doublejosh

Board Game, Lessons Learned, Draft Three

Played the Space Cat board game for reals for the first time: start to finish. Rules were actually read as printed out, we used actual pieces and drew actual cards. Few things emerged:

1. It was too easy to move into trading the expensive units, and the cheap units were almost more of an annoyance than a resource. SOLUTION: Start with less (batteries), so it takes a little more effort to trade up.
2. Relaxed rules about dice rolls (allowed to move less than the actual role) made it too effortless to navigate the board. Only 1-2 turns per person in the whole game weren’t spot on for doing what they wanted. More importantly the cards (and upgrade) that allow more delicate movement were pretty much useless. SOLUTION: Require using the exact dice roll. Remove some spaces from the board to go from 12 spaces per planet to around 9. (new amounts: Yellow:2, Orange:2, Gray:2, Black:2, Red:1). Switch to only using one dice. This will make movement a little harder, but not too bad, plus make use of the movement improvement elements.
3. The first time playing can be done with no upgrades at all. To learn the rules and strategy it’s totally fine to play a basic version without them. You just have to remove one chance card. DISCOVERY: Offer a quick play version with simpler rules.

Both #2 and #3 could both leveraged in order to create a relaxed rules easy version. If movement is easier, you don’t have to worry about perfect movement or any ship upgrades the whole game is made much more simple. This might be a REALLY good thing. The advanced version is only slightly different, so it would be fine for even the 2nd time playing.

Perhaps it would be best to bill the easy version as the First Time Playing instructions rather than a normal version with an advanced version in case that scares people… because it doesn’t need to.

Quick timezone format converter (Drupal to WC3)

// Convert timezone from second in Drupal to WC3 standard
function timezoneConvert($val, $toSeconds = false) {
  if(!$toSeconds) {
    // Starts like: "-28800" and becomes: "-08:00"
    $sec = substr($val, 1);
    $hours = intval(intval($sec) / 3600);
    $minutes = intval(($sec / 60) % 60);
    $w3cTZ = substr($val, 0, 1) .
      str_pad($hours, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT) .":".
      str_pad($minutes, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    return $w3cTZ;
  }
  else {
    $seconds = 0;
    $units = explode(':',$val,2);
    $seconds += $units[0] * 3600; // Hours
    $seconds += $units[1] * 60; // Minutes
    return $seconds;
  }
}