Design Corner | Petersen Games

Designer Diary: Evacuate

by admin | Jan 16, 2021 | Design Corner, Evacuate, Evacuate News, FEATURED NEWS, Monster Invasion, Monster Invasion News, Uncategorized | 691 Views

New Game by Jeff Petersen & Tony Mastrangeli Coming in February

Evacuate came about because I thought, “What game wants the player to be in the middle of a pack? Not the first, but not the last.”

In most games, you are racing to be the first, the one in the lead. So I had to think of a way to convince the player that they didn’t necessarily want to be in the lead.

What if there was danger all around and you didn’t know what was around the next corner? Would you want to lead the pack? And if the danger is all around then you don’t want to be at the back of the pack either. You want to be protected like the president with people all around you.

Read Full Designer Diary Post

Designer Diary: Invasion of the Brood

by admin | Jan 8, 2021 | Design Corner, FEATURED NEWS, Invasion of the Brood, Invasion of the Brood News, Monster Invasion, Monster Invasion News, Uncategorized | 675 Views

Designer Diary: Invasion of the Brood
(A game that will be released later this year)
by Sandy Petersen

When I was 13 years old, I invented an alien race to rule the star empire I pretended to control in my fun pretend games with my pals. All my friends invented alien nations too. Mine were the broodmasters — hideous black hulks without any sensory organs except telepathy. They spawn small arachnid-like broodlings from their bodies to act as workers, soldiers, and everything else.

While the broodmaster itself hid in an underground burrow or a fortress, the broodlings swarmed over the landscape building a civilization, all under direct control of their ruling broodmaster’s immense mind. Over the years I kept refining these aliens until I understood almost all the details of their grim society, rapacious personalities, and strange biology. Then I turned 16, found out about girls, and that was that for the broodmasters.

Read Entire Designer Diary

Designer Diary: Potions & Profits

by admin | Dec 30, 2020 | Design Corner, FEATURED NEWS, Monster Invasion, Monster Invasion News, Potions and Profits, Potions and Profits News, Sandy of Cthulhu News, Uncategorized | 1476 Views

(Game to be released later this Winter)
by Zoran Dobrijevic

Potions and Profits came from the desire to build a game around imperfect information. There are many games about pushing your luck, value speculation, or just mitigating randomness but few built around giving players only general clues about the board state. A game with perfect information becomes one of low luck and high skill but this limits the enjoyment of many players.

The game chess already exists and not everyone desires to play that game at every opportunity. On the other end of the spectrum are games that are high luck and low skill as the amount of information hidden from the players or random number generation makes it impossible to optimize play. I find that Potions and Profits sits in an interesting design space where it has some hidden information but every move a player takes grants imperfect information to every player, making every move engaging for everyone else at the table.

Read Entire Designer Diary

Evacuate – Designer Diary

by existoid | Dec 28, 2020 | BLOG, Design Corner, Evacuate, Evacuate News, Monster Invasion, Monster Invasion News | 987 Views

Evacuate came about because I thought, “What game wants the player to be in the middle of a pack? Not the first, but not the last.” In most games, you are racing to be the first, the one in the lead. So I had to think of a way to convince the player that they didn’t necessarily want to be in the lead. What if there was danger all around and you didn’t know what was around the next corner? Would you want to lead the pack? And if the danger is all around then you don’t want to be at the back of the pack either. You want to be protected like the president with people all around you.

Next, I wanted a game that everyone started equal and had the same opportunities to play cards. There is luck of the draw in most games or roll of the dice. Evacuate (basic game) gives the players the same set of cards in their hand. This allows the players be on equal footing, and pushes them to out think their opponents instead of hoping for a good draw. In Evacuate, players need to estimate what everyone else is going to do on a turn and play accordingly.

Deck building has been something that I really enjoy, but has been done many times in other games. I thought “What about everyone contributing to the deck that is built? That would be different.” So in Evacuate, if a player loses a miniature, then they get to decide what card is added to the Nomia Deck. The deck is built by the community of players during the game, of course it might start to segue in a certain direction trying to even the playing field.

Finally, randomness is a necessary evil in a game. I would prefer that their was not randomness or very little. I really think the key to randomness is that it is the same for all players. Meaning that all players have to deal with the same randomness, be it a die roll or a draw of a card. In Evacuate, their are two random events that happen. First, the community built Nomia Deck has a card drawn each turn. The card is random, but all players have knowledge of what cards are in the deck – giving them the ability to predict what card will be drawn next. The other randomness in the game is the corridor that the players are running on. The player that reaches the end of the current corridor gets to choose if the pack turns left or right – thus they draw two cards and choose one for the next corridor.

I hope that you find Evacuate as fun to play as I enjoyed designing it.

Thank you,
Jeff

Design Corner – Potions & Profits

by existoid | Dec 23, 2020 | BLOG, Design Corner | 700 Views

Potions and Profits came from the desire to build a game around imperfect information. There are many games about pushing your luck, value speculation, or just mitigating randomness but few built around giving players only general clues about the board state. A game with perfect information becomes one of low luck and high skill but this limits the enjoyment of many players. The game chess already exists and not everyone desires to play that game at every opportunity. On the other end of the spectrum are games that are high luck and low skill as the amount of information hidden from the players or random number generation makes it impossible to optimize play. I find that Potions and Profits sits in an interesting design space where it has some hidden information but every move a player takes grants imperfect information to every player, making every move engaging for everyone else at the table.

