Since the new Farmnation prototype came in, figure I’ll do a more detailed upwrapping that shows all the packaging that’s typical of Gamecrafter published products, as well as a general rundown of the pieces. All in all, OMG it’s so nice – definitely the kind of pieces I was going after. The price tag is a little heftier ($48.99 retail) but that still clocks in lower than games like Agricola, so I guess that’s a win.
As usual, going to clean up the box a little (holy crap I suck at box design) but that’s really it. Should be up for purchase later this afternoon. WOO!
And now to uwrapping.
Unwrappage
It arrived in a heavy cardboard shipping box just large enough to hold the game, so no jumbling or tumbling around – all the corners were completely straight. And Oooooo shrinkwrapping.
The front
The back. Riveting, I know.
The box itself is pretty sturdy, so I wouldn’t be worried about stacking stuff on top of it in the game closet. Opening it up, everything came individually wrapped in brown packing paper so those pieces also wouldn’t tumble around during shipping. Nice attention to detail.
It’s all cute and wrapped up!
As the game uses stickers applied to tokens for the main pieces, the stickers arrived on a couple of sheets and the tokens in two plastic bags. The play mats were also a really nice quality and heft.
Blank Tokens and Equipment Cards
Sticker Sheets and Playmats
I also expanded the rulebook to 8 pages rather than only 4, and included more pictures and examples. Definitely think this was the right way to go – it’s a hellovalot easier to read and scan through now.
Hey look, white space!
For the first time initial setup, it only took me about 15 min to attach all the stickers to the tokens, while drinking coffee and watching TV. If there were more people to help this would go by quite a bit faster. The tile bag was also plenty big to hold all the tiles at once, with lots of room to dig around or shuffle them, without having them fly out all around the room.
Hey look, they fit on the mat.
Tile Bag! And Finished Tiles
All in all I’m pretty happy with how this one came out – only wish the price could be a little cheaper…but then I’d be actually losing money on each print. That would be a sads.
Farmnation Mini
Also we had a couple of people over on the weekend and they played through both the original Farmnation prototype (this one) and Mortgage. And no, I didn’t take pictures because I’m a huge idiot – looks like an excuse for another party. Anyway, turns out none of them minded playing with the tiny little cardstock tokens, even though I thought they were too small and lightweight to deal with. So I figure – why not offer both? Farmnation shall the big bigger, more awesome one with actual tiles (and damn is it easier to play when you can actually see at a glance how many tiles you have stacked) and I’ll offer the smaller scale one as Farmnation Mini at a cheaper price. If the damn little cardstock tokens weren’t so flyaway I could say it’s a travel sized version, but I think the pieces would be too easy to lose.
So yay for compromises. There’ll be the definite edition and the cheapo-ish-edition for people who don’t want to spend that much. I’ll need to update the little box and create a new game store page for it, but that shouldn’t take too long. Maybe even have it ready today not too long.
Mortgage Updates
While they were playing Mortgage, a couple of new house rules were discussed and implemented (by the players, not by me – I was…actually…I have no idea what I was doing or where I was at the time), and they came up with a way to play with 5 – 6 players (since there were 6 of them). The latter being so stupidly simple I again feel dumb.
New Rule – Mortgage Points
Let’s say you’ve got the Interest Rate Cards 4.3% and 8.9% in hand. You play down the lower one since you really want to win this hand. Unfortunately, the dude to the left of you plays a card for 4.1%. Rather than lose without a fight, you can now pay $50 to reduce your rate by 0.1%, any number of times you want. So you could pay $150 in this case to lower your rate to 4.0% and win the hand – the money goes back to the bank. Thanks Sarah, James, and Jeremiah!
Playing with 5 – 6 People
Rather than deal out 5 Interest Rate cards for everyone’s hand, just deal out 3 per person. That’s it – and it totally worked fine without unbalancing the game at all. I feel stupid for not even considering this before. Yay for Sarah, James, Jeremiah, Mike, Erin, and Ross!
Now off to update Mortgage with the new rule sets (and the art for the max num of players accordingly, and get the two Farmnation editions out the door. Woo!