Happy Friday, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle with another board game design brain dump. I’ll keep today’s entry brief. I’m in the middle of writing this year’s novel, and last month, Geekly shared a craft talk, so this month, I’ll share an update of my game designs.

I have yet to hear from the local publisher I submitted Spill the Beans to several months ago. While I’d like to work with the company (not just because they’re local, but they make high quality games), I spruced up Spill the Beans’ promotional material (sell sheet and introductory video) to reflect the changes I’ve made to this game’s ruleset. Honestly, I had a breakthrough with Spill the Beans.

I noticed some players would try to optimize every turn. What each bean was worth was public knowledge and how much of each bean every player owned (in their score pile) was also public knowledge. So, I gave player reference cards a second purpose: a shield. Now, players lose the knowledge of which beans their opponents have. This has dramatically shortened plays of Spill the Beans. Play times are exactly where I want them to be, and the game is better for having partial knowledge. No more players min-maxing.

Prior to this (and one other small change), I had grown tired of playtesting Spill the Beans–at least to some extent. I’ve rediscovered my groove. I can’t wait to run more Spill the Beans playtests.

I’m a lot closer to finding Rustbucket Riots’ balance. Bag building works far better than dice rolling (shorter turns and less maintenance each turn), but I haven’t had as much time to playtest these changes. Rustbucket Riots’ shift to bag building works on a mechanical level. Now, I have to make each playthrough feel tense, while providing meaningful choices each turn. Rustbucket Riots may be closer to publishable than ever before, and that has me excited. Too bad I’m writing a novel set in the same world as Rustbucket Riots. LOL

I still wait for notes on Monster Chef’s rulebook. I submitted the rulebook to a couple of game designer groups and haven’t yet received any feedback. There’s no way the rulebook contains no errors. The handful of changes I’ve made (and they were small) work within the flow of the game. I like where Monster Chef is at from a design standpoint. With or without significant feedback, I may begin submitting Monster Chef as soon as early next year. This title had the least issues than many of the others. I also love the theme and can’t wait for Delicious in Dungeon to return in 2027.

And I have one final game I wanted to share with you all. Since I’ve reach a comfortable point with at least three of my games, I began work on an untitled fallout shelter game with polyominoes and spinners. I’m bringing spinners back. Oh, yeah! This fallout shelter board game is in its infancy. I don’t even have a working title for it yet besides Fallout Shelter Board Game, and I want to make certain early design issues get ironed out before sharing specifics in this blog. This is a warning that you may see updates in 2027 for a new board game in this series. Yay!

That’s all I have for this month’s game design brain dump. I’ll see you next month, hopefully with a craft talk. Who knows? I may still be finishing up the novel. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.