In my quest for Crokinole discs I have found a couple of sites that sell inexpensive discs. The first is Workshopsupply.com. I have placed an order with this company, however I have not received them yet. The other is Mr Crokinole, which carries many different styles of discs and rings.
Ian
This past Tuesday we had a productive game design meeting. Everybody got to playtest each others’ prototypes, and we all found them to be rather interesting. I brought to the table a card game I’ve been working on for over a year now called Salvage. I haven’t been constantly working on it; it’s just been on and off the back burner for a long while. It has gone through a lot of transformations along the way. I like to try out a lot of ideas, and some of them just feel as though they are meant for another game, not this one. I scrapped a lot of ideas along the way because I wasn’t happy with how they worked in the game, but I think I’m to the point where I like how the system works.
Players assume the roles of post-apocalyptic scavengers searching through the rubble of a war-torn landscape to find the components they need to rebuild their lives. The piles of junk are limitless, but the resources they need are scarce. Players alternate between rounds of scavenging (card drafting) and building. During the draft, each player is dealt seven “junk” cards; they simultaneously select one each and pass the remainder to the left, repeating until done. With the “junk” cards they have acquired, players then take turns building and upgrading their camps, tools, weapons, and vehicles which all have their own unique abilities.
The testing in this latest version was mostly about the recycling of the junk deck. The depletion of the junk deck marked the end of a “season” in the game. The game lasts as many seasons as there are players. This allows for games with different numbers of players to roughly last around the same amount of time.
In previous versions of the game the junk deck would run out, players would get short changed junk cards (by design, I convinced myself), and play would continue as normal. The player with the leader card would get less short-changed than the other players because he was dealt his card first. After the short-changed round, a new season would start. Each new season would require all junk cards (even the left over ones the players had in their hands) to be shuffled into a fresh new deck. Even though the short changing of the cards didn’t affect the overall balance of the game, it just felt sloppy. It didn’t feel like good design when players played a round with one or two new cards instead of the full seven.
To fix that problem, I decided to just have the discard pile be shuffled when the deck ran out. That let the players continue to draw their cards so that each round they had 7 new cards. When the deck runs out, the players should note that the end of this round marks the end of the season. I also allow players to keep their card between seasons. It seems like a simple solution used in countless other games (and even in previous incarnations of this game), and I just took the long approach to get there.
With that nagging flaw no longer there, I plan on focusing on the project abilities, cleaning up the rules, and more playtesting!
I have had the strangest urge to play flicking games lately. Games like; Crokinole, Carabande, and Carrom. However, with my budget I just cant afford to go out and buy any of these. So my desire to flick little wooden disks has inspired me to create my own take on a flicking game (Flicking + Conflict = Fun).Flick wars can be played on any kitchen table, and will fit into a large dice bag. Each player has 10 disks in his army. There are also 3 different unit types in the basic game (I have already begun working on an expansion); Archers, Infantry, and Calvary. During your turn you can ether move one of you disks, or attempt to attack an opponents disk. Each unit has a different movement rate (the number of times you can flick the disk), and specific requirements for making an attack on another piece. The winner of the game is the first player to accumulate 6 kills. Dan and Mark played the game last night and both had very positive reactions.
This is an extremely portable game. My wife and I played it while waiting for our dinner at a local restaurant tonight. The game took about 25 minutes, and was very close. Our food arrived just as Melissa made the winning shot. The table was clean but felt a little tacky. This made judging shots a little more difficult than usual. All in all it was a very fun game. People kept watching what we were doing, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be to be able to tell them where they can purchase it online.
Mark has challenged me to get this game finished and self-published in one months time. I plan on meeting that challenge. I really feel that this game has that special something. Mark has really inspired me with his recent release of Honeypot.
I plan on posting updates on my progress in the following weeks.
This is something I came up with last night. No play testing and I don’t even have the pieces needed to play. This is very rough.
It is a two player game that uses 2 sets of tree house pieces. That’s 30 pyramids in 5 different colors and 3 different sizes.
Setup: Take all of the large and medium pyramids and randomly place them into a 4×5 grid. Then both players take turns placing the remaining small pyramids on top of the large and medium ones of different colors.
Play: Players take turns moving a single pyramid one space on the grid. A player may immediately move the same pyramid once more if it landed on a larger pyramid of the same color. At no time can there ever be more than three pyramids stacked. A player may only move a pyramid a maximum of two spaces during his turn.
Goal: To get sets of three pyramids that are stacked from largest on top to smallest on bottom. This scores 1 point if it the stack is made up of 3 colors, 2 points if made up of 2 colors, and 3 points if made up of 1 color. Once a player has formed a triple stack he must immediately remove it from the table and place it in front of him. The empty space on the board may be moved into by other pyramids.
Game ends when one player has 5 points.
Well, we missed last Tuesday because of the 4th of July holiday and I sorely missed it. Sadly, I still have not finished my prototype of V&V. However, I would like to go over the ideas behind it with you guys…maybe I can make some preprototype improvements so that the first game will go smoother. Anyways, I hope to see you guys tonight. 7pm. I am really looking forward to another game of Wiz-War. The last one left me wanting.