Try-and-see test

Tonight I sat down with some components from various games, jamming them against eachother, testing any sets of rules that seemed promising. I ended up working with the following:
Triominoes: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/104712
Cards from Rage: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/91475
Cubes from El Grande: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/167025

I started off with just the triominoes and cards from Rack-o, letting 2-digit numbers 0-5, 10-15, etc coorespond to pairings of the 0-5 numbers on the tiles. Nothing really great there. Also, there was no actual 0 cards, which got me thinking about card decks that do go to 0. How about Rage? I've used those cards in a lot of experiments before. But they have 6 colors, might as well do something with those.

So I tried this, pretty much off the top of my head, with only a little misstep or two requiring adjustment.

Rageominoes: A game for 2 players
Setup
- Use a deck made of red, green, blue and yellow Rage cards from 0-5, 12 cubes of each of those colors, and all the tiles.
- Each player gets 5 cards and 4 tiles, hidden from their opponent. One tile is placed face up in the play area, the others are all face down.

Game Play
- Each turn a player plays a tile adjacent to an existing one. If both numbers on the tile match the adjacent numbers (ie, a legal play in triominoes, if I remember correctly), then a card with one of those matching numbers may be played. The card is discarded, and a cube matching its color is placed on the played tile. The player takes a cube of that color.
- Then the player draws up to 4 tiles and 5 cards, as necessary. Play passes to the other player.

Game end and Scoring
- The game ends when a card must be drawn, but there are none left.
- Each set of touching tiles that have cubes of the same color on them form a group. Cubes of a given color are worth one point for every tile in the largest group of that color. Players add up the points provided by the cubes they have taken, the highest score wins.

I like the simple ruleset, and the way that you must manage both tiles and cards. I like the potentially explosive scoring of rattling off a large group and collecting the cubes necessary for that group.

It didn't really work though. You were too often just at the mercy of the cards and tiles you had, without enough information about your opponent to work with. That said, there's already an information overload, an artifact of using the triominoes tiles. Too often, I would look at the colors and cards I had, and just try to find a way to place that card, looking for a matching tile space. Plus its an annoying, unfun kind of decision search, with limited options in a Knizia-ish sense, but requiring a lot of visual scanning.

I'd been envisioning lots of designs with those triominoes tiles, but I learned something important: that the basic search of matching tiles is annoying as hell already, and tacking a game on top of it is likely a bad idea. Good to know, sealing off directions that have a low chance of bearing a good idea, so that I can focus my thoughts elsewhere, is very productive. I may still use them face-down though, as movable triangular spaces. There are sort of cool "swinging" moves you can make.

I was watching the Phillies lose their 10,000th game today, and someone had a sign referencing a famous Edison anecdote. Basically, he said he made 10,000 mistakes on his way to creating the light bulb, but considered it a 10,001 step success. In my thoughts about design fields and their points of difficulty, I become frustrated at my inability to tell what's going to work in a board game design; the difficulty in mapping designs to outcomes before implementing them. It might just be one of those fields where the only way to know is to try try try over and over again. It took one mistake to learn some properties of triangular dominoes, I guess after 10,000 lessons I'd probably have a handle on things well enough to publish a game. One a night for 30 years I'm there. Mistake 1.