Hippodice

In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and some time later he created me. Is that too far back? Three years ago, on 11/04/05 I decided that I wanted to try and make a game that I could submit to Hippodice in November ’06. The goal was to make a game as good as Puerto Rico. I picked a time period that my wife told me about that seemed interesting and Mark Galvez and I started brainstorming what we wanted to see in the game.

Hippodice is a game design contest a game club in Germany holds each year starting in November. There are no prizes. You submit your rules, an abstract of the game, and some pictures. The game has to be unpublished and not going to be published. They say they get from 100 to 150 of these from year to year. The members of the club review all the submissions and grade them. Then they contact the owners of the top 30 to 50 games and request they send a full working copy of the game for play testing. They play test these games for next few months and grade them. Then they pick about 10 games one is the winner, some more are runners up, and the rest are honorable mentions. A list of these games and descriptions is sent to several game publishers. Those publishers often then send representatives to the awards ceremony where the games are available to be played.

Well I didn’t make it in 2006 or in 2007; but this past October I sent Noblemen to Hippodice for the contest that begins November 2008!

I don’t think it’s as good as Puerto Rico but I like it and I need to move on. So the development of Noblemen is finally done, unless of course some publisher wants me to continue.

Here is my submission: Noblemen Hippodice 08.zip