Flywheel: Inertial Game Design

I was feeling a little concerned about my game prototype Stellar Underworld. This feeling came from some of the feedback from the guys from Oklahoma, and from a botched playtest with some “improved” rules based on that feedback. All of that, and I feel pressure to get this game ready for the Protocon design contest.Well, last night I decided to try out some simple changes and see how that fared. We played and I am happy to report that it played really nicely!

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 The “comandeering” rules for stealing are no longer in effect.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!

There are two main states of game development:

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.

Today I received some feedback from Mike and the guys at the Royal Steamwork Society about Stellar Underworld. Here are some of the main points I pulled from 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.

Ian’s Unnamed Space Game Playtest

Ian, Jon, and I played a newer version of Ian’s unnamed space game. This game is your basic 4X game: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Actually, the “explore” aspect isn’t really there because the board is pretty much open information from the beginning. So, I guess it’s a 3X game. Anyways, the real ingenuity of the game comes in the form of flicking, as in Crokinole or Ian’s other game Taktika. Instead of dice or card draws, the random element of the game comes in the form of flicking. About 80% of the time, the flicks are successful, but that remaining 20% keeps players in a haze about their future. You see, the rest of the game is perfect information, and the only uncertainty comes from your opponents and the flicking. All in all, this game is coming along nicely. It will take a lot of play-testing because there are so many build paths and strategies.

Venture Forth Playtest

Ian, Jon, and I played my latest incarnation of Venture Forth. This game started as an ambitious project two years ago to make a Euro-style Talisman. It has gone through many many incarnations between periods of being shoved in the back of my closet out of frustration. The core of the game has remained throughout: character ambitions. My big beef with fantasy games is that it is assumed that all characters have a bloodlust to kill monsters and an unending desire to acquire treasure. My game would allow the character to be who they are and be rewarded for it. For example, in the current version, you can have just a lone Faerie in your party and score points by just ‘making friends’. There is still treasure and there is still killing, but only certain characters desire those things.

Last night, I got to test it with more than two players and it worked great! My new bonus point system worked as well as my new cube ‘currency’ system. Everything fell into place, and I couldn’t be happier.

Dan and I met Tuesday night for play testing. We each brought a new game design to the table. Dan had a dice game based on the video game Rampart. We each had a Castle and had a stack of gold placed inside. We were able to build up the walls to our Castles, place attacking ships around our opponents Castle, blow up walls, and steal each others gold. While the game did not really have an end condition, it played very nicely. On the first round I was not very excited about the game play, but by the end of the 3 round I did not want to stop playing. While there are a lot of dice rolls in the game, there are also a lot of decisions about how to use them and in what order you need to attack the different sides of your opponents Castle. Dan indicated that this was just the core mechanics of a larger multiplayer game. Dan talked about some really cool sounding additions to it. I’m excited to see where the game goes, and I look forward to playing this again with 3 or 4 players.

My new game is essentially a light Galactic Empire Building game that has a Flicking mechanic to it. The game should scale for 2 to 4 players. Each player controls a faction of humans that have fled their own galaxy for fear of a seemingly unstoppable alien race that is bent on their destruction. After arriving in this new galaxy the refugees discovered ancient relics of 4 alien races that have long ago disappeared. The faction that develops the most new technology based on the ancient alien relics will establish the foundation of the new Human Empire. There are 24 world discs that are spread across the table. Each world disc has non slip rubber backing so they don’t move around. Players will move from planet to planet by flicking small starship discs. Also, starship combat is accomplished by a simple flicking mechanic. There are 4 different types of Technology that can be developed and each type has two different abilities (now 3). There are two different types of buildings that can be built: Research Facilities and Planetary Defenses. The game also did not have an end game condition so Dan and I played about 12 rounds. It played very well for a first prototype. There really seemed to be no reason to build Planetary Defenses, and every time I built a Research Facility Dan would take it over because it was cheaper than building his own. I focused on building up Technology while Dan focused on spreading out and Occupying Worlds. When we stopped playing Dan had about 28 points and I only had 3 points. I have tweaked the scoring a bit so it should be a bit closer next time.

Last night Ian, Jon, and I met.

Chit-Chat

We started a bit differently by chatting about games on the couch. We talked about our games being published, and all of the details that go along with that.

Ian told us about his newest game idea involving dice, Chun-Li, and fireballs. We were very taken with the idea of a Street Fighter-based game, and Jon and I were spouting out ideas left and right.

The topic of designing to prevent cheating came up when Ian mentioned using dice behind a player screen. Jon said one of his biggest pet peeves was when playtesters ask: “How do you prevent the players from cheating?” He said that cheater will cheat regardless, and there’s no reason to work to stop them. I was concerned with unintentional cheating: accidentally giving the wrong answer in Mystery of the Abbey, or not following suit when you have one in you hand, or, in Ian’s example, accidentally manipulating some game state (dice, score track) that is behind a screen. Those actions can derail a game sometimes. I think we all agreed that taking the time to consider these problems is worth it, regardless of whether or not we fix them.

Haunted Destinies

Knowing that the night was slipping by, we decided to head to the table and play Jon’s game Haunted Destinies. It was a deduction game, but it lacked deduction. It was more in line with a “stab in the dark” style of detective work. The players had to determine who the bad guy was by revealing cards from the individual player’s decks. If they saw the bad guy card, then they knew how to proceed to victory. This sounded good when Jon described it, but I felt like it was a slow process. With 30 some cards to look through, a player may stumble upon the bad guy right away, or, through no fault of his own, not find the card until he sees everyone of them. Actually, that isn’t entirely true. In a three player game, the maximum amount of cards you actually need to look through is 2/3s of them because if you don’t find the bad guy card in player 1 and player 2’s decks, then it must be in player 3’s.

The revelation part of the game was, for me, the part that needed the most attention. The other parts of the game, however, were actually very clever: Eliminated ghost players, and making setup of the board into a mini-game. I hope Jon continues to refine this game to make all of the mechanics shine.