Improv Challenge!

Jun 062007

Mischa, Dan, and myself met tonight for a couple hours at Austin Java to give Dan’s Travelogue prototype one last go-around before it was shipped off to Italy. A three-player game ran just over half an hour, and I must say, it was a pretty solid, fun card game, all around. Mischa smashed out the lead with a monster twelve-point “trick”, but the scores were satisfyingly close, and everyone felt a certain level of control and pacing throughout the game. I like the broader range of scores on the cards, and the new stacking system for the destination cards. There were a few other modifications from the last time I played that I wasn’t sure of at the beginning, but it all hung together very well, and although I know that Dan loves to tinker, tweak, and twiddle his games over and over until everything is perfect, it feels like a winner to me already. I look forward to seeing how it fares in the contest.

We chatted some more and fiddled a little bit with designs here and there – Mischa brought out a copy of Siege Stones, and we played around with a few designs around the pieces in the box, including one based very loosely on Lines of Action. Dan also gave us the sad news that he’s going to be re-theming his Monkey Lab game along the lines of some fantasy thing, to make it more palatable to publishers. (Wah!) Mostly game chat, though – although, and the end, we decided that Flywheel needed another challenge, and we each put in one restriction. So, Flywheelers, here is your challenge: you have one week (or two, or three, or however long it is before you show up to the next playtest hootenanny) to devise a game that 1) uses a board, 2) does not use any numbers, and 3) uses cards, with some kind of “flip and take” mechanic. I’ll leave those open for now – if anyone wants to post a clarification question, the person who put forth the restriction can pipe up and sort things out.

In production news, I have found myself some artists! I have a spreadsheet delivered to and a promise received from an illustrator friend of mine in San Francisco to draw me some pretty spaceship parts for my RocketYard cards, and another one in Austin who says he’ll kick down some art for Pangaea and Fluffy Bunny Tea Party, and potentially some Flat Track Action down the road, when I get that game not to suck so much. This means that I need to get back on track with hunting down cheaper card and box printing for RocketYard, and start thinking about how I want to package Pangaea up – I’m leaning more towards a flat board, rather than the (pretty sweet) bandanna printing I used with HoneyPot, but we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully, with a few more games available (or more, if the rest of the Flywheelers want to sell some stuff indie-style on Gizmet instead of waiting around for a publisher) I can make more of a marketing push, and get things moving a bit better…

My Quick Recap of Travelogue

Jun 052007

Things I learned from last week’s meeting, specifically about my new card game Travelogue, which I’ll be sending away to Italy for a game competition:

  • It ran a little long at 45 minutes.
  • It doesn’t scale well in regards to time to play.
  • There is a slow build up of cards in your hand, so a few turns are spent drawing.
  • The Destination card acquiring system is a bit fiddly.
  • The Destination card, while balanced, were a bit too similar.

What I did to fix those problems:

  • I cut the game down to 30 minutes no matter the number of players. Since it is a card game, I changed the end game conditions to this: “If there are no cards in the deck, this is your last turn.” This way the game has more or less the same number of turns which are divided amongst all the players.
  • Mischa suggested that the player be able to draw two cards (instead of one) as a card-obtaining option. At first I didn’t like the idea, but then I thought about it and tried it out. It turns out that if a player just keeps drawing two cards each turn, eventually they will lose them to the hand limit rule and won’t get to score them. So the options are “slow and steady” or “fast and furious” or a bit of both.
  • Drey (our new attendee) suggested something that sparked an idea about the Destination cards. I no longer have a draw pile and discard pile for them. Instead I have three face up piles. The player can discard beneath any pile to draw the top card from that pile. It saves a ton on table real estate and give the players a chance to see what’s coming up without having to physically draw any cards.
  • I spiced up the Destination cards, though not too much. Basically, one group of 6 allows the player to score a set of 5 for 11 points, while the others only allow the player to score a set of 4 for 8 points. However, the ones with 4 are more flexible in other areas. Also, on each card I added on more icon to allow for a bit more flexibility.

