Flywheel: Inertial Game Design

My latest few revisions to Monkey Lab included the following changes:

Shared Scoring

When a player scores by unlocking a cage, the players in the same room or adjoining rooms also score (except one less point). The score keeping is now done with numbered chips that are kept face-down instead of opened cage tiles kept face-up. This main problem that this fixes is the runaway leader problem. When one player got a huge lead, the other players felt hopeless. Now, since the points are hidden, and since scoring happens more often, players are unsure of who is exactly in the lead and by how much. In the few tests I’ve tried with this, this seems to work nicely.

Once side-effect of this new scoring is that players can now cooperate. It is a nice addition to the game since it adds a bit more depth to your decisions and it really works with the theme. It even works well with two players and gives the players a big incentive to use the combat mechanic to scare the other player away.

Game Ending

The game used to end when the guard made his way one time around the board. No matter how much I wanted it to happen, players always forgot to move the guard. I tried it at the beginning of the turn as well as the end, but no luck. I decided to remove the guard moving altogether and add a different end game condition. Now, when the deck runs out of cards, the game will end. I’ve tried this a couple of times, and it seems to be a good timer. Players have control over it and it guarantees a certain length to the game. I still need to tweak the number of cards in the deck, but this seems to work.

The Guard IN the Rooms

I liked the mechanic of the guard so much that I didn’t want to completely get rid of it. I instead added cards that moved the guard inside the lab rooms. He has the same effect of limiting actions to his room and adjoining rooms. Thematically, it works since he is slowing the monkeys down by chasing them. It adds a certain amount of tension because the other players don’t know when he will strike. Also, since he starts out off the board, there is a certain time of “free play” in the lab. I’m not totally convinced that I want him to affect adjoining rooms as well since it seems to really hinder players options. I’ll probably test it more both ways to see which I like better.

Last night I met with Ian, Mischa, and Chris to do some playtesting. Here’s the scoop:

We started the night with playtesting my game Salvage. Salvage is a card game for 2-4 players that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the landscape is a junk yard, and you are there to salvage, build, and survive. The main mechanic of the game is card drafting, similar to a booster draft found in collectible card games. Players go through hands of cards picking the components they want to keep and pass the remaining to the next person. After the draft is over, they use that junk to build one of four types of projects: camps, tools, weapons, or vehicles. The projects are double-sided cards and players can spend junk cards to upgrade them (flip them over) as well. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

I tried out a new rule for my weapon upgrade. It states that on the turn you upgrade the weapon, until the end of the turn, whenever someone else builds or upgrades, they must discard a card. My goal is to create balanced abilities on all the cards that only become powerful when used at the most opportune moment. For example, this one wouldn’t be good to use when everyone has few cards in their hands since they probably aren’t going to build. It worked out pretty well in the game we played. What I didn’t expect is to have two different players use them at the same time causing a two card penalty for building. That was pretty cool though. As it stands right now, it gives both the weapon user AND the weapon victim a choice. “Do I build now with a penalty or wait until next turn?”

It was also suggested that I experiment with the quantities of the projects available to build. I tested out last night with 8 of each project. The tools and camps were the first to go. There were about 2-3 each of the weapons and vehicles. I’ll have to test this out more. I don’t want limit any one strategy. If a player just wants to build vehicles, then I want that open to him.

I’ll write more later about the other games. Please comment with your thoughts about this playtest.

I got to try out Marc’s hex board game last night “Hive”. Here are my thoughts:

The game is an interesting abstract where your only move is to place a numbered double-sided hex with “arrows” onto a donut-shaped hex board. The goal was to have a higher total of points from your hexes than your opponent. This was accomplished by capturing (flipping) your opponent’s pieces by pointing your higher-numbered hex’s arrow toward your opponent’s piece, or by teaming up with smaller pieces and “equaling” the enemy piece. The rules are simple and gave me time to focus on the strategy.

Of course, I wasn’t 100% sure of what the strategy was, which is a good thing. I mostly ended up playing a piece to at least capture one of his pieces so that I felt like I was making forward progress. When I decided to spice things up by placing my piece alone on the other side of the board, I didn’t get any immediate “feedback” from it. Was it a good move? I wasn’t quite clear about that until several turns later. In fact, I’m still not quite sure if it was a good move or a bad move.

I’m not sure I like that the game tends to grow from one location. There seems to be little incentive to play all over the board. This is, of course, a huge incentive to play near the group – capturing!

I would really like to see an analysis of the optimal score per move. Each player has two sets of 1-9 tiles. That’s 90 points per side. (Now that I think about, we might have mis-added the totals up because both of our scores were in the eighties!) So, a player has to get more than 90 points to win. I’m going to venture a guess and say that a player needs to score at least once per turn to win (or at the very least keep up the rate of the opponent).

I like how the angle of the double arrows is at 120 degrees. That seemed to prevent a lot of double flipping in one turn.

Mechanically, I didn’t like having to keep track of the directions of the arrows when I flip. I think I messed up on a few occasions. If this was a video game, then I could see the captured color just changing, but as a board game, the flipping has to be taken into consideration. Is there any way to make this easier to remember?

Another thing about flipping: Any game piece that you have to flip repeatedly should be of some thickness. I know this is a prototype, but when you move to the next step, thicker pieces will help.

The game was very close at the end, which was good, and it was unclear who the winner was until we totalled up the score. Now after thinking about it, I want to play again to test out some of my strategy theories.

Overall, the rules were very complete and all cases were handled. I think there is room for some more spice in the game. Give something to the players to consider besides flipping hexes.

Here’s some other abstract games that this game reminded me of:
Othello
Ingenious – Play it online!
Hive