Welp. It happened again.

Another idea hit me. This time it was the fault of another designer. I was at an in-person playtest a month back, and some of the feedback I got after a playthrough of Nebula was something along the lines of 'have you tried doing a tech tree?'.

.
.
.
Click.

No, I hadn't considered that. And now I'm wondering how I didn't think of it. The idea resonated with Nebula on so many levels, both mechanically and thematically. (I mean, a spaceship is just a big ball of technology, right?) The idea just fit so well that I had to so something with it.

After that session was over, I went home feeling like my head was going to explode from all the possibilities. Once home, I sat in front of my computer and started ripping a lot of the game out. Every mechanic that had always felt out of place or bolted on was fair game. Upgrade and goal tiles? Gone! Auto-repair bonuses? Bye! Tile storage? Don't need it anymore! Unlocks? Nope! Special ability tracks? Deleted! Color prisms? Poof! Generators? Scrapyard! Repair bots? Recycled!

What took the place of all of that? Tech tree time! Well, okay, maybe not a tree, exactly. I did some research on games that have a so-called 'tech tree' component to them. What I noticed is that the majority of games actually have tech tracks. It's a small but subtle difference. Mostly, tracks don't branch. Or merge. Sure, you don't have as many choices. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In games that have a complicated tech tree, the tree can often become the main focus of the player's attention. (You want a full-blown tech tree? Look up a game called 'Progress: Evolution of Technology' sometime.) While I do need a place to put all of the mechanics I removed, this new component shouldn't overshadow the rest of the game.

So, tech tracks then. One or more of these tracks, and you move forward (up, down, whatever) on them in response to something, and each step you go gives you resources or abilities. Huh, that sounds awfully familiar. Not like my ship sheet already has tracks...  ohwaitamin...

Well, whichever. So my game has even more tracks now. Any place where you gained tiles before (and lots of places where you didn't!), you gain tech points now, which you can spend to move up on these tracks. A few of the upgrade abilities made it into the tech tracks, renamed as command abilities. (Yup you're ordering your ship to do stuff now.) Since previously, each upgrade tile could be used once per turn, I needed some way to similarly limit the abilities that you get now, so now you have command points, which are required to activate the command abilities. Similarly, goal tiles, which gave end-game points, are now sitting at the tops of the tech tracks; you have to finish the track to get the extra points. And, of course, since we have the two new currencies (tech point and command points), we now have two new slide trackers (just like the one for energy) for tracking how much of each you have.

And, just in case you're curious, generators are gone, but repair-bots are still there. They aren't called that, of course, but the 'repair any space anywhere' ability is available in the game as a command ability. Yay!

"Coming soon: Tracks, the game!" Meh. The tech sheet is just another sheet of paper that you will need to play the game (alongside of the other two, the ship sheet and the ship tracks sheet), so it's not a huge component change, it just takes up a lot more table space now.

But, ya know, after some playtests (actually, a lot of playtests), I have concluded that...
<drum roll>
...the game actually works! It's odd, but when I play this game solo now, I actually feel a little enthusiastic about it. (Yeah...  I've been working on this thing for almost two years now. It makes sense that my interest in it has waned a little. But this change has restored some of that.) And when I show it to other players, I'm getting mostly positive feedback about the changes. Even putting it in front of board gamers that are not typically playtesters (and definitely not designers!), I still get positive feedback. This is a good sign! Of course, everyone has some ideas on how the game can be improved, which is fine; this is still an early iteration and I'm certain it's not at its best yet. But just the fact that most everyone that plays it seems to like it, and that players are eager to suggest ways to make it better is encouraging. And that's something I need in order to have the energy to keep working on it.

More playtests incoming! The tracks need balancing, and there is a possibility that I might be able to do a branching structure while keeping it simple. We'll see. But at least I'm still making progress. :)

Oh, and I still want to do public playtesting at some point. Seems like that might be a little farther off than I wanted. Sigh.

We're happy to announce that our mailing list is available for signups again! Signups were closed for a while there, mostly because we didn't have any new content to share. But now we're back, with a new upcoming game and possibly more announcements in the future!

If you're interested in being notified when we next do crowdfunding (most likely Nebula will go to Kickstarter in 2022), or if you're interested in being invited to playtest sessions, add in your address here! We promise we don't spam; we generally don't send out more than a couple of emails a year, sometimes a little more if there's a Kickstarter happening.

