On the Keeping of a Kingdom

Has it really been 6 months since I posted here? My concept of time has been simply mad this year.

A couple of hiatuses from, and subsequent returns to, game design, have lead to a crystallization of my thinking on the process. I find I'm less inclined to go down poor paths, to flesh out ideas that aren't workable. My instincts for good and bad designs are growing more keen, and I can bring them to bear on less well-formed designs. I was attempting to pin down what exactly the insights are, but they're slippery. Here's a start:

- Don't fall in love with engines. I sometimes figure out a conceptual way that certain game entities might interact, creating an engine that the player can influence. This is a bad starting place for a design, and placing such a mechanism first is going to put you down a design path that is unlikely to actually be fun, and will to tough to deviate from mentally. This was the biggest problem with much of my early designing.

- What is the challenge structure? This is the biggest insight I've had, is to ask this. Challenges, as I think I discussed in a previous post, are at the heart of interesting gameplay. When the player sits down, what challenges are presented to them? Ask this of any new design you have, if you don't have a good answer, work on the idea until you do. If you still can't solve it, its not a good design.

- What is the simplest version possible of this game? God, this exercise is useful, this is a great way to judge the early viability of a game.

- What are the first two sentences you say to a new player when you sit them down to play this game? Imagine you are just sitting down to play this game, and it is being explained to you, is it something that you want to play? This is an important step-back method later in the process, when you're trying to sort the details out. Is there a core way to explain the game to someone new that is understandable (grokable even) and appealing? So often you wander from the core of what you wanted to do in a game, get so excited about some mechanism that its become impenetrable to the new player.

I think games need to be constructed in layers of elegance, and that this can be detected by the way that a new player perceives the game. Is there a quick, high-level picture of what the game's about? Does the rest of the stuff fall under that as reasonable extensions of the initial principles?

My point is, a teachable game is a good game. The more easily players can internalize the logic of your game, the sooner they can get to the business of playing it. Thinking about how you would present the game as it currently exists is a valuable exercise in the quality of the design.

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This is all to say these are techniques for seeing your game in terms of the experience it provides, rather than the makeup of its parts. And this doesn't mean the decisions that are presented, or the per-turn nuances that you're trying to create: that's the sort of stuff you think about naturally while you're designing. The challenging part is to see the big picture, to see if all that stuff is adding up to a game.

Because honestly, usually when you take a stab at the detailed mechanics of a game, you're going to end up with ones that just don't work. Its such a fragile, fickle, brittle, wicked thing, game design, the low level stuff you create that seems good in isolation just rarely works in the broader context. The trick is to recognize that early on, and try again, and again, and to keep your searches shallow and your process broad. When you dive too deep into a given mechanic, and invest too much time into it, and allow too many assumptions inherent to it to calcify, you've ruined the entire design for yourself. You're no longer able to throw it away and try something else, it has crusted into place around the rest of your design the two have to live or die together. So they die.

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So yes, this is all a bit dramatic, mostly for effect. Of course generating ideas is good, as is exploring them, falling in love with them, honing them and being patient. Finding elegance is hard work. But I rant like this because I think that the other side of the coin is easy to ignore, especially for the novice designer (like me, still, to be honest). Of course, yes, you can throw ideas away, and good designers do. But my point is, its harder than you think, and hard work and focus on a given idea that shows promise is not always the right course of action.

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This ties into two general design theories that have come into focus for me this year, that I will allude to just briefly here:

1) Design is about creating approximations of the outcomes and experiences that you expect your design to lead to. You need to create sketches, models, mental simulations, actual simulations and other approximations of your design, and see how they fare in approximated practice. This is tough in board game design, where the actual experience is borne of the complex unknowable interactions of mechanics and human minds, but the tips I mention above are a start.

2) There are special challenges when you are designing information-based products such as software and board games, when you are creating not a physical object but a system of rules and ideas. In these cases, too much depth early on is a death stroke. Its as if your first step in designing a building was to lay down a huge iron column and decide what to do from there (with apologies to Christopher Alexander).

