Just a quick update. I playtested a new, action-point-based version of this with the Tigris and Euphrates components, featuring a much smaller-scale city, and it seemed to go well. There are some interesting, emergent things that I'm liking. It still needs something, but its the best I've felt about it so far. Something special is happening with it, I just need to hone that into a proper game without losing that.
Don't have the time to do a proper update now, but will soon.
Showing posts with label Monster City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monster City. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Malleable Monster and Branches of Power
I talked with Chad a bit about the Monster City design, one thing we batted around was having changable sides. On the city side, there would be six possible factions, each with their own unit and set of cards, and you would choose three of them to use during a game. This would give each game a different feel. Similarly, the monster would choose a number of parts to its body, each of which provided specific move cards. The overall balance of attacks and movement would be preserved by associating them with "leg", "arm" "head" etc, card types, which would tend towards certain types of moves, and each monster wounld choose on of several options from each category.
There's a part of me that likes this for the replay value. The balance would be wonky at times, but this isn't an abstract asymetrical strategy game, its just meant to be fun. More Memoir '44 than Fox and Geese. Players would have more ownership over their abilities, and would be able to try drastically different approaches.
There's a part of me that is aesthetically repulsed by it though, it seems so messy. I'd want to really clean up the basic mechanics down to nearly nothign, and keep the cards themselves very elegant.
Also, because I would no longer be trying to perfectly balance the game, some games would be a little lopsided. So I would design it more as a "one more game" game, with a quick play time.
The end result being, I need to really streamline this down. I think shrinking the board *way* down might also be in order. The district idea might go away.
----
Also, I realized I need some kind of drama that rises and falls over the course of the game. Something that makes each turn different than the last, and provides a secondary concern. I know this is at odds with what I just said, and if I streamline the game down enough, maybe I can avoid this. But everything seems very linear these days. A "rage" value that rises and falls might be a step i the right direction, where more powerful moves are enabled by a higher value. Conversely, there might be a "morale" value for the city troops. Some secondary concern to strategically balance against, to carefully judge the importance of at a given moment.
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I wonder if cards are even still the way to go for the monster. Dice, in a particular way, are starting to become appealing again. Its a long story.
There's a part of me that likes this for the replay value. The balance would be wonky at times, but this isn't an abstract asymetrical strategy game, its just meant to be fun. More Memoir '44 than Fox and Geese. Players would have more ownership over their abilities, and would be able to try drastically different approaches.
There's a part of me that is aesthetically repulsed by it though, it seems so messy. I'd want to really clean up the basic mechanics down to nearly nothign, and keep the cards themselves very elegant.
Also, because I would no longer be trying to perfectly balance the game, some games would be a little lopsided. So I would design it more as a "one more game" game, with a quick play time.
The end result being, I need to really streamline this down. I think shrinking the board *way* down might also be in order. The district idea might go away.
----
Also, I realized I need some kind of drama that rises and falls over the course of the game. Something that makes each turn different than the last, and provides a secondary concern. I know this is at odds with what I just said, and if I streamline the game down enough, maybe I can avoid this. But everything seems very linear these days. A "rage" value that rises and falls might be a step i the right direction, where more powerful moves are enabled by a higher value. Conversely, there might be a "morale" value for the city troops. Some secondary concern to strategically balance against, to carefully judge the importance of at a given moment.
-----
I wonder if cards are even still the way to go for the monster. Dice, in a particular way, are starting to become appealing again. Its a long story.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Monster City update
Still working on this design. I've got some stuff in place that I think is generally working, but I think I need some outside input. I am just too damn involved in the design to be able to think about it rationally any more, too invested in particular avenues and concerns, and I need a fresh set of eyes to say "well, obviously this part is the problem."
The basic innovations of this version are:
- A more interesting city map. No more straight grid, but a series of city blocks and alleys with some character. I should have done this in the first place, it is already much more interesting.
- An unconventional movement model. The city is broken up into 6 districts. Each unit can undertake "normal movement", moving X spaces on the board. But they can also use "strategic movement": if they are outside the district the monster is in, they can move directly to any other space outside the monster's district. What this means is, your units are never completely out of the fight, they're always a move away from the border of the area where the action is. So far this looks to have some very nice emergent strategy as the monster considers when to change districts, and the city player tries to prevent or anticipate these changes. Credit Europe Engulfed for inspiration on this matter: thematically it means that its easy to move through uncontested areas, but a lot tougher when you're implicitly being careful, being attacked, or otherwise moving through a warzone.
- Finally! The "damage" model. As I mentioned previously, the monster can't destroy buildings when its within range of a unit's attack. This feels really right, giving the city player just the right amount of control over the monster mechanically and thematically.
- Card-based movement. This is giving me the kind of semi-predictability I wanted, I think, though this is the part of the game I am least certain of.
The game feels a little slow right now. but I need to playtest a bit because:
- Games always seem slower and more boring when you're self-playtesting, need to see how much that carries over.
- I think the basics are in place, and I think it could just be missing some changes to the board and cards, rather than fundamental rule changes. This is something I definitely need another head for.
Things I'm looking for:
- Keeping the pace brisk
- Balancing the sides
- Avoiding a runaway winner
- That pop. Right now, each turn is a bit like the last, needs some ramping tension, som buildup of power, some unexpected turns. This is probably my biggest issue, but one that should be fun to try to fix.
Maybe I'll employ Robin for this, though I will certainly bring the prototype to Seattle for some poking on my visit.
The basic innovations of this version are:
- A more interesting city map. No more straight grid, but a series of city blocks and alleys with some character. I should have done this in the first place, it is already much more interesting.
- An unconventional movement model. The city is broken up into 6 districts. Each unit can undertake "normal movement", moving X spaces on the board. But they can also use "strategic movement": if they are outside the district the monster is in, they can move directly to any other space outside the monster's district. What this means is, your units are never completely out of the fight, they're always a move away from the border of the area where the action is. So far this looks to have some very nice emergent strategy as the monster considers when to change districts, and the city player tries to prevent or anticipate these changes. Credit Europe Engulfed for inspiration on this matter: thematically it means that its easy to move through uncontested areas, but a lot tougher when you're implicitly being careful, being attacked, or otherwise moving through a warzone.
- Finally! The "damage" model. As I mentioned previously, the monster can't destroy buildings when its within range of a unit's attack. This feels really right, giving the city player just the right amount of control over the monster mechanically and thematically.
- Card-based movement. This is giving me the kind of semi-predictability I wanted, I think, though this is the part of the game I am least certain of.
The game feels a little slow right now. but I need to playtest a bit because:
- Games always seem slower and more boring when you're self-playtesting, need to see how much that carries over.
- I think the basics are in place, and I think it could just be missing some changes to the board and cards, rather than fundamental rule changes. This is something I definitely need another head for.
Things I'm looking for:
- Keeping the pace brisk
- Balancing the sides
- Avoiding a runaway winner
- That pop. Right now, each turn is a bit like the last, needs some ramping tension, som buildup of power, some unexpected turns. This is probably my biggest issue, but one that should be fun to try to fix.
Maybe I'll employ Robin for this, though I will certainly bring the prototype to Seattle for some poking on my visit.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
More Monster City
This game continues to plague me. There are just a very large number of ways you can take the game, so many ways to do the monster actions, so many ways to do city actions, so many city layouts, so many extra twists, all exploding combinatorially. This is the nature of game design, but its especially tricky this time.
I've tried to focus on my actual goals, to back out of assumptions about how things should be done. What I've come up with is:
1) City units should be able to hinder the monster, getting in his way.
2) The city players should not be able to damage the monster. This emerged over time, that it just felt wrong for the city to slowly damage and kill the monser. The city is in a desperate fight to avoid getting obliterated, but they are not an actual threat to the monster's supremacy.
3) The way the city player wins is to survive until a point where they get an ultimate weapon done, which is the one way they can kill the monster and win.
4) The way the monster player wins is to do a boatload of damage to the city, and return to the sea before the ultimate weapon destroys him.
