meeplespeak

Reason

2011-05-19T04:58:00.000-07:00

All rules need reasons for existing. If you can't pin down a good reason for a rule to exist, it should be pulled out of the game. In fact, I'd almost go as far as stating that the rules need to have a mechanical reason for existing; if a rule solely exists for a thematic reason, it probably needs to be re-thought.

And then there's another step deeper, where you have to decide if the reason itself is important enough to warrant the reason being there.

And this is one of the things I hate about chess. Just what the heck is the reason for the en passant rule there for? Remember, all pieces have their own set of moves, which are strictly followed, well except, in the one special case...

(I'm willing to give the "pawns can move 1 Space forward, EXCEPT ON THEIR FIRST MOVE THEY MAY MOVE TWO SPACES exception," given that there are a few good reasons for that to exist: It speeds up play at the start of the game, and it does offer, I think, a few more strategic choices.)

Anyway, rules without reasons just clutter the game. Rules with poor reasons should be given better reasons or removed completely if you want a tight game that flows. Rules that provide for multiple reasons are even better.

There's probably some interesting way to analyze games by looking at the reasons. Of course, reasons are pretty subjective. Here's a sampling of reasons things exist, or in some cases removed, from My Little Vineyard.

Spoilage - Originally existed as a reason to include weather/seasonally effects...was removed to due "player reset" symptoms and made the game too restrictive.
Research Books - Currently probably one of the stronger rules/reason sets as they are currently implemented. They are used as a fallback option, when there is nothing else available to do for the player. And they provide for a general "growing machine" bonus over the course of the game without directly scoring.
Fertilizers - These are thematically very strong, but on first glance, they are a weak choice. However, while they typically don't provide many points, they are very strong in removing options for competing players.
Wine Cellar - Thematically strong, provides strategic options as to score now, or hope to score better in the future decisions.
Market Place - Thematically okay, provides tactical options and some screwage against other players.
Dice Pools - Flexible way of having a group of stuff meaning one thing to one player, while meaning something else to another. Also, it's the unique feature of the game
First Round Dice Roll exception - Yeah, I'm not to happy with the first round requirement of hacing players being FORCED to roll multiple dice, as opposed to letting them decide. But the reason is very strong why it exists; the dice pool needs to be seeded somehow in a somewhat balanced fashion.

Of, course there's a lot of weaker of stuff, too. The current variety of fertilizers have pretty reasons to exist; in fact, I could probably get rid of either wood chips and volcanic ash without missing much. On the other hand, variety is always nice to have.

Thers something to be said about the potential of drafting different sets of grapevines that a player can use to spice up the variety even more, just to be sure that there isn't one clear path to victory. I'm not sure I want to add that complexity to the game at this point...and that would entail all sort of other balancing issues, I think. Which is a good enough reason to leave it alone for now.

Time

2011-05-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in a play-by-forum game of Fiasco using the All the Damn Time playset. It's considered to be a dangerous, expert playset, mostly because everybody plays the SAME CHARACTER just in different time periods of his life, and they start intermingling in strange time-travel-y ways.

Unlike my other Fiasco experiences, we've been playing this one pretty serious and "realistic" as far as a sci-fi time travel thing can go without all the wacky Fiasco-eque-ness that usually ensues. The core thrust of the story so far is that we are all playing Sam, a garage-shop kind of scientist with aspirations of time travel, who is married to an artist. He has received funding from a mysterious technology group. And, oh yeah, his wife's artwork will be worth a LOT of money in the future, somehow.

I guess I just wanted to save this "scene" here that I "played out." For reference, in the future, Sam and Abby have an argument that causes an experiment that Sam is working on in their studio/lab to explode, with Abby saving Sam's life in the process, even though she dies.

A black die was selected, indicating that the result of the scene should end badly for Sam.

**************************

Sam sits at his desk. It's 1AM, and the only light that illuminates his office is a single wash of light from a desktop fluorescent. All around him, journals and notebooks spread about, open to seemingly random pages.

With a sigh, Sam leans back in his chair. "It's not going to work," he mutters to himself, "nothing is going to work."

"Nothing."

He stares around in his room in silence. Abby's not home, having gone to some high-falootin' art party. He thought that having the house all to himself would give him some time to think; to make the equations work.

But they don't. Not even close.

"Time to throw in the towel," Sam thinks. Too much of his life has been wasted chasing this empty venture. Time for a new beginning. A new start. Time for more time with Abby.

These journals have nothing of importance anymore. They are just a collection of flawed theories and bad math. Time to get rid of them....

THE KILN!!!! At Abby's studio. One big hot oven. Surely, that will burn all of these useless pages to nothing but a tiny pile of ash!

Sam gathers up a large collection of journals and notes into a big plastic storage bin. It's heavy, but he manages to carry it out to the truck of his car without pulling a disc in his back.

By the time he reaches the studio, it's begun to drizzle. By the time he manages to carry the bin into the back door of the studio, there's a steady stream of rain.

And by the time he warms up the kiln, and opens the bins, it's a full-on thunderstorm that is brewing outside of the small studio.

CRACK!!! An instant flash of white and a loud boom of thunder knocks Scot-Sam to the ground as the light quickly flicker off. Sam fumbles in the dark to a far corner. "I think that's where the flashlight was," he thinks. The wind of the storm howls through the back door.

But it doesn't stop. It's a voice. A woman's voice in pain.

Sam doesn't find the flashlight...but the burning coils from the kiln glow bright red through some cooling vents, powered by natural gas. His eyes adjust to the darkness and growing soft light of burning red heating elements. They are adjusted well enough to see the shape of a woman crumpled on the floor by the door. The smell of burnt clothing a flesh begins to flood Sam's nostrils.

"Sam...." It's Abby's voice. Dear God, it's Abby.

Sam rushes over to her, tripping over a small tricycle, "How the heck did that get here?" he thought, kicking it out of the way. The tricycle rattle quickly over to a bookshelf near the kiln, banging into the wood structure solidly, dropping some unused telephone books behind the kiln, which in turn knocked around the valve that connected the natural gas line to the kiln.

But all of this didn't matter to Sam. He knelt down next to Abby. Even in the dim red glow of the room from the heated kiln he could see she was badly scarred across the left half of her face...a recent burn.

"Christ, what the he'll happened to you?"

Abby lifted her head up weakly, as another thunder clap rumbled from above. She smiled slightly, "Sam...you're whole again. You're..." she grimaced in pain.

"Jesus, stay right there, will you. We'll get you to the hospital"

Sam raced over to the desk, noting a small pack-and-play crib off to one side with a glance of lightning through the front window.

He reached for his cars keys with a quick grab. Followed by a swipe at his cell phone in which his arm stopped still as a statue as the blue glow of his phone emitted a string of text messages that froze him.

"Party went longer than expected"
"Staying at my moms tonight"
"got a couple of good sales leads, talk to you in the morning"

Sam found himself breathing heavily, the rest of his body still. He jerked his head around to look at the shadow of the woman behind him.

Abby had managed to crawl herself up the door frame. She leaned against it in a hump, exhausted, wincing. In between painful breaths she muttered.

"I saw it, Sam. I saw it....all. The tradeshow...the morning after that night...on the library roof...the...trial...that accident at the lake...that night you won the trophy....bowling alley...the..."

Her eyes got wide with fear.

"The explosion... MY GOD, the explosion...the operating table...what they were able to piece back...the CNN interview..the foothills over by the zoo..."

She crumpled to the floor writhing in pain.

Sam rushed to her side and picked her up. Even though she had been talking slowly in short breaths, Sam's mind was racing with what he was hearing as if she was talking at a million miles per hour. Some of the things she mentioned had indeed already happened. But others? Were these future events? This clearly wasn't "his" Abby.

But now there was no way he could take her to the hospital either. He knew the philosophical issues of two Abby's existing in the same time stream like the back of his hands.

He carried her over to the old, musty couch that Abby would often take naps on during her long "creative impulse" sessions. He held her close, feeling how heavy and slow her breaths were.

Another lightning flash. Across the room Sam noticed the family portrait on the wall. It was a picture of him in his finest suit (granted, not too fine, all things considering), with his arms around the waist of Abby, who held an infant boy. Both parents smiled proudly.

Sam rubbed his eyes, wondering what kind of tricks the night, the storm, and this other Abby were playing on his mind.

"You're so warm," she spoke softly, "and you're whole again." She looked up at him, longingly, determined, "Don't let me wake up again."

"What?"

Her one good eye that wasn't scarred burned into his eyes with as much energy that she could muster, "When I wake up...that's...when it happens....I don't want to do...do it again....it hurts tool...much..."

"What? What happens? What do you want me to do?"

She put her head down on his lap. He could feel the tangle of burnt hair through his fingers.

"I'm too tired..I can't do it...but you..have the strength...don't let me wake up..."

A flood of memories came pouring in to Sam's mind, an uncontrolled river of images, and sounds, and touches, and smells all at once of his son. His son, Max! Maximilian!! How could he ever forget about his only son!!!!!

"Please, for me, Sam...let this be the end of it..." her voice trailed away.

***********

Her heart didn't take long to stop beating after he had made the cut. It was only a few bucketfuls. Hopefully, the heat of the kiln would scorch the blood away. The body on the other hand....

He turned to watch the final ghost of Abby's body simply fade away, as if it was never there, returned to the ether. The buckets he held, on the other hand, still contained her fluids. His mind still raced. Time travel MUST be possible! Maybe it has something to do with REM sleep, or brain chemicals during the waking process? Of course...Sam had never taken into account the human elements in his equations!!! That must be the missing puzzle piece!

The storm had passed outside. There was no thunder anymore, but a constant potter of rain continued. It would be dawn soon.

He opened the top of the kiln. He had this niggling thought that he should avoid walking into a tricycle by the kiln. But it was a foolish thought, and Sam laughed at it as having a tricycle in this place would be ridiculous. He looked at a bare corner of the room, and felt like "something" should be there, like something had gone missing from it's proper place, but he couldn't fathom it.

Once dawn broke he sat on the couch, reviewing his notes, looking for places where he once had mystery, but now had clarity thanks to the "other" Abby. He looked at the morning light that was streaking across the bare wall opposite to where he sat, and had this funny feeling that that would be a perfect place to hang their wedding picture.

***********************

It didn't end badly for Sam in the typical Fiasco style, which usually means getting thrown into a trunk of a car. But he did wind up killing his wife-from-the-future at her request, and doesn't remember the son he never had.

So I can't say it ended that well for him. Well, except that he doesn't give up on the time travel thingy. At least he's got that going for him.

Loose

2011-05-03T15:35:00.001-07:00

Well, my suspicions were correct. Another playtest of My Little Vineyard with a "looser" set of rules did many things, all of which led to a better experience. Many of the rules changes weren't changes at all, but removals. Which is a good thing. Solving problems by subtraction instead of addition, or worse, addition of exceptions (as discussed a little bit later) is generally a bad place to be.

A lot of the complexity of rules centered around the removal of spoilage. During various parts of the game, most of your warehouse of supplies would be returned to the stock if you didn't use them "before winter came." Thematically, this made some amount of sense. But from a game play aspect, it really required way too much pre-planning for a player to think of, especially in a game using dice where you might not get the die roll you want. Not only did spoilage punish the player who rolled unlucky, or poorly selected a roll based on bad stategy, it resulted in a case where it "reset your world" thought various points in the game.

And that reset of the world turned out to be a problem. Early on in the design of the game, the desired reasoning was that the risk to make the better scoring wines was the potential that your supplies for it would be spoiled out of existence. As it turns out, just the fact that the higher scoring wines simply "cost more" is good enough. One of the more interesting statement on the last failed playtest which turned out to be wiser than it seemed at the time was that a game of this type should be a steamroller game...one where you start by building little things, and end with building big things. Spoilage never let you reach beyond the little stuff.

Another aspect that was changed to fit into this simpler world are the way the research books are implemented. And their change resulted in killing two birds with one stone. The research books now apply across the board to any barrel of wine you make, and you can purchase a research book at any time for yur turn for the cost of one die. Before, you only got a book when you produced a barrel...and it was only good for the type of wine you produced to earn it. Which resulted in some confusion as to when the book applied it's bonus (when you first picked it up) and tended to make player concentrate on a single wine type.

Now, with the one die pick for the book, it gives player something they can always do when there are no other actions available (the game was missing a fallback action when the was no other decent option available) as a beneficial side effect of a generalized bound-for-all book.

Anyway, I'm back to feeling good about the game again.

One other discussion about the game that we had was about defining different rounds to as doing something specific. For example, when you produce a barrel of wine, you can store it in your wine cellar, whee it will "ferment" and gain points at the end of every round, or simply ship it to score it's current value. The problem with barrels in your cellar is that they don't score for you unless you ship them out of your cellar which requires an additional action.

One of the things I liked about this system is that over the course of the four or five rounds you play, the first rounds are spent storing barrels, while the last rounds are spent shipping barrels. However, it is up to the player to decide whethat tipping point occurs. If players aren't careful, players will wind up at the end of the game with barrels stuck in their cellar scoring zero points.

Anyway, this is a choice OF THE PLAYER. There was some discussion of programming the rounds (round 1 and 2 are storing only rounds, 3 and 4 are shipping only rounds, etc). I believe that this is needless rules creep, and could prevent players from experiment with unusual strategies as they get better with the game, and falls into the category of "rules exceptions" which I don't like. Otherwise known as "the rules are this, except when..."

Chess has a few "rules exceptions" that bug the he'll out of me. Castling your king, and en passant, which are both rules that break piously discussed rules.

As it is, the game currently has one rule exception...on the first round of a season, every player must roll at least 5 (changing to 4) dice to add to the center pool. After that, it's one or more. I'm not a big fan of this exception, but it helps with first player advantage, and gets a lot of dice out in the middle of the table to start the round in a methodical manner. So, I can live with it.

I hope to have the next version of it up soon, but another, stranger project is sucking away at my time. Which I may or may not talk about depending on how that works out.

Those Summer Nights

2011-04-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

So, in case you are wondering; no, you cannot load custom fonts on an iPad.

I came to this conclusion fairly quickly. I have recently received an iPad2. One of the first things I wanted to do was load up one of it's "fully featured" word processing apps, and create a Fiasco play set on it. Unfortunately, Fiasco uses a bunch of fonts that aren't considered to be Apple approved. And with that out of the way....

One of the things the Fiasco guys have been taunting Fiasco fans with is their upcoming compendium with all sort of new Fiasco goodies, including a hack of the system that let's you play the game in a way to recreate 80's teen comedies in the style of John Hughes movies. They (well, Jason Morningstar, the prime designer of the game) likes to call it a "gentler" fiasco.

This dovetails into a recent spring break trip where we took the kids to a local indoor water park for a few days. Floating around the lazy river, one can't help but notice the many late-teens who are life guarding the place, kind-of watching over numerous kids under 8 years old and their parents. Not too mention the kids workgint eh towel counter, the ticket redemption area of the arcade, etc. It can't be THAT luxurious of a life, but granted, probably better than slinging burgers.

One of the movie I've enjoyed in the last year was Adventureland, which did a really good job as far as capturing the whole 80's teen movie zeitgeist. And it seemed to capture some of the realities of someone I knew who used to work summers at Great America. Things like there being a sort of pecking order with regards to your position there, and how the coolness of the jobs there were directly proportional to how easily you could accidentally a group of people. In other words, the ride operators had the cool jobs; the kids hawking the carny games, not so much.

This leads me to the inevitable conclusion of trying to create a Fiasco playset based on a teen romantic comedy centered around these teens who work the summer jobs at a local water park.

Which had some interesting little battles.

The typical Fiasco playset includes all sort of nasty things. Things that people want to keep secret, things that people desperately wants, and things that can lead to violent deaths. While there are emotional stressors in your usually teen comedy, they generally don't have any truly violent or despicable detail. There's a certain innocent quality to those things. I was looking for things that were more bittersweet and less violently confrontational. It was kind of fun plucking out interesting little bits of high school experiences from 25 years ago to put into the playet, such as using film canisters to carry not rolls of film, but as a secret compartment to carry vodka shots.

And there's a lot of elements to create. It's strangely seductive to create or suggest dark "what's the absolute worse way things can go wrong" details given the confines of a certain theme. But coming up with simple objects and needs that try to lead a story down the path of "the geeky guy trying to win the cute girl" angle of Say Anything is kind of hard due to the simplicity of the situation at hand. heck, the standard Fiasco playset usually has a whole category dedicated to weapons.

The Tilt Table has the same issues, of course; and in some ways is much worse, as they are designed for things shift the game into complete disastrous chaos and bodily harm. I needed gentler tilts obviously. I threw away pretty much the entire aftermath phase, and replaced it with something else. Something that again, doesn't have the characters writhing in agony over loss of limbs, but instead constitutes telling the story of that crazy summer with questionable truths to their character's kids.

So, hopefully, Ducky DOESN'T die (like he would in a normal Fiasco game), and Bender does the get the girl in the end (while defiantly shoving his fist in the air, of course).

Feel free to take a peek at the PDF here. It's uder the "files" section. If it doesn't make any sense what-so-ever, you might want to check out the free sample of Fiasco here.

*********

As a strange side note, Those Summer Nights! is oddly sitting at the top of "The Hotness" chart for RPGs on RPGgeek. The file itself only has 14 downloads. It's sort of an interesting comparison of the kind of hype it takes to get anywhere near the hotness top on the BGG side. I'm guessing it's because BGG is truly the one-stop shopping area for board game geek, while RPG geeks have a bunch of other sites floating around in that network. So it's easy to skew the hotness charts on the RPG side.

Fatigue

2011-04-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

I fatigue easily on a design. Part of it is that I don't really have a nice continual stream of playtesting. And so, as a game gets fudged this way and that, a new design experiment comes along that captures my attention like a moth to a flame. At which point the old design gets scuttled own the shiny new design....which winds up getting scuttled for something newer.

Strangely, I do have a relatively nice stream of play testing ability more than most. But we only meet for every other week, and typically only two games get to the table. So I maybe get only one playtest a month or so out of a game in order to try and make sure everyone gets a chance to be in the spotlight.

And so, My Little Vineyard continues apace, with a new change every month or so. The link off to the right there is really old and moldy...the link on boardgamegeek is about 1.5 versions behind. But I had thought I was coming close to actually finishing it. Really close. Everyone in the group seemed to like it (which is surprising given the wide array of tastes in games). And so, I figured the last playtest would be strong with just a couple of tweaks to points and such.

And I was wrong.

Maybe because people have become familiar with the game now, they are now able to see some issues that weren't there before. Not that this is bad...just discouraging as it seemed the finish line was close. Fatigue is really settling in with this game at this point, as these probably 3 other projects I have a great desire to work on at this point, and that "1 play test per month" is valuable, indeed.

The biggest issue was where one of the players felt helpless after realizing that the action he had taken three turns ago was a poor one, and now that he had realized it, felt there was no way to rebound from it and catch up to the rest of the players. This bothered me quite a bit the more I thought about it. If you make an obvious bad play in most games, you get "penalized" for it and learn from it and move on.

It left me wondering if the obvious bad play wasn't obscured enough; I've been playing Agricola some lately, and one of the comments that comes from that game seems to be along the lines of "I lost again! And I don't know how."

Anyway, this lead to a fairly interesting discussion of fixes for the game, which would seem to complicate things further. Additionally, the fatigue that had worn on in the design of the project I could now see stretching further out down many more months. Granted, these aren't working man-months; really just an hour or so here and there in between playing. But still, the real-time length to completion is painful indeed.

As things usually happen, over the weekend I spent some time digesting the comments, and trying to come up with solutions. What I've noticed is that a lot of my project usually wind up with me adding more and more things to them, then near the end, a great purging happens; suddenly there's a realization that a lot of those things aren't needed, and removed. And that is what is happened on this next revision of the game. I think the game will be better for it, and it addresses the issues that were brought up.

And hopefully I can move on to something else soon. Strangely, while I think that this is probably my most commercial-ready design, it is also somewhat less appealing to me than other designs which are a bit more experimental. And that's what I'm missing playing around with.

RPG Solitaire Contest Entry

2011-01-10T19:45:00.000-08:00

So, my interest continues into story games. Over at the story-games site last month, I noticed that there was a contest starting up for the first half of the first month of the new year. Of course, I didn't notice the later posts where they listed various challenge goals (as noted in the post I linked to). And so, I feverishly worked out something, went to post it, and found out about the challenge goals the hard way. Ouch. So, I don't know if I even qualify.

There's a saying in poker that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker. That's sort of my feeling I get at the story-game site. It's fun feeling like being the "idiot in the room," as I know very little about this type of game, and the people on the story-game forums seem to know a lot about their hobby, and have quite a literate discussion of things. Which is quite different than some of the board game design-y discussions you usually wind up having.

But I digress...

Anyway, the allure of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" still holds me in sway, going back to my first BGDF game design competition entry five years ago. My RGP entry is called "Replaced," and has you trying to get out of a small town with your loved ones while the town members are being replaced around you with (potentially) alien clones.

It was a nice change of pace to work on...no need for coming up with a component list, or worry about game balance (well, it a different kind of game balance, I suppose). More about creating leads into a story for the player to follow, some of the leads being false in the worst way...after he has decided to follow them.

You can download my entry here.

Holly Jolly

2010-11-30T13:01:00.001-08:00

Boardgamegeek (well, really, rgpgeek) is running a Fiasco playset design contest. So, that sounds like fun. Here's a link to my entry.

The concept of the theme came from a thread on story-games.com, which is a forum dedicated to narrative RGPs, and is pretty interesting to read. They use a lot of big words over there, and a lot of big-named concepts, and ideas are generally well shared. Unlike board game design, where it seems a lot of it is "I've this this great idea, but I'm not telling you because you'll steal my secrets."

Anyway, the theme is centered around Rankin Bass holiday specials. Unlike most fiascos, which have a sort of gritty, losers-trying-to-better-themselves-in-a-really-bad-way kind of thing, Holly Jolly! is a bit more fanciful, with nods to magical devices, and talking animals. Or in the case of the cover artwork as shown to the left here, animated talking and singing snowmen. Well, animated before being stabbed by the North Pole marker in the chest and his umbrella through the eye.

Of course, there's a still a pretty good chance that Santa Claus is going to wind up being tossed into the blades of a large snow thrower, like all good fiasco's should end.

Random Bits

2010-10-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

I managed to play a game of Fiasco is real-life finally. It almost feels more like an improv game than a "game." And the whole experience of the game was pretty hilarious. Since Fiasco does a really good job of creating a narrative, I felt it was only proper to write up a session report in a story fashion, as your typical session reports are a bit dry for my tastes.

Click here to read it, and try and figure out who "wins".

Kickstarter.com is an interesting website, dedicated to independent artists and such, looking for way to fund their little (and sometimes big) projects. Tasty Minstrel Games is experimenting with it to try and get a new game funded for publishing. Others have managed to crack their funding barrier, but with a cheap "buy in." It will be interesting to see if their current funding efforts maintain its velocity for the next 24 or so days, or if it peters out. I know Seth has a couple of interesting things planned up his sleeve in order to keep interest high.

Protoplay

2010-10-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

When creating and playing prototypes, I always expect the first pass to be awful. It's second play of the game, after all of the gross adjustments have been made, that determine if the game is worth moving forward on for me.

Anyway, in the last week, I've had a chance to playtest My Little Vineyard twice. And the second playtest was very successful in this manner. Many of the really awful things from the first playtest were resolved, and it really felt like progress had been made forward, as opposed to sideways.

Obviously, the game currently is in a print-n-play format of just a scoresheet, and everyone agrees now that it should be more than that. So porbably the next version will be something much more like an art project. But at least I feel like it's worth the pursuit. The Shipwreck game, while having merits, always seems to run sideways. And the (what seems like) 25 hours of mocking up a new set of parts for that just doesn't seem like a good use of time, at least until I get the hunger to re-visit it again.

Aside from the BGG link for My Little Vineyard given above, you can go to the sideboard link which has all of the most recent files. The BGG link is kinda slow in updates due to the "moderator must check all files" thing. In the end, this is a very good policy; just not that great for quick updates.

Vines

2010-09-27T10:19:00.001-07:00

So after rambling on and on about finding narratives and such, I quickly put together a prototype of a game that is very much as far away as possible from a narrative game. And, for an experiment, I've put it up on boardgamegeek and asked for playtesters, just to see how that goes.

The central play of the game revolves around a very large dice pool that everyone shares. Pulling out sets of dice (straights, pairs, trips,"additions" and so on) let's players collect resources. Combining certain resources scores points. It's inspired by the "Fiasco dwindling dice pool mechanic", as previous mentioned.

Additionally, a player may roll additional dice into the pool if there is nothing there that the player wants. however, the price of this is that any new dice that are introduced to the pool that aren't pulled for resources simply become available fodder for the next player.

Which, from my solo playtesting, seems makes for a game that's pretty interesting. And, since I'm always on the lookout for new and different ways of things, an added plus to the game is that it is a dice game, but plays much different with the dice, since almost all dice games seem to use the "re-roll your dice three times and score" Yahtzee method. But then again, the core of it is stolen from Fiasco....

Anyway, I'll have to see what is made of it from the 'geek.

Measuring the experience

2010-09-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been poking around at "story-games" recently. This is a relatively new, relatively indie sub-category of role playing games that have popped up. In a nut shell, the crux of these games is about leveling up or churning stats, but instead focus on the creation of a good story, often without a game master running things. In a way, these are more like improv tools or things to break writer's block than games.

And that's what I'm finding appealing about them.

For the most part, board and card games are about following rules to "win the game." The thematic experience is usually there more to explain why you are doing things, but usually have very little "feel" of doing those things. It's about some combination of luck and the skill in finding efficiencies with in the rules. While those can be great experiences, or awful, to me there seems to be very little to walk away from the table aside from, "here's that great move that I pulled off to win the game."

I'm at the point now where I feel like I want something more than just following the path to the greatest amount of points. I'd like there to be some other attachment to the "narrative" of the game; I want the experience to more of an experience than just a race. These games are more about cerebral machinations, while I'm looking for more emotional and narrative connections.

*****

One of the more talked about games from the last year or so is Train. It's a game with a trick ending, a game that the designer claims to have an emotional appeal to those who played it, and even deciding not to play it is playing it. A lot of her discussions on the game seem like far-reaching "artistic vision" kind of stuff to me, but hey, everyone has to have a world view of their own stuff, I guess. There is nothing about the actual game system itself that stirs the emotions...just the tacked on theme of one of the most painful events of human history. Then again, it's kind of nebulous what the game actually is, given that she apparently she refuses to release the rules and the card data for review. In other words, the theme needs to be experienced for the emotional impact. Her other projects are also about emotionally heart breaking themes of human doing other humans wrong in grand ways. I'd be interested in seeing if she could capture the same type of emotional responses by not themeing a game around some terrible historical tragedy.

On the other hand...

I do think that they are good art pieces; and probably better than most mass produced games, from what little one can discern about them from afar. They get people talking about things in constructive ways.

Why I bring this up is the one unique thing I've found about Train from a rules standpoint is this: apparently the games doesn't describe a win condition. There is no mention of an ultimate goal with which you are striving for. Which is pretty powerful stuff. Here's why:

Without a known win condition, the player is left to determine his own experience with the game. It's not about optimizing moves better than the other players, it's about optimizing your turns in such a way to gain the best experience that you, yourself have created as a goal. And I can change that goal on a whim. It's about the experience.

Story games seem offer this kind of open-ended structure from a different angle; it's about the story that's created, the travel on the road, the experience of getting the end. The winning is in the creation of a story that is uniquely yours.

*****

Of course, with all that said, the one game that has really struck a chord in me is Fiasco. It's a game where the initial setup of the game is creating the relationship between the other player...then you fill in the blanks about your character. After that, you take turns creating a twisted little story of desperate people doing things that they shouldn't be doing, and things spiral out of control.

