Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Perfect Storm, yet another board game from NSKN

Do you like fishing? If you do, that's great news, you will enjoy our new prototype. If you're not sure, this is a great opportunity to learn.

Prototype of the map

Perfect Storm is a game for 2-5 player about fishing in the Bering Sea, one of the toughest places on Earth to have a job.

You are a young entrepreneur with a fishing boat and dreams of getting rich. So, you will hire a captain and a crew and send them fishing in those dangerous waters.

The weather in Bering Sea is the greatest challenge. It can be sunny today, but tomorrow your boat will face 25 ft tall waves and a storm you only get to see once in a lifetime. But it's not all bad news, the bigger the waves, the easier it is to catch the best seafood in the region, the Alaskan King Crab.

Perfect Storm is a game of risk management and every player will have to calculate his decision to fish for the most valuable prey without exposing his crew and cargo to unnecessary danger. In the end, the winner will be the player who will find the best balance between his boat, crew and captain, the place to fish and the risk to face bad weather.

More news after a few sessions of play-testing.


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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad 

Friday, February 22, 2013

A review of Exodus by Michael Barnes

Michael Barnes from No High Scores has written a review of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and he also agreed that we share his thoughts with all of you. 



There’s a new contender for the space 4x board game throne, and it’s called Exodus: Proxima Centauri. Designed by Andrei Novac and Agnieszka Kopera, Exodus is on some levels exactly what you are expected from a game quite directly descended from Twilight Imperium and Eclipse. Start from a home planet, take over neighboring planets, manage resources, do a little politicking, tool up with technologies, and blow up spaceships. It’s certainly not an unexpected design and it’s definitely a little more ramshackle than either of its ancestors, but after a couple of games of Exodus I’m convinced that there is room for this game in the marketplace and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes something of a cult hit, luring longtime TI3 players and recent Eclipse acolytes away to engage its particularly aggressive, more direct style of play.
If you’ve played either TI3, Eclipse, or pretty much any other 4x style space conquest game you’ll be on familiar terrain. It’s driven by an action card selection mechanic, wherein players concurrently pick an action (twice a round, or three times with the right tech) and execute it with a follow-up round enabling other players to perform a secondary action at the cost of a population cube pulled from their home planet. The actions are typical fare- research a technology on the game’s four-branch tech tree, roll a die to take some income, buy ships or upgrades to ships, or trade resources on a shifting market scale. There are three resources in the game- a general currency and rarer materials used to build ships and ship components. In a neat twist, players are taxed any time they gather those from one of their planets, all of which have finite resources available.
Movement is handled in an entirely separate phase. Each player plays face-down movement chits to each of their ships, which may have a number or be blank.  What’s more, a ship that can move three spaces may have just one chit played on it, but with its full movement allotment or it could have three blanks.   This all adds a neat- and really kind of unexpected- bluffing element to maneuvers, especially since the movement is simultaneous and not turn-based. There is no actual exploration element, but more on that later.
The political component is simple- every round three political cards that have various one-time, round-lasting, or environmental effects are displayed and everyone bids in an all-pay auction round to vote which of the cards is enacted. Combat is a basic “fives and sixes” scheme, with players tallying up the number of weapon icons on ships to determine their dice allotment. Shields absorb hits, better shields absorb more hits. There are also neutral Centurion forces on the map from the beginning, defeating them often gives you a chance to instantly learn a tech, gain resources, acquire ship equipment, or victory points.
Yes, winning the game is a victory point thing, but the victory points are mostly earned through fighting and conquest. There’s no technology or political victory, everything is geared toward awarding conflict with very few exceptions. Every ship destroyed in battle yields points as does every planet held by a majority of your population cubes, which must be shuttled out to distant worlds by capable ships and landed. This makes for a very aggressive game that rewards the bold and punishes the turtlers. I find this to be a marked difference from Eclipse and TI3 in particular, where games far too often denigrate into Cold War scenarios of limited conflict eventually culminating in all-or-nothing battles in the last quarter of the game.
One of the key reasons that Exodus unfolds like it does is along such a violent path is because there is no exploration element- so let’s call it a 3x game. The map is already defined, there are no buffer zones of neutral planets to take over that add an hour or more of playtime before anybody starts shooting. Ships have a great deal of mobility and there are no complicated movement schemes, so it’s always easy to get your fleets into position to kick some ass. But above it all, one of the things that distinguishes Exodus from the rest of the pack is that it has a WMD phase.
Once the applicable techs are researched, players can station WMDs on planets where they are the majority. These have a range of up to five, so they can usually hit a good percentage of the map after determining range with a die roll. If they hit, depending on the weapon used they can take out resources, population, or- tell me this isn’t awesome- the entire planet. Yep. Flip the tile and flush everything that was on it. Because of the nature of this game, it’s not and idle threat, either. So yes, if you were one of the folks that felt Eclipse was too much of an economic game, this one may be more to your taste. If you hated waiting four hours to blow somebody up in TI3, Exodus wants to get you to the bloody meat of the game much quicker, even if it lacks the world-building narrative and flavor text of Fantasy Flight’s game.


