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| The map from a distance. |
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| The map close up. |
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| Some favourite cards of mine. |
Thursday, November 24, 2011
I want you to play this game.
If you live in the HRM I'd be happy to come out and give you a demonstration of Thief. It takes about two hours to play, and it's best with about 4 people. I've played it with everyone from 12 years old to mid-sixties and it was always a good time. Send me an email at samsamfraser at gmail dot com and we can make an arrangement.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
I got accepted into the CEED Self Employment Benefits program!
This means I'll be working full time on Thief and other Organic Games for the next 40 weeks!
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Strange and Wonderful Thief Cards from Earlier Iterations of the Game
Mistakes from the Past
- security
They were ready for
you! It's your
abandoned bastard
child, Pedro, and he
wants to talk to
you about that
screenplay you never
finished!
A Riddle!
- security
"From the strong,
something sweet.
From the hunter,
something to eat."
It's a dead lion,
full of honey.
The lion's not much of
a threat, but the honey
is kinda sticky.
Security: 1
Jim's Scientology Hut
- location
Once per character
purchase greater
cosmological awareness
for 500 bucks.
Raise your Skill
1 point.
Growth - 1
Security - 2
#3
Giant Moat Filled With
Barbed Wire!!
It's not going to
be extremely easy
to cross
Security: 3
That funny ringing
that shows up in
your ear turns up
at an inopportune
moment requiring you
to have +3 on your
next skill roll.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Magic: The Gathering
I was the first guy in my group of friends to buy a deck of Magic cards, back in the summer of '94 or '95. I bought them at a pet store! I remember the way they smelled when coming out of the deck box, a wonderful smell of cardboard and special inks that quickly became associated in my mind with excitement and discovery.
I played a lot during high school, but didn't sink a whole lot of money into the game, and went for about 10 years without playing much at all.
But recently a friend of mine has got into it big time, partly spurred on by the Steam games, and he now has about a dozen different decks. It didn't take me long to dig out my old boxes and put together some Legacy decks with my old favourite cards. Now we've got a whole league thing going on with an A group and a B group. Fun stuff for sure.
A lot of things about the game have changed, I've noticed. The rules have been refined considerably of course, especially the timing component; the game is now simpler to play but still allows for complexity and deep strategy. Abilities that used to take a whole card full of small print have been condensed into a word or two. The art and design of the cards have improved considerably as well.
But the problems with the game are still there. The biggest problem for me is the money: if you don't spend a lot of money on new cards, your decks won't win. Simple as that. The power of some of the rare cards dwarfs the cards in your average deck, and no matter how well you play a deck with a mythic rare will win. This takes some of the fun out of the game. The league we have set up mitigates this loss quite a bit though, since there is no expectation that a B group deck will beat an A group deck, and so the competition is at a different level and facilitates a different style of play.
This problem, intrinsic to the nature of all CCGs, was the main reason I started designing Thief. In Thief, all the cards are created by you the player, therefore any card's value is determined not by its rarity but by its in-game power and usefulness. A card that always helps you out in a sticky situation is just better than one that doesn't, no question of rareness or *shudder* dollar value.
Of course there are a whole host of other problems that come about when you allow your players to start creating cards, and the rest of Thief's development cycle was about trying to solve these problems. What happens when too many cards are added to the deck? What can you do with cards that are so powerful they unbalance the game? What about feature-creep, or in this case, Option-creep?
Thief is balanced now, and though it doesn't have the same level of strategy that Magic does, I still think it's a better game. Sure Thief has uber-powerful cards like Magic does, but someone will always find a way to undermine that power. They don't have to go out and buy 50 booster packs to find the card to match it, they can just create it on their own during the game. The ebb and flow of power in Thief, over the long term, make it a much more interesting game than Magic can ever be.
I played a lot during high school, but didn't sink a whole lot of money into the game, and went for about 10 years without playing much at all.
But recently a friend of mine has got into it big time, partly spurred on by the Steam games, and he now has about a dozen different decks. It didn't take me long to dig out my old boxes and put together some Legacy decks with my old favourite cards. Now we've got a whole league thing going on with an A group and a B group. Fun stuff for sure.
A lot of things about the game have changed, I've noticed. The rules have been refined considerably of course, especially the timing component; the game is now simpler to play but still allows for complexity and deep strategy. Abilities that used to take a whole card full of small print have been condensed into a word or two. The art and design of the cards have improved considerably as well.
But the problems with the game are still there. The biggest problem for me is the money: if you don't spend a lot of money on new cards, your decks won't win. Simple as that. The power of some of the rare cards dwarfs the cards in your average deck, and no matter how well you play a deck with a mythic rare will win. This takes some of the fun out of the game. The league we have set up mitigates this loss quite a bit though, since there is no expectation that a B group deck will beat an A group deck, and so the competition is at a different level and facilitates a different style of play.
This problem, intrinsic to the nature of all CCGs, was the main reason I started designing Thief. In Thief, all the cards are created by you the player, therefore any card's value is determined not by its rarity but by its in-game power and usefulness. A card that always helps you out in a sticky situation is just better than one that doesn't, no question of rareness or *shudder* dollar value.
Of course there are a whole host of other problems that come about when you allow your players to start creating cards, and the rest of Thief's development cycle was about trying to solve these problems. What happens when too many cards are added to the deck? What can you do with cards that are so powerful they unbalance the game? What about feature-creep, or in this case, Option-creep?
Thief is balanced now, and though it doesn't have the same level of strategy that Magic does, I still think it's a better game. Sure Thief has uber-powerful cards like Magic does, but someone will always find a way to undermine that power. They don't have to go out and buy 50 booster packs to find the card to match it, they can just create it on their own during the game. The ebb and flow of power in Thief, over the long term, make it a much more interesting game than Magic can ever be.
CEED Self Employment Benefits
I've applied for the Self Employment Benefits program available through CEED, the Centre for Entrepreneurship Education and Development. If I'm accepted, I'll be able to work on Thief and other Organic Games full time! They work with you to set up a demanding timeline which would see me publishing games within about eight months. I would have a lot of work to do to get it to that point, but that's exactly the type of work I want to be doing. There's not guarantee that I'll be accepted into the program, and if they don't think it's a viable option then I'm out, but I put together a good proposal and now I'll have to wait and see. I will find out in a week.
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