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Ted Vessenes
United States
Somerville
Massachusetts
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Design on The Phoenix Syndicate started over five years ago on a cross-country car trip from Los Angeles to Boston. My wife Rebecca and I were moving east due to a job I'd just taken, and it turns out that the American southwest is very boring to drive through, so we started talk about games to pass the time. (My comments are in black and Rebecca's are in red.)
Rebecca loves networking games like Ticket to Ride, and I'm a sucker for games with modular boards, so the question came up as to whether it was possible to make a route-building game with a dynamic board. Making each hex tile a different planet and setting the game in space seemed like a natural fit, and that idea never really changed. The obvious mechanical issue to solve is that if you create static objectives – e.g., connect tiles A and B – you might end up with some boards where this objective is ridiculously hard and other boards where it's almost trivial. So some mechanism must be in place that balances the effort-to-reward ratio for these objectives, which became the contract cards in the final version.
We came up with two ways of tackling this problem in the initial design. First, each contract card would list three planets instead of two. This lets the game award different point values for connecting one, two, or three locations in the network, which provides much better granularity than a simple binary test of whether two locations are connected. Second, the contracts would be selected from some kind of a draft board each turn. Whichever contracts were not selected would acquire resources on them as an incentive to take them in the future, such that eventually even the worst of contracts would be worth taking.
We also recognized early that we wanted each planet tile to have links out of it, with each link listing half of the resources required to connect to the adjacent tile. And because all planets need to be reachable and it's possible for a tile's random placement and orientation not to have any links into it where both sides match up, we knew that unmarked edges of each tile would need an implicit high cost.
Last, the game needed some mechanism that gave players resources so they could build these routes. Thematically we liked having planets in your network provide resources so that players might have to decide about building to get better resource acquisition versus building to complete contracts. It seemed obvious to make the collect action provide resources from one planet. Bigger networks then provide more options but not necessarily more resources, which should prevent snowball victory problems. We also made moons give one less resource per opponent present, so that connecting to a remote planet could be a resource benefit in some cases.
And that was the initial game. There were no action cards, no guilds, and no bonus points for completing the most contracts of a given color. Oh, and you started with only one initial planet instead of two, which made initial bootstrapping brutal in a particularly puzzlish way.
A very early prototype of the planet tiles
Rebecca: That was the initial concept for the game, but much of our road trip was spent determining the link costs and production distributions. I had just received my Ph.D. in Algebraic Combinatorics (i.e., the math where you count things) and found this to be a very interesting question. Once you decide how many links you want on a tile (5, 4 or 3) you've implicitly determined a classification of planets (Primes, Colonies, Outposts). We wanted there to be some balance and symmetry in the resource structure without everything being identical.
We started by generating all the unique link configurations for a tile. For instance, there are four different ways to put three links on a hex that are distinct under rotation. I still have our old notebook where we drew out all the configurations and calculations. Having only four Outposts would not work well from a gameplay standpoint, so we put a lot of thought into how many tiles and planets of each type we needed and how to obtain that distribution in a mathematically elegant way. From the start, we intended purple and red to be slightly rarer in the galaxy, but to get the numbers to look pretty we found we needed to make blue a bit more plentiful as well.
As you probably can tell, I found this part of the design interesting. In short, the distribution of planet and moon pairings, link layouts, size, and colors were all chosen with gameplay, color balance, and mathematical elegance in mind. We did something similar with the contracts, although those underwent a few more revisions.
Initial playtests were promising, in that the basic networking mechanism was interesting and the market mechanism really did balance the power level of good contracts versus bad ones. There were some issues, too, of course. The major issue was that there was only one point source: completing a contract. If someone consistently completed her contracts for three points and you fell behind for one turn, it was virtually impossible to catch up. Furthermore, all points information was public, so you had a sinking feeling that the only way you could win was for them to make a mistake. What's more, the game had only one strategy as well: complete all three planets on each of your contracts.
A lesser issue was that turns could be really long and intense. On each player's turn, she acquired resources, then expanded her network, and then had to take a new contract and pay bribes. That's more than double the thought that goes into a current turn, so the entire pacing felt much slower. So on and off for the next five years, all the remaining tweaks were focused on addressing these two issues: the game having only one strategy and turns taking too long.
The first list of planet names that weren't just letters
Early on in testing, we added the idea of awarding a distribution bonus for the most contracts of a certain color (plus another for most colors). Since your final three contracts aren't cashed in until the end of game, everyone's final score is unknown until after the last turn. We also wanted to give players some way of acquiring more contracts while being less able to complete them well, so there would be a strategy based on quantity (bolstered by distribution points) in addition to the standard quality strategy (scoring the maximum points from each contract).
Rebecca: Part of the early reasoning behind distribution bonuses was to reward players who diversified their networks. It also supported what I think of as an Outpost-based strategy. Since the contract color is the color of the Prime, one approach is to get to one Prime, then take contracts only of that color. Since Primes are easy to get to and about a fifth of the contract deck are in each color, this is a relatively easy-to-implement strategy. However, there are only six Outposts, so being at two Outposts means you'll have at least one planet on a third of the contracts across all colors. This means you can potentially earn more points on distribution.
The first idea was to try a scoring system in which completing three planets was worth 3 points, two planets was worth 2 points, and one planet gave you a token you could use to draw another contract later (while keeping the first contract for distribution points). At least there was some semblance of a quality versus quantity strategy, though it still felt bad to cash in contracts for only two of the three planets.
Rebecca: It took us awhile to completely address this issue. Players need to be able to get contracts at different rates so that they can find a strategic balance between doing well with a few contracts and doing the minimum on a large number of contracts. It's the classic quality versus quantity trade-off.
The major breakthrough we had was separating the different parts of the turn onto action cards. On each player's turn, she would choose to collect, build, or contract, then flip that action face down. All three actions refreshed once all three were face down. This helped offload the computation complexity of each player's turn.
However, it still had the same basic problem that players acquired contracts at roughly the same rate as one another. We couldn't make each action available on every turn, or players wouldn't take contract early in the game and would take nothing but contract in the late game. There was also the issue that players need to spend more time acquiring resources than spending them. Since a collect will net a player four or five resources, and even the expansion of a single route costs six resources on average, the game needed more resource acquisition actions.
We needed a wide variety of resource production, so we gradually went from three actions (collect, expand, contract) to six, with every action providing some way of acquiring resources. For example, we gave the expand action an initial acquire and a higher bribe (net +3 resources) instead of no acquire and a bribe of 0 (net +0 resources). The gamble action was added for two reasons. First, it's important players get more than one contract every five actions or so. And second, it adds hidden information to the game, so players can only estimate how many contracts of a color are needed to win distribution points. Without any hidden information, a player with a good memory or a piece of paper can work out exactly how much is needed at the cost of everyone else's time, and that's just no fun.
Rebecca: Splitting the game turn into action cards and adding actions is part of what I think really makes the game work. Gamble went through many revisions, and I like how it now plays. Early in the game I'm often looking for direction in how to build my network or need just one more resource of a color, so I'll gamble for one contract. Later in the game I'll want to take advantage of my network or flesh out my color distribution, so I'm willing to forgo the two resources to gamble for three.
Our publisher Chris Cieslik at Asmadi Games had the insightful idea of setting the bribe cost on the contract action to be the number of unflipped actions you had, then to have contract refresh them. This idea solved three problems at once: It prevents players from doing nothing but selecting contract in the late game, it forces players to take contract in the early game, and it guarantees players will have different numbers of contracts at the end of the game.
Rebecca: This is what I think pushes the game up the Euro-strategy scale. Everyone has the same actions and same number of turns, but your action choices determine both the cost and accessibility of your later actions. I've seen players do well playing a methodical game of using every action before contracting with a bribe of 0. I've also seen great games in which a player minimizes the number of times he takes a connect action and carefully manages resources in order to maximize the number of contracts he gets. It's fascinating how different strategies approach the action reset question.
This was roughly four years into design. At this point, the basic game system was in place. We made a few other small but important tweaks in that time. Colonies start with a bonus point, the resource trade rate is 3:1 instead of 2:1, and the contract deck only includes contracts on which all three planets have different colors. (If you don't include that last one, players end up with almost no solid resource production because they are too specialized. Then they don't do well or have fun, but aren't sure why. Eventually we realized it was the contract distribution.)
