Today I published a new expansion for Ubongo Extrem: "Ubongo Extrem Craxy Expansion," which has 70 new puzzle cards with four 5-piece solutions on each of them. It's a more than a little crazy, thus the "x" (for xtra crazy).
Ubongo Extrem was one of my favorite Essen 2007 releases, taking the original up a notch in difficulty, and making the scoring system much better to use. You can read my review of it here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/296660
Originally, I had just wanted to see if 5-piece puzzles made sense to create and solve. I printed out a bunch of hexes and went to it, and found out that it made the game much more challenging. And it was also kind of fun to design each board. In fact, it was so much fun that my kids joined in and helped out by designing 20 of the 70 boards that come with the expansion.
Once I realized that I was going to make enough puzzles for an expansion, I printed up a "test" board (shown above). I started by placing five tiles (always using one 9 or higher piece), then marking off the unused spaces. I circled the pieces I was using on the board. Then I took a picture of it (so that I could recover the solution in case of getting stuck), and picked a different color and tried to find 5 pieces that worked in the same shape. I circled those pieces and took another picture, and repeated twice more for the other two colors. I did this for all 50 boards that I designed, and the kids did it for each of the 20 boards they designed.
With all these puzzles defined, I hopped into Illustrator CS3 and created each of the puzzles, two to a page. I used symbols for the pieces, and I started with the "planner" shape above, deleting the hexes that were marked off for each puzzle. It was fairly time consuming for each puzzle, but still somewhat enjoyable to make them. I would estimate the time at about 1/2 hour per puzzle in total. So that's about 35 hours of puzzle creation. Then there's the time for creating the sleeve, formatting the files so they could fit into a reasonable-sized PDF for downloading, and all the prep work of drawing the pieces and setting them up.
Finally, it was time to test the expansion puzzles, and to determine what modifications to the rules (if any) were required. Initially I really wanted to just crank up the difficulty with the extra piece, but I found that people were able to finish them in most cases by the time that two timers were completed, so I modified the rules a bit to allow for that.
Then I finalized the sleeve/instructions, touched up the PDF, took some pictures of the game, and sent out the announcement to BGN and posted the game page and PDF on the bezier games website (http://games.bezier.com.craxy.html). And finally I wrote this, for a total of about 60 engaging hours spread over 2.5 weeks of time.
Now there's the wait for the expansion to appear in BGG (not sure what the process is there, but it seems very random for how long it takes to get a game to appear)...
Ubongo Extrem was one of my favorite Essen 2007 releases, taking the original up a notch in difficulty, and making the scoring system much better to use. You can read my review of it here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/296660
Originally, I had just wanted to see if 5-piece puzzles made sense to create and solve. I printed out a bunch of hexes and went to it, and found out that it made the game much more challenging. And it was also kind of fun to design each board. In fact, it was so much fun that my kids joined in and helped out by designing 20 of the 70 boards that come with the expansion.
Once I realized that I was going to make enough puzzles for an expansion, I printed up a "test" board (shown above). I started by placing five tiles (always using one 9 or higher piece), then marking off the unused spaces. I circled the pieces I was using on the board. Then I took a picture of it (so that I could recover the solution in case of getting stuck), and picked a different color and tried to find 5 pieces that worked in the same shape. I circled those pieces and took another picture, and repeated twice more for the other two colors. I did this for all 50 boards that I designed, and the kids did it for each of the 20 boards they designed.
With all these puzzles defined, I hopped into Illustrator CS3 and created each of the puzzles, two to a page. I used symbols for the pieces, and I started with the "planner" shape above, deleting the hexes that were marked off for each puzzle. It was fairly time consuming for each puzzle, but still somewhat enjoyable to make them. I would estimate the time at about 1/2 hour per puzzle in total. So that's about 35 hours of puzzle creation. Then there's the time for creating the sleeve, formatting the files so they could fit into a reasonable-sized PDF for downloading, and all the prep work of drawing the pieces and setting them up.
Finally, it was time to test the expansion puzzles, and to determine what modifications to the rules (if any) were required. Initially I really wanted to just crank up the difficulty with the extra piece, but I found that people were able to finish them in most cases by the time that two timers were completed, so I modified the rules a bit to allow for that.
Then I finalized the sleeve/instructions, touched up the PDF, took some pictures of the game, and sent out the announcement to BGN and posted the game page and PDF on the bezier games website (http://games.bezier.com.craxy.html). And finally I wrote this, for a total of about 60 engaging hours spread over 2.5 weeks of time.
Now there's the wait for the expansion to appear in BGG (not sure what the process is there, but it seems very random for how long it takes to get a game to appear)...
1 comments:
Excellent work! I already printed it, now some cutting and then it just needs testing. Looks fabulous, but then again, that's not unusual for something done by you (I sure wish I could get your redrawn map for Wabash Cannonball).
Post a Comment