Creature College Update 13 – Fighting the Hamster of Chaos

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Welcome to Creature college Update 13

In homage to the late great Terry Pratchett, “If complete and utter chaos was an escaped rabid hamster with little pointy teeth then I’d be the sort standing next to a hamster wheel dressed as a carrot trying to tempt the hamster into a tiny box muttering “Here Squeaky, here boy””. We’ve definitely been in overdrive this month. Three cons, updating the website, finishing stretch goals, filming play through videos, running competitions and working with our artist, designer and media studio to get ready for our Kickstarter. My wife has hardly seen me, the children have formed their own self-ruling proto-civilization on the top floor of our family home and given my bleary eyed state at work my colleagues have adopted the mistaken belief that I spend my evening crawling bars sampling the heady Cheltenham nightlife as an elderly Lothario.

So what has actually been happening? Well with less than two months to our Kickstarter now it’s been all hands to the rigging to try and get everything ready.

Website

Well for those who haven’t already noticed we’ve completely revamped an updated the website. Partly so we could add new features but mostly because the old website looked like it had been created by a five year old with a bunch of multi-coloured crayons. The new website is a big improvement, it has play-through videos, our rule book, details of other projects and even a shop where you can buy some of our natty Creature related merchandise. We only have t-shirts available in the shop so far but that will change over the next few weeks as we get closer in to the Kickstarter. You can take a look at the new website at http://www.happyottergames.com/.

Reviews

We’ve now sent sample games out to all of our reviewers and there are some really well known names on the list. Keep an eye on the website for details of the reviews as they become available.

Stretch Goals

All our stretch goal art work is finished and we’re currently working on our extra stretch goal items with our fabby printer Wingo Games. We’ll publish more details on these as they become available but take a look at these cute little suckers!

Most of these guys have already been named by our friends over at The Boardgame Group but there’s still one naming competition left so keep an eye out and join in!

Play-through Video

We know that you’ve been dying to find out more about how Creature College plays so we’ve filmed this neat little video to take you through the game. It’s hard to see the cards so at some point we may film a top down view as well. You can take a look at the video on the front of our website http://www.happyottergames.com/.

We’ve arrived on Board Game Geek!

So we now have our own Board Game Geek page!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/179433/creature-college

We’d love for you to go take a look at our page, vote on our page and become a fan! We’d love you, and hug you and call you George ( unless you’re a girl in which case we’ll call you George).

Ninja Snails

We’re currently working on a game to be released after Creature College. We don’t plan on being a one-game-wonder! It will be a few months yet but we can give you a sneak peak at our concept art! Here is our Hashimoto Clan Leader. Ninja Snails is a card game that we think will have two decks of just over 100 cards in total. The aim of the game will be to defeat other ninja houses to collect koku. The person at the end of the game with the most koku will win.

Well that about wraps it up for this addition of the Newsletter. We’ll be running more fabby competitions and all sorts of other good stuff will be happening in the run up to the Kickstarter so keep an eye out and thank you for all the support you’ve given us as our community. We couldn’t do this without you!

All the best,

Orhan.

The Happy Otter Games Review – Five Tribes, The Djinns of Naqala by Bruno Cathala

Players: 2-4 Duration: About 90-120 minutes (The rules say 40-80 minutes but we’ve never managed to finish a game in that time)

Age Range: We’d say about 10+ (The rules say 13+ – it is a deep game so I can understand their rating)

So this was another game I’d been dying to try. I’d heard good things about it from a number of friends, and people seemed to be raving about it on the boards as well…but did it live up to the hype? Five Tribes is produced by Days of Wonder, the same company that brought us the hugely successful Ticket to Ride series, Small Worlds and Memoir ’44 so I can perhaps be forgiven for having very high expectations of Five Tribes. A couple of weeks back I purchased a copy from Amazon and planned to unleash it on our Monday night games group, however on the Saturday night I had the opportunity to play the 2-player rules with a friend who had a couple of hours to kill. I was pretty much hooked from the first five minutes, clever game mechanics coupled with beautiful production and great re-playability make this a great acquisition for any one’s games collection. I had actually managed to persuade people to play it four more times by the end of games night! Five Tribes will set you back about £36($52) if purchased on Amazon.