So, the monster is trying to screw stuff up as fast as possible, and the city player is trying to keep the monster from screwing too much stuff up until they can get the weapon online, and either kill the monster with it, or use the threat of it to drive the monster back to the sea.
So how do the city units do anything useful? Well, for one, they can contain the monster, who can't use his big long-distance moves if there are units in the way. So we get a bit of fox-and-geese, where the city units try to slow the monster down and cut off his options. Second, and this is a fairly recent idea that I'm not completely cemented on: the units have an attack range, and they don't do damage or anything, but the monster can't attack a building while he's in the attack range of a unit.
So this leads to an interesting interaction. A city player piles up a bunch of units near the monster. The monster might try to kill all those units, and then will be able to wreck the nearby buildings, but this might take a while, especially if the city player keeps bringing in reinforcements. So the monster is liable to just head off to some other part of the city, where the resistance is less stiff, and wreck that freely. But the city player can use units to try to slow the monster's avenues of movement, to keep it in the areas where the city is well defended. But if the monster breaks free, its going to rip stuff up for a while, until the city player can stop it.
If this happens, does the city player desperately send in a single unit to buy himself some time while the monster kills it and goes back to wrecking? Does he send in a big force, which the monster might just avoid? Does he start cordoning off the main routes out of that area, and then send in a big force, to reestablish control? Or some combination of these effects? I think the strategic depth has a lot of potential.
In addition, I like the thematic feel better than some other versions I've come up with. The monster shouldn't actively seek out tanks, he should just wail on the ones in his face and then go back to beating up the city. And the city player shouldn't be able to control the monster, but can still limit its options, make stands, block certain streets. They will never be in control, but they just might buy themselves enough time...
Some questions remain as far as making this work:
1) How can I balance the monster and unit mobility so that these sort of questions are interesting?
2) How can I keep things unpredictable within the game? I don't want it to be complete information, where the monster can say "well, if I go here, there is no way he can stop me". I feel like in a game like this, it could get frustrating, and I'm not interested in crafting a perfectly balanced, open information, asymetrical, thematically sound game, its plenty challanging as it is. It'd be nice if he could instead make a reasonable guess about how likely the city player was to be able to stop him, based on some secret or unpredictable element, and had to weigh that. Think Memoir '44, but with more reasonable mission balance.
3) Can I keep the tension high throughout the game, or will one side clearly be doomed 2 turns in. This relates to the win condition, how many points does the monster need to win? Does he know, hits it, and escapes? Or should it be a press your luck affair, where he wants as many as he can get without dying. Could it be secret somehow?
4) I want to encourage the monster to get to the heart of the city, and the city player to want to stop that. But I also want it to be a bad idea for the city player to just hole up downtown, letting the monster bulldoze the shoreline. Its a tricky business, and might involve the scoring system somehow.
5) How do I give the game some pop? I still need that OMG turn, that memorable sequence that turns the game around.
Lots of open questions, but I think I'm on an interesting track. I have a new city design that I think will be more compelling, and a card-based approach to actions that just might work. I think this is maybe where the pop will come in, through narrowly applicable but powerful cards that can have a splashy effect if used just right.
In any case, I need to mock it up and playtest it again; there's too much theory swirling that needs to be confirmed or refuted.
-
Also, I went back and added lables to all the old posts. Might be useful?
-
Note to myself: I should do a post on "pop" and how it relates to "the bomb" from that Games Journal article. It's been coming up a lot.
I've tried to focus on my actual goals, to back out of assumptions about how things should be done. What I've come up with is:
1) City units should be able to hinder the monster, getting in his way.
2) The city players should not be able to damage the monster. This emerged over time, that it just felt wrong for the city to slowly damage and kill the monser. The city is in a desperate fight to avoid getting obliterated, but they are not an actual threat to the monster's supremacy.
3) The way the city player wins is to survive until a point where they get an ultimate weapon done, which is the one way they can kill the monster and win.
4) The way the monster player wins is to do a boatload of damage to the city, and return to the sea before the ultimate weapon destroys him.
So, the monster is trying to screw stuff up as fast as possible, and the city player is trying to keep the monster from screwing too much stuff up until they can get the weapon online, and either kill the monster with it, or use the threat of it to drive the monster back to the sea.
So how do the city units do anything useful? Well, for one, they can contain the monster, who can't use his big long-distance moves if there are units in the way. So we get a bit of fox-and-geese, where the city units try to slow the monster down and cut off his options. Second, and this is a fairly recent idea that I'm not completely cemented on: the units have an attack range, and they don't do damage or anything, but the monster can't attack a building while he's in the attack range of a unit.
So this leads to an interesting interaction. A city player piles up a bunch of units near the monster. The monster might try to kill all those units, and then will be able to wreck the nearby buildings, but this might take a while, especially if the city player keeps bringing in reinforcements. So the monster is liable to just head off to some other part of the city, where the resistance is less stiff, and wreck that freely. But the city player can use units to try to slow the monster's avenues of movement, to keep it in the areas where the city is well defended. But if the monster breaks free, its going to rip stuff up for a while, until the city player can stop it.
If this happens, does the city player desperately send in a single unit to buy himself some time while the monster kills it and goes back to wrecking? Does he send in a big force, which the monster might just avoid? Does he start cordoning off the main routes out of that area, and then send in a big force, to reestablish control? Or some combination of these effects? I think the strategic depth has a lot of potential.
In addition, I like the thematic feel better than some other versions I've come up with. The monster shouldn't actively seek out tanks, he should just wail on the ones in his face and then go back to beating up the city. And the city player shouldn't be able to control the monster, but can still limit its options, make stands, block certain streets. They will never be in control, but they just might buy themselves enough time...
Some questions remain as far as making this work:
1) How can I balance the monster and unit mobility so that these sort of questions are interesting?
2) How can I keep things unpredictable within the game? I don't want it to be complete information, where the monster can say "well, if I go here, there is no way he can stop me". I feel like in a game like this, it could get frustrating, and I'm not interested in crafting a perfectly balanced, open information, asymetrical, thematically sound game, its plenty challanging as it is. It'd be nice if he could instead make a reasonable guess about how likely the city player was to be able to stop him, based on some secret or unpredictable element, and had to weigh that. Think Memoir '44, but with more reasonable mission balance.
3) Can I keep the tension high throughout the game, or will one side clearly be doomed 2 turns in. This relates to the win condition, how many points does the monster need to win? Does he know, hits it, and escapes? Or should it be a press your luck affair, where he wants as many as he can get without dying. Could it be secret somehow?
4) I want to encourage the monster to get to the heart of the city, and the city player to want to stop that. But I also want it to be a bad idea for the city player to just hole up downtown, letting the monster bulldoze the shoreline. Its a tricky business, and might involve the scoring system somehow.
5) How do I give the game some pop? I still need that OMG turn, that memorable sequence that turns the game around.
Lots of open questions, but I think I'm on an interesting track. I have a new city design that I think will be more compelling, and a card-based approach to actions that just might work. I think this is maybe where the pop will come in, through narrowly applicable but powerful cards that can have a splashy effect if used just right.
In any case, I need to mock it up and playtest it again; there's too much theory swirling that needs to be confirmed or refuted.
-
Also, I went back and added lables to all the old posts. Might be useful?
-
Note to myself: I should do a post on "pop" and how it relates to "the bomb" from that Games Journal article. It's been coming up a lot.
Friday, November 16, 2007
The Theme and Mechanic Traps vs. Tension-Resolution
This idea is something that I have had percolating for some time now. I don't know if I can quite bang the whole thing out, but I wanted to get the essence down.
My early game designs fell into two approaches, both "traps", in the sense of leading me down wrong paths and ending up at games that weren't going to work.
The Theme Trap
The theme trap is where you think of an awesome scenario, and want to make a board game that creates the awesomeness of that scenario. For example, my early versions of my Monster-in-the-city games were born from this. I liked the idea of monsters wrecking a city; you could wreck buildings! Stomp tanks! So I started from that point, and let some major, important decisions be made in that spirit.
