cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/73992864

I am seeking a few groups for a final round of blind playtesting for my latest board game Hop Shot - a micro dexterity game for 2 players that plays in about 10 minutes inspired by the Japanese sport of pole toppling.

For those interested I am asking for $5 USD to help with shipping ($10 USD outside the US) as well as at least 3 plays of the game and 1 feedback form submission. The game is yours to keep.

Box top:

Box bottom:

Box contents:

Not a board game, I know: it's a game-night thing for the table, and I'd like to hear from people who run game nights.

Put it on a laptop or TV, everyone scans the QR, and each phone gets a few strings of the same guitar. Tap your dot when it hits the ring and the big screen plays your note; miss and the song has a hole in it. Nobody holds a guitar, but the table plays one.

In the clip four phones play House of the Rising Sun, and at 0:12 the bass phone leaves. The song keeps going with a gap where the low notes were. The clip is four phone screens recorded in a browser, not a filmed table.

Free, no account, nothing to install: https://overflow.games/unison/?door=lemmy-boardgames

Where does it fall apart with your group? Too easy, too few players, too loud?

I was planning a game night where instead of the traditional boardgame, we just combine the old games off-label to create something different e.g. risk map and troops with monopoly money and properties with scrabble/trivial pursuit as battles. I'm afraid it will get too complex and boring quickly. Anybody tried this before, any opinions? Suggestions of combinations that work well?

Naipe Cimarrón now plays Uruguayan truco, on the same table as the card game.Muestra, piezas, flor and envido, one-on-one against the bot, with a 40-card Spanish deck made just for the game. Free in the browser, enter the code TRUCO in the menu:naipe-cimarron.yunque.games/?d@boardgames#IndieDev #GameDev #BoardGames #GameDesign #Uruguay

BGG Link

Saw a stack of these for sale at Half Price Books for $10, new in box, and decided to give it a try.

It's a very very light weight game. You could teach it to most kids in a few minutes. But it's still basically a war game. There are objectives, units with different values, and some tactical decision making. It's perfect for introducing the basic concept to younger players or older players with little gaming experience.

Honestly at this price point it might be worth it just for the components, it seems like it would be pretty easy to design your own ruleset.

white's turn

let's call it a draw

First app, shipped solo, and I'd love a second pair of eyes on it from people who know what they're looking at.

Are You Clueless? is a party knowledge game for two or more people on one phone. Clues for a single answer appear one at a time; first to shout the right answer wins the card, a wrong shout costs a space, first to square 18 wins. Three of the eighteen squares are hidden and re-randomized each game — one lets you wager 1–4 spaces before you see the question.

The constraint I set myself was zero network. All 1,738 cards ship in the bundle, there's no account, no analytics, no ad SDK and no device identifiers, so the privacy label is a clean "Data Not Collected". It made the App Privacy questionnaire the easiest part of submission and I'd recommend the approach to anyone who can live without telemetry.

Free on the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6806418529 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ruclueless.game

Any feedback on the onboarding or the App Store screenshots especially welcome.

I know this is about trading card games and not board games, but I would say they're very close in principle, considering the complexity of games like Magic. I recently discovered the mysterious world of "grading", in which services like PSA will grade your card as to add some felt value to the card itself, because of its rarity and how near to mint it is.

We're talking about services that will grade the same card differently three times if you send it back, because of course they have no practical way of having an absolute meter for every possible imperfection.

Follow-up to my earlier post here about Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations a medium-heavy thematic Euro about the Congress of Vienna, the salons-and-gossip side rather than the maps-and-borders side. Still in development.

The game has two main routes to influence: throwing parties, and pursuing political goals. And playtesters kept quietly drifting toward the political one. Not because it was stronger, but because it was easier to understand. That's the kind of signal you can't argue with: if people avoid a whole subsystem, the subsystem is the problem.

The party side had three things wrong with it. Too much luck up front a bad opening draw could make organising a party painfully hard through no fault of your own. An unreadable payoff – you couldn't reasonably estimate how many points a party was worth before committing to it. And death by a thousand exceptions – the attractions, the music, the food each carried their own little pile of special-case rules. Elegant in isolation, chaos on the table.

So this iteration was, honestly, mostly deletion. I unified the three sub-mechanics into one consistent shape, cut the exceptions, and pulled the worst of the luck out of the setup. Same feeling as when I cut my rulebook down a while back. I removed far more than I added.

The honest cliffhanger: it's rebuilt, not yet tested. Playtests start next week, and I don't know whether I've made the party genuinely competitive with the political route, or flattened it into something too safe. Ask me in a while.

Attaching entertainment card design – I am still in wireframe mode, but it is much clearer then the previous iteration.

For the heavier-game players here: when players keep avoiding one part of a game, how do you tell whether it's genuinely broken – or just needs a few more plays to click? I read it as broken this time. Curious where others draw that line.

When I consider a game for buying, I look for playthrough videos, more than reviews. Do you do the same thing, and what are your favorite channels?

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/4526069

I have really enjoyed the story games of Ben Robbins. Robbins is probably best known for Microscope, where the players construct a timeline by telling events in a non-linear fashion. They are light RPGs with a focus on characters and story telling. Most games have no stats or even randomizers (beyond your fellow players). They are easy to get into and so light on rules that one easily may think that it isn't much to them, when they are constructed in a very deliberate way.

I just found out that Robbins has made a free version of his game Follow a couple of years ago. Follow is a game where the player characters go to perform a sort of quest together. It is a good opportunity to try a modern story game for those that are curious.

Cross-posted from "Magnagothica: Maleghast Print & Play – Condition Tokens" by @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !magnagothica@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Hint: You can comment directly with your lemmy account by visiting the post from your instance, like so: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72027414

The 3v3 mode is just so epic.

Cross-posted from "Magnagothica: Maleghast Print & Play – Unit Chips" by @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !magnagothica@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Hint: You can comment directly with your lemmy account by visiting the post from your instance, like so: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71978395

Sango Nini! Welcome to the land of Zairoo, an immersive, original world based on African and Global Black Diaspora mythologies and histories. We invite you to explore a universe where memory, myth, and identity are preserved through original storytelling and community-driven creation. Zairoo is the world’s first Pan-African fantasy a TTRPG, blending Afrofuturism, powerful mysticism, and intricate technology in a narrative-driven d6 dice game.

Based on my research after seeing it pop up on Woot, Amazon's returned-products division: https://home.woot.com/offers/robin-hood-sheriff-of-nottingham-game-6

Another entry on Amazon shows that it's running out (like it said "last one" or something), and prices across different retailers are strongly trending <$15 whereas on eBay it's still >$20, so it seems like they're trying to get rid of it. I feel mixed about this because it's a solid 7.0★, 1.66🧠 on BGG and I haven't played it yet. Then again, I know someone who owns it so I could just ask to eventually play it...

Hey all, prior to covid, a friend and I were playing our way through the lotr lcg. He had loads of store credit and bought several boxes so we could have any cards we might need, because (as i recall) there maybe only a single card in the initial box, but we might want (or need) multiples of those cards... So it necessitated buying several starter boxes. I imagine the game was probably playable without that, but it was a convenience for cash sort of thing that felt predatory to me.

I wanted to try the Arkham Horror rerelease, but thought i would ask here if that sort of thing was part of this as well? Or had Fantasy Flight decided to be less shitty with this game?

I appreciate input! Thanks!