The Unpack

For a game costing only £35 Five Tribes has undeniably beautiful production. You notice almost immediately the vibrancy in the colours, the nice finish on the cards and the large number of quality wooden playing pieces. A great deal of care and attention has been spent making this game look and feel really good. I especially like the little cloth draw string bag for the preponderance of meeples, not strictly necessary given the game play but a very nice additional touch. The crenelated edges on the cardboard coins give them a rather nice unique feel and the artwork on the cards is attractive. Another nice touch is the scoring pad; the largest I’ve seen for a game but that does make it very easy to use especially if like me your arms have been getting successively shorter in the last few years. The rule book is well laid out and easy to follow and the card game references, the large mats in the picture, a luxury as they serve only to help you with quick look-ups during the game. Did I feel I received my money’s worth in the box? Definitely…I would happily have paid another £5-£10 for this quality of game.

The Trope

You have arrived in the Kingdom of Naqala to find it’s Sultan deceased and the five tribes in disarray. You have to cleverly manoeuvre the tribes into supporting you so that you can defeat your opponents and become the new Sultan of Naqala. To do this you must capture regions of Naqala, influence all powerful Djinns, gain influence through manipulation of the tribes, build palaces and oasis, and ultimately become a very rich man/woman. The trope works well and although the game mechanics would work equally well in multiple different genres you do get the feeling that the author has tried hard to make everything in the game fit comfortably into the backstory. This is a good instance of backstory definitely adding to the game.

The Game Play

Five Tribes is played on a board constructed of 30 region tiles. The region tiles are placed randomly at the start of the game. Each has a score and a special ability. The fact that the board is different every time definitely adds to the re-playablility of the game. Each tile has three meeples randomly assigned to it from the five tribes of Naqala (merchants, viziers, elders, builders and assassins).

You bid for who moves first and this can be key if you can see a particularly good move on the board. Bidding involves paying for a position on the player order board, but don’t pay too much unless it really benefits you as your hard earned cash translates directly into victory points at the end of the game!

The central mechanic of the game involves how you move the meeples around this board. On your turn you get to take all of the meeples from any one tile and move them in a line either horizontally or vertically (or both) leaving a meeple on each tile you move through until all your meeples are gone. You have to colour match on your last tile, in other words there must be a meeple of the same colour as the last meeple in your hand when you place on the final tile in your run. When you place on the final tile you remove all the meeples of the colour of the last meeple you placed.

So in the above example we took a blue, green and white meeple from the top right hand corner and left one meeple on the (5) tile another on the (15) tile and placed the final white meeple on the (4) tile. There was already a white meeple there so we were able to remove both white meeples.

Once you’ve moved there are three things that you can then do:

• Activate the power on the tile which allows you to buy resource  cards, Djinns or buildings.
• Claim the tile by placing one of your camels on it if you removed ALL of the meeples (i.e. they were all one colour)
• complete the action for the meeples you removed

The meeples all allow you to complete different actions:

• Elders (white) – these give you points at the end of the game and enable you to buy Djinns
• Assassins (red) – Assassinate meeples and can help you claim additional tiles
• Merchants (green) – allow you to claim resource cards
• Visiers (yellow) – pure vp at the end of the game
• Builders (blue) – allow you to claim gold during the game

In Five Tribes gold and victory points are the same thing, You can earn victory points by collecting resource sets, djinns, tiles, gold, buildings and meeples. These all tally up at the end of the game to determine a victor. It’s worth mentioning the Djinns as these have special powers on them that can effect your strategy significantly during the game. I found it was really worth buying djinns but you then had to play to their special powers to gain the full benefit. So there is one djinn that multiplies the gold bonus of your viziers but it’s pointless unless you collect viziers. You get the picture. I guess the point here is don’t ignore them they’re a great strategy to play.

