Scales: sound check

 First playtest for Scales today, just a bare bones setup to make sure the basic mechanics work.  And basically they did.  Players liked the overall system of improving their various musical stats, and the competing needs of solo practice to improve personal stats vs group practice to improve the band's stats.  And the final battle mechanic seemed to work well enough for now at least.  They felt like there wasn't enough information in the game to make meaningful decisions, which is what I expected for this 0.1 alpha test, and we had a good discussion afterward for different features that should help with that.  I especially liked a suggestion they had for adding information - put some of the stat icons on the backs of the opponent cards, indicating what each opponent's strongest and weakest stats are but without saying which is which.

So, next steps for this game:

• Make more opponent cards
• Decide between the suggestion above, or my original idea of letting players reveal the opponent any time they want but that incurs a penalty for the rest of the game (ultimately I should probably test both variants and see what goes better)
• Re-balance the stats for the different instruments
• Come up with characters that have unique abilities (and maybe secondary goals?) so each player can pick one of those to then combine with whichever instrument they choose

Probably going to be a bit before I put all of that together, but we'll see what happens...

Werewolves of London - it's New Scotland Yard now

 The last couple of weekends, I played Werewolves of London with different groups of people in real life (as opposed to my usual online playtests).  One of these games ended with a police-triggered game over, on the final turn of the game.  First time that has happened, and while it wasn't the worst thing in the world I didn't absolutely love that outcome either.  As luck would have it, the person I met with for the other game had some interesting ideas for potential revisions, one of which was a complete revamp of how the police investigation works.  So I took his general idea, and today I worked out the details for it, and here's what I have now:

Instead of the old "if you hit this Meat threshold then the police do stuff," the new system has police doing stuff every turn.  Bribe money prevents them from doing stuff this turn, instead of undoing stuff from previous turns, and there is no more "police catch you, everyone loses" like before.  And now there's variation to what they actually do.  Sometimes it will be locking down random territories like what I already have, and sometimes they will target specific territories based on a game condition like "where there was combat last turn" or "where there is currently the biggest single investment."  I don't know that I have all the details right just yet, but I think this new system has some potential and I'm looking forward to testing it out.

The other thing I learned from these recent games was that the I might need to have a 2-player mode with some rule tweaks.  I think the last time I had a game of Werewolves with only two players was many iterations ago, so the information I got from that is completely obsolete now.  And what I got from this one was that, with only two players, it was a lot harder to mitigate an early imbalance compared to a larger group where multiple players are all messing with each other.  I'm not sure yet what the solution to this could be, but I'm going to wait and see how things go with the new police rules before I work on this.  So in any case that's still a few more test games needed before I start hunting for publishers again.

Too many games, too little time

 Lots going on lately, across multiple games.  Here are the various updates for the last couple weeks:

• Werewolves of London got knocked out of the Cardboard Edison competition, which is not too surprising when they have ~350 games submitted and only take 21 finalists (which I think was still more than they usually do).  But my scores do keep moving up compared with games I've submitted in previous years.  Besides that, the judges who looked at Werewolves were almost unanimous in that they liked the theme, they liked the overall gameplay to the extent that they were able to assess it, but they wanted combat to work differently.  So that's something for me to polish up before I start submitting this one to publishers.
• Dolomball was back on the table today, in a very stripped down form so I can get a better sense of what actually needs to be in the game and what doesn't.  I got some good suggestions for that, and (with encouragement from today's playtesters) I got more comfortable with an idea that I had already been considering - dropping the link to the existing IP and no longer being constrained by trying to fit with how someone else defined their aliens in their game that, honestly, has nothing to do with my game except for my trying to shoehorn it into the same universe.  I definitely appreciate the support that I got from the folks at Galileo Games as I was getting this started, but trying to stick to the Dolomé has definitely let me to make some decisions that have detracted from gameplay, so it's time to let that go.  Which of course means I'm going to have to go through that title change thing again.  But in any case this one is probably going back to the back burner for a while because I also need to talk about...
• Scales - a new game, this time not based on a song title but on a little pun that- I actually don't even remember how it came up.  But someone said the word "scales," and I said "that should be a song about dragons learning to play musical instruments," and now I've got some rules sketched out and a 0.1 alpha prototype almost ready to go.  It's a cooperative game where all of the dragons are not only learning their own instruments but also they're in a band, and the goal is to get good enough to win the battle of the bands at the school talent show.  Once I have the basic materials together I need to get a test game to make sure the core gameplay works, and then I've got some bells and whistles to add, but I'll talk more about those once I know that the game is ready for me to add them (and that that's actually even the direction that it's going).

