First of all, I’m looking for playtesters! The Print and Play component is being tidied up at the moment, but if you’re at all interested, please get me on my twitter, leave a comment here, or email me at twoplusgames at gmail dot com!
After a couple of playtests, some major tweaks and overhauls, I’m happy to show you my latest card game design - Cartel V3.0! 😀
Cartel is a two to four (tentatively) player game where you play the head of a corporation in a Cartel. On the surface, you’re building a metropolis of thriving commerce, but in the shadows, you vie for dominance against other Cartel lords by racketeering for territories with your hired muscle and manipulating the City by pocketing shady officials… But careful, rely on corruption too much, and everyone may be snitched out by a traitorous member of the Cartel!
Isometric stacking buildings with cards!
The design of this game began with the idea of cards that make isometric, stackable buildings. This idea lent itself to a game of territorial control - and as I’m the BIGGEST Netrunner fan in the world, it had started as a game called Corporate War - the name of a Netrunner card. (How’s that for a piece of pointless trivia :P) I’m not going into the history of this game much more than this 😛
Isometric stackable buildings with cards!
At the heart of Cartel are these buildings, or floors, or businesses, which give you points when they’re A) controlled by your thugs, AND B) placed correctly. There are four types of businesses in the game, each only generating benefits when placed in their preferred spot:
A - Anniewares General Stores are worth one point anywhere in the city. They are unrestricted in placement because Seven Elevens don’t care where they are.
T - TopTech Technologies are worth three points when they remain at the top of a building at the end of the game, because tech giants need a view.
G - Groundhog Coffees are worth two points when they’re on the ground floor, because I’ve never seen a Starbucks on the second storey.
D - DoubleDown Casinos are worth three points when they’re connected to another Double Down, because casinos need to be big.
The businesses are set up in the City, and each cartel boss vie for control with…
The Muscle
The thugs are what keeps what’s yours yours, and helps you move into what’s not yours. As you build businesses in the City, you gain more members in your gang, which you use to move around the board and control buildings. Conflict may resolve in the removal of opposing thugs if you manoeuvre a superior number into the right place!
Thugs are also one of the ways that the game may end - when any player reaches 10 thugs in their gang, the game ends because one of the gangs has reached super notoriety, and scoring commences.
The Muscle vs The Muscle
No honour among thieves
There is another set of cards that represent city officials, the proud people of City governorship… that you can get into your pocket to do your bidding. In addition to adding to your score, each personality has special powers when you buy them into your service: Constable Fernandez can call a police raid and force all thugs in one place to evacuate their current location, Senator Johns is less subtle and can pull two thugs outright off the street with a crackdown order, and Warden Manny can keep your thugs from being thrown off the streets entirely, returning them to play as long as you have Warden Manny in your pocket…
Get City officials in your pocket to do your bidding.
…So why would you ever lose Warden Manny? There is more than one copy of every pocket card, so when you hold any pocket personality, when someone else plays another of the same name, yours is immediately discarded. The corrupt are fickle by definition!
Pocket cards also provide the second game-ending condition - The Snitch. When corruption becomes impossible to cover up, one of the cartel lords can turn state witness and rat everyone out, ending the game. The Snitch is worth A LOT of points. How much? I haven’t decided yet - it’ll require a heck of a lot more playtesting to get a feel for the points. It should be a large enough payout that it should win any game outright, but it should also be possible to overcome if a player has a solid enough stranglehold on the city’s territories.
The Snitch
Join me in The City
So that’s about it for the game. There are a few things I hadn’t spoken about like the road cards, which provide a sort of a limit to where buildings can be started, as well as the payment for for building up being discarding of cards, and the way you generate resources (card draws per turn) by occupying a tall building, but those are details that hold the game together while the exciting stuff happens. I LOVE thematic games, and with Cartel my goal was to create a game where you actually feel like a criminal lord jockeying for territory, using every available resource, while the cloud of being Snitched out hangs above everyone’s head.
If you’re interested in helping me playtest Cartel, just get in touch with me (leave a comment here, or get me on my twitter, or email me at twoplusgames at gmail dot come) and I can send you a Print and Play copy of the game when it’s ready! (It’s still quite messy right now despite the clean look it has in the photos)
Octgn has since really fallen by the wayside, so if you want to play Netrunner online, the best bet is to play on Jinteki.net , it’s completely web-based and easy (enough) to use with no need for installation at all.
