Originally published March 9, 2020
For the last few months, we’ve been working with first-time designer Jonathan McGarvey and artist Tim Kings-Lynne on a casual cooperative game set in the universe of our topseller, Hoard.
We’d been using the pithy but anachronistic “Road Troll” as the working title, but as the game comes together, it was time to find a better title, so a challenge went out in our most recent quarterly newsletter. We were delighted with the number of suggestions that came in.
Playtester response has been enthusiastic. In particular, we’ve had a lot of positive comments about the prototype gems–$2 shop bits glued together. We hope to have a few different shapes in the finished product and expect they will be one of the game’s big attractions, so it made sense to highlight them in the game’s title. Our choice is Glimstone Grab, suggested by Chazy.
The Glimstones are a pivotal component for character movement, rescuing children, and eliminating trolls. Esmeralda travels on the inner edge of the board, collecting gems there, while the wizard flies through the air on the outer edge accessing those gems. Event cards are another feature of the game and reveal whether a child has been snatched this turn or if another forest creatures, which can be friend or foe to the heroes, has been active. It is a race against diminishing gems and hungry trolls; if a player finishes their turn and all children have been snatched, the game is over.
We’ve finetuning the game to enable players to set the difficulty and expect this process to take several more months. We’ll aim for publication in the first half of 2021. In the meantime, prototypes will be available for play and feedback at all Board Games by the Bay events and Wellycon.
If you’ve tried Glimstone Grab, you can weigh in about it on BoardGameGeek.
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