A Village with Fewer Darlings

 There is a bit of clichéd advice from the writing world that has carried over to the field of game design: "Kill your darlings". The idea is that if there are characters, plot elements, etc. that you love but don't further the overall story, then they should go. In the case of game design, that mechanism or component that you feel is totally awesome but which gets in the way of the intended play experience... axe it!

One of the more contentious parts of The Village on the River -- the "flip and write" game I am working on with Chris O'Regan -- is the way that resources are gained. The game was initially designed to work with a standard deck of playing cards, where the number cards of three suits represented resources that you could acquire, with the twist that each number indicated a unique "block" of that resource. So, you could claim the 7 of Diamonds card and circle the 7 of Diamonds spot on your playsheet, which meant that you gained a unit of money which you could spend later. There were some other ways to gain resources too, which meant that you could choose a spot to circle regardless of that number. If, on a previous turn, you had gained money and represented this by circling the 7 of Diamonds, then if the matching card came up later, you could not choose to take it as that block was already claimed.

This was something that grew out of the use of the playing cards, and stayed when we revised the game to use custom cards where the "suits" were actually people, stone and money rather than Hearts, Clubs and Diamonds. Spades became construction actions, if you are interested. Also the numbers turned into letters, but that is even less relevant.

My playsheet from the latest test. And a win!

Anyway, some players have enjoyed the quirkiness of this system and the texture it imparts to play, but overwhelmingly players have bounced off it, sometimes because they just find the rule unintuitive or hard to understand, and sometimes for other reasons like it feeling like the game was sometimes randomly punishing them for choosing the wrong thing and having no information about that choice in advance.

So... Eventually we decided that we could at least try the idea out. All we needed to do is play the game but ignore the letters both on the cards and on the play sheet and see how it went.

The first play doing this felt OKish to me, but a bit wrong to Chris. One of the things we had observed was that the method we had built in for players to keep track of the resource cards that showed up in the game (should they so wish) now felt really wrong, and our standard ways of playing just didn't feel quite right. 

We left it a few weeks after that, with both of us doing other things and not getting around to further work or meetings. Then the next time we played, with a little distance from the original decision, everything pretty much fell into place. The resource tracking still didn't sit right for us, but otherwise we both felt that the game was easier to play but still felt like it had decent levels of challenge.

Our current thinking is that we will try testing the game with other people with the simplified rules, which looks likely to become the "standard" way to do things. We think that the "resource letters" may be kept as a sort of advanced play mode, but we'll see how things go.  

Expo-sure

 Another in my series of long-after-the-fact blog posts... 

So the weekend straddling the end of July and beginning of August was UK Games Expo, for the first time since 2019 and two months after the date it would normally have been held. A few months earlier, around the time when the new dates were announced, information was also circulated about how Covid-19 control measures would be in place and details would be announced nearer the date. Then, some time later, the UKGE website was updated to suggest that the controls would be essentially optional, and then over the following couple of weeks there were further updates that brought us to a state that more-or-less reflected the original "play with confidence" position, having passed through various states of confusion en route.

For the last few years, I have focused my visits to the Expo around Playtest UK and the playtesting area that is organised each year by the awesome Rob Harris, who has claim to being the primary Rob for these events, with me just slotting in as a backup. This year I went a little further and was one of the core team for the playtest zone, meaning I was essentially working there full time. I wasn't planning on any formal meetings with publishers this time, so this worked well for me overall.

The preview event in progress.
The yellow mats in the foreground are for the open play area
to encourage social distancing.

After setting up the playtest area on Thursday, I went to the "press preview" event, something I had not done before. Basically this is open to anyone with a press or exhibitor pass (I had the latter as a playtest volunteer), and is an area of tables where exhibitors can show their latest releases, etc., and have a couple of hours where they can chat with folk in a quieter and less cluttered environment than the trade hall. I'm not a press person in any sense, but it was nice to meet and chat with a few people about their games.

