I guess I could try doing a monthly update, since weekly updates were clearly too difficult for me and several of the past blogposts have been kind of general “what’s been going on” style affairs.
1: Kepi
I released another boardgame! The main motivator for making it was that I had these wooden sticks that felt difficult to use because they were cylindrical and as such rolled really easily. I bought a cheap “Yankee scarf” for 1,5€ in the local dollar store equivalent to help with the rolling, and in the end was very satisfied with the overall look. The game turned out to have some stalemating issues, but a rule addition suggested by pinchazumos seems to have fixed that. Thanks! You can download the rules for free here.
2: First Planet Keke song
I almost-finished the first tune for this game, and decided to make a proper preview video to showcase it! There are little details that I still want to adjust in the song, but overall I’m happy with it. The game has also been coming along pretty nicely, although there’s plenty left to do.
3: Watercolours
I had a small notebook and decided to do some little paintings in it. It was fun to paint again, and the small size ensured that being more haphazard about it didn’t feel bad.
4: Summer cottage
I spent a couple days at our summer cottage. It was neat! Photo not mine.
5: New Baba tactics game work
I hadn’t worked on this for a while, so it was nice to get some new work done on it.
I posted about this boardgame in 2020 after building the board and pieces; it’s an asymmetric abstract boardgame based on the imaginary game Thud from Terry Pratchett‘s book of the same name. My initial goal was to reconstruct the game described in the book to the best of my ability; I had read about some of the other similar attempts some years earlier, but as far as I know I didn’t really utilize that knowledge in my own design. For example, the initial layout of the units was something that I stumbled into when considering Pratchett’s vague description of the starting position.
Anyway, this first version showed a surprising amount of promise, and I playtested it a bunch in late 2020, polishing the ruleset. Despite being quite happy with what I had then (and having built the above physical board and pieces from 2 cheap chess sets, acrylic paints, coins and pieces of old sock), the worry that the game balance was off in some hard-to-see way gnawed at me and I left the game to wait for later. There were a couple playtests every now and then over the years, but nothing substantial after that initial excitement. One cool detail is that I got a chance to briefly show the game to Vlaada Chvatil when he was visiting the Finnish event Ropecon last year. Thanks for taking a look, Vlaada!
As one might have noticed, this year has been quite active for me boardgame design -wise, and it seemed like a good idea to finally finish my Thud-like. I had already pondered on taking the game away from its origins, because I felt that it was enough of a separate thing that presenting it as a “fangame” would’ve felt a bit unpleasant. I did some more playtesting (thanks to quantumpotato for suggestions and playtesting help) and adjusted the rules quite a bit based on this – the 13×13 board became 11×11, one faction lost a fairly powerful move that seemed to be either overpowered or too weak, and the central Monolith piece became movable. I also changed the names of the components and the game to represent divergence from its origin, and thus Piiri was born.
I’m a bit wistful about the original 13×13 version of the game, so it might be that I’ll return to it at some point to give it another try. However, this 11×11 version seems to work ok, and as such it makes sense that this is the “official release”.
Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…
Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.
Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).
Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:
My birthday was a couple days ago and a friend made me a cool birthday Baba card! It’s cool!
I’ve also updated the Paper Puzzle collection with the Equal measures puzzles, as well as a new Diagaquarium puzzle. You can see that below alongside another new Equal measures puzzle.
Hey, it’s been a while since I put out a new paper puzzle type! This one is apparently very close to various other types, especially Belarusian snake; I’m quite happy with how the puzzles feel!
I posted some drawings I doodled as a part of a Stars Without Number campaign my friend is running earlier this year; I’ve since drawn more of them, as well as painted a couple other small pieces, so have at you:
I’ve been working largely on my solitaire collection; the project has grown during development, going from the initial plan of 13 solitaires or so to ~24. I’m currently working on the 17th solitaire of the bunch, and while there are a couple potentially nasty ones to implement, I should be done relatively soon. Maybe? Audio is kind of an open question at the moment, I haven’t done that for Löve2D projects before.
Would you look at that: another abstract 2-player game! Like with paper puzzles, it seems that once I get into the mood, it tends to last for multiple things before I run out of steam.
Malsymmetric is probably the messiest of the three I’ve put on Itch.io (and also messier than the 4×4 one I haven’t posted on Itch but posted pics of earlier). I hope this won’t be too much of a problem, because the playtime appears to also be rather short. I playtested this (and the others) on playingcards.io, which I can recommend for simple boardgame designs, but I’ve (again) gotten the hankering of implementing a personal BGA-style rules-enforced boardgame engine, both for ease of testing and fun.
I worked a bunch more on this boardgame idea, and thanks to some good suggestions from pinchazumos & quantumpotato got it into a way better shape! Thank you! Anyway, the game felt like it was ready to be published to the rest of the world so like with Cylinders of the Wise, I put the rules on Itch.
One change was that the board size increased from 5×5 to 6×6, which meant that I had to craft a new board for the physical build. Pretty happy with the result – the hinges are way nicer although the board doesn’t sit quite evenly when open.
