Like everyone else we are taking a break from working hard, but not from playing, so this is one of the last posts of this year. We're going to refresh our minds and prepare new games which we hope will entertain most of you through the years to come.
We want to thanks all of you for reading us, commenting and giving us advice and we promise we'll come back soon will stories and news about gaming and beyond.
We are wishing you all Merry Christmas, a great New Year and happy holidays!
NSKN Games blog has moved: blog.nskn.net
Friday, December 21, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Praetor - first pictures and details about the workers
I was telling you some time ago about a Euro-game to be from NSKN, called Praetor. Today I have the first pictures with the prototype and a few more details about the game.
Let's start from the... end. This is a city built by 2 players. The Green and the White were competing to become Praetor and the Green player succeeded.
You can see the city tiles with property markers on them, the Caesar tiles on the left, representing demands from the empire, the two player boards at the bottom and the workers on the map.
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| The end of a 2-player game |
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| The city |
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| City detail with workers |
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| City detail and the happiness track |
The special thing about these workers is that they gain experience with almost every action they take. A more experienced worker will bring you more resources or more Prestige points, becoming increasingly efficient, but they end up retiring and from that point on they will just consume your food.
The workers are represented by dice! A worker starts with 1 experience and he will grow to a maximum of 4 before retiring. There are ways to make your workers stay active longer by building a Clinic or Public Baths in your part of the city.
The rules of the prototype are almost final and we'll proceed to testing soon. So, stay around for more Praetor news before the end of this year.
Happy holidays!
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Tuesday, December 18, 2012
A special day
Today is a special day for me for two reasons. The first is that it's my birthday, but that's been happening every year for the past... well let's leave it at that. The second reason is that exactly two years ago today I made a life-changing decision, to quit my day job and make board game full time. It was the kind of decision which triggers all your friends to gather up and have an 'intervention' to make you realize how silly/crazy/stupid you are and to bring you back on the righteous path.
Well, I stood my ground and two years later I am still in the board games business and I don't regret it for a second. It was probably one of the best and (at the same time) worst decisions of my life, but I am finally doing something that I love and even though from the financial point of view it is not as good as my old job, I have high hopes and most of all I am happy from the professional point of view.
There are people around who contribute to my being happy with what I am doing and those are the people from NSKN and all the others who I won't name here and who are contributing by testing, giving feedback, etc.
So, this is the story of the day, at least for me, and now I will go back to doing what I'm usually doing - board games!
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG | ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Well, I stood my ground and two years later I am still in the board games business and I don't regret it for a second. It was probably one of the best and (at the same time) worst decisions of my life, but I am finally doing something that I love and even though from the financial point of view it is not as good as my old job, I have high hopes and most of all I am happy from the professional point of view.
There are people around who contribute to my being happy with what I am doing and those are the people from NSKN and all the others who I won't name here and who are contributing by testing, giving feedback, etc.
So, this is the story of the day, at least for me, and now I will go back to doing what I'm usually doing - board games!
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Monday, December 17, 2012
Impressions from around the internet
The new NSKN games are not going unnoticed this winter. There are some English reviews waiting for the final touches, but in the mean time, we found discussions and reviews in several other languages.
In French, on trictrac.fr there's a short description of Exodus
Exodus Proxima Centauri (au lait)
Ludoversum have published their own impressions of the game. For our German fans
Exodus review
There's a review of Wild Fun West, also in German, on spieletest.at
Wild Fun West
Wild Fun West was noticed as far as in Japan and the game description together with some links on plaza.rakuten.co.jp
ワイルド・ファン・ウェスト(Wild Fun West)
Our Italian fans were not forgotten and, even though a bit older, there's a nice game description of Exodus on kultunderground.org
Exodus review
We are constantly collecting all the impressions about our new games, good or bad, from everywhere in our quest to provide the latest info and it is all on our website.
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
Praetor - a worker placement board game
I've been asked countless times what the story of NSKN focusing so much on civilization or empire building games and when will we come to our sense and do what every typical start-up board games publisher does and make a simple worker placement game which would potentially reach a much wider market. Every time I answered the same thing, "when the time is right, our Euro-game will come to be", maybe with less fancy words, but you get the idea.
Well, it looks like that time has finally come and we're working on a Euro-game!
The working title of our board game is Praetor, it has a setting in the Roman Empire - pretty obvious I would say - and a number of players, most likely up to 6, are competing to become a Praetor. They're all in charge of building a new new Roman settlement together, each responsible for his own part and in the end, the most skilled of them will be appointed Praetor by the Caesar/Emperor.
As Euro-games go, this one aims to be either middle-weight Euro. That means it won't be addressed to absolute beginners - it looks like I am simply not capable of designing easy games - but it won't be too complex for the average gamer to enjoy and it won't last more than 90 minutes.
So far the theme is a bit different from the typical worker placement game (Agricola, Pillars of the Earth, Caylus, Fresco, Le Havre, Ora et Labora) but this is just the beginning.
Since we're in the early stages of development and the game has undergone just a few tests, we can't reveal all the details, but just to stir your curiosity... the most important 'trick' this game bring is that your workers gain experience over time, becoming more efficient in building and collecting resources. However, once a certain amount of experience is accumulated, they retire so you must recruit new ones.
Moreover, instead of being a simple worker placement board game, Praetor will combine this mechanic with city building. You will start with a simple settlement and you will develop it by placing new tiles. In a nutshell, each game will look different, simply because the order of available building will be different.
