I received my copies of Um Krone und Kragen (which some of you have played in prototype form as Royal Advancement) last week. Amigo has, on the whole, done a very nice job. Those cards are certainly thick!
But, it's not my intention to shill. I do have a point. Afterwards, I did a quick search of the web and ran across this comment in Naturelich's 2005 boardgame retrospective: "Amigo has shown us how to create pre-release awareness by letting us participate in the game creation process of Royal Advancement. Even the final game title was determined by the online community: it will be Um Krone und Kragen. I think this is a very good example of how online awareness can be created for a boardgame. In the future, a game that wants to be successful (in the long run) requires a decent online-marketing budget and an excellent reception in the community."
I knew what we were doing (I contributed a series of articles on the game's design for use in this marketing effort) was new for Amigo, but I didn't realize that it was so unusual for the German boardgame industry as a whole!
Larry, do you really think Tom isn't going to like it?
Brian, I don't believe the Amigo "From cardboard to game" pages ever got translated into English. I mostly viewed them using web auto-translation tools.
For my strategy articles, I'll eventually post the original English versions online on my web site, after I update them to refer to the published characters (a few character names got changed due to either not translating well into German or because the artist already had a nifty painting depicting something else that could be fit into the game).
Anything further on the unpublished prototype we played thirty times at the last gathering?
Yikes! As you probably guessed, I didn't bother to check out who the author of the article was. Damn you, Bankler, now that you're too lazy to write everything on your own blog, I have to take the time to look at the name at the top! This could ruin my whole day!
Tom, I'm glad you continue to like your own game. And yes, I intend to pick it up as soon as I can.
I'm a patriot everyone can love. I outsourced my own job, to another American!
We have continued to tune the game, probably altering 10 or so of the 110 cards you saw. We have also added and playtested two expansions (20 and 32 cards) to allow for up to six players to play and revised the 2-player game. The base set seems pretty stable, though. We have only tweaked one card in it since late November.
I do not expect any more expansions. We're reached the limit in terms of controlling variance that a single draw deck card game can support, in my opinion. (As a aside on Brian's post on CCG size limits, I think there is also a limit for non-CCG card games, due to the increased variance that adding more cards introduces.)
The publisher intends to make 2006 "the year of 'mystery prototype #19'", so I am hopeful that some version will see light of day reasonably soon.
The silver lining has been that we've backported "hooks" into the base game for powers that appear in expansions. And, as we nail down the final rules, I am able to carefully word things knowing these future powers. This is a luxury that few games in development ever get.
That's about all I really can say at this time (I hope I haven't said too much... I'm trying to be careful as providing advance info is really a publisher activity).