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Ascent Sequence (by Me)

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Here is our third release on itch.io ... Ascent Sequence is a "simple" climbing simulation where each step of the way you must roll d100 and come up higher than the last roll.  It sounds simple, but the dice WILL betray you before you know it.  With a dozen pieces of equipment to help you, and four complete scenarios to survive, I hope you will find this a fun challenge. This game was done as a part of the Minimalist TTRPG Jam 5, which ends in a day and a half.  Part of the challenge of this jam was having no graphics or font changes.  I hope that we met all the requirements on this one.  I have set it up as Pay What You Want, hoping maybe some people will in pitch in, as the previous games we posted here have had no attention at all. Here is our playtesting sheet from today.  It won't make any sense, but we ran two climbers and both just barely survived. The downloads include detailed developer notes, telling the twists and turns and midnight decisions th...
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Meow Mayhem (Cenvodiq, 2024)

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So I got a few more reward points at work and spent them on games on Amazon again.  That's an odd balance: do the thing I don't like during the day to directly get things I do like doing.  This time, I got Meow Mayhem, Rat-a-Tat Cat and MLEM (cats in space). We played a hand of Meow Mayhem this time.  The cards were cute but the rules felt like something was missing.  The only valid plays are a Month Party (3+ cats from same month, different breeds) or a Scarf Parade (same color collar for 3+ consecutive months).  We played our own sets in front of us, like it was rummy, and the game just felt empty, then the deck ran out, and the rules were silent on what happens when the cards are gone. First off, there should be month numbers and scarf color at the edges of the card, so they can be seen when fanned out in your hand.  Instead, you have to look at the full images to see these, and the breed is at bottom right, also not easily visible in hand.  There w...
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MLEM Space Agency (Reiner Knizia)

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We picked up MLEM in Julian this week.  Yes, I am easily lured in by cats and nice artwork on the covers.  I think the selling point for me was seeing Reiner Knizia's name on the box.  He was the designer of Botswana and Butterfly Garden, two games that couldn't be more different if they tried.  What would he do with cats and rockets? When I looked in the box, eeek ... there were way too many little pieces to punch out.  Then I rolled out the big game board and worried it might be too long for our gaming table.  But we stopped worrying and watched a video or two.  Like this one on the BoardGameGeek channel .  They did such a good job explaining it that I could replace all the worry with, "That's all there is?" So ... over half of those cardboard pieces are just score tokens.  Another third are for advanced rules.  That leaves a big cardboard spaceship, 4 player cards with 8 astronaut tokens each, a little rocket to move on the board...
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Find Matt's Cats Part 3

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We just wrapped up all the levels of Find Matt's Cats in Normal mode.  It looked like there would only be 12 maps time 7 levels per map, which is still a crazy amount of design work and fun.   It turns out there are two additional maps, where things start to get more experimental and weird. In Level 13-1 there is an extra bonus if you can find all 15 of these "blob people".  Other levels have similar extra achievements, like turning on all the gaming gadgets. Level 13-2 is a gorgeous map inspired by M.C.Escher.  Parts are upside down and it messes with your eyes ... like these hidden object games aren't already messing with your eyes enough.   After that, Map 13 ends with another gorgeous design: a heavenly wheel where the outside ring of things slowly turns beneath the central essence of cat.  The final final level 14 does this theme again but with evil motifs.  Not sure why. At one point, one of the devs said that they were planning on call...
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Julian Game Trip #10: King of Tokyo??

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On Tuesday night, we sat down in the Victorian parlor of the Julian Gold Rush Hotel and played ... King of Tokyo.  That was a satisfying case of being out of phase with the reality around us.  We just bought the game earlier in the day, another case of a game where I saw it and said, "Why on Earth do I not have one of those yet?"  We did play with the Leggs once or twice, and maybe once at a con. Here is the old Tabletop episode where the four players are having a blast. Right away, we felt it is not as much fun with two players.  There was a huge imbalance, because the first player who faces an empty Tokyo space has to move in, and then they get +2 victory points per turn unless they bail out and just have to hang in there until they hi 20 VP to win.  I didn't see the rule that you can't heal with dice while in Tokyo, but it still felt out of whack.  Then I saw the little optional rule for 2 players where you get 1 energy point per turn for starting in To...
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Julian Game Trip #9: Final Bits and Pieces

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We were still on our Julian trip where we were inundanted by games and puzzles of all sorts.  There were even more games in those drawers, including Low Down, Uno, Phase 10, and a few cribbage boards.   There were also these weird little things ... Some were tilt-the-box mazes, others were just unfamiliar.  We have looked at so many little wooden games and puzzles at so many places over the years, I have to say it's a bit sad how many of them don't even have a new on the bottom, or any clue what it is or where it came from.  The trip was winding down, but what a fun experience getting to try so many clever distractions up close and personal.
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Julian Game Trip #8: Sorry, Madagascar

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Of the newer games on the shelves at the hotel in Julian, I wanted to look at Sorry: Madagascar Edition because I couldn't visualize how you would add thematic content to Sorry.  Sorry is just moving around the board, bumping each other and saying you're Sorry when you never really mean it. Right away, the way this was skinned was obvious: use big funny cardboard characters from the movie as the pieces and add more character art to the cards.  There was also movie art on the board itself.  So that's how you skin a game of Sorry. I had a moment where the cards struck me as odd.  It didn't feel right using cards to move in this game, but I think I was thinking of Parcheesi (an ancestor of this game) or the Pop-O-Matic die roller that's actually in Trouble (a cousin of Sorry).  Then I was floored by how much text was on the rule sheet.  It's just Sorry, not some extravagant strategy game. The cards were almost split in half from having been used so man...
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