On November 1st, I launched the Glyph Kickstarter project. I felt the project page looked good--we had a great video that was succinct while highlighting the main game mechanics; Sergey's art was prominent and added a nice visual to the text; the game itself was a good value. In addition, my experience and knowledge in the board game industry as both player and creator was been increasing exponentially the past few years. The $52k funding goal still worried me, but I had seen

In my last post I talked about the value of quality art in a board game. The past month I have been looking for an artist to work on the art for Glyph. I came across Sergey Vasnev's portfolio (among others) on Artstation and was impressed with his work. I had no prior experience contacting an artist for freelance work, so I wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. I reached out to him and explained my need for an artist for a board game I'd been working on. Sergey was quick to

Just a few thoughts today on rulebooks. One: they are hard to make! I don't mean the design and layout of the rulebook--although, that too is very hard and beyond my capacity to do myself. I'm talking about actually putting words to a game you have designed. It is deceptively more complicated than you might first assume. Two: KEEP GOOD NOTES! By good fortune, I have kept fairly decent notes regarding theme/backstory as well as all the miscellaneous ideas that turned into actu

I'm am very excited about today's post. Tonight, Nate joined me for another full playtest following changes I had been making over the past few weeks. The end results were very promising. My Champions: Brute, Priestess, Barbarian Nate's Champions: Fire Guard, Adept, Assassin Duration: 1:52 (under 2 hours, huzzah!) Rounds: 10 Victor: Nate w/ two Champions remaining: Fire Guard and Assassin Main Issue: A few tweaks need to be done on Champion abilities. Fire Guard's Shield Bash

If you are ever in need of some time to focus on your game idea, might I recommend taking a long flight across the Atlantic Ocean? I was in Paris last week, and during the 8+ hour flight my creative side was working overtime. I created a whole bunch of possible Champions and items. Some of them may just make it into the base game, the others I'll probably use as promos, stretch goals, and whatnot. What items and Champions are joining the struggle for Tundrus? You'll have to w

I'm getting ready to prototype some pieces for Glyph--specifically the dice. Today I went through and created a spreadsheet of all the current starting dice and item dice gains to see just how many dice would be needed for the game. What resulted was some great data that helped me to visualize how prevalent (and lacking) some of the dice were. Gold turned out to be way over-represented, so I went through and scratched a number of gold gaining item cards. On the flip-side, blu

Nate is a good friend and we've played numerous games together. He was intrigued by my concept and wanted to try it out, so we cracked it open before playing a round of Android: Netrunner. My Champions: Soul Eater, Warlord, Stone Golem Nate's Champions: Necromancer, Priestess, Fire Guard Duration: 2.75 hours (improvement!) Rounds: 15 Victor: draw with one hero each (Nate was the spiritual victor at 2:25, before I double healed with elixirs) Main Issue: While time is still an

This day marks the first full playtest of Glyph with an outside participant--my friend and fellow gamer, Jared. Up until then, I had tried out a few mechanics but not a full game. It went quite well, albeit long (the game clocked in at over 3.5 hours). I'll share a few insights on how it went as well as some thoughts on changes based on the playtest. My Champions: Necromancer, Stone Golem, Warlord Jared's Champions: Assassin, Fire Guard, Adept Main Issue: Time. At over 3.5 ho

The past couple weeks have been spent thinking up Champions and items. With this, came the need to write down the basic outline of a Champion's activation. Also, some thoughts on initiative and item storage. A few notable changes/breakthroughs: - Established base stats for current Champion lineup. - Rethinking initiative. So far, it hasn't seemed to fit. It is an added layer of complexity without adding much at this point. Trying an approach of assigning initiative at start o

Today marks the first official post about Glyph changes as I design and test the game (as well as a few ideas that could be incorporated into the game at some point). These first few posts will be retrospects, as all my notes have accumulated on a large .doc file (or scraps of paper in the middle of playtests) over the months. I decided it would be fun to make some of these notes public, so fans of the game could see how it progressed. Luckily, I had the foresight to date my