BrettSpiel+

Quotables #010

2009-10-31T15:06:00Z

‘Every designer’s dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.’

Arron Russell

‘Every picture painted owes more to other pictures painted before than it does to nature.’

E.H. Gombrich

Both these quotes offer a slightly different take on that hoary old maxim ‘all art is theft’. And my point in repeating them is to highlight the difference between creativity and originality. It’s tough enough for the game designer to be creative. It’s far, far harder to be truly original.

Which, as an old boss use to say — and he said this sort of thing so frequently that most of us ended up hating him for it — is ‘an observation not a criticism’.

I recently opined that Colonia, the sparkling new release from Queen Games, seemed a little too familiar at first sight. Gorgeous, yes, but familiar. Lavishly creative, certainly, but essentially a roll-call of mechanisms, each of which would elicit a quiet nod of recognition from any self-respecting Eurogamer.

And with this year’s SPIEL now a fast-fading memory in the minds of many a gaming maven, there seems little concensus on what ‘the game of the show’ was, or indeed whether there even was one. And if that’s true, then it certainly wasn’t because there was some sort of collective failure of creativity — far from it! — but rather, I would suggest, that there was simply nothing genuinely original on show for the gamers to get their teeth into.

‘The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.’

Albert Einstein

And I guess I could take Albert’s advice and fail to mention my sources, but I’d much rather point you all at the excellent and inspirational Quotes on Design instead! All art is indeed theft, and so is most blogging.

Hippodice Update

2009-10-27T12:29:00Z

The Hippodice competition window remains open for a few more days (until November 1st) but I have, unusually, beaten the deadline by finally getting my act together over the past few days and submitting both of the games I mentioned earlier. To submit a game you need to provide two documents: a complete and workable set of rules, plus a short ‘primer’ that includes things like the number of players, the game duration, a list of components and an introduction to the gameplay itself.

On Saturday I sent off the documents for my first submission Archipelago. This is a true family strategy game for 2–4 players, aged 8 and up, that plays in around 30–45 minutes. I say ‘true’ since I think it geninely offers an experience that will keep both children and adults engaged, and a game concept that can be played and enjoyed on differing levels by young and old. The game has a nice mix of (admittedly light) strategy and tactics, but I think the appeal comes from the physicality of the game’s components and gameplay.

With a name like Archipelago, it is probably not completely surprising that it has a modular board made up of islands, but the game also uses a little boat, which you can see in the photograph, plus a nice big bag of 90 multi-coloured meeples! Yay! We love meeples!

I have been looking for a source of small wooden boats ever since I started designing the game back in February, but for now the prototype includes this cut-out origami version that I fashioned, quite successfully I have to say, from some thin card.

And yesterday evening — or rather very early this morning since it was past midnight when I was done! — I also mailed off the documents for my second submission. When I posted about Hippodice earlier this month I mentioned that I was still looking for a name for this second game. Well, I finally found one: the game is now called Jukers! (with an exclamation mark, if you please).

And what, you might ask with good reason, is a ‘Juker’? Well, the name is believed to be the original name of the Joker playing card, and a corruption of the German name for the game Euchre. Around 1860 a single highest trump card was introduced to games of that family, and by 1880 this card was already being represented as a clown or court jester. At least, that’s one theory. Carto-historians seem divided on the matter.

Anyway, my game is a small and quick bidding and card-collecting game for 3 or 4 players, aged 10 and up, that’s all over in just 30 minutes or so. The deck is mostly made up of low-value cards in the four classic suits, but also include a few unpredictable ~~Jokers~~ Jukers in the pack to mix things up.

And so now we wait. The Hippodice club will soon set about the not insubstantial task of reviewing all the submissions received by the November 1st deadline, and choose a certain number to go forward to the playtesting stage. Once notified the successful designers will have then until 1st December to get their prototype to Germany… by hook, crook or registered mail.

Last year I also submitted two games, Terraform and Mosaic Romanum, both of which were selected for playtesting. Who knows whether Archipelago and Jukers! will be received as kindly, but fingers crossed!

SPIEL ’09: Now On!