I.e.: Each player has a monster. But who controlls the city? Well, each player also has a set of army units! What are some appropriate army units, how about infantry, tanks and planes? How should those move? Well, infantry should be slow, planes should be able to move really far in a long line. And monsters should be able to have fire breath and eye beams and...
It sounds really childish, and I am giving myself a hard time a bit, but its really easy to fall into this trap. Some games can pull it off, but they usually do so with an (unpredictable) one-effect-per-card deck, give the cards to the players, and let the whole thing fall out as it may. It sort of can work, but the gameplay is usually pretty unsatisfying.
The Mechanic Trap
This is where you come up with a clever mechanic or interaction, and try to build a game around it. You would think the outcome is a successful game with no theme, but that's not quite it in my experience. For me, it doesn't even turn into a workable game.
A lot of my designs have fallen into this trap. And I think the problem is, I see an interesting interaction of rules, and I build a game around them, but there often isn't any game there. I might call a sub-problem of this the "engine trap", where basically I build an interesting engine that the players can toy with, hoping that their doing so in opposition to one another will lead to interesting gameplay, but it just doesn't. It doesn't lead to good player interaction, there are positive feedback loops of success or failure, the whole thing ends up feeling like its playing itself, or its just not fun for some reason.
I had a game design (lets call this Mistake Explanation #4) where you were a scientist/wizard who was collecting body parts and workers and buildings, and using them to create zombies, which could be used as workers, and made money for more buildings, all powered by some kind of drafting mechanic (which I spent far too long in love with). Basically, one thing lead to the next, lead to the next, lead towards a victory state, and it was up to the players to grab the right stuff. But the game ended up feeling totally arbitrary and frustrating from the player side, and the player interaction was minimal at best.
It ended up feeling like sitting with your opponents at one of those conveyor-belt sushi bars, trying to get full the cheapest (god dammit, that sort of sounds like a doable game). But my point is, it was a clever machine, and you were competing, but it wasn't much of a game.
The 2-Player Monster/City Experience
Recently, its mostly been the theme trap that's been messing with me on the 2-Player Monster/City game (any name suggestions? this is getting ridiculous). I realized I wasn't getting the gameplay I wanted out of the top-down city map, and kept shrinking the board, turning the easy knobs, without looking at the root of the problem. Shouldn't it be more interesting to maneuver around the city? Why wasn't it?
I realized that I had decided on the city unit types/abilities/stats basically for thematic reasons, but not because they actually figured to lead to interesting gameplay. There should be artillery, it should have infinite range. There should be infantry, they should basically be canon fodder to slow the monster down.
Even monster rules came about this way, and I fell into traps of things that seemed to have nice synergy, but that didn't necesssarily contribute to overall gameplay. I want infantry to slow down the monster, and thematically it seems like the monster should be able to stomp right over human units, so I'll say he can kill the first unit he gets to, but then has to stop. This, lead to other decisions that were made in similarly willy-nilly ways.
This wasn't wholly responsible for the failings of the design, but it wasn't the right way to make the decisions. I wanted, at one point, for the game to be about containing the monster, but I made decisions counter to that. Artillery as a unit made no sense at all in this game, but I liked the image of artillery shooting at a monster, and in the unit went.
Solutions?
I've cone to realize that player interaction is crucial as a starting inspiration point and evaluation criteria, especially in a 2-player game, you would think. Further, I've started to see designing in terms of tensions. The core of a game is establishing tension and providing satisfying resolution. You have to create a situation where 1) the outcome is in question, and possible results fall into categories that are more or less advantageous to the player, 2) where the player is able to affect the outcome in a way that makes its resolution satisfying. I won't go into a long string of examples, but I think this is present in nearly any good game I can think of.
Conversely, games where the outcomes aren't forseeable enough to be hoped/pushed for, or where the possibility of outcomes produce tension but the resolution is so arbitrary that the player loses interest, abound - and can blame many of their problems for this failing. I was working on a list/taxonomy of game problems, and many of them fall into here in one way or another. A game with too much luck is an obvious choice, but the runaway leader problem is on a larger scale; it is an inability to maintain tension because while the short term outcomes are still predicatable and affectable, players are so far behind they aren't compelled to care.
So can your mechanics yield tension in the short term, on a move by move basis, and maintain it over the course of the game? And, on repeat plays, does the game remain unpredictable, yet controllable enough that it remains compelling. I think the double-sided loop game Chad and I worked on in Seattle last year was actually well designed in the sense that we put move-by-move tension as a first priority, but its most-pips-wins aspect eventually killed it, since the overall result no longer seemed to resolve satisfyingly (there's still something in that game).
Anyway, this has gone on quite long enough, I'm going to try to rethink this monster game drastically, get back to the kinds of tensions I'm trying to build, and make my choices around supporting them. Interestingly enough, I think there might be futures for both the top-down and side-scrolling games - at least if I get stuck on one I can work at the other for a bit. Cheers to you if you read this far!
My early game designs fell into two approaches, both "traps", in the sense of leading me down wrong paths and ending up at games that weren't going to work.
The Theme Trap
The theme trap is where you think of an awesome scenario, and want to make a board game that creates the awesomeness of that scenario. For example, my early versions of my Monster-in-the-city games were born from this. I liked the idea of monsters wrecking a city; you could wreck buildings! Stomp tanks! So I started from that point, and let some major, important decisions be made in that spirit.
I.e.: Each player has a monster. But who controlls the city? Well, each player also has a set of army units! What are some appropriate army units, how about infantry, tanks and planes? How should those move? Well, infantry should be slow, planes should be able to move really far in a long line. And monsters should be able to have fire breath and eye beams and...
It sounds really childish, and I am giving myself a hard time a bit, but its really easy to fall into this trap. Some games can pull it off, but they usually do so with an (unpredictable) one-effect-per-card deck, give the cards to the players, and let the whole thing fall out as it may. It sort of can work, but the gameplay is usually pretty unsatisfying.
The Mechanic Trap
This is where you come up with a clever mechanic or interaction, and try to build a game around it. You would think the outcome is a successful game with no theme, but that's not quite it in my experience. For me, it doesn't even turn into a workable game.
A lot of my designs have fallen into this trap. And I think the problem is, I see an interesting interaction of rules, and I build a game around them, but there often isn't any game there. I might call a sub-problem of this the "engine trap", where basically I build an interesting engine that the players can toy with, hoping that their doing so in opposition to one another will lead to interesting gameplay, but it just doesn't. It doesn't lead to good player interaction, there are positive feedback loops of success or failure, the whole thing ends up feeling like its playing itself, or its just not fun for some reason.
I had a game design (lets call this Mistake Explanation #4) where you were a scientist/wizard who was collecting body parts and workers and buildings, and using them to create zombies, which could be used as workers, and made money for more buildings, all powered by some kind of drafting mechanic (which I spent far too long in love with). Basically, one thing lead to the next, lead to the next, lead towards a victory state, and it was up to the players to grab the right stuff. But the game ended up feeling totally arbitrary and frustrating from the player side, and the player interaction was minimal at best.
It ended up feeling like sitting with your opponents at one of those conveyor-belt sushi bars, trying to get full the cheapest (god dammit, that sort of sounds like a doable game). But my point is, it was a clever machine, and you were competing, but it wasn't much of a game.
The 2-Player Monster/City Experience
Recently, its mostly been the theme trap that's been messing with me on the 2-Player Monster/City game (any name suggestions? this is getting ridiculous). I realized I wasn't getting the gameplay I wanted out of the top-down city map, and kept shrinking the board, turning the easy knobs, without looking at the root of the problem. Shouldn't it be more interesting to maneuver around the city? Why wasn't it?
I realized that I had decided on the city unit types/abilities/stats basically for thematic reasons, but not because they actually figured to lead to interesting gameplay. There should be artillery, it should have infinite range. There should be infantry, they should basically be canon fodder to slow the monster down.
