Curufea

Almost playtested. Discovered I'd forgotten to upload one card type, so therefore when I dumped all the files together to print out, they weren't.

So no the total deck size (including the cards kept separate from the deck in play) has jumped from 140 to 155.

For all the cards that can be upgraded by playing multiples of the same kind - there are 3 multiples. This means that either one person monopolises on a particular thing (ie gets all the orcs, or all the poison dart traps) to get the high level versions; or people use the wild cards to upgrade. This mechanic is meant to keep the cards circulating (ie if you want an orc, you'll damage that person's dungeon to get them) and to reduce the amount of adventurer help (ie the best cards to help them are also the wild upgrade cards).

I'm also keen on putting all the rules necessary to play on a single page for people with short attention spans (i.e. Torben and anyone who knows of a social (sport/movie/whatever) event coming up soon and feels no guilt over interrupting someone explaining rules). It's happened to me before too, and I find it very rude.

I don't enjoy explaining rules by demonstrating, then finding out that only half the people were paying attention, and when the ignorant people query what has just (10 seconds ago) been explained - everyone who was paying attention re-explains.

However, I do enjoy that those paying attention retained the rules long enough to explain it :)

Never before have I been so tempted to buy a game console, let alone a handheld one....



What grabbed my attention-

Emulation Software Available for: MAME (retro arcade games), Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore VIC20/64/128, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, NeoGeo and more

Runs Linux

High-resolution OLED touchscreen with removable stylus

Charges via USB

It can play video files including MPEG4, Xvid and DIVX. You get a built in e-book reader, calendar, voice recorder... etc... you know the drill. 1GB of storage is built-in and you can expand on this with the SD (SDHC) card slot.

The only downside for most people will be "runs linux" which should imply to folk that you need a fair amount of computer literacy to get the thing working. Likewise the "emulation software" which also hints that not all games will work or be compatible.

But still...

I've finished writing up the cards, and almost finished making prototypes in photoshop.

I'm happy with the rules as they are and I think it's suitable for playtesting.

When I've uploaded the cards to the site and made thumbnails, I'll post again.


[edit]

First lot of cards uploaded 52 of them. Looks like the deck will be about 3-4 times that amount with the multiples needed.

http://www.curufea.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=DungeonBuilderCards

The Background:

Various commentators came up with great ideas, some of which I'll steal for my game (thanks!), but sufficient for themselves to create their own games as well (I'm kinda diverging in concept from them too much).

The Challenge:

So I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a challenge - make your own dungeon building game. Either board, card, war or a mixture. The prime focus is building the dungeon, but it is also necessary that adventurers are part of the game and will be destroying your dungeon.

The winner:

Either we take ideas from all games and make one game, or one game is the outright winner.
If you're not Canberran, you'll need to make copies of all entries and playtest all of them (bit task)

The prize:

All the art gets done (by me if no one else is able/wants to) and it's made to look professional.

My entry:
http://www.curufea.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=DungeonBuilder

My current thoughts are that I'm simplifying. I'm dropping ingredients in favour of multiples of the same card for upgrades for example. I've also simplified what things upgrade into and nearly everything runs on charges of some sort.

Because of this simplification, buying major improvements for your dungeon now must come from your hoard - which means you need to kill adventurers in order to get more money.

Here's my idea of a player layout-



The traps and the monsters are kept separate from the room cards so they can be upgraded separately. The layout also shows that the player has all spaces filled.

I'm thinking of maybe limiting the number of major improvements a player can have to two. Not just for the ease of layout, but also for balance.
The improvement types they could choose from would be - affects monsters, traps, rooms, or the dungeon as a whole.

Well, I installed DK2 computer game and have been playing it a bit - it's been giving me ideas :)


I've had some further thoughts on dungeon building - that perhaps it may be best to make it more abstract and less literal.

Rather than having cards for rooms and corridors - to have cards for configurations. e.g. "labyrinth of tunnels" or "trapped area".

Possibly with each player only have a 7 card layout (or some number not yet determined) within which to build their dungeon and the adventurers progress down it in a linear fashion. The cards used can be a stack of different things - the basic room type, monsters and traps. There would be limitations on how many of each type of item you can place in a spot for your dungeon. If you get better room types, you replace them and re-stock.

The major improvement cards would be additional to the base dungeon.

Possibly one of the major improvement card types could even increase the size a dungeon could be?

I've put some mockup cards here-
http://www.curufea.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=DungeonBuilderComponents

Which tells me a few things -
1) Dungeons could grow large, so some kind of size limit will need to be enforced. Or dungeon building needs to be more abstracts (ie a linear 10 card dungeom max)
2) I'm now thinking that the player vs player use of failure cards in Dr Lucky might be a good model - rather than mainly using random chance to work out if adventures get past monsters and traps. Although in a reverse way - other players play adjustment cards to help the party succeed. So there would be a variety of power in how they affect tasks, the more useful dungeon cards would also be more useful on adventurers.

