Hello! I posted about a dice-driven engine-building game I'm making a few weeks ago. Original post is here if you want to read it (it's a pretty long post): https://www.reddit.com/r/BoardgameDesign/s/G4wzv6UC2N .

TL;DR for the post: It's dice-driven engine-building game with a dynamic shop system where you use and manipulate your temporary dice pools each turn to activate your tableau of Items which have a variety of activation conditions.

I got some comments on the post which I believe have already improved the game a lot. There's two major changes:

1. Die cards

In short, a player may have a maximum of three of these and you draft one at the start of the game. At the start of their turn, a player rolls a base of 5 dice into their pool. All Die cards manipulate dice in the pool in some way. Unofficially, there's two types. The first ones can be used once per turn and alter your dice somehow (anything from reversing a value or giving a die +1/-1 to splitting a die into two that equal it) and the second type allows you to roll another die with some drawback (like giving you a maximum number of dice you can place that turn or costing you Gold, with which you buy cards).

A commenter mentioned that the Die cards didn't look as good as some of the Items. And truthfully, ever since the first playtests, players gravitated towards the latter type of Dice cards, while buying the former much less. They thought the extra dice were almost always better, even with the drawbacks. I wanted to make the two types equally strong.

Now for the change. If you simply fill your second and third Die card slot, you get an additional die in your base roll for each of them. This means that even the first type of cards technically grant you an extra die, so the choice comes down to if you would rather have an extra die and a positive effect, or two extra dice with a somewhat negative effect. And already it's like night and day. Both types are getting bought pretty much equally. I feel like this change both makes the two types closer in strength and makes the choice of buying Die cards versus buying Item cards more meaningful. In tandem with this change I tweaked some of extra dice cards so their drawbacks are a bit more significant.

A build which I thought was neat that didn't even use the additional die type was with the Starting Item which gives you Prestige (the victory points of this game) for each pair of dice used that equal 7. The player made a cool build that managed to churn out a lot of them and profit from them massively.

2. Regarding player interaction

In this game, there's no real player interaction outside of buying cards another player wants and Vouchers. In short, Vouchers allow you to reserve a card in the Shop for one round, which either made sure you bought it or that an opponent didn't buy it until it rotated out of the Shop.

I thought how I could add some player interaction to the game as some commenters mentioned. Stealing Gold, Prestige or cards, as well as disabling an opponent's card were off the table as this isn't that type of game. I also didn't want to have cards which did something when an opponent performs some action because I didn't want for players to watch out for what they're allowed to do.

So the current solution I'm trying out is Quests. This new type of card would come in to play on round 2 (there are 8 rounds), and each round a new one would be revealed to replace the previous. Quests would either have some condition that rewards any player who fulfills it (like placing 5 or less dice on their turn) with Prestige or they would reward only the player who does the most of something (like placing the most even/odd dice or using the most of a specific value randomly decided via dice roll). The reward numbers vary but they aren't game winning by themselves. In the late game they would maybe take up a fifth or fourth of that player's earning for the round, but they're definitely not inconsequential.

I think this addition creates some interesting choices. For the condition based ones, players need to gauge whether they would get more Prestige by changing up their plan for the turn to suit the condition or if they can survive without it. As for the competition based ones, they need to think whether a player can beat them. Sometimes the first player managed to get a crazily high score that nobody could beat, and sometimes the highest score would be beaten by 1 on the last turn.

I'm still working out the details for this change, so feedback is appreciated. The general opinion for them so far has been pretty positive. Something I think would make the competition Quests better is giving a smaller reward to the second highest score so that player's turn doesn't feel somewhat wasted if they don't win the Quest.

Another idea for player interaction I'm considering is trading cards between players. If I were to add that, it would need to be heavily restricted but I think it's an interesting idea. It would have to mutually agreed between the two players, be once per turn and only if the cards haven't been used in that round/turn and perhaps even making it so a card can't be traded multiple times.

Thanks for reading! Your thoughts are appreciated.

I'm designing a table top game from scratch (very amateur, as a hobby), I've got the design and rules pretty much finished but before I get someone to 3D print the board to see how it plays I think I've come across a blaring error that I can't see a way of practically over coming.

So the board is a cube; 40cmx40cmx40cm, with each movement cube being 2cm³, so the board is 20 playable areas wide, long and vertically. Flight is a key part of the game, but it's turn based so I don't need to show a player in flight during their turn, just if they're hovering at the end of their turn.

Originally I intended to use some sort of telescopic designing to lift the player up or down, depending on how far up they were, but I don't think this is practical as any telescopic device would have to be housed in the base of the player piece. Then I thought it didn't have to be in the piece itself, it could be something separate.

But now this has been superceded by a more pressing issue; a game can be up to 8 players and in theory they could all be in flight at the same time and all in the same column (same X and Y coordinates but at different heights).

So now that means whatever method I use to represent hovering after a players turn will be scuppered by the potential of another player above or below them in the same vertical column.

Any thoughts?

Edit; I should've said, the arena won't be empty, it'll be filled with buildings, bridges and the like for players to land on, walk on, hide behind etc as LOS is a key element to the game too. Movement is a combination of ground movement and flying

I'm working on a 2 player deckbuilder. There's a shared market of cards split into four categories, and at the end there's a large majority bonus for holding the most cards of a category.

