I’ve known Seth Jaffee for a number of years through our interactions at the Board Game Designers Forum (he goes by “sedjtroll” at BGDF).

A few years ago, Seth started posting and chatting about a game he was calling “Terra Prime” … which was a start on a space-based pick-up-and-delivery game with some adventure, exploration, discovery and — can’t forget to mention — hostile aliens.  Over those years, the game would come back up now and then, and I know he posted about it on his game design blog … but it seemed to fade from view until it popped up on Tasty Minstrel Game’s initial game offerings.

Now that the game’s been out for a few months, I thought I would send Seth an e-mail with a bit of Q&A about the design process that the game went through.  Here’s the way that exchange went … Read more

The game Keeps & Moats Chess is my example of the phrase “oldie but goodie”.  I came up with the idea for the game sometime in 2003 and released the PC game a few months later.  I am still getting contacted every few months about the game, and the free demo keeps a pretty consistent download traffic.  It does not use any special graphics or sound libraries (like DirectX), so it should work on most Windows machines found today (from Windows98SE all the way through Windows7). 

Like with a lot of abstract games, I’m not a very good chess player.  I’m way too impatient and aggressive and don’t have a natural ability to see the whole board and envision how things will play out a few turns into the future.  This was the initial basis for the design … Read more

Tonight I added a link to the free “Castle Danger” Print-and-Play Edition that can be downloaded from the game’s page at BoardGameGeek.com.

The download is free, and it provides everything you need to play the game.  Your only cost is the ink in your color printer to printout the game board and pieces, and the time it takes for you to cut out and fold the stand-up game pieces.

You can find more info about it on the Free Board & Cards Game Page.

One area of Jump Gate that has remained relatively stable since early revisions of the game, has been the types of Resource cards, their distribution and scoring methods.

The game has a number of layers of scoring, but the Resource cards will provide the main focus.  Because, while scanning and claiming Planets provides points for players, the main purpose of getting to the claimed Planets is to be able to harvest the Resources that are found there.  I wanted the game to encourage players to specialize in which Resources they were looking to collect, while having those Resources be randomly scattered around the Planets.  To encourage the specialization, most Resources score better when a player has collected more of that type.  This approach also adds in the strategic need to pay attention to what the other players are collecting in order to try to stop them from getting what they need … a bit of tension between wanting to collect *your* favorites, and stopping others from collecting theirs. Read more

(As I post this and see the card back graphic to the left, I realize now that I’ll need to update that one to include the udpated Gem and EnerGel icons.)

I got a few minutes over the weekend to get back into Photoshop and finalize the graphics for the Jump Gate Resource Card faces.  I’ve gotten great advice between my friend, Dan, and the folks replying to my feeback thread on BGG. Read more

I recently updated both the rules and the components for DareBase as I got the 2nd Edition ready for publication through TheGameCrafter.com.

While the 2nd Edition has quite a different look from the original, it really has essentially the same component list (a board, 10 Player Markers and matching Power Markers, Flags and 3 dice).  It was the update to the rules that was the biggest change. Read more

As I continue to get the site updated and fully functional, I just signed-up with FeedBurner today to improve handling of RSS Feed Subscriptions.

Now, in addition to registering as a site user and processing the raw RSS feed through your browser, you are able to use the FeedBurner links on the right to subscribe to the feed via your favorite reader and to receive the feed via e-mail.

I would really like to encourage anyone who might be interested in seeing what I’m up to with these game projects of mine to register in one way or another.

I tweaked the design a bit that I have shown-off a couple posts ago, and now things look like this (thanks to Gary Simpson for pointing out the discrepant lighting between the UI and the geometrics):

I just posted yesterday with my latest updates to the faces for the NavComp cards for Jump Gate.  In fact, I’ve even tweaked those a bit to add a little extra computer-ish flavor text — something to fill in some empty space on the UI without being a distraction.

Since then, however, I’ve stayed busy in Photoshop and redid the faces for the Resources cards as well. Read more

My first “Fellow Designer” post is about David Whitcher, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based designer behind PyroMyth Games.

I’ve known David over the internet for at least a decade, but only finally met him face-to-face at last summer’s Protospiel in Ann Arbor.

Once I had my website updated and planned on running a series of posts about other indy board game designers and computer game developers, it seemed an easy thing to start with David … and I e-mailed him a bit of a Q&A. Read more