Rebecca: Contracts having three different colored planets was done early in the game design, but even then the contract deck had all possible Prime-Colony-Outpost combinations that met those criteria. We found that deck size to be too large and too variable, so we added additional constraints (like the Outpost moon color never matching the Prime) to trim the deck while keeping the underlying symmetric balance intact.
Our playtests were going well, but players still wanted a little more in the way of strategic variety. The basic game thought process was still about maximizing the quantity and quality of contracts you completed. Our solution to this was to add guilds. At the beginning, all we knew was that they were an alternate or supplemental point source. Their use would not be required to win the game, but some winning strategies could focus on guilds. How many points they were worth or how players could join was to be determined.
Rebecca: It should be noted that the strategic variety requests came from our hardcore playtesters, who by this time were very familiar with the game.
We tossed around a number of guild scoring systems, but discarded most of them for either being too complicated or rewarding the same plays that improve contracts. It's not a strategic option if it doesn't actually change your strategy! The one thing that worked was awarding players points equal to the number of planets they had infiltrated, so the blue guild is worth four points if you've infiltrated four blue planets by the end of the game.
Rebecca: This is a different strategic direction since all the planets on a contract are different colors, so going to an extra blue planet doesn't increase the value of a contract. Being on three blue planets might help complete contracts for distribution, but it will depend on which blue planets you are at.
This worked well for the most part, but presented two challenges to solve. First, the value of joining a guild is constant, so players have an incentive to join guilds as late in the game as possible (when the opportunity cost of losing resources is at its lowest). So the cost to join needs to start cheap and get expensive as the game goes on. And second, the red and purple guilds were much worse than the others (and the blue was a bit better) because there are few red and purple planets and one extra blue planet. We tried making a combined red/purple guild (too confusing), awarding a bonus point for joining these guilds (too fiddly), and adding Sabean Core as an extra red/purple planet (doesn't help enough). In the end what worked best was creating separate cost tracks to join each guild, and making the red and purple guilds cheaper than the others.
Very early concepts for the planets
Rebecca: We did keep Sabean Core, however, to replace an asteroid tile. The link costs for Sabean Core are slightly higher than the asteroids, but the planet itself potentially adds more purple and red. Since it's not on any contracts, this change didn't affect the contract distribution, while still supporting the red and purple guilds.
Players also needed some way to join guilds, which is where the scheme action came from. Previously we tried an action called Fence, which let you cash in contracts for bonus points, but it didn't create interesting game play. We kept the concept of cashing in contracts for scheme, but made it an alternate source of resource acquisition. The opportunity cost of cashing in a contract earlier is traded for always getting six resources, possibly from a world you don't yet control. Then infiltrating a guild during the scheme action gives the player the option of trading resources in the present for some number of points at end of game. And as a bonus, if they take this option they'll have additional strategic direction.
Rebecca: Scheme (or Fence) went through so many revisions. Being able to convert a difficult contract into six resources (even without an agent there) and possibly some points is very useful to certain strategies. Other strategies use it to fund their Guild bribes. It's one of those actions that's very flexible.
I really like how Acquire, Gamble, Scheme, Contract Board, and 3:1 resource trades are such different ways to get goods. Sometimes when we mention that Syndicate was partly inspired by Ticket To Ride, people think that set collecting might be a game mechanism; however, our good production mechanisms are quite different. One option is to build routes using only the goods of planets/moons in my network or explore a nearby world just for its resources. If I'm short a single good, I might try my luck at gambling or take the more expensive 3:1 trade that doesn't cost me an action. I could instead decide to scheme a contract away to get colors from a planet where I don't have agents, forgoing the potential for additional points. Sometimes the colors on the contract board will determine which contract I choose. The game is set up so that players have choices in how they get goods; they aren't at the mercy of the train deck or die roll to get certain resources into the system.
Last, there was some discussion as to whether the complexity of guilds was suitable for an initial play of the game, or if they should be added into later plays (similar to the action cards in Agricola). We tried both ways, but in the end they stayed. Even with the option of infiltrating guilds, The Phoenix Syndicate is slightly less complicated than Endeavor and Macao, two excellent games that didn't need a "training wheels" mode.
Rebecca: I'd say The Phoenix Syndicate is "less complicated" from a rules or teaching perspective as there are fewer things for a new player to track than in, say, Endeavor. Strategically, it feels to me on par with Macao (one of my favorites), without a deck of unique ability cards. One thing I like about The Phoenix Syndicate is that I feel like I can see how my choices are affecting my strategy.
For more details on game play, you can download the not-quite-finished-as-we're-awaiting-final-artwork rulebook (PDF) or check out the Kickstarter project which ends in early May 2012.
Ted Vessenes
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Not sure what to choose during game night? Perhaps this handy-dandy "How to Choose the Perfect Board Game" flow chart will allieviate your worries:
(HT: That other Eric Martin)
• In a Tasty Minstrel Games newsletter, TMG's Michael Mindes writes, "I am doing an 'Ask Me Anything' on Reddit on Friday April 27th, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT (GMT -7)... For those of you not on Reddit, this will be a discussion where I field questions from anybody and everybody that wants to ask one." I'll confess to being "not on Reddit" and my efforts to find an appropriate place to link to failed; I did, however, run across Asmadi Games' Chris Cieslik "ask me anything" post, so perhaps I'm just an old fuddie-duddie and not hep to what the youngsters are all doing these days. (Bonus EM reference: Reddit's general manger is named Erik Martin.)
• Can you compare board game genres to music? BGG user Martin G – full name presumably Erig Martin G – has done so in a blog post on BGG. I disagree with many of the classifications in the original post, but I suppose that's the magic of argument and differing points of view. Lots of fun comments in the thread, many of them way above my level of music knowledge (which consists mostly of how to search for bands on Pandora).
• Tom Vasel – whose name is nothing like "Eric Martin" – has posted nominees for the Dice Tower Gaming Awards, with nominees coming from games released in 2011. With A Few Acres of Snow on the nominee list for game of the year, I expect to hear more grumbling from Jesse Dean given his commentary on reviewer neglect in praising a broken game.
As an aside, and to put more "Eric Martin" in this Eric Martin-free item, I have now fully grasped the fact that I'm in no way a member of the Cult of the New, as I sometimes picture myself. Perhaps I was at some point, glomming onto new games every few weeks as I attempted to gain personal experience with every release and build a mental catalog of what's out there, but those days are clearly in the past as I've played precisely one of the games nominated for "game of the year" on the DTGA list and I have strong interest in playing only two of the remaining nine titles. Of the first 200 games out of nearly 1,000 items listed as 2011 releases on BGG, I've played 22 of them. Who knows? Maybe that 11% playing rate still pops me into Cult of the New status for some, but given the number of games being released, I don't see how it's physically possible to play a huge percentage of them – much less play them enough times to meaningfully get a handle on which ones rise above the rest. Maybe that's just me, though...
Wed Apr 25, 2012 12:58 pm
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David Sirlin
United States
California
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Casual versus(??) Hardcore
"Casual" and "hardcore" can be a false dichotomy. Which one is World of Warcraft, for example? It's pretty casual friendly, and yet it's not at all casual to the hardcore raiders who spend literally more hours than a full time job at the game. Likewise, Puzzle Strike is pretty casual friendly, having kid characters, a pink box, and fairly easy rules. At the end of this post, I'll talk about the casual side of Puzzle Strike, and the several ways we're really turning up the casual appeal even more in the future, but for now, I want to tell you purely about the hardcore side – about Puzzle Strike as a serious, competitive, tournament game. Make no mistake, one of the missions of the game is:
Quote: For Puzzle Strike to be the best competitive deck-building game there is.
