Castles in Their Proper Places (ish)

A long story about a small game design decision.

I've not done anything with The Castle War for a little while, but have been thinking about it, particularly in light of some feedback I received.  If you didn't know, or don't remember, this is a two-player card game inspired by the 12th century civil war in England between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, which eventually led to the crowning of Matilda's son as Henry II. The game is based on a period of that conflict where there was essentially a stalemate characterised by a series of sieges and exchanges of castles, where there were no significant open battles.

Game play involves the two players deploying forces and using tactics and events across six castles that were all significant during the period. If one player ever controls all six castles, they immediately win; otherwise, whoever controls the most castles at the end of the game (when the card deck runs out) is the winner.

But with six castles, a tie is clearly possible. How we break that tie is a question that has taken some thought.

I drew a sketch map to show the (approximate) locations of the castles.

Originally, the castles were nameless and numbered, 1 to 6, to tie in with a dice rolling system that was used to open up opportunities to the players. Then if there was a tie at the game end, you added up the numbers on the castles you controlled and whoever had the highest score won. This meant that the high numbered castles were more valuable than the low numbered ones, but if you concentrated on defending the two highest scoring castles, the other player could win by capturing the rest, even though their combined score was not as high. This was fine, but somehow a lot of players seemed to have difficulty internalising that the scores were only useful for tie breaking.

To give the game a little extra flavour, I wanted to name the castles, so a little research yielded the six locations depicted in the rough map above. (Fun fact: I live in between Faringdon and Wallingford, and have visited the sites of both castles.)  Furthermore, I wanted to have the initial ownership of the castles reflecting history as best I could.  (Another fun fact: Wallingford castle is distinguished in having not changed hands throughout the conflict, despite being sieged and attacked with some vigour.) The problem here is that, in order to keep the initial scores balanced, I had to distribute the names of the castles along the line of six with no real attention to geography. This was fine from a game play point of view, but as this is inspired by history, it bothered me a bit.

So now a slight diversion. We'll bring this back in a bit.

Before this stalemate stage of the war, Matilda was in a very strong position and very nearly got herself crowned as Queen, it seems there were effectively three power bases that needed to be brought onside in order to become officially the monarch: the Church, the royal treasury (based in the old Wessex capital of Winchester), and the people (or at least the leaders) of London. Matilda had gained Church support and held the treasury, but never managed to convince the leaders of London to back her cause -- partly, it seems, due to her own arrogance, and partly due to the actions of another Matilda, this one the Queen, and wife of the then-imprisoned King Stephen.

Eventually, Queen Matilda and her allies managed to retake Winchester, capture some key prisoners, and arrange for an exchange, thus freeing the King and bringing us to the Castle War's stalemate situation.

Anyway, three factions that could be influenced... that gave me an idea...

If there was some form of way of tracking influence with these three factions or power bases, then whoever has influence over the most of them wins an otherwise tied game. There are a number of ways this could be handled, but I have decided to make each faction a simple binary: they are supporting either Stephen or Matilda, and I chose to represent this with a set of three flippable cards, similar to the way I have players flipping the castle cards to show ownership.

I then added an icon representing one of the factions to each card in the game, with an even distribution of these icons throughout the deck.  The plan now is that each player can now take an action on their turn to flip one of the faction influence cards by discarding a set of three cards with matching faction icons on them.  The set of three decision is intended so that, with a full hand (of six cards) you stand a decent chance of having a set, but using it will dramatically reduce your options for the next turn and you may have to give up on some other useful cards.

With the numbers on the castles being irrelevant for game end purposes, I can now arrange the row of castles in an order that follows a plausible route between them that you may see in the map, from Wareham to Wallingford, and as there are some minor elements of adjacency in the game, that makes more thematic sense now.

You wouldn't put the faction cards there for an actual game, but you get the idea.

A common question from players is about how to cycle out unwanted cards in hand, so this system will give a way to address that, assuming those unwanted cards can be combined into a set.

So far this seems to work OK, but I am a little concerned that collecting three matching icons to gain influence in something might just feel boring and unthematic to a lot of players.  I'm hoping that it's one of those elements of the game that if you totally ignore it you may be at a disadvantage, but if you focus on it too much, you will almost certainly lose.  It should give a small, but meaningful, additional option at some points in the game, without dominating.  Only more playtesting will show if this is actually a decent decision, and if the set collection doesn't work out, I am certain there are other options to allow us to do something similar in the game.

