Friday nights don’t tend to be associated with board games for some insane reason. I don’t get the aversion myself since, after all, board games are way more social than packing yourself into an overcrowded bar and trying to make out what your friend just said. Thankfully, I’m not alone in the appreciation of the ‘traditional’ gaming form; The inaugural Playup After Dark was packed (literally, we were booked out), teeming with people keen for board games and beer. There were so many people there, in fact, I wasn’t able to try out every game on offer, but let’s start with the ones I did manage to get my hands on…

Cogz

Born from a Game Jam 2 ½ years ago, Wesley Lamont’s Cogz is all about making colourful chains. The board is made up of square pieces with coloured pipe segments on them, each piece having two segments on it. The aim is to make long pipe chains of all four colours by swapping pieces in and out from your hand with those on the board. Your score is counted by colour (one score for each), and the lowest one is what counts at the end. Where it gets dastardly is when chains of one colour meet end to end, causing them to lock in place for the rest of the game. Sounds simple right? Well, that’s because it is.

It’s strength is it’s deceptive simplicity; everyone who wanted to try it out sat down, read the rules, and instantly understood what was going on. Because you’re usually looking for one specific colour to take advantage of, the board never looks intimidating, and games are quick enough that you’re left wanting to play again. That said, there’s enough depth to the game to keep the most meta-craving of players happy, myself included. It strikes a nice balance to bring both new and old players back into the game without getting bogged down by rules or technicalities.

On the night, I got to try a team variant of the game where you had to collude with whoever sat opposite you, negating each other’s lower score in each colour in favour of the higher one. I thought it actually worked really well: My partner and I tried to advise one another, but neither of us could carry the duo since we didn’t know what tiles we had. This kept turns quick and teaming relatively fair, avoiding the 10 minute strategy sessions that can plague team games dominated by the meta-cravers.

COGZ is scheduled for crowdfunding on Kickstarter in August. Get hyped!

Cave Troll in my Pocket

After quickly moving on from the obvious, “Is that a troll in your pocket or…” jokes, Glen Spoor explained Cave troll in my Pocket as a simple yet incredibly complex game like chess. You either play as a troll or three boys. The boys have to prove there is a troll by gathering evidence and returning it to the village without being eaten by the troll on the way. The troll wins if he eats all the boys or reaches the village at night time. This all plays out on a tiny, tiny board and is supplemented by action cards, which is kinda the problem.

When I played as the boys, both the troll player and I agreed that the game was very much favoured towards the troll. As soon as one of the boys was eaten, I was boned. Because the hand sizes for the cards were so large, for every card I had to incite an action, the troll had a cancel for it. It wasn’t a one-sided battle by any means, but it was clear that the troll had the easier path to victory. Mind you, when the game worked, it was good fun.

The board was tight with only eight spaces to move across, but this also meant every decision had weight. As in the late game of chess, there were only so many possible moves I could make, so what really mattered was how I set up the boys’ position to make the troll react on my terms. It was extremely satisfying thinking ahead to try and force the troll’s play, even if it was countered by the frustrating card-play. The hidden tactical depth made this innocent looking game quite a bit more interesting than a simple game of Poker.

Colossus Awakes

Glen Spoor’s second offering of the night was Colossus Awakes, a hex-based blend of resource management, town building, and combat. Upon seeing the board, my inner nerd lost it. The game’s played on something like a 23×23 hex grid, you have access to five heroes, there are sliders keeping track of events, and tokens scattered EVERYWHERE. The beginner’s rulebook (ie, the bare minimum rules) was four pages long, which should cement the idea of how insane this game seemed.

I wasn’t able to play the game myself, but the general reaction was that no one really understood how. Even looking at it, I could tell that this wasn’t a game you’d crack open for a bit of fun, this was a game you set aside a day for. If you looked away for more than 10 seconds, you’d be lost again. Glen openly admitted before the night got under-way that this was the game he had shoved every mechanic he could think of into before peeling them back, but something tells me that more layers would need to be removed before most people could really sink their teeth into it.

Glen’s currently a lecturer of game design and culture at Edith Cowan University and his website can be found here.

Breakwater

The final game of the evening was Anthony Sweet’s Breakwater, a jazz-fueled parade simulator that ran on clockwork. From what I could gather, the premise of the game is to guide the lords of Breakwater into various districts of the city via parades, which are purchased using a nifty resource system. Part of the board is a large clock used to track the day-night cycle and collect available resources. Unfortunately, that was as far as the explanation went without explaining every element of the game, but I was assured that it all flowed smoothly together.

