Creators - a world-building micro RPG

Had a burst of inspiration and wrote this little game.  Inspired by Microscope and listening to mythology podcasts.

Dolomball: a look ahead (maybe)

I was chatting with another designer today, talking about my struggles with updating Dolomball after the recent playtest, and he gave me a great idea - put everything on the intersections rather than in the spaces.  This means that movement follows a hex pattern, which some players find easier to manage, while allowing me to keep the triangle grid (because I'm leaning hard into the 3s and I'd like to keep it that way).  It will also make it easier to quickly process which way things move when they ricochet, since you can just follow the line instead of having to think for a second about which side of the triangle would be correct.  Based on another comment he made, I might also have the balls start out near the goal zones, with one in easy reach of each team, rather than starting in the middle and having the game start with everyone running into the middle of the board.  I like the idea but I'm not 100% settled yet.  Also probably better not to make too many big (untested) changes at once.

And while we were talking I made progress on getting the new action cards together, which I've kind of been sitting on since last time.  Starting with just the basics for now, make sure it feels right, and then I'll add some more complex ones for stuff like team maneuvering or making an opponent fumble a throw.

Dolomball: first playtest

I played Dolomball with two other designers on Break My Game today.  Overall they both liked the premise of the game but felt like, in its current iteration, it moved too slowly to capture the excitement of the sport.  Highlight of the game was when one person got a couple of pieces in the right position to create a really cool chain of passes.  Big changes to make based on the feedback I got today are to increase movement and/or decrease the size of the board, get rid of some of the edge case rules (they liked fighting over the ball when two players reach it at the same time, they didn't like the opposed roll when colliding with another player) and maybe also the "special plays," and make the programming aspect meatier (especially if I can do it in a way that encourages more interaction between the players - right now I have vague ideas about something where correctly predicting an opponent's move will give you some sort of benefit, but I need to work more on that).  They liked having bumpers in the middle of the board but found the shape to be hard to work with.  They didn't like the "stun" effect.  And the two of them disagreed over whether or not the triangular grid worked well, which means I keep it for now but maybe emphasize that when requesting feedback in future playtests.

That's it for now.  I've got a lot to rewrite, and then we'll see when this one can hit the (virtual) table again...

And here's the kickoff, or something!

 Well, here we go - the Dolomball virtual prototype is now live on Screentop.  Give it a try maybe?