Improv game design again

May 282007

Between various members being out of town, I hadn’t been able to make a Flywheel meeting until last Tuesday, the 15th. I played both Dan’s Travelogue and Ian’s Sky Castles for the first time, so I got to offer criticism and feedback for the first two or three hours of the evening.

Once we found ourselves with no more prototypes to play, someone suggested we do another collaborative game design exercise, much like last time. Since I missed out on that one, I really wanted to do it this time. The basic rules are similar to general improv games- you can’t say “No.” Only “Yes, and…” or “Yes, but…” Everyone’s contribution, once written, is golden. In creating this game, we discovered that the rules were sound and playable, but horribly unbalanced. While nobody vetoed a rule during creation, we certainly hammered out a few details and noted that certain values would have to be tweaked.

Here’s the rules for “Ranch Hands,” in order of creation, as best as I can recall/infer from my scribbled notes. Yes, that’s a working title. Commentary is in brackets, images are from Board Game Geek since nobody used a camera while we were playing. This game is by Ian, Dan, and myself.

  1. The player with the most points, wins.
  2. This game uses no cards.Roads, settlements, cities
  3. This game uses the wooden bits from The Settlers of Catan. [We briefly debated if the dice were part of this rule- since they were wooden, they were in. Strictly speaking, are dice “bits” or something else? Either way, the majority was in favor of dice.]
  4. The dice are not rolled during the game. [Ian squashed the use of dice pretty quickly.]
  5. Each player has one color.
  6. There are two “pots” of points, as indicated by the dice.
  7. Players can increment or decrement a die by one.
  8. This is a three-player game. The fourth color is neutral, but in play. [Remember the base game for Settlers only has four colors.]
  9. The robber pawn is used to indicate one pot of points is negative.
  10. The robber indicates one die as a “cost,” and the other die as a “gain.” [This is interesting as a direct riff from the previous rule, with no context for what’s next.]
  11. The cities are used as toggles for resources: pointing up [like a regular placement of a city in Settlers] indicates a player has a resource.
  12. Neutral bits can be acquired. [We don’t know how, but you can.]Terra Nova in play
  13. This game is played on a Terra Nova board. [Ian grounds us from an abstract game.]
  14. Players can acquire other player’s resources. [We still don’t know how yet! :)]
  15. The terrain on the board does not matter. [I had to nip those potentials in the bud. Now we’re just dealing with a well-illustrated albeit oddly shaped hex map and a track of numbers.]
  16. Players can spend resources to build fences. [Ian demonstrates with roads on the board and we start fiddling.]
  17. Fences are places inside a hex, corner to corner. [They fit just right!]
  18. Players start with $20. [We use one settlement to track money around the edge. I liked my rule because it uses the board differently than as a victory point track- it’s interesting to work with creative constraints.]
  19. Ranches (settlements) are built on the board. [Finally, we get a theme. The earlier rule about fences is only halfway there- Terra Nova is about fencing off areas already.]
  20. Ranches are built inside a fenced-in area that uses your color fence and another color.
  21. This game has a western theme. [I spent a rule to make sure nobody would whip out magic dragon powers.]
  22. When you score an area, you get victory points equal to the positive die.
  23. The dice are pieces on the board.
  24. The edge of the board counts as neutral fence.
  25. You can buy a neutral resource for $5.
  26. Building a fence or a ranch costs a number of resources equal to the cost die (marked with the robber).
  27. It costs $5 to take two fences off the board and into your personal supply.
  28. When you score, the robber moves to the other die.
  29. When the robber moves, any fence he crosses pays out $3 to its owner.
  30. Spend $1 (maximum $5) to move a die one hex without changing its value.
  31. You get 5 Action Points per turn. [We still do not know what this is for, which makes it an interesting rule addition!]
  32. There is a starting setup. [Insert diagram here: Place three neutral fences in a Y-shape. Each player places four more fences to form three two-color enclosed areas, and then one ranch of the correct color inside each fenced-in area.]
  33. Spend 1 AP to flip one resource.
  34. Spend 1 AP to gain 1 dollar. [Note well this rule for later commentary.]
  35. Spend 2 AP to change a die’s value by one.
  36. The game ends when there are ten ranches on the board.
  37. The dice are rolled for setup. [This would normally be not allowed, as it directly contradicts an earlier rule. However, the majority liked it and technically the previous rule was no dice rolling during the game.]
  38. It costs $10 to build one ranch, plus the cost in resources. [We knew this was unbalanced.]
  39. The start player is the person with the closest birthday. [It happened to be Ian’s birthday when we created this, so he was our start player. Naturally, this rule was added with him in mind.]

