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Ignacy Trzewiczek's Blog - Boardgames that tell stories
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Meet me!, Wednesday

Imagine Lucca

5 listopada, 2014 by Ignacy Trzewiczek Brak komentarzy

photo-gallery-of-4-stars-hotel-in-lucca-64Imagine old city. Italian, beautiful city with narrow streets, small squares and decorated gates. With small shops on every street and hundreds of small restaurants and cafes on every corner. It’s sunny in the day and it’s bright in the night too, with all those lamps and lighting from windows, cafeterias and moon. Imagine Lucca.

 

pobrany plik

Imagine convention that takes place in a whole city. Not in the exhibitor hall. Not in the convention center. Imagine convention that absorbs the whole city.  With exhibition tents on every square. With geeks on every street. With events, cosplays, fun taking place on every corner.

They say Gen Con has about 50K visitors. They say Essen has about 50K visitors.

Lucca has 180K visitors…

Imagine convention that takes place in a whole city…

 

zdj-cie 1 (1) zdj-cie 2 (2) zdj-cie 3 (2)

zdj-cie 5 (2)

Every little shop celebrates convention. Whatever it sells jewelry or clothes, whatever this is a grocery store or small pizza place, it celebrates convention. Comic books, video games, cosplay. The whole city… You walk those narrow streets and you see comic book store and another comic book store, and store with action figures and store with cosplay accesories and you don’t get it. How’s that? This is some sort of a dream city? With only geek dedicated stores on every street?

They explain you. For the 4 days of convention local stores close and rent the space to geek stores who open only for those 4 days.

So you walk those narrow streets. Geeks all around. Comic book store on the right, action figures store on the left. Dream city it is…

 

zdj-cie 2 (3) zdj-cie 4 (3) zdj-cie 3 (3)You are fan of Dragon Age? They built actual village for you. Have fun. You are in a Lucca. Dream city…

 

zdj-cie 1 (2) zdj-cie 1 zdj-cie 2So you are comic books fan. Or Warhammer fan. Or Munchkin fan? It’s not gallery that waits for you. It’s actual performance area, where your favorite artists paint in front of you, create masterpiece paintings right there, right for you. Imagine Lucca, can you?

 

zdj-cie 3 (1) zdj-cie 4 zdj-cie 5 (4)Awards ceremony? Of course, it takes place in a fancy theater. Guest panels? Of course in press room. And so on and so on…

Last weekend I’ve been in Lucca. Biggest con I have ever been. Con that takes place in a city. Literally. Imagine that. Imagine Lucca…

 

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Fashion, Wednesday

Designers, Essen and charity!

28 października, 2014 by Ignacy Trzewiczek 2 komentarze

zdjęcieWhen I was a kid video games were much harder than these days. In most cases you needed to use cheat codes and other tricks to handle bosses and hard core levels. In magazines dedicated to video games there were sections like „Tips & Tricks” where you were able to learn how to get unlimited ammo or find all hidden doors. Remember those days? I bet so!

Few days before Essen I came up with crazy idea – I will gather „Tips and Tricks” for board games. Ultimate Guide to win! Oh, yeah!

And then I will give it for charity.

***

I had a small notepad, I had a pen and I had this dead simple idea – approach as many as possible game designers at Essen and ask them to contribute to this little book. I know many designers by person so it looked like easy and fun task. The fair began.

On Wednesday I had no time to get any entries to my Ultimate Guide. I was too busy and in a fact there were not that many designers in the halls yet.

On Thursday I had… On Thursday I had no time to get any entries to my notepad. I was way too busy to even have a hot dog or cup of tea. That was crazy busy Essen day. In the evening I came back to my room and looked at my notepad. It was empty. No entries. I was sad. I was worried that my crazy idea has no chance to succeed. Essen was overwhelming this year.

On Friday I had…

OK, Friday looked just like Thursday. It was crazy. But, I didn’t give up. I managed to get entry from Kristian Ostby (designer of Escape) who visited our booth. I managed to get entry from Brad jr. Tolton (designer of Pixel Tactics) who visited our booth. And then breakthrough happened. My friend from CGE, Peter Cernak came to our booth with Matt Leacock (designer of…  c’mon, do I need to say it?!).

I asked Matt to contribute to my book and to write a tip how to win Pandemic. I explained him that I gather entries about winning games and I am creating Ultimate Strategy Guide and then, after Essen I will give it for charity. Matt, of course agreed.

„What a cool idea!” said Peter.

