There you go... scale again.... size!

Well I dropped off the radar a little bit there... I'm sure that there were some people who were worried that I had gone to the Wigan Wargamers group and from thence been sold into slavery... no such luck for you I say.

The Wargamers Group was wonderful, I had a lovely time and played three games that I had never played before. The People there were very patient with such a newbe to the hobby explaining games clearly and well and not afraid to admit to it when they had ballsed up. Highly recomended.

I have stalled a little on the production of the marooned demo version because of one issue... scale.

In the game (as you may have seen from the photos in the first post) you need to have your men on top of the little blocks... sometimes up to six at a time. In the photo the men were represented by coins but I would rather that they were 3D tokenms of some kind either the Meeple thing or a Pawn.

The problem is then fitting these on the top with any degree of comfort. I ordered some Pawns from an online surce and next to my blocks they are bloody huge! you can only get four on top at any one time. I tried Meeples from my Carcassonne game and could get the requisit six on top but only just, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder (or stumpy arm to stumpy arm) and it seemled like one faulse move would bring the whole thing crashing to the ground.

Now I could just go with Tokens... or I could make the Blocks bigger... which would have a knock on effect on the board size, the weight of the product and the size of any packaging.

I think that for the purposes of this demo version (and the fact that I have had enough blocks made for five two player sets) I shall source some tiddly winks style counters and put some stickers on with nice smily faces to represent the tokens but I'm not sure that this is the best solution. (The best solution in the end is Meeples I know this but for that I will have to bite the bullet of resizing).

Meeples... they are lovely aren't they.

Why am I resisting the resizing issue? Well I guess it's because I don't want the pieces to look too much like children's blocks. But it may be that i will just have to rely on my elegant design skills for that.
Anyway. Enough of that stuff. on my tick list for today is, write a blog entry (ticked, good boy point to me) and make a start on writing down the rules (not ticked, one good boy point taken off (Aw!)). The Rules will not me made available on this site BTW and bringing that up gives me a chance to address something here and now.

I am hoping in the future to let producers of Board Games look at this game with the possibility of producing it and selling it; Therefore it would be foolish of me to put completely out in the open the game for all to pick over now. Some people have said that already i have been a little too candid in the info I have given so I will be pulling back on that somewhat. I don't think you could reverse engineer my game from the info posted but you never know.

Now if all that seems a little tight, then remember  will be looking for play testers somewhere down the line and I will be announcing that need here first, so stick with it and you will be among the first to be able to play the game in this iteration. I also have plans to do some print and play games that will be developed in the open and I'll not be so precious about so there will be more interesting things to come.

Mr John Inman as Mr Humphreys

The first idea I have had for a print and play card game is tentatively titled "I'm Free!" and will centre around the machinations of the staff at a well known department store in the 1970's. It came to me when I was dropping off to sleep a couple of nights ago and I will no doubt rattle on about it in some depth soon...

Anyhow, that will do from me for now,

IH OUT

Stepping Out

Tonight I plan to take a trip to a local game club, Wigan Wargames.

http://www.wigan-wargames.co.uk

This has been long overdue.. Lets face it I am someone who LOVES board games but who hardly every plays them because, well, we just don't in the UK do we?

I am lead to believe that things are different on the continent, that board games are not considered to be childish things and that are perfectly reasonable things to use to while away the hours with friends. I do think that in the UK the general consensus is that Games are just for kids, but if you look at the complexity of most games (even those that on the surface might not seem to be that complex) it quickly becomes apparent that the last thing that they are is childish.


I will illustrate this point by showing you this image...

This is the cover of a game (not the original cover but very similar) It was bought for me and my friends when it first came out in 1979... because well, it's a game, it has monsters in it and they will enjoy playing it... I was eight... I was the oldest one in the group and I really did try to understand what you had to do but it was far to complex we ended up playing tiddlywinks with the monster tokens I think.

I replayed the game in my twenties and I seem to remember it as a quite good strategy game with a good level of humour but far too sophisticated for kids... but look at the art again...

It looks like it should be a great kids game with all those funny people and further to that, it doesn't look like a sophisticated game that adults could play. This however does...

...mmm how classy! The latest edition of the 1980's smash hit game... In fact the game that made it ok for adults to play boardgames again. Even though it's had a bit of a makeover it still very much aimed at the adult dinner party market. This edition even puts its playing age as 16+! I'm assuming that implies that the questions are too hard for kids, not that all the questions are post-watershed stuff, but you never know.

At the time people were heralding a new dawn for the board game and that a tide of wonderful followers were going to sweep in the wake of Trivial Pursuit's thundering advance... but... it ... didn't.

...and once the box of questions had been gone through a couple of times even Trivial Pursuit went back into the cupboard...

That's not quite fair TBH it was an uphill battle for boardgames at the time, home computers were the new thing and were taking off like wild fire. A lot of the leisure money that once would have gone on physical games were now going there... but now there is a trend back towards boardgames... on social networks, on portable multi-devices such as iPhone and iPad and in online games networks like x-box, steam and PlayStation. All have electronic versions of games... and not just the obvious old favorites, Scrabble, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, but things like Carcassone, Settlers of Catan and multi-various Reiner Knizia creations.

This can only be a good thing for board games in general, if you play the electronic version you may well wish to play the real life version too... so how long until you get the iPad version of Marooned?