The other real issue here is that this setup gives Stephen an advantage, winning the tiebreak if nothing else changes, so Matilda gets the first turn, which also appears advantageous.  Again, playtesting should help reveal if one side has a significant advantage here and if there is, there are plenty of ways to mitigate that.

Grab Bag Hare

I haven't been to a 3rd Sunday playtest at the Jugged Hare in London for a couple of months, but finally managed to get myself in order for a trip last weekend, taking with me Grab Bag Zoo, my co-design with Mike Harrison-Wood, who managed to make the trip too, for our first face-to-face meet since we started working on the game.

There was a little uncertainty as to whether I would actually get into London as we had just been hit by the second big (by British standards) storm in two weeks, causing all sorts of problems for travel (not to mention people's houses getting flooded and property damaged) around the country. Checking the situation before I left home everything looked OK for my planned route, and the train was close to being on time, but we ended up being delayed by an hour en route due to a problem that emerged later. Unfortunately this meant I was not able to meet with Mike before the main meetup, but I managed to arrive comfortably before the playtesting started anyway.

Thanks to Mike Harrison-Wood for taking a much nicer photo than I managed to take!

While waiting for everyone to arrive, we had a quick play of Grab Bag Zoo for five players, including me, with Mike sitting out and taking notes. This worked pretty well, but the players fell massively short of winning. We suspect that the game is just too hard for larger player counts.

A little later, with the whole group assembled, we were able to get some more plays, this time for four players, this time including Mike while I observed.  One of the key things I learnt from this is that for a fast-moving, real-time game, it can be difficult to take meaningful notes about what is going on!

The group was enthusiastic overall and there was a lot of intense activity in the game, and they were keen to play a couple more times, meaning that we managed to try out all four of the zoo board sets that I had brought along between this session and the earlier game. The idea is that the game has a number of different sets of boards, each providing a different style or intensity of challenge, and this proved to be the case: the players took a different approach to each set of boards. The balancing of the board elements isn't right yet, but we are learning how the different options affect play.  However, we are also learning that some of the rules we have for the game are just too complicated and can easily get missed or wrongly applied.

So, I think that this was a really helpful testing session. We got feedback that the game is pretty compelling, but also identified a number of problems that need addressing, and we are getting to work on that.  I'm also discovering the fun of working on a very short game where you can easily just say, "Let's try that one more time, with this change..."

Of course, there were other games there, and it was fun to work through a few games designed by others: an interesting "short straw" game, a game about being a band, recording music and going on tour, and a nicely stripped back investment game. It's always good to get a look at some of the projects other folk are working on.

Four Fings in February

I seem to have four game projects on the go at the moment, all of which are either collaborations or in development under external guidance, so here's a quick outline...

The one I have just spent a day working on has the working title of "Snails and Grails", and is inspired by 13th and 14th century manuscripts that show images of snails, monkeys and hares (as well as all manner of other bizarre beasts) in combat (and other) situations. My collaborators, Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer, and I had a few hours discussion about this a few weeks back, and each constructed different parts of a prototype, which we just stitched together, Frankenstein-like, into a somewhat creaky, but basically operational whole. Over three plays, which included a load of on-the-fly rules changes and writing on the components with Sharpies, we managed to refine the game into a magnificent, slightly less clunky version that we were really enjoying playing.  OK, so a long way to go on this one, but I think we are off to a good start.

Our third play of the day, with a load of scribblings on components.

Then, of course, there is Scurvy Crew, which you may remember is signed for publication with Braincrack Games, and we are slowly building into a campaign game, where you play a series of games, each of which introduces some new elements to change the focus of your strategy and, it looks like, you will be keeping a "captain's log", recording some of your achievements and earning power-ups as you go.  I'm really excited about where this is going now.

Next up we have something else new, which came out of a conversation with Mike Harrison-Wood at Dragonmeet at the end of November, and in early January turned into a physical thing. With the working title "Grab Bag Zoo", this is a real-time game that involved pulling wooden animals from bags in order to collect sets, and leans heavily into tactility (you have to choose an item by feel only). The game generally works, but there is a lot to tighten up about it, and we are both trying out assorted variations at the moment that we can compare and use to find the best way to play the game.

Finally in this little batch, we have a game about the history of popular music through the second half of the 20th century, which I am working on with Phil Tootill. I say "working on", but this is his baby so far and he has done all of the initial work, so only time will tell if this turns into an actual co-design or if it is his and I have just helped a bit. It looks like it could turn out really interesting though.