Feedback on game board design

I would go with a lot less flavor text on the cards. You need just enough to trigger the players' imagination, and nothing more. Too much written detail gets in the way. Also, avoid text that is redundant with your card image.

For instance:

As you set up camp, you hear the sound of a man approaching. He is dressed in a loincloth and a headdress like the old photos you saw of Native Americans. He sits and shares some wisdom of times past and tells you that his [redacted].

This is way too long. It would be much better if you changed it to a simple quote spoken by the character, like:

"You come from the North. Give me food and I will tell you what I know of of the South."

All of your flavor text could be cut at least by 50% without losing anything of import, which would give you more room for the pictures.

Definitely drop the state borders, they run counter to your theme. Why are you going with a square grid over hexes? Hexes are superior in nearly every way for purposes of regulating movement. Here's my stab at a look for your map:

Not Sure wrote:

Nice looking game. From an art standpoint, I'm going to agree with prior posters. Decrease the saturation of the base map, then it won't be so busy. If the state boundaries don't exist anymore, then erase them. If they're important somehow, you'll need to dash them, or do something to differentiate them from the square grid.

The state boundaries have relevance to gameplay, that's why I kept them there, but I like the idea of dashing them. They were not originally there and I hand-drew them in. It's originally a NASA photo, totally copyright free, so I can go back to the source with little issue.

To all others talking about the oil painting filter, all of the photos are mine. I took them while travelling all over the place, and I did that to add "dark".

I'm also willing to bet you haven't spent much time out west, either. As someone who lives in the middle of that map, and has been all over this godforsaken depicted area, your city placement is, um, interesting.

I'd take that bet; I lived in California for 15 years, the Pac NW for 4. Been there, seen it all. On the prototype map, the cities were Pullman, Missoula, Yakima (actual area, not new placement) Ogden, Reno, Redding, Tonopah, Sacramento (on the coastline) and San Bernadino (now Port Patton). All those cities are smoked, and the people who crawled out from the ruins of old Earth started anew in the areas because the place has changed so the "rules" of where water and arid areas were is no longer viable.

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I'm willing to look past that sort of thing as game design (Ticket to Ride was famously loose with city placement), but it sort of sticks out for anyone who's travelled around here. "South Lake" in particular is in a very strange place for any kind of civilization. Zoom in a bit on Google Maps and you'll see what I mean. [/quote]
LOL, that used to be South Lake Tahoe, which was 100 miles to the west, but I changed the location for gameplay reasons. Remember, again, the old cities are gone. Now these are more settlement/village than city, aside from Phoenix.

Is it a coincidence that you put the southern Anarchist zone dead center across the FLDS (fundamentalist polygamist Mormon sect) stronghold of Hildale/Colorado City? That one made me chuckle.

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

All area-related bitching aside, looks like a fine piece of Ameritrash growing there.

All the playtesters have WOWed. It's a fun, fun game and it's hard as shit to win.

Last Alchemist wrote:

I would buy a game that had Cannibal Mormons in it.

Dan

Not confirming this or denying this....but will that be Cash, Check, or Charge?

Stephen Avery wrote:

Other than the lack of comic sans, the graphic design is fine...

Seriously though, the colors and saturation look fine. I like the saturated hues and am sick of seeing washed out colors in board games. I would go a hue orangier on the yellow to pick up on the blue (like a mustard or ochre but not too much brown.)

So tell me about the gameplay. It looks like you move and resolve encounters. How do you turn Anarch? Do charaters have variable starting powers?

Steve"Avid veturer"Avery

Simple, Sir Avery. You may move 2 spaces on your turn, but at a cost of 1 Stamina. You may alternatively rest and recover all Stamina. If you run out of Stamina, you permanently lose 1 Courage as your will has been broken.

At the end of movement, you draw an encounter card. Only <<SOME>> of those are shown at the 'Geek. Many have changed drastically, too. Anyhoo, each one does something, generally bad, to the game or to you.

In cities, you may barter for items of the same color as the city you're in. You may take a job, which by random roll tells you what your options are. One is to be a cat skinner, earning you 2 Dog Food, another is to be a porn fluffer, earning you 2 Meat. It's all about choices and conversation.

