Archive for Designer Diaries
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Next » [14]
-
David Whitcher
United States
Manchester
Michigan
-
Most of the time when I design a game I start with a very basic concept, possibly pairing a theme or game type with a mechanism I think will be interesting, such as a train game with a modular board that is built during play. From this I try to let the idea evolve, adding in the game mechanisms in as organic of a way as possible, such as having your train require more coal if you have a heavier load.
This is where I started with my first real attempt to make a train game, which was to focus on route-building and deliveries. I decided to use large hexes for the modular board and sticks for rails – some spare Catan parts would do the trick. I put two locations on each hex where you could pick up and drop off freight and the positions where rail could be built cheaply. Freight would be replenished by drawing it unseen from a bag.
A recreation of a hex in the first prototype, the original having been lost in a hard drive crash
I threw together a crude prototype and gave it a solo test. It worked mostly as planned – game designs are rarely gems right from the start. The freight load rule worked well; you could load your train with multiple cars to carry more by paying more coal, allowing you to deliver large loads if you could get to them. What I didn't like was that the route-building was too fiddly and the game too long for what it was. At the time I had other more promising projects, so I put it on my prototype shelf with other misfits and moved on.
Running Off the Rail
At this point you're probably thinking someone messed up and put the wrong title on this diary. Not so, as Tahiti started out as the aforementioned train game. Several months after I had set it aside, I was doing some writing for a different game when the "Modular Train Game" folder caught my eye. After rereading the rules and my notes I was keen to fix it. The problem seemed to stem from building routes, so I tried placing predetermined track on each hex with track exiting on three sides. Depending on how you placed the tiles, there could be dead ends all over the board. Adding more track to the tiles connected everything to everything else, which didn't seem very rail-like either.
I decided to chuck it – not the game but the track. Since trains don't work well without track, I knew that required a theme change. Trucks need roads so that was out, too; planes didn't seem intersting either. I decided that boats delivering to and from islands would work best. I also made the leap of players delivering to a central hub rather than to locations all over the place, which helped jell the theme of islanders gathering food.
I still had the problem of over-connection as some paths needed to be better than others, so I decided to add reefs.
From the first prototype, salvaged from 1.5 Gigs of design files on the hard drive
The reefs would act as a barrier, allowing the player who was placing the island to make it easier or more difficult to get to depending on its location and orientation. This addition required a rule to prevent players from completely blocking off an island, but it worked. I had to change a great deal for this transformation; coal was changed to muscle power, and I removed the currency from the game, changing the goal to collecting instead of becoming wealthy. I changed all the commodities to food and goods that could be scavenged on or around the islands, including fish.
Fish Don't Grow on Trees
Wait, fish? I had introduced a good that needed to be handled differently. I have done my share of fishing and know that the one constant in fishing is uncertainty. I wanted this uncertainty to be reflected in the mechanism for collecting fish but didn't want to add dice to the game.
Turns out that I didn't need dice as I already had a better randomizer: the bag of cubes. Fishing in Tahiti means just that, reaching into the bag and trying to fish out a fish cube. Unlike with dice, the bag's state evolves over the course of the game and you know what that state is based on what has already come out. This makes fishing a risk but one that can be mitigated.
The Goddess Arrives
The game worked well most of the time but there was trouble in paradise. The archipelago building rules allowed players to place an island tile anywhere as long as it shared two sides with other islands. This could cause the archipelago to become quite elongated. When a player placed an island he was not interested in, he would generally place it far from the home island to keep others away from it. This was disastrous as another player might have to travel many hexes from the home island to reach it, traveling around reefs in the process. If the island was six hexes out, it could take three turns to reach it. Three boring turns!
I needed a way to control the archipelago expansion, and this is where the fertility goddess comes in, traveling the edges of the map and guiding where islands may be placed. This mechanism helps drive the archipelago formation in a way that gives everyone an equal share of control. Although the goddess will allow elongation of the archipelago, it can happen only if the players collectively push it in one direction.
Print-and-play version of Tahiti, with Haumea showing the way to unexplored islands
Small Change = Big Effect
Tahiti was working well, and I was testing it with a fellow designer to ready the game for Protospiel when it dawned on me that the reefs would be more interesting if they were a decision point rather than just a barrier, the decision being whether to risk goods by traveling over the reef or to stay safe (but spend more time) by going the long way around. Once again I needed a randomizer, so I turned to the bag again.
The Protospiel testing not only went well; some of the testers raved about the game, which is unusual since we typically pick them apart with the goal of improving them. Tahiti was 90% done at this point, which was enough for James Mathe at Minion Games to ask for a submission copy. The remaining 10% was balancing the game and eliminating first-player advantage – which took almost as long as the first 90%.
Kickstarting It
Minion Games has successfully used Kickstarter to fund several games but this one is my first. Finalizing the art, making videos, figuring reward levels, getting the rules (PDF) and print-and-play files ready so people know what they are supporting – all of that took months. Now that the Kickstarter campaign is underway, it's exciting to watch the pledging and read comments from the participants. Hope you're interested in checking it out...
David E. Whitcher
-
Lorien Green
United States
New Hampshire
-
Hey there, BGG readers. My name is Lorien Green, and I'm a boardgame lover/BGG lurker around these parts. I also made the tabletop gaming documentary Going Cardboard. Today I wanted to share with you some of what went into creating that.
