One week left for this Kickstarter project. It's a turn-based strategy game on hexes, inspired by games like * General, Battle Isle, Advance Wars. It looks promising.






www.kickstarter.com/projects/kingartgames/battle-worlds-kronos-turn-based-strategy-revisited

No base building, it's scenario-based. Will feature a campaign, challenge scenarios, multiplayer, including PBEM, a map editor and a random map generator. Check out the project page for videos and extra info.

Signups are open until May 2nd. Game will start May 5th.

Abstract

Two Rooms and a Boom is a social deduction, hidden role game. There are two teams, the Red Team and the Blue Team. The Blue Team has a President. The Red Team has a Bomber. Players are equally distributed between the two teams and given roles; then, they are randomly sorted into two rooms (separate threads) that don't communicate with each other. The game consists of 5 rounds. At the end of each round, some players will be chosen by an elected leader to be traded between rooms. At the end of the game, if Red Team’s Bomber is in the same room as the Blue Team's President, then the Red Team wins. Otherwise the Blue Team wins.

What's new? Differences from Werewolf

2 Rooms and a Boom is similar to our standard game of Werewolf in that it relies on a group of players being able to work together, and vote and reason in a way that brings their team to their victory condition. However, there are several key differences that will provide a change of pace from a game of werewolf:

• The teams are relatively equal in size and composition: Each of the two main teams will have similar roles and goals, except for the desire to either pair up or separate the President or Bomber at the end of the game. There also are various 3rd Party roles that can be included in advanced games.
• No players know any other player's identity at the start of the game. In werewolf the wolves know each other at the start, but since the two main teams are equal in size for this game, there is no need for players to begin the game with information about other players.
• All players cannot talk to each other at the same time: The players will be divided into two different threads for each round, and a few players will move between threads in each round. This brings in a necessity to bring/bluff information as people move around rooms, since players are not allowed to read the thread of the room they aren't in and therefore have to rely on information about what happened when they weren't there.
• Nobody is killed during gameplay: Instead of the main action each round being killing off of a player to gain their information, the resolution of each round results in players just being switched in between rooms. This also has the bonus of everyone staying in the game for the entire length of the game, which works well because-
• The game is a set length of time: The game takes place over 5 rounds (I'll have these be 2 days long each), no matter if there are 6 players or 30 players. This has a nice effect of being able to predict the time required to play each game, and in conjunction with the previous rule avoids the problem that WW games are privy to of some people leaving the game immediately, and some people being forced to be around for a month for one game.
• So wait, if people never die, how does any sort of confirmed information come into play? The answer to this is that Players are allowed to reveal their alignment or role in a way that is certified to be true. There will be syntax that a player can use to make these verified claims, that they can use to share their information with another player, either 1-way or 2-way, or to share it with the public.
• But that has the problem of everyone just revealing at the start being the proper play, right? Nope, because All players have secrets to keep. Each team will want to protect the other team from knowing their President/Bomber, so that it would be harder to avoid, and most of the other roles that can be included will have an influence in one way or another with the revealing process, so that there has to be a certain caution to play to not play your hand to the other team.

These are the main differences between 2 Rooms & A Boom and the Werewolf game we play. I think it has a great capacity to work very well with our group here, because it changes up the paradigm of how to play, makes for games that can be shorter with more people to help prevent burnout, and involve deduction from both the good and the bad team, so certain players have something to do when they roll bad guy team besides just writing deception. *cough Gaspar cough*

How To Play: Overview

At the start of the game, players will be divided up equal or close to equally into two teams, the Red Team and the Blue Team. Then, each player will be given a role. The game will include the Blue President and the Red Bomber, and will also include a combination of either regular "vanilla" roles, or special roles that have specific abilities (Players do not start with knowledge of anyone else's role or alignment.) Then, the players are randomly distributed between two different threads, and the game starts.

Once the round starts, players will then start talking with the other players in their room. Since the winning condition depends on whether the Red Bomber and Blue President are in the same room or not, players will want to try and figure out who possesses each role, and try to keep them apart or together depending on their team.

In order to control who moves between the different rooms, each round a leader will be elected for each room. The leader is voted for by everyone in each room, and is determined by who has the most votes for them at the end of the day. The leader will state a list of the people they want to move from their room to the other room, and at the end of the round those players will be switched to the other room.

Since there is no player death during the middle of this game, players do not get confirmed information in that way. Instead, players are allowed to reveal information to each other that will be GM confirmed. (Have to use specific syntax, GM will punish any false information shared in this format as true.) The two forms of information you can share are in color-reveals (You share your alignment: red, blue, or grey) and co-reveals (You share your alignment and your role name). The rules allow for 2-way sharing (via PM), 1-way sharing (via PM), and public sharing (in thread) of alignment/role.

