First, we picked out some games that we felt had tension. I brought up Ticket to Ride as a game with a lot of tension. As a player, you are always on egde wondering if you will get the right cards in time or if someone will steal your route. In my book, there is no greater tension than in a five player game of TtR. Another game that has tension is Carcassonne: You can feel it when tie up a lot of meeples in a city or farm all the while unsure of whether you can make it pay off.  Agricola also has tension in that you don’t know if you can feed your family or if someone will take the resources you desperately need.

Second, we tried to find the common factor in all of these games. The first thing we noticed was that the player took a risk. The bigger the risk, the more tension felt. The second thing we noticed is that the longer the risk takes to resolve, the higher the tension. In Ticket to Ride, you make have an LA to New York ticket from the start of the game. You may not complete it until the very last second. In Agricola, your entire plan revolves around getting the grain action, but you have to sit there patiently waiting for the other players to place their farmers.

In summary:

Tension = Risk  x  Time

This seems obvious laid it out like that. Now that we have the formula, we can think about it in terms of our own games. What can we do to ensure that our games have the right amount of tension?

It is a nice feeling to get a game off of my docket. It frees my time up to work on other games, and gives me a feeling of accomplishment. I feel that it is much better to have a prototype sitting on a publisher’s shelf than on my shelf waiting to be tweaked for the umpteenth time.

This game was the first of three that I will be courting to publishers. They were all sitting on my shelf either done or 98% done.  My plan is to diversify the games with different publishers. Hopefully, this will mean the gears of progress will always be turning somewhere even if I’m not actively doing anything.

Now to start the process with the second game in my queue.

Last night Ian, Toby, and I played my prototype for A Loss For Words, a party word game. The game involved getting your teammate to guess your randomly-chosen photo from an array of stock photos using only one word. That one word must start with a letter from a card in your hand. Your team has a deck of each letter, so even the bad letters must be used at some point. You get points (which are bad) for each letter card in your hand, and you can choose to draw cards as you wish. The more options you have in your hand, the more bad points you get.

It played like I imagined, thought I can see room for improvement. Toby gave some important feedback – there is a lot of downtime. That is true, and I need to alleviate it. While one player is being clever in their head, other players are just sitting and waiting.

STELLAR UNDERWORLD

We also played Stellar Underworld with two new changes:

• You can ship cubes to any sector, not just your own, but at a cost of twice as many cubes.
• The black market got an overhaul. Now, the player draws cubes from a bag and swaps them with theirs if they wish. They can assign more henchmen to pull more cubes.

The new shipping freedom was used a lot more than I had imagined, even though it wasn’t really efficient. It has the added benefit of messing up your opponent’s plans, if you choose to. I’m calling this one a keeper!

The new black market also worked well in my opinion.  It has a bit of push your luck to it. Most importantly, it solves the problem that the older version had: Using a market on landing AND launching gave the player no benefit. Now, the player can benefit because they get two shots at pulling the right cubes they need. Before, if you recall, they were fixed cubes.

The final score was 101 (Dan), 100 (Toby), 92 (Ian).

Venture Forth

I taught Venture Forth to Patrick, Ben, and Gil. I was still a bit rough on the explanation of this game, but before you knew it we were up and playing. The game lasted about an hour for four players.

Theme: Some feedback I received was about the theme. The game is a fantasy adventure game and that genre comes with a lot of baggage. Players expect experience points, killing monsters for gain, gearing up your characters, etc. My game has none of these. I am trying to break new ground, but it is difficult when the feedback I get is that the game is not like the tried and true dungeon crawls. I’m sticking with my vision, but I am open to tweaking it to get more acceptance.

Level Cards: The new system for level cards worked, but as Patrick pointed out, it could be simpler.

Tension: The other feedback was about tension.  You just go through the motions of your turn with very few points of suspense. The punishments from the enemies that you encounter is not that severe, so traveling down a path with one isn’t so scary. I suppose I could crank up the consequences on some of the enemies. Other than that I will have to really think this one out.