Most Euro-games have a scalability problem, if they work well with two players they become messy in 4 or 5, or if they work well with many players they will become dry with only two. We plan to overcome this problem from the very beginning by changing the modular map setup according to the number of players.
I guess these details will do so far, as soon as we're convinced and start massive play-testing, we'll come back with many more details and pictures.
Until then, it looks like the winter is the season of great board game ideas. Stay tuned!
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Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Essen loot
I cannot believe it's been already two months, well almost two months since we went to Essen. Right after we came back - and by we I mean the NSKN people and our friends who helped us - we divided the games and each of us took his.
However, this is what Agnieszka and I managed to get just for ourselves. I was telling people that I exceeded by far mu budget for board games for the whole year, so this is why...
I can tell you so far that I had many good surprises, like ViavaJava - The Coffee Game and Kosmonauts and that there was only one game that was a really disappointing, but I won't mention its name since there are people I know who like it.
Overall, this was a good year, we managed to increase our collection and now we're playing and gaining more experience for our games to come.
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG | ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
However, this is what Agnieszka and I managed to get just for ourselves. I was telling people that I exceeded by far mu budget for board games for the whole year, so this is why...
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| Essen 2012 loot |
All these games made a nice addition to our collection and we're trying to give each and every one of them a chance to hit our gaming table.
I can tell you so far that I had many good surprises, like ViavaJava - The Coffee Game and Kosmonauts and that there was only one game that was a really disappointing, but I won't mention its name since there are people I know who like it.
Overall, this was a good year, we managed to increase our collection and now we're playing and gaining more experience for our games to come.
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Saturday, December 8, 2012
An expert opinion
Yesterday evening we had a very pleasant surprise. It came from Tom Vasel, one of the most famous board game reviewers in the industry, who posted his Dice Tower review of Exodus: Proxima Centauri.
Without any further introduction...
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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Back to the basics with Warriors & Traders
When it comes to Warriors & Traders, the world seems to have split in two, into those who love it and those who hate it. We are very pleased that the first category contains more people, but we still want to understand and improve so that for our future games there will be less and less people unhappy of what they get. So, we've been looking into what made some of the gamers complain about Warriors & Traders and what parts did they like the least.
After careful research we've identified two issues and both of them are related to our lack of experience at the time we developed the game and wrote the rule book.
The first and largest issue was the length and clarity of the rules. Most of the people who rated Warriors & Traders low on BoardGameGeek are those who did not agree to the way we phrased the rules and could not get a grasp of the game. Some gave up, the others survived all the way through but ended up playing only one game without ever discovering the full potential of Warriors & Traders. But we're not here to point fingers or to look for excuses. It is obvious that in spite of our enthusiasm and heavy testing, we lacked the experience of writing short, clear rules. We've improved a lot since then and the best proof is the way the rules of Exodus or Wild Fun West are written, so it would not be fair to overlook our first game and leave things the way they are.
We're starting to re-write the rules of Warriors & Traders from scratch, following the same principles of play and using the same game components. We will simply try to show everything in a new light, so that more gamers will be able to enjoy the game.
And since we're about to put a lot of effort to address one issue, we'll tackle on the second one as well. Some of the players who did not have a problem finding their way through the rules and even enjoyed the theme found Warriors & Traders too ... realistic. In other words, the limited number of options led to a too deterministic or even dry game. We worked too hard to show the shortcoming of those centuries and we ended up making people feel that with just a few more turns the game would have made so much more sense.
While developing, we've been playing around with several sets of rules. We need to go back a few steps, look over the old rules, find another point of balance between the Dark Ages setting/realism and the game play and get to work.
We believe that before the end of this winter we will have a brand new rule book for Warriors & Traders, one that reflects the experience we've accumulated and solves most (if not all) the problems people pointed out.
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Monday, December 3, 2012
W - a future board game
You must be wondering what comes next for NSKN after Exodus: Proxima Centauri and Wild Fun West. We're already working on several new projects which we'll present to you as they evolve. We said quite long ago that we're trying to diversify our portfolio and the result of this effort is starting to take shape.
I have been fascinated with politics ever since Romania ceased being a dictatorship and embraced democracy and I have been following political news from all over the world since my high-school years, although I never intended to get actively involved. There are things I like about politics and probably more things that I dislike about it, but one thing is for sure, a political campaign has something unique, that je-ne-sais-quoi that pushes me to study further.
The US political campaigns are particular interesting, they run much longer than the European ones and in my opinion the political debate is far above what I could expect in my home country and most of the countries I've lived in. Even in its darkest hour, US has provided the world with very entertaining presidential campaigns which made the whole world stop and watch.
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| Blue states vs. Red States - Source: Wikipedia |
Two of these campaign features ex-president George W. Bush. Although I am not a big fan of him myself, I studied his campaign for a simple reason, they are some of the tightest political contests is US history and, like everyone else, I sometimes wonder what would the world have looked like if only a few thousand votes went the other way.
So, between hearing news, reading Wikipedia and playing board games, an idea sparked in my head, a board game about the US elections. Easier said than done, I have been working on the game mechanics, studied the history of the Democrats and Republicans and the American political system in details and, long story short, I decided to pursues the idea of putting the US presidential election of 2000 and 2004 in a board game.
For now, the working title is simply "W". Whether we like it or not, George W. Bush was the winner and the main character of those elections and now part of all our history. In "W", two players will take the roles of campaign managers for the Democrat and Republican candidate and will try to either preserve or bend history.
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