Bene Factum

2012/02/24

Picnic Blitz

Filed under: Traditional Games — AlexWeldon @ 8:55 pm

Picnic Blitz box

Picnic Blitz is a dice game that I released shortly after Insidious Sevens. Like Insidious Sevens, it was loosely inspired by several classic dice games, such as Yahtzee and Nada, both of which my friends played a lot of in our university days, and Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop, which proved that a game can be mostly about rolling dice, yet still have a significant skill component.

Players control teams of six ants, one for each of the six tracks on the board, which in turn correspond to the six numbers on a standard die. At the end of each track is a food item, worth from 2 to 4 points depending on the length of the track. When an ant reaches a food item, the points are awarded to that player, and no other ants can progress on that track; however, the ant may be dethroned by the other players, in which case the player loses the points and the food is back up for grabs. The number of points needed to win depends on the number of players, but it can be very tricky to hang on to enough different food items simultaneously to reach that goal.

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Insidious Sevens

Filed under: Traditional Games — AlexWeldon @ 3:31 am

Insidious Sevens box

Insidious Sevens was my first commercially published game. It’s a trick-taking game loosely based on the classic card game Oh Hell, which has been a family favorite for at least a couple of generations on my mother’s side. It made the GAMES Magazine Top 100 for 2012.

Insidious Sevens was born out of a desire to improve on Oh Hell, as despite my love for the game, it has many flaws that were apparent to me long before I started thinking of game design as a career. Although I started thinking about ways to refine the rules while still using a standard deck of cards, certain ideas led me to think it would be easier to work with a different distribution of cards, which in turn led to the decision to try to get it published commercially. The deck I settled on contains the numbers 0-7 in each of 5 colors, for a total of 40 cards.

Like Oh Hell and many other games in the genre, the basic goal of Insidious Sevens is to predict how many tricks you’ll win in each hand. You earn points for being exactly right, and lose points for being wrong, regardless of whether you take too many or too few.

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2012/02/20

New website launched!

Filed under: Site News — AlexWeldon @ 7:21 pm

Bene Factum has had a complete makeover; the old site is no more, and this new one is better in almost every possible way! If this is your first time here, please click the “About this Site” link in the navigation bar for a bit of an introduction to me, my work and what you’re going to find on this site.

Aside from the obvious visual improvements made, there are a few important things to know about the new site. Firstly, it is now completely WordPress driven. What this means is that every subsection of the site works like its own little blog; if you click the Board Games link, for instance, you’ll see the full details about my most recently-released game, shorter blurbs for those that came out earlier, and a link to take you to the archives if you’re looking for something older still. You can also leave comments or questions on almost any piece of content you find on the site. Better still, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire site, so you’ll be informed whenever new content is added, regardless of the category.

The other important thing to note is that I’ve decided to separate my game-related and artistic careers; you’ll no longer find my art and design portfolio on this site. A second website will go live soon to serve as a professional website for my freelance services. The two sites will, of course, link to one another, but I feel it makes sense to keep them separate, as not everyone who is interested in one of my fields is necessarily interested in the other.

How do you feel about the redesign? Feel free to leave comments or criticisms, or make suggestions for further improvement!

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