Okay, great mission and all, but how do we accomplish that mission? Let me tell you all that's gone into making that happen, and the challenges we've faced along the way. Here are the criteria that have always been at the heart of the project:
-----• Asymmetric design
-----• Player interaction
-----• Quick access to the meat of the game
-----• Strategically interesting dynamics
-----• Exciting moments built into the system
-----• Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
-----• Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Asymmetric design
In Puzzle Strike, you start by choosing a character. Each character has different abilities, allows for different gameplay, and appeals to different player personalities. I've been involved in competitive scenes for games for a long time and the excitement added by having a cast of characters from which to choose is enormous. The two-player version of the base set alone has 55 different character matchups, while the expansion brings that to 210 different matchups. There are so many nuances to knowing how to play all these matchups differently that symmetric games feel flat by comparison. Even apart from the big gameplay advantages of asymmetric games, there's a boost to the player community by having so much to debate and explore. Different characters also allow different players to find their personal playstyle in at least one of the many options.
Though your opinion may differ, to me a symmetric game would be a non-starter here, as in not eligible to even be considered as the best deck-building game for pure competition.
Player interaction
There's a reason to have games with low player interaction. Maybe you'd rather all play a mostly solitaire game without having the "harshness" of directly competing. Even in games with low direct interaction, there can be indirect forms of interaction. That said, this is not a great recipe for a real competitive game. The more player interaction there is, the more opportunity there is to display the kind of skill that should matter in a competitive game. A game with literally zero player interaction would still require skills, of course, and those would probably be the skills of optimization. It's just that a race of several non-interactive players optimizing is a missed opportunity when instead we could have a game of very high interaction, allowing for maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.
I've heard the terms "contested" and "uncontested" skills used, here. Uncontested skills are the kinds your opponent can't do anything about. In a video game like Street Fighter, that would be the part where you perform a difficult combo, for example. Contested skills are the kinds your opponent CAN do something about. In Street Fighter, the example would be getting at just the right range to do your move because your opponent can move his own character to affect that range. While uncontested skills can certainly exist in a good competitive game, the focus really needs to be on constested skills – at least if long-lasting tournament play is the goal.
In Puzzle Strike, the "crash" mechanism builds player interaction into the core of the game. You are trying to fill up the other guy's gem pile full of gems, and you do that by "crashing" (breaking) gems in your own pile and sending them to your opponent. He can "counter-crash" to stop those incoming gems. He might want to because doing so actually removes gems from the system, which slightly lengthens the game. Counter-crashing this way also doesn't cost an "action" so that's another reason to do it.
But there are reasons on the other side, too. Simply accepting those incoming gems and crashing on your own turn would require spending an action, but it would also yield a bit of money to buy better chips. And it would NOT remove gems from the system, so if you're in a good rushdown position, this might be a better option.
The point is that this kind of direct interaction is at the forefront of the game. Also, the red attack chips all have big effects on the game, and the blue defense chips have pretty relevant effects, too. You are often faced with decisions how about to respond to your opponent, and whether you should try to disrupt them, rush them down, or hang back and build your own economy. All the *indirect* interaction that's common in deck-building games is still there, too, of course – the part where your choices of which chips to buy depend on which chips you see your opponents buying. Luckily that's not *all* the interaction though.
Quick access to the meat of the game
In Puzzle Strike you start with your three character chips in your deck, so you can play those starting on the first turn. In some games, you start with basically blank cards and it takes more turns to get into the real meat of the game. This might sound like a small point, but in a tournament game, it's important to use every minute of gameplay to its full extent – or to cut that gameplay. If you want to run several games in series, it's kind of boring if the first few turns of all those games take a while to get things going, so it was a conscious decision to give players character chips they can play right away, even before the buys from the deck-building start to kick in.
Strategically interesting dynamics
Of course a game has to be actually interesting to play on a strategic level if it is to be a long-lasting competitive game. In June 2010, I wrote an article about how difficult it was to arrive at interesting dynamics that weren't degenerate. The short version is that the money system, the purple chips that manipulate the gems in your gem pile, and the delicate balance between rushdown, building econ, delaying the game, and ending the game were tough to get right. It's tough because the game system is interconnected, meaning that just about everything affects everything else. It's easier to balance a game if you have some subsystems that can be adjusted without messing up everything else, but if you do manage to get such a dense system to actually work, it means an even richer strategic playground to play in.
I also was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, and balancing that game was challenging, too. It was based on a game that had been played heavily in tournaments for 14 years, so changing anything about balance at all is a bit like threading a needle. Also, if you change anything about a character to fix a specific matchup, then it will affect all the other matchups. At first glance, it means the system is so interconnected that it's damn hard to work with. But in Street Fighter, it was actually possible to use a lot of tricks to make that balancing challenge easier. By thinking hard enough, many solutions to balance problems in a matchup could have minimal effects on all the other matchups.
One example is Dhalsim vs. Guile. If you aren't familiar with Street Fighter, Dhalsim has stretchy limbs that reach across the screen, while Guile often likes to stay back and throw his projectile called the Sonic Boom. This was a problem, a boring match. One champion tournament player suggested that barely changing the hitbox on one of Dhalsim's stretchy punches would mean the difference between it getting a clean hit against the Sonic Boom and trading hits. And that one change would really improve the gameplay of the match. Changing that hitbox had very little effect on any other match because it meant changing something on the backside of the character in a place where fighting moves don't usually interact anyway.
I'm not sure if you followed that, but the contrast is that in Puzzle Strike, there are usually no such tricks available to us. Every damn thing affects every other damn thing, which means a lot of work on the development end, but also a lot more ability of the player to affect the game with nuanced play than there would be otherwise.
Exciting moments built into the system
That last section might have sounded a bit dry. Although strategy is very important, there has to be excitement in a competitive game. Now that we understand games more than the olden days, I think we know that when making a competitive game, we want to build exciting moments into the system. I don't mean to force them artificially, but to create a game system that we know is likely to generate exciting moments.
In Puzzle Strike, there's a comeback mechanism that's modelled after the very interesting comeback mechanism in the video game Puzzle Fighter. (I was also lead designer of Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, by the way, so it's no surprise I chose this theme for Puzzle Strike!) Anyway in both games, when you have a lot of gems in your gem pile, you are closer to losing in some sense. If your side fills up to the top, you lose. In another sense, you're doing just fine though. One reason is you have more ammunition to fire back at the other player. And on top of that, both games have a "height bonus" that gives you an advantage for having a lot of gems. That means there's a push-your-luck element there, which also helps as a comeback mechanism. In Puzzle Strike, the height bonus allows you to draw more chips per turn the higher your gem pile is – so when you're close to losing, you can do even bigger combos.
Another conscious design decision to increase the drama of the game is WHEN the win condition is checked. The basic idea is that if the various kinds of gems in your gem pile add up to a total of ten or more, then you lose. But you don't instantly lose; this is checked only at the end of your turn. You often go over that limit, then on your turn manage to save yourself and stay in the game. It gets really exciting when your opponent sends you way, way, way over that limit of ten, and you somehow manage to pull off an amazing turn to throw it all back at him. This isn't an accidentaly exciting moment though – it's there on purpose an example of designing excitement into the game system.
Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
In my article series about balancing multiplayer competitive games I talk about the difference between two different usages of the word "balance". Sometimes people mean balancing the set of options available during gameplay. Both symmetric and asymmetric games have to care about that. If there are several kinds of moves you can make, but all of them basically suck except one kind, then that isn't "balanced" in a sense.
Asymmetric games have to deal with that AND then also deal with making sure the different starting options (in our case, all the characters) are fair against each other. Let's talk about that first kind of balance first, though: the viable options during gameplay, regardless of there even being different characters.
The article I linked earlier touched on the challenges of getting this kind of balance to work. After releasing the game, we've had a whole lot experience with it though, and have seen across dozens of tournaments exactly how different strategies are used – or not used – and there has been a threat to the balance of viable strategies we've been facing for a long time. The third edition of Puzzle Strike (and the Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion) make one change – one seemingly small change – that has a huge effect across the entire game to address. But first, what is the problem?
The problem is "mono-purple". That is, the strategy of ignoring most of the bank and buying only the purple chips that directly affect your gem pile. Playing in this way is kind of short circuiting the game, avoiding big swaths of it. That could be fine depending on how powerful such a strategy is. So is it powerful? Well, yes and no. Some characters in the second edition of Puzzle Strike tended dangerously close to mono-purple power, while others used more diverse strats. Then we released the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack to address that. The situation was much improved, as more diverse strategies were viable than ever.