„I wish I had more time to go around halls and gather more entries.” I said.

„I’ll help!” replied Peter.

He took notebook. Few minutes later he was back with entries from all Czech designers that were at their booth.

And that was just beginning. Peter began to walk around the halls and talk about my project. He was asking designers to visit Portal Games booth and put entry into the book. Antoine Bauza came. Then designers began to tell each other about project. And then Merry helped. In a few hours my notebook had entries from Martin Wallace, Friedmann Friese, Bruno Cathala and many many other great designers.

I have tips and knowledge how to win Ghost Stories and Forbidden Island, and Chaos in the Old World, and Cold Express and Timeline and even Story Cubes! 😀

All together 23 entries from 23 designers about winning in 23 great games.

Here is a quick look at this piece of craziness…

***

I am happy to tell you that you can have my Ultimate Strategy Guide for Boardgamers. This is all unique item, this is great designers contributing for a good cause.

Here is the auction!

How cool our hobby is, huh?

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Fashion

38 questions

27 października, 2014 by Ignacy Trzewiczek Brak komentarzy

zdjęcieI put so much hope in every board game I bring home. I believe it will be awesome. I can’t wait to try it. Some offer great brain burning experience, some give me just pure laught and joy, some have theme that strong that I forgot about table and feel like I am having true adventure.

I love these moments. This pure excitement. My first time with Lewis and Clark. My first time with Five Tribes. My first time Star Realms. You finish the game and you have this huge smile on your face. That was awesome experience. You can’t wait for second game. What a gem!

I brought from Essen 38 games. Some of them – sadly – will suck. But some of them will put smile on my face. And I can’t wait to try them all!

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Meet me!, Wednesday

22 października, 2014 by Ignacy Trzewiczek Brak komentarzy

That was most busy and exhausting and amazing at the same time Essen so far. I need to catch up with sleep, with rest, with everything, but hey, it’s Wednesday – I owe you a post, right! Here is some cool photos from Essen. Those of you who follow me on Twitter already saw them, for rest of us – here it is, Essen how I saw it.

zdj-cie 1 (1)Three big personalities of our hobby, from the left: Eric W. Martin, who covers for us all board games news, Tom Vasel, who covers for us reviews of nearly every game that is published in the world, and Brad Jr. Tolton, designer of publisher of great games (like Pixel Tactics or BattleCon). As we clearly see, Eric is just announcing that he heard about 600 new games that will be published and which need to be reviewed…

zdj-cie 1 (2)They say that in Essen you can buy everything for your board games. Well, I couldn’t find sleeves for this Settlers card…zdj-cie 2 (1)Best trolley ever!

zdj-cie 2 (2)Zee was stealing my thunder and signing box of Imperial Settlers. C’mon man, design a game by yourself! 😉

zdj-cie 3 (2)We all knew that Essen will be like a heaven for Ryan Metzler. It indeed was. 🙂


zdj-cie 5Don’t worry, I can fit one more game here! Everything is under control!

zdj-cie 4Runar had one suitcase. I had one car…

zdj-cie 3My Essen haul in all its glory!

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gdj, Guest post

Sara

13 października, 2014 by Ignacy Trzewiczek Jeden komentarz

This is a guest post by Charles Beauvais
You can learn about his game and back it at Kickstarter!

Sara

„What are you playing?”, she asked.
„It’s a new game idea I’m tinkering with.” I replied, somewhat distractedly.
„I want to play.”, she said.
„It’s not ready yet.”
The first thing you learn about game design is that your initial attempts are always bad. Not just unbalanced, or filled with unclear edge cases, or too fiddly, but really bad. The opposite of fun.
As such, I always do some solo playtesting before inflicting the game on anyone else. Sara, my wife, is often the first innocent victim of unfinished designs.

„I still want to play.”, she insisted.
„I don’t even know what the rules are yet. I’m just rolling the dice and moving pieces around.” I replied.
„But, you’re coloring!”

***

We had played a lot of Matt Leacock’s Roll Through the Ages, and I thought it would be an interesting design space to explore. In particular, the one side of each die where a player had to choose between 2 food and 2 workers. My goal was to combine RTtA with something like Delve, the solo dungeon-crawl dice game. In my mind, it was „Roll Through the Dungeon”, where the symbols on the dice would be swords, shields, wands, etc.
But, before I could allocate the symbols appropriately, I wanted to get a sense for the probabilities. I replaced the symbols with colors, and now I could roll 4 green, for example, or 2 purple. But what to do with them?
I sketched out a landscape scene: a river, tree, bird, sun, and arbitrarily assigned weights to them – this required 4 yellow, that required 2 green. And this nascent game is what my wife wanted to play.

