Actual things

It is a huge shift for me to go from game theory and design to actual crafting.  There is a weird thing where it feels like they are part of the same process and yet are so different as to have nothing to do with one another.

One of the big things is my perfectionism.  When I am talking about numbers and formulas I can and will iterate without end.  I can always find a better way to do things, always improve.  But when I am building a physical model I manage to cut that part of me out of the equation and just get the thing done.  Obviously I want a prototype to be good, but I am able to effectively manage my time so that it is good but not wasteful.  When I am building something theoretical I am much worse at the whole 'just get something out the door' part of it and I just sit there building and tinkering for years at a time.

The two things are similar in that I can really get into the zone doing either.  When I am cutting things out with scissors or a knife and then getting ready to glue all the pieces together there is a real calm there, a sense of flow, similar to what happens when design is really working.  The physical act of building also seems to make me feel better in the same way that chores do.  When I do the dishes or clean the bathroom or other similar things I get a sense of calm accomplishment.  Doing so makes me feel good about the world.  I can be happy about designing a game purely theoretically but it isn't quite the same thing - it makes me happy in a different way.

The game I am building today is Dot.  It is the fourth copy of the game in the world, and although this particular copy probably won't ever be played for the amount of time I spent building it I am still pleased to be doing so.  There is something in my brain that is deeply pleased that my designs will be out there on somebody's shelf, occasionally coming down for a dust off and a playthrough.

This latest craft is going to nearly run me out of foam board.  I bought two sheets roughly ten years ago when I first started building game prototypes and I have been consistently using it to create boards and tiles since then.  It is ideal in that it is easy to pick up, light, cheap, and no problem to cut exactly as I want it.  When I have to go back to the store for another sheet it is going to feel like an era has ended. 

I wonder which game will cause me to finally go back out and buy some more.

Construction

I really enjoy upping the quality of my game prototypes.  It is silly, almost, in that they aren't finished products so maybe I shouldn't be pouring time into them like this, but I get a real satisfaction from improving the way they look.  As as example, the game Dot that I built a few years ago was played on a random printed out sheet of paper for quite a while.  Months ago I built a better model where I glued the paper sheet to a hunk of foam board, but the result was still very inelegant.  The paper was lumpy from the glue, the foam board was not smoothly cut, and it certainly didn't look like much.

 The new version is laminated, feels strong and solid, and actually looks decent.  I so often forget that a little bit of colour and some effort at proper layout makes a huge different in how a game presents to people.  The new version has a scoring track that is actually big enough and the two pieces can fit in a pretty tiny space.  I also built a similar version by attaching the same pictures to standard game board chunks that I stole from an old Risk board I had sitting around.  That particular Risk world now has some big holes in it, but I have another cool board option for Dot.

The tiles that you place on the board have been improved too.  They have gone from paper bits glued on to cardboard to paper glued with cruddy glue to shoddy foam to laminated paper glued with good glue to nicely cut foam board.  The difference in the hand feel and appearance is pretty substantial.

Plus the new version is actually water resistant so people don't have to worry so much about ruining it... and I don't have to cringe every time someone waves a drink around near the game, threatening hours of work.

Arts and crafts basic lessons, being slowly learned somewhat later in life than usual.

Big games and little ones

Last night I took a trip to Snakes and Lattes for their game designers night to get some testing done on my newest Dot iteration.  I added in three and four player rules to the existing two player game and it did really well in the test.  The higher player versions played in the same timeframe but had very different feels which was pretty much exactly what I wanted.  The thing I noticed was that the people bringing games to the event seemed to have an awful lot of big, complex games.  The prime example was a game called Camelot which had a playing board that combined about five regular chessboards with four towers about 20cm high, four complete sets of chess pieces, two stacks of cards, and a ton of special extra pieces.  I played the game for most of an hour and there was still no winner; in fact the game creator admitted that you could easily play for dozens of hours without victory.

I wonder about making really complex, huge games.  In my life there are lots of complex, great games out there but I have absolutely no ability to play them.  Le Havre is great, Agricola is great, Diplomacy is great, the list goes on.  Hand me a huge block of time and a bunch of gamers and I have an enormous list of games I want to attack.  However, in real life I never actually get to play those games because they require huge amounts of space and time.  The games I actually get to play are ones that are small, quick to learn, and fast to play.

