Its been a while since the last update, but welcome to our Summer Update, discussing progress so far on Defenders of Dragonfell.
Dragonfell is based on a modular game board that can be configured in many ways. Players then select a scenario and set the game up accordingly. One of the biggest elements of Dragonfell is the ability to alter the map layout. A straight road will be more challenging, if the monsters get past, you waste action points chasing them. A very curvy road gives your towers multi-attack opportunities if correctly placed. We’ve thoroughly playtested our main scenario to a point it is well balanced, you don’t always win, but it’s always close. Our main challenge this summer has been developing new scenarios and lots of playtesting!
Recently Ben ran a play testing night at his dayjob. The best thing to come out of the night was seeing how playable the game was! At one point, it was getting late and with a baby at home Ben needed to get home. Ben was ready to pack up and go, but everyone else wanted to stay, so he ended up leaving our prototypes with them for the evening! The play testers wanted to try different tower combinations and different characters – which tells us it’s a game with repeat play-ability.
It’s important to keep the rules short and simple. Some people may disagree, but I don’t see the fun in reading a rule book novel before getting to play. We just want to get on with gaming! So we have worked hard to keep the rules to 2 sides of A4 (admittedly without pictures). We blind playtested with a group recently and didn’t explain anything, just gave them the rules and observed where they struggled. This highlights where more explanation might be good, but overall it was a refreshingly positive outcome. Based on their feedback and comments from the UKGE, we have also been working on improving the rule book.
We are slowing moving closer to finalising all the card artwork and getting stuck into the rulebook layout. We have had some positive conversations with a few manufacturers and LongPack Games and Print Ninja are both looking like great partners so far, although we are still a long way from a decision!
In other news, after a lengthy process, both Juniper Games and Dragonfell now have entries on Board Game Geek, so we can continue to build our community leading up to launch. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts are really starting to pick up with over 350 followers across both platforms now, which is a major milestone for a new Studio like ours! We’re even starting to reconnect with people we met at the UKGE! This success relies on your kind Likes, Retweets and Follows to get the word out there and we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for helping us grow Juniper Games to what it is. We can’t realistically push the button on a Kickstarter campaign until we have built up the Juniper community, so this is important and valuable work.
As always, we would love you to keep in touch with development on Dragonfell and our other games. Please signup to our newsletter and our shiny new blogs will automatically wing their way over to your inbox. Just fill in the form at the very bottom of the page!