact how it works in the world of book publishing as well.

So, it’s time to shamelessly self-promote!  Here’s what I’m doing.

• Running the game at local game conventions.  I’m kicking myself for missing ComiCon this weekend, but I aim to hit most of the other area cons to demo Prolix.
• Donating copies to reviewers.  I just sent a bunch of copies out today for reviewers.  Of course, I don’t expect the reviewers to slant their review either way because they got a free copy.  Unless you believe Roger Ebert pays for all the movies he sees?
• Appearing on podcasts.  You can hear me in a week or two on The Dice Tower talking about the challenges of designing a word game.
• Submitting Prolix to the Mensa Mind Games awards.  This wouldn’t apply for most games, because Mensa tends to skew towards lighter family fare.  Fortunately, that describes Prolix pretty well, and I think it has an outstanding chance of doing some serious damage at the Mensa awards.
• Discussing self-promotion on my own blog.  How very meta.

Here’s what I’m not doing.

• Paying money for ads.  I simply can’t afford an ad campaign of any effective size.
• Making appearances at game stores.  I’m not a “name” yet, and anyway, most game stores cater towards 15-year-olds playing Magic, which isn’t exactly Prolix’ target audience.

I mention both of those because they’re what most people are suggesting I do to promote the game.  I wish I had the money and name recognition to pull both of them off!

So that’s that.  In the meantime, why don’t you hop by BoardGameGeek and take The Prolix Challenge?

It seems that my tweaks have been successful, for the most part.  Players love the die, and there haven’t been any complaints about the game being too dry.  I worry about a lack of replayability, but I’m sure that’ll have some way of resolving itself.

In other news,the countries have names now!  At least, better names than “North,” “Central,” and “South.”  The three warring nations are now North Vulturian, Central Weaselium, and Lower Insecticus.

Speaking of the nations, I have found a problem with the distribution of the three countries in a 4-player game.  Because two players start with bonuses to North Vultarian and the other two start with bonuses to Lower Insecticus, there’s no incentive to sell to Central Weaselium.  As a result, the Sea and the City tend to founder in a four-player game.  I’m resolving this by eliminating Central Weaselium in a 4-player game.

Finally, some playtesters don’t like the way the Battle Bonus.  The fact that the leader just needs one Bot to get the bonus is, in one tester’s words, “lame.”  So I’m going to try awarding the bonus to players who have two or more surviving Bots on the winning side.  Will it work?  Who knows!

I brought three games: Pax Robotica, MacGuffin Market, and Grand Guignol.

Pax Robotica was awesome! Players really enjoyed it. The last change I made to it, adding the die, made an enormous difference. Players didn’t find it too random at all, perhaps because they get $5 every time their Bots are blown up, as opposed to $3 if their Bots survive. (The math works, but it’s a little athematic. Hmmm.) I think I’m very close to publishable with this one.

As for MacGuffin Market, hmmm. How can I put this? MacGuffin Market is now a “well, it’s okay” kind of game. I’m very unhappy with where it is, to the point that I’ve decided to shelve the design. I may not ever come back to it; there is simply too much for me to work on right now to worry about a mediocre game.

Now, the third game. I suppose you want to hear about it. Very well. It’s called Grand Guignol, and it’s a drafting game. I’m setting it in the legendary French horror theater, which should give the design some bite. In the game, players roll dice to determine how shocking your plays can be. If your plays are just shocking enough, you receive Faint Tokens. If you ignore the Shock Threshold, that might work also; there’s a bonus for most shocking production, regardless of the Shock Threshold. At the end of the game, the player with the most Faint Tokens wins.

Grand Guignol was played by other people for the first time at Protospiel. Players seemed to enjoy it, although it’s still very, very raw.  I’m looking forward to seeing how this one develops.

I ditched the idea of new draft cards with values printed.  That means I’m keeping the 1-3-6 Bot levels.

But I’m keeping the idea of chips tied to pairs of Bots.  When you pull a chip, you resolve the battle the chip points to.  So if you pull Sea #2, that means the Bots in the second Sea column will fight it out.

How will they fight it out?  I did something I never thought I’d do: added a die.  Each player rolls a d6 and adds it to their Bots’ level.

Why did I add a die?  A few reasons:

• It gives a lower-level Bot a chance to defeat a higher-level Bot.  This allays one of the fears I had about the new head-to-head system: a slowdown with the game because everyone refuses to sell to a spot across from a high-level Bot, and there aren’t enough tech levels to fight him.  With the die, there’s a shot at beating him.
• It makes ties much smoother to resolve.
• Dice are fun.
• It adds a good uncertainty to the Battle Bonus at the end of the game.

As for said Battle Bonus, I’m going to go with sliding a cube up a track for every battle in a region.  The higher the cube is on the track at the end of the game, the higher the Battle Bonus payout.  I hope it’s not too fiddly.  We shall see.