You can subscribe here:

You can also subscribe on our About page on this website.

​Most importantly, we're making preparations to do a large-scale beta playtest for Nebula: Pull & Write sometime soon. (Don't really know exactly when, but it's high on our list of priorities.) If you're at all interesting in trying out an upcoming new game, and maybe be a part of helping to contribute to making it better, then we definitely want you on our list. We will be sending out emails when that gets close to happening.

​Thanks!

Still here. Still chugging away on Nebula. Progress has been a lot slower lately, mostly because my goal hasn't been as clear.

Playtesting

I'm still firmly committed to get Nebula out there as a published game, it's the route to get there that I'm questioning. My plan was, once I got the core mechanics of the game solidified (which I have done), that I would host a large playtest, the purpose of which would be to help flush out any balance issues in the game. (I'm fairly certain there must be some, as the game has a large amount of variables within and between the various layouts; I severely doubt I got everything perfectly right the first try.)

However, I've been informed (by designers more experienced than me) that this may not be the best route, that the data from a large playtest would be better directed towards graphical and playability concerns. This is rather disappointing, as I wanted to button up as much as possible mechanically before I start forking out money for art and graphic design, but it doesn't seem like I'm going to get my wish.

I have started addressing visual concerns, at least what I can do on my own. I'm attempting to make the game look a little more like what I hope the final product will be, addressing visual elements and giving the game more table presence. I'm also still trying to nail down the game balance, searching for corner cases that might 'break' the game or make it not fun.

Still, it feels like I've lost my way a little bit. I'm still doing playtesting, still fixing problems, still making progress. Just seems like there's a little less wind in my sails right now. 

Streaming

In other news, I've started experimenting with streaming! I frequent a lot of Twitch channels, for both gaming and music, and I've had a couple of people recommend that I start a stream myself. Now, I'm not really sure what I could stream that would be interesting for other people, but just on a whim I tried doing a stream of me playing Manaforge solo. It worked...  reasonably well? I didn't have my camera or mic set up, and I didn't advertise or anything, so I wasn't really expecting any sort of turnout. Still, I had a couple of people drop in, and even chatted with one person for a bit. So... success? Definitely went better than I thought it would.

So, not sure if I'm going to make a regular thing out of it. I know audiences like consistent schedules. Perhaps next time I'll hook up my mic. Not sure if I want to be on camera or not...  the way I figure it, nobody really wants to look at me. Maybe I'll try doing the vtuber thing...



And that's where I'm at right now. I know it's not much for not having posted in a couple of months, but I am still here chugging away. Hopefully I'll have more to report on the streaming front, as it seems like there could possibly be some interest in 'preview' streams of me playing through the prototype versions of Nebula. Or maybe I'll make a thing about streaming plays of other (indie?) games on TTS. Ideas are welcome, of course...  check the About tab of this site if you'd like to suggest something.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

​Welp...  it finally happened. This post makes me a little sad, but I know that sometimes these things are necessary to facilitate the progress of a design.

For a while now, I'm been struggling to incorporate some sort of player interaction into my game. I know that Nebula is pretty low on the player interaction scale; it wasn't really meant to have much. Players put so much effort into solving the puzzle on their own boards that there isn't really much mental space left for interference by other players. However, I wanted there to at least be something.

For a while, I was trying to incorporate interaction in using the game's Goal tiles. I wanted players to pay attention to what the other players are doing, and have to make the decision as to which victory point routes they can obtain versus which they have to let other players have. I got a lot of complaints that paying attention to other player's boards is too much to do when you're already concentrating on your own. So, that idea went away.

The other mechanic that has been in the game for a while is a player-interactive version of distributing resources. This resource 'draft' took many forms over the various versions, but ultimately it boiled down to working with other players to determine who gets which colored cubes. This took many forms over various iterations. For a while, I had a modified draft system, where players would pull cubes and then take cubes from each of their neighbors. I tried a cube 'market', where players could spend Energy to buy groups of cubes, with the price depending on where in the order they were. I even tried the most basic form of draft, a simple pick-and-pass.