Summary

Five Tribes is a “tour de force”; it has deep gameplay, requires you to play multiple strategies to win, pits you in very interactive tactics with your opponents and delivers more than enough mind bending for even the very seasoned gamer. In the games I’ve played with friends so far it has had a greater quotient of “hang on a moment I need to think” than pretty much any other game I’ve played. Given the relatively short time it takes to read and grasp the rules, finding such depth of gameplay is a welcome surprise. The cost is more than reasonable given the quality of production and the fact that this is a very good game. It’s rare that as a game designer that I come across a game and honestly think that there is nothing I would do to improve it but Five Tribes gains that honour and hence there’s only one way I can really rate it.

Otter Rating: 5 Otters

very much the case here.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 10 – Competitions, Posters and Goats

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Welcome to our Week 10 News Round Up!

So it’s been quite a week this week. Mostly it’s consisted of preparing files for our printer Wingo in China. This basically entails writing lots of instructions, checking through all the files and ensuring that we haven’t made any of those silly little mistakes that you notice later and think to yourself “Why didn’t I check everything through more carefully?” The last piece to this particular puzzle has been integrating all the feedback on the rules which was finished this morning. Now we’re in full publicity mode of UK Games Expo which happens at the end of this month. Mike Legan, our brilliant artist has been working on poster art which we’ll share later in the Newsletter and we’ve been working on some freebies to give away at the show. The other exciting piece of news is that it looks like we’re going to launch a little earlier than we originally thought. You’ve probably seen the odd piece where we’ve mentioned November but it now looks like we’ll be launching over the Essen Games Show in October!

We also have a winner for our April competition. Frank Auge won our $150(£40) prize and chose Cthulu Wars as his prize which is currently winging it’s way towards him! We’ll post pics of Frank with his prize as soon as we’re able to. We also published our first game review of Greenbrier Games’ Ninja Dice. You can read the review here.

Finally our friends Arthur and Veronica Critchfield launched their game Gruff on Kickstarter yesterday. We were able to drop in on their Skype launch event and have a chat with Brent whilst Veronica drew the most amazing Mutated Monster Goat mural in the background. We just want to say one thing:

BACK GRUFF NOW

Mutated Monster Goats….come on people! Joking aside this is a great game with fantastic artwork and a strong well play tested design. At only $25 for the bottom tier it’s one of the cheaper Kickstarters to back. It’s almost funded already. This will be a Kickstarter that you’re very pleased you’ve backed.

UK Games Expo, 29th – 31st May

So we will have stand 7 in the Library at UK Games Expo this year. We’re going to be playing the first sample version of Creature College, running competitions, collecting for charity (hopefully) and generally having a great time. We’ve started an event on Facebook and if you’re on this side of the pond (i.e. In the UK) we’d love to meet you and have a game!

Just look for our poster…you won’t be able to miss us!

Ninja Dice Review

We love Ninja Dice as a great little filler game for the end of an evening or to take with you on holiday. You can get Ninja Dice from Green Brier games. Read the review here.

Back Gruff on Kickstarter!

This is a game that needs to get backed and then some. Not only does it have Mutated Monster Goats in it, reason enough to back it in our books, but it has fabulous artwork, a great design and compelling game-play. But don’t take our word for it, take a look at the Kickstarter video and the review video below.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/31839895/gruff-the-tactical-card-game-of-mutated-monster-go/widget/video.html

Well that about wraps it up for this week folks. Have a great week and we’ll have more exciting news next week!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 7 – Enter the Were-Gerbil

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Welcome to our Week 7 News Round Up!

So the more perceptive of you may have noticed that we seem to have fallen behind by a week on our weekly reports. I would like to be able to claim that our previous week 7 report was caught in an unexpected space-time vortex and sucked into a dimension populated entirely by sheep and people called Eric. Sadly the truth is a little more mundane that I’ve been caught up in far too much work for Creature College and real life has also encroached on my time. Having said all that, it has been an almost bed-wettingly exciting week for us here at Happy Otter Games. First and foremost we had the first images of our box design that some of you may have seen during the week on our Facebook posts, in addition Scott D. Randel was kind enough to send us a picture of him playing “Invasion from Outer Space” which he won in our March “Win a Board Game” competition.

