That hiatus over the last few months was good for me, but I am definitely back now. Today I did my first barely-even-alpha solo test for a new board game, Tonight the Stars Revolt! The premise of the game is that a number of human-occupied space stations around a trinary star system were being forced to gather energy from the stars for the benefit of their alien overlords, but now they are fighting back. It's a co-op game with all of the players working together against the aliens, trying to destroy their mothership before the aliens have collected too much solar energy. The goal is to have lots of high-speed space combat, multiple problems on the board that need to be addressed at any given time (kind of like X-Com, now that I think of it), and an interesting AI system for the aliens. There's still a lot for me to figure out, but I think I'm at least on the right track here. And I like what I have so far for the AI, that it uses three different decks, which are weighted toward different types of actions, and the decision of which deck to use depends on the player action to which it is responding. Ideally I'd like to get it to a point where players can strategize around which deck they want the aliens to use (or avoid), and have that be a meaningful decision.
There's still a lot of work to do before this one is even ready for testing with other people, but it does already feel like there is a real game here (much more so than what I got with Scales). And more importantly, it's gotten me excited to get working on games again.