And so, we finished because we wanted to play our game. We stopped when we knew everyone had added an equal number of rules, then added a few more setup and housekeeping rules.

  • Players start with no resources
  • Anything costs an AP
  • Only one ranch per fenced-in area
  • Let’s use glass stones to keep track of actions

Amazingly, this game works. As noted, it’s pretty seriously unbalanced. In retrospect, we’ve got several currencies running around between resources, money, victory points, and AP- this is keeping too many plates in the air for an improv design. Ian felt that we could consolidate money and AP somehow, but I’d rather see them separate things for players to balance. That said, money drains too quickly, and building got prohibitively expensive (in terms of resources:AP over time) rapidly. We really liked the mechanic of moving the robber between the dice- it added an interesting dynamic of balancing VP and cost, plus his motion between dice is the only real way to generate significant income.

We played so each of us got a handful of turns (maybe two dozen all told), enough to basically see most every rule get touched. I think the game was a tie, and I know I was seriously broke. Dan and I cornered Ian out of the neutral resources, which bankrupted us for a long-term advantage. At the end of the day, we all agreed that we would play it again if it were balanced.

Strange Design Space

Apr 042007

Last night’s game design meeting was just Ian and me again. I showed off my early prototype for the Lucca games contest, and Ian showed a galactic empire / abstract tile game. Those both had good starts and need more development.

At the end of the evening, we decided to do some collaborative design. The method for this collaboration was simple. We started with a blank slate. Then I’d declare a rule, and then Ian would declare a rule. We continued until we though we had a game. I started with an easy rule:

  • The winner of the game is the player with the most points.

Then Ian followed with the two part rule:

  • On your turn, you may play a tile or add a glass stone onto a tile.

That gave us a lot of direction. A few more rules went into the rule-set including:

  • Each player had a set of five tiles of their color.
  • At the beginning of the game, pile up four colors of glass stones in the center of the table.

That was all well and good, but the center of the table was also where we were supposed to place our tiles. It was my turn to add a rule, so I declared that we would indeed be placing our tiles amongst randomly arranged beads on the table. At that point both Ian and I knew we were venturing into strange design space. Some other interesting rules were:

  • You can use your turn to move any one stone in a straight line such that it eventually hits another stone and stops. (Although not an official rule, we both made magnetic swooshing and locking noises when the stones were moved and stopped)
  • Tiles must be placed so they are touching two matching colored stones.
  • Scoring occurs three times per game, each when you place your fifth tile.
  • When scoring occurs all beads and tiles used to score are discarded from play.
  • Plus many more…

We went ahead and played this freak of a game. Surprisingly it actually worked pretty well. We both agreed that this was something that we would have never come up with on our own. Even though we didn’t add a theme to it, it felt like some otherworldly planet mining game with processing plants (tiles) and ore (stones). The game was even close at the end. Of course the end never actually officially happened. We forgot to add a rule to determine the end of the game!

Like a rulebook without pictures...

Jan 242007

Last night, Mischa, Ian, and I met at my place for some good old-fashioned playtesting. One of the first things we did was go over my rulebook for Salvage. Admittedly, it was not a polished as I would have liked it, but I tried to make sure it was as rules complete as I could make it. Writing a rule book is not as easy as it might seem. It needs to be tested just like the game itself to make sure that everything has been covered.

