meeplespeak

Dungeon

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:26:00 +0000

So, this year's One-Page Dungeon Contest....

Here's my entry. Feel free to give it whirl. I'll try to be spoiler-free as much as possible if you want to keep the "surprise" of the game as surprise-y as possible.

I've been wanting to do something interesting with the mini-book format for a while, and a choose-your-own-adventure system seemed like a good fit for it...especially since the mini-book format dovetails perfectly into the one-page design requirements of trying to fit a dungeon on to one side of one page of paper. The fun thing in this design is in the use of ripping tabs off the paper as a way to denote status changes in the dungeon. This allows for a little back-and-forth into the same areas, but with different effects.

As usual, I continue to be interested in the mechanical aspect of hiding and obfuscating linked information by way of windows on cards when placed on one another (as I've talked about before). And, again, the minibook format became a fun playground to mess around with that idea. There's quite a few layering tricks employed in this book with regards to revealing and hiding information. Having done this the first time, I'm sort of looking forward to trying it again from scratch to see what other nonsense the format could pull off.

As far as the dungeon itself is concerned, it's naturally quite small. There's only so much room you can fit on a sheet of paper while handling the status changes within the game. However, I'm pretty pleased with the amount of "weight" the story. Given how little information is given with regards to the story, I think that there's enough of a twist to make you think about your given mission.

Play-wise, the game has a very distilled and raw resolution system, tied to two different colors of dice. (The dice are also used as a way to track you health, yay for dual purpose components! )The main decisions that the player will make will involve deciding which color set of dice to roll during combat. Initially, both color sets were balanced with the exact same rules (a die's color is more powerful against an obstacle it's same color), which became a very simple mathematical enterprise to determine which color set to use. In this version, the color types are rather unbalanced...which adds a little bit more thinkiness when determining your course of action when going into battle.

And again, there's really not much to battle, given the size and scope. And the game is balanced enough to make sure that you will win more than lose...if you really have a desire to play it more than once. I would probably work in a couple of extra colors of dice for more choices....but hey, it works right now for a first pass at an idea.

*edit* link for the file now goes to the RGPGeek entry.

Robbing

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:22:00 +0000

I know people have issues with the way dice work in Settlers of Catan; just because 6's and 8's should come up more often than 4's, doesn't mean that they do over the short-term. So, they use a a deck of cards that exactly matches the probabilities of the results of two dice. I think one of the charms of Settlers is that, over the short-term, your expected chances of getting that valuable 6 region to pay off might not happen.

But after falling way behind in a recent "Settlers Trails to Rails" game, I was more concerned with the way rolling a 7 just extends the pain. With every roll of 7, no resources get produced for a turn...effectively pushing out the game one extra turn. So, not only was I falling further behind because of wacky, non-expectant dice rolls...the game was just getting longer due to the 7s.

So, is there something that can be done to change that?

Now, I also don't think the robber should change...stealing a card from the leader (and shutting down one of his hexes), and keeping someone from hording cards are important to the game. But what if, after a player rolls a 7 and performs his duties as a robber, the player does an additional action...he simply keeps rolling until he rolls a non-7, pays out the regions on that number, and the game continues as normal?

Basic probabilities here.... 6 out 36 possible rolls will result in a 7. So, every sixth roll will result in a robber action...producing no goods, which, based on my theory, extends the game by another turn. If we let a player still payoff regions, that would mean the game doesn't have those extended turns, and we've reduced the length of the game by 1/6.

Assuming a game of Settlers takes 120 minutes. 1/6 of that time is 20 minutes. So, now the game is reduced down to a game that takes 100 minutes. That seems somewhat substantial.

So, let's roll with this rules change. Does it affect, in any way, that the game gets played? The game probably becomes looser in the end game, since every turn will produce supplies, and therefore starting out a turn short of cards won't happen very often. The robber rules will still be in effect limiting hand sizes, though.

Does trading change? Since your hand size will be larger, it will be easier for you to build what you want...but you will also have more cards to trade, and I think, there will be more incentive to trade to keep under the robber 7-card level.

Because of this, I think that game even speeds up more, because it will be easier to hit the winning conditions (even though that may be offset by the slower player turns, due to having more cards in hand...which will create more decisions to be made). But I don't think anything fundamentally changes.

It's worth a try at some point. I think.

Hotness

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:31:00 +0000

In case you are wondering how the "Hotness" rating on boardgamegeek works....
I really have no idea.

I know that there's always some concern about people gaming the hotness charts. Even though I'm not really sure what the end game of that would be. I guess as a form of "marketing" to make it look like your game is really popular. But it just seems sort of variable; but I admit it's nice to have a series of "quick links" over there where there's a certain meta-society-gestault thing about a game...if you use bgg as a reference, in general you are learning about a game at the same time as everybody else.

But as an interesting example on the rpggeek side of the site, I have put up a new Fiasco playset. It's called "Lord Doomicus and His Giant Battle Planet". It's a playset designed as a comedy about all of the background people who are needed to run a giant Star Wars-like Death Star.

It "became active" yesterday. This morning, it's rated number #2 on the "hotness" scale, behind the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game. I checked the Giant Battle Planet direct link and it has had....32 views, with 18 downloads.

Again, this is on the RPG hotness scale, and not the boardgamegeek scale. I assume it takes a lot more than that on the boardgame side. Bu, then again, I could be wrong about that.

I don't know what kind of traffic drives the rpggeek site on a given day, or if the RPG world is consumed by 3 or 4 800-pound gorillas (such as D&D and Pathfinder) with everybody else a quite-the-distant second, but I just find it interesting that that small amount of clicks on that side of the site can drive something that high on the hotness list.

Small

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:29:00 +0000

So, there's this wonderful game I want to do for the 2-player print-and-play contest over at boardgamegeek.

It's an interesting theme, based on the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, where both players are essentially "trapped" on a deep space mission together from competing countries. They need to trust each other, and work together, to make the mission succeed, but as news slowly winds itself through space to the probe that tensions are mounting back home, the trust starts to break down, as victory conditions start changing for each player. It could be fascinating, interesting, and different (at least in my mind).

But I don't have time for that now.

So I decided to try my hand at a tiny card game (since I like working with oddball restrictions), ala "Love Letter" which I haven't played...but I get the general gist of it.

Current set of rules and 15 print-and-play card are here in GoogleDrive. It just needs a few playtests to see if it runs at all.There's a wonderful chance that the game is a complete disaster...like most first prototypes.

Anyway....

I originally was shooting for 12 but would up with 15; but it felt like I had to push the card count out more as I self-played it. The simple rules overview is as follows:

The deck is comprised of three suits...and each suit has the same set of wacky action cards. One card is removed from the game. The goal of the game is to determine the color of the card that was removed, with scores based on owning cards in your hand that match that color at the end of the game. A player's turn is simply: A) optionally playing a card out of his hand and performing the action on the card, followed by B) drawing a card from the deck. If at any point a the draw deck has no cards when the player is required to draw a card, then the player may optionally end the game. Scoring is based on matching the card color of the removed card with your cards in your hand at the end of the game.

Now, scoring has some unique tricks to it. Scoring is designed to prevent card hoarding. You score points for having cards in your hand that match the target color, AND for cards that don't match the target color in your opponent's hand. In general, the scoring should "play" with the player's perception of what they need to do in the game...in this case, since the player wants to find out what the missing card is, he wants to see as many cards as possible, but since scoring penalizes card hoarding, he wants as few cards in his hand at the end of the game as possible. Which should create an interesting dynamic.