__________________
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad 

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Board games - between art and engineering

Source: www.123rf.com
Some may argue that designing a board game is not art, it is simply the process of dressing up a mathematical structure with a theme and the few tweaks that make the game interesting can be easily added during play-testing. If you play Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola you will most likely have the peculiar feeling that the game has been engineered o be perfectly balanced, still offering enough options that no two games are alike.

The whole genre of German (or Euro) games are usually almost luck independent, they challenge only the wit and skills of the players and the more you play the better you are. In a typical Euro-game, it is quite unlikely for an experienced player to be defeated by a newbie. Therefore, we may safely say that most Euro-game have an engineered engine, a mathematical model which is usually nicely hidden behind a village or town building like theme to make it more attractive to light gamers and families.

However, those of you who have played lots of Euro-games know already that there are hardly two games alike - I am talking here about the good games, not about cheap clones - and that every game challenges you in a different way. If you know how to win Agricola, you won't be able to apply the same 'algorithm' for Puerto Rico, Trajan or Ora et Labora. As a game designer myself, I must argue against the assumption that most Euros are a nice cover for simple (or complex) maths. I am not saying that there isn't a core based on an algorithm, most good games have that, I am simply stating that there's a lot more to making a game than the maths behind it.

You may have noticed that the best games out there are innovative in at least one way. This is where art or inspiration comes in. It's not enough to be a good engineer and apply optimization algorithms to have a good game. You might end up with a perfectly balanced game, but to achieve the holy grail (new + fun + balanced) you need a drop of ... something else. Innovation is not as easy to describe and quantify, but I will give it a try. When Puerto Rico was launched, it brought something that most player have not seen before, the mechanism of the common action chosen by the active player, executed by everyone. This was the new and brilliant touch that pushed Puerto Rico to the top of gaming charts. In Terra Mystica (best Euro I have ever played) it's difficult to pin-point a single innovation that makes the game great. If I had to choose, I would go with the way the theme integrates with the game mechanisms. I don't know how the authors worked this game, but I notice the result. Terra Mystica does not feel at all like two separate parts, the algorithm and the theme, it feels like an inseparable integrated body. Each race has one or more unique abilities and it also comes with deviation from the standard costs vs. advantages. However, each race feels so solid that I could not have imagined it having different abilities. Designing this game is definitely a combination between art and engineering, because the game a whole is balanced without being boring and each race is unique without being overpowered.

Let's take a look to a different genre, the Ameritrash games. In my opinion, most of these games are leaning more towards the art side. To make a successful game of this genre, you need inspiration above all. You need to have a story, an universe that sucks people. Of course you will also need solid game mechanisms, but the theme dictates the mechanisms and not the other way around.

Regardless of its type, whether it is thematic, family or strategy, any game is a mix of inspiration and hard work. The hard work is usually on the engineering side, when you bust you brains to balance resources or to quantify different paths to victory but the small tweaks that make a good game great are always the fruit of inspiration. In my opinion, making a game is just as much art as it is engineering because you need to be creative to make a board game but you also need to develop a technique of development to make the game playable and balanced.