Here's the myth about software design and board game design: that mental design decisions are wholly malleable. The ideal is that you just think about stuff, and if a given solution doesn't work, well, you'll just try something else. You won't.

Once you've thought about a given idea in enough depth, put the effort into developing it, gotten used to thinking about certain idea's you've developed as givens and constraints to work around, they become solid. They become as solid as if you'd physically started building something.

What you need to do in board game design, and software design as my ongoing research is trying to prove, is take lots of little stabs at the problem. Explore it from a variety of angles at minimal depth, and slowly work your way in. The preliminary work on one angle will provide the means to understand the other angles, and as long as you don't go deep on one too early, you won't lock the whole thing up and ruin it.

Some of the tips I mentioned above are towards this aim. You think about the challenges, the simple version, the explanation of the game. They yank you out of your current angle, show you the others, show you where they clash. And if you're lucky, you can try to build an elegant solution that involves the shifting of all of the angles' needs, instead of building them around one big calcified spike of an idea that you're just too attached to.

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Again, I know, this is all very dramatic. The idea of spikes you can't move, of all these angles, of clawing your way back out of your ideas? Its only to draw contrast to what you might think about game design.

Every idea you generate is a double edged sword that represents progress in one direction, but resists deviations from that path. Its a fortress. You've staked out a space, and now you can use it, but if you try to uproot it, it will bristle with crossbows from palisades. Build little outposts on the landscape, but don't let any of them get so strong that they defy you.

Edit: added 3rd section as something of a response to Chad's comment - thanks Chad!

Victory Conditions

How do I see myself succeeding at this game design game? I'd like to create something playable; something fun. I see three main ways this might be achieved, three kinds of games, or more accurately three kinds of game designs, that might forge that path.

1. The real game. The traditional-sized, fairly complex game that doesn't reinvent the hobby, but that I just happen to make better than average through some effective designing. This is the hardest to accomplish, the hardest to prototype, and the most daunting to playtest.
My Examples: Pirate coop, nearly every early game I designed
Real-World Successes: Puerto Rico, Arkham Horror, most games.

2. The simple game. Sure its not the best game you ever played, but its an illustration of a clever mechanic or interaction, and it was obviously designed as a "small" game. Pet games might use cheap components, or existing components like traditional dice or cards, piecepacks, or minimal custom decks. Can seem unexciting, but are far more feasible to prototype and play.
My Examples: Several designs, tellingly though, few that get talked about here.
Real-World Successes: Many public domain games, many cheapass games, card games such as 6-nimmt and rage, For Sale, many smaller Knizia games.

3. The innovative game. Take a simple idea and make it fly, providing something really new, without necessarily recombining things that you'd seen in the past. This best explained through:
Real World Successes: Apples to Apples was able to go with nothing but a decko f words and like 3 rules to create gameplay. Tales of the Arabian Nights brought the book of tales concept to its full height (and most of the rules they added afterwards really weren't necessary). Finstere Flure built a simple set of rules around the idea of an autonomous monster, Roborally added some (too many, perhaps) rules around the basic notion of prealigning moves with a card each. Magic obviously blew things up with its collectible notion (though the game itself is one of the most complex around if you really get down into it).

The real game is the hardest to create, the hardest to work with, but its easy to slip into. I often start with something simple or innovative, and I really like it. But it doesn't quite work, and I can't quite get it to come together, but I liked the original idea enough that I can't really let go of it. Soon I've painted myself into a corner, and don't know it, or cling onto the idea anyway. Making a real game work requires, as I've described recently, resources and/or bravery that I currently don't have, and rather than fight it, I'd like to satisfy myself with smaller designs for a while. So, how to proceed.

1) Accept the growth and go ahead and try to make the "real" designs that start to emerge work.
2) Show more discipline in keeping ideas simple. Easier said than done, but something I'm working on.
3) Generate more simple ideas, creating a large number of them, and not getting too attached to any one.

This last one is where I'm going with all this. It seems a little unintuitive, essentially a strategy of quitting. To explain: I think its far, far too easy in design in general, and game design in particular, to get hung up on a given idea, work out some additional rules/constraints/decisions to make it work, get locked into those ideas, and find yourself in a failing state in the space of possible designs, without the will/wisdom/wherewithall to know how to salvage what was working. In fact, in the midst of working on a given idea, I'd say its nearly impossible to even throw away everything other than the core idea and try a different direction on it, let alone retreat to a more complete, later, partially successful state.

