Focus

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 Turn for the Better

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

If players want to do something...

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.

The Moral Compass

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.

Procedures (part 4) - your ever growing world

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

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)

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)

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 leash

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.