Monthly Archives: September 2013

Emotiv Kickstarter Ends This Weekend

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20130914-083342.jpgI just got my reminder email that the Kickstarter for the Emotiv Insight is ending in 3 days (38 hours now). Just like the Ouya, Oculus, and Google Glass, I’m deciding to pass. Not because I don’t believe in the products, but because I think it is too soon. These first-run products are too limited. They are all, in my opinion, important evolutionary steps in their particular niche of the human tech tree, but none meet or exceed what I imagine to be the potential inherent in their design.

Kickstarter has been amazing for getting these revolutionary products (sans Google Glass) into the hands of consumers without needing the infinite pocketbooks of, say, google. I do think human trials are an important fist step in the process, but only google really has the capability to do an 8,000 person beta test. So the other products, even though nobody knows really what they’re for, or how they will be used, have to be dressed up as a finished product. (I guess the Ouya is the outlier here, it’s a perfectly viable product already, just needs more games, IMO. It’s also not doing anything particularly revolutionary.)

A 4X Dice Game

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dice-pnpThis project came about while I was joking yesterday afternoon with my friend Patrick about how we needed to rush a space-themed dice game to Kickstarter before TMG publishes Eminent Domain Dice.

I’m still working on my deckbuilding 4X game, so 4X mechanics have been on my mind a lot lately, and the more I thought about it, the more I actually thought a 4X dice game could be pretty cool. Right away I had the idea that you would take your actions at the beginning of your turn, then roll the dice to plan out your next turn’s actions. From there, the game practically wrote itself.

I went to BGG to post my rough draft of the rules (without any graphics or pnp files), and before I got that far, I discovered that the theme for this month’s 24 hour game design contest is dice. Well, that seemed awfully convenient, but reading through the rules, I’d have to do everything myself, prototype art and all… so I did.

The other thing I did for this project that I’ve never done before, because I think it’s part of the “complete board game package”, is that I wrote some “flavor text”. I’m actually pretty happy with it too. Here’s probably my favorite bit: “What gravity at the edge of a black hole, this calculating weight of choice?”

So without further ado, here are the rules (and PNP pages, including custom dice in two sizes), for my new game, which I am tentatively calling 4X Dice.