From a design standpoint, it's a simple game, but there's some really interesting mechanics in play. The create-the-relationships, not the character thing, as mentioned above is pretty brilliant. It allows for easy "change your locations" scenarios by simply using a few different charts. If you poke around on their website, you can see that they come out with a new "playset" every month, around a different location, era, or theme.

There's also mechanic of pulling dice from a central pool which is more fun that it should be that determines the relationship details, and if a character in a story is having good or bad outcomes.

It's worth a read of the rules to understand what is going on, and how easy it is for players to create their own messed up worlds. And to use as inspiration for other things.

Villains

2010-05-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

I've been centering a lot of my prototype time on the Shipwreck game of late; as noted in this post, it has become more of an Indiana Jones-type adventure, where the game is about finding the clues through artifacts that lead the players to a final destination. And so, it continues; and I am strongly applying more thematic parts of that kind of adventure to the game.

Now, in this case, the word theme in the traditional sense of it being applied to board games would mean that I am taking characters and mythology from the movies series; well, this isn't the case. This is more about theme in the classical sense. In the sense that I am playing around with the ideas of running around the world is search of wacky magical artifacts, which have powers that can make you rich (the winner of the game), or can otherwise destroy you (put you is a losing position) due to your own moral compass.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the new direction that the game has taken is the idea of "playing the villain," which is something I haven't run across before in other games. Generally, this means you can play the "honest" way, which is full of hard work and a lot of money and actions being spent; or you can simply be the evil rogue, stealing need-to-use boats and hiring henchmen to steal artifacts. Or you can walk a fine line somewhere in between, and only play with treachery as a desperate last cause when needed. And of course, much like the Indiana Jones movies, those who take the easy, more villainous route, will most likely pay the piper when the "check comes due."

In general, the idea works like this: There's a set of rules how to obtain various important things in the game; these typically require some amount of money and actions to obtain. But, if you decide to not pay those fees in acquiring these things, you gain Villainy points.

Each artifact has a randomly (and unknown) Villainy threshold. Once a player acquires the artifact, the threshold becomes known, and if the player's Villainy is higher than the artifact, well, in true Indiana Jones fashion, the artifact turns on its owner and "bad things happen" to its owner.

From a design standpoint, I think it's an interesting concept as most games usually thematically assign a role to the player, either the good guy or bad (depending on the point of view). Then it is up to the player to win the game within the definition of that character. In this case, the player is self-defining their own character; do they see themselves as the honorable treasure hunter, or as the collector who collects through any means necessary? Are you Indiana Jones, or Rene Belloq? It's a risk/reward system where taking the low road early pays quick dividends; but the player does not know what the true risks even are (due to the random thresholds of the artifacts). So, a large part of the game is playing chicken with one's villainous self, while dealing with the race against the other players.

(I guess I should mention that there are not enough artifacts to go around for all players, so there NEED to be at least a little villainous streak in everybody. Let's face it, Dr. Jones was never one to shy against a little chicanery when times called for it.)

It also adds another layer of choice to the game. It's not just a racing logic puzzle anymore, where you choices were determined simply by trying to figure out the most efficient way to get the next part of the puzzle that you need. Now it's more about how you go about chasing down your clues long term, as decisions to use Villiany may or may not come back to bite you later on.

The closest that can find to this mechanism would be in Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, where you gain corruption tokens for using sub-standard building materials. I've never played it; I assume it's pretty close to what I'm talking about. And I guess that there must be other games out there that do this kind of thing.

How did this come about; like most elements of Eureka moments, it's about solving problems with the design. In the last playtest, I really wanted a strategy to exist where a player could simply spend all their time collecting money, while other players are doing the hard work. Then the money rich player could simply hire more goons and steal the artifacts away from the other players. However, even though no one attempted that strategy, it seemed pretty clear that it was the optimal one.

While suggestions came in about limiting what a player could do with regards to the money-rich strategy, I preferred to still let the player decide to take it or not, as opposed to the game limiting the collection of funds or steals in some way. The player SHOULD be able to take the role of the extremely wealthy collector if he wanted to, instead of the down-and-dirty tomb raider.

And hence the Villainy count was born, where every time the player tried to steal an artifact, he get dinged for a Villainy. Then it became second nature just to apply this concept to all of the other aspects of the game, and make it a prominent feature of the game.

**After all, the concept of tomb robbing, regardless of reasons for the robbing, is a little villainous no mater how you look at it.

Interview

2010-05-04T06:13:00.001-07:00

I guess I'm a little late posting this up, but Matt Worden asked me a few questions about the development of PocketCiv, and here are the answers.

Castle Panic

2010-04-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

I bought Castle Panic this weekend, primarily to play with my kids, who are quite enamored with Plants vs. Zombies. And it works quite well as a fun co-op with kids. I imagine it would work very well as a good gateway/party game for adults who don't know better about board games.

The simplicity of this game just screams variants. I'll probably wind up applying some rules form my old Doppleganger design, to create a nice traitor variant, even though a lot of this seems stolen from Battlestar Galactica at this point.

Things such as:

-- Players are dealt loyalty cards at the start of the game.
-- All cards are held as closed.
-- Discard pile is face down.
-- Player select 2 monsters, and return 1 to the stock, while playing the other one face down to the board. While moving normally, the monsters are turned up with the first hit; all effects occur then.

I may have to limit trading a bit to counter the effect of the players having control over the monsters.

Also, there would have to be some kind of accusation element added into it. I'll have to think about that for the time being.

Mission to Mars

2010-03-16T19:14:00.001-07:00

Seth may appreciate this, or maybe not.

Seth has been interested in doing a "Mission to Mars" based game, with somewhat realistic-based theme-ing, based on current scientific theoretical planning. However, as he described it more, to me, it became just another in a long line of M.U.L.E. like resource generative games: put a mining unit on mars, let it mine for minerals to make more stuff, which then let's you mine different stuff, etc. etc.

The thing that struck me of being interesting about scientific-based theme is dealing with the amount of time it takes to get stuff across great distances, and the general precise of doing space travel stuff. Additionally, as President George Bush found out when he made an announcement about plans to go to Mars, it is technologically feasible to do it; but it's mostly about the political will power to be able to push through a plan of such large scope and money drain, with no obvious payback to the American public within a lifetime.

At least in the case for the race for space in the 60s, it was sold to the public partly as a race against the evil communists, as a way to prove American know-how can beat the evil empire.

Currently, I don't think that anyone is remotely close to Mars.

Anyway, so the game I proposed was not about resource management, or pick up and delivery back and forth between Earth and Mars, but primarily about controlling political clout, and the timing of various modules to Mars, based on the long term plans within the Case For Mars.

Simply enough, the game, as shown above, works like this. The sheet with the yellow pawn abstracts out the "public's interest" in the Mars program. The higher the interest, the more actions, or "political clout" you have. As most things with the public eye, interest wanes over time, giving you less clout to spend on the issue, until an important milestone is hit (say, a man walking on Mars), which increases the awareness in the program, and therefor, giving you more clout to spend.

So, the top row of cards are event cards that randomly indicate how much interest wanes on a turn. This would represent various newsworthy things that the news cycle and the public replaces their interest with. Things like scandal, wars, economy, etc.

As a country figurehead, you can control this somewhat, by spending your clout to adjust the events; "it looks like there's a war brewing, we better put a stop to that." Of course, this is clout that you can't spend towards your mission to mars.

The bottom row represents cargo ships delivering modules to Mars. Larger ships are launched with more clout; and emptier ships move faster than full ships. Eventually, the modules are dropped off on mars (to the right of the picture, where the cubes are stacked).

Certain modules don't "work" without previous modules being on Mars, and some modules eventually expire if they don't have humans, and habitat modules, powering them within a few turns after their arrival.

And so, the game pretty much plays where you are watching your clout and interest in the project dwindle, then a milestone is hit, and you got clout again.

For a first pass, it's an interesting play; but right now the game needs to be a bit tighter to be interesting I think. I'm probably being way too generous with starting clout; it really needs to feel like you are racing between hitting the next milestone and hitting rock bottom on your public interest to be fun.

Obsessed

2010-03-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but I've decided to actually finish the Shipwreck game, instead of letting it linger for other exploratory designs. Unfortunately, it's a hard game to prototype; and through various machinery of my free will and accidental programming, finishing the prototype is turning out to be a nerve racking affair, with a lot of wasted "sticky-back" printer paper.

The game includes 120 small cards which need to be on thick, chipboard-style cardboard, and I'm using illustrator board for it. These cards either contain data point clues, or cards with windows that reveal specific clues when placed over the first set of cards. Unfortunately, after mounting and cutting, it turns out that my program was "building" the cards wrong, which entailed another set of printed cards. After which, I noticed that some of my data entry was wrong, which entailed another change, reprint, and mount.

Then, when I thought I was finished, I came to another, better conclusion to how the game should be constructed, which required another set.

But I think I finally have it right now.

The next problem which I think I have solved is the way the clues are recorded for the player on the data sheet. Back when it was simply "fishin' for 'recks," I just had a data sheet with a copy of the map, and a player could mark up multiple maps for each wreck he was currently involved in hunting for. It worked, but I wasn't happy with it, and I never could come up with a better solution. However, with the new DaVinci Code-styling of the game, which involves three different "stages" of hunting and piecing together clues each with it's own slightly different approach of clue gathering, the simple map marking technique won't work.

And so I've come up with a two sheet solution. The first sheet to the left here is a data grid for each of the three stages, cross-referencing the important information that is gleaned from clues.

The top part is the ultimate goal of finding a gate. This is done by combining artifact cards (of which there are three types, A,B, and C). Each set of artifacts reveal a clue data point to the location of a gate. Two or three of these data points will reveal the gate location.

The middle part is for shipwreck searching. Shipwrecks are located by directional vectors from each of the five cities, plus a depth rating. By triangulating enough of these data points, you can find a shipwreck.

And the bottom part is for locating which shipwreck an artifact is on. Each city has a different combination of buildings. And researching an artifact in a city will reveal that shipwreck, or give you a building of the city that can reveal the shipwreck's name.

Page two over here on the left is a simple representation of the map and the important data points for triangulating the clues, and a list of actions the player can take.

By folding page two (the map page) in half inward, a player can create a "cover" in order to keep page 1 secret (also folded in half). Page 1 is folded outward, so that the data grids are on "both sides" of the half-sized page of paper, and allows for easy flip access to both halves, and easy cross-referencing of the data grid to the map. Of course, the map can also be used for taking notes.

At least, in theory, this all seems to work well. It's up to the unforgiving world of playtesting to see if actually unfolds as well as it does in my mind.

Focus

2010-01-12T05:41:00.000-08:00

So, I've been busy. That's my excuse. For not bothering to post in a while.

I've been re-working the Shipwreck game a bit lately. It's now on version 4.

It's been a sort of troubling game. The core mechanics are fun and everyone who has played it seems to enjoy that part of the game, but the surrounding structure of it has never seemed to gel very well.

The core structure is finding clues to find locations of shipwrecks, which players salvage for points. There was always an intended structure for the points allotted, based on various things, such as the class of the ship, the quality of the salvage crew you've hired, and how deep the shipwreck was in the lake.

And ultimately, most of that stuff never really mattered.

So much time and effort was spent on finding enough clues on a particular a shipwreck, that if you did realize that it was a low point salvage operation, you never really cared. You had completely "adopted" that wreck at that point, so it was in your best interest to salvage it anyway, low points be damned.

And so, in the end, it felt like the wrecks were just handing out random points, even though there was a lot of effort built in to the game to make it not random.

Therefore, the game was just running around, finding wrecks, and getting random points. Pretty much like what I imagine real shipwreck hunting and salvaging is sort of like. I've gone through 3 different versions of this, with handling the point system in different ways. With all the same results; while the clue hunting is fun and sound, the game around that aspect isn't.

Recently, I decided that what was wrong with the game is the focus of it; the ultimate goal of how to win at it. The ride was fun, but the destination wasn't. As it was, I had still not developed a good way to end the game, aside from "after 12 shipwrecks have been found." I've never liked this kind of arbitrary kind of ending in a game to begin with. I'd much have a more organic way to end the game (whatever that means), than some simply stated fact. There's nothing really building towards that finish. It's not like players are building an empire from some small cogs. Your salvage operation is always the same operation throughout the game. Puerto Rico doesn't end after XX rounds,there are hard component limitations that end the game, things that the players can control, or at least feel like they can. Or at least point to how it happened.

Not, "just because the rules said so."

So I've turned the game much more into an Indiana Jones/DaVinci Code affair. Which has brought a lot of the mechanical concepts of how the game works into a much more sharper focus, and has even brought the theme out some more. And it has gotten rid of the entire pesky points awarding system. It goes like this now:

The game is the first player to discover one of the 3 Gates of Atlantis at the bottom of the bay. To do this, players combine artifacts together which reveal clues as to where those gates are. However, those artifacts are also lost in the bay, hidden amongst the many shipwrecks. So, the player first travel from city to city, finding the clues that eventually lead the players to discover which shipwreck each artifact is hidden on, then the players must discover the locations of those shipwrecks, dive down to recover the artifacts and then use the artifacts to discover the location of one gate.

This is a much stronger narrative theme to impose on the players, as it gives them a call to action. The game now has a drive behind all of it's clue-hunting mechanical nonsense. And like any good "race for the artifact story," the game no thematically allows for stealing things from other players, leading to more direct confrontations, which I think should play out well.

//Well, of course, until it doesn't play out well, then back to the drawing board. The life of a prototype game is never complete.

A few interesting podcasts

2009-11-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

...for your perusal.

The Games With Garfield podcast #6: Casual Randomness is an interesting discussion about randomness. And "rando-chess" makes an interesting point, too!

Penny Arcade has been recording and podcasting a few Dungeon and Dragons sessions, with the PvP guy, and Wil Wheaton as additional members of their adventuring party, with a WOTC guy DM-ing. I've linked to the first episode of their latest adventure here.

As you can expect, the actual battles with all the dice-rolling gets pretty tedious to listen to; however, when battles aren't going on (which is usually the first 3rd of the session, and a few breaks between the battles in the middle), it's usually pretty funny. It should also be noted that the DM is also really good at his job here; I've tried listening to other RPG podcasts just for comparison sake, and pretty much determined that he really knows his stuff (as you'd expect from a WOTC employee who I assume was helping develop the new edition of D&D).

What makes this session fun is the way it ends, and is definitely worth sitting through all eight segments for the climatic ending. Which isn't what you think; as the true hilarious capper of the session is caused when the player who is running Binwin the dwarf explains why his character can't die, and Wil Wheaton's response to it.

Artscow

2009-10-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

So, it took a while, but finally, after a month or so, my experimentation with making an Artscow deck came in.

For whatever reason, Artscow.com seems to have become the standard bearer for print-it-on-your-own card games and decks on boardgamegeek. Even having the need to use Artscow specifically for a few contests people are running there. I'm not really sure why this is; I've had reports of other places doing it cheaper, or more efficiently, or whatever. It's not that they are bad or anything. They have rotating daily (or even hourly) specials, so that helps. Also, they have a pretty nice interface for uploading cards through the use of Silverlight.

It is the first place I've seen that let's you create a deck cards where you can specify different card backs for each card, which is exceptionally nice when you are doing odd ball deck sizes, or smaller, differently handled decks (as such that I was playing with).

Anyway, the biggest issues I've found are with the fact that cutlines supplied with the image importer don't really correspond nicely to the actual cutting edges of the cards. Looking at the top row of cards in the lousy photograph over here to the left, given enough whitespace along the edges, and they look great.

However, bleeding out the images to full size is less-than-stellar, due to the over-growth of the images in relation to the physical cut lines. The text on the "Oracle" card even got chopped a bit off the top. The other two cards have a second ornamental bezel applied around the edge, which got severely cut (you can see traces of the extra bezel in the corners.

Otherwise, the cards are a bit flimsier than your standard poker deck; I am not well-versed enough in printing productions to know if this is because of the plastic coating or paper thickness.
The actual edge cuts are nice and crisp; even though I know of someone else who had small complaints about the cutting.

As far as prototyping goes, they are perfectly fine and feel and look "real" enough to fool your friends and family.

It Doesn't Look Good

2009-10-12T04:53:00.001-07:00

I've been playing a play-by-forum game of Battlestar Galactica on boardgamegeek. Granted, it's been painful at times. While not a complicated game, it has a lot of issues with regards to players interacting with each other with card play and dice rolls and such on each others turns, and so pretty much after every event that happens, every player needs to "check in" with how they are responding to the current pace of things. Playing around a table, it's pretty easy to do this, online and in a forum environment, well, it's takes some time.

Additionally, it's hard to believe that there are people who moderate this (for free!), for fun. Again, the rules are are pretty straightforward, but there's a lot of bookkeeping kind of stuff that needs to be taken care of. Kudos to the moderators!

Aside from the length of time, it's been a fairly entertaining game, with some pretty good role-playing-ish banter. One particular humorous exchange occurred during a food shortage crisis; during this the President needs to decide between food rationing (which results is discarding cards) or just keep eating (which results in dwindling away at our already dwindled food). President Baltar had already earlier decided on "eating the veal" instead of rationing, which was already leading to him being a cylon traitor.

Tigh: "Adama, I'll be preparing the Brig for Baltar if he eats any more of Galatica's food."

Baltar: "We're having Caprican rost beef again this week? Well of course I'll take an extra plate, it's not like we're running out of the stuff anyway. Better enjoy fine cuisine now, food rationing will help, but it'll taste terrible ..."

Anyway, things aren't looking very good for our ragtag group of humans at this point. Our food is down to 2, our fuel is down to 1. And we are running out of space to add Cylon ships.

One of the things I particularily like about the game is that a player is pretty free to take whatever action he wants (and there are usually a lot to choose from). There's no reason why Starbuck can't waste her time running for President, for example, or have Baltar running around launching and controlling Vipers. However, the special ability modifiers that each character gets really defines what is optimally a better choice for that character to do; Starbuck is much better off flying around in a Viper because she gets an additional action when in a Viper. A lesser game would just say, "she's a Viper pilot, so that's where she is all the time, and here's her list of actions she can take."

As another example, I have just gotten done reading the rules to Agricola. While it is a highly rankied game, and well-respected, it has a worker placement rule that annoys me. Players take turns placing their workers on various actions; these actions are then triggered. However, each action can only be triggered once per turn. So, if there's an action that is "bake bread" or "rake leaves" and someone has placed a worker there, a subsequent players can't trigger that action.

Why the hell not!? I guess from a game standpoint, there's the strategy of "pick this now before it disappears;" but jeez, why can't I rake leaves just because another player is raking leaves? It's things like this that make me appreciate the "do whatever the hell action you want" ability of BSG so much more.

Risk and Reward

2009-10-01T19:34:00.001-07:00

Very often in game design, and game playing, the term of "risk versus reward" comes up often, relating to determining the best course of action. Ideally, as a player you want to make the choice that will give you the best expected value over the long haul of the game.

In reality, there is very little inherent to the "risk" part of the equation; the worst that can actually happen is, simply, losing the game. And maybe getting humiliated by your friends; I guess it depends on the crowd you ahng around with.

Back in the mid to late 80's, someone tried to re-start the Twilight Zone franchise as a TV series (and again, more recently with Forrest Whitaker as host). But there's something about the old grainy black and white noir look of the old series that adds to the creepiness that the newer, IN LIVING COLOR presentations lack.

Anyway, one of the standouts of the 1980's reboot is an episode dealing a gambler in Vegas who has lost everything. He meets a man who offers him $1 million dollars if the gambler can successfully light a cigarette lighter 10 times in a row. Unfortunately, the risk in this case is that the guy offering the deal gets to hack off a finger of the gambler if he is unsuccessful in lighting attempts.

Ultimately, the risk/reward ratio here is kind of hard to define; ultimately, the guy is offering the gambler $1 million for a pinkie finger; but he can get the money for free with a bit of skill flicking a Zippo. Unfortunately for the gambler, the build up to the to actual start of the contest does a good deal of spooking him out, involving buckets of ice, wood planks and rope to tie down the gambler's arm, etc.

Why bring this up? Well, I've been directed to a risk/reward contest that, while not quite as limb threatening, is all the more devious: TOUR DE DONUT!!! In a simple nutshell, it's a 30 mile bike race. But there are pit stops at the 10 mile and 20 mile marker with lots of donuts. For every donut you eat, you get 5 minutes taken off your time.

Or as this website claims: "Each donut eaten at 2 stops along the course brings cyclists either closer to glory or simply closer to a massive stomach ache."

Looking through the finishing times of the various bikers also indicates how many donuts they ate along the way. I feel rather disappointed in the bikers who ate none, opting for the race to be a "pure" biking experience. Thankfully, it appears the donut-eaters generally crowd out the top positions. Congrats to Bradley Meinke who won the "Men under 40" division with a winning time of -25 minutes, due to the consumption of 33 donuts along the way.

Board Game Narratives, part three

2009-09-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

And so, begins part 3 of Board Game Narrative Stuff. Once again, I lead with the following disclaimer:

It should be noted that I’m just collecting random thoughts on this subject. Various thoughts as described herein probably have many fallacies when viewed through the lens of different types of game, and I'm sure that anyone could find a particular game that refutes any thesis that I'm providing (heck, I can do that on my own).

Part 1 can be found by clicking on this link.
Part 2 can be found by clicking on this link.

******************************************************

CHARACTER VERSUS OVERLORD
As a subset of the theme, the player should be defined as a character within the world the game is being modeled on. This does not necessarily mean the player is given a character to play (even though that is often the case), but somehow, the player has tangible understanding of the world, and actions naturally make sense through the game rules and whatever results from those actions make tangible sense. The player becomes a living component within the game world, and is not simply an overlord over a game board shuffling pieces about.

Most board games put the player into the position of the overlord; here a player has complete control over his world; components always follow at his command, randomness is often derided as something that can ruin good strategy, and the players simply get more powerful over time. The character model suggest a different world, where the world doesn’t conform to the whim of the player, and can lash out in unexpected ways back at the player. It’s a world where the players try to gain control, but the world is a slippery beast, and the player can fall down just as often as he climbs up in power and control.

Trading card games are interesting to look at in this view. The basic structure of a single game can be considered to follow the overlord model, in that you are simply gaining the ability to play with stronger cards as the game goes on. But the meta-game of deck building follows the character model. As you are trying to gain some sort of control over the randomness of the shuffle, and whatever other player you might face off against.

Additionally in regards to TCGs, there’s a sense of having some skin in the game; it’s not just a set of components you are playing with, as these are components that you’ve personally chosen. You’ve created this character,as represented by your chosen cards, by yourself (within the restrictions of the game world). There’s going to be at least a little emotional relationship to those little slab of cardboard, due to the amount of control that you are trying to influence over the game world in which the rules preside.

A lot can be said for Magic: The Gathering with regards to TCGs, but Jyhad: The Eternal Struggle (of course it’s been renamed to Vampire for a while), is an even better game, I feel (even though it runs a bit too long for my short-attention-span life). Not only are you playing with the creatures and things that you’ve decided to have, it takes your life points to gain control of them; the more control over the game you want, the weaker you become; your ties to the game world and a component in that world is much stronger.

STATUS ACQUISITION
What other traits can be found that helps to define a character different than an overlord? Again, looking at Tales of the Arabian Nights for inspiration, we can find that game's system of statuses (stati?) worthwhile. You can further breakdown the difference based on how abilities and statuses are collected and affected to the player. Each of these abilities can be considered to be a different game status, which regards to how the player interprets, or follows certain rules. In overlord situations, the player is the controlling entity over various components in the world, buildings up “engines.” These engines eventually lead to some critical mass where the player collects enough victory points with which to win the game.

In the case of the engines, each component part is an individual status. But there’s a few important caveats with this. One, in the overlord situation, the player quite often almost has full control over the status components he is collecting or building, carefully piecing together a puzzle that he hopes will fit the best. Secondly, and more importantly, the statuses are pretty much NEVER bad. They are all finely tuned cogs in a smooth running machine. Each status is working in the favor of the player toward his defined goal.

In the case of the character, the statuses that are collected by the player can be random, and almost always include not only helpful bits, but also negatives as well. And statuses are lost and gained. A character evolves by battling to keep his good statuses and somehow removing, or attempting to downplay, the negatives; an overlord just keeps getting more powerful.

As a representation of life, the character model of status works well. You go through life, gaining new knowledge and abilities, often trying to keep the demons at bay. And of course, you pick up bad habits as well. The idea of overlording, where a constant stream of good advancements at a person’s call and bidding, while wished for, never happens. There are always roadblocks (even though most of them aren’t quite as drastic as being turned into an Ape-form).

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
There have been a lot of papers and discussions in the past relating to narrative in games in the recent past, mostly for video games, that talk about Game versus Narrative. In these cases, it is usually in the form of interactivity versus storytelling. Often, the discussion comes down to this: a good story is a good story because of the very linear nature of storytelling. The author has completely control over plot points, the pace of the characters, and the various dilemmas and results of actions that pertain to them.

Unfortunately, the second you make this kind of work interactive, the author loses control over the story, and therefore loses almost all of the aspect of what makes the story good. Additionally, the sheer amount of content that would be required to handle all of the multiple paths a truly interactive character can take and still keep a plot-like storyform going becomes unwieldly and impossible to control.

This is what makes a role-playing game with a good dungeon master so valuable; there’s a human brain in there somehow controlling the pace and reacting properly to the interactive desires of the players, as the story is unfolding in a natural state.

In the case of role playing games, there have been other theories bandied about that might be worth checking into. Such as GNS (Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist) theory and The Big Model.

The RPG Everway is interesting to look at if only because it is left up to the game master to decide how to resolve actions, which is by using one of the three categories of the GNS model. Basically, there is no dice, but a tarot deck, which is used to help determine the results of actions through interpretation of the cards. However, the game is designed in such as way that the game master is free to follow what he feels what would be the best outcome for the story that is being created (Narrativist), solely based on comparing stats (Simulationist) or by card interpretation (Gamist). Since there are no hard and fast charts and lookup tables for "hard" success numbers, the game become a winding road that builds upon itself, as opposed to simple mathy exercises. it's this self-creating road that is built as needed that makes the game feel more narrative that others, as the game REQUIRES the game master to be a good story teller, and just someone who can compare numbers on charts the fastest.

Of course, any good game master should be able to do this, regardless of the look up tables that he needs. But Everway really clears away all of the needs of the charts, and lets the GM focus solely on the story.

Board Game Narrative part 2

2009-08-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

And so begins Part 2 of Board Game Narrative Stuff. Once again, I lead with the following disclaimer:

It should be noted that I’m just collecting random thoughts on this subject. Various thoughts as described herein probably have many fallacies when viewed through the lens of different types of game, and I'm sure that anyone could find a particular game that refutes any thesis that I'm providing (heck, I can do that on my own).

Part 1 can be found by clicking this link.

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IMMERSION OF THEME
Since a main component of the narrative story is the theme, there is a need to somehow get the player immersed into the theme. Immersion can come from many areas, one core relation is that choices and performance of actions actions that seem natural within the world of the selected theme is necessary for this to happen.

Probably one of the biggest disappointments in this regard is the co-operative Lord of the Rings games. Here’s a case of a very rich theme in which the game itself seems to have very little to do with the exciting themes that surround it. It just feels like you are carefully playing cards to move your little tokens along various tracks, racing against another token on another track. There is no sense of defeating various villains or moving logically throughout a world; the players are just moving on to the next board as quickly as possible.

It’s a tricky thing. Usually, to get one immersed into a theme the design should try to hide it’s mechanics as much as possible, getting the fiddliness out of the way, trying to make sure that players are involved in the story of the game, and not the rudimentary bookkeeping actions that all games have. This would normally require that the game be kept simple in some regards. But often, that is usually not the case; the Lord of the Rings game example above is probably as easy as you can get, but since the game is reduced to merely “play XX amount of icons to move on a track” it loses almost all of the flavor that the theme represents. A game like Arkham Horror, which contains many components and reading of cards and various interlocking rules becomes much more complex, flavorful, and immersive.

