"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

- Attributed to Vice-President Dan Quayle

Another design post. I haven't done one of these in a while. The concept for this one occurred to me recently when two very different ideas that were both floating around in my head kind of congealed together.

My original idea was going to be a rant, posted somewhere else. My rant is concerning a particular game I play through Discord. (I don't feel the need to name it, but anyone familiar with it will recognize the description.) It is a text-based game where you play as a fantasy character, defeating monsters and collecting loot, so you can craft better weapons and defeat stronger monsters and get better loot, and so on. The game itself is fun for as simple as it is. It's closer to an 'idle' game than an old-style text-based adventure, but that's fine. The challenges in this game are few; there is an occasional 'dungeon' which serves as a gate, meaning that you have to get through the boss monster within to access the next area of stronger monsters. The first few dungeons are relatively straightforward (press button, deal damage), with later dungeons incorporating more puzzle-y elements. But it's still fun, as you get to make progress by improving your character as you go.

My gripe with the game is the randomness in the loot. At certain dungeons, there is a gear requirement. As in, you must have a specific item equipped. The only way to get this item is to craft it, and the only way to craft it involves gathering a large amount of monster parts. (Unicorn horns and dragon scales and that sort of stuff.) The problem is, these monster parts only drop from the corresponding monsters, and the drop rate is very low. Like, we're talking low single digits here. This leads to frustration as there can very easily be a lack of progress as the random number generator decides it doesn't want to play nice. Kill monster, no drop; kill monster, no drop; kill monster, no drop. Yes, you get xp and other stuff when you kill monsters, but none of that brings you any closer to the goal. There's always the same chance for that monster drop, and nothing you can do improves that. At least for me, this can quickly become not-fun.

With that train of thought bounding around in my head, I happened to read a random post someone made on Facebook, talking about how a particular game designer is always interested in the 'feel' of a game. He would ask stuff like "How do you want your players to feel while they are playing your game?". I've noticed this mentioned quite a lot over the years, and it's a good thing to focus on. (I do think about it for my games sometimes but it's not usually as front-and-center as it probably should be while I'm designing.)

Put those two together, and it made me think about the feel of this Discord game. Frustration can't be the intended result of this game, right? So, then, what should it be? My thought process let me to the question: How do I, personally, want to feel when I'm playing this game. Or any game? Why do I play games at all?

My answer, just talking about myself, is 'success'. I want to feel like I succeeded at something. I want a sense of accomplishment. Completing a victory point goal. Getting to play a difficult but powerful card. Executing a complex strategy. Obtaining a rare resource. Solving a difficult puzzle. I want something I can look back on as the highlight of the game. "That game was fun because I got to do That Really Cool Thing for the first time."

(Note, that 'defeating other players' and 'winning the game' are not on that list. Achieving victory over others is not a requirement for me to have fun. I supposed this places me squarely in the 'euro' gamer category; I don't need to feel superior over the other players, only over the game itself.)

Okay, so what is the opposite of success? Failure. I'm having less fun if I fail to accomplish the thing. Tied into that, though, is the reason for failing. Why did I not succeed? How I feel is based on that.

• Did I fail because my strategy is flawed? I didn't get the Golden Chalice of Infinite Rubies because I forgot to buy a magic key to open the chest? Meh, okay, totally my fault; I just need to learn from my mistake and do better next time.
• Did I fail because some other player executed a better plan and got there first? Ouch, okay that stings a little, but that's just an incentive for me to improve my strategy.
• Did I fail because another player with a Really Big Hammer hit me on the head and knock me out of the race for a couple of turns? Okay, that sucks; that was an attack targeted directly at me. I'm more likely to want to get back at that player for a while, which pulls me away from the accomplishing fun stuff part of the game. Also means I have to devote attention to not getting clobbered again, which is another distraction from having fun.
• Did I fail because I rolled a 1 on some die somewhere? Or I drew a card that says that I failed? This is the worst possible feeling, for me. In the other circumstances, there is always something I can do differently to increase my chances of succeeding. In this scenario, I have zero agency. I can only keep trying (if the game even allows that) until I succeed. And in that interim, someone else could come along with a better die roll and steal the goal. This scenario, failing due to random chance, causes frustration for me. And even if I do eventually succeed, how many turns did I spend sitting there and making failed rolls before I finally succeeded? Other people might feel a high from that moment, finally rolling that 6 and getting the reward; me, it's almost a sense of relief, like 'whew the bad part of the game is over'. Why does the game need a bad part in the first place?

Note that one way to help mitigate this scenario is to make a reward for failure. What if, the first time I roll, I need a 6. If I fail, then the second time, I need a 5 or 6. Third time, 4 or better. And so on. It still hurts, but at least there's a sense of progress towards a goal. Eventually, I will succeed. Or maybe each time I fail, I still gain a ruby, which I can turn in for bonuses elsewhere. There is also the possibility that I could take extra precautions. Like, if I take an extra couple of turns to go the long way and grab the Platinum Key of Unlocking Everything, then I don't have to make the final roll; just walk up and take the prize. Give me the choice to do the expensive but reliable route, or try my luck at the fast way. (I don't trust my luck, so I will almost always take the reliable route, but just having the choice is nice.)

One good example of mitigating the sting of failure was the time I got to try Rising Sun. In that game, while combat is a large part of it, there is also the element of betting on the outcome of the battle. And there are times when you might want to bet on a particular side losing. Like, if I know I'm going to lose a fight, at least I will be sure to get an extra bonus out of it. This can even be a strategy, playing to lose a combat so you can get a bonus that will let you win elsewhere. 

But games that are pure chance? Press button, fail; press button; fail. This is not fun for me. Yes, games should have some randomness; it provides variability and replayability to the game. But I don't enjoy when the main game experience is based entirely on luck. If I play a game like this too many times and get hit with bad luck too often, I'm very likely to reject ever playing that game again. Even if I don't always succeed outright, there should always be some sense of moving forward. Otherwise, I'm just wasting my time, both figuratively (in the sense of the game's turns), and literally.