UKGE as a whole was significantly smaller than usual, with less trade hall space, bigger spaces between stands, and more unused spaces (though there was a nice area of picnic benches near the food stands in the main hall, which I appreciated), but the Friday at the playtest area felt as busy as usual. We did have fewer tables than usual and those we had were spaced out more, so clearly we weren't as busy, but there was a steady flow of players turning up and for most of the day, the game designers were not having to wait long to fill a game. This more or less continued for the weekend, but I think was particularly noticeable on the Friday.  We discussed this a bit and a few folk had the impression that a lot of people felt that there was less pressure to see everything in the trade hall (there was less, after all) and so were more available for playtesting. I don't know how true that was, but it was the subject of some pondering in general.

Not as packed as usual, but still a very big event by any other standard.

On Friday evening was the publisher-designer speed dating event, which I took part in a few years ago. This time I was dragooned in on behalf of Playtest UK to provide a little extra stewarding and general dogsbody effort. As it turned out, apart from helping to arrange tables there wasn't much I needed to do, so I was able to tour the room and have chats with most of the designers during down time - there were more designers than publishers in the room, so there were a few periods for each designer when they were just waiting for something to happen. It was interesting to see the variety of games being pitched, varying from a very toylike game that was really aimed at families with youngish kids (I think this was somewhat out of place given the publishers present) up to a fairly heavy thematic Euro. Hats off to all those presenting their pitches -- I hope at least some of them had some luck from their efforts.

After the speed dating I met up with some friends in the open play area, which was of a similar size to the trade hall and, somewhat unusually for my experience of these events, every time I went through there was plenty of space for anyone who wanted to play, even though there was always a good buzz of people there. Let's just say, I am glad to have finally been introduced to the epic trading game, Sidereal Confluence, but by that time of night my brain was struggling to keep up.

The Playtest Zone in full flow.
Note the pretty universal mask use and spacing between tables.

Saturday was pretty much more of the same during the day, but I did have the opportunity to do some of my own playtesting. Actually, one of my co-designers, Chris O'Regan, spent the morning running through several tests of our game, The Village on the River, and got some really useful feedback which we discussed a week or so later. Then in the afternoon I had a slot with a family (with adult kids) playing Grab Bag Zoo, the game I am working on with Mike Harrison-Wood. GBZ is a short, real-time cooperative game that went down really well with this family (they ended up playing the game TEN TIMES in a row!) but it was apparent that it is just too difficult and intense for the playing-with-younger-kids audience we would like it to work for.

Grab Bag Zoo - you can't tell from a still photo, but this 
got really quite loud and excited during play.

That evening was pretty chilled, going out for burgers with Rob Prime and then playing a couple of lightweight games that I had bought that day.

Finally on Sunday, after working at the playtest area for the morning, I met up with my family, who had come up for the final day as we have been doing for the last few years. This was the point that I actually had a chance to play a couple of demo games on trade stands with my daughter, buy a few extra things, and then go home, exhausted.

Of course, COVID-19 provided one final little game to play: on the way home, I got "pinged" by the official COVID app, telling me that I had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for the virus and that I had to self-isolate for the next nine days. Fortunately I was able to work from home for that time, as was my wife, so it had little impact other than making me a bit stir-crazy and prompting me to learn how to make and drink the South American drink, mate, but that is another story. None of us tested positive or developed symptoms ourselves, and I haven't heard of anyone getting ill who I was knowingly in contact with, although I do a number of them were also required to self-isolate.

So, all in all, I am very glad to have gone to UK Games Expo. I admit I was a bit nervous beforehand, but it all turned out well, and in particular I got a lot out of the opportunity to see and catch up with a load of old friends and meet a few people who I have met online over the last year or so and had never met in person. It's sad that a lot of people didn't go, but given the coronavirus issues, I can't fault anyone for their decisions. Hopefully next year will be closer to normal, but for this year, a huge thanks to the organising team and volunteers for making the event probably as good as it could have been.

