DunDraCon Recap
Hedz were bitten off, this time in color!
Busy! Long! Productive! Exhausting! It’s DunDraCon!
DunDraCon is a 46-year old convention in the Bay Area, named after Dungeons and Dragons. I haven’t been to this con since 2002. That was the year that I made The Man Between with Anthony Gallela; we shot one scene in the DunDraCon hotel.
I can’t usually make it, but this year the timing was right, so I came for the whole darned thing: Thursday night to Monday afternoon. I spent almost the entire con in the Protospiel room.
Protospiel
Protospiel is a nonstop game testing room, intended to bring designers and testers together to make better games. I played many interesting prototypes over the weekend: some were brand new, and some were in the final stages. I even played one published game: Kabuto Sumo, which is a charming little dexterity game about pushing bugs off a stump.
There is an amazing group of game developers in the Bay Area. It was great to see so many designers getting work and selling games, and now I’m inspired and also jealous.
The Games
I won’t talk about the games I tested for other folks, assuming they are mostly still secret. The games in my tote included Bitin’ Off Hedz, Shipwrights of Marino, Coat of Arms, Lord of the Fries, and a few others I never got to. I also wrote a new little game, “Ageda Brava.”
Bitin Off Hedz: This was the first major test with the full-color board. I made a few small changes over the weekend, but nothing huge. This game is coming along well, and according to one tester, is “far better than a roll-and-move deserves to be.” I don’t know about that, but I do know that it’s far better than the original, and I can’t wait to post the final version.
Several of our races were deliciously close, even when players got sent back to the start several times. I’m pleased that the new mechanics remain chaotic, while also forcing the game towards a conclusion. The original game could literally last forever.
I chatted with Mike Eckert from KublaCon about his big Bitin’ Off Hedz event. Mike once made a giant version of this game for KublaCon, almost 20 years ago, and now we’re doing it again. By the end of May, we will have the final rules and artwork, and players should even be able to order the board from DriveThruCards. Meanwhile, Mike will put together a new giant-sized board, with big plastic dinos and a giant volcano for them to leap into.
Shipwrights of Marino: This game is also improving, but on a less predictable course. The core mechanics are solid, but small changes to the deck can have a huge impact on the economy, and individual cards can be notoriously hard to balance.
The category of single-use card abilities, the “at launch” and “game end” cards, may seem boring from a player’s point of view, but they are critical from the perspective of game balance. So I hope to include abilities in this category that are at least somewhat interesting.
Coat of Arms continues to improve slowly. I made a new deck of quest cards and got a single test of these, immediately wanting to adjust some other pieces. Hopefully I can play a few more games soon.
Lord of the Fries: I have been trying to come up with a good idea for the “all-you-can-eat” Brazilian steakhouse, but my first attempt at a menu was pretty dull. The combinations were extremely simple: One of each meat, then two of each, three of each, and finally pairs of meats wrapped in bacon. It worked, but it wasn’t quite up to the usual standards, however low those might be.
Greg Whitehead and I experimented with a menu-free version of the game, to simulate the all-you-can-eat mechanics of a real Brazilian steakhouse. Players drafted cards over a series of rounds, trying not to “overeat” by collecting more than one copy of the same card. It was a bit clunky and it didn’t feel like Lord of the Fries. So I probably won’t make these the core rules, though I might release them as an alternate game.
Ageda Brava: Monday morning, I wrote a new gambling game, Ageda Brava. This game has another “press your luck'' mechanic, similar to the Lord of the Fries variant above, but stripped down even more. It’s also related to Pairs and Lowball and a lot of press-your-luck games: basically, keep taking cards until you get a pair. What’s different is the rules for scoring.
I bought a cheap UNO deck, as I often do, because you can make a lot of different decks from those cards. I stripped it down to ranks 1 through 6, eight copies of each, on the assumption that this game might be based on some older dice game with the same basic mechanics. I played a few solo hands, roped some designers into an extended test, and called it good.
The result was pretty fun, and certainly worth further testing, perhaps eventually resulting in a new eight-suited deck at Crab Fragment. The first rules are at the end of this post.
The Rest Of It
Was there a convention outside the Protospiel room? I guess? Aside from two short sweeps through the dealer’s room, and one through the flea market, I saw very little of this con. Just nonstop testing, punctuated by meals, naps, and some alone time to rebuild my prototypes.
