Dragonflight 2023 Recap

*A quick 2-player game of London, at Dragonflight 2023*

Dragonflight is a Seattle area convention in its 43rd year. It used to happen on Labor Day weekend, but then a little event called the Penny Arcade Expo came along. PAX exploded and Dragonflight shifted sheepishly backwards on the sacred timeline.

That was nineteen years ago.

I don’t know a lot of people in the local gaming scene, apparently, or at least many who went to Dragonflight. So it was crowded but mostly with new faces. I hung out with those few folks I do know, browsed the wee dealer’s room, made some new friends, and spent some quality time playing games in progress.

Linos

This month I’ve been working on a game called Linos, picking up from a false start four years ago. Linos is an ancient-style abstract with twelve rectangular pieces, intended as a background game in a fantasy book. My first attempts were lousy, but this time I think I may have something good.

I played a lot of Linos at Dragonflight, including many solo games when I couldn’t find a player. I explored several dead-ends, including playing for coins, and trying for the lowest score instead of the highest. But ultimately I changed only one rule, no longer requiring that new pieces touch old ones. This makes for a few more opening moves, though player 1 is still stuck with 2 points no matter what.

I had a laugh with my friend Tim Beach, who kept outscoring me, that the game seemed to have a first-player advantage when he went first, but a second-player advantage when he went second.

You can check out the early alpha of Linos at its own new game page, here.

Whispers

I played a few games of Whispers to test the new deck art, and I learned a few things.

Last month I made two versions of the deck, one illustrated, and one with standard pips. The numerals and pips looked okay in the illustrated version, but the same numerals were annoyingly large in the plain version. That was unexpected, but see for yourself above.

Some players didn’t like the illustrations of oysters on the whisper cards (not shown - they are realistic but also oysters are gross) and it seems like the game will work better if the whispers look almost the same as the card backs, since a facedown card is also a whisper.

And, not surprising, the dark jewel tones are too close to each other, mostly because I set their layer to “multiply” instead of normal, and they just get really muddy and dark over that coffee colored paper. Some of the icons also seem a little “fat,” and I can’t quite explain why, except that I did shy away from sharp corners and narrow lines. I do like that fish, though.

So now I need to redo this art and play again, hopefully coming to a reasonable deck design for both versions. It was interesting to learn that indexes of one version weren’t necessarily the right size for the other.

Whispers can end really quickly, and I’m wondering whether this deck should have the numbers 1 through 8, not 1 through 6. But I’ll stick with the current recipe for now, and ask that question again when I play with a larger group. At the moment I’m focusing on the art.

London Vacay

I played London Vacation a few times with two players this weekend. My big question this weekend was whether this game fits comfortably on a 12x18 board, since that’s the best way to print the game at DriveThruCards.

I spent two days last week rebuilding the game entirely, because a different shape of board means a different slice of London, and therefore a different collection of things to see.

The new board seems a decent size, though I’d still like to see how busy it gets with six players. One nice thing about running the scoring track around the outside is that those track spaces can theoretically stretch into open table space when they need to hold multiple pawns.

London Vacation is not up on the website yet, but it will be soon. The theory is that once I have a decent core game, the same rules can apply to any location. I could make versions for Las Vegas, New York, a Devil Bunny theme park, or cities from Carrisor and Dew Point. London is just a starting point.

You might see the first open alpha of London next month. Meanwhile, I’ll play this version a few times at PacifiCon.

Tomb of the Ancients

I got some feedback from a prospective publisher that Tomb of the Ancients ran too long with two people, along with lots of suggestions for how to fix that. I played it with a friend this weekend and, although I’ve enjoyed the game at its full length, I can also see that it gets a little repetitive. So I’ve added a suggestion in the rules for shortening the deck for smaller groups. You can grab the new rules at the game page.

The Harvest

I taught a couple of friends to play The Harvest, but they were both like “Ow, My Brain!” And yeah, this one is supposed to be a brain burner. I am comfortable with a harder game, perhaps because I like it this way. We’ll see if any game publisher agrees with me.

Other Games:

New Game: I playtested a new game with a great theme but some shaky foundations, and had to tell the inventor that I didn’t want to struggle through mud to do battle with a coin flip. I was tough but fair, but I don’t think I made a new friend. He was about to go to Kickstarter with this thing, and he probably still will, but I keep wishing I could put my design book in someone’s hands and say “here, read this.”

Krypto: Back in 1963, Parker Brothers published a stark little math game by Daniel Yovich called Krypto, a card game where you have to use numbers and basic math to make other numbers. It’s dreary and difficult and exactly the kind of game that Tom Jolly loves, and I admit I’ve even made one or two of these games myself. But the best part of Krypto is the preamble to the rulebook, which basically says “one day Daniel Yovich woke up and asked himself, why are there no games that are amazing and fun, and so he made this one.” Sure, Parker Brothers. Sure.

Thunder Road: I didn’t play this game, but I watched my friends play many times. Thunder Road: Vendetta is a reprint of a 1986 Mad Max style game, brought back to life because that genre will never die. It has some fun and familiar mechanics and it reminded me that I have a perfectly good half-done game called Stop The Truck that deserves its moment in the sun.

Videos: I watched design videos on YouTube every morning before the con. The first was Ben Brode’s 2023 GDC postmortem on Marvel Snap, where he declares that all games are built with mechanics stolen from other games (but, Ben, where do those mechanics come from?). Next it was Richard Garfield’s talk on Luck in Games from ITU in Copenhagen 2013, which I find represents some thinking that I believe is out of date. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career repeating these points, but now that I’m seriously attacking my design book, I have to reexamine how much of this is actually true, and how much is just easy to say. So watch and learn, and see what seems right to you.

And if you’d like to watch me ramble about fun in games, check out my recent interview on Board Game Design Lab.

Pacificon Recap 2023

RinCon 2023