Not that I’m inviting the idea that flavor text as an answer. In most cases, I hate flavor text. But if the individual rules and flavor text somehow merge as the same thing, then I’m all for that. Ideally, flavor text SHOULD be the unique rules, or at least describe the “what and why” of the unique rules given a certain representation on the card.

Additionally, I completely understand the idea to iconize all components as much as possible. This reduces the cost of a game significantly, being that the game doesn’t require multiple printings across multiple languages. But I feel that there is a cost to this; the game becomes, again, a mere shuffling of iconography around as efficiently as possible.

Again, following this thread of thought, the "tangible representation" of what is supposedly going on in the game should have some attempt at feeling like a real world representation. A game like Caylus completely fails in terms of feeling like an actual castle is being built. Additionally, as much as I like Princes of Florence, the game never really feels like fantastic works of art are being created which is what the game promises. Instead, the game is merely collecting points off of various menus.

FIGHTING THE SYSTEM
With regards to how players compete with each other, games can fit on a sliding scale with one end being competitive, while the other end being co-operative. Strangely, over the scope of most games, this result in an inverted bell curve of either-or possibilities; it is not very often that a game comes along that shares a compromise of being both competitive AND co-operative, unless you consider “traitor” games, when one of more players are secretly plotting against the rest of the players to help the system win.

While games on both ends of the spectrum can be narrative, games where the players must fight the game system tend to be more narrative, as opposed to pure competitive contests. Unless the system allows for the players to invoke thematic, creative “elements” into the game as the game goes along, pure competitive struggles focus solely on winning the game, and trying to derive the most efficient ways to do.

By adding systematic elements for the player to fight against, in addition to the players, the designer has time and creative effort to add thematic elements into the struggle. Ultimately, the game system becomes another player, who isn’t so much involved in “winning” (even though this can certainly be the case, especially in co-op games), but this virtual player is instead adding thematic flavor to the game, in the form of obstacles that are jointly being added against each player.

However balanced or unbalanced these events are, this does add randomness to game. Randomness, it can be concluded, is a prime factor for narrative, provided it is thematic and not random for random's sake. Events that are known to be coming or are scripted to happen, are things that can be planned for. Things that can be planned for then become mathematical exercises. Which reduces the thematic impact of such events.

This does not mean that things should happen completely chaotically or willy-nilly. Logic still needs to dictate these random elements. If a game’s monsoon season starts in late summer, then it shouldn’t happen in winter. But that doesn’t mean a player should know the exact date as to when the monsoon is coming. An even better approach would be including elements of foreshadowing that, yes, the monsoon is coming…the clouds are growing darker, but it’s still an unknown as to when the skies will open.

to be continued...

Board Game Narratives, Part 1

2009-08-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

This will be a multi-part post, with a new post popping up every few days or so with regards to "Narrative in Board Games." It should be noted that I’m just collecting random thoughts on this subject. Various thoughts as described herein probably have many fallacies when viewed through the lens of different types of game, and I'm sure that anyone could find a particular game that refutes any thesis that I'm providing (heck, I can do that on my own).

What lead me to collect these thoughts is due to someone in my local prototype group searching discussions/papers on game narratives, and him complaining that there's not being able to find much out there. So now he can(Hi, Tim!).

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Narrative in board games is a tricky business. Most of the time, the purpose of designing a game is based around the ideas of just making it work, which includes balancing opportunities between players, making the rules "flow," or other such nonsense; trying to incorporate a narrative structure into this kind of world usually goes against these principals.

It is important to realize that, unlike other game genres, most board games do not really need an apparent story-like narrative to survive and be enjoyed. Obviously, abstract games exist for no other reason than for players to match wits across some pre-defined set of mechanics.

On the other end of the spectrum, role-playing games all have some amount of story driving the game, even if it’s a simple dungeon crawl. In many cases, the entire purpose of a given particular RPG is solely to drive a narrative; the game becomes much more similar to a work of improvisational theater. In fact, many “indie” RPG games are pushing the boundaries of this kind of thinking. See My Life with Master and The High Flying Adventures of Beatrice Henrietta Bristol-Smythe for examples.

DEFINING NARRATIVE
Wikipedia describes the term “narrative” as a ”story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of events.” All games can have a simplified story structure if you are thinking about things in the standard abstract layout of how a story is told. In other words: “Beginning, Middle, and End.” So, in a most basic sense, all games have a story. But are they a good narrative?

As with most things, the pure existence of a narrative doesn’t make it good (like any art form). But in the terms that are frequently bounded about as far as narrative games go, the term “narrative” itself implies something more than a mere cycle of start-to-end phases. It implies that there’s an actual story with characters, or things that can be abstractly though of as characters, that are doing something. And that’s the hard part. Characters need to have goals, and reasons, however flawed, to achieve them. And it probably needs to be more thematically tangible than “to score the most points.”

Unfortunately, at a board game level, the game is mostly about simply winning. Typically, there aren't very many results: Be the first to score XXX, whoever has scored XXX at the end of a predetermined event, or last to survive. There are various twists to these themes that are often implied, but much like the Seven Main Plots, that's all there really is to it at it's most basic level.

TEST OF RETELLING
“Story” as a term involves something that is a rather collective unconscious kind of thing. While a game of chess could be told as a story, and retold as a simple series of events with regard to “how one person won the game,” from outside of the chess knowledgeable world, there probably is not much interest in it. In fact, it becomes the equivalent of geek speak to a non-geek. It is simply series of somewhat complex movement notations, with not much emotional heft, or cultural understanding to it, aside from "capture the king."

However, if you can somehow retell the story of the game not as a series of interesting moves, but as thematic entries, you are much further along an interesting narrative path. So here’s a key component: “how is the story re-told to other people after the events occurred.”

“Moving my knight to C8 to fork my opponent’s Rook and Queen…” quite possibly is a key component to a victory in a game of chess, as forking two expensive opponent pieces is typically rewarding, and a turning point in the game. And from the story of the game itself, could be considered to be a key plot point.

But as a thematic story itself, it’s not very exciting to those who don’t understand the intricacies of chess.

It’s why a lot of hobby board games fail in terms of an interesting narrative (while they still may be a compelling game to play). Sure they have a theme. But there is a lot of wood bit shifting around to maximum efficiencies. It’s not a very fulfilling story to a neophyte when you tell of your thrilling victory because “you managed to fill up the corn ship before Chuck could take his turn.” More often than not, this is commonly referred to as having a “pasted-on theme.” The theme merely exists in order to hopefully, in some great way or small, explain the abstracts of the mechanics.

As a counter example would be explaining what happened in the game through thematic episodes that had happened in the game. For example, in my last play of Tales From the Arabian Nights, probably the best moment came from a player who, in an act of trying to steal a magical statue of a horse that flies, she gained the assistance of another character (non-player). The theft was a success; however, the non-player character pushed her off the horse, and flew away, leaving her crippled.

It was a grand moment, but if you note in the re-telling of it above, no mention was made of the countless chart lookups, the destiny die roll, or any other mechanical rules-wise thing we needed to do.

Now, I probably should note that this is an extreme example (as Tales from the Arabian Nights is a pretty extreme case in these matters). Other games do manage to tell a story without directly “telling the story of the game mechanics” pretty well. Battlestar Galactica, for example, does a good job being able to re-tell parts of the game without getting into the rig-a-ma-role of explicitly needing to explain the mechanics: “The Admiral decided to force a jump at the cost of a few civilians in order to avoid the ever increasing Cylon menace that just kept coming; the cost of those lives were nothing compared to the possible loss of the entire fleet.”

Part 2 soon to come...

A few things

2009-07-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

Thing #1
There is a new updated Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures up and available. New features include dungeons, which is completely inspired by someone who tested the game named Cameron Harris (I think), but who I've lost his email.

Dungeons, while right now I don't think happen regularly enough, solve a little sticking point I've had; namely, that of "why don't you just funnel all of your development points into a single Settlement, instead of spreading them out?" Hopefully, the appearance of a dungeon in a kingdom where a player is simply "camping out" for level ups will make him think twice.

Dungeons are simply a series of battles, that pay out 2X gold, and when they exist, prevent special effects of Settlements from happening. Plus, if you decide to NOT try and take out the dungeon, the Settlements get angry with you.

To offset the new dangers of Dungeons, I've added a new "harder to die" feature, which allows for a scavenger magician to find your body, and replace your severed limbs with magical armor. Fun stuff, if you look through the abstractness of it all.

I'm at the point now with the game that I don't mind it being posted up to the geek, so if anyone wants to earn some geekgold, feel free to submit the game.

Thing #2
On another note, in honor of my love for games that play differently, I picked up the new Z-Man edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights. And then, I put it down, and picked it up again. It's a good workout, given that the box is amazingly heavy considering that it's all cardboard and paper (no wood pieces).

After playing around with it a little bit solo just to get the feel of how it worked, I came to the conclusion that it really does feel like a game produced in the early 80s: fairly simple mechanics wedded to countless look-up charts that reference other look-up charts. But it's a 1980's game with the trappings of the new millenium's penchant for gorgeous art and top notch production values. Even the box top oozes class; the main background of the box is matte black, but the rest of the artwork is all colorful and glossy. Granted, I don't buy too many games, but I don't think I've bought a game with cardboard punch-out chits this thick before. Anyway, I look forward to bringing this handsome edition of a "choose your adventure" book out on the table soon, even if it's just with my 6 year old daughter, who should be able to handle most of it easily as long as I'm the reader, since the game is pretty much A) move in the world, then B) go through a look-up chart process to find out what story happens there.

Also, I wouldn't running a play-by-forum/blog version Tales at some point. Granted, it's a lot of typing, but the game flow and 99% non-turn-order wackiness should make it easy enough.

Speaking of play-by-forum, I'm currently in Season 12 of the Battlestar Galactica play-by-forum game at the 'geek. Needless to say, with all of the possible interrupting, and potential out-of-turn card play, it's a slow go. Very slow. I'm amazed that people can actually RUN a play-by-forum version of this game, much less play it. For the record, the game officially started over a month ago, and we still haven't quite made it 'around the table' of player's turns yet.

**Still awaiting his next chance to playtest the Three Fates game.

A Turn for the Better

2009-07-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

At the BGDW meetings recently, I’ve been running into a various games that have been toying around with different ways of dealing with player order. I figure it’s an interesting subset of mechanics to explore for a little bit.

I’m not that interested in the “why” of wacky turn orders in these cases, as they are usually obvious. Balancing first player (or last player) strength is usually the number one culprit. However, there are a few other reasons: add some variability is one. Complicate the “cost” of things is another. But what I am more interested in is the “how” of player tracking, and simple solutions required to keep track of things that are more complicated that simply “the player on the left goes next.”

My first real encounter with alternate player order mechanics probably would be with Circus Maximus, the old Avalon Hill chariot “racing” game. I put racing in quotes, as the actual race part of the game was usually overshadowed by the whipping and pulling of drivers out of the carts and the spiking of opponent horses and such. One review I read of the game, which summed it up nicely, went along these lines:

Out of ten chariots, you will most likely find that only 2 are still in the race by the first turn, and one of those have one of his wheels still on his chariot mostly by the power of wishful thinking. The other eight players will be either getting dragged by their horses, or running for the walls desperately trying to climb out of the arena.

Really, there was very little reason to run three laps, aside from the glory of trying to run over players who are making hapless escape rolls.

Anyway, turn order in that game is resolved simply enough; everyone puts their color chit into a cup, players determine their current speed, and then a color is drawn and that player takes his turn. The next color is drawn for the net player, etc. Since a player’s turn is taken immediately as colors are drawn, you don’t have any knowledge of the complete turn order for the round, it leaves a bit of risk and reward for where you want to wind up on the board, who you are trying to block, and how you want to waste your speed on combat.

This didn’t seem that special at the time, as it felt like a good representation of the chaos of horse-ramming. And while I’m sure it’s not the first game to mess around with the standard “play moves to the player on the left,” it obviously didn’t scream “HEY LOOK AT THIS NEAT-O NEW MECHANIC” either.

The first game that I can think of that I ran into a player order featured that DID seem to call out “HEY LOOK AT ME” was Manhattan. The players “edge” (as we called it, a holdover from playing Jyhad: The Eternal Struggle), would move to the next player at the end of a round, and the edge would signify who would go first the next. Over the course of four rounds, each player would go first, second, third, and last; thereby negating somewhat the first-player advantage (or in some cases, last-player advantage) that games typically have.

Granted, nowadays, this is pretty much old hat; but back in 1994 or whereabouts, this was pretty slick and novel. At least to those of us who have never encountered such a thing before. But now, the these things seem to be a staple, with either auctions or “the edge” being the standard way to handle things.

And as usual, things continue to evolve. I’m sure that other games that are currently out there do various tricks and things that I am not aware of; I can only speak of things that I have played.

The trickiest part of handling wacky turn orders is trying to come up with a tabletop interface that helps keep track of the order. “Next player to the left” is pretty straightforward, but when the turn order can be all over the place, things can get a bit hairy.

On the simplest front, one designer of our little group has a game where players take turns collecting various things. At any point, you can get out of the dwindling collection phase; the order in which you leave determines the turn order for the next round. When a player quits the collection phase, his pawn is placed on a turn order track, along with a matching color marker, in the first open space. Not only does the pawn “over there” signify that he is out of the collecting, the matching color marker stays there, indicating future turn order for the next round when the pawn goes off shopping.

Next up on the complication scale would be a design of mine, which I’ll probably post up as a print and play when I get another play test under its belt. It’s an asymmetrical game, in that players select roles, with each role on a given round has different, and opposing, scoring opportunities. The turn order for selecting roles is determined through a bidding system.

However, the bidding is a little different than the standard auction rules, in an attempt to make the bidding feel more organic, and less structured. Everyone first blind bids an amount, which is revealed. Then the player with the lowest bid can then pass, or select any higher bid than his current one, that is not currently selected by another player. Note that this is ANY bid amount, he does not need to be the highest one, but he can “slide under” the high bid and happily be the second highest bidder (for example). Then the play proceeds to the newly-appointed lowest bidder.

To further complicate things, role selection is performed in reverse order of how players have passed. In other words, the first player to pass becomes the last player to select their role, and the last player still in gets first selection. Additionally, there’s a bit of a dollar auction going on here, in that the top TWO bidders must pay their bids.

Since players aren’t taking turns bidding, simply beating the current high bid, as is usual, the chore was to come up with a clean way to keep track of each player’s bid, and the turn order in which they will select their roles. Initially, we played based on strict memory of each player; which works, but a more concrete way of defining these events would be nice. An obvious choice would be something like poker chips for the bid, and turn order markers. Which is a lot of things to be shuffling around the table.

And so, the creation of a modified “secret bid” bidding wheel, which can be used for secret bidding, with additional marks on a second wheel for turn order indication was born. As can be seen in the pictures to the left here.

Notches in the wheels allow for easy thumb-turning access for quick adjustments as bids are made, and as players drop out, they can simply adjust the wheels to their up coming role selection order.

The third turn order complication really is a pickle.

In this game, players secretly bid to take different actions, which have a specific turn order to them. There is a “tie breaker” list, which is an ordered column of tokens related to player colors. This is important because only one player can use a given action per round. Taking an early action is usually very powerful, however, if you are in the back in the tie breaking list, odds are that someone else will take the early action (who is higher up in the tie breaking list), leaving you to do nothing.

However, as the actions are being taken, the player who takes the first action winds up moving to the rear of the tie breaking list for the next round. The player who selects the second action winds up being in the second-to-last position for the next rounds, etc. Players who are “beaten out” of an action and do nothing get to slide up in the list for the next round. So, usually taking a powerful early action on one turn usually means you are out of luck for doing anything useful in the next.

Anyway, the way to track the moving the tie-breaking list is rather complex. Basically, the order in which you take an action this turn, puts you in the reverse order for the next turn, with players who take NO action in the front of the list for the next round.

What I came up with to solve this problem is this: a stand up model, with rolling chips. The right side of the model indicates the current tie-breaking list, with the far right chip being the first tie-breaker leader.

As a player takes his action, he pulls his chip and places it on the left side. The chips roll down on the platform to the far left, in this case the cyan player.

After a full round is played, the left platform is rotated up, and all the chips roll back into their place on the right side platform, creating a new tie-breaker list. And there you have it! A kind-of-neat mechanical device that cleanly deals with the complexity of the turn ordering system in a fun way. I think.

Of course, I'm not saying that any of these solutions are cost effective from a publishing point-of-view. Especially considering that the last two games pretty much revolve around card play mechanics. But at least their solutions fix a problem; something that the silly cardboard cauldrons in Poison don't do.

** I'm a complete sucker for wacky mechanical cardboard stuff

The Thematic Lightbulb

2009-06-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

It's sort of odd; as all game designers are want to do for various reasons, the discussions of theme and mechanics always seems to come up. Whether it's a generalized starting point as a discussion ("What do you start with, a theme, or a mechanic?"), or something that sort of gets sideswiped into the design discussion ("We really should do that, because that's what people expect when you are simulating XXX..."). And I've found this to be quite apparent across various game design fields that I've in contact with over the years. Generally, everyone is trying to simulate SOMETHING; even something as simple as Tetris could be described as a sort of gravity simulation. Mostly because, well, people just understand the nature of how strangely oblong blocks stack up, and that packing them one way will result in very different packing position if you pack them differently.

It does seem like board games is a game subgroup that really doesn't mind having an abstract genre (and yes, I know they exist in video games), but even when you get to something that really is completely abstract, such as pinball, the amount of theming within the rules is astounding from a developer standpoint (and as an ex-pinball guy, I know). Really, a pinball machine is just a set of play mechanics that allow the player to score points based on whatever state various shots and targets are in, but every effort is made to somehow theme each of these states and reasons for why "increased scoring potential" may be active. It all made sense to me when I was in the industry: "This game mode represents "Payback Time" from whatever hot movie license the game was based on." But a few months out of the industry, and I was completely lost.

STORYTIME!

As a case in point, before I was in the industry, I played a pinball machine called "Whirlwind." I enjoyed it a lot. And this was way before the craze of various continual play modes that began in the '90s.

Anyway, as it was frequently done back in those times, various things would advance the scoring of various other things. And in the case of Whirlwind, one of the features was "Jets At Max." First of all, there were no airplanes on the game, and since it was a weather/tornado themed game, I started assuming that Jets meant Jet Streams, and the outer loops had "cloud faces" blowing wind around; that looked like Jet Streams to me! Soooo, I figured, Jets at Max meant that the outer loop shots must be worth big points.

It was only I started working in Williams/Bally did I realize that Jets referred to "Jet Bumpers." In other words,the silly pop bumpers that bounced the balls around were maxed out at big points, not the loop shots.

Alas, what was my point? Maybe it was this: here was a case where the theme, and the search for a logical extension of the theme, caused me to guess completely wrong as to how a scoring mechanic worked.

END OF STORYTIME.

Anyway, as I said earlier, it's a little odd. There's always talk about themes and mechanics, and especially how Eurogames wind up just having a collection of mechanics with a theme pasted on. I know some people like having a brainburning good time fighting with mechanics and searching for optimal mathematical play, but I find myself leaning further and further toward the Fortress:Ameritrash side of things; I want a logical explanation for why things are happening, not "just because" a rule tells me so.

This came most strongly into my vision while playing a prototype recently. Mechanically, it worked fine; he added a few new features to it that felt better than the last. And while the stated goal of the game was often discussed in terms of mechanics and scoring mechanisms, the entire game devolved into operating things solely for the gain of positive points, or avoidance of negative points. And while he had studied up strongly on his chosen theme of the game, and various detailed historical matters regarding the theme he wished to impart upon it, it was clear that the game was pretty much an abstract; you did not feel like you were doing anything that represented anything close to his theme; all actions were solely manipulating little cubes to best scoring results.

The little theme-ing lightbulb turned on in my head near the end of the evening. Basically, one of the new features he added was the addition of neutral cubes that scored negative points. At this point, I realized that those cubes, based on a the discussion which kept coming back to him describing the games theme (which to any other player, doesn't really exist), could actually perform an action that relates to the theme and represenations that he decribed that affected the game interestingly, as opposed to just a point suck.

Whether or not that something like this gets implemented in his game, I do not know. But it did make something tangible to me that was often talked about in rather mysterious terms: what exactly does theme mean within the context of a game? And the answer was a rule that performs as you'd expect in simulating that particular thematic action.

At least until I change my definitions again.

** I know I'm being a little vague on describing the game above. As it's not my game, I don't feel it's right to talk too much about it's details.

If players want to do something...

2009-06-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

This is a nice short article about the design of Asteroids. And how one design element leads to another.

Of particular interest is the idea that if players keep wanting to do something, maybe it's in your best interest to allow them to do it (shooting at asteroids).

Well, until the guys who pay your checks start complaining, then you don't let them do it (lurking).

Everything in moderation, I suppose.

An Epic Update!

2009-04-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures has been updated once again. Click here for the link.

Numerous things have been hammered out and altered. A quick glance:

REMOVED
-- No more cursed items (for now).
-- No speed initiative for creatures.
-- No references to time penalties on Quests.

ADDED
-- As suggested by "Tim," the player has some decisions to make in Battles now (granted, not much too start the game, really)
-- In response to the "mighty Battle Actions" that the player can obtain, Creatures are built differently; known game types are randomly assigned, and can affect the rules of Battle now.
-- As a way to increases the useful of the Terrains, Creatures are randomly assigned Terrain Modifiers, which modify their Level.

CHANGED
-- Magical Items are Battle Strength modifiers, instead of Level modifiers.

Probably the biggest addition is the use of and acquistition of Battle Actions. These are basic modifiers that are used during battles, which can only be used once per player level change. So, when you increase your Level at a Temple, you "recharge" your Battle Actions. Also, increasing your Level gains new Battle Actions.

The selection of new Battle Actions is sort of interesting. They create "paths" towards a character archetype. So, instead of simply declaring yourself as a Fighter or Wizard, the "path" that you decide to take in acquiring your new action sort of thematically decides that for you. It's sort of subtle.

Anyway, the Creatures are probably too mean now, due to the Terrain modifiers. As they are using the modifiers regularly, whereas your Battle Action modifiers are pretty limited, especially early on. But maybe not.

Print on Demand

2009-04-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

Currently, there's an uptick in discussions with regards to POD for games. This is attributed to various things, mostly to websites such as artscow.com that are now printing playing cards on demand. Granted, these are pricey, non-money making affairs for the designer at this point, and I doubt a publisher at this technology point could do single one-off games at a desirable price point.

Additionally, I doubt that an POD in the near future is even going to bother with the intricacies of box making, part making, and chit cutting that a large fancy game entails. But it could happen.

I guess the other aspect is with people thinking that they can become "publishers" with this method somehow, which, when you take the POD company's take on the deal, price-wise, the game won't be very attractive at all. Unless you are merely using the service to get the game out there, ala print-and-play.

For example, Lulu.com features a "store" option for most of their book publishing. Unlike "real" publishing, where there is a great amount of cost reduction in the mass producing of a book, lulu.com charges the same high price that you would get as if self-printing a book for yourself from your own data files. Whatever profit you want to charge to go to yourself gets added on top of that price. Your simple deck-o-cards-only card game better be good if you are going to wind up charging $25 total. This would include your additional profit, plus whatever the POD website charges for shipping and delivery. And that doesn't include a rules sheet.

I guess one could make an argument that if someone is POD a game, then they'd just download a free set of rules, or something else, or they'd find a way to get whatever else was needed. And it's a good argument. Or maybe you had a few cards leftover which you could put the rules on.

Granted, if you are trying to get a nice set of prototype cards done, it may be worth the $20 for 52 professionally feeling cards.

Anyway, part of the fun of this world is trying things out, and so, knowing what is currently available out there, I went off an attempted a simple little puzzle/game booklet, using artwork that my kids have done (the larger gallery can be viewed at the BuddingArtist link off to the side). It's sort of a more advanced choose-your-own-adventure book. I would up using shutterfly.com for no apparent reason really. It's available here for viewing, and I suppose, for purchase. It should be noted that I get none of the money in the very odd chance that someone really wants to purchase it, but I do have to say that the little java script thingy is very neat-o.

View Project at Shutterfly

And if the neat-o Java thingy above isn't working, you can go directly to the shutterfly entry for the book here.

The "game" of the puzzle entails collecting items from certain characters, then going to other pages with other characters that manipulate them somehow. Characters come in three different flavor, one's that give the reader something, ones that alter them, and ones that block enterance to other pages until they are given the proper item. Unlike a choose-your-adventure book, which is pretty linear, this is more of a simple text adventure where you can go back and forth between "rooms," experimenting.

Surprisingly, it was a lot tougher than I thought originally when I was taking notes and laying out my world. In fact, the 1st edition of the book was set up much more like a world, where each page would only be able to to other pages; in the final edition I simplified the world by letting the reader visit any of the "base world" pages.

At first, my idea was to layout the entire puzzle on paper, then it would be easy enough to copy and paste the structure into a POD photobook website. This turned out not to be the case initially. Conceptually, it was easy enough coming up with a few puzzles that could be strung along with various ideas derived from the "artists." But understanding the relationship of where each page would be was a harder concept to build. Ideally, you want to "hide" whatever linearity in the puzzle you have throughout the book, instead of it being a simple read through.

In the end, probably laying out the world of the pages on note cards would've been much better initially. The ability to move things around visually would've greatly helped.

At some point, I realized that instead of a typical NSWE grid layout, I decided that a ring around a central page was better, with a few additional "secret passages" across the world.

In the end, it didn't matter much anyway, as my wife, who is ultimately the target for this book, found it a bit hard to comprehend. And while this above method worked, the need to considering your target market prevailed, so, the new current edition was built with no "mapping" of most of the world...the reader can go to any of the early pages as if all the characters are in the same location, only the later pages were locked, to be "unlocked" by the earlier pages.

As far as the "published" book itself, I'm very pleased. Shutterfly provided an excellent end-product that feels truly published, and not just run off a printer in some guy's basement somewhere. So physical quality is not a question with regards to POD stuff at this point. And if you are going to design a game that uses just cards, or just a book, or any of the other wacky stuff that they can "publish" for you (I've always been fascinated by trying to design a game confined to a "space" of it being a published calendar), it works. Just don't expect a cheap price for it.

Congratulations are in order

2009-03-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

Congrats go out to Dwight Sullivan, as his Nobleman game won top prize at Hippodice this year.

Another link with a little bit more information.

As I may have mentioned earlier, it's a game that I'm not surprised that they liked. It's got a much beloved theme for a German game (medieval-ish European land/castle building), with a lot of well known mechanics meshed together. Plus a LOT of playtesting went into it, so it's pretty polished. Not to mention some hand-crafted pastic molded pieces.

The Moral Compass

2009-02-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

So, life has been getting in the way a lot recently. But I promised that I would update ESNA, and so here it is. The latest version of Epic is up with some rules clarifications, new cards, new quest types, and a new topic to discuss!

(Of course, I should note that I haven't really had a good chance to fully playtest this version. So while I've clarified things that has bugged people, I'm sure that the new added rules have just as many holes in them.)

And on to the topic...

At this point, I need to comment that I am not a student of philosophy of any size or shape, so I'm sure I'm using terms in the wrong way; hopefully the drift of my words is clear.

Dungeons and Dragons used to have this thing called Alignment back in version 1 days, I have no idea what the equivalent is, if any, in today's version. Anyway, it was a compass of sorts that described the way your character should act, making a cross between a Good/Evil axis and a Lawful/Chaos axis.

And in a lot of ways, pretty useless. Since you just played the game the way you wanted your character to play. Or at least that's how we did it. It was a game of heroes doing heroic things, not villains performing evil deeds.

