Been a while
I've been concentrating most of my "game time" recently on trying to build up some complete prototype games, in the hopes of trying to submit them to publishers. So, my time to to any amount of posting here has been limited. Anyway, on with the show.
This month's GDS, Growing Season, is interesting to me from a strange point of view; based on last month's reception to the Spy theme, I would've thought that the whole farming thing would put people off. Instead, there are 15 entries! So, hats off to the members of the BGDF, I was completely surprised at the amount of people who took up the challenge.
Entry #4 and Entry #7 are marked as having too many words. Given that entry #7 is at 1,000 words, I can see that being a little tough to cut down. It might take some re-thinking on the layout of the rules to cut out 200 words out of that. But Entry #4? It just seems like that would be SOOOOOO simply to fix.
Remove the summary. That's 68 words right there. We all know that we are doing farming games here, and it's fun to write up silly little game summaries, but it's hardly needed for this contest. Well, unless you are doing something a bit off-kilter, like #2(the wizard game) or #3(the war plants).
Combine the Components with Setup. A lot of duplication there.
You can probably completely remove the Gameplay section.
And there's a lot of tightening that could possibly be done.
Anyway, I've personally tried a whole new approach this month, in order to see how efficient you can write up these entries. The original purpose of these showdowns were to be less rules/more overview; even though a lot of people like to rate things as if it was a full hard-and-fast ruleset. Therefore, the showdowns have pretty much fallen into "fully playable rules" of late. So it will be somewhat interesting to see how my game rates.
My votes typically now sway towards games with interesting ideas; as opposed to game balance, "broken" rules, and other things which people consider important in fully, finished games. I figure that most of those things would get ironed out in playtesting. Sadly, I think I'm in the minority as it's probably easier for some people to go "I can't give this game a vote because XXX costs to much and throws the game out of balance." I'm willing to give the designer at this point some benefit of doubt; if the game is ever prototyped and played, I assume that those issues are eventually fixed; balancing is easy with enough play, a good strong basic idea is the hard part.
On to the voting. Of course, my best chance of winning would be to throw all of my votes on the games with the extended word count, because those will be disqualified by everyone else. But I'm not that desperate....yet.
My votes are leaning this way:
6. 1 vote.
2. 2 votes.
9. 2 votes.
11. 3 votes.
14. 2 votes.
Many of the games don't seem to implement crop rotation very well. Or at least, the decision to rotate your crops. Oh well.
This month's GDS, Growing Season, is interesting to me from a strange point of view; based on last month's reception to the Spy theme, I would've thought that the whole farming thing would put people off. Instead, there are 15 entries! So, hats off to the members of the BGDF, I was completely surprised at the amount of people who took up the challenge.
Entry #4 and Entry #7 are marked as having too many words. Given that entry #7 is at 1,000 words, I can see that being a little tough to cut down. It might take some re-thinking on the layout of the rules to cut out 200 words out of that. But Entry #4? It just seems like that would be SOOOOOO simply to fix.
Remove the summary. That's 68 words right there. We all know that we are doing farming games here, and it's fun to write up silly little game summaries, but it's hardly needed for this contest. Well, unless you are doing something a bit off-kilter, like #2(the wizard game) or #3(the war plants).
Combine the Components with Setup. A lot of duplication there.
You can probably completely remove the Gameplay section.
And there's a lot of tightening that could possibly be done.
Anyway, I've personally tried a whole new approach this month, in order to see how efficient you can write up these entries. The original purpose of these showdowns were to be less rules/more overview; even though a lot of people like to rate things as if it was a full hard-and-fast ruleset. Therefore, the showdowns have pretty much fallen into "fully playable rules" of late. So it will be somewhat interesting to see how my game rates.
My votes typically now sway towards games with interesting ideas; as opposed to game balance, "broken" rules, and other things which people consider important in fully, finished games. I figure that most of those things would get ironed out in playtesting. Sadly, I think I'm in the minority as it's probably easier for some people to go "I can't give this game a vote because XXX costs to much and throws the game out of balance." I'm willing to give the designer at this point some benefit of doubt; if the game is ever prototyped and played, I assume that those issues are eventually fixed; balancing is easy with enough play, a good strong basic idea is the hard part.
On to the voting. Of course, my best chance of winning would be to throw all of my votes on the games with the extended word count, because those will be disqualified by everyone else. But I'm not that desperate....yet.
My votes are leaning this way:
6. 1 vote.
2. 2 votes.
9. 2 votes.
11. 3 votes.
14. 2 votes.
Many of the games don't seem to implement crop rotation very well. Or at least, the decision to rotate your crops. Oh well.
posted by Unknown at 5:14 AM
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