New board gaming period with Scythe

 

I spend time reflecting to wrap things up at the end of every year, and then create things for the new year, like a context, motto, themes, and this year some main objectives.

I had a board game design idea a few years ago that I hadn't progressed with so it's on the list for this year (I admit it was last year too, I just didn't do anything about it then).

Anyhow, we had someone missing for our regular roleplaying game night with friends so I suggested meeting at Loufoque, a board game café I like, and trying out a quite big game. I suggested Architects of the West Kingdoms because I haven't played it, but someone else wanted to try Scythe, the game designed and published by Jamey Stegmaier (Stonemaier Games), and featuring beautiful artwork by Jakub Rozalski.

I'd played Scythe, though years ago when I was in Chicago. I also had the chance of having Jamey Stegmaier on my podcast back then, you can check the episode out here. Jamey is incredibly generous and prolific with the amount of interesting content he shares: perspectives about the board gaming industry like about how they're affected by recent tariffs, publishing advice, design focused content, and much more.

It has a few different moving parts about it, though I'd probably describe Scythe as an engine building strategy game, with wargaming elements. It looks like a wargame with it's big alternative 1920s steampunk-ish mechanical engines and hexagon tiles, but it isn't really exactly that. 

It may look intimidating, and clearly designed for a large American size table - we barely had space for drinks, though actually I love the way it's designed such that it is quite easy to grasp what you can do every turn, so tactics, and not so much analysis paralysis (well sort of, more on that in a second), and yet lots of depth and moving parts from game to game to think about strategy.

I totally lost but it was a fun game, good to test it again. I went on to play the digital version I have on Steam over the weekend, which is where the analysis paralysis kicked in for me, in front of my laptop playing 3 computer AIs (medium level difficulty) and getting absolutely beaten every time, trying to understand wider strategies to better understand the intricacies of the game.

I also played some Terraforming Mars, that I'd forgotten I had as a digital version, and then a friend invited me to join Board Game Arena, so I started playing a few more games there too. My user name is Hippowill if you want to add me as a friend and play a game some time.

I started a new notebook with design notes for my board game idea, I'm pretty clear what the theme and design goals are, but I wasn't too sure of mechanics to quickly start prototyping and playtesting. After a few new games tested and a few podcasts, talks, design book passages from my shelves, I had an idea last night for a starting point that I'm happy with. I'm not exactly ready to talk about it just yet, but I will do soon, to document the process.

I had been trying to find specific processes and/or methodologies, starting with the Board Game Design by Joe Slack (it's all right though I think you can find many free ressources online instead of this one), and Jeremy Holcomb's notes in The White Box board game design workshop (it's a useful toolbox of things).

The main thing I keep up with is rapid prototyping. I have a tendency to start things and not finish, or study and daydream rather than do. At the very least I have made more progress than in all of last year.

Publishing videos: 100% of winners gave it a chance

 

I've been publishing podcasts on and off since 2015, mostly audio first, and mostly video streaming since 2020. Thoughts for those thinking about similar ideas.

My main Ice Cream for Everyone podcast has been on a hiatus since the pandemic; at the moment I publish these conversations with my friend James D'Souza. We call them our creative sessions.

During the first pandemic lockdowns, James was making efforts to create and share interesting video classes for his pupils. He was about to give his class an assignment about marketing a board game business, and reached out asking me to record an interview for his class.

That reminded us how much we enjoyed chatting, and given I'd just began teaching as well, we came up with the idea of answering recurring questions from his high school pupils, and my advertising communications students.

That was Teaching Tangents and we made two seasons of it before feeling like we were repeating ourselves. We wrapped the show up, and looked at what was next, and came up with what might be an unusual mix.

We really like having a frequent chat sharing what we're up to, I find them generally encouraging, inspiring, and agreed we might want to keep talking somehow.

The last show wound up partly because we didn't care to spend too much time to formalise, improve, or promote it. 

That said, the idea of being live streamed was appealing. 

We like doing it and occasionally (surprisingly, even), someone of the average 1-10 viewers per video comments and says they enjoy it too. 

I guess it's our own dance like no one's watching version of Wayne's World. 

It's just us talking and geeking about books, movies, games, personal knowledge management, note-taking, technology, music, meditation, coaching, work, play roleplaying games, etc. It's pretty random.

Yesterday we talked about the Tales from the Loop tabletop RPG, inspired by Simon Stålenhag's art, which also led to a series on Prime Video I haven't seen just yet. We also talked about note-taking apps: Logseq, Roam Research, Evernote, Obsidian.

I'm sharing this because we both hear about students' (or clients) aspirations to publish videos, or podcasts. 

Just as an example, Youtube has 2.6 billion monthly active users, and only 4.4% of them have created their own channel. Around 321,100 channels have over 100k subscribers ; around 32,300 have 1M, and only 5 over 100M (source).

The piece of advice I read most often as I was planning for my first podcast seems correct; the most important is to find something you enjoy doing even if few people see or listen to it - which is what's most likely.

It begins with making something and publishing. Keep it simple and get out there to begin with.

As the old French Lottery slogan used to say: "100% of winners gave it a chance" (100% des gagnants ont tenté leur chance).

