Hard to win a scenario when you repeatedly shell your own positions. (Brought to you by another installment of Playtesting After Dark.)

One day I'll stop adding features, but today is not that day.

Gave in and refactored offboard artillery. Drift is now more likely and can be more extreme, but on the flip side it now affects (up to) seven hexes instead of one.

Added hidden units/decoys (specifically for Stalingrad, at least initially). Also added the 100th scenario (here at Красный Октябрь/Krasny Oktyabr/Red October steel plant in Stalingrad with the new special rule). Only about a third of the scenarios have been tested, though.

Tabletop time.

Think we've (more or less) gotten the Tarawa scenario balanced (took several tries), but (as is only appropriate), the scenario is a complete bloodbath (more than half the VPs are from casualties). Also revamped the fire rules a bit to make fires a lot crazier (in certain circumstances).

Time for some Muse. THIS concert I went to on purpose. Only got rained on a little bit, but now I smell like weed. >_>

Something about a dude in a band who doesn’t play an instrument and just jumps around on stage that’s hard to take seriously.

Ungrateful users, always asking for new features. :D

Not a redesign, exactly, but adding a reinforcement schedule with maps of available deployment hexes (and VP locations) to the scenario details. With hindsight, this should have been there all along, otherwise players are going in blind on the first play of a scenario, but better late than never.

Adding experimental hotkeys, but it's tricky because pretty much no combination of ALT-SHIFT-CTRL is safe to use on Windows (ctrl by itself is typically fine on MacOS). So the option is off by default, and toggleable with plain key hotkeys (which has its own drawbacks, see: chat box).

Still chasing the elusive tied game.

In the process of refactoring the control flow to make playing easier and more comprehensible. Even with a lot of new tests, probably still introducing bugs in the process that will have to be stomped. But also making a few other random improvements, e.g. a visual indication of initiative changes.

Not much going on lately, just getting my head above water after a really rough week-plus that ended up involving (minor but annoying) emergency surgery after a bloody awful lot of pain (and the discovery that I'm largely immune to morphine, which was... Fun). So, uh. How is everyone out there?

Adding a new set of related features/actions: Tank crews can now abandon/man abandoned tanks and SPGs (and possibly attempt to repair immobilized vehicles), and there's a chance that tank crews may survive when tanks are destroyed.

Added color-coding to line-of-sight overlay to indicate hexes in or out of range.

Overrunning the Americans at Kasserine Pass. My opponent hated this scenario, though.

Starting to get to more involved scenarios -- playtesting a scenario during the battle of Kursk, the first scenario we've played with Tigers, and it's pretty much ready to go now. Lots of dead vehicles in this one.

Almost done with first pass of scenario editor: finished initial implementation of OOB tab. Now just need to add controls for resizing the map and undo/redo.

To the three people that read my BS posts... Still looking for playtesters for AHTF (ahextoofar.games). Reply, send me a DM (I think they're open?), join the Discord server (link on the front page). Tell all your friends. Reward me for the extreme effort that went into making this amazing GIF.

Going to an Ed Sheeran concert is one of the most random things I've done this year. Do I listen to Ed Sheeran? No. Did I know any of the songs? Also no. Am I planning to go pick up a bunch of Ed Sheeran albums now? Also no. Not a bad concert, though.

More work on the scenario editor. Map editing done.

Lotta smoke, dark red moon tonight.

Beethoven's 1st and 5th piano concertos at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival (Anne-Marie McDermott on piano with Academy of St Martin in the Fields).

Pegasus Bridge. Uhhhh... There's one stupid mistake that blew the whole scenario, so need to fix it up and try again.

Tarawa. Extremely bloody battle, as it should be. And neither of us really knew how to play it. Needs balance, though.

I've never felt more seen.

Adam Vian@sfbdim.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this is what it feels like to make a game

Ortona is ready. It should be a chaotic mess, and indeed it is.

A little bit closer to balanced.

Playtesting a little scenario in Ortona, Italy, a location that might be familiar to Canadian viewers out there. Still needs a little tweaking for balance, but probably ready in a couple days.