Steven Tu / @Tuism Indie Game Maker, Designer, Illustrator

Results for category "boardgames"

10 Articles

Released: Busara - The Enter Africa “megagame”

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tuism

Last year, I joined Enter Africa, a project spanning 15 countries, led by the Goethe-Institut, and engaged in a “megagame workshop” in Ethiopia to create a board game with cooperation between 15 countries.

It was an eye-opening workshop in October 2018 that began the journey of creating a pan-African board game, which culminated in the presentation and release of the game Busara at two international events this year: A MAZE Berlin (April 2019), and Gamescom (August 2019).

My role in this project was a game design consult and primary graphic designer. Together with an amazing core team (Christoph Deeg, Bethlehem Anteneh, Dagmawi Bedilu, Stefanie Kastner, Dr Julia Sattler), we journeyed with participants from 15 countries throughout Africa to design Busara.

A cultural artifact

The game was created as a print-and-play, that means it is a free game that anyone can play. It is meant to be a cultural artifact, something accessible to as many as possible.

You can download the game for free here

The year-long endeavour to creating Busara has been an incredible experience. Having participants from 15 countries, juggling literally so many ideas, priorities and aspirations was a challenge. We are stupendously proud of what we were able to stew down into the eventual essence.

Busara is a game that takes inspiration from Africa, and a rare interpretation of Africa by Africans.

Busara is a conversation on identity, borders and borderlessness, competition and cooperation.

Busara is a cultural expression wrapped up in a game, whose birth journey is more important than the physical bits themselves.

I hope you enjoy the game! Again, you can download it for free here.

A GOOD Keyforge Multiplayer variant

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tuism

I’m pretty into Keyforge right now. A short intro: Keyforge is a cool game by the creator of Magic The Gathering, Richard Garfield, published by Richard Garfield. It’s a dueling card game somewhat like Magic, with the twist of decks being procedurally generated and completely unique in themselves.

It was made as a two player game, but I discovered a variant on Reddit that made a really compelling multiplayer game. I wanted a way to share it easily, so here it is!

Key rules:

  • Default hand size is 5 cards. You’ll see why later.
  • Players select an opponent before starting their turn (including before selecting house or forging keys)
  • Whenever you are selected as an opponent, draw a card.

Additional tweaks:

  • Captured amber always goes to “current opponent” when the creature is removed. This enables looting and amber bouncing around is really fun and interactive, and creates interesting decisions.
  • Effects that affect the opponent are divided into two kinds, active effects are ones that you play. For example, playing Foggify means your current opponent can’t attack in their next turn, and activating Lash of Broken Dreams means your current opponent’s keys cost +3 on their next turn.
  • Passive effects that sit on your table affect whichever player picks you as their opponent. For example, Titan Mechanic will grant whoever picks you as opponent -1 key cost if they pick you as opponent.
  • Global effects like Gateway to Dis will only affect you and your current opponent.
  • Key cost is tweaked by number of players to make the game length reasonable. 3-4 players keys cost 5, 5+ cost 4. I guess I wouldn’t recommend more than 6 players. This does change the strengths of some cards that count amber, so if you really want, you can tweak those numbers by the same amount. But that’s getting too much into the weeds.

Good Game Design!

I really like the design of this variant, some key reasons:

Choosing an opponent each turn limits the scope of weirdness that can happen. Wipes not clearing everyone’s board, for example, prevents the game from entirely sinking into restart-every-turn which can really suck when you’re waiting for multiple players to take their turns.

Additionally, having a chosen opponent creates a funnel of decision making rather than making every decision across the entire board and optimising so much that it feels like cheating. If two players both have captured amber, for example, having to choose which player to pick as the turn’s target at rather than just grabbing them all in one go, makes for a much more interesting decision to be made.

And having the chosen opponent bulking their hand means that even out of turn, players remain engaged and interested in what’s going on. Also it gives someone picked on a possibility to come back in a big way.

This is possibly my preferred way of playing Keyforge now, it breathes so much new life into the game, and changes it from a softcore dueling game to an interesting group game similar to “traditional” boardgames. Has an almost Blood Rage feel to it.