Stellar Underworld

I played this one with Ian and Brad. I explained the rules fairly well, and there weren’t many questions to come up. The final score was 100 (Ian), 101 (Brad), and 102 (Dan). I was pleased that the scores were close because we all had different strategies. Brad took a lot of sectors, mostly the resource generators. Ian took a few sectors for their abilities, as did I.

After the game was over, Brad was a little quiet on the feedback. He did suggest a desire to be able to ship to any sector, not just your own. After thinking about it for awhile, and remembering other people giving the same feedback, I decided that I needed to address that. The current plan is to allow shipping to opponent’s sectors for twice the amount of assets. Thematically, it would make sense because you have to “outbid” them on their contract. I don’t think it is a viable startegy, but it does give the player an extra option.

Design Tip #1: Don’t tell the players they can’t do something. Tell them that they can do it, but it will cost ‘em!

Design Tip #2: Fine, tell the players they can’t do something. BUT, make a special power that allows them to do it

So, let me tell you a little bit about Monkey Lab. You play as escaped research monkeys who return to the lab to free your monkey brethren. Since you don’t have access to the keys, you must use the items around the lab to break, pry, pick, and smash the cages open. You score points by releasing monkeys from the cages, or by standing around a newly opened cage and taking credit.  You can work with other players to free a deluge of monkeys through clever card play, or you can work against them by invoking your monkey combat or by sending the guard thier way.

AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group) is publishing the game as they have just started their expansion from CCGs and RPGs to the boardgame publishing world. They have recently released Tomb which has already gotten great reviews.  I’ve been privy to the work they’ve done on Monkey Lab so far and it looks great! I got to see the drawings of the monkey figures – Who doesn’t want a game with monkey pawns? Everything looks awesome and they did a great job bringing the game to life.

The release date is still cloudy, but my hope is that it will be available before BoardgameGeek.con so I can see people play and enjoy it. I will be posting some stories about the making of Monkey Lab in the coming weeks either here on on BGG, so stay tuned!

~ Dan Manfredini

Here are some of the things I addressed:

Your ship is your ship – In the previous versions, your ship could be stolen if a player sent enough henchmen to do it, though you could also defend it if you wanted to. The system worked out ok, but the feedback I was getting was that it didn’t feel like you owned your ship. The “comandeering” rules for stealing are no longer in effect. You can only use your ship and the two neutral ships. Suprisingly, this worked out pretty nicely. And it was one less thing that players had to worry about (keeping enough henchmen around to defend a ship).

A nice side effect of this is that when you used your ship, you could leave cargo aboard without fear of thievery. No need for the warehouse. However, when you use the neutral ships, you almost always have to use the warehouse. The usage of the neutral ships are amplified now that other players ships are off limits to commandeering.

This is a perfect case of the development philosophy “How much can I remove from the game, and have it still be the same game?”

Henchmen are worth less – In the previous version, a recruiting strategy seemed to be a main path to victory. Henchmen were worth the same as completed contracts, and they provided many other benefits. Now, they are worth half as much as contracts. Players still benefit from having a lot of them, but now they aren’t “double dipping”.

There were other feedback points that I may or may not address, but for now I think the game has improved. I just to make a new bigger board, and a few other cosmetic changes, and I think I’m ready to go!

Exhilaration – You have a list of some issues in your game that need to be addressed. You’ve come up with a solution to one of the problems on paper. You think it is so elegant and will solve all of your problems. You, sir, are a genius! You live in the land of happiness and can’t wait to try out your idea.

Despair – Your elegant solution failed completely. It made the game unbalanced. It made the game broken. It made babies cry. Now you must head back to the drawing board to face that annoying issue you were trying to resolve in the first place.

So, this process continues over and over. New issues replace old issues. New fixes break old fixes. You become an expert on your game, and you have tinkered with every aspect of the design. One day everything everything falls into place and you have a game. Sometimes this takes you by surprise. In the end, all the highs and lows were worth it.