2009-10-20T23:10:00Z

The annual Internationalen Spieltage opens its doors on Thursday for four days of board game madness. Officially labelled ‘SPIEL’, but more commonly known by those in the know as ‘Essen’, the fair is the industry’s biggest get-together and is the cue for game publishers the world over to release a tidal wave of new games.

To get a taster of the gaming goodness on offer check out this GeekList over on BoardGameGeek, follow Frank Schulte-Kulkmann’s ongoing coverage on G@mebox, or check out the glitterati’s hashtag of choice #spiel09 on Twitter.

And, apropos of nothing imparticular, does anyone know the origin of SPIEL’s colourful tangram logo? For gamers it’s an instantly recognisable symbol that’s indivisible from its source, but if you give it a fresh look, it’s a rather funky and obscure device that on its own doesn’t instantly say ‘board games’ in any direct way. If anyone knows anything about its history do let me know!

ALERT: This feed isn't what it used to be!

2009-10-19T23:35:15Z

If you’re reading this, you are subscribed to either http://feeds.feedburner.com/bitepsiel (links feed) or http://feeds.feedburner.com/brettspiel (BrettSpiel blog posts + links feed). However, I’m switching to posting links on Twitter instead. Please follow me @55cards!

The main BrettSpiel blog will go on, of course, so please resubscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/brettspielcouk to continue to receive updates of new posts — apologies for the inconvenience!

All About Alvin

2009-10-15T19:44:51Z

All About Alvin:

Portfolio of classic, timeless, if retro design.

Quotables #009

2009-10-15T20:30:00Z

‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’

Albert Einstein

I wish I’d found this nugget of wisdom a while ago since it would have slotted nicely into the discussion in my last Game Design 101 article The Price of Magic.

Writing game rules is hard, and Mr Einstein has hit the proverbial nail on the head by highlighting that the only qualification needed to write a simple explanation of anything is a genuinely deep and meaningful understanding of the topic by the writer. Without that, the writer is on a hiding to nothing.

And I guess that goes for blog writers too.

Game Preview: Colonia

2009-10-13T10:46:00Z

Colonia, designed by Dirk Henn and to be released by Queen Games at the Essen games fair, appears to be the apotheosis of the ‘big’ Eurogame in every regard. Lavishly designed and with, no doubt, equally lavish production values (something for which Queen Games has a well-deserved reputation), the game pulls in many popular Eurogame memes: an abstracted market economy, a stylized medieval setting, and a layered gameplay consisting of multiple resource collection, management and conversion mechanisms.

It also comes laden down with a mammoth collection of ‘bits’ guaranteed to pique the interest of the average Eurogamer: mulitlple decks of cards, stacks of cardboard components and over 200 multi-coloured wooden cubes. One can only speculate — with mild trepidation! — at the size and weight of the box that will contain all the game’s plunder.

The interested but otherwise uninformed reader can now read through the rules posted on BGG in English and German. Having done so, I can say that the flow of the game appears straightforward, with the board divided into seven numbered areas that represent the actions taken on each ‘day’ of the game’s six ‘weeks’. This is a nice conceit that helps to frame the cyclical nature of the gameplay.

Image: The innovative board is made up of eight die-cut cardboard panels, which lock together like a jigsaw to create a plan of the city of Colonia within which all the action takes place.

Merry-go-round

The fundamentals of the game are this: the players represent so-called patrician families in olde worlde Colonia and each has a stash of cubes representing their family members, and hence their available man-power (this is the players’ primary resource in the game, so let’s call it Resource A). These cubes are progressively commited to each area of the board by the players to take actions there and gain the available rewards. The ultimate goal is to earn victory points in the shape of ‘relic’ cards bought, appropriately enough, on the ‘Sunday’ of each week. However, the degree of abstraction between the player actions and eventual buying of the relics is alarming.

On ‘Monday’ the week is prepared: the flip of a card from a special deck determines the relative balance of the key resources available. This mechanism ensures that each week presents a slightly different challenge to the players.