I came at this project as a double noob. First, I was a boardgaming noob (compared to some, anyway). I knew designer board games were cool and special, and I'd played a decent number of them. (At the time, my favorites were Goa, Power Grid, and Bohnanza.) I knew enough about the games to realize they would make for a good documentary, but I didn't know a ton about the community, the designers, or how the whole genre came to be. That was an asset in some ways because I approached the hobby with a clean slate, asking lots of questions.
I also didn't know an awful lot about filmmaking. I loved watching documentaries, but had zero experience behind a camera. As I studied up on filmmaking, my nose buried in Documentary Storytelling and The Shut Up and Shoot Documentary Guide, I discovered that I needed to sketch out a story for the film. At first that was counterintuitive. "This is a documentary! You're not supposed to make the story! You just... you document it." Still, people watching films have a certain expectation of a film's structure, whether it is conscious or not, even for a documentary:
Quote: Most screenplays have a three-act structure, following an organization that dates back to Aristotle's Poetics. The three acts are setup (of the location and characters), confrontation (with an obstacle), and resolution (culminating in a climax and a dénouement). In a two-hour film, the first and third acts both typically last around 30 minutes, with the middle act lasting roughly an hour.
Confrontation? Climax? We're talking about a hobby documentary here so that was sort of mystifying, pretty much the same way that putting "documentary" and "storytelling" together in a title was to me at that time.
I wasn't expecting to find drama; I just thought it was a cool topic and I wanted more people to know about it. I figured I was going to have to ignore that traditional act structure, so I sketched an outline of what I thought I would cover – things like communities, game nights, game groups, conventions, variety and peoples' favorite games, benefits of gaming, etc. – then I started interviewing people at Unity Games in Woburn, Massachusetts in February 2009. I was asking pretty generic questions, but I made a point of asking every interviewee what THEY thought was important or special about the hobby. Their responses started to open up my eyes to things like Spiel (the annual game convention in Essen, Germany, which I did NOT know about prior), self-publication, and more interesting topics than where I'd started.
So as far as that "document this!" side goes, the film follows this general informational flow:
-----• Nostalgic introduction ("what's past is prologue"): people talk about their childhood memories of boardgaming.
-----• History: how did designer games come to be, and make their way to the United States all of a sudden
-----• Monopoly
-----• Community: meeting people, forming game groups, holding game events
-----• Designers and Publishers: industry stuff
-----• ESSEN
-----• So you want to be a game designer?
-----• Looking forward: board games moving into the video game space
-----• Summary: what does this hobby mean to people
In some ways, the above does follow the three-act structure. There is sort of an Act 1 of setting the stage and relaying background information. One could argue that Essen is the climax of the film, and that the stuff that comes after Essen is "where do we go from here" and summary. Here is one of my early attempts at organizing the topics into that structure:
As it turned out, though, there were a couple of story arcs that themselves followed that three-act structure pretty well...
Bryan Johnson/Huang Di
Act 1
The story behind Huang Di and Bryan himself. The background information of his Salem, Massachusetts surroundings, and a summary that brings you to the point at which JKLM is scheduled to publish his game.
Act 2
Basically the story that unfolds after the set-up, leading up to the bad news and status update about Huang Di's "to date" publishing status. That serves as the climax, I think.
Act 3
Originally, I would have thought the final title card in the credits sequence (and I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, such as they are) would be the climax. But that's actually the "dénouement", "the outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences" – which does make perfect sense, when you put it that way.
Donald X. Vaccarino/Dominion
Act 1
Same situation here, there's background information that brings you up to speed on Dominion, Donald X. Vaccarino, and Rio Grande Games, and how it all came together.
Act 2
The confrontation, or suspense part, is the anticipation leading up to the Spiel des Jahres win in 2009. Speculations before the announcement. The climax of winning that, and the initial reactions by Jay and Donald.
Act 3
The resolution involves the odd situation in that while the SdJ win has meant a great deal around the world, with Dominion being published in "16 languages already" – 18 last I checked in with Jay, which is more languages than Magic: The Gathering is published in! – here in the U.S. there's still a challenge in trying to get people to understand the magnitude of this accomplishment.
Obviously, I had no idea these two stories would emerge when I first started filming or that they would fit into this act structure format. When I first interviewed Jay Tummelson about Dominion, the game had not yet even been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. When I was first interviewing Bryan, we were talking about filming his launch party. But if it hadn't been these stories, it would have had to be some other story. This is also why there is room for more documentaries on boardgaming; there are an infinite number of stories to tell around this hobby, and an infinite number of angles and approaches people would take to tell them.
In the end, the stories of Huang Di and Dominion not only serve as engaging story arcs, but also contrast with each other very well. This was all luck-based, a matter of me being there with cameras at the right place and time to get enough angles and opinions, and the right timing for these stories to be able to run their courses in time to be concluded before post-production ended – but I think it's one of the big reasons the film is getting a pretty good reception. Because let's face it, it's not my elite filmmaking expertise at work. 
And by the way, if you're interested in documentaries of this nature, these are some I highly recommend, with IMDB links for each:
-----1. Rock, Paper, Scissors: A Geek Tragedy
-----2. TILT: the Battle to Save Pinball/Special When Lit
-----3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
-----4. Monster Camp
-----5. Get Lamp
Safe travels!