IDLEcon 2: Clockwise Boogaloo

Back in the dark days of December, the lovely Michael Fox, game designer, Twitch streamer and generally Good Guy, hosted a two day game jam called IDLEcon, during which time a bunch of us created something-and-write games and then played them live with participation of the audience of his stream. I collaborated with Chris O'Regan to make a game we called The Village on the River, which we have continued to work on since.

Back in the not-so-dark days of late June, Michael hosted a follow-up event, IDLEcon 2.

This time the format was different. While the original took place in the "dead time" between Christmas and new year, with most of us in some form of a lockdown, the second run acknowledged that most of us had work or other commitments, so the idea was to spend one weekend creating games, and the next weekend playing them; the intervening time allowed for more development or design, or just getting on with your life. The challenge this time was to make a game that could be played on-stream, with Michael, as host, playing with or against the people in the chat. 

Once again, the dual focus of the event was Michael's Twitch stream and his Discord server, where folk could chat, discuss ideas, team up, and so on.  I put a half-formed idea of a game into a channel and ended up talking with Bez (she of Yogi fame, as well as much else), throwing together a very rough virtual prototype (actually using a shared Google Drawing to work as board and counters) and spending the afternoon experimenting, testing and iterating until we felt we had something that was decent enough fun but needed "proper" playtesting.  I didn't have much available time over the following week, so we pretty much left it there, other than making sure that there was a usable virtual prototype on Screentop.gg and the rules were written up.

Michael attempts to avoid the robots on stream.

The basics of the game are that one player (intended to be the host of the stream) has the task of moving their character from one corner of a gridded board to the opposite corner. This is complicated by the five robots which move around pre-set routes, the distance each of them moves being tied to the results of a poll that is run for viewers to vote on. We have some general ideas about how this could translate to a tabletop version, and may work on that later, but for now it was just a game aimed at the specific challenge of the day.

The following weekend was set aside for playing the games on stream. I, however, was camping in a field, half way across the country so my daughter could take part in a folk music related activity, so couldn't really take part properly. I did get good enough mobile signal to be able to watch a bit of the stream live, and then caught up on the rest using Twitch's video-on-demand facility a couple of days later, though Bez was able to take part on the day.

So the game actually worked. There were a good few people taking part in the chat submitting their votes, so the polls actually looked like they had meaningful results, and there were points when the voters were trying to make sure that certain results occurred. It got interesting when Michael observed that the rules did not prohibit him from taking part in the votes, which mean that in some circumstances, he was able to force, or prevent, certain results.

It turns out that the way polls are implemented in Twitch, the tallies are shown while voting is taking place, which made it both easier for the chatters to know what was going on, and for Michael to throw his spanner into the works. This, combined with the predictability of the robot movements made things a little less than ideal, particularly in the second play of the game -- though the fact that everyone elected to play a second time was hugely gratifying in itself. There was a lot of discussion though about ways to introduce more chaos and unpredictability, as well as generally strengthening the game, so I think this went really well for a first "proper" play.

We've not returned to this design in the weeks since, but I think it could be interesting to have another look at it some time and see what we can make of it. Michael suggested that it could be good as a mass-play convention game, with people as playing pieces and some form of crowd voting, and that sounds like it could be great if we found the right people to partner with to make it happen. My thoughts are that it could be a one-versus-many tabletop game, with the "many" having cards with varying numbers of votes or moves for multiple robots, and everyone selects what they will play at the same time, hoping that they can coordinate without discussing the actual cards they have in hand.

Anyway, this was another enjoyable exercise, both from the angle of working with another game designer (a friend for years, but whom I had never created anything with) and of working with interesting restrictions and requirements. It's entirely possible that we'll never be able to make a commercial product out of this, but the creation can often be worthwhile on its own.

They Came, They Played, They Built

It has been well over a month since my collaborator, Chris O'Regan, and I set up an experimental play-by-blog playtest of our flip-and-write game, The Village on the River, and it's about time I got off my backside and wrote something about how it went.

