You can play my new logic puzzle game, Dictator of Rome, at dictatorofrome.com now!
I tried, but slowed down (not gave up) making a monkey space themed card game, which you can read about here.
Not to be deterred, I continued to play around with other ideas in my head. I quickly ruled out a true TCG as I think (perhaps wrongly, but in my strong opinion) that it’s virtually impossible to get a TCG off the ground if there’s no real pull or desire from people to actually collect – whilst Disney or various other franchises have a deep well of material to delve into, I don’t think you build that as TCG first (maybe book/comic -> TCG). In any event, whether I’m correct or not is really by the by as I chose not to go down that route.
Instead, I wanted a game the invoked the feel of a regular 52-card deck, including the endless possibilities it allows in terms of new rules/games, but has a historical flair to it. It was playing rummy with my family that help me land on the base mechanic and my love of Ancient Rome (Republic more than Empire) that helped me land on the theme and a name: Consul of Rome.
After that it was just the simple steps of designing rules and mechanics, initial testing, modelling gameplay, figuring out how I was going to build the templates without any great artistic or design ability, play testing, production, funding, distribution and marketing. I’ve started to figure some of these out and will write about them here, though admit doing this as a hobby/side project means it’s slow-ish going.
In the meantime I had another idea that could be tied to this in a slightly different game profile – a daily logic puzzle game with a Roman flair: Dictator of Rome. This is fully playable and online thanks to some help from codex. The ultimate idea being that it would be quite fun to have a tie in game that was easy and quick to play.
So there I am – seeing how I can push these two forward at the same time and hopefully to people who will enjoy them.