Lorien Green
P.S. – One other little bit I wanted to share was the process behind designing the inside cover of the DVD. My husband had this cool idea for it to be a menagerie of board game components. I think if he'd known what he was getting into, he might not have shared that concept with me, though. I just went down into the basement one night and warned him not to come down there – for his own good:
I used pieces from about 75 games in the final shot. Six of those pieces remain orphaned to this day because I couldn't figure out which game they came from. Hey, out of 75, that's not bad! And they will find their way home someday, but I figured you guys would appreciate the gravity of that photo. This was one of the initial progress shots to give you an idea what the final product looks like:
P.P.S. For those of you who want some taste of what the actual movie is like, here's the trailer:
(Editor's note/disclosure: As you can see from the screenshot above, I'm in the movie. I'm a friend of Lorien's and helped her get in contact with some of those interviewed, so I'm hardly unbiased when it comes to wishing her success – and someday I'll actually watch the movie, too! —WEM)
-
Oleksandr Nevskiy
Ukraine
Khmelnitsky
-
At the start of summer 2011, Oleg Sidorenko and I had the idea of creating a game which could display the life of a small farm in a light and accessible form. We wanted to show the seasonality of labor and the dependence of crop ripening with the seasons. Different crops have different terms of ripening, and we wanted to make this process take place with the players.
In order to give sense to the process of growing the crop, it was necessary to come up with a deserved reward – that is, a logical calculation of victory points. Just growing this or that crop was dry and boring, and we wanted something deeper and more unusual. There was also the idea of competition between players in the quality of their harvest: some kind of County Fair, in which each farmer would be praised for his "longest squash" – but a seed's transformation into "better" or "less better" crops appeared too accidental (via a deck of events) and we didn't like that. In addition, the question arose about displaying a larger number of different crops of one kind, not just the worst and the best. All of this seemed to be too overloaded and not very interesting.
After that, we decided to abandon the competition for quality and instead try to arrange a competition for different combinations of fruit. Right at this time, we got the idea for which different fruit combinations might be needed – and in such a roundabout way the animals were born, animals which must be fed, and the feeding process of the game reminded us of our childhood.
We don't know whether the following game is known outside the Soviet Union:
Each player draws on the top of a sheet of paper the head of a person/animal/fish, then folds the sheet so that the next player cannot see the image. Then the next player draws the body and folds the sheet again. The last player draws the legs or tail or anything else. In such a way the "animals" appear, and it's very funny...
In this way, the general concept of My Happy Farm occurred and the game immediately started up with a large number of animals, including dogs, cats and even mice. One of the first prototypes even included a human: "Uncle Nick" (a cousin of the farmer, elbow-bender). We treated it as some kind of model tryout for the game in which we had to leave just the right animals we would need for a good game. (Many of our friends regretted Uncle Nick leaving the game as he was a favorite.) The game process appeared quite logical and interesting. We just needed to bring this model to the perfection of balance and replayability. And so the week of tests began...
Artist Margitich Mihail, aka Monkey, made us a test copy of the game components. Almost immediately we decided to reduce the number of animals. Uncle Nick left first, while the pig remained a favorite among the animals as it eats everything, acting like a wild card. During the evolution of the game, we tried different mathematical models: something changed, something added, something cut off completely. Finally, half of the initial number of animals left our farm, and the game mechanisms turned out simple, logical, and dynamic.
A beta-version of the "farm" was made by Monkey in the style of Android, with players feeding the "animal-robots" with screw nuts, letting them drink lubricating oil – but we abandoned this style; that's another game!
At the same time, while working on the project StalkerQuest, we met with the artist Leonid Androschuk and he agreed to draw images for My Happy Farm in a cartoon style.
Весела Ферма was presented to the public by the Ukrainian publisher IGAMES for the first time at the Ukrainian Boardgaming Festival 2011 in August and received the award for "Best Game Art" and a nomination for "Best Game of the Exhibition". While we liked Leonid's style at once – and the game design of the first edition hasn't changed since being released in Ukraine and Russia – we have made some changes to the art which will appear in future editions. We hope players will like our new art.
After the Ukrainian Boardgaming Festival, we clarified some details of the game mechanisms, decided on the game components, and printed the game. At that same festival, our "farm" was sighted by the largest Russian publisher, Hobby World, and in February 2012 Счастливая ферма appeared on the shelves of Russian stores. A few months later, we signed an agreement for an English-language edition of My Happy Farm from publisher 5th Street Games, which is running a Kickstarter campaign for the game through mid-June 2012.
Also, after the Igrosfera 2012 (Ukrainian Game Fair), Hobby World said that it wants an expansion for My Happy Farm, as this game has found ready sales...
Oleksandr Nevskiy
-
Miguel
France
Caen
(from Valencia, Spain)
-
This is a summary of why and how I designed BASKETmind back in 1981, how the game has evolved over time, how I made the most recent prototype, and how things changed during the production process that has lead to its publication by nestorgames in April 2012. I only hope that if I publish a second game it will take less than thirty years!
The title of this diary says "Play" because there are a lot of league management basketball games, but few about playing the game itself, and I found those few either too simple or too fiddly. That's why I thought that, after thirty years, there was still an opportunity for my game to get published.
The Idea
In 1981, when I was 13, I began playing games, mainly wargames, and designing games of my own about WWII battles I could not find (Okinawa) or those that did not exist (a hypothetical Nazi invasion of Iceland), but then I began to think about sport simulations. I started with tennis, but it was too simple for a game, then soccer and handball, but the shots were hard to simulate: The goal was several hexes wide – yes, I only knew wargames! – and the scoring probability depended on both distance and angle.
