April 16, 2011: Munchkin Axe Cop Progress Report

It's coming along well. It was slow going for a while, but now we're rolling:

• Sunday night I got most of the Munchkin Axe Cop cards more or less finished and e-mailed a question to Ethan Nicolle - basically "Would you ask Malachai what shoes Dinosaur Soldier wears?")
• Monday night I got Malachai's answer, giggled madly, put it into the game, and finished balancing the cards.
• Tuesday night I finished the first rules draft (which, as usual, means "Go through the last Munchkin rules published, add, subtract, and rephrase, and then hit myself on the head and ask how we're going to fit all this stuff in").
• Wednesday afternoon Andrew reviewed the cards, and Wednesday night he ran a playtest. We had a good mix of players - some were Axe Cop fans, some had never seen the strip. Three games were played. Everybody had a good time.
• Thursday after Senior Staff meeting we reviewed the playtest.
• Now the rules and cards go to Ethan Nicolle, and next week, or as soon as schedules permit, we'll see whether he likes the direction we're going and what HIS evil ideas are. That'll lead to a second draft, and we'll start building final card graphics (yes, you'll get to see some of those soon).

We're now shooting for an October release. We'd hoped for September, but that assumed that I could just sit right down and write the whole game in couple of a weeks. That didn't quite happen. Axe Cop is absolutely perfect source material; my friend Jan Hendriks called it "a rich and untapped vein of weirdness." But putting that weirdness into the Munchkin format - and, especially, keeping the cards compatible with the existing Munchkin games - took some time. It didn't help that my initial approach to character design wasn't going anywhere. (Here's a public shout-out to Will Schoonover for the "gee, I figured you'd do it THIS way" suggestion that broke the logjam.)

-- Steve Jackson