In cities you may also take a city card, which allows you to undertake a mission. None of these have been posted, nor shall they be. It's a bit of a surprise. Anyhow, some allow you to change allegiance to the Anarchist side, thereby changing your objective to killing the other players (which is ALWAYS an option) and taking over Phoenix to become the Anarchist King, essentially.

There's horses and cars which allow you to travel much faster than on foot as well, but the horse requires food and the car requires fuel. To carry fuel, you must have a gas can, which is a Large Item (same as all guns but the pistol) and so you have to weigh your options: Travel light and be more combat effective, or cary fuel and travel faster?

Then there's the combat...anytime there's a combat, you must decide what to use before rolling, and each Anarchist has a "Combat Rating" that you have to roll equal to or above to kill. Unfortunately, it's not a low number and it's always a D6 roll. 1 die for each enemy you fight. Doubles is a Major Malfunction, which causes your gun to blow up (unless you don't have a gun) which results in a 50/50 shot of receiving an Injury (not a wound) which is essentially the fastest path to a quick and painful game ending.

There's many guns, and SKILLS which augment and completely change how the player plays. The AK-47 has a +3 Combat, and the AR-15 has a +4 Combat, but the AR-15 has malfunctions more (both on doubles AND on any roll of a 1). Then there's the Shotgun, where you roll only one die no matter how many enemies you have....

The end of the game comes when everyone is dead, if the Anarchist Patrols sieze 5 Free Cities, or if any player reaches Phoenix with a City Pass in hand. Don't ask...it's all in the rulebook.

Jason Lutes wrote:

I would go with a lot less flavor text on the cards. You need just enough to trigger the players' imagination, and nothing more. Too much written detail gets in the way. Also, avoid text that is redundant with your card image.

The purpose of the game is more "Arabian Nights" than Runebound. The text is there for the feel, although it has been considerably pared back.

Definitely drop the state borders, they run counter to your theme. Why are you going with a square grid over hexes? Hexes are superior in nearly every way for purposes of regulating movement. Here's my stab at a look for your map:

Needed, but I will mute them.

As for hexes, I wanted to do that and the original map was in fact with hexes, but I like the squares better and there's more room on the map to play with where the squares don't waste any space. Originally I had a D6 roll using the 6 adjacent spaces to determine random movement, but after I changed to squares it looked so much cleaner that I decided that it was the way to go.

superflytnt wrote:

I'd take that bet; I lived in California for 15 years, the Pac NW for 4. Been there, seen it all. On the prototype map, the cities were Pullman, Missoula, Yakima (actual area, not new placement) Ogden, Reno, Redding, Tonopah, Sacramento (on the coastline) and San Bernadino (now Port Patton). All those cities are smoked, and the people who crawled out from the ruins of old Earth started anew in the areas because the place has changed so the "rules" of where water and arid areas were is no longer viable.

Unless the rules of physics change to erase the rain shadow of a 10,000' mountain range or significantly lower the 4,000' average altitude of the Great Basin, there's just not going to be a whole lot of water in there. The fact is that most of it goes down the foothills of California, and what doesn't nearly disappears if it hits the ground. Central Nevada (where South Lake was moved to) is generally even higher and drier, which is why I laughed to see a town dropped there.

In fact, most of this area is going to be significantly more arid without civilized intervention, because nearly every scrap of significant green east of the Sierras and west of the Rockies gets that way by massive Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects.

This area is plenty deadly, as it's basically an apocalyptic wasteland even before the fall.

I realize you're building a game and not a simulation, but a little attention to where civilization is naturally sustainable and isn't makes a good background into a great one. To be honest, Phoenix "after the fall" is probably totally fucked, unless there are an awful lot of very good engineers concentrated there to keep some water flowing.

Modern Phoenix, Las Vegas, and even Los Angeles are total anomalies, dependent entirely on moving phenomenal amounts of water in from other places continually by pumping it. It's a screwy business.

(actually, there's probably a very good game in the water wars of Los Angeles as well.)

I have thought of a lot of this, especially Phoenix. Channel Island is the only place that produces power in the known world anymore, and a subplot revolves around this. Water and power are pumped from the great desalinators in Phoenix, hence the reason the locals have walled it off. The areas that are agricultural are the ones that are green, so the food is grown there and caravaned down to Phoenix and other cities.