In developing the expansion, though, we were often faced with too small of a design space. We make an interesting character, but then the game system's reward for playing in the boring mono-purple way is a bit too much unless we take specific steps to fight that with various extra clauses on lots of chips that punish such a strategy. It also left us little design space in which to create new puzzle chips. (Those are the ones in the bank that change every game.) If a puzzle chip is too weak, people will ignore it and just buy purples – but purples are so strong that when we turn up the power of puzzle chips to compete, they often have to be so strong as to be game-breaking if they are tuned just a hair wrong. What we need is more breathing room here, more space to create chips that are of a reasonable power level compared to purple chips.
In another article, I talked about how I looked toward Starcraft for an answer to something, and their model of late-game units like Carriers that could smash early game defense sparked me to create uncounter-crashable 4-gems in Puzzle Strike. So again, I looked to Starcraft to answer our troubles here. Our trouble is that a player who buys only purples is trying to end the game as soon as possible; he is doing a six pool zergling rush, or something – but if the opponent holds off this rush, he is no better position. In Starcraft, the rushing player would have a big economic disadvantage, so there is more of a tradeoff in whether to rush. What makes matters worse is that in Puzzle Strike, it's not really even analogous to the rushing player having zerglings. Those are early game units that fade in effectiveness later. (Yeah, yeah they can be upgraded in Starcraft, but that's beside the point.) Anyway, all those purple chips in Puzzle Strike are just as good late as early, so it's like rushing for no economic disadvantage with hydralisks or mutalisks or something that you can win the game with later anyway.
This maneuver needs an economic disadvantage for the system to make strategic sense – and now it does.
The Combine chip (the basic purple chip that combines two smaller gems into one bigger one) now costs $1 of in-game money each time you play it. If you buy and play only this one chip over and over, you are rushing to end the game, but if your opponent buys just one or two to hold you off, he will be able to survive and extend the game. At that point, you will have spent several turns buying low cost chips, while his economy was not really affected, so he will have better tech going into the mid-game.
Along with this change, we also adjusted several other chips to allow for rushdown to still be possible, just in a way that requires actually using your character chips and puzzle chips from the bank. Overall, in high-level tournament play, there's a more diverse set of viable strategies now. Rushing, econ, disruption, and engine-building strats all coexist.
Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Once the game system works, we need to have a set of fair characters – that is, no character can be too good or too weak: Too good is a much worse problem because that invalidates all other characters; too weak is just minorly unfortunate because no one will play that character. After years of iteration based on tournament results, I think we're in good spot now. Twenty different characters(!) that all seem to have their uses in high level play, without any particular one of them dominating too much.
I could go on forever about the balancing process of these characters, but instead I'd rather talk about the goal of even balancing them in the first place. It seems that most game publishers are interested in releasing more and more and more content, like expansions every three months. New, new, new. I'm not interested in that at all, and it actually runs counter to the goal of creating a highly-polished competitive game. Instead of adding more and more, we are zeroing in on a better and better game. Each iteration has been more polished than the last, better gameplay dynamics, and better balance. If we simply add more and more, yeah, that appeals to some players, but it doesn't actually produce something legitimately great. It means instead of fixing whatever issues older chips / cards have, we would be waiting for them to rotate out of tournament play. We'd be forsaking those earlier sets and letting them lie with whatever issues tournament play had uncovered.
I'd rather give you all the very best versions of my games that we're able to produce, at that given moment. And with years of development effort now spent on making Puzzle Strike Third Edition (plus the Shadows expansion!) the best competitive game it can be, I can truthfully say that this is the best version we've produced so far, by a big margin. I look forward to seeing the competitive scene grow, and for years of Puzzle Striking to come.
You can also play Puzzle Strike at FantasyStrike.com for free, by the way. Some players have logged THOUSANDS of games of Puzzle Strike, and there are tournaments all the time, in addition to casual play. Thanks to the entire community of players who have all contributed to refining the game into its current awesome state.
•••
While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play for expert tournament players, not everyone even cares about that. I mean, is it fun in the first place? How does it fare with more than two players?
Free-For-All Mode: Second Edition
In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, the four-player mode has player elimination. If your gem pile fills up, you're out of the game and the other players continue. Also, you can't choose who you crash to; you must always crash to the player to your left. ("Crash" means break gems in your own gem pile and send them to another player's gem pile.)
There's a reason the second edition worked this way and a reason why the third edition doesn't. Regarding player elimination, while it's not a desirable feature really, it's better than a system with "lame duck" gameplay. That term refers to a player who has no possible way to win a game, but who is somehow still in the game. For example, in a deck-bulding game in which you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's possible for one player to be far enough behind that he cannot possibly get enough VP to win, even if he got all the remaining VP cards. Whenever you have a lame-duck player, you are inviting kingmaker. In other words, if you have a player who can't possibly win anymore, you are inviting the problem of that player making moves that will affect which *other* player will win. And beyond that, it's just a stupid feeling to be in a lame-duck situation.
Player elimination solves that problem. In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, if you're not out yet, you can still win. In order to reduce the downtime after you're out, the final crash that puts you over the top "overflows" and can possibly knock out other players at the same time. And besides that, the game is usually pretty fast anyway.
Then there's the other point: in Puzzle Strike Second Edition you can crash only to the left, not to anyone you want. If you could crash to anyone you want, the optimal strategy is both obvious and stupid: You should form a pre-game alliance with someone, and agree to gang up on the other players to eliminate them one by one, then face off with your "partner". Any free-for-all game with targeted attacks faces this problem, and I think any thoughtful design has to do something to prevent or minimize it. Hence your inability to choose your target in the second edition.
Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve real problems, a lot of people just don't like those things. Also, even though the game usually ends quickly after someone is eliminated, there are unfortunately times where it can drag on much too long.
Free-For-All Mode: Third Edition
With the Third Edition (and the Shadows expansion), I wanted to get rid of player elimination, but somehow not introduce the lame-duck problem and somehow avoid the problem of pre-game alliances, too. This was actually a tough nut to crack, and I think it took over a year to really figure out.
Now, the game ends at the same time for everyone whenever anyone's gem pile fills up. At that point, the winner is the player with the lowest gem pile. (If there's a tie, there's a tie-breaking procedure where everyone takes another turn.) Also, you can crash gems to any player you want, and you can even counter-crash to "save" other players from losing. The dynamics that result from this are non-obvious, somewhat bizarre, and quite interesting.
First, you can't really even make a pre-game alliance with someone. If you both decide to double-team another player, whichever player in this alliance has a higher gem pile total will realize he shouldn't allow that killing blow to happen, or he'll just lose. In fact, ANY time a player is about to have his or her gem pile filled to the top, that player ALWAYS has another "friend" in the game. Whichever other player doesn't have the lowest gem pile really wants to save the poor player who is about to cause the game to end. Who you're "friends" with necessarily shifts over the course of the game, depending on how poised you are to win when someone else causes the end-game condition.
I urge you to give it a try. I will say that the feedback from playtesters on this mode was pretty consistent. Almost every one of them said, "This mode sounds terrible", then they played, then they said "This is great, I'm never playing the player elimination mode again." Ha! Perhaps it would have been better marketing-wise to have a mode that played terribly but *sounded* like it would be good. I will settle for the other way around though!
2v2 Team Battle Mode
This mode is pretty self-explanatory. Have you played Two-Headed Giant in Magic: The Gathering? It's pretty much like that – and it's nice to have someone on your side when you're trying to have a good time.
Custom Clockwork Mode
In Flash Duel: Second Edition, I put in a mode where you can draft your own character by mixing and matching chips from different characters. People really liked that, so it's in the new Puzzle Strike as well. Enjoy!
Panic Time
You can never get 100% of the people to agree on anything, ever. That is, until this rule. It is the first time in human history that everyone agreed that a thing was good.
The "Panic Time" rule simulates in a puzzle game when time is running out and the pieces are falling faster. It exists to end games that are going too long. When stacks of chips in the bank run out, players have to ante 2-gems instead of 1-gems. If the game goes a bit longer, Panic Time turns to Danger Time in which they must ante 3-gems. If it goes a bit longer than that, Deadly Time activates where they must ante 4-gems – which are *un-countercrashable* in Puzzle Strike!