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Heh, okay. I guess this turned into more of a rant than I wanted. But the point is there; if you're making a game, ask yourself: what do I want my players to get out of this game? Then keep the answer to that in mind when you're putting together your game's systems; there might be something in there that goes against the experience you're trying to craft.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

It's been a crazy year so far. You'd figure that with the pandemic being a known quantity and the holidays coming up, at least there would be some semblance of 'normal' with everything that's happening, but nope. Still, life (and game designing :) continues to happen. Here's where I'm at:

Nebula

I 've been keeping up with Nebula playtests where I can. I keep making tweaks and adjustments, hoping to find the sweet spot for the game. I think I'm getting closer; I've had a lot of positive feedback lately from my playtests. I think putting it all into a list is probably the best way to organize it:

• My last couple of playtests have had very positive feedback. It seems like lately the players are more enthusiastic about the game after playing it. I've even had a couple of players say stuff like 'I'd like to buy a copy now' or 'let me know when your Kickstarter launches'. Very encouraging to hear!
• On the flip side, better game means less in the way of constructive feedback. I had one playtest that basically gave me zero feedback; the players thought the game was good enough that they didn't have anything significant to offer in terms of improvements. So, while it's good that the game is viewed well, I know it can't possibly be perfect, so I have to work a little harder to get indications of things to adjust.
• I'm up to four playable ships now! I was always planning on having multiple ship layouts, each with special little quirks and such. I had created some alternate layouts a while ago, but only recently did I do a balancing pass on those to get them roughly in line with the power level of the original ship. (Of course, I can't make them exactly equal, nor should I try. But they should be close while still being different.) I ran a couple of playtests with the alternate ships available, and while they're certainly not perfect, I don't think they're too far off. Just needs a couple of adjustments. Feedback on the new ships has been kinda meh, though. They're definitely different but apparently they don't change the play experience much. Something else to work on.
• Still trying to balance the goals and upgrades. The upgrades are, I think, doing well. It's getting harder for players to decide between different upgrades, which is good; two different powers should appear roughly equal in power level while still providing different strategy options. I think some of them might need a slight bump in victory point values, but that's mostly it. The goals I'm still having a difficult time with. I've got a few that are very good, and a few that are playable but not well balanced. Problem is, I don't feel like I have enough of them. For some reason these have been difficult in terms of trying to keep the amount of effort on par with the reward, and yet still keep then roughly balanced against each other. Right now I have ten goal tiles; I would like more but I think this is going to be the limit.
• I've been hitting a problem I call 'exploding turns' for a while, where one player gets a massive burst of resources (usually mid-turn) and ends up taking far longer to finish all their moves than everyone else, resulting in a lot of player downtime. (Not to mention that player usually ends up running away with the game.) I've been attacking that problem by trying to reduce the amount of resources players can gain during the turn; it's best when the gains are gradual and all players gain at similar rates instead of having the resources fluctuate wildly. I've been slowly turning down the bonus 'chaining'...  gain an energy instead of a cube over here, gain a track step instead of energy over there, gain a fuel instead of energy at this spot, etc. It seems to be helping; players are still making a lot of progress but it's more evenly distributed.

Still chugging away, but I'm happy with how the game is turning out.

Side Project

One of the things that has been slowing down my designing progress has been something new and shiny to work on. If you've ever done any sort of extended project like this, you'll be familiar with the feeling of some new and cool idea coming along, distracting you from finishing your current project. Well, I've hit one of those. It's not another board game, though, but something digital. Specifically, something on Discord!

I've been spending a lot of my time connected to Discord lately. Besides being a really great platform for video gaming, it's also vital for staying in contact with other board gamers. This one community I'm attached to also has a game, playable right within Discord! It's a mostly text-based game where you play as a fantasy adventurer, going around slaying monsters, gaining treasure, gathering crafting materials, and powering up your weapons and armor. It's fairly simple game compared to most games out there, but just the fact that it can be played through a text chat makes it highly accessible and playable anywhere.

So, of course, I figured if this is a thing, maybe I can make one too?

Cue the montage of learning about Discord API libraries, databases, Discord servers, network bandwidth considerations, connection pools, cloud-based private servers, Linux administration, SSH tunneling, Discord bot directories and rankings, image hosting, error-tolerant programming, and probably about a million other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.

After hacking at it off and on for a few weeks, I have a working Discord bot. Right now it just hangs out on my private server and one other. Say hello to it, and it will give you an uplifting greeting in return. Tell it to wait for a certain amount of time, and it will ping you after that time elapses. Ask it to search, and it comes back to you with colored hearts. Tell it to combine colored hearts into a gift, and it keeps the gift in your inventory for later. Tell it to throw a gift at someone, and it will send that other person a cuddly hug animated gif. And tell it you want to play a game, and it will give you a set of five dice and play Yahtzee with you. :)

Most importantly, each of the concepts I had to learn to make any of those features work will be useful in some way trying to make a full-featured game later. I'm not quite sure I have all the pieces I need to make a complete game yet, but at least I have plenty of ideas floating around and directions to go. Hopefully this is something I can continue to hack away at.


And that's all for now. Focused on one board game and one online game. Plus side orders of playtesting other people's games, staying connected on Discord, and watching Twitch streams. (Along with gaming streams, there's a surprisingly large amount of good music streaming on Twitch.)

Two months since I last posted. Bleh...  I've really been slacking.

Except, I haven't. It's been a really busy couple of months. I've been doing a ton of stuff, mainly centered around Tabletop Simulator. Three things in particular:

Manaforge on TTS

I finally did it. I realized a while back that I had left my implementation of Manaforge on Tabletop Simulator incomplete. I had it marked as a 'release candidate' version and had neglected to update it once the game was published. Once of my tasks was to correct that oversight.

Pictured above is the result of that work. It's still the same game, of course, no rules changes or anything. But it should be a lot more playable now. I switched out the table for a much larger one and moved all of the player boards to the same side of the table (not like elbow room is really a thing in a virtual environment), so everyone has the same view of the cards. I updated the token bags to actually look like the tokens they're holding. I replaced the pawn I had as the first player token with an anvil model. I added the rulebook as an object in the game. I added some scripted buttons for common tasks such as refreshing the cards on the central board or passing hands during the talent draft. And I added a UI element that I call a 'mana tracker', taking the place of the mana abacus accessory in the physical game, for use in keeping track of how much mana you have during your turn.

And, for flavor, I updated the environment. I found several freely-available mods on TTS containing various models for use in tabletop role-playing games; I copied a few of those into my game, added a floor and some walls, and decorated it with the same magic circle templates that were used on some of the game components. I'd like to think that it looks pretty good now.

The whole thing is published on the Tabletop Simulator Workshop as the 'official' version of the Manaforge mod. (It's the same link as before, just the content is improved.) Oh, and I prettied up the workshop page for the game as well. Added links to the rulebook, faq, and game page on my site.

