Blank Wall Games
Print and Play Wednesday #3

PnP Wednesday #3

This week we took Jeu De Lune, by Christopher Chung, and Euphoria, by Stonemeir Games, out for a spin *spoiler alert*  Both games were huge hits.  We also tried some new prototyping techniques, some of which turned out great, and some not so much.

Making the Games

I’ll start with Jeu De Lune because it was by far the easiest.  You can find the PnP files here.  If you look through you will see that all you need is a board, some 2" tiles, and some ¾" circular tokens.  There is also a moon tracker and a scoreboard.  This one is a no brainer, just print it, glue it down to your choice of sturdy stock, let it set and cut it out.  Chris did a great job making this a user friendly pnp with one exception.  He had the same problem that the Scoville pnp initially had back in PnP Wednesday 1 and that Serica had in PnP wednesday 2, SPACING! 

 

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It seems like such a stupid thing to complain about but it actually ended up being reasonably significant here of the sizing.  It turns out you can get 8"x10" matte board pieces at Hobby Lobby for dirt cheap.  We paid $3 for a pack of 30.  You can do some quick math and see that if the tiles in the file had been put together with no space in-between not only would we have been able to cut them out in one pass if the roller, we would also have been able to fit them all on a board and have a pretty huge material upgrade.  As it was I couldn’t justify wasting that much matte board so I went with 110lb card stock for the tiles and repurposed cardboard for the board.  It ended up being okay, but with all the tile movement in this game the thicker tiles are very fingernail friendly and also help prevent accidental board shifting.

On to Euphoria, you can get the pnp files by backing it here.  This game was a beast to pnp, mostly because I wanted to try out some new methods that would do the art justice.  First, I used the aforementioned matte boards for the Recruits, the multiplier cards, the hidden agendas, and the markets.  Considering how many times things would be flipped during the course of the game it turned out to be a good idea and the players really appreciated the heavier materials.  So I highly suggest to anyone making a print and play try to position your small art pieces to fit within, and fill up an 8"x10" area and you will thank yourself.  Only do this with squareish pieces though, not circles.  Matte Board is a bit tough to cut in anything other than a straight line and hand punches for tokens have a hard time getting through it. 

Speaking of tokens, this is the one place that the PnP really let me down.  When you run through the rules that is a pretty big list of bits you need.  If you are a heavy connoisseur of board games you can probably cannibalize other games to make it work, but I really hate doing that as you never know when you might want to play game B instead of A open it up and realize that you forgot the bits back at home.  (We travel frequently with our games to friends and FLGS.)  Putting optional paper versions of the tokens in your pnp file is a friendly gesture to the people who take the time to get your game set up, and is also nice is someone loses bits and needs to replace them with something that is still unique to your game.  I had Dominique go ahead and whip us up some ¾" tokens using art from the rules and put them on a double thick layer of the 110 card stock.  It made them a little tough to punch but the weight kept them from being blown around by an errant breeze from something like a door opening and allowed for easy tossing from player to player. 

So none of that sounds very tough right.  Glue, punch, rolling cutter, you are talking maybe two or three hours for set up and cut out, so what the heck made this a 6 hour undertaking?  The board and the artifact cards would be my answer. 

 

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The cards are a great example of a failed idea on my end.  I have some blank 2.25" by 3.5" cards, which is conveniently the same size as the artifact cards.  I had the bright idea to glue them to the card print out instead of using sleeves and magic cards. Yea…that was a dumb idea.  Without a light box if was hard to line them up and using a glue stick caused the cards to warp so I had to go back to the spray adhesive, but it stuck so fast that I couldn’t slide the cards around to get a perfect alignment.  Then I had peeling problems with some cards so I ended up having to go over all of them with clear duct tape to make them shuffle-able.  Lesson learned, penny sleeves and Magic cards for me.  Please include optional backs as it helps up the production value of your game.

 

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The Board was a HUGE triumph though.  If you don’t know Euphoria has a large, roughly 25" by 33", board.  So I had the option of having a large hard to store board, or 6 tiles that would move around and be a pain to play on.  I refused to settle for crap and went with option 3!  I made a 5 piece foldable board that collapsed down to a box friendly 8"x11" block.  I started with one large piece of cardboard, a thick piece that used to be a TV box, then carefully glued down the whole board and let it set up for an hour. 

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Then I took some sheets and tape and worked out where to score and where to cut through for practice.  Once I had it all mocked up and the board dried I want to town.  To make the folds I scored through the box down to the covering paper on the other side, folded it to get a good flex then used duct tape on the back and clear tape on the top to make strengthen the folds.  Collapsed it looks like a pile of trash that then blooms into the gorgeous Euphoria board.  Check out the video to see the slow open, but at the store I got pretty good at smoothly snapping it open like a magician.  Take pride in your craft and people will appreciate it. 

Both games ended up looking very good and the players liked them. 

Playing the Game(s)

Starting with Jeu De Lune again, and I have to say this game surprised me.  All of the games I spend the time to make and play are equally worth your effort, I would never waste my own time on something I thought was bad, some games are more equal than others.  When I first looked at Jeu De Lune I figured this will be a pretty fun filler style game that will be good to waste some time between more engaging games.  I wasn’t alone in that impression either.  When I finally got players to try it out (more on that later) they were just as surprised as I was about the depth of this very simple looking game.