The cities in the VERY arid zones that you speak of have deep wells that provide the water there, and they have slave-powered pumps that provide the pumping action. The one "green" Anarchist city has greenhouses which provides the ability to grow food.

Think of it like this: the Earth was completely smashed and the weather patterns are completely unlike they once were. Mountains were born and undone due to a "mysterious Apocalypic event" which changed the face of the planet. The US West Coast are all that remain inhabitable thanks to the shielding of the Rockies, which are now a shadow of their former glory.

And no, it wasn't war. War never changes...

The idea is that everything is completely alien from what it once was, and there's a great many subplots within the game to unravel, each with a reason for wanting to do so. One major one is that a "historian" wants to know what really happened as in the last 70-80 years since the Fall people have basically decided on their own that it was some sort of plot rather than a natural event, and so this historian tasks you with finding out what happened. That's where those 3 "X/3" cards with redacted text come in.

LA, my adopted home town of San Jose, and the entire southern West Coast were completely decimated by the Fall, and the new shoreline starts at Sacramento-ish and moves down to damned near Pasadena-ish. Sorry, Uncle Johnny, but Camarillo is now both flattened and underwater!

ubarose wrote:

A trick for the untrained eye. Squint at your work from a moderate distance. What ever stands out from the now grey and blurry background are your focal points. These will draw the eye, and your brain will interpret them as most important.

Right now you have two strong, competing focal points on opposite sides of the map - the white snow caps on the right and the bright blue coastal waters on the left. The eye will instinctively move back and forth between those two points until the viewer gets a headache or throws up, whichever comes first.

The parts on the central/upper right are a great crater and remnants of a fire, not snow caps, although adding the snow to the northern border is actually a pretty slick idea, especially considering that's the reason for the game's players to get out of Dodge anyhow! I do want to tone down the color of the water, though, but I wanted it to be Carribean, not Pacific, so that's why it's so bright.

You should see the map printed on color glossy, the biggest bitch I have (really, the only one) is that the yellow surround is too bright...it really washes out the map a bit.

I would add that we've been playing on this map, or a nearly identical version, for a month or so now and nobody's mentioned the "puke" phenomenon, but I will certainly poll the playtesters and see. Thanks for the heads-up, Uba!

superflytnt wrote:

Think of it like this: the Earth was completely smashed and the weather patterns are completely unlike they once were. Mountains were born and undone due to a "mysterious Apocalypic event" which changed the face of the planet. The US West Coast are all that remain inhabitable thanks to the shielding of the Rockies, which are now a shadow of their former glory.

Okay, if you're going to rearrange mountains, then my points about aridity and rainshadow and such fall by the wayside. The Coast Ranges also seem to have mostly disappeared, otherwise there should be some substantial islands near New Sac.

If you're changing the face of the planet, then I'd recommend doctoring up the satellite images a bit more. As it is, it confuses folks like me something awful. It lies in a weird no-mans land between "I know where this is", and "but it's all different now". That kind of cognitive dissonance affects me even more than the eye-movement vertigo affects Uba.

It worked for Thundarr because I don't think we ever saw a world map. When I'm staring at a photorealistic one for an entire game, the mind wanders.

Last Alchemist wrote:

I would buy a game that had Cannibal Mormons in it.

Synchronicity. I was just reading one last night.

Did you take your inspiration from The Road?

No, I've not seen it nor read it. The game used to have an alien-war theme, but that was too cheesy and I scratched it in favor of a darker theme. All of this is new material, with photos taken in Central California while I was on vacation last month. I've got some really dark stuff there, such as a couple of military bases and other stuff.

Despite varying opinion, I wanted a very, very grim look and I thought the oil painting filter on the very dark art was it. I may stick with that theme anyhow and let the publisher make decisions from there if it comes to that.

I guess I was just tired of Fantasy and Sci Fi games, and wargames about post-apoc where it's totally unrealistic. I wanted to play a game that had hopelessness, despair, and all odds against the player(s). This was originally going to be a solo game, but we found it was so perfect for adversarial play that it had to go 2-player. I had a hard time with getting chits to be cheap enough, and I didn't want cardboard or davey board, so I went with wood chits for a really quality feel. It's substantially more expensive, but it feels RIGHT when you play it, so IMO it's worth it.

It's a really, really fun game. It's just hard to win, especially if you want to be a "good" player!