In “defense” of the Medium game

Let me start this post off by saying that nobody has “attacked” the Medium (10-piece) setup of NXS. Mostly I just thought it was a clever-ish title.

However, this post is a response of sorts to the wonderful review of NXS in Abstract Games Magazine Issue 20. It really is a very well written, and positive review of NXS. The author does an excellent job of explaining the rules of NXS, without relying on the diagrams that I find myself falling back on. He also points out one of my favorite features of NXS, which is the variety of ways you can play, as well as the tendency for excitingly close endgames.

Towards the end of the review, the author makes the following statement: “And so, I prefer the game with fewer pieces and a single Merchant, which highlights the effect of the objective. The ‘rugby scrum’ phase is shorter and less significant, and the game speeds to an exciting conclusion.”

Far be it for me to disparage someone’s preferences! I truly enjoy the Short (7-piece) game myself, and a 9-point objective really is more sharp.

But I would like to take this opportunity to point out the reasons that I do love the Medium (single Merchant) game just as much, as well as detail a thing or two you miss out on (at least partially) if you only play the Short game.

For one, the “rugby scrum” phase at the border is almost a separate game within a game. It is a scrum, yes. It is “trench warfare”. The confines of the border between two boards are… well… confining, but (IMHO) in a good way. This is terrain. In nautical terms, you are fighting in a narrow inlet. Can this be frustrating? Sure. But you see, your opponent is fighting on the same terrain. And you can use this against her. It is an intricate dance. You are probing your enemy’s defenses, looking for a weakness, carefully exchanging ships (and hoping to come out a little ahead), looking for your opportunity.

Your opportunity for what? *That* moment. The “Aha!” moment. The “there it is” moment. That moment when the game tips to the endgame. That moment when the game-within-a-game ends, and you stab into your opponent’s territory and put him on the defensive, scrambling to block their lines.

In fact, I would say that’s the difference between being a decent (Medium game) NXS player, and a good one. Being able to recognize that moment and take advantage of it.

EVL

A brain bending battle of good vs. EVL

When I designed NXS, so many years ago, I always figured that would be my one and only game. And until recently, other than designing some variants of NXS, I really had no desire to create a new game. After all, getting myself to actually make anything happen with NXS took over 20 years!

But, largely spurred by my desire to create a Hnefatafl variant that could be played entirely with a NXS set, I’ve started to see more games in my future. Designing heXentafl made me stretch my brain. I’ve also had this idea floating around in the back of my brain for years, that if I ever did decide to design another game, that it would use heptagons (7 sided polygons). Why? Because everyone, including me, uses squares and hexagons. And for good reason! They actually tesselate uniformly, which has the advantage of rules simplicity. However, in order to challenge myself, I wanted to break out of those confines.

There are several ways that heptagons tesselate, but the most interesting to me was the one shown above. Essentially, the gaps between heptagons are “filled in” by irregular pentagons. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make use of them, but it was an interesting challenge to me.

My first attempt was a game called Angels & Demons. It accomplished everything I set out to accomplish. It was an asymmetric game. One side was the angels, the other the demons. The angels had a smaller force, a different move method, a different capture method, and a different goal than the demons. One side moved on the heptagons, the other on the pentagons, etc. But… at the end of the day, it just wasn’t all that fun to play. I knew I could do better.

Now, I’ll admit to a bias against games that start with an empty board. Which is odd, since some of the games I consider to be excellent start with an empty board. For whatever reason, I just prefer the idea of two “armies” (or in the case of NXS: Man-o-War, navies) facing off across a battlefield. So when I embarked on my second heptagon board attempt, I decided to challenge myself to design a game that starts with an empty board.

Several influences were floating around in my head. I’m not sure if there is any such thing as a totally unique mechanic at this point in history, so I’ll freely give credit where it is due. The custodial capture of the Tafl family was definitely on my mind. Stacking games, obviously, but particularly Tak. And the pick-up-and-sow mechanic of the Mancala family.

