In Arabella, I find the building up of a sprawling network quite satisfying. The money system is interesting, and one I’ve not seen before. You earn and spend money in sets of 1, 5 or 10, and if you don’t spend the exact change, you’ll lose it. The game ends when you get to the end of any one of the money tracks (usually, the 10s.)

I’m a big fan of roll-and-write games in general, so I’m pleased to contribute to their presence on BGA!

Wanting to explore the genre myself, I though 7drl was the perfect vehicle.

So, I present, Amalgamate.

I’m pleased with the outcome! It’s fun, skill-testing, and there are plenty of secrets to discover!

I like

• Skill-testing. One of my notes reads: “noob, 8 points; pro, 88 points.” I think it’s important that your actions matter (obvious though it sounds.) In this game it’s very much the case. Whether you merge item A or B, spawn loot, cast a spell… it’s all impactful! But it doesn’t feel it at first.
• Mechanical points. There’s something I call “mechanical health”, and I try to shoehorn it into my games. It’s where your health is represented by the mechanics of the game (rather than being a number). Mosaic and Magpie have it, Perimeter doesn’t. Amalgamate is the first game I’ve made which has mechanical points! Your points are items on the board like any other.
• Spells. I really like the spell-casting system in the game. All spells start costing the same amount of mana, but they get harder to cast each time. This has the advantage that I don’t really need to balance the spells!
• Secrets. I’m hoping there are a couple of epiphany moments in the game. But I can’t really talk about those here.

I don’t like

• Time-consuming. A good run feels like it can take a really long time to complete. It’s a problem I’ve come up against in Magpie and Perimeter too; it can feel a bit of a slog.
• Hopelessness. The game feels profoundly unfair at first blush. Monsters are relentlessly piling out of the chest, and you feel you barely have time to defeat them all. I think this will put people off the game (it certainly would me) before they get to the good stuff.
• Not enough merging. Merging is satisfying, but the game doesn’t give you enough time to tidy up your board before the next monster comes knocking. I wish I found a way to balance the two aspects: allowing merging (because it’s fun) and putting pressure on (because you need a reason not to merge.) I tried a lot of variations, and never found the solution I envisioned.

Back in 2014, me and three friends got together over a weekend to each create a couch multiplayer game for 4 players. We called it 4pxbcgj (four player Xbox controller game jam). Most of the games we made for that have been lost to time, sadly. But the memories have not.

I wanted to run a similar event, but this time I would keep all the games on my Raspberry Pi so we can revisit them whenever we want. Thus, Couchjam I was born.

The event

Instead of making the games over one weekend, I invited my friends over with a few weeks of of warning. The idea would be to create the games ahead of time, and we would just meet up to play them all.

It was great fun, and everyone made an enjoyable and unique game.

Here are our creations (apologies for the poor photos).

Alchemess

Michael’s game was a co-op potion crafting game. Every day, customers come to your shop asking for potions, and the players have to work together to craft enough of them before the day ends.

We were in collective awe of the time and effort that went into this game. There was a lot of depth and secrets to discover too!

aleon.

Seth made a semi-cooperative version of Space Invaders, potentially inspired by the pong demo. You have to shoot the approaching aleons, and then turn into a face to collect the stars before anyone else. Beware, if you hit an aleon, you’ll lose all your stars!

Chess & Zombies

Ben made two games! A multiplayer chess and a version of CoD Zombies.

In multiplayer chess, you cannot move the same type of piece consecutively, and each piece has a small cooldown. Pawns move orthogonally, and capture diagonally. There are no queens. It’s very fun and hectic.

Zombies was the only game to feature haptics. It was very satisfying to shoot, especially when you’re armed with a rapid-fire minigun!

Available here.

Dungeon Climb

Jack made a platformer in which you have to keep climbing as the screen scrolls up. Be the last man standing, and you’ll win!

You can shoot ropes from your character to attach to platforms, but once you’re attached you must rely on your momentum to take you where you want to go as you can no longer control your character, except to jump off.

Flick-Tac-Toe

I made bowls-meets-nought-and-crosses, which came in two variants real-time or turn-based. Both involve flicking pucks on the grid. Take control of cells to earn points, and if you manage to control 3-in-a-row (pretty hard with 4 players) you’ll earn mega points!

Space Oddity

Santi’s entry was a co-op space shooter. Defeat the geometric shapes which spawn in waves, and use relics to fuse into spell-casting entities within which both players need to work together to unleash powerful abilities!

Vibe Check

Zach brought a competitive spot-the-difference! Try and find differences in the AI generated images before everyone else, but spam A and you’ll be locked out from guessing for a while.

The game is based on one of the Penrose tilings with which you can asymmetrically tile the plane (although that requires some additional restrictions which are not enforced by Elongo.)

The goal is to find homes for your collection of animals, and the first player to place them all on the board wins. The shapes you can create and the ways you place animals are very interesting, and it’s superbly multiplayer with the ability to block players, snipe control of regions, and surround enemy enclosures with a large boma.

I enjoyed the mathematical nature of the game, and even had to cut out some pieces to get my head around the different parts of the tiles. Each of the tiles has regions and edges, each with their own ids.

I’d wanted to make a monopoly roguelike for some time. I envisioned a game in which you complete circuits of a board, picking up items and fighting monsters as you do so.