If you remember, the game involves a series of rounds, in each of which, three cards are flipped from a deck of cards and you, as a player, get to make use of two of them in order to build your own little village, and what you build (and how you place it) gives you a score that you can compare with others when the deck has run out. We set up a blog post on Board Game Geek, which had a pre-set series of images of these card flips, each hidden behind "spoiler" tags, so you could go through, revealing one set of cards at a time, and play the game that way.

Over the next few days I received messages through various channels, including email, Facebook and Discord, though nobody actually commented on the blog post directly. Everyone sent an image of their play sheet, and quite a few folk sent comments about their experience. One person even went so far as to send a video of them playing the game, with the chatter with their partner about decisions being made. 

Eight playsheets, with a variety of approaches.

Just by way of a quick detour, I have heard a lot of people (most notably Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and much more) talking about having videoed remote playtesting as a really useful tool. This was my first experience of this, and I can totally see how useful this can be. If the players can relax enough to not worry about the camera, you can get so much information about what people are doing, what is causing them problems, and so on.

The Village on the River is, like a lot of random-and-write games, essentially a multiplayer solitaire; what you do does not affect other players at all, and the challenge is trying to make the best use of the random sequence of events that is available to all players. As such, while it appears ideally suited to solo play, the problem is that what constitutes a good score can vary greatly from game to game. Our observation from earlier playtests is that a score above 40 is generally very good and puts you in with a good chance of winning, but sometimes the winning score (even with competent players) is around 30. 

So, with that in mind, while you could set thresholds for winning or losing (and we may end up doing that), what you really need is other players' scores against which to compare yourself. The more other players there are (and the game can, in principle, scale infinitely), the better idea you have of how good your score is, and the better idea we, as designers, have of how the game performs. 

The eight sheets we received had scores ranging from 17 to 49, with four players in the 40's. There were a few small mistakes in scoring and at least a couple of players had misunderstood parts of the game until it was too late. There also wasn't a single approach that the higher scoring players had all found: several different strategies resulted in competitive scores.

Overall, we were very happy with how things turned out, particularly with the comments that helped us home in on the elements that were causing problems.  

Our big issue here was in communicating some of the rules, so it is easy to miss some parts or interpret them in a way that wasn't intended. This is something that was clear from some of the playsheets, and made even more so by the comments and reports that folk were kind enough to send. Now, with things like this, it might be that your graphical presentation makes some things less intuitive than you would like, the wording or organisation of the rules might not be clear enough, or the rules themselves might be the problem and you need to change to something more intuitive to the average player. It is too early for us to be sure on this, but we are working to improve the first two points initially.

Aside from this, though, there was a general sense of, "yeah, I'd play again", which is very helpful for morale. Of course, we'll have to see how that works out in practice. And I think that, based on this experiment, we'll be having another go at this format of testing pretty soon.

Doctor* Rob's Play-Along Blog

So here is something of an experiment. You may remember that I was working with the awesome Chris O'Regan on a "flip and write" game, The Village on the River, which we started at "IDLECon" at the end of last year (and I now realise I haven't posted about since). We have kept working on this since, tweaking here and twiddling there, and the game seems to work pretty well, but although we have had a couple of plays with a load of people (the game in principle can scale to any player count), it has mostly been tested with just Chris and myself. This results in a few shortcomings: firstly that things that make sense (or are fun) to us don't necessarily make sense (or fun) to everyone else, but secondly, we can't be sure that there aren't huge imbalances in play.

 A not-terribly-impressive result for me on a recent play.

When I talk about balance, by the way, I mostly mean that everything in the game can contribute to a winning strategy, and there is nothing in the game that is absolutely essential for a win. In this context, I am mostly thinking about the buildings and special characters, and I would be OK with things like not being able to win unless you have dwellings in your village, etc. In recent versions of the game it does seem that some ways of playing often result in good scores more than others, but I'm OK with that as long as nothing is either essential or useless.

Anyway, one of the strongest ways of testing for this is to just play an enormous amount of games and see if we can see patterns in the way people play. More specifically, in the case of this game, it is really helpful to see the results of big games so, for example, seeing the way a dozen people interpret and exploit the same set of cards.