So my favourite card game in the world is Android: Netrunner (ANR). In addition to running the local ANRSA Events group, I’m making an effort to see that more people can play it online, from the comfort of their homes.
What? Play online you say?! The idea should be superbly appealing to anyone who enjoys the game, but many are turned away by the seemingly complex setup of the game. Well, it’s not as straightforward as an iPad app, because it *is* a third party card gaming engine (octgn) with a fourth party plugin made by the dev whizzard DB0, and not officially by Fantasy Flight, but let me tell you this:
It is really a pleasure to behold once you know how it works, and an even more so if you don’t have people to run with nearby.
So the point of this guide is to get you into the world of online ANR play as painlessly and quickly as possible! Let’s go!
Quick Overview
First of all, this is not intended for absolute beginners of ANR. Although the system automates some things, it is not a fully automated commercial game. If you don’t know how to play ANR, get someone to teach you before you even try this and get the crap confused out of you. This guide assumes basic knowledge of the ANR game.
Here are what this guide will cover. These links will take you straight to the corresponding chapters.
If your computer doesn’t have the .NET Framework 4.0, it’ll prompt you to download and install it. Don’t worry, it’s not a virus. The install will then continue.
Once you’re in the application, remember these two things - the tab menu, and the drop down menu.
2. Installing the ANR plugin
Most of this section is by none other than DB0, the creator of the ANR Octgn plugin: Kudos for the creation + concise instructions!
Run Octgn.
Register a new account or log in with an existing one if you have one.
Go to the game manager tab and click the “Add” button. In the window that will open type: Name: OCTGN Directory
In OCTGN, go to game manager and click on “Add Image Packs”
Select the .o8c files you download them one by one and install them. You will see a install window and once each pack is installed, you’ll see a pop-up window confirming this. This should take a few seconds at most.
Find and start your own game, and wait for someone to join
Find your friends and join their game.
Find an existing open match
Just go to the Play tab menu, and use the button Hide uninstalled games to see only ANR games running.
Double click on an open game to go in. The common “LF Corp” or “LF Runner” notation shows the owner of the game wanting a runner or corp opponent.
In the game chatroom, discuss the terms of engagement (I corp or you run or whatever), and the owner of the game will click start.
Start your own game, and wait for someone to join
Go to the Play tab, and Start game.
Type in a descriptive name, like LF runner or LF corp if you’re looking specifically to play a side. I also use [beginner] or [experienced] or [experimenting]. Beginners who announce that they’re new are likely to get people helping them with the interface.
Choose the game. In our case it’s “Android: Netrunner”.
A password is optional if you want a completely private game.
Click the A or B next to your name to change sides - A is corp, B is runner, though it doesn’t really matter now as an update made the game update in the game according to the deck you load.
When two players are present, press Start to start the game.
If more than 2 players are in the game, the extra players beyond the two players can spectate the game.
Find your friends and join their game
To friend people on octgn, go to the Community Chat tab
Type in the friend’s name in the box - unfortunately offline accounts aren’t shown, so friends will have to be online to be added.
You can chat via the interface. If you’re in a game, incoming messages don’t have notifications and sit in the main lobby window, so they could be missed.
Start a game by going to the Play tab and creating/joining the right one (you can see the game owner) as usual.
4. Building decks
Of course you want to build your own decks. This is one of the best things about playing ANR online - not having to sift through boxes/folders of cardboard. There are a few recommended ways of deckbuilding:
A fansite that was eventually bought by Fantasy Flight Games. They have a great online deckbuilder, the only one with all thumbnails, and you can save all your decks online if you have an account registered. Exports to octgn, but may change (in fact did for a day) due to being officially owned now. Can be a tad slow. Good stuff.
The fastest and cleanest online deckbuilder. Saves and loads speedily, can share, has cool keyboard shortcuts. This is the one I use now after the octgn export function threatened to disappear from cardgamedb. Unfortunately, no card art thumbnails, which I prefer to see as I’m quite a visual guy. Within a day, the creator of netrunnerdb.com changed it to include thumbnail views 🙂 Awesome guy 😀 Use netrunnerdb.com! 😀
Many players swear by this one, and it’s pretty good. Clean, has card art on hover. Also recommendable, but I haven’t really used it.