On ‘Tuesday’ the players determine their relative influence on the week’s affairs (and hence the player order) at the city council by commiting differing numbers of men; this power is effectively a resource which players pay for in cubes/men, so let’s call this Resource B. The remainder of that week’s actions are taken in player order, so this is clearly an important factor.

On ‘Wednesday’ the players visit the market and place family members in exchange for differing quantities of the city’s five wares (leather, iron, wood, linen and fur) — let’s call these Resource C.

On ‘Thursday’ the game moves to the craftsmen’s quarter of the city, where specific combinations of wares can be exchanged, through the ‘payment’ of more men, for five different types of good (saddles, cartwheels, paintings, clothing and footwear); these then are Resource D.

On ‘Friday’ the players visit the docks where boats are waiting to take the city’s goods to far away lands. The players progressively fill up the boats’ cargo holds with the prerequisite goods before, on ‘Saturday’, the boats set sail and earn the players money — Resource E — although since the boats each sail to one of four different countries the money comes in four different flavours (Sterling, Grivna, Mark and Gulden).

And so we come to the end, and on ‘Sunday’ the players finally get their filthy mits on those precious religious relics — Resource F — although each one can only be bought using the correct currency. The players stash their relics behind their screens, a new week begins, and life in Colonia goes on.

Hoopla

After circling the board six times the game is over, and the players are awarded victory points for their remaining money and for the value of their relics. So, just to be clear, it is the relative values of Resources E and F owned by each player at the end of the game that determines the winner. I may be in the minority here, but to me the number of hoops through which players have to jump to generate any points at all seem to be two or three too many. This notion of the sequential conversion of resources into (eventually) victory points appears in many Eurogames — indeed is one of the genre’s defining characteristics — but Colonia seems to stretch the model to breaking point.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Colonia avoids one of the other core Eurogame mechanisms: that of so-called ‘engine building’. Each of Colonia’s weeks is, largely, a clean slate; little of what the player choose to do in one week influences what options they have in the next. Many Eurogames, by contrast, allow players to invest resources in game assets that enhance their individual ability to generate or convert resources in later rounds, and hence allow for some variation in genuine long-term strategy. Colonia, however, appears to be a ‘big’ Eurogame that is, for the most part, largely tactical, which is actually rather refreshing! But I do wonder if hardcore Eurogamers, always on the lookout for their next fix of strategic resource management and engine building will be disappointed, and similarly whether gamers who generally prefer lighter, more tactical fare will be put off by the game’s heavyweight looks.

Image: And just in case Queen’s lavish production values aren’t lavish enough, the game is also to be offered in a limited ‘Collector’s Edition’ with these jaunty-looking meeples in place of the cubes.

All the fun of the fair

There is much to like about Colonia. Its presentation appears faultless, the gameplay elegant and fun, and it’s worth pointing out that of the two groups of gamers I just mentioned, I am firmly in the latter (and hence prefer more tactical, less strategic games). In any case, I haven’t played it yet, so who am I to comment?

I wish Dirk Henn and Queen Games success — they have clearly invested a great deal in the game’s development and production — but the danger, in my opinion, is that the community’s familiarity with Colonia’s collection of mechanisms will indeed begin to breed a little contempt. The package may be elegant, attractive and compelling but there is no ‘shock of the new’ here to delight the gaming crowd; rather, it seems the emperor’s new clothes are getting yet another outing.

10/GUI's Con10uum UI

2009-10-13T11:33:43Z

10/GUI's Con10uum UI:

Cool video showing off a new concept touch UI.

Beau Lotto Speaks at TED

2009-10-08T19:43:00Z

Here’s a great talk from this year’s TEDGlobal 2009 conference, which took place in Oxford, England in July. The theme of the conference was The Substance of Things Not Seen and this talk, given by the somewhat implausibly named Beau Lotto, explores some of the science of perception that lies behind optical illusions.

The talk isn’t actually about games, but every single TED talk has something to offer the inquiring mind so if you’ve never seen or heard of TED before then be sure to check out the ever-growing catalogue of talks on their website.

And when I found a link to this talk on Digg I couldn’t help but follow it; after all, isn’t Beau Lotto just the perfect name for a game designer!?