But, through all of these, I was constantly getting complaints about the cube draft phase. The most common one was that the cube draft, as a mechanic, was not worth the physical and mental effort required to execute it. Being able to choose which three cubes you get at the start of the turn was not a meaningful decision when you're getting another ten to fifteen cubes over the course of the turn. Also, distributing cubes in this way felt like an obtrusive break in the game's flow; everyone had to stop what they were doing to deal with this part of the game.

So, after many bits of feedback telling me that this wasn't working, it eventually sunk in that it wasn't worth trying to force it. With that hanging over me, I ended up removing the entire game phase. This makes me sad, as it's basically the last bit of player interaction in the game. (Sure, there's passing the bag of cubes around the table, and looking at what cubes other players have to try to guess what's left in the bag, but that's pretty minor.)

I've heard the 'don't be afraid to kill your darlings' advice many times. The original quote pertained to writing, but the idea applies equally well to game design. However, I never thought that it would apply to me like this. Sure, I've removed mechanics from the games I've worked on plenty of times. But this one was so ingrained into the game that it didn't even occur to me until this point that it was something I could possibly remove. It took many playtesters doing the verbal equivalent of beating me over the head with it until it finally sunk in.

With that change implemented, I tried playing the game solo a couple of times, just to see how to see how the new flow works. The game felt a little faster, but I got the odd feeling that something was missing without that phase. I assume that, because the cube draft was part of the game for so long, that I was just not used to the new game flow yet. So, I left it to the playtesters to decide if the change was positive.

Wow! Dramatic difference.

So far, I've run four playtests with the phase removed. A couple of players (especially ones that had played before) commented that the game basically felt like multiplayer solitaire with the draft gone. However, that didn't stop them from enjoying the game. A lot, actually. Players new to the game also enjoyed the game quite a bit, and didn't seem to mind the lack of player interaction.

Two very interesting things happened from this change:

• The time it takes to play Nebula dropped noticeably. Whereas before it would take 45 minutes to an hour to play, now it's more like 30 to 45 minutes. Very strange, though...  the draft might typically take a minute, and it occurred seven times during the game, so I have no idea why removing it would reduce the game time by 15 minutes.
• The general feel of the feedback I received from players changed quite a bit. Before this change, players would complain about the game's mechanisms; of course this includes the cube draft, but also stuff like wanting different rewards from the board, the balance of some of the tracks, and how powerful Energy should be. Now, the feedback I'm getting is more about minor concerns: the arrangement of information on the board, the game's iconography, some of the board colors, and of course, suggestions about how to add player interaction. My only guess as to why the tone of the feedback changed is that players are enjoying the game more, and so are more prone to overlooking the game's mechanical glitches? Don't know.

But, regardless of anything else, there's no question that removing the draft was a positive change. Even if it is a mechanic that has been in the game a long time and that hurt to remove. Anything to make the game better.

Now let's just hope I don't have to cut out anything else important. :)

One recent success...

One of the nagging problems I've been having with Nebula is how to handle the 'goal' tiles. For a while now I've had rectangular tiles with various objectives and victory point values on them. These tiles serve three purposes: to give the players another vector for scoring victory points, to add variety between plays (because the tiles are randomly selected), and to give players some direction on a board that otherwise has an overwhelming number of possible starting strategies. The tiles have accomplished these purposes. However, just because they fit the parameters doesn't mean they are good:

• I've tried putting many goals in the center of the table that apply to all players, with the condition that each player can only choose two of them that they want to score. Players complained that they couldn't decide between too many options.
• I've tried putting just two goals in the center that apply to all players. Players either forgot about them, ignored them, or claimed that they weren't 'interesting' enough to pursue. (And then were unhappy when they lost because they didn't get the points from them.)
• I've tried giving 'personal' goals to each player. Players complained that that the goals weren't balanced.
• I've tried putting goals *between* the players (ala Between Two Cities), so each player had one goal to each side that applied to them. Still got complaints about balance and disinterest.
• I've tried making the goals use player interaction; goals were stated as 'first to do X'. Players didn't want to be bothered with parsing other players' boards to determine which goals were worth pursuing.
• I've tried stating the goals as 'player with the most X'. Same problem with players not wanting to look at other players' boards.

Frustration. Couldn't find the right idea. And then I got a suggestion from another designer: tie the goals into the Upgrade system.