My thoughts began to coalesce around the idea that the heptagons would be where the pieces could be placed and move, and that the pentagons would be the “territory” that you were trying to capture by surrounding (custodial capture). I knew that I wanted a stacking game, as I find the mechanic intriguing. Finally, I wanted un-stacking to feel a bit like Mancala, where you “sow” the pieces one at a time as you go. I wanted the theme (or lack thereof) to be as primal as possible. Good vs. Evil. Shortened to three letters with no vowels as a nod to NXS. Thus EVL was born.

Thanks to some playtesting, and some excellent suggestions from play-testers, the rules have evolved somewhat from the original. In particular, the original version only allowed unstacking straight down a row, not across them. But that was limiting some really interesting tactics (as pointed out by a play-tester).

And so, we come to the final version of EVL, as described in the rules found here. I am very pleased with the final version, and I plan to release a 3D printed version this fall (2021).

A sandbox version created by Roman Ondrus is available here.

Rare game endings in NXS

…and my personal aversion to draws.

I admit it. I am biased against draws. If a game ends in a high proportion of draws, I consider it a flaw. One of my goals when designing NXS was to have a draw-less game. As far as I can determine, especially since I removed the second Merchant from the standard two-person setups, NXS can’t really end in a draw. Even if one player loses every ship but the Merchant, the other player still has a Merchant plus one other ship, which is enough to win (assuming you are playing to 10).

However, a player recently asked me about a hypothetical rare end condition that I had not considered. “What if I move in such a way that I give myself 10 spaces, but also give my opponent 10?” Under the current rules, this would be illegal:

It is illegal to move in such a way that you give your opponent enough territory to win, except:

Close call victory

If moving one of your pieces will give your opponent the requisite number of spaces to win, but will also give you more territory than your opponent, you still win the game.

Example: Moving your piece gives your opponent 10 spaces, but also gives you 11 or more, you win the game in a close call.

But should it be? Here my personal aversion to draws is clearly coming through. If I move my piece in such a way as to give both my opponent and myself exactly 10 (or 11 or 12 for that matter), should that actually be a draw? And here is where the rare game ending comes into play. What if I can’t give myself a “close call” win, but if I don’t, my opponent will be able to win on their next move? Clearly it would be to my advantage to force a draw instead.

Should I allow for a draw in this rare situation? And if I do, how do I program it on BGA 😉

Random Goodness

If you’ve never heard of Chess960, I can hardly blame you. It is a somewhat obscure variant. I won’t replicate the Wikipedia article here. Suffice it to say, the idea came from the famous grand master Bobby Fischer. In order to get to a high level of chess play, you have to memorize a large number of openings. Some find this rote memorization to have a negative effect on creativity and skill. “Fischer’s goal was to eliminate what he considered the complete dominance of openings preparation in classical chess, replacing it with creativity and talent.” To facilitate this, Fischer proposed randomizing the back row of pieces.

I am not a chess player, but I was immediately fascinated by the idea of Chess960 when I first read about it, and felt the concept would be very applicable to NXS. In fact, NXS is far more suited to a random starting setup than Chess (in fact I included the loose idea of a random opening position as an official variant from the beginning). The nature of Chess dictates that you must have a front row of Pawns, you should have one Bishop on each color square, the King should be between the Rooks so that he may castle, etc. NXS has far fewer constraints. In reality, NXS has no constraints as to piece placement. But as I began experimenting with the concept, I found that practicality dictates a few small concessions.

The following assumes we are discussing a medium game setup between two players. The rotation of the pieces are not randomized, the standard front facing is used in all cases.

There are 14 pieces in NXS:

• 3 @ Merchant (3-0)
• 3 @ Cutter (3-2)
• 2 @ Man-o-War (5-4)
• 2 @ Frigate (4-3)
• 2 @ Corvette (4-2)
• 2 @ Brigantine (4-2s)

As discussed previously, two-player games of NXS are best with a single Merchant per player. That brings us to 12 pieces. However, that one Merchant is critical to the unique character of a game of NXS, so I want to ensure that each player always gets one. We’ll set it aside. This bring us to 11 pieces, of which 9 are randomly chosen. The Merchant is added back in, and (initially) the positions of all 10 pieces (within the standard board layout pattern) were chosen at random.