95% of the reason this rule exists is for new players, and 5% is for experts. Sometimes new players struggle to build a good enough deck to finish each other off. (Often they buy too many money chips because that is a good strategy in other deck-building games, but not in Puzzle Strike.) To help address that, the rulebook now gives basic advice on how to play effectively. But more than that, the Panic Time rule will kick in and help you end the game if your deck is getting too bloated to do the job effectively.
When good players play, Panic Time rarely kicks in – like I said, it's mostly for beginners – but when it does kick in during expert play, the experts are thankful. Once in a while, two experts have the opposite problem as the beginners. They each manage to build such efficient and amazing decks that they stay exactly equal and struggle to finish one another off. While this is rare, it's really stupid when it happens, and players will even skip playing the mega-powerful Master Puzzler chip in this situation because all the good chips it could get them are already gone from the bank. When experts do manage to reach this kind of deadlock (and again, that's not often), an end-the-game force from Panic Time is welcome.
Components
The Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack came with extra components: playmats and screens to hide your chips on the table. Even though these things aren't necessary, they sure help. And just as importantly, they look cool. It's just more fun when there's some extra visual appeal to a game.
The screens each teach a different game rule using amusing 8-bit character art, and if you don't like holding a bunch of chips in your hand, they offer an alternative:
The playmats are now boards in Puzzle Strike Third Edition and Puzzle Strike Shadows:
A lot of reviews said that after playing with those components, they couldn't imagine playing the game without them. Okay, fine – they come right in the box now! And also, the box is bigger so there's even more space to hold the extra components.
•••
If any of this sounds good to you – the intense competitive game, or the new multiplayer modes and extra components – get in on the Kickstarter project for the Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion as well as the Puzzle Strike Third Edition base set.
Thanks!
Sirlin
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
-
• The UK publisher Ragnar Brothers will debut a new game at the 2012 UK Games Expo, held May 25-27, and as is sometimes the case with the Ragnars, the design is perpendicular to past releases. Here's a short description of Anyways from the publisher:
Quote: Anyways is a fast-paced, interactive word game in which players place one letter at a time from their hand onto the board, while trying to maximize their score. Words score in every direction: horizontally, vertically and diagonally; forwards or backwards. In other words, Anyways! Players choose whether to restock their hand from the consonant bag or the vowel bag, and letters vary in value. There is a unique scoring system for this unique game. The tiles are solid wood and in black with colored letters, making for a stylish display!
• Writing from Alan Moon's somewhat industry-only gaming event The Gathering of Friends, blogger/cartoonist Debbie Ridpath Ohi shows a couple of pics of game components from City of Horror, due out from Repos Production (with Asmodee distributing) in time for a Gen Con debut in August 2012.
• In a another blog post from TGoF, Ohi shows off Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition, an apparently forthcoming title at Spiel 2012 from Bézier Games and "Legend Dan Hoffman". I expect Bézier's Ted Alspach to send me a breathless email chock-full of superlatives and virtual pats-on-the-back about this title in the near future because that's just the kind of guy he is...
• Belgian publisher Flatlined Games sold out of the first edition of Ken Rush's Rumble in the House – all 2,900 copies – in just three months following its debut at Spiel 2011, but as of late April 2012 the game is back in print once more, with a slightly larger box to keep everything flat and the lid closed during shipping. While the first edition contained rules in five languages, the new edition comes in two versions: one French/Dutch and the other English/German/Spanish.
• Fantasy Flight Games has announced a new expansion for Battles of Westeros – the House Baratheon Army Expansion, due out Q2 2012.
• French game news site TricTrac details some of the changes in GOSU2, the recently announced reboot of GOSU from Moonster Games. Each of the goblin cards will have some combination of seven icon-oriented powers, with those powers existing in both regular and MAX versions. The "vision" power, for example, has you draw five cards and keep one at the basic level, with MAX allowing you to keep two cards. Destruction either lets you destroy a free card (basic) or swap the position of two cards on the same level, then destroy a free card (MAX). The «link» ability mentioned in the previous announcement involves the addition of a card to one's army. Cards have link icons on all four sides, and as you add a card to your army, you're linking it to one or more existing cards, which grants your cards power in various ways.
• TricTrac also notes that Perepau LListosella's Sidibaba, which publisher Hurrican debuted at Spiel 2011, has now reached retail stores in France after publication delays caused by production errors. Asmodee is handling distribution of the title in the U.S., as noted in this February 2012 news item, but the previously announced April 2012 release date is likely pushed back a tad since the game is just hitting French stores now.
• Two titles from Queen Games – Kimmo Sorsamo's Kairo and Donald X. Vaccarino's Kingdom Builder: Nomads – have been released in some parts of the world (Kairo in France, Nomads in the UK) and are undoubtedly making their way to parts of the world yet unblessed with these particular titles – or maybe they're not and Queen will force people to order each new release in 2012 from a separate country in order to encourage inter-continental oneness and gamer unity across borders. That sounds like a reasonable business plan, right?
-
Michael Fox
United Kingdom
Milton Keynes
Bucks
-
[A blank screen clicks on with a burst of static. An isometric view appears of a practically bare room, bathed in darkness. A shaven-headed man in glasses sits handcuffed by a table in the centre of the room. After a few moments, a grizzly looking man in a suit walks into view. In a gruff voice he identifies itself as Special Agent Drew Marshall of the CIA, Games Division.]
Marshall: Interview recording with designer Michael Fox, Sprocket Games, date [garbled by tape]. For the tape, can you confirm your name and occupation?
Fox: Michael Fox, game designer.
[Marshall laughs]
Marshall: Game designer, son? Well, we'll see about that. You want to tell me about this...what is it, "Ace of Spies"?
[Beat.]
Fox: It all started with a Cadbury's Selection Box.
Marshall: Don't mess around with me, boy. What are you talking about?
[Fox clears his throat.]
Fox: A Selection Box. Back in England it's kind of traditional to get a box of chocolate bars at Christmas and a lot of the time the back of the box will have a little game or activity on the back to cut out and play with for about ten minutes. Then you forget about it as you gorge yourself on far too much sugar. Back in October 2010, at an event in London called GameCamp, a bunch of us were taking part in an open-to-all design competition. The task was to design a new game for the Christmas 2011 Box. The organizers were looking for something different, something new...something that could potentially hold kids' interest, really.
Marshall: Go on.
Fox: Plenty of people were involved – some in teams, some solo. I was in a group of four alongside my friend Chris O'Regen and some glorious random Internet strangers: Neil Meyer and Mark Rivera.
Marshall: [Interrupting] Yeah, we know about those guys. Had them on our radar for a while now. In fact, I've got a little surprise for you.
[A corner of the room lights up, revealing a broken-looking man. He looks tired and has seemingly been beaten. His mouth is gagged. Marshall walks over to the man and removes the gag.]
Marshall: See, we've already spoken to Mr. Rivera. We didn't much like what he had to say.
Rivera: [Gasping to get words out] Don't tell him anything, Michael!
[Fox looks at Rivera, confused.]
Fox: Dude, you do know that these interviews are done to promote the game we made, don't you?
[Beat. Rivera looks at Fox, also confused.]
Rivera: Ummmm...no. But still, don't tell him anything!
[Fox looks at the camera and shakes his head in a "really?" kind of way.]
Fox: Anyway, we worked well together. We toiled away for a few hours, ideas were bandied about, and eventually a game was born that we were actually pretty proud of. Not bad considering it was the product of only a few hours work. (There was a strict time limit that we had to adhere to.) The various games were tested by volunteers and eventually...well, we came second. For a bunch of noobs who'd never even considered designing stuff before, we felt it was a pretty decent result! And then we forgot all about it.
Marshall: Or so you thought.
Fox: Yeah. It seems that after that initial brush with designing something from scratch, we didn't stop thinking about how to take ideas from nothing to a playable state. A couple of months down the line, Mark got in touch and asked me a question that had been brewing in my mind for some time: Did I want to collaborate with him on the creation of a new game? Of course I said yes, and we began the process of throwing ideas together and seeing what we thought would work. Eventually, we settled on a game that we initially called Espionage, a glorious tale of spies speeding around the streets of Victorian London in horse-drawn carriages, delivering secrets and cutting their enemies down. Everything about it was brilliant, from the way that players collaborated to how the card actions worked. Immediately we thought we were on to a winner.
