A Cubicle Gamer’s Initial Impressions : Vye

Full Disclosure : We purchased the basic edition of Vye ourselves, it was not provided to us.

The day is finally here! Sorry ahead of time for the bad pictures!

Vye: The Card Game of Capture and Control has arrived on our doorstep! We are VERY excited to receive the game after backing its campaign last year. With excitement we opened the package with care:

The box was very well packaged. It was shipped in a bubble wrap USPS shipping bag. The box itself was tightly encased in bubble wrap to protect it while in transit. Sand Hat did a great job with the packing and the game made it in pristine condition!

The box itself was shrink wrapped. It’s a very sturdy box and the artwork is fantastic. Once you open the box it’s separated into 4 wells: two for cards and two for the two bags of cubes. It’s not the end of the world that there is only two bags for cubes, it’s easy enough to change that. When Vye gets a second print run, that might be something for Sand Hat to consider improving what’s in the box. Beyond that there is the a nice size rule book that sits on top.

The cards feel great and are high quality. They don’t stick together as some cards are prone to do. That may change with use, but I don’t think that will be the case here. Not only do they feel great but they look amazing! The artwork for Vye is just awesome, it was one of the reasons we ended up backing the project. It looks even better in hand than on the Kickstarter page. Here is a sample of some of our favorite, with the back of the cards in the middle:

I won’t go into our impressions of the game itself, as we have already done a bunch of basic games using stand in components(normal deck of cards and coins). Not to mention we haven’t actually played the real game quite yet =P You can read that article here : Preview Games. The short version: the game plays quickly and is a really fun area control card laying game. We have really enjoyed it.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate Sand Hat Games on the delivery of Vye. I know for them they still have lots of games to ship out, but for us this Kickstarter campaign is closed. The game was successfully funded mid October 2014 and it was delivered the end of May 2015. According to the Kickstarter page it wasn’t supposed to be delivered until June 2015 so technically they are a few days earlier than they anticipated. Though I know it’s only by a few days =) Sand Hat ran a very professional campaign. The communication flowed freely and there was really only one point where I wondered where an update was(it had been over a month with no word, save for comments). Other than that I’m very satisfied with the way they ran the campaign and the goods they delivered. I can’t speak for the collectors edition since I ordered just a regular game, but what I received is exactly what I pledged for and expected.

I’m very happy with the physical product we received. It was well worth the cost of the pledge and I predict many, many play sessions of Vye in our future. Again, congratulations are in order for Sand Hat who ran a great campaign! We will definitely be keeping an eye out for the next game from them. Keep an eye out for our final thoughts on Vye now that we have the real game.

One last thing: included with the game was a neat post card from Sand Hat thanking everyone for backing:

This was a very nice touch by them to thank backers!

Matt Wolfe on Rescuing Wombats and Pooping Cubes

Good interview with Matt Wolfe. He’s a designer local to me coming out with a unique game. I haven’t met him before, this interview just piqued my interested and I recognized the name from my LGS’ calendar

The Inquisitive Meeple

Interview with Matt Wolfe on his game Wombat Rescue, which is currently on Kickstarter. For 1-4 players, Wombat Rescue is a network/route building game, where players wombats trying to rescue their 4 baby wombats from the dingo. “To save them, you must create new smell areas that will lead them home. You will create smell areas by eating and digesting food so that you can poop out another cube and expand your smell area. The first wombat to rescue all of its babies wins!”

View original post 3,356 more words

Transparency

In whatever I write about I try to be transparent. I don’t want to introduce bias or mislead you into thinking something I don’t believe. A writer can never remove bias from everything since they have an opinion. Just know I am attempting to be transparent with you all and I’m not attempting to hide anything.

However, that isn’t what I wanted to talk about today. I just thought I would open up with it!

I have been thinking a lot about transparency. Not about the concept in writing, but about how it works in games. It’s an interesting concept that I haven’t seen used much in games. I think the best example of it is the card game Gloom, by Keith Baker. Gloom revolves around using transparent cards to cause terrible things to happen to the family you control. This is what one of the family cards looks like with a tragedy being laid on top of it(note, this is an image from BGG):

The goal of the game is to lay down as many tragedy cards onto your different family members as you can. Each leading to an eventual death. A player can also play happy things onto another players family to raise that families worth. The player at the end of the game with the lowest family worth wins.

It’s an interesting concept and makes use of the clear cards. That really intrigues me and Gloom is one of the few card games which makes use of it. A few others are Swish and On the Dot(neither of which I have played). Beyond that there isn’t a whole lot aside from poker cards, which admittedly you can play a lot of different games with poker cards. But, there aren’t many specifically designed with transparent cards in mind.

I mentioned I had been thinking about it and came up with a couple ideas which might be interesting:

-Transparent “loot” cards which you equip to a character by putting right onto the character card

-Each card is a different piece to an item that you eventually have to build from your hand

I have personally been working on an idea for the second one where the players have components in their hand which they combine in front of “discover” an item. They can then use that new discovery to purchase better components and whole items from the community pile. The goal is to use the whole components on a set of people available to all players. The player with the longest chain of components on the people wins.