...a little while yet I should think.

... but I'm not ruling it out!

So back to the first part of this post... I'm off out! to meet new people and play new games, and find out what sort of people real gamers are!

You see I don't know that many real gamers, certainly not people who are so wild as to go out on a Friday night to a scout hut just to play board games (They play table top war games too but I don't think I will be doing that)

And it looks GREAT! in pictures of the last meet people were playing all kinds of interesting board games... Power Grid, Boom Town and Cosmic Encounter!  All stuff I've never played... I'm gonna spend my night being taught new games and drinking tea... how lovely!

IH OUT

Pretty Pretty!

I really don't like stuff that hasn't been nicely turned out...

When I first made Marooned I had an idea of how I wanted it to look but unfortunately the technology I had at my disposal at the time couldn't keep up with what I wanted to do.  The blocks were hand cut, the stickers were just printed black and white on paper then stuck on and varnished... they looked alright but were not perfect... the boards were hand drawn... again nice, but not quite right.

NOW I HAVE COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN!

WITH COLOUR!!!!

Look at these lovely sides for the cubes...

Aren't they pretty?

I love the look of flock wallpaper and glowy numbers... I have used it before for the branding of Impropriety an Improv Comedy Group I sometimes work with. Its got a kind of groovy Fall of the Raj type feel to it.

Lots of colours up there aren't there?... that's me going a bit mad... as I will only be producing the two player version to start off with (possibly) then it will most likely be the Red and Blue sets first.

The current plan is that the designs will be printed out on to large stickers and then put on to the cubes.

Tomorrow I will be mostly painting cubes!

IH OUT

Little Blocks of Loveliness

Just look at this....

 Do you know what this is???

One hundred little wooden blocks that's what it is! Isn't that a thing of loveliness?

Here's the thing, To stop Marooned (insert alternative title here) from becoming just a bunch of odd wooden blocks in the back of the cupboard of what might have been I need to do something about it. A game is not a game unless people are playing it yep?

But apparently it's not as easy as ringing up Mr Monopoly and saying, 'Hey mate, I want you to publish my game for me and give me oodles of money for the privilege.' Games companies want things called demo versions and the right to say no! How very rude.

They also prefer it if you have some kind of interest in your game from the games community before you even approach them! I mean really! They'll be asking if the games any good next! Cheek!

So like you do i had a little look around on the interweb to see how people go about getting their game noticed... the answer seems to be, 'With a lot of hard work', but there are a few things that nearly every indie board game inventor has done to get his/herself noticed but the powers that be... one of the best ones is, self publish and be damned! If you are a poet or first time novelist that is now quite simple to do but because a board game is such a mix of disparate parts some of which might have to be hand crafted in the first instance this can be a bit of a big hill to start climbing let me give you an example as to why...

They say that you should produce 500-1000 copies of your game to begin with, some to send out free to reviewers and 'Alpha' gamers, the rest to haul around trade shows and sell and/or sell from a website. this should start getting enough buzz going about your game (assuming it's any good) to get you a better foot in the door with any games companies you may approach after that.

Each Player in Marooned (sic) has at his/her disposal ten blocks (8 movement blocks, an 'In' Block and an 'Out' Block) so in a two player set that makes 20 blocks (can you see where this is going?). To produce just a basic 2 player version as a demo I have to source up to 20,000 little wooden cubes! That's the first picture times 200 to my limited maths... that's a lot of bloody blocks!

And they aren't really off the peg items... have a look around the web... see what you can price these buggers up for... I looked on CraftShapes.co.uk and found a set of five 1 1/2 inch blocks at £3.53! that's an outlay of £70,600 to make the demo set... GULP!

Ok so I didn't get my cubes from there... I'm not so daft.

I got them from a local timber merchant who will cut to size any bit of wood and liked the challenge of doing the cubes for me 100 cost £7.00 (Much better) but to get to the 1000 demo sets would still take £1,400 just for the blocks alone so I think this will have to be done piecemeal. A little at a time and perhaps (certainly for a web order) Produce on demand.

Did that scare you a bit? It did me... here have a picture of the lovely blocks again to calm you down.

...look they've got a little old style one on top... how cute!

Old style? Oh yes! the new Marooned will look differenter to the old one my hearties... more of that later!


IH OUT

Here we go!

So this is a blog hopefully to let people know where I am at in the development of my board game Marooned (at least that's what it's called at the moment, that might change).

So... what is Marooned (or Whatever) where did it spring from? Well, when I was a Drama Student in That-There-London I got into playing board and card games quite heavily. Many hours were spent playing things like Magic the Gathering, Talisman and Illuminati the CCG. I was also quite into Logic Puzzles and in one book there was a puzzle/game which involved a dice on a chessboard type affair.

Marooned grew from thinking about this puzzle and various other things (more of this later) this is just a first post.

The basics of Marooned (or Something) is to get your little men from one side of the board to the other using the blocks to form a path whilst trying to stop the other players from doing so.

You can have 2-4 players but I think that the demo version I'm going to produce will just be the 2 player game... here have some pictures of the very demo set with the crayon drawn board we used this weekend.

The Game at Set Up

Mid-Game

Red Wins

So there you are.. some pretty pictures and a bit of a rambling text.. that should do you to start off with!

More Later...

IH OUT