(Come to think of it, I should have a link to the BGG page for the game. Add that to my to-do list.)

Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=826257424

Nebula

Of course, I've still been hammering away at Nebula. Playtest, fix, playtest, fix, playtest, fix...  yeah, you get the idea. The game has been coming together remarkably well. I think I'm pretty close to done with the mechanical changes and I'm starting to get into balance tweaks. Pretty good sign that the game is coming together. It's also a good sign that my last couple of weeks worth of playtests have been giving me a lot of positive feedback. Players are almost always saying that they enjoyed playing. For the feedback I'm getting, it's more small stuff and balance bits. (And quite a bit of graphic design and layout stuff, but I'm not able to do much with that right now.) I've got several people asking when I'm going to host a playtest next, and one person even saying that they're ready to back my Kickstarter. Very encouraging! :D

At this point, I'm going to do a couple of rounds of balance changes, and then start on the rulebook. (Actually, I have a rulebook made, but it's from months ago and is way out of date.) Once I get the game playable from the rulebook, I'm going to start setting Nebula up to be blind testable. Running playtests is great and all, but the game needs a lot more testing than I can do with the time I have. Hopefully having the game played a hundred times will help shake out any lingering kinks that I'm not seeing.

After that, it might be time to start thinking about publishing. Graphic design and artwork and marketing and crowdfunding and production and shipping...  yeah, don't want to get ahead of myself. With luck I can start aiming for a Kickstarter date. Hopefully not too far into next year. I wonder if I'll hit a 2021 holidays delivery date.

OBJ Library

One other little side project. This one will only be useful to other people that are creating games on Tabletop Simulator. This is one of those things I did mostly to prove to myself that I could, although I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well.

I created and published a workshop mod containing a bunch of generic shapes. Cube, cylinder, flat plane, various regular prisms, and pyramids. All of these objects are done as model objects in TTS, and those models are using .obj files. While most normal people would use a modeling tool to create obj files, I decided to try my hand at creating them using a Java program. (Since I'm very bad at using modeling tools.) It was an interesting challenge, writing code to generate vertices, normals, and texture coordinates. Stuff that I haven't done in a long while, and certainly haven't done in Java at all. The file format for obj files is actually pretty simple (it's just a text format), so the main challenge was to come up with the coordinate data and figure out the quirks of Tabletop Simulators Unity rendering engine. (And yes, there are definitely a lot of quirks.)

The nice thing about using models instead of the built-in TTS components is that you can do several neat tricks with them. I used the cylinder objects I made as the bags in my Manaforge rebuild. Model objects have a behavior setting, which can give the object various properties. Examples of behaviors are 'bag' (stores other objects), 'die' (has sides and can be rolled), and 'figurine' (always uprights itself when interacted with).

I do want to add more shapes and better texturing options to what's there, but I'm hoping what I've done so far will be of benefit to someone.

Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217611502

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And that's it for now! I hope to have more news about Nebula soon. If you're interested in playtesting, send me an email and I'll see about setting up a test. I'm also going to keep testing on the various Discord-based playtest groups for a while, so if you frequent any of those you'll probably see me around.

It's been a busy month or so. Since I last posted, I've attended two different online conventions, done a lot of work (and playtesting!) on Nebula, and started learning the Board Game Arena platform.

Virtual Gaming Con 2020

At the end of June was the first Virtual Gaming Con, organized by a combination of The Dice Tower and BoardGameGeek. I want to say that this is the first virtual gaming convention that I enjoyed. (My first one was technically the PAX Online convention, but somehow that one kind of fell flat.) The focus of this convention was to recreate the feel of a Dice Tower convention, with both organized and open taming, panels and presentations, and a main hall with big events. While there were some aspects that could've used some polish (figuring out when the major events were happening and how to join them took too much effort), overall I think the convention was well organized and quite enjoyable. Clocking in at five days (the length of the corresponding physical convention) I think it felt a little too long, but I'm glad I attended anyway. I got to play several games, a few of them new to me, and I also managed to sneak one playtest of Nebula in there. It was also nice to be able to step away from the convention for a couple of hours, eat and rest and spend time with family, and then hop back in like nothing had changed. And while there was a $10 price tag, I think it was well worth it. Looking forward to the next one!

Protospiel Online July 2020

​Contrast this with the first Protospiel Online convention, which happened during the second half of July. This convention was organized by the Protospiel Indy crew, and was done specifically for the purpose of having game creators come together, playtest, and give feedback on each others' creations. This convention was sponsored by several different game creators and publishers and featured a good amount of dedicated playtesters and board game media types mixed in. It was an enjoyable convention, well organized and run, with ample opportunity to have my game tested and test a huge number of designs that I hadn't seen before. (I ended up getting to playtests of Nebula; I could've gotten more but I had all the information I needed so there was little point.) Finding something to test was a simple matter of joining the correct voice channel, and finding playtesters involved posting the game's 'info card' to a text channel, easy to do. There was also the ability to post sell sheets and pitch games to publishers, and there were a few 'coffee talks' featuring prominent industry types having a discussion on various topics. The convention was a long weekend (Friday-Sunday) and I felt that that was the correct length; by the end of Sunday I was exhausted and ready to do something else. Probably the only bad part of the convention was the price tag; it cost $50 to register as a designer, which left me wondering what all that money was needed for. If I end up not attending the next one of these, it will likely be entirely because of the cost. (Especially since I can get the same playtesting, though maybe not as concentrated, from the regional online playtest groups that I'm a part of.)

Nebula: Playtest & Feedback

I've gotten in several playtests of Nebula over the past month, and I'd like to think that the mechaincs are starting to settle down. The split of the Artifact tiles into Upgrade tiles and Goal tiles was well worth it. The structure of the upgrades is working well, and including one upgrade on the timer track as sort of an introduction to the mechanic works very well. The upgrade tiles themselves have some balance issues, but I'm slowly weeding out the ones that don't work and balancing the rest.

