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.

Last Year

Last weekend was Orcon down in LA. We managed to have a short Team Pygmy meeting to work on plans for this seasons game. Primarily, our focus was on looking at how our artwork will look for our cards this season. Our new game is based on a music festival idea that the Wastrel came up with. This dovetailed nicely with a sideshow carnival idea that I had been working on independently. The struggle with the artwork for this year is that we have these two concepts coming together. Angela has been doing some designs for card backgrounds that will likely end up being used when the design is re-implemented after Poly Con this year. This will be an interesting experiment for us in that we would like to actually produce a version of this year's game. It will not retain the Pygmy theme and will likely focus on the traditional outsider art of sideshow banners. Combining that with Pygmy for this year has been challenging. Scott is working on preliminary designs as well and has put together a digital iteration of a collage style background based on Angela's design ideas. What you can see below is a rough impression. I feel like posting it as a work in progress and I am interested in seeing how it develops into a final version.

The card reflected here is actually an approximation of two cards combined. The square background card will include the type of act that will be performing and behind the actual performer (Thrudd in this case) one would see bonuses relative to other act types. The image of Thrudd that is seen here has been filtered to give it more of a handpainted look. This image represents a card placed in front of the background as it will in the final design. This mechanic will allow us to match Performers, with Act Types in varying configurations for replayability. It will also serve to hide bonus variables which act as private information that players can leverage for increased scoring depending on the act types being requested by the Pygmies and the act types being presented by the other players.

All artwork here is preliminary and used only as an example. 

Blast from the Past

I set up a blog on BGG in an effort to generate additional followers and traffic for the Pygmy Games Blog. My intention is not just to show off our stuff but to hear from the gaming community at large and increase interest in event games and in Poly Con. I figured that we could use a picture to help draw interest so I grabbed a preset pic from our first year at Poly Con. We preplan all of our boards in the weeks leading up to the con and in the few days before the con we will often do a preset of tables and terrain as we figure out configurations. This particular configuration (we called it the H) lasted for the first two years. I see it now and it seems so small. We thought it was giant at the time, but we have grown our boards by leaps and bounds since this set up. We were also using wooden hexes for movement in those days. We have moved beyond those (through painted hexes, to printed hex cards to printed hex tiles and this year we have a free movement system that does not incorporate our hexes (at this point)). Since my purpose in this blog is to document the work we do, I am happy to share a little of our history from six years ago.

A First Attempt

I am sure that Scott feels no danger from my skills as a graphic artist. We don't have any tiles for our Preference Track for the playtest copy of Festival so I decided to download GIMP and try my hand at making an actual card (Update: I made three last night, and one this evening). I started by downloading the PNG layer from Game Crafter to make sure that all of the sizing was correct. I then spent a few hours figuring out how the layers work. I certainly do not have all of the tools and skills necessary to make cards for Team Pygmy, that job is safe with Scott, but I kinda managed one that would be good enough for playtesting...only 3 more to go. (Update: All four finished, each faster than the last.)

What About Bob

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the contributions of our buddy Bob in helping out with Team Pygmy. Bob is a "train guy" who also loves to game. In being a train guy, Bob helped to move our terrain work forward with some tips and tricks, primarily on the appropriate application of static grass using a homemade electrical appliance that I now regularly shock myself with.a few times a year. The thing is made out of a bug zapper but it produces awesome effects.

The is not Bob's only contribution however. He also produced all of our table risers that we use to provide some dimension to our tables. They have stayed in the box for the past two years while Islands was the theme because we were looking for a nice flat ocean, but they will be back for Festival this year to provide additional dimension.

Bob is also the owner and proprietor of his own laser cutting business and has produced a number of bits for Team Pygmy, including the card boxes seen above and a really cool custom die for our whale. Additionally, Bob has made it a whole lot easier for us to get to the con by both coordinating our tables with the university so that we don't have to bring our own and by helping to load up in his nifty trailer so we can take the whole show on the road at once.

Needless to say....

Thanks Bob.

Here is a preliminary map sketch for Pygmy Festival. Given the new design, you can see a dramatic shift from the configuration from Islands and Disaster. In essence, it combines the separation of Islands with the return to the terrain effects of Disaster.

