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.

More Monster City

This game continues to plague me. There are just a very large number of ways you can take the game, so many ways to do the monster actions, so many ways to do city actions, so many city layouts, so many extra twists, all exploding combinatorially. This is the nature of game design, but its especially tricky this time.

I've tried to focus on my actual goals, to back out of assumptions about how things should be done. What I've come up with is:
1) City units should be able to hinder the monster, getting in his way.
2) The city players should not be able to damage the monster. This emerged over time, that it just felt wrong for the city to slowly damage and kill the monser. The city is in a desperate fight to avoid getting obliterated, but they are not an actual threat to the monster's supremacy.
3) The way the city player wins is to survive until a point where they get an ultimate weapon done, which is the one way they can kill the monster and win.
4) The way the monster player wins is to do a boatload of damage to the city, and return to the sea before the ultimate weapon destroys him.

So, the monster is trying to screw stuff up as fast as possible, and the city player is trying to keep the monster from screwing too much stuff up until they can get the weapon online, and either kill the monster with it, or use the threat of it to drive the monster back to the sea.

So how do the city units do anything useful? Well, for one, they can contain the monster, who can't use his big long-distance moves if there are units in the way. So we get a bit of fox-and-geese, where the city units try to slow the monster down and cut off his options. Second, and this is a fairly recent idea that I'm not completely cemented on: the units have an attack range, and they don't do damage or anything, but the monster can't attack a building while he's in the attack range of a unit.

So this leads to an interesting interaction. A city player piles up a bunch of units near the monster. The monster might try to kill all those units, and then will be able to wreck the nearby buildings, but this might take a while, especially if the city player keeps bringing in reinforcements. So the monster is liable to just head off to some other part of the city, where the resistance is less stiff, and wreck that freely. But the city player can use units to try to slow the monster's avenues of movement, to keep it in the areas where the city is well defended. But if the monster breaks free, its going to rip stuff up for a while, until the city player can stop it.

If this happens, does the city player desperately send in a single unit to buy himself some time while the monster kills it and goes back to wrecking? Does he send in a big force, which the monster might just avoid? Does he start cordoning off the main routes out of that area, and then send in a big force, to reestablish control? Or some combination of these effects? I think the strategic depth has a lot of potential.

In addition, I like the thematic feel better than some other versions I've come up with. The monster shouldn't actively seek out tanks, he should just wail on the ones in his face and then go back to beating up the city. And the city player shouldn't be able to control the monster, but can still limit its options, make stands, block certain streets. They will never be in control, but they just might buy themselves enough time...

Some questions remain as far as making this work:
1) How can I balance the monster and unit mobility so that these sort of questions are interesting?
2) How can I keep things unpredictable within the game? I don't want it to be complete information, where the monster can say "well, if I go here, there is no way he can stop me". I feel like in a game like this, it could get frustrating, and I'm not interested in crafting a perfectly balanced, open information, asymetrical, thematically sound game, its plenty challanging as it is. It'd be nice if he could instead make a reasonable guess about how likely the city player was to be able to stop him, based on some secret or unpredictable element, and had to weigh that. Think Memoir '44, but with more reasonable mission balance.
3) Can I keep the tension high throughout the game, or will one side clearly be doomed 2 turns in. This relates to the win condition, how many points does the monster need to win? Does he know, hits it, and escapes? Or should it be a press your luck affair, where he wants as many as he can get without dying. Could it be secret somehow?
4) I want to encourage the monster to get to the heart of the city, and the city player to want to stop that. But I also want it to be a bad idea for the city player to just hole up downtown, letting the monster bulldoze the shoreline. Its a tricky business, and might involve the scoring system somehow.
5) How do I give the game some pop? I still need that OMG turn, that memorable sequence that turns the game around.

Lots of open questions, but I think I'm on an interesting track. I have a new city design that I think will be more compelling, and a card-based approach to actions that just might work. I think this is maybe where the pop will come in, through narrowly applicable but powerful cards that can have a splashy effect if used just right.

In any case, I need to mock it up and playtest it again; there's too much theory swirling that needs to be confirmed or refuted.
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Also, I went back and added lables to all the old posts. Might be useful?
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Note to myself: I should do a post on "pop" and how it relates to "the bomb" from that Games Journal article. It's been coming up a lot.

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.

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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?

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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.]

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.

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.

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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.

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!