Aside form the 'goal' tiles, Nebula also has square 'upgrade' tiles that give special powers and a small number of victory points. Players can only hold a certain number of upgrades at a time, though that capacity can be increased by repairing one of the ship's systems in particular. The suggestion was to roll the goals into that mechanic, have the goals occupy the same slots that the upgrades use, forcing the player to choose between special powers and victory points, and perhaps creating an inflection point during the game when the player would want to switch from one to the other.

I further modified the upgrades to not have victory points at all; tiles are now either resource boosts or vp, not both. (Okay, with one exception, but that one's pretty small and might not even survive testing.) I also ditched the upgrades that give a one-time special power or boost, and balanced the power level of the rest so that they are all now consistently 'once per round' effects. (Fewer variation in the mechanics means easier to learn game.) I changed the upgrade slots to designate that they can hold an upgrade tile, a goal tile, or the player's choice of either one. I also got rid of the rule that some upgrades are locked in place; any tile can be discarded at will, making for further consistency.

So far the change has worked very well. With players having to acquire the goal tiles themselves (all tiles are draw-two-keep-one), instead of just having them assigned, it gives the players a choice of what strategy they want to pursue. Also, since players now have to work a little for their the goal tiles, it forces them to invest in them mentally, which means, they are less inclined to forget about or ignore them. The tiles themselves are not well balanced yet, but that is secondary to making sure the core of the mechanic works.


One problem solved, about a thousand left. But it's progress, can't argue with that. Hopefully I should have another post soon...  I have one more hurdle that I hope I'm about to get over.

Progress on Nebula continues! Slowly, anyway. Here's where I'm at...

3-D

I've had a minor (and to most people, probably obvious) epiphany about the ship layouts. Working off of the crawlspace feedback I got last time, it occurred to me that I was thinking about wrong. Instead of trying to add more crawlspaces, I should be thinking about the ships in terms of 'upper' and 'lower' decks or floors. The Terran ship's lower deck consists of just polyomino squiggles, but not all of the ships need to have that same layout. Taking inspiration from the Xyxyx ship, where all of the crawlspaces are linked into a circle, I redesigned the Ferrite and Rhox ships so that they have an entire fully-populated lower floor. You can stick to wandering around just the upper deck or just the lower deck if you wish, but there is something to be said for climbing from the upper to the lower, moving around the lower, and then popping back up to the upper deck in a different location to continue your repairs. I really wanted the ships to feel three-dimensional, and while I don't think it's quite there yet, I feel like it's a step in the right direction.

(The Rhox ship, pictured above, actually has three decks. You start in the middle deck, you can climb up to the top deck to hit some of the spaces there, or you can climb down to fix the ship's FTL core. If you can't tell from the layout, I'm attempting to make an 'onion' ship, where each deck is a 'layer' and is smaller than the one above it, and each layer wraps around the sides like a cylinder rather than having a discrete 'port' or 'starboard' side. Hence the "Bullet" in the name; that is supposed to describe the actual shape of the ship.)

Areas

Okay, so the ships are no longer flat. So what? My goal from before was to add more candy to the ship in the form of ship regions that could give bonus points or powers if all of the spaces in the region are repaired. I ended up going back to all of the ship layouts and re-coloring the space backgrounds so that each ship has several of these regions present on all the decks of the ship, not just the lower one. Right now, the candy for completely repairing these regions in just victory points. I've had trouble with the crawlspaces before where a player would finish one and then forget to collect the special power it granted. Now, with just VP on the line, the rewards can wait to be tallied up until the end of the game and don't cause a cognitive interruption on the part of the player.

Success! After a couple of playtests, the ship regions idea seems to be going over well. Players appreciated having some extra goal to work towards and found the extra VP for finishing a region satisfying. That's not to say that the idea was 100% accepted; some players wanted more than just VP rewards from the regions (which butts up against the forgetting to claim the reward problems I mentioned above), and others didn't care for the goals that I tied into the regions, where you get points for completing certain colors of regions. (The regions are still color coded, based off of the location of the region in the ship and what track symbols you might expect to get from it.) But despite that, I still call the idea a success, just that it needs a little bit of tweaking.