It’s also been a great week for play testing. We went down to Cardiff on Wednesday and met up with Robert Fisher, Scott Robinson and Patrick Barry, a trio of very talented board game designers who are part of the meetup group Playtest UK. Many chips were consumed whilst playing Creature College and the guys gave some great feedback on the game much of which should make it into our sample print. We’ve also finished the draft of our rules and they’ve gone to our designer for the design work. Last but far from least, a few weeks ago Sherri Kopel Haight made the suggestion on Facebook that we should have a Were-gerbil in the game. We loved the idea…so we put him in and you can have a sneak preview of the concept art below.

We’d also like to give a shout out to Gruff from Studio Woe which will go live on Kickstarter on the 1st of May. We’ll definitely be supporting this great tactical card game, mutated monster goats! We’re so in!

Our Game Box Design

The design for the front of our box was finished earlier on this week and we have to admit…we love it!

We decided to let the great folks on Board Game Geek’s Facebook site tell us what they thought of it and we’ve had some great feedback:

 ” It is very cute and clean. Clean is always good and very easy to read.”

” I like it. Definitely catches the eye and makes me want to see how the game plays.”

“Very Appealing, I would pick it up…its eye catching and engaging.”

“clean, polished and above all – readable!”

Our brilliant designer is now working on the back of the box.

Invasion from Outer Space

Scott D. Randel  won our March “Win a Board Game” competition and very kindly sent us this great picture of him playing the game with his friends!

I haven’t played Invasion from Outer Space but by the response this picture received on Facebook it’s definitely worth giving it a go. I may be forced to raid my piggy bank and see if I have a few pounds left in there.

Beware the Were-Gerbil

We love our community, you have some great ideas and you’ll be glad to know that we do occasionally actually listen to them! When Sherri Kopel Haight saw Kevin the Giga Pig on Facebook she exclaimed that if the game had Were-Gerbils in it she was in! Well, never being the ones to loose the opportunity and thinking that Were-Gerbils would be past cool…we decided to put one in the game and here he is…thanks Sherri!

Well that just about rounds it up for this week. Thank you for all your support guys and please do tell all your friends about us and we’ll love you forever!

Orhan.

Happy Otter Games Ltd.

Creature College Weekly Update 6 – Dellcon, Competition Winners and Box Art Sneak Preview

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

We’re late this week! I know, I know….the weekly round up normally goes out on a Saturday so what have we been doing with our time? Well as always it’s been a mad busy week, we were fortunate enough to go to Dellcon at the Dellhouse in Malvern, UK over the weekend which meant that instead of writing newsletters we were out enjoying ourselves playing a lot of cool games including Creature College. Our hosts, Kevin and Elizabeth, were fabulous and I can recommend the Dellhouse if you ever want to organise a gaming weekend with friends! We’ve also been working on an article for the UK Games Expo show magazine. It’s all about being a virgin games designer in a cruel world! You’ll like it! Actually our world really isn’t cruel at all, it’s pink and fluffy and filled mostly with cuddly things albeit some of them having huge pointy teeth.

We’ve finished our box art as well and we’ll be giving our wonderful WordPress followers and Newsletter subscribers a sneak preview below! We also have another competition winner! Scott Randel won our March competition and will shortly be the proud owner of a copy of Invasion from Outer Space by Flying Frog Productions. Way to go Scott! We’ll be giving away a game every month until we launch in the Autumn so tell your friends to subscribe to our Newsletter and let’s share the love!

Box Art from Our Fabulous Artist

As an exclusive treat for our News Letter subscribers we’re giving you the first peek at our cover art. We haven’t built all the design pieces around the cover art yet so you’re seeing it pre-production! Drop us a line and let us know what you think!

It’s just possible you may spot one or two of our other characters and creatures that we haven’t yet released any information about!