Initially the card actions were simple: "draw an extra card" "shuffle the discards back in the deck". Most of the actions have been re-thought using ideas based on the Cut-The-Pie problem (one person cuts the pie, the other person decides who gets what piece). This was done for a few reasons; it adds more "weight" and more decisions to the game while keeping the component count really low. And two, it gives each card some specific ways to be used slightly differently depending on the stage of the game where the player is at. As mentioned above, the game can be thought to have two stages, the initial find-the-missing-card stage, followed by the hand-building-and-point-forming stage. And by giving the actions multiple levels of decisions, the cards can be used differently in each stage.

An additional, quieter side effect of the actions is the way the player can control the game speed. Remember, the game can possibly end when player cannot draw a card (ending the game with that player's discretion). By giving the players some control of feeding cards back into the draw deck, or how many cards that can be drawn, the players can control that speed outside of the realm of simply deciding to end it.

Of course, there are potentially issues with regards to recursive card action and card play that can never end the game. Hopefully I've caught those. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's some trick somewhere in there I missed. That's the dangerous side of letting the players control the speed and end game of the game; the playing for the draw, or just flat out breaking the game.

On a final note...I once read something about comic strips, that in a lot of ways drawing comic strips are harder than traditional artwork or comic books, because of the level of tolerances and the amount of lines drawn will reveal any mistake on a comic strip character as a much larger flaw than a slightly altered line in a more detailed model. For example, if there is one line that isn't juuuust right on Charlie Brown, you see it immediately as an error. I have a feeling that small games like this are similar. I don't think there's a case of "well, if you just tweak this one little rule a little bit, it will be fixed." Small games either work, or are a complete disaster.

At least that's my story right now, and I'm sticking with it.

Half-Chance

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 03:50:00 +0000

So, there's a thread gong on at the story-games forum talking about what RPGs can learn from board games. I have no idea if this is any kind of solution, but some of the things being discussed there led me to ka-noodling this idea. Currently, the idea is theme agnostic...but there's no reason why you couldn't add cards that theme-specific as expansions or whatever.

First of all, the cards themselves. This is basically a card game. Once you know the basics, everything else you need to know is on the cards. A player's turn is simply this: play a card and follow the directions. The cards show a list of instructions to follow, starting at the top. Once a player follows the directions in the grey box, he flips a coin. Flipping a tails is a "minus" result while a heads is a "plus" result. The player then moves down the list of instructions until he finds the next instruction that matches his result. Once a player hits an instruction that reads END CARD, his turn is over.

And that's the basic idea in a nutshell.

So, let's say a player played the Wander card over to the side here. He describes why things are "hard to see", and then selects another player for their opinion on what is in the distance.

He flips a coin, which lands as a heads...so he moves down to the next instruction with the plus sign, and now he needs to describe the voices that he is hearing, and ask another player to flesh that information out.

He flips a coin again, which lands as a tails..so he moves down to the next minus sign, and now must describe as they investigate, how whatever the other player thought was going on...it's actually much worse.

Again, a coin flip, and another minus...which results into sliding all the way down to the final instruction. And now he describes how things have gotten much, much worse. He selects another player to play an Encounter (as seen below). Once that player's Encounter card is over, control of the game comes back to him, at which point he hits the END CARD instruction, and his turn is over.

Encounter cards play out the same way. The only big difference is that while Wander cards set up a scene, Encounters are more about a character's action in the scene. Encounters play out as little scenes within the main Wander scene. And yes, Encounters can cause other players to play Encounters.

Once an Encounter hits an End Card, the control of the game is reverted back to the player who was the person who requested this Encounter to be played.

And finally, there's a class of cards called Conditions, which you acquire and play when you can't play the required card, or when you become injured, as seen further down.

And that's about it.

And now for the more detailed rules. I'm leaving out theme, setting, and character building for the time being. The game is designed to have no GM, and no pen-and-paper stat tracking; the only "stat" is your five cards and the amount of Conditions that suck up those five spaces.

With that said...

******************************

There are two decks of cards. The main deck is comprised of Wanders and Encounters. Shuffle those together, and have every player draw five cards. Shuffle the Condition cards to create the Condition deck. The Condition deck sits off to the side until a player needs to draw a Condition.

On a player's turn, he plays a Wander card from his hand and follows the instructions. If he doesn't have a Wander in hand, he then selects a Condition that he owns in front of him to use as his set of instructions. If he doesn't have a Condition, he then draws a Condition and follows the instructions on that card.

After completing each instruction, the player flips a coin, and then moves down the list of instructions to find the next instruction that matches his coin flip. The player never moves back up the card. Any instructions passed over because it does not match the correct coin flip at the correct time is "lost" for that play.

If the player must choose another player to play an Encounter, the originating player becomes "the caller"; he is the player who called on another player to play. The caller will need to remember where he is in his instruction set as the player he called will return control back to the caller when the called upon player's instructions are finished.

(And to be fair, there can be multiple callers and "called upon players" in a chain if Encounters require the choosing of another player. As long as everyone remembers where they were when control bubbles back up the chain, everyone is good).

If a called upon player is asked to play an Encounter, and he does not have one, he must choose a Condition he owns to play. If he does not have a Condition, he must draw one and follow those instructions.

If at any point an instruction notes that a player is "injured" they must draw a new Condition and follow the instructions.

Conditions are always kept face up in front of the player who acquired them, and the player can never get rid of them unless an instruction tells them to do so.

After playing a Condition, the player can discard one card from his hand and draw a new card from the main deck.

Instructions are followed until the player hits an END CARD instruction, at which point his turn is over. At the end of his turn, the player draws back up to five cards, which include any Conditions the player may have. So, a player with 2 Conditions can only draw up to three cards for his hand. The Wander is officially placed in the discard pile, along with any Encounters that were played during the player's round. The only player who draws cards is the player who's turn has just ended.

A player is considered dead if he has five Conditions.

Reason

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:58:00 +0000

All rules need reasons for existing. If you can't pin down a good reason for a rule to exist, it should be pulled out of the game. In fact, I'd almost go as far as stating that the rules need to have a mechanical reason for existing; if a rule solely exists for a thematic reason, it probably needs to be re-thought.

And then there's another step deeper, where you have to decide if the reason itself is important enough to warrant the reason being there.

And this is one of the things I hate about chess. Just what the heck is the reason for the en passant rule there for? Remember, all pieces have their own set of moves, which are strictly followed, well except, in the one special case...

(I'm willing to give the "pawns can move 1 Space forward, EXCEPT ON THEIR FIRST MOVE THEY MAY MOVE TWO SPACES exception," given that there are a few good reasons for that to exist: It speeds up play at the start of the game, and it does offer, I think, a few more strategic choices.)

Anyway, rules without reasons just clutter the game. Rules with poor reasons should be given better reasons or removed completely if you want a tight game that flows. Rules that provide for multiple reasons are even better.

There's probably some interesting way to analyze games by looking at the reasons. Of course, reasons are pretty subjective. Here's a sampling of reasons things exist, or in some cases removed, from My Little Vineyard.

Spoilage - Originally existed as a reason to include weather/seasonally effects...was removed to due "player reset" symptoms and made the game too restrictive.
Research Books - Currently probably one of the stronger rules/reason sets as they are currently implemented. They are used as a fallback option, when there is nothing else available to do for the player. And they provide for a general "growing machine" bonus over the course of the game without directly scoring.
Fertilizers - These are thematically very strong, but on first glance, they are a weak choice. However, while they typically don't provide many points, they are very strong in removing options for competing players.
Wine Cellar - Thematically strong, provides strategic options as to score now, or hope to score better in the future decisions.
Market Place - Thematically okay, provides tactical options and some screwage against other players.
Dice Pools - Flexible way of having a group of stuff meaning one thing to one player, while meaning something else to another. Also, it's the unique feature of the game
First Round Dice Roll exception - Yeah, I'm not to happy with the first round requirement of hacing players being FORCED to roll multiple dice, as opposed to letting them decide. But the reason is very strong why it exists; the dice pool needs to be seeded somehow in a somewhat balanced fashion.

