Reason

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.

Loose

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.

Fatigue

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.

Protoplay

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

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.