But that idea was good - what's needed is a way to keep it, but to get a clean conceptual start on it. I wonder if rather than hashing out a single idea, it would be wiser to create a large number of ideas, take a stab at working out each, but then log them, move on, and use the time working on newer ideas as a palette cleansing period to take on those that have fallen by the side.

Perhaps I'm not succeeding in explaining the motivations behind this process, let alone the process itself. But I want to find a way to:
1) ride that enthusiasm of an idea, which is fun
2) explore it a bit
3) but not keep pounding on it until its broken
4) find away to return to it later

In short, going a bit more breadth first with my design process for a bit - increasing my chances of keeping the core good ideas straight and sticking to those simple and innovative games without letting the need to make them work distort them. This might involve a more rigorous approach to my sketchbooks and filing, or might emply this blog somehow. We'll see.

regarding the real world

I'm constantly looking at the world in game design terms, but this can lead to lots of excitable trips down dead end paths. Oftentimes, I find:

1. Modeling an interesting real-world decision process in a game does not necessarily result in an interesting game mechanic.

2. Introducing an interesting real-world effect as a rule does not necessarily make for an interesting rule, let alone interesting gameplay.

There's getting inspired, and there's getting distracted. Telling them apart is difficult.

gosh but designing games is hard

I worked for a while on the pirate coop game, and the asymetrical monster city game - and I think both have potential. Lately I've hatched an idea for a strange drafting / sports game that seems to have learned the lessons of previous similar designs. But its proving tough to get past a certain point with these designs.

I think part of the problem is, there is only so much you can do without a playtest group. Furthermore, I think you need hours and hours of playtesting at various levels to make any progress. And while I might have had the possibility of such a group years ago, I didn't take advantage of it, and now the possibility has largely evaporated.

What is the solution? I'm not sure, I suppose I could look for / recruit for a group locally, on craigslist of whatever. Its a bit of an intimidating prospect, but I think a groups of this kind are the only hope for moving beyond the sketches and doodles phase.

But then, is that a goal? The sketches and doodles phase is fun, and maybe that's just where I'll stay. Its a bit useless, but no bigger a waste of time than, say playing video games. And I do feel like I'm honing my sense of what will work and what won't, catching duds earlier in the process, steering designs away from pitfalls I'm learning about.

The latest draft-ball-game is a good example of this - maybe something I'll write up later.

The Strategizing

I think the clues were all there. This will maybe be no big epiphany to most of my readers, who mostly know me well. But the full realization came as something of a surprise to me: I like talking about games more than I like playing them. In fact, I think one of the main reasons I even bother playing games is so that I can talk about them afterwards, or even during.

Whatever it might be, the design of the game itself, the way the game played out, or the strategies that one might employ. The latter of these was what really got my attention yesterday. I was playing a bit of this flash game proximity, and was mulling over the strategies one might use. The game was fun, but it was mostly a testing session to puzzle over what the overall strategies might be. And when I came to interesting tradeoffs, about defensive moves vs offensive ones, for example, I wanted to chat over them. If I'd been playing with a person, I would have found that much more interesting than continuing to play the game in isolation of one another.

What does that mean? Some offshoots:
1) It help explains some of my issues with being chatty during games.
2) This explains why I like games like Magic, where discussing new cards, decks, strategies, formats, are totally part of the game. Similarly, I like that Apples to Apples is mostly about discussing the choices (at least for me), and can see how I might come to like an open-ended game like Race for the Galaxy once I could talk competently about the cards.
3) Maybe this means I'm cut out to design games, in that I like thinking about games and externalizing said thoughts. But maybe it means I'm a lousy choice - I mean, if I don't even like playing games, just theorizing about them, does that disqualify me from doing it right?
4) Is there a way to leverage this appeal into a game? Cooperative games are a start, where you discuss strategies. Nomics are a start, but sort of too fiddly. I guess the problem is that it can't be competitive, at least not openly. Maybe what I want isn't a game at all, but a conversation. Is there a way to structure an activity that would scratch this itch? Now I'm just getting out there. Maybe there is room for something like this in a Social Game (a topic I've not really touched upon yet properly here, but likely will some day).