The first game I played against an opponent resulted in an interesting conundrum. A single Man-o-War was (randomly) placed in the back rank. This resulted in a very unsatisfying situation. This piece is (by design) so very slow. Both my opponent and I hardly used the piece. In the standard medium game setup, the Man-o-War is purposely placed front and center (the b1 hex). Here, it is a very useful piece for area control.

And so, much like in Chess960, a little order in the randomness makes for a better result.

My current implementation is to remove all Merchant and Man-o-War pieces. Eight of the remaining nine pieces are chosen at random. A single Man-o-War is placed at b1. A single Merchant is added, and the positions of these nine pieces are randomized and placed into the standard medium game layout. Obviously, this is more easily accomplished with a computer, but you can also get the same effect at home by randomly drawing slips of paper with the pieces names written on them.

As the name implies, Chess960 has 960 possible starting positions. Calculating permutations is not exactly my strong suit, but if I have it correct, I believe that NXS (following the given parameters) has 68,040 possible starting positions.

But calling it NXS-68040 seems a step to far, no?

Addendum: I don’t plan to implement the short game random setup on Board Game Arena. But if you wanted to play at home, I would recommend taking out all but one Merchant, both Man-o-War pieces, and one Cutter. Then randomly select seven of the remaining pieces. This gives 10,080 possible starting setups. I’m not going to try to calculate the long game. I would recommend placing the two Man-o-War pieces at d15 and d5, taking out two Merchants, and randomizing the remaining pieces.

Two Merchants, or not Two Merchants

that is the question…

And the short answer is; I am changing the default starting layouts for all three versions of NXS.  The short, medium, and long game are all changing (in two-player games) to a single-merchant version.

All of the new layouts are posted on my website.

The problem:

No matter how many times I have played NXS, there is just no substitute for thousands of eyes on something.  As of this writing, over 3000 people have played NXS on Board Game Arena.  And they have played over 2300 games.

Some of these players are very clever people.  Since the Merchant ship (the 3-0 piece) cannot be captured, many players have realized that if you place your Merchants correctly, you can create an impenetrable border position.  By impenetrable, I mean that there is no way for you to initiate any action that can progress the game forward.  You can offer to sacrifice a piece, they can choose not to take it.  You can “open” your border, allowing your opponent the opportunity to slip in and take territory, and they can choose not to accept.  True, they cannot win this way, but they can choose not to progress the game, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to force the action.

Possible solutions:

One possible solution would be to add some sort of “chess-like” rule regarding repeated board positions.  So if the two players are just moving the same respective piece back and forth, then the game is a draw. The problem here is that one player might not want a draw.  They may just want to drive their opponent nuts until they open their border enough, or leave enough pieces undefended, and then finally attack.  They might “fiddle” pieces in the back, never repeating a position two turns in a row.  NXS shouldn’t be contest to see who flinches first.

The solution for that would be to have a rule about “progressing the game”.  So if one player can be said to be holding up the game, not progressing forward into their opponent’s territory in other words, then would it be a loss for the stalling player?  But what if neither player is progressing the game?  A draw I suppose.  But defining this as a clean rule would be challenging to say the least.

NXS is a pretty clean game in terms of rules, and I really don’t want to add a new one unless absolutely needed.  And, frankly, I’d rather have a game where a draw is extremely unlikely, or even impossible.

And, at least for me, the stuck border situation just isn’t fun.  It reminds me a bit of Terrace.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Terrace.  But it does suffer from “stuck” corner positions.  Especially in the long game, or the four person game.  You often get these painful high corner situations where nobody can really do anything, and it definitely takes some of the fun out of the game.  I don’t want that for NXS.