4. Octgn built in deckbuilder
Octgn also has a built-in deckbuilder. It works, but it lacks the speed and grace of the online ones. Also it doesn’t report stats. To find it, go to the Dropdown menu > Deck Editor.
All of these has the function to export octgn deck files, so build your deck, and load from octgn when you’re in a game.
5. Playing the game
NB: Whenever you use any keyboard shortcuts, make sure you’re not in the chatbox, or the shortcut won’t register. Click somewhere on the tabletop first to get out of the chatbox.
First things
Load deck
Control + L
Or use the menu bar and file > load deck.
Setup
Control + Shift + S
The first thing you do after loading your deck. Only do this after octgn checks your deck and it is ok. You can also just drag your identity from your hand to the table to do this.
Start turn
F1
Typically, if you want to do anything before the start of your turn, after the opponent’s turn, do it first before you press F1.
End turn
F12
Target card
Shift + Click
Before playing anything with a target (Parasite, Personal Touch, Oversight AI, etc), target that card first.Hosting works with this too. Target the thing your card will be hosted on before you play the card that will be hosted. Works for Caissas, programs played onto Dinosaurus, Djinn, Personal Touch, Oversight AI, etc.
General actions
Play a card from hand
Double click it
Click for a cred
Control + C
Draw a card
Double click deck R&D/Stack
Create a remote server marker
Control + S
Use this to indicate that there’s a remote there. Runners interact with the marker to make runs.
Corp actions
Rez Ice
Double click it
Usually use this only during a run
Trash a resource (if runner is tagged)
Target, then Control + Del
When rezzing Archer, target the agenda you will forfeit first.
Advance a card
Mouse over it, Alt + A
Install Ice
Double click it from hand, move it manually
Remember to pay for install costs when you install above first level of ICE.
Virus Sweep
Double click the Virus Sweep card on the right
Make sure you have three clicks to do this.
Runner actions
Remove tag
Control + R
Make a run
Double click the server marker
During a run the runner signifies where they are by targeting the piece of ICE he is on, and wait for the corp to respond.
Use Icebreaker
Double click it, and make multiple selections
Even after learning all the shortcuts it’s still good to remember that:
You can change things manually - this is invaluable for take-backs and mistakes.
Right clicking on the tabletop and cards will give you a lot of context menu controls.
6. Advanced play conventions
The above are the basics of play native to the system. Over time, players have developed certain conventions to help make playing the game smoother without having face-to-face communication tools. Knowing them really helps!
Making a run:
When making a run, as the Runner, we usually use targeting (shift + click on card) to indicate which ICE we are on. So if there is an unrezzed ICE, target it to indicate you are waiting for the Corp to rez it. After breaking a piece of ICE, target the next one to indicate that you are continuing, otherwise there’ll be a tedious exchange of Corp: “Do you continue?” “yes” “ok let me think”. Bleh. Use targeting! Targeting is your friend to show your intentions!
Tracing:
Whenever a trace happens, the corp starts by running the card and running the trace. The Corp will be given the chance to boost that trace. Then the runner must double click on this to set how much they will spend towards their link, remembering that Link will be added, and any recurring credits will be automatically spent (so if you have 3 Compromised Employees and want to spend those credits, you have to set 3c spend.)
Viewing archives:
When the runner discards it should only got to the face-up archive. If you put it in the face-down, you’re doing it wrong. Put it into the first one. Then, because it’s super useful, you can keep a window of archives open (yours and opponent’s, make sure it’s the face-up one) by right clicking the archive and selecting view > all cards. Don’t bother with visibility.
Remember to target:
(shift+click a card) before playing any cards that require a target. This includes Parasite, Dirty Laundry, Femme Fatale, Test Running for a Femme Fatale/Parasite, Psychographics, Personal Workshop (target the card in your hand and double click Personal Workshop), Aesop’s Pawnshop (target the card on the table and double click Aesop’s Pawnshop), and many more.
Icebreakers and their strength:
Icebreakers (all except some of the Shaper ones) are supposed to lose their strength after each ICE encountered. However this is not automated in Octgn, so just remember that. You can take the strength counters off manually, or you can just remember that it needs to be pumped again.