And then I thought about basketball: The basket is just one hex, and the scoring probability depends only on the distance! So back in 1981 I began drawing hex mats on paper (if only I had thought about the circle alternative...), checking the right court size, and playtesting some rules. The size of the board was dictated by one fact: I wanted shots beside the basket to be missed only on a 1, and beyond the three-point arc to be scored only on a 6. Yes, at that time to me die=d6!
The First Prototypes
The first board was a full basketball court, drawn almost freehand, and mounted on a thick wooden base. The players were pawns, but soon I wanted to introduce players of different heights, so I glued different discs below the pawns. The ball was beside the pawns, however, so the hexes had to be bigger to hold pawn and ball, and it was not visually appealing. I added toothpicks to the pawn heads and a hole to the ball.
Unfortunately, I didn't keep the very first board and players; I offered them to the first friend that played the game with me. Everything was resolved with dice: shots, dribbles, passes, blocks, rebounds, steals... (We were used to dice at that time since we played Risk!) Passes and shots could only go through straight lines of hexes, but this limited action a lot, especially shots, since there were only three lines of shot to be defended. (The three-point arc was drawn only until 60 degrees from the center.) Therefore I extended shots to any hex, always missing on a 1 beside the basket and on one unit more every extra hex away; just beyond the three-point arc, shots were missed on a 1-5.
The turns, score and statistics were written on a sheet. (We were used to that, too.) We tracked even the individual player scores, and number of fouls. There were two replacements with poorer abilities that could enter play when important players were close to their fifth foul, or that did when one player was eliminated. Everything was resolved with a d6, but forwards got a bonus for shots.
One thing hard to implement was counterattacks as players needed two movement values: one for the normal sequence of play and a bigger one for movement from one half of the court to the other. And before the five players came back, attacks were quite easy with such a low density: hard to both cover the perimeter and block a drive to the basket with only two or three players!
Despite these difficulties, I organized tournaments with friends and my brother, and everyone loved them! Matches looked a lot like real ones, with teams exhausting possession when leading, forcing attacks on players with four fouls, decisive shots on the last turn... Luck played a role but not a huge one: the final game was often my brother against me, and I think I won all of them! The games were long enough to reward good play (looking for better shooting positions) over lucky rolls, and we were used to long games at that time (Risk again).
A few years later I got my first computer and drew the board with a program, added colors to the court and key – but then I left to the University and the game found a quiet place inside a drawer. A few years ago I came back to the boardgame hobby and discovered a lot of new games, with more elegant mechanisms than just throwing dice, that lasted less than an hour now that we are always in a hurry, with beautiful components... and I wondered about that basketball game in a drawer, which by the way I had already named BASKETmind. (I played Mastermind in the 1980s...) Could I adapt it to the present generation of board games?
The Mechanisms
The guidelines to follow were to make the game simpler, shorter and prettier! And with fewer rolls...
1) Shots: The only die roll I could not suppress was the one for shots. Players would still miss on a 1 beside the basket and 1 extra unit every extra hex away. This was the core idea of the game from the start. I added two new ingredients: Forwards use a d8 (no need of bonus), and the shot can be taken from any hex around the player, that being the Zone of Control or ZoC. (No bonus needed for easy shots either.)
2) Counterattacks: If transitions from half to half were hard to simulate, why not throw them away? The board was reduced to a half court, which in addition could be expanded and lead to bigger hexes/players. A playtest try (with circles!):
I was afraid that setting up the players at the end of every ball possession would slow down the game, but it did not; it was much faster than counterattacks.
3) Passes: There should be lines of pass but not too restrictive. I had added some "hex diagonals" to the straight lines, but they were quite complex. And then I thought about straight lines only – but from ZoC to ZoC! Passes are easy to perform but still not easy to survey for the defender. Before, any defender along the line could try to roll for interception, but I replaced this roll with one-player-only secret activation.
4) Dribbles: And this activation mechanism could be applied to dribbles at the same time! If the ball handler goes through the activated player's ZoC, the dribble fails. The failing probability was 1/6 and now is 1/5, avoiding one roll (or more). The activation mechanism is definitely modern as it adds a bluffing aspect to the game.
5) Blocks: I replaced the block roll, too. If the shooter secretly chooses the shot hex, then the defender can choose the hex(es) he will block! This is another bluffing element and very realistic. The defender marks the blocking hex(es), then the shooter places the ball for a shot. Fouls are therefore easily introduced: If you block the shooter hex but he can still shoot, you committed a foul.
6) Rebounds and Free Throws: After a rebound in the earlier version, the game continued. Offensive rebounds ended often in a slam dunk, or with all the attacker players having to leave the key, and defensive rebounds started a complicated transition. Now the team getting the rebound re-starts possession, period. Free throws were performed as in real games, with rebounds, etc. Now you just roll the die, without re-setting up players, and miss on a 1-2.
7) Press: When one team was leading and was playing long possessions, the other team could try to steal the ball always with the same probabilities: 1-2 foul, 6 steal. Now I use the secret block mechanism to try to steal the ball. One more roll avoided, one more bluffing element added! And when the ball handler is cornered it is easier to steal. The lower foul probability is compensated by the fact that you lose the activation of those players, so your team gets quite exposed after pressing.
