Presets

Most game designers (I would think) don't have to do this part. We do what we call preset each year to determine how our terrain fits together for the actual Con board and determine what still needs to be built/repaired. Scott came up this past weekend (and will again this coming weekend) to do presets and the pics above constitute a day's work. What you can see are three of the four outer corner tables. The fourth could not be accomplished both due to time and the need to repair the foundation terrains that were needed for it. I have since repaired them and am in process of setting that table up now. It is our snow table and the snow had gotten a bit dingy over the past couple of years in storage as it was not used in Islands.

A big part of preset is story telling. With each location, we try to tell a story rather than just placing bits on the board. For our snow board, I have decided to paint my very large misprint Bones dragon for a nice Dwarf wars tableau. We have a fortress war happening in the board above as well but many of the stories don't reveal themselves until the boards are completely decked.  We specifically stick to gross building for preset and do not include trees and "bits" nor do they include miniatures of any kind. We just want to make sure that the terrain pieces used are not allocated to our board more than once.

Because of the unique way we are handling movement this year, it was important that the preset design clearly indicated spaces. Each of the boards above includes 5 spaces for the purpose of movement. Those will be clear on game day as they will each tell a distinct story. The bones of those spaces should be clear above. The other task as we get presets ready is to make sure that board to board transitions are clear. Water spaces connect to water spaces and land to land. That has required adjusting things from the playtest board to the final board so if you saw may playtest board now it would include a number of rotations, swaps and shifts to make sure that everything will work for game day.

I have sketches for the interior water boards and hope to have them preset this weekend. The Wastrel is working on the stages for Pygmy so we can preset the center tables....still lots of work and hopefully it will all pay off.

Pygmy Unbox

Let's recognize together that I am a poor photographer, I leave that work to Scott for a reason....having said that though, our GC order came in today and so how could one not post a picture for an audience not paying attention to starving for information about Pygmy Festival. Well, as usual, there a couple of issues and oversights, but all in all it is a good year for design and production and I cannot wait until Con weekend to try everything out.

Scott and I will be getting together this weekend to do board presets and so I will likely have pics (that he shoots) to post up to give folks a look at the shape of things to come. I think it is fair to point out that a few years ago we got our GC order in 2 hours before our first session. This year, we have 6 weeks to show time, and I had a baby, and we are ready to roll (sort of). The Wastrel is working on Festival stages as we speak. I have not seen them. I am confident that they will be done by con and be a cool addition to the year.

Link To PolyCon Precon BookThanks to the folks at PolyCon for our continued guest status. We appreciate how welcome you make us feel.

We are in production

I really think it is relevant to say that this year we are taking our work very seriously. What I mean by this is that in the past, we were very interested in the dimensional parts of our games (sets, minis, etc...) and we were forced to recognize that at times, our games were not nearly as good as they looked. We have been testing like crazy this year and have written what appears to us to be our best game. Part of the motivation there was to write a game that could be tested to the point that it could eventually go into real production. The sad part of that goal is that after our playtests, we have realized that our game is really good, but that it requires our large scale tables to work properly. We will continue to look at Pygmy Festival throughout this Con Season in hopes of finding the magic revision that will allow us to take our mechanics and play them on a reasonably sized board.

Above is a screenshot of our Gamecrafter page for this year. We are all super proud of our Audience Cards (seen above) and so I am celebrating our In Production status with a screenshot. We are #302 in the production cue and I am experiencing an interesting part of my year as I count down to getting our GC order. Our ship date is in early May and so it will still be a couple of weeks until arrival. I am hoping to be blown away by all of this year's work (and looking forward to our first real scoreboard). I will update on the Blog that no one reads as soon as the unboxing begins.

As a final note, I want to thank everyone that was involved in playtesting this year. Our old testing tended to involve us setting up the game in my yard the day before the con and the Wastrel and I hoping that it worked. This year, we ran a number of tests and learned lots in each test so the version that will arrive at PolyCon should be a real blast. Lots of tweaks of numbers and rules, a whole phase and a ton of improvements.