And so, I bring up "morality," or the basic thinking of good actions versus evil actions within a game. This is something that to my limited vision never seems to be covered in games too much. Goals of games are hard wired into "best way to win" or "best way to collect the most points as fast as possible." And while these are all choices that players make, aside from a mere point-collection perspective, there is very little consideration with regards to which path is the "right choice" versus the "evil choice."

Just how far you can veer off the "most point laden path."

In fact, there is seemingly very little outside of RPGs that allow for a player to truly make a moral choice, even down to a simple childlike level of good versus bad. Even in shame such as Battlestar Galactica, where there's a "good" side (the humans) and a "bad" side (the skinjobs), it's not a player's choice; it's merely a card draw of fate that determines your goals.

Then you can take it a step farther; what is really good or evil; one's view of what is good is certainly different depending on which side of the fence you are on. Once you are a Cylon in BSG, getting rid of the humans are a good thing. The victor of a war decides who the patriots are, and revolting peasants are the losers.

So, the next step in this is, is there a way to define a good or bad aspect in a game, derived from a player's choice of actions? Something more than just a logical quest of point accumulation?

What I will contend here is that actions are only decided to be good or evil based on the defining conscience and responses around those actions. In fact, what makes actions somewhat compelling in an RPG is that the NPC, being run by the DungeonMaster, have a memory of how the characters treated them previously. And it is the "memory" of past actions that ultimately define the view of a character's action over the course of time as to whether they are good or evil. Without that memory, there is no justice to return in kind, and no remorse for following a different path.

Or something. As I said, my screw around time has been short. Hopefully this makes sense.

And so, I've imparted some rules into ESNA that attempts to capture this. I've given Settlements a simply memory of past actions where those who live in the Settlement feel they've been slighted by the player, and actions are altered based on those previous actions. Conceptually, I like this a lot; since my playtest time has been remorsefully short, mechanically, I don't think it's implemented as fully as I'd like, and in fact, probably doesn't come into play too much at all.

But it does allow you to go off to rape and pillage an entire Village, at the cost of spreading the news that you are, at best unstable, or at worst, someone that the other Settlements should not be dealing with.

And in some cases, late into the game, pillaging Villages is a good thing for you to personally do; it reduces the cost of building your Keep while gaining some extra gold. If you can live with the crummy reputation throughout the land.

Anyway, it's up for review. I'm always interested in comments and suggestions.

Updated ESNA

2009-01-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

Updated ESNA to include the missing rules as was reported by Aaron_ in the comments.

Also, I should point out that he found something similar. Granted it's much more dice-heavy, but kind of does the same thing. Which makes me want to move on to other things.

The worst episode of BattleStar Galactica ever

2009-01-25T18:28:00.000-08:00

So, we finally had a chance to play the Battlestar Galactica board game. Through natural selection of various reasons, we wound up with 3 players, which isn't really enough to fully appreciate the game. But we decided to play anyway since none of us had played it before, and felt it was worth getting the hang of it anyway.

And what we wound up with was a game that suffered from something that is a common malady that all game designers fear, regardless of what kind of game you are working on: "demo-itis." Here's how it works: in the middle of a design, you are required to show your game to some big wig or somebody, so you spend a day or two just making the thing work, through whatever means possible. Mr. Big Wig comes in for a demonstration, and you hope that the game does exactly what you want it to, the actual hooks and fun stuff becomes apparent, and everyone has a grand old time.

Unfortunately, the oppposite typically happens. While a complete breakdown, most likely resulting in fire extinguishers and ambulances, never occur, it's the little bugs, the things that you miss, or simply, the game does not show off it's features well, or obviously enough to someone who hasn't been wrapping head around the game for the last 5 months. Which usually results in some type of tap dance of "well, what you are experiencing is quite rare" or "well, that feature isn't quite finished yet," or some sort of excuse.

Anyway, in the case of the BSG game we played, the Cylon fleet never bothered to show up beyond their starting positions. Never. And not really through any clever type of card play either; it was just an unlucky shuffle of the deck for the most part. I played Roslyn, who has the quite powerful ability to draw 2 Crisis cards and only select 1 to play, and for the first 80% of the game I didn't draw a Cylon fleet card; it wasn't until the very last 3 rounds that they started showing up, and only to me, at which point I simply selected the other card.

Now I don't think that makes the game broken in any way. It's just that when you have events driven through the random ordering of a shuffled deck of cards, this is bound to happen at some point. And in fact, it even points out how powerful Roslyn's ability is with three players. For a round of all three players, the other two players draw one card, while Roslyn draws 2 and picks one, so she alone is seeing 50% of all crisis cards drawn; once Adama revealed himself to be a Cylon, now she was seeing 66% of the crisis cards. (Since, typically, revealed Cylons draw from their own deck).

It's enough to make me think that Roslyn probably shoudn't be selected in a three player game.

Additionally, I tend to agree with the observations that with three players, you wind up drawing too many card than you really need. At some point, we were defeating crisis checks with monstrous numbers just because we had so many cards to toss into the stack; if we have to discard down to 10, might as well use them anyway.

*********

One of the more interesting features of the game is that it thematically "feels" like playing out an episode of the show remarkably well. Except in cases where the game doesn't work properly due to a bad randomization of the cards. And so, I present to you our episode, "One Is The Lonlient Cylon," probably the worst episode ever, but sort of humorous if you can imagine it as a "real" episode playing out.

After the opening credits, we find Roslyn doing her presidential duties on Colonial One, building confidence with the Quorum. On Galatica, Starbuck jumps into a Viper to defend the few human ships behind Galatica from a few Cylon raiders, while Admiral Adama commands that a few for Vipers should be launched, acting like a true leader.

Not much interesting is happening at this point, Starbuck takes down a raider, Roslyn is dealing with the Quorum, and Adama is yelling "frak" a lot. The Cylon basestar lauches a heavy raider, and right before the fleet executes it's first jump, the raider lands a boarding party on Galatica.

At the fleet's new location, Starbuck decides to jump in a Viper again, and go off on patrols, just waitin for the Cylons to jump into range. Adama waits for someone, anyone, to yell "Draedus Contact" because he is getting itchy with his control over the nukes. And Roslyn is just hanging with the Quorum.

So we wait, and wait, and wait. Sure there's a few minor crises' going on, but the fleet is constantly spinning up their FTL drives, so there's no big issues. Roslyn complains that maybe someone on Galactica should, you know, deal with the Cylon raiding party that is on Galactica, who really aren't doing much raiding anyway. Maybe they are a Cylon READING party and they've found Adama's bookshelf. In response to Roslyn's request that maybe someone should take care of the Cylon reading party, Starbuck responds, "Hey! That's not my job, I deal with stuff OUTSIDE of the ship!"

Adama, for his part, laments his need to throw anyone in the brig, but because of his emotional attachment disadvantage, he doesn't have it in his heart. We find a need to look up some rules, and Adama is disheartened that he can't launch one of his nukes at Starbuck.

Roslyn decides to put up "WANTED" mug shot posters of Starbuck just for fun, and finds out that Starbuck is not a Cylon. Morale on the ships drops a bit.

After a jump, Starbuck decides, "It's fraking boring doing training runs and patrols, I'm going to run for fracking president." Adama also decides to run for fracking president. President Roslyn, upset that noone cares about the Cylon reading party on Galactica, decides that it's up to her and her cancer-ridden body to deal with it, and transfers off to Galactica.

Meanwhile, both Starbuck and Adama are holding numerous press conferences on Colonial One announcing their intentions to be fracking president.

Cancer-ridden Roslyn visits the armory, gets her weaponry, and defeats the Cylon reading party. Starbuck gets sent to the sickbay due to some crisis, and then Admiral Adama also becomes fracking president.

While cancer-ridden Roslyn, due to a crisis, goes off on a mission to find water, Starbuck goes back to Colonial One and holds some more press conferences. President/Admiral Adama does something wacky during a crisis, makes it obvious he's a Sleeper Agent Cylon, and reveals himself. As President/Admiral Sleeper Agent Adama is sent out an airlock (and gets reborn on the Resurrection Ship) the bombs he planted on Galatica go off.

Fortunately for the humans, Sleeper Agent Adama doesn't know his own ship that he commanded for years. Even though he wanted to knock out the FTL drives, he inadvertantly placed a bomb in both the main gun control room and in the armory. Which would be useful to him if other cyclon ships ever bothered to show up.

Starbuck winds up becoming both the President and the Admiral. Roslyn, still cancer-stricken, just waits it out on Galatica.

Starbuck and Roslyn work together to spin up the FTL drives as quickly as possible, jumping the fleet. Cylon Adama on the resurrection ship continues missing rolls and getting lousy crisis/super crisis card selections. Foolishly, both Roslyn and Starbuck hang out together in the lab which just makes Cylon Adama want to continue to take pot shots at Galatica, in the hopes of hitting the lab and sending them both to sick bay.

But it doesn't happen, Roslyn and Starbuck just hang out together tossing back beers and Chamela Extract, reliving the good times.

With two fuel left, Galactica performs it's last needed jump, and the humans win.

Closing credits roll.

ESNA finally written up

2009-01-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's been awhile, and I've been sort of distracted by real life things, but I finally got around to putting together the early beta rules I've been playing Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures with, for those who want to play along.

Remember, it's kinda mean at this point.

Clicky here for the rules and stuff.

It's also in my Half-Baked sidebar.

2 more playtest

2009-01-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

Well, two more playtests for ESNA. I'm learning a bunch about the flow of the game (which moves very quick) and the balance (which is favored VERY heavily in the game's hand I think).

Game two actually was moving along swimmingly well, I managed to build a castle, went on a few quests (one involving going off and slaying a stinky elephant, two of them involving going of and returning an emissary from another Region, and one involving escorting a princess). Even managed to get up to Level 2, and created a few Level 2 creatures (Burrowing Gophers and Flying Kangaroos).

Unfortunately, on my next request for a quest, I needed to defend the castle in Brykestok from the invading Burrowing Livestock horde (well, two of them), and in since I was so busy transporting people around like the variant taxi driver I am, I never bothered to stop at the village to rest and reclaim HP, so I totally blame that on me. I was planning on doing that on the next Quest, but got hoodwinked into the castle defense.

Game three was a pretty sad state of affairs. I got beat up by two Undead Football Fans really badly; I couldn't even muster past their ridiculously slow speed rating of 3, to avoid their early hit.

Anyway...

Initially I figured that the player's total score would simply be whatever gold he has when he decides to retire (which at this point in the design cycle seems to be, don't even start adventuring; be a farmer). But gold is an interesting fungible resource; right now it is used to reclaim HP at the Village, and to advance levels at the Temple. Ultimately, I've determined that the race to simply retire with some amount of "vast sum" is kind of boring. It's pretty much at this point, "well, the game is getting too hard, might as well stop when I get a big payday."

And aside from that, the terraforming is kind of fun. And while it's sort of fun to run around the world, you can sort of do it on autopilot; I need some more decision points.

So, the player can build a Keep now, in which to retire in. The sheer impressive size of his Keep
will be the player's score.

At any point in the game, the player can determine his Keep location by selecting a Region without a building in it. At this point, the player can funnel money into his Keep.

But there's a trick to this. To increase the value of his Keep by one, he must pay the sum total of the levels of all the buildings that currently exist in the Kingdom. Early Keeps are easy to build while "building resources" are plentiful, but the money is tight early on, and you might want to spend money instead of HP (as I've learned quickly). Later on, while the Kingdom is functioning nicely, it's more expensive, but gives you an excuse to dump that extra cash into something nice like a media room or your Keep. So there's a bit of risk/reward decision making in the process of how and when to spend your cash. And that's typically good.

Along those same lines, I've been pondering the use of a new building, the Quarry, that will also let you spend money, this time to increase the Level Values of the Buildings. I don't want to increase the +1 Events too much (even though I will), and again, this will allow the player to make more decisions into the game with regards to money managements.

All is well in the world. Except for Fred, the Third, my latest Nameless Wanderer.

*****

Since there seems to be a little bit of interest in the game, I don't mind spending some time to put together an official, full functioning, completely pre-alpha ruleset for those who are really interested in getting the butts handed to them. Feel free to chime in.

From a design article standpoint, the game is doing what I thought it would do, and I really hate giving rote playtesting stories, as I'm much more interested in talking about design concepts, goals, and ways to achieve those goals. Since this game has pretty much fulfilled the "build the components as you go" requirement at this point, my need to present lengthy papers on personal dsign opinions has lessened for this!

ESNA playtest

2009-01-05T19:26:00.001-08:00

Yes, I'm still screwing around with ESNA (Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures). I just took my first playtest spin with it tonight. Granted, it's a first test, but some notes....

It ran pretty smooth. It ran pretty short, because I got decimated pretty quickly.

As you can see if you click to enlarge the picture on the left, I managed to explore my little Kingdom out to 9 different Regions, eventually meeting my demise in Hillyhills on my return from the dead-end otherwise known as Icabod's Roost due to a particularly strong pair of Armored Snakes. One of the interesting features that developed was that I only drew the "+1" twice; my first use was creating the useless Level 1 Temple in Caroyln, the second use was developing my Village in Alyndale up to a Level 2, since I was watching the terror of continuous hordes of level 1 creatures just CONSTANTLY gnawing on my extremities with every turn.

In general, I felt that the development of the Kingdom went well, with enough "0 Additional Path" cards drawn to make my life a pain to move around in, but not so much that I felt trapped. The Region of Byzantine, Diamonddale, and Icabod's Roost were the Regions that "dead-ended" out; Diamonddale being particularly damaging as it was a central Region, and it canceled out one of my 4 gimme routes out of Alyndale.

Clicking on the left picture here shows my Creature List. Since I didn't even come remotely close to being able to advance to a new level, all of the creatures encountered were also Level 1. Overall, there were 9 total encounters, plus the two Building Advances, and I think a single "no event happens" phase, which leaned against me slightly in terms of expected probabilities.

Early on, I defeated a Flying Kitten, which, aside from a tiny amount of gold, netted me a treasure, so I opted for a +1 Crown of Flying (+1 due to the Kitten being a Level 1 creature, this allows me to add +1 level against all flying creatures during battle) to place upon my pretty little skull. Sadly, the very next encounter, which I believe was against the Armored Dumpling, wound up putting a curse on my crown.

Defeating the Stinky Jackalope netted me the +1 Bodice of Stinkiness (again, +1 level for me against Stinky creatures). But sadly, by this point, even though I increased my village to 2, I was not able to really rescue enough hit points to continue on.

The second encounter of Armored Snakes (which now doubled their damage because there were, well, two of them due to being it's second encounter) did me in nicely.

Finally, I guess as creatures go, even though typically I like my Undead to be zombie-like slow, I guess if they are Undead Rebel Bikers, their bikes would explain their higher speed rating.

As you can see by my character sheet, there's not much to be filled in. Pity the poor nameless wanderer, for nature has run it's course on thee.

Obviously, in one playtest, there's not enough data at this point to determine if "the numbers" are out of whack...but my intuition tells me that the game leans pretty hard into the player (at least at the starting level) at this point, just based on the fact that the encounter/improvement Event occurances are relatively close for a small sample. I started with 50 hit points...perhaps that's not enough to start with.

But I think that the need to advance levels quicker that the creatures can multiply is of prime importance. Also, I was playing with an Initiative rule where when a creature is encountered I would check a Battle Result number from my Level against that creatures speed. Losing that check gave the creature a free hit on Nameless Wanderer, which didn't help.

On the other hand, this is what I assume it felt like playing a 1st level Magic-User in the first editions of Dungeons and Dragons:

"Oh yeah, ok guys, you go off and fight that monster and I'll be huddled in the corner over here, keeping my one stinking Magic Missile around in case we REALLY need, but otherwise, I'll just be right...over...here. Cowering. Occasionally shaking my staff at the the monster."

Too bad this is a solitaire game.

Pod People

2009-01-03T19:02:00.000-08:00

Over at the BGDF, Seth posted a blurb about a co-op/traitor game, based on Reservoir Dogs. While everyone loves a good backstabbing divide-the-loot game, I'm not sure how adding a traitor element to something like this would "feel." Sure, there's a lot of traitor-ish games out there, and technically you could just easily boil out a lot of the space opera of Battlestar Galactica and retheme the game, but I'm not sure it would feel right. In others words, it's a strange thematic paradox. Mostly because in a game themed around everyone being thieves, EVERYONE is supposed to be a backstabbing bastard, not just one guy.

Plus, there's something about the EPIC SIZE of the goal of a game of BSG, and to a lesser extent Shadows over Camelot, offer. In the case of BSG, the storyline is nothing short of saving the entire human race. The themetic power of being a traitor against that cause is, well, powerful. Being a tratior is a roomful of untrusty, slightly off-kilter thieves isn't as impressive. And to make matters worse, if the goal really is to take the most loot, then everyone is sort of working against each other anyway, there's no real reason to trust each other to begin with. Traitors need the opposite, the complete need to trust to work together to a common goal, not an individual one, for the traitor goal to succeed.

Converting the theme on it's head a bit, and making it something like old school Mission:Impossible, where a team is working together, and that, to me, makes it more interesting, if only because everyone is supposed to be working together. The traitor is truly a traitor at this point. Granted, this is a stupid theme change, and nothing more, but I think that in traitor/co-op games the theme is important in defining the role and motivation of the traitor; more important really, than the applied theme of most games.

Somewhere at the half-way point of this theme, is probably the hero-thief archetype, ala the Ocean 11 movies (old school or new school, it doesn't matter), or really any heist theme where the criminals are presented as the heroes.

Digressing a bit...

Currently, most co-op games really are just re-themed disaster movies. By this, I think Bruno Faidutti thematically got it right with Red November; a bunch of players thrown into a situation where an escalating bunch of things constantly, randomly going off in their way and trying to deal with it as best. Perfect for a submarine disaster game.

What is a core theme to the M:I and Ocean 11 movies is not really the sense of trust amongst the team of individuals, but the unfolding of the clever, ridiculously complicated plan of the people we are following. What would be interesting, from a design goal standpoint, is a game where it's not a bunch of random obstuctions (like the seeming never-ending stream of ghosts in Ghost Stories), but instead, there's a random world created with a goal, and all the players figure some way to "solve" the world, but this requires some percision of various players needing to be doing X at Y in the timelime at location Z, for another player to do something. Sure, little random bumps can occur along the way to get in the way, but the focus should be on developing and trying to maintain a long term plan, and not simply, "How do we put out the newly created fire at location ZZZ."

And the final digression...

As I spent some time mulling around in my head why I didn't feel that traitors don't work well as a game element in a Reservior Dogs world, I happened across the classic movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And it got me to thinking a slightly different approach.

(For those uninitiated, Body Snatchers involves "space pods" that perfectly clone a human, and then when you sleep, they absorb your thoughts and memories, and then mysteriously somehow displose of your body. The Pod People, then join the rest of the Pod People, spreading the pods around, secretly (or not so secretly) converting people, knowing full well that eventually, they'll fall asleep. Generally, Pod People are pleasant enough, only because they only thing they lack is emotion, so while there is no hate, or greed, there isn't any love or God either. Even though they do have an abundance of "converting to be like us is the greatest thing in the world" moxie. In the end, Pod People wind up sort of just being the same person, just with different physical shells, and that's why you don't want to be one, I suppose.)

As with most traitor/co-op games, there's the team, and then the potential tratior, who conspires against the team against them completing the goal. But those roles, once selected never really change.

What if the goal was more internal? In the case of a Body Snatchers game, the team is trying to do "something," whatever that may be. Getting out of town, finding a cure, whatever. But the real goal belonged to the tratior, and that would be infecting all of the other players, turning them into pod people, who then join his side? All of this is would have to be done somewhat secretly.

In my imagination, it would have to work generally like this: every player would have a set of traits that would be decreasing, low traits man bad things happen, a zeroed out trait means death. Traits could be replenished with some kind of supplies like FOOD, WATER, or SLEEP and whatever else. It is randomly decided at the start of the game which supply actually can cause the conversion (and maybe one of the goals of the team is to determine the cause somehow). Once players have been secretly converted to Pod People they can poison the supply further, and obviously "help" other players to convert to their cause. The game would be designed with the need to replenish your traits often, and hopefully paranoia would settle in as players are strangely offering help, and presumably making slightly different perceived actions once they are converted.

Of course, the hard part in all of this is handling the secret conversions so that true humans don't know where they stand. I never said it was going to be easy...

Procedures (part 4) - your ever growing world

2008-12-18T05:15:00.000-08:00

Thankfully, this post is going to be a fairly short one. Continuing with the ESNA (Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventure) theme. Ultimately, we are pretty much done with the heavy baggage of the "procedural" elements of the game at this point. But I might as well finish the game up. So....

As noted in the previous post, the basic turn structure is A)move to a new Region, then B) draw a card to see if an event happens there, based on matching up the land icons on the card with the region where the player is currently at. While the last post contained all of the information required for basic monster creation and handling (although not combat), which is run using the letter symbology, the question remains: "What happens if you draw an event that ISN'T a letter?" As say, for example in the card to the left here?

The +1 icons are a good thing. Instead of a creature encounter, this allows you to add or improve buildings to your little paper empire.

There are three types of buildings in the game: Villages, Temples, and Castles. You've already started with a Village when the game began. If you are in a Region where an Event DOESN'T happen, then you "visit" the building in that Region (if there is one) and perform the special actions that those Buildings can trigger.

Villages allow for rest, which will restore lost Health.

Temples allow for study, which increase your character's Level.

Castles allow for Quests, which let you go on specific "adventures" to gain big gold and magical treasures.

Getting a +1 icon from an Event card let's you build a new Level 1 Building of your choice in any Region that does not currently have a Building. Only one Building per Region please! Or, you can increase any pre-existing Building's Level by 1, up to a maximum of 10.

At this point, the game needs to have a bit playtesting to determine the best cost ratios for each action that the buildings can provide. But it's best to start simple.

Resting at a Village:
Paying 1 gold to a Village will restore an amount of Health equal to the Village's Level.

Study at a Temple:
Paying "100 times the desired next level" in gold at a Temple will increase your character's Level by 1, and increase your character's maximum Health by 50. Additionally, you cannot increase your character's Level beyond that of the Temple's Level.

Example: Increasing your character's Level from 2 to 3 would require you to find/create a minimum Level 3 Temple. Pay 300 Gold at that Temple, to increase.

Creating Quests are worth another post. But the only thing that's missing from this being playable is combat. So that will be coming next.

Podcasts

2008-12-12T12:33:00.000-08:00

From 1991 to 1999 I worked for Williams/Bally/Midway, in the pinball, and then later, in the slot machine design departments (and then back again into pinball). I started off as a lowly dot matrix animator, but bounced around across different departments fairly regularly, depending on the needs at the time.

Anyway, much like any geek-y crowd, there's a big internet following for pinball (or what remains of it). One of the more generally interesting website is a collection of audio interviews of various "pin-heads" and pinball programmers which can be found by clicking on this this link. While most of these names are probably foreign to the board game crowd, to the pinball crowd, many of these names are held in the same light as Knizia, Moon, Faidutti, and Wallace. And often in the same regards to design styles and themes. "I love the fast action flow of Steve Ritchie games" equates to "I love complex buisness engines of Wallace train games" kind of thing. The names of the people may be unknown to those outside the hobby, however, the names of a lot of the games they designed aren't.

With the recent acquisition of a shiny new mobile phone that can play MP3, I've been listening to a collection of interviews with the various people who I've worked with in the past. So, I can't really vouch for the interviews of people who are spending hours talking about, say, how to rebuild electrical coils or whatever, but the interviews of people who actually worked and designed these games are interesting to listen to as a whole. It creates this interesting picture of all these people who followed various threads in their life, who all came together to work on one specific type of product, and then went their own ways again.

I had been asked at one point to be interviewed, and sort of declined. I had always been bothered by the "how can I make a buck out of my hobby" that pinball enthusiasts have seemed to have, and didn't want to feed into that. But now seeing this as a project that brings together a bunch of threads and makes a layered tapestry puts a different light on the subject.

One podcast that I've recently finished that if worth listening to is the interview of George Gomez (TOPcast show 40). Aside from being one of the guys who I've had probably the best pleasure to work with, he really knows his stuff (both creatively and industrially), he touched a wide variety of arcade games across different companies, and he worked for Marvin Glass (one of the top game and toy development houses before they broke apart). Plus he's a very interesting and honest speaker to listen to. It's worth the time to listen.

Procedures, part 3 (Monsters)

2008-11-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

Continuing on with our trip into the world of EPIC SOLITAIRE NOTEBOOK ADVENTURES, we now move on to the next challenge...creatures to beat up. But let's review again what the stated goal of this exercise is: creating a game where components are created "on the fly" as needed.

First of all, I missed card 15 in the original card pack, which I have added back in. Click here for all the cards.

There are a few things to consider with regards to monsters in your basic creature-bash adventure game. One of the more important features is that the monsters somehow must scale in power as the player's character "levels up" in power, so as to keep the game interesting to the player. While running around in God-mode squashing monsters like bugs on a truck windshield might be fun for a little bit, a more interesting game-y approach is to somehow ensure that encountered monsters are relatively equal in strength. Even more interesting would be a situation where the monsters are also leveling up somewhat independently of the player, and a major factor of the game would be the player "racing" with the monsters to keep up.

The above mentioned race brings into consideration probably one of the least considered game design devices, which can be called The Clock. The Clock is usually subtle and somewhat forgotten (by most players) in most multi-player games, because it's never realized as to what it is. Ultimately, this is the point at which the game is declared over. It can be "no more tiles left to play," or "once a certain score is achieved," or any other number of ways a game can end. It is important, however, the realize that the clock is another resource, direct or indirect, that controls the game.

How is it a resource? Good players recognize the Clock. While most players understand that "once the tiles are gone, the game is over," a good players sees the Clock and, with some basic math, understands what it really means; there are 80 tiles to draw, there are four players, the game isn't over once the tiles are gone as much as it is over after I've taken 20 turns; 20 turns to maximize my results. From a game design standpoint, it's probably not a good idea to look at things as just as a game over condition, but as the number of expected actions a player can take.

So, getting control of the Clock is pretty important. Any game that ends with a player saying "if I only had one more turn to bring my evil plan to fruition to utterly destroy you" is a good game, in my opinion. Regardless of the above mentioned player's actual capability to really bring that plan into actuality. But that is a hook that demands the player to play again, because he was "merely" just one step away.

Anyway, the Clock will be the race between the monsters and the player leveling up. Interestingly, this will be somewhat indirect, as the player will either die during an encounter, or the player can retire with whatever goods he has obtained. Retiring will be at the sole discretion of the player, which will most likely be the point where it becomes obvious that the monsters are too strong for him to deal with safely any more...the risks of death will be too great.

Anyway, on to monster creation...

Aside from the sheet of paper where the map is being drawn, you will need another sheet which will be used for our "Monster Manual," but since I'm sure that's trademarked, I'll call ours the "Monster Journal." On the far left side, label each line of the sheet of paper with the alphabet, one letter at a time, starting with A on the top row, and ending with T twenty rows down. Much like creating Kingdom names from the last post, each monster, as they are created, will be referenced by a unique letter, and probably should be named starting with that letter, but that is left to your discretion.

A monster is comprised of various traits, again like Kingdoms. These are it's Type, Name, Level, Speed, Loot, and Flock Size.

Right now, before the game starts, you need to "seed" your Monster Journal with the types of Monsters you want to be dealing with. You should pick 5 or 6 different types, such as "poisonous", "undead", "flying", or "6 legged." The categories you choose don't matter too much, it's up to your personalization, and will affect things later when we talk about magical treasure creation later. After selecting your chosen categories, you should randomly allot each letter on your Monster Journal a type. Spread them around. Mix'em up.

And now you are all set.

During the game, on every turn, after you move to a new Kingdom, draw a card. In the middle right-hand side of the card, there is a grid of land types, and some letters and numbers.