 

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The Good

This game was a wonderful multi-person puzzle.  It took a few turns for the players to get comfortable with figuring out how the scoring worked and how to maximize it, but once they did they were heavily engaged in the play.  Even though only one person makes moves during a turn you end up studying the board on their turns to see if you can find a better way to get points and in some cases by offering advice on how the path to take the princess on so that you can either get more points from their dance or screw another player out of points.  There is a heavy social element and while winning is fun finding the most points available on any given turn is so much fun that you might even find yourself helping the other players.  This happened a lot actually and the winner almost missed his win until another player pointed out how he could shift the board to get enough points.

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The Bad

As awesome as this game was there is a bit of a runaway player element and it suffers from over analysis.  I’m not sure if it is necessary to fix either of these since playing the game is a very fulfilling mental exercise and the point of the game is to analyze the board.  One thing that would help with the decision making would be to make the tile values larger.  The imagery is good, but wasn’t as easy to parse as the numbered values.

Also the rules need to be a bit more robust.  Two questions that came up during play that would be quick to fix would be: When you shift is it one tile over?  I assumed so and it was played that way, but it was never stated explicitly.  Where does your water spirit start?  We assumed on the first tile played, but found no specific rule.  Also a better example of the princess movement would be good, possibly one with a full board so it can show multiple paths.  The example given is good but very simple compared to the complicated board states and paths.  Also if I could get game designers to do one thing it is to stop using the word adjacent.  Diagonal and orthogonal are explicit adjacent is vague and left us asking if the princess could move diagonally like sprites could.  We assumed no, but it caused confusion.

The Ugly

The only real detraction from the game was the theme.  Personally I was fine with it as this is really an abstract math game and also I like the theme, but then again I also identify with approximately .003% of the US.  It actually made it hard to get players though.  In a room full of people flying star ships, killing zombies, casting spells, summoning demons, and building oppressive empires I had people give me the oddest stares when I asked if they wanted to be a water spirit and dance with the moon princess.  While I normally would not put something I find so trivial as a must change aspect of the game I do think that it causes a barrier to getting this game into players hands.

The Wrap Up

 

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Jeu De Lune is a deceptively awesome game that might have trouble reaching publication with the current theme.  It is a quick to make PnP and if you like very cognitive games with player generated complexity this is a must have.

On to Euphoria:

Euphoria is a worker placement game with a twist.  The players take on the roles of members of dystopian societies seeking to gain power by claiming property in the four civilizations.  It is the second offering from Stonemaier games and you can find his blog here.  If you are interested in game design or publication they are a must read.

 

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The Good:

There is so much good here it would be hard to talk about all of it.  The game play is fast paced and easy to grock so this has a much lower barrier to entry than other worker placement games, and the recruits modify play enough that it also isn’t as easy to solve as other games of its style since your worker can affect your best choices.  The markets, the hidden recruits, and the hidden agendas also stave off the repetitiveness that you find in some worker placement games since your options can shift significantly when any of those become active. 

 

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The Bad:

The moral track is interesting but ultimately ended up being useless in our plays.  At no point in any of the games did any player have more than three artifact cards, nor did anyone ever go below 2 moral.  At one point in a game I played I actually almost completely ignored using food or bliss to pull workers and just built my moral back up when I claimed new workers.  It was similar with knowledge.  In one of the three player games all three players sat on the -6 pretty much the whole game and never came close to losing a worker.  I would love to see those bars be more meaningful.

The Ugly:

The balance between the recruits, and in some ways the factions, is pretty skewed.  Superficially the wastelanders seem useless as food is only used to gain moral.  Some of the wastelander recruits have decent enough abilities that you may end up going that way anyway, but if you can be Euphoriate or Subterran you have a huge advantage. 

 

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The ten on the right we felt were near 0 impact on the game, the 11 on the left we felt were almost game breaking in power level. The rest were right on the money.

Similarly some of the freedoms you lose in the market don’t really have an effect on the game in a meaningful way.  While that’s not a big deal there is one market, The Laboratory of Selective Genetics, that is oppressive in comparison.  The players would rather that all of the markets be as important, or all of them be more middle of the road since they are random.  Similarly the costs are a bit skewed for visiting some of the markets and it would be nice to have the numbers be consistent across the markets.  The markets play a huge role in getting rid of ownership tokens since building a market is the cheapest way to get rid of them. 

The Wrap Up:

Euphoria is a great game, I highly suggest that if you are interested in dystopian settings, worker placement, or just playing fun board games, you head over to their Kickstarter and get in on it now.  The PnP is beautiful, but they have some awesome stretch goals they have already hit that will really make your copy of this pop.  In the interest of full disclosure I backed it, and I would love to see more of the stretch goals unlocked because it’s pretty sweet.

Designer Observations:

For Jeu De Lune I would look at redesigning the tiles a little bit to make the values more prominent.  The art is great but the information is the important thing in a game and it should be prominent especially in a game that is being viewed from many different angles.

For Euphoria I would add specific sections on the board for the resource stacks, currently you just put them near the place you get them from but some graphic design to add a storage spot would be nice.  Also make the places you put the workers a little more prominent, possibly with a dark border of something, they blend in a bit but that might have been due to the pnp. The printing tends to darken all the colors so it might not be an issue in the proof, but players remarked on it during play.  Also the artifact cards were a bit bland compared to the rest of the game, I will be interested to see what the high res versions look like since the ones in the pnp were pixilated.

Obligatory Self Plug

Blank Wall Games Inc. has our first game up on Kickstarter at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dnd/monster-moos-board-game

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