The good news:

The great thing about this situation is that it is remarkably easy to solve without adding a rule to NXS.  By design, the starting position layouts are flexible.  If you don’t like one, or there is a problem, then just pick a new layout!  So, I created single-merchant layouts for each of the official starting setups.

With a single merchant, an impenetrable border position just isn’t possible.  Yes, I miss having two merchants.  Getting a couple of merchants deep into enemy territory and forcing them to block your territory capture (and thus not focus on their attack) is a strategy I have employed many times.  Setting up your pieces behind a couple of merchants and forcing a wedge into your opponent’s territory is a blast, and it’s hard to defend against.  But honestly, they can also become a crutch when all you do is race them to the border and park comfortably behind an impenetrable wall.  I was as guilty as anyone of this tactic.

The even better news is that if you don’t like the new default layouts, there is nothing stopping you from from using the originals, or any starting setup you want!

Board Game Arena and other news

As of 1/24/2020, NXS is live on Board Game Arena!

As of this writing, 538 people have played 508 games of NXS, and someone has already arranged a tournament.  I am very happy about this result.  For over 20 years I have just wanted to get NXS in front of people, and BGA has allowed me to do just that.

I previously described the process of getting the game up and running, so I won’t re-hash that.  So far I have only had one real bug reported, so that feels pretty good.

I have also recently had another milestone with NXS.  I finally got a publisher to take a look at NXS!  So far all my submissions have been met with polite refusals.  Getting someone to even look at an abstract is an accomplishment, so I’m excited.  Obviously, publishers only take a small percentage of their submissions to print.  So I’m not getting my hopes up too high, but it feels like progress.

The Board Game Kaptain

NXS: Man-o-War has been reviewed by The Board Game Kaptain!

Spoiler alert: NXS received a 8.5/10!  They used words like “wonderful” and “brilliant” to describe NXS.  I am absolutely over the moon about this review, and I thought it would be fun to write my own review of their review.

The story

The first thing to understand, is that finding a board game reviewer that isn’t actually openly hostile (or at best apathetic) towards abstract strategy games is a challenge.  It’s just a fact of the genre.  People go nuts for anything with dice and cards, but an abstract?  Not so much.

I was looking for reviews of a couple of games from XV Games.  I was working out a game trade with their owner, and I wanted to see which ones held the most interest for me.  A review of Chartae by The Board Game Kaptain came up at the top of my YouTube search.  I was immediately impressed with his format.  He talks about the game, he does a mini tutorial of the game, he reviews the game, and finally he gives it a rating.  I really appreciate this format.  It gives an excellent overview.  I also appreciate that he has co-reviewers on with him.  Sometimes it is Alex, sometimes Lynn, but it is nice to have a couple of different perspectives on each game.

I was thrilled to find a reviewer that wasn’t apathetic towards abstract strategy games.  In fact, he has a whole bunch of them!  I spent quite a bit of time watching all of his abstract reviews, and I thought to myself “I’ve got to get this guy (and his team) to review NXS!”

My assumption going into it was that he wouldn’t be too keen to review a game that wasn’t commercially available in the traditional sense.  I am still self-publishing NXS by printing copies as fast as I can on my home 3D printers.  You aren’t going to find NXS in your local game store.  But to my surprise, he seemed more than happy give NXS a look!  So off in the mail went a copy.  The “Deluxe Nautical Colors” edition to be exact.

I waited nervously for my review.  Would they love it?  Hate it?  A couple of pictures of games in progress showed up on his Instagram, which I took as a good sign.  Then I got an indication that he must at very least not hate it.  The Kaptain contacted me and told me he wanted to purchase a copy to give away in a contest!  Wow, what an honor!  A bit later, he also gave me a hint that the game was going to get a good review.

But how good is good?  I may be wrong, but I am *fairly* sure that in all of the abstract reviews I had seen on his channel, I had never seen better than a 9/10.  I might be mistaken, but I think that is right.  And what that tells me is that a 9/10 is as good as it gets.  So I was very hopeful that I might get something 7.5 and up.  An 8 would have made me very happy.