One point of contention, though, is what to call these new spaces. I used "Areas" during my playtesting. "Rooms", "Regions", and "Zones" all came up as alternate possibilities, and I'm sure other ideas would fit. I don't know what the correct term for them should be. Minor point, I know, but having the right word in there can help evoke the feeling that these spaces are connected for a particular purpose. Because flavor is important too. :)

Goals

Still with the goal tiles. The idea of having player interaction through the goal tiles looking for 'most of' values did not work out. Players complained that they were satisfied enough with the puzzle presented to them, and they did not like the cognitive interruption caused by having to check other player's progress to determine the value of pursuing the goal. Fine.

The latest iteration of goals set them to about as simple as I can possibly make them. The goals are reworked to be 'get 1 VP per XYZ', capped at 8 VP per goal. Two random goals are dealt out to the center of the play area and applied to all players at the end of the game. And that's it. I tied the areas mechanic to a few of them, giving points for certain colors of areas, because the goals I had before based on the ship geography didn't apply anymore.

Still with the thud. Some players appreciated the goals; they give direction when you don't have an idea of what strategy to take. (3 VP for doing this thing, or 6 VP for doing this other, equally difficult thing. Which would you do?) Additionally, they change the point landscape for each game, forcing players to prioritize things differently each playthrough, which should hopefully increase the game's replayability.

However, other players were still complaining that the goals weren't influential enough. Some players want the ability to ignore the goals entirely and 'do their own thing'. Others complained that the random chance nature of pulling cubes means that they don't always get the necessary resources to be able to even pursue a particular goal at all. (I thought I had enough randomness mitigation in there so a player could overcome that if they chose; perhaps the players just didn't feel like they needed to prioritize the conditions specified in the goal and so suffered at the end of theg ame when VP was tallied.)

In any case, I'm still not there with this part. Strange that this little detail is something that keeps eluding me. One player suggested tying the goals into the areas in a different way; maybe have variable rewards for completing areas or something like that. I'll have to investigate.

Blind Playtesting

In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to start doing blind playtesting on Nebula. That idea fell by the wayside while I wrestled with getting some of these last mechanical changed locked down. Now that it's starting to (again) look like the game is settling down, I know I want to get back to the blind testing idea. I don't know how many more iterations I'm going to need, but I hope to be able to update the rulebook and get it looked at very soon. I'm starting to see that a lot of these nagging problems with the small mechanics aren't going to be solved by just a few designer playtests; I think I need a larger audience and more opinions as to what feels the best. To that end, I need to get the mechanics at least stable, so I can capture them in the rules and present that to the playtesters.

The rest still applies...  I want to get signups going on my mailing list again (because I want to advertise my playtesting on there), I want to get my Discord safe for public consumption, and I want to get the feedback form tweaked to help target feedback towards these hot-button mechanics.


Soon, I keep telling myself. We'll see how long it takes for then to become now.

Been a while since I last wrote anything. Haven't been able to put a lot of time into Nebula lately, but there have been a couple of developments.

Goals Redux

So, the mission cards I posted about last time didn't really work out. I stand by the idea; I think it was a neat concept. And players liked how they gave you a sequence of goals to follow and injected some story into the game. However, they were too complicated. That material would be better left as an expansion, something to add in once the game starts getting stale. They definitely aren't suited for new players.

So, back to my previous idea. I'm going back to the goal tiles, which always worked reasonably well but just had some balancing issues. Hopefully I may have figured that out?

This latest iteration of the goals has two goal tiles dealt out in the center of the board. Each goal tile has two pieces of information: a 'metric' that refers to a player's progress in one aspect of the game, and a 'minimum' that represents a threshold for that metric. For example, a metric could be 'number of repaired pink spaces' or 'number of marks on the track with the least marks'. The threshold is just a number... 3 or 5 or whatever.

Under this system, scoring goes as follows: for each goal, each player with at least the minimum amount of whatever metric the goal cares about gets 8 points. Then, the player with the most of that metric (or tied for the most) gets an additional 8 points. So each goal is worth up to 16 points, and there are two goals, so 32 points total for getting everything.

This system actually worked better than I expected. The minimum threshold gives players some low-hanging fruit to score, and the 'player with the most' comparison gives a target for overachievers and players who like to outdo others. Adds in a tiny amount of players interaction and forcing awareness of the overall game while not absolutely demanding it; players can ignore some or all of the goal points at their own discretion. While I think the point value is too high (32 points is huge for a game with average point totals in the 60s), the mechanic seems to be sound and I think all it needs is some tweaking.

