Top Cakes
This week we’ve been packaging up lots of copies of Top Cake. Top Cake is a bidding game where players try to win layers of cake and stack them on top of each other to create high score showstoppers. The preorders of BuzzleBox 2 are being shipped on Monday and Top Cake is one of the games in this box. The BuzzleBox, which has a ‘Doughnuts and Cake’ theme, also contains the doughnut grabbing Doughnut Dash, Sleuth Box, which is a deduction game on a coaster, three cakey themed puzzles and a pocket of game cards. Get your BuzzleBox here.
First Followers
If you’ve made a purchase from The Dark Imp shop since we opened at the end of 2019, then you can expect a little thank you gift in the post. We’ll be in touch with our first followers again in the next few weeks with some more freebies! Don’t worry, it’s not too late to join this exclusive club… Get thee to the shop!
Playtesting via videoconferencing
If you’ve been following these regular updates, you’ll know that during lockdown, other than when I manage to rope the family in, all my playtesting has now moved online. While it is possible to upload games to online engines and play games that require shared resources, it can be clunky and time consuming. Mostly, I’ve been playing games that can be played just over zoom.
Roll and write games, where everyone has the same scoresheet and one player rolls some dice that everyone uses, are ideal for this. So my new mini ‘roll and write’ games got further playtests this week. These have a loose town planning theme – one is more abstract than the other. Both games are working well, but both need small tweaks to mitigate the luck of the dice and in one case, to shorten the game slightly.
My coaster games also work really well by videoconferencing. I share my screen, which contains the coaster. Then each player has a pen and paper. We tested a simplified version of Alien Farm this week. The game is now much better suited to the format, but one of the aliens needs to be changed. The Pocketpop scores too highly and everyone fights over those aliens. So that one needs a make-under!
Don’t forget
- Every Tuesday at 4pm during school closures we are running online board game sessions for families. Register here (it’s free).
- We’ve created a page of board game resources for families in isolation, so do have a look… you might find something useful.
In case you missed it…
On Monday, we released a new video about 7 ways to occupy the enthusiastic gamer.
On Thursday, we published a review from Alfie Dix about the two-player backgammon-style strategy game, Tatsu: Alfie reviews…. Tatsu.
Coming this week…
New video: Using house rules to keep everyone in the game.
New blog: Recommended games for different key stages