My current problem is the Goal tiles. My original idea was to have the goals be public, but with the ability to 'claim' a goal to make it private. Each goal had a unique endgame scoring calculation (such as 1 VP per step on a track or 3VP for each finished crawlspace). This was intended to create a sort of race between the players to get the best goal, as the players must fill in certain portions of their board to do a claim. It kind of worked, but ultimately claiming a goal created the negative feeling of taking something away from others rather than achieving an accomplishment. So in my latest iteration of the tiles, I have changed them to each have different claim conditions ('have 6 steps on your yellow track' or 'make a chain connecting the two sides of your ship'), with static VP values for each goal and a special rule that the first player to claim a goal gets bonus VP. I'm not convinced this structure is the correct one, but after a couple of playtests it does appear to be an improvement over the previous mechanic.

Board Game Arena

One of the things I was introduced to during the Virtual Gaming Con was Board Game Arena. This is another gaming platform that has been around a while and that I have heard of, but never really felt the need to research. The graphics on BGA are much more primitive than Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, but BGA has the extra feature of rules enforcement; the game specifically instructs you on what actions you may take and forbids anything that the rules would not normally allow.

I am currently researching how difficult it would be to port Manaforge over to this platform. I've registered for a developer account on BGA and started working through their tutorials. While the specific languages and technologies they use are very common, the fact that entire platform is based on web technologies like PHP, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript means that I have a little bit of stuff to learn before I can feel truly comfortable with porting my game over. (I have done some web development in the past but it's definitely not my specialty.) I am however excited about the prospect of porting my game over to a new platform so that it can be exposed to more people.

The Future

My current to-do list looks something like this:

- Finish developing Nebula: Pull & Write and publish it. This includes getting artwork, having a professional graphic designer make it look good, setting up a marketing campaign, launching a Kickstarter, and having it manufactured and shipped. Hopefully by next year.
- Get back to developing Sky Pirates. That game was coming along pretty well but I sort of lost interest in it; I need to reignite that particular flame.
- Get back to designing the Manaforge expansion. I've had one idea (given to me by another designer) bouncing around in the back of my head for a while and I think it might be time soon to let it out of its cage and have it run around.
- Make another attempt at designing Suicidal Cabbages. I could never get it to be truly fun but someone else suggested a change to the type of game (from timing and hand management to push your luck) that sounds like it could work.
- Get back to creating the Mystic Tiger Games branded felt component bowls. I'd like to find a way to construct them more easily and maybe come up with a reliable way to sell them.
- Take another stab at creating an 'art deck' for Manaforge; a standard deck of 54 playing cards that have the artwork from Manaforge on them. There's too much awesome artwork in that game to just let it go unused.
- Design Mystic Tiger pins; small decorative pins with my company logo on them that I can give out as swag to help push brand recognition.

Dunno when I'll get to all of that. :)

Time flies when your environment never changes.

Sure, the world has been going crazy. COVID-19, "Murder Hornets", police brutality, escalating politics, strong hurricane season. Seems like 2020 is set to become a recond year for events.

As for me, I've been hiding at home. Seems like it's still not safe to go out.

Which means that I've had plenty of time to devote to home projects. Including making games.

I've spent the past couple of months putting in as much time as I can into Nebula. I've gone through tons of revisions, changing a mechanic here, making a balance change there, all trying to make my game fun.

And playtesting. Lots of playtesting. I'm glad that Tabletop Simulator and virtual playtesting communities exist online. I've gotten many tests in on my game as it's evolved, and I can easily credit those testers for making my game better.

About Nebula: Pull & Write

For those of you interested in what Nebula is actually supposed to be, Nebula is my attempt at a pull-and-write game. I call it a pull-and-write because it feels awkward to me to call a game roll-and-write when it has no dice. Similarly, I would expect a flip-and-write game to contain cards. This game has neither. Instead, this game's randomization engine is pulling colored cubes out of a bag. I don't know of a better term for that, as I don't know of any published games that use this particular mechanic; I will sometimes call it a "random-and-write" game but even that seems kind of off.

Of course, there's more to it than just the cubes. The game's premise is that each player is stranded on their damaged spaceships in the middle of a nebula, using their ship's tractor beams to vacuum up clumps of dust and gas as raw materials to fix their ships. Players get cubes from them bag, then 'spend' them to move around their spaceship, repairing the ship as they go. Ship squares have a cost (in cubes) to repair them, and a benefit (icons) when repaired. Icons gained are marked on the ship status tracks, and the tracks give VP and special abilities at various spots.

Though playtesting, I learned that while the cubes from bag mechanic is interesting, it's not a big enough source of randomness; the game plays all felt the same. Therefore, the iteration of the game that I'm working on right now also has two types of tiles. There are 'upgrade' tiles that give you special powers, and 'goal' tiles that give you endgame points. Both are obtained over the course of the game, and both are an extra source of chaos. And staying true to the pull-and-write idea, the tiles are pulled at random out of a container. (TTS virtual 'bags' hold any type of object, so I'm using those. Not sure how the physical version will shake out; might direct players to use the box lid or something like that.)

Playtest, Playtest, Playtest

Interested in playtesting Nebula? Or interested in just playtesting in general? Or want to get a game of yours playtested? Join an online testing community! You will need two things: a copy of Tabletop Simulator (on Steam), and the Discord chat program. Discord is free! Tabletop Simulator is not, but it's a one-time $20 cost. (And if you're patient, it goes on sale frequently.) Plus Tabletop Simulator has a massive library of games (called 'workshop mods') that are free to download and play. Just add friends!

All of the communities I'm a part of have presences on Discord. Want to join one? It's as easy as finding the right server. Gil Hova (of Ludology podcast fame) has a list of Discord servers that are accepting new people. The servers are at many spots in the U.S., plus at least one server in Europe. (Seems like there should be more; our friends across the pond need attention too!) Whatever time and day you want to play, you should be able to find something that suits you. Try this link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XsXtPUtg8oGkirfdVRSPds5ywStqoO2p0fZjbPWSFKI/edit#gid=0

Looking to the Future

In an ideal world, I would be planning on launching Nebula on Kickstarter near the end of this year. I don't know if that's a realistic goal. I'm still hammering out the game's mechanics, though it feels like they're starting to settle down. I will need to start the process of getting publicity for the game. I will need to start commissioning artwork and getting other bits of game polish done. I will need to start pricing out the production process and figuring out costs. I will need to start setting up shipping and fulfillment. I have not done any of this yet. Plus, launching a Kickstarter game around the holidays pretty much guarantees that I'd be fighting with holiday gifts for a slice of people's wallets. It's starting to look like a Kickstarter launch in the first month or two of next year might be more realistic. But who knows; I'm not quite at the point where I can decide this stuff. It all depends on how much more progress I can make on the game in the world environment.