Even monster rules came about this way, and I fell into traps of things that seemed to have nice synergy, but that didn't necesssarily contribute to overall gameplay. I want infantry to slow down the monster, and thematically it seems like the monster should be able to stomp right over human units, so I'll say he can kill the first unit he gets to, but then has to stop. This, lead to other decisions that were made in similarly willy-nilly ways.
This wasn't wholly responsible for the failings of the design, but it wasn't the right way to make the decisions. I wanted, at one point, for the game to be about containing the monster, but I made decisions counter to that. Artillery as a unit made no sense at all in this game, but I liked the image of artillery shooting at a monster, and in the unit went.
Solutions?
I've cone to realize that player interaction is crucial as a starting inspiration point and evaluation criteria, especially in a 2-player game, you would think. Further, I've started to see designing in terms of tensions. The core of a game is establishing tension and providing satisfying resolution. You have to create a situation where 1) the outcome is in question, and possible results fall into categories that are more or less advantageous to the player, 2) where the player is able to affect the outcome in a way that makes its resolution satisfying. I won't go into a long string of examples, but I think this is present in nearly any good game I can think of.
Conversely, games where the outcomes aren't forseeable enough to be hoped/pushed for, or where the possibility of outcomes produce tension but the resolution is so arbitrary that the player loses interest, abound - and can blame many of their problems for this failing. I was working on a list/taxonomy of game problems, and many of them fall into here in one way or another. A game with too much luck is an obvious choice, but the runaway leader problem is on a larger scale; it is an inability to maintain tension because while the short term outcomes are still predicatable and affectable, players are so far behind they aren't compelled to care.
So can your mechanics yield tension in the short term, on a move by move basis, and maintain it over the course of the game? And, on repeat plays, does the game remain unpredictable, yet controllable enough that it remains compelling. I think the double-sided loop game Chad and I worked on in Seattle last year was actually well designed in the sense that we put move-by-move tension as a first priority, but its most-pips-wins aspect eventually killed it, since the overall result no longer seemed to resolve satisfyingly (there's still something in that game).
Anyway, this has gone on quite long enough, I'm going to try to rethink this monster game drastically, get back to the kinds of tensions I'm trying to build, and make my choices around supporting them. Interestingly enough, I think there might be futures for both the top-down and side-scrolling games - at least if I get stuck on one I can work at the other for a bit. Cheers to you if you read this far!
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Dammit!
I am totally stuck on this Monster/City game (pictured here). Basically, originally, the monster started at the top, and worked its way to the bottom, with some potential for lateral movement. I found more and more that I wanted to narrow the city, since the lateral movement just wasn't interesting. If I turn it all the way into a single column, I have all this unused space. If there's only forward and back, why not make it side scrolling?
Alongside this, I jotted down some priorities I had for how the game should feel, and working with those came to what I'll call Monster/City 2.0. Basically, the monster Roborally-commits a number of move cards, then the city player gets one move, alternating with a pre-chosen monster move, and so on. The monster deck is "predictable" [man, that ended up being a key concept for me], and certain types of city attacks can counter certain types of monster moves, so it becomes a bit of the city player trying to outguess the monster player's moves.
I still like it, but I just can't seem to get it work right in practice. I think I have the right monster moves, but can't find city player gameplayer that hooks into it well. I'm going to run it all by Robin at some point, he may be able to jar me out of my assumptions a bit.
Stepping back, I wonder if the reason that the lateral movement felt wrong was the building thing. I had it set up in a set grid of buildings, each surrounded by street spaces. But this lead to weird choke points. I wonder if I need to reexamine that assumption to make the lateral movement more interesting. For example, do we need bridges that can serve as interesting options? Also, I wonder if my (very simple, elegant, even) morale/damage solution is really quite right. I think maybe it needs some gold-type effects along the way. And I wonder if the basic monster-can-stomp rule isn't causing some of the problems. But, I'm rambling, these are notes that aren't likely to make sense except to myself. Welcome to my thought process. Still working on this design, in any case.
Alongside this, I jotted down some priorities I had for how the game should feel, and working with those came to what I'll call Monster/City 2.0. Basically, the monster Roborally-commits a number of move cards, then the city player gets one move, alternating with a pre-chosen monster move, and so on. The monster deck is "predictable" [man, that ended up being a key concept for me], and certain types of city attacks can counter certain types of monster moves, so it becomes a bit of the city player trying to outguess the monster player's moves.
I still like it, but I just can't seem to get it work right in practice. I think I have the right monster moves, but can't find city player gameplayer that hooks into it well. I'm going to run it all by Robin at some point, he may be able to jar me out of my assumptions a bit.
Stepping back, I wonder if the reason that the lateral movement felt wrong was the building thing. I had it set up in a set grid of buildings, each surrounded by street spaces. But this lead to weird choke points. I wonder if I need to reexamine that assumption to make the lateral movement more interesting. For example, do we need bridges that can serve as interesting options? Also, I wonder if my (very simple, elegant, even) morale/damage solution is really quite right. I think maybe it needs some gold-type effects along the way. And I wonder if the basic monster-can-stomp rule isn't causing some of the problems. But, I'm rambling, these are notes that aren't likely to make sense except to myself. Welcome to my thought process. Still working on this design, in any case.
Friday, October 5, 2007
2-Player Monster-City Game Playtests
I spent a few solid hours creating and solo playtesting a prototype of my 2-player monster-city game today. I think its coming together fairly well, I made some early changes, but it seems like the game plays quickly, and with a lot of variety between runthroughs, which is a good recipe for one-more-time gameplay.
I'm a little concerned about:
A) strategy vs. luck - seems like sometimes one player just gets hosed.
B) ensuring that the game doesn't get stale over time - it needs a little more pop, that rare game-event that is exciting to hope for - the equivalent of shooting the moon, or a well-executed chess maneuver.
Also, right now, the Monster player is losing nearly every time, but I think I have enough knobs to turn to fix that eventually.
One thing I've started doing is taking a picture of the board state at the end of the game, along with a card with the result and game version (sort of like a little clapboard). For example:
I don't know if they will be useful artifacts in the long term, but it makes me feel more like I'm accomplishing something as I clear the board, change the rules, and start over.
I'm a little concerned about:
A) strategy vs. luck - seems like sometimes one player just gets hosed.
B) ensuring that the game doesn't get stale over time - it needs a little more pop, that rare game-event that is exciting to hope for - the equivalent of shooting the moon, or a well-executed chess maneuver.
Also, right now, the Monster player is losing nearly every time, but I think I have enough knobs to turn to fix that eventually.
One thing I've started doing is taking a picture of the board state at the end of the game, along with a card with the result and game version (sort of like a little clapboard). For example:
I don't know if they will be useful artifacts in the long term, but it makes me feel more like I'm accomplishing something as I clear the board, change the rules, and start over.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Sabradical!
Back! I made some progress on the 2-player monster game while I was gone, leaning towards a series of modes for the monster, which will support certain strategies, and require certain responses from the city player. Once a mode has been entered and subsequently left, it cannot be returned to, so the choice of when to change modes, and which to change to, could be nicely dicey.
Also, I've long pondered how to modify the board game Tales of the Arabian Nights. I really like some elements of it, but it also has some pretty serious problems. I've been reading this book about travel and transformation in the original 1001 nights stories, and its giving me some interesting ideas about the game. Specifically:
- It talks about travel being for religion, trade, knowledge or love. These are some interesting motivations for encouraging player travel, something the game currently lacks.
- It talks about the nature of political boundaries in the stories, and how there are not solid, real, guarded borders, but rather that you need to visit a ruler in the capital in order to have truly arrived in a given location. It got me thinking about breaking the board into regions, establishing capitals and creating a concept of each player's influence in a region.
This ties into some previous ideas I had about changing the basic scoring and victory systems, so this might seem a little vague. If I finish the variants, I'll of course post them on boardgamegeek, and link to them here. Its a game with a cult following, that deserves a better outer game to go along with its stunning book of paragraphs.
