Wizards and invisible Monsters

During this weeks playtesting me and my group tried out two boardgames we hadn't testet yet, I can remeber the group numbers sorry about that.

The first game we tried out was sort of like a dungeon crawler, where one player got to be an evil wizard I got to be the wizard which was awesome! the other players where heroes who's goal was to find 3 keys then go to my tower and  kill me, and the wizards goal is to kill the heroes before that happens, all of the heroes starts with 10 hitpoints.

The game started with the wizard placing out 6x6 tiles upside down, the other player then had to close their eyes while i got to hide the keys under different tiles, when the game started I got to draw If I remeber correclty 5 cards then discard 2 of them, In the pile there is monster,spell and trap cards, when I played a moster card I usally got atleast one monster and a blank which I could place anywhere I wanted, I also got to draw one card when it was my turn and if my mana was maxed out I got to draw an additional card. To play these cards I need mana, in my tower I had a wheel which goes from 1 to 10 which represented my mana.
When the other players walked on a tile you turned it around on the tile there was two numbers one for how many cards I got to draw or discard and one for how much my mana would increase or decrease.

When the heroes walked on a tile they got to take a loot card if there also was a monster/monster on the tile and they defeated it they got an additional card, but if they couldn't defeat the monster/monsters they lost a life equal to the amount of monsters in the room and pushed back one tile, the combat is decided by rolling a d20, if there was more than one hero on a tile they all rolled the die and used the best roll die.

Once all the keys was collected an event called "Wizards rage" started which allowed me to remove

I really liked this game and I had alot of fun placing traps and mosters in order to kill my friends, I really liked that you got to place blank monsters and traps in order to make the players take the route you want them to take. All the systems worked really well together, I only feel like they need to tweak some of the systems and it takes quite some time to play, if I remember correctly we played it for over an hour, but other than that it is a really fun game.

The second game we tried had 4 player face of against each other in a race in order to retrive a relic, while playing against each other there is also a monster that one players controlls and which only shows itself every fourth turn which had you trying to figure out where it was at all times which is a cool idé. To move around the players rolled a d6

Each player started in one of the four corners, to find this relic the players had to stand on red tiles, for every turn they stay there they get to draw one card and somewhere in this deck there is one relic, other than the relic there where cards which would give you speciel abilities one for example allowed you to roll an extra die, but once you had the relic you couldn't use the cards.

In order to win you first had to find the relic then run back to one of the four starting location while the other players tried to stund you by standing next to you and taking the relic from you, if the player with the relic got killed the relic got shuffled into the deck. The players all have 3 lives each, the monster can't be killed.

When we played the game it seemed to never end the relic just bounced around to different players or the monster killed the player with the relic and it got shuffled into the deck again, what was good tho was that once all the cards where taken from the deck they never got shuffled back in except for the relic.

There was a lot of just running around, so I would like to see some sort of system that would focus all the action in one point to make the games go by faster, also the player who had the relic was in a really bad position having to avoid both the players and the monster, if they fix this I think it will turn into a really fun game, as I said earlier I really liked the idé of the moster being invisible most of the time.

Introduction/What happened this week

I totally forgot to introduce myself in my first post, but better late then never.
My name is Simon i'm a second year student at Uppsala university Campus Gotland, I study game design and graphics.

During the week we kept on working on our board game, we made a new board for the game which I forgot to take a picture of but it looks better than the first on trust me.
We keept the movement system but made it so that you will move further so the players will get to the action faster, which the two groups that tested our game enjoyed more than the slower paced game.

We also tried out two games, the first on was a game where you had to place move and turn gears in order to get to the other side, I really liked the idé but it took some time to understand how all the gears would move when you turned one of them because unfortunately the gears didn't work, but other that that I had fun with it.

The second game we played had you play as a rat, the goal of the game was to move a cross a board and find a cheese that was hidden, you started with 5 cards on your hand if i remember correctly, the cards where ordinary playing cards, you then placed a card and you got to move the same amount of steps, of you managed not to run into any walls you could play another card.
When a player found the cheese he/she had to get back to the start location, and at the same time trying to avoid the other players.

I had fun with this game as well, the most intresting part of the game was the movement system, it made it so that you had to plan your move carfully when you wanted to get somewhere or catch a player who had the cheese.

First boardgame meeting

Yester day I met my group to start figuring out idéas for our boardgame,
Luckily for us Simon Wulf already had an idé.

He wanted to create a game which would simulate pirates having naval battles.
We all liked the sound of this.

The game is played on an hexagonal board and will look something like this but will hopefully be made prettier in the future.

We came upp with a movement system which will simulate sailing, we implimented  a wind system to further simulate sailing, the movement system for now works like this, first of we roll a die too decide in which direction the wind will blow, this happens every new turn.

The players then choose their desired direction, when all players have choosen a direction the ships will move simultaneously, if two ships are abutting from any side there will be a combat phase, we havn't figured out the combat yet so for now we roll a die.

And that's about everything we decided during this meeting, we also playtested the movement system quite a bit.