If anyone is interested in helping test but aren't sure how to contact me, feel free to send me an email! (The address is on the About page.) The more eyes I can get on my game, the faster it will become a thing!

So...  yeah. Weird times we're living in right now.

While 2020 didn't exactly have the best start, I never imagined that we'd end up with a worldwide pandemic. And I had no idea how much something like that could affect how everyone lives their lives. How much it could affect the world's economy. How much it could affect interpersonal relationships. How much it could affect everyone's mental health.

And, of course, how much it could affect the board game industry.

But life, as always, seems to have found ways to adapt. Board gamers are typically an innovative bunch, and it seems like we've found a new outlet for getting games made.

The Internet.

Sure, there's been lots of ways to playtest games without having people be there in person. There are many online play services out there with an enormous library of games available for play; some free, some not. (Manaforge has been available for online play on Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator since around when it was published.) There are also several services available for doing voice chat with friends, and games can even be played using a few videoconferencing services.

But now, since gathering in groups is not a good idea at the moment, use of those services for board gaming has gone from a novelty to a necessity. And, all things considered, that's not so bad.

Sure, playing games online is more awkward that normal; there's often more setup involved, there are technical glitches that might disrupt games, it's sometimes hard to learn a new gaming interface, it's takes more effort to see everything that's going on, and simple movement of game components takes extra work.

But for every downside, there's an upside. You can play games with friends on short notice instead of having to plan a time and place to gather. You can play games with people from around the world. You can play games with people you've never met before (and would never let into your home or meeting place). You can play games without having to find a sitter for the kids. You can even play games in your pajamas if you really want to! (Because who cares what you're wearing if they can't see you? :)

And, most importantly for game development, you can get a new set of fresh perspectives on your game. While it's nice to have a dedicated group of friends to help test your creations, a larger pool of testers equals more perspectives equals more opinions and ideas and identification of flaws in your games and how they can be improved.

And that's the new normal for right now. And I'm happy that it's helping to push Nebula forward.
​
​Nebula Online

In order to keep in touch with a lot of my gamer friends, both for playing games and for playtesting, I've been using Discord a lot. Discord is a great service; just about anyone can set up a server and invite their friends. The voice quality is good and it's not particularly difficult to use. I now have a ton of servers that I'm connected to and it's great for keeping in contact with the various groups.

One group in particular I've been in contact with is a group of game creators and playtesters located in New York. Due to the virus outbreak, they've ramped up their online testing, welcoming anyone and everyone into the group. They are a fantastic bunch, full of good game ideas and good feedback. I've playtested several games by other players, and so far I've gotten Nebula to the virtual table once, with more to come soon. My playthrough was very informative, with lots of suggestions for mechanical improvement and streamlining. (Of course, I'm not going to implement everything that was suggested, but a lot of it was very good feedback and I'm incorporating a pretty good sized chunk of it into my game.) Can't wait for the next time I'm able to get my game out there.

BTW... if you're interested in joining the group, it's still open to everyone! Use this link: bit.ly/join-rem-play. You will be taken to a short document to read, followed by a questionnaire to make sure you actually read and understand the document. (The info in the doc can be summed up as 'how to not be a dick'...  it's just some info on etiquette and such.) Even if you're not making a game yourself, you're still welcome! If you like playing new games, the games you'll find on these playtests haven't even been published yet, so you're guaranteed to be able to try something new! :)

Virtual Game Conventions

One other thing to have grown out of the current gaming climate is the rise of online conventions. Since so many physical conventions and events have had to cancel due to the virus, a few enterprising individuals have stepped up and created virtual versions of the conventions. Gaming areas, playtesting rooms, vendor halls, artist alleys, discussions and panels... all the perks of being at a convention without leaving your house. (And without having to put up with the smell of sweaty gamers and heat from poorly air-conditioned rooms.)

Since I'm a member of the Indie Game Alliance, I feel I have to mention their upcoming convention. It's called "Play Unconventionally" and it aims to recreate the convention experience as much as possible. There have been other such conventions announced, but as far as I know this is the first one. If you're interested, take a look here: www.playunconventionally.com



And that's really all that's been going on right now. Stuck at home with plenty of free time means I get to keep hammering on my game. With luck, I'll have something publish-worthy by the end of the year. Here's hoping!

Happy 2020 Everyone!

Wow, two months since I've last posted. Where did the time go? I guess there hasn't been a ton of new developments, but there are a couple.

Nebula

The bulk of my time over the past couple of months has been going into my Nebula roll-and-write game. (Picture above.) While I'm not completely ready to divulge all the details of the game, know that I've been through a ton of iterations since I last posted. (Last time I was on...  what...  version 2? I'm working on version 10 now.)

The game has been coming along relatively well. Sure, I've had some failures; I've tried a bunch of mechanics that didn't fit well or just didn't work at all. But each time I cut something and try something new, it feels like I'm inching a bit closer to the goal. (I kind of lost that feeling with the other projects I was working on, hence why this one has captured my attention so completely.)

Without giving too much away, at least I can mention the game's (possible) theme:

- The theme of Nebula is that the players are captains of cargo ships travelling through FTL. Each ship hit an unknown space anomaly and was forcefully ejected from lightspeed, getting badly damaged in the process. The only two pieces of good news are that the ship's power reactors are intact and functioning, and the ships are stranded in the middle of a gigantic nebula, meaning there is a virtually unlimited supply of raw materials nearby to repair the ships with. The players are using their tractor beams to suck up clumps of gas and dust and using that to fabricate replacement bits to get their ships working again.

One glitch I've already hit is the name; I don't think I can keep the name Nebula because there is already a game with that name. Granted, it's over 40 years old, but I still don't see the point of tempting fate. I'm trying to decide if I should just change the name a little (call it "Nebula 13" or "Nebula 4913" or "Nebula Roll & Write" or somesuch like that) or try to come up with something completely new. All of the completely new names I've been able to think of just don't fit the feel I'm trying to go for.