I want to start with incremental changes, keeping the game’s base and tweaking the Bot, Tech, and combat systems.  I think the game works well enough as it is that I shouldn’t just throw it all out the window.  Plus, I’d rather start with a small change, and if doesn’t work, proceed to a radical change (like the seductive map-based game that Jeff suggested).

Here’s what I’m thinking.

• Bot changes:
  • No more Bot levels.  All Bots are the same at first.
  • Instead of drafting abstract Techs, you’re drafting specific upgrades, like armor, guns, missiles, and nunchucks.  Each upgrade is tailored for a specific Bot type, and is effective against 1, 2, or 4 Bot Types.   Each upgrade is worth a certain amount of Battle Points, with later upgrades being worth more Battle Points.
  • The first Tech you get for a given Bot Type means you can start building that Bot.  Anything else adds Battle Points.
• Economic changes:
  • Each Bot costs $4, plus $1 for each upgrade you have.  So a Bot with 3 upgrades would cost $7.
  • Selling a Bot gives you $5, plus the round’s demand, plus (possibly) a certain bonus for selling to the losing side.  This is based on Geoff’s suggestion, but I haven’t fully figured out if or how I’m going to implement it.
• Battle changes:
  • No more cubes.  Instead, there are chips between facing Bots.  Each chip is numbered, and tied to a specific region.
  • The bag starts with 4 Junkbot chips inside, tied to a specific region. Also, there are Peace Chips that go into the bag every round, instead of Peace Cubes.
  • When you fill up a column, the corresponding chip goes into the bag.
  • If you pull a chip, the corresponding Bots fight, based on Seth’s suggestion.  You can tell which Bots fight by the region and number on the chip.
  • If you pull a Junkbot chip for a certain region, they blow each other up.
  • Each player counts the BP of his Bot.  The player with more BP wins the battle, and blows up the other Bot.  (Geoff’s flipped-tile damage idea is also seductive, but I’ll go without it for now, and see how it plays.)
  • If there’s a tie for BP, both Bots die.  I’m not 100% sure about this yet; let’s see how it plays out.

So, as you can see, it’s a big change, but not a radical one.  If this still plays like too much of a bloodless Euro, then I’ll move forward with more radical changes, most likely based on your suggestions.

BREAKING UPDATE:

Two more changes to battles:

• Pulled chips go back in the bag.  This is essential, because otherwise, selling to a battled spot would be a no-brainer.
• Every time a Bot blows up another bot, put a cube by the nation’s name.  If there’s a tie, both nations get a cube.
• At the end of the game, if you have a surviving Bot on the winning side of a battle, you get money equal to the total number of cubes in that region times five.  So, if the South wins against the North 3-2, then players with surviving Bots in the South get $25.  This might be a little too fiddly; we’ll see how it plays.

I’ve been meaning to address Seth’s comment for awhile now, but it always went to the backburner.  Hearing exactly the same thing from Brian and Geoff has pushed me to action.  I have to do something.

Here’s what I’m thinking.  Each region starts the game with five cubes.  I’m going to mark up the last three cubes with a white dot.  These “last three” cubes will always be the last ones pulled from a region.

If a regular cube is pulled from the battle bag, then the battle is a “skirmish,” and the current battle rules apply (each side loses its weakest bot).  However, if a marked cube is pulled, then the battle is “heated,” and the resolution is different.

In a heated battle, you go from right-to-left in the given region, looking for two bots facing each other with different values.  If you find one, then you destroy the weaker bot.  You repeat this for every heated cube you pull.

If there aren’t any different values between bots in a heated battle, then the battle becomes a skirmish.

If you pull both a heated and a skirmish cube, then the skirmish cube counts as a heated cube.

I don’t know if I’ll get to try these new rules anytime soon, as my work situation has exploded, and I may have to work next weekend.  But I’ll definitely post as soon as I get a shot at playing this again!

I’ve made big changes to Pax Robotica over the past few months.  Gone are the auction and VPs.  The winner of the game is the player with the most money at the end of the game.  I’ve made some smaller tweaks as well, and I look forward to playtesting it this coming weekend.

I’m a little worried about MacGuffin Market, because it’s hit the table a lot recently, and yet I haven’t got a lot of critical feedback on it.  Most people would take this as a positive sign, but I’m still worried.  Consider it a character trait.

I won’t discuss the third game just yet, because I’m afraid I’ll jinx it.

Once upon a time, I had a game called Wag the Wolf.  It was a good game, but its rules were too dense for its gameplay, and the whole thing wound up being less than the sum of its parts.

So as I may have mentioned in the past, I’ve been taking various bits of Wag worth saving and putting them in new games.  One of the coolest parts of Wag was its brutal, evil auction.

I built a new game around that auction, based on some ideas about the military-industrial complex I had at the time.  That game, PaxRobotica, grew to the point where its focus was its other mechanisms, and I recently decided to remove its auction.

So now I have this great auction, and a blank slate on which to plate it.  Hence, MacGuffin Market.