Marshall: A bit presumptuous, wouldn't you say, Mr. Fox?
[Rivera butts in.]
Rivera: Shut up! We're geniuses!
Marshall: I told you yesterday, boy – keep your mouth shut!
[Rivera is silenced with a slap from Marshall.]
Fox: Seriously, Mark, you're not making this easy for yourself.
[Beat.]
Fox: Well, we know now that the damn thing was just far too complicated. In our excitement, we'd managed to create something that was so unwieldy, so ridiculous, that it was pretty much unplayable. Our worst fears were realized when we had a very rough prototype at the UK Games Expo in 2011 that sat there looking difficult and miserable. Mark and I had created this Frankenstein's Monster of a thing that was no good to anyone.
Marshall: You ever heard the Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler"? There's a line, "You've got to know when to fold 'em"?
Fox: Man, did we know that it was foldin' time. A couple of weeks after that weekend, we realized that this was something that needed to be put down – and quick. However, it wasn't all doom and gloom; we also knew that somewhere in this mess were some decent ideas, some nice concepts that could potentially rise like a phoenix. All we had to do was find them and so began the process of sifting through everything to discover what not only worked, but was also actually fun. By making Espionage so complex, we'd sucked out a lot of the enjoyment. We quickly came to the conclusion that we needed to simplify it – a lot – and make it more accessible to the players. Further discussions over Skype and via emails and texts eventually saw us arrive at the decision to develop a card game, still based on spies and their craft but now a lot quicker to play and, dare I say it...good.
Marshall: So what happened next?
Fox: The ideas came thick and fast. We eventually set on a game that's built around the concept of four separate decks of cards, three representing the European cities of London, Paris and Berlin, with a fourth comprised of missions that players would need to complete. By drawing cards from the decks, players would be able to collect the elements they needed to finish these tasks which would score them points. The endgame was still a little nebulous, but what would become Ace of Spies was finally born...and the hard work began.
[Fox pauses and takes a drink of water.]
Fox: Players essentially take on the roles of spymasters, collecting Agents, Tools, Intelligence and Locations to complete their Missions. Some require very specific elements from a certain city and as such are worth a lot more points than one that could be finished by grabbing cards from anywhere. Early builds of the game were kept simple – we'd learnt our lesson from Espionage! – but we soon worked out that despite the fact the engine was fine, it needed something a little bit more...
Marshall: There's always a little bit more, didn't you know that? Designers are never happy.
Fox: Yeah, well, I set about tinkering with the three decks. Mark was pretty busy at the time, but I was more than happy to throw myself into the project now that we had something we were okay with, and I eventually settled on rebalancing the deck contents; each deck contains eight agents and eight locations, but there's a different emphasis now for the three cities. One has more Tools, for example, while another has more Interventions.
Marshall: Interventions?
Fox: Yeah! I've not mentioned them yet, have I? These are cards that can be played whenever you like: out of turn, when it's your go, whatever. I wanted something in the game that would really reflect the nastiness of spycraft and so the Interventions came to be. After all, the world of espionage isn't all sunshine and roses; it's a hard job and I didn't want the life of the spies in our game to be an easy one. These cards allow you to screw over your opponents – stealing cards, destroying missions, that kind of thing. There are a few cards in there that can protect you, too, but a lot of the time you'll just have to keep your head down and hope that no one sees you when you're pulling into a lead. The best spies are always able to divert attention away from themselves, aren't they? Of course, you can always take a more aggressive path if you so choose, but that could really backfire...
Marshall: So, once the decks were done and you were happy with it, what was your next step?
Fox: Well, then we went into full-on playtesting mode. I'd been trying out things as I'd been going along, of course, but then I made a relatively decent set of cards on Photoshop for Mark and myself to use and we started playing games with friends. The feedback was good; people liked the game and offered up a few suggestions, some of which were incorporated into it, some that weren't... It felt like I was building a new version every couple of days at that time, taking out cards and replacing them with new stuff. Soon it was time to widen our circle of testers and we eventually ended up with twelve groups around the world who were playing it and reporting back with new issues and ideas. Again, some were considered and discarded, but a fair few have now contributed to the final version. Anyway, we settled on what we thought was a finished product and the time came to start shopping it around.
Marshall: Never an easy thing to do. How did you go about doing that?
Fox: Being total noobs, we of course decided that the best place to do this was Spiel – the biggest games fair in the world. Looking back now, I realize that this was utterly mental. Mark was only there for a day whilst I attended the whole thing...
Rivera: Ooooh, Germany. That was nice.
Fox: ...and in between recording interviews for The Little Metal Dog Show I was hawking the game to folks who were already suffering from game overload. Still, a few folks expressed interest, which was a lot more than I was expecting. The most positive was Colby Dauch from Plaid Hat Games; he's someone I've got a lot of time for. The guy built his company from scratch on the back of Summoner Wars and that's something I'd love to do myself one day. I played Ace of Spies with him in the Playdek booth, and he fired out a few ideas on where he thought it could be improved – it didn't take too long to see that he was right. At that point it was like a slightly undercooked cake, still a bit soggy in the middle but certainly getting there.
Marshall: Did you meet with any other contacts in Germany?
Fox: There was also Richard Bliss, known in the industry as The Game Whisperer, and it's safe to say that he's been a huge influence on getting the game to where it is now. He was incredibly supportive and gave us some great advice that both Mark and I are very glad we followed. It's always good to have experienced industry folks at your side. Sure, it's nice to learn the ropes but you don't want to have people take advantage of your naivety.
[Silence]
Marshall: So, do you believe the Essen trip was useful?
Fox: Yes. Definitely. It was around now the last major change was made to the game, the addition of a secondary ability for each of the Agents in the game that could be played instead of using them as part of a Mission. This was pretty much a direct suggestion from Colby, and I honestly reckon it adds so much to the game. That extra level of strategy that we were looking for to tip it over the edge was finally there – all we needed now was a bit more testing, so we passed the new decks out to the various teams and waited for their opinions.
Marshall: And what did they come back with?
Fox: Genuinely, the news was great. The game played well, people had plenty of options. The only problem was that some folks felt there could be issues with the endgame, so some tweaking was necessary. We eventually worked out that the best way to solve this was to finish the game when one player either completed seven missions or hit seventy points; this allowed people to take different approaches, either trying to complete a few big point missions or race to grab lots of smaller ones. Once we'd decided on that, Ace of Spies finally felt ready for the world – and a good job too, because people were sniffing around.
Marshall: And that would be Mr. White, your shadowy benefactor, yes?
Fox: Yeah. He keeps himself to himself, but he's been incredible. He came to us with his associate saying that he wanted to get the game out there so players could get their hands on it. Within what felt like no time at all, contracts had been signed, artwork samples were flying all over the place. It's all getting very exciting. It's strange. Everything felt very up in the air before but now...it all feels very real. And a bit scary.
Marshall: Why scary?
Rivera: Because you beat me up and you are a scary man! [Spits blood and a tooth out on to the floor.]
Fox: [Stares at Rivera.] Well, it's going to be out there for all to see. It's like sending a child out into the world! This is our creation and we want people to like it! We know that we've got a game that plays great but also will look utterly gorgeous; we can only hope that gamers get behind us.
Marshall: Interesting. So what's happening with Ace of Spies now?
Fox: We're spreading the word about the game as much as we can. Folks can follow our reports from the Base of Spies by checking out our Twitter feed, and we'll also be shamelessly promoting the game on a few podcasts. There's the BGG page as well that we'll be keeping up-to-date with information on the game and Kickstarter. As we're going down that route, we basically won't be keeping quiet until that very last second and we plan of making sure that all of our backers are kept completely up to date with what we're up to. There's no point in hiding our light under a bushel. We've got a brilliant game that we want everyone out there to play. It's accessible to such a wide range of players from kids who just want to beat up on their opponents to adults who are seeking the opportunity for a bit of strategy in a middle-weight card game – we just need to get it into the hearts and minds of the community. Oh, and their hands, too. That'd be good.
Marshall: Sure it would.
[Beat.]
