Author: Zubon

Pitch Deck is a fun concept for a party game, on Kickstarter now, but I don’t think it will age well. The idea is to match a company with a new product and explain why “Soylent for Juggalos” is going to be the New New Thing that everyone should invest in. It is vaguely like Apples to Apples, but everyone gives a pitch for their answer.

I think that sounds kind of fun, maybe you don’t. I do not see it aging well because lots of those companies are going to stop existing over the next five to ten years. A fair number of them you’ve never heard of, because everyone’s “everyone knows” differs. This was written by some folks in San Francisco, which goes a ways towards explaining the variety of recent tech start-ups but the conspicuous absence of major corporations or middle American consumer products (and the notion of having a game about elevator pitches for startups). I would be amused to see how the implications of some of these change over time; in recent memory, MySpace was THE social media hub and eBay was an auction site.

Have you seen that effect in other games? If you have an older copy of Trivial Pursuit, some of the answers have changed over time, and some major celebrities have changed to “who?” Playing Apples to Apples with the next generation gives lots of those moments like, “Who’s Michael Jackson?” I don’t know how well Cards Against Humanity has aged with aggressively edgy references to people who were politically relevant in the five minutes the game was published.

If you are interested in giving the game a look or test run, there is a Creative Commons print and play download available.

: Zubon

While I am talking about Kickstarters, I should point to Tao Long. ThunderGryph Games started up last year and Kickstarted their first game, Overseers. It looked interesting and I backed it at the “Founders Club” level, which is a lifetime subscription to their games. So I’ll be paying attention to everything they do. Gonzalo Aguirre Bisi of ThunderGryph has a nice post about his first Kickstarter experience. The game arrived as expected, upgraded, and before Christmas.

I have only had one evening with Overseers on the table, so I do not have a heck of a lot to say about it yet. The mechanics work well. We found the swings of small decisions to be very large, but part of that was due to translation issues with the rules. When you play, make sure you have the FAQ because some of the rules are mis-described and there is a recommended text change that happened between printing the cards and the manual. I think the game runs much better after seeing the FAQ, although Greed becomes much weaker.

Let’s be honest, you expect some language issues when a Spanish company translates a Japanese game into English. Hyperborea, which I love like chocolate, had worse issues trying to avoid language and instead using increasingly arcane symbols to show complicated rules on cards. We have put up with worse to play our MMOs. This looks to be their model, translating games and taking them to new markets. I look forward to more non-European Eurogames.

Storytime over, Tao Long burst out of the gate, more than triple its funding goal in less than a day and currently over 1000%. It’s not a $10 million game, but it is already a relative success, twice the funding that Overseers received. If anyone has explored the game in greater depth and would like to discuss mechanics, rather than just game development meta, comments are open.

: Zubon

This is not a project I am backing, but I feel that I should point out the gaming Kickstarter spectacle of the year. I would surprised if anything tops the $10 million (and counting!) that Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 has. You have one day left if you want to join in, but I mostly want to wave towards the spectacle. The campaign is past 10,000% funding. On my monitor, the description is more than 100 screens long as they just keep adding things. The average pledge is over $500, and more than 250 people took the $2,000 pledge level (plus any add-ons). Pathfinder is doing a crossover, and that’s just the one where I got a press release.

I was really impressed with Monte Cook’s Invisible Sun, but this is more than 10 times as big.

: Zubon

My love of deep strategy games may never fade, but I am finding social deduction games to be the most fun. They can fail spectacularly based on who you’re playing with, but they seem to have both a high average and high highs.

Deception is the latest one I learned, and it is a lot of fun. Players are detectives, and one of them is the murderer. Find the murderer and the evidence to win (or else the murderer wins). That is more or less the setup of most social deduction games, what makes this one special?

The game starts with information. One of the investigators is the forensic scientist. The game setup is that each player has four murder weapons and four clues in front of them. After everyone closes their eyes, the murderer points to one of his weapons and clues. Now the forensic scientist knows, and they can communicate only by selecting one from a set of clue boards like “scene of the crime” or “relationship to the victim.” Players then discuss these clues and try to deduce the murderer. (The forensic scientist is likely the least fun role, as it misses all the discussion of the game and needs a poker face to avoid giving away information. The forensic scientist can be the MVP or the cad based on quality of information provided.)

The fun of the game is trying to deduce what was supposed to be communicated, given limited communications options. Which murder weapons seem most like the cause of death, and would you have chosen that cause of death as a description of this weapon? For example, “severe injury” covers a lot more range than “poisoned,” and the murder weapon probably was not plague if anything other than “disease” was chosen (if “disease” was a choice). Committing murder during surgery is obvious if the location option “hospital” comes up, but what do you pick as the forensic scientist if that wasn’t one of the options this game? It matters what the scientist “said” and what was not said, along with how they expected those answer to be interpreted, mixed with the open question of whether that clue was supposed to refer to the blue or the brown card in this murderer’s combination.

The other great fun is trying to put together a story for the murder based on fairly random evidence. “Okay, the victim was killed with … a locked room, where the clue left behind was … timber. So, what, he was left to starve to death at a construction site?” Okay, that one was dull, but weapons include mad dogs and chainsaws, and evidence left behind can be quite random. That story also mutates with the clues, because the forensic scientist is trying to fill in the blanks, and some of the clue cards will have nothing useful at all, so then folks are wondering how “winter” fits into this story.

Balance seems to be pretty good, in that online commentary says the murderer almost always wins and that the murderer almost never wins. Granted, I won five games in a row, murderer and investigator, so I might be biased and would start thinking otherwise if my group was a bunch of foolish investigators who kept throwing it to the murderer. But our small set of games showed that both sides could win, under a variety of game sizes and circumstances (for example, optionally adding the accomplice and witness roles).

Hardest problem: avoiding meta-gaming. It does not seem to be a big problem, but we openly acknowledged around the table that some of the things we were doing were not exactly 100% fair to both sides, like discussing the forensic scientist’s clues while they were picking. Acknowledge that you could spoil that and take steps to avoid meta-gaming, such as making noise to mask movement while the murderer reveals hidden info.

: Zubon