[edit]
In other news, I thought I'd play Dungeon Keeper 2 again, as I was contemplating Evil Genius the game :)
It seems there's an editor out for levels for DK2 these days - not only that but it comes with icons as separate graphic files. So I'll be using those for the card game.

Hmm, also the latest patches add more traps and creatures to the game. I'm quite looking forward to it now.

How would you design a competitive dungeon building boardgame?
How detailed would it be?
Would players of the game build both their own dungeon and the adventurers sent out to wreck other player's dungeons? Or would it be a collaborative effort of all players to build a single dungeon to stop the adventuring parties?

Further to the previous post on things I don't like. I said "haven't even mentioned where religion comes on the list - it's higher than sport by a fair margin oddly."

Which is mainly because aside from inspiring great evil, it has also inspired great art.

So my question to the blogosphere is - if religion wasn't there as the inspiration for artists and serial killers, philosophers and wars, would something else have been chosen to replace it?

Humans do after all, like to categorise and find any excuse for what they do (as shown in the eye colour bigotry doco).

I should add, that sport is a close contender for a replacement inspiration here :)

After a derisive mention of listening to a sports broadcast of the Ashes while boardgaming, I realised that I don't find sports the most offensive thing and worthy of the least respect. It actually ranks above some others.
So my order of things worth the least amount of respect is-

Sports
Gambling
Fortune Telling
Fortune Telling (Horoscopes)

As Horoscopes I find more abhorrent than other kinds of time wasting fortune telling.

On the plus side I think getting drunk is one up from sports.

For those worried about Mongoose discontinuing their current publications...

This is from one of the writers who posted on the Hero Boards-

In fact, the new 25th Anniversary PARANOIA rulebook is due out later this summer. The special "Black Missions" limited edition version has a CD that includes .PDFs of most of the Mongoose PARANOIA support line, as well as video interviews with the game's original creators and myself. The new rulebook tweaks a few rules here and there from the 2004 Mongoose edition, but all published supplements work easily with the new rulebook -- not that rigid adherence to rules is a hallmark of PARANOIA.

The wonderful kaffles has not only blessed me with space food icecream but also a 20th anniversary edition of MST3K - it includes 4 episodes and the story of the show.
We've watched two of them so far - First Spaceship on Venus and Laserblast. The first I fell asleep through - it turns out that early MST3K was adlib and unscripted, so isn't as funny as later seasons (IMO).
Laserblast was an amusingly pointless movie about teenagers without shirts (who are just as angsty as other movie teenagers) and claymation aliens.

We've decided that shelf space is more important than having lending copies :)

So we're selling the following-

Babylon 5 (all seasons, local region)
Crusade (as above)
Lord of the Rings (all extended movies, local region)
Jeeves and Wooster season 1 (local region)
Firefly (American region)

I just need to work out what a reasonable price is, and I'll put them up on work's email bulletin board.

[edit]
Prices will be-
B5, crusade & firefly - 20 each season
LOTR - 15 each box
JW - 25 for the season

Anyone get a thrill just reading that title?
:)

From- http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2009-06-21-alice-in-wonderland_N.htm

Make your ebook reading a complete experience....


http://smellofbooks.com/

Three down, three to go. Just finalising who plays what for Things that go bang in the night.

[edit]
Aleister done, just Victor and Ortensia left - yay!

My occasional difficulty is separating out people's minor secrets from their major ones. Because no one should know about their major secrets until round 1 of the game itself. It's occasionally difficult to explain one without the other.

FOR LEXOPHILES (THE LOVERS OF WORDS):

1. A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.
2. A will is a dead giveaway.
3. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
4. A backward poet writes inverse.
5. In a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.
6. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.
7. If you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
8. With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
9. Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.
10. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
11. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.
12. A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France resulted in Linoleum Blownapart.
13. You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.
14. Local Area Network in Australia: The LAN down under.
15. He broke into song because he couldn't find the key.
16. A calendar's days are numbered.
17. A lot of money is tainted: 'Taint yours, and 'taint mine.
18. A boiled egg is hard to beat.
19. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.
20. A plateau is a high form of flattery.
21. The short fortune teller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.
22. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.
23. When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.
24. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.
25. When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye.
26. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
27. Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.
28. Acupuncture: a jab well done.
29. Marathon runners with bad shoes suffer the agony of de feet.

A Robert Downey Jr. movie I must see. Even though I'm a fan of Sherlock Holmes. My love of pulp overides the purist :)

Another great video about innovative new uses of existing technology (like the Siftables I posted about earlier) What happens if you combine a webcam, gesture recognition, a mobile phone connection to a PC and a projector on a wearable device? You get a new interactive information interface- ( Read more... )