Playing a two-player game of Smash Up
Smash Up made a big splash at Gen Con this year, and you can expect a review soon (after I get caught up with PAX and my trip to Taiwan). It’s a “shuffle-building” game: you pick two factions and shuffle them all together — that’s all the deck-building that’s required. With combinations like dinosaurs and ninjas or robots and wizards, you score points by attacking bases with your minions, and wreak havoc with action cards. It’s an easy-to-learn, fast-playing game.
Eric Reasoner of Coffee Haus Games tries out our Watership Down prototype with GeekDad Erik Wecks.
Erik Wecks and I have been developing a board game based on Watership Down for several years (with a long break when I moved to Kansas), and we made a lot of good changes after playtesting it at GameStorm in March. We decided we’re ready to start showing it to publishers, so Erik made up a couple of playtest sets (with a printed board to save on setup time) and we broke it out a couple times during the convention. It still needs a little tweaking, but we made a few contacts and are hopeful that we’ll be able to finalize the rules and send it out to some folks soon. Of course, one big looming question is whether we’d actually be able to get the Watership Down license or if it’ll be some more generic title, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it (or perhaps float down the river on a raft). In the meantime, it’s still way early for a Kickstarter campaign but you’ll definitely be the first to know if/when it happens.
Eric Reasoner, pictured above trying out our game, is Sales Director for Coffee Haus Games, which distributes a lot of games that don’t have US publishers. A few that I spotted that looked interesting were Drako, a two-player game about three dwarves vs. a huge dragon in a tight space; Vanuatu, a game with “programmable actions” and some auction mechanics; and Sheepland, in which you and your opponents are shepherds moving your sheep around in the same field.
An upcoming Looney Pyramids game: Pink Hijinks
At the Looney Labs booth, I got to meet Andy Looney himself, and got a signed Fluxx card that lets me brag about the time I met him. He showed me an upcoming Looney Pyramids (formerly Icehouse) game called Pink Hijinks. It’s a two-player game on a 3×3 grid using three of each size pyramids and a die. Your goal is to get three pyramids of a single size into your home row, one in each square, with nothing else there — or, get all of the pyramids into your opponent’s home row. You roll the die to see what piece you can move, and anything stacked on top moves with it. Also, anyone can move things into someone’s home row, but only you can move things out of your home row. It’s a simple idea but lends itself to some really fun gameplay.
Game designer Rick Collins explains the rules of Scrapbots (prototype).
One of the fun things about any gaming convention is getting to try out things that are still in development — you get to give input on the gameplay and make suggestions, and also see a bit of the game design process in action. I met Rick Collins at GameStorm earlier this year; he does Studio Support and Game Development for Game Salute. But he’s also a game designer, and showed us Scrapbots, a mashup of Mechwarrior, Battlebots, and Junkyard Wars. The idea is that you build your bots from the scrap heap and then send them into the arena, where you earn points for smashing each other and knocking parts off the other robots. If you die, you just grab some more parts and send in another bot — it’s all about pleasing the crowds. Collins hopes to finish tweaking the game for a 2013 release from Clever Mojo Games, so I’ll be watching for this one.
Fun fact: in the photo above, Randy Newnham and Julian Leiberan-Titus of the Story Realms team are also learning the game. (Angie Hickman Newnham is to my right.) Also, in the left background, I think that’s Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games.
