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.
Don’t mind the silly name: it’s what I ended up with with the boardgame I posted about earlier. I got to playtest the game a bit and it seemed solid enough as it was, so I decided to call it done and put it on Itch.io. I also submitted it to Ludum Dare #53, which feels a bit silly in hindsight.
I had another idea and more components at my disposal and thus another prototype was born! The idea here is to get your cylinder to the opposing end of the board while preventing your opponent from doing the same. It has felt somewhat nice and maybe more promising than the earlier prototype so far, but for either a better judgement can only be passed once I’ve tested them against another person.
I made a small abstract boardgame! It’s so small, in fact, that all the components fit in a normal playing card box:
I’ve accumulated a lot of boardgame components over the past ~2 years because I was playing more boardgames in general and got the itch to design my own. To a large extent buying components was one of those unhealthy “I can justify this as vaguely useful and it gives me happy feelings” shopping habit things; I have currently more various game pieces, coins and other such bits than I’d probably need. Not great, but ideally I’ll eventually utilize all those bits and pieces in one way or another.
Anyway!! I recently read the book Lautapelien Historia (translates to ‘History of Boardgames‘) by Ari Saastamoinen; it was fairly interesting, although fairly lopsided in favour of chess & go. The book concentrating on abstract games (combined with the aforementioned accumulation of boardgame components) made me want to design a simple abstract boardgame. I’m not a very skilled boardgame designed but crafting the board and pieces was fun. I’ll probably post the rules here once I’m happy with them.
In other news, I’ve been steadily working on several projects for the past months. ESA2 progresses at a fairly steady pace, while the Keke rocket game and the Into the Breach -esque puzzler have had some chugs in development, followed usually by bursts of activity. On top of these 3 there’s also a collection of solitaires I’ve been making in Löve2D, inspired, again, by the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Compared to the others, this game is a bit more limited in scope, and as such I managed to even put out a beta version with 8 solitaires included (including Babataire & Babataire EX, now with more appropriate names)! You can download that version on Itch.io.
I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and have recently been leafing through his book, Thud!, again. The story didn’t grip me all that much the first time around, but now I’ve grown to appreciate it quite a bit more.
Anyhoo, the book features a fictitious boardgame called Thud. The book lays out some basic rules and features of the game, but leaves out a lot. I had noticed years ago that some people on boardgamegeek (iirc) had tried to construct rules for Thud. I was now struck by the urge to try to do the same, and to help with the testing (& because it felt like a cool and fun thing to do) I decided to build myself a Thud board & the necessary pieces.
I bought two cheap chess sets and repainted one of the boards from 8×8 to 13×13, as seen above. I also combined the rooks & pawns from both sets to get myself enough troll & dwarf units, respectively. A queen was transformed into the central rock structure. Since the cheat chesspieces were quite light, I glued coins under them to give them some nice weight and then glued pieces of an old sock under the coins for padding. The result might be a bit less sturdy than I’d like but it feels nice so far. Also I found an use for a black sock with a hole in it, so that’s extra good.
I’ll post the rules here once I’m happy with them!