METAL!

I know, I've been quiet lately, bouncing between game revisions and other non-game things (which therefore don't go on this blog), but I do have one quick bit of news for today:

Neon Knights has hit copper bestseller status on DTRPG!

Dolomball: updates 1/20/25 (no clever title)

I finally figured out how I want to implement the revisions based on my playtest a couple weeks ago, so I spent a good chunk of today working on that.  Redid the cards once again, with the idea being that you get a couple of shorter moves instead of one longer one, plus a separate "special effect" that you can play whenever it's applicable (same effects as some of the cards I had before, but without feeling like you have to waste one because it's your only card with the right move distance or whatever the case might be).  Rewrote the rulebook, got the new cards mostly set up, still need to make a couple more diagrams to go on the cards before I can make the new deck (I came up with a couple more special effects that weren't there before, replacing some of the ones I took out since they don't fit with this revision).  And I also put in the moving barriers like I mentioned in my previous post.  Really excited to see those in action.

Dolomball - a new season

PAX is over, Werewolves is in competition limbo, so I'm finally back to focusing on Dolomball.  I ran a test game with some minor changes following from the previous playtest, six months ago, and it looks like I'm moving in the right direction of having a good fast-paced strategy game but I'm not there yet.  Got some good ideas from today's game though, for some more radical changes that I think will take it much further.  Both of the test players agreed that the most fun aspect of the game in its current form was ricocheting, so that needs to get amped up next time.  Current idea is to add a few straight panels which start out in the middle of the board but which players can rotate and shift during the game to block opponents or set themselves up for fun trick shots.  I'm looking forward to seeing how that one works out.

Other ideas brewing as well, but I'll wait until after the next test to talk about those.

PAX Unplugged 2024

Yesterday was my annual tradition of attending PAXU to do some playtesting with Unpub and try to get any attention at all from publishers, so today is the annual tradition of breaking down how it went.  The game I brought was Werewolves of London, and it was a great success - the people who played Under a Violet Moon last year mostly liked that game, but the people who played Werewolves this year really liked this one.  Overall I came out feeling like this is much closer to done compared with how Violet Moon felt after a busy Unpub morning (still a few bits to polish, but no major changes).  Here were some specific things that stood out from playtesting:

• Now that I've finally gotten to see the game all the way from start to finish, I can say with confidence that the duration is about an hour.  Slightly longer than I was aiming for, but it felt right during play - long enough to have some interesting back-and-forth, not so long it overstays its welcome.
• Everyone who played felt like once they were a couple turns in and got the basics down, everything felt very intuitive.  I even had some unintended semi-unguided testing, as I got wrapped up in a side conversation at one point and the players went through about one-and-a-half rounds without me hovering there, with no difficulty.
• The theme clicked right away, and people wanted to be vicious toward each other
  
• It always felt like there were multiple viable strategies to succeed, and players found it really interesting to think about whether they should focus on spreading out vs focusing on a few territories, and how to work endgame bonuses into their plans (whether for their own benefit, or just to prevent opponents from getting bonuses).
• This was the first time that I got to see the new combat mechanic in action, and it worked exactly as intended and felt fair to players - someone who was willing to risk more had a better chance of winning, but was never guaranteed
• Players in the first group suggested an improvement to the rule for sabotaging opponents' investments, and it worked out great when I implemented it later on
  

No luck with publishers unfortunately - only got one meeting, and they quickly concluded that the production was heavier than they were interested in (and probably the gameplay too, but it was a short meeting and we didn't get into that as much).  So I might want to veer toward publishers who do heavier games, even if the gameplay itself is solidly midweight.  But in any case I'm not doing any more pitching until Ion Awards are done, and probably also Cardboard Edison (and I've worked in whatever feedback they give me as well).

And in the meantime I will once again have the time and brainpower to get back to serious work on Dolomball...