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.