8) Replacements: The counting of individual fouls was realistic but complicated the game, and if one wanted to play a shorter game the foul limit would have been re-scaled. And there was a "center" replacement and a "guard/forward" one, so one player could use three centers by the end of a game. The easiest solution was to eliminate foul counting, and thus eliminate replacements. Special players can still be introduced, see below.
The Components
I wanted them simple/cheap, functional and pretty, and then I found these plastic checkers' pieces:
For about €1 I had the twelve discs per color needed (six for centers, four for forwards, one for guard, and one spare), and they were indented! The ball, a wooden cylinder, would be easily carried with the ball handler. The discs were big enough to get the player movement, shooting and ball abilities printed on them. They are not hard to remember, but the discs being indented, I could add a label below the player and introduce variant players with new abilities that could balance the game against beginners or add variety for experts.
When I first thought about replacing the rolling-dice-for-everything mechanism with secret activation, I used "benches" and screens. It looked good, but it slowed down the game play and made the design incompatible with the nestorgames format. I was trying other publishers, too, but thinking about how to make the game suitable for nestorgames I realized that the dice already in the game could be used to activate players and blocks by just covering them with your hand! Bye, screens...
Aside from being better suited for nestorgames, the game play became easier and faster. You had to remove the screen every turn, and "imagine" the shooter's ZoC on the bench for the block, which was hard for some players; now you just uncover a die: the d6 to choose the activated player (1-5) and the d8 to choose the hex around the ball handler (1-7). The score sheet was replaced by a panel, with two turn markers and two score wheels, with a special d6 (numbered 0-5) to count tens of points:
No more need to photocopy sheets or look for pens! The panel has a block of fifty turns, and you can choose to play a quick fifty-turn game or four quarters of fifty – the 200 turns that we played in the 1980s! I took advantage of my computer skills to make a pretty board, with the key colored in order to remind players that attackers cannot stop inside, and with the two semicircles (decoration only) in light blue. I mounted the board on two thick cardboard panels that fold at the center. All the components would fit in a very small box.
The Game Play
Finally, the game became simpler, shorter and prettier...and with fewer rolls! But does it play better? I have been playtesting it intermittently in these recent years, and it feels (1) much more modern and up-to-date, and (2) much closer to basketball. The only problem with the activation system that I have found is that it makes solo play impossible, even with a split personality! I use to playtest solo a lot, but once I introduced activation I needed help from my brother, nephew, and brother-in-law.
Shorter games may rely a bit on luck, but this is something I do not mind when I play games now. Anyway, better play is still rewarded; I played against my nephew, letting him use all the variant players, and I beat him easily. In order to get an idea of how close it is to real basketball, check the examples of play at the end of the rulebook (zipped PDF); you will see many spectacular actions!
That is exactly what I wanted: Allow as many "real" actions as possible through few and simple rules. For example, there is no specific rule for screens, but they ARE in the game. (See "Example C" in the rulebook.)
Publication and Production: Nestorgames
And to conclude this diary, here is the final product!
The game entered the nestorgames continuous abstract game design contest with the prototype described above, and in only three weeks it got the 100 thumbs it needed to get published! I was happy about that, of course, but mainly about the interaction I had with so many users on BGG that like both board games and basketball, and the support of many "virtual" friends who I have met over the past years here.
The last step before entering Néstor's contest was making the rules available so that people could find out whether they liked the game or not. That was a lot of work! The rules had always seemed simple to me because I was always there to explain them, but organizing them, making everything explicit, adding the rules that would avoid people playing the game "not as intended"... And in order to get more support I created the rulebook in English AND Spanish, so I had to correct/change/add things in both at the same time!
Some users were very important during these last steps. The first one was kduke, who encouraged me to go ahead and tried several U.S. publishers for me, and GeoMan, who built the first prototype I didn't build myself and through his playtesting comments encouraged many Greek boardgamers/basketballers to give the "final push".
I cannot say much about game production compromises because this was only my first experience, but it was a great one. I don't know how common it is on the game industry, but Néstor (n_r_a) from nestorgames has always listened and respected my opinion on the changes that had to be introduced. And most of them, though imposed by production constraints, have made the game look better!
1) The player symbols: The nestorgames format makes the scale of the board and players a bit smaller, so the small hex/die numbers were hard to read. Néstor came up with the symbol idea, which I like much more!
2) The circle grid: The new move symbols were circles, and then it made more sense to use a circle grid instead of the hexagonal one. I had used both through the years, and we liked the look of the result.
3) The score panel and team colors: Néstor proposed the hollow frames for the score, and since the background is black, a black team was not a good choice. I had used black/white in order to give the game a "classic", chess-like feel, but those bright red and blue are much more attractive!
4) Number of dice and markers: During production we realized that I had been using more pieces than needed! Not a problem for a prototype, but we found out that six gray markers – red is used for a team – and two dice were enough.
5) The variant players: Having the variant player labels below the pieces is not very "durable" as they wear out if the pieces are not indented. When Néstor decided to make separate pieces, we thought that proposing them as an expansion was a better idea. Indeed they are not needed at all; the hundreds of games I have played through the years have never used variant players! I used them only for some sample turns to see how the game would change. The game has enough variety without them, but if some want to change, balance teams, play the pre-game of drafting the players, etc., then they are available as an expansion.
6) The rulebook: The rules have not changed, but they are much clearer now. That's why I have deleted the files I had posted on BGG; now the official rulebooks are available only at the nestorgames site. The links have been added on the BASKETmind game page. Note that I have added a summary at the end that makes clear many things that can be forgotten during a first play. I am also working on a French version of the rules...