Escape Winter Convention 2020

In other news, the first run of the Escape Winter Convention happened this past weekend. Great stuff! This one was created by the people that previously ran the Dice Tower Con in Orlando, so you know they know what they're doing. Unfortunately for me, I managed to get sick right before the convention started so I was kind of dragging throughout the whole con and couldn't enjoy it to its fullest, but at least I managed to get a few games in. Here's what I was able to play:

- ​Fleet: The Dice Game (4/5 Liked) [own]

I picked this game up 'for research purposes' as someone suggested it would be an example of well done roll and write; I should be able to take some inspiration from this game. Turns out this was pretty good advice. I think this is a solid, if complex, take on a roll and write game. The core mechanic is pretty simple; twice per turn, roll a pool of dice, and everyone drafts one. Each player gets the effect of the die they drafted, plus the one leftover die that nobody drafted. Each die effect lets you mark off boxes in a particular section of your player sheets. Each section has various bonuses that activate when enough spaces are checked off. But that simple rule doesn't say anything about the staggering array of options that you have to pick from. In fact, I'd say the game's only major weakness is that there is a huge number of strategy options and you really can't grok them all until you've played the game a couple of times. I'm glad I picked up a copy of this as I can see it will get a lot of use, both as a good short-to-medium length game and as an example design to work towards.

- Azul: Summer Pavillion (4/5 Liked)

I really liked the first Azul game. The second, not so much. I'm happy to say that I like this third one as much as the first. The tiles are diamond-shaped instead of square, and you're making starburst patterns instead of a square mosaic, but otherwise it's a very similar to the previous games with the immediate scoring for adjacency and endgame scoring for completed patterns. Placing tiles around certain board features will allow you to take more tiles from a designated bonus pool. More than just losing points for taking the first player tile and 'dropping' tiles, now you also lose extra points for all the tiles you take along with the first player tile, so if you can see yourself getting hit with that then taking it early to minimize the damage is a possible option.  Finally, some tiles are wild, but the color of which tile is wild changes in a predictable pattern so you can plan ahead for what tiles you want to hang on to. Overall I think it's a solid addition to the Azul family and I'll be happy to play it again.

- Silver & Gold (4/5 Liked) [own]

Technically a roll and write game, but not really what you'd think of when mentioning the term. This is a very quick and light tetris-style game that lets you write on its cards. Each 'treasure map' card has a small grid of squares that must be marked off to complete the card and get its points. Each player has two such cards out at a time, and immediately gets a new one when one is completed. Each turn, a card with a polyomino pattern is flipped over, and players must mark off squares on their cards corresponding to the pattern, with the ability to flip and rotate the pattern. Some treasure cards have other features like X symbols (let you mark other squares for free) and coins (bonus points). Most points wins. Quick, easy to learn, and enjoyable. The gimmick of writing on the cards struck me as odd at first but quickly made sense and fit right into place. A friend gifted me her copy and I don't think I'm ever going to get rid of it. :)

- The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Herb Witches expansion (3/5 Neutral)

So, I definitely liked the Quacks base game when I first played it. I was eager to give the new version a try; expanding the game to five players seems like a big plus to me. While that in itself was good, it seemed like the rest of this expansion fell flat for me. The expansion adds two new 'sets' of effects for the bag tokens, three one-shot 'witch' powers usable by all players, and one new type of bag token: Locoweed. Granted, I've only played the base game with the 'Set 1' effects (good for beginners, I'd think) so I'm not familiar with how the game changes with the various effect sets, but it seems like the effects in the expansion just weren't that appealing. The new token type was almost completely unused in our game. One witch power was really nice, the others mostly useless. Really the mvp of the game was the 6-power orange pumpkin tokens, which I never had the resources to buy; the player that won managed to get two of them. I might enjoy the expansion more now that I understand how some of the new effects work, but as of now the expansion is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for me; I'll play with it if someone else has it but almost definitely won't be buying it.


Mystic Tiger Games Store Closing Soon

On a slightly sad note, I'm going to be closing my web store soon, probably within the next week or two. While I have made a few sales through my store, I'm definitely not bringing in enough revenue that way to justify keeping it open.

However, all is not lost! Besides being available at larger conventions through the Indie Game Alliance, and working with Atheris Games to make my games available at smaller conventions, my games will also be available through Cool Stuff Games! If you haven't already, pop over to their website and give them a look. Good news is that, if you've gotten a gift certificate or discount code for their site, then you can put that towards a copy of Manaforge! Oh, and if you don't mind a little bit of box smooshing, they have 'damaged' copies as well that you can get for a bit of a discount.

I'm not sure if it'll work like this, but theoretically this link should search their inventory for my games:
https://www.coolstuffinc.com/sq/?page=1&submit=search&s=bg&f%5BPublisher%5D%5B%5D=Mystic+Tiger+Games%2C+LLC


Thanks for reading everyone! Have a good 2020!

Hello everyone! As 2019 comes to a close, I've started looking around at what I've accomplished this year, where I stand now, and where I want to go next year.

On the surface, it doesn't seem like a lot has happened in 2019. I haven't published any new games, commissioned any artwork, or put anything new on Tabletopia or Tabletop Simulator. I've only sold a handful of copies of Manaforge, and I've only been to a couple of game conventions.

However, behind the curtain, a lot has been going on. I've put a lot of energy into designing the expansion for Manaforge, developing Sky Pirates, and getting my newest design Nebula off of the ground. And, of course, all of those required playtesting. LOTS of playtesting. Also, of the conventions I attended, one was Dice Tower Con, where IGA sold several of my games; another was the first year of Orlando Games Con, where Zack Crawford of The Thirsty Gamers did a good job of organizing a play space for lots of board games; and a third was HoliCON, where I was invited to demo Manaforge.

Here's a breakdown of what's been going on:


Manaforge Expansion

The project I want to complete most is to finish the expansion for my first game Manaforge. It's been difficult trying to settle on what exactly should be in the expansion; Manaforge has a ton of untapped design space and I'm struggling to figure out exactly what the expansion should do. Here's the list of design goals I'm fighting with:

