I like to balance out the player-hours spent playtesting my own game designs with an equal amount of me playing other game designs. So far I had only contributed to playing others' games - which I love, but it was time to break out one of my own designs.
I had done my #BoardGameDev just the week before, indeed scribbling ideas down on half-index cards at the event itself. Note to new designers, I have the opinion should be functional and cheap, so if it turns out to be crap you can start over without too much of an investment.
Here, I have my prototype called "Vroom, Vroom, Boom" an arena car-combat game. I was literally making up rules on the fly, trying to find out if the game was even playable. Short game! Some of the cards were clearly out of balance, but the core element seemed fun. On your turn, you can either take color-coded sections of road into a staging area, or launch all of your staged moves - during which you can shoot your weapons. It seemed to work acceptably well.
The movement was inspired by a brilliant underrated German game from the 2000s "Techno Witches". I feel like I've made a couple of innovations from that movement with color-coded maneuvers and simpler choice of them. TW was mostly a simple racing game, and to that I've added "Ameritrash" crazy upgrades and blowing up cars. That's kinda my favorite design recipe - take cool ideas from German-style games, and mix it up with dice-chucking & crazy-powers more typical in American games.