Back around the IDLECon time, another collaborator, Alex Cannon, set up a test for a roll and write game he had designed by posting a series of die roll results on his website (actually doing several of these sequences), with the rolls hidden behind "folds" so that a player can click through and play the same sequence as other players, and so the scores can be meaningfully compared.

This all seems like a good solution to the problem and I have finally got around to having a try at this. Chris and I had a run through the rules and the playsheet to make sure we had a stable version to share. So it was a matter of how to set up and share the sequence.

As you may know, we have implemented our custom card deck on Screentop.gg, which allows easy iteration and sharing, including allowing any number of people to watch the card flips in progress and play along easily. I set up a play session with this virtual prototype and ran through the deck, three cards at a time, taking a screenshot of each set of cards.

One turn's worth of card flips.

The Blogger platform I post this blog on doesn't seem to have an easy way to handle the staged reveals of each turn, but it turns out that Board Game Geek's blog system includes "spoiler" tags which are pretty much perfect for the purpose. And so, I present to you: The Village on the River playtest play-along #1.

As I said at the start this is an experiment and it relies on goodwill of other people, possibly even more than regular playtesting as we are asking people to do something without guidance or a schedule or anything, but we hope it will be both helpful for us and at least a bit of fun for testers. If you are up for taking a look, maybe playing, or maybe just commenting, that would be amazing.

* Not a doctor.

Learning to be a Mentor

This is just a very quick post about the Tabletop Mentorship Program, a scheme run by the wonderful Mike Belsole and Grace Kendall over the last couple of years or so. The idea is that they connect people who do just about anything within the games industry, or who want to, from game design to illustration to podcasting or reviewing, with more experienced members of the community who can help them take their next steps. A mentoring period is over three months, during which the mentor and mentee agree to meet (via an online call of some sort) at least six times, for at least half an hour each time.

After discussing the scheme with a couple of friends, I signed up as a mentor for the January run of the scheme. I must admit that I was somewhat nervous, as I am still close to the bottom of the industry ladder, and wasn't sure how much I could offer, but reassured by the friends, and the information on the scheme's website, I gave it a go.

I was matched with a designer who was working on their first "serious" design (they had tinkered with others, but not got far with them), and we hit it off well on a personal level, and over the three months it was great to see the designer preparing their game and pitch for showing to publishers. They were well motivated and, I think, just needed a little reassurance on a few things and some pointers based on at least some experience of interacting with publishers, which I do have a bit of.

Overall, I found my first time as a mentor to be a really enjoyable experience. My mentee claims I was helpful, and I felt that I learned a lot from the process as well. The scheme also has great support through a Discord server, through which you can get help, advice, or just chat, plus there are regular talks on YouTube (some streamed live, some recorded), interactive discussions, and social meetups.

Applications are now open for the next round of mentorships (which will be the last for this year as the organisers will then be working on restructuring the scheme to be a long-term prospect), and I have already signed up again. If you think you could offer something as a mentor (if you have any experience in any games business related activity, there is a good chance you can!), or would like to find a mentor for yourself (or both, in fact!), it's well worth looking on their website to find out more. Applications for this round are only open until 17th May, so there isn't a lot of time.

An Ancient Space Station Rediscovered

I was having a clear up the other day and found some components stashed in a pile. Not a playable prototype, or even part of one, but a few elements of one of my early game projects that I was trying to build back in 2014, not long after I started this blog, a game that I called Space Station 7, which was about shenanigans between rival peoples/species on a space station that may or may not resemble something that appeared on TV in the 90's. I have the bones of a rules document in my Google Drive, a basic nanDECK script and associated data file, and a few blog posts discussing my thoughts (you can see everything with the SpaceStation7 tag, if you are interested) along with another, partially-written draft that I never finished, but includes some more ideas I wanted to throw in.