Happy End
Hopefully I don't design games for a living, only to have fun. I like games and I like creating things, but most of the time I have created alternative pieces, variants or scenarios for existing games. And believe me, creating a game from scratch is a completely different beast!
If I have to keep one thing from these thirty years, it will be the memories of the Basketball World Cups I organized with my friends in the 1980s – that and the interactions I had with the BGG users and Néstor. And the feeling that "something has been completed" when I see the game at nestorgames. Well, that makes three things to keep!
Next time I open a game and think "But why did they do it that way?", I'll remember the compromises I had to meet with BASKETmind and be more understanding... Thanks for reading, and I hope some of you will enjoy the game!
Miguel Marqués
-
doug eckhart
United States
INDIANAPOLIS
Indiana
-
My friend Aaron Lauster invites me over to the house one evening. I show up, he smiles, reaches behind him into a big plastic box, hands me sheets of printed pages and a pair of scissors, and tells me to start cutting along the lines. He and this other guy, Max Michael, have designed a board game, but there are what seems like a couple hundred scraps of paper that need to be cut out. That game was Legend of the Flying Canoe and was the first game in ten years to roll out under the StrataMax Games label, a company Max had started previously.
Little did I know, but I'd now become a part of StrataMax Games and would for the next couple of years playtest, count bits, and join them on the trip to the Origins game convention in Columbus, Ohio. After that first year at Origins, Max called me out in an interview and said something to the effect that I was due to come out with a game, and that led to my first train game: Congo Line. Of course, I didn't know that in standard train games, trains don't move because you see, I had not played many games, so I didn't have any context to work from.
It's Origins 2006 – my first Origins actually – and I'm back at my hotel room. It's late, my kids and girlfiriend are asleep, and I have small tubs of cubes around me. Earlier at this con, we released Aaron's Iroquoia and Congo Line, which Max and I had put together. I've been wanting to make a voting game, but none of my designs have quite worked out yet. My first shot led to Aaron and Max suggesting a retheme: Salem Town Counsel, where various goofy issues would come up and be voted on by the counsel. I was not happy.
I spent maybe half an hour trolling through my mind for historic scenarios in which voting and, in particular, politicking were significant – and out jumped New York. I remembered those scenes from Gangs of New York in which that actor was asked whether he'd voted yet and he responds, "Twice this morning already." It seemed perfect. I went to BGG and searched for games about New York and voting and Tammany Hall and to my absolute shock there weren't any. I couldn't find a single game from this time or context.
I spent another half hour looking for maps that could serve as the basis for my idea and found two that seemed great: One was the Mitchell map, and the other was the map I was able to use, a much plainer ward map. As beautiful as I felt the Mitchell map was, I knew that we were a white-box, small print company and that I was far better off to start with the other where there would be less simplification for me to do.
The map not used...
The next morning, I was excited to tell Aaron and Max that I thought I'd found what I was looking for and gave them the name Tammany Hall. They were supportive, but still a bit skeptical as voting games rarely come off well. It didn't matter, as for the first time in a year I'd felt I had the right direction.
That convention was held at the end of June/start of July, and we were all going to be together for a game-focused weekend at the end of year for our "winter retreat", so I spent the next couple months thinking about how to make Tammany Hall. I'd had a wider scope of ideas at first, wanting to include taverns and fire brigades as a mechanism to increase electability and add influence; I wanted to use gangs as electoral campaigners ready to do battle with one another between the wards of lower Manhattan, but it just wasn't gelling in my mind. I'd sketched out parts of an economic system but couldn't see the game in where I was going.
I'd met with Aaron a couple of times to swap prototypes, and he suggested that I focus on the election part since that was the game I kept saying I wanted to make. This helped immensely. I came away with a new focus toward how the actual politicking would happen as opposed to how to raise money and influence for running.
It wasn't long after that the idea of political favors came into play and the immigrant function came into being. I'd picked up the book Five Points by Tyler Anbinder and saw the immigration tables that showed over the rough timeframe of my game how the immigrants had shifted from Irish with English and German to Italians and thought I could capture that by preloading the board and having a draw bag for new immigrants. I put an Ellis Island on the board for a draw set randomly taken from the bag. Aaron's Iroquoia game was inspirational to me, but we had taken some review hits for the randomness factor, so I wanted Tammany to be player-determined. Elections would be straight-forward affairs and the bluffing element (because I LOVE BLUFFING games) would be where people could distinguish their play. Now I needed something else, some way to introduce balancing and variation – we'd also been criticized for a game without progression – and that's where the idea of roles came into being. Again, meeting with Aaron, we came up with the basic ideas of roles and what they would do, and made it the job of the mayor to give them out – all the better. We didn't have anything too specific then, but it got the ball rolling.
For the next month, when I walked my dogs in the evening, I'd think about how the game would work. I'd kept running through my mind the way the voting would happen, how the roles would work, and mentally playtest the game over and over. I'd felt it was there! I was sure it all worked and made sense. I was excited and ready to get together to show what I'd made.
When we got together for our winter retreat, I got out my board and bits, and we gave it a go. We pounded out the basic roles and powers: Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Chief of Police, Counsel President, and then Max suggested the near-mythical role that had slander power: the Dog Catcher. It was the perfect name. One of the special bits in Tammany to me is how "winners" are treated: the Mayor gets no power, but the Dog Catcher can effectively spread lies and get ahead.