Of, course there's a lot of weaker of stuff, too. The current variety of fertilizers have pretty reasons to exist; in fact, I could probably get rid of either wood chips and volcanic ash without missing much. On the other hand, variety is always nice to have.

Thers something to be said about the potential of drafting different sets of grapevines that a player can use to spice up the variety even more, just to be sure that there isn't one clear path to victory. I'm not sure I want to add that complexity to the game at this point...and that would entail all sort of other balancing issues, I think. Which is a good enough reason to leave it alone for now.

Time

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:18:00 +0000

I'm currently in a play-by-forum game of Fiasco using the All the Damn Time playset. It's considered to be a dangerous, expert playset, mostly because everybody plays the SAME CHARACTER just in different time periods of his life, and they start intermingling in strange time-travel-y ways.

Unlike my other Fiasco experiences, we've been playing this one pretty serious and "realistic" as far as a sci-fi time travel thing can go without all the wacky Fiasco-eque-ness that usually ensues. The core thrust of the story so far is that we are all playing Sam, a garage-shop kind of scientist with aspirations of time travel, who is married to an artist. He has received funding from a mysterious technology group. And, oh yeah, his wife's artwork will be worth a LOT of money in the future, somehow.

I guess I just wanted to save this "scene" here that I "played out." For reference, in the future, Sam and Abby have an argument that causes an experiment that Sam is working on in their studio/lab to explode, with Abby saving Sam's life in the process, even though she dies.

A black die was selected, indicating that the result of the scene should end badly for Sam.

**************************

Sam sits at his desk. It's 1AM, and the only light that illuminates his office is a single wash of light from a desktop fluorescent. All around him, journals and notebooks spread about, open to seemingly random pages.

With a sigh, Sam leans back in his chair. "It's not going to work," he mutters to himself, "nothing is going to work."

"Nothing."

He stares around in his room in silence. Abby's not home, having gone to some high-falootin' art party. He thought that having the house all to himself would give him some time to think; to make the equations work.

But they don't. Not even close.

"Time to throw in the towel," Sam thinks. Too much of his life has been wasted chasing this empty venture. Time for a new beginning. A new start. Time for more time with Abby.

These journals have nothing of importance anymore. They are just a collection of flawed theories and bad math. Time to get rid of them....

THE KILN!!!! At Abby's studio. One big hot oven. Surely, that will burn all of these useless pages to nothing but a tiny pile of ash!

Sam gathers up a large collection of journals and notes into a big plastic storage bin. It's heavy, but he manages to carry it out to the truck of his car without pulling a disc in his back.

By the time he reaches the studio, it's begun to drizzle. By the time he manages to carry the bin into the back door of the studio, there's a steady stream of rain.

And by the time he warms up the kiln, and opens the bins, it's a full-on thunderstorm that is brewing outside of the small studio.

CRACK!!! An instant flash of white and a loud boom of thunder knocks Scot-Sam to the ground as the light quickly flicker off. Sam fumbles in the dark to a far corner. "I think that's where the flashlight was," he thinks. The wind of the storm howls through the back door.

But it doesn't stop. It's a voice. A woman's voice in pain.

Sam doesn't find the flashlight...but the burning coils from the kiln glow bright red through some cooling vents, powered by natural gas. His eyes adjust to the darkness and growing soft light of burning red heating elements. They are adjusted well enough to see the shape of a woman crumpled on the floor by the door. The smell of burnt clothing a flesh begins to flood Sam's nostrils.

"Sam...." It's Abby's voice. Dear God, it's Abby.

Sam rushes over to her, tripping over a small tricycle, "How the heck did that get here?" he thought, kicking it out of the way. The tricycle rattle quickly over to a bookshelf near the kiln, banging into the wood structure solidly, dropping some unused telephone books behind the kiln, which in turn knocked around the valve that connected the natural gas line to the kiln.

But all of this didn't matter to Sam. He knelt down next to Abby. Even in the dim red glow of the room from the heated kiln he could see she was badly scarred across the left half of her face...a recent burn.

"Christ, what the he'll happened to you?"

Abby lifted her head up weakly, as another thunder clap rumbled from above. She smiled slightly, "Sam...you're whole again. You're..." she grimaced in pain.

"Jesus, stay right there, will you. We'll get you to the hospital"

Sam raced over to the desk, noting a small pack-and-play crib off to one side with a glance of lightning through the front window.

He reached for his cars keys with a quick grab. Followed by a swipe at his cell phone in which his arm stopped still as a statue as the blue glow of his phone emitted a string of text messages that froze him.

"Party went longer than expected"
"Staying at my moms tonight"
"got a couple of good sales leads, talk to you in the morning"

Sam found himself breathing heavily, the rest of his body still. He jerked his head around to look at the shadow of the woman behind him.

Abby had managed to crawl herself up the door frame. She leaned against it in a hump, exhausted, wincing. In between painful breaths she muttered.

"I saw it, Sam. I saw it....all. The tradeshow...the morning after that night...on the library roof...the...trial...that accident at the lake...that night you won the trophy....bowling alley...the..."

Her eyes got wide with fear.

"The explosion... MY GOD, the explosion...the operating table...what they were able to piece back...the CNN interview..the foothills over by the zoo..."

She crumpled to the floor writhing in pain.

Sam rushed to her side and picked her up. Even though she had been talking slowly in short breaths, Sam's mind was racing with what he was hearing as if she was talking at a million miles per hour. Some of the things she mentioned had indeed already happened. But others? Were these future events? This clearly wasn't "his" Abby.

But now there was no way he could take her to the hospital either. He knew the philosophical issues of two Abby's existing in the same time stream like the back of his hands.

He carried her over to the old, musty couch that Abby would often take naps on during her long "creative impulse" sessions. He held her close, feeling how heavy and slow her breaths were.

Another lightning flash. Across the room Sam noticed the family portrait on the wall. It was a picture of him in his finest suit (granted, not too fine, all things considering), with his arms around the waist of Abby, who held an infant boy. Both parents smiled proudly.

Sam rubbed his eyes, wondering what kind of tricks the night, the storm, and this other Abby were playing on his mind.

"You're so warm," she spoke softly, "and you're whole again." She looked up at him, longingly, determined, "Don't let me wake up again."

"What?"

Her one good eye that wasn't scarred burned into his eyes with as much energy that she could muster, "When I wake up...that's...when it happens....I don't want to do...do it again....it hurts tool...much..."

"What? What happens? What do you want me to do?"

She put her head down on his lap. He could feel the tangle of burnt hair through his fingers.

"I'm too tired..I can't do it...but you..have the strength...don't let me wake up..."

A flood of memories came pouring in to Sam's mind, an uncontrolled river of images, and sounds, and touches, and smells all at once of his son. His son, Max! Maximilian!! How could he ever forget about his only son!!!!!

"Please, for me, Sam...let this be the end of it..." her voice trailed away.

***********

Her heart didn't take long to stop beating after he had made the cut. It was only a few bucketfuls. Hopefully, the heat of the kiln would scorch the blood away. The body on the other hand....

He turned to watch the final ghost of Abby's body simply fade away, as if it was never there, returned to the ether. The buckets he held, on the other hand, still contained her fluids. His mind still raced. Time travel MUST be possible! Maybe it has something to do with REM sleep, or brain chemicals during the waking process? Of course...Sam had never taken into account the human elements in his equations!!! That must be the missing puzzle piece!