Festival Design Entry 3

Met with the Wastrel last night to get the whole team up to speed on the design. He noticed a couple of holes to patch and I think we have a good plan for filling there. It is a true statement to say that neither of us are particularly mathy and so we will often estimate a game's economy and then try to refine that economy in the testing phase. As a result, many of our "decisions" last night we to look at a potential issue in testing and finalize a concept.

Central to this was the mechanic for the Festival Phase. The Festival Phase use the Performer and Act type cards reflected below. In the center of the board there are four stages, one for each of the Pygmy Clans. Each stage has a path on which the players will place Performer/Act combos as they recruit them. There is also an Audience Preference Track that is shared by all of the players and represents what the Audience wants to see. On that track, the primary position is worth +3 Dice. The next position is +1 followed by +0 and the last position is -1. Each of these spaces is occupied by a token representing one of the four Act Types. To determine victory in the Festival Phase, a player takes the number of dice equal to the Performer card, modifies it by the Preference Track and then lastly adds the bonuses from the Act Type card (which is hidden information from the others)

The issue that we faced was in multiplying bonuses. On its face, it seems easy to multiply a bonus by the number of particular Act Type cards in the round, however, that builds an economic problem in that if three players select the Act Type on the Preference Track (+3) and one player plays a card at the end of the Track (-1) but includes a high hidden bonus against the Current Act Type, that player would likely win the round (with a bucket of bonus dice) while performing an act that the audience is least interested in. This is a thematic issue as well as a gameplay issue for me in that it favors playing against planning and disadvantages strategy for tactics. So I think the answer is a simple one with bonuses registering if the Act Type is in the Festival but not per Act Type in the round. We think that is the solution but have decided to look at it in testing to see how it works.

Festival Design Entry 2

Above are three images that illustrate the basic mechanics for the Act Type and Performer Cards. The Act Type card contains the bonuses for using that particular type against one of the other four types. The bonuses listed are in number of dice rolled in addition to the value of the Performer card. The performer card is paired prior to the beginning of the game (during set-up). This adds variability tot he cards in that the 3 die cyclops card above could be a dancer in one game with the bonuses shown but could be a singer in another game with entirely different bonuses.

This mechanic couples with the Preference Track. That track consists of standard bonuses in a row. The last position is -1, then 0, then 1, then 3. The track is populated each round with tiles that represent the four different acts. So if Dance is in the #1 position, then this act is worth 6 dice (with 5s and 6s being successes). The act gains additional bonuses to its value if the other players have one or more of the other types of acts and those bonuses are determined by the Act Type card and are only known to the Pygmy playing the card.
In the end, the Performance Phase will be based on three variables, the Performance Track,  (not controlled by the players) the Performer Card (with a value known to all players) and the Act Type card (with hidden information). All players then roll their dice and the highest number of successes gets first choice of the Audience Cards for the round, second place gets second choice and so on.

Festival Design Entry 1

I intend to document this year's design in a number of short posts based on components on the game. This first post will be a general mechanics overview without specifics and then I will log specific rules sequences in future posts.

This year's design focuses on a festival being held by the pygmies. this festival is competitive in that the success of each clan will be reflected in audience response and that success will eventually act as the deciding factor in our traditional victory condition where the most successful clan gets to nominate the new chieftain (as the old one is constantly dying).

Our pygmies will work in pairs. Each player has a choice of pygmy roles: Recruiter or Stage Manager. The recruiters will be the "movers" in the game and their goal will be to: Recruit new acts, Quest for Artifacts, Acquire new Audiences or Rehearse an Act. Stage Managers must be in Pygmy Village to act. They have the ability to manage their Act track and bring an act to the stage ahead of another act. They also Manage Artifacts and add Audience cards to the Festival.

The central premise to the two roles is resource use. Both pygmy players can be out in the world and gather the available resources, but they do so at the expense of controlling events at the festival. Or they can remain behind at the festival and sacrifice options for gathering resources. Historically our pygmies have identical roles so this year's shift toward role differentiation will provide a new level to the teamwork we try to generate among our clan teams (these are always made up of two players)

Next time...the Preference track and Stage Managing the festival.