So Much News!

Going to be keeping an eye on this one.

via omniurge

The good thing about being so sporadic with this blog, is that my long silences are usually justified by Brobdingnagian amounts of progress!  So much progress, in fact, that I’m not sure where to start.  Let’s just jump in.

All the cards are mechanically alpha-ready, meaning as soon as I’m able to put together a prototype ($$$!!), it’ll be ready for all you lovely alpha playtesters to break and abuse.  Right now, I’m iterating on cut-to-size index cards.  They have an annoying habit of sticking to each other, but they shuffle decently, are cheap as hell, and leave lots of nice room for notes.

I was planning on having the cards measure in at 80x80mm, but these 70x70s feel so nice in the hand, and it will save a lot of table space!  The smaller size will mean that I’ll have to ensure that prints are of the highest quality, so everything is nice and legible.  I’ll probably also have to cut out a fair bit of flavour text as well, which, frankly, is going to be heartbreaking.  Case in point, my worst offender for cramped real estate:

Apropos prototype building, check this bad boy out!  (Stack of car tires for scale.)

I’m currently waiting on a handheld puncher set from Amazon, because I got about 100 tokens into this monster with boxcutter and scissors, and my hand just cramped up and said “No, fuck you, dude!”  Once these are punched, I’ll be applying a matte sealant to each token, letting them dry, and then getting to work on the tiles.

In other news, I’ve been fiddling with board cleanliness.  I’ve applied a much cleaner font to the cards, and reworked some of the effects so that I won’t need a bajillion tokens of excruciating specificity in order to track them.  This is another point on which purity of mechanical theory has, necessarily, acceded to table practicality.  I’d rather see some weird balancing issues than see frustrated players pushing around dozens of tokens just for upkeep.  The former can always be fixed.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in touch with the fabulous Chainsaw Pixiepuff about box art.  Exciting stuff!  More to come on that later.

And finally, I’m just gonna leave these here…

Right, I think that’s it for now.  I’ll be going on parental leave in a couple of weeks, so if any of you are in the Oslo area and feel like popping by for some pre-alpha fiddling, or just a coffee and a chat, hit me up on twitter @omniurge

Until next time,

-Joe

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