• Add More Cards [mandatory]: Create more item cards, give more choices in the recipe market, add more variety to the card effects. This is one of the things I'm trying to accomplish with the 'dark item' cards; two dark items are dealt out alongside the six standard items, giving the players more choices and more variability in what the cards do. This variability needs to be in both card effects and card power; there can and should be cheap but weak cards that leave resources free for other things, and super-expensive cards that give tons of points but leave you unable to do anything else in the turn.
• Add More Resource Outlets [mandatory]: Create more ways to spend resources. When I see Manaforge played, either when I'm playing or when I'm watching others play, I always sense some disappointment in the first couple of rounds of the game, when players are getting resource generation cards but not having any place to spend those extra resources. When I'm teaching the game, "I'm not allowed to build another card?" is a common question I get early on. I created the 'customer' cards to try to combat this, giving the players something else to spend mana on.
• Add More Point Vectors [mandatory]: Create another strategy option for scoring points. Right now, there are two major ways to do well in the game: build a solid engine in your workshop for churning out points each round, or build lots of high-point cards (typically done by going all in on wands). I want a third option, a third strategy that players can focus on. I was hoping to accomplish that with the customer cards, giving a chaotic but steady source of point opportunities for the players. I'm not convinced what I have now does that well, though; players often treat the customers as a side note instead of as a primary target.
• Increase Player Interaction [optional]: Add ways for your actions to affect other players and for other players to influence your decisions. Manaforge is not very good at this; really the only major interaction in the game is drafting the item cards, where you might take something that someone else wanted. My original idea was to add take-that effects but I learned that that doesn't fit well into the game's current feel. Right now I'm adding the customer cards, which are a first-come-first-served source of points, but that is just more of the same; taking something your opponent wants. I've been trying to add card effects that pull the other players into whatever it is that you're doing but those tend to get passed over in favor of more straightforward cards. I haven't found the formula for this yet.
• Vary the Value of Existing Game Elements [optional]: Best described as an 'event deck', the game might benefit from having periodic things happen that change the landscape of the game. For one round, fire items give bonus points, or water items are cheaper, or everyone gets a free earth gem, or whatever. Force the players to react to some sort of source of chaos. Or course, the game already has plenty of creating order from chaos in it, but this could be something completely out of the player's control. Dunno if this is needed, but it's something to investigate.

For the moment, the Manaforge expansion is 'on hold'. I haven't given up on it, but it's currently sitting on the back-burner, waiting for some new ideas and a fresh perspective to help figure out where it needs to fit into the base game.


Sky Pirates

The project I have that is more finished is my area control game Sky Pirates. This game is in very good shape; the mechanics are pretty solid, the theme seems to fit well, and the balance isn't far off. Right now the game just needs a ton of playtesting to help chase out any problems I'm not seeing. I also need to put another big dent in the rulebook; the first draft is done and playable but I need to make some terminology and description changes to go with the results of my most recent playtests. This game is kind of in a holding pattern as well, but for a different reason: I'm trying to decide if I want to publish the game by myself or have someone else help me with it. Game development and production I can handle, it's the marketing and Kickstarter aspects that I'm not very good at. Dunno if I just need to find an adviser or two to help, or if I should bring in another publisher.


Nebula

My current focus is my new roll-and-write game, code named "Nebula" (pictured at the top). I'm still keeping this mostly under wraps for right now; I'm trying something new with a roll-and-write game that, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't been done before. (Of course, I say that, and then someone will come out with a new game that does exactly the same thing. Oh well.) It's still a novel idea, and I'm hoping it generates some attention by that alone.

I'm on my second prototype version of Nebula. The first idea was pretty much a disaster; it was slow and boring. I recently finished a rework of it and got to playtest it a couple of times. It's...  well, slow and boring. But at least it's less so this time. Last time I playtested this, it didn't seem to go over well at all. This time, it seems like there might be a spark. I need to do some rebalancing to see if it's just the way the game is currently paced that's the problem. Hopefully in a couple of iterations it will start to become an interesting game.


HoliCON

I recently attended a convention in Ocala called HoliCON. I was invited by one of the convention organizers to go and demo Manaforge, get some extra exposure for the game. I had never heard of this convention before then, but I decided to give it a try, and I'm glad I did. While not a particularly large convention, there was a great group of friendly people that made us feel welcome there. I got in a few Manaforge demos, and even managed to sell a copy there due to my showing it off. I didn't have time to play many games, but I did manage to try something new:

- Fantastic Factories (4/5 Liked)
I played this game for the first time at HoliCON, and I'm glad I did! Interesting mix of dice placement and engine building. You use rolled dice to generate resources which you use to gain cards and add them to your tableau. Some cards give you ways to transform resources, while others you have to activate by using up your dice. Lots of fun! I kind of think of this in the same family as Gizmos, but with an extra level of complexity on top. Dunno if I would buy it (maybe if I found a cheap copy), but I'd definitely play it again if someone offered.


Other Games

While I've played a lot of games over the year, one of them bears mentioning because it helped me with my designs:

- Terraforming Mars: Turmoil expansion (4/5 Liked)
I recently received the latest expansion to Terraforming Mars, and it didn't disappoint! So far I've played this a couple of times; once as a 2-player game with all of the expansions mixed in, and a second time in a 5-player game also using the Prelude expansion. Overall, I think it's a good addition to the game. The expansion adds a political aspect to the game, where six political parties wrestle for control of the planet. Players may add their own delegates to various parties, and at the end of each generation the party with the most delegates becomes the one in charge. Each party gives a bonus for having certain tags, and imposes a rule that gives benefits to certain types of actions for the next generation. The expansion also introduces global events, which give players penalties or bonuses based on certain criteria, and the effects of the events can be altered (improved, for good events, or reduced for bad events) based on how the players' delegates are positioned. The expansion has a couple of rough points, like the complexity of calculating the delegates at the end of each generation slows the game down, or how a run of bad events can be brutal on all the players, but overall I enjoyed playing with this expansion and will be using it again.

This expansion is notable because it gave me some fuel for the Manaforge expansion. The event cards in Turmoil help to mix the game up and divert some of the player's focus away from the main task of building their engine. But in a way that's good because navigating the events correctly can actually give you a boost to your resources. Maybe Manaforge needs this kind of randomizing element, some global event that changes the way players value certain actions. There needs to be some care in there, though, as players don't have perfect flexibility to do anything they want, especially when it comes to the game's four elements; an event that benefits fire cards is great for someone playing all fire but is useless to someone playing water. The randomness needs to be, on some level, equally beneficial (or harmful) to everyone.


Cool Stuff Games

More of a side note, but I recently got Manaforge listed for sale on the CoolStuffInc.com website. Yay! Gamers now have an additional outlet to buy Manaforge. In addition, there are a few 'ding & dent' copies listed for sale on there, so if you're looking to get a bit of a discount on the game and don't mind a little box damage, then check that one out!


Looking Towards 2020

That's everything I have to report on for now. I likely won't post again until the new year. I still need to do a design post on the idea of Cognitive Load, but I haven't had much inspiration towards that recently. I'm going to need to give it a good push soon.