Also, I've long pondered how to modify the board game Tales of the Arabian Nights. I really like some elements of it, but it also has some pretty serious problems. I've been reading this book about travel and transformation in the original 1001 nights stories, and its giving me some interesting ideas about the game. Specifically:
- It talks about travel being for religion, trade, knowledge or love. These are some interesting motivations for encouraging player travel, something the game currently lacks.
- It talks about the nature of political boundaries in the stories, and how there are not solid, real, guarded borders, but rather that you need to visit a ruler in the capital in order to have truly arrived in a given location. It got me thinking about breaking the board into regions, establishing capitals and creating a concept of each player's influence in a region.
This ties into some previous ideas I had about changing the basic scoring and victory systems, so this might seem a little vague. If I finish the variants, I'll of course post them on boardgamegeek, and link to them here. Its a game with a cult following, that deserves a better outer game to go along with its stunning book of paragraphs.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Six 2-player monter game approaches
Here's six quick sketches of idea for a 2-player monster-in-the-city game, as described below. No rules in mind yet, just broad directions.
1. Simple dexterity - City player usese blocks to build buildings and defenses in some fashion. Monster player gets some turns to flick a monster token into them, or otherwise do something dexeritous to try to knock them down. Carnage! Fun!
2. Channel-Based Dexterity - A little trickier to describe, but the board would have some channels in it, little lowered grooves, that the defender uses to flick units onto the board, from the side. These would be layed out like streets, with raised, vulnerable buildings between them. The monster player tries to flick along the flat surface, avoiding the defenders that have been flicked into place, to knock down buildings. Seems like the gameplay might be too simple for the expense of producing some insane shit like this.
3. Flick/Magnets Dexterity - The monster player flicks the monster around on the board, while the defending player uses a magnetic stick to control his units from below, trying to impede the monster's progress. This might even be real time!
4. Closed-eyes drawing - One more dexterity one, these sort of lead one to the next to the next. There's some board game that uses this for ship navigation. Basically, the monster player closes their eyes and traces a path across the board, as their move. Depending on what the City player has done, this might present some negative effects, places where the monster player's turn might end, or allow the city player to screw with the drawing process in one way or another. I like the way that the monster might be stiffled for turn after turn, but then just bust out and wreck everything in one splashy go.
5. Memoir 44 Lite - Now lets move into non-dexterity ideas, just a couple for now. The city player has cards that allow them to activate different kinds of defenses, in different ways, in different parts of the city. For example: each plane unit on the board can move any number of spaces in a straight line; move any tank squad up to 4 spaces; fire a big bomb on any space (damaging the monster and any surrounding buildings). The monster, meanwhile, has a series of basic and special moves. For example, move 5 spaces in any one direction; knock over an adjacent building; grab an adjacent unit and throw it at any other unit in sight, destroying both.
I generally like this card model for these reasons:
- A way to differentiate and balance asymetrical sides
- Limiting a player's options on a given turn, allowing for many possible effects with a mimimum of anaysis being possible.
- Similarly, allowing for a wide variety of moves, by being able to summarize their effects on the cards.
- That does-he-have-the-card-he-needs-to-wreck-me calculations.
That last one leads me to the big sub-decision of this approach, whether to have a predictable deck or not (see previous post). There could be big splashy decks with lots of splashy effects, but ability to strategize about your opponent's possible reactions would sure be hurt, especially early on.
On the other hand, it could be sort of a compelling strategy game with set decks, where you had to reason whether your opponent could reasonably be holding a 9 or 10 card, after all the chances he had to use one in the last few turns, for example. Not sure what predictable decks would look like in a game like this. Perhaps something like this for the city player:
- 3 each of Tank-1, Tank-2 and Tank-3. Each allows you to select and move the appropriate number of tank units and attack with them. Similarly, there would be Rocket and Jet cards, 1-3. The 1 cards might provide some bonus to that one unit, to allow for those cards to be more tactically interesting.
- 2 each of 2 kinds of special cards. Bombs, which hit the monster and wreck everything nearby, and Assault, which allows you to choose any 4 units, move them each one space, and attack with each.
You could do a monster deck this way, with move cards 2-4 spaces, charge in one direction cards 4-6 spaces, jump 3-5 spaces, with a couple specials, but it doesn't feel right. It seems sort of boring, especially because you only have one guy to work with. There could be some hybrid solution, where the city player has a hand of 5 fairly standard cards, from a 30 card deck. Meanwhile, the monster player could have a 2-card hand, basically 2 choices on a given turn, from a mere 10 card or so deck, and the city player has a reminder sheet about them. And each provides an effect with far more options left to designate afterwards.
I mean, we are getting deeply asymetrical now, but I think building this concept around a clean-as-possible core could provide a really interesting experience, doing justice to how different it really is to be a rampaging monster, versus a general in charge of the defending army.
1. Simple dexterity - City player usese blocks to build buildings and defenses in some fashion. Monster player gets some turns to flick a monster token into them, or otherwise do something dexeritous to try to knock them down. Carnage! Fun!
2. Channel-Based Dexterity - A little trickier to describe, but the board would have some channels in it, little lowered grooves, that the defender uses to flick units onto the board, from the side. These would be layed out like streets, with raised, vulnerable buildings between them. The monster player tries to flick along the flat surface, avoiding the defenders that have been flicked into place, to knock down buildings. Seems like the gameplay might be too simple for the expense of producing some insane shit like this.
3. Flick/Magnets Dexterity - The monster player flicks the monster around on the board, while the defending player uses a magnetic stick to control his units from below, trying to impede the monster's progress. This might even be real time!
4. Closed-eyes drawing - One more dexterity one, these sort of lead one to the next to the next. There's some board game that uses this for ship navigation. Basically, the monster player closes their eyes and traces a path across the board, as their move. Depending on what the City player has done, this might present some negative effects, places where the monster player's turn might end, or allow the city player to screw with the drawing process in one way or another. I like the way that the monster might be stiffled for turn after turn, but then just bust out and wreck everything in one splashy go.
5. Memoir 44 Lite - Now lets move into non-dexterity ideas, just a couple for now. The city player has cards that allow them to activate different kinds of defenses, in different ways, in different parts of the city. For example: each plane unit on the board can move any number of spaces in a straight line; move any tank squad up to 4 spaces; fire a big bomb on any space (damaging the monster and any surrounding buildings). The monster, meanwhile, has a series of basic and special moves. For example, move 5 spaces in any one direction; knock over an adjacent building; grab an adjacent unit and throw it at any other unit in sight, destroying both.
I generally like this card model for these reasons:
- A way to differentiate and balance asymetrical sides
- Limiting a player's options on a given turn, allowing for many possible effects with a mimimum of anaysis being possible.
- Similarly, allowing for a wide variety of moves, by being able to summarize their effects on the cards.
- That does-he-have-the-card-he-needs-to-wreck-me calculations.
That last one leads me to the big sub-decision of this approach, whether to have a predictable deck or not (see previous post). There could be big splashy decks with lots of splashy effects, but ability to strategize about your opponent's possible reactions would sure be hurt, especially early on.
On the other hand, it could be sort of a compelling strategy game with set decks, where you had to reason whether your opponent could reasonably be holding a 9 or 10 card, after all the chances he had to use one in the last few turns, for example. Not sure what predictable decks would look like in a game like this. Perhaps something like this for the city player:
- 3 each of Tank-1, Tank-2 and Tank-3. Each allows you to select and move the appropriate number of tank units and attack with them. Similarly, there would be Rocket and Jet cards, 1-3. The 1 cards might provide some bonus to that one unit, to allow for those cards to be more tactically interesting.
- 2 each of 2 kinds of special cards. Bombs, which hit the monster and wreck everything nearby, and Assault, which allows you to choose any 4 units, move them each one space, and attack with each.
