The game that has moved the farthest forward the fastest has been Monorails of Mars. The map scale was good on the first try, and all I’ve had to do to the graphics was change the colors and lettering a bit and correct some duplication.  The cards have gone through three versions, and they’re pretty set now, though I have to make a couple of small changes because of moving from using red and orange cubes that were difficult to distinguish to using red and blue cubes.  Added one element to reduce the randomness of which new cubes come out.  The income track has gone through a couple of iterations and seems good now.  And everything seems balanced in the player scaling (how many players play) by just altering the number of cards out and how quickly the game ends.

With the rise of Kickstarter as a funding source and a place for gathering pre-orders, we are getting ready to launch two campaigns at once — a new campaign for Samsara, and a campaign for Robot Hamsters in Space.

Samsara’s last campaign last year only raised about half the needed funds, so this time we are going to give ourselves more time, offer better incentives, more pre-order options, and better publicity.  The game is probably one of the friendliest abstract strategy games, and one of the only ones that offers both multiplayer play and negotiation.

Robot Hamsters in Space is awaiting some artwork, and then it should be ready to go too.  The game scales well between 3 and 6 players now with the distribution of tiles and the changing rules as they are.  I usually describe it as a cross between the tile-laying mechanism from Carcassonne and the programming and moving mechanism from RoboRally.  The winner is the one to build a space station and move his or her robot hamster to all the repair stations in order first.

The newest game design is still very new.  It’s only been tested once, but it seems like an interesting and fun variation on worker-placement mechanics.  It’s called Avatars of Silesia, because you embody a different character in 13th century Silesia every two years, picking up where the last player geographically and karmically left him or her, trying to achieve the most balanced kingdom in three categories of achievement.

I will try to keep things more updated again now that spring is arriving here in New York.  It was almost 70 degrees today.

Mark Salzwedel

New board for Monorails of Mars

Play test of Monorails of Mars went well, even with just 4 players.  Although the new score sheets slowed the process, there is still a runaway winner issue, but I’m not sure yet if that’s related to the learning curve or luck or what yet.  Players all said they had fun though, and it finished in 2 hours again.

Play test of Robot Hamsters in Space also went well with just 4 players in two consecutive games.  The testers liked the balance of strategy and tactics and the dynamic playing surface, and again, there was much fun and wishes to buy.

I also tested just the alternate rules for Star Hopper (collisions, then collisions and sieges) with a group of 4 and then 5 accomplished adult male gamers, and the mechanics seemed to work, and the luck and tactics seemed to balance enough for all to have fun with some close contention until the game end for good suspense.

The organizers did a good job trying to schedule the participants to match the needs of the various play tests, which meant I got one very early card game prototype to test, and I think we helped with a couple of balance issues the designer hadn’t noticed before.  And I got to play a new version of a friend’s game design that was actually very fun until I started losing very badly.  I think some minor tweaking to some of the rewards in the game will fix that one so it’s easier to catch up.  I also had time to watch a test for another friend’s more advanced card game design, and that seemed to go really well.  I’d played an earlier version not too long ago, and it was amazing how tight and balanced the game was in such a short time.  And the graphics were beautiful.  If you get a chance, try to look up Arboretum by Dan Cassar.

Now back to working on the art for Robot Hamsters in Space and the 3-player game modifications for Monorails of Mars.

Mark Salzwedel

Because of a new investment coming in, I’ve commissioned the artist who worked on Zombie Attack and Deer Hunter 2050 to do the art for Robot Hamsters in Space.  The first sketch looks pretty good, but I won’t post the art online until it’s finished, so you’ll have to wait.  We are hoping to launch a Kickstarter campaign for this game soon.

One review of The Climbers came out with a rule misinterpreted which I thought I had corrected.  The review was positive, but I realized there are still copies of the first edition being sold and traded and I hadn’t posted the second edition rules online yet, so I did that.  Another video review should be coming out soon, and I’m sure they have the most recent rule book.

And after four play tests of Monorails of Mars now, the rules are much further along than I expected.  The final scores are coming closer together, players are spending less time in debt, and it’s clear that I’ve created what I’d started out to do:  designing a spatial strategy game with multiple winning strategies.  I’ve found that so many games suffer from a lack of balance, so that there is really only one way to win them.

