So if any of you happen to be in the Baltimore, Maryland area of the U.S., I can be found at a designer table at the Unpub event -- a place for unpublished board and card game makers to get a wide net of playtesting and for players to play all sorts of new stuff for free. You can check out the event here:

http://unpub6.unpub.net/

Regardless of if you're attending or not, I could use some good vibes for the game I'll be presenting. The game is called Improvidence, which is loosely based on the same project as this ISB thread of mine. It's currently a 3-6 player game where everyone works to build the city-state of Improvidence, and the player who gains the most influence while building wins!

Here's a screenshot of the end of my last playtesting:


Depending on how things go, I may continue working on this game after the Unpub event to see how refined and polished I can get this, so that it could be publish-worthy. For now though, I'll settle for fun enough for the playtesters, and I'll need vibes just for that.

So.. how does it work?

I can best explain it after my Unpub event. Unfortunately, I don't really have the time to do so right now, either in detail, or in a concise-and-accurate way.

It's about the cones.

I'm fairly certain my game won't be quite the complexity that is Cones of Dunshire

So life got in my way until now. I'll give a short run-down of how I started explaining towards the end of Unpub.

The goal of the game is to be the player with the most influence at the end. Influence in this game is both your score and your currency; you spend influence to build the city with cards and dice, and you score with how you place them. The general mechanic of this game is that you score more if you play in relation to other players' cards and die (instead of your own). They earn influence as you do though, so you have to consider how, at the end, your plays still net you the most.

The game ends in one of 2 ways:
1) When a player plays their last card, called the Hidden Wonder, onto the playing field. Hidden Wonders have a personal, secret goal that the players pick at the start of the game, and if they succeed in playing it and meeting the goal's requirements, they get additional points.

2) When a player runs out of a certain number of dice.

There's more to the game, and what I've said is the heart of it. I found I got mostly positive feedback from the feedback forms at Unpub as well as some very helpful constructive criticisms. For instance, one of the most reoccurring issues was difficulty in reading the value of the cards later in the game, which I'm looking to solve by adding a small number and color border along the corners and edges of the cards respectively. For a game so early in development, I'm glad to see how quickly it's come along from an interesting idea to the start of a solid game.

If a group of players are working toward something while looking out for themselves, is there a lot of late-game backstabbing?

Well, they're "working towards something" in that they're building the same space. While there is some spirit of co-op inherent in the experience a player can draw from, the game doesn't really have the sort of classic 'team up' moments. At least from what I've seen so far, there's really no particular opportunity for "backstabbing" type actions. So to answer your question, no, I've not seen any late-game backstabbing at this point.

I am interested in taking my game to a local group who focus particularly on trying to 'break' the game, though I feel I need to make a few changes first before that, possibly more depending on how they go about it.

Unrelated, I was also pleased that I had been approached by a publisher at Unpub. Unfortunately, I don't think they quite understood my game, as their usual demographic (ages 2-12 family) was not aligned with how I see my game's demographic (ages 10 and up, probably best suited in a game cafe setting). Still, as I am very early in development and I didn't want to shoot down things prematurely when I don't have to, I swapped info and said I'd consider.