Daniel Solis

This is the story of how I tried to make a cool spatial auction mechanism into a complete game, but never quite found a concept that sold to a publisher. The last version was called OORT and the details are here: Theme Pitch: The Oort cloud is the last stop for a thousand light-years, so you better stock up! Dock your ships at the right stations to claim the best supplies and send their whole fleet further into space. Gamer Pitch: This is an auction in which where you place your bid matters. A top bid only lasts once, but a lesser bid can persist for multiple rounds. ( Rules Google Doc Here ) What Worked: Top bidder wins, but doesn't stay. Players have "ship" discs valued at 1 to 15. Each round, a random segment of the board is being auctioned. Bids are placed in turns, face-down. Though the bids are hidden, you do know some information: Small ships are valued 0-4. Medium ships are 5-9. Large ships are 10-15.   You must place bids at specific spots around that segment....

  Like everyone else late last year, I got pretty hooked on Marvel SNAP. But enough ink has been spent praising the elegant gameplay, clever wagering strategies, and rather generous business model. I'd instead like to highlight the logos! The little names you see on every card in the game. Having worked on several Marvel card games in the past two years, I've certainly considered giving every card their own masthead name like this, but the challenge is always three things: Not every character has an iconic masthead to pop onto the card. Some characters have just not headlined their own comic series, so there's no precedent for their logo. We have limited graphic design resources that need to be spent on boards, rulebooks, tokens, packaging, marketing, and web. There's just not room in the pipeline to make a whole new brand logo for each character. Even if we had the bandwidth to do it, space on our components is so limited that a big masthead would cut into valuable rea...