Board Game Narrative part 2

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...

The Hook

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.

Motivators

When I get the chance, I've been play-testing a basic version of Leviathan a bit, tweaking some values and such, and putting the rules into some kind of understandable form. As a recap, this is a general overview of how things currently work, based on what I've fleshed out so far.

Tales:
The object is to get as many Tales in each Port as possible. Your final score is based on the 2 Ports with the lowest Tale count.

Strength:
When a player runs out of Strength, the game is over. A player gains Strtength by taking down ships (eating the sailors). But a player also loses Strength when doing this, and due to weather events.

Game Play:
The player first decides how much Strength to apply to an "At Ready" Strength. This is the amount of Strength he expects to expend during this round. All unused At Ready Strength is discarded at the end of the round. However, if the player did not assign enough At Ready Strength to cover "losses" during the round, he must cover start sucking up his Strength reserve with a penaltly of using 3 Strength for each Strength that is required to be paid.

The player may move to a new location.

The player checks out what he has discovered at this location.

If he finds a Fleet, he Battles them, using up Strength in the process, or attempt to run away.

Strength and Tales are awarded for sunk ships.

And then round finishes, all excess At Ready Strength is discarded.

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Playtesting at this stage, I'm currently smoothing out the Battle system, and getting a feel for how the balance between using up Strength and awarding Tales feels.

And without the Evolution system, the game feels fairly dry. It's completely playable for sure. The game as it stands right now, is basically the player making decisions pretty much based on making decisions based on Strength/Tale conversions. And that's essentially the sole "motivator" right now.

Most motivations that move a game along are pretty simple, and they are typically all tied to "Winning the Game." Whether that means the most points, or getting rid of your cards first, or first across the finish line, or whatever, it's pretty much all tied to winning.

Usually, though, there are a lot of secondary motivations you can find in games. These things are a bit more varied, but they usually more exploratory in nature. These things are usually along the lines of finding the best strategy in order to win, but they can also be more about just trying to mess around with the game's systems and see what becomes of it if you don't follow the obvious path, like attempting to go the 100% corn producer path in Puerto Rico, or playing Princes of Florence without building ANY buildings. Or playing Tikal solely for chasing the masks and idols. A big part of the CCG allure in is this; often, it's not so much as winning the game as it is trying to get all of the cogs of some infernal machine together to come out of your deck just right.

Anyway, in my experience with PocketCiv (and really with games in general), you really need to have something more than a design that is simply "best points win." Or in the case of a solitaire game, just a running total of points. Sure, you can "beat the game," but the flexibility of the PocketCiv turned out to be much larger than I thought; there's a lot of things to explore in there.

Which leads me to Leviathan, which, in it's current form, doesn't have the same amount of flexibility. As a game design, it's pretty static, and the player has only a few real choices; these things I are Player Movement, Player Battle Decisions (which includes the At Ready/Reserve mechanic), and a player's decision to keep fighting or to run away after each sunken ship. There really isn't that much to explore.

And so, my next step is introducing the Evolution system into the mix.

Generally, the concept is this: When a player sinks a "good" ship (one that has a certain value), the player is awarded with a power-up (he Evolves). However, the fly in the ointment here is that giving the player an option of what he wants will most likely allow him to beat the game easily. PocketCiv controls this aspect by it's costing structure: more interesting or powerful technologies simply cost more, or have preresiquites before you can obtain them. Additionally, I need to have some control over the Evolution to keep the player coming back to explore new routes.

I don't really want the player to "target" a certain power-up, I would like him to discover it somehow. So if a player wants to follow a certain Evolutionary path he hasn't been down before, he can find something new.

Of course, this sort of relies on a certain amount of trust in the player in that he simply doesn't just read the entire menu before he plays the game. On my end, I sort of have to hide the power-ups as best as I can, so the player can't just happen along something cool that he isn't supposed to get.

In a nutshell, that is the design issue I'm out to solve, and here's the first pass. I think it will work out well, with the exception that I note after the description. The Evolution system requires the need for two additional grids (on one or two boards), and a book or manual for the "Captain's Log."

