ronhallidaygames.bsky.social
Professional cartographer; semi-professional board game designer.
61 posts
53 followers
102 following
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I'm usually happy if I don't finish "out of the hunt". I want to be good, fair, and friendly competition. I only feel bad (for the other players) when I play so poorly that they can pretty much ignore my turns for the last half of the game.
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This looks amazing!
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And the pips are oriented correctly! I only know this because someone called out the publisher of one of my games for it (the faces pictured on the box were correct, but the orientation of the pips was non-standard).
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Dems ex machina
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Congrats! 🎉
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🎵 The shills are online...with the shouts of Murica... 🎵
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Woof Days and Cat Days -- now that I wasn't expecting! I was hoping to stop by Gareth's booth in Nuremberg; I'll make a point of it now!
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This is my kinda jam! boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26...
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Hey, I helped someone! I'm taking the rest of the day off.
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12 points in games with 3+ players; 6 points in games with 2 players.
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More than they're already nerfed in a two-player game? (For people who don't know, the player with the most puddings gets 6 points and the player with the least puddings loses 6 points. But in a two-player game, the player with the most puddings gets 6 points and the other gets 0 points.
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I don't know if it impacts my design process, but it definitely has an effect on my desire to ensure that rulebooks are as clear and as concise as possible -- you're basically shooting yourself in the foot if it makes learning how to play the game for the first time more difficult than necessary.
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I kinda did something like this for my game Seven Bridges a while back! Some people were surprised that the point salad end-game scoring takes over a minute, so I showed that the setup is well under a minute to even things out. A speed runner could probably do it in 20 seconds. 😄🏃
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I'm guilty of not doing this more often, but I've learned to at least get a skeleton of a rulebook as I simulate the first gameplay. Another thing I've learned is to also write down what didn't work and why, because a) people will ask and b) it may work later if something else in the game changes.
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I hear you! It's interesting how often the range of scores end up between (n) and (n - 0.15n) because everything offers a reward. And when you step back to look at the margin of victory, it can be as little as one item that was drafted/available at a key/lucky moment.
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One Night Hole Punch? Tiny Epic Hole Punch?
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I actually laughed out loud, if you consider it a fun problem to find out if a biweekly podcast comes out twice a week or once every two weeks.
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I guess the initial prompt would be that I'm going to the Nuremberg Toy Fair at the end of January, and I wanted to have a microgame to give to people who come by my table at the Inventors Fair. 🙂
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My wife is a standup comedian -- she even did a couple of shows in Toronto the year I met you at Breakout. She unabashedly loves making puns, and in unapologetic about it.
I don't think anyone has made me laugh harder than Sean Cullen, but being from Nova Scotia I really like Ron James as well.
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I really enjoy the challenge of taking a competitive sport or activity (i.e. something with scoring) and turning it into a board game that its fans will enjoy. In this vein I have created games for baseball, soccer, Brazilian Carnaval, and most recently German nine-pin bowling.
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Genres (subdomains) of the top 1000 board games on BoardGameGeek, as defined by its users. Most games fall into one subdomain; the rest fall into two and very rarely into three.
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Does Aggretsuko count? 😄
I have the Brazilian game Rock'n Roll Manager, one of the player boards is named Graveyard in reference to Sepultura, and your workers are...
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There's still time! And I imagine they're starting to go on sale. It's been a long time since I bought one, Christmas panettone is the go-to here.
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Note: A prototype not yet on BGG 😉
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It's been awhile since I played Perudo, I found a used copy thrifting in Nova Scotia. But as a game designer, those dice cups are always handy -- I used them yesterday for a prototype!
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I haven't done much geology-related mapping since moving to South America in 2004, but I did make a map of seismicity in Paraguay when I lived there.
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Which is nice when you make your living as a cartographer! I had a small business in Calgary from 1998 to 2004, and a lot of my work was making geology maps for small exploration companies who didn't have cartographers of their own. Sadly most of that work has been lost to time.
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Thanks!!! It's been a long road; that video was from quite a few years ago, but Revanche just came out this year (aside from a small run of 100 copies I did myself).
A recovering geologist, huh? Makes me wonder what would happen if you designed a game with a recovering cartographer. 😄
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For my games that are based on sports or events with scoring (baseball, soccer, bowling, Brazilian Carnaval), I like to track the scores so I can show how they simulate the range of real-world results. Here's one comparison!
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5 replies so far! ❤️
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Not my name, but rather my avatar: its four colours are the colours on the Brazilian flag; the yellow and white can be seen as both a lightbulb to represent my ideas as a designer, or as me wearing a lanyard at events. 🙂
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Yep, that's why the colours on my meeple avatar are what they are. But I'm Canadian, hence the u in colour. 🍁
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So do I! I guess that's why we both jumped at the opportunity to design a game for that Maximum City Tokyo contest! Good luck, by the way! 🤝
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High praise indeed! And as an aside to an aside, Seven Bridges was one of my games that didn't have to pass through very many gates -- I posted looking for playtesters and a publisher liked the idea and reached out to me!
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Yes, this is so important! Building good, long-term relationships with people in the industry has led to having windows opened from the inside when I may not have been able to get my foot in the front door otherwise.
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I'm really thinking I should put coffee sleeves on my Perudo cups for the gag.
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I'd like to see a bird use this map for navigation, since that's ok!
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I'm also interested in OMITB because my wife and I are halfway through the series, and I didn't realize there was a game! But I saw the photos on BGG and the components...they just look so drab.