Prototypes Out Of The Woodwork And Onto Tabletop Simulator

I've spent a few hours recently modding some of my prototypes on Tabletop Simulator (is that how you say that?). Some of them are older designs that I have decided to dig up and revive a bit. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the prototypes I can currently play on TTS:

Apotheosis

This is my most recent project, a co-design with my friend Rick Holzgrafe, and I've talked about it a lot already. I even shared a screenshot of the TTS mod for it:

Apotheosis is a worker placement game where each of your workers have a type and a level. Many of the worker spaces care about one, the other, or both of those attributes. Blocking is a big dynamic in worker placement games, and in this one you are allowed to use a space as long as your worker is at least tied for the highest level there when you place it. This means there's not as much blocking at the beginning of the game, but as players level their workers up, blocking (and therefor placement tension) becomes more and more of a thing. I like that dynamic in this game.

Another uncommon (though not unheard of) twist on worker placement in Apotheosis is that it's a race to the finish line. Doing adventures advances you up three victory tracks, and the first to reach the end of any one of them wins the game. Players can spend as much time as they want collecting resources and leveling up their workers, but if they are not focused on reaching the end of a track, they will lose to a player that is.

In the TTS mod, there are little tiles indicating the worker's class, with a die sitting on top showing the worker's level as well as the player color of the worker. In my physical prototype, those tiles have squares cut in them, so the dice nestle into the tiles so there's no risk of them falling off when moving the worker. In production I could see these pieces going a couple of different ways. The two front runners in my mind are:

1. Use dice as workers to track levels as I am now, but with a molded plastic holder (much like Coimbra) to set the dice in:

Attached to the die holder could be either a sculpted mini, or a flat plastic standee onto which a full art sticker could be placed to indicate the worker type. Two potential down sides to this... the standees/minis might obscure players' view of the board, and as has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere - when given dice, players want to roll them. It's not unheard of to have dice in a game that solely track status, but there are players for whom rolling the dice is the most fun part of having dice at all, and giving those players dice that they do not roll sort of takes that fun away from them (or fails to deliver on the promise of fun die rolls).

2. Instead of dice, in production I could see the game using a mini or standee with a Heroclix style dial at its base.

This would resolve the concerns above about using dice, it would make leveling p workers a little easier (no searching the die for the next number up), and it would also open up some design space with the adventures, because the max level wouldn't need to be 6 (currently I'm using 6-sided dice, so the max level is 6, and that works out well for this game, but I could open that up if I wanted to).

Automatown

Automatown is another game for which I took on a co-designer. I had largely stalled out on the game, and Mike Brown has taken it to the next level. He also implemented the game in TTS:

Automatown is another worker placement game. In this one your workers are robots, and you use them to get, swap, and upgrade parts to build more robots (more workers), in an effort to raise a robot arm to take over the city!

The twists on worker placement in this game are that the workers you build can have abilities, and so there's some combo-building or engine building going on, and the worker placement spots cycle through from round to round, so each spot will only be there for a few rounds, and then will disappear.

Dice Works

An older design, from 2011, Dice Works (FKA Eureka!) is a real time dice drafting game ostensibly about building different inventions. Your player board has 4 columns, each representing a different possible invention, and the winner is the first player to make ANY discovery. This is kind of the same win condition I used more recently in Apotheosis (see above). The way that you advance on these "victory tracks" in Dice Works is by drafting sets of dice - in real time. Each round you roll a handfull of dice, and players, at their own pace, grab them one at a time and place them onto their board. When those dice are gone, you check your board for errors (in case in your haste you accidentally placed a die in an illegal space), then advance your marker up the columns if the next space is complete. You win by reaching the top of any of the columns, but there's a reward for advancing evenly on all columns.

This one might be difficult to play on Tabletop Simulator due to the real-time nature, and the physical fiddliness of the virtual environment. Then again, it may be even MORE challenging in that environment! However, I suppose a turn-based version could be played... I suspect it may be less fun than the real-time game though. Now that there's a TTS mod for the game, I may be able to find out!

Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages

Many years ago (2007!), I discussed the idea of using Liar's Dice as a main mechanism in a larger game with a then-friend of mine. We worked together to try and build a game based on that main mechanism, and in the end we never finished. A few years later (2011), I decided that the main Liar's Dice mechanism (which we were calling a "bluff auction") was going to waste just sitting in that unfinished game, so I started over and made a different game using it. That game is Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages:

In Exhibit, you are bidding for artifacts at auction before their true value has been assessed, and if you bid more than the assessed value, your funding will not come through, and you bid won't count! So the goal is to bid highest without going over the true value... but you only have partial information about that value, and you'll have to deduce the rest from the behavior of your opponents.

I think this game is great, and it was even signed by a European publisher at one point (circa 2014, I believe), but never got published due to that "friend" claiming I'd stolen his intellectual property and was trying to claim it as my own :/

At the time, that person was a big deal in the game industry, and the publisher didn't want to piss him off even if he didn't have any legal standing (and though he used legal sounding language, I am unsure he would have pursued any legal action if they'd published the game). That is no longer the case now, so maybe one day this game could potentially get published after all.

In any case, now it's on Tabletop Simulator, so maybe I'll rustle up a game of it sometime, so at least *I* can enjoy the fruits of my labor, even if nobody else will get to!

Isle of Trains boardgame

Dan Keltner and I took 3rd place in a game design contest, some 6 or 7 years ago now, with a multi-use card game called Isle of Trains. The prize was publication, and the game did well enough at the time that the publisher had asked for an expansion. Dan and I submitted something, but as of 2020, the expansion has not seen the light of day. In fact, a couple of years ago the publisher asked if we could do something a little bit different, they were interested in a bigger-box version.

So Dan and I set about making a board game version of Isle of Trains. We did some brainstorming, and after a little iteration I think we've made some headway... we're unsure whether to try and keep the game on the lighter, more accessible end (like the card game), or make it a deeper, more complicated game. I made a TTS mod of the "simple/accessible" version, but I think I'm coming around to agreeing that it ought to be different (specifically that the train car effects might ought to be more unique):

Kilauea

Another really old design of mine that is being given new life by way of a co-designer is Kilauea. In Kilauea, you use a Mancala mechanism to spread your tribesmen around the island of Hawaii, and make sacrifices to the volcano goddess Pele in hopes that she'll spare your tribe when the volcano erupts. In the original version (pre-2006), you scored points for all the spaces your tokens occupied, but spreading out made your tribe (a) more vulnerable to attacks from opponents, and (b) more vulnerable to the lava flow. Moving tribesmen onto a Altar allowed you to sacrifice them, and the player with the biggest sacrifice each round got some control over the direction that lava turned when the volcano erupted at the end of the round. The game might have had some potential, but it had been on the shelf for so long that I really haven't considered working on it anymore.

Thiago Jabuonski liked the sound of the game, and offered to jump on board as a co-designer when I put out a call for them at the beginning of this year. He has proposed a big change in how the board works, but the game still features most of the same details it always did. I haven't had a chance to play his version yet, in fact i'm not sure he's even written down the rules, but he sent me some files, and I made a TTS mod so that maybe one day I'll be able to give it a try:

Reading Railroad

Yet another one from the back catalog... I've always been enamored with Reading Railroad, a connection game with word building as a mechanism:

Since deciding to try and revive it recently, I've been describing it as "Ticket to Ride meets Scrabble," but that's not terribly accurate - the word building is simpler and more forgiving, and you don't place the letters on the board like yo do in Scrabble. Rather, you spell words to get coins, then spend those coins to build track connecting cities. When you add a city to your network, you collect one of the Alphabet blocks in that city, which you ill use to score points in the endgame by spelling specific words (i.e. collecting a specific set of Alphabet blocks). The number of Alphabet blocks you can use to score is limited by your largest network, so it matters a bit where you build (or at least hat you connect up your network before game  end), and you can build a Factory, which blocks up spots to store Alphabet blocks (limiting your endgame scoring potential), but allow you to draw more letter tiles to make words with - and longer words pay out much better than shorter ones, and leftover coins are worth points, so if you're good at word games, you could pursue that strategy and end the game with a bunch of points from coins saved up.The point of the game however is that if you're NOT particularly good at word building, you can still get along fine (so long as you can at least spell some short words!).