The storm had passed outside. There was no thunder anymore, but a constant potter of rain continued. It would be dawn soon.

He opened the top of the kiln. He had this niggling thought that he should avoid walking into a tricycle by the kiln. But it was a foolish thought, and Sam laughed at it as having a tricycle in this place would be ridiculous. He looked at a bare corner of the room, and felt like "something" should be there, like something had gone missing from it's proper place, but he couldn't fathom it.

Once dawn broke he sat on the couch, reviewing his notes, looking for places where he once had mystery, but now had clarity thanks to the "other" Abby. He looked at the morning light that was streaking across the bare wall opposite to where he sat, and had this funny feeling that that would be a perfect place to hang their wedding picture.

***********************

It didn't end badly for Sam in the typical Fiasco style, which usually means getting thrown into a trunk of a car. But he did wind up killing his wife-from-the-future at her request, and doesn't remember the son he never had.

So I can't say it ended that well for him. Well, except that he doesn't give up on the time travel thingy. At least he's got that going for him.

Loose

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 03 May 2011 22:35:00 +0000

Well, my suspicions were correct. Another playtest of My Little Vineyard with a "looser" set of rules did many things, all of which led to a better experience. Many of the rules changes weren't changes at all, but removals. Which is a good thing. Solving problems by subtraction instead of addition, or worse, addition of exceptions (as discussed a little bit later) is generally a bad place to be.

A lot of the complexity of rules centered around the removal of spoilage. During various parts of the game, most of your warehouse of supplies would be returned to the stock if you didn't use them "before winter came." Thematically, this made some amount of sense. But from a game play aspect, it really required way too much pre-planning for a player to think of, especially in a game using dice where you might not get the die roll you want. Not only did spoilage punish the player who rolled unlucky, or poorly selected a roll based on bad stategy, it resulted in a case where it "reset your world" thought various points in the game.

And that reset of the world turned out to be a problem. Early on in the design of the game, the desired reasoning was that the risk to make the better scoring wines was the potential that your supplies for it would be spoiled out of existence. As it turns out, just the fact that the higher scoring wines simply "cost more" is good enough. One of the more interesting statement on the last failed playtest which turned out to be wiser than it seemed at the time was that a game of this type should be a steamroller game...one where you start by building little things, and end with building big things. Spoilage never let you reach beyond the little stuff.

Another aspect that was changed to fit into this simpler world are the way the research books are implemented. And their change resulted in killing two birds with one stone. The research books now apply across the board to any barrel of wine you make, and you can purchase a research book at any time for yur turn for the cost of one die. Before, you only got a book when you produced a barrel...and it was only good for the type of wine you produced to earn it. Which resulted in some confusion as to when the book applied it's bonus (when you first picked it up) and tended to make player concentrate on a single wine type.

Now, with the one die pick for the book, it gives player something they can always do when there are no other actions available (the game was missing a fallback action when the was no other decent option available) as a beneficial side effect of a generalized bound-for-all book.

Anyway, I'm back to feeling good about the game again.

One other discussion about the game that we had was about defining different rounds to as doing something specific. For example, when you produce a barrel of wine, you can store it in your wine cellar, whee it will "ferment" and gain points at the end of every round, or simply ship it to score it's current value. The problem with barrels in your cellar is that they don't score for you unless you ship them out of your cellar which requires an additional action.

One of the things I liked about this system is that over the course of the four or five rounds you play, the first rounds are spent storing barrels, while the last rounds are spent shipping barrels. However, it is up to the player to decide whethat tipping point occurs. If players aren't careful, players will wind up at the end of the game with barrels stuck in their cellar scoring zero points.

Anyway, this is a choice OF THE PLAYER. There was some discussion of programming the rounds (round 1 and 2 are storing only rounds, 3 and 4 are shipping only rounds, etc). I believe that this is needless rules creep, and could prevent players from experiment with unusual strategies as they get better with the game, and falls into the category of "rules exceptions" which I don't like. Otherwise known as "the rules are this, except when..."

Chess has a few "rules exceptions" that bug the he'll out of me. Castling your king, and en passant, which are both rules that break piously discussed rules.

As it is, the game currently has one rule exception...on the first round of a season, every player must roll at least 5 (changing to 4) dice to add to the center pool. After that, it's one or more. I'm not a big fan of this exception, but it helps with first player advantage, and gets a lot of dice out in the middle of the table to start the round in a methodical manner. So, I can live with it.

I hope to have the next version of it up soon, but another, stranger project is sucking away at my time. Which I may or may not talk about depending on how that works out.

Those Summer Nights

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 02:51:00 +0000

So, in case you are wondering; no, you cannot load custom fonts on an iPad.

I came to this conclusion fairly quickly. I have recently received an iPad2. One of the first things I wanted to do was load up one of it's "fully featured" word processing apps, and create a Fiasco play set on it. Unfortunately, Fiasco uses a bunch of fonts that aren't considered to be Apple approved. And with that out of the way....

One of the things the Fiasco guys have been taunting Fiasco fans with is their upcoming compendium with all sort of new Fiasco goodies, including a hack of the system that let's you play the game in a way to recreate 80's teen comedies in the style of John Hughes movies. They (well, Jason Morningstar, the prime designer of the game) likes to call it a "gentler" fiasco.

This dovetails into a recent spring break trip where we took the kids to a local indoor water park for a few days. Floating around the lazy river, one can't help but notice the many late-teens who are life guarding the place, kind-of watching over numerous kids under 8 years old and their parents. Not too mention the kids workgint eh towel counter, the ticket redemption area of the arcade, etc. It can't be THAT luxurious of a life, but granted, probably better than slinging burgers.

One of the movie I've enjoyed in the last year was Adventureland, which did a really good job as far as capturing the whole 80's teen movie zeitgeist. And it seemed to capture some of the realities of someone I knew who used to work summers at Great America. Things like there being a sort of pecking order with regards to your position there, and how the coolness of the jobs there were directly proportional to how easily you could accidentally a group of people. In other words, the ride operators had the cool jobs; the kids hawking the carny games, not so much.

This leads me to the inevitable conclusion of trying to create a Fiasco playset based on a teen romantic comedy centered around these teens who work the summer jobs at a local water park.

Which had some interesting little battles.

The typical Fiasco playset includes all sort of nasty things. Things that people want to keep secret, things that people desperately wants, and things that can lead to violent deaths. While there are emotional stressors in your usually teen comedy, they generally don't have any truly violent or despicable detail. There's a certain innocent quality to those things. I was looking for things that were more bittersweet and less violently confrontational. It was kind of fun plucking out interesting little bits of high school experiences from 25 years ago to put into the playet, such as using film canisters to carry not rolls of film, but as a secret compartment to carry vodka shots.

And there's a lot of elements to create. It's strangely seductive to create or suggest dark "what's the absolute worse way things can go wrong" details given the confines of a certain theme. But coming up with simple objects and needs that try to lead a story down the path of "the geeky guy trying to win the cute girl" angle of Say Anything is kind of hard due to the simplicity of the situation at hand. heck, the standard Fiasco playset usually has a whole category dedicated to weapons.

The Tilt Table has the same issues, of course; and in some ways is much worse, as they are designed for things shift the game into complete disastrous chaos and bodily harm. I needed gentler tilts obviously. I threw away pretty much the entire aftermath phase, and replaced it with something else. Something that again, doesn't have the characters writhing in agony over loss of limbs, but instead constitutes telling the story of that crazy summer with questionable truths to their character's kids.

