Origins Game Fair 2024 Post Mortem
I think every convention, I’m going to write about what happened, just to get a clearer head about the entire situation, it’s always interesting, you’re there working on something, but also, you’re trying to learn and really dig into the fun of what games are.
The Great Deception had a lot of success. The reception at the Unpub event was great! Tons of great feedback from a lot of really talented people, and I think it’s pretty close to where I want it, some minor changes to help with colorblind players, There was some feedback about the colors being difficult for red green colorblind players, as well as the backs of the cards may as well just say what kind of evidence it is on the back. It’s not going to be intrusive to have “Suspect” written somewhere on the back of the card. I spoke to some publishers about the game, and there were at least three that seemed interested in it.
I’m going to do some retheming to see if there can be variants on the system or expanding it to a series of similar titles. I keep thinking of the Atari game Pitfall for some reason. There are some ideas to make it a little bigger of a game, but I like the simplicity of what The Great Deception is right now. It’s a tight package, and about as small as you can get, but it might be part of a larger game in the future, not really sure, I don’t think I’m done with expanding on it just yet. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I have a print and play available here, and an updated rulebook here.
Tales From The Supernova had a lot of great feedback on both mechanisms and theme. It is starting to really come together as a coherent experience instead of the “big dumb prototype” phase of a game. I got two full playtests, and the feedback about the systems made me re-evaluate the “why” about the game, and the most important part is that I got a playtester who was eager to try, but not necessarily interested in the theme or typical “weight” of games like this, and she seemed to really enjoy herself with it. I truly am appreciative, from the bottom of my heart for the people who took the time to play this game I’ve created. There was a moment in the first playtest that really struck a chord with me that I hadn’t really considered at the time, but the game is a big huge dumb civilization card, and one of the cards was called The Favor Of The Natives, and a player brought up that they felt like the card landed too close to home, and I really hadn’t thought about what the game I was making really was. Is it really a game about civilizations? It’s an abstraction of it but it’s really impersonal. It’s not really handled well at all, and it certainly doesn’t tell a story on its own.
You’re the leader of a galactic civilization, but what does that really mean? You’re not a great tactician when you’re abstracting that all away, it makes you into a bureaucrat at best. You might be planning the rise and fall of your foes, but you’re stopping a gang of 3 or 4 people although that does happen in the game, you’re limited to 8 total pieces on board, why abstract that all away? Why could it not be literal, they are your ships. Your crew is ragtag, you’re smaller. The current narrative for the player is really weak, they see cards and they know they are upgrades, but why do they need to be weird technology? Why not make them characters? That way when you “kill” a card it actually has a scaffolding for storytelling between the players. You’re making members of your crew, but not only that, they help you complete Bounties. You’re still collecting sets to win the game, but now it’s not just “buy the biggest stuff” like with “energy deflectors”, but really investing into the future by hiring a mercenary who knows how to travel through asteroids.
I think that gives the opportunity to write flavor text as quotes, but don’t attribute them to anyone. That way, the players can look at who is on their crew and just pretend like that’s something that was said based on the title of the Discovery/Quest/Subplot cards. I think those can just be rewritten on their titles too and have a much more evocative interplay with the more personalized experience. You are going to a blue system doing a blue discovery, with a blue crew member, and you see a quote that says “Let’s meet my cousin, he can get us two speeders fast”. It won’t happen all the time, but it would help tie the mechanisms together better. That also means that Policy cards have to change from what they are currently, and I think I’ve landed on them being YOUR mood, as the leader of this bounty hunter gang.
It also means your action cards are now something you do. So it’s not just that your civilization hatches a scheme to destroy a technology card your opponent controls. YOU John D. Playtester killed my best commander with your own hands. You didn’t have a time dilation happen to your civilization, you had a time dilatation happen to YOU and your crew, and not only did you experience it once, but someone else can come back and say “this time dilation that happened a few turns back just was a relevant plot point to my next objective.
Institutions are a new mechanism to the game, but I think they are mostly successful. I think they also need to change, but why not make it something like the Triforce or any other McGuffin, it’s some three objects that make you unstoppable when you have them all together, maybe places on the board, I could see them being placed on the board and it gives you a more direct avenue to win through combat potentially.
Speaking of the board, for all of the work into making this modular board, it is now also the biggest setup hassle, and there has not been a single playtest about the board that made people feel like the modular board was very effective, and I think that’s an interesting point. It should be a mostly uniform board that converges, but it’s too big for a 3 or 4 player game. It might be worth trying a static board for the galaxy area, and having rings for different player games.
The final two big feedback points were about not setting your policy/mood, but rather getting it back, and just running through the hand is too slow. I think the solution so far is to say you can skip your round, to pick up your cards. This gives the game a little more staggered feel as well, and allows me to unfortunately (fortunately?) kill a darling of the game for a while by removing the fleet supply mechanism. Unfortunately the compelling part of the game isn’t sliding markers around to tell you how many actions you can take on your turn, it’s doing the actions. The selection between more productivity and more tactical advantage, tended to favor the raw power of actions. Most people don’t have 5 cards rolling into battle, so it makes sense, to just let them limit it to what’s in their hand in the first place, and now I can simplify playing policy to “you get an additional action for each other player your mood matches”. It sort of builds a sense of inter-player comradery too. You both got an extra action because you’re both “adventurous” today, Your opponents that were busy delving for relics and they don’t get any extra actions. It reduces a ton of rules overhead, and also still gives players an advantage for thinking about what everyone else wants to do.
The Unpub Game Jam was a blast and really got a lot of creative juices flowing. Met Jay Bucciarelli and he gave a lot of great advice and we came up with a really fun party game about semi-cooperatively stacking cards on top of a box and trying to get them to not fall, by having someone else moo at you. It was surprising fun, and actually worked despite us failing to show the proof of concept in the explanation.
It was a great time and I learned a lot over the whole week.
Guybrush Taylor’s Doom Room was a great little beat em up board game, and looks as good as it plays. Also, I found this game “Kaboom” that was a great dice flicking game by Adam Stichter, but if you see this in the wild, try it. It’s a ton of fun. I really hope this one gets picked up or published sometime soon.
There was a lot more that happened like a two table game of a Distant Plain, but I think I’m going to potentially write about that story at a later time (here’s a spoiler, it was really fun!) See you all next year at the next Origins Game Fair!