Somehow, the game which came out of the jam looks very similar to initial mock-up I made…and yet doesn’t at all feel how I thought it would. The game I had in my mind was a slower-paced game in which you collected coins to spend on buying the items you wanted. Perimeter is fast, and you cycle through piles of items in no time at all.

This year, I purchased a subscription from CraftPix giving me access to a bunch of really nice assets to use for the jam. This meant I had a pretty complete playable demo after half my time was up, and the remaining time I invested into playtesting and balancing the game. It’s not perfect, but all told I’m happy with the end result.

As has been the case every year, I am unbelieving of the fact people are playing and enjoying the game. And that there are so many scores being submitted. A huge thank you to all the players, you make me very happy!

Some elements I like:

• Elegance of decision. The only input from the player is choosing which square to travel to. I love that all of the gameplay stems from this one choice. There are no activated abilities (Escorial) or upgrade choices (Magpie). This was actually one of the “axioms” I chose at the start of the jam.
• Item activations. I like the how the rings, potions and shields all activate under the same conditions. It means once you’ve played a little, if you pick up a potion, you might not remember exactly what it does, but will know it activates on a 1. Also, I managed to include the kind of “pun” I love: rings activate when you complete a loop. I had hoped to add trousers and tops which do things with the bottom and top half of the board, but alas I couldn’t come up with any good effects.
• Enemy traits. The enemies can have trait icons appended after their health bar. That is all the information you need to know how an enemy behaves, there are no complicated rules. This was inspired by Mage Knight. In addition, the image of the enemy also indicates exactly what traits they have. Red enemies always deal extra damage. Plant enemies always gain 1 hp each time you complete a loop. And flying enemies, well, fly.

So give it a try if you want to organise an event, and these features look good to you:

• Free to use
• No sign-ups or emails
• Participants can enter how convenient an option is for them, from 0-100

I made the initial version 2 years ago in PHP + Svelte. The new version is written in React with a Tailwind UI-based design, hosted with Cloudflare Pages. The reason for the rewrite was to allow me to deploy changes more easily – any commits to the master branch are automatically built and deployed by Cloudflare.

I think this new version is a lot easier to use, and looks a lot cleaner. I hope people like it!

In Karvi, workers take the form of dice, upon which pips represent “beer” or the resources available for that die to spend on actions. As you move dice around the board you can deplete their beer levels to perform various actions.

There’s also a map across which you go trading and raiding with your Karve (which I learnt is a type of Viking longship), and building outposts and trading posts.

It’s currently in Beta, which means the game is open to anyone, with the caveat the implementation might not be perfect. I don’t know when it will be fully released, but I’m happy with the implementation. One tiny feature that I’m happy with is when moving the Karve long distances, the boat will animate from location to location to show the journey taken.

I’m really happy to be able to continue making games for BGA despite no longer working there full time. It’s a lot of fun, and exciting to still be part of the site.

Edit: Karvi went live on 8th January

Rune is super easy to use. You can test locally using a dev ui, from which you can add and remove users, simulate different latencies and test spectators. When ready to publish, you simply push to their platform, and once approved, the game becomes available to their users through the Rune app. Rune supports both turn-based and real-time games, although I didn’t try making anything real-time.

I do wish I’d added these features to Kangaroo, and if I ever decide to pick it up again, these will certainly be in my mind.

The API itself is really easy to use, and I liked it a lot. There are also a few downsides for me.

• Desktop support. The games are only playable through the mobile app, and there is no desktop support. Given the games are all javascript, it feels there should be the option to play in the browser.
• Cheating. There is no way to have game state available to only one of the players. This means that any private information (such as the cards I have in my hand) is sent to all clients. I’m not really bothered about this, but it’s something available in Kangaroo and BoardGameArena. I think for the style of games encouraged on Rune (quick, fun, social games), this isn’t that big of a deal.
• Voice chat. The app strongly encourages voice chat, and automatically joins you to a voice channel when you join a room. I find this too intimate!
• Vendor lock-in. The platform itself is not open source (the documentation is, but I’m unsure if that would allow a new implementation of the client API or not), meaning that I am relying on Rune for a game to continue being playable. This is not such a big deal as the Rune API is a very thin layer on top of the game, and it would be easy to swap out for an alternative.

I’ve already made a few test games on Kangaroo, and so I decided to take one of those and move it over to Rune to try it out. I picked old game we used to play on MSN Messenger called “Seven Hand Poker”. Players take it in turns to lay down poker hands. When two hands are opposite each other, the better hand takes a coin. When you have 4 coins total, or 3-in-a-row, you win the game. I renamed it “Head to Head Poker” and uploaded to the platform.

I’m happy with the result, and I hope people will enjoy it! If you want to try it out, it’s on Rune.

Causets Game aims to introduce how causal sets work geometrically, whilst also being fun to play. It is a twist on Square Worlds, but instead of placing objects you are placing tiles which contain “nodes” or “events”. There are various ways in which connecting these nodes together scores points.

The game can be played here.

Additionally, the game is open-source and is available on GitHub. If you want to go an make changes to the game, please go ahead. I’d love to see any forks of the game!

The game was commissioned by scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh and funded by the STFC as part of the “Quantum Software for a Digital Universe” project.

Some of these projects have been to develop BGA adaptations, as I did before I took on a full-time role. The first of these being Botanicus, a cute gardening-themed Euro game. I think it can be enjoyed by both newcomers to boardgaming, and boardgame addicts alike.

Go and give it a play!