Time for a new "Season"

Welcome back to the four or five people who actually check in on this Blog. I guess like for many people, the purpose of our blog is to keep track of our own ideas for our own purposes. For me, I like the idea of having a history document given the years of effort that have gone in to what is now known as Pygmy Games.

So, a bit of backstory:
Pygmy games began almost thirty years ago without any pygmies at all. In fact what we know now began in the pages of Dragon Magazine with a game called Claydonia. My original writing partner and I decided that we wanted to build an adventure using that system, the basics of which were to make heroes out of playdough and fight each other. Well, we built it. It was a massive affair with working traps, water hazards, remote control, ice, puppets and assorted lunacy. It was in no way similar to the kind of thing that Team Pygmy writes and builds today. And in truth, it only involved one current member, me, on the writing team.. However, the line from there to here exists and the basic principal of Pygmy existed from the beginning: Be big, build event games, and have fun.

We wrote a sequel to that first game. It involved using polymer clay rather than playdough and it was set in space...but we never built it. Instead, we ended up writing another sequel that was a step toward modern pygmy games. In the sequel, which took place in the subconscious of a grocery store owner, we worked in 25-28mm (it was so long ago that 25mm was still the standard with a couple of 28s thrown in). This second adventure featured new elements like pyrotechnics, lighting effects and a musical score. The great sadness of the first two adventures is that there are no existing pictures of them as digital photography was still years away. We do still have many of the miniatures and an artifact or two pops up among friends every so often.

Times change and friends move and marry. I found myself in a new town years later with an old friend who had played in the earlier games but had not written one. When the time came for our next monumental adventure, I found myself with a new partner and the core of Team Pygmy was set. We were on an expedition to Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica when we saw the Citadel Pygmies for the first time. This was back in the days when picture of minis in White dwarf were drawn by hand. I immediately fell irrationally in love with the pygmies but the owner would not sell them (they were, and remain in his personal collection). The owner of Aero has since passed away and I have made multiple attempts to buy those pygmies from the current owner, but he wants to keep the collection together so I have to settle for the set I had made by the Games Workshop Archive service (that used to be a thing).

During that summer, we designed an built an adventure for our pygmies. Their chieftain had died and the candidates for the job were tasked with going out in to the world and finding something useful for the village. The one who managed that goal became the new Chieftain. Basically this has been the premise for every pygmy adventure from that day to this.

In the early days we would borrow elements from other systems as our gift was in the painting of minis and the building of terrain and scenery. Much of the terrain we built for those early adventures endures to this day. We spruce it up, remodel and repaint. We add bits and leave bits out but we can see the development of our world over time and I think that is comforting.

After another move (this time to Los Osos) we found ourselves back together again. The problem we had was that the two of us were in a new town and knew no gamers. We heard that there was a game con run by the local university so one year we stopped in to check it out. What we found was that they didn't have anything like what we did. We came to find out that no one really does what we do but at the time we assumed that we were not unique in the gaming world. We decided that it was time to bring the pygmies back out. We knew though, that it was unlikely we would get a group of players to dedicate 14 hours of their game time to the crazy strangers with the pygmies so we decided to go back to Dragon Magazine and run a version of Tom Wham's Search for the Emperor's Treasure with our pygmies and our aesthetic. We had done this once before for a group of friends in LA so we knew we could pull it off.

And we did, not wildly successfully but we pulled it off. In the process, we entered a new phase for Pygmy Games: the Giant Board Game. That is what we basically build now, really big board games. We break 100 sq feet every year and often grow from year to year. During one of those sessions at Poly Con (our home now and in the future) we added the final member of the team, this hobbit/jedi who said he could improve on our graphic design...he was right. While he started as primarily a graphic designer, he has grown to be a critical member of the overall design team.

Fits and starts are what they are. For a while we would try to run a brand new game every year. This was both a good and bad idea and depending on the year, each different member of the team found themselves on a different side of the argument. That argument is a settled issue these days and our model is to design a new game every two years. That cycle is up this year so our Poly Con event this year will be entirely new. My hope is that we will use this space to keep ourselves, and anyone else who cares up to date on the comings and goings of our latest design...Pygmy Festival. We will take this game in to our tenth anniversary year at Poly Con and it will be a blast, just like it always is.

I remember our first Polycon experience where we were beating the bushes to fill our 8 game spots. Now we have to turn players away and we are thankful to the Cal Poly community for giving our lunacy a home.