There might also be limited personal messaging allowed between players. I am still working out the details but there will be a specific numbered allowance of messages a player can send to other players each round. This allows for some secret communication and planning, but will have a cap on it to prevent the hundred-message verify-a-thons and prevent gameplay from moving mostly into secret communication.

At the end of each round, the players chosen by each leader will be moved from room to room. The GM will then create a new thread for each room and its new group of players, and begin the next round. At the end of the 5th round, all players' identities will be revealed, and depending on the location of the president and bomber, either the red or blue team will win.

FAQ

What are some of the additional roles I might encounter in the game?
Most of the additional roles center around the process of sharing information, adding additional bonuses and obstacles, and vary in complexity. All of the non-3rd party roles are for either team, and usually one of each role is present on each team in a game. Some examples include:

So, the game that I'm planning to run next has, as part of its theme, a bad guy character who's a bomber trying to track down and assassinate a leader figure. Due to all of the actions and deaths that have happened this week with the Boston Bombers, I've realized that this might be a touchy issue to have represented in a theme so soon.

I am guessing based on the players we have here that there is a good sense of maturity and capacity to know the difference between the real thing and a theme designed just to move a game along, and the theme isn't presented in any sort of light or desire to glorify these actions. Even so, I thought it would be prudent to go ahead and state this, so if anyone would be majorly offended by having that as a game theme, they could state it here, and I could come up with an interim theme instead.

I know we used to have a fair amount of RBers who were 20 and younger. I know my son (just a tad younger than some of you when you first got here) played in RB games when he was still in elementary school. Is RB an aging population or are we getting new young bloods?

Should RB have a facebook presence?
(and/or other social media)

Vote and leave a feedback whether you think it's a good thing or not.
Ideas on what we can do with it.

One thing I can think of is that we can have numbers on our side, to bump our linkedIn profile, or some prized popularity vote on facebook.

As usual, I gave this adventure a lot of thought. I couldn't figure out how to maximize the scoring, until I finally realized that the points don't actually come from efficient food-to-<yields> but from how well you place relative to others.

Once I realized this, and realized that participation was likely to be light (given our recent history ), I decided upon a plan:

- Play to maximize hammer and GPP output for the first checkpoint
- Then starve the city down to size 1 (whipping along the way)
- Try to stay alive until 1500BC while minimizing food usage
- After the "Great Hunger" period, come roaring back for glorious victory!

I had one clever idea after the first checkpoint: Revolution! In order to minimize food use, I tried to remember to revolt every 5 turns.

Capital: Settled 1W of the start for the extra commerce, and hoping to pull in something from the fog (failed that).

Research:
Mysticism (for Stonehenge)
Animal Husbandry (for Cows, hoping for Horses)
Writing (for library)
Archery (for defense)
Polytheism & Priesthood (for Oracle)
Aesthetics (open up Literature)


Notable Builds:
2640BC Stonehenge
2480BC Library
1640BC Oracle (chose Literature)
850BC Great Library (for the Scientist specialists)
400BC Temple of Artemis (for the Priest specialist)
150BC Forge (bonus hammers!)
400AD National Epic (bonus GPP)
700AD Market (bonus coins)

Great people:
Prophet
Prophet (shoulda been a scientist)
Scientist
Prophet (shoulda been a scientist)
Artist (from Music)

Graphs:
1000BC:


500AD:


1500AD:


Here's an overview of the "Empire" in 1500AD:


The end of the game was...anticlimactic. I clawed back up into middle of the pack over the 300 years after 1500AD. Even flipped 2 cities (Matara and Rostov) that had been settled near me!

But then, it looked too long to really take over and win. Plus, there was a big Buddhist (AP) lovefest that led to the diplomatic situation only having two miscreants: Peter and Darius (Hindu). I must confess that I didn't put too much into the end game.

I think I did get a little over 100 gold in failed wonders, though I did make an honest play for them. The AI was not good at all about building early, then took off after I fell behind, though many wonders still went quite late.

While a space victory was probably possible, it would have taken a fair bit of concentration. Instead, I took it easy and voted for Zara thus giving him the diplomatic victory in 1920AD.

While this report is brief and not detailed, I did spend a fair bit of time trying to think about how to approach this game. Unfortunately, the conclusions I reached meant that I didn't concentrate too much on the actual play of the game. That was unusual, to say the least.

As always, my thanks to the sponsor and the mod-maker. Now to go see what Seven did....

Any advice for a young man looking to find someone on the interwebs? Do's and don't's, tips, etc. Any experiences you'd like to share, good or bad?

Report in pictures:

Quote:Your final score is this total divided by your cumulative Crop Yield at 1500 AD. For example, if you earned 20000 points from hammers/beakers and produced 5000 food by 1500 AD, your final score is 4 points. If you win before 1500 AD, use your Crop Yield from the final turn before victory.

I just watched the trailer and felt nobody should miss this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dofacvjRkc

Be known from now on, that I'm an happy father of a beautiful (for me at least) child.






Now it' time to change the diaper.