It seems to me that if you are making an enormous, long game you are pretty much giving up on the mass market and are aiming for the student crowd.  I certainly recall in university playing Barbu for three hours and then playing it twice more.  Good luck with that now!  I have to get up and get Elli to school these days so just getting in one game of Barbu is rough.  The way I see it if you really want to make a game a success it needs to be fast and simple with as much emergent complexity and potential depth as possible.  Gigantic boxes filled with pieces and dense rulebooks strike me as a good way to never play the game in question.

Of course there are other advantages to fast games.  If a player gets stuck in an unwinnable position or is knocked out of the game they don't feel like their entire evening is shot.  Also you can have a bunch of different people win a game in a given night and that generally leaves people feeling much better about things.  Perhaps we shouldn't put so much weight on winning, but most of us do.  All of this is why I am focusing so much on Dot and less on FMB.  FMB is my baby but it is a hard sell to anyone but a serious gamer.

PvP critical points

I had a bunch of people over to play board games this weekend.  Even though the group as a whole really likes to play board games we had a hard time agreeing on a game to play because anything there was a lot of interest in got vetoed by somebody or other.  The problem seemed to revolve around how much PvP there was in the game and how critical moments of PvP resolved themselves.  For example, in Settlers of Catan you have lots of small PvP moments where you have to place the robber baron on somebody's land or decide which player you will trade with when you have identical offers.  These choices do matter but the stakes are low and they certainly don't make and break games on their own.  There are also critical PvP moments where one player builds several road segments at once and drops a settlement in a location that somebody else was all set up to take.  When this happens it often is such a blow that the player getting ganked is pretty nearly out of the game.

We ended up playing Vegas Showdown and got to see exactly why it has this same sort of issue.  There are plenty of times when you are faced with the choice of two relatively equal options with the only difference being 'who do I want to punish?'  The trouble is that often the game ends up revolving around somebody buying the Theatre and then struggling to place it - it is common that if they do place the Theatre they win and if they don't they lose so there is a very high stakes fight over it.  This isn't a problem in a two player game so much but it becomes pretty annoying in a five player game because people end up arguing over who has to bite the bullet to block the Theatre player.  Puerto Rico is similar because again you have lots of small options to hurt somebody and then in the endgame you can easily hand someone 10 points by calling Craftsman in just the right (wrong?) place and playing kingmaker.

Factory Manager ends up being entirely the opposite but in many ways just as problematic.  In that game a good player will make few or no significant mistakes over the course of the game and gaining ground early has a snowball effect so if you get stuffed (or do something stupid) in the first turn you are often out of the game.  There just aren't enough critical points for you to find a way to get back into the game in most cases so the person who is ahead on turn two will usually cruise to victory.  I think both of my games, FMB and Dot, fall more into this category.  There are a ton of small decisions to be made throughout the game that matter a lot but there is rarely a big 'well, now you lose' moment unless the game is incredibly tight.  Sometimes I get feedback from testers that the games don't seem to have any big changes and you just keep playing until somebody wins; this is true and it is all part of the package.  If there are critical moments then it allows for a weaker player or a player who is behind to catch up and that isn't my design goal.

I don't see a good way to design a game to get out of this trap.  If you have big critical PvP moments then people will end up fighting over what to do and some people will really dislike that.  If you don't have those moments then anyone who falls behind a little has no chance to get back into the game and some people will really dislike that!  Hell, you will find some people who dislike both, in which case it will be hard to find a game they like to play consistently.  Either way I seem to end up designing games with very few critical PvP moments that are won by an aggregation of small decisions; that probably accurately reflects the sorts of games I like to play.

Meta effects

In many games there are effects that are directly affect the game position and aren't really comprehensible outside of it; I call these regular effects.  There are often also effects that are a little more abstract in nature and are often shared between games; I call these meta effects.  Some examples from my game Dot:

Regular Effect:  Artist:  Rotate a red Tile to a new orientation.