Stealth Credits and other kinds of specific credits:
It would be best to manually take them off of cards (by dragging them off the card and releasing) and tell your opponent what you’re doing, or you’ll find yourself spending your Cloak credits on your Corroder and running into an Archer with 200 normal credits. There is also the option to right click on the card (in this case Cloak, not the Icebreaker) and find the Reserve Credits selection. Stealth and things are generally tricky to deal with in Octgn.
Bioroids:
to break them using clicks you just manually set your clicks down. Some things aren’t automated and you don’t really need them to be.
If you still need it, here is a video made by ANRBlackhats that will show you a how to use Octgn:
Annnnd as a last bonus, here’s the official Octgn ANR keyboard commands cheat sheet for a really extensive play aid. I personally find it a bit too extensive but it’s good to have for completeness 🙂
And that’s that! Enjoy Octgn and ANR online! If you have any problems and questions, feel free to ask in comments, on twitter or wherever 🙂 Run ya later alligator! (Though I enjoy corping more)
Oh, one last thing, fellow South African Netrunners - please remember to join us on our ANRSA Events group where we’ve always got events and things going on!
A MAZE is an indie games festival and convention from Germany, and last year’s A MAZE was in South Africa for the first time. It was also around the first time I got into this whole game dev thing. Fast forward to 2013, and A MAZE was back for round two. And now that I’ve been a part of makegamesSA for a year, I could well and truly appreciate the amazingness of A MAZE 2013.
As there was simply too much to ramble endlessly about, and my time is limited due to the urge to make more games, this is gonna have to be a condensed supernova of the awesomeness that was A MAZE 2013.
1. Speakers from all over the globe and of course SA
Guys from Nigeria, France, UK, the States, Poland, etc. I was particularly sad that I couldn’t attend the Friday sessions, what with work and all, but I’m absolutely looking forward to videos of those sessions. The full programme of speakers can be found here.
2. Meeting and hanging out with international greats
In particular, Vlambeer‘s Rami and McPixel‘s Sos was there, and we got to hang out a lot. Besides being really cool guys, they are also really inspirational individuals who’ve achieved tons. Rami’s keynote about how Vlambeer came about and the very existential musings around how we are all inter-connected (it’s like emergent gameplay! 😀 ) really made me re-think a lot of my own life. Sos’s energetic attitude to game making (his business card: Mad Scientist of Video Games. His credential? McPixel, Achtung Arcade with 600 games.) was super infectious. The opportunity to pick their brains alone were simply amazing.
3. Pecha Kucha!
At the closing party, we had a Pecha Kucha session. Pecha Kucha is a format of speaking where each speaker has 20 slides with 20 seconds to talk. Thatsitgo! Good thing Thorsten (The handsome fellow who’s the A MAZE event organiser from Germany) convinced me to participate - it was an incredible experience, thinking and putting together the material as well as running through it really leveled myself up. Simon Bachelier from France Vined them all, and of course I await full video releases of them from A MAZE 🙂
4. Inspiration!
Seriously, the best thing about A MAZE is the gathering of minds, and the palpable atmosphere of people doing what they love, how they love, and succeeding at it. The sheer force of will is incredible, and makes a great bit rocket behind your back propelling you to do what you should be doing - which should be what you want to be doing. And if that’s making games, then GO DO IT! NOW!
5. OK you can look at some photos first before going to make games
Unfortunately the gallery was obliterated in the Great Blog Crash of 2013. If I have time and energy I’ll resurrect it, but I’m sure you’d rather see new content rather than old stuff :3
I love boardgames, and I love community. It’s only natural that I’m pretty active on BoardGameGeek. To my surprise, a member of BGG has chosen me as Geek of the Week - a little bit of community fun which means that I have to tell a story about myself, answer a bunch of questions from people all over the world for a week, and get people to guess which of these three things about me isn’t true:
Two truths and a lie:
I have scars from four canine attacks (one bone deep), but I still love dogs.
Despite doing a perfect Vader voice impression my entire life, I have never watched Star Wars (The original trilogy 4,5 and 6) until last week.
I didn’t buy something from one of those girl’s worn panties vending machines when I visited Japan.
