This week, Jaya writes a functional review co-operative ‘boss fight’ deckbuilder Aeon’s end, exploring the subtle ways it plays with deckbuilding conventions to deliver on its thematic premise. Player activity summary Aeon’s end is best summarised as a video game ‘boss fight’ in cardboard form. Players work together as a group of desperate ‘breach mages’ trying to protect their own from a variety of horrifying nemeses; using new and unfamiliar magic that appeared alongside these monsters to defeat them. Players will buy new cards and skills to improve their deck, invest in opening their ‘breaches’ (the conduits they require in order to cast multiple spells at a time) and keep an eye on the health totals, not just for each...
Has it really been two months already? Unsurprisingly, there’s lots to catch-up on with progress on playtesting, design and ever increasing public awareness of the game! Building the coverage Over the last few months the amount of coverage Magnate has received in the press has started to swell. Some swift googling revealed a mini post Essen flurry of articles like this, this and this. We even got a mention on the Polyhedron Collider’s most anticipated games of 2019 podcast! Rory Somers, one of the “colliders”(?) had already given us a great little write-up in his review of Dragonmeet, but it was awesome to see Magnate specifically called out as anticipated alongside much more famous names like Wingspan and Munchkin. At...
Today Jaya writes his first ever functional review – an often overlooked gateway title ‘Jamaica’: One of the first tabletop games he ever purchased, and still one he regularly takes out with new friends. Player activity summary Jamaica is a competitive, pirate-themed racing game in which players have to complete a lap of an island, managing their resources of food, doubloons and gunpowder. They will score points based on how far round the island they manage to get by the end and the amount of doubloons they have in their holds. They can gain or lose further points based on the treasure cards they’ve picked up on the way. Each turn the captain (first player) will roll two six-sided dice...
In today’s article Jaya Baldwin compares two different classic word games and, when looked through the lens of modern design, finds one more dated than the other It’s easy to ignore mainstream games when you’re down the rabbit hole of the hobby space tying to find out what makes games great. But the truth is that their aren’t many famous hobby word games. Those word games that are part of our modern crop – perhaps Codenames come to mind – are often built on the associations of words, not vocabulary or spelling as the classic games are. If you want to test your word skills, the classics are still where you normally need to go to get your fix. But...
So much of the conversation about a game’s design bounces from the very broad to the very specific without stopping to consider what really matters: the human emotion game dynamics give rise to. But if designers can spend more time at this level they can make more innovative games. If there was one maxim every designer should know by now, it’s this: “Different strokes for different folks”: We know that what precisely makes a good game is incredibly subjective. Even when conditions are ideal – a perfect teach, the right amount of space and time for the game to occupy, quantity of noise or quality of ambience and a willing audience – no one game can be guaranteed to please...