The double land types directly refer to the two land types in the Kingdom that you are in. So, if you are in a Kingdom with a Mountain and a Desert, scan over this grid. If you don't see those land types, nothing happens. However, if there IS a matching pair of land types, then some event happens. If it is a letter, then there is an encounter with a monster.

I can talk a little bit about the math behind the relationship of the land types and the event grid. There are 10 different possible combinations of the four land types ("specific ordering" doesn't matter in this case...Forest/Mountain is the same as Mountain/Forest). Each card can have up to 8 different combinations, and therefore, up to 8 possible events.

However, the +1 events are considered to be "good" events. They help build your world without a chance of death. In general, the player has about a 50% chance of a monster encounter each turn in the current card set due to a creature letter appearing.

As another side note, the actual balancing of the creature letters is not a mere random placement. In fact, each letter is weighted towards a specific land type. So, if you go exploring mostly in forested Kingdoms, you will encounter the same forest-dwelling creatures more often. Calculating and fudging data and numbers for this kind of thing is easily handled within your friend, a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel.

Aside from the basic gee-whiz factor of this letter pairing, there exists a subtle strategy within the game because of this. Simply, if you know that the most dangerous creatures live in the forest, and you don't want to deal with them, it's probably wise to avoid the forests if traveling. But as you will see later, this comes at a cost of "pumping up" the lower level creatures, as mentioned in the race/clock discussion above.

For right now, we won't bother with the details of the battle (or the other actions that the other icons take). We are still concerning ourselves with the creation of a creature...

Continuing with our example to the left, if we are in a Kingdom with land types of a Mountain and a Desert, then the creature designated as a G attacks. If we have not "built" this creature yet, we will need to do so now.

You've already given him a random creature type; let's assume he's been typed as a creature who you've designated as "Stone Throwing" at the beginning of the game.

Ok, so creature G, let's give him a name. As naming the Kingdoms, it's usually a good idea to name the creatures with the starting letter for easy reference. And since creatures have a tendency to hang out in specific land types, we'll call this creature a "Gorge Orc," since that's the kind of fellow who would seem to want to hang around Desert-y Mountain type places.

Next up, is Level, when a new creature is introduced to your creature journal, the creature gets the same level as your character's current level.

Speed is handled by drawing the next card. Right below the event grid is a banner with a ghastly looking monster; his speed is shown in the lightning bolt on that card, so write that down.

Loot is again handled by drawing another card, and to the very right of the lightning bolt is a number; write that number down for the creature's loot.

And finally, Flock Size. Flock Size does two things at once. It keeps tracks of how many times you encountered this monster, which for all practical purposes, is a pointless data point. Since this is the first time w've encountered a Gorge Orc, put a single tic mark here.

But the second thing is important. Every time you encounter a creature, another tic mark is added to the Flock Size. This also indicates how many creatures make up the "creature's party." So, the next time you draw the G event, you will be battling 2 Gorge Orcs. The third time, there will be three, etc.

So why is this important? This has a lot to do with scaling the creatures against the player's abilities. Obviously, introducing a new creature at the same level of the player's character keeps the scale balanced, but what of the old, scrawny level 1 creatures, while you've grown up to be a strapping level character? By increasing the NUMBER of the low level creatures that attack you as you get stronger, the integrity of the creatures is kept stable while becoming a strategic race clock to battle against.

At this point, I guess I need to point out a little tidbit about your hero. He tops out at level 10. But creatures don't top out with regards to the amount of creatures that can band against you. And so, there is your clock you are racing against in this game; the ever increasing growth of creatures in the world.

For example, as a level 8 character, you might want to putz around in the forest because you know that there are a bunch of level 1 Drunken Elves that you can beat up on, while avoiding the level 8 Beach Whales in the desert. However, pretty quickly, after a few encounters with the Drunken Elves, they start amassing in quite bigger groups...at what point do you decide that maybe dealing with 2 Beach Whales is a better choice that 10 Drunken Elves? And then, at what point does it maybe become prudent that you are better off retiring with your loot than risk dealing with the 12 Drunken Elves OR 4 Beach Whales?

And so, as a recap, here is our "G" creature:
Reference Letter: G.
Type: Stone Thrower.
Name: Gorge Orc.
Speed: 8.
Loot: 3.
Flock Size: 1 tic mark (the first encounter).

Repeat as new creatures are needed. Or increment your Flock Size as old creatures are re-visited.

Coming soon, you and your ever-growing world.

Procedures, Part 2 (The World)

2008-11-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

Ok, part two. So, as a quick refresher, the design goal here is: by designing the game in such a way that data parts of the game are "built on the fly," we can keep our original component count low, while, in theory, making a pretty "big" game.

And so, with much ado, I present... Epic Solitaire Notepad Adventures. A grand solitaire adventuring game across vast wildernesses, with mighty battles, missions of intrigue, incessant looting....

...all on twenty cards. Which you can download by clicking here. All you will need is the cards, plus a writing utensil (a pencil) and a pad of paper. And a coin, I guess, if you want a token to indicate where you are.

A sample card is off to the left here. There's quite a bit of data point here, which are used to describe various aspects within the game, and to randomly build game data for use in the game.

The plan here is to discuss each system a bit individually, and how it relates to "on the fly" data components. The cards will most likely change somewhat as I get a bit further on in the development; in fact, there's always the chance, like most things of a design-y nature, that the damn thing just won't work, and it eventually gets tossed on the dusty shelves where all the other bright ideas that didn't pan out wind up.

ESNA is basically a solitaire fantasy world game; go around the world, go do missions, level up, beat up on monsters and steal their loot. There seems to be some calling for this kind of game on BGG on occasion. So, it's a good target to shoot for. As you will notice, unlike a typical Hack-n-Slash loot game, the cards don't have any flavor text, or names of fascinating creatures and such. What the cards DO have is the raw data needed for creating these things. It is up to the player to add personality to the things that get created on the way as the cards merely provided attributes to these pieces of data.

Anyway, this will become more clear as we go. For starters, let's get you building some worlds!

So, right now, the core gameplay, for all that we care out, is moving around in the world. The general deck action that we all know and love applies: draw a card, get the data you want off the card, then discard. If the deck empties out, reshuffle the discard pile and make a new deck.

On one sheet of paper, you will be drawing a map of the world. The map will be drawn as a series of land regions known as Kingdoms. Kingdoms are places that the player can move back and forth through, having completely fabulous adventures and such. Kingdoms have various attributes, most of which are assign by the ESNA cards, but some that are assigned, or placed by the player. The player aspect of this is important, as it grants a bit of strategy to the mix.

To begin....we need a Kingdom for you to start at! Draw the border of a Kingdom on your pad of paper. A Kingdom can contain A) a Name B) a certain amount of paths to other Kingdoms, B) two land types that describe the type of Kingdom it is, C) A Village, A Castle or a Temple.

Doing the easy part first, give the Kingdom a name. There's only one restriction to this...each Kingdom name must start with a unique letter, A through T. This allows the ESNA cards to "call out" a particular Kingdom when necessary by referencing just the letter (A,B,C...T). Sure, you could simply call your first Kingdom "A", but there' no fun in that. Let's go with "Alyndale".

Paths let you travel to neighboring Kingdoms. Your starting Kingdom starts with 4 Paths, which are drawn as dotted lines that extend to the border.

Each Kingdom has two different land types associated with it; in this case, the cards determine these attributes. So, draw a card off the top of the deck, and look at the land type in the large square sort of centered at the top of the card. There are Forests, Mountains, Deserts, and Farmlands. Draw the symbol in your Kingdom. Repeat this action one more time.

Finally, since this is your home Kingdom, there is a Village here. Draw a little Village icon in this Kingdom, and give it a Level of 1, by drawing a "1" in the center of it. In a later post, I'll get into the leveling system.

Ultimately, what you should wind up with is something that looks like the Kingdom off to the side here. Alyndale, in my world is a pleasant forested Kingdom! Oh, sweet Alyndale.

All cutesy aside, this is the basic data structure for a Kingdom. Generally, as you follow paths and go off exploring, you won't be placing Populated Landmarks (Villages, Castles, Temples) as those are added by a different means, but this is pretty much it.

So, let's do a little exploring. Following the example above, your hero decides to take the path on the upper right to venture off into the world. So, go and draw a new region for the shape you want this Kingdom to take, draw a path that continues into the new Kingdom, and give it a name starting with a letter you have not used. After this, draw two cards to determine the land types the Kingdom contains.

However, there's an additional card draw that's required when moving to a new Kingdom. After determining the land types, draw one more card, and look at the very upper right hand corner of the card, for the stat that lists "addl. paths." The indicates how many additional paths you can draw from with in the Kingdom. In the case of my example, "Beaverton" drew a card that lets me draw three additional paths. It should be noted that the borders between two Kingdoms can only include 1 path.

As your hero continues to go off and find new Kingdoms, there's a bit of trickiness in the way you build your world. Since you only are able to build a single "free" path in a new Kingdom when you follow a path to get there, trying to build a nice multi-faceted network of Kingdoms is risky. But at the same time, you don't want to be building a "single long chain" of Kingdoms. You don't want to be exploring Chile.

So, let's take a look at a further example of this; a new Kingdom called Caldwilly. Exploring from Beaverton into the new Kingdom of Caldwilly, we decided to draw Caldwilly close to Alyndale (in order to make a nice, easily travelled network), and drew our "free" path from Beaverton into Caldwilly. Then we drew our land types. Finally, we drew for additional paths.

And got "zero additional paths."

So, the path that we expected to connect Caldwilly to Alyndale doesn't exist, so we will have to cross out the "dead" upper-left path in Alyndale. And so it goes.

Anyway, this is the basic building blocks of building a world "on the fly." There's quite a bit of personalization going on, and a bit of strategy, with a dash of luck, so you won't be able to build the perfect network of Kingdoms. The important thing to concentrate on here is how player-created data filled up a "virtual template" for the game rules to understand. And of particular note, pay attention to the first-letter coding of the Kingdom name, as this will be used further.

Next chapter, the Kingdom's population grows, and monsters appear.

Following the Procedures

2008-11-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

Recently, a much-awaited digital game FINALLY hit the market. Spore, by Will Wright, for those who aren't aware of it, is another in the long line of his sandboxes. While these types of games have game-y elements, there is no main goal or story to complete. Granted, Spore does have this in a small amount: the object is starting with a single cell organism, eventually evolve and go off and conquer planets. However, it's really more about mucking about, and seeing what happens.

What makes Spore unique is the way that the data is handled. Instead of having massive teams of artists developing massive amounts of content for the various races, creatures, globs of primordial ooze, etc, all of this is handled procedurally. Basically, creatures aren't defined by what the artists make them look like, but instead, by simple software definitions of said creature, and the program just "figures it out." This allows for immense flexibility, as you just apply a few random numbers to a creature template, and TA DA, you have a living, breathing creature that knows how it's supposed to walk, fight, and otherwise generally behave.

What does this accomplish? Well, for one, size. The game doesn't need to have a bunch of pre-programmed walk motions, designed specifically for a pre-drawn animation cycle, designed by an artist. It just needs to know that the creature has three-legs of X size. Since artwork and texture are generated on the fly from this thinking, there's no need to have to import 100 Megs of texture images. It's just created as needed.

Additionally, this allows the users to make infinite combinations of creatures, without having to deal with creating their own textures and monster-shaped polygonal meshes. And once on the internet, suddenly there's millions of creatures, all defined by users, polluting the in-game universe, with very little "real artists" getting their hands in the mix.

One of the more imaginative side effects of this is the way creature data can be moved from one player to another. Since creatures are defined by various database attributes (as opposed by pre-created artwork), the file size of any creature is REALLY TINY. Sharing a creature is as simple as "taking an in-game picture" with the camera tool, and forwarding that image to your friend. What the game does is store all of the creature attribute data in the alpha channel of the picture; what is amazing about this is that all of the data that it takes to accurately replicate a creature is actually smaller, file-size, than the JPG IMAGE OF THE CREATURE ITSELF!

In fact, it is so easy to move creatures around is that if you want a creature from the Spore website, you simply drag the image from the website into your Spore program. Quite amazing stuff. (I've been amazed at this kind of stuff before, feel free to click this link.)

Anyway, what can we learn from this, in a table-top world. Obviously, when you are talking about player-creation, a few notables come to mind, such as Dungeons and Dragons, or really any game out of the RPG genre. But there's an interesting table-turning factor here; while Spore is a world where users create all of the elements in the world. D&D seems to be, aside from some character creation aspects, where the players create the world, and populate it with pre-designed denizens from a Monster Manual. I'm not saying that all D&D groups do this; I'm sure there are many out there that truly build a complete world on-the-fly; but most of the money made on RPG is based on creating a system, and then having the players buy countless expansions of new content, as opposed to creating their own.

So, where am I going with this?

One of the secrets of a successful print-and-play game (successful being a term that is rather fungible in this genre) is having a tiny component list; the less components that are required to print out and cut and paste and prepare, the better. No one wants to spend 3 hours building a game that isn't potentially fun; but maybe if it took the player 15 minutes, it's worth the risk of the time.

However, typically, a simple component list also waters down the game a lot, down to a simple game (unless it's some wacky abstract, where the depth of play comes from a more analytical nature). So, the question arises, how do you make an interesting, long-playing game with as little components as possible?

A completely viable solution to decreasing the component list is reducing as much data as you can to being procedural, as described above. In other words, the game should not necessarily come with all of the data pieces, but instead should just have the required rules to build the data units as you need them.

Aside from compactness, this also creates a game where each game is unique. You don't need expansion cards later to "refresh" the game, as the game constantly refreshes itself through the building of the data as you progress....

Soon to come, part 2, an example game....

Bad Night at Levee Rock

2008-10-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

Look's like I forgot about this GDS entry from a while ago. It came in fifth place of the "Going Solo: Man versus Wild" contest. I guess that's why.

(As with most GDS entries, this is just a rough 1st-pass game outline. So, even though it uses common parts, it has not been playtested, so please…be kind if you do play it.)

The storm of the century is causing the Rolenbohns River to rise, and the five levees that protect the small town of Levee Rock are about to burst. Using the manpower and equipment available to you, can you stop the levees from bursting, and destroying the town?

What you need:

(approximately) 20-30 Levee Dice (6 sided dice in one color)
The River (Standard playing card deck)
(just guessing) 12 Worker Dice (6 sided dice in a different color)
(maybe) 6 Light Equipment Dice (8 sided dice)
(possibly) 3 Heavy Equipment Dice (10 sided dice)
1 Command Center Die (20 sided die)

What's going on here:
The cards will set water level of the Rolenbohns River at each of the five
protective levees that surround Levee Rock. Levee Dice are rolled, and as the River rises, Levee Dice are removed. If any levee loses all of its
Levee Dice, the levee breaks, the town is flooded, and the townspeople hang you to dry. And, oh yeah, the game is over.

If you can play through the entire deck of cards, the levees have survived the storm, and the town hails you as a hero.

Setup:
Define 5 areas on your table to be Levee Areas, Place 3 Levee Dice at each area.
Shuffle the deck of cards.
Keep your Workers, Equipment, and Command Center near you for the time being (otherwise known as the Command Center).

A turn consists of 5 phases, that occur in the order below:
DIRECT EQUIPMENT AND WORKERS:
You can move Worker and Equipment dice from your Command Center, and between Levee Areas. However, the larger the Equipment, the more time it will take to move.

When moving Equipment, roll the Equipment dice you wish to move, and place it BELOW the River cards in the Levee Area you wish to move them to. These dice are considered to be IN TRANSIT to the desired location. The number rolled indicates how much time it will take to get to the desired location and become ACTIVE.

You may move In Transit Equipment to a new desired location if you wish, but you can only redirent each Equipment once per turn.

Workers move fast, and are never IN TRANSIT. When moving Workers, simply place them above the cards in the Levee Area you wish to move them to. All dice above the River cards are considered to be ACTIVE in repairing and building up the levees.

EQUIPMENT MOVES:
Decrement all Equipment die faces that are In Transit. Once an Equipment Die has been decremented to show a 1, that piece of Equipment has made it to its location; move the die above the River cards to indicate that it is Active.

Roll the Command Center Die. The number rolled indicates the additional amount of “decrements” you can perform on any Equipment die. Again, any Equipment that is decremented down to 1 becomes Active.

REPAIR THE LEVEE:
Roll all Active (above the River cards) Worker and Equipment dice in each area. For every die rolled that is equal to or above 6, add a Levee Die to that Levee Area.

THE RIVER RISES:
In each Levee Area, you will be creating sets of two cards (and leftover
singletons). A set of cards is two cards that match in either rank or suit.

Once a set of cards is made, simply stack the two cards together, and flip them upside down in that area.

So…… for each Levee Area, draw a card; if it creates a set with another
singleton card, then stack the set together, and flip them face down.
Otherwise, leave it in the Levee Area as a singleton to be matched into a
set later.

If a levee draws a joker, remove a set from that levee. When the second joker is drawn, remove 2 sets from that levee.

LEVEE DAMAGE:
At each Levee Area, roll all Levee Dice. Remove any Levee Dice that is
equal or less than the current amount of card sets (not singleton cards) at that area. If all Levee Dice are removed from any one Levee Area, the Levee has been breached. The game is over. Levee Rock is destroyed. Stupid Mother Nature.

Hippodice Entry Guide

2008-10-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

So, the entry deadline for Hippodice fast approaches. I won't be entering this year.

The few interesting projects I've worked on this year are Dark Water Salvage, and Reading Railroad. DWS still needs a bit of work to fix some timing issues (which should only require one more playtest, whenever that is) before I can balance the game out. And RR is a hybrid word/train game that probably would need some alterations due to language. Plus Seth has sort of taken that game over, and corrupted its soul into a different game (somewhat). But hey, at least he's taking it to BGG con for playtesting, which is more that I can do.

However, since I did make the initial cut last year, I thought I'd put up my entry from last year for those who are interested in entering. This way, interested parties can see how I laid out my initial entry, based on the way way I parsed out the English translations.

You can download the .zip file for my entry at this location.

The amazingly biased election simulator

2008-10-15T06:40:00.001-07:00

For those watching the election, I've put together a quick election simulator to predict the outcome of this year's election.

Or if it doesn't load well from there, try this link.

The latest shockwave update has messed up something, for some unknown reasons.

Campaignin' for JibJab

2008-09-05T06:11:00.001-07:00

Even though it's been around apparently since July, JibJab has a new (to me) political Flash cartoon out, Time for Some Campaignin', and I have to say, I'm really impressed.

I'm not talking about the humor (even though it is funny) as much as the animation and art design. Visually, the short is sumptuous. It's hard to believe that it is composed in 2-D Flash. There's quite a bit of subtle camera movement, and depth of field tricks, and some beautiful background "paintings". I am particularly awestruck at the McCain "the Jyhad needs containin'" shot, and the whole Obama fairy tale world. Oh yeah, and also the stair climb to the voting booth. And the marching citizen shot. And the Uncle Sam butt poke (which reads worse than the visuals). Even the cliched "newspaper throwdown" shot is animated so nicely, that I'm even amazed at something as simple as that, considering the animation platform.

Visually, I find a lot of the stuff in Campaignin' more interesting to look at than most Dreamworks feature length animations. (Although, I do have to say that Kung Fu Panda impressed me on many levels; it's the first Dreamworks cartoon that left me going "wow, that vistas (or whatever) looks stunning.") When compared to This Land!, which is the short that got JibJab on the map, it's a huge leap forward.

Thankfully, JibJab has provided a development blog for the Campaignin' short. It's pretty clear that it's not just two guys in a garage anymore; and the whole approach to the short was approached as if they were making a traditional animated short. This Land is what I thought Flash animation could do, since most Flash animations are done on such tight budgets, or appear so, it's impressive to see what it actually CAN do, given the right time and effort.

So, as JibJab would say, go watch it , WATCH IT NAOUGHW!"

The leash

2008-07-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, I try to write up a post that focuses in on a design aspect, using examples with something I'm currently working on. This is one of those posts. However, it feels like it came out a little more jumbled than it should have, and for that, I apologize.

Anyway, on with the show...

Early game prototyping can be thought of like walking an insanely active dog; you want it to be happy and go about following it's desired course, but you need to keep it under some amount of restraint, otherwise it gets away from you.

While I have no concrete evidence of this, my personal experience is that good games (like most creative processes) develop "on their own" fairly naturally with only gentle shoves and yanks of "the leash" as guides. It's a careful balancing act, games left to run by themselves become a mess pretty quickly, and require quite a bit of leashing mid-way in the design. And games that are under the heavy hand of the designer leash, with no intentions of wavering away from the original plan. Well, they don't go any where much at all. Every game project that I've been involved with professionally was never, ever considered to be "done" by the creators; just "finished enough" given the tightrope walk between the various constraints of schedules and finances on one side, and creative design work on the other. They are never perfect, but close enough to almost be happy with the final the output, as there is always at least one more bit of polish to clean up, or one more feature to add that the game absolutely requires, but at some point, as a designer, you have to stop, and move on.

The development process usually works like this (of course, your mileage may differ). Early on, after settling in on one or two "gimmicks" that the game is going to based around, I let the game go, adding features, or doing whatever the game feels like it needs. Ultimately, the gimmicks are the leash; these are the things that will guide the decisions made for the rest of the design process. But I allow the game to go off and explore other possibilities. Until, of course, the game has now become so bloated, or confusing, or misguided, that now is the time to yank the leash, and get the game back on a course. Editing out extra rules, or components, or things that don't seem to affect the original gimmicks, etc.

In most cases, letting the game "roam free" doesn't happen and develop in a vacuum. They require the ability to bounce off walls, knocking into other people, and going through various filters that other people have, through your usual playtesting experiences. In fact, the first few playtesting sessions of a game probably should mostly focus on the main gimmicks, making sure that they even work, without much attention to the side effects generated by the game running it's own course. These additions (and subtractions) should naturally come and go as they please.

Recently, I've been playing around with the Shipwrecks game (the current version can be downloaded off in the "Things To Play" section in the sidebar, listed as "Dark Water Salvage"). There's been a nice progression of the main gimmick, along with various levels of fluctuating game-defining rules.

Luckily, I'm a member of the Board Gamer Designers Workshop, which is a small group of geekiness dedicated to just playing game prototypes of our own creation. A sort of a bi-weekly Protospiel. So, there's no need to torture real players who might not understand the concept of how prototypes work.

As is usual of my designs, the game went through a few revisions even before the first playtest. As I've noted in a previous post regarding the use of windowed cards for hidden data, the main gimmick of the game is hunting for shipwrecks that are "hidden" in a lake. This hidden information system was originally being developed as a haunted house game; but things "weren't meshing" well at that point. This system initially was testing for directions using simple binary coding (Y or N). The binary "bar code" worked with deducing items back when it was a haunted house game, but now the game involved searching for a location, and the game cried out for a modified version of the system that more closely relates to that action.

And so, while the gimmick was kept the same, the data was reversed. By testing from various locations on the game board, you can get directional information regarding where a location is in relationship to the testing location. In this case to the left, the location is Southwest of the city of Missaukee (when Missaukee is stacked on top of the location card). So, while "the leash" of the stacked cards revealing hidden information is kept, the game was still allowed to form naturally around it.

During the first playtest, one of the main focal points was watching to see if this mechanic would actually work (it did). Other elements of the game around it did not, but that's fine. As the core interest point of this game is based on the the searching and locating function of this mechanic, those are adjusted or removed, and tested again.

At this point, I'd like to point out that there's almost no sense of trying to balance scoring, or creating a more "interesting" map, or any kind of fine tuning. It's an early prototype, and the basic functions of the game are still being fleshed out. In fact, after finding a major rules break in the second playtest, it became obvious what some fixes were required, and what was still broken...there was no need to finish.

As an additional aside...

One of the games we played was very much of a loosey goosey party game, whose main goal was seemingly guessing random numbers. The only information that you had to go on was that the current number to guess is less than the previous number on a card. Basically, no strategy or skill, just wild guesses for the most part. And while the designer was happy with what he implemented, this IS a group dedicated to board game geekery, and simple random guessing games don't cut it.

The results that came out of the discussion at least sounds like an interesting game. At least playing the game mentally. It still keeps it's party game roots, but has some elements of a mind game. For the most part, it was an idea that was "let loose" to see where it would go. As is typical of a brainstorming session, no leashes are attached.

For the fun of it, I've dubbed the name of the "Vezzini," in honor of the greatest mental skills battle ever filmed, the Battle of Wits from "The Princess Bride."

I imagine that the game winds up being played in a "well, I picked this because I think you picked that because I figured you'll think I'll pick this" kind of manner. I also imagine that the game could be potentially be terrible, too. Of course, this is solely what I consider to be the best version discussed, I'm sure other would have different opinions.

Vezzini
A (potentially irritating) battle of wits for any group of players

Give every player a pad of paper and a pencil.
Someone will also need to keep track of a running point total for each player on a separate sheet of paper.
Agree to a Target Score that determines the winner.

THE GAME:
The game is player in rounds. In each round, the players will first determine who the Host is. Once a Host is determined, all players then battle the Host.

DETERMINE THE HOST:
All players write down a number secretly on their pad of paper.
All player's reveal their number.
The player who wrote down the LOWEST value number, that is not tied with another player's selection, becomes the Host. All other players become Active Opponents.

The Host scores points equal to the number he wrote down.

BATTLE THE HOST:
A Battle consists of three rounds, in each round the host secretly writes down a number that MUST be lower than the number he previously wrote down. In the case of the first round of the battle, the number he writes down must be lower than the number he wrote down to become the Host.

All Active Opponents now write down their guess. Opponents can ask questions; the Host can lie or bluff, or refuse to answer.

Once finished, Active Opponents reveal their guesses, and the Host reveals his number.

If an Active Opponent guesses correctly, they stay Active; an incorrect guess renders them Inactive, and out of the remaining battle rounds.

The Battle ends when all Opponents have become Inactive, or after three rounds of Battle have been played. All Opponents that are still Active after three rounds (they have successfully guessed the Host's number three times), win points equal to 2 times the amount of the initial number the Host selected to become the Host.

THE GAME IS OVER:
...when a player has earned points equal to or greater than the target score.

Fatal Frame, and other things that go bump in the night

2008-07-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Generally, when one thinks of "Survival Horror" in the video game world, the Resident Evil series will be the first name that pops up, followed by Silent Hill. To me, they both miss the point.

While both games can fall into a "survivoristic" mode, I've never found that much horror in them. Sure, Resident Evil has zombies, or mutants or whatever, but it's always been another run-around-and-shoot-stuff-that-moves game to me. It might as well be Nazis. You are trained military with guns, fer christs sake! You BETTER be able to survive those things. Walking around with a loaded shotgun doesn't really provide me with a sense of impending doom, knowing full well I can blast whatever beasty is around the next corner into 40 little pieces.

And Silent Hill, which dabbles more than a bit in the supernatural, winds up just coming off as just plain weird more than scary. Nothing like the little mutant babies that just follow you around in Silent Hill 1 to be creepy...but the strange mannequin monsters, sure they are definitely strange, but hardly scary. And the whole "pyramid head monster rape scene" is a bit over the top.

Nope, if you want a true scary video game experience, you need to pick up one of the games in the lesser known Fatal Frame series.

Fatal Frame does scary the right way. You aren't running around with guns ablazing, not that guns will do you any good anyway against the ghosts. All you've got is a camera that, given enough time to focus, will "capture the essence" of the attacking spirit in question.

But, really, the scariness goes beyond the combat.

The camera is equipped with a raspy buzzer that alerts the player when something supernatural is around. And just because the buzzer starts going off, that doesn't mean you can see what's making it buzz. Sometimes it's an attacking ghost, other times it's a hidden "key" that must be photographed to be revealed to progress in the game. Occasionally it's a random haunt by a wandering spirit that has no care about you.

In other words, it doesn't just instantly jump monsters out at you, but alerts you to the fact that something MAY be jumping out at you in the very near future. Which makes a lot of difference.