Marshall: Right. That's enough for now, Mr. Fox. We'll be letting you go but be warned. We'll be keeping an eye on you and Ace of Spies. A real close eye. Understand?
[Silence]
Marshall: Nod all you like, I want to hear some words, son.
Fox: I understand. What about Mark?
Marshall: Him? We told him to leave three days ago, but he just won't go. Man's crazy.
[Screen returns to static. Tape clicks off.]
Addendum: Further surveillance has revealed that the Ace of Spies project has now gone live. Agents wishing to investigate further should begin at the game's Kickstarter page. Fox and Rivera are to remain under close watch until further notice.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
-
• Polish gaming magazine Świat Gier Planszowych has posted a cover shot of – yes, can you believe it?! – yet another game based on The Hobbit, this one a card game designed by Martin Wallace and published in Poland by Egmont Polska with Ted Nasmith providing the cover art.
To indulge in a bit of speculation, (1) The Hobbit Card Game appears to be based on the book and not the movie, (2) Fantasy Flight Games released a new board game based on The Hobbit book in 2010 (with Reiner Knizia providing the design of The Hobbit), (3) Egmont released a Polish edition of this Hobbit game, and (4) Ted Nasmith provided the artwork for FFG's 2001 board game The Hobbit (designed by Keith Meyers and Michael Stern).
Ipso ergo factotum speculatum, The Hobbit Card Game will be released by Fantasy Flight Games in English, just as it's releasing an expansion for its The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game based on The Hobbit – two expansions, actually. Remember, you heard the rumor here first... (HT: Mirosław Gucwa, editor-in-chief of Świat Gier Planszowych)
• In other Martin Wallace news, ICv2 reports that Asmodee will release a Few Acres of Snow-type deck-building game from Wallace in September/October 2012, but the game will be "for four players and in a different universe". To indulge in yet more speculation, this title is likely to be Mythotopia, discussed in this BGG thread in March 2012. In that thread, BGG user Jim Marshall provides an overview of Mythotopia based on three playing during a playtest session.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
-
• In a Kickstarter update, Jeremiah Lee at Cambridge Games Factory notes that "advanced shipping orders" of the black box version of Carl Chudyk's Glory to Rome will leave China by plane before the end of April 2012, with the remainder of the print run leaving by boat shortly afterward. A demo copy will be available at the 2012 Origins Game Fair, and KS backers can pick up their copies at the con, but no copies will be available for sale. Instead, writes Lee, "pending boat vs. ocean, and then customs, we expect games to be arriving at your doors in the summer" – i.e., Q3 2012.
• In a newsletter update, Tasty Minstrel Games notes that reprints of Belfort and Martian Dice, along with the yet-to-be-released For The Win, are being prepped for shipping and "if everything goes according to plan, then the games should be arriving in about six weeks" – i.e. the start of June 2012.
As for other releases coming from TMG, Village is in the finishing stages at Ludo Fact and will likely take six weeks or so to ship once finished, artwork is nearly done for Kings of Air and Steam (and I'll post a diary from designer Scott Almes before the game hits the market), and pre-press work has started on Ground Floor (now on Kickstarter).
• After having his previously self-published Elemental Clash picked up by T.O.G. Entertainment, designer Andreas Propst is once again bringing out the game on his own, this time via The Game Crafter. In addition to re-releasing Elemental Clash: The Basic Set and EC: Underworld, Propst is publishing a second expansion for the game: Elemental Clash: Spellforce. In a BGG blog post, Propst has detailed the contents of these new "Master Editions" as well as plans for quarterly expansions, with eight expansions already planned out.
• Spanish publisher nestorgames has published BASKETmind, a thirty-year-old design from Miguel Marqués, who has detailed the origin and development of the game in this BGG thread.
• Fantasy Flight Games has updated the release date for the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game, noting that the game "will be launching onto shelves in the summer of 2012" – which I'm listing on BGG as "Q3 2012" due to all those folks in the southern hemisphere. Hey, y'all!
What's more, FFG has announced a quintet of X-Wing expansion packs and four of those now have listings on BGG:
-----—X-Wing Expansion Pack
-----—Y-Wing Expansion Pack
-----—TIE Fighter Expansion Pack
-----—TIE Advanced Expansion Pack
Each of these expansions consists of a miniature of the starfighter named, new Upgrade cards, and Ship cards that include pilots to allow for squadron customization. The fifth expansion is a Dice Expansion Pack so that players don't have to pass dice back and forth during play.
• To close, I'll point out Joli Quentin Kansil's Solitaire for Two, which Gryphon Games now has launched on Kickstarter. Solitaire for Two (which actually plays with up to four) takes the solitaire game Klondike and adds two additional suits of cards and a point system to put a competitive spin on the game. Of course if you want to play Klondike using this release, which uses tiles instead of cards, that's possible, too... (KS link)
Thu Apr 19, 2012 11:42 pm
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
-
My apologies for the briefness of today's post. I'm on the road with limited Internet access, so I'm making do in short time!
• Steve Jackson Games has announced a July 2012 release date for two previously announced items: the Munchkin Conan standalone sequel/expansion and the Munchkin Skullkickers 15-card booster pack.
• In a convention report from The Gathering of Friends, designer Alan Moon's mostly industry-insider event, Dale Yu shows off a pic of Mayan Age, a worker-placement/resource-collection game from Czech Games Edition that also has a four-second video showing the game board gears in action. Four whole seconds!
• BGG user Henk Rolleman has loads of pics from Zuiderspel, a game convention in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, including shots of Michel Baudoin's Crash'em (a Spiel 2012 release from Baudoin's Wacky Works), Tetteretet from Sensalot (which needs a game entry), and many other Dutch-only releases.
• Today's Kickstarter item is a pair of items: the third edition of David Sirlin's Puzzle Strike and the standalone sequel/expansion Puzzle Strike Shadows, with the KS project being within striking distance (ho ho ho) within a day of launching. Says Sirlin, This expansion and the "redesigned base set has been a long time in the making. The online version at FantasyStrike.com has been adjusted and adjusted based on both tournament play and casual play, and I'd really like to lock it down and get the physical version totally in sync with the online version." Also from Sirlin's description:
Quote: Puzzle Strike Shadows has ten new characters, 24 new puzzle chips, new gameplay modes including a free-for-all mode with no player elimination, a 2v2 Team battle mode, and a customization mode. Hopefully it will have even more components, too, depending on how the stretch goals go.
(KS link)
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Brian Lewis
United States
Ypsilanti
Michigan
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I love games, and I know I'm not alone since you're reading this on BoardGameGeek, which means you share the same passion for games that I have developed over the years. The following story explains how my new game Titans of Industry went from idea to publication.
In 2007 my life took a different direction when I found out about the Origins convention in Columbus, Ohio. I had never been, and I wanted to give it a try. I booked a room at the Hyatt, then headed down for my first experience. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed! Tons of people playing board games, vendors selling all kinds of cool tchotchkes...I was in nerd nirvana!
Since it was my first time there, I didn't know what to do or try, so the majority of my trip was spent shopping and playing two-player games with a friend who had come with me. I mostly played Magic: The Gathering and didn't know much about Eurogames – but while at that convention I got a chance to see and experience a whole world of games that I did not know about.
I returned to Origins in 2009. I had booked my room at the Hyatt, bought my board room pass, and had money to pick up some new games. I sat down with my convention book and looked into sessions that would teach me how to play games in which I was interested. The three games I decided on were: Battlestar Galactica, Android (which had been given to me as a gift) and Race for the Galaxy. After playing these games, I had a new appreciation and fascination for all the different types of mechanisms employed in these games. I wanted to learn more and see what I could do on my own.
After returning from Origins I decided that I wanted to try my hand at designing a game. I had always loved games and puzzles, and wanted to stretch myself to see whether I could make one myself. I told a few friends that I was going to do it, and I heard the obligatory "Oh, that's cool" comments.
What was my game going to be about? How would it play? I had no idea – I just knew that I wanted to design a game.