Ships come in two classes for the purpose of Evolving. Once a ship is sunk, the next Battle Card is turned over, and based on the Ship Type (of the defeated ship), the player can determine if the ship is "Named" (a cool ship, one worthy of songs to be sung by sailors), or "Unnamed". If a ship is Named, you are awarded a icon; there will only be 4 different icons a player can collect. Additionally, a player can only have one of a particular icon at a given time; so if a player collects a "spyglass," and he already has a spyglass, then too bad, he doesn't get an additional one.

I would've liked there to be more of a theme to "naming ships," but at this point, I'm going to attempt a simple route to keep the current, overly large component count down a bit.

Anyway, evolving is based essentially on a probability tree. A player starts a pawn on the bottom of the tree, he may spend on icon to move on a branch to the next space up on a branch, provided he has the current icon to move there. At the new space, there will be an entry number of a Captain's Log that the player will be required to read.

The Captain's Log contains two types of articles. First, a Captain's graphic description of the sea monster that attacked his ship, which will end with another pointer to entry somewhere else in the book. This entry contains the power-up rules description; the new rules that appply to the player now that he has Evolved.

Ultimately, the Captain's description is fluff, but important fluff it is! It is the link that hides the misdirection between the entry number on the Evolution Tree (which can be seen by the player) and the eventual reward of the power-up (the entry that the Captain's description points to). So while a player may glance and read about a potential rules change; he will most likely not know how to get there, short of scanning and remembering other Captain's descriptions.

So, let's break this down a little bit more, in terms of a player's choice.

The player now has fairly limited control over exactly how he will evolve. He has enough control where he can decide to wait and spend his icon (in this example, the "spyglass") on whatever the next "spyglass" Evolution will be. Now, if he has played the game enough times, and decides that he has seen the "spyglass" Evolution choice enough at the start of the game, he may wait and use it further up the tree in the hopes of exploring a new branch on the tree, and finding a new "spyglass" Evolution that he hasn't played yet.

However, this comes at a possible price, as getting another "spyglass" is essentially a useless endeavor, since you can't carry spares. "Collecting" a second "spyglass" is giving up one Evolution. So, there's a bit of fun risk/reward in this. You can collect the known Evolution now, or you can wait, and try for a different one, in the hopes of spending it on a new, unplayed Evolution later.

While conceptually, I think the basic design is strong, the hard part on my end is this: I need to somehow come up with a rather large list off power-ups to make this a useful and interesting feature. And they need to be fairly unique, especially the ones further up the tree, as these will not be seen very often. They need to have a certain "hey that's cool!" about them, so the first time a player experiences something neat 5 levels into the tree, he'll want to come back and try a different branching route in the tree to see what else is at level 5.

I'm somewhat concerned that the "base game" isn't robust enough to really pull this off. Or at least, pull it off to the point of making the player's choice meaningful with the Evolution Tree. Here are the current "systems" I can power-up:

• Player movement
• strength/healing
• Battle options
  
• Awarding of Tales
• Weather effects

And so, that's the plan of the moment. We'll have to see how it all comes out.

The Natural Migration of Sea Monsters

My definition of a game is broader than the typical game geek. It is, simply, "a set of rules the paticipants agree to follow for primarily their enjoyment." This pretty much encasulates things like Chutes and Ladders and slot machines, which the geeks would disallow since there is no control over the game, and things like Rubik's Cubes and The Sims, which geeks would argue are toys.

Anyway, games are pretty much rules with parts. It is up to the other players in the game to provide the competition. The game, itself, usually doesn't provide any competition, aside from getting screwed by a bad random event. The standard bearer for this seems to be the "Settlers of Catan bad dice roll syndrome." But even that, I don't really consider to be "competition," the game is just doing it's thing; it's not out to get you. That's the odds.

