now the elephants

Components tray, good to go. (Taken with instagram)

FOLLOW-UP, THE NEXT DAY:  Deke was especially happy and gracious about the gift. He looked thoroughly overwhelmed as he looked through the box and the game board. For the next couple hours we played with his new frisbee and Rubik’s cube, he played some Legos and then he rode home with me.

“That’s the most thoughtful gift anyone’s ever given me, Dad.”

Eleven years old.

Final Watch Your Six inclusions. (Taken with instagram)

Might have to take another pic to show how perfectly the wooden cubes and dice fit in the organizer on the top right. The poker chips are kind of a sneak gift; they’ll be used as currency for Watch Your Six, but he’s been asking how to play poker lately, too. Plus, they’re ridiculously heavy, which will make the box feel fuller.

Now I just have to wrap the goods. Thanks to everyone who’s been following along.

Watch Your Six lot/building tiles cut. (Taken with instagram)

Although all the elements we need will be in the box he’s getting tonight, there’s an unfinished quality to much of it that I keep reminding myself is to our advantage. After all, this is a game we’ve been dreaming up together and this is his first shot at seeing that it’s been made real. He should still have tons of input into how the game works, and having the player cards, lot tiles, building tiles and mission cards written in pencil should help us both adjust things as we like in the early going.

Watch Your Six gets a quasi-logo. (Taken with instagram)

Again, big thanks to Brad for coming up with a quick type treatment of the game’s name that can double as an official-looking logo in time to give Deke his present. Now I can slap that on top of the box and it’ll make  a much better impression when he unwraps the works.

T minus 30 hours.

With two days to go, the Watch Your Six game board is finalized. I think it looks tremendous. Major kudos and thanks to Brad for the effort that went into producing it.

I love that he took the extra step of finding little bits of art to add to each of the main buildings. Stuff like that will make it feel more authentic for Declan, and that’s huge.

Now I just have to finish making the lot counters, the buildings, the player cards and the mission cards. Really not as daunting as it sounds, but I did lose a lot of time this weekend to Declan’s manic baseball schedule. (5 games in 6 days, including tonight.) Luckily work is a little slow, so I can get these things done in the margins.

It’s great having talented and generous friends.

Watch Your Six master plan comes together.

Well, it at least is starting to make sense to me. The undeveloped lots on the board at the beginning of the game were looking too drab and lacked any sense of fun, so I decided to create face-down lot tiles that have to be “unearthed” at the outset of the game, and i’ll probably hide treasure, bonuses and the occasional dead body under them, which should tickle him, as he doesn’t mind when luck comes into play.

Looks like players will have activity points to spend on each turn, for things like movement, developing lots/adding buildings, acquiring additional team member player characters, and attempting the special skills/abilities that fulfill the player’s secret missions.

The main thing now is to balance how much an activity costs with what it could gain you, so there’s no cheap way to just do one thing and win the game. The best games leave you with a series of equally attractive choices, and that’s what i’m shooting for.

My two big questions, now that i’ve got the basic mechanics down, are 1) how long does it take to play this game? (good length? too long? too short?), and 2) do the winning conditions really tend to favor the person who played the best? Or just the one who was the luckiest?

Time to do some playtesting.

Watch Your Six components: wooden cubes, polyhedral 7-die set for each player, and skull counters—a ridiculous bargain at 25 for $1.99. (Taken with instagram)

The cubes were borrowed from Carolus Magnus, a terrific Euro abstract strategy game that Deke has absolutely no interest in ever playing, so they won’t be missed. The skulls will lend a bit of a sinister edge that will be sorely needed to counter the cuteness of the Lego minifigs we’ll be using for character pieces.

And the dice? Well, they’ll be needed for darn near everything, so rather than putting a random collection of stuff cobbled from other games, I thought I’d spend a few bucks so something in the game (beside the board) would feel distinctly new. Still, we’re at about $19 in production costs for what would probably cost $50-$60 in the store.

The real problem now is that the rules—though chock-full of things he likes to do—are having the aggregate effect of feeling like a game of Calvinball. (Or, as Kim astutely put it, “you’ve invented True American the Board Game.”)

Game board initial sketch. (Taken with instagram)

Fairly dough-less, so for the young man’s 11th birthday my friends and I are making him a board game based on an idea he gave me a while back. It’s kind of an espionage/super-team type theme, probably more akin to Mission: Impossible than anything else I can think of. I just need to come up with a good title for it in a hurry.