Nottingham: Playtest on Saturday at Spielbany revealed some significant problems with the design of version four. A new version (five) has been created and will be playtested this weekend. Version five has reduced the number of players (3-5), consolidated the action system into card play and shifted player interdependence to higher level game dynamics.

Torch: Five of the six spots for Nottingham Torch have been claimed. Passports have been received and prototypes are being made. The relay is still set to begin on August 1st pending the outcome of this weekend’s playtest of Nottingham. Nottingham will travel to game groups in WA, CA (twice), AZ and NC.

Hellas: Plans are in the works to bring a 2D illustrator and texture artist on board. Ryan is working on the accessories and animations for the units. Jeff is currently porting Tide over to Java to run on TomCat so that we can scale the service seamlessly.

Claim Jumper: The first playtest of Claim Jumper at Spielbany was lackluster. The game devolved to gang up on the leader. Claim Jumper has been redesigned to merge the tile drawing and token staking of Gold Mountain with the claim jumping and dice rolling mechanics of the beer & pretzels game.

Assorted: Dungeon has migrated to a dice, card and tile game. Houses of Orion will incorporate elements of Through the Ages, Eminent Domain and Nottingham. Drug Lords will merge Alter Ego with Ascension. Dice Pirates will blend Illuminati with To Court the King. Brad has redesigned Tennis! into a gladiatorial game. Stacket sourcing continues.

Nottingham has a greenlight for production. Nottingham is now engaging and complex enough to reach players in the hobby market. It will be playtested again (with slight modifications) this Saturday at Spielbany. Otherwise, it’s ready for polishing and production.

Stacket: Theo and Justin have signed up to help promote Stacket. The pieces will be made of wood, come in geometric shapes, the three primary colors and range in size between small and large. There will be no tiny pieces. We will establish three different rewards on KS to allow people to select the bonus piece they prefer. The cost of sourcing the components is unknown at the moment.

Torch: In order to playtest and promote our tabletop games, we will be setting up a program called Torch. EG will make two prototypes and organize a schedule for each of the prototypes to tour the country. Each torch bearer will get the prototype for a week and be responsible for shipping it to the next torch bearer in the relay. To test out Torch, we plan to launch Nottingham August 1st.

Hellas: Plans are in motion to adopt FluidHTML as the final markup language for Hellas. Jeff still has to clean up some of the code for Tide and integrate it with the java applet that already exists for Hellas. Meanwhile, Ryan has produced some 3D animations for the units in Hellas. But, we are still missing a graphic designer and 2D/texture artist for the game.

Assorted: Gold Mountain is now Claim Jumper with a new look and new beer & pretzels mechanic. The game is already being disseminated to playtesters. Prime Property is now Public Works with a reverse auction mechanic focused around a government contractor theme for the casual American audience.

Justin Kapr has joined the team at Evertide Games as a designer, producer and promoter. His role will vary from project to project depending upon the need. He has playtested Nottingham and designed an original game called Titanium. He will also help produce and sell Stacket and collaborate on the design for Beijing.

Nottingham is going to be playtested this saturday (here) and next Saturday (at Spielbany).
If the game holds up, the component list for Nottingham will be and it may be kickstarted sometime in September:

• 250 Poker Size Cards
• 96 Half-Size Cards
• 16 1.5″x1.5″ Tiles
• 15 Wooden Meeples/Pawns
• 130 Wooden Cubes
• 2 Gameboards (~1.5′x2′ each)

Stacket is going to be kickstarted and we are already beginning to coordinate production. ETA for launch is early August (?) with the hope that it will be released by Christmas. Of course, we’ve talked about other details.

Hellas is going to be available soon online as a very rough java applet for preliminary network testing. Hellas will be using the Tide webservice that we’ve developed since February and it will also be a preliminary test case for Alpha.

Alpha: Specifications for Alpha are being considered. Focus of Alpha will be on remote, but live, in-house playtesting of our games with the aide of audio conferencing and scheduled play. The exact off-the-shelf solutions are TBD.

3D Designs: Stones may soon be picked up by another company. I’m looking into the feasibility of high art game design… basically interactive sculpture for the art market and/or something for burning man. Stacket, Cubic and 3D Tic-Tac-Toe are all possible fare for that. We’re currently talking with Common Extract (a la Nuts) as a possible partner in launching these titles on the iPad.