Both guys gave some good suggestions on layout and wording. One big problem was the lack of card layout and procedural examples. I did have examples, but not enough and not in the needed areas. As they say, you can never have enough examples.

Besides examples, I included a glossary for all of the cards in the game (there’s not that many). It serves as a mini-FAQ and a dumping ground for any notes I have about a particular card. I like it because it’s not in the way when you’re trying to learn the game, but it is there when you have a question about a particular card.

I made a change to one card that required quite a lot of explanation in the glossary. The concept is simple once you know it, but it is a real pain to write it down succinctly and clearly. Imagine trying to explain the word “most” to people who had no concept of numbers being greater than or less than others. To me, that’s what it feels like. I tried my best, but after reading it, Mischa was definitely disturbed by it because it seems like a big clunky addition to the game. I strongly feel that it is not a difficult concept, and I just need to find a better way to explain it. After we played, he agreed that it was a simple concept, and he suggested adding a thematic explanation to make it easier to swallow, ala Star Trek via Futurama:

Fry: Well, usually on the show, someone would come up with a complicated plan, then explain it with a simple analogy.

Leela: Hmm. If we can re-route engine power through the primary weapons and reconfigure them to Melllvar’s frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure.

Bender: Like putting too much air in a balloon!

Fry: Of course! It’s so simple!

It’s as simple as that!

The Last Guy, a work in progress

Jan 162007

A few months back, I had lunch with my brother. We do a fair amount of lifehackery to keep each other focused on getting things done; this isn’t the venue for that post. At this particular Chinese lunch, we were talking about patrons in our respective creative fields: film and games. It’s not uncommon in the gaming industry to hire a designer to make a game- I’m pretty sure that this happens to Reiner Knizia with some frequency. It’s also not unheard of for RPG designers to do the same. Hollywood, that great specialized bank, does the same: if the money is right, the talent produces. As a result of this discussion, my brother commissioned me to design a game for one dollar, with a provided theme of “heists” and possibly “Australia.”

Evidently, I’ve got a lot simmering around in my brain, and quickly was able to sketch out a game idea that revolved around players sending in a crew of specialists/thugs/criminals working to complete jobs for points: the Faceman, the Driver, the Femme Fatale, the Safecracker, the Hacker. Each had various strengths that could be used to win the jobs- the long con, the jewelry store heist, smuggling, and so on. At this point in the development, my working title was “the Fourth Guy,” a nod to noir masterpiece The Third Man.Most every tweak and idea I’ve had must fit in with the theme somehow, or it’s getting dropped.

I’ve had TLG through a dozen or so minor variations, many that I discarded without playing. I’ve kept notes on them for possible inclusion in a later revision. For instance, I’d like to include the notion of rewards that a player earns for completing a job. Right now, I’m still working out the basic mechanic and deck distribution, so “powers” are on the back burner for now.

So far, I keep running into a runaway leader scoring problem, where it’s obvious who will win and there is literally no point to continue play. That, and the game plays in less than ten minutes, which feels short. The length isn’t as big a problem as I originally thought. Since The Last Guy is fundamentally a trick-taking game, those games are usually stretched over several hands to make for a compelling game. A series of hands neatly solves the leader problem, I think.

I don’t have a huge production studio or a color printer and stock in foamcore like some of our members, so my current prototyping constraints include that the game must be playable with standard playing cards. This means that I don’t waste time making up a prototype that won’t pass muster after one play, and that I can focus on tweaking the core of the game instead of throwing extra unplaytested cards at a (perceived) problem. I also have about ten decks of two-for-a-dollar cheap-as-hell cards that I found at Target. I picked these babies up expressly for prototyping, and they are so cheap they’ll tear with a rigorous riffle shuffle, I kid you not.

This portability has also let me playtest it with people I wouldn’t normally. I don’t need to drag around a huge board or a custom-printed deck of cards. With several decks of regular playing cards (and once with a six-suited Rage deck), I can make radical changes in gameplay without fretting about investing in the time needed to produce a complete prototype.