You could do a monster deck this way, with move cards 2-4 spaces, charge in one direction cards 4-6 spaces, jump 3-5 spaces, with a couple specials, but it doesn't feel right. It seems sort of boring, especially because you only have one guy to work with. There could be some hybrid solution, where the city player has a hand of 5 fairly standard cards, from a 30 card deck. Meanwhile, the monster player could have a 2-card hand, basically 2 choices on a given turn, from a mere 10 card or so deck, and the city player has a reminder sheet about them. And each provides an effect with far more options left to designate afterwards.
I mean, we are getting deeply asymetrical now, but I think building this concept around a clean-as-possible core could provide a really interesting experience, doing justice to how different it really is to be a rampaging monster, versus a general in charge of the defending army.
Aside: Pacing Philosophy
I wanted to raise 2 underlying principles when I think about this design, at least with regards to its non-dexterity versions. I like the idea that the City player will eventually win, if the game goes on long enough. They just need to thwart the monster long enough, until either the monster is slain via accumulated damage, or some timer harkens the arrival of magic technology or a savior defender monster, or whatever. So they try to contain and control the monster, while the monster makes increasingly desperate gambits to destroy the key building, or break through to the other side of the board, or otherwise achieve some goal that might be achieved at any moment.
The second principle stems from this, and that is that the City player should never be truly sure that their line or formation or plan is safe. They might feel like they have set things up pretty well, but should be saying "as long as he doesn't...", and must strategically decide which risks to take. Perhaps this might be enacted with a 15 card monster deck, 5 of which are removed from the game, and the game is over after 10 turns, when the monster has used the remainder. For example, just a thought.
6. Asymetrical Robo-Rally - After that marathon, one last one. Each player has their own deck, draws some number of cards, chooses some subset of them, and commits face-down, in order. Each player, then reveals their first card and enacts them simultaneously. So, yes. Roborally.
Philisophically, it is similar to the previous suggestion, in that each side has a very different deck, and wondering what cards your opponent has can be cause for worry. It also adds an additional level of outguess each turn, and it allows for more big, splashy turns, improving on the inching-along, I-move-a-little, you-move-a-little, feel of the previous direction.
Not sure what the deck composition would be here, but it would likely be fairly predictable, with a couple splashy special cards worked in to keep people on thier toes. Certainly, each player should have some reasonable notion of what is in their opponent's deck, and what they need to worry about.
I think there might be a good game here. Some of the dexterity games could be fun, but sort of trashy, lacking in depth and replay value, as least out of the fairly primitive things I've come up with so far. There are still a lot of little details to square away in the more traditional approaches, and it might be difficult to keep those designs elegant in the face of such a tantalizing thematic situation, but I like both of those directions in some intuitive sense. Asymetry is fun, if you can pull it off.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Mistake 2: Monsters in the City
So this isn't actually a continuation of the big theory described below, just a side philisophical point that was occuring to me today. I was thinking about premises for 2-player games and happened upon "monsters attacking a city" from my 100 adventurous themes list. I've dismissed this idea in the past, the problem being that everyone wants to be a monster, and its really a matter of monster vs. the city, not monster vs. monster. In short, its not a theme thats really that compatible with player interaction. But in a 2-player setting, we can have an asymetrical game of monster player vs. city player, and that might actually work.
But the important thing is, it reminded me of my first attempt at designing a game about this theme. A couple years ago I got this vision in my head of a game where players monsters and can destroy buildings, knocking them over into eachother, causing some to explode, potentially causing chain reactions. Stuff flying all over the place. I then proceeded to design a terrible game around this premise. I added army units that each player also had a complement of. Players would choose move cards that let their monsters and armies do special things. A variety of scoring systems were thrown at it. In the end though, the whole thing was terribly fiddly and arbitrary. It would be a game I would hate to play.
Worse still, I didn't detect the problems with the game early on, and spent far too much energy in a fruitless direction. I ended up mocking up boards and pieces in Illustrator so I could simulate movements, and even wrote a simple card shuffling and dealing java app for handling cards.
I'm not saying I necessarily regret the effort, but it was a lot of work, and the only payoff it yielded was in lessons learned. I think I'm finally ready to learn those lessons. Where did I go wrong in that game?
Goals and Outcomes
I think a lot of your success in design relies on your goal setting, on the qualities you use to guide your idea generation and selection. In board games this is tricky. Your goals are usually on the order of the game experience you want to create, either in terms of tension, socialization, enacting a given theme, creating an envisioned situation, etc. Your ideas are usually on the order of specific mechanics, rules, cards, physical components - the elements that make up an actual game design.
The problem is, outcomes in board games are usually emergent: they are the result of several, subtle interacting ideas. If a game has tension, that might be the result of some finely tuned interactions between the actions players can take and the victory conditions. If a game really captures the feel of exploring a haunted house, that might be the result of streamlined mechanics, well-designed physical components, well-considered card designs and an objective system that drives players to play in the "right" spirit for the game. So you have to come up with ideas that mesh together well, and that serve a variety of purposes.
And there are so many ways that an outcome can fail. If the strategy is too obvious, if there isn't enough player interaction, if there is too little control, if the rules are too complicated, if the pieces are too fiddly, if there is a runaway leader, if the game takes too long, if the game is too physically bulky, etc etc etc: then that kills the design. So you're trying to meet these emergent outcome goals, while ensuring that you don't fall into one of dozens of pitfalls.
In a way, you have this idea, and you're just trying to get some approximation of it out there without falling into some pitfall. (I see something similar in software design, and I find myself wanting to refer to them as "negative design fields". I think it is an artifact of having an information-based product.)
So what does all this have to do with my old Monster game design? I didn't have good goals. My goal was to enact a particular sequence of game events, and I met that goal. The problem was, the resulting game was not any fun.
On some level, I need to consider the player experience when you're designing a game. I can't get wrapped up in some vision of the board, or the way the pieces move around, or the situation that I want to create. At the end of the day, what you are creating is an experience, and you need to have goals that reflect that.
Now, its tough to just keep in mind "I want my players to have a good experience" and expect that to guide you towards good designs. Rather, there are some subgoals that I think you can keep in mind.
I've begun to develop a series of "step-back exercises". There's nothing formal about them, they're just patterns I've noticed in my own thinking that demonstrate a tendency towards giving me insight and getting me past blocks. And from them, I've started to hatch some goals and ways of thinking that will help to ensure that I can work my way towards successful designs, without falling into problems. In a way, I think a way to be successful in game design is to flit between different perspectives, ensuring that you don't paint yourself into a corner. If you can sense problems of a given sort developing early, you can prevent getting yourself into a dead end that will be psychologically disheartening, if not cognitively impossible, to back out of.
Here's and early stab at goal-based approaches that I've found useful so far:
Component Reality Check
This was the first one I started with, back in the day, which I suppose says something about the sort of bloated designs that I made back then. Basically, when I sense that I've reached a certain critical mass on a game's component, I list them out and imagine whether they seem reasonable laid out on the table or as a manifest for a mass-produced game. Sometimes this is relative - if the gameplay is fairly light or if each game is pretty quick, it seems silly to demand a lot of component, either just in terms of setup time or (eventually) the marketability of the game relative to the cost of production.
I think in the past I was a bit to lax with this in the past, but then my focus has been on cleaner designs lately, and generally more disciplined. Beyond setup time and production, I think this can be a warning sign that your design is getting inelegant, as you tack on a deck of cards or board to track values. Ensure that all of the physical elements of your design are pulling their weight, and you might get some insight into your conceptual efficiency as well.
Explain this to a New Person
This is another simple one that I've increasingly used lately. Too often I accumulate assumptions about how things should work, check them off as solved and spend hours trying to mentally tackle the remaining issues. I start rearranging the established stuff to fix the problems with the remaining stuff, shifting pieces around in response to local threats, sort of stepping my way through things. Its like trying to solve a sudoku puzzle by slamming in a bunch of numbers and trying to spot-correct the inconsistencies: you end up chasing your tail. Sometime's I'll feel like I have just one more issue left, but when I look at the finished product, its a mess.
