Archive for Turf Wars

An Art Preview of Fantasy Turf Wars

Cray Cray Games presents an unofficial art preview of Fantasy Turf Wars—our latest strategy board game creation. The initial prototypes have been made and will be played at upcoming game conventions like TotalCon and Connecticon.

We sincerely hope to see you at one of these conventions—sign up for a play-time slot! If not, catch us on our upcoming Kickstarter campaign in the coming months.

We welcome your comments and questions anytime!

Cray Cray Games to attend TotalCon27

In Mansfield, MA from February 21-24, Total Confusion 27 shall be running and Cray Cray Games has spots on Saturday and Sunday to showcase prototypes of their current games.

There’s sessions for both:

  • Do You Know Your Neighbors? on Saturday at 11am
  • Fantasy Turf Wars on Saturday at 1pm
  • Both games will be playable again on Sunday at 1pm

Hope to meet folks there and get potentially interested parties for our future Kickstarter projects.

Cray Cray to attend ConnectiCon (July 2013)

Josh and I are signed up for ConnectiCon and will be bringing copies of Do You Know Your Neighbors? and possibly some really-proto prototypes of Fantasy Turf Wars to get them play tested by the masses.

If you’re interested in seeing and playing our game(s), join us there.

Note: we’ll likely add a date or two for shows in February and/or March 2013 as well.

Play Test #20: Turf Wars

Today we introduced another person to the game.

The 2nd of our potential graphic artists met with the first one and the two of them played with Josh and me.

They both liked the game and were both interested in moving forward and working on art for the game.

Josh and I are quite excited and can’t wait to see what they produce.

We should have the turf graphics that will allow us to produce the game board and their corresponding event, action and secret win condition cards by the end of July. It’s very exciting!

More Play Testing: Turf Wars

Tonight we played games #18 and #19 with another friend who hadn’t yet played.

It was an interesting set of games for a few reasons, the first of which was that one game ended quickly (in 5 rounds) and 3 secret win conditions were triggered.

Plains Guardian triggered because no one was in a Plains turf.

Then the conditions Steadfast and Undefeated were also triggered.

However, no one had engaged in a turf war and so we’ve adjusted those other two conditions so that you cannot be considered undefeated if there was never a risk of being defeated.

There were some bits of feedback that we decided to add which probably captures some potential issues for people who may not be able to understand implication and such. It never hurts to be painfully, redundantly clear. 🙂

Play Test #17: Turf Wars

Today we play tested the 6-player team version of Turf Wars. This is a planned mini-expansion that introduces two new factions that are potentially a little more powerful than other factions. They are the leaders of the two sides and are accompanied by two factions with plains home turfs and two with swamp home turfs.

I wanted us to play this version of the game to see if it truly was a team-based version of Turf Wars that made sense on its own and wasn’t just a contrived version of it.

I’m happy to say it went really well. We were able to weed out events and secret win conditions based on their not making sense for teams.

I will need to write up the official rules for the 2v2 and 3v3 team versions of the game. I think this will be a very worth-while expansion or stretch goal for the eventual Kickstarter.

Open Call in Massachusetts for Play Testers

Josh and I have created (Fantasy) Turf Wars, a strategy-combat game that makes use of well-known fanstasy races that are each vying for domination over the land.

We have played it 16 times (as of 5/28/12) now and it has progressed to a point where we’re hoping to get it played by many more people.

If you are interested in being involved in play testing, please respond to this post. We’ll likely get you on a Saturday (or Sunday) as week nights are difficult to coordinate and the location will either be Quincy or Malden.

All of this is in preparation for a KickStarter.com campaign we hope to launch just after Labor Day.

Play Test #16: Turf Wars

Today we played with 3 new people all of whom are not really game players. And one of the new people won with the secret win condition: strength in numbers (having 35+ troops)

Game play was fine after a while. The non-gamers asked some questions that no gamer would need to ask and that was helpful in terms of trying to have things be a bit more clear for that audience.

They liked the game but it is probably not something they would gravitate toward.

And now we know. TW is more of a game for gamers… and that’s fine. 🙂

Fantasy Turf Wars: Game Testing In Progress

We are 15+ games played into our first creation—Fantasy Turf Wars. The premise is a command and conquer type board game with fantasy creatures and humans fighting over their home turfs.

There are several ways to win the game, many factions to choose from, and the replayability is excellent. Everyone is enjoying it so far and even after play testing nobody is sick of it yet. With small mechanic changes being ironed out after each play, artwork design has now begun and we are slated for a September kickstarter launch.

We hope to see you there!

Play Tests #13-15: Turf Wars

That’s right. We played TW 3 times today. AND, we also got to test the 2p version of the game.

We played with one of the people who may end up doing art work for the game so we thought it important that he play the game a few times to get an idea of what we were doing, the nature of the game, the feel of it given the way we’d written cards, etc.

I was concerned that the 2p game might seem contrived b/c it’s a game with fewer available turfs (needing to only control 3 home turfs to win), no teleporters because the board size is smaller and with just one other player, you clearly want to kill them.

It ended up being fun anyway. Needing to navigate around the board did make it slow and ultimately the DP win condition kicked in and I don’t like the game to end with points as the deciding factor. But it’s got to happen some of the time if it’s a valid win condition.

We then played 2 6-player games. This was the first time we were able to do that as well. The max so far has only been 5 players. So, a 2p and 2 6p games with 3 new sets of eyes to give fresh feedback…

The 2nd game ended in Round 2. ROUND TWO. That’s not possible. This sparked the discussion that will forever be known as the Siren Wars of 2012.

The scenario:
Josh was playing the Sirens who’s faction power allows him to take 2 troops from anyone but the attacker to use as additional troops when he’s defending against an attack. He had a nemesis in play and that player only had 2 troops due to an event mishap that killed off too many of her troops. Pestilence (kill 2 troops in every controlled turf) will get ya every time…

So he borrowed her troops. And I was attacking him and was going to win.

So, we just stopped it right there and had a half hour discussion on order of operations, the spirit of the nemesis kill win condition, faction powers, death by defensive action, etc. It was heated and lively and it resulted in a rewrite/clarification of the Siren powers and a rewrite of the nemesis kill win condition and the secret win conditions that involving the secret killing of the player to the right or left of you.

It was very useful and actually had a domino effect on many different cards and mechanics. Good times.

The final game wasn’t nearly as eventful.

The feedback from the 3 new players: It’s a fun game.

We then went on and tested our other game but… that’s a different post.