Countdown to Hippodice

2009-10-05T23:02:00Z

The Hippodice Games Club in Germany has opened the application window for its annual game author competition, so if you are a game designer and fancy your chances, then you have until November 1st to email your application.

The club then reviews all applications, and any authors selected for the next stage will have until December 1st to send their gleaming, newly minted prototypes to Germany to allow the games to be playtested. The club members will then certainly have their work cut out for them before announcing the results around the beginning of March (at least, that’s when news broke in this year’s competition).

I entered two games — Terraform and Mosaic Romanum — into the 2009 competition, both of which were selected for the playtest stage; Mosaic Romanum even made it into to the next and final round, although just missed out on a place in the winners’ circle, garnering a 'Recommended' badge instead. Given that this was my first shot entering the competition I was jolly pleased with the result.

This year I plan to follow suit and enter two games (and hopefully have as much success). The first is a brand new board game design that I have developed this year called Archipelago, the second is an older, smaller card game design called… well, that’s actually a good question… I still haven’t found a good name for it.

I guess I have until November 1st to make up my mind!

Doctored Whose Logo?

2009-10-05T09:10:00Z

Doctored Whose Logo?:

All will be revealed Oct 6th.

The Mercury Men

2009-10-04T00:50:53Z

The Mercury Men:

Great looking trailer for some retro cliffhanger action.

Quotables #008

2009-10-01T23:12:00Z

‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’

Aristotle

I don’t think I really need to explain this one, but if you need advice on either creating better habits or kicking bad ones, then one imagines that the Zen Habits website is quite probably a good place to start. [Zen Habits via Lifehacker]

Think ‘DGIQSXZ’ is a Terrible Scrabble Rack? Think Again!

2009-09-30T10:04:00Z

Now this is not, to be sure, a situation likely to come up in tournament play, but Scrabulizer reports this new theoretical highscoring Scrabble move (they actually reported this in May last year, so it’s hardly breaking news). [via MetaFilter]

Handwriting Game, 1955

2009-09-28T23:43:00Z

Image: A handwriting game being analysed by members of the Ideal Toy panel on Inventor’s Day at the Ideal Toy Company in Hollis, New York. Credit: Orlando/Getty Images, January 1st 1955.

This image, apparently showing a prototype of a ‘handwriting game’ (whatever one of those might be) being demonstrated to an eager playtesting panel, originally appeared in LIFE magazine in the 1950s. I just found it, after following some labyrinthine internet byway, in a slideshow of ‘30 Dumb Inventions’. Ouch!

One wonders what the story is. Perhaps the gentleman at the chalkboard is the inventor (and Marilyn Monroe fanatic) who, having put on his Sunday best and excitedly made his way to the Ideal Toy Company’s front door on ‘Inventor’s Day’, is captured in the photograph in the middle of a make-or-break presentation of his new-fangled prototype. As if in a scene from a 1950’s edition of Dragons’ Den.

A man in a white coat scribbles notes while a test panel consisting of two children chosen specificially for the neatness of their hair look on with ill-concealed indifference. A game about handwriting you say? In which players have to write lines on a chalkboard and then score points based on the clarity of their cursive script? I’m out!

Big Burj in the Big Apple

2009-09-28T01:57:00Z

Big Burj in the Big Apple:

The compare-and-contrast Google Earth shots are frightening.

Museum of Hoaxes

2009-09-28T01:41:05Z

Museum of Hoaxes:

Pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Game Design 101: The Price of Magic

2009-09-26T14:43:00Z

In which I consider rules — the thorniest issue in all of game design! — muse on the nature of them, and propose my ‘Five Cs’ of good rule writing.

In the episodic graphic novel Gossamer Commons, Eric A. Burns set out to tell the story of a writer who, having saved the life of a fairy child is, somewhat ungratefully you might argue, marked for death. But before he can die, he is owed a Boon by the fairies and asks for the one thing all writers desire: the ability to write a truly significant novel, something the fairies are ill-equipped to provide.