I had always heard that you should write about what you know. Would that same philosophy work for game design? I was about to find out. At that time I was working as a retail manager for GameStop, so I decided to make a game about retail and businesses ownership. After deciding the design would be a card game, I came up with a series of businesses that could be purchased. There was also a stack of action cards. Five businesses were laid out, and you had your choice of three actions: You could purchase a business, play an action card, or take an action card. The action cards allowed you do something beneficial for your businesses or harmful to your opponent's businesses. (This is where my Magic: The Gathering background influenced the design.) I called it Entrepreneur.
The businesses produced income, which then in turn allowed you to purchase more businesses. The game ended when someone had built 12 businesses, and whoever had the most VPs won. After producing my cards in Excel, it was time to give it a playtest. I played with two friends, and the game lasted about 25 minutes as my friend Mike broke the game within the first ten minutes. He was able to see card combinations that produced a lot of money, which in turn allowed him to buy the most expensive businesses and use the action cards to get even more businesses. He won by a large margin.
Examples of the original Entrepreneur cards
He was very kind in his critique, but I knew that some things were fundamentally flawed. I put the cards back in their tuck boxes and set them on a shelf, thinking "I'll get back to this when I have time."
Well, as you may have guessed, those tuck boxes gathered a lot of dust. I was working two jobs (a second job delivering pizzas, then a second job working for Apple retail). I was still playing the occasional game, but didn't have as much time to play as I wanted. I remember listening to the radio and hearing about this website called Meetup.com, so I checked it out. It was pretty cool! I decided to start a board game group and see who would show up. I contacted a local retailer (Fun 4 All in Ypsilanti, MI; give it a try if you haven't) and the owner Rich said we could host the group at his place on Wednesday nights. (All the other nights were filled with D&D or Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh!). I agreed, and the Ann Arbor Board Game Group was born. Our first meetup was attended by seven people, and we played Ticket to Ride and Bohnanza. We've been running for over two years now, and we have over 185 members. I have met a lot of great people through this group that I game with on a regular basis. One day, a friend and member, Andres, brought a protoype of a game he was working on. I remember playing it and thinking how cool it was he had done all this. It inspired me to bring out Entrepreneur and rework it.
At this point I had experienced a lot of new games through my board game group. We played a lot of Rosenberg (Agricola, Le Havre, At the Gates of Loyang) and a lot of Wallace (Brass, Steam, Automobile) plus many other games that exposed me to a variety of different mechanisms and ideas. So I sat down and came up with a list what I would like in a game: Worker placement, resource management, and auctions. I was ready to implement these in my newest version of Entrepreneur.
Back to work I went. How could I make worker placement work in a card-based environment? It became clear that I would need some type of board in addition to the cards. Where would the resources come from? I didn't want them to all come from the board; perhaps the cards could produce goods? Yes, that was it! It then dawned on me to have Factories that produce goods, and Businesses that buy those goods. Each player would have a set of Factories and Businesses that would be available for any player to use. The catch? If you used an opponent's business or factory, they would get a victory point. But how to make it so that an opponenent would use my Factory or Business so that I got a victory point? Offer an incentive! If you placed a research and development cube on your factory, it produced an extra good. I also had For Sale cards; these cards gave victory points by filling the requirements on the cards.
Things were starting to fall into place – now to work on the board. I needed spaces to place workers that were not placed on the businesses and factories, but also we integral to game play, so I came up with twelve spaces that were available to workers. Now how to deal with player position and the auction? Each round businesses and factories would come up for auction. But how to make it so that the person with the most money wasn't also the person who had first position, the best factories, and the ability to place workers first? The idea I used was borrowed from Brass: the person who spent the least amount of money at the auction got to place his worker first, with the person who spent the most on the auctions going last. With all of the details worked out, my calculations in place for money and victory points, and my cards and board ready, I subjected my friends to a playtest of the new and improved Entrepreneur.
My first play was with my friend Dave and his wife Natalie. We ended up playing two games of it that night, with those initial plays going fairly smoothly. Dave commented that he found the game pretty balanced, but that people could abuse the Corporate Strategy cards. (Corporate Strategy cards were secret agenda cards that allowed you to score VPs by fullfilling the requirements of the cards.) Dave (and later his wife) discovered that you could get massive amounts of points by using those cards. I took that feedback and tweaked the cards, then gathered three more friends to playtest a four-player game of Entrepreneur. One concern – and one that I addressed in later versions – was game length; with four players it took about two hours and 45 minutes. I subjected my friends to several more playtests over the next few weeks. I didn't change any major mechanisms because I wanted more feedback on the original design. At this point it was time to bring it out into the wild. I was heading to Origins and felt it was a good time to get fresh input.
Revised Industrialist cards
While at Origins in 2010, I had the pleasure of meeting two budding game designers: Lance Semen and Jeremy Kalgreen. I saw them and told them about my new game, which I had retitled Industrialist. (I felt like this title better reflected the idea of the game.) Lance was more than gracious and offered to playtest my new game. His feedback was great; I made a few minor changes to the cards and was ready to playtest it more. Jeremy (who is also an incredible graphic artist) offered to work on artwork for a prototype, and I could not resist. (Remember, I was currently working with Word and Excel documents.)
While in the board room area of the convention, I was playtesting yet again when a gentleman stopped by and asked what we were playing. He stood and watched, asked questions, and seemed genuinely interested. He introduced himself as Matthew Duhan from Gozer Games, an independent publisher from Chicago. At the end of the game he expressed his interest in the game and asked me to stop by his booth the next day. I did, and little did I know how fortuitous this meeting would be.
One of many game boards during playtesting
A few days before Protospiel in Ann Arbor, MI – if you aren't aware of this conference, you should definitely check it out! – I received an email from Matt asking whether I would be interested in sending a prototype of my game for evaluation. I said that I was, but I needed time to make some tweaks. I was heading to Protospiel and wanted to get more feedback before I submitted.
Protospiel was a great experience. I think I got five playtests in, one including Seth Jaffee from Tasty Minstrel Games (he had some great feedback) and one with Minion Games, which also had some very relevant feedback. Over three days I tried three different versions of the game – removing things, adding things... It was at this convention that I decided to remove the auction mechanism, and even though I love auctions, it was a good move because it shortened the game time considerably.
After these changes, I submitted my game to Gozer Games and waited. After a few weeks I received an email from Matt asking whether I would be interested in having his company publish my game. I was excited and scared at the same time. I think all game designers have grandiose dreams of getting picked up by a major publisher, but let's be realistic – that does not happen very often. So after some negotiations, I signed a contract with Gozer Games.
The game had been signed. Now what? Yep, you guessed it, more playtests! After many playtests and numerous amounts of feedback, we finally tweaked the game to a point where we felt it was ready for publication.
As for the title of the game, Entrepreneur was ruled out because we felt it was too generic. I tried Industrialist, but that didn't roll off the tongue and wasn't memorable. The next title we decided on was Mogul. We liked that and that was the working title as we ironed out the kinks, but there was a problem when we went to submit the title to BGG: Rio Grande Games was releasing a new version of Michael Schacht's game of the same title in 2012. It was back to the drawing board. After some brainstorming, we decided upon Titans of Industry.
Here are some of the changes made from Industrialist:
• We now had cards for three-, four-, and five-player games. (Originally I had the same number of cards, no matter how many players.)
• We introduced more Corporate Strategy cards for more variety in which cards people would get at the beginning of the game.
• We removed the auction mechanism, and Businesses and Factories would now be purchased in player order, with each building costing the amount of the current level. (Level 1 cards cost $1, level 2 cost $2, etc.)
• The original "Train a worker" space was opened up so that everyone could train as opposed to one player per turn.
• Originally, Research & Development chits were used only on factories for producing an extra good. Now they can be used on businesses to sell goods for extra money or VPs.
Factory and Business cards with new artwork
Our Kickstarter campaign is now active, and to give you a better feel for how it plays, Cartrunk Entertainment is hosting a live playing of the game on Thursday, April 19 at 8:30 p.m. EDT (GMT -4). If Titans of Industry turns out to be your kind of game, please consider supporting it and helping out the small indie publishers that are taking risks to bring games like this to the gaming community.
Thanks for taking the time to read this diary. If you plan to be at Origins, I'd love to game with you. Drop me a Geekmail!
Brian Lewis
Final game board for Titans of Industry
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A very early prototype of the planet tiles
The first list of planet names that weren't just letters
Very early concepts for the planets
