Tabletop Mentorship Stories

 …That’s a terribly misleading blogpost title in search of some grain of ‘cleverness.’ As all participants of the Tabletop Mentorship Program should know, this past Saturday (yesterday as I write this) was “ Round Table Da y.” My day started before dawn and ended after nightfall. I joined five very different round table discussions and managed to squeeze in my weekly D&D session and went on two quick excursions with my daughter, just to get out of the house and clear my head a bit. Being of the mindset that if you are “on time” you are late I signed in to each session a few minutes ahead of schedule and as a result ended up getting the additional benefit of a few minutes one-to-one in most sessions with the roundtable “leader.” My pre-dawn session was on Prototyping and Production with Geoff Engelstein. Our one-to-one was very small-talky. We’ve exchanged a few Tweets in the past – and my experience has always been that he is nothing if not approachable and friendly. ...

The Queen Must Die is a long game.  Not Twilight Imperium long. But well over an hour, realistically two even without the shackles of Tabletop Simulator. For the first half of the mentorship that was my big goal – to trim the game down. And I knew it was happening – but I really couldn’t know for sure to what degree thanks to the ‘playing-one-handed-with-an-oven-mitt-on’ experience of playing on-line.   What was important was that the game had been trimmed enough that I was no longer feeling like that was my main issue. I even said, out loud, that I felt like the low-hanging fruit was getting to be pretty small. Never say that stuff out loud. Right? I knew that I needed to play the end of the game more. Due to the length it was not uncommon for us to not get to the endgame in a playtest. And the endgame is one of the outstanding ideas of this game. And not by a little-bit. Consistently it was what people who I explained the game to keyed in on as the most exciting elem...

  I would say I'm a decent traditional artist. But I want to draw what I have seen, rather than what I see. Here's an example of my most current work I've written and illustrated, "The Great Zodiac Race" , a D&D 5e adventure that  is a story of Chinese mythology and the origins of the Chinese Zodiac and Chinese Lunar calendar. Adventurers are able to re-enact the Great Race to determine the Chinese Zodiac and standard measurements of time within China.    The cover is painted with acrylics and on canvas. It tells the story of the Great Race that determined the Chinese Zodiac, the order in which the animals came in and how they arrived at the finish line. There's even the environments and objects you'll encounter in the story painted there.  And it took 7 tedious hours.  I entered the Tabletop Mentorship Program with the goal of improving my digital art illustration skills. To create some concept art for the second revision.   But on...

Sunday again.  This is a regular part of my cadence. On Sunday my playtest pool for The Queen Must Die knows I will be testing - the only question is "what time?" They are in many time zones, so I shake it up for them... okay - as dictated by the specific openings in my schedule. Gawd, I am thankful for them. It's a deep group and I can rely on getting the 3-6 players I need once a week. And they are all players only - no designers. I don't need to trade game testing with them. I want to stress - this is a temporary situation. I DO NOT have an unlimited supply of goodwill flowing from a bunch of unicorn-gamers who just want to play test what ever digital cardboard I put in front of them. I know how lucky I have been to get this group going and supporting me. I do not take them for granted. They are here just for The Queen Must Die, and just for this three month window of the mentorship, and I will be lucky if I can tap anywhere near this number of them again for a f...

 As I find myself doing more and more playtesting, making smaller and smaller changes, and feeling just about ready to cross the pitch-ready finish line, I wanted to take reflect on the design process that has taken place over the past three years in hopes that someone finds something about it useful/relatable. Here we go! *Quick note: This is a continuation of my first post, "Homophobia Brought Me Here". You can read that first if you want some more context around my the design choices. -Design Pillars- When I decided I wanted to design a new game, I went in with some parameters to help guide my choices. Mechanical • Gameplay and rules should be relatively simple and accessible to a wide audience, while still providing a level of decision making that is engaging and challenging.  • Setup and play time should be relatively short (~30min), where several playthroughs are possible without inducing player exhaustion. • Gameplay should utilizing mechanics that eliminate individual...

Semi-Technical discussion ahead. A few people that have seen the game have suggested I try to simulate lots of play tests to make sure nothing breaks in the game. I'd heard about Monte Carlo simulations, but did not know how to make one. Searching online for examples didn't show me much in the way of examples either. So, I decided to brute force it using Excel and macros. I think it turned out pretty well, and wanted to share it with everyone in case others can use it too. Below is a description of how the tool works: 1st, a quick description of the game I'm modeling. Abstractly, it's a card shedding game, like Crazy 8's, or Uno. A game ends when one player plays the last card in their hand.  Cards can be identified by a color (Coded SF, R, H, M as the first character(s) in the description) or a suite (Coded S, C, M, A as the next characters in the description), and finally a number. An example of one of my cards is coded SFC3, or RM2. There are also starting cards ...

Shiny things. They’re the bane of my creativity. Those new ideas that seem like precious unique flakes of snow that you must give your attention to before they melt away. This week I had an ambitious goal – to tear apart a key aspect of The Queen Must Die that had its’ carefully engineered mechanics throughout other systems of the game and would refuse to be extricated without a critical breakdown. And then to come up with a leaner version that held on to as much richness as possible while being fast (hopefully play could be much more rapid) and less prone to analysis paralysis. It was going to be a lot of manual overhead, and apart from a few parameters and sub-goals I had basically no idea where to embark. And then things ran away on me. Badly. I try to leave a few evenings a week to hanging out with my wife. More often than not we just watch TV, and that is good. It shuts down my mind for a few hours and I focus on other things than “What is the expectation value of these custo...