Games are more interesting than they are fun, for me, these days. A troubling realization, perhaps.

Romantic Bits

I was looking at a board game book on Amazon, and noticed this cover of a related item. I'm a big fan of bits/pieces/tokens/components in a game - I liked the little gems in Niagara so much that I bought 7 bags of them in various colors for use in prototypes. I just wanna touch em.

For some reason, the little dice with an Anchor on it, in the top right of this picture, really appeals to me. I want to roll a dice and hope for an anchor.

It's strange. Suppose there's a game where you can take a number of actions, as determined by a dice roll, and one of these actions is to move your ship. I'm not that excited about a game where a standard dice is used, and a 6 corresponds to ship movement. But when I need to roll an anchor to move the ship, now I'm stoked.

This is tough to get past when I'm prototyping. You don't have time to do every little thing right in an exploratory prototype, and you certainly don't have the ability to get custom pawns/dice/etc made. So you make do. But sometimes when a game is missing some spark, I have to wonder if the spare physical composition is to blame. I feel like a Niagara prototype, without the canoes, waterfall effect and gems, would belie the appeal that the finished game ended up having.

I even let this problem impede me in the monster city game, where I wanted to use the Memoir 44 dice (depicting tanks, infantry, grenades, etc) so badly that I let it dictate some probabilities I might not have gone with otherwise. The effect wasn't all that profound, but I found myself drawn by the components in a strangely seductive way.

I suppose the answer is to learn to see past the components during a prototype, but that's tough. At very least I need to separate my emotional dissatisfaction with the feel of a game from whether or not its actually working. If its "working" in some sense, I might need to gussy it up a bit and see how it feels then. The more I think about it, I know of plenty of games that would have seemed pretty lame before a proper componenting out.

The Stoke of Genius

Another idea I'm haunted by is the stroke of genius, the feeling that there is a wholly unique approach to games that is waiting out there to be happened upon, some utterly elegant, appealing idea, that is just out of reach. I get so excited about looking for it sometimes, but so far I've come up empty.

On a few occaisions, I've had the experience where I'm sleeping, and in my dreams something really good will happen, maybe I'll come into some great sum of money. And while I'm still dreaming, it occurs to me in this vague way that I can't "keep" the money, that its not real. I'm filled this vague, deep sense of loss that I suspect can only be felt by the sleeping mind, my dream's existential crisis, I suppose. And after that flash of recognition, fevered dream logic frantically bargains with reality, thinking there must be some way, and then the whole thing folds in on itself and I wake up, always a tiny bit disappointed that my boon didn't find its way through with me. Its sort of like that when I think way outside convention, looking for that overlooked gem of an idea: this excitement, and then sense of something slipping through my fingers.

I have a game that I respect a lot, and its not really one you'd necessarily expect. Apples to Apples is not a perfect game, and its something of a crutch when the group gets big, and we've played it to death, and the gameplay is shallow in various ways and so on. But it is such a simple idea, it is so utterly clean, and it has no precedent that I'm aware of in games. Its such a pure example of emergent gameplay, where the actual mechanics are absolutely tiny, but the discussions and repercussions of each choice are where the fun lives.

On some level, maybe I get frustrated trying to carve out a game the right way, which is really difficult, and I just hope for that flash of inspiration to free me from my "lack of having even a single game design I'm really happy with under my belt". Its like summing the numbers from one to one-thousand by hand, knowing in the back of your mind that there must be a formula that will let you find the answer in 15 seconds.

And I don't even want commercial success, just something satisfying. I think maybe the answer at the tip of my brain still has something to do with drawing, or maybe it was physical-levels, or maybe... but its always too quick to grab, too smooth to hold, as Kevin Drew says, tbtf, and so on until morning.

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!

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.