But when it came to actually playing, it was miserable. We couldn't even get past two rounds, and it was clear the game wasn't working. In the original draft, once-placed Campaign Workers didn't leave, and the board was a dense and confusing pile of bits. It was tough to keep track of scoring, and the analysis was overwhelming. Max and Aaron tried to suggest changes, but nothing made sense. I left the room and sat down, frustrated and knowing it should work.
About ten minutes later: "Max, I know how to fix it. After the election all the campaign workers except one from the winner leave the board." We tried the game again, and there it was. The board became clear, scoring was easy to track, the game worked.
We made a few more decisions; we formalized how slander would work – I'd taken it out, Aaron insisted it go back in – to simplify things we made all the immigrant populations available at all times, and that was that. The game worked, it was non-random, it had a clear ending (Round 16), and it forced people to engage in direct conflict. Max thought it was fiddly to have the immigrants come in randomly, so in the first edition we made them all available to buy, that is, another player choice.
We released it the next year in 2007 in the white-box format at Origins and it did all right. That next year, though, we were prepping to do our first full-production game since Max's Rebs & Yanks, that game being Days of Steam. We had some trouble and a few challenges, but the amazing happened – Valley Games licensed the game after seeing a prototype at Gen Con. We'd already decided to print it on our own and were actually meeting with Valley to discuss Tammany, but that game never made it out of the bag once they saw Days of Steam.
Components of the first edition of Tammany Hall
Another year, and now we were looking to produce Tammany as our "First Real Essen Game That Makes It to Essen". There were new questions and problems, however. Early feedback from our friends in the UK told us no one there would care about this bit of American political history. Suggestions started floating about changing the time period or theme. Aaron had gone so far as to develop a "Tammany Hall in Space" retheme that put it on a space station and introduced the board expansion rules for 3-4 player games to keep the game tighter from the start, while also adding special spaces that gave bonuses and powers. The Dog Catcher role was out (because there are no dogs in space).
I wasn't real involved when Aaron and Max (and special pinch-hitter Dave Duffield from the Indy Gamers) were playtesting what we were calling THiS, and my first reaction was hurt. Space games were hot, Europeans won't care about Tammany Hall, etc. I disagreed. I met with Max and lobbied hard. The original theme needed to stay! It's unique, there still is no other game from this time period. Space games are popular, but there are already too many! Nobody really knows about 2 De Mayo either, but that's what makes it great; it's a compelling story that gives you a chance to become interested! It worked. We kept Aaron's improvements, while also keeping the original theme.
Max's friend Martin Wallace agreed to manage the production for us. His artist of choice, Peter Dennis, rediscovered the Mitchell map, secured an actual copy, and used it for the board. Peter drew the new art for Castle Garden, Tammany Hall, and that amazing cover, but it wasn't done yet. Out of the blue, Martin actually sent us back an alternative way to play the game that he and the Warfroggers had put together and offered to let us run with it as a revision/rewrite. In it, there were only two factions duking it out in Tammany Hall. It was an interesting new design, totally unsolicited, for us to look at.
Max was torn. Here we were, about to make another big push for a big box game with the chance to print a Martin Wallace design of our own. Another round of lobbying with Max, and the eventual agreement was that we were happy with the design we had and believed in it. One thing did make it in from Martin's redesign: He had the immigrants coming in a random pool drawn from the bag. Max saw this as a great improvement – even if it was part of the original design – which makes sense because as he likes to point out, "It's one thing if an idea is yours and quite another if it is Martin's!"
Essen came, and we sold a few, although were far from a sellout. Initial reviews were favorable, but the people playing the game were having trouble going past the first round if they felt they were too far behind. At Essen, the Germans, Dutch, and Belgians seemed to expect a solitaire optimization game – more along the lines of a typical Eurogame – and why shouldn't they? It was Essen after all. Max also has pointed out that folks at Essen are often only there for a day or two and want to try as many games as possible, so after that first election if someone looks like he is behind, the prospective customers are in a hurry to move on to try something else. Little could they know that the player elected mayor first really isn't way ahead...
So Tammany Hall is not a good game for someone in a hurry to evaluate a game or someone not expecting the direct conflict it creates. I wouldn't call it a flop, but our sales were disappointing. We shipped copies back to the States, added them to the webstore, and kept looking for the next step.
We brought Tammany back to Origins in the summer and were excited to see we had finally found our audience! A great review by Joe Steadman, and Tammany sales picked up; a few more great reviews were published, and Tammany moved into the top 900 games! Then, a few months ago, one of our fans and game publisher Nathan McNair approached me about a reprint under his company Pandasaurus Games. We'd been interested in licensing the game, but Nathan really came to the table with plans, enthusiasm, and what we think is the right spirit to the game.
I'd like to add a couple closing thoughts. If you're new to Tammany Hall, you should be warned that it's not really a game for players who don't take control of the board – or at least you won't win if you don't try to do so. If you expect the games rules and mechanisms to keep everything in balance, you're in for a surprise. Tammany Hall is not a game of solitaire – it's political theater, a challenge between players. This is the game I wanted to make.
Doug Eckhart
The Mitchell map reborn, thanks to Peter Dennis!
-
Ted Vessenes
United States
Somerville
Massachusetts
-
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
-
David Sirlin
United States
California
-
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
-
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.