I've recently started revisiting Fatal Frame due to the fact that there's a Fatal Frame 4 coming out in Japan for the Wii (exclusive). Which means, hopefully, a winter U.S. release.

Fatal Frame is the gold standard as far as I'm concerned in trying to make a haunted house game work well. It's one of my design goals to somehow capture the spirit of it in a board game format. Somehow. Some day.

There already exists a fan-created Fatal Frame card game in print-and-play format. The game uses imagery from the video game source well to make a very pretty looking game. But ultimately, like most adventure-ish card-based games, it's a collection of CCG-like cards that interact with each other, that tell the basic story of a Fatal Frame-like game. Which is fine, but I'd love to see a method that can somehow create a general sense of uneasiness and spookiness, if not real scares.

Granted, that wish of mine is a hard target to meet. The emotional responses that something like Fatal Frame creates is due to the complete sensory look and sound of the game, and of the pacing of various elements. It's tough to get that out of a pile of quiet cardboard.

Anyway, in my search for info on Fatal Frame 4, I've come across some pretty funny YouTube videos of a bunch of guys playing the Fatal Frame games, which give you a pretty good sense of the "jumpiness" Fatal Frame provides. Now, I have no idea if "Brad" in the videos is really freaking out, or if he's just joking around, but the videos are pretty hilarious.

And, I should note, the audio is rated:

The one brilliant thing that Fatal Frame does that really enhances the scare factor is that the game lets the player switch from your standard 3rd person viewpoint when exploring to 1st person, which is required to take a photo through the camera (to deal damage). The 3rd person lets you see things out of the corner of your eye, and the 1st person really captures a claustrophobic feel, as it's easy to lose the ghost while in "battle view." And then when you least expect it, that ghost which looked far away in 3rd person view is actually right on top of you.

"It's a f***ing doll!"

"Wait a minute, they want me to look through here..."

"Oh, and there's blood all over the mirror."

"It's like The Ring!"

The incestuous industry

2008-07-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Probably one of the most common laws of any creation/design project is the belief that whatever you are currently working on, no matter how awful or banal it truly actually is, is that it is going to be one of the greatest things ever. Or, at the very least, very good. It is, after all, your little baby that you are spending hours on that you could otherwise be doing limitless other things during that time, potentially more successful. But when you've got the design bug, it doesn't matter really; after all, one of the reasons you are designing something is that you think you've got a better way (or an idea with a better result) than what is currently out there.

And, given a forum to talk about this madly exciting new thing that you are shaping, of course, you will have an inclination to hype it up.

But do you have the right to hype it in the guise of a quasi-reporter?

The boardgame geek hobby, as much as many fans would like to believe, is a pretty small niche. For the most part, it is comprised of many tiny publishers, most of whom are working day jobs, eeking out sales that are probably lucky to sell 3,000 units. Sure, there are those who may be considered to be wildly successful, such as Z-Man and Days of Wonder; but even by those successes are really tempered by comparison to the niche hobby itself, and not by the mainstream. There's a reason why Hasbro bought out Cranium, and not Days of Wonder.

Anyway, given the nature of this small niche, there's bound to be some amount of "insider incest" going on. Hiring and marketing from within the realm of the known hobby space, as it were. Which winds up creating some interesting partnerships. Sure, from the publisher's point of view, you know that the people you are involved with have their heart and soul placed in the exact market that you want. But from the casual fan's viewpoint, things now need to be taken with a grain of salt. Incestuous Industry Insiders aren't a necessarily a bad thing, but again, their viewpoints are a bit skewed. You just have to be careful of those who report on the news that they, themselves, are creating.

And so, with that, enter Dominion. At his blog, Seth Jaffee had an observation about this upcoming game. And while he's approaching it from a what-does-this-title-do issue, there's another issue that caught my interest.

Valerie Putman and Dale Yu are both regular bloggers at boardgamenews.com, which is for all practical purposes, is the one-stop shop for designer game news and information for the fans of the genre. Sort of a kotaku for boardgame geeks. Unlike boardgamegeek.com, which is more of a forum or database for fans, BGN is really the daily news update on the industry (again, from a "hey look, you fans, we've got news for you!" angle.)

Now, both of these people have been hyping the game for quite some time now, initially as a mysterious Game X. At least going back to the last Gathering of Friends top secret meeting (itself, a fairly incestuous event, I imagine). But, from all details that I can remember, it's always been as a reporter-ish kind of way, as if from a distance.

But now, it appears there's more of a personal stake involved.

So, now in the case of Dominion, here you've got two of the more well-known bloggers of the industry trying to spread the news of the "next great game," which just happens to be their baby, so to speak. Of course, we don't know how much of a personal stake they truly have, but at some point, it begins to look fishy. Early on, it seemed like they were both simply stating the facts of "Oh, I played this wonderful new prototype at The Gathering" or whatever. But now, they are reporting on a game where they acknowledge that they are more than just "active supporters." And as is human nature, something that you are creating becomes your baby, and you lose true objectivity.

I personally like this comment from Valerie's latest post about Origins, a fairly big game fair that was recently held in Ohio:

I also didn’t miss out on the hottest new game at Origins , since Dale and I were the ones teaching Dominion.

The hottest new game is still currently a prototype? Maybe within the small confines of a select group of knowledgeable insiders, sure. But I doubt for the ENTIRE FAIR. Of course, prior to this, she lists all these other games that were new to her, but didn't play, so to be fair, it seems she really didn't spend much time around the fair except for the small sampling of players who played her game.

Additionally, as developers they both also don't mind pumping up the game's ratings either. Plus a ton of insider-ish playtester ratings. I wonder what their ratings will be when the game is actually debugged! Crank that rating up to 11! Would any designer rate their own game a 3?

And with many things geek-related, once someone is told that something is cool, many a geek will follow along, just because, well, because someone said it was (and, let's face it, there's not really THAT much information of cool things on the horizon coming out on a daily basis in boardgame world).

Of course, the game may actually be this fantastic, or simply very good, or whatever. But it definitely shines a different light on their reporting of the game, as their mere association with the game is now muddied.

On a side note, I used to work for a company that got a reviewer fired for one of the industry magazines for giving a bad review of one of their games. Well, "fired" wasn't quite the word that they used. But that's another story for another day.

And as a final extra, there is something humorous about Ted Alspach running a series of Board2Pieces comics about the hype behind Dominion. Especially since he himself, is a designer of sorts (thereby making himself another incestuous industry insider) and while he does make mention of his countless Age of Steam variant maps, at least he never advertises them as the Next Great Thing. Even though he does shill his own game ratings.

And the people shall speak...

2008-06-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

I had always hoped that, somehow, PocketCiv would wind up taking a life of it's own somewhat. And that somewhere along the line, that some small community somehow would come along and support it, add to it, and let it grow naturally.

In a lot of regards, this did not happen. While the general response has been overwhelmingly more enthusiastic than I could have dreamed ( ranked as the 720th best game on BGG), it's been a disappointment in the "virus" category so far.

Some part of this is that I really haven't "marketed" the game at all. One, I've got other things I want to do in my limited free time, and two, again, I really wanted to see what would happen to it, so I wanted it to have a life of it's own with me pushing it.

Most notably in my eternal sadness, even though there have been various calls for someone to turn it into a multi-player game, no one has apparently even tried the 2 player variant I have listed in the rules.

However, in other cases, things are brighter. I have received numerous emails for various people who have been inspired by PocketCiv to create their own solitaire game, using system elements from the game. So that's pretty satisfying. Most notably in this case is Zombie in My Pocket, the tiniest zombie game ever. And even though ZIMP leaves me a little flat due to the game lacking some interesting decisions (in my opinion), it does get props for the sheer size (or lack of size) of it, and still feeling like a game. Plus, it's been picked up by a publisher (Cambridge Games Factory), so it can't be all bad. And again, in this case Jeremiah (ZIMP's designer) has gone to pretty good lengths as far as marketing the game on BGG.

Anyway, this leads me to this point, in that I've agreed to let a fan of PocketCiv create an errata sheet, at which point I'll go back and fix all the bugaboos that the Geeks have found. And so, the call has gone out on BGG, at a thread that can be read here.

I assume this will give the geeks a little ownership of the game. And maybe a little pause for some creative sparks on their own beyond just rules fixes. And maybe, just maybe *sniff* my dream will be realized.

Well, if not, that's ok, too. As long as people still have fun with the game.

Multi-Card Extravaganza

2008-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

In a lot of cases, I’m always more interested trying to innovate wacky new mechanics than trying to develop the game itself. In the end, the mechanic itself may not look very innovate as it essentially gets whittled down to something workable as a function of a game. Having said that, take a look at the card off to the left here. While it may look like a crudely drawn spider web, it actually has a bunch of information hidden within the web....

I'm pretty fascinated by games with hidden information, and the ways for the players to logically decode it, as these things are not very easy to create. Of course, the great example of this type of game is Clue, or Cluedo; and it still holds up pretty well after all these years. In fact, it holds up so well, that most games of the deduct-the-mystery style of game play pretty much are descendant for Clue. Not that I'm aware of many. Mystery of the Abbey uses the "figure the card that is out of play" from Clue pretty well. Wadjet uses the same puzzle amazingly poorly.

Also, my fascination of playing around with the mechanical aspects of cards continues. “Mechanical” is a strange term, I know to use to describe cards; cards can do a lot more than we are used to in relating information, I think. When refer to mechanical uses here, I am referring more to the physical actions and uses that cards be used for, or for indicating things, rather than just the pure display of indicia.

Probably the most common form of this would be based on the rotational aspect of the way the card is played. The most obvious game use, and in some game-y legal circles, of this would be that of rotating a card 90 degrees in Magic:The Gathering to indicate that it has been used in that round. Questionable patents aside, this is a fairly clean mechanism. Other game uses the rotation of cards to indicate various things; the 2 player Starship Catan card game comes to mind as a way to keep track of resources.

What I would assume to be the oldest incarnation of rotational meaning to cards most likely predates your standard playing card deck itself. The reading of Tarot cards are often read as having the opposite meanings of the particular card being studied if it has been turned on the table upside down. So while a Death card placed in its natural orientation would indicate “change” in the future, a reversed Death would indicate “statis” or no change.

Something I am not too aware of, however, are cards that have direct mechanical relationships with other cards, or cards that, when combined mechanically or spatially create some meaning or data out of the combination whereas as single cards the data shown on them is useless by itself.

There are some games that come close to the effect I’m looking at. Games such as Skallywags, where you try to build a pirate out of three different body parts. Still, to me this doesn’t equate to what I’m getting at; the game boils down to a three card set collection mechanic (get one card of each “suit”). It’s just that the suits are head, torso, and leg, aside from hearts, spades and diamonds.

I guess I’m looking for something more gimmicky. So where does this lead? Especially with the lead in to this post?

On occasion, I keep coming back to a haunted house game design that I've worked on here and there. One the things that I was fighting against was trying to come up with was a interesting hidden information system, something that wouldn't just be a bastardized Clue clone.

Basically, the game involves players surviving the night in a haunted house. There's a fairly neat "haunt" mechanism I've come up with that does a pretty good job of capturing "I think I sense something is going to happen," as opposed to your standard haunted house game draw-a-card result. Ultimately, the game revolves around trying to put the various ghosts to rest by trying to figure out what item they want, and where they want the item to be placed. For example, a ghost may want the locket placed in the study. But coming up with an interesting way of hiding this information, that wasn't easily cheat-able, was a problem.

The current system as it stands now involves a combination of cards that can reveal hidden information. In this case, the web card as shown above, and then a series of "test" cards. Each test card represents an item, a room, or an attribute that can help describe a room or item, that you are "testing" for. If half of the windows show a web intersection, then the test is true. So placing "the Pocketwatch" data card on the web above, will reveal two windows having intersections; any ghost that has this card is somehow linked to the Pocketwatch, and wants it to be placed somewhere in the house.

How this works:
Each web card is a graphical representation of a digital bar code. Each item and room can be described by two atrributes. In the case of the Pocketwatch, it is both "gold" and an "heirloom." By pairing up the digital codes for each attribute, you can create a unique code for each item.

This kind of data creation is repeated for the 8 different rooms of our haunted house. Again, there are numerous attributes that we can define in various pairs to help code up a particular room.

And then, with this data, all of the combinations of items/rooms are compressed into a single barcode number. A partial list of the data is shown below.

At which point, it becomes fairly easy to assign different areas of each card as a location for a TRUE (a crossed web graphic) or FALSE (empty space) to graphic show the digital mark of the card. So, each web card contains the “barcode” of all this information based on the web intersections. Each windowed test card, with windows based on certain attributes that a player wants to test for, simply reveals only certain barcoded elements.

So, naturally, after devising all this, my interest waned in developing the game. The haunt mechanism turned out to be a bit more finicky than I would like. But as things naturally happen, after catching glimpses of a show on TV about shipwrecks, this mechanic has been born again! This time the barcodes revealing information regarding landmarks, directions from landmarks, and water depths, of where various Shipwrecks are located.

In the Shipwreck case above, instead of trying to graphically hide the barcode into a web, the barcode information is using simple icons.

And so on, until my interest wanes on that idea…

Another aspect of meshing two cards to derive information I’ve played around with is using the edges of cards to point to information on other cards. I’ve gotten a few emails detailing using PocketCiv like mechanics in a fantasy-adventure dungeon-bash game. But a lot of these games I’ve seen leave me a little cold (which maybe is worth another post). So, I’ve decided to see if I could create one.

As I’ve noted before, when you are designing a game primarily for “print and play,” the amount of components really need to be kept to a minimum; a BARE minimum. In the current design, I’ve decided to limit myself to 20 unique cards that describe all aspects of the game, the world creation, the quest creation, the creature creation, the battle resolution, etc. Of importance to this discussion would be the battle mechanics.

In your typical slash-n-bash dungeon affair, many dice rolls are used to determine battle outcomes. Since a big goal of these print-n-play games is to make them somewhat playable on an airplane, rolling dice is not acceptable; a way to use the cards to derive random numbers for battles would have to be created.

Basically, a basic battle outcome in this game is a fairly simple and quick affair requiring only three cards. Each card along the left edge has a series of arrows, randomly distributed that indicate a combatants Level. When placed slightly offset on to another card, these arrow line up with another strip of numbers on the lower card. This set of numbers is the strength points that a combatant is given (essentially duplicating a dice roll). So, a battle simply is play a card down, then play a second card on top of it. Reference the creature’s Level, and obtain the creature battle score from the first card played based on its Level. Place a third card on the second card, and reference the player’s Level on the third card to obtain the player’s battle strength from the second card. Compare the battle scores for results.

There’s quite a bit of Excel work going on here. Even though the Level arrows bounce around from card to card, the average results are that the higher the Level that you are obtaining a Battle score for, the higher the average Battle score will be obtained. So even though the battle scores and Level numbers may look like they are randomly placed, the layout of the data on each card was particularly chosen.

And of course, as with all hack-n-slash adventure games, the scores can be further modified by special weapons and such.

One may ask “why not just have the results of a level on one card, instead of spreading it across 2 cards?” The reason is fairly straight forward. It’s simply about creating a much larger spread of results than is obtainable by using a single card solution.

Given any particular Level, if each card just has a single Level-to-Battle score ratio, the amount of results that can be obtained is solely dependent on the number of cards you have. In other words, with 20 cards, you are left with exactly 20 results for any given level.

But in this implementation, due to the fact that the Level indicators can point to any other number on a different card, for a single card, a single Level on that card can possibly point to 19 other random results (the 19 cards). Since each of the 20 cards can point to 19 different results, this results in a spread of potentially 380 different results.

I’m sure there are some additional interesting ways to building things to get a whole data point out of two halves. For even more mechanical fun, in the past, I’ve toyed around with sliding cards in paper sleeves as a way of hiding, and obtaining information. Not that slider cards are anything new, but I believe that they can be pushed further to the limits than they have been previously used for.

Real Lazy Comic Strips

2008-05-29T06:04:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of some of the comic strip review blogs that currently exist. These sites do a great job of pointing out the obvious through petty snarky means. And that truth is that most strips aren't about being funny, but more about capturing some kind of marketing scheme while trying to avoid as much complaining from the newspaper's readership as possible. These marketing schemes include, but are not fully represented by things like "keeping the old folks around reading our paper," "keeping an old and tired strip around just enough in the hopes that someone will want to buy the movie rights," and more recently "targeting a very specific marketing group."

The strip above falls into the latter case. Raising Hector is quite possibly one of the worst strips currently residing on the Chicago Tribune's comic pages. I believe that it's only sole reason for existence is that so they can court the Hispanic One-armed Hunchback market, because, by God, it has no inking of any humor whatsoever.

Not that all comic strips need to be funny; the strip that it replaced, Candorville, while only mildly amusing, actually had something to say about the condition of it's characters and made you think about things. Raising Hector jokes are obvious at best, and are just stupid at their worst. A running "joke" in the strip involves the older son trying to steal the baby's milk bottle for some unknown reason, and his utter failure to take it. Try opening the fridge.

Raising Hector makes bad sitcom writing look about to be on par with the writing of the great screwball comedies of the 30s on a daily basis. Yes, reading Raising Hector makes According to Jim feel like you are watching His Girl Friday.

Aside from that, yes, I'm not particularly impressed with the way it's drawn. But the sheer amount of laziness in today's feature just needed to be pointed out. Just look at that "craftsmanship" of the text on Hector's shirt. Not only does the artist not even bother trying to draw on the message, he doesn't even try to size the text correctly to the area of the shirt, as it slightly over-runs the edges. Sad. Click the image above to revel in all of it's laziness...

Anyway, for a daily dose of running comic strip commentary, I'd suggest the following:
Comic Curmudgeon
Amazing Spider-Blog
This Week in Milford
Stuck Funky

There are many more (as you can track down by various links from the sites I've listed above), but these are the ones that follow for my ration of sarcasm.

Prototyping REALLY BIG games

2008-04-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

As I may have mentioned here before, in my previous work-life, I worked at Williams/Bally/Midway, doing, among other things, working in the coin-operated games business, working in the pinball industry. Due to the marvels of modern IRC technology, even though various people have gone their separate paths, I'm still in daily contact with many of these people. And quite a few of them are still in the coin-op industry.

As the arcade market has continued to shrink (for various reasons), most of the big names have dropped out, focusing their efforts on home games, redemption pieces, or other things.

A friend of mine works for Raw Thrills, who, for all practical purposes, is the only major player in the United States still producing "pure" video games for the coin-op market. And, in some respects, one of the last few big video game manufacturers in the world. They've done this by (rather smartly), not concentrating their efforts of trying to create the next expensive hardware set to push more polygons or more realistic bump shadings, but instead on leveraging cheaper technology with a more focused attention to making the games fun. So, while their games may not be as technically impressive when it comes to technology bullet-points, their arcade units are much more cost effective with a better ROI to the operator who buys the units, as their games will typically out-earn the more expensive, more technologically advanced Japanese cousins.

Anyway, for those who are interested in the world of game prototyping, Cameron has put up a pretty extensive photo gallery of what it took to prototype the project he's currently working on: A coin-op American Idol Karaoke Booth. It's a good example of using prototypes to solve important issues; notably, trying to do green screen effects within a tiny space.

The other cool feature of the booth is that it produces a DVD of your performance (for a few bucks more), complete with American Idol judging, all done mechanically by the booth itself.

Attack of the Banjo on the High Seas

2008-03-31T19:11:00.000-07:00

Ok, so here's a pretty brilliant game design contest: The Video Game Name Generator Competition. Basically, you had to go to a website that randomly creates a video game name for you, and design a video game based on that name.

Given that they have screenshots with the names, they are all pretty darn amusing. At some point I will probably even risk the downloads of a partially completed joke (or not so jokey) game to see how they play,especially given that people actually went through the time and effort to do this.

After all, after watching Nintendo just hammer out game after game with word Mario affixed to the title, it's time for some new IP (intellectual property). Who knows what horrors could possibly await at "My First Skydiving Academy?" Or what the learning value of playing "Obsessive Compulsive Penguin Simulator" could entail? And who would want to miss the amazing action of "Morbidly Obese Rugby Nation?"

But I guarantee you, nothing can prepare you for the carnage that must entail in "Papal Shotgun Gladiator."

Hmmmm, I think I have an idea the next time I guest host the Game Design Showdown....

Captain Tempest and the Astro-Patrol: Final Episode

2008-03-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've entered a GDS. In fact, I had no intention of joining up on this months edition, which is to create a compact game around an outer space theme. But then again, I really can't take ALL the credit for the design I submitted either...

Ultimately, the concept for the game started with my 4.5 year old daughter (of which you can see some of her fine artwork here). We finished a game of Gulo Gulo, and as she usually does after playing a game with the rules, her innate game design genes kick in. And the next game we are playing is of her design, pretty much making things up as we go, using the parts of the game we just finished.

In this case, her variant of Gulo Gulo involved random draws of the colored eggs from the mixing bag that is provided with the game. And after a few draws, it started feeling like something like this could turn into a GDS entry.

The planet card aspect of Captain Tempest wound up coming from the October 2003 copy of Games magazine, that I had recently found. Inside was a 1-page game called "Perfect Union," designed by Dave Shapiro. It's a simple area control game with the theme of an early 12-colony election, where each state was valued at different "electoral college" points. While not much of the actual Perfect Union game was used, the image of the various states and their point totals stuck with me, and became the other main focal point of the game mechanics. The "board" is shown off to the left here, in all of it's scanned in goodness.

At this point, the game was fairly themeless; simply drawing colored wood cubes to stake an ownership on a planet. But, this is a GDS entry, and I've found that theme often plays a much more important role in these contests. With not much else to go on than 800 sparsely written words, abstract games never fair well; the theme is often the hook that the people voting can most easily grasp, and will often overlook better games with lesser themes, if only because the theme lets them visualize things with a bit more clarity.

So, it wasn't much of a stretch turn the cubes into asteroids, and from there, creating a reason to be hurling asteroids at planets.

The last piece of the puzzle is probably the name. I decided that coming up with a name that evoked some recollection of old science fiction serials would be the best, as opposed to just a simple declaration of who the players represent. When viewed through the sepia colored memories of old black and white Buck Rogers movies, this creates an even stronger imprint of a look and a goofy breezy fun, and slightly goofy, feel of that style. The name of Captain Tempest really came from searching for a name that could somewhat match those of Flash Gordon or Buck Rodgers, and Nick Fury popped up, as another pulpy hero name; 1 syllable first name, 2 syllable last name and all.

From there, it was another small leap trying to find a word that had the same imprint as Fury; hence Tempest. Astro-Patrol simply completes the retro feel. And yes, much like Flash Gordon, the name is kind of jokey.

Of course, this desire to go towards 1930's serials probably wasn't hurt by the fact that I had seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow recently.

(A quick aside here: In my previous work life, I worked with a fellow named George Gomez who was as big of a an as I am of old Bond movies. His most favorite Bond quote was from Thunderball, I believe: "Turn on the underwater landing lights." Sky Captain has such a delightful phrase, Angeline Jolie is the leader of the an airborne patrol who's base is a giant flying contraption that hovers around over the ocean. During an attack, she commands: "Alert the Amphibious Squadron." Just typing that makes me all giggly inside. I'm not sure if it's because of the brilliance of the line, or just the memories being brought back of George commanding that the underwater landing lights be turned on in his best Bond villain accent.)

But why is it the last episode? Well, since Captain Tempest and his band of do-gooders never arrive "during the game" to save the solar system, he has clearly lost. And the fact that he's isn't even a part of the game is part of the joke.

Captain Tempest and the Astro-Patrol: Final Episode

Due to the constant interference of Art Deco space-hero Captain Roger Tempest and his Astro-Patrol, the Council of Galactic Evil has decided that it's just better off to destroy the entire Earthen solar system than take it over. They do this by launching numerous asteroid attacks to destroy each planet. Good-bye Captain Tempest!!!

Of course, as always with the Council, every villainous deed becomes just another excuse to argue over who is the most villainous.

What you need:

Cloth Bag of many small same-sized plastic molded Asteroids, in 9 colors (1 color for each Planet). The Asteroids are roughly the size of small wooden cubes.
Nine Planet cards (color-matched to the Asteroids).

Each Planet card has the name of the planet, plus a value, as shown below:

Mercury - 1
Venus - 1
Earth - 4
Mars - 2
Jupiter - 4
Saturn - 3
Uranus - 2
Neptune - 2
Pluto - 1

How to play:
Players are members of the Council of Galatic Eeeevil.

The bag of Asteroids is mixed, and the 9 Planet cards are laid out available close to all players “to be targeted for an Asteroid attack.”

Player start the game by drawing 6 random Asteroids from the bag into one hand. This hand is where they will keep their stock of Asteroids, which must be kept secret from others.

After selecting at random who goes first, players take turns doing one of the following:

Draw 2 Asteroids at random from the bag.
Return X Asteroids from their hand into the bag(showing the discards to their opponents), and drawing X replacement Asteroids into their hand.
Draw 1 Asteroid and declare a Planet Attack.

When a player declares a Planet Attack, he announces a Planet name from the un-collected Planets that remain "to be attacked."

Each player now selects Asteroids from his stock, and places the selected Asteroids in his other hand.

All players reveal their selected Asteroids.

Whoever reveals the most Asteroids that match the color of the announced Planet is the player who gets to carry out the nefarious attack with a large, chew-the-scenery evil laugh, and is considered to be the winner (of this attack).

If there is a tie among any amount of players for the winner, then the player who declared the attack is considered the winner, regardless o how many matching Asteroids he had selected.

The winner returns all matching color Asteroids in his selection hand to the bag. He must also return an amount of Asteroids to the bag that is equal to the value shown on the Planet card that was attacked. These Asteroids come from his stock, and can be any color. If the player does not have enough Asteroids to cover this cost, he discards as many as he can; regardless, he still wins the card.

Players who did not win keep their "bid" and return their Asteroids to their stock.

Play continues as normal.

Once there is one Planet card left, the last Planet Attack is to be declared immediately by the next player (in other words, the last two Attacks will occur right after each other).

The game is over... When all Planet cards have been collected, the solar system has been destroyed!!! The game is over. Players reveal their remaining stock. All Asteroids in a player's stock of each color that are singles are kept; matching color sets of Asteroids are discarded.

A player's score total by adding all of the Planet values shown on their collected cards, and then subtracting the amount of Asteroids they still have in their hand (after colored sets are discarded, as noted above).

The highest score wins, and is deemed to be the most evil member of the Council.

In response....

2008-03-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've been away from the wired world for a while, waterparking with the kids at Grizzly Jacks. So, instead of responding to the comments of the last post in the comments, I figured I'll use the power of the RSS feeder to answer the questions.

The hook for PocketCiv would simply be "solitaire Civ game."

The hook for One Against the Dead would be "Solitaire Zombie game with household components." Of course, I've decided to blow away that hook, and am slowly working on a more story-driven basis for that game, while keeping the slightly strategic elements of city building/zombie creation. But that's sort of slow going at this point...creating all of the story points and arcs is turning out to be a larger time-consuming project than I have imagined.

The other project I'm working on is the resusitation of KitchenTable. The more observant may have noted that it has magically appeared in the 'Places to Play" link off in the sidebar. This is my attempt at a game prototype engine that can support multiple players, that I had given up last fall with the introduction of Gabob and Zun Tzu. However, these don't seem to appeal to a few members of BGDF, so I've gone back and started working on it again. The multiple player is currently turned off to chase down gamebox creation bugs, there's no documentation, and it's being debugged by a few BGDF chat people, but it's there for people to play with.

And, of course, there's no promise that I'll ever finish it, and give it up further along the line.

And yes, "The Hook" image was created on the DS Colors program.

The Hook

2008-03-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

In a recent discussion on the BGDF chat forum, I’ve found that some people may, or may not, know about this little trick in the game design world known as…The Hook. Since I haven’t been feeling rather design-y recently, The Hook might be a nice little discussion point worth posting about.

