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Category Archives: Playtesting

Yay! Prototypes!

Lately, our meeting schedule has been in flux, so last night when Ian and Marc came over, it was a nice treat.
Taktika
Ian discussed his latest scenario for Taktika. It involves a special disk known as the Glyph of Protection. The rules were simple and straight-forward. We recommended that he publish it on the web.
Coalescence
Marc showed [...]

Recap & Preview

Due to scheduling changes, at least for awhile, our game design meetings will be on Thursdays. Tonight I plan on testing Space Port to get it ready for a convention this weekend.
But first, a recap of last meeting…
First Drey, Ian, Marc, and I played Space Port. Actually we didn’t get very far. The whole thing [...]

CHAOS!

On Tuesday, it was just me and Ian at the design meeting. We played a several iterations of my new Space Port game. We took it from a bunch of clunky mechanics and turned it into something that was interesting and playable. It still has a lot of work to go, though. Besides that, we [...]

A Nice Little Meeting

Last night Ian and Marc showed up at my place, and we did a bit of playing and a lot of design talking. Here are some of the highlights:
Lab Work 
I asked if we could try out Monkey Lab with some suggested rules. There were some clever plays, and a few evil ones.  In the end, [...]

Meeting Preview

Tuesday night is here again.  Here are some things we may see at our meeting:
Ian has a new game out called Taktika. It is a disc flicking war game that is a lot of fun. The last I heard, he was polishing up the last bit of box art and rules wordings. The game is [...]

Ubermause

I dusted off the Ubermause prototype and brought it over to design night. I got to meet John finally, who turned out to be interesting and pleasant. I had not really looked at the game in about a year and only had a ream of printed notes with the rules scattered throughout. I was able [...]

Tonight is Design Night

Every Tuesday we have design night at my place and I usually shoot out an email with some agenda details and a call for who is coming. From now on, I figured I’d post this here on the blog instead so everyone can see what we’ve been up to.
One of the things I’d like to [...]

Beads, Tools, Dungeons and Podcasts

Let me cast my memory back to Tuesday night where Ian, Dan and I huddled around a collection of gems as we played Dan’s As Yet Unnamed abstract bead game. I had given the rules a once over (easy to understand, just a few clarifications needed) and then we started to play. An elegant game, [...]

Improv Challenge!

Mischa, Dan, and myself met tonight for a couple hours at Austin Java to give Dan’s Travelogue prototype one last go-around before it was shipped off to Italy. A three-player game ran just over half an hour, and I must say, it was a pretty solid, fun card game, all around. Mischa smashed out the [...]

My Quick Recap of Travelogue

Things I learned from last week’s meeting, specifically about my new card game Travelogue, which I’ll be sending away to Italy for a game competition:

It ran a little long at 45 minutes.
It doesn’t scale well in regards to time to play.
There is a slow build up of cards in your hand, so a few turns [...]