Flexibility in Representations / Racetrack Design

I've been sketching lots of maps for the Pirate Co-op game, just trying to get a feel for the design space. But it occured to me it would be really nice to have a way to be really flexible about this, to have a physical map that could be readily rearranged during playtesting.

Heroscape tiles might be nice if we ended up with a hex-based game (this is still not certain, believe it or not!). But just starting with a map with a blank grid, and then placing island / trade route / dangerous seas tiles on it could work too. Its strange, I assumed we would have a printed map, but there's really no reason that must be the case, especially not during playtesting.

-

The concept of a flexible, intermediate representation of design ideas is something that I've been thinking about a lot. When you're designing, its often a matter of finding a medium that reflects the properties you're looking for and then:
1) creating a representation of your ideas in that medium
2) evaluating that representation to see if it has the qualities you're looking for
3) adjusting or creating a representation based on what you saw

Ideally, you end up in Schon's of Reflection in Action, where this all happens as a unified, creative thought process, where you're evaluating as you create.

So, you want a representation that is easy to create, but that tells you what you need to know. These are the two steps I've always focused on when thinking about this stuff, ignoring that third step of adjusting course. Maybe that's because most of the books I've seen on this subject focus on sketching, where you usually make sketch after sketch, rather than trying to adjust a previous drawing.

But what about a representation that lends itself to changing its configuration? That is, rather than sketching map after map, should I be creating a physical set of objects that can be nudged around as I see fit?

-

So I was already thinking about this a bit, but what prompted me to post was seeing this show about a guy who designs racetracks. They had this footage of his studio, and I immediately started to wonder, what sort of representations would you use for this? As he pointed out, you need to consider making the course challenging to drive, interesting to watch, you need to work with the topography of the land. They showed these drawings of course layouts, but I didn't see how you could get to those just by drawing squiggle after squiggle and saying 'that looks like a good one!'

About 5 minutes later, I wasn't disappointed. They had built a topographical model of a location out of layers and layers of cardboard, and were using pins with yarn between them to lay out possible course routes. They had multiple routes in different colors, and when one guy placed this red segment, they talked about how it had this nice drop down the hill, and how the cars would really fly down it given the angle and the speed they would have. How cool is that?

The lesson I got from this was how to build prototypes so that you can readily adjust them as you're playtesting. More specifically, don't assume that the approach you're going to use in the final game is the approach you have to use for a playtest: even if you plan to use a static map in the end, tiles might do you good in the meantime. For reasons I won't get into here, I firmly believe playtesting is one of the only good ways to get feedback about a board game design, and ensuring that third "adjusting" step is as easy as possible seems like a good idea.

Is this obvious? Maybe? Its something I overlooked though, and it seems like an observation worth holding onto.

[Finally started adding labels. Will maybe go back and add them to the old ones some day.]

Co-op Pirates

Last weekend, Robin and I spent a goodly number of hours working on a cooperative pirate-themed game. I'll not get into too much detail here, but important details are:

1) The big insight was that if you want to do a pirate game right, it really should be cooperative. Everyone wants to be a pirate, but pirates aren't really in the business of directly competing with eachother. Pirate's Cove was illustrative of this, usually the last thing you want to do in that game is spending the time and resources to fight another pirate, and you spend most of the game trying to stay out of eachothers' way. Pirates are mostly in the business of preying on the weak, so why not let the game itself represent the players' targets, and let the players work together to conquer them. Robin came up with a really nice theme for the cooperation, but I'll tease it away for now.

2) There's more to pirating than pirating. We tried to make multiple strategies that a player could undertake, and make sure that each is interesting. Specifically, players can a) attack merchant ships, while avoiding navy defenders b) smuggle contraband between islands c) explore far-off islands in pursuit of epic treasure. There are skills and items that support each of these angles, and no one player can fully adopt one strategy without weakening themselves in terms of the others, so players can informally establish roles for themselves, and work together in disparate ways towards a common goal. I see it almost in terms of a WoW clan, where players have different classes, and might find an item that they can't use, but that is useful to someone else. That's good, fun camraderie.

We have pretty nice systems in place for all of those details; mostly we need to refine out how exactly the actual ship movement hangs together so that the pacing of the actual pirating-smuggling-exploring subgame occurences feels right. Then its actual card design and balance, which will just be fun.

The biggest threats right now are component overload and rules complexity, but we've been pretty mindful of both, and it certainly won't be worse than Arkham Horror, or your average Fantasy Flight big-box game on either count.

-

In other news, I suffered through the old ticketmaster price double-up to ensure I had my ticket to Ultimate Reality Live / Dan Deacon Set Jan 15th. Because, lets face it, Dan Deacon is the man that makes me most want to quit grad school, blow off my life, and become him somehow.