Page: News.News201308070838AM - Last Modified : Wed, 07 Aug 13 - 1664 Visits

I followed some threads on BGDF and BGG that talked about micro or wallet size games. Even if facinating, I generally do not have a lot of ideas for those kind of games since they seems rather to be limited around 1 mechanic so it feels like if it's lacking of depth.

But my mind found a way to design a semi-micro game by recycling ideas I had already thought. After playing 1812, I had an idea where kingdoms fight each other by moving cubes, taking place on a small board made of a connection of diamond shape tile owned by each player. I reused this concept by making the necessity for each player to only own their kingdom components (1 diamond tile, unit tokens and a set of a dozen of cards) and combine their board with other players to build up the game.

So in theory, every player could bring the faction he wants to play and no more components would be required. If released as PNP, the components would fit on a letter size page, same thing for the cards. So players will only need to print 2 pages and possibly mount 1 page. Of course, a player could decide to print all factions and place them all in the same box without using too much space.

A second mechanic I borrowed is the Archery-Infantry-Cavalry combat resolution mechanic I wanted to use for my Master of Magic board game. Now since theer are tokens of each of those unit type, this system is much more convenient for this type of game.

The game will play a bit like 1812, you play card to gain movements that you use to move your units. Then you resolve combat. The game ends when all, or almost all the cards are played. Player with the most territory wins. The end condition has little climax so I might need to find something else.

I did not expect to work on a new game, but considering it's very small, and I probably already have most of the components ready from previous prototyping attempts I might give it a try. As for my other games, I printed some test cards for Ratscraft, but I somewhat lost motivation to playtest, but atleat I'll have some components ready. I explained the game to one of my friend and even if complex, he seem to have seen some virtue behind the game. I also got new development idea for my CCG game, the goal is to setup a good library catalog to design a card set to start playtesting. So I am trying to restrict myself to make card design easier.

Finally, all this slowdown is due to a new computer in the house. I'll give more details once the installation is finished. My girlfriend did not believe me when I said that it's going to take at least a month to install. After many adventures and problems, I think the whole process would have taken almost 2 months.

So when the computer is finished, now I will start working again, and probably on the new Fallen Kingdom revision. Not sure if the new computer will accelerate the development of my projects, but I would like to beleive so.