And then, my Christmas present arrived early.  The Kaptain released his review of NXS on 12/24, and I received an 8.5!

As is usual with his reviews, the Kaptain (and Alex) discussed the game.  They were very impressed with the physical components.  They really enjoyed the Age of Sail theme.  They weren’t too impressed with the box, but that is fair and expected.  I’m still running through my supply of old boxes.  Hey, they’re expensive 😉  My new box design will be beautiful (IMHO).

 

The one (minor) negative that they did mention was the price.  The Kaptain said that $50 was a bit pricey “for an abstract”.  From one point of view, that’s fair.  Certainly your average abstract is more like $30-$35.  He went on to mention that I was 3D printing them myself, and that probably had something to do with it.  Let me tell you, it does!  $50 is only high if you are comparing it to games that are mass produced in China.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to do that some day, and reduce the price.  But for now, NXS is *very* small batch (boutique if you will), and made in the USA.  Once I add up the cost of printer filament, boxes, rule-books, etc…  Let’s just say I am not exactly getting rich here, lol.  Also, are you paying $50 for an “abstract”, or for a box of 42 paint-able “minis”?  I bet if I was marketing them as minis, $50 wouldn’t seem high at all.

Oh, and let’s not forget shipping.  $50 includes “free” shipping in the US.  For those not in the know, there is no such thing as free shipping.  Especially if you are not a big company that ships millions of orders a year (and so probably get a huge bulk discount).  For those of us “boutique” creators, we have to go down to the good old US post office and pay $10-$15 per box (don’t get me started on international shipping).  You would think that people would rather pay the “real” price of the product, plus whatever shipping costs.  But you see, Amazon has spoiled us all.  It’s a running joke (that isn’t a joke) in the industry that if your game is $40 + $10 shipping, the customer will balk at it.  If it is $50 with “free” shipping… sold!  It is absolutely true, and an odd quirk of human psychology.

Then they moved on to the tutorial part of the review.  The Kaptain did an excellent job of explaining the rules of NXS in a very easy to understand way.  I was impressed.  Then they played through a few turns including piece capture and blocking, as well as explaining what territory was captured.  The only mistake was that Alex was treating his piece rotations as optional.  They are actually mandatory.

I often get asked why the rotation is mandatory.  I have found over the years that having optional rotations disrupts the flow of the game.  Too many times, you will be sitting there waiting for your opponent to either rotate or tell you they pass.  They didn’t want to rotate, but didn’t tell you.  Forcing the rotation creates a definite end to your turn.  It also has the benefit of making the game situation more dynamic.  On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with having a “house rule” where you can pass on rotating.

After the tutorial comes the review.  It was stellar.  As I mentioned before, they used words like “wonderful” and “brilliant”.  Alex called it “a game made for me.”  They wondered if it was my first game design (it is), but said it was impressive it whether it was my first or my 20th.  They really liked that there were three different setups to the game (short, medium, and long).  They seemed to really like the tactics created by the diagonal capturing and capture blocking (take that companies that said diagonal capture wasn’t intuitive).  They seemed impressed by the rule-book.  Basically, they had nothing negative to say.

Except about the name NXS.  I get it.  I really do.  I spent 20 years calling the game Nexus.  But when I went to add the game to Board Game Geek in 2015, there were 10 other games called Nexus!  I know, I know, sometimes there are more than one game with the same name.  But I just couldn’t.  I’m the kind of person who will never have a username like Kevin136781.  I will try and try until I find a unique username, and I certainly wasn’t going to have my game with the same name as 10 other games.  So how do I call it Nexus without calling it Nexus?  Well, I drop the vowels and spell it weird.  Voila, a completely original name pronounced like I had always pronounced it.  And if a few people mispronounce it?  Such is life.  The Kaptain made a similar comment during the review.

In conclusion, I would like to thank The Board Game Kaptain, and Alex, for the amazing review.  If you are a fan of abstracts.  If you are a fan of board games.  Subscribe to this YouTube channel.  You will thank me.  They are some of the best reviews out there.