The story was published online in 2005 and 2006 and is, as yet, unfinished, but at each step the author provided a commentary both on the project and his philosophy of writing, a commentary which included the following fantastic quote:

‘It’s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.’

Eric A. Burns

The author is talking of the need to create boundaries within fantasy fiction. Fiction is of course the realm of the impossible but the author’s thesis is that if no limits are placed on the power or authority of the supernatural then the storytelling itself will fail. Actions require consequence. Resolution can only follow from genuine tension. And with great power — to use an oft-repeated caveat from an entirely different fantasy franchise — must come great responsibility.

In short, the fantasy world needs rules; its magic needs a price.

What are rules?

That may may seem a trivial question, and a trivial answer might be to suggest that the rules of a game are simply the things that stop the players doing whatever the hell they like. This is true, but not particularly enlightening.

A more interesting answer might be to describe rules as the interface between two experiences: the one the designer intends the players to have, and the one the players actually experience. The designer’s hope, of course, is that these two experiences are identical, but it is the quality of the rules that will decide this. Players can never directly know the designer’s ideal. Their experience of a game is always an interpretation of that ideal, and one that is governed solely by the rules.

There are, then, two very important things to say about rules:

Rules are vitally important! Without them a game would be little more than a box of colourful bits and pieces, which at best might be described as an intriguing toy. Rules are a necessary codification of everything the designer has spent months or years creating, and for the designer not to give them as much care and attention as was given to the game itself would be an act of hubristic foolishness of the highest order.
Rules are largely futile! Players, being only human, are flawed, capricious beings who as a breed can rarely read with absolute attention nor be relied upon to understand what they have read with absolute precision. This is simply a statement of human nature and its accuracy and veracity cannot be disputed. Unfortunately, this means that the creation of rules is an act of hubristic foolishness of the highest order.

So it seems we have a problem, albeit one I am exaggerating for comic effect. Since these statements appear to be both true and contradictory then the truth must inevitably lie someplace else. You can, after all, never please everyone all of the time, much less teach them; and as a designer you share precisely the same flaws as everybody else. The best I think we can do is to acknowledge the following conclusion and move on:

All rule sets are imperfect, and all will be interpreted imperfectly.

The ‘Five Cs’ of good rule writing

Having accepted the folly of our endeavour, I think it’s time we got on with it, to which end I am here proposing my ‘Five Cs’ of good, or at least better, rule writing.

The first thing to say is that my intent is to formulate a cribsheet of useful and succinct ‘ways of thinking’, and not to espouse a set of prescriptive or doctrinaire ‘ways of doing’ nor some universal standard of language, structure or tone. It is important to realise that each game will have different requirements and limitations, and that each game genre a different set of stylistic and linguistic conventions.

The second thing to say is that writing rules is essentially an exercise in communication design. The purpose, then, of a rule set is to effectively communicate a game’s principles and regulations. Rule sets may do other things too — provide historical background to a war-game or a sense of narrative fantasy to a eurogame — but these are secondary concerns.

I think then that it is both possible and fair to say that a rule set is meaningfully and empirically ‘bad’ if it fails in any way to fulfil its primary objective, that of communicating the aforementioned principles and regulations. And I think too that there isn’t a ‘bad’ rule set out there that would not have been improved if the designer or rules editor had given the following five ‘ways of thinking’ just a little more thought.

Clarity

There are two ways in which the game designer needs to demonstrate clarity. It is of course always important to write clearly about the game, but for the designer there is a more important imperative: to have first thought clearly about the game.

All games have an internal logic and structure, a narrative that either originally inspired the designer or emerged as the game developed. The logic at work may be entirely personal to the designer — and quite labyrinthine and opaque to anyone else! — but no game can exist without it.

But the written rule set is not a direct translation of this logic and structure; rather, it is itself an interpretation of this deeper, and often hidden narrative. There are, in this sense, always rules behind the rules, and it is the designer’s duty to be clear on both!

Consistency

For me consistency is one of the most valuable ‘ways of thinking’, although I realise that many consider it a sort of grim addiction to an artless and rather futile pedantry. It’s true that simply being consistent certainly requires a degree of pedantry (a skill that will come more easily to some!) but within game design there is nothing simple or futile about the results.