A MacGuffin is an object in a film that drives the plot, but its actual identity or contents are irrelevant.  TV Tropes summarizes it very nicely…

To determine if the story is using a MacGuffin instead of another plot device, check if replacing the item with another would make relatively little differences to the core plot. For example, in a crime story, the MacGuffin could be the Mona Lisa, a large diamond, a bank vault, a computer terminal, or a museum artifact; the story would be exactly the same. It doesn’t matter what specific power or value the item possesses, only that there is a desire for the characters to possess it.

In so many games, the players are simply after MacGuffins. It doesn’t matter if it’s silk from 16th-century Venice, or a robot translator from 25th-century Alpha Centauri. So this game’s theme reflects my frustrations about theming a game where I’ve already set up the mechanisms. I could’ve pasted on a theme, but it would have resulted in a dry and somewhat dishonest game.

So I threw up my hands and gave up.  The game is about MacGuffins.  The players are bidding on items that have no value within the game, other than VP.  I’ve defined them within the game as “beeping black boxes” or “big honkin’ gems.”  That’s the best I can do, I think, because if I made it about collecting cars or diamonds, it would’ve felt like every other game out there with a pasted-on theme.

This is a good thing, because I was very upset about the game for awhile.  I actually didn’t enjoy it, and was stunned when my playtesters did.  Once I realized I could keep the theme and play off the idea of the players going after silly items, I relaxed and realized that I might have something here.

The auction was never a worry; I know the auction works.  For those who don’t, it’s pretty simple.  A player makes a bid on the bid track, and slides a bid pointer so its “High Bid” arrow points to his bidding pawn.  This bid marker also has a number of “Underbid” arrows, but the total number of High Bid and Underbid arrows is always one less than the number of players.  So players can underbid the high bid and remain in the auction, although the high bidder will always get the spoils.

What are the spoils?  Turn order is the first one.  The auction winner has the first crack at buying a MacGuffin, which gets him VP.  I want turn order to be critical in this game.

The second spoil is gems, which is a brand-new addition.  Previously, the auction winners received VP, but that just didn’t seem right.  Under the newest ruleset, the winning bidders get gems, with the highest bidder getting the most.  They can cash these gems in for MacGuffins instead of using money, and in fact, the exchange rate of gems to MacGuffins is better.  This solves the problem of a player bidding his wad of cash at the auction and not having enough to buy MacGuffins afterwards.

Instead of buying MacGuffins, players can also take Bonus cards, which give them special powers during the games.  Finally, players can take an Income chip, which is how one makes money in this game.  The only thing is that taking an Income chip ends your round.

The game takes five rounds, and runs about an hour.  I’m aiming for it to fill the same niche as a game like St. Petersburg; a pleasant and quick economic game.

Building bots is interesting, because you can build as many as you can afford.  Also, you get a discount if you build multiple bots (-1 for your second bot, -2 for your third bot, and so on).  However, another change I’ve made is that your bots get more expensive as you build more of them, so buying in bulk is key to keeping your overhead low.

However, when you sell a bot, you only get to sell one at a time.  So one of the issues of building many bots is that you may not be able to sell all of them.  You can sell them directly to the scrapyard if you’re in a pinch for money, but you won’t get as much money as you would selling to a nation.

The playtest didn’t go badly.  Sure, there are balance problems, but that’s because the new turn-based system has put everything out of whack.  The game is now harder and more strategic.  Sadly, that means that playtesters who like more casual games are less likely to enjoy the new version of the game.  But I think folks who like heavy economic engine/snowball games will really dig it.

The next enormous change I’m making in the game will be to eliminate VP.  This is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, but was afraid to do because I was worried about excessive positive feedback and snowballing within the game.  But there’s already snowballing VP, so why keep it?  Making collecting money the object of the game is also much more thematic, and I think players will find it more intuitive.

It’s strange, because I got the game to 80% done, and now I’m taking it back down to 50% done.  But I’m hoping that once I finalize these changes, I can bust past the 80% barrier that I was stuck on for so long.  There’s so much to do, even though I have a month before the game’s next playtest.  I hope these changes will take this from a good game to a great game!

The first is straightforward. I’m changing the order of the columns on the board to go 4-4-3-2 instead of 4-3-4-2.

The main reason behind the change is in the 1- and 2-player games. In those games, letters move two columns every round instead of one. With a 4-3-4-2 board, the letters in the first column will automatically be 4 points in the third column. The 4-4-3-2 layout keeps things interesting. As a bonus, players in the 3-5 player game find it more intuitive. Win-win all around!

The second change was a tougher decision. It applies to the four-player game only. Under the old rules, at the end of a 4p game, each player crossed out one regular word for each interrupt he or she made. Now, each player crosses out one fewer word than the number of interrupts he or she made. So if a player interrupted 3 times, she will cross out two words.

Alert readers will recognize this as the 5-player variant. I decided to copy it to the 4-player game because I noticed too many 4p games dragging.

Players want to interrupt. Why deprive them of the chance?