This looks interesting: a site for self-publishing games.  At Game Crafter, you can create an account and then upload your artwork for cards, boards and rule booklets, then add dice, play money, tokens, and so on and so forth.  In fact there’s a ridiculous number of bits and bobs available.  Then they’ll put everything into a box and post it to you, plus they’ll offer it for sale on their site, on your behalf.

I did some quick calculations, and it wouldn’t be worth me using it for Army Of Zero, partly because the unit cost would be too high, and partly because the packaging is a bit basic, but your situation and requirements might well be different.  But you can order as few copies as you like, so it looks like a great option for producing quality prototypes and proofs-of-concept, even if shipping from the US might introduce a bit of a time delay.

Here’s something I found particularly informative. We had a game of Sensible Soccer, which I spent far too much time on in the nineteen-nineties, and guess what? It was still great! The graphics were primitive in the extreme, but it was fast and easy to get the hang of and consequently brilliant fun. And it played nothing like football, but it didn’t matter because you got that it looked like football, so you knew the object of the game, and then you got that it was fun, and so who needs the “realism” of FIFA10?

I’m reminded of a documentary I saw once about seventies TV sci-fi, in which the “special” effects were discussed. The point was made that the fact that the spaceships were painted egg-boxes on bits of wire wasn’t a concern, because the viewer was quite happy to accept that the egg-boxes were a representation of a spaceship. Of course they were! You couldn’t film an actual spaceship, so what were the special effects guys supposed to do? The egg-boxes were used to inform us that the spaceship was on the move - and on with the story.

And so it is with Sensible Soccer. And it was a timely reminder, as we continue to work on the Army Of Zero rule expansions, that realism comes a distant second to playability and fun. Being able to pick up the game and just play it and have fun with it is paramount, and simulating “realistic” combat doesn’t matter. At all.

We haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks, but we’ve been plenty busy writing up and testing the variant rules for Army Of Zero (and clearing out the stockroom, but that’s not as interesting). Actually, rather than talking about variants to the rules it’s maybe more accurate to say that we’re coming up with new games that you can play with the Army Of Zero deck.

As well as offering a different way to play, the additional rules will let you play with more than two players.

There are two main approaches that we’re working on. It looks like one new game will be purely cooperative, and will involve all the players working together to defeat a common enemy.  We like co-operative games when they play well, like Pandemic.  And here’s an example of an invented cooperative card game called Seamus.

The other approach will be more of a team game, with the players divided into (probably) two teams, and those teams competing against each other.  This version will use many more of the 84 character cards than the standard game - perhaps even all of them, if we can hone the rules to make it keep moving quickly - to give more of an “Army” vibe.  Zombies!!! is a game that does a great job of keeping things moving while there are lots of pieces in play, so it can be done.

It seems likely that we’ll be making more use of the clans in the new games, too. You’ll get extra benefits such as enhanced stats if you hold more than one member of a particular clan in your hand at once, so there’ll be a new “collecting” element to the game. This will make some cards more valuable than others, because not all clans have the same number of characters in them. There’s only one member of the Horse clan, for example, but there are three Hyenas.

None of this, of course, affects the basic game, which will stay just the same, but for those of you who have asked - and we’ve had inquiries particularly about playing Army Of Zero with three or four participants, and about adding a bit of complexity - it will add some new perspectives.

So, at the moment we’re drawing up the rules, but we are looking for play-testers! If you’d like to help us out, and have an influence over the new games, then please email playtest@pointzerogames.com.

Also - maybe it’s a bit early for this - we’re going to need new names for the games. We’re thinking along the lines of Army Of Zero: Blah Blah Blah or Army Of Zero: Whatever. Probably we need to play the games a few more times and do a better job at setting the theme, but if you’ve got ideas, or even ideas that we could use for codenames right now, let us know, again via playtest@pointzerogames.com.

Cool site Wordle draws word clouds for you.  A word cloud is an arrangement of pieces of text where the size of the font varies for different words or phrases, according to their popularity.  Here’s a word cloud based on the character clans in Army Of Zero.

A treat for those of you with a love for word games and extreme clever-cleverness…