Three-player Tafl ("Tafl Trio") didn't work. Back to two player. See the home page. The original game had let's say blue soldiers, and let's say yellow bodyguards for a yellow king. The king has to make it to a corner. Let's try shaking it up by having blue soldiers and blue king, with yellow soldiers and yellow king for the other player.

There are two flies in the ointment. 1) I've been down this road before. It went nowhere. 2) Setup is a headscratcher. What do we do about throne(s)?

This would not be a your side and my side, like football. King goes from centre to corners, just like before. What I like about tafl, or at least tablut, is the way the king slides across the board, making a dynamic game.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Q: Can Rocks and Stones fit in an Altoids tin?

A: No, unless you want to go miniature. Just the glass pieces barely fit in. You could use small glass pieces - see your local glass shop - for the stones, and normal glass pieces for the rocks. Maaybe .. It would be intuitive.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

COLOUR Dice has been a construction struggle. Let's look at coloured paper attached to the dice. Instead of coloured writing, we'll look at coloured background. One can get coloured paper, with lighter shades, at Michael's. Should the bits of paper be square, or circle? Pros and cons. Squares would still leave awkward white areas. Stamps with black ink could make neat letters.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The board for Twelve was nicely, successfully made. But the pieces are a problem. The plan was to use ordinary dice as pieces, convenient and easy to manipulate. However, the multiple numbers on a die are dazzling, confusing. There were attempts to make most of the faces white, but this is not straightforward.

Back to considering posterboard. Deep blue posterboard blue corrugated posterboard, which would contrast with the white dice. Layers of posterboard, with square holes so that a die can sit in a recess. The possible advantage of this is the sides of the die would not be so visible. Another advantage is that small square recesses will keep things in line.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The quality and nature of Drinkin' Dragons are unknown. It's not easy to make things to test this out. However, we can test out part of it, the movement, without too much fuss. When a dragon (rather randomly) grabs the holy grail, can another dragon take it from that first dragon? We can add generic target drinks, which will increase mobility options.

I bought the fancy dice and tried it. This has reopened the Pandora's box of problems and possibilities.

The weirdness of the theme showed up. Dragons consuming drinks based on orthogonal moves that emerge from dice rolls. It was tedious, not completed. It didn't help that I was working three players on the floor with flawed components and missing the colour of the drinks theme. The game was not exactly bad, but tedious and weird. Dragons did take the holy grail from each other. Dragons travelled to most of their target drinks, leaving behind a lot of neutral drinks. If a blue dragon has the holy grail and all the target drinks it can, it has many movement options and its goal is to ...

The game originally came from just two words: Drinkin' Dragons. What else could we do? Cards, set collection? Give up, move on to something else, like nailing down Atlantis Chess? Try flying around a ring of different markets? You are flying somewhere.

The plot thickens. I've got a new idea bubbling up fast. Different markets (stores, teahouses, whatever noun), with an element of musical chairs. The number of places is two more than the number of dragons. Consider the criteria it satisfies:
 
 

Here is a model we can work with for Drinkin' Dragons. Later we will find problems and fixes.

Six places around a big table. Stores if that helps you to understand it. Four dragons and the holy grail are randomly put in these places. Each place has ten or so drinks, in a specific order so you can only drink one specific drink at a time. During a turn, a dragon can drink, fly to another place, fight or do nothing.

Target drinks (e.g. Arcticus should get hot chocolate) are secret.

Fighting is a matter of who has the highest number on a rolled six-sided die. A dragon gets a die every time a target drink is consumed, so the dragon can roll a number of dice. The dragon who initiated the fight wins ties. Drunk dragons lose ties. The dragon who loses is incapacitated for three turns after the superior dragon leaves the place. The winner can seize the holy grail from an incapacitated dragon.

Drunk dragons are drunk for three turns. Drunk dragons can not fly and are inferior fighters. Consuming coffee means you have a one in three chance of needing to pee for the next turn, so you can't do anything including communicating ("I'm busy").

The dragon who hold on to the holy grail at the end of the game wins.
 
 

Problems, dilemmas, observations:

People would stand up, walk around.

In the past I thought of a game with hermit crabs moving from one shell to another in a social group. They are not hermits, and they sometimes fight. I got to my hermit crab game by accident.

The ideal is this hermit crab game, where dragons flit from one place to another, preferably unoccupied, to get target drinks. Tactical moves, timing, negotiation and trust, and combat. That's the ideal, but it might turn out that dragons go to the places, dragons at the same place live and let live, bad drinks are evaded and and everyone gets their target drinks. (Ignoring holy grail) That would be bad, because players don't make the tactical movement decisions or have tense negotiations.

What will we call the places?

What happens toward the end of the game when we are running out of drinks?

A dragon gets a die after getting a target drink. So I guess that means a dragon can't fight initially. Also, might there be a runaway loser who can't get dice?

Stores don't work like that. But having a specific sequence of drinks forces dragons to make tactical decisions, forces them to consume neutral drinks, and makes them run into bad drinks.

Are target drinks private or public?
 
 
 
 

Components:

A dragon is toppled over if it has lost a fight. A drunk dragon has three chips (never more) which are eliminated after three turns. A dragon that has to pee after a coffee has one yellow light blue chip with a P on it. Dice would be dragged around with a dragon, so maybe you would have colours associated with players. An awkward thing is you would have to have information about specific dragons, e.g. "allergic to bananas" that is available to players.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The game Attention could be classified as a combination of card, party and social deduction game, but that's messy. It is, as of writing, for exactly five players. Testing it requires five willing players, which is tough. We did not play it at Christmas. We got as far as learning the rules, but this collapsed in confusion and fatigue.

Setup for this untested game is underdeveloped.

Players are categories (reptiles, fruits and vegetables); the two are synonymous. Coloured cards would help players to associate categories with players. In practise, with handmade experimental cards, this mostly wasn't done because of the large number of cards this would entail. White cards were used for the Find cards, shared by different players.

It's built for exactly five players. What about four players? That would mean tediously removing certain cards before starting the game. Also it might not play as well with four players.

Each player randomly gets one secret Spy card showing which category is spied on. How is this done? You don't want to spy on yourself. I can think of four ways to do this, but for now we're doing brute force. You deal out secret Spy cards to players, and if someone is spying on himself you restart dealing out spy cards.

The same sort of problem exists for the Find cards, but it works differently; you don't have to restart everything. If each player had their own Find cards you would have both straightforward setup and colour coding on the public side. But that's a lot of cards.

Player A asks player B if player A's Find card (with a colour by the way) matches player B's Item card. Do you have a cumquat? This activity continues for the round. So what if player A runs out of usable cards? There are no rules for that.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I'm pleased to say that I posted a video about a Ukrainian city some time before the start of the full-scale war. When I was young Ukraine was an unknown, grey grim Soviet place. Now it is a war zone, bombarded over and over. This video (not sure which one) showed an interesting place, with culture and colour and buildings with character, apparently a nice place to walk around. This was news to me. There is a different scene in the differnt parts of Ukraine, for example the port city of Odessa.