4th June 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - -APRIL-MAY 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone!
Strap yourselves in, because this might be our biggest studio round-up ever! Not only have we rolled the past two months into one round-up, but we’ve got some of the biggest announcements that we’ve ever made as a studio to cover.
From Talisman to Fury of Dracula, we’ve got lots of news about your favourite Games Workshop board games - and we’ve also kept working on Board Game Cafe too, and even managed a visit to the UK Games Expo!
We don’t normally mention this (as it’s implied each time!) but if you’re reading this, we massively appreciate you actively taking an interest in the things we’re doing here at Nomad Games - it’s thanks to the ongoing support from people like you that we can continue making great games for you.
Now that the soppy bit is over, let’s get into the full round-up!
Talisman: Digital 5th Edition officially got announced on May 23rd as part of the Warhammer Skulls festival, and you can wishlist it NOW!
This announcement was definitely the biggest thing to happen to us over the last 2 months, and keeping this announcement a secret from you all has been agonising. Since the physical release was confirmed earlier this year, many of you had been asking, poking and prodding us about the possibility of us making an adaptation of it. We’re so relieved to finally be able to show it off and talk about it.
Wishlists for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition are open now, and tons of you have already expressed your interest in this new chapter in Talisman history we’re making! Over the coming months, we’re going to be showing off more of what we’ve already been working on, what our ongoing development looks like and all the exciting changes we’ve made over the original Talisman: Digital Edition experience.
As part of celebrating the announcement of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, in May we made the base game for Talisman: Digital Edition free on Steam, GOG and mobile!
While we fully understand the move to free-to-play often sets off alarm bells in 2024, we published a full FAQ that answered a lot of the questions we imagined people would have about this change! You can read the full FAQ here.
Also, it turns out that announcing a whole new game and making your existing game free is what it takes to get noticed by cool folks like PC Gamer! Go us!
Back in 2022, we worked with our good friends over at Humble Bundle to launch the Talisman: Digital Edition Complete Collection, which contained Talisman: Digital Edition, Talisman: Origins and all the different expansions, characters and Legendary Decks for them!
Now that the base game is free too, we know a lot of players have been picking up this bundle so they can sync their Nomad Accounts and get all of Talisman: Digital Edition on their mobile device of choice - something we definitely encourage!
One of the reasons we announced Talisman: Digital 5th Edition when we did is because the annual Warhammer Skulls Festival took place on the 23rd of May! A celebration of everything Warhammer, our official announcement video was part of the Skulls Showcase video, but there were a ton of other cool, non-Talisman things announced too. It’s worth checking out the full showcase, if you’re interested!
Alongside all of the exciting Warhammer news, there were a ton of sales across all platforms on Talisman: Digital Edition, Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition and other Warhammer licensed titles - so if you managed to pick up anything from us during the sales, thank you!
Back in March, we rolled out the very first version of the Immortal Update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition. Since then, we’ve been rolling out regular updates for the game and in May, we officially released the full Immortal Update to the public!
You can check out the patch notes for the full release here. Be warned however, there’s a lot of changes!
Alongside the release of the Immortal Update, we also took some time to sit down with Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition community legend Scotsword, to discuss everything we’d been adding to the game over the previous month. Well worth a watch!
Two months is a lot of development time, and Board Game Cafe has had a ton of updates, improvements and progress made on it over the last two months! For anyone who hasn’t been keeping up, Board Game Cafe is our upcoming management game, where you’re tasked with running your own cafe full of your favourite officially-licensed board games. And you can wishlist it now!
Because there is so much for us to cover, we’ve broken down the highlights from development over the last 2 months in key milestones/achievements!
Added a Map UI
While we’ve been working hard on the user interface and menus that you’ll see while running your cafe day-to-day, we spent some time over the last 2 months working on a new screen for the map menu. This is where you’ll be able to choose which cafe you want to run, see stats about each one and see your overall progress.
Added a ‘remove UI’ option
While this is more a feature for grabbing in-development screenshots (like the ones in this round-up!), but we’ve now made it so that when you press ‘CTRL+H’, all of the UI elements in the game get hidden. This feature also works on the main menu, but because that screen is ALL user interface, it just makes this happen:
Not the most exciting main menu ever!
Updating Food Satisfaction
In April, we noticed that in games where 4+ customers were playing at once, they’d take an absolute age to play games that should only take an hour. After some investigating, we realised this was caused by a number of different systems interacting in a way we’d not anticipated. Basically, this is what would happen:
A group of players would sit down to play a game.
After a certain point, one of the players would get hungry and want a snack.
One of the players would would get up and order something, meaning everyone else stopped playing the game.
They would come back to the table with their snack, by which time one of the other players would have got hungry while waiting.
The player who’d got hungry while waiting would get up to order a snack, meaning everyone else when back to not playing the game while they waited for them to return.
This meant that a group of 4 players would be playing a game a turn at a time before they needed to stop, because they kept having to wait for whoever had left the table to return. To solve this, we made it so that customers order food/drink as soon as a game starts even if they aren't quite hungry/thirsty enough to order just yet, so they don't need to order mid-way through a game. Just like how in real life, you’ll make sure you’ve got your snacks ready before you start your game!