Dellcon

We’d like to give a shout out for our friends Kevin and Elizabeth at the Dell House in Malvern. They hosted Dell Con 2015 last weekend. We met some cool people, nearly got blown off the top of the Malvern hills (I had to actually hold my hat on), played more games than I can remember including Terra Mystica (my favourite), Suburbia, Alea Iacta Est and Ticket to Ride Europe, and play tested Creature College. I can recommend the Dell House to anyone who is organising a weekend away with their games group.

Competition Winners February and March

Kris won our February competition and sent us a picture of her holding her winnings! Scott Randel took the prize for our March competition and we’re looking forward to seeing a picture of him playing it with his friends!

Have a great week and a safe and happy Easter everyone and we look forward to updating you again after Easter!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 5 – DellCon and Vesper Bunnysnatcher

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

Another busy week here at Happy Otter Games as we work to having an updated play test version of our game ready for DellCon next weekend. We’ve also made good progress on the box art and Will, our designer is primed to work on the design component of the box as soon as the artwork is finished. He has also been busy working on the design for the battle cards which are coming along nicely and should be finished by early next week. We’re very close now to having all our artwork and design completed.

The rules need to be updated with examples and just have a little bit more humour injected into them now that we have the base text complete. We’ve also been running a competition during the week to name one of our creatures, more on that later. This coming week we’re going to start to write a couple of articles for publications on the experiences of a first time indy game publisher so watch out for them in the coming weeks.

Vesper Bunnysnatcher!

Earlier this week we asked our wonderful community to come up with a name for one of our creatures to be included in the game. We’re pleased to announce that the winning entry was from Nikki Boom and Ian Loxam. Who came up with the name “Vesper Bunnysnatcher” for the character in question. As a special preview for our newsletter subscribers here is Vesper Bunnysnatcher in all his OtterColour glory complete with “Pissed Off Bunny” :).

We hope you like your colour version of the creature Nikki and Ian and thank you again for your great entry.

DellCon

So this week see’s our first convention of the year. A small collection of gamers in Malvern sitting in the heart of the English countryside at the Dell House. I think Kevin and Elizabeth still have some space so if you’re interested then give them a call and come along. It will be a very pleasant weekend of gaming. We’ll also have a beta version of Creature College there for anyone who would like a game.

Ninja Dice Kage Masters

We really got into Ninja Dice this week. Our own copy turned up from our friends at Green Brier games across the pond and we decided to give it a whirl at Monday games night. It was a lot of fun with some real “Nooooo!” moments. Definitely a good way to Kill half an hour. The Ninja Dice Kage Masters Kickstarter is into it’s final week so get yourself a copy of Ninja Dice and back their Kickstarter for many happy ours of Ninja’ing (is that even a word??)

Well that about wraps it up for this week! See you again next week with more news and updates.

Indy Board Game Art

As you probably know if you’re here, Happy Otter Games is embarking on publishing it’s first game, Creature College, this Autumn via Kickstarter. So I’m going to preface all of these articles with the predicate that I’m learning as I go along and we’ll have to see whether my efforts are more or less successful than others.

I’m also going to predicate these articles by saying “I love games”, it’s my passion, I’ve been playing board games, RPGs, card games, video games and pretty much any other sort of game I can get my hands on for over 35 years. Building a board game and publishing it, if you’re doing it right, is a phenomenal amount of work. On top of my normal job I probably spend at least 20 hours a week working on Creature College. Don’t even begin down this path unless you have a passion for games because you’re going to need that passion to sustain you when you’re looking at a piece of design work that you just can’t get right at 2:00 AM in the morning!

Our game has been in development for just over a year now and I thought it might help others who are about to start down this path if I wrote about some of my experiences along the way. You might think that starting this series with an article about art is a little eccentric, what about the design of the game? What about the mechanics? What about play testing? I agree with you, all these things are important, very important but….

Now I know that different people tick in different ways however the first thing many people probably judge a game on is whether or not it looks engaging. I’m fairly certain that the majority of us will have been in a games shop or on Amazon browsing games. Sometimes we’ll have been on Board Game Geek and found a top rated game were interested in but often as not I’ll just browse for something that looks interesting and the first thing that normally catches me is the artwork.

