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All set up at today's Dutch game fair in Amersfoort. #boardgames
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Game design nostalgia.
Ever since the first Gaia Mission data release in September 2016 I have been working on prototypes to use the data in a star-themed board game.
There have been three major versions:
Achernar, which includes relativistic velocity and time dilation
Guniibuu, which focuses on stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun, and
Acrux, which focuses on stars within or near the Local Bubble (about 400 parsecs from the Sun) and adds research stations and trading posts.
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This Saturday, my star-themed board game, Acrux, based on data from ESA's Gaia and Hipparcos survey missions, will have its public debut at the Dutch Board Games Association (Ducosim) game fair in Amersfoort. I am busy improving my prototype to make it look as good as possible! #boardgames #astronomy #gaiamission
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Introducing new player boards and aids for the Acrux star board game. Looking less and less like a prototype and more like a real game.
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My Acrux board game set up for play. The new action card feature where you are allowed to buy up to three cards that give you one-time powers like jumping to any star or emptying an opponent's ore supply has turned out to be very popular.
After six months of play testing I think the game is basically finished so I am now looking at ways to promote it and find a publisher.
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I just found this worker-owned publisher company that makes these apparently amazing #boardGames: Space Cats Fight Fascism, Co-opoly the Game of Cooperatives, Strike! The Game of Worker Rebellion, Community Garden the Board Game... I can foresee lots of fun!!
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My wife has been helping me add more competitive interaction features to the Acrux board game using a new set of action cards and more trading posts. First run through was encouraging! Expands the area control aspect of the game.
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At the suggestion of our latest play testers, I added a star system legend on my Acrux game playing board at the upper right. The board is looking pretty good so I am considering having a quad fold version printed in Belgium.
The Acrux prototype is looking more and more like a real board game!
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We just finished playing the last few turns of our game of Terraforming Mars from last week and it was INSANE - Final score was 199 to 159 (I lost 馃槥 ) but that's still my best score by far. Almost the entire board was filled up too - mostly by my opponent John, who unleashed a deluge of cities and forests (12 cities were placed in total in the last three turns of the game!). On the card side, I was doing a lot with the Floaters, John was big on the animals/life cards. I did manage to pull off some big plays in the last few turns - I think we ended up playing for a total of 13-15 generations? I was vastly outmatched in points from what I call the "ground game" (cities and forests) but aside from that we wouldn't have been too far apart in points. I just find it hard to concentrate on both the cards and the ground game - I tend to just stick with one (usually the cards) and leave it til too late to start actually terraforming Mars itself. John did also start with two Preludes that gave him a big leg up in starting production too which probably helped him a lot.
Still I don't feel too bad about that considering that's my best score so far and I felt like I knew what I was doing. Maybe four intervening years of gaming experience was useful 馃槉
#boardgames #scifi
(incidentally the digital version and DLC is on sale on Steam until 25th November so grab that while you can!)
Terraforming Mars - my opponent is red and green because he ran out of marker cubes of one colour! (I'm the black cubes).
Terraforming Mars, final board