Dexterity Games

Oh, nothing nips at the back of my mind like dexterity games. All too often, when I'm playing a real board game, I find myself thinking about how it might be a dexterity game instead (I just had an idea on how to do Masons, while I was typing this). Why is that?

I think the main thing is, in a board game setting, you divide your attention between 3 things: decision-making, enacting, and storytelling. Decision-making is the actual game playing, the actual choosing from among choices, and is usually the fun part when it doesn't become overwhelming. Storytelling is also the fun part, where you associate the events in the game with a larger, thematic, metaphorical plotline that you can derive enjoyment from. Enacting stands in between, its the actual movement of pieces, looking up results in tables, shuffling cards - its not the fun part.

Different games make each of these easier or harder. Some games give you horrifyingly complex decision trees that are no fun to decide. Some games have rules so at odds with reality that its hard to keep your mental story connected to them. And some games make you spend forever screwing around with enacting the decisions that you're making that you're trying to tell a story with, to the point of ruining your fun.

This gets to the heart of what I like about dexterity games - their enactment is handled for you. You make a decision, apply force skillfully (which might be a new step), and stuff just happens. Sure you might have to do some setup and teardown, but during the game, you can work between decision and outcome, and therefore overall story, fairly seamlessly. Look at Pitchcar - rather than having to roll a dice, check your gear, and look up items in a chart in order to see if you make a turn, you flick a disc, and it either does or doesn't.

Its instant gratification, and when it comes to games and play and staying in a flow state of sorts, thats a good thing.

Two developments I'd like to see in dexerity games:

1) More story. Too many dexterity games are just about flicking discs or stacking blocks, without any thematic conceit on them. I like the idea that when a tower falls, that represents a tower of some kind, in some larger world, rather than just "my blocks fell!". Pitchcar remains a notable exception.

2) More real-time dexterity. There's an image in my mind of a game, Crokinole-like, with players sitting around a central area, flicking objects into the middle. They are on two asymetrical teams, and each has a reason to go quickly, generally to outpace the other team in establishing positioning, or achieving some other goal. Thematic punch is attached, and players have to balance rushing with lining up their shots well. This is vague, but its been kicking around in my mind for years - I'll try to dedicate a post to it some time.

Social Games

I love the way that games, especially board games, have the power to provide a social experience. The giant joystick in this clip certainly got me thinking about that idea:

http://www.areyouindie.com/showcase/profile.php?id=19

Part of why I'm down on video games lately is that, while they can provide a heck of an experience, its generally not a social one. That often makes the experience empty, somehow, if you ask me.

Mankind's earlier games, from board games to general acts of vaguely organized frollick, were inherently social, at very least by nature of involving one or more people. One could argue that this was out of necessity.

Let me back up a step: one major difference between a game and a non-game activity is unpredictability. You don't know what's going to happen next when you play a game, and trying to affect that outcome, and experiencing the results, is part of the joy of it. This is why we don't play games that are "solved", why we shun the broken strategy, why a game without depth loses its appeal quickly. We don't want to go through the motions, we want the thrill of uncertainty, and the challenge of affecting it.

So, early on, the easiest way to provide challenge and uncertainty was to pit players against one another. You want X, he wants not-X, conflict ensues, the outcome is uncertain.

But computers can do a bunch of stuff under the hood, can cut decision outcomes along time-discretions so fine that our performance is at the mercy of our more base reflexes, they can provide an uncertain outcome in our interaction with them.

And sure, a deck of cards for solitaire can provide uncertainty. A ball-and-cup game, through the finer points of physics can provide the unexpected bounce and twitch.

But for many people, the social end of gaming has become the exception.

Some people are fine with all this, I'd reckon. 'Gimme uncertainty, via a person or a magic box or whatever, I want to impose my will on the world. Thank god I'm not at the mercy of having other people around to get my game on'. I can't imagine anyone actually uttering that statement, ever. But you get the point, I don't think some people see the loss of a human element in games as a problem.