-
Brian Lewis
United States
Ypsilanti
Michigan
-
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
-
Stefan Malz
Germany
Vechelde
-
It's amazing where a single idea can lead to...
In June 2009 during the Game Developers' Gathering in Göttingen, Germany, my son Louis and I were sitting at our table, waiting as usual for any editors to visit us. We had already developed more than a dozen games, and this was our second time participating at Göttingen. All of a sudden, an idea hit me: Why not make square action cards that vary in their effect depending on their orientation?
This was well before World Without End was released, so it seemed like quite a new idea to me. In a few hours of talking and sketching, the basic concept of the game came to life: square action cards with four different actions each, a simultaneous planning phase in each round, multi-purpose pawns that can either activate action cards or move along the board to actually execute the actions, an indeterminate number of rounds, four different resources, three types of buildings, and various ways to win.
The Early Stages
It took two months for us to design the first prototype, without a real theme and rather abstract in the game material. First tests were promising, so we kept on going. Over just the next three months, the game experienced ten significant iterations, each of them thoroughly tested. Several other game designers gave valuable input, and our gaming groups liked the design very much.
An early action card (in German)
During this time, we introduced a setting for the design, settling on a non-descript plateau enclosed by mountains with a few passes to reach it. This explained the seclusion of the game's setting, provided for all game elements, and generated the prototype's working title: Altiplano, the Spanish word for mountain plateau.
Early board and material design, with action cards placed face-down on a player's tableau, making planning rather tiresome
In November 2009, we decided to submit the prototype to the Hippodice Game Developers' Competition. During that competition's proceedings – a long four months – we playtested the game again and again, without changing any of the mechanisms. The rulebook, however, was revised and dressed up with some examples, while the game board's size was reduced significantly. This "uneventful" time was well-used to gain experience that would serve us well in future development stages.
An early version being played at the Hippodice Competition in 2010 (Used with permission of Hippodice's Karsten Höser)
On March 13, 2010, we received a simple e-mail informing us that Altiplano had won the special "Best Full-Length Game" award in the Hippodice 2010 contest. What a day!
Finding a Publisher
But despite our never-ending enthusiasm and contact with many editors, no one seemed to be interested in this game at first. We had to wait quite some time and needed a lot of luck to find a publisher for our awarded game.
During a gaming weekend in September 2010, we happened to meet an editor from Queen Games, while the rules of Altiplano had already been sent via mail to another Queen Games editor. A few days later, Queen requested a prototype, and only a week later we received a call – our game had been accepted! We were completely overwhelmed, and we would never have guessed what was yet to follow. Our adrenalin level was on a constant high, and we couldn't wait to sign our first contract several months later.
Better Is Better
One might think that this would be the end of the story, but it actually only started about then. Without warning, we were carried away by a helluva guy from the Queen Games team – a gaming maniac. Our game was virtually taken apart and reassembled several times in order achieve three main goals:
-----1) Remove any in-game text to make the game language-independent.
I would never have thought it possible since all action cards and tableaus featured a lot of text. But he insisted, so we took our time to create a set of simple icons to be used, which were consequently tested and optimized. Check!
Final prototype of an action card, now without text
-----2) Optimize the game material for better handling, less overhead, and more fun.
At first, players placed the action cards face-down on their tableau, making it necessary to remember the first choices while thinking about the last one. One had to pick those cards up again and again during the planning phase. The new planning tableau with a slot and an inverted action card layout did the trick. A complicated method to determine each round's starting-player has been removed without any bad effect on the game. Determining the income of the settlement was simplified. Many other elements were refined without losing any tactical or strategic choices. Some of the more complex action cards have been removed from the game, but many of them will probably return in future extensions. Check!
Final prototype of Edo – then still "Altiplano" – before the artists got to work
-----3) Find a good theme that fits to the game mechanisms.
Quite early we found one possible theme, placing the game during the Spanish conquest of South America. This choice influenced the game's further development, introducing additional elements that made the end of the game even more exciting.
But still, we were not completely satisfied with the theme. Then, after nursing the first theme for more than six months, someone from the publisher came up with the idea of placing the game in Japan during the Edo period. At first, we did not like the notion of completely changing the theme – but after some consideration we realized that this new theme fit perfectly! All game elements were completely in line with the theme, and many additional elements were waiting to be introduced. Check!
Detail from the game board
And finally, the rules had to be adapted and designed. It never fails to amaze me how much difference a single word can make. In the end, everyone was thrilled by the final results.
And Here We Go
In retrospect, I still cannot believe how much of our initial prototype was changed over the years, while the game still feels much the same as at the beginning – but much more beautiful, less cumbersome, faster to explain, and much more fun to play. All our playtesters still love to play the game, although they already "had" to play it a lot of times.
I hope you will have as much fun playing the game – whether you back the current Kickstarter project or pick up the game at some later date – as we had creating and playtesting it for more than two and a half years!
Many thanks to the Queen Games Team and to our playtesters, especially Timo, Andy, Dennis, Velvre, and all the others of the Spieletreff Braunschweig.
Stefan Malz
[Disclosure: Queen Games hired me to edit the English-language rules for Edo. —WEM]
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Next » [14]
|
|
A recreation of a hex in the first prototype, the original having been lost in a hard drive crash
From the first prototype, salvaged from 1.5 Gigs of design files on the hard drive
Print-and-play version of Tahiti, with Haumea showing the way to unexplored islands
