Author Topic: Solomon's Temple (redesign)  (Read 2949 times)

Dragon

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Solomon's Temple (redesign)
« on: August 04, 2020, 12:37:24 »
I've been working on a redesign of Solomon's Temple. It's a game about 20 years old now that I only recently played. I had been hoping to find some more good Bible-based games when I got this. Unfortunately, the game play was horrible. My wife and I slogged through one game of it, which lasted about 3 hours. My wife won, but hated it. Even though I was losing, I wanted to play it out to see how it ended.

I knew right away that the game needed to be redone. The artwork is decent, although, the way that they designed the cards made it very difficult to read in places. This made it especially difficult during the game because there are so many cards and sometimes similar ones had slight variations of how they worked. Original game play made it extremely easy to get stuck, if you didn't know what the limitations were to end the game, and on the flip-side, knowing what you needed to hold onto just made you frustrated when you got something too early.

My redesign eliminates some of the redundant components, makes additional players possible (we played with 3), and gets out of the rut of getting stuck like you would in the original. Let me know if you have copy of Solomon's Temple from Cactus Games and are interested in trying out my new design of the game. I'm planning to send them to the publishing company for review and possibly give new life to the game.
"Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? ... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on. Err, the button turns it on. Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes." - Roy (The IT Crowd)

Dragon

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Re: Solomon's Temple (redesign)
« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2021, 16:13:59 »
I did send my proposal to Cactus Games, but assume they would just prefer to forget that they ever made that game than deal with trying to fix it. For the benefit of everyone who already has the game, I'm attaching my rewrite to this post and anyone interested can try it out on your own.

Problems with the original game:

  • Difficulty reading cards.
  • Lack of movement through the deck along with requirements to play temple cards in a specific order means one player could be missing a card needed half way through the game or stuck with an unusable card from the beginning.
  • Excessive table space consumed by duplicate boards.
  • Unclear rules.

My redesign is an attempt to overcome these problems. Although I'm not including redesigned cards on the PDF, I'm simplifying the instructions on how to use them so that they are more consistent rather than having some fine print on some cards that reads differently than fine print on another similar looking card.

You will need an original set of the game to start, although about half of the components won't be used. At the beginning of my PDF, I'm including preparation instructions to remove the cards and things for my rule set. Also, the original instructions won't be necessary. I've tried to include everything in my PDF to explain how to play even if you've never played the original game.
"Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? ... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on. Err, the button turns it on. Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes." - Roy (The IT Crowd)