Kickstarter Picks – 11 Jan 2016

Avignon: A Clash of Popes – Two player micro card game. Well funded and just a few days to get in.

Kickstarter Picks – 04 Nov 2013

Battle Systems – Sci-fi modular terrain, cardstock with clips to hold together. Looks pretty awesome. Well funded and with three weeks to go.

Get Lucky – Kill Dr Lucky, as a card game, massively funded with over two weeks to go.

Kickstarter Picks – 15 Jul 2013

Dominion Storage Case – Dominion is a card game with a lot of expansions. This case should have room for them all. Well funded, with a week to go.

Electronic Gaming Mats – Playmats with integrated LCD screens. Two weeks to go, and not funded yet, so get on board.

Kickstarter Picks – 22 Apr 2013

Time for more Kickstarter picks:

Tasnia – A resource collecting and tile laying game. It’s already funded, and has around three weeks to go.

Heroes of Normandie – A tile and grid based wargame, still has a few days left, again it’s well funded.

I’m going to keep calling out interesting game projects I see, probably just a quick link and summary, unless there’s call for more detailed information.

Magic Deck Statistics

This is a fairly soft launch of my new site: Magic Deck Statistics

It’s a way for fans of Magic: the Gathering to see the popularity of cards over time, as seen in decks that do well in various tournaments.

There are a set of simple filters available to anyone who is interested, just head over and give it a go.

If you register there are more options available to filter by, and I’ll be providing more types of chart soon, along with other views on the base data that drives the system.

This combines a lot of my favourite things, games, statistics and exciting web technologies. I hope you find it useful. If you have any feedback, just let me know. I’ll look forwards to hearing from you!

 

Ticket to Ride Analysis

Ticket to Ride is a game of connecting various cities to one another following coloured routes.

I’ve done a bit of analysis on the original game, counting the number of connections, and their length. I thought it might be useful for someone else, so I’m sharing it here.

There are:

• 36 cities
• 78 total routes
• 22 doubled routes

So we have a total of 100 possible connections.

If we analyse them by the colour of the edge, then we see the following.

Length	Grey	Red	Yellow	Green	Blue	Black	Orange	White	Purple
1	9/1
2	26/14	1/0	1/0	2/0	1/0	1/0	1/0	2/0	1/0
3	6/6	2/1	2/0	1/1	2/2	2/1	2/1	1/1	2/1
4	2/2	2/2	2/1	1/1	2/2	2/1	2/0	1/1	2/2
5	0/0	1/1	1/1	2/1	1/1	1/1	1/0	2/1	1/0
6	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1
Total	44/24	7/5	7/3	7/4	7/6	7/4	7/2	7/4	7/4

The first number in a set shows the number of routes, the second shows the number of individual routes of that colour.

The only double routes that are of one colour are grey. There are 4 double routes of length 1, and 6 of length 2.

Every colour has 7 routes. They have at least one route of every length from 2 to 6.

Necromunda – The Heist

The Heist is a Necromunda scenario for two players.

One of the gangs have been hired to guard the vault of a bank, the others have decided to try to steal the money stored within.

Conflict

Most games require a central conflict to work. Although winning is not the only reason we play games, the vast majority of games do end up with a winner.

Many games take the requirement for a conflict and apply it directly, turning the conflict into a contest of martial skill. Diplomacy and Risk are the two best known examples, and Chess is a more abstract form of this kind of conflict.

Other games provide the conflict in other arenas, Monopoly’s property development, Acquire’s company building or Puerto Rico’s shipping of goods.

Few games have no conflict in them, you should always look for a conflict when designing a game, or a good reason to not require one. Find out what resources the game cares about, make sure they are scarce, and make sure that they can change hands among the players. This should drive the conflict, and with a good conflict, you can create a good game.

Tor.com

The publisher Tor have just opened their new website, Tor.com. It’s got lots of cool stuff, free e-books, free short stories, and some good bloggers, writing about interesting things.

I wanted to point out a cool article about rpg design, written by Bruce Baugh. It’s pretty thought provoking, hopefully it might give you some ideas about game design, and the setting you use.

Welcome

I love playing games, I love writing games. I want to share them with other people like me. I’ve created toadflax games to allow me to do this, to share what I like doing with as many people as possible.

I’m going to do things a little differently to the rest of the gaming world, and I hope that everyone likes what I am doing. First off, all of my games are available for free from this site, with the rules and components available in as many different electronic formats as I can think of. Please download them, and use them. Share them with your friends, but don’t modify things without my permission. If you like the games I provide, then I will make it easy for you to pay me for them, via pay-pal.

I’m going to have all the comments I get about any of my games available to anyone who cares to look at them, I don’t want to have a few select testimonials, I want everyone to be happy with the games I write, and I want everyone to be able to find out the thoughts of others with regards to my games.

I want to keep in contact with anyone who plays my games, or considers playing them. I will aim to reply to any e-mails I get with regards to toadflax games within a day of getting them, if I get online in that day, you’ll get a reply. As well as e-mail, you can see a link to the toadflax games blog, which will be updated regularly. Important updates will also be posted on the front page.

I hope you like the games I have available, initially I present a card game, King of the Castle, but I’ve got more card and board games in the development pipeline at the moment.