I've found the problem is an inability to design with the gestalt, the elegant whole of the design, in mind. This is no small challenge. But something that helps is envisioning myself trying to explain the design, as I have it so far, to someone who knows nothing about the game. I try to imagine what their reaction is likely to be as I progress. Are they nodding and following the logic of what I've said thus far, or are they getting overwhelmed with ambiguities, details or exceptions? For the parts that are still difficult, how might I more elegantly explain them.
On the surface, its important that players a game understand it easily the first time they play it. But I also think there is a connection between the initial understandability (or explainability?) of a game and its overall playability. Sure, there's many a game that seems easy once you get the hang of it, certainly and defininitely granted. But the game that you immediately understand usually remains understandable (though there is the issue of strategic confidence, which I get into below). I find taking this step helps me get my head around the state of the design, where it's straining, where there are details that I might need to prune. Performing this step a little earlier in the process seems to be helping me back out of directions destined to spin into unworkability.
Interaction Checks
A more recent, even nacent, approach. I realized that too many of my designs were basically focused on creating interesting sets of interacting mechanics that the players' actions were variables in. Or I effectively came up with an interesting, puzzley situation and allowed multiple people to participate in it. But I believe that the heart of a good game is very often in its ability to provide a medium for compelling interactions between players, and this will rarely emerge on accident.
In short, I've started to focus my design process on player interaction. This has primarily manifested itself early in the process, as a way of evaluating initial designs or thinking of direction to take a given theme. In short, if you aren't going to have an interesting interaction mechanism, your design's liable to be doomed. Games are much more interesting when your ability to pull off your plans depends on your opponent's actions, and when your goals must be balanced against efforts to thwart those of your opponents. I think explicit focus on this aspect of a design will do me good.
Fundamental Decision Structure
This sounds fancier than it is. Somewhere in the back of my mind there's a model of the decision trees that players face over the course of a game, and which are more appealing than others. But in the meantime, I've started using a basic version of this concept to evaluate the experience provided to players. After all, its a player experience you're really hoping to create, the game is just the means.
During a game, a player will be faced with a large number of decisions. In most games, there are certain patterns that govern these decisions; each decision is unique, but they are of certain constant types. For example, in backgammon your decisions revolve around which pieces to move with your roll for the turn, and possibly how to handle doubling decisions based on board evaluations. In Puerto Rico, you are looking at questions of role selection, as well as decisions within role-turns, such as which boats to ship on, where to place colonists, and what buildings to buy.
The issue is, which of these kinds of decisions are fun? I think there is some value in Knizia-like designs, where the the player has limited options at any given moment, but where the implications of those decisions are sublte enough that choosing between them is difficult. I think games where you have a great many decisions can be ok, as long as you can categorize them as being productive to your goals or not, and quickly prune your search to those that you're interested in. For example, there's a veritable ton of things you can do on a turn in Arkham Horror, but you generally end up deciding between a few, reasonable alternatives, as you take advantage of the opportunities the game presents you.
This approach is really about avoiding pitfalls. For one, there's analysis paralysis. If you give the players a ton of information to work with, and a ton of choices, trying to find the best one can be daunting. For example, imagine that on a player's turn of Carcassonne they received 4 tiles from the player to their right and one from the stack. They played one, and passed the other 4 to the left. Sure, the game might be more strategic, but the enormous number of options it opened up would mostly just grind the game to a halt. Players would have to look at tons of possible plays, and also worry about what they were giving their opponents. Downtime would increase, and I reckon it would often just give players a sour taste of feeling like they missed the best move. The same goes for playing Metro where you can play tiles in any direction, or games where nearly-un-memorizable past information is kept open for people to consider.
On the other hand, there's the problem of lack of control. If a player's decisions don't affect their chances of success in remotely predictable ways, they're likely to see the whole exercise as not worth thinking about. This is often manifested in terms of large amounts of luck or hidden information, but it might just be an issue of the complexity of the system in which the players are working. I find the initial chaos of a game of Tigris and Euphrates to be daunting to this day.
What it comes down to is, what is the basic decision you are asking the player to make, and does this represent a fun challenge, or at least a means to exert control over the game situation? This is about as close as you can come to the question "is the game fun?", at least from a purely mechanical standpoint. Or at least, recognizing this aspect of a given design helps me to avoid situations where I've managed to simulate something, or even create an interaction, where the basic activity of playing the game just isn't any fun.
Side Note
I might be hatching a new theory here, where a game is essentially decision structures, interaction structures and theme. That is, enjoyment from puzzling out answers, enjoyment from interacting with others, and enjoyment from the story told by the events the game simulates. I'm not sure if that's a complete list, or if there's an elegant way to encapsulate them, but they seem related somehow.
But the important thing is, it reminded me of my first attempt at designing a game about this theme. A couple years ago I got this vision in my head of a game where players monsters and can destroy buildings, knocking them over into eachother, causing some to explode, potentially causing chain reactions. Stuff flying all over the place. I then proceeded to design a terrible game around this premise. I added army units that each player also had a complement of. Players would choose move cards that let their monsters and armies do special things. A variety of scoring systems were thrown at it. In the end though, the whole thing was terribly fiddly and arbitrary. It would be a game I would hate to play.
Worse still, I didn't detect the problems with the game early on, and spent far too much energy in a fruitless direction. I ended up mocking up boards and pieces in Illustrator so I could simulate movements, and even wrote a simple card shuffling and dealing java app for handling cards.
I'm not saying I necessarily regret the effort, but it was a lot of work, and the only payoff it yielded was in lessons learned. I think I'm finally ready to learn those lessons. Where did I go wrong in that game?
Goals and Outcomes
I think a lot of your success in design relies on your goal setting, on the qualities you use to guide your idea generation and selection. In board games this is tricky. Your goals are usually on the order of the game experience you want to create, either in terms of tension, socialization, enacting a given theme, creating an envisioned situation, etc. Your ideas are usually on the order of specific mechanics, rules, cards, physical components - the elements that make up an actual game design.
The problem is, outcomes in board games are usually emergent: they are the result of several, subtle interacting ideas. If a game has tension, that might be the result of some finely tuned interactions between the actions players can take and the victory conditions. If a game really captures the feel of exploring a haunted house, that might be the result of streamlined mechanics, well-designed physical components, well-considered card designs and an objective system that drives players to play in the "right" spirit for the game. So you have to come up with ideas that mesh together well, and that serve a variety of purposes.
And there are so many ways that an outcome can fail. If the strategy is too obvious, if there isn't enough player interaction, if there is too little control, if the rules are too complicated, if the pieces are too fiddly, if there is a runaway leader, if the game takes too long, if the game is too physically bulky, etc etc etc: then that kills the design. So you're trying to meet these emergent outcome goals, while ensuring that you don't fall into one of dozens of pitfalls.
In a way, you have this idea, and you're just trying to get some approximation of it out there without falling into some pitfall. (I see something similar in software design, and I find myself wanting to refer to them as "negative design fields". I think it is an artifact of having an information-based product.)
So what does all this have to do with my old Monster game design? I didn't have good goals. My goal was to enact a particular sequence of game events, and I met that goal. The problem was, the resulting game was not any fun.
On some level, I need to consider the player experience when you're designing a game. I can't get wrapped up in some vision of the board, or the way the pieces move around, or the situation that I want to create. At the end of the day, what you are creating is an experience, and you need to have goals that reflect that.
Now, its tough to just keep in mind "I want my players to have a good experience" and expect that to guide you towards good designs. Rather, there are some subgoals that I think you can keep in mind.
I've begun to develop a series of "step-back exercises". There's nothing formal about them, they're just patterns I've noticed in my own thinking that demonstrate a tendency towards giving me insight and getting me past blocks. And from them, I've started to hatch some goals and ways of thinking that will help to ensure that I can work my way towards successful designs, without falling into problems. In a way, I think a way to be successful in game design is to flit between different perspectives, ensuring that you don't paint yourself into a corner. If you can sense problems of a given sort developing early, you can prevent getting yourself into a dead end that will be psychologically disheartening, if not cognitively impossible, to back out of.