Meta Effect:  General:  Take an extra turn after this one.

Meta effects can be fun but they often generate lots of problems.  A good example is early Magic:  The Gathering where effects like Time Walk (take another turn) and Ancestral Recall (draw three cards) dominated the game and eventually had to be removed to preserve any semblance of balance.  Ziggyny talked about a similar issue in the Campaign Manager game he played where you could build an 'infinite deck' using these meta effects and utterly dominate any deck trying to use regular effects.  I remember the CCG Rage having this issue too since you were generally supposed to fight using a five card hand but there was one card that allowed you to draw ~eight extra cards and made you more powerful to boot!  You know there are likely to be problems any time certain cards let you do multiple things or read "Draw three cards".  I am currently evaluating two meta effects for Dot.  The original incarnations are as follows:

Inventor:  Shuffle your hand and reserve pile together and draw a new hand.

Spy:  Opponent plays with their hand revealed until your next turn.

These presented problems.  The first was that Inventor made you shuffle.  I have always hated the requirement to do a properly randomized shuffle in the middle of a game and I can't imagine anybody thinks that is good design.  In a computer game this effect would be completely fine; it is useful to cycle away cards you don't want right at the moment and computers can shuffle instantly.  In a physical tile game though it seems poor because the interestingness of the effect does not justify the annoyance.  Spy was reasonable but seemed not compelling enough and I wanted it to do more.  The second iteration had a rules change which caused you to draw up to three Tiles in hand on your turn instead of always drawing one.


Inventor:  Draw three Tiles.

Spy:  Look at opponent's hand and force them to discard Tiles of your choice until they have two Tiles or less.

The Inventor in this iteration was good because you got greater selection for a few turns but it would certainly make it complicated to make decisions when you had five Tiles to choose from.  Playing the Spy right after your opponent had used Inventor was utterly brutal though because it gave you even more selection to pin them with the worst Tiles!  The other issue is this version of Spy causes a reshuffle, which hasn't magically become 'not crap' in the past paragraph.  The current working effects:


Inventor:  Your opponent may rotate this Tile to a new orientation.

Spy:  Look at opponent's hand and choose a Tile.  They may not play that Tile until your next turn.

Of course this version of Inventor doesn't sound much like an Inventor and isn't really a meta effect any more.  Maybe he needs to be named Turncoat instead.  He has swapped from being a relatively weird effect to a powerful bonus to a significant penalty.  Quite the journey.

A mistake in design

Last night I went to Snakes and Lattes' Game Designers Night again.  I brought Dot to test and was really pleased with the results:  Everyone who played it enjoyed it and thought the game felt polished and complete though there were a few small suggestions for minor tweaks.  This is a lot better than last time where FMB was played and the reception was not so hot.  I got to see a lot of other people's games there too and I was stunned (again) by how much production and economics goes on in games where the fundamental mechanics aren't even sorted out.  When I don't know what is going on with my games the furthest I get is paper, plasticine and beads but the other folks there had figurines carved by goldsmiths, ingraved metal coins and all kinds of other interesting bits for games where the play style was still totally up in the air.  Lots of comments were made about the feel of the pieces and the boards, on the importance of flexible cards vs. solid and other such details that I naturally overlook.

The biggest example was the last game I played on the night which had the hand carved pieces and for which the creator already had manufacturers and distributors lined up; publishing was set to commence in a month.  Despite this there was a major rules revision just prior to the visit to Snakes and Lattes and the new rules had never been tested before.  I played the game once and at the end I was quite certain that there was a very important flaw:  The game was scored over five rounds and the winner of the last round was nearly guaranteed victory.  This was borne out in our test game where the person in last who had done nothing of note throughout the entire game won the last round by getting a single lucky die roll and consequently defeated everyone else.  I can't imagine this mechanic working out well in the long run since the game is obviously intended to have a lot of long term strategy and what decisions you make seem like they *should* matter but they do not.  I am quite confident in a four player game you could use the algorithm of "Never do anything, if forced to take an action choose randomly" until the fifth round and maintain a solid 24% win rate.  Your decisions in the fifth round are also mostly irrelevant too, though on the last couple rolls there is a "whoever gets the die roll they need and flips over their card first" mechanic to decide the victor in which planning and reflexes do matter.