One example is Ticket to Ride.  It seems from first glance that one can win either by accumulating and completing a lot of tickets or by building a lot of long track segments, but after thousands of plays, it is clear that the former strategy can never really beat the latter one.  By changing the ticket cards in the 1910 edition of the game and the boards/maps in other editions, this balance problem is less pronounced, but still there.

So one of the playtesters last night of Monorails of Mars asked if the game would be available for sale in a few weeks.  I told him it would more likely to be a year or two from now, because it takes a lot of play testing to make a game balanced enough so that for most of the game, all players believe they can win, even when they choose different strategies.

Even with a prototype, a cover design is a good way to attract attention

The concept is fairly simple.  You start with no money, and whoever has the most money at the end of the game wins.  You take out loans to build track to connect a city that produces goods to another that wants them.  Every time you do, your income goes up.  You can also develop towns so that they start producing goods.  Beyond that, the similarities with previous games ends.

You can slow down other players by raising tariffs between territories through which they ship.  Monorails can’t cross, so blocking other players is a much more important consideration.  And you can build incomplete tracks, but then you risk getting blocked more seriously.

During the play test on Saturday, two players tied, but the high and low scores were around 286 and 86, so there needs to be some adjusting of cost and reward numbers in the game.  But usually, some mechanic on a first prototype breaks down before the game can come to its expected conclusion, so I was pleasantly surprised about that.  And I started to see which strategies were innovative and poorly conceived.

Although it’s a thin theme, I have tried to make it mildly educational.  For the game board design, I copied the terrain of Mars when imagining it as terraformed and populated, using place names derived from the named craters near them and putting water in all the lower elevations.

The game may end up on our list at some point, but it’s way too early to tell.  I try to make it a practice of continuing to design new games when I am inspired.  It’s an investment though, as it takes several days of designing and building and around eighty dollars to produce an attractive prototype that people will want to play.  It’s a minor gamble that I am trying to make into a habit.

After all, I’m increasing my ratio of marketable games each time I try.

Anyone have kids around 10-12 in the New York City area who would be willing to test this one?  I suspect they would grasp and enjoy it pretty quickly.

Mark Salzwedel

Small opportunities for new financing have been popping up, and we are working to position ourselves for them.

Robot Hamsters in Space

Assorti

Samsara

And I’ve been taking the sales lull as a good time to do more product development and testing.  I’ve continually upgraded and honed the prototype for Robot Hamsters in Space, and we may be able to design and produce plastic hamster pawns for them soon.  I just tested Assorti again yesterday, and it went over pretty well; players liked the relatively short rounds (about 10 minutes usually), and how often simple decisions were required (about which cards to keep and which cards to discard to one of several stacks).  I have played Samsara with a variety of different groups, and I’ve decided I just need to start watching, because I’m getting too good at it for new players.  I hope to bring out Master Spy and Star Hopper for more testing again soon as well.

Mark Salzwedel

Far across the galaxy, a slightly-less-advanced race of aliens launched their first satellite.  It was fully automated and small, so they designed their repair robots to look like hamsters.  Now the satellite is taking damage as a result of a meteor shower, and all the robot hamsters have been activated, hoping one of them will be able to make necessary repairs before the satellite bursts into flames as it drops into the atmosphere….

When the Kickstarter campaign failed to raise the $10k to produce Samsara, I started to notice how frequently one of my most recent prototypes was garnering interest, Robot Hamsters in Space.  People just heard the name and wanted to play it!

The game seems engaging even beyond the name, though.  I suspect the fact that it is a fast-moving game where the board and the player rankings change relatively quickly helps.  The necessity, as with 4th Corner, The Climbers, and other of our games, for temporary alliances also seems to go over well.  The changing rules over the course of the game keep changing the pace and balance the game to help prevent runaway leaders.

I’ve been surprised how important the graphic design is on this game.  I suppose when a title incites the imagination so much, the graphic design has to continue that feeling into the first few game turns where the mechanics and banter take over.  So over the course of a very fast development process, I’ve been redesigning the graphics more often than changing the mechanics.

The tile distribution and rules seem fine, now that I’ve found the ideal hand size (5 tiles) and developed different distribution rules for the special tiles for 2-4 and 5-6 players.  The game length seems to be staying under an hour now, which also seems important.  The table space needed seems to more consistently stay on a 3 x 3 foot table now.