So, hopefully, Ducky DOESN'T die (like he would in a normal Fiasco game), and Bender does the get the girl in the end (while defiantly shoving his fist in the air, of course).

Feel free to take a peek at the PDF here. It's uder the "files" section. If it doesn't make any sense what-so-ever, you might want to check out the free sample of Fiasco here.

*********

As a strange side note, Those Summer Nights! is oddly sitting at the top of "The Hotness" chart for RPGs on RPGgeek. The file itself only has 14 downloads. It's sort of an interesting comparison of the kind of hype it takes to get anywhere near the hotness top on the BGG side. I'm guessing it's because BGG is truly the one-stop shopping area for board game geek, while RPG geeks have a bunch of other sites floating around in that network. So it's easy to skew the hotness charts on the RPG side.

Fatigue

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 01:50:00 +0000

I fatigue easily on a design. Part of it is that I don't really have a nice continual stream of playtesting. And so, as a game gets fudged this way and that, a new design experiment comes along that captures my attention like a moth to a flame. At which point the old design gets scuttled own the shiny new design....which winds up getting scuttled for something newer.

Strangely, I do have a relatively nice stream of play testing ability more than most. But we only meet for every other week, and typically only two games get to the table. So I maybe get only one playtest a month or so out of a game in order to try and make sure everyone gets a chance to be in the spotlight.

And so, My Little Vineyard continues apace, with a new change every month or so. The link off to the right there is really old and moldy...the link on boardgamegeek is about 1.5 versions behind. But I had thought I was coming close to actually finishing it. Really close. Everyone in the group seemed to like it (which is surprising given the wide array of tastes in games). And so, I figured the last playtest would be strong with just a couple of tweaks to points and such.

And I was wrong.

Maybe because people have become familiar with the game now, they are now able to see some issues that weren't there before. Not that this is bad...just discouraging as it seemed the finish line was close. Fatigue is really settling in with this game at this point, as these probably 3 other projects I have a great desire to work on at this point, and that "1 play test per month" is valuable, indeed.

The biggest issue was where one of the players felt helpless after realizing that the action he had taken three turns ago was a poor one, and now that he had realized it, felt there was no way to rebound from it and catch up to the rest of the players. This bothered me quite a bit the more I thought about it. If you make an obvious bad play in most games, you get "penalized" for it and learn from it and move on.

It left me wondering if the obvious bad play wasn't obscured enough; I've been playing Agricola some lately, and one of the comments that comes from that game seems to be along the lines of "I lost again! And I don't know how."

Anyway, this lead to a fairly interesting discussion of fixes for the game, which would seem to complicate things further. Additionally, the fatigue that had worn on in the design of the project I could now see stretching further out down many more months. Granted, these aren't working man-months; really just an hour or so here and there in between playing. But still, the real-time length to completion is painful indeed.

As things usually happen, over the weekend I spent some time digesting the comments, and trying to come up with solutions. What I've noticed is that a lot of my project usually wind up with me adding more and more things to them, then near the end, a great purging happens; suddenly there's a realization that a lot of those things aren't needed, and removed. And that is what is happened on this next revision of the game. I think the game will be better for it, and it addresses the issues that were brought up.

And hopefully I can move on to something else soon. Strangely, while I think that this is probably my most commercial-ready design, it is also somewhat less appealing to me than other designs which are a bit more experimental. And that's what I'm missing playing around with.

RPG Solitaire Contest Entry

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:45:00 +0000

So, my interest continues into story games. Over at the story-games site last month, I noticed that there was a contest starting up for the first half of the first month of the new year. Of course, I didn't notice the later posts where they listed various challenge goals (as noted in the post I linked to). And so, I feverishly worked out something, went to post it, and found out about the challenge goals the hard way. Ouch. So, I don't know if I even qualify.

There's a saying in poker that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker. That's sort of my feeling I get at the story-game site. It's fun feeling like being the "idiot in the room," as I know very little about this type of game, and the people on the story-game forums seem to know a lot about their hobby, and have quite a literate discussion of things. Which is quite different than some of the board game design-y discussions you usually wind up having.

But I digress...

Anyway, the allure of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" still holds me in sway, going back to my first BGDF game design competition entry five years ago. My RGP entry is called "Replaced," and has you trying to get out of a small town with your loved ones while the town members are being replaced around you with (potentially) alien clones.

It was a nice change of pace to work on...no need for coming up with a component list, or worry about game balance (well, it a different kind of game balance, I suppose). More about creating leads into a story for the player to follow, some of the leads being false in the worst way...after he has decided to follow them.

You can download my entry here.

Holly Jolly

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:01:00 +0000

Boardgamegeek (well, really, rgpgeek) is running a Fiasco playset design contest. So, that sounds like fun. Here's a link to my entry.

The concept of the theme came from a thread on story-games.com, which is a forum dedicated to narrative RGPs, and is pretty interesting to read. They use a lot of big words over there, and a lot of big-named concepts, and ideas are generally well shared. Unlike board game design, where it seems a lot of it is "I've this this great idea, but I'm not telling you because you'll steal my secrets."

Anyway, the theme is centered around Rankin Bass holiday specials. Unlike most fiascos, which have a sort of gritty, losers-trying-to-better-themselves-in-a-really-bad-way kind of thing, Holly Jolly! is a bit more fanciful, with nods to magical devices, and talking animals. Or in the case of the cover artwork as shown to the left here, animated talking and singing snowmen. Well, animated before being stabbed by the North Pole marker in the chest and his umbrella through the eye.

Of course, there's a still a pretty good chance that Santa Claus is going to wind up being tossed into the blades of a large snow thrower, like all good fiasco's should end.

Random Bits

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 02:56:00 +0000

I managed to play a game of Fiasco is real-life finally. It almost feels more like an improv game than a "game." And the whole experience of the game was pretty hilarious. Since Fiasco does a really good job of creating a narrative, I felt it was only proper to write up a session report in a story fashion, as your typical session reports are a bit dry for my tastes.

Click here to read it, and try and figure out who "wins".

Kickstarter.com is an interesting website, dedicated to independent artists and such, looking for way to fund their little (and sometimes big) projects. Tasty Minstrel Games is experimenting with it to try and get a new game funded for publishing. Others have managed to crack their funding barrier, but with a cheap "buy in." It will be interesting to see if their current funding efforts maintain its velocity for the next 24 or so days, or if it peters out. I know Seth has a couple of interesting things planned up his sleeve in order to keep interest high.

Protoplay

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:00:00 +0000

When creating and playing prototypes, I always expect the first pass to be awful. It's second play of the game, after all of the gross adjustments have been made, that determine if the game is worth moving forward on for me.

Anyway, in the last week, I've had a chance to playtest My Little Vineyard twice. And the second playtest was very successful in this manner. Many of the really awful things from the first playtest were resolved, and it really felt like progress had been made forward, as opposed to sideways.

Obviously, the game currently is in a print-n-play format of just a scoresheet, and everyone agrees now that it should be more than that. So porbably the next version will be something much more like an art project. But at least I feel like it's worth the pursuit. The Shipwreck game, while having merits, always seems to run sideways. And the (what seems like) 25 hours of mocking up a new set of parts for that just doesn't seem like a good use of time, at least until I get the hunger to re-visit it again.

Aside from the BGG link for My Little Vineyard given above, you can go to the sideboard link which has all of the most recent files. The BGG link is kinda slow in updates due to the "moderator must check all files" thing. In the end, this is a very good policy; just not that great for quick updates.

