Hippodice Entry Guide

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.

When it rains, it pours.

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...

Sir Reginald applies for his passport

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

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?

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.