Almost every time the game has actually hit the table, it passes the “Let’s Play Again!” test, which is huge for me.

Rockets and Dinosaurs

Jan 122007

Our latest playtest session and design roundtable was a great success – all four of us had promising games to show, two new ones, and two revisions of designs-in-progress. I’m looking forward to seeing each one work its way into the hands of eager customers. I’ve actually been selling copies of Honeypot to people I don’t know, so now it’s time to keep turning the crank on the old game machine and get some new stuff out there.

The two top contenders at the moment are RocketYard, a card game about bidding for rocketship parts and shooting various animals into space, and Pangaea, a board game that uses some neat territory control and move-limiting mechanics to replay the breaking apart of our Mesozoic super-continent. RocketYard has been playtested pretty thoroughly, and probably only needs one or two more go-arounds before I can get some final art locked down and deepen my search for card game manufacturers. (The quotes I’ve received so far for smallish runs have been extraordinarily out of my acceptable price range. If anyone has any leads, I’d be delighted to hear from you.)

Pangaea, however, is brand spanking new, and that was my bring-to for playtesting this week. It started with my fiddling around with a little bag of plastic dinosaurs, trying to figure out if I could make a game that only used them as pieces, and blossomed into a larger strategic game that has a board with sixty spaces arranged in a grid (which is much too regular and ugly-shaped to work in the actual game – I’d like to retain the same topology, but squish it around until it looks like an actual land mass), sixty counters in six colors, and a small number of markers that the players use to nail down their territory as the continent separates. The rules are fairly simple – I’m a big fan of the one-page rulesheet – but still a little fiddly. It played well, however, and everyone in the group enjoyed playing it more than once, so I think there’s a good bit of promise in there. I almost hate to say that it feels like it almost works right out of the gate – game design is such an iterative process that when something works this well straight off, I get suspicious, and start trying to pull it apart and adding and taking out bits when it might not need pulling and prodding, just because that’s how it’s “supposed” to work. Either way, I’ll mock up a slightly prettier board and run it through a bunch more players, and see if I can smooth it out some more.

So, there’s that. Fun fun.

I’ve also got a card game in the pipe that has some potential connection to a hot little chunk of IP out there, which I’m still working the kinks out of, both game-wise and deal-wise. I’m pretty excited about getting the fire stoked under that one as well, but one thing at a time…

Salvage Playtest

Jan 122007

This past Tuesday we had a productive game design meeting. Everybody got to playtest each others’ prototypes, and we all found them to be rather interesting. I brought to the table a card game I’ve been working on for over a year now called Salvage. I haven’t been constantly working on it; it’s just been on and off the back burner for a long while. It has gone through a lot of transformations along the way. I like to try out a lot of ideas, and some of them just feel as though they are meant for another game, not this one. I scrapped a lot of ideas along the way because I wasn’t happy with how they worked in the game, but I think I’m to the point where I like how the system works.

Players assume the roles of post-apocalyptic scavengers searching through the rubble of a war-torn landscape to find the components they need to rebuild their lives. The piles of junk are limitless, but the resources they need are scarce. Players alternate between rounds of scavenging (card drafting) and building. During the draft, each player is dealt seven “junk” cards; they simultaneously select one each and pass the remainder to the left, repeating until done. With the “junk” cards they have acquired, players then take turns building and upgrading their camps, tools, weapons, and vehicles which all have their own unique abilities.

The testing in this latest version was mostly about the recycling of the junk deck. The depletion of the junk deck marked the end of a “season” in the game. The game lasts as many seasons as there are players. This allows for games with different numbers of players to roughly last around the same amount of time.

In previous versions of the game the junk deck would run out, players would get short changed junk cards (by design, I convinced myself), and play would continue as normal. The player with the leader card would get less short-changed than the other players because he was dealt his card first. After the short-changed round, a new season would start. Each new season would require all junk cards (even the left over ones the players had in their hands) to be shuffled into a fresh new deck. Even though the short changing of the cards didn’t affect the overall balance of the game, it just felt sloppy. It didn’t feel like good design when players played a round with one or two new cards instead of the full seven.

