Tuskken has officially entered Game Chef 2016. Check out our submission, Sands Robot, which is available for free as a Print and Play game. For more information about Game Chef, check out this year’s theme and ingredients.
Game Chef: Designing in 9 days
We’re pretty happy with how it turned out as far as an idea. Designing something up in a week turned out to be quite the challenge. It took until 4 days in to have a complete ruleset, which is far beyond what I would have expected. From there, I brought the rules in to work and let the board game enthusiasts poke holes in it. There’s a pretty good contingent playing Risk Legacy in the lunchroom, so we had the luxury of a good focus group. The feedback proved useful and showed some early holes in the game.
From there, the details of the cards and board had to be fleshed out. This was my first experience using Card Maker, it was an absolute lifesaver at this point. I’ll be donating for sure. There are lots of claims about stability issues in the release, but it worked far better than half the commercial software you actually pay for. Damn fine work.
Anyway, I didn’t have drafts together until Friday. There’s a board game club near me on Camp Pendleton that just happened to have its monthly meeting on Saturday. A friend said I should bring it for playtesting, but I don’t totally feel right showing up asking for feedback when I have only been once before (and missed a few meeting since). Reluctantly, I agreed. The baby (who is 9 weeks right now) decided any plans of leaving the house would be unacceptable. Scenarios on paper had to suffice as our testing. This caught quite a few things and I think we created something that’s probably not broken. Hopefully we find out someday.
But oh no!
The poor art. Card Maker set everything up nicely, ready for Paul to blast in better images.The card listing wasn’t finalized until Friday, which I’m pretty sure is way too fast to try to put together decent artwork. Event still, just as everything was ready, a nasty illness took Paul out of commission. So, we get to see what happens when I muddle through with GIMP and Googling things like “unicode lightning bolt” to find icons. It could be worse.
Sands Robot is being released as version 0.2. Drop a note in the comments here if you decide to try it out! This game turned out pretty good, I think it might have a future beyond the design competition.
We wish everyone luck this year in Game Chef. In the spirit of the competition, congratulations to all for getting their entries done.