The tricky part of the tile design is that there needs to be a robot hamster command on each tile that activates only when it is placed.  Previous notations for movement on the tiles have included arrows or words that initially confused players about whether landing on a tile with a direction on it made a difference.  Next test will be with the directions in small circles in the corner of the tile, so they are easy to read when they are close in one’s hand, but harder to read when they’re further away on the table.

Mark Salzwedel

Board Game Guru in the UK

Ũber Cool Stuff in Canada

We were able to get good rates through a special freight class with UPS, which means that smaller distributors and retailers can order smaller quantities and still price our games competitively with ones they get from larger domestic distributors.

Once we get more inventory back in the warehouse, we hope to sell other games through our new international partners.

And we are hoping to hear back from a distributor in Australia soon, so that will really expand our market.

Mark Salzwedel

Please, whether or not you have pledged toward the production, email this video to your friends and family who enjoy board games, because we need almost 400 more contributors in the next 5 weeks!

Mark Salzwedel

For most of our games, the initial production costs are too high for this method of funding to be practical, but because we are manufacturing Samsara ourselves and therefore starting with a much smaller production run ( 1,300), we have launched a 45-day campaign to finance the first run of Samsara on Kickstarter.

The game is for 3-8 players age 10 and up, and other than the starting order (somewhat balanced by the reverse setup order rule we recently added from a playtester suggestion), there is no luck involved.  Winning relies on you to use negotiation and tactics to position your followers to absorb other followers.  The one who has absorbed the most when anyone loses their last is the winner.

Most games last 30-45 minutes, a bit longer with experienced players, 6 or more players, and when using the advanced setup (no dummy pawns for easy absorptions).

The rules are pretty simple.  On every turn, you must use exactly 4 moves with one or more of your follower pawns.  If at the end of moving, you have one or more single pawns or stacks of pawns adjacent an opponent’s single or stack, you can absorb the opponent’s pawn or stack under one of your adjacent ones.  In order to keep you from wiping out any one player too quickly, an attacker’s pawn count is diminished for every pawn in his/her stack(s) of the same color as the opponent to be absorbed, and the max cone height is 3 pawns.

Blue invites black to absorb the purple double stack

The negotiation comes into play most often because triple stacks are hard to absorb, so two or more players may agree to cooperate and divide the cones between them when they join forces to absorb a third player’s pawn.  Some times, players request rights of passage or coordinate attacks through negotiation.

The game comes in a 14 x 3 tube.  The board is nylon over neoprene (like a mouse pad), so it rolls easily and unrolls flat.  The 8-page rule book includes many diagrams and two different setup options (easier and harder).  The cone pawns come in a single resealable tube for easy storage.  The MSRP is $24.95, and through Kickstarter, you can preorder your copy for $25 and we’ll cover your shipping in the USA.  We hope to have copies for sale by the end of August.

We have pledge levels from $1 to $350 that include rewards like mentions in the rule book, priority fulfillment, Samsara T-shirts with the phrase “Hello.  I’d like to absorb you.” on the back and the logo on the front, handmade prepublication copies, and even a deluxe carved wooden board for two lucky contributors at the highest level.

The link to the funding page is here. We hope to have a demo video loaded there in a few days.

Mark Salzwedel

Sales have really slowed down.  Only one new wholesale order, no reorders, and only a couple of direct sales in the past month.

Tests of new products continue to progress, and Robot Racing seems moving toward a slight re-theming as Robot Hamsters in Space, because the tiles look similar to a Habitrail maze.  In the past few play tests, I’ve been working out the rules and the tile distribution to allow for a better length and winnable game for groups up to 6 players.  Full Moon is on hold temporarily.  Hybrid Dungeon may be moving forward a bit because of recent opportunities to meet seasoned RPG players.

I hope to focus on a proposal for becoming a vendor with the largest game retailer when I get back from a business trip to Los Angeles this week.

Our offices may be moving to a less expensive location, if negotiations with our landlady do not resolve in our favor this month.

One of our sales reps is meeting with our biggest mass retailer next week, but their order is unlikely to be big enough to justify reprinting the game they’ll want.

We sold our shrinkwrap machine finally.

I will try to get back to weekly updates again, however short they may be right now.  Sorry to have been out of touch so long.

Mark Salzwedel