The company went through some changes in the intervening years which led to Alchemy Bazaar being slower to see print than originally expected, but they are now actively developing it. Everest is in an odd little limbo. I wrote about this in that same blog post. But Everest might come from Grey Fox someday, I suppose. Fibercraft : Forthcoming in from Clay Crucible Games. Stay tuned! This was my second game design attempt, started during NaGaDeMon I wanted to build a card game where you had a Champion that you were adding powers to, but each round the Champions could be swapped around,.
Mansion Builder : Shelved. I put up three designer diary posts about this game, and I continued developing it for several months past the final diary post my last version of the game is dated July and the last blog post was April I took it to a local convention for playtesting, and it went okay, but not well enough for me to get passionate about polishing it. This was also about the time that I decided I needed to spend more time with my wife and less time developing and playtesting games, so I intentionally backed off for a while.
I never blogged about this game, but I demo it at a couple of local conventions. The funny story here is that it has been totally superseded by Mechs vs. A little known fact about MvM is that it was based on an older, never widely published game called Weapons of Zombie Destruction.
That game was designed by Stone Librande, who is a friend of a friend of mine. Minions came out. So, Robo Battle is on the trash heap. This is one you would only know about if you closely followed my tweets in early I enjoy Twilight Struggle , but I would love to capture a similar experience in a shorter play-time.
So, I started designing my own twist on it, where the two players are rival corporations trying to gain market share in a region. I could see coming back to this one someday. Clay Crucible Catan : Freely available! Take out the dice! So there you have it: The state of all of my games that have gotten at least as far as the prototype stage, as of spring Do any of the shelved games pique your interest?
Have you seen any of these out in the wild? The big message: Two of my unpublished game designs, Everest and Alchemy Bazaar , have been picked up for publication by Grey Fox Games. Woo hoo! Now, things are a long way from the end point right now, and there can be a lot of changes between today and the day that you can buy these games in a store.
But they have agreed that they want to publish both of these games in the next few years! Specifically, the man behind Foxtrot Games, Randy Hoyt. I was there for two separate one-hour sessions: One of them showing off Everest and the other showing off Alchemy Bazaar. Randy had apparently seen me talking about Alchemy Bazaar online and was specifically interested in checking it out at Speed Dating.
I wrote in detail about this event on my old Online Dungeon Master blog last year. He and his son had a lot of fun with Everest, and he was strongly considering publishing the game, even to the point of having some nice prototypes made up and sent out to playtesters. However, because Randy liked Everest so much, he decided to help me find a publisher. He was doing some demos of the game at BoardGameGeek Con last November , and he got a couple of people from Grey Fox Games to sit down for a demo.
They were really interested in the game, and Randy and I ultimately worked together to develop the game further for Grey Fox. By the time I was preparing for Gen Con this year, I had already had extensive discussions with Shane at Grey Fox, and he had already agreed that he wanted to publish Everest, though it would likely come a bit later in their production schedule.
Since he and I were both going to be at Gen Con, I set up some time for us to meet Saturday afternoon to nail down the details about Everest. We went through a demo with the updated rules, and while he liked the improvements from last year, he ultimately decided to pass on Alchemy Bazaar. This time it was two hours on a single game, Alchemy Bazaar. I talked to about a dozen publishers about Alchemy Bazaar, four of whom seemed to be very interested in the game. None of them got back to me before my Saturday meeting with Grey Fox, though.
So, Saturday afternoon I met with Shane at the Grey Fox booth, and we found a table in a slightly quieter area to talk about Everest.
I pulled out the prototype copy of Everest I had made for him, explained the rules, and we played through the game which takes about minutes. Shane was happy with it, and we talked about further development plans getting it in the hands of Grey Fox playtesters and such. As we were talking, I decided that I should at least mention Alchemy Bazaar. I had a prototype with me naturally , so I brought it out and went through things in a little more detail.
Shane was very intrigued, so I offered to let him take the Alchemy Bazaar prototype I still had another one , which he eagerly did. I also gave him a copy of Otters, because he has kids in the right age range.
Fast forward a few weeks to Labor Day weekend, when out of the blue I get an email from Shane saying that he and his friends had played Alchemy Bazaar, they really liked it, and Grey Fox Games wants to publish it! As I mentioned above, there are still a lot of details to work out.
It seems likely that Alchemy Bazaar will be published first and Everest second which is fine with me. As publisher-level playtesting moves along, we will likely try out some changes to both games.
But if all goes according to plan, you will eventually see two of my games published by Grey Fox! They are publishing two games that have already had success on Kickstarter, Draco Magi and Conquest of Speros , with Run, Fight or Die and other games coming in the future. It will probably be a while, so be patient! But when our gaming friends introduced my wife and me to Settlers, we fell in love with the game.
One complaint that seasoned gamers sometimes have about Settlers of Catan is that the dice create too much randomness. A smart player who builds settlements on hexes with numbers like 5 and 6 and 8 and 9 should get lots of resources because those numbers should be rolled a lot… but sometimes the dice roll a streak of 3s, and weird things happen.
However, I wanted to turn resource production into an interesting decision. Rather than rolling dice or drawing a random card to decide which hexes produce resources each turn, I wanted players to have some decision-making power over production.
The one-page PDF contains these rules condensed plus number squares you can cut up to use with your Settlers game I recommend printing on card stock.
But for gamers who prefer a bit less randomness in their Settlers game, this variant is a good fit. Please let me know if you try this variant with your group — I would love to hear about it! You can leave a comment here, or email me at ClayCrucible gmail. In the first two chapters of this Design Diary chapter 1 , chapter 2 I talked about the underlying inspiration for my auction game, Mansion Builder , and the different methods of conducting the auction that I tried. I was happy to discover that the basic game mechanics worked and were interesting.
Players were bidding on Improvement cards for their mansions the top row of cards , and then they were getting money from selling mansions with the right Improvements to the various Buyer cards the bottom row.
The problem was that I had 12 different Improvements, and it was hard for players to scrutinize the various Buyers in order to tell which Improvements they wanted. With a bunch of cards on the table, the text became overwhelming. However, I later discovered The Noun Project discussed a bit in an earlier post , which had all of the icons I needed. The cards now look like this:. Beyond the icons for the improvements themselves, there are two other things I want to point out.
This makes it clear that there are two different meanings for numbers on cards. The second thing I want to point out is that there are two different types of numbers now. In the first iteration that you saw above, all numbers were the same — money. I soon realized that it was important to separate money the stuff that gives players more options during the game from victory points the stuff that lets you win the game. The icons are still black and white, though, which needs to change being able to tell which icons are which based not just on shape but also on color will help.
In chapter 1 of this Design Diary, I described the initial idea for my work-in-progress game design, Mansion Builder. One of the first issues I had to deal with: How do I want to actually conduct the auction? How did I want this to work at the table? My first thought since it was at hand was to go with cards. Specifically, I used regular playing cards and gave each player a set of Ace representing 1 through 10 of a suit. When it was time to bid, everyone would choose one of their cards, put it face down in front of them, and then everyone would reveal simultaneously.
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