Dragonmeet 2015 Tabletop Gaming Convention

I was at the Dragonmeet tabletop gaming convention in London last weekend. I’ve started mentioning it around my blog, website and podcast that I’ve been interested in tabletop gaming for a long time and I’ve been actively getting into it this year. I’ve also started putting more time into what lessons can be brought from tabletop gaming into other areas, particularly with work in marketing strategy and planning. My talk at the European Planning Conference was about that, I’ve already mentioned I recorded it and I’m going to publish the audio as a podcast episode soon.

I met with several interesting roleplaying game designers, for some reason several of whom were science-fiction themed. I don’t know if it’s my own interest these days leading me towards those, or if there were more science-fiction themed roleplaying games who had stalls.

I attended a few different seminars, including announcements for Pelgrane Press and was particularly interested in finding out about a recently published collection of original story games – that’s a style of games somewhere between a board game and a roleplaying game, where players typically build a story together. It’s called Seven Wonders, an anthology of seven games from different authors. I’m interested because most of the game authors / designers are in large majority women, and because the topics were out of the ordinary fantasy or science-fiction tropes. These games propose questions like what you be ready to sacrifice to protect your family, what happens back at the village when the heroes are gone adventuring, or how dystopian societies come to be. Unfortunately the book was sold out by the afternoon when I thought of buying it, though there will be a new print run soon and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’ve heard a lot of good feedback and reviews from Sarah Newton’s game called Mindjammer. The game is already published though she is currently running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project to for new adventures to be written within the same science-fiction universe, and there’s also a novel. I just backed the project, for those interested there are several levels of participating where you can save on buying the main book and game at the moment. I talked about the project with Sarah, she has been working on it for several years and hearing the description made me think of Iain M. Banks Culture universe. I’m apparently not the first person to say that, even though Sarah hadn’t read any of those novels when she starting writing Mindjammer. If you enjoy The Culture novels, I’d recommend checking it out.

I also met Carlos of Burning Games who successfully crowdfunded a science-fiction themed roleplaying game called Faith, with the interesting fact that it presents itself like a board game, with a lot of tokens and cards typically not needed in a tabletop roleplaying game. It intends to be a half-way to introduce people to roleplaying games, which is an interesting idea. I also met with Ed of Imagine RPG and talked about his sci-fi game called Era: The Consortium, for which he wrote 500 years of detailed and playable setting history.

There were many people playing and testing all sorts of games. I had the opportunity of trying Microscope, an ‘indie’ game. It’s pretty interesting, though I’d barely call it a game; it is a methodology for narrating periods, events, and scenes in the history of a civilisation (or of whatever you want I guess). There were many interesting ideas I think I can steal for brainstorming sessions and workshops, I bought the pdf and I’m going to study this a little further.

The convention is also an opportunity for game designers to test some game prototypes. I had fun meeting with Henry and trying his wrecking ball game prototype. The principle is simple and a great idea: you have to build a tower with cubes, try to destroy other people’s towers with a wrecking ball or a demolition truck while protecting your own construction. We talked about the best way to balance this kind of game, how much the pieces should weight or what size they should be, etc. I wish Henry luck and success with the next steps, at least it seems like a great idea for a game.

I attended a live recording of the Ken and Robin talk about stuff audio podcast, both of them are quite known and successful writers and game designers, several of the games they worked on were for sale during the event as well.

It was a great day, I was just a little disappointed by the fact that the attendance seemed to be pretty old on and very male skewed. I’m not sure if it’s representative of the event in particular or of hobby gaming in the UK though. Women are typically in minority from what I could see in similar events in France, maybe 25 – 30% women, where in this event there seemed to be like half that many unfortunately. Lastly, it was almost entirely caucasians in attendance. A little too stereotypical, mostly full of aging white dudes…  Even though I believe that hobby games are evolving in a good way, generally growing as a category and becoming mainstream in the past few years, there’s probably still more that can be done to encourage new people to play these kinds of games, including women and other ethnicities.

With my friends at the French tabletop roleplaying podcast Les Voix d’Altaride we are preparing for an episode on the topic of women and roleplaying games (in France / French speaking countries) and have already collected over 300 responses from an online survey to ask people about it, I’m looking forward to analysing the results.

Spiderman: Web of Shadows

I just came across the trailer of a new Spiderman video game, apparently coming out in October this year. Apart from the very cool fact that you can see a symbiote infested Wolverine in the video, I checked the website for the game and I thought it looked pretty cool as well, check it out.

I like the map navigation system with goodies to unlock, but what's even more surprising and really intriguing is that it claims that members of the website community can influence aspects of the design and development of the video game, which I think is very cool.
I haven't fully looked into it, but as I understand, players will have a lot of freedom of choice in the game and are reflecting that in this campaign, apparently people could lastly vote for the artwork featured on the Xbox 360 game packaging and before that people chose the model who would be playing Mary-Jane in the game.

Good example of interactivity and involving the users in the creation of the product. I would call that an interesting example of Wikinomics applied to the video games industry. I wonder how many people are registered on the website. I checked the site forums and there are over 6,000 posts in total; I don't know when the site was launched, but it sounds pretty healthy for a video game site.

That said, the game strangely looks much alike another I came across, whom apparently everyone is talking about these days; namely [Prototype]. You can view the trailer for the game here. Also set in New-York and and apparently completely open world, where the player is pretty much free to roam as they please. I'll have to check what they're doing for their online campaign...