One of the lines of thought in the book included that a "well-played game" is one where the participants all take part willingly and enthusiastically, and can leave the game if they no longer wish to continue, and may even be able to change the way they play. There are plenty of angles to this well-played game explored in the book, but this is an area that had my mind firing off. Could I make a board game where players could come and go if they wish, and which allowed them to change the way they played?
As an aside, most roleplaying games I know about can be played in this sort of way: the core is the developing character narrative and a gamesmaster and the rest of the group can work together to adapt the play however the group wishes. I am certain there is a lot already written about this sort of thing (the RPG community has spent a lot of time thinking about how games are played), but that's out of my area these days.
After some sleeping on this, I started thinking about a world, growing from nothing, with players building the world, populating it, and guiding its inhabitants as stuff happens. One player could be creating a map by laying tiles, another could be building villages on the map, and another could be an adventurer exploring the map, and so on. You would take a role, which would give you a simple set of actions that you can take, and a way that you score points. When you choose, you may discard the role, take a new one and now, instead of being a terraforming deity, you are now a dragon gathering gold for its lair.
I threw together some tiles in nanDECK, going for an arrangement of square tiles, each of which contains four triangles that are put next to other triangles to make squares arranged at 45° to the alignment of the tiles. I'm not sure why I did that, but it seemed fun at the time. After printing and cutting a few of these I decided that I would actually take the opportunity to get some practice in playing with Tabletopia, so shifted my efforts to a digital version that I might actually have a chance at playtesting during the ongoing lockdown.
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| Printed tiles. You get the general idea |
One of the advantages of an online platform is that you can import all sorts of components and just experiment. I have at home a good supply of assorted game components, but for tiles, cards, and so on, there is a load of printing and cutting required, which I have got pretty efficient at, but is still something of a grind. Tabletopia has a decent library of standard components (not covering everything, but good enough for many purposes) that can just be dropped into a game project. Preparing tiles and cards for upload and managing them in the system is a bit of a pain, especially at first, but there are some big advantages. Like, for example, when I decided I wanted twice as many tiles, I could just click on the existing stack and duplicate it.
I fiddled about with my virtual prototype for a while, building up a few of the roles that players could take, putting the instructions for them onto oversized cards that I added to the prototype, meaning that pretty much all of the rules would be within the game itself: each player could just take a role card, read it, and start playing.
Eventually I got to the point where I enlisted a friend to try the game out and see how it held together when I was not playing all the parts.
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| Testing with another human was very revealing. |
As is so often the case, the game didn't play particularly well. The general concept of the game seemed OK, but it was just too damn complicated for the light-and-breezy type of game I was hoping for. One of the big issues was that there was too much variation between the different roles, and as a player you were more or less having to learn a new game each time you took a new role. And the way that you played a role for as long as you wished before changing just didn't sit right.
At the start of the design process for this game I was wondering if it should be competitive or cooperative in nature, and I went for the former, mostly because it is what I know best and cooperative games can be so much harder to create. After all, not only do you need to make the game mechanisms work properly, but you need something for the players to be working against, and getting that right is hard.
Anyway, at this stage I decided that what the game really wants to be is a series of puzzles, where what one player is trying to achieve can interact with the other players' actions. And with this in mind, cooperative play could be best. A game of this sort of form could be played against some sort of a timer, so the roles would now have an objective (on completion, or if you decide to give up, you switch to a new role with a new objective) and the aim would be for the players between them to complete a certain number of objectives before time run out.
A literal timer is out of the question for this. Real-time pressure, while exciting in some contexts, just adds stress and I don't want this to be a stressful game. What I actually decided to go for is to introduce dice. A bunch of (six-sided) dice get rolled, players each take one in turn to use for the movement of their avatar, until there is only one left, and that die gets placed in a "timer" display, and a new fistful of dice are rolled. When either one of each number (1 to 6) has been accrued, or there is three of a single number, the game ends. This way the players are partly at the whim of fate, but also have some control over how they allow the game to progress.
So building the next iteration of the game was largely about this timing mechanism and the idea that there should be core rules for everyone to learn and the roles just give minor variations, which may accumulate as you move through the game, but at no point should require anyone to absorb a large raft of new options. Getting these changes into Tabletopia can involve a little faffing, but I'm not having to print and cut physical components, so there is something of a trade-off.
I then managed to get a playtest with a couple of friends, who got on pretty well with the general concept of the game and its overall flow, but had plenty to say about it as well. I was left with a feeling that this iteration was definitely an improvement and I liked the game in its cooperative mode. The next thing to do would be to extend the selection of roles and sequence them so that there is something of an arc to their progression. One suggestion was to have three phases of play: one being to build the world, the next to add complexity and cause trouble and strife, and the third to heroically put everything right. Players then have to get through a certain number of roles, or complete some of the "ending" roles before the timer runs out.
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| A few turns in, working with the first set of "world building" roles. |
I would also like to have some more significance to how the timer operates, maybe having events triggering when certain sets of numbers are completed, but I can worry about that later, I think.
As an aside, I have also figured out the "magnetic board" option on Tabletopia, which allows you to have components neatly snapping into position when you drop them, and have a grid board that makes placing tiles much easier. What I made isn't as big as the potential play area, but it'll do, and you can always add more tiles alongside.
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| A "magnetic" board can make everything so much smoother and cleaner. |