Vines

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:19:00 +0000

So after rambling on and on about finding narratives and such, I quickly put together a prototype of a game that is very much as far away as possible from a narrative game. And, for an experiment, I've put it up on boardgamegeek and asked for playtesters, just to see how that goes.

The central play of the game revolves around a very large dice pool that everyone shares. Pulling out sets of dice (straights, pairs, trips,"additions" and so on) let's players collect resources. Combining certain resources scores points. It's inspired by the "Fiasco dwindling dice pool mechanic", as previous mentioned.

Additionally, a player may roll additional dice into the pool if there is nothing there that the player wants. however, the price of this is that any new dice that are introduced to the pool that aren't pulled for resources simply become available fodder for the next player.

Which, from my solo playtesting, seems makes for a game that's pretty interesting. And, since I'm always on the lookout for new and different ways of things, an added plus to the game is that it is a dice game, but plays much different with the dice, since almost all dice games seem to use the "re-roll your dice three times and score" Yahtzee method. But then again, the core of it is stolen from Fiasco....

Anyway, I'll have to see what is made of it from the 'geek.

Measuring the experience

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:23:00 +0000

I've been poking around at "story-games" recently. This is a relatively new, relatively indie sub-category of role playing games that have popped up. In a nut shell, the crux of these games is about leveling up or churning stats, but instead focus on the creation of a good story, often without a game master running things. In a way, these are more like improv tools or things to break writer's block than games.

And that's what I'm finding appealing about them.

For the most part, board and card games are about following rules to "win the game." The thematic experience is usually there more to explain why you are doing things, but usually have very little "feel" of doing those things. It's about some combination of luck and the skill in finding efficiencies with in the rules. While those can be great experiences, or awful, to me there seems to be very little to walk away from the table aside from, "here's that great move that I pulled off to win the game."

I'm at the point now where I feel like I want something more than just following the path to the greatest amount of points. I'd like there to be some other attachment to the "narrative" of the game; I want the experience to more of an experience than just a race. These games are more about cerebral machinations, while I'm looking for more emotional and narrative connections.

*****

One of the more talked about games from the last year or so is Train. It's a game with a trick ending, a game that the designer claims to have an emotional appeal to those who played it, and even deciding not to play it is playing it. A lot of her discussions on the game seem like far-reaching "artistic vision" kind of stuff to me, but hey, everyone has to have a world view of their own stuff, I guess. There is nothing about the actual game system itself that stirs the emotions...just the tacked on theme of one of the most painful events of human history. Then again, it's kind of nebulous what the game actually is, given that she apparently she refuses to release the rules and the card data for review. In other words, the theme needs to be experienced for the emotional impact. Her other projects are also about emotionally heart breaking themes of human doing other humans wrong in grand ways. I'd be interested in seeing if she could capture the same type of emotional responses by not themeing a game around some terrible historical tragedy.

On the other hand...

I do think that they are good art pieces; and probably better than most mass produced games, from what little one can discern about them from afar. They get people talking about things in constructive ways.

Why I bring this up is the one unique thing I've found about Train from a rules standpoint is this: apparently the games doesn't describe a win condition. There is no mention of an ultimate goal with which you are striving for. Which is pretty powerful stuff. Here's why:

Without a known win condition, the player is left to determine his own experience with the game. It's not about optimizing moves better than the other players, it's about optimizing your turns in such a way to gain the best experience that you, yourself have created as a goal. And I can change that goal on a whim. It's about the experience.

Story games seem offer this kind of open-ended structure from a different angle; it's about the story that's created, the travel on the road, the experience of getting the end. The winning is in the creation of a story that is uniquely yours.

*****

Of course, with all that said, the one game that has really struck a chord in me is Fiasco. It's a game where the initial setup of the game is creating the relationship between the other player...then you fill in the blanks about your character. After that, you take turns creating a twisted little story of desperate people doing things that they shouldn't be doing, and things spiral out of control.

From a design standpoint, it's a simple game, but there's some really interesting mechanics in play. The create-the-relationships, not the character thing, as mentioned above is pretty brilliant. It allows for easy "change your locations" scenarios by simply using a few different charts. If you poke around on their website, you can see that they come out with a new "playset" every month, around a different location, era, or theme.

There's also mechanic of pulling dice from a central pool which is more fun that it should be that determines the relationship details, and if a character in a story is having good or bad outcomes.

It's worth a read of the rules to understand what is going on, and how easy it is for players to create their own messed up worlds. And to use as inspiration for other things.

Villains

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:10:00 +0000

I've been centering a lot of my prototype time on the Shipwreck game of late; as noted in this post, it has become more of an Indiana Jones-type adventure, where the game is about finding the clues through artifacts that lead the players to a final destination. And so, it continues; and I am strongly applying more thematic parts of that kind of adventure to the game.

Now, in this case, the word theme in the traditional sense of it being applied to board games would mean that I am taking characters and mythology from the movies series; well, this isn't the case. This is more about theme in the classical sense. In the sense that I am playing around with the ideas of running around the world is search of wacky magical artifacts, which have powers that can make you rich (the winner of the game), or can otherwise destroy you (put you is a losing position) due to your own moral compass.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the new direction that the game has taken is the idea of "playing the villain," which is something I haven't run across before in other games. Generally, this means you can play the "honest" way, which is full of hard work and a lot of money and actions being spent; or you can simply be the evil rogue, stealing need-to-use boats and hiring henchmen to steal artifacts. Or you can walk a fine line somewhere in between, and only play with treachery as a desperate last cause when needed. And of course, much like the Indiana Jones movies, those who take the easy, more villainous route, will most likely pay the piper when the "check comes due."

In general, the idea works like this: There's a set of rules how to obtain various important things in the game; these typically require some amount of money and actions to obtain. But, if you decide to not pay those fees in acquiring these things, you gain Villainy points.

Each artifact has a randomly (and unknown) Villainy threshold. Once a player acquires the artifact, the threshold becomes known, and if the player's Villainy is higher than the artifact, well, in true Indiana Jones fashion, the artifact turns on its owner and "bad things happen" to its owner.

From a design standpoint, I think it's an interesting concept as most games usually thematically assign a role to the player, either the good guy or bad (depending on the point of view). Then it is up to the player to win the game within the definition of that character. In this case, the player is self-defining their own character; do they see themselves as the honorable treasure hunter, or as the collector who collects through any means necessary? Are you Indiana Jones, or Rene Belloq? It's a risk/reward system where taking the low road early pays quick dividends; but the player does not know what the true risks even are (due to the random thresholds of the artifacts). So, a large part of the game is playing chicken with one's villainous self, while dealing with the race against the other players.

(I guess I should mention that there are not enough artifacts to go around for all players, so there NEED to be at least a little villainous streak in everybody. Let's face it, Dr. Jones was never one to shy against a little chicanery when times called for it.)

It also adds another layer of choice to the game. It's not just a racing logic puzzle anymore, where you choices were determined simply by trying to figure out the most efficient way to get the next part of the puzzle that you need. Now it's more about how you go about chasing down your clues long term, as decisions to use Villiany may or may not come back to bite you later on.

The closest that can find to this mechanism would be in Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, where you gain corruption tokens for using sub-standard building materials. I've never played it; I assume it's pretty close to what I'm talking about. And I guess that there must be other games out there that do this kind of thing.

How did this come about; like most elements of Eureka moments, it's about solving problems with the design. In the last playtest, I really wanted a strategy to exist where a player could simply spend all their time collecting money, while other players are doing the hard work. Then the money rich player could simply hire more goons and steal the artifacts away from the other players. However, even though no one attempted that strategy, it seemed pretty clear that it was the optimal one.

