Taking a break...just kidding working on "Backstabb Project"

This week we will take a break to discuss a live action game, its similar to larping, and an ARG, but more like how to host a murder.

Backstabb is a project that i have been cultivating over the last 20 years.  It involves teams gathering information trying to solve a crime (or series of crimes). The winning team is the team that solves the crime first.
    This usually involves spreading clues out across a large area, a college campus works great, but we have used large parks and whole cities as well.
    The clues form three to four different levels with multiple on each level.  What that means is that a level on clue will give you hints about how to find other level one clues and a level two clue.  This is done so that not all teams will head to the same place at the same time, and in case if one clue is two difficult you are not stuck with no way to advance.  Each level one clue has a different hint about how to get to level two and so on.
    Some clues will require you to make real world phone calls and listen to messages, contact and interact with chat robots, figure out cypher codes and anything else we can figure out.
    Its a lot of fun, a good way for gamers to get some exercise.  Jesters Hand has plans to make a re-playable commercially available game with different difficulty levels available. Backstabb is a fun project, but it is a labor intensive effort and a good play test requires a huge amount of resources to do.  We will update ya more on this later.

A wandering eye: A break from the war.

Believe it or not, Jesters Hand has other projects other then siege.  One of which is a live action murder mystery that involves a scavenger hunt kinda thingy. Teams are assembled and are presented some clues that lead them to the next clue and so on.  One of the developers for Siege started this as a hobby about 20 years ago, and has been doing it annually on and off.  It was never really developed to be packaged and sold to the public, but we are looking in to the idea.  The current version has some pretty cool aspects, One is the use of Chat bots to act as kind of a non-playing character.  Thanks to a company that publishes some easy to program chat bots, anyone with a phone or tablet can access the the chat-bot and access some important clues to help finish the game.  When you add some Google automated emails and google voice mails to the mix, it all comes out pretty interesting.  We hope to be able to deliver a good repeatable project by the end of the year.  We will keep you up to date.  No back to Siege of Verdan.   

Into to Video!

We have decided to get a few how-to video's together for youtube.  This will explain game play, show you the game components, and some other fun stuff, I guess the only reason we have not do so thus far is that the rules seem to always be changing.  It would surprise the average person how much testing goes into the rules.  The game designer wants to make the mechanics  as fun as possible and as easy to learn as possible.  Ergonomics is the wrong word but you would almost like the system to be instinctive but still provide a sense of discovery while you play. These videos should help, and once we get up and running I hope to include a few reviews video's as well.
In fact if you are a reviewer reading this, shoot us an email.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFaomc_3SCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdeiaUBnrMA
More soon!

Everything has gone dark!

My graphics guy has finally convinced me that the picture is not enough for our cards. The bright white card, with black text is very easy to see, and with a small font (not yougi small but magic small) that we are using i thought this might be the way to go. how bout NO!!!!!!!
We re-designed the card to have a brown leather look to the background and a steel plate for the text. I am no graphic artist but I know what I like! I would love to hear from the rest of you on your opinions. The old card

Followed by the new version

So, i sent yet another set of cards off to the POD printer (TGC), and they came back way too dark. They do have an option for a print filter, but my perception was that even that came out lighter then the card in hand. So, again I have yet another valuable lesson: Make sure its light enough to read folks, have as much contrast between text and background as you can!

So we will spend about 8 hours on photo shopping 108 cards and re-entering them into the POD database. We do this all for you.

Next, the Collectors Edition box design.

Welcome to the cast!!

Siege comes with a huge amount of tokens, you need 6 different to tokens that distinguish between your different units, a token for your king (or queen), a token for your capital, and enough control tokens to show that you have control over a state (area). After a few play-tests where players are stacking up the tokens and having to dig thru them to do battle, and seeing big stacks of them fall over I thought that it would be nice to have some resin game pieces to distinguish between the units and the control tokens. Economic constraints have also dictated a smaller board so now I am having a bit of a spatial problem.  The solution was stackable game pieces with large designations on the side.  I figured the best way to go is up! 

Off to you tube I go to find out as much as I can about sculpting, silicon molds, and casting.  I think this will be too large an expense for the basic level game, but I do plan on having a Signature edition available so that people that have had a chance to play their friends copies may want to spend the extra amount on a nicer version.  What can I do to make a signature edition a little nicer?

Soon we will talk about rulers, and kings and what they bring to the game!!

The cost of war: Costs are going up and available rescources are going down

The economics of war, raising prices.

 

    After a few more play-tests a few things have become obvious.  The deck was too populated (see post “Distribution of Power”) and we have an economics problem. This is especially transparent in a four player game.  I never wanted siege to have a strong economic focus but I did want it to be a part of strategy and theme. After all, a small poor country is less likely to have a large powerful army then a huge wealthy one.

I decided to make a few more subtle changes to the board, I lowered the total amount of resources by about 3% this was not a huge number but in the 6 player version of Siege of Verdan the economics work pretty well and I knew a small change to the available resources in the 4 player version would multiply in a 6 player version.  I also didn’t want to add another complicated mechanic that changed how the 4 player game would work in comparison to the six player game. I am working on reducing the complexity of the rules, adding another rule just make understanding the game more complicated, another chance for something to be forgotten, and another chance to spoil a game experience for a new player.

The next decision would be a tuff one.  I am raising the initial cost of the military units by one point.  This will impact the game in two ways; first it will make a slight difference on the economics of the game (about a 33% change for most military units), but it will not effect the economics on the other cards (spies, assassins, explorers, and merchants). So now the start of the game will shift towards the non combat aspect, which means more politics, and economic building.  Secondly, since only a military unit can sac a capital city, it may help to close the gap between the first player out and last player out that make longer games unfriendly.  What we don’t want to happen is for it to have a big affect on the amount of time it takes to play the game. Heck, we just fixed that! Well we are off to play-test, wish us luck!