I just can't fathom having a game in that state and being ready to ship to a publisher.  I can much more readily imagine having a game that has been tested and tweaked and smoothed to near perfection years ago and never publishing it at all which may well show that I am the fool in this scenario since nothing of mine is going to hit a publisher at the rate I am going.  For many people the art and flavour of the pieces, pictures and cards is critical while for me the important part of the game is the mathematics.  I am perfectly content playing with scrap paper and cardboard if the game is awesome and completely uninterested in a beautiful game with a great feel if the gameplay is weak.  The regular gamer is probably somewhere between the two extremes.  Gameplay matters and presentation matters too; if you have neither you get nowhere and if you want a smash hit you must have both.

More dot, more dot, more dot.

Wendy and I played a game of the newest version of Dot last night.  The original game was very simple to learn but the options you had on any given play weren't all that large so recently I added in more stuff to do to try to make things more complicated to figure out.  Instead of simply having a large number of tiles that are nothing but squares with one to eight dots on each edge every tile has a special ability.  Some of those special abilities are more impactful than others of course, as "Take another turn" is a lot more strategically important than "Shuffle up your tiles and draw a new hand".

I like the new version a lot.  There are only 12 turns in the game so you don't actually do very many things but deciding which thing to do can be very tricky.  You hold 3 tiles in your hand and must pick a location, an orientation and sometimes how to use a special ability on each turn and that is it - the number of decisions is on the same order of magnitude as chess but of course there is an element of luck involved.  The strangest thing about the game to me is how close the scores are.  While I have managed to blow out one person 27-18 it was a really incredible fluke and normally I would expect a game between a veteran and a new player to be more like 20-24 and two veterans would rarely have more than a 2 point spread between their final scores.  I am used to games where people who are losing get half the points of the winner but nothing like that is ever going to happen here.  If you got to a very serious level of play I would expect that at least half the games would be either ties or decided by a single point.

Pictures first, files afterwards:

The picture below is the new board, the the caveat that the text describing the various tile abilities is messed up in this picture for reasons that are complicated and annoying.

This is the picture of the new tiles.

And the full rules (Really short!):


Rules for Dot

The ruler of the City of Dot has died and the race for succession is on.  You are a contender to become the new leader and you must deploy your followers throughout the City of Dot to try to gather more influence than your opponent.  The game is played by placing Tiles that represent each player’s followers on the board to score points. The player with the highest point total at the end of the game is the winner and is declared the new leader of the City of Dot.

Setup

To set up the game each player selects a colour and takes all the Tiles and the scoring marker of that colour.  Next each player flips all of their Tiles facedown and draws three Tiles at random to form their starting hand.  Each player’s hand is kept secret from their opponent.  The players randomly determine who will go first after which they alternate turns.  Each player has twelve Tiles and they will play all of those Tiles over twelve turns.  Points are kept track of by moving scoring markers along the scoring track on the board.

Turn Order

1. Play a Tile.  You must choose a Tile from your hand and play it on any empty space on the board.  You may not place a Tile on the middle space.

2. Use Tile Special Ability.  You must use the special ability on the Tile you played.  If it is impossible to obey a special ability it is ignored.  Note that a Tile is adjacent to another Tile if they share a side.  If two Tiles they are diagonal from one another they are not adjacent.

3. Make Attacks.  To attack you check each side of the Tile you played to see if it has more dots than the edge of the board or enemy Tile it is adjacent to.  You may not attack your own Tiles or empty spaces.  For each attack where you have more dots you score one point.  If your Tile is on a space with a Star(+2) in it you score two extra points.

4. Draw a Tile.  You draw a Tile from your reserve if there are any left and pass the turn to your opponent.

Tweaking the Tile Game (Dot)

I have been playing and tweaking my tile game that I posted about last week.  The initial design had a flaw that I felt would be easy to address:  The first player to take a turn had a noticeable disadvantage.  The problem is that generally you want to get two points from placing a tile and there are very few options for the first tile to achieve that while the second tile played has significantly more choices because they can score off of the first tile.  The second player seemed to have consistently more and better options throughout the game and also won by 1-2 points most of the time.  One solution I considered was to simply give the first player a bonus 1 or 2 points to begin the game but that seemed somewhat inelegant and also left the game playing very differently for the two players which I wasn't especially happy with.  