Come join in the interrogation and vote on which you think the lie is on BoardGameGeek! Also I’m hunting for the next Geek of the Week. Gotta love the community!
(Edit: Added a bit more nuance to the mechanics of Dungeon Power)
This weekend, there was a Board Game Jam at the Wits Game Design Lab - open to all and sundry who wanted to try their hand at creating a game with not code and pixels, but pencil and paper. I was there, along with a few members from makegamesSA, and had an amazing time inventing, musing, playing, and re-inventing 🙂
I had gone into this jam with certain expectations, having a game in my head that I wanted to make already. The first half of the Saturday was consumed by this one - A deck-building game about advertising where you are an agency morgul, amassing fortunes, hiring employees and pitched for clients. We prototyped it up quickly and had many arguments over it - in the end it was deemed too complex and too similar to existing mechanics (Thunderstone) for a short jam and I abandoned it. Ernest picked it up and turned it into another game.
But then I made something else! Everyone worked on a couple prototypes, but in the end this one grabbed my imagination and interest the most: The Rogue-Like Card Game (RLCG)
How to make a game
Before I tell you about RLCG, I just have to give a big shout out to the Wits Game Design peeps, who organised the Board Game Jam. They had a cool lab, complete with all kinds of cool stuff - tiles, counters, dice, tokens, a guillotine with which I cut my cards, and all kinds of little bits, which really drove home the essence of game making - it’s not about the code or the graphics, but the game - the set of considered, defined, and tested rules which make an interaction fun.
It’s about challenging people and creating tension between players, and creating choices which turn into opportunities for everyone involved to feel thrilled and invested. This post on the Board Game Designers Forum describes it very well, and you do it with naught but writing some stuff down on bits of paper and some more bits to keep count of something, and then it’s all in the rules of the game, followed by a lot of playing and testing and tuning.
So if you wanna make games, give it a shot. Try it, stop imagining that it’s hard, imagine instead what you want to show people!
Introducing The Rogue-Like Card Game:
In brief:
RLCG is an asymmetrical card game that pits an Adventurer against the Dungeon Master (with multiplayer to come!).
The asymmetrical play means that the two players play differently. The Dungeon master lays out the dungeon for the adventurer to move in. There is a certain ratio of boons and banes in the Dungeon Deck (following deck construction rules), so the adventurer is never completely overwhelmed. The dungeon builds Power over time, and its master can make use of the stockpile of Power to wake slumbering evils, or he may choose to save his power to assault the hero in another way. Power tokens can be taken into the dungeon’s power stockpile, or be invested on the board, over face-down cards. When an adventurer slays a minion, the dungeon loses power from its stockpile equal to the cost of the monster. This creates an interesting choice for the dungeon - does he hang onto the power, where it could be lost, or does it invest it on the board, where it’s safe from the adventurer’s attack? The dungeon may also create disinformation by investing power onto cards that aren’t monsters, creating the illusion that they are indeed monsters.
Each turn, the Adventurer moves through the rooms of the dungeon. If the dungeon has enough Power in hand and on the hidden room, it may spring the room’s evils on the Adventurer… Or it may choose not to. The Adventurer may then choose search the room: if it’s something bad, the dungeon need not to pay Power to wake it, but if its a boon, the adventurer claims it. If it’s a monster, a battle ensues.
The game is one of bluffing and calculating risks, for the adventurer knows not what is in his surrounding, but must discover the treasures and slay lesser monsters to build up skills to tackle the bigger fiends, before the dungeon gathers enough power and overwhelms the adventurer.
The hero’s task is to steel himself in the dungeon and defeat enough minions, before assaulting and destroying the Heart Of The Dungeon. The Dungeon seeks to defend itself and kill the intruder.
A varied mix of character cards, dungeon features (monsters, traps, treasures, etc) and skills round off the game by making each combination a unique experience, with some features being stronger against some than others.
Eventually, this will have multiplayer - with multiple adventurers competing to be the first to slay the dungeon heart - but the dungeon may just slay them all first!
So, RLCG?
I’ve still got a lot of polishing and testing and tuning to do, but the game is making me very excited 🙂 So hopefully this will get a name as well - I’m not sure what I wanna call this, if you have suggestions please let me know! All suggestions welcome! 🙂