To make a long analysis short, since board games really can't do the artificial intelligence (coming up with a battle plan or strategy based on player actions) like a computer game, it's generally hard to pull off any some of semblance of "Game versus Player." But they can do something that I have termed, for lack of something better, "Automatic Intelligence" (or a.I. for short). This is basically where a game is pre-programmed, or in the case of a board game, somehow designed, to get harder or more challenging as the players progresses. Since the game can't do much in terms of creating alternate stratagems to whatever the player is doing, all it (and it's designer) can do is make educated guesses that at certain points in the game, the player will be at a strength of X and therefore the game needs to somehow combat this at some level.

To be honest, I can't think of too many competitive games that actively work against the player(s) using some sort of a.I. mechanism. The few examples that I can think of would be the co-operative Lord of the Rings game and it's sister Beowolf (with it's funky 3 paneled folding board), and strangely enough Prince of Florence. I'm sure there are others, and people who are much more versed in many more games than I can come up with them. Again, since most games are designed to be player versus player, there's really not much reason to spend time and effort on a.I.

In the PoF case, the a.I. mechanism is the ever increasing minimum value that a work of art must need to be completed in that round. One of the things that strike me most about this part of the game is this: I can't fathom a reason as to why it's there. Winning games of PoF HAVE to include creating art well above these minimums. I assume this fixes something that was found to be broken in the playtesting at some point. Since you have a limited amount of actions to use to create artwork anyway, just whipping out a bunch of crummy 5 VP creations is a path to failure. I'm left to ponder what happens to the game if you just don't follow that rule.

Beowulf does a really good job of implementing the LotR mechanic of collecting and playing cards along a definite path, but turning original game on it's ear by making it competitive auction game. It uses a.I. well, as various auctions get more interesting as time goes on, leaving players with a lot of decisions regarding "Do I play these cards now, or get bloodied now while holding on for future rewards."

I have trouble including LotR in this list, as it is co-operative, and strangely enough, it usually becomes somewhat of a solitaire affair, with one player making all the decisions for everyone. As a solitaire game (which again, it often turns out to be a solitaire game with three friends helping hold cards for you), it is a pretty fascinating usage of a.I.

Which leads me to this...

Solitaire games, I feel, need some semblance of a.I. to make them have any kind of fun. Just doing something and then rolling dice for some random event doesn't seem to cut it, as a player can't really plan against pure randomness. The player needs to have some feel that he can control his destiny against the game with some amount of strategy. Something logical.

A lot of the design in PocketCiv went towards the Event Cards to make it seem like there was something evolving in the world around the player, that within the randomness of the card draws, there was some logical plan to the chaos. Looking at an excel sheet of all the cards, one can see a progression to the events.


Early Eras have fewer Events, hopefully allowing the player to get a foothold into the game. Later on, Events come nearly every turn; hopefully, the player has built up the resources to protect him from them.

Additionally, the types of Events change over time. Early Era Events are mostly natural disasters, with a few Visitations thrown in for good measure. As the game progresses, so do the Events, in their complexity, the damage they can cause, and within some amount of relationship to where the player should in his civilization at the time. Additionally, the scaling of the scalable Events also helps the game keep up with the player as he grows more powerful, but that's a more obvious effect.

Just throwing dice and looking up Event XX wouldn't be the same. Getting dumped with a Civil War before you have a chance to actually HAVE civility doesn't make much sense.

Actually, the whole Event concept, as originally created in (and, I admit, borrowed from) the grand-daddy Civilization is a nice example of "a.I.-lite," in that it does a good job of throwing out the desired calamities into the mix as the players advance. The rule about secretly trading the calamities to other players somewhat lessens it's a.I. usage, however. Even though I think that themewise it works; as a civilization trades more with other civilizations, foreign ideas can pollute the nirvana that was once a well planned group. But isolation is hardly a good answer as outside ideas and trade also can help foster ideas and speed along civilizations in many ways. So, you take your chances, I guess.

Which brings us to Leviathan. The game as it stands now, in it's simplest terms, move to a sea area, and then see if there are any ships that you can attack. It would be reasonable to simply just roll some dice and look up some ship data in table.

But I want the game to have some intelligence. It needs to have some a.I.

