Z-Man's monster game

Oops, I already spilled my beans...I'll have to keep a tighter lip from now on. Hope I didn't screw up my chances.

***True dat. Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know it will take about two weeks to go through everything - at the last minute we got almost 2 dozen more entries bringing the total to near 50 entries!

Very cool, but that means my brother and I will need the extra time to read through everything and discuss matters.

Please be patient.

Thanks!

I submitted one idea. I had been toying around with several different approaches since Zev first posted the offer, but none of them led to anything really workable. Add to that the lack of time and computer access due to my vacation, and I was on the verge of resignation, already thinking 'I should have submitted something'.

Finally, just two nights before the deadline, at about 1:00 am, while trying to sleep, an idea came, and I ended up sitting on my sister in law's kitchen taking notes. I managed to convince my wife to go shopping with her sister ne next afternoon, while I stayed at home 'taking care of the kids' (i.e. working on my sister in law's notebook while the kids played happily on their own), so I was finally able to submit a proposal.

It's a simple game, I think it might work fine, but I'm affraid it might be a bit too abstract to match Zev's idea. Anyway, even if I don't get selected (and I don't think I have much chance) I might end up with a nice simple game, so no time is lost.

Seo

This is an e-mail I got from Zev on August 8th.

Still going through it - though most of it is done by my brother first - he really wants to inspect every one and as I said I got nearly 50 proposals. I'm hoping to have some answer before I leave for Gencon next week.
Zev

Since Gencon just ended on the 21st, I imagine he is recovering from that right now.

-Darke

Thanks for the info folks, pretty much what I thought. Heck, the two times I've been to Gen Con I was wiped out for a week and I was just attending, not there showing things and being a business guy! =) Refilling patience tank and finding something else to OCD over for abit, I guess I'll go back to Firefly/Serenity...... =)

Xan Lynch
www.rentoys.com

It's scheduled for release this September 30th.
http://www.fireflymovie.com/

K.

~Josh

***Almost ready. I was hoping for this weekend but then some personal stuff came up and I'm trying to work around it. I will be sepaking with the brother to narrow the field of entrants down. I hope to have some news real soon.

Thanks for all your patience.

OK, finally I have gotten the results to the contest. My brother and I discussed matters for awhile and since we both have diametrically opposed tastes it was a hard choice. We decided to take choices from the both of us.

But first let me say thank you to all for submitting your ideas. There were lots of good ideas so it was hard to pick the best. I will say that some of you did not submit a proposal that suited our needs: either the game presented had little to do with the theme we sought or the game was all cards.

Some proposals were very short, describing briefly the theme of the game, but gave little detail on how the game actually played. Needless to say it was hard to say yes to those proposals. None of the proposals seemed ridiculous or dumb and for that I’m grateful: and you all should be happy with that.

As a statistic, we got 3 proposals that described making movies with real monsters as the actors. They were interesting but just not what we were looking for.

The two major themes of games were hunters looking for monsters (for whatever reason and there were a few) or monsters stalking victims, possible turning victims into their minions.

I won’t comment on every submission as I just don’t have the time, plus it’s hard to comment on a proposal except above where I thought it fit or did not with what we were looking for.

The winners of the contest, and those we now seek prototypes for are:

Jason Diamond
Johan Forsell
John Velonis
Sebastian Bleasdale
Tim Mitchell
JR Carlson

Congratulations to them (they have been personally contacted) and again, thank you all for your submissions. If there is no objection, I will send some of those submissions on to my friends at Twilight Creations to see if they wish to use any of them. If you don’t your proposal forwarded onwards, email me privately.

Congratulations!

Thank you for the opportunity.

I'm John Velonis. (And no, that's not a self-portrait.)

First of all, thank Z-man for the opportunity. Congratulations to all others that also went on to the next round.

I had 4 games as submission and one of the games was a TV game (that one did not make it).

The next round will be harder. We have (at least I got that) until 1 December to have a working first prototype. This gives me around 90 days to make the prototype.
I'm planning to have at least 3 full scale tests (with a test group of 4-6 players), an equally amount of half tests ("solo" test with 2 players) and a number of solo tests. In my experience, I will redo the rules and the prototype from scratch several times before I'm satisfied (still I have the first design ready and are working on my fisrt prototype).

If I check out the opponents, there are strong fields. Both Yogurt and Sebastian has a good record in the Showdown (and there they have interesting high quality proposals). I recon that the other selected games have the same quality as Yogurt and Sebastian usually have. The fact that we had 6 games instead of 3-4 as intended would partly be that there was a lot of interesting games (not just the once that was selected) and Z-man had a hard time to pick.
In theory all submission have a little less then 1 chance out of 6 (Z-man can chose to drop it all). I think that we have to put in a lot of hours just to come up to the theory.

Yogurt did say that his game We Were Human Once is an adventure board game. My game Horror in Europe is an epic strategy game. The type of chosen games look very different, but within the same theme and limitations.

Good luck to all of you others.

// Johan

Congratulations gentlemen! May the best design win!

-Darke

Teenagers.

Actually, there's no food nor even much preying on innocents. My take on classic movie monsters is that they're misunderstood, not evil. The terror and destruction they spread is as much due to human panic as the monsters' beastliness.

But it's an adventure game, so I'll throw in a pudding card just for you, Seo. ;)

I'm discovering that adventure games require a lot of bookkeeping. I don't want to print anything out until I've had a few successful run-throughs, so it's all electronic right now.

So far I have:

* a Word document for the rules * a flowchart for the board (recommendation: OpenOffice Draw, quirky but easy to use connectors)
* three spreadsheets for different sorts of cards
* a CardTable file for playtesting
* an OCTGN file for playtesting too (not sure which is best yet).

Ah, I should have pitched an elegant Euro game instead. ;)

Yogurt

Congratulations for everybody, but especially
for Johan! Keep up the good work.