Games that can be played on a NXS board

A HexHex4 game board is certainly nothing unique (although I don’t think there are any others that use them quite like NXS does).  So, I thought it would be interesting to keep a list of other games that can be played on a NXS board or boards (using common components like Go stones, Chess pawns, colored cubes, etc.)

Of course there is heXentafl (another game that I invented, based on Hnefatafl).

• Blooms, by Nick Bentley
• Bug, by Nick Bentley
• Nosferatu, by Chris Huntoon
• Annuvin, by Jeff Roy
• Sáto, by Kristian Järventaus
• Dodo by Mark Steere

Let me know if you find others!

nxs AT nxsgame DOT com

Board Game Arena

Partly thanks to some excellent advice from this blog, I decided to publish NXS on Board Game Arena.

According to BGA’s own promotional material, they have over 1.6 million users(!), and over 700,000 games played per day(!).  That is a lot of potential players for any game.  Additionally, their ELO system makes it attractive for players to try out new games in hopes of getting good rankings they might not be able to get with an established game.

For these reasons, it really made sense for me to get NXS running on their site.

Warning, here there be nerdy stuff:

BGA uses Javascript, PHP, and MySQL, all of which are very standard web technologies.  They also take care of putting your content in a mobile friendly format, which is awesome (although that has had some challenges, more on that later).  They also handle all of the notifications, player communications, rankings, etc.  It really is a great platform.

I had already implemented a playable version of NXS using these technologies, so that made the process much, much faster.  However, fitting NXS into the BGA platform definitely had some challenges.  For one thing, BGA games typically use something called CSS Sprites for their graphics.  I had implemented NXS using HTML5 Canvas, and I really, really didn’t want to re-do all of the graphical components.  Luckily, their developers were open to a different implementation.  Thanks BGA for being open minded!

The next hurdle was that I had initially implemented NXS entirely client side.  That means that all of the game logic (determining what is a legal move, etc.) was all done in the clients browser.  Only later did I add the ability to play over the internet.  But in order to make those changes small, I still kept all of the game logic client side.  As the BGA developers pointed out, this could be a problem if somebody with technical knowledge decided to intentionally cheat, and send bogus moves to the server.  So, that meant re-writing the important pieces in PHP on the server.  PHP is definitely the weakest area of the three languages for me, so getting quickly up to speed was important.

Some of the BGA design components were also quite tricky to understand.  I’m not exactly slow, and their game-state system was a mind bender for me.  But eventually, I sorted it out.

My HTML5 Canvas implementation has caused a couple of issues.  First, it is nice if things happen when you hover your mouse over a game component.  This can be a pain in Canvas, because there are no individual components to react.  The entire canvas reacts to a mouse move event, for example.  The means redrawing the entire canvas for everything, and I didn’t want to do that if I could avoid it.  So there are a few minor niceties missing that would be easier in CSS Sprites.  The bigger issues is the interaction with BGA’s mobile interface.  Something is going on that neither their developer nor I understand yet.  I don’t think it is a big deal, but it forces the player to zoom in using their zoom button before he/she can move a piece.  You really want to be zoomed in anyway, so that you can target a hex precisely.  But still, it is non-standard, so hopefully they will be able to sort it out.

Play-testing:

Play-testing with a couple of different users has been great.  They have made some excellent interface improvement suggestions that I was able to implement pretty easily.  They are really things I should have thought of in the first place.  But hey, that’s why more eyes are better, right?

Overall, this has been a great experience, and I’m very excited about getting NXS in front of more people soon!

Publishing an Abstract

As anyone who is an abstract strategy enthusiast probably knows, getting one published is a royal pain in the rear-end.  Publishers are understandably cautious about these wonderful games because they just don’t sell in the volumes that are needed to justify the production costs.

