Games – Page 2 – The Industrious Squirrel

Touch table Broom Servce

I’ve completed my touch table conversion of the game Broom Service. We were introduced to Broom Service at Essen. One of the many good games that we learned about on that trip.

In Broom Service, the players compete to gather resources, move around the map and deliver potions. The interesting mechanic is that in each round, players select four of ten cards to play. When you play a card you can play it bravely, betting that other players haven’t selected that same card, and get a bonus. Or you can play it cowardly.

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Board game programming tutorial – Part 3

This is the third part in my tutorial for converting a board game for a touch table using Unity.

The first part covered all our reuse code and conventions, setup the project and created a main menu.

The second part built the UI for a very simple game called “No Thanks!”.

This part will write the events to control the game, add buttons to the UI for the players to use to play the game, and finally add animations to the game.

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Touch table Village

I’ve completed a touch-table version of the board game Village.

Village has an interesting mechanic where you manage the life and death of your workers. All your workers start as farmers and can be trained as specialists. Actions take “time” to perform, and when enough “time” has passed, a worker dies. A limited number of each type of worker is rewarded with fame and victory points upon death while the rest get an anonymous grave. The key is making the best use of your workers and their time while trying to arrange a good death.

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Age of Discovery and more about complexity

I’ve completed the touch-table version of Age of Discovery and this article compares this project to my previous project which was Medici.

For both being touch-table conversions of board games, they were very different projects. Medici was small and took less time than I expected it to. Age of Discovery was a large project, and it ended up being even longer than expected.

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Touch Table Medici and a discussion of project complexity

I’ve completed a touch-table version of Medici

Medici was an interesting project because of how simple it was. It is my first conversion project that has taken significantly less time than I thought it would and is also the quickest that I’ve been able to make a new game.

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Touch Table Castles of Burgundy

I’ve completed a touch-table version of Castles of Burgundy. In the board game, players build up their estate with tiles drawn from a common area. Each turn, players roll two dice and use the results to pick tiles, place tiles or sell goods. Placed tiles give the player victory points, extra actions, or advantages in later turns. Each player manipulates their own estate and only interacts with the other players through competition for the tiles in the center.

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Distract-O-Vision Video

We were interviewed by Distract-O-Vision at Conclave of Gamers this year. We talked about the games that we’ve been making and the basic ideas behind the touch table. They put together a great video that shows off the touch table and games.

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Touch table Concordia

I’ve completed a touch-table version of Concordia. We saw the game at Essen last year. They were promoting the Salsa expansion, but we weren’t familiar with the base game. The game has relatively simple rules but it takes many steps to achieve your goals.

The game was a good candidate for the touch table because is no hidden information, there is a decent amount of setup time and piece twiddling, and I felt like the game could be improved with a real-time scoreboard.

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Card Games

A couple of months ago I started a project to convert some card games for play on the touch table. I started this project because I wanted to convert the card game “Linko”, but I’d also been planning to convert “Turn the Tide”.

I’d done one card game (Wizard) in the Torque engine and I used the web interface to keep player’s card’s on their device. I wanted this implementation to be more generic and support multiple card games.

I planned to use Unity’s built in networking and have the server run on the touch table with an Android application that players would download to their phone to show their hand of cards.

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Shop Heroes

I’ve been playing “Shop Heroes” for about a month. It’s a bit embarrassing because it isn’t a serious computer game. In fact it’s a casual browser/mobile game and it even has micro-transactions where you can pay money to speed up progress in the game. It’s the reality TV or soap opera of the computer game world. But it has managed to distill the addictive elements of casual and role playing games into a very appealing form.

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