I got it on paper and I’m working up some mock cards to give it a shot. I found a tutorial online on how to make homemade transparent cards. Once I have made some I’ll let you all know how it went and post the tutorial I followed on here. I don’t want to post it until I use it in case it isn’t helpful =)

A Cubicle Gamer Previews : Smart Green Heroes

Full disclosure : I was not paid for this preview, unless you count pizza at the launch 🙂 I used a prototype version of the game provided at the launch party.

Smart Green Heroes box

“Smart Green Heroes” is a game designed by Chris Faulkenberry and Jonathan Estes. The game is being published by Smart Games Systems. Last night I attended the Kickstarter launch party at Atomic Empire and had a chance to play one of the later prototypes of the game. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the game so the ones in this post are from the BoardGameGeek page.

“Smart Green Heroes” is a consumer game with a message. It’s about being a small business leader who is attempting to go green. Your goal is to go green in 4 different areas of your business. It’s not going to be easy though, there are 2-4 other businesses which are competing for customers and to become the first fully green business. In order to accomplish your goal you will start projects, hire consultants, and search for opportunities.

The game is pretty straightforward. I am not going to go into depth of the rules and how to play, that can be found in this video by Smart Play Games on YouTube. Every turn you will choose from 3 actions: look for projects to start, search for opportunity, and finally hire a consultant. Projects provide energy, community, and environment which are “green resources” from your company and then used to green your company in the 4 different categories. They also award cash, which you use to pay consultants and start new projects. Some carry risks, which are always bad. Projects also give you the chance to win you customers, which in turn provides you with more income. Other players can help you, and sometimes you NEED to get their help, but I will talk a bit more about that later. Projects are essential to winning the game.

Searching for opportunity gives you the chance to gain cards which can be played almost anytime. There are lots of cards and effects, but some of them are: mitigate risk, gain an “at large” customer, advance projects, and many more. Not all benefit you directly, some effect your opponent: mitigate their opportunity card effect, potentially take customers, and a few others. These are a fun addition that add a different dynamic to the game since they can be played almost anytime. If you’re holding them your opponent doesn’t know if you’re going to stop their card or use it for your advantage.

Finally on your turn you can hire consultants. They are free to hire on, but require a retainer at the end of every round. There is only one of each consultant, so once someone hires them they stay there unless that player stops paying them. An opportunity card can steal consultants away from opponents during that players turn. The consultants give you a nice advantage, but at a price. I’ll be honest, in our game we didn’t use the consultants very much. To me it almost seemed a waste of an action to hire them so I didn’t end up attempting to use them. I think if I were to play again I would try to make use of them.

Every turn you get to take one of the actions above. Once every player has had a turn you enter the upkeep phase. In turn order players advance their projects, pay upkeeps, etc. Once the last player has done their upkeep everyone is paid and the first player advances one to the left. Then a new round begins!

Smart Green Heroes board setup and ready for play

I wanted to touch on projects again. I mentioned that players can help each other on projects. This is all but required, but that isn’t a bad thing! When our group was playing we were all attempting to start projects ourselves, at first anyway. Once we got into the swing of things we realized we couldn’t do the number of projects we needed alone. We all had to work together to fund projects and get them going. All parties that helped receive the resulting benefit of a completed project. Once it clicked this quickly became my favorite part of the game. It fostered a sense of community and comaraderie among the players because we all stood to gain from the project.

That’s “Smart Green Heroes” in a nut shell. It was a fun game that I really enjoyed! Our play time was about an hour and a half. Another game around us completed sooner(which also had the designer playing!), but I’m confident we could get sub 1 hour games now that I know the rules. The game I played didn’t have final components, but what it did have looked good to me. If I had one complaint in that department it was the color of the tokens, the purple token should be one of the majority customers and the “green” customers should be the blue tokens. This would just help with clarity since purple is one of the project colors. But, it’s a small physical issue that I expect would be ironed out before final printing, as I said before I was playing a prototype after all =)

As I mentioned before, my favorite part was the help players can give each other on projects. For me it fit thematically and just made sense. The game is about greening your small business and just like in real life, it’s hard to do it alone but together we can get a lot done! This mechanic really helps drive that point home.

One of the really cool touches to the game is that the opportunities and projects are all real things. Jonathan wrote a book about greening your business and his research went into the game. Every project is a real project which real companies did to help green their business. This is neat because it helps the game in it’s dual purpose: be fun and teach people some of the things they can do to green their business. It also helps individuals learn about it because all the projects aren’t huge expenses, I believe some are along the lines of: switch to LED bulbs. Meaning, things you could do with your family to become a little more green.

At the party I met Chris and Jonathan, the designers, and both are great guys. Smart Game Systems is onto something here. If this sounds interesting then follow this link to their Kickstarter campaign, which just went live last night!