The Lords Return to Vegas
Along with my various duties at Crab Fragment Labs, I sometimes do freelance work for other game companies. Game design, graphic design, and so forth. Last week, for example, I helped Mike Selinker and the crew at Lone Shark Games with their next big project: several new expansions for Lords of Vegas.
Mike and I designed Lords of Vegas more than ten years ago. It was first published by Mayfair Games in 2010, and Lone Shark retrieved the rights in 2020. They kickstarted an expansion called Underworld at the start of the Covid pandemic. Here’s a link to the game’s BGG page. (Overall rank 445!)
Now Lone Shark is back at the drawing board, with new designs and components for this excellent game.
The Core Game
Lords of Vegas is a strategy game about about building Las Vegas. The board has six blocks, each made of several small vacant lots where players can erect million-dollar casinos. The game has profit, loss, trading, risk, and even gambling. It has all the best parts of all your favorite real estate games. And lots and lots of dice.
In 2020, Lone Shark released the card-based expansion, “Underworld,” which added some extra flavor to the game. We came to Las Vegas in February to shoot that Kickstarter video, right at the moment when we should have known better and stayed inside.
Here’s a link to that Kickstarter campaign. Poke around to find our walk-and-talk videos on the streets of Las Vegas (in the early updates). They are pretty fun.
Wireframes for Tombstone, Reno, and Atlantic City
New Boards
The upcoming Lords of Vegas expansions include three new boards, each with its own set of rules. These are Atlantic City, a long, thin map where every block is connected (or can be); Tombstone, a map with fewer lots and some special characters to buy, like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday; and Reno, the biggest little expansion in the world, designed to work best with two players.
We’ve been testing these new boards for months, and now we have the final wireframes. These are just dimensions, not final art. They show exactly where the blocks and other elements will go, so the artists have the dimensions they need.
New drafts of the paper money
New Money
Lone Shark is replacing the old Monopoly-style money with colorful new bills, in denominations that correspond to the five different colors of casino. These are also still in progress, but they are getting close to final. (Let us know what you think!)
The colors of these bills will correlate with the Lords of Vegas poker chips, in case you want to use bills and chips together.
When Will All This Happen?
Soon! For more information about the upcoming Lords of Vegas expansions, and everything else from Lone Shark Games, please visit them at lonesharkgames.com. Or sign up for their mailing list here.
Las Vegas: Crossroads of the old and the new