It’s gratifying to have been able to play and promote a game through its start-up phase, and then see it finally boxed and available to the world.
When I had the opportunity to run off a print ‘n play preview copy of Bullfrogs - A Strategy Card Game of Amphibian Combat some months ago I jumped at it.
The game by designer Keith Matejka is a card game for two-to-four players.
Each player has a set number of cards, along with a handful of pieces representing frogs and bullfrogs.
The idea is to move your amphibians around the ever-changing maze of cards until they are full of frogs. The players with the most frogs on the ‘lily pad’ wins the card, and associated ‘victory points’.
As a two-player game Bullfrogs is very strategic, allowing for some definite forward planning.
In four-player strategy goes by the wayside as too much happens between your turn and the next time you have a chance to influence the game to hold a strategy in place.
Getting to play the game with actual wooden frog and bullfrog pieces enhances game aesthetics way past recycled wooden cubes from an old Risk Game.
So check it out at www.thunderworksgame.com , you will not be disappointed.
But wait. There is more.
Matejka has come up with a solitaire variant for Bullfrogs.
“Every frog warrior must take part in tactical war games as part of basic training, and each year, at the close of the trials, the young frog warriors are ranked according to their skill on the battlefield – a Grand Master ranking may spell the difference between commanding an army and becoming cannon fodder on the front lines.
“About halfway into the development of the game, I thought it would be cool to design a solo version,” he said. “I wrote a version of the rules and did some testing with it and liked it quite a bit, but I put it aside when putting the financials of the project together. It just wasn’t a priority. The single player variant just wasn’t going to be part of the core product. It wasn’t something everyone would want, so I didn’t want to increase the cost of the game to add a feature not everyone was interested in.
“When the campaign was doing well, I started thinking about resurrecting it. I did some more testing, and with the encouragement of a few other people who were testing it, I decided to add it to the campaign as an add-on. I was kind of hoping it would turn into part of an expansion down the road, but I was excited to bring it to the market along with the base game.”
It helped having the base game to build from.
“Most definitely! Without the base game, this would not exist,” said Matejka. “The solitaire variant was a bit of an afterthought. I’m not a huge solo gamer, but I know quite a few people who enjoy solo games so it was fun to explore.”
Matejka is right, solo gaming is not for everyone, but it can be a way to game when buds are busy.
“When I sat down to design the solitaire variant, I wanted to keep the core mechanics as close to the original game as possible,” said Matejka. “I’ve seen some games use decks of cards to control the opponent, which I always found to be too clunky. I thought it would be especially so in a lighter game like Bullfrogs. So, I thought of dice.
“I thought it would be cool if the opponent was actually on the game board for the player to manipulate. So, it’s logical that the opponent will need to move and take actions; hence the movement and action dice. The four direction side of the movement die was a later addition. Originally, it had two blank sides.
“Regarding the rest of the variant, the only real difference for the player during their turn is they don’t have a hand of cards. They draw one and do the best they can with it. This happened because I found managing the opponent’s pieces and the dice plus a hand of cards to be too clunky.
“My next published design should be a game called Roll Player which is a dice drafting and tableau building game about creating fantasy RPG characters. I’ve enlisted the same art team from Bullfrogs. Play-testing is going really well on it.