There are exceptions of course, like Tak and Azul, but they are definitely in the minority.  For the most part, they are a novelty that someone might buy for coffee table appeal.  The reasons for this have been discussed at length elsewhere.  Some people don’t like the lack of theme (to me this is an advantage!).  Some people don’t like how much deep thinking is required (they just want a “fun” game).  Some don’t like that you can only play with two players (this is not always so, and is not true for NXS).  Whatever the reason, they are not big sellers, and they don’t even tend to do well on Kickstarter.

I myself have had no luck in getting publishers to consider NXS.  Eventually I’ll write up a rant about one of the more ridiculous reasons I have been given, but that it neither here nor there.

So, how does one go about solving these problems?  I’m not honestly sure, but I feel like I am starting to see some light.

Let’s take the problems mentioned above one at a time.

Lack of theme:

At its core, NXS has no theme.  Arrows, dots, and lines tell you everything you need to know about how the pieces move.  And I absolutely love that.  It allows me to imagine whatever battle I want.  Cavalry and cannons?  Space ships?  It’s up to you.

I mean just look how simple, clean, and gorgeous this laser-cut wood version looks!  OK, I’ll stop tooting my own horn 😉  Besides, laser-cutting is very expensive, unless you do it in bulk, just like everything in the world of production.  Ugh.

But, for a lot of people, the lack of theme is a no-go.  They feel like it looks “boring”.  So, it is reasonable to look for an attractive theme to layer onto your game, especially if it fits the mechanics of the game well.

When I play NXS, I’ve always seen sailing ships from the Golden Age of Sail battling it out on the high seas.  Frigates and cutters and brigs, oh my!  So, why not embrace that?

So the arrows, representing direction, become sails.  That fits well, and rotating your piece becomes tacking your ship to a different heading.  The lines, representing attack, become cannons.  That fits pretty well (although capture is by replacement, so the metaphor is a tiny bit tortured, admittedly).  The only thing that was a bit challenging were the dots, representing distance.  Basically, what I am going for here is fewer sails and cannons represent a lighter, thus faster ship.  So what I settled on was little cannonball piles (or barrels) on the deck.  It looks good, it’s easy to count, and it fits the theme.  The barrels distinguish the 3-0 (invincible/unarmed piece).

Tiny ships!  I mean, come on.  Pretty cool, right?  You can practically hear the waves crashing 😉

And the good news is that I can cost-effectively 3D print these sets, and sell them on Etsy.  I’ll have a separate post about the “fun” challenges of 3D printing, but at least I can produce something!

Additionally, games with miniatures seem to be extremely popular.  Perhaps if I put this on Kickstarter at some point, with pictures of the pieces painted up like little pirate ships, it will catch on?  We shall see.

Only two players:

Obviously, this is solved in NXS.  The basic set comes with boards and pieces for three players.  Why include three sets by default?  Because NXS really shines with three players.  The typical “kingmaking” problem in multi-player abstracts is solved in NXS (because of the requirement that you get at least 1/3 of your required territory from each player).  Playing with three players adds a new dimension of interaction, tactics, etc.

But NXS isn’t only a three player game.  It can be played with four players.  Obviously, this requires extra equipment.  A fourth set of boards and pieces, and a neutral middle board.  I can see this being a stretch goal on Kickstarter.  Four player games are really a lot of fun, in a way even the three player version doesn’t match.  You have to get at least 1/4 of your territory from each of the two players not touching your board.  This forces you to “sail” across the neutral board and engage with all of the players.  There is a lot fun interaction between players.  A lot of complex tactics emerge, etc.

More than 4?  Possibly.  There is no physical reason you couldn’t play with six players, but I honestly am not sure what that would look like.  You would definitely need to put a clock on play to keep it moving.

Conclusion:

I feel like NXS has a lot going for it.  But finding a publisher will continue to be a challenge.  So I may have no choice but to go the Kickstarter route.  The biggest hurdle there is not knowing what I am doing.  From all accounts, running a Kickstarter is an art-form in itself.  Half science and half voodoo.  One way or another, you will hear about it here on the NXS nexus.