Some Bacterial Cultures, Finally Brought To The Tabletop!
Jacob p -
I would once again like to welcome you to my blog post, pathogenic partisans. Yet again, I have had another insanely productive week. I would even consider this week to be my most productive so far. And yes, the title is correct. I have finally got my game to the point where I can start playing it on a table, rather than just in my own head (yes, I do live a sad life).
I accomplished so much this week primarily because throughout previous weeks, I have been refining my processes. The biggest refinement I have made was in cutting out game pieces so that I was able to cut out cards, tiles, and statuses with absolutely wicked efficiency (while skipping multiple meals). I also have been able to complete artwork significantly faster because I am becoming more familiar with Procreate. The artwork is also getting a lot better and I have finally started getting a sense for color selection.
I ended up cutting out 40 environment tiles (4 copies of each), 500 tokens (100 of each type + 10 for each bacteria type), 212 gene and disaster cards (4 copies of each), and 10 bacteria cards (1 of each). About half of the tokens I have a just squares but the rest are fully completed circles. The gene and disaster cards ended up not quite being the correct size but through printing the bacteria cards again, I learned that I need to turn scaling to 1.1x on Tabletop Creator Pro. By far, I was most proud of the environment tiles, which look absolutely marvelous. Cutting out each one was a delight, firstly, because I love hexagons and secondly, because I loved seeing how the artwork printed. By printing and cutting all of these components, I was finally able to playtest my game.
Playtesting went about as well as you would expect for a new game; it crashed and burned. I spent the majority of the game removing tokens, placing tokens, and doing math rather than actually enjoying the game. After this first game, I changed around some of the rules to limit the amount of math necessary to play the game. I also clarified a lot of the rules on my gene cards and guide to make things simpler. On the second playtest, which is ongoing, I ended up replacing the glucose tokens with 20-sided dice so that I didn’t have to keep removing and placing tokens. It is a blessing that I played Magic previously because I have used 21 20-sided dice so far (there are 4 players). I’ll have to keep playing to see any other improvements I need to make.
Playtesting also helped me realize that I need more gene cards to add variety to the game. Currently, I have a little over 40, but this is somewhat limiting when building a deck for a specific bacteria. I’ve already made some cards that don’t strictly follow the current understanding of bacterial biology, so I might as well jump off the deep end. From now on, I will be putting anything that pops into my head into my gene card list. From there, all I have to do is wait a few decades for something similar to be found in an obscure bacteria off the coast of Taiwan.
That is all I have for this week, I hope to see you all again on the next blog post. I will now be returning to the abnormally toxic google project like the little extremophile, Chrysiogenes arsenatis I am. I have attached some photos of a game board and tiles for reference.
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