While suggestions came in about limiting what a player could do with regards to the money-rich strategy, I preferred to still let the player decide to take it or not, as opposed to the game limiting the collection of funds or steals in some way. The player SHOULD be able to take the role of the extremely wealthy collector if he wanted to, instead of the down-and-dirty tomb raider.

And hence the Villainy count was born, where every time the player tried to steal an artifact, he get dinged for a Villainy. Then it became second nature just to apply this concept to all of the other aspects of the game, and make it a prominent feature of the game.

**After all, the concept of tomb robbing, regardless of reasons for the robbing, is a little villainous no mater how you look at it.

Interview

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:13:00 +0000

I guess I'm a little late posting this up, but Matt Worden asked me a few questions about the development of PocketCiv, and here are the answers.

Castle Panic

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 02:02:00 +0000

I bought Castle Panic this weekend, primarily to play with my kids, who are quite enamored with Plants vs. Zombies. And it works quite well as a fun co-op with kids. I imagine it would work very well as a good gateway/party game for adults who don't know better about board games.

The simplicity of this game just screams variants. I'll probably wind up applying some rules form my old Doppleganger design, to create a nice traitor variant, even though a lot of this seems stolen from Battlestar Galactica at this point.

Things such as:

-- Players are dealt loyalty cards at the start of the game.
-- All cards are held as closed.
-- Discard pile is face down.
-- Player select 2 monsters, and return 1 to the stock, while playing the other one face down to the board. While moving normally, the monsters are turned up with the first hit; all effects occur then.

I may have to limit trading a bit to counter the effect of the players having control over the monsters.

Also, there would have to be some kind of accusation element added into it. I'll have to think about that for the time being.

Mission to Mars

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:14:00 +0000

Seth may appreciate this, or maybe not.

Seth has been interested in doing a "Mission to Mars" based game, with somewhat realistic-based theme-ing, based on current scientific theoretical planning. However, as he described it more, to me, it became just another in a long line of M.U.L.E. like resource generative games: put a mining unit on mars, let it mine for minerals to make more stuff, which then let's you mine different stuff, etc. etc.

The thing that struck me of being interesting about scientific-based theme is dealing with the amount of time it takes to get stuff across great distances, and the general precise of doing space travel stuff. Additionally, as President George Bush found out when he made an announcement about plans to go to Mars, it is technologically feasible to do it; but it's mostly about the political will power to be able to push through a plan of such large scope and money drain, with no obvious payback to the American public within a lifetime.

At least in the case for the race for space in the 60s, it was sold to the public partly as a race against the evil communists, as a way to prove American know-how can beat the evil empire.

Currently, I don't think that anyone is remotely close to Mars.

Anyway, so the game I proposed was not about resource management, or pick up and delivery back and forth between Earth and Mars, but primarily about controlling political clout, and the timing of various modules to Mars, based on the long term plans within the Case For Mars.

Simply enough, the game, as shown above, works like this. The sheet with the yellow pawn abstracts out the "public's interest" in the Mars program. The higher the interest, the more actions, or "political clout" you have. As most things with the public eye, interest wanes over time, giving you less clout to spend on the issue, until an important milestone is hit (say, a man walking on Mars), which increases the awareness in the program, and therefor, giving you more clout to spend.

So, the top row of cards are event cards that randomly indicate how much interest wanes on a turn. This would represent various newsworthy things that the news cycle and the public replaces their interest with. Things like scandal, wars, economy, etc.

As a country figurehead, you can control this somewhat, by spending your clout to adjust the events; "it looks like there's a war brewing, we better put a stop to that." Of course, this is clout that you can't spend towards your mission to mars.

The bottom row represents cargo ships delivering modules to Mars. Larger ships are launched with more clout; and emptier ships move faster than full ships. Eventually, the modules are dropped off on mars (to the right of the picture, where the cubes are stacked).

Certain modules don't "work" without previous modules being on Mars, and some modules eventually expire if they don't have humans, and habitat modules, powering them within a few turns after their arrival.

And so, the game pretty much plays where you are watching your clout and interest in the project dwindle, then a milestone is hit, and you got clout again.

For a first pass, it's an interesting play; but right now the game needs to be a bit tighter to be interesting I think. I'm probably being way too generous with starting clout; it really needs to feel like you are racing between hitting the next milestone and hitting rock bottom on your public interest to be fun.

Obsessed

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:44:00 +0000

Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but I've decided to actually finish the Shipwreck game, instead of letting it linger for other exploratory designs. Unfortunately, it's a hard game to prototype; and through various machinery of my free will and accidental programming, finishing the prototype is turning out to be a nerve racking affair, with a lot of wasted "sticky-back" printer paper.

The game includes 120 small cards which need to be on thick, chipboard-style cardboard, and I'm using illustrator board for it. These cards either contain data point clues, or cards with windows that reveal specific clues when placed over the first set of cards. Unfortunately, after mounting and cutting, it turns out that my program was "building" the cards wrong, which entailed another set of printed cards. After which, I noticed that some of my data entry was wrong, which entailed another change, reprint, and mount.

Then, when I thought I was finished, I came to another, better conclusion to how the game should be constructed, which required another set.

But I think I finally have it right now.

The next problem which I think I have solved is the way the clues are recorded for the player on the data sheet. Back when it was simply "fishin' for 'recks," I just had a data sheet with a copy of the map, and a player could mark up multiple maps for each wreck he was currently involved in hunting for. It worked, but I wasn't happy with it, and I never could come up with a better solution. However, with the new DaVinci Code-styling of the game, which involves three different "stages" of hunting and piecing together clues each with it's own slightly different approach of clue gathering, the simple map marking technique won't work.

And so I've come up with a two sheet solution. The first sheet to the left here is a data grid for each of the three stages, cross-referencing the important information that is gleaned from clues.

The top part is the ultimate goal of finding a gate. This is done by combining artifact cards (of which there are three types, A,B, and C). Each set of artifacts reveal a clue data point to the location of a gate. Two or three of these data points will reveal the gate location.

The middle part is for shipwreck searching. Shipwrecks are located by directional vectors from each of the five cities, plus a depth rating. By triangulating enough of these data points, you can find a shipwreck.

And the bottom part is for locating which shipwreck an artifact is on. Each city has a different combination of buildings. And researching an artifact in a city will reveal that shipwreck, or give you a building of the city that can reveal the shipwreck's name.

Page two over here on the left is a simple representation of the map and the important data points for triangulating the clues, and a list of actions the player can take.

By folding page two (the map page) in half inward, a player can create a "cover" in order to keep page 1 secret (also folded in half). Page 1 is folded outward, so that the data grids are on "both sides" of the half-sized page of paper, and allows for easy flip access to both halves, and easy cross-referencing of the data grid to the map. Of course, the map can also be used for taking notes.

At least, in theory, this all seems to work well. It's up to the unforgiving world of playtesting to see if actually unfolds as well as it does in my mind.

Focus

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:41:00 +0000

So, I've been busy. That's my excuse. For not bothering to post in a while.

I've been re-working the Shipwreck game a bit lately. It's now on version 4.

It's been a sort of troubling game. The core mechanics are fun and everyone who has played it seems to enjoy that part of the game, but the surrounding structure of it has never seemed to gel very well.

The core structure is finding clues to find locations of shipwrecks, which players salvage for points. There was always an intended structure for the points allotted, based on various things, such as the class of the ship, the quality of the salvage crew you've hired, and how deep the shipwreck was in the lake.

And ultimately, most of that stuff never really mattered.

So much time and effort was spent on finding enough clues on a particular a shipwreck, that if you did realize that it was a low point salvage operation, you never really cared. You had completely "adopted" that wreck at that point, so it was in your best interest to salvage it anyway, low points be damned.