On top of all that, the system is much simpler compared to previous iterations. Each goal is worth the same number of points. Each goal has the same two comparisons, 'minimum' and 'most'. The goals are balanced for all players; no goals are specific to a player. I think the only potential problem is some goals might not play nice together, but that shouldn't be too complicated to work around.

I hope this idea holds, because I really want to lock this mechanic down.

Center, Left, Right

The idea I had for the cube draft from last time is still there and holding. (Each player pulls three cubes, keeps one, then take one from the player to the left, then from the player to the right.) It's definitely an improvement from the cube market from previous iterations; it flows much faster and encourages all players to participate simultaneously. However, it is apparently a little confusing to keep track of. Both in the digital version of the game and the physical version, there are often some instances of an overzealous player rushing to take their three cubes and potentially grabbing something before the other players are ready, and then a slower player comes along and is lost trying to figure out what happened.

I'm not really sure what to do about this... I did get some compliments about the mechanic; it gives players some agency about what free cubes they get, and encourages a little bit of player interaction. The criticisms though are that it's unnecessary (since later in the game players are getting so many cubes that the colors of the first few are inconsequential) and physically awkward (since players are occasionally reaching past each other). I've been thinking if I can do anything about that, and aside from changing the draft to a bland pick-and-pass system, I don't know how else I can resolve it. So, this mechanic is still not solidified, though it is in the running.

In-Person Meetups

Speaking of a physical copy, just this week my Orlando designer group meet up again, for the first time since COVID hit. It was fantastic to get out of the house and back with my friends! Sure, things were a little different; masks and vaccinations were required for everyone, and we had to pack up when the store was close to closing time instead of the store owners holding the place open for us for a while. Still, it was totally worth it. We're only meeting once every two weeks for now, but it's nice to see reality starting to get back to nromal, at least a little. Looking forward to the next one!

(P.S. I might have another design bubbling in the background, and it might end up showing up at one of these in-person meetups, and it might fit into something a publisher is doing. TONS of speculation and vague possibilities here, but we'll see.)

Spaceship Architecture

I'm not sure what to do with one other idea that I got from one of my recent playtests. I haven't done any implementation of it yet, and I'm not sure that I will, but it's one of those feedback bits that caught my attention and just refuses to let me forget about it.

I had one of my playtesters mention that they liked the crawlspaces mechanism. As in, really liked it. So much so that they wished that that was a larger part of the game. As in, they wanted the ship to have more 'rooms', more discrete areas that can be individually repaired, and maybe more rewards or incentives related to repairing these regions.

While I don't really know what form these areas would take, one positive thing is that there would be little to no mechanical change to implement this; this is entirely a content change. It would amount to rearranging the ship layouts and adding in some strategically positioned walls, probably with some other minor adjustments. I'm a little wary of doing that at the moment, since generating and balancing the ship layouts is a surprisingly large amount of work. Still, I can't think of any specific reason why I shouldn't give it a try, other than the amount of effort it will take.

One added benefit to doing this is that I can inject a little bit of flavor in this way. Instead of just having a loose cluster of green spaces, now I can have a 'medbay'. Or the orange spaces at the bottom can be an 'engine room'. I can even switch it up between ship layouts; the Xyxyx (insects) ship can have a 'hatchery' for life support spaces, the Rhox (angry anthro rhinos) ship can have an 'incinerator' for power spaces, etc.

Laundry List

Feels like there's so much left to do on this...

• Finish rewriting the rulebook (very close on this one!)
• Update my google form for receiving playtest feedback
• Finish cleaning up my Discord server so that it can be used for playtesting
• Set up blind playtesting sessions
• Advertise blind testing on social media and Discord
• Re-open my mailing list for signups

And that's just to get the next phase of playtesting going. I had been saying for a while that I wanted to launch a Kickstarter in 2021...  that's seeming increasingly unlikely, considering the number of steps I have left to do. Still, even though I'm going more slowly than I would like, at least I'm still going. Which means I'll make it to the goal eventually.

Kind of a quick update...