***
A few weeks later, Sara’s mom (my primary Dominion opponent) was visiting. One morning, Sara woke me up.
„You’ve got to print out more puzzles. We’ve already colored in all the ones we could find.”

***
We’re out shopping, and I pick up a few boxes of crayons that are on sale, half-price.
„Buy more”, advises Sara, but I’m not sure.
„I’m still working on the game, and it might be a dud. I don’t want to be stuck with boxes of crayons.”
„You should buy them while they are on sale.”
„I’m sure crayons go on sale periodically. There’s plenty of time.”
Did I mention this was during September? When all the stores have their back-to-school sales? Periodically is right, I’d have to wait a year before crayons would be that cheap again.

***

„What is that?”
„It’s my coloring for this stained glass puzzle. I’m going to for an even distribution of the six colors.”
„It looks like a clown threw up. Print a blank copy for me, please.”
You be the judge. My version actually inflicts damage on the eyes.

***
Before finding a publisher, I created some copies of the prototype to demo and sell. While „how much would you pay for this game?” is a good question for playtesters, it’s even more powerful when it’s not hypothetical. I started with a print run of 250 dice, then another 250-die run, followed by two 1000-die print runs. That’s 2500 dice, all of which had to be stickered by hand. Each face of each die had two stickers, so, yes, we (with help from our friends) applied 30,000 stickers.
Three of the four corners can be stickered easily. Is it a purple die? Surround one corner with purple stickers, another corner with blue, and another corner with red. Simple. The last corner, however, required the remaining three colors in a specific configuration. For all 2500 dice, Sara was the only person I trusted (other than myself) to do this correctly.

***

I’m teaching the game to some new friends, and I start explaining the color bank mechanic.
„Wait,” interrupts Sara, „that’s not how it works.”
„Yes it is. I’ve changed it.”
„Well this new version is stupid. The last version was much more powerful.”
She’s right. The new version is weaker, but much simpler to explain. New players didn’t understand the old version, and thus didn’t use it correctly.
Game designers aren’t the only ones who find it hard to let go of clever mechanics. It affects early playtesters, too.

***

It’s 8:00 PM. We’ve just had dinner, and we sit down to sticker some more dice.
„I think it’s time.”, Sara says.
„Okay, let’s just finish this batch of dice.”
„Okay”.
We finish the last batch of dice, and then drive to the hospital. Twelve hours later, our daughter is born.

***

„The publisher wants to add a trading phase at the start of each round.” I inform Sara.
„That won’t work. It’ll slow the game down too much. It’ll be a disaster.” she replies.
I also have my doubts. I could see the need for more interaction, but I was worried about slowing down a quick-moving game.
„We won’t know until we give it a try.”
We try it with some friends, who are new to the game, so we introduce trading after they’ve got the basic flow of the game going. And what do you know? It works. It doesn’t slow down the game, it gets players to interact with each other, pleading, threatening, and having a great time. It’s a great addition.

***

There are many emotions involved in game design: elation, despair, pride, and disappointment. But I’d like to talk about gratitude. I wouldn’t have been able to produce this game without Sara’s help and support. She’s guided me through the disappointment of being rejected (again) by potential publishers, and she’s shared the joy of reading great player feedback. She’s supported me in this crazy dream of being a game designer, and I hope I can show the same support in her next ambitious project.

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MY DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

I strongly believe that good board game is the one that tells a good story. You play it and suddenly you are sucked into it, you feel chills on the skin. Emotions grow. In a moment you defend castle. You hear roar of warriors. You smell boiling oil. You are into it. That's how I design my games. I always want to tell a good story. I want players to be into it. As deep as possible.

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9 paź 1843979237730263474

BGG has some testimonials about AI Space Puzzle and I like them a lot! 📷

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Just had a long call with Adam Kwapiński discussing abilities and powers in the faction I designed for Nemesis: Retaliation!

I cannot wait for you to change Island setting into Space base and die again... 😉

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🌴 Robinson Crusoé - Aventures sur l’Île Maudite 🧭
Ça y est, Robinson Crusoé effectue son grand retour ce vendredi ! Suite à un naufrage… vous serez confrontés à une aventure extraordinaire, dans laquelle il va être question de gestion, construction, exploration…

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Back in the office! Excited to dig into all these "I'll do it after Essen" topics! 😉

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