Developing SeaFall

The folks at Plaid Hat Games have been posting a series of articles from Rob Daviau about SeaFall, his legacy game that's set to release at Gen Con. I had the awesome opportunity to develop the game with Rob, and wrote an article for Plaid Hat talking about the experience.

I also wrote about what I learned in developing SeaFall for the League of Gamemakers, a game design community I contribute to.

If you haven't already, check out SeaFall at the Plaid Hat Games website, and consider pre-ordering it - you'll want those sweet metal coins that come with the pre-order!

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JR Honeycutt is a full-time husband and game-player, and co-host of The Nerd Nighters.  He makes games for Artana, and also writes games with the League of Gamemakers. You can find him on Twitter at @JayAhre or at a Friendly Local Game Store in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas.

Mega Civ, For the Eighth Time

When I picked up my copy of Mega Civilization at BGG.Con last fall, Nate told me I'd never actually get to play it. Surely, he said, a game for 18 players that takes 12-20 hours isn't something I'll be able to get to the table more than once in a lifetime - and not just because the box weighs more than 20 pounds! I told Nate I'd play it 10 times before BGG.Con the next year.

Fast forward 8 months and I've now played it 8 times, including live-streamed sessions at Plaid Hat Games and Gen Con's headquarters in Seattle. This game brings people together like few I've seen - I've got friends who've travelled from Connecticut, North Carolina, Chicago, Houston, Oklahoma, and Colorado just for a chance to spend the day playing an amped-up version of a game from more than 30 years ago.

Our map at the end of the game. Maurya and Dravidia not used in the game.

I played again last night at Collected Comics in Keller, TX, this time in a 16-player game that took about 15 hours to finish (Basic AST). I played as Minoa and won after three tiebreakers, 147-147. It's the most fun I've had playing the game so far.

Tesla vs. Edison: Developer Diary, Part 2

Developer's Diary, Part 2: 

In part 1, I talked about how I got involved in Tesla vs. Edison: Powering Up!, some of Dirk's original design goals in the game, and how we prioritized the balance between "adding new things" and "providing a familiar experience". 

After making the change to HQ cards, Dirk and I felt like the expansion started to hum. We started focusing on balancing the inventors against each other, creating abilities that were both thematically appropriate and powerful enough to be interesting, and tweaking various things to get the game length and experience where we wanted it to be. 

Tesla vs. Edison: Powering Up! Developer's Diary, Part 1

Howdy - I'm JR Honeycutt, the developer for Tesla vs. Edison: Powering Up!, the expansion to Tesla vs. Edison: War of Currents by Artana. I'm writing this developer's diary to talk about some of the things introduced in TvE: Powering Up! and how I got involved. This is part 1 - parts 2 and 3 will come later in the campaign. 

The expansion is currently on Kickstarter, and I'd love it if you took a moment to click here and check it out! 

In November of last year I was at Rob's place in Massachusetts finishing up dev work on SeaFall. Dirk Knemeyer and Marcus Muller, the folks who run Artana, stopped by for a playtest of one of the early iterations of Chronicles: Stone Age, which I tagged along for since I was already in the room. 

It was a blast, and I noticed right away that I had good chemistry with Dirk and Marcus. They asked me to be involved in demoing the game at BGG.Con, which turned into a lunch conversation with Dirk about developing the Tesla vs. Edison expansion. 

I had never played Tesla vs. Edison when Dirk first offered to let me work on it, and it took me a few weeks to get it the table enough times to start doing real development. One of the criticisms of the base game was that the rulebook was hard to understand, and sure enough the first few times I played I got a fair number of things wrong. That was an early hiccup that Dirk and I worked through by playing together on Tabletop Simulator - an awesome resource for long-distance testing. Huge thanks to Andrew Christopher Enriquez for building the module for us and keeping it updated through the process. 