__________________
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad 

Friday, February 15, 2013

New videos of Praetor and Exodus: Proxima Centauri

As I was saying in a previous post, NSKN attended the toy fair in Nürnberg. There, we had the pleasure of a visit from W. Eric Martin, the news master of BoardGameGeek. With Doug behind the camera we talked about Praetor, explaining the game mechanism and having a quick look through one turn in a 2-player game. 



While our team was at the toy fair making contacts and discussing distribution, on the other side of the Atlantic, Sam Healey from the Dice Tower was presenting his top 10 games of 2012. If you're curious, you'll enjoy the full 35 minutes, otherwise just scroll to 32:40 and watch from there and you'll discover which game made it all the way to the top... no, wait... I have to tell you, it's Exodus: Proxima Centauri. It looks like we've done it this time!



__________________
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad 

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Deus ex machina - it's time to research

There are so many games out there with some technology tree that you can research just so you get more resources, better weapons or all other kinds of advantages. I know I've been playing lots of them and two of our own games (Warriors & Traders, Exodus: Proxima Centauri) feature the same mechanisms and it so much fun to research.

I've seen gamers who play just to be able to research, oblivious to the fact that technologies were simply means not purpose. So, what is technologies were the purpose?

OK, enough small talk and introduction, let's skip to the main topic - what do you think about a game which is all about research?

Our new prototype called (at least for the moment) Deus ex Machina is a game in which 2 to 5 players research technologies. Each player takes a civilization in its earliest stages and develops it to the 20th century.

You'll start by discovering the wheel, agriculture, religion, move through the middle ages with arts, cannons or alchemy and end up developing jet fighters, artificial satellites or social media.

The game has a total of 500 research cards depicting 159 different technologies divided into 5 ages, ancient, medieval, industrial, modern and post-modern/contemporary and also into 5 types, according to their purpose, government, military, science, engineering and culture. 

Guilds Tech card, first prototype 
Every player starts with 5 cards in his hand and takes one action per turn. The action can be to play a technology card, to place a card in his personal stash or to draw new cards. With each technology he discovers, a player gets an advancement or a number of victory points. 

Every technology requires some older technologies or an amount of knowledge progressively higher as you advance through the ages and it open the path for one or more new ones. The same cards can be discarded to pay the knowledge cost of another technology, making the game streamlined and fast paced.

We are still in the early stages of play-testing, but things are looking well. We're going to start mass testing soon and we are hoping that Deus ex Machina will go to print before the end of the year.


__________________
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad 


Monday, February 11, 2013

Convention report - Nürnberg Toy Fair

One week ago Nürnberg hosted the largest toy fair in Europe and NSKN was present for the first time. We went there with little understanding of the event, knowing that unlike Spiel Essen, this will not be open to the general public. The only attendees were the "traders", company representatives from all over the world on the hunt for novelties from the toy and hobby industry.
NSKN booth before the opening hours
The space allocated to board games was limited, there were at best 20 publishers, but there was heavy representation from the manufacturing companies and other adjacent businesses. We're trying to improve the quality of our board games, so we had a lot of meetings with specialized companies from Poland, Germany, China and Russia trying to find the best compromise between price and quality.

Zvezda - Russian manufacturer of miniatures
Trefl - Polish manufacturer of board games and puzzles
For us, the main focus was to expand our distribution network. We scheduled several meeting before the fair and we had many more impromptu meetings with results above our expectations. 

It would take to long go through every relevant experience in Nürnberg, but we can sum up the immediate results. We had the pleasure to meet Bergsala Enigma, the largest distributor of board games in Scandinavia and as of this week all our title will be once again in stores across Denmark, Sweden and Norway, we reached a new agreement with GTS Distribution from USA so that NSKN games will reach even more hobby stores overseas and we're going to have direct distribution in Canada.

Bergsala Enigma - our Scandinavian distributor
We have also established new contacts in France, Italy, Poland or the Netherlands and these days we're following up attempting to get our games to those countries where we have a smaller presence on the market.

All in all, the Toy Fair was a corporate event, everyone dress accordingly and not so typical for the board games world. As a games I found a few interesting board games for the future, but not even close to the number of cool title you can find in a dedicated event. As a publisher, this fair is a must go event, since all the important names in the industry come by to search for opportunities. 







__________________
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG
Follow us on Twitter: AgniAlexandraAndrei and Vlad