Hope you enjoy it! And if you have any inputs to the variant rules, please shout! 🙂

Released: #DiskiSkills the One-On-One Football Card Game

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tuism
A game with my game design was just released! It actually feels completely weird to not have anything to do with how a thing I contributed to looks, since I’m so used to playing the art and/or graphics design role. Simphiwe Xulu, in collaboration with the Johannesburg Goethe Institute, was making a card game that was themed around the local South African one-on-one “Freestyling” soccer culture (also called “Diski”), and also have an app component of showing videos  of how Diski moves looked through AR. They were having trouble with the game design (their first iterations were basically a version of Top Trumps, remember that from your playground days?), and so they consulted with me to improve on the game design, while keeping the same elements. We went through a process of interrogating what Diski was all about, and ended up with the current game design for #DiskilSkills, where two players take turns attacking with various Diski moves, and where skills were equal, the player with more swag (“style” in the local vernacular) would win the point. “thematic af” was the goal of the design, and I daresay we did pretty well with it. The game was launched on Oct 27 at the Goethe Institute at an event with actual Freestylers and kids showing off their real #DiskiSkills. I got to watch people play the game without me having to give any input - watching people read your rules and play the game without your help is a really awesome feeling! Further, watching people laughing as they kick each other’s ass, learning to get better at it, was fantastic. Thanks to the Goethe Institute Johannesburg, Simphiwe (Mr Media X) and everyone involved in bringing this to life!

Designing for #EnterAfrica: a pan-African boardgame collaboration spanning 15 countries.

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tuism
The Goethe Institute has been doing a mega project called EnterAfrica, which has two parts: Part one involves each of the 15 African countries involved creating location-based mobile games in their 15 cities that tell a story about the past and future of their city, and part two is the creation of a mega analogue game (tabletop game) by a collaboration of all 15 countries.
I was fortunate to have experience both in graphic design and tabletop games design, and I was involved in part one of EnterAfrica, and so was serendipitously brought in to help bring this ambitious game design project to life. It was a tall order: the goal was to synthesise the voices, experiences and cultures of 15 diverse countries to create a united vision and expression as one game. The project was led by Christoph Deeg, a German gamification and digital/analogue strategy specialist, and various members of the Addis Ababa Goethe Institute. We had a one week workshop in Addis Ababa to get to know each other and home in on a game design which will then be crafted and designed further. And what a week it was! We worked hard, exchanging and talking about everything from the principles of game design to cultural ideas and ideals, to individual and group experiences. I knocked out prototypes in record time and wrote and re-wrote rules. We learned from one another, laughed with one another, and had our eyes on the ball - the culmination of a single game that will represent both the diversity and the unity of the participating group of African countries. I’m super grateful to the Goethe Institute for such an amazing, ambitious and expansive initiative, not only is the vision for such inclusivity astounding, the sensitivity with which the whole project was handled was inspiring and something I’ve learned a ton from <3 The week-long workshop is over, and we have a game design that’s all about trading resources in order to achieve one’s nation’s goals. The game is far from done yet, but we have the core values and rules that will take it to the finishing line. The game is planned to show in 2019 at A MAZE Berlin and Gamescom, so if you’re gonna be there, look out for the game. And with some luck, maybe I’ll see you there?

Dubai: Selected as Cardboard Edison Award Finalist!

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tuism

Last year in November, I made a game for a 24 hour game design contest on BGG, it was called Burjs, the word “burj” meaning “tower” in Arabic, like the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.

The game was spawned off of a previous game I had made called Cartel, whose central concept revolved around these 2D cards forming 3D isometric buildings.

While Cartel was cool, and was featured at AMAZE, our Indie game festival in Johannesburg, it wasn’t focussed on its core premise. As such, I felt, it suffered from an identity crisis. I sought to address that with this new design, by focussing strictly on the aspect of building. Simplicity is best!

Many iterations later, it’s now called Dubai for simplicity, and I liked it so much I entered it into the first Cardboard Edison Award. I had to make an awkward game introduction video 🙂

And Dubai was selected as one of 10 finalists out of 100+ entries! 😀

Much to my delight and surprise! 🙂

Right now I’m doing some final tweaks and balances to the game rules and structure to ensure that it’s as good as it can get before sending the final prototype (oxymoron!) off to Cardboard Edison for final judging. As that’s done I’ll put the latest files on.

For now, you can read more about the game, its evolution, and find the latest Print & Play files here on BGG 🙂

 

A great big shoutout to everyone who’s helped playtest this little guy, and given feedback. Trust me you’ll all get credit when the game has some kind of credit page 🙂

So so happy and flattered and all sorts of good vibes! 😀