The Quarter Vinyls

 A few years ago I found that game designer Phil Tootill worked at the same place as me, and for a while we met up regularly over lunch to test each other's prototypes or show each other published games that we thought were interesting. Eventually Phil moved on to another job, but we've been keeping in touch and meeting up occasionally, but we never quite managed to find a project to work on together.

Early this year, Phil pitched a promising idea to me about the development of popular music through the decades, and some possible ways to approach this. We talked this through a bit, discussed via a Google document for a while, and then Phil got to work on building an initial prototype.

Then, not too much later, Covid-19 hit full force and the country went into lockdown.  Phil found himself furloughed for a while, and used some of that time to work on this game, which he gave the working title of The Vinyl Age.

Time passed, and after the restrictions were sufficiently relaxed, we finally found a time to get together and play the prototype as it was. 

So in the intervening time, Phil had put in a hell of a lot of work and built a crunchy card game with some real brain burning as you work through one deck of oversized cards representing recording artists, and another deck of standard cards representing records, performances and events, looking for combos and synergies to maximise your scoring. The popularity of five broad genres of music was represented by tracks covered by "fan" markers, and you could attract fans of the different genres to your city, revealing scoring and resource opportunities as the tracks become uncovered, while being able to make use of the fans as a resource in themselves.

My partly-there rebuild of the game in Tabletopia, as per discussion later.

The game as it stood was a cracking piece of work and played very well for the right sort of players. I lost pretty badly, but could see how Phil had worked with the resources he had available to build something of an engine, while I was just trundling along opportunistically. I'd have been able to play much more strongly on a replay.

We had a feeling though that the game would be difficult to sell. It was easy, particularly when new to the game, to get caught up in "analysis paralysis" (a cycle of assessing and reassessing options in an attempt to find the best course of action), and the game could get very "mathsy", particularly towards the end. It felt like the game had to be either a bit lighter and smoother, or double-down on the crunchiness and go for something really heavy. Given the theme of the music business, I felt that lightening things up might be better, and possibly this could be done by removing the financial aspect to the game and refocusing on the remaining elements.

After some discussion, Phil said I could have a go at trying some changes. So that's what I've been doing, putting together a virtual prototype in Tabletopia.

Of course, removing a whole element of the game's economy (cash, in this case) results in a lot of knock-on changes, and fixing up those results in even more.  The changes I have been making bind the acts and the other cards together more tightly than before, so we see a story developing more for each of those acts; and some feedback from Phil has suggested a way to enhance this even more.

The downside is that the game is otherwise a lot less coherent than it was before, particularly with the alternative paths of building a career for an artist and having them retire from their active career. This is the current focus, to actually add some detail back in to the game and find ways to balance out the alternative ways to manage an act. The game as it stands is not fully playable, and only works for a few turns, so I also need to build that up.  Fortunately we still have the data files with all the ideas and detail from Phil's build of the game, so I can gradually pull more of them into my version as I put more flesh back onto the bones that I picked clean.

At this stage, I am just tinkering with ideas and we don't yet know whether this will result in a viable line of development or not, but it is an interesting project to work on when spoons and time allow.  Hopefully I'll be able to report some interesting developments on this in time.