The Dustbowl Fracas

It's my goal to find a publisher for Farmageddon. The path towards this goal includes a lot of rejection, though oftentimes that's paired with feedback. Some I take, some I ignore. Most of the feedback I ignore is that which pushes Farmageddon outside of the realm of a casual game and towards something more hardcore. It's not that Farmageddon can't be that, it's just it wasn't designed to do that, plus I feel that direction requires more than a tweak, but an overhaul.

Well, I spent yesterday doing one such overhaul. I spent an hour scribbling notes on my notebook at a coffee shop, then several hours at home drafting the rules and refining the content.

I'm not abandoning Farmageddon, because I think over time it's evolved into a solid casual card game. I believe in my derpy corn. But, there's room for a second entry into the Farmageddon family. I've been working on the game for a year now and that familiarity allowed me to create something new really quickly. That new thing is Dustbowl Fracas.

Before I go into the explanation of the new game, here are the rules for Farmageddon. Here are the rules for Dustbowl Fracas. If you're familiar with the original Farmageddon I think the new game will be both more familiar and more interesting. They are cousins.

Dustbowl Fracas is a deckbuilding game for 2 to 4 players. It includes some of the content and core elements of Farmageddon, but tweaks almost everything in order to serve its new purpose.

My Own Worst Fan: A Critical look at Frontier Scoundrels

Frontier Scoundrels has been in development since July and I think I've hit another key milestone, though it's not necessarily a good one. I've held a few complete start-to-finish playtests of the game, and while I think the game is finally mechanically sound, it's too complicated, ill-focused, and lacks the fun element it needs to have. I'm not sure I can fix the game in its current state.

The past 5 months haven't been wasted though; I know a great deal more about what works and what doesn't. More importantly, I know which of my core mechanics need to change, though that means I need to discard some of my original design focuses.

This will be a long post, so here's a quick table of contents to show you what to expect. Another thing to note is that I aim for this post to be useful as a design exercise for folks and it hopefully won't require prior knowledge of Frontier Scoundrels.

Table of Contents

• The Current Frontier Scoundrels: Summary of the game flow with a link to the complete rules
• Why It's Broken: A breakdown of what's wrong with the current game
• Mulligan: Details on where I'm taking the game next, including a mind-map.
• Thinking Time: Questions for which I need to find answers