Category Archives: Board Games

Griller Z Off to the Races

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Whew a lot has been going down in the past month.  Griller Z’s latest print test was just sent to the printing company, and a fresh copy with the new box art should be arriving in a few weeks.  The final rules are still being flushed out, but it feels like it’s getting really close to production ready great.  That of course will be left up to whoever gets the first review copies (yikes!).

I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the challenges I’ve learned over the course of a year of Griller Z development (wow it really has been that long).  One of the most interesting aspects about designing a board game has been the constant state of flux everything is in.  From the beginning until the end of development (and I’m not even done yet) really anything can be cut or added.  Perhaps this is because I’ve been doing most of the heavy lifting alone (Art & Design), but I think it’s important to be adaptable.

Griller Z is still version 1.0, but honestly that’s 3 complete overhauls with new art (to some degree) in each release.  It’s been a real labor of love and sheer will power to get it this far.  It feels really funny/terrible to be so completely certain that you have a winner to then have players take and break your hard work in seconds.  Complicated is only good if it’s simple?  What does that even mean, I’m not sure but I’ll tell you that Griller Z biggest lesson learned was that even the most amazing system in the world is probably too complicated.  People play games for fun!  You’ve got to make your players use their brains, but make it simple enough to be fun first.

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Apologies for not continuing to post news about Griller Z, product reviews or anything new for a few days.  Getting Griller Z to print was a huge priority, and managing some of the other Flux 6 Studios initiatives always suffers when I’m pulled into Griller.  I sure hope it’s a year well worth my time.

More soon, Frank.

Griller Z Characters

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Changes are inevitable, but Griller is getting close.  The core game system is finally ready, and we’re just tweeking and polishing now.  In the coming weeks a comprehensive video review of how to play Griller Z will be hitting the webz.  For now here’s a little taste of the latest card action!

First up are a few character cards!  Every character card is 100% unique with stylized art of the character on both the front and back of the card.  Every character has a passive pool of 4 skill points that dictate how they start the game.  These points can be allocated in BURN or ROT, SKILL(et) & MUNCH  Humans typically cook with BURN and Zombies generally cook with ROT.  We don’t discriminate however, go ahead with your bad Zombie food human Grill Master self!

character_back_01 character_frnt_01

First up is Shirly Shish-Kabob.  She means business, and is one of the most skilled characters in all of Griller Z.  SKILL(et) does a lot of different cool things we’ll talk about soon.  As a tease, consider her one of the better characters for sabotaging others, and cooking up orders with precision.

character_back_02 character_frnt_02

Ricky is a brute of a cook.  With 3 passive ROT right out of the gate, this boy is going to stink up the grill very quickly.  Look for him to infect a lot of food very fast.  With no passive SKILL(et) to protect him, he may be an easy target for sabotage.

So short, but hopefully sweet!  That’s just the way Ricky likes his rotten hotdogs.  We wouldn’t want to spoil (pun intended) too much just yet, but more will be trickling out in the coming days.