To fix that problem, I decided to just have the discard pile be shuffled when the deck ran out. That let the players continue to draw their cards so that each round they had 7 new cards. When the deck runs out, the players should note that the end of this round marks the end of the season. I also allow players to keep their card between seasons. It seems like a simple solution used in countless other games (and even in previous incarnations of this game), and I just took the long approach to get there.

With that nagging flaw no longer there, I plan on focusing on the project abilities, cleaning up the rules, and more playtesting!

Flick Wars

Jan 102007

I have had the strangest urge to play flicking games lately. Games like; Crokinole, Carabande, and Carrom. However, with my budget I just cant afford to go out and buy any of these. So my desire to flick little wooden disks has inspired me to create my own take on a flicking game (Flicking + Conflict = Fun).Flick wars can be played on any kitchen table, and will fit into a large dice bag. Each player has 10 disks in his army. There are also 3 different unit types in the basic game (I have already begun working on an expansion); Archers, Infantry, and Calvary. During your turn you can ether move one of you disks, or attempt to attack an opponents disk. Each unit has a different movement rate (the number of times you can flick the disk), and specific requirements for making an attack on another piece. The winner of the game is the first player to accumulate 6 kills. Dan and Mark played the game last night and both had very positive reactions.

This is an extremely portable game. My wife and I played it while waiting for our dinner at a local restaurant tonight. The game took about 25 minutes, and was very close. Our food arrived just as Melissa made the winning shot. The table was clean but felt a little tacky. This made judging shots a little more difficult than usual. All in all it was a very fun game. People kept watching what we were doing, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be to be able to tell them where they can purchase it online.

Mark has challenged me to get this game finished and self-published in one months time. I plan on meeting that challenge. I really feel that this game has that special something. Mark has really inspired me with his recent release of Honeypot.

I plan on posting updates on my progress in the following weeks.

TDC- Cosmic Iced Rum

Nov 082006

Here’s my mostly unplaytested game for the Treehouse Design Challenge. I call it Cosmic Iced Rum, taking inspiration from Cosmic Encounter, Guillotine, and Rummy.
Cosmic Iced Rum

For two players and one stash, plays in less than ten minutes.

  1. Shuffle a stash of treehouse pieces (five colors, three sizes each), and create a single-file line. Use the tube to clearly mark one end of the row as the end of the line. All pieces will be drawn from the start of the line.
  2. Roll for powers, using the standard Treehouse die:
    • Aim: Reorient a pyramid. Force left or right placement on the other player
    • Dig: Draw from end of line.
    • Hop: Pull n+1th piece, depending on size (second for small, third for medium, fourth for large).
    • Tip: Precog defense, shift target one to left or right.
    • Swap: Swap end pieces with freshly pulled pyramid.
    • Wild: Your choice. Only if you roll Wild can two players have the same power.
  3. Play phase one, loading:
    • On your turn, draw the pyramid at the start of the line. It goes to the line you’re building in front you you, either on the left or the right.
    • When you place a pyramid in your line, you may aim it either at yourself or at your opponent, indicating the target of your power.
    • When you use a power, you must take a flat pyramid and make it upright.
  4. Play phase two, fighting:
    • Any remaining flat pyramids now fire, starting with the start of the line.
    • Shooting an upright pyramid causes to to be removed.
    • Shooting a defensive pyramid causes it to become offensive.
    • Shooting an offensive pyramid causes it to become upright.
    • When you use a power, you must take a flat pyramid and make it upright.
  5. Scoring: When all pyramids in both player’s lines are upright, a player gets five points for two like colors next to each other, and three points for two like sizes next to each other. A single pyramid may score twice: once for a match on the left, once for a match on the right.

There’s definitely a game in here somewhere, but it needs some TLC.

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