It Doesn't Look Good

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.

Procedures, Part 2 (The World)

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.

The internet is a big place

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!

Success!

After watching the viral-ness of the internet take it's time, PocketCiv has made it on to boardgamegeek by itself (well, somebody other than me). I've seen a few comments about it in various threads, and have gotten a few email links to some session reports, so I've been kind of looking around for it. Of course, it's spelled "Pocket Civ" with a space, so it was kind of tough for me to find. Looks like I'll have to update the game name to include the space for completeness sake. And it's also listed as a "2005" game. I didn't start messing around with it until...checking blog archives...July 27, 2006.

It's nice to see such a high rating for it, even though there's only 6 votes for it. Heck! Those could be 2's and 3's. So I'm glad that people are enjoying it. What is particularily engrossing about the ratings is that I was able to develop a game that people like within the fairly tight contraints of the PocketCiv goal of "a solitaire sprawling epic in the tiny space of an airplane tray." I think that just pulling off a working game within those limitations is a tough cookie to crack (Lord knows that Leviathan isn't going to be going anywhere near that), but the fact that it's also fun to it's target niche audience is encouraging. The component list for initial entry into the game is fairly small (16 cards and rules) compared to other Print-n-Play games most likely helps. Just another hurdle for Leviathan to cross. Or fall down on it's face on.

I hope that at some point, there will be some amount of critical mass that gets hit where people will start submitting their own scenarios for it. Or better multi-player rules. Or something else to keep it fresh and engaging.

Anyway, for those who might have played it, and don't know about it's entry, here is the link to it: Pocket Civ at BGG. And if you have the ability and an inclination, feel free to give it a rating. A nice rating would be good, but a honest one would be better.

ALERT! A vote has been added since I started this post! Can't stop this train now, baby!