Potions and Profits intentionally uses multiple types of card backs. All players know if a player is playing “positive”, “negative”, or “weird” cards, but only the one holding the card knows how game changing the card is. As nearly all cards are played face down during games of Potions and Profits, all the players at the table can try to discern the reason a type of card was played at any given point. This creates the wonderful type of gameplay that can only be experienced with human players. It is the classic “I know that you know that I know that they know that I know…” situation. If there is a potion a specific player needs to win, everyone else may start throwing all their negative cards at it to try and make it no longer worth that player’s time. If that player then throws one of the “weird” cards face down on that potion, it creates a puzzle for everyone to mull over. Did that player just find a way to nullify all the negative cards or did they just throw in something useless to tempt someone else to take the still ruined potion? It is a much more interesting game scenario than face down cards with identical backs. Hidden information often leads to individual players trying to mitigate the randomness surrounding their own turns while imperfect information leads to interesting speculation around your and your opponent’s optimal play.

Players are unable to take an action in Potions and Profits without signaling to other players what their intent might be. Advanced players know that this applies to most every game but Potions and Profits puts that fact front and center for everyone to enjoy. Imperfect information gives the average gamer a taste of the high-level reading and bluffing that most games keep hidden away for only the veteran players to discover. Potions and Profits isn’t a game where players first memorize typical play sequences and then can later dedicate mental energy to reading other player’s actions. Reading other players and analyzing the board state is built into the game from the first time you open the box. When gamers start playing with the imperfect information of Potions and Profits, they may well learn how players present these clues in other games, without the need for differing card backs giving that away.

– Zoran Dobrijevic (Designer of Potions & Profits)

Tips for Successfully Publishing a Game

by Sandy Petersen | Dec 9, 2020 | BLOG, Design Corner, Sandy's Design Corner | 932 Views

A Publishers Interview with George Mylonas at Finders Grove. George wanted to get some advice from someone who knows the ins and outs of board games and tabletop RPGs to help guide him through developing a licensed game project. Here are the results! His website is FindersGrove.com

Can you give some advice on specific manufacturers for plastic mini figurines, boards and paper booklets? I know there are good deals overseas, but it’s hard to find one when you don’t speak the language and have little experience with physical production. Any leads on where to find these manufacturers and how to contact them would be majorly helpful.

There are dozens of such manufacturers, and they are actually really, really easy to find. In fact, they are eager to contact you and my team has to fend off new requests from them every week. They always have someone who speaks excellent English.

One easy way to find them is to grab a game off your shelf that you think was well-made, and look for the Chinese manufacturer’s name on it. Then look them up on Google. Many of them have the city names of Ningbo or Guangzhou in their company name, but not all. They are primarily located in Guangdong province. I will say that it is possible to get a bad manufacturer – you will want to get one that has a track record.

As for a kickstarter, were there any news outlets or influencers or social media marketing that significantly helped get the word out?

For my first kickstarters I did not use social marketing much, depending on my own well-known reputation to get the word around. I now pay a social media company to assist with this, but frankly I doubt their services would be useful to a newcomer.

The main sites you want to use are BoardGameGeek and Kickstarter itself. If you have a couple grand of cash laying around, you might want to consider paying for a banner ad on BoardGameGeek. Kickstarter itself will help a lot with its reach. I’d suggest frequent Kickstarter updates on your project, and both How-To-Play and playthrough videos.

Also, a couple of reviews would be good if you can get them. Most reviewers won’t review a game before it comes out, so you may have to do a “Player Feedback” video instead – have people play the game at a local game store or convention or your house if need be, then film their reactions to the game. (Obviously, edit out negative reactions if you have any)

Any general business tips and Kickstarter campaign advice?

Here are the most important four things I’ve learned from launching my games on Kickstarter.

1) Shipping is a huge, huge part of your costs. You can easily lose ALL your profit by not charging shipping correctly. Do not forget to charge VAT for Europeans – they’ll bitch and moan about it, but if you eat those costs, that is literally all your profit, meaning you are making zero money on shipping to Europe. You also have to charge sales tax separately for every state in the USA. It’s a massive, massive pain and you may want to contact a fulfilment company to help you run the campaign. I can recommend https://gamerati.biz/ but there are others. If you do decide to go with Gamerati, tell Ed I sent you.

2) Your game should be as complete and polished as possible before the campaign starts. In the old days, this wasn’t necessary. Now it is.

3) Be as communicative as possible with your backers. Show up in the Comments. Blast updates.

4) if your project fails, regard this as a gift from God. You now know that this game idea would not have been a success. Don’t complain about it and try to rework it so it’ll succeed. You’ve just been told it’s not working and now you don’t have to lose tens of thousands of dollars trying to make it work. I have had many, many failed kickstarter campaigns and I am grateful for each one. One time I really believed in the project, so I decided to rework the campaign and relaunched. I then (barely) funded – I have ever since regretted doing it since that project did not have any momentum in the market either and I was stuck with thousands of copies taking up space in my warehouse (for which I paid) which took years to sell. Argh. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s good to know that the project is going to fail ahead of time – this is what Kickstarter tells you!

Go to FindersGrove.com