Time for you and me is not the same as in Chartagon’s early days. The Constructor obviously must have spent enormous amounts of time when he single handed built all the lighthouses for the first islands, without getting worn out or older. From the few notes he left we know he was tired and exhausted after some days, and he did get sick like all of us, but there was always time to rest. The Clerk and the Constructor met a few times, and when they did we have quite good descriptions of how the Constructor worked, which combined clever use of mechanical-, balance/gravity-, and blood-sweat-tears-strategies. The patience and hard work of the early years is impressive and we conclude that time must have worked differently to allow all those light houses to be built by one person.
So what have we done recently, during the time that has passed since the last post? Let’s make a list:
- Regular lore research. We are continuing to create an inventory over the fragments already found, as well as finding new pieces to the Chartagon puzzle.
- The fourth game in the Chartagon main series has made significant progress, and we have started tweaking parameters and test playing again! We’ve started the graphical design of both the cards and the boards(s), and we soon need to print a first test game as a next progress step. The music score has a ready main theme, but we think that we’ve only come half way.
- We also started development of a solo-player mini game called Chartagon Foghorn. In this game you play a teenager who has been challanged by a friend to sound the Queen’s foghorn before midnight, and you could obviously not skip that challange! You’ll have 40 minutes to sneak past the Queen’s palace to find the way to win the challange. We ordered empty cards over a year ago, so the overall idea has matured for a long time. Unfortunately, time is not as forgiving as for the Constructor and there has not been time to plunge into this project until now. We’ve been working intensly on this during the last two weeks, and we are glad to say that the mechanics and conceptual layout is fully done! We need to make the graphical design, which will be a bit more complicated than previous games, so this might take quite some time. We also need to make independent play tests to see how we can make the instructions easy to follow, and to allow minor mistakes in interpretation. But overall: we’re confident that we’ve got a good game for some side-lore of the Queen’s palace!
- We’ve evaluated a new game component for Chartagon: Discoveries/Competition which allows placing two or more markers on the same post! This balances out some of the advantages you get from being player one, and especially so on a map with one especially favourable harbour post. We’ll possibly get back to this in a later post, and we need to insert it into the rulebook.
- We’ve just started developing a new mobile timer app for Chartagon: Discoveries/competition, which is intended for very large maps with unlimited players. Each player will have their own timer which says when they are allowed to make a move. The timer runs independently from the other players and also have a random delay (counterbalanced between players) that eliminates downtime. Or at least makes downtime fair.
So as you can tell, we’ve been very active! The greatest obstacles are time and money, so we will continue to make slow progress whenever we have the possibility!