Here's and early stab at goal-based approaches that I've found useful so far:
Component Reality Check
This was the first one I started with, back in the day, which I suppose says something about the sort of bloated designs that I made back then. Basically, when I sense that I've reached a certain critical mass on a game's component, I list them out and imagine whether they seem reasonable laid out on the table or as a manifest for a mass-produced game. Sometimes this is relative - if the gameplay is fairly light or if each game is pretty quick, it seems silly to demand a lot of component, either just in terms of setup time or (eventually) the marketability of the game relative to the cost of production.
I think in the past I was a bit to lax with this in the past, but then my focus has been on cleaner designs lately, and generally more disciplined. Beyond setup time and production, I think this can be a warning sign that your design is getting inelegant, as you tack on a deck of cards or board to track values. Ensure that all of the physical elements of your design are pulling their weight, and you might get some insight into your conceptual efficiency as well.
Explain this to a New Person
This is another simple one that I've increasingly used lately. Too often I accumulate assumptions about how things should work, check them off as solved and spend hours trying to mentally tackle the remaining issues. I start rearranging the established stuff to fix the problems with the remaining stuff, shifting pieces around in response to local threats, sort of stepping my way through things. Its like trying to solve a sudoku puzzle by slamming in a bunch of numbers and trying to spot-correct the inconsistencies: you end up chasing your tail. Sometime's I'll feel like I have just one more issue left, but when I look at the finished product, its a mess.
I've found the problem is an inability to design with the gestalt, the elegant whole of the design, in mind. This is no small challenge. But something that helps is envisioning myself trying to explain the design, as I have it so far, to someone who knows nothing about the game. I try to imagine what their reaction is likely to be as I progress. Are they nodding and following the logic of what I've said thus far, or are they getting overwhelmed with ambiguities, details or exceptions? For the parts that are still difficult, how might I more elegantly explain them.
On the surface, its important that players a game understand it easily the first time they play it. But I also think there is a connection between the initial understandability (or explainability?) of a game and its overall playability. Sure, there's many a game that seems easy once you get the hang of it, certainly and defininitely granted. But the game that you immediately understand usually remains understandable (though there is the issue of strategic confidence, which I get into below). I find taking this step helps me get my head around the state of the design, where it's straining, where there are details that I might need to prune. Performing this step a little earlier in the process seems to be helping me back out of directions destined to spin into unworkability.
Interaction Checks
A more recent, even nacent, approach. I realized that too many of my designs were basically focused on creating interesting sets of interacting mechanics that the players' actions were variables in. Or I effectively came up with an interesting, puzzley situation and allowed multiple people to participate in it. But I believe that the heart of a good game is very often in its ability to provide a medium for compelling interactions between players, and this will rarely emerge on accident.
In short, I've started to focus my design process on player interaction. This has primarily manifested itself early in the process, as a way of evaluating initial designs or thinking of direction to take a given theme. In short, if you aren't going to have an interesting interaction mechanism, your design's liable to be doomed. Games are much more interesting when your ability to pull off your plans depends on your opponent's actions, and when your goals must be balanced against efforts to thwart those of your opponents. I think explicit focus on this aspect of a design will do me good.
Fundamental Decision Structure
This sounds fancier than it is. Somewhere in the back of my mind there's a model of the decision trees that players face over the course of a game, and which are more appealing than others. But in the meantime, I've started using a basic version of this concept to evaluate the experience provided to players. After all, its a player experience you're really hoping to create, the game is just the means.
During a game, a player will be faced with a large number of decisions. In most games, there are certain patterns that govern these decisions; each decision is unique, but they are of certain constant types. For example, in backgammon your decisions revolve around which pieces to move with your roll for the turn, and possibly how to handle doubling decisions based on board evaluations. In Puerto Rico, you are looking at questions of role selection, as well as decisions within role-turns, such as which boats to ship on, where to place colonists, and what buildings to buy.
The issue is, which of these kinds of decisions are fun? I think there is some value in Knizia-like designs, where the the player has limited options at any given moment, but where the implications of those decisions are sublte enough that choosing between them is difficult. I think games where you have a great many decisions can be ok, as long as you can categorize them as being productive to your goals or not, and quickly prune your search to those that you're interested in. For example, there's a veritable ton of things you can do on a turn in Arkham Horror, but you generally end up deciding between a few, reasonable alternatives, as you take advantage of the opportunities the game presents you.
This approach is really about avoiding pitfalls. For one, there's analysis paralysis. If you give the players a ton of information to work with, and a ton of choices, trying to find the best one can be daunting. For example, imagine that on a player's turn of Carcassonne they received 4 tiles from the player to their right and one from the stack. They played one, and passed the other 4 to the left. Sure, the game might be more strategic, but the enormous number of options it opened up would mostly just grind the game to a halt. Players would have to look at tons of possible plays, and also worry about what they were giving their opponents. Downtime would increase, and I reckon it would often just give players a sour taste of feeling like they missed the best move. The same goes for playing Metro where you can play tiles in any direction, or games where nearly-un-memorizable past information is kept open for people to consider.
On the other hand, there's the problem of lack of control. If a player's decisions don't affect their chances of success in remotely predictable ways, they're likely to see the whole exercise as not worth thinking about. This is often manifested in terms of large amounts of luck or hidden information, but it might just be an issue of the complexity of the system in which the players are working. I find the initial chaos of a game of Tigris and Euphrates to be daunting to this day.
What it comes down to is, what is the basic decision you are asking the player to make, and does this represent a fun challenge, or at least a means to exert control over the game situation? This is about as close as you can come to the question "is the game fun?", at least from a purely mechanical standpoint. Or at least, recognizing this aspect of a given design helps me to avoid situations where I've managed to simulate something, or even create an interaction, where the basic activity of playing the game just isn't any fun.
Side Note
I might be hatching a new theory here, where a game is essentially decision structures, interaction structures and theme. That is, enjoyment from puzzling out answers, enjoyment from interacting with others, and enjoyment from the story told by the events the game simulates. I'm not sure if that's a complete list, or if there's an elegant way to encapsulate them, but they seem related somehow.
Initial Strategy
Finally, a small observation of a quality shared by many members of the upper pantheons of successful lightweight Euros. I've noted that many good games are characterized by brand new players' ability to learn the rules and immediately say "I think I'll try to do this". That is, rather than blindly performing moves, or sort of needing a prod from the experienced players (T&E, Acquire, Battle Line, I'm looking in your direction), players can hatch at least a rudimentary overall strategy that will guide their initial moves.
For example, the tickets in Ticket to Ride provide an imputus to some initial train placements and interest in certain areas. In Settlers, interest in certain expansion points, the allure of development cards or the kind of resources you happen upon in the early turns can definately guide you towards certain approaches.
I'm not sure what to do with it yet, but it seems like creating a game where the player is immediately seduced by their own ability to have a plan is a quality to strive for. Its something I've tried to keep in mind in some early designs these days.
In conclusion, game design is certainly not as simple as starting with a theme and creating some mechanics around it. Nor can you come up with some mechanics and make a terribly fun game out of them. It sounds obvious, but this was too often the way I ended up approaching things. Rather, there's a variety of qualities you need to converge upon, and its a process of careful triangulation.
A final note on themes. I'm finding I need to avoid getting hung up on a particular approach to a theme until there's some mechanical groundwork that provides a basic level of interaction and compelling decision-making. I need to avoid getting seduced by thematic, cinematic events, they're very demanding on the rules, and can create cracks all over the place, and aren't usually necessary to make a game truly fun. Assuming you want to start with a theme: I think its more a matter of finding a theme that will inspire some interesting possible mechanics, massaging those until they work pretty well, allowing the theme to poke in when its welcome, and then allowing it to act as a coat of paint at the end. The basic mechanical inspirations, and the naming and art and sheen, should be enough to tie the game to the mechanics, and if those are sound the game just might work. Its a tricky balancing act to say the least, but I'm hoping by better acknowledging it to end up with more designs that are fully successful.
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