I want the player to have to reason to move about the board, to move to different areas. In order to make this work, I need to have the Fleets change their locations during different parts of the game. Weather and seasonal changes give me a logical reason to do this; during the Winter, ships travelling across the Altantic (especially in the north) will be few and far between, and ships will most likely follow the coast lines; in the Summer, voyages crossing the Atlantic become more plentiful.

I want the game to start being more aggressive as the player become more powerful, and if enough Tales reach land about the fearsome beast that lurks in ocean blue, I want the game to be actively searching for the player.

And, at least for now, here is how I am doing it. Of course, at any point I can change this, but this is my first pass at making this all work.

The Discovery Phase

The Discovery Phase is derived from a small deck of Discovery cards. Each card of the Discovery deck shows all 7 areas of the Atlantic Ocean that the player can occupy. Each card has a different psuedo-random order to the ocean areas. In order for me to better "control the randomness" of the game, ocean areas that are more northernly tend to hang out at the top of the list on the card; southernly areas tend to be on the bottom.










Additionally, there is a Discovery Board (labelled by Years) that Discovery cards will be placed on, one per turn. The placement of the card moves one notch over for every turn. When a card is placed, a player can look up data from the board that is directly to the left and right of the ocean area the player currently occupies. As the player progresses through the board, the type of data changes, simulating the changes that the "world" would be experiencing during those seasonal changes.






The data itself is two codes (a letter and a number) which is derived from referencing the current ocean area that the player is in. The letters determine a Weather Event, or a fleet's Port of Origin and Destination, and the numbers determine the size and strength of the fleets that the player will interact with. Much like the Discovery card and their "sorted-randomness," the data on the board points to Ports that roughly correlate to Northern-to-Southern Ports.

A lot of this organization of Northern-to-Southern stuff has to do with trying to make sure that there are no goofy weather conditions, such as snowstorms in the Carribean, and to make sure that Port Destinations and Origins also make some reliable sense, such that a fleet wouldn't be travelling in the North Atlantic while going on a route from Port Royale to Sierra Leone (a typical southernly route). However, there is enough random slop in the system to keep it from being too predictable.

So, if a player is desperately trying to get more Tales (Tales are the main point system of the game, which are awarded when you take down ships) in Halifax, he can make some informed decisions as to when, and where he should be for his most likely chance of success; but there is no guarantee.

While it's a confusing system from a design standpoint (and involved a lot of excel charts to figure out "the math" behind the numbers), to the player it should play fairly straightforward:

1. Draw a card, place it in the "slot" of the current turn.
2. Based on his current location, look up the letter that is to the left of the card in the Ports Chart to determine the ports of Origin and Destination for a Fleet (I'll describe the importance of ports of Origin and Destination in a later post). Place the appropriate Origin and Destination markers on the map as a reminder. Or play out the Weather event.
3. If he has found a Fleet, look up the number on the right side of the card (again, based on the player ocean location) in the Fleet Chart, which will reveal the composition and strength of the Fleet, and then the battle may or may not begin.
   

But what does this really mean to the player?

Since the main point system is based on getting Tales "told" in Ports. A player's score is, right now, derived from the port with the LOWEST amount of Tales told. So players will want to naturally target fleets that come and go from all Ports equally, as getting a lot of Tales in one Port is worthless if another Port has zero. However, all Ports are not treated equally due to seasonal adjustments (and, well, map locations). Hopefully, the player can latch on to this, and learn to best adapt to the a.I. of the Seasons to help him focus on the Ports where he needs more Tales. He will need to learn to naturally migrate with the seasons.

At least it is my hope he will.

Unique

On a recent "Inside the Actor's Studio," Micheal J. Fox was being interviewed. He had a pretty funny comment about why he didn't like math. Why I can't quite remember the exact quote, it went something along these lines.

"Two plus two equals four. That's it. There's nothing else to it. No matter who adds them up, it's always the same. It's been solved."

And then he went on about how acting let's him explore new things, and how his interpretation of a character is going to be different than someone elses. Math is always the same.

