Yes, I've been away from blogging for more than a week. Sometimes things come up in the real world that take precedence.

One of these I don't care to discuss here, but I'll at least mention it: My girlfriend and I have broken up. It was a serious relationship that I thought would last, so it's been difficult.

The other is that for the past week I've been in furious correspondence with my old buddy Gelmo about Buy That Guy! A few of you may remember that BTG is the game that he and I invented more than a decade ago. BTG's subtitle is "the game of political corruption". The central gimmick is that players don't represent specific politicians. Rather, each player represents an interest group; the players "buy" politicians by giving them campaign contributions, the purpose being to manipulate their votes to pass favorable legislation which will create more profit for their industry. As you might imagine, the game is cheerfully cynical (which is a good attitude for me right now).

Buy That Guy! has evolved quite a bit since its invention. The basic idea proved very playable, but there were structural problems with the game as a whole. Every couple of years we drag it out of the closet and revisit it, but usually the project bogs down and the game relapses into neglect. This time Andrew has lined up a serious production team and we expect a new edition to be ready in about a week. In preparation for that we've been hashing out all the numerous ideas for improvements we've had over the years. The new game is streamlined quite a bit. (Most notably, the main board is completely gone, so that it's now more obviously a card game.)

The current edition will be prettier than any of the past ones, though still short of professional production quality, which isn't affordable at our small scale. The first printing will have a few gaps in some non-essential places (eg, the card backs are blank) so that it can be a prototype for one more round of playtesting with the revised rules. Some time in the fall we'll make final revisions and have the first edition that's actually available for sale.

There's a website at www.buythatguy.com. (It's actually a page on my Earthlink space.) Right now there's just a brief announcement, but when there's real information, that's where it will go.

11:43:24 PM  [permalink]  comment []