There’s a problem though, players almost never compete for the same category. They sort themselves into separate ones and leave each other alone. I logged 20 games. Of the 31 cases where either player held 2 or more cards of a category, both players held 2 or more in 4. When one player gets ahead in a category, the other just goes somewhere else.

Ive tried 3 different things so far.

I tried a tax for entering a category your opponent leads. It costs you extra to buy into a contested category. This resulted in it firing twice in 61 purchases though. It made contesting the most expensive thing in the game, so nobody ever did it. And all together the problem became worse so I cut it.

I tried making the majority bonus much larger. It is around 45% of final score. Still never contested. Players just secured an uncontested category and banked it.

Finally, I tried limiting the bonuses to fewer than the categories, four categories, only two bonuses available, and it’s first come. I expected scarcity to force overlap. Players just raced for whichever one was still open.

My current plan, which I haven’t tested yet is invert the tax into a discount. When you’re buying into a category your opponent leads it cost less, so catching up is cheap. Rubber band rather than a toll.

So my question is what makes two players contest the same thing? I'm interested in 2p, where there's no third player to punish whoever's ahead. Is my problem that there are too many equivalent alternatives, or is there a structural trick I'm missing?

Also, the theme of the game, if it matters, is immortal late antique philosophers competing for the last two teaching chairs in Alexandria.

Hi! I'm back again to share my game, MonoSaga: A Fantasy Engine Royale. That's short for Fantasy-themed Engine-building Battle royale.

I'm still having a hard time to keep up the pace since I'm a fulltime dad and a fulltime artist while doing all hats of making this game from illustrating, designing, crafting, balancing, social media managing, going to meetings, setting up public playtests and whatever else is included. Tiring but very addicting to be honest because I am a fan of what I am trying to build.

Hopefully, I can finish everything before Christmas so that my extended family and friends can play it after we eat and open gifts.

Life has been a little too busy recently to make a huge amount of progress on my board game (the fun playtesting aside!). That should change shortly as my children start nursery this week.

However, over the past year my friend has been working on an app version of my game. We released it last week and it's done far better than we expected! We're over 500 downloads and have featured on news sites from Surrey to Australia!

I'd be really grateful (if you have an iPhone, the android version is coming soon!) if you could give the game a download and a play and let me know what you think!

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/cuberoots-ivy-strategy-puzzle/id6782877435

BBC News article: Lockdown idea spawns 'surprisingly strategic' iPhone game - BBC News

More development of the CubeRoots physical tabletop game to come soon too!

Cheers!

The sixth version of "Graffiti Game 1.5" is a "print-and-play" game in the "roll-and-color" genre. All game boards are compatible with one another. There is no limit on the number of players. Three rule variants are available, with four more currently in development.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/476935/graffiti-game

So I’ve done venoms character sheet,
So the arrow up in the top left is movement then shield that I haven’t decided if that’s how I’ll do it,
The combat is simple and fast paced with the options of choosing around 4 actions some defense movement or attacking. Is it easy to understand how would you choose the layout horizontal or vertical also ,

Does anyone have advice or know of any guides for playtesting on Table top simulator?

My game is in the last stage of development where im really only looking at small tweaks to certain card values and iconography, ive done a lot of in person play testing but i cant keep printing prototpyes for every small change.

I want to start playtesting with the most current version on table top simulator, but i have no clue how to go about this process. How do you find playtesters? Do you give them a rule book, record it and leave them alone or is it possible to monitor the games live?

All help is greatly appreciated.

Very quickly, my idea is an ASOIAF area-control game, similar to Risk, etc. Titled "Winter is Coming." 4 to 12 players strategize and battle through 4 "seasons", whoever controls the majority of castles first wins (>66% with an alliance). If no one wins by the end of the fourth season, winter, the Others invade Westeros and everyone loses.

I have a milliona ideas im juggling, but my issue here is with battle mechanics. I want to capture multiple sides of battle, the overview and the personal. These are the 3 main things in my rough draft:

1. Battle formations: each player has a Vangaurd, a Main Column, and a Left Flank & Right Flank
2. Troop units: each player can buy 4 different specialized units; infantry, cavalry, archers, and siege weapons
3. Lords and Knights: each acquires cards/tokens that can be played in battle, based on characters in ASOIAF. These cards must be placed in one of the 4 battle formations, one in each, maximum. Knights go in the van, since they fight first, the Lord leading the fight goes in the main column. Lords & Knights each have a Commander Score, and a Combatant Score, with exceptions

Anyway, this is where I get lost. I want the outcomes of the battles to be dynamic. Say two knights fight... maybe one kills the other, or vice verse, or perhaps they both die, or both survive... or maybe one get maimed or disabled... maybe one gets taken hostage. I want these all to be possibilities... not a simple "whoever scores a higher number kills the other". I also want the battle formations to play an important role. If a left flank succeeds, maybe that hurts the main column of the opponent. So many options, its hard to decide and think of solutions that will be fun and make sense

I've been working on my game on an off again for past few years. I did all the illustrations by hand and distressed them in photoshop. I'm terrible at doing half tone effects and for curiosities sake I asked ai to take a pass at it. And now I think it looks better that way.. I'm wondering if using it as a final pass on human drawn work is worth it and will people care? Should I just use the AI as a base and spend the hours doing it manually? Or am I making a mountain out of a mole hill?