Showing posts with label Deep Madness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deep Madness. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Dawn of Madness - Suggested Icon Changes

Dawn of Madness is complex, choose your own adventure/terror game by Diemension Games.

I was fortunate to check out a prototype at GenCon 2019.

The Kickstarter is going on now and draft rules posted.

This posts suggests two changes and enables image-URLs to refer to in the comments.

Since "Concepts" have gone away and many are confused by icons, I suggest the below changes:

1) Simplify Sentience Icons: Eliminate the icons-graphics sentience and just use the colors (no one in the play throughs says them by "name" and no one can read the icons when made tiny on the cards....). Best to eliminate the confusion.  Makes more sense to add a color (sentience) to a graphic to make a domain

2) Simplified Sentience Test Verbage: This can further help declutter the cards...for example the Sentience Testing. No reason to say "test x for y" …. just make the icon bigger (so you can read it) and sow the colored-domain





Monday, August 12, 2019

GenCon 2019 - Bloodborne and Dawn-of-Madness

Dawn of Madness Preview - Byron Leavitt game writer

I got sucked into Diemension Game's cooperative dungeon crawler Deep Madness.  Their follow up prequel promises to be as weird (hopefully less difficult), and a very different experience. Hints of this game 's art were shown on the Deep-Madness Kickstarter. Dawn of Madness will be Kickstarted in a few months (Fall 2019): check out the preview Kickstarter page.

Byron Leavitt, the lead writer for the game, demonstrated the prototype game via the storybook  "Emily's Realm".  I learned that this game plays more like a choose-your-own-adventure book on steroids than it does a dungeon crawler. It is a co-operative nightmare in which each player has their nightmares meshed with the others. The party is guaranteed a story ending based on decision and encounters, but the ending depends on which character is affected the most during gameplay. 

Instead of using lots of tiles to make a gameboard(like in Deep Madness) a single spider-web board with blank identifiers is reused; areas are identified/assigned locations based on the story (i.e., Emily's house). Time and actions are tracked with a ladder-like system (see Roman numeral track in below image with character chits).

Most appealing, is the way characters "level up"/devolve as they experience their mental issues. These even have various miniatures, so as Emily explores her past she may transform into some demon-like thing. There are several currencies that each represent mental parameters--I forget the specifics but recall one color being akin to anxiety, for instance.    


Image credits: Deep Madness Kickstarter update Aug 2019

Check out our preview Kickstarter page at http://bit.ly/DoMPreview! It may be a late Dawn of Madness Friday, but we're coming back with a doozy! Here is our first video in a new series diving deep into Dawn of Madness before the Kickstarter launches in mid- to late-September, describing why Dawn of Madness is not just another board game: it is, instead, a horror experience in a board game. (Sorry for the choppy editing and the questionable quality, guys: I really wanted to get this out today, so I put it together over the course of a few hours.) More to come! #Kickstarter #boardgames #horror #survivalhorror #crowdfunding #miniatures #dawnofmadness
Posted by Diemension Games on Friday, August 9, 2019


Bloodborne CMON – Michael Shinall

As fans of the Bloodborne video game (and huge fans CMON's Zombicide games), my son and I went all-in on the Bloodborne Board Game Kickstarter. 

At GenCon we listened to co-designer Michael Shinall walk through the game.  

Keen-eyed readers may spot my son,