My original intent was to open Nebula up for everyone to be able to playtest. I had started hammering out the rulebook, trying to make it usable for blind testing. I was also starting to plan out how I was going to get attention for the game, dropping open playtest requests on Facebook groups and Discord servers and such. Started polishing my own Discord server, figuring out how I would schedule playtesting events, getting my mailing list working again, etc.

And then, my muse struck. <dramatic music>

Although I'm happy with Nebula overall, there have been two mechanics in the game that felt 'squishy'. (Opposite of 'solid', vague feeling that they don't quite fit properly.) One was the 'goal' tiles; I like the way that they give players direction and offer the incentive of extra VP, but many times they were ignored or didn't have enough of an effect on the game. The other is the draft; it accomplishes the purpose of adding some player interaction and of distributing cubes to players, but it was too slow and fiddly. So, after thinking through both problems for a while, I was hit with an inspiration on how to fix the goal tiles...

Missions

The mechanic I came up with is a direct replacement for the goals. Instead of each player having two different micro-objectives to work towards, instead I'm giving each player a unique set of objectives that grant both victory points and unique bonuses.

This was inspired by two things. First, I was testing a mechanic for the Manaforge expansion that I called 'relics'; each was a complex mega-item with prerequisites to construct it, an energy tracker that marked how 'charged' the item was, and a bunch of various special abilities. It was an interesting concept but didn't really feel right. Second, I was playing World of Warcraft for a while, and I was inspired by the quest 'chains' in that game. Do this thing, which gives you a reward, then go over here and do this thing, for another reward, then go to this spot and beat this boss, which you turn in for a mega reward. I wanted that same sense of progression, working through a set of goals with small rewards along the way, until you reach the end of the chain and get a big payoff.

I'm not sure what I ended up with fits that exactly, but I think it's a great first step. These 'mission' cards give a series of tasks that may or may not need to be accomplished in a specific order, with rewards for each task consisting of straight victory points plus bonuses that cannot be obtained any other way. Some of these missions might change the way you play the game, or change the balance of the game overall, so each different mission is almost a different game. (Well, that's what I'm hoping for anyway.) Additionally, each mission has a general theme, even so far as giving a little story blurb explaining what you're doing out in deep space in the first place.

I've only playtested these new mission cards once so far, but that first playtest went fantastically well. Of course they're horribly unbalanced, and some of the missions don't really make a lot of sense at the moment, but for a first attempt it clicked better than I could have hoped. I am working now on a second iteration, with more understandable instructions, a little better balance, a larger variety of missions, and more unique powers.

During the feedback portion of that one playtest, I also asked the playtesters about the cube draft phase, saying that I didn't like how it was but wasn't really sure what to replace it with. After chatting with one of the testers, both during the feedback session and offline afterwards, we came up with an idea that sounds like it should be a vast improvement...

New Cube Draft

The purpose of the cube draft phase is to give free resources to each player, but also to create a little bit of player interaction and make players feel like they have some agency as to what cubes they get.

The current cube draft has the lead player put groups of three cubes in a line on a special draft board, one more group than the number of players. Each player gets to pick a group of cubes in turn order, but the caveat is that a player must pay energy to skip ahead in the line. This system works well enough for fulfilling the objectives; players might take groups of cubes that the others want, and have to think a little on if they want to take the 'free' cubes or pay to get a better choice.

However, this system is too slow for what it does. Players often just take the 'free' cubes, since energy (the cost to skip cube groups) is precious and can be used to gain more cubes anyway. Plus, the ability to hate draft cubes that others might need isn't really useful.

The idea we came up with was to ditch the draft board entirely and instead have each player pull their own group of three cubes, placing them out on the table. Each player then simultaneously takes one cube from their group, then one cube from the group of the player to their left, and finally the last remaining cube from the group of the player to their right. This should still accomplish the goals of interacting with the other players and giving agency, but should be significantly faster since the grabs are simultaneous and the fiddliness is distributed.

I have not playtested this mechanic yet, but it will definitely be a part of the next game I run. Fingers crossed!


So, with both of the new mechanics in the works for the game, it looks like getting it opened up for public testing got pushed back a little bit, if for no other reason than I'm going to have to rework the rulebook for these new rules. (Which in a way is good, as I was having trouble with the organization of the rulebook. Having something shake it up might make other pieces fall into place.)

