Brains and Themes....

 Left for dead has always been one of my favorite zombie games ever created. It was fun and had zombies in it. So in a sense it had a heavy influence on me when I created my board game. Its theme was all about surviving the hordes of zombies that came after the player and to get to point A to point B and as always the player would have close calls.

Church Lunatic: Who's there?
Frances:Let's see, I'm Francis, and that's grandpa Bill and, there's zombies out here, open the goddamn door!

  So like I said before I created my board game with left for dead in mind and always thought of a survival point in a house. ( another influence was 28 weeks later when the survivors were inside the house at the start of the movie) I felt that making a last stand  in a house would be appropriate for a zombie survival game because for the most part what would we have done?

A little joke about dead rising and left for dead.

So whats my game really about? Well its a simple for the human player its a survival game and for the zombies its your hungry and there's food in the house that is the essentially the mechanic of my game. So how would I make a theme for my board game? Well using the little joke between the two company's and my countless movies of zombies I seen in the past ill use a simple theme........... Its a little cheesy but in all honesty it fits the game perfectly.(Unless I think of something even cooler)


"Stay Alive"

Play testing a new board game

     I scraped my original board game because how complex it got when I added the money mechanic and the other mechanics of the game. In the end I ended up creating a survival game about zombies vs humans. If you play as a human you start off in a house where you must defend your self against numerous zombie opponents. As a zombie player your goal is to eat the survivor. Although the first play though kind of put me in a bad mood because of how bad it was it started to get a little better when some good feed back.

So lets get down to play testing
When I began play testing with kids in motion design they seemed to enjoy the game. However as we continued the game I noticed that some of the rules didn't make sense. Aside from flaws I knew of from before I asked the kids who play-tested the board games what they would like to see added or removed and I got a range of improvements that I can work on.

1.Necromancer- For zombies either roll a certain die and be able to place a necromancer down, He will then be able to raise a dead zombie up that was killed previously.
2. When a zombie is killed have his body become a barricade that zombies and humans must walk around.
3. Increase Health and damage so it feel like we do more damage with each of our shots.
4. Add an ability Encroaching Fear. When zombies have surrounded the house the human survivor began to panic and his roll become halved.
5. Repairable walls and or fortified walls/windows.
6. A House kit so they may build the house they like to live in during this attack.
7. Add a way humans can improve/ reinforce the house.

There were other suggestions and I only posted a few up here but the ones up here I do like and want to implement them into the game. I was always thinking about adding abilities to help balance it out for both players but I still feel the humans are at a disadvantage and the zombies don't have enough fun while playing.

I ended up making my forms and handed them out to people who played my game
On a scale 1-10 how much fun did you have playing this game?
What mechanic did you like the best and what the least?
Do you feel like certain players need to be balanced our or power up?
If you could change one thing about the game what would it be?
Would you play this game again?
I ended up getting good feed back on the play tests and not to bad for it still being young in the process of development.

Brainstorming for Print and play board game.

    I have been playing with a couple of ideas on what to make for a print and play game. One of the ideas involves 2,4,6, or 8 players. The main goal of the game is to destroy the enemy's main base. Each player gets to choose 1 out of the 4 hero's  to play as. Depending on what team you choose to be on changes the classes of hero's  that you can select from. Each player will start on their side of the board and roll dices to move around the board.  When encountering an enemy hero on the board you would have an option of engaging or not. By engaging in the combat you have a chance to win a treasure piece that will improve your chances of taking out the enemy fortress. However you may choose to pass up this option because while two players may be in combat a team mate can enter the fight and gang up on a player to kill them.

      It's still in the early stages of play testing but I should have a board made soon.

- Hero class game

- Board/Map will have unique attributes to them

-Fighting will either be card based or dice based or both combined

   

Sword and Sail

SWORD AND SAIL

The goal of the game:  To completely occupy a country with your troops.

Mechanics:

Sword and Sail is a strategy and chance card based game. The chance part of the game comes from the 16 randomly shuffled land cards that allow you to play your infantry on the map. These cards also can tilt the balance of power extremely easy between players, they can allow you to reinforce your troops or cause a distraction to the other players in your favor.

The space on Sword and Sail is a 2D card based strategy and chance game. However the players who may or may not want to prolong the battle or end it in a swift attack control the game space. The cards being drawn to allow action on the field are also constantly changing the space.

Objects, Attributes and State:

The objects in the game are 14 land cards, which are placed in the center and reshuffled once the cards are all used and the game is still going on. 1 Game board of the map of countries and state to control the territory. 210 cut outs of an army, but each player receives 30 infantry tokens and 12 ship tokens.

Actions:

Players turns are broken into 3 actions steps everything consumes 1 action point (AP) to do so.  By using a Card drawn from the middle the player used 1ap and places a troop on the field. If he or she chooses to move his infantry to the next space that to also costs 1ap. In that fashion players are able to frequently able to harass another player from completing his goal while you try to accomplish your own.

Resultant Actions:

 Because the game revolves around empire domination players will try to hinder another’s player by blocking movement into another location using their armies or go into war to claim a territory.  War has its befits and negative aspects to. The good thing is you killed his army and now can claim the state, however the bad part is by taking out his army you also lose a portion of the army you attacked with.

 Rules

Skills

The skill of the game comes how you can manipulate situations into your favor. Again this is a war-based game where you always want to stay a couple steps ahead of your opponent and make battles fall into your favor. A simple version of chess and risk would be best to describe the skill needed to play this game.

Ty making a move before I crush his puny attempts of world domination

Our armies scattered through out the map

Army slowly moving into play

This was a fun game to play. It had some broken mechanics but we found that if we tweak two rules the game would last longer and be easier to do combat with each other. The game seems more ideal for 3 or more players playing at a time. But by tweaking two rules when battling for a territory we can move two armies for the cost of 1 AP and also if it’s a two player game you need to control two counties in order to win.