The ability to play around with new, unique things is a fun part of design (and more than often, can be rough). At one point I was more than happy to try and design games around a certain mechanic or theme that I had seen in another game, just to muck around with it. Isla Margarita is a good example of this. I had seen the game called Bridges of Shangri La, and decided that I wanted to try my hand at a connect-things-with-bridges game. Then I mixed in a little of Puerto Rico-styled select-your-action game play. It still might feel new because of the changes I've made as the design went along, but I don't feel like there's anything TRULY unique about the game.

I've progressed beyond that now. Now I want to try and create new systems along with new games. While the final product may not exhibit any truly unique requirements from the outside viewer, a lot of my design process now is spent on trying to derive things that are entirely new.

Minsterpool reflects this. While it might feel like another typical political/area influence game, I really wanted to try and make a game in which characters and relationships died over time, and in that regard, the players also had some amount of control over the speed of their deaths. I'm not sure how much a player gets from this initial design challenge; hopefully, it feels new and fresh because of this. But it's also somewhat abstracted out to "just playing an action card."

Vegas Showdown is a game that is fairly interesting in this respect. Here's a game that gets really good ratings, yet also gets seemingly punished for borrowing too many elements from other games. First of all, while some of the elements might seem borrowed, there's plenty of differences. Most notably is the "lay out your rooms" mechanic, possibly borrowed from Prince of Florence. Aside from the basic description of placing tiles in a confined space, the actual usage feels completely different to me. Princes had all these weird odd-ball shapes that you had to contend with; made especially harder if you didn't bother buying up builders, which lessened various spacing requirements. It really was Tetris on a board. Vegas is different; it's more about connecting rooms appropriately, and placing certain tiles next to each other. Princes didn't care what was next to each other, just as long as you fit them in your little world.

Granted, the auctions are somewhat similar, but that's pretty much the way all auction games work. Overall Princes was more about building all this machinery to play your scoring cards; Vegas is a little more "pure" in the room layout respect; it's all about how you place tiles on your board, and how they connect. They are both strong games that share some similar aspects, but not enough similarity for me to complain. While I love Princes, there's a huge amount of headaches in that game, regarding things like the evergrowing minimum point value for creating a work of art and the shopping list of stuff you must be continually adding up. Vegas is happily streamlined.

Anyway, as I've said, I've tried to move on to trying to develop mechanics as uniqie as possible now. Since Comcast has put the halt on Restless for the time being, I'm now setting my sights on doing another solitaire project based on the Leviathan discussion at BGDF.

This has been rattling in my brains for some time, and I've sort of parsed the game down into a few distinct mechanics that I'm trying to approach with new ideas. Most notably, I've been trying to come up with a new way to resolve combat. No dice throwing, no charts of comparison numbers, etc. Yet something relatively simple and doable under the auspice of a solitaire game. And I think I've finally come up with something that I'm currently mocking up to test. This is definitely going to be a fairly unique approach to handling battles (at least in my mind).

Additionally, there's a few other mechanics that I'm dealing with, as outlined below:

As the discussion in the BGDF thread boiled down, the goal of the game should be mostly about spreading the tales of terror of the terrible monster (you) that has attacked the ships, so the real goal of the game is to create Tale points at various ports around the Atlantic Ocean. However, as ports grow wise of the terrible creature out at sea, fleets from those ports will start to include warships to battle the monster below; large amounts of fame and famous monster hunters will start joining in the chase.

As a side note, I want the monster to "evolve" as the game goes. But the monster will evolve somewhat randomly, based on the ships the player has taken down previously. The Evolution system will take place, at least in my initial thinking, as a set of captain's logs, telling tales of the horrible beast. Fun flavor text that will hopefully create a nice little story that changes with each play. I think that I'm going to borrow somewhat from the Betrayal at the House on the Hill mechanic of determining the Haunts in the game.

So those are my three major systems I'm looking at: Battle, Tales, and Evolution. And they need to intertwine. And I think I've got all the pieces in my head.

There are obviously many lower level systems at work, as in any game. These include things like player movement, determining the ship types in an area of the ocean, etc.

Time to get to work.