To fail to be consistent is to introduce the possibility of confusion and error to the players. To refer to a single game piece as, for example, a ‘pawn’ in one place and a ‘man’ in another is to create an illusion of complexity that has absolutely no place in the well-designed game. How are players to interpret this apparent ‘choice’ of language? Is the disparate terminology intended to imply some semantic difference? If not, why was the different language used? Simply to create the space in which players might ask such questions is a failure on the part of the writer. A lack of consistency shows a lack of engineering nous which will do nothing to further the success of a game.

Part of the joy of game design is finding names for things; there is something profoundly rewarding and essentially creative about doing so. So choose your terminology wisely. And stick with it!

Concision

Or, to be blunt, be blunt. Be careful never to talk at unnecessary length about some aspect of the rules, or to introduce needless repetition. Note that I use the words ‘unnecessary’ and ‘needless’: lengthy or repetitious explanations are sometimes required or useful, but a written rule set is most likely to succeed in its primary objective — that of communicating a game’s principles and regulations — if the language used is as direct as possible.

The designer must consider every word of a rule set, and decide whether its inclusion or exclusion better serves the goal of effective communication.

As a native speaker I know that English is at once both a remarkably abundant language and a remarkably economical one. There are typically myriad ways to express a single idea, and whichever you choose there will usually be a shorter one. The mileage of other languages may vary, of course, but the principle is the same.

Completeness

You might think that it goes without saying that a written rule set should aim to contain all of a game’s rules. If so then it is notable that this is the one aspect of game design where commercial products often fail.

However, it is probably fair to point out that achieving completeness is not as simple as it sounds, and may often be a near-impossible goal. Game rules often need to rule as many things out as they rule in, and is it ever possible to rule out everything that a player might conceive of doing? Even the simplest games can generate ‘edge cases’ where the consequence of a sequence of actions is unclear. More complex games may generate so many that it would, at best, be impracticable to cater to all of them in a printed rule set.

The designer is therefore charged with trying to second-guess every player that may ever experience a game and provide a rule set that will satisfy most of their questions most of the time. And unfortunately this is the one directive that designers themselves will find most difficult to police. To the creator every nook and cranny of the theoretical rule set is familiar, which makes them all too easy to overlook when the theoretical rule set is transposed to a written one.

Coherence

This is perhaps the ‘The Big C’, since to me the goal of coherence represents the need to view each rule set as a single piece of communication design that ideally amounts to rather more than the sum of its parts. It is quite possible for a rule set to be complete without being particularly consistent, or to be clear without being terribly concise, but I think for a rule set to be genuinely considered all of these things — clear, consistent, concise and complete — requires it to be, in an holistic sense, coherent.

Genuine coherence combines clarity, consistency, concision and completeness with something else: an elegance and thoughtfulness in the expression of the rules that reflects the elegance and thoughtfulness of the game itself. A rule set’s language, structure and tone — the three things that I am deliberately not attempting to define here — must still be made to work seamlessly together to effectively communicate what a game is, how it is played and what it is about.

Paying the price

There are many ways to approach writing and designing a rule set, but if I am saying anything at all, then I am making a plea for writers and designers to simply take care when they do so. Anybody smart enough to design a game is smart enough to understand and apply my ‘Five Cs’, and I may have said that all rule sets are imperfect, but that’s no reason not to strain every mental sinew to improve them. If you care about your game, you must care just as passionately about your rules. That effort is the true price of magic.

And, if at the heart of that bargain, there is both necessity and futility, then there is irony too. I dismissed as trivial the notion that rules are simply the things that stop players doing whatever the hell like like. This twist is that they don’t even do that.

Players are always free to create their own magic, and it won’t cost them a penny.

This article is part of a series examining various aspects of board game design. The story so far can be found at the following locations:

It's National Punctuation Day

2009-09-24T15:54:40Z

It's National Punctuation Day:

Apparently. So mind your apostrophes, please.

Whodunnit?

2009-09-24T13:23:10Z

Whodunnit?:

An amazing YouTube video with a twist in the tale!