The initial learning curve was apparent with everyone I talked with, but once they were in the game, remembering the rules seemed to be carried by intuition. Turns were quick, down time was bearable, and figuring out what to do next wasn’t just an exercise in number-crunching. There were apparently ways to ‘clock-block’ your opponent from acquiring resources, but without being able to play the game myself (sorry, Anthony!), I can’t say much more than ‘I really want to play this’.

You can follow Breakwater’s development via Anthony’s website or Twitter.

Aside from missing out on a couple games, I thought Playup After Dark was pretty fantastic. Everyone who played a game had great feedback to give the dev, and the bar helped provide a more mature ambience to the adult-filled room. Thanks to everyone who came down, and If you weren’t able to make it to this Playup but want to check us out, we’ll be announcing Playup #4… Soon…

It was a good day for a playtest. Outside was freezing, the sky was miserably grey, and even the birds were melancholy. What better way to stay warm than by embracing the soft glow of a computer screen before huddling into a group and giving feedback about what we just played? Well, doing that and then playing Bok, that’s what! It was great to see everyone getting involved, not just participating in the games but in discussions too. If you missed out (hopefully we see you at the next one!), let me give you a taste of what went down…

Underwater Story

First on the agenda was Wendy White’s ‘Underwater Story’. Before diving in, Wendy explained that the game was a throwback of sorts to the good ol’ point-and-click games of the 90’s, focusing more heavily on player driven story than a linear narrative, and revolved primarily around the player’s relationships with other NPC’s. What this boiled down to was a visual novel with a few quirks and some wicked art.

Wendy’s vision of the game was to make the player’s choices deeply impact the story, barring progress through the game if necessary, and I personally felt like that was a good idea; creating a transitive narrative with branching plot directions is something video games do very well. While it was an early build, remnants of the design philosophy were already well embedded into the game. I told a seahorse (a placeholder seahorse, but a seahorse no less) I swam fast and got a trait, which came in handy later when I needed to swim fast. It might not seem huge, but at this stage of development, it’s a step in the right direction for sure. This persistence resonated with the rest of the group as well, praising it as one of the highlights of the demo.

Of course, persistence is a double-edged sword. The expectation of player influence in a game often brings the assumption of agency, independence, control. A concern of the group was ensuring the player felt like they were integral to how the plot evolved and not just sitting back clicking through text. The addition of viewable relationship meters, inventory system, and (my personal favourite) a Sam & Max style map to decide where to go next were all mentioned, but whether they will be integrated is another question.

If you’d like to keep track of Wendy’s seahorse fueled creation, you can check out her website here.

Bok

Next up was Claude Woodward’s great new sport, Bok! Bok is played a bit like Kung Fu, if Kung Fu involved balls and racquets, that is. The outstanding feature of the game is the usage of racquets about the size of your hand, made to punch small balls and shuttlecocks Bruce Lee style. It’s a bit of a meta-game, with the racquets hosting numerous variations of Bok games like Battle-Bok, Biff-Bok, and Astro-Bok, all involving a ball of some kind (perhaps a small one attached to a cord, perhaps a larger one to bounce off a wall) and the Bok racquets. If this all sounds a bit full on, it’s hardly a shock.

The main issue with Bok wasn’t the idea or the product, it was the pitch. Claude had obviously spent a long time crafting ideas for games made for the racquets but never stopped to ask what games came most intuitively to people who’d never seen the things before. It was too much about the package and not enough about the product. Battle-Bok was fun, everyone agreed on that, but that wasn’t selling the best part of Bok: The racquets.

Claude’s vision was to one day make Bok a competitive sport, and while the group saw the potential, going about it was something Claude struggled with. There were a number of suggestions, including taking the game to uni sports clubs that would be interested in a novel game to draw new members for their own club with. Another suggestion was Tough Mudder, quite well-versed in embracing the new and unique, and with Bok’s quirky, stamina-testing mechanism, it would suit the endurance event quite nicely. Adopting Bok as a fitness tool instead of a game was brought up too, but those racquets were way too cool to be the next Zumba.

You can read more about Bok in all it’s forms at the official Bok Website.

Overall, the event went swimmingly. The group came up with some useful ideas, the devs were open to feedback, and it was a lot better than suffering through the freezing cold outside. If you weren’t able to make it to this Playup but want to come along and help out some local devs, Playup After Dark is just around the corner.