For me though, I feel like I need that social element. Believe it or not, this isn't even meant as some screed in favor of social interaction, its just what I'm finding I want from games lately. When I play video games, I strive for coop gameplay when I can find it. Even when I play a video game alone, I find myself looking for games that are going to promote social interaction after-the fact. I like my ownership-of-experience games (I don't think I've done my rant on this yet here) where I can tell someone a story of what I did that is different from the experience that every player has. I want something where I can compare achievements and high scores. Bioshock's coming out, and I'm stoked to play it, but its at least partially because I want to talk about (what's shaping up to be) a landmark game, with other game lovers.

Side note, I played the demo, god damn. An enormous, abandoned 1950's underwater city, ready to collapse under the weight of the ocean at any moment, filled with period propaganda, magestic architecture, and crawling with maniacs. Abandoned, underwater, 50's, metropolis. Jesus! Best video game atmosphere ever? So yeah, I'm still a sucker for the solo elements.

This comes into board games too. They're inherently social, but I'm finding I want to weild this in ways other than outright competition. Not just because of my game-based neuroses, though I'm sure thats part of it, I feel like there are other kinds of interaction that can be inspired by games than I-win, you-lose. I'd like more cooperative games, and even games that encourage creative expression, for example. That's a lofty enough goal, I'll stop short of games that let you share your feelings.

To get back to the initial inspiration, I love the idea of the giant joystick. It's collaborative, but furthermore, it allows people to choose their own approach to the collaboration. Its cooperative, but there's a negotiation there, I can imagine. Its a creative act, just playing it, just deciding how to play it, and one that multiple people participate in. All this despite being a video game. Delicious.

I can only dream of a board game design like that: one that allows people to choose their own mode of interaction, while providing enough of a framework so that the whole exercise doesn't fall into disarray.

It seems impossible, but as if often the case with these posts, I'm warmed by the promise of the idea's distant glow.

The Euro RPG

I've worked out the begginings of a list of attributes for Chad's suggested approach to the drawing game. Perhaps I'll post it here for discussion in a bit.

On the subject of RPG's, one more time, I've been considering how RPGs, at least as I know of them, have been distinctly American.

That is to say, in the American tradition of fringe board games, often wargrames and fantasy games, there is an emphasis on ensuring that every case is covered, usually by piling on rules as needed. Meanwhile, Euro-style games demonstrate an efficiency of rules, even if this means streamlining away certain choices or themes.

Its strange to me the way that every RPG I've come across (and I've seen my share, just as research, if nothing else) is distinctly American-style. To some extent, in a game where any action is supposed to be possible, and you are up against a subjective game master, having rules for every case doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But there is this weird lack of:
- Efficiency in rules
- A willingness to allow for abstraction and improvisation
- A willingness to adopt an elegant solution that might provide slightly less realistic results
- Challenging, subtle decision-making during combat or other moments of crisis

There's a couple counter-examples: the luck-point system in Battlestations, and some improvements in 3rd edition DnD, but its not great out there.

The assumption in RPGs, shared with many 80's style American games, is that you want answers, even if the game's willingness to provide them hinders smooth, elegant gameplay. The fact is, I want a system where I can keep every rule in mind, without ever having to refer to a book or chart. If anything has been guiding my design process, it is that I don't want you to have to ever stop playing the game to look something up. Such moments are killers of board-game sessions, and I don't think RPG sessions are any different - RPG'ers have just come to accept them.

No! I say.

Maybe this is all nonsense to anyone who hasn't given any thought to RPG design, I reckon its an especially esoteric interest. Just to entice said folks, possible upcoming subjects:

- The pass-your-hand mechanic: its alure and pitfalls
- Scoring card/tile configurations: Rummy vs. Koi Koi vs. Scrabble
- A rant about shallow fantasy sports systems

Random long-held passionate game desire:

Man, I want a decent game that revolves around drawing things. I think it was looking at the latest posts on Mary's blog earlier today that reminded me of how strongly that is the case, and how it has haunted me for years. There are certain ways that playing games and drawing are at odds with eachother, but I feel like there's overlap that lingers just outside my grasp.

I don't want something quite like pictionary, where someone draws and everyone else watches. I think I want something where everybody draws something and then presents them towards some end. I want more drawing time than 1 / (numPlayers) of the time.