Special Customers
Something we’ve been working to get included in BGC since day one were unique customers who had unique quirks. Over the last two months, we’ve been slowly adding these customers to the game, so now you can encounter colourful characters like “Chester Chuffington”, the retired train driver who exclusively plays train themed board games, and his poor wife who lovingly puts up with his odd game choices.
The Great Uncleaning of ‘24
One of the things your customer will care about in Board Game Cafe is how clean your cafe is. A messy cafe leads to unhappy customers!
We’ve had this system in place for a while, but about a month ago during testing, we accidentally pushed our customers too far. The results were… interesting:
The good news is, we now know what happens when we push the game too far, and can make sure that if you do ever let your cafe get completely overrun by rubbish, the game knows what to do.
Adding New Themes
One of the features of Board Game Cafe that we’re working hard on is customisation options for you while you play. There are tons of different physical board game cafes out in the real world, and each one has it’s own unique style and theme behind it. We’ve just added a futuristic sci-fi theme to the available choices, so you can set phasers to fun.
Furniture Placement
There’s no point in adding all this cool stuff you can decorate your cafe with, if you can’t do any decorating, right? In the last two months, we’ve also been working on improving the system we use for placing, moving and adjusting the furniture in your cafe. Check it out in the short clip below!
Adding Specific Events
One of the challenges that you’ll face in Board Game Cafe is when specific groups of players will all come into your cafe at once. Having a load of pensioners come into your cafe at once will stress your tea reserves, put a big demand on your classic games and more!
Similarly, you can now book in school trips to your cafe, which will mean you have to ensure you have everything a group of rowdy, possibly ill-behaved teenagers will need/demand from you.
Back in May, we rolled out an update for CATAN® - Console Edition that included fixes for a number of community reported issues, along with adding support for 5-6 player multiplayer games on all platforms!
We know a number of players had been patiently awaiting this update, so we massively appreciate all the patience that you showed while we were busy working behind-the-scenes to make sure this update rolled out to all platforms at the same time.
Back in April, we made another exciting change for Talisman: Digital Edition - including it in Google Play Pass!
This meant that anyone with a Google Play Pass subscription can now access Talisman: Digital Edition, all expansions and all characters as part of their ongoing subscription.
After rolling out the Google Play Pass version of Talisman: Digital Edition, we saw a big jump in Android players picking up the game - so thank you if you decided to give Talisman a go!
You can find out more about the Google Play Pass version of Talisman: Digital Edition in our full blog post.
Due to all the madness around getting the announcement for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition ready in May, Tom sadly didn’t have time to stream Board Game Cafe for you all over on our official Twitch channel - but now he can!
Every Wednesday in June, tune into twitch.tv/nomad_games to watch Tom play the latest in-development version of Board Game Cafe. He’ll be showing off what we’ve been working on, answering your questions and just generally having a chill hangout!
If you make sure to follow our Twitch channel, you’ll get notified when he goes live - and we’ll think you’re really cool. So what are you waiting for?
While we didn’t have an official presence/stall at the UK Games Expo, the Nomad Games team were still there! A number of our team managed to attend the UK’s premiere board game expo, and saw a ton of cool board games, cool people and even cooler copies of Talisman: 5th Edition!
A bumper round-up means a bumper mailbag! You’ve all sent in some great questions over the last 2 months, so thanks for that. Don’t forget, you can send questions to our ‘Monthly Mailbag Questions’ channel to our Discord, which you can find here!
From Polygon Loft via Twitter
RNG in board games is usually visible to players in the form of dice, whereas RNG in video games is usually completely concealed. When digitising a board game how much liberty do you think should be taken with obfuscating RNG to players?
When we’re adapting a board game into a video game, we actually have a fairly easy job when it comes to what RNG to obfuscate! First, we look at all of the elements that make up a game that involve RNG (dice rolling and drawing adventure cards in Talisman: Digital Edition for example) and see what elements of that RNG are presented to the player, and what is kept hidden.
Anything that is already public knowledge (or the odds are public knowledge) will be fully visible, because if you were playing Talisman in real life, you’d know that rolling a dice has a 1/6 odds of each different result. There’s no need for us to conceal that from the player, unlike in tactical games where not showing the player that they have a 60% chance of being hit according to the code (as an example) is something that could break immersion for the player.
From Merliora via Twitter
Next toad expansion WHEN - I need it.
It’s toad-ally coming. The more you ribbit on about it though, the more we know you want it.
From Kirby Thompson via Twitter
Nothing about 🐸, any news on catan? It has now been two months. Is it true the game been abandoned so the update will never come?
We appreciate that it took much longer than we’d like, but we hope that now the update for CATAN - Console Edition is out, you’re happy with the fixes included and they address your issues!
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
If you’d like to follow us, keep up to date with us and generally just see all the cool things we do, you can find all our social links, games and more over on our Linktree - how handy!