Just recently I was both interested and touched by an individual who was brave enough to post a synopsis of why they felt their game had missed it’s funding target on Kickstarter. They’d done many of the right things, play tested for hours, built a small community, sent the game for reviews, advertised…In many ways they deserved their Kickstarter to be a success. Their game had a farming theme and many of the cards were obviously rural in nature, animals, places, that sort of thing.

The artwork was shockingly dreadful. Essentially it consisted of photos with a Photoshop artistic filter smeared over the top. It’s a testament to the quality of the other work that this individual did that he managed to make any funding at all on Kickstarter and here’s the point, had the artwork looked and felt engaging…had he thought about the artwork and design he might well be delivering his games to people right now.

I’m going to major on artwork in this article *not* graphic design. Aren’t they the same thing I hear you cry! No…absolutely not…we’ll come to this in a later article but one thing I’ve learnt in my journey is that you can’t assume that your artist can also provide your graphic design, they are different skills.

There are several obstacles the budding game designer has to overcome when looking for the artwork:

•  Art Style – what art style should your game have, cartoony, epic myth, grunge, Steam Punk. Whatever you choose should be in keeping with the theme of the game. For instance a Steam Punk style probably won’t work terribly well in a game about cute cuddly animals but will probably be fine in a game of battling Victorian airships. Choose an art style that matches your theme well.

• Reference Material – Whether you happen to be a talented artist or you’re hoping to find or hire someone, reference material will help a lot. Find images, styles and fonts that match the artistic style that you want for the game. You won’t be able to use any of these materials directly unless they’re royalty free but they’ll provide a great resource for developing your own artwork.

• Finding an Artist – You may be an artistic genius yourself (and be honest with yourself here) but likely as not you’ll need to find an artist. There are lots of good internet locations where artists hang out but a couple are the Board Game Geek forums and CG Society. Make sure that you take a good look at other work the artist has completed and that they can create artwork in the style you’re looking for. Also remember to do the legal work…agree a price then sign a contract that specifies that the copyright to the artwork transfers to you. You can find standard art contracts at various places on the Internet

• Payment – unless you happen to have an extremely talented an altruistic friend who you’re working with, you’re going to have to pay for artwork. Remember here that good artwork takes time, hours of time, be realistic in what you’re expecting to pay. $100 per picture is way too much $10 is an incredibly good deal. $20-$30 per picture is probably about right. Ensure you have enough budget to cover the artwork for your whole project.

• Time – Don’t expect to have all your artwork completed within a week. If the artwork is great artwork expect it to take months and plan accordingly. At the same time however, make sure you set a schedule with your artist and encourage them to meet that schedule. Ensure that you agree a payment schedule up front and stick to it making your payments regularly. Losing an artist due to a disagreement could set you back months and be very costly.

So now you have your artist and your starting on the artwork, what next? Think about the artwork for your game and have a cohesive view of how it all fits together. The way I achieved this (and I know I can be a bit of a sad puppy this way) is that I put all my artwork requirements and descriptions into two or three excel spreadsheets so that the art work I wanted had a set of descriptions and resources ready to send to my artist. Then brief your artist with a detailed description (no more than a paragraph of text) and reference images.

If groups of characters or other actors (ships, monsters, killer 50ft high robots, etc.) have a specific theme then give the artist very strong guidance on theme. Numerous games do this well but taking a leaf from a massively multi-player game the race themes in EVE Online are worth taking a look at as an example of how to do this well.

Agree up front with your artist how you want to work. I’ve found that the artist producing a couple of concepts for each piece of artwork really helps you visualise the end piece of art work. Also be very positive about your artist’s work, even when it doesn’t go quite the way you want. Always remember that brilliant art is hard and every piece from a good artist is probably praise worthy even if it doesn’t fulfill your vision for the piece of artwork. Gentle guidance is almost always better than a harsh word.

I hope this short guide has been useful for people, if it has I will probably do the next episode on Graphic Design. I’d love people to add their own experiences and please do critique.

Orhan.