And so, in the end, it felt like the wrecks were just handing out random points, even though there was a lot of effort built in to the game to make it not random.

Therefore, the game was just running around, finding wrecks, and getting random points. Pretty much like what I imagine real shipwreck hunting and salvaging is sort of like. I've gone through 3 different versions of this, with handling the point system in different ways. With all the same results; while the clue hunting is fun and sound, the game around that aspect isn't.

Recently, I decided that what was wrong with the game is the focus of it; the ultimate goal of how to win at it. The ride was fun, but the destination wasn't. As it was, I had still not developed a good way to end the game, aside from "after 12 shipwrecks have been found." I've never liked this kind of arbitrary kind of ending in a game to begin with. I'd much have a more organic way to end the game (whatever that means), than some simply stated fact. There's nothing really building towards that finish. It's not like players are building an empire from some small cogs. Your salvage operation is always the same operation throughout the game. Puerto Rico doesn't end after XX rounds,there are hard component limitations that end the game, things that the players can control, or at least feel like they can. Or at least point to how it happened.

Not, "just because the rules said so."

So I've turned the game much more into an Indiana Jones/DaVinci Code affair. Which has brought a lot of the mechanical concepts of how the game works into a much more sharper focus, and has even brought the theme out some more. And it has gotten rid of the entire pesky points awarding system. It goes like this now:

The game is the first player to discover one of the 3 Gates of Atlantis at the bottom of the bay. To do this, players combine artifacts together which reveal clues as to where those gates are. However, those artifacts are also lost in the bay, hidden amongst the many shipwrecks. So, the player first travel from city to city, finding the clues that eventually lead the players to discover which shipwreck each artifact is hidden on, then the players must discover the locations of those shipwrecks, dive down to recover the artifacts and then use the artifacts to discover the location of one gate.

This is a much stronger narrative theme to impose on the players, as it gives them a call to action. The game now has a drive behind all of it's clue-hunting mechanical nonsense. And like any good "race for the artifact story," the game no thematically allows for stealing things from other players, leading to more direct confrontations, which I think should play out well.

//Well, of course, until it doesn't play out well, then back to the drawing board. The life of a prototype game is never complete.

A few interesting podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:15:00 +0000

...for your perusal.

The Games With Garfield podcast #6: Casual Randomness is an interesting discussion about randomness. And "rando-chess" makes an interesting point, too!

Penny Arcade has been recording and podcasting a few Dungeon and Dragons sessions, with the PvP guy, and Wil Wheaton as additional members of their adventuring party, with a WOTC guy DM-ing. I've linked to the first episode of their latest adventure here.

As you can expect, the actual battles with all the dice-rolling gets pretty tedious to listen to; however, when battles aren't going on (which is usually the first 3rd of the session, and a few breaks between the battles in the middle), it's usually pretty funny. It should also be noted that the DM is also really good at his job here; I've tried listening to other RPG podcasts just for comparison sake, and pretty much determined that he really knows his stuff (as you'd expect from a WOTC employee who I assume was helping develop the new edition of D&D).

What makes this session fun is the way it ends, and is definitely worth sitting through all eight segments for the climatic ending. Which isn't what you think; as the true hilarious capper of the session is caused when the player who is running Binwin the dwarf explains why his character can't die, and Wil Wheaton's response to it.

Artscow

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:52:00 +0000

So, it took a while, but finally, after a month or so, my experimentation with making an Artscow deck came in.

For whatever reason, Artscow.com seems to have become the standard bearer for print-it-on-your-own card games and decks on boardgamegeek. Even having the need to use Artscow specifically for a few contests people are running there. I'm not really sure why this is; I've had reports of other places doing it cheaper, or more efficiently, or whatever. It's not that they are bad or anything. They have rotating daily (or even hourly) specials, so that helps. Also, they have a pretty nice interface for uploading cards through the use of Silverlight.

It is the first place I've seen that let's you create a deck cards where you can specify different card backs for each card, which is exceptionally nice when you are doing odd ball deck sizes, or smaller, differently handled decks (as such that I was playing with).

Anyway, the biggest issues I've found are with the fact that cutlines supplied with the image importer don't really correspond nicely to the actual cutting edges of the cards. Looking at the top row of cards in the lousy photograph over here to the left, given enough whitespace along the edges, and they look great.

However, bleeding out the images to full size is less-than-stellar, due to the over-growth of the images in relation to the physical cut lines. The text on the "Oracle" card even got chopped a bit off the top. The other two cards have a second ornamental bezel applied around the edge, which got severely cut (you can see traces of the extra bezel in the corners.

Otherwise, the cards are a bit flimsier than your standard poker deck; I am not well-versed enough in printing productions to know if this is because of the plastic coating or paper thickness.
The actual edge cuts are nice and crisp; even though I know of someone else who had small complaints about the cutting.

As far as prototyping goes, they are perfectly fine and feel and look "real" enough to fool your friends and family.

It Doesn't Look Good

noreply@blogger.com (scott slomiany) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:53:00 +0000

I've been playing a play-by-forum game of Battlestar Galactica on boardgamegeek. Granted, it's been painful at times. While not a complicated game, it has a lot of issues with regards to players interacting with each other with card play and dice rolls and such on each others turns, and so pretty much after every event that happens, every player needs to "check in" with how they are responding to the current pace of things. Playing around a table, it's pretty easy to do this, online and in a forum environment, well, it's takes some time.

Additionally, it's hard to believe that there are people who moderate this (for free!), for fun. Again, the rules are are pretty straightforward, but there's a lot of bookkeeping kind of stuff that needs to be taken care of. Kudos to the moderators!

Aside from the length of time, it's been a fairly entertaining game, with some pretty good role-playing-ish banter. One particular humorous exchange occurred during a food shortage crisis; during this the President needs to decide between food rationing (which results is discarding cards) or just keep eating (which results in dwindling away at our already dwindled food). President Baltar had already earlier decided on "eating the veal" instead of rationing, which was already leading to him being a cylon traitor.

Tigh: "Adama, I'll be preparing the Brig for Baltar if he eats any more of Galatica's food."

Baltar: "We're having Caprican rost beef again this week? Well of course I'll take an extra plate, it's not like we're running out of the stuff anyway. Better enjoy fine cuisine now, food rationing will help, but it'll taste terrible ..."

Anyway, things aren't looking very good for our ragtag group of humans at this point. Our food is down to 2, our fuel is down to 1. And we are running out of space to add Cylon ships.

One of the things I particularily like about the game is that a player is pretty free to take whatever action he wants (and there are usually a lot to choose from). There's no reason why Starbuck can't waste her time running for President, for example, or have Baltar running around launching and controlling Vipers. However, the special ability modifiers that each character gets really defines what is optimally a better choice for that character to do; Starbuck is much better off flying around in a Viper because she gets an additional action when in a Viper. A lesser game would just say, "she's a Viper pilot, so that's where she is all the time, and here's her list of actions she can take."

As another example, I have just gotten done reading the rules to Agricola. While it is a highly rankied game, and well-respected, it has a worker placement rule that annoys me. Players take turns placing their workers on various actions; these actions are then triggered. However, each action can only be triggered once per turn. So, if there's an action that is "bake bread" or "rake leaves" and someone has placed a worker there, a subsequent players can't trigger that action.

Why the hell not!? I guess from a game standpoint, there's the strategy of "pick this now before it disappears;" but jeez, why can't I rake leaves just because another player is raking leaves? It's things like this that make me appreciate the "do whatever the hell action you want" ability of BSG so much more.