The forgotten taste of free time!

I have been working long hours, and when I do come home I spend my free time with my girlfriend.  (Pro Tip: Spending time with your girlfriend makes them happy.  Do not put them off to work on your game, its never worth it).  This does not leave a lot of free time to work on my game or write about it.

Needless to say, I have been working very hard on Taipan, but as my past posts discouraging you from working on art would indicate, the second you start adding art, the development time suddenly becomes takes much longer to keep focus and maintain your development and testing pace.

This past week I got to print my cards and get them cut out and sleeved. The total process took almost a full week, but that was mostly because I was doing it an hour at a time when every I had a little free time.

It took me 2 days to cut all of the print outs.

Cutting the cards wasn't difficult, just boring and time consuming.  In the end I didn't make the guides small enough so some of the cards wouldn't fit in the sleeves.  This required more cutting as I was trying to slide the cards into the sleeves.  That was frustrating.

In the end, the leftovers look like this

Here all the cards before they got put into their sleeves.

The final count is 5, Ship Cards, 14 Captain Cards, 34 Cargo Cards, 32 Combat Cards, 48 Event Cards, and 29 City Cards.  I also printed out a new version of the Map using the new art and the new cities that I added.  The map and all of the cards look great.

The final product looked great.

This past Thursday night, I left work early to attend the Dragon Valley release party.  My friend CW just got the first print run of his game Dragon Valley that he got funded through Kickstarter.  It looks great and I am very happy for him.  When Taipan is ready to go, I will have to pick his brain about the whole Kickstarter process.

Dragon Valley is now available.

While I was at the Dragon Valley party, I got a chance to sit down a play a partial game of Taipan.  I say a partial game because I didnt have a lot of time, so I quickly came up with a rule that I thought would make the game take about half as long.  I was right, a game that I thought should take about 90 minutes took about 45.  Just enough for the game to get going, but not enough to get a good sense of the flow of the game.

The start of the first game of Taipan I have played in about a month.

It did help to identify a few new problems.   Not enough threats from Pirates allowed for player to hang on to their money instead of spending it on upgrades or paying off their Debt.  Some Event Cards still reference the old Cargo type Medicine which has been replaced by Tea.  Upgrades were too expensive in the cities other than Hong Kong.

With all the new rules and mechanics, I am not surprised there are all new problems to solve.  Well, I guess its back to work.  I will try to have an update about the new changes soon.