Daniel Solis

Wow, super busy during the tail end of convention season, but I'm still squeezing in playtest time for Solar Senate though! Here's an update: I haven't made any changes to the game since a few weeks ago. I've played this latest iteration several more times with different players over the last couple weeks to good response. But I still haven't tested any "advanced" variants. I just can't shake the feeling that my impulse to add endgame bonuses or special actions would make a rather elegant game needlessly complex. Discussion drifted to the topic of "modular complexity," in which a game is perfectly functional even if you ignore one particular way of scoring points or remove one particular component. For example learning to play Carcassonne without the farm scoring or adding any of the expansions. Exploring that idea a bit, I tested the game with a simpler orthogonal variation. You couldn't place or capture diagonal...

I playtested the heck out of Solar Senate (formerly Alien Embassy , formerly Spheres of Influence ) formerly at last night's Game Designers of Carolina meeting at Gamer's Armory . Still not sure if that theme is working for me, but at least we got some hard mechanics 97% operational. For some background, check out this tag . Here were the changes that I think I'll keep in the final form of the game. This is purely a head-to-head 2p thinkie game. Each player has their own identical deck of cards, comprised of cards numbered 1-5 in a reverse triangle distribution. (1x5, 2x4, 3x3, 4x2, 5x1) Each player has one color-coded token. The first player draws two random cards from her deck as her starting hand. The second player keeps his 5 and draws one random card from his deck. That's the setup. Now here are the gameplay notes. Most of this will be familiar to anyone following this game's development. New stuff is in red. On your turn, you play one c...

I've got a basic mode of interaction for Alien Senate, which is pretty interesting in theory. I just don't know what the endstate means. Here's a quick overview of how it plays, in a very basic sense. The idea is that you're deploying senators who are loyal to you. This is indicated by the orientation of the card. If the little point on the card is aimed at you, that means that senator is on your side. These cards eventually form a 4x3 grid of 12 senators. So you take the first turn and deploy a senator, a relatively average influence of 3 Your opponent deploys a very influential 5. You suspect an attack is coming and you don't have many defenses, so you decide to place elsewhere and prepare for a counter-attack. And there's the opening salvo. Your opponent has bracketed one of your cards with two of his own. Now you must compare their total influence to the influence of the senator being bracketed. Alas, 10 beats 3, so as a result, that car...

Sometimes a game idea just won't shake out of my head until I've actually seen it with my own eyes. You can follow one example of this on the Spheres of Influence tag, which has morphed a bit in terms of mechanics, but generally kept the same premise: Cards representing influential people who influence other people toward their own orientation. The whole thing has a science fiction flavor laid on top of it, like the galactic senate in Star Wars. But I wanted these cards to have a very different look. I'm much more inspired by Iain M. Banks' Culture novels than anything in movies or TV at the moment. I like the sense of far out post-human interstellar congresses hashing out details of galactic civilization. The problem is art. I can't spring the dough for a big art budget on my own, and my illustration skills are quite nil. I do know photoshop, though, and I have a big supply of stock art, and I know where to find CC-licensed photography. Maybe I can put som...

A long time ago, I decided I wouldn't design any games with violent or colonialist themes. No conquering territories, no wars, certainly nothing in the usual "attack/defense" paradigm. And definitely nothing with gore or horror. No zombies, no Lovecraft mythos, no gibbering madness. But there is a rare situation when I stumble across a mechanic that does seem to lend itself to a theme that I don't want to use. Case in point: Ever since playing Keyflower a few months ago, I've been fascinated with the idea of using table orientation as an indication of player-ownership rather than color, graphics or some other iconography. In Keyflower, up to six players can bid to claim hexagonal tiles. You place your bid on the edge facing you. I find this very interesting, as it opens up several other axes of information that would normally be occupied with indicating ownership. For example, in Keyflower, the meeples you use to bid come in several different colors. Onc...

I'm still thinking about this card-turning Triple Triad-inspired game about lobbying an alien senate. This time, I'm thinking about some victory conditions outside of simply turning as many senators to your direction as possible. That in itself may earn you some points, but I would like to introduce a simple mission system in the spirit of Ticket to Ride or Takenoko . Assume the game begins with an arrangement of senators on the table already. Each player is dealt a hand of five senators to play one round. The senators have various personal interests several issues, including logistics, military, culture, science, exploration, plus whatever caucus to which they identify. These would be represented by icons on their card. At the start of the game, players also get a certain number of "Bills" that they're trying to pass through the senate. Normally, after each round, each player collects any senators pointing in his or her direction. This is the mainstream w...

In thinking about Triple Triad , one of the benefits of being a digital card game is that it's easy to change a card's color as its ownership changes between players. Obviously this is more fiddly in an analog game, but not impossible. First, let's assume a theme something like the big Galactic Senate scene in Star Wars. Each player is trying to sway dozens of planets to ally with herself. Each planet is represented by cards with four numbers on each cardinal direction, just like a Triple Triad card. But, how to reflect "ownership" of those cards in play while still keeping them on the table? You could place a coin on each card with one player being head's and another player being tails. For more players, simply use colored stones or poker chips. Unfortunately, this obscures some of the information on the card. You might instead print double-sided cards, with identical information on each side except for a colored border. But again, the downside is tha...

Last week I played Guilds of Cadwallon for the first time. It's a very elegant tactical game with some clever nooks and crannies. You can check it out in the video above. It actually reminded me of Triple Triad , an old digital game from the Final Fantasy series that I've occasionally tried to hack into an analog format. Anyway, here's a simple dice-based game you can play. Each player starts with an equal number of d6s, in their own color. To start the game, players roll all of their dice at once and leave the results as they stand. On your turn, take one die from the supply (of either color) and place it on the table adjacent (up, down, left, right, not diagonal) to another die thus forming a grid of dice. The round ends when all dice have been placed. Then points are earned by surrounding an opponent's die with your die results totaling a number greater than your opponent's die result. Only orthogonal (up, down, left, right) adjacencies are consider...