And not something where your drawing abitility necessarily gets you the win, as should go without saying. I want to reward creativity, though that's no small challenge, no?

- - Motivation - -

To backtrack my motivations, as they become clear even to myself, what I really want is a game that encourages people to be creative, and to revel in eachothers creativity. To let people share their ideas with one another, to enjoy having their ideas appreciated, and to enjoy appreciating others' ideas.

This already exists, its called conversation. But I think there's the potential for a game to spur people on, to encourage interaction and participation, and even creativity (von Oech reminds us that restrictions spur creativity). I don't want a situation where the game is "The rules say you have to invent something right now!" - it needs to seduce. So I think of those vocal-style parlor games (or my growing repatior of no-materials car games), but that's not quite it - though somewhat in the spirit, perhaps.

Drawings appeal to me much more. There is that explicit phase of thought, creation, elaboration and adjustment, where an idea can be developed in private, before being revealed onto the others at hand. And besides, we talk plenty, and draw far too little. Finally, I like the idea of a record of the game, the fact that the drawings can persist.

- - Competitive? - -

But I don't know of any game that gets it quite right yet. I think the hardest decision is how formal to make this. I feel like some sort of reward system is in order - some concept of success to be achieved. But I don't want something overly competitive either; I expect the game is going to be pretty subjective, and I don't want to necesarily reward the besty artist unduly, and hurt feelings need to be avoided at all costs - a recipe for minimal winner-declaration.

I think that Apples to Apples is a good analog here, where points are gained, but nobody really tracks them or feels a strong sense of victory upon acquiring the most.

- - Success Measures - -

Ah, but the hard part. What do you draw? What makes one drawing better than another? So right now I'm working under the high-level model of "everybody draws, then presents their drawings, some notion of success is assigned". I don't think that having a set judge of the drawings (theApples to Apples model) is quite right, its too flippant for the amount of work a drawing is (vs. throwing out a red card). I also don't quite like the idea of everybody just voting, it seems too subjective still somehow. And yet, I don't quite like the just "Yay! We're all winners! Lookit our radsome drawings!" model either. I think a little bit of structure is needed to inject some drama into the situation.

A nice semi-subjective approach is still the "can I successfully convey something with this picture" measure, as employed in pictionary. You need to motivate the guesser and the drawer, and I vastly prefer the informal pictionary model of "correct guesser gets to draw next" / "a point to the guesser, a point to the drawer, upon success" - as opposed to just putting the drawer and guesser on a team as with pictionary proper.

- - The Taboo Effect - -

I think of the most satisfying pictionary moments I've had, and many of them revolved around a certain amount of outside the boxism, where people go "I see what you did there! Delightful!" The latter part not so much said, as implied by the curious, outright glee that squeaks out in these moments. The party game Taboo is a word-based game that accomplishes this nicely. Sometimes people tiptoe around the forbidden words with various synonyms and do ok. But the game was much more fun when people would just come at the problem from outlandish, personal angles. "We had a great one of these at June lake... - Cobbler! Hey man, nice... - Shot! Being one of these totally sucks ass! - Pilgrim!".

I don't necessarily want to find the direct drawing analog, but I like the way this encouraged creativity and quick thinking by knocking people out of their comfort zone. They couldn't take the road, so they had to improvise. I think a similar factor might be at play in trying to encourage creativity and avoid over-rewarding the best artist.

- - Some game sketches - -

Multiple word, round-robin guessing
(somehow) each player gets 3-5 words from a very large pool of possible words. A timer is set, and everyone draws. Time runs out, everyone reveals, looks at eachothers pictures for a bit, ideally laughs. Time to analyze player A's picture. The player on their left says one word, and if it's one of the drawer's designated words, the guesser and drawer get points. Then, continuing clockwise, each player says a word, trying to guess the drawer's words.

Why do I like this better than a single word? First of all, it means that multiple people can guess and participate in the judging. Even if one person guesses a word, others remain to be guessed. Also, I like the idea that the drawer has to create a drawing that sums up more than one word, that has to incorporate more than one concept.