The Hook is a general term that we use around the office that describes the one most singular thing that makes the game compelling to the user. This is not a game mechanic or theme, or full “pitch” sentence that describes what the game is about. In fact, it is frequently under 8 words, at most, that simply answers the question:

“So, what is the hook of this game?”

Again, it is important to realize that this is NOT really what the game is about (even though, in some cases it can overlap). This is the one simple thing that a player can grasp that “reels them in” into further play, or even the interest of playing the game. This is important because, if you cannot identify The Hook, then there is a good case to be made that the game itself is pretty bland, and there is nothing much more you can do to fix it.

Conversely, if you CAN indentify The Hook, you will understand that almost all functions and systems of the game hang off of it and support it, making a much stronger game in the process. If you feel that the game is “too heavy,” it is probably because there’s a rule or mechanism in there that doesn’t support The Hook, and can easily be removed, often improving the game.

And now, the examples.

Puerto Rico’s hook is “building the most efficient machine.” That’s it. Note that there is nothing in The Hook that describes it’s theme, or it’s somewhat unique role-selection mechanism (and yes, I know there have been role-selection games before hand).

In fact, PR's hook itself is not that innovative, as many games can be thought of as “building the most efficient machine.” But this is the thing that gets player to come back and play it again; with each play, the player picks up a better understanding of the various interplay between the buildings (and to a lesser effect, the way the worker resources energize the buildings and plantations) in determining how to avoid the inefficiencies of previous games.

Some games are often harder to find The Hook in them, or have multiple relational Hooks. The Princes of Florence, while it, too is a “efficiency builder” has an additional relational Hook, which I think is the bigger Hook for a new player in the game. The big hook for PoF players is "play Tetris in a board game". Remove this element, and while you may have a nice game there, but there'd be nothing remarkable about it. In this case, the hook defines a fairly unique application of how the game works. I suppose I should note that you aren't REALLY playing Teris, but the whole puzzle solving aspect of packing in various oddly shaped pieces matches well with that description.

It should be noted that in the two above examples, there really isn't much thought given to the theme of those games, especially with regards to their Hooks. The games, themselves are fairly themeless once you remove various typefaces and graphics. I've always found it amusing that in PoF you are supposedly attracting artisan's to your little art clubhouse and having them produce their wares, but you never actually SEE or feel an artist, and their supposed "art" they are producing is merely a card with a lot of stats on it. These are effectively themeless games, with a theme attached to them.

As an opposite example from above, I present Ticket to Ride, which has a hook that is very similar to it's game description: play sets of cards to complete tracks. The Hook here is "Building a track layout to complete city connections through simple card play." As much as I tried to keep the word count down to a minimum here, I felt that the card play aspect of the game is the thing that really carries it; there are plenty of other train games out there, but TtR is the game that I think solves the solution simply for the average player "to get," and to pick up and play often enough. And in this case, some allusion to the theme is appropriate...slapping a non-train theme on to this game is most likely inappropriate.

Of course, I've applied The Hook to three Euro Designer games, but it can be applied really to any other game. In some respect, The Hooks of various games are defined by the family in which they keep.

"Trick taking/avoiding game" all share the same hook, as described by their family trait, with maybe an additional comment with regards to what defines the trick. Wargames are somewhat all similar, given that thety can be block-styled, or card driven, or action point driven, or what have you.

The important thing, however, to take from this is that once you have found a Hook, it is important to make sure this is the heart of the game, and all other mechanics "tendril out" from it and support it. Otherwise, it gets lost, and the game will be confusing at worse, or just meandering, at the least.

More Colors! stuff, and Playing With A Purpose

2008-01-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

So instead of doing really meaningful stuff, I've been spending a lot of time with my DS while on the road, mostly with Puzzle Quest, and with the Colors homebrew as mentioned in an earlier post.

This has been quite an experiment, really, playing around with Colors. I've never done anything that equates with painting before doing artwork, as I've pretty much learned on-the-job doing things digitally. I assume that if I was doing this with real paints, I'd be creating the world's thickest paintings ever, based on the amount of color layering I wind up doing (there is no UNDO button! If you want to make a change, you "paint" over it). But so far, I'm pretty happy with my results in this wacky new medium.

The duck is my first attempt. I'm trying to do everything freehand; just to make my life harder, I've set a goal to try an avoid using any rference material as my actual freehand art isn't very good. I'm more of a 3-D animator guy than a traditional artist, anyway.

My second attempt is the moai, in which I quickly broke my "no reference material" rule, as it is based on the cover of an airline magazine that was on a recent flight. It wound up turning out a bit darker than planned...the overhead reading light on the airplane turned out to be too direct on the DS screen, giving me perfect bright lighting on the screen while I was working on it. Sure I can adjust the levels in photoshop, and then it looks a lot better, but that would be cheating!

Finally, on the trip home, I wound up drawing the hippo you see here. Knowing about the airplane lighting issue, I was more aware of the brightness levels, and was able to compensate better this time.

It should be noted that these images really didn't take that much time...most of the wasted free time was spent on Puzzle Quest, which, for some ungodly known reason, I decided to dedicate to myself to "beat." "Beat" not in the sense of "getting to the finish of the game," but more like "come to grasp it it's workings a little bit better to gain an advantage."

For those who are not aware of the Puzzle Quest set up, it's basically a match-three casual game mated with an RPG. You select your typical D&D-ish class, and then travel around a world, completing Quests, fighting many a monster, sieging towns, gaining magic spells and powerful artifacts, increasing stats, buying and selling weapons, etc. But everything is done through a fairly standard Bejeweled casual game interface. With slight variations depending on what you are doing. Such as...

When fighting monsters, you take turns playing Bejeweled against your opponent; matching three colored same-colored jewels removes them from the matrix and add to your appropriate colored mana to be used later for magical spells, removing three or more skulls in row does damage to your opponent, removing gold increases your gold, and removing purple stars adds to your experience, which increases your levels. That's the basic format, with various twists, some I've listed below.

If you want to train your mount (I've recently upgraded my giant rat to a wolf), you do the same as above, but with time limits. If you are forging new equipment, you are trying to get rid of "anvil" symbols, without creating a "no legal move" board. If you are trying to capture a monster, then you are playing a simple "remove all symbols" puzzle; but one false move, and there'll be a leftover symbol, and the monster escapes.

And so on.

Unlike playing Bejeweled, however, the fact that the puzzle game is merely a game wrapper for all the actions within this RPG world is sort of engrossing. You aren't playing the game to simply pass time, as you would on your standard casual game, but now YOU ARE PLAYING WITH A MISSION!!! In fact, Penny Arcade humorously capture it all in this comic. Strangely, on paper, it doesn't seem like it would work. But it works wonderfully. It should be noted that Puzzle Pirates also follows this model somewhat, albeit in a more, MMORG kind of way.

There's quite a bit of strategy involved, meta-game wise. Collecting colored symbols are always good; nothing like using them for a well-timed magic attack in the heat of the battle. However, simply being bloodthristy means that you are probably not collecting a lot of gold or experience. Conversely, do you spend you turn collecting those experience symbols, and hope that the monster doesn't kill you off with some wacky combo thing, when you could simply kill him off instead?

Lately, I bought a few items that increase my damage when knocking out the skull symbols, which usually puts me in a large lead with the simpler monsters; at which point I can start using the life-point gap to collect the meta-game stuff. But not always; I've had a Harpy on the ropes with 3 life points left, and me holding on to about 30 life points, and then watched the Harpy pull off an amazingly lucky combo, taking me out. Not fun.

Now if I could only get past the stupid 2 headed Ogre who gets a free turn when ever he collects 3 or more Gold symbols, I'd be in business.

The internet is a big place

2008-01-21T05:08:00.000-08:00

So, how do I know that the internet is a big place?

On Friday, I spent some time cleaning up the PocketCiv website, finally purging it of all version #1 data, and FINALLY updating the scenarios. But it turns out that I had missed a link (to the rules sheet, of course).

And how do I know this? I come into work on Monday, and find that I have 8 emails from people informing me about bad link.

Which probably doesn't seem like a lot, given the whole entire scope of things. But, in a lot of ways it's quite amazing. I don't track traffic on the site, so I have no idea how often it gets visited. Really, the only "marketing" there is in terms of pointing out where the game is at boardgamegeek, and it's only occasionally mentioned here or there in a forum. In fact, there hasn't really been a large jump in it's ratings for quite some time now; I had assumed everyone has just moved on to "the next big thing." Well, that's assuming if PocketCiv was ever a anything larger that a small thing to begin with.

The game is such a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche kind of thing. First, you need to find that group of players that are "enlightened" board gamers (as opposed to the vast amount of people who only know of Scrabble and Monopoly, and whatever is sitting on the shelves at Target). And then with in that group, you need to find the people who are interested in a solitaire non-wargame experience, followed by people who are willing to take the time to print-and-play within THAT group. I imagine that the the pickings at this is is quite small.

But dedicated.

I guess that this leaves me wondering how constant the flow of traffic is, even though I'll probably just leave it as a mystery. After watching for various forum posts about the game, I'm always quite surprised how quickly catch an update to the website and mention it. So there must be some kind of small following for it.

As a side note, I've been toying around with a game tentatively named "Conjunction Junction" (named by Darkehorse of bgdf.com fame) with Seth over at sedjtroll. It's a sort of wacky idea I've had combining train/rail connections with Scrabble-like word play, that Seth has prodded me to investigate further with a few good ideas of his own. I can't imagine what the Venn diagram looks like for the crossover between those type of players!

Mouse Tar Tar

2008-01-16T21:30:00.000-08:00

I guess I should update this. I find my self frequently the Game Design Showdowns less frequently on BGDF than in the past. Mostly this is a combination of:
A) I've won numerous times, therefore my desire to win has been lessened.
B) I've got enough of my own projects to work on.
C) The general bugginess of the BGDF has been experiencing with some upgrades occuring with it's ISP has been rather limiting my time there.

Anyway, my last attempt was back in October, with a rather bad finish of 6th place. Part of this I attribute to the fact that I completely missed one of the requirements: Set Collection, I believe.

There is usually the common complaint during these things about 800 words not being enough; this entry continued my downward spiral of trying to create something with less and less words, targeting more simpler party games with an interesting easy-to-grasp gimmick than trying to shoehorn an overly done gamer's experience. Plus, a continued avoidance of graphics, when possible, just to make it a bit more challenging.

Hence, the wackiness of building food platters with play-doh while trying to hide little plastic rodents within the food.

All of the gory details about the contest can be found here at the October 2007 GDS challenge link, otherwise known as "Eating Crow."

Chocolate Mouse
Each player gets 1 player screen, and 10 Bucks. Bucks are single coins or chits.

Additionally, each player gets two small, plastic dishes to create food items on.

One player gets the Food Critic badge. This is passed to the player on the left at the end of each round. Any player who is not the Critic becomes a Chef for that round.

Place on the table in the center where everyone can reach:

Containers of various colors of play-doh.
A pile of tiny plastic Grey Mice.
The deck of Entrees and the deck of Sidedishes, both face-down.
A 6 sided die, known as the Health Inspector.

A Round of Play:
If a Chef has at least one Rat, he must roll the die. If the Chef has more Rats than the die roll, he discards 2 Rats, gives half of his Bucks to the Critic, and must sit out this round.

The Critic draws 4 Entrees and 2 Sidedishes. He selects one of each, and discards the rest.

The Critic places his selected dishes face up on the center of the table. The Chefs will need to make these dishes to the best of their abilities and using the play-doh.

The cards are simple text descriptions of basic menu items: "T-Bone SteaK" and "Garden Salad".

The Critic should close his eyes, or leave the room, for the next phase of the game.

All Chefs secretly select an amount of Bucks and place that amount into the fist. All Chefs reveal their selected amounts.

For each Buck selected, each Chef can take play-doh of a different color. SO if a Chef selected 3 Bucks, he can take play-doh of three different colors. There should be enough play-doh for everyone; one player cannot "capture" a color from any other player.

However, the player (or players) who has selected the most Bucks must also take an amount of Rats equal to the amount of Bucks they selected minus the amount of Bucks that the next highest player has played.

Example: Steven and Joy both played 4 Bucks. Fred played 2 Bucks. Steven and Joy get to select 4 colors of play-doh, but they also have to take 2 Rats. Fred takes two color of play-doh.

Behind the screens, each Chef must now use their play-doh to construct the best looking Entree and Sidedish. If a Chef has one or more Rats, a Chef may try and hide the Rats in his dishes. Players are not allowed to mix colors of playdoh.

When all Chefs are done, they present their finished dishes by placing them randomly at the center of the table.

The Critic returns to the table (or opens his eyes), and takes 10 Bucks from the stock. He can touch the dishes, but can examine them closely. He votes on the most tasty looking dishes by placing up to 5 Bucks next to any dishes he wish. Otherwise he may divide up the Bucks any way he wishes.

Finally, the Critic may complain that any dish has Rats in it. If the accusation is true (by physically taking apart the play-doh in the dish), the Critic collects the Bucks next to the dish. If the Critic is wrong, the Critic must match the Bucks next to the suspect dish with Bucks from his own account.

The Chefs reveal who created what dish, and collect the Bucks next to their dishes.

The dishes are collected, and the play-doh is seperated back into the correct colors (as much as possible) for the next round.

For the Win:
After all players have had a chance to be a Critic three times, the game ends. A player's score is the amount of Bucks they have minus 2 bucks per Rat. Whoever has the highest score wins.

Artwork A-Go-Go

2008-01-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is pretty awesome. First, click here to go to this forum and look at all the amazing pieces of artwork.

All of these pieces were done in the same program. However, it's not Photoshop, or Illustrator, or some other big name program.

And no, it's not some freeware program for your desktop, like GiMP. However, it is free.

It's a program called Colors. It's a a free downloadable paint program for the Nintendo DS, if you have a DS Flash Cart.

What is a DS Flash Cart? It's memory card with a USB port that allows you to copy programs on to it to play on a console. In this case, the DS. Naturally, Nintendo would rather these things didn't exist, as their main function is to pirate DS games.

It's a very amazingly intuitive low-fi art tool that can provide some outstanding results. While it doesn't feature various now-commonplace things as other paint programs, such as layers, or undo, it really captures the essence of painting in real-life perfectly. The best part of the program is that it automatically creates a MPEG-styled movie of your brush strokes as you paint. And these can be shared also. So, as in the case of the forums, not only can you trade artwork, but you can actually trade the ENTIRE PROCESS of how the artwork was created (by uploading/downloading the mpeg file), in order to learn various painting techniques. And since the DS is WiFi, you can do all of this trading wirelessly, supposedly.

Technology is cool.

(and the cat picture isn't my picture. It's just "borrowed" from the forum)

The Value of Risk

2008-01-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

It's somewhat ironic that in my last post, I bring up the Prisoner's Dilemma. To recap, my personal feeling of PD is that, while it's an interesting game theory question within itself, it doesn't play out very well in real life, in that it doesn't take into much emotion, or the value of emotion too much, derived from the situation that the "player" may be in at any given time. Additionally, I'm not sure how you can truly test the game without a value of risk involved. Sure you can play the game repeatedly in your kitchen room, deciding "guess I'm going to jail for 5 years now!" because of your choice (and of the choice of your traitorous compatriot).

But it is a different situation entirely to be locked up in a police station, presented with the same choice FOR REAL, not knowing if your buddy is blabbing in the interview room next door.

I guess I should also note here that I am not a game theorist! I don't even play one on TV.

Another aspect is that I am very hard pressed to come up with a good game that employs PD. At the root of PD is this: in general, all players moderately "share a win" if they stick together; but at what point is one player willing to break ranks to heavily "win singularily" while tossing the other players into an abyss. Of course, each player knows this option exists, but they have no idea if any other player has taken the bait.

Negotiation games such as Diplomacy don't count, since usually games like this are targeted at having only one winner; it is inevitable that someone must do some backstabbing to get ahead, and there is no real sense of a shared win. Additionally, traitor games don't count either; while players cooperate against a hidden, single foe, players are given roles, and they must perform them as expected. Now, if all players started out co-operative, but were given a choice somewhere in the game to turn secretly bad, then we might have something! But I know of no such game currently out there, not to say that it doesn't exist.

And so, here's where the irony begins.

I've been reworking Doppleganger recently. Thematically, Doppleganger is about a team of UFO believers who have broken into a deserted Area 51 outpost in the Nevada Desert. And while they have found clear evidence of alien life that has visited Earth, their vehicles and communication equipment have been sabotaged. The players must work together to escape the desert to civilization.

(I hesitate to link Doppleganger to anything at the moment...I'm not quite prepared to release Doppleganger 2.0 to the wild, and the version of Doppleganger that is currently online is missing the key trait that I am discussing here. But you can view the old version on the list of links to the right.)

At it's heart, Doppleganger is a secret traitor game; the players are working together to overcome various desert obstacles. However, there may be an alien doppleganger in their midst, trying to make sure that the team does not reach civilization. Originally, as shown in version 1.0,there are two basic win conditions: if any amount of humans makes it to civilization, the humans win. If all human players expire in the desert, the alien wins. It's simple enough.

In re-working the game, I've thought about how to create a greater sense of paranoia amongst the players. Obviously, the alien player must be careful to hide his destructive action within the team, but how can the game system "help out" the alien by naturally creating a situation where human players can find EVERYONE suspicious?

The Prisoner's Dilemma offers an interesting solution to this. It's fairly simple; let the game give secret offers to the humans to let them have a large singular win at the expense of helping out the lesser shared win.

So, not only are the humans on the lookout for suspicious behaviors from an enemy alien, but they all know that the other players will be offered potential sweet deals during the game to break ranks for the fellowship. For a player to win the game, he must rely on his partners to work together, because if they don't work as a team, it is impossible to win individually.

Here's how it works.

As the team wanders the desert (tiles that are drawn and placed, creating a desert map), when a player moves the team to a Crash Site location, that player gets to distribute XX amount of Supply Cards as shown on the tile. Distributing a Supply Card works like this, the player draws 2, discards one (face down), and then can keep the remaining card, or give it to another player.

For the most part, the Supply Deck is primarily built of supply cards that can be used to overcome obstacles. But a small amount of cards are scoring cards, cards that score points at the end of the game ONLY if that player reaches civilization safely. The question becomes:

Is a player willing to keep a scoring card which provides no help to the team to reach it's goal, or "take one for the team" and keep a supply card that can be used to help overcome an obstacle?

Of course, the Alien player could simply hand over a Scoring card to a human to cause problems in the ranks. But won't the player who received the card now realize that the ONLY reason this card was passed to him would be that the player handing the card over is the alien for the sole purpose of messing with the team? Does this player now alert the team to the alien presence, at the risk of revealing that he now has a scoring card?

A lot of these decisions fall under the category of what the Value of Risk currently is in the game. Most likely, early in the game, humans will not want to have anything to do with the scoring cards; it is in their best interest to stockpile supply cards. But the value of the risk in terms of needing supply cards change as it becomes apparent that the team is having an easy time (or not) crossing the desert. Or at least, the risky visual appearance of a player stockpiling supply cards, but never playing them, because, most likely, they are worthless scoring cards when it comes to overcoming obstacles.

So, at some point, if the team members feel that they are close to escaping, it stops becoming a team effort, and instead becomes a secret individual effort to be the sole winner. But at what point does this become prudent? Each player is assumed to have their own value of this risk, and potentially understanding what the value of risk is for each player they are playing with.

Which I think captures the Prisoner's Dilemma nicely. In theory, anyway.

There's some amount of cleverness with the scoring cards themselves, actually, as each card has a different value of risk. There are simple cards, such as awarding points for each supply card that the escaping human holds at the game. This might be worth grabbing early if everyone is holding a handful of cards.

But the more complicated cards or more interesting.

One scoring card, "The Infection," actually lets the player switch sides to the alien side. This card is interesting in terms of when it's potentially kept. It's worth keeping later in the game if it appears that the humans are a part of a lost cause.

Even better, an alien can give this card to another player to "infect" him.

But the most creative use would be this:
There is a scoring card, known as "The Hunter." This human scores points if he survives AND if an alien has been killed off (yes, players can vote off other players to kill them). So, an interesting play would be to keep the Hunter card, and then, if you draw the Infection, "infect" another player, and then persuade the group kill off the infected player.

Other scoring cards include cards that score points for the number of players that survive, and it's ying-yang, for the number of players that died.

With a little hope, this should make for an interesting experience in growing paranoia of what everyone's motives really are. After all, everyone has a little villainy in them!

("alien shadow" image blatantly stolen from www.punchstock.com)

Epic! and a little game theory, too.

2007-12-08T16:48:00.000-08:00

There's quite a bit of lengthy commentary going on at BGDF regarding "how to make a game 'EPIC.'" Which has sort of devolved into "maybe we better define what Epic means first."

A few apple and orange comparisons are at work here. First, there's the physical camp that seems to imply that having a lot of components, chromy things, and large ruleset define an epic game. There's another line of thought that plays out on more of an emotional level, along the lines of "starting small but finishing huge." Finally, there's the third line of thought that is sort of "well, I've played games of chess that I'd consider Epic."

First of all, I think we can dispose of dealing with the third case. This is merely dealing with the concept of EPIC TALES THAT WILL BE TOLD FOR YEARS, and interesting stories about an event. Indeed, I suppose you could have an epic battle of between people playing tic-tac-toe, constantly playing to draws for hours on end, until sleep depravity (or the need to go to the bathroom) drove one player make a bad play. For the most part, these are merely legendary stories; and I don't think anyone can freely call the design of tic-tac-toe epic in any sense, even though one could, I suppose, have an epic game of it.

Which I guess leaves us at with the first two lines of thought.

In my mind, if the real goal was to answer the question of "How do I go about designing an Epic game," my answer would fall along the second line. I think that you have to start out with the notion that you are going to try to make a game, thematically, where the player has lofty, thematic goals, but they start out as a lowly peasant (or a thematic equivalent). This is the traditional epic quest, the heroes quest, if you will.

While I suppose one could study Joseph Campbell's seminal work on this subject, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, it's probably overkill for game purposes. There's a lot of stages the hero goes through, and it's pretty far beyond the scope of a typical boardgame.

However, if one COULD create a game that follows the Campbell roadmap to the letter, it would be truly EPIC!!!!! indeed.

Anyway, thematically "starting small with large goals" leads pretty much to the first line of thought anyway as a consequence. You'll be needing all those shiny, plasticy pieces to keep track of your ever-growing armies; or those well-illustrated cards indicating your new actions you've acquired or learned and can apply. Simply put, I don't think you can have huge goals while starting small WITHOUT a lot of components for keeping track of how large you've gotten, or how close to the lofty goal you've become.

The next thing to question would be, "can the theme itself somehow keep a game from being epic?" I suppose it could...but I think a sense of something being epic leads a person to looking back at the end of the game and seeing what they have accomplished. And for any game to have an epic feel, the accomplishment of starting gamewise from a lonely peasant boy to becoming the CEO of a cotton ball factory (assuming cotton ball manufacturing is, indeed, your theme), still allows you to look back and see all the little accomplishments along each step of the way.

Additionally, the amount of time spent should matter. There is very little epic-ness in completing a game in 15 minutes to start all over again. Going on an epic quest means having to spend something dearly to achieve the goal. Beyond the purchase price of a game, there is very little spent on the game aside from time.

Time seems to be a fairly good constant with regards to this. The struggles between a baseball better who constantly is fouling balls off a pitcher with two strikes against him seems to always be raising the ante; who will give in first? The above mentioned game of the theoretical tic-tac-toe game that goes on for days will have an epic quality to it; they've both spent so much in terms of time, who will win the battle after spending all that time and energy?

There's actually a good "game theory" theory about this. Sure, everyone has heard of "The Prisoner's Dilemma." But in real life, the Prisoner's Dilemma is hard to play out since the results are way too dramatic. There are very few real life examples that play out nicely in PD (well, unless you go on crime sprees, and your ONLY concern is the amount of time you do in prison).

The game theory that I suggest that is worth looking at is called "The Dollar Auction." There is a large element of epic in here, in that it deal specifically with a person's amount of willingness to press something being spent, with the possibility of getting nothing in return.

And, you can actually play it at home with a reasonable outcome, which is something PD won't let you do.

Basically, a person puts a dollar up for auction. Players can bid on it, starting at a penny. The trick is that once all players have quit, and one person has made the top bid, both the top bid AND second highest bidder pay their bids. What usually happens is this: both players wind up paying more than a dollar for the dollar. It becomes more about the money spent while gaining nothing in return than trying to make a profit.

This plays out in life all the time; how much of something are you will to pay in the hopes that you won't get nothing at all. Do you wait in a really long line for tickets that might be sold out by the time you get there? You want a Wii, but you can only go to either Best Buy or Toys R Us, because odds are, if you go to one store, the other one will be sold out. Do you spend the night waiting in line in the hopes that there will be one available? People waiting in lines for days when the iPhone came out are really pretty stupid, but epic in some sense, I suppose, in that their story became a legend of some sorts. Even though I would like to think that all that time spent on a piece of tech could've been spent better elsewhere.

Of course, you could not play at all, but that's not very epic. But spending a LOT of something for an accomplishment, however small, is pretty epic. And the something should be a tangible personal investment. Little pieces of cardboard that have no value in real life isn't much of an investment; the only thing a person playing a game can tangibly invest is time.

So, there you go! "Start small, big goals, and a fairly large chuck of time."

Next question.

My Christmas Story

2007-12-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

I started this a few years ago, and only recently have decided to finish it. At some point, it might be worth my time to illustrate it as well, maybe do a lulu.com book out of it or something.

For those wondering about the Christmas tree ship, these really existed on the Great Lakes. They effectively brought Christmas trees to Chicago and it's suburbs in the late 1800s and early 1900s from Michigan and Wisconsin. However, as anyone who has lived near the Great Lakes, the winter storms that can kick up from November to March can be quite nasty (as the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will tell you); so delivering trees in December by this method was quite risky, indeed. Growing up around Chicago, I've occasionally heard the various legend surrounding these ships around Christmas, most notably the Rouse Simmons.

Maybe there's a game in here somewhere...

Anyway, I liked the way that this turned out; it's not just a little story, but actually a tall tale "explaining" a reason for a common Christmas tradition.

"Ghost ship" image blatantly stolen from voyage.discoveryworld.org.

Finley, the Christmas Starfish

Many, many years ago
Before you were born,
People tell of that Christmas
With that terrible storm.

In the deep waters,
Rather dark, clear and blue,
There was a starfish named Finley
Not much older than you.

Finley dreamed of exploring
above his coral and caves,
So he swam up to the surface
and bounded up on the waves.

Finley suddenly heard singing
Carried in the night air.
"Why, they're coming from that ship,"
He thought, "I should go there!"

He climbed upon the hull of the ship
With remarkable ease,
And on the deck he was surprised
To see piles of evergreen trees.

For this was the Christmas tree ship,
By name, the Midnight Dawn,
And every year they set sail
To bring Christmas trees to our town.

Though it was a bitter cold night,
The sailor's wine helped them along.
They continued their carolling;
Happily, Finley danced to their songs.

Suddenly, all the men started running
with their laterns bright aglow,
Finley heard some sort of ruckus,
Coming from within the ship below.

Finley watched as the men rushed about
Said he, "What could they be thinking?"
He then heard quite a loud shout,
"Captain! The boat! She's sinking!"

Finley ran into the ship;
He was both brave and bold.
And what he saw was water pouring in
from a hole in the wall of the hold.

When he saw the rushing water
Finley knew just what to do,
he plugged up the hole with one arm.
When it wasn't enough, he used two!

The Captain went below and what he saw
was quite the unusual sight.
He was astounded to see a little starfish
Stop the great lake's water with all of his might!

He called to his roughshod men,
to make quick with the rudders and sail.
"For if this brave little starfish can hold,
surely, there is no way that WE can fail!"

