2017!  Wow that’s been a while!  I know you’re all (all 14 of you), desperate to know what’s been happening.  Did you guys die?  Did you make the game and retire on your millions?

Well, no.  

We took the game to a Game Design Protospiel, and while the feedback was mostly positive, there were some criticisms, all entirely valid.

And… it was still a beast.  Too much going on.  Too many mechanics.

So we redesigned it.  There was a Mech game, then there was a Starfighter dogfighting game.  Both of which had some good ideas, but definitely not there yet.

In the meantime, we entered another solo board game competition, and came up with something different, although still in our world of FUSION.

FUSION: Asteroid Mining

FUSION: Asteroid Mining is a tile-laying, pickup-and-deliver game set in a time when new solar systems are just being explored. You are a FUSION Pilot, and your goal is to mine Actium from asteroids and trade it for Credits, while avoiding the PRISE Peacekeepers who will attempt to tax your efforts heavily.

Issy Malstrom did a great review of it. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1852151/even-space-theres-tax-review-fusion-asteroid-minin, and in fact she came up with the above description!

That seemed to work quite well.

U-Boat Attack

Our U-Boat Attack solo game still gets some comments, has been translated into Spanish, and even included in a Spanish History magazine!

And now . . .

Our latest game started out as a 2-player Print N Play game, but has evolved into a physical, multi-player game.  FUSION: Clan War has been entered into the Cardboard Edison game competition and we’ve done a Competition Introduction Video to introduce the game.

Update 27th Feb

Well, we didn’t make it into the final, but received some great feedback, mostly pretty positive:

“Love the asteroids. Really cool way to do a lot of different board setups and just create a lot of tension and spots you don’t see in games in this genre”

“The balance of actions/combat dice reservations adds good tension throughout the game as players race to points or build that strong fleet”

“The combat mechanic of having ship effects within a fleet correspond to different dice values is an interesting way to look at fleet construction. It asks players if they want to always roll something or take bigger risks with their fleet composition for bigger rewards. It’s so elegant that I’m surprised that I can’t think of other games that do this.”

On the negative side, it mostly seemed to be that the theme wasn’t original. One judge uploaded a video and said something like “If I have to evaluate another space-exploration game where you mine a planet for resources…” (Gulp – guilty!)

So now we’re considering the feedback and making some adjustments, while ensuring we don’t get away from the core fun aspects of this game.