In the previous post I talked about having the players place 3 tokens on the board before the game starts each of which was worth 1 bonus point.  The idea of that was to give player 1 more places to play and some bonus points but it ended up working out badly; player 2 had ways to play that negated the advantage and still retained the upper hand.  My latest and best solution to this problem is to place 2 bonus points on the tiles that are located diagonally from the centre tile.  There are two ways to do this:  The first is to place 2 bonus points on all 4 of the tiles that are diagonal from the centre tile and the other is to place 2 bonus points on just 2 of those tiles instead.  

These 2 options produce very different boards and strategies.  With 4 different tiles with bonus points the play is all over the board at once and the game becomes largely about maximizing your personal point return with little regard for your opponent.  There are numerous places for each player to play to get 2 points on their turn so they just pick one of them.  When only 2 tiles have bonus points the game becomes much tighter with fewer options but it allows for more defensive play.  It is feasible to play extremely defensively trying to deny the opponent good plays while scoring few points yourself because your opponent does not have very many useful things they can do.

It feels a bit like Scrabble.  The 2 bonus tile game is like expert Scrabble - you spend a lot of time denying your opponent and trying to gum up the board and balancing personal gain vs. opponent's gain is crucial.  The 4 bonus tile game is a lot more like beginner Scrabble where everybody plays big words and there are endless options for playing your own things.  I am bad at Scrabble so I can't really play the expert game at all but I really like the idea of making tradeoffs between offence and defence so I am going with the 2 bonus tile game for now.

I have been really pleased with the reactions to the game so far.  Everyone who has played it has given positive feedback and the good reactions have come from both hardcore gamers and people who aren't particularly into games.  I think I need to squeeze in a little more variety in tile powers still before the game will be done but it is feeling really positive.  This is the sort of game that is much more marketable than FMB as it is simpler to learn and doesn't have the excess of pieces and tokens that drives prices up.  My current working name for the game is Dot, though I am very much open to better suggestions!

I had a dream

This past Friday I had a dream about a game.  I woke up at three in the morning with a full set of rules in my head and determined that I would remember them upon waking.  As soon as I got up in the morning I began to draw on paper and make little cut outs and voila, a new game appeared.  I have never done this before as all of the games I have built have been products of long iteration and conscious design rather than simply writing down what appeared to me in a dream.

The thing that I am most pleased with is that the initial design seems to need almost no tweaking to work.  That isn't to say that no improvements can be made but rather that no improvements need to be made for the game to be exactly what I was hoping:  Extremely fast to explain (1-2 minutes), fast to play (10 minutes) and deep strategically.  Even after playing a bunch of games I was still struggling to figure out the best strategies and sort out exactly what I should do given particular choices but after getting a number of people to test the game with me it was obvious that the player with the most experience and talent won consistently.  I wanted a game that was as simple to explain as chess, played much more quickly and had the same sort of strategic depth while retaining just a little randomness.

The idea is that this is a simple 12 turn game.  On each turn you play one tile and score points for each side of your tile that has more dots on it than the adjacent tile or edge - you can only score points from enemy tiles or edges.  These comparisons are called attacks.  Tiles can have special rules which you see on the sheet in the picture.  Each player has 12 tiles which are identical but you draw 3 of them at random to start the game and then draw a new one each time you play one.  This means the games will be different each time but that each player will have the same quality of tiles over the match.  The final wrinkle is that before the match starts three tokens are placed on the board on squares.  Whoever places a tile in that square claims the token and each token is worth 1 point.  The first player places a token, then the second player, then first again.  After this they play through their 12 tiles with the first player going first again.

That's it.  Thematically of course the tiles could be all kinds of things and have all kinds of powers.  They could be fantasy monsters, foods, spaceships or whatever else fit the theme of the game (which I haven't yet settled on).  Numbers first, then set dressing!