The main pitfall here is, of course, that people will just draw 3 different sub-scenes, one for each word. Ideally it would be something cohesive. Several possible solutions. There could be an initial vote for which scene is most cohesive, the winner getting a bonus, anyone failing to get at least one vote being ineligible for the (big) got-all-your-words bonus. Not great though. The answer might also be in word selection - that is to say that you get some mix of nouns, actions, settings, moods, styles, background events, whatever, lending the proceedings towards a single scene trying to evoke many angles. Or there might just be an honor system of trying to make a cohesive scene of some kind.

I feel like its not quite right, that its still going to lead to score-mongering and precision rather than innovative approaches. This might work as a seed of an idea though, or when combined with some of the other ideas below.

Also, its probably too hard, perhaps people get multiple guesses, or the words are kept simple, or its multiple choice, or you're allowed a caption, or - not sure, would have to playtest probably.

(Splashier scoring)
The first time one of the designated words is said, both players get 1 point. The second success awards 2 points to the guesser and drawer, the 3rd 3, and so on, with a possible non-linear big bonus for guessing the last word / getting all your words guessed. So guessers are rewarded more strongly for getting the less obvious words, and the rewards to the drawer ramp up for great success.

(Cooperative Gameplay)
Man, I love cooperative gameplay. In this case, it might be a nice way to bring drama and inspire performance, but without the negative effect of competitiveness and bitterness. What theme could a super-round of guessing-each-player's-pictures-rounds be couched in?

I love the idea of a simple board where the players (individually, or a single group token) are represented in a dreamlike world, where only their ability to create otherworlds that evoke the correct notions can allow them to escape eldritch horrors that pursue them. The handicaps I discuss below could play into this too. I see a scene where the players have moved across the dreamworld board, are near the end, with darkling creatures in pursuit, and know that they need to have X much success in communicating their drawings to one another if they are, as a team, to escape and win. Maybe that's just Mary's blog talking, though. I can't quite articulate it, but I have an image in mind that is extremely compelling to me right now.

My initial thought of drawing rounds as holes of golf (surprisingly frequent as my initial thought in games), seems downright stupid by comparison.

Handicaps
Some editions of Pictionary have a dice that incurs handicaps, like drawing with your off hand, drawing with your eyes closed or not lifting your pencil. I've always liked this idea, and have flirted with incorporating it as "injuries" in my cooperative swashbuckling pictionary/charades game.

In this case, I like the idea of a deck of cards, each with a penalty on them. I might add to the above list such things as: no curved lines, no stick figures, reduced time, smaller piece of paper, big fat crayon as tool, random portion will be obscured upon completion (I have a couple mechanisms in mind), viewers can only see it for a moment before guessing, guessers can't hear eachothers' guesses. You get the idea.

As cards, they have a lot of power; they could be used in a number of ways: Maybe you draw one at some point as a penalty for everybody on a given round. In the competitive game players might get them and be allowed to keep them face down, to be incurred on another player, handicapping the target for a single round. They might be automatically evoked on a runaway leader, distributed as special rewards, or given to a losing player as a consolation. In the cooperative game, monsters might attack the players, causing a given handicap to be incurred on one or more of the players, rachetting up the tension and forcing people to improvise.

But broadly, why do I like these? I like that they put people outside their comfort zone. They will sometimes (hopefully) result in drawings that are delightful in their clumsy, clever attempt to work around the restriction. They help to keep the game from getting predictable.

I especially like them in the cooperative version, where trying to overcome adversity and still have a productive round of drawing and guessing could be quite dramatic, I think. At its most ridculous I see it like "Oh no! The spitting lizard of self-doubt caught up to you, and has sprayed you in the eyes! Can you still convey your thoughts without your ability to reflect on them? Draw with your eyes closed this round."

They might be really obnoxious, and be more frustrating than they are fun to work with, but its an idea with promise, I think.

- - - -

Most of this came to me just as I was writing what was meant to be a single paragraph. Not sure if any of this is quite what I'm looking for. But I think the power of games to nudge and inspire, and the power of drawings to express and delight, have not yet been symbiotically harnessed to the fullest of their potential. I sense there's a really original, interesting game out there somewhere.

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.

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.

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.