That said, if you're interested in trying an early prototype playtest of Nebula, feel free to contact me. I can always be reached at my business email address [email protected], and I can also be contacted via my business page on Facebook. I also frequent many of the playtesting Discord servers if you want to reach me there.

 Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you all a good 2021...

Wait, what? It's March already? How did that happen?!

Okay, okay. I guess it's hard to keep track of time when you're cooped up in the same place all the time. Stupid pandemic. Here's hoping life gets back to normal sometime soon. At least I haven't been completely idle...

Nebula Blind Playtesting

My main objective right now is to get blind testing started on Nebula. I feel like the game is in a good place; the mechanics are fairly solid and I haven't made any major changes in a while. I'm certain I will need to make more tweaks; the balance is still slightly off but I'm thinking that should shake out with a large number of playtests.

I also have a rulebook put together for the game. This is not intended to be anything close to a final rules version. Instead, this particular rulebook is adapted for Tabletop Simulator, containing references to the game's digital interface elements, like menus and buttons and such. While I'm sure it could benefit from some diagrams and other improvements, it's not really intended for any use beyond the digital playtests so I'm not too concerned about how good it is, as long as it's understandable enough to play the game.

In addition, I have a Google Survey set up for players to give their feedback after playing. (The assumption being, since it is a *blind* playtest, that I might not be present for the playthrough.) Even if I am there, it's nice to be able to record players' feedback, and I've noted that players tend to be a little less inhibited with their criticisms if the medium is anonymous and I'm not there breathing down their necks. :)

Finally, in order to help facilitate the playthroughs, I'm trying to figure out exactly what players will need in order to playtest. 'Where' and 'when' come to mind as questions that need to be answered. In the context of an online playtest, 'where' needs to be a communication tool that can support voice chat and allow players to coordinate. 'When' means making sure all players know at what time to be ready to play. Both of those can be facilitated by my...
 
Discord Server

Mystic Tiger Games has its own Discord server! Currently, there's not much there. A couple of channels (text and voice) for playing board games online, and a couple of (text only) channels for playing with the server's bots. I intend to add more to the server over time; there's a couple of other Discord game bots I'd like to try out, not to mention still wanting to write one of my own. And I'd like to make a space for players to discuss games and such if they want.

I'm not ready to publish the link to it yet, as I have a little more setting up to do. (It's good practice to be able to moderate users if the situation requires it, and there are bots out there to help with that sort of thing.) But I do want to make it public, and soon.

Mailing List

One other thing that I haven't started yet, but I've been giving some serious thought to, is restarting my company mailing list. I've had a mailing list for a while but I've only used it a few times. Notably, the last time I used it was before they passed the big data protection law that basically says that everyone must explicitly opt-in to a mailing list in order to keep receiving stuff from it. Now, everyone on my list either requested to be on the list, or is someone I know personally. Still, since I don't have "explicit opt-in permission" from all of them, my best choice is to scrap the list and start over.

My plan is to send out one last email to the old list, informing everyone that there is a new list to subscribe to if they still want to keep receiving emails. If someone doesn't respond...  then they're done. No more spam from me. Then I can try again with the new list, sending out the occasional announcement for Nebula or whatever else I'm working on.

Links

While I'm not quite ready yet to make a huge announcement about playtesting Nebula (it's coming soon tho!), I will put the links up if anyone wishes to look at the game now. Feel free to play around with it, though if you do run a full game of it I request that you use the feedback form afterwards to let me know what you think. (The form should be anonymous; feel free to trash the game as much as you like, I won't know who you are. :D ) You can put your email address on the last answer if you wish to be added to the new mailing list too, though I won't actually be able to add you until I create it. :)

Link to the Nebula rulebook:
http://mystictigergames.com/Nebula_rulebook_v34_tts.pdf
​
Link to the Tabletop Simulator mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2297746065

Link to the feedback form:
https://forms.gle/ws61sSjHgEtDgXR69


And that's it for now. Stay tuned everyone...  I hope to make this year much more active for Mystic Tiger Games! :)

Our game store has moved! Mystic Tiger Games now has copies of Manaforge available for sale on Amazon.com. The game copies are available now at a lower price, plus Amazon Prime members qualify for free shipping!

Manaforge page on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C8C84DM

Happy Crafting!