I strolled past some big games in the bar, and frankly I’m a little scared of the level of detail the average game seems to have these days. A hobby game is now an avalanche of words and symbols concealing yet another worker-placement deckbuilding mechanic with a snake draft.
Sometimes I feel like these games are literally too complex to understand, but I guess that’s what some players are after. Meanwhile I keep trying to cut away my game rules until almost nothing is left. “I’ve taken a look at that rock-paper-scissors, and I think I can get it down to just rock and paper.”
In the end, DunDraCon was a lot of work and a lot of fun, and as usual I have returned home with a long list of changes, and the enthusiasm to make them.
See you at the next one!
Kabuto Sumo, like the quarter-pushing arcade game, but with wooden bugs.
Ageda Brava: Preliminary Draft
Here is the very rough draft of Monday morning’s quickie gambling game. You can play it with pieces from an UNO deck, cards from two poker decks, or with cards from Pirate’s Bluff.
Created at DunDraCon, February 20 2023
Background: I bought an UNO deck because I wanted to make a new gambling game for one of my fantasy worlds. I figured there was a smaller custom deck inside this deck that I hadn’t played with already. And so I played around with the ranks 1 through 6, as if the game evolved from a dice game.
I called it Adega, which apparently means Wine Cellar in Galician, then misspelled it “Ageda” and added “Brava” for no particular reason. Google Translate tells me this means “Good Luck” in Basque, although when I reverse that translation I get “Zorte On.” So I’m gonna assume it means “Good Luck” in some language and move on.
The Deck:
The Ageda deck contains the ranks 1 through 6 in eight suits, and four “blank” cards, called Whispers. (This is all the 1 through 6 cards in an UNO deck, plus four Wilds), for a total of 52 cards.
This deck is theoretically evolved from a dice game of a similar mechanic. The pasteboards that tracked players' rolls eventually became a deck of cards. And then someone added specials, because they replaced something that only dice could do. Whatever that was.
Setup:
Players use chips for betting. There is a “first player” button that moves to the left after each hand. Determine randomly who will start with the button.
The Deal:
Every player pays an ante of one coin into the pot. Shuffle and deal one card face up in front of each player. The button acts first, and players act in turn, to the left.
Each Round:
On your turn, you may stay in or fold. You may also offer to split the pot. But if you make an offer and it is not accepted, you are automatically opted in.
Once all players have declared whether they are in or out, and after concluding any splitting negotiation, each player receives one more card face up, starting with the button. Generally speaking, if you receive a duplicate card, you are knocked out and must pay a penalty.
One Pair: If you receive a pair, and someone else doesn’t, then you lose the hand and pay a penalty equal to the rank of the paired card, for example, paying 6 coins for a 6.
No Pair: If you receive no pair, you are safe this round, and still in the hand.
All Pairs: If every player gets a pair, then the hand is over. In this case, the player who paid the highest penalty on this round wins the pot. If there is a tie for highest penalty paid, those players split the pot.
Blank Cards: Whispers are blank and cannot form a pair with any card, even other whispers. However, if you catch a pair with a whisper in your hand, you pay double the usual penalty. If you catch a pair with two blanks, the penalty is quadrupled, and so on.
Ending the Hand: The procedure repeats until only one player is left alive, or everyone is knocked out, or when all remaining players agree to split the pot. After every hand, the button passes to the left.
Odd Coins: If there are odd coins after any split pot, they carry forward to the next pot.
Ending the Game: This is a gambling game, in which every hand is a separate game. Players may continue for as long as they wish.
Notes: I’d like to play more of this game and learn about it, and maybe add some extra wrinkles. The odds calculation is already pretty interesting, and I’d also like to play it with the Island deck, i.e., a 6-suited deck with ranks 1 to 7 and two face cards (all face cards being blanks) - possibly with a different behavior for each face card, or possibly with a situation where two face cards of the same rank constitute a pair.
In any case, we will surely see an updated version of this game in the future, but I thought it would be fun to capture the first draft.
Ageda Brava was designed by James Ernest on 2/20/23, with help from John Brieger, Logan Chops, and Michael Dunsmore.