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.

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.

Friggin Marlins

Why did they have to hand-deliver two great players to the Tigers? For nothing but prospects.

I'm tempted to put quotes around "prospects", to derisively say that the Marlins're doing nothing but cutting costs so that they can put a subpar product on the field for a payroll under 10 million. But, they did this in the past and enough of those prospects payed off that they still won another championship.

Part of me says, this is bullshit, you can't sell off all your best players just to cut costs. But if you can cut costs to the organization and still contend in the long term, isn't that genius?

The dual nature of victory conditions got me thinking. Wouldn't it be a rad game where you run a sports team, trying to win a championship, while also trying to run a savvy business? Where the glory (and ticket sales) of a winning team are nice and all, but where a carefully planned "rebuilding year" can win you the game on a 20-year time scale?

The strategy of the rebuilding year, that's what really gets me. When do you enter one? When is it a bad idea? Would the Yankees (huge, huge, huge payroll, nothing to show for it lately) be losers in such a game?

I'm not going to design it, but it piqued my interest.

Edit: snipped. No need to be silly.

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.

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.

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.