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Commentary and processes of J C Lawrence:
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Oooo my pretty precious!
As those who follow my Twitter feed know, Corner Lot did rather well at the Kublacon design competition, coming in the top 3 and quite likely being second. Julie, the organiser of the competition said that if it had player aids it would have won.
Several changes:
- Player aids! Yep, there are now neat little player aids which contain the most frequently requested information (the 4 bonus categories and the 3 actions)
- Spiffy new art without conflicting colour pairs (all credit goes to Ariel Seoane here)
- An advanced variant which simply ups some costs and cash drains and thus significantly changes the timing and pacing of the Empty Lot cards1
New rules. Playtesters will find that the file at the same magic URL has the new card images and rules.
Footnotes
- The increased cost of the Empty Lot cards is not cast in stone, the other two values likely are ↩
Comments
A small typo: the advanced rules talk about empy lots. The new art looks spiffy indeed.
JC, could you please resend the link to me. I’m interested in seeing how the changes turned out.
Thanks. Fixed.
Email (about to be) sent.
Thanks for resending. I like how the location-based theme was implemented. However, I find the text on the background map to be distracting. I also became attached to the candy colors which have now been muted, but maybe just because that was the first version I saw.
Have you considered scaling down the theme to areas within a city? San Francisco or New York for example? The theme works better for me at this level. I never understood Manhattan’s theme implemented in a similar way to the current version of Corner Lot.
Yo Ariel! FWLIW the game concept started around properties in cities, set in the late 1940s. Ariel picked that ball up very nicely.
Printed here it almost vanishes in the general blur of the background.
Yeah, I liked them too, but this presents more easily and has a lower digestion factor. The overt styling also gets a fair bit of praise.
Briefly. I didn’t find neighbourhoods as resonant as cities and few cities outside of London and New York have more than a couple easily regions that are easily recognised by a global audience.
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