The men worked with a hurry,
with many a "Ho-HEAVE!"
And finally the reached the port
Rather late on Christmas Eve.

Finley fell down to the floor
Exhausted and quite tired,
The Captain picked him up in a small towel,
If not for the warmth, he surely would have expired!

The Captain walked up to the deck,
Where the townspeople waited and stood,
Then Captain held up the little starfish,
and explained the story darn good!

"We were taking on water, and
beneath the waves we would've slid
if not for this brave little starfish.
Why, he saved Christmas,
Saved Christmas he did!"

The story of Finley was carried
To all people near and to all far.
And that's why every year on Christmas,
We top the tree with a star.

One Against the Dead update

2007-12-04T10:25:00.001-08:00

So, I'm breaking out One Against the Dead from the Games on the Cheap lineup, as I'm adding more graphic elements to it to make it more game-y. The rules will still be in "gather peices from around the house" format, but much like the Deluxe version of PocketCiv, there is now a list of downloadable content to print-and-play to go with the rules that replace various components.

And as such, there's a new page dedicated to the game in the "Things to Play" header off to the right.

Weapons for 'One Against the Dead'

2007-11-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

After testing One Against the Dead a few times, I was pretty annoyed at how often i had to refer to the rules to figure out how combat was getting resolved. So, I broke my "Games on the Cheap" rule of "only things that can be found around the house" and made some special cards for the weapons.

It amazing what you can do with a few stolen images around the internet (thanks, Google image search!) and a few Photoshop filters.

You can find the card image collection at the Games on the Cheap website area, if you are so inclined. I've also put up a One Against the Dead entry on BGG, just to see if anyone takes the bait and actually plays it cold. If GoneGaming bothers with another year end contest, this game will be my entry into the downloadable game category.

At some point, I'll have to earn my GeekGold and put the card images up on BGG.

[Of course, these include my typical spelling errors, but hey! it's first pass.]

Sir Reginald in a box! Plus the insanity of Z-Man!!

2007-11-27T05:23:00.000-08:00

Sir Reginald is now out of my hands and is hopefully whisking his way across the big pond. To follow his adventures, here's his tracking number: 8618 7464 2310. Hippodice IS in Germany, right?

Anyway, in the rush to get a nice Sir Reginald prototype built and ready-to-go to Germany for Hippodice, I was somewhat surprised to find out that Genji didn't make the cut. It's a card game with a fairly unusual theme (romancing Japanese women with poetry), and is very nice on the eyes. It's not your usual "build up your resources and cash 'em in for Victory Points" that I assume most players are going weary off (however, with the recent rush rush of love for Cuba, I guess I could be wrong with that!)

Of course, the good news part of this equation is that Genji was shown to Zev at Z-Man Games at BGG-Con, who apparently snatched up the publishing rights quite quickly. So congrats! go out to Dylan for that!

But the frightening thing to me is this list: the planned roll out of games for Z-Man in 2008. 18 games!!! Sure, you have to figure that at least a few will fall into 2009 or so, but man, that's a lot of games for effectively, a one-man show to keep track of in various states of publishing. And, as far as know from people I've asked, this is still a part-time affair for him!

While I have nothing but admiration for anyone who can build a company out of being devoted to a hobby, I'm often left wondering "just how many games can the hobby market hold?" I guess I much prefer the Days Of Wonder approach, where they work on publishing maybe 1 game per quarter or half-year, and concentrate on that, hope that some amount of those games "become evergreen."

Granted, I have no insight into the business plan of Z-Man, or any inkling of their financials, or distribution chains, or what not. (I wonder just how many hobby game are purchased at your friendly local game store versus online anyway). But it just seems to me like a dangerous path to take, and conceptually, overloading a promising company way past stability by throwing way too many darts at a wall while trying to maintain a high standard of quality.

Or worse, a potential stress-causing heart attack.

Now, I guess there is a problem where, if you find a really good game, you need to produce it, I suppose. And if you find a streak of good games that you feel can be produced, then you have to decide to bite the bullet and produce them all (which it appears is what is happening here). Even still, I think I would've rather played it safer, and just try an concentrate on improving fewer games. It appears that Z-Man is still looking for that one big hit that can carry the company through thick and thin, ala Settlers at Mayfair, or Ticket to Ride at Days of Wonder. While Z-Man is known for pretty darn good games with pretty darn good production values, nothing in his library has really crossed over the line to be more mainstream. Hopefully he'll find one in the next year, even though, in general, his games are a little more geeky than the stuff that Days of Wonder puts out, which fell a bit more mainstream.

In the end, I can't do anything but to wish them well, and hope that it all works out in the end and they don't implode from the sheer amount of stuff that they intend to produce.

In other news and a plug:
Usually when I go to Vegas, I try and spend a few days out at Lake Mead hiking. On the last trip, I took along my Vibram Five Fingers. I've been using them for indoor rock climbing and general health club workouts. It turns out that they are truly the best shoes I've ever worn while hiking at Lake Mead.

Lake Mead offers a really interesting mix of everything, due to the inescapably low water level. Rock scrambling on large gravel, sand, wet silt and mud, water, hard rocks. Lots of up and downs. Since the Five Fingers truly "fit like a glove" it allows your whole foot to wrap around everything and provide maximum traction. In the past, climbing up steep hills of loose mini-boulders often resulted in a two steps up/ one step slides down approach. But these shoes allowed for a complete monkey-grasp of the rocks.

Additionally, since they are curved to meet the soles of your feet, they don't get sucked off in muddy siutations, and they generally don't allow sand and debris inside due to their tight stretchiness. And they are thin on the bottom, so they allow you to feel the edges and curves of the rocks, so you get MUCH better stability than any other shoe.

Anyway, if you have the means, and are interested in a great low impact hiking or workout "shoes," I heartily endorse the Five Fingers.

I'd upload some pictures, but they are currently trtapped in my digital camera, as my Compact Flash card reader refuses to acknowledge the Memorex CF card that the picture are on.

Plug off.

When it rains, it pours.

2007-11-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

So, I'm gone for about a week to a trade show, the holidays are coming up, and in general I was in the mood to just take a break from all this designing stuff.

So, naturally, Sir Reginald is accepted to Hippodice.

And I've suddenly got a whole list of PocketCiv questions appearing.

And I've got to get a copy (which hasn't really been built yet) to Germany by Dec. 5th.

I would've had a lot more to talk about, but I'm too busy right sticking stickers on 100 wood cubes right now...

The Very Special Zombie Post

2007-10-25T05:22:00.001-07:00

As a special Halloween treat to my 3 loyal readers, I thought I'd introduce you to a new "Game on the Cheap" known as "One Against the Dead."

Yes, it is a zombie game. Zombies for some reason have become a rather popular theme of late in the pantheon of board game geekery. I'd go about and list them all, but Yehuda went ahead and created a nice list for Halloween that includes not only zombies, but all of your typical Monster Mash characters and genres.

Anyway, with the mad rush towards zombie-ness, I thought it would be fun to see what I could come up with. Most zombie games, from what I can tell, seem to really try and be a zombie movie for some reason. This happens almost to the extent of moderately role-playing, giving player various archetypal abilities, and various goals and such. Additionally, it appears, that usually one player controls the zombies while the others play the heroes; this doesn't seem to make much sense to me. I mean, what kind of artificial intelligence does a zombie need that you can't just program them into the game.

It's not like zombies do some clever velociraptor-from-Jurassic-Park pack hunt strategies or something. Zombies are slower than the living. Zombies go after the closest living brain. And there are a lot of them. That's all you need!

Anyway, "One Against the Dead" is, as the name suggests, a solitaire game. And being that it is a game on the cheap, it doesn't have much fluff in terms of scenarios, characters, special abilities, etc. The winning conditions are simple, get to point B from point A.

It features a fairly unique "health" system, in that doesn't record what typically would be referred to as "taking damage." In most zombie movies, if you have just been nibbled on a bit, that's usually pretty bad news, as you become infected anyway. Having a health score doesn't make much sense in zombie-town, as getting damaged just sort of means that you are putting off the inevitable transformation anyway.

So, instead, we have "strength," which sounds pretty much like the same thing, but it's not. Conceptually, this represents how much will power and energy you have to fight off the dead. As long as you can keep your strength up over the amount of zombies that are attacking you, you are still in the fighting. But once the zombies out-number your strength, you become overwhelmed and cannot resist anymore.

This has a weird little psychological implication. Whereas simply having something drain your life points down to zero, at least you feel like you put up a grand struggle, and went down fighting, ala a crazed Spartan warrior.

Being overwhelmed is different. Sure you might have 7 strength left, but when surrounded by 12 zombies, you are forced to give up. It's a surrender, not a glorious fight-to-the-death story told for the ages. You are just another drowned body who gave up against the rising tide.

And trust me on this, I've been quite surprised at how fast the tide can rise in this game. This in no "oh, look, two zombies are at the door breaking in waiting for a glorious headshot" game. Most of the time, this is a desperate run against a tidal wave, with a lot of crossed fingers as to what cards you draw next.

And while the game is fairly random, it does have some amount of decision making with regards to building the zombie-infested town. This is important, however, as the amount of zombies that become active is a direct result of your card placement when building the town. And while it is by no means a deep game, there are some tactical implications to it: "Do I place this card here, which creates 1 zombie, in the hopes that the next card I draw isn't a worse fit that creates 3 zombies."

The weapons may still be a little bit too powerful, and it may still be too easy to escape to the awaiting helicopter. But I think it's an amusing 15 minute ride nonentheless.

As a side note, if you truly are playing with coins, you will need quite a few of them. Buying a bag of plastic play coins might be a better idea, just make sure that the coins have apparent heads and tails sides to them.

Just click here to go to the Games on the Cheap page. One Against the Dead is on the bottom.

Sir Reginald applies for his passport

2007-10-23T10:28:00.001-07:00

Sir Reginald was officially emailed off to Hippodice last week. I hope he didn't get hurt when he was getting compressed. We'll have to see what happens this year, as my entry last never apparently never quite made it through the internet for some reason.

For those who would like to build a copy of the current game and rules, here a link to where you can download all of the required files.

Sir Reginald and the Noblemen

2007-10-04T11:02:00.001-07:00

So, I actually did make it to a Chicago Board Game Designers Workshop meeting this week, which is a small number of like-minded guys working on game prototypes of their own. Which turned out to be a very late night for me...

Anyway, the first game we played was Xaqery's Nobleman (version 7.0!), which turned out to be pretty fun. I have had it described to me on a few occasions, which made my head swim. And the swimmingness in the head re-appeared again upon the overview of the rules again. There is a lot of stuff going on, as a player can have a potential of performing nine (if I counted right) different actions on a given turn, each with their own different rules. In addition, some are "shared" actions in that everyone takes the action in turn, but with the players who goes first getting a bonus while players at the end will have limited (or no) options (much like the shipping rules in Puerto Rico). Other actions are solo and just occur to the player picking them.

There are cards, there are land tiles, there are buildings, there is money, there are knights; it's a pretty big game. But in the end, it all sort of make sense. Nothing felt really broken. But as in anything this big, there are some balancing issues that need to addressed. And most of this was discussed after the game. Various suggestions included a slightly better use for the knights which will let a player leech a little bit on to another player when they perform a "Taxation" event, and not dragging low prestige losers along with victory points when a "Masquerade" is called.

Afterward, I was given the "new guy treatment" by letting Sir Reginald take the table. Which turned out to be a complete reversal of what had happened during Nobleman. In Nobleman, especially towards the end of the game, there was a lot of discussion regarding best ways to score points, balancing, etc. Sir Reginald turned into something different altogether; a fast paced wacky race to build things, pretty much disregarding any thought towards effectively trying to win. There was little concern for most of the game for trying to match up Desires.

It turns out, and rightly so, that setting up 10 "rules of scoring points" at the beginning of the game is pretty useless, especially since those rules can be changed by the players. First of all, reading, and learning ten different ways to score at the start of the game is daunting, and not much fun, and cast a shadow on the fun part of the game, which is getting into playing with Cubes as fast as possible. I pretty much feared that this was the case, and now seeing it action, it is confirmed.

Secondly, the correct way to play, in this case, was to look at the cards in your hand, and build according to them, and then, near the end of the game, try your best to swap them out on to the scoring board. Which created a set of scoring rules that were pretty much random to everyone involved.

And so, with everyone pretty much agreed that the actual building of things is fun, and that starting the game with 10 target rules was way too much. Starting the game with only 1 target, and slowly additional Desires as the game progresses will enable players to "learn" them as they go, and concentrate on the wacky building aspects.

This is a VERY important design concept to grasp, and I've always been a big fan of it. It's probably worth one of my larger design theory posts to talk about, but instead it will just sit here within this one (for now). It is something that Nobleman probably suffers from as well, in a slightly different tone. While there are a lot of rules to learn regarding all of the actions you could take, there is most likely one 2 or 3 that are worth taking, and 2 or 3 that you might as well dismiss altogether. For instance, you might as well not even consider calling a "Masquerade" if you have no Prestige; you are just going to help everybody else.

The easiest games to learn are those which start with nothing, and build slowly, adding layers of rules as you go. This, I think, is one of the great barriers of teaching chess to someone new. "Here's 16 pieces, of which, there are 7 types, and they all move differently." It's a trademark of so many games in the modern, especially very complex ones, to allow for teaching as you go. All collectible card games are pretty much driven by this kind of thinking. The entire mass of a CCG of base rules and cards that break the rules, is monstrous; but since cards come into play one at a time, it smooths out the learning curve while actively in the game. It's something I completely missed in my original concept. While building starts small, your TARGETS of what ou are building towards is HUGE. And so, a change is made.

Another part of the update will be to vastly simplify the Desire cards down to their required icons, as shown to the left here.

To make the game more friendly, I'm switching the scoring rules a little bit. Before, it was an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Whoever got the most of a category on a Desire card won the points, everyone else is out of luck. Now, in my new way of thinking, everyone scores points for meeting a minimum criteria on a card, and the player with the most scores a small to large bonus.

Additionally, with some changs in the way the cards come into play (as seen discussed below) and making the individual player scoring variable makes the card play aspect of the game more strategic. While the actual building of Cubes is very much a "multiplayer solitaire" experience, the card play now becomes a push-your-luck kind of thing. There is no swapping of cards anymore. Once a card is played, it's there for the rest of the game.

Since cards played into slots that award high single-player bonus points will be valuable, these should be early targets for players. However, bringing them out too early in the game allows for other players to try and build their houses to become the "leader" in that card's requirements. Getting into races with other players, as in most games, usually mucks up the works, as you spend all of your effort in one race that you invariably lose 4 others. So, in theory, the player should wait to play his card when he knows he is in the clear lead that noone will bother to try and "take his card over."

However, this creates a problem, as another player can place his own card in high single-player bonus slots before the first player does, so the first player can't wait too long. It's a careful balancing act between trying to capture points without letting other players steal them. The tension between the players racing for card placements, and card requirements, should balance nicely with the solitaire aspect of the house building itself.

Speaking of races, I'm in quite of a race myself with Sir Reginald. I'm expecting to enter it into Hippodice this year. Here is where my entry currently stands as I update files, and try to make things generally more understandable. For those who aren't aware, Hippodice is a game club in Germany that runs a fairly well known prototype game contest along with contacts from various publishers. It's the premiere "winner usually gets published" contest in the board game world of geekery. It will be fun to see what happens.

Where is the "fun" function?

2007-09-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've bothered posting. A few things are keeping me busy. These things happen to include the Nintendo DS games Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Justice For All and Puzzle Quest, which are both fairly brilliant in their own distinct ways. As far as my game designs go, I've been working on a solitaire zombie game for my games-on-the-cheap list called One Against the Dead, and a game called Sir Reginald's Fabulous Country Estate which will hopefully neatly all tie in with the rest of this article.

There always seems to be some kind of running discussions on BGDF regarding various game design theories and paradigms (as can be seen here or here, for example). They are somewhat interesting from a scholarly viewpoint, and they usually wind up including big fancy words of importance when, in my mind, there are really only a few things that are really important.

Ultimately, a game is a simply a product; and how well (or how poor) the product turns out depends on how well the goals of the product is met. Games pretty much have only one real goal: fun. Granted, they may have some other goals as well, things such as "simulation" (trying to accurately re-create an experience that one may not normally be able to do), or "educational" (trying to teach a specific skill or ability). But ultimately, fun is the usual target. A game that generally isn't fun is a game that won't get played.

But fun is sort of a nebulous goal, in addition to being a very personal thing. While most people could agree on if a game meets an educational target ("this game does a good job of teaching kids on how to count change"), or simulation ("this game accurately reflects General McBean's ill-fated attack on General Lee's non-existent forces in North Dakota with lightsabers"), each person grasps at fun with very different sized hands. And those hands can change size depending on the type of game being played.

Producing any type of game in a corporate environment really brings out the ghostliness of fun.
A case in point would be my previous job working for Williams/Bally/Midway. In the corporate world of game design, games are kept to a fairly tight schedule; you need them to be finished by a certain time to keep the factory humming, meet certain time frames for release dates to coincide with certain seasons, etc. Ultimately, there's a bean-counter guy who prepares a schedule, based on what the desired final product finished date, and works backwards from there with various targets and goals. These are things that are used for determining a final bill of material, making sure that all art assets are finished, etc. And each goal is given a certain amount of time on the list. And this time frame is given to the wacky-designer guy, at which point he shouts out the commonly heard refrain:

"Where's my time to make it fun?"

It should be noted that this isn't meant to pick on anyone of my former employer; this is just how it works when you have a system that requires deadlines because mouths need to be fed. And you can't feed the mouths without product coming off the factory line. And that doesn't happen unless the bill of materials was solidified 3 months prior in order to shop around for parts. These are all the tangible things, with known prices to them, that you can throw in the a spreadsheet, and perform mathematical equations on to get desired results.

However, fun is simply magic. If you could somehow create an excel function that would guarantee fun all the time, you'd be the richest person on earth.

But you can't.

You can put together a list, or form a path, that you think may guide you down the right path. Or conversely, create a list of "things to avoid" and try to find fun by deletion of ugly elements. These are things the that usually go on in the usual BGDF forums. Things like "what is you path to making a game?" or "Do you work on theme or mechanics first?"

But still, if you create a product that includes your desired features, that doesn't mean it's fun. It means you have a thing that does your list of features. You've created a cellphone. It doesn't mean that the features don't work or aren't useful. It's just that you aren't playing with it because it's fun; it's because it works. But no one really has a slip of a paper that they can pull out of their back pocket with the"magic rule that makes a game fun." It's completely an iterative, "try it once, make changes, did it work," kind of thing. Which could take hours. Or years. Or depending on the other goals, never. At which point maybe the goals should change.

Anyway, I guess where I'm leading towards is this; when starting a project, I think it's also worthwhile noting of what you think would make it fun. Games should be mostly about providing an entertaining way of passing the time. Some thought should be made at the very beginning as to WHY it should be entertaining.

Of course, this will mean different things to different people. But simply saying "because it takes place in the Lord of the Rings universe" or "it's a pick up and deliver game" doesn't make it fun. Lord of the Rings Checkers, anyone?

Which leads me into Sir Reginald's Fabulous Country Estate. This game is inspired by my previous rant against Pillars of the Earth. To sum it up, while I haven't played the game, I've seen pictures of it and thought that whole "build the wooden cathedral" thing in th middle of the board looked really cool. But then I glanced over the rules, and realized that the cathedral is simply a round marker; at th end of a round, add a wood piece to the cathedral. Once all the pieces are placed, the game is over.

Lame. There's no sense of a reason why you should build the Cathedral differently from one time to the next. You can place all the pieces in a random puddle of wood in the middle of the table and the game doesn't care. Or a wacky Jenga-like structure. It doesn't matter.

I was wondering how you could build something with wooden bits, where the actual building of it meant something important to the game. Some thoughts floated around for a while, back-burnered in my head. I had some discussions about it with Sedjtroll in the BGDF chat room, but never really intending to work on it.

Then Xaqery donated 200 3/4inch cubes to me to do anything. And so, with a bagful of cubes, and some light prodding by Sedj, I was off.

Ultimately, playing Sir Reginald is a lot like being a real estate agent, trying to sell a home to a picky future homeowner. He has a lot of wishes for what he wants, but every estate can't fulfill every wish, so he'll buy the one that best suits the most number of his wishes. And the agent can influence his wishes a bit, getting him to change his mind on some things.

The main aspect of this game is that every player is building a Manor, Guest House, and Servant's Quarters on a Plot of Land using the cubes, which come in various flavors, such as Doors and Windows. Sir Reginald has a list of things he wants in his house as depicted on cards. The player who best matches the cards with their buildings win.

It's fairly straight-forward. But what caught me a little off-guard is how much fun it is to build little mansions with the cubes. It's a very tactile, rewarding experience just to build things, without a game wrapped around it. It's a toy as much as it's a game.

And unlike Alhambra, where you don't really get the feeling of building a palace (even though I like the game a lot, it could just as easily lose the theme and be an abstract), Sir Reginald really does feel like you are building houses. For some reason, I always place my doors facing the road, and most of my windows overlooking the lake, because, well, that's what you'd expect in real life.

It's fun just playing with the cubes and building things. Therefore, almost all of the rules, or lack thereof, are focused solely on making the building of stuff the focus of the game. Every turn you collect cubes, and you build with them. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

For example, I played around with only drawing one cube and placing it on your turn. That wasn't as much fun as placing multiple cubes. So the rules focus on placing 3 cubes per turn. And while Sedjtroll gently kept prodding me to try and come up with a more interesting way of collecting cubes, suggesting various routes through hiring craftsmen, getting the proper supplies, that kind of thing, I decided against it. While these are fine ideas, these really took the focus away from the simple fun of building things, and added the additional focus of material/labor management, which winds up, I think, watering down the what I felt should be the focal point of the game...the cubes themselves. So now, you just pretty much "collect cubes" from a small sample of cubes.

This is something that often gets talked about in various designing themes, such as removing "fiddliness" if possible, or "streamlining" rules. But often enough, this is almost based SOLELY on making the game work better, not making it more fun. (However, this should indirectly make things more fun in theory, as streamlining things should make the game more playable.) But very rarely are the discussions held in in terms of "what parts of the game make the game fun, and how do you bring that more in focus."

It's a question that should be asked more often in the design circles I follow. And I probably should ask it to myself more often as well.

Magic Mirror

2007-09-02T05:59:00.000-07:00

This rocks in so many, many ways...

Build a Magic Mirror for Halloween.

The special children's game post

2007-08-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

So, there's been a lot of demand recently in the house for game playing. And what a tangled web of games there is! Since it's a 4-year old and a 2-year old asking, needless to say, the game list is not your typical geeky game list.

Thankfully, we've been feeding them not on the usual roll-and-move games, but on a collection of Cranium and Gamewright games (along with a few Zach kiddie games). These are games that pretty much don't get the lovin' they deserve on BGG, mainly because they aren't targeted at Geeks, but instead at little kids. And they are (mostly) surprisingly great little diversions.

In fact, what I believe is a good benchmark for a small kids game is that it would simply make for a good college drinking game. For the most part.

Anyway, here is a list of kids games that has been seeing a lot of play time, in rough order of preference:

Cariboo (great for the wee little ones)
Balloon Lagoon (fairly entertaining mix of family gambling/dexterity games)
Duck Duck Bruce (fun little press your luck game)
Hullabaloo (Twister-lite)
Chicken Cha Cha Cha (memory game where the kids usually beat the parents)
Gulo Gulo (dexterity game)
Cookin' Cookies (slap the ingredients as fast as you can)
Zooreka (Settlers for kids, more on this later)

I'm not a big fan of the following:
Leaping Lizards, Peanut Butter and Jelly, and, ESPECIALLY Wormy Apples.

I hate Wormy Apples. Both the game and in real life. Spin the spinner and remove the matching worm from your apple. First to get rid of their worms wins, provided you don't fall asleep first.

The one game that sort of surprised me was The Ladybug Game. Yes, it's pretty much a roll-and-move with no thought. But it's a fairly entertaining race game considering that it was created by a 6 year old, with a few wacky aphid-collecting twists. Given the choice between The Ladybug Game and, say, CandyLand, the ladybugs kick CandyLand's butt.

It should be noted that in some cases, some of the rules have been bent a little bit to allow the kids to play the game more easily, and is some cases, less agressively. Also, there are a few other games that right now are being used more as puzzles than games themselves, such as Landlock and Snap!

Snap! is a particularly interesting mechanical marvel in the way the puzzle nubs on tiles ensure that you can only place similarly colored dragon parts next to each other.

Gamewright gets a nod or publishing a series cheap card and tile games that won't put the adults asleep. There's usually just a slight amount of strategy in there to keep things interesting enough.

But really, I can't give enough praise to Cranium Inc. They do a pretty fantastic job of creating pretty fun kiddie game, with great components and simple hooks (Cariboo is a really amazing package that easily attracts 2 year olds and their 15 second attention spans, and is even understandable to them. A feat of epic proportions.)

But I do have a few issues with Zooreka. As the box says, it is designed to be played with someone aged 8 and older. Which maybe is a little old. You do have to be able to read some of the special action cards. Anyway, it plays sort of like a weird, simplified combination of Monopoly and Settlers of Catan. But it seems to me that at that age, you probably are just better off teaching the 8 year old those games instead.

Zooreka involves rolling dice, running around a board, and landing on a space that gives you a special action on that turn. Also, before each player rolls, all players "bet" on what symbol is going to come up on the Resource die. If you guess correctly, you win a resource card of that symbol. Ultimately, you need a large set of certain symbols to buy a zoo display, showing off your favorite animals. Get four zoo displays, and you win.

The biggest problem is that you can only build a zoo display if you land on a Trading Post. Meanwhile you are collecting resources willy-nilly. It can be frustrating sitting around with enough resources to build 4 displays, but never landing on th Trading Post to do it.

Additionally, the Trading Post allows for conversions of your resources. You get a little conversion chart, similar to the shopping card for Settlers of what you can buy. However, I have a little nickpick on the card, which is sort of interesting from a design standpoint. Here, take a look:

Due to the justification, it appears that the trading is a one-way street. One Paw can be traded to get 3 Bananas. Thankfully, they have arrows indicating that the trading post can work the other way, too. However, by justifying it to the left, it creates a certain visual flow that seems to indicate a trade only going one way. I think I would've centered the "math," thereby visually equaling the trade flows. Something more like this:

Anyway, it's a minor nitpick.

Games on the Cheap
In other news, I've added two more games to Games on the Cheap collection: Checkpoint: Berlin, and The Great Lakes Fish-Out.

While everyone that I've taught Werewolf to has had a blast playing it, there are some nagging issues with it, especially when you can't get over 7 people to populate the village. These things include some stuff like "the first lynching" problem, where the villagers really have no information to go on, and there's probably a mathematical proof somewhere that indicates they really DO need to lynch someone anyway. (I referee the game in such that the Villagers can choose not to lynching someone during the day).

Checkpoint: Berlin is an extension of Werewolf, in that there is still two asymmetrical teams vying to win the game. The larger group is trying to smuggle diamonds past the guard at a checkpoint. However, there may be a mole secretly working with the guards within the thieves. There is no attrition of the players that Werewolf has, so everyone is pretty much in the game the whole time (unless the thieves start killing off their own in the hopes of getting rid of the mole). Plus, it doesn't need as many players as Werewolf really needs to make it hum.

The Great Lakes Fish-Out is a rules cleanup of my GDS entry from last year. A fairly quick, simple, and chaotic trick-taking game.

I'm finding coming up with these style of games is pretty fun, in that they aren't these projects that just drag on forever while I try and find the time to work on them (Leviathan, anyone?). These two games also represent me toying around a little bit with the way I've been laying out rules. I'm trying out landscape ratio, with 2 columns, instead of the usual "endless paragraph in portrait" style. This sort of came about from Byrk's Fistful of Football rules.