ACE talks about Tabletop Simulator on Steam

Editor's Note: When asked on Facebook to provide tips, tricks, and a general explanation of the benefits and drawbacks of Tabletop Simulator, Andrew Christopher Enriquez (ACE) provided this response. I think it's great, and worth posting for the world to see. I've made only minor edits. Enjoy! - JR 


Tips, tricks and best practices, this is going to be a long response so bear with me. In order for me to talk about tips and tricks I think it's important to first talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

I should probably start with the bad. There are only a few downfalls of the system but they're important. First and probably most debilitating is the lack of user base. The system requirements and cost are currently prohibitively expensive for any sort of real mass play-testing. This could and probably should be fixed by allowing for a 'Developer' tier where we, the module creators, pay a higher cost, but anyone can use that specific module for free without having to buy TTS, this would have to have some real limitations but I'd use the crap out of it!

Pit, and an Interview With a Competitive Friend

Age ain't nothing but a number

As I've become more and more immersed in this world of tabletop gaming, it's been easy to be consumed by the "hobby" game market and conveniently forget about - or worse, look down on - the millions and millions of people who play "mass market" games like Risk, Stratego, Uno, Clue, Whist, Euchre, etc in their regular play groups. 

For more than a century, at least four full generations of Americans have spent their evenings around the table playing a game about making markets and furiously trading cards in an attempt to collect sets and make money. It's not Monopoly - that mainstay of American tabletop gaming - but it is just as old. (Seriously, 1903 was a great year for game design!)

The game is Pit, and your great-grandparents learned it from their parents around the kitchen table after dinner, when the radio was newer and more interesting than Marvel's current cinematic universe and "Eurogames" meant the renewal of the ancient Olympics in Athens, Greece just a few years before. 

A Pairs Variant From the Editor

I'm a fan of light card games, particularly those that I can carry in my backpack and break out at the bar over drinks, or with my family at dinner. Pairs, funded through Kicksarter by Cheapass Games in 2014, fits this description perfectly!

I had a chance to play Pairs and Continuous Pairs with James Ernest, the designer and owner of Cheapass Games, while at GAMA Trade Show last week. I was inspired to try to design my own Pairs variant, and James was gracious enough to encourage me to post it publicly. Here goes!

Gen Con 2014 Designer/Publisher Speed Dating Coverage

Gen Con, aptly nicknamed "The Best Four Days In Gaming", is an event of such size and scale that it can't be experienced fully in one visit. It's the only place I know where you can find anything you'd want from the gaming world.

Of the many events scheduled during Gen Con, "Designer/Publisher Speed Dating" is among the most interesting. James Mathe and his team have created an event designed to provide game designers the chance to demo their games for publishers large and small, and to do so in a structured, rapid-fire environment that promotes professionalism and efficiency. 

I got permission from James to cover the Saturday evening edition of the event, and arranged a series of interviews with game designers Drake Philyaw and Kelsey Domeny (Two Penny Games) and with publishers Jeff and Nathan Cornelius (Cosmic Wombat Games) and Daniel Hadlock and Seth Jaffe (Tasty Minstrel Games).

The Perfect Game #1: Intro and Interesting Choices for Failure.

exactly like this

In celebration of the upcoming 46th annual "Best-Four-Days-of-Gaming" Gencon, I wanted to do something a little special. It's been awhile since I've gotten to flex my RPG chops, and I intend on spending at least 24 solid hours doing just that at the event that has become tabletop gaming's Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Mōdraniht, and Saturnalia all rolled into one.

With that in mind, I'd like to do a couple of articles for the fine patrons of The Nerd's Table, getting into some gritty design concepts that make good games. As a forewarning, I will be naming some games that may or may not be the best at some of these design philosophies, That doesn't mean that they aren't excellent games, it just means that they are lacking in some areas that would make them My Perfect Game.

Most importantly, though, I want you, dear reader, to get in on the conversation. If this series gets talked about enough in the comments, I'll continue to talk your ear off about the hobby I love the most.

With that out of the way, let's get started!