Rules Clarifications

Can contraband assets be delivered in multiples?

Yes. This will have to be explicitly stated in the rulebook. Contraband assets are different from other assets in that they don’t require any contracts to score them (because contraband is always in demand). This leads to some extra rules in dealing with them, and I guess this area had some confusion.

When can a sector ability be used and how often?

For the most part they are used during the docking bay ability phase. I will need to clarify this a bit more. I also plan on adding a glossary for each sector to answer any specific questions.

Strategy

Is acquiring henchmen too powerful of a strategy?

There are two methods of scoring points in the game: recruiting henchmen and completing contracts. It has been suggested that taking a strategy of heavy recruitment is the best way to go. I know that henchmen are important because they not only score points, but also provide the manpower to activate abilities. I don’t believe you can win by ignoring them, or by solely focusing on them, but I need to test this out.

Test: Play a test game where one person only scores via henchmen.
Test: Play a test game where one person does not recruit any more henchmen.

Are warehouses necessary?

An interesting occurrence happened during the blind playtest: In their second game, the players completely ignored one feature of the game because they deemed it too weak for its cost. The feature is the warehouse. The warehouse allows you to move assets around more effectively, keep them safe from commandeering, and set up more efficient scoring. The cost for loading an asset into the warehouse is one henchmen. You also have to pay the cost for unloading too. In all of the other playtests, everybody used their warehouses. I am always on the lookout for dominant strategies, but I failed to look for utterly weak ones. Maybe the warehouse is too weak. I haven’t really thought about it, but I will need to investigate more.

Test: Play a test game with one player does not use his warehouse.

Theme

Players don’t feel like they own their ship

In the game, each player has one ship and there are two neutral ships. Owning a ship means that if someone tries to commandeer (steal) it, you can defend it and try to stop them. Other than that, owning your ship means nothing. In real life, owning an object really means nothing either except that you feel like you would need to defend it (by force, lawsuit, etc.) if someone tried to steal it. That was my reasoning, but it doesn’t seem to come across to well in the setting of a game. Especially in a game setting where stealing is an everyday occurrence.

Possible Solution: I think that stripping out the idea of owning a ship is the way to go. I have an idea on how this would work, but would like to experiment with it first.

Components

The board is too small for some components

The board is a map of a space station with a space in the center for the “bank” of henchmen and contracts. I underestimated how many of these things there would be and it does look cluttered.

Solution: This one’s easy! I think I can just reduce the number of pieces or make the board bigger where it needs to be.

Frustration Points

Replenishing no assets or no Contracts at a sector

Frustration: The production system in this game uses a random method that could result in the sector gaining no contracts or no assets. Having no contracts at a sector means that you can’t score points there, and having no assets at a sector means that when you arrive there you’ll have nothing to ship back on the return trip. Statistically, it shouldn’t happen that often, but when it does, it is really frustrating. I have yet to determine if this actually hinders the player or if it is a psychological issue.

Possible Solution: I need to add more flexibility to this system, but I’m not sure how to do this just yet.

Having limited end game options

Frustration: The game uses a system where each player has an identical set of cards. Each turn you play one card a turn until no players have cards. This system inherently causes the end game to have limited options.

Possible Solution: Make the end game occur before the players reach their last card, possibly third to last. This will still give players choice on the last turn. Of course, this solution will cause a new frustration: player wanting to play the rest of their hand!

Not being able to ship directly from sector to sector

Frustration: The core idea of the game is that you always have to stop at the space port when traveling from sector to sector. There is no direct route. If there was a direct route, there would be little reason to use the space port (the whole point of the game).

Possible Solution: Give each player one or two Direct Route Cards to allow this to happen. It should appease player frustration enough, and answer that question “Why can’t I just go from here to there?” The best “abilities” in games come from easing player frustration.