I hope everyone had had a good year, and I'm looking forward to what 2020 will bring. Happy gaming!

"Out of sight, out of mind."

- John Heywood

So, an interesting coincidence happened recently.

I'm still attempting to make an expansion for Manaforge. While I think I'm on the right track with my ideas, it often feels like there's some element of attractiveness missing. As in, I come up with something that I think would be interesting to the players, but when I run a playtest, my changes are often times ignored. I've even tried making the new game elements more powerful than the standard ones, and they still sometimes go overlooked.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to an episode of the Ludology podcast. (If you haven't heard it, and are into game design, you really should give it a try. Lots of good stuff in there.) Along with the show's regular hosts Gil Hova and Emma Larkins, they had Scott Rogers on to talk about his theory of "The 6 Zones of Play". The short version is that the play area in any board game can be divided up into roughly six regions with respect to a particular player. (The regions I have in my illustration above are not the same as the zones Scott Rogers was describing. Instead, shown above is my reinterpretation of the idea.) While the theory is a work in progress, and there isn't total agreement on how many zones there should be or what goes in each one, the underlying concept is solid: the placement of game elements with respect to the player can make a difference in terms of the mental processing the players devote to them. Game pieces that are farther away from the player, harder to see and harder to reach, tend to get less consideration, even though the options they present may be superior to the options closer by. Also, there is a certain amount of mental 'context switching' going on, in which the player first processes information close by (objects in the hands and in their personal tableau), and then switches to the objects farther away (main board and sideboards) to complete their move.

Circling back to my expansion ideas, I'm currently working with four new elements. I have a deck of 'customer' cards, which represent additional scoring opportunities for the players; a deck of 'dark item' cards, which are dealt out in parallel to the standard item deck cards and expand the item build options from 6 to 8 each turn; a black 'dark power' die that gives players a shot of bonus resources in exchange for gaining darkness points; and a 'darkness' meter and associated 'curse' cards, which start to dish out obstacles to players that draw too heavily from the dark abilities.

For my first iterations with these new mechanics, I had all of the new components sitting to various sides of the main gameboard. The new items above the board, the customers below, and the curse cards and black die to one side. Typically, the game board is facing the players (at least for a small number of players), so the customer cards are close by and the dark items are far away, with the black die to the side. I noticed that players tended to be interested in the customer cards but didn't pay much attention to the dark item cards or the black die. I can't tell if my new elements are any good if the players don't pay any attention to them. (Or, maybe, they just suck that badly that nobody wants to touch them? I hoped that wasn't it.)

While I was wrestling with this problem, I happened to listen to the Ludology podcast, and the concept just clicked. Perhaps players weren't paying attention to my new game elements because they were just too hard to see? In essence, all of my new stuff could be considered to be part of the game's 'sideboard', which typically gets less consideration than anything in the main play area. Sideboard elements are often farther away than the main board, and so can suffer from decreased visibility as well as the need to 'context switch' to specifically devote mental processing time to these outside options.

With that in mind, I did a little bit of rearranging. I moved the new dark item cards onto the main gameboard; it was very cramped and hard to get everything set up right, but it did get the new cards next to the old. I also changed the black die into a small deck of square cards; while I couldn't place the die any closer, I did exchange it for something it larger and easier to see, incorporating larger iconography. The customers were fine close to the players, and the darkness meter is fine being a sideboard element; it does not need constant consideration. (It's sneaky like that. :)

Playtesting with the new elements arranged that way went significantly better. I had one player comment that the new items were easier to compare to the old ones, being placed next to them. The dark power deck (instead of a die) received more attention as well, though it was hard to tell how much of a difference it made. (One player was trying to play 'clean', not using any of the new dark powers, but ended up giving in and dabbling a bit anyway. Muhaha!)

I need significantly more playtesting to be able to come to a conclusion, but so far it does seem like the placement (and size) of some items affects how they are perceived, and therefore how they factor into the players' decisions. I'll have to keep this in mind as I keep iterating on these new mechanics. This might also affect the physical game elements themselves, as I might need to use cards instead of a die, and may end up with an entirely new gameboard. (If I do make a sideboard for the new items, it will have to attach and blend in so that it seems like part of the main board. Yay expensive component considerations. :)


Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope to theorize more on this topic as I learn more, but I thought it was such an interesting timing coincidence that I felt I had to post something about it sooner rather than later.

So, I've been wanting to do an upgraded version of Manaforge for a while. I have a bunch of ideas of components that could be improved. Replace the cardboard gem tokens with acrylic gems. Make the dice be multicolor swirled instead of just a single color. Add the mana abacus accessory in as a printed board. I have a fairly good idea of what each of those would look like, and as far as the acrylic gems go, those are easily obtainable in small enough quantities that I could make a few 'upgrade kits' and see if anyone is interested in them.

The one thing that's been a little more elusive is coming up with good tokens for the mana prisms. I actually have an idea for what would look good there, too. Since I'm looking for tetrahedrons, what better place for a gamer to start with than to look for blank d4s? Chessex makes d4s in some gorgeous colors, but there doesn't seem to be an option to order those without numbers directly from their site. I sent a couple of inquiries a while ago about getting a few made but never heard back. Just as well, I suppose, considering that they'd probably want a minimum order of a thousand dice or something like that.

Since a lot of my friends have had luck creating their own game components using 3D printers, I figured I'd give that angle a try. I don't own a 3D printer myself, but there is this really nifty service out there called Shapeways that can do it. Hmmm. So I went to Thingiverse, found a blank d4 model, uploaded that to Shapeways' site, and had a few printed. Pictured is the result.

Thoughts:

• The size, shape, and weight of these is perfect. They're slightly heavier than most d4s I own, but that's fine.
• They're kind of an off yellow. I don't know how I'd make them the rainbow colors that the game's mana prisms are.
• They're mostly smooth. A little bit of texture to them, and yes you can see the printing layer lines if you look hard enough, but overall they're well made.
• Too expensive. This batch of four cost a lot more than I was expecting, and there is no economy of scale that I'm aware of. It would be cost prohibitive to make the 20 needed for a copy of Manaforge.

I'm debating getting a 3D printer myself. I don't mind soaking the cost, as I could use it for other projects too, but I don't know if it would be good for running off a limited number of sets of prisms. Having never used this kind of printer before, I'm a little concerned about the associated learning curve.

Maybe if I'm good, I'll get one for Christmas. We'll see how it goes. :)