Episode 46: Newbie Variants and Grand Goats

Danny Devine on April 15, 2013 at 6:55 pm said:

First of all, congrats on the 50 likes!

Dominion Note – You guys should play through the single player adventure mode for Dominion online, the base set is free and it does a great job at slowly introducing new cards to you while you play against challenging AI. I have learned several new strategies this way. http://play.goko.com/Dominion/gameClient.html

Jason, great work spinning the name “Grandma’s Goat” into thematic gold, I was proud of how unusable that title would be when I submitted it and you made and interesting story out of nothing. That being said, I am glad you are finding a better use for Deck Building – Tile Placement. If you strike it rich with that mechanic you owe me a beer 🙂

You asked what other people do to get inspired. A common thing that I do when thinking up a new game is mix mechanics from 2 games I really like and see where that takes me. For example my game Mob Town (which is officially my first game) was inspired by Ticket to Ride and Small World. In Ticket to Ride, I really like the idea of doing only 1 thing per turn as well as the 5 face up cards that players can pull from instead of drawing blindly. In Small World I was instantly inspired the first time I played by the basic rule that every space costs 2 to take over +1 for every token on it. I combined these basic ideas along with an old idea I had for building a new board every time you play and I ended up with Mob Town (https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/mob-town).

That was probably more involved than you were looking for, but I was bored and felt like typing you guys a novel.

Keep up the great podcast, I can’t wait to see the artwork your friend did for Frankenstein’s Legacy, I’m an artist myself and it’s always inspiring to see other artist’s styles.

~Danny
Pawel Predki on April 18, 2013 at 4:32 am said:

Hey,

It’s #50 like here, glad I could help 😉

I posted a comment on your Facebook page for the last episode but I’m not sure you guys look at those so maybe I’ll try here this time.

Let’s start with ‘Grandma’s Goat’. The way you described it at the beginning made me think of ‘Courage, the cowardly dog’ 😉 A desolate farm with elderly people and an animal. You managed to spin a title that sounds like a childrenąs game to something that could be enjoyable by everyone, great job.

I also have a comment to the topic of the game, ‘newbie variants’. When it comes to more complicated games I believe you need this kind of easing the player into the complexities of the game. I can’t imagine playing ‘Civilization: Through the Ages’ with all the rules from the start. On the other hand, it is possible that a player will get discouraged by how easy and unexciting the newbie/family variant is and will not play the full version of the game. This happened to a friend of mine when we were trying ‘Flashpoint Fire Rescue’ out. The introductory variant is extremely easy, nothing is really happening and you rarely feel any kind of real danger. We played it once and he didn’t want to waste time playing it again so we moved on to another game. I played it in a different group later on and I really enjoy the game.

‘Dominion’ is a great game. I started my card/board game adventure with ‘Magic: the Gathering’ and I loved it. It is, however, too complicated to play with a group of casual gamers and buying all the expansions can prove quite expensive. Dominion, on the other hand, is easy to understand by most of the players and gives you the idea of how fun a card game can be. I own ‘Dominion: Intrigue’ and just bought the ‘Cornucopia’ expansion but I’m yet to play the latter.

Good luck with your designs and keep up the great podcast!

Pawel
Louis on May 31, 2013 at 10:12 am said:

I like what you guys tend to be up too. Such clever work and coverage!

Keep up the great works guys I’ve added you guys to our blogroll.

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