After working on this project for a few months I ran out of steam and inspiration and moved onto other things. For instance, it was early 2015 when I first discovered the 24 hour design contest and shifted a lot of my focus to actually getting games to a playable state quickly, which led indirectly to me getting involved in Playtest UK meetups, and the rest is history.

Nothing wrong with prototypes like this.

So I was clearly biting off more than I could chew at the time. I think the game was heading towards being a mid-weight, Euro-ish design that, if I had managed it, would have certainly had way too many weird bits and exceptions. Either than or it would have been utterly dull. 

I have a lot more experience now (though still have plenty of weaknessed) and finding this stuff has reawakened my interest in the project. Having read through the old blog posts and the rules (such as they are), I think there is still something there that I could work with. 

In summary, what we have is:

• Action is centred on a space station, but players also have their own homeworlds and colonies.
• Players have "workers" who are essentially ambassadors and other representatives of their species, which can visit various locations each round to undertake actions.
• Actions are actually triggered by card play, and "workers" have to be in appropriate locations to take advantage of the card plays (e.g. you need a representative in the Council Chamber to partake in debates and votes).
• Actions take a while to come to fruition and need to "develop" by playing other actions or simply waiting. Some of these actions might be played face-down as covert actions.
• Play of actions may be "programmed" each round and revealed in stages.
• Assassinations (of workers/representatives) happen, but the role of the victim is refilled by the homeworld, so they are not lost for ever.
• Taking direct actions against other players can result in "grudge" tokens being exchanged, indicating tensions between worlds, and can make certain other actions harder or easier.
• A was also considering a small, semi-random, semi-set deck of cards to provide a series of events that provide a scenario or plot arc for the game, a bit like having an external threat-of-the-week in a TV show to interact with while they go about their regular intrigues and shenanigans.

I'm planning on sleeping on this and seeing if the Enthusiasm Beast takes over. I have plenty of other projects to be working on, but one more can't hurt, can it?

Researching The Artifact

So, another game design project I have ongoing at the moment, and another collaboration. This one is working with Alex Cannon, who says I am allowed to blog about the project as long as I make him look good. I will do my best!

This game came out of one of the fabulously intelligent and charismatic Alex's occasional Twitter threads of game ideas, after I responded to a short idea along the lines of "friendly worker placement", where players maybe get benefits in some way from nearby workers placed by other players.  I couldn't help thinking about scientific research where, while research groups can be intensely competitive, the whole field relies heavily on the output of others. You know, the whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing. Or at least standing on each others' chairs.

We had a chat and after bouncing various thoughts around, we got to the idea of teams of scientists working to investigate a big alien artifact; a crashed space ship or something. The idea is to find ways to exploit the various forms of technology found in the artifact and earn fame, fortune and victory points!

A first shot at manipulable components, even if it wasn't actually a playable game.

As we live something like 100 miles apart and have been pretty much locked down due to Covid-19 restrictions, we needed to collaborate online. Our method so far has been to make notes and write rules in a couple of Google documents, alongside a spreadsheet for component data, all of which we are both able to edit. I built a set of nanDECK scripts for the various components, and can run those quickly to generate files that can then be uploaded to a Screentop.gg project that we both have access to. It means that I currently have to take action any time we want updated components, but unless there is some structural change required, it takes only a few minutes from changing the spreadsheet to being able to play.

Over the early iterations (we have been having a discussion, and usually a play of whatever we have set up at the time), we homed in on a few concepts that we wanted to build around, and which we have pretty much stuck with even though a load of other things have changed...

• There are no victory points in the game; you win by being the first to achieve three objectives (in the form of "projects".
• There are no spendable resources to gain and then spend; instead you just have access to levels of knowledge according to the positioning of your researchers (workers) and the layout of the board tiles.
• On every turn, you add a tile to a central layout, with domino-like placement rules and can place or move one of your researcher tokens.
• Access to knowledge via your researchers on tiles allows you to play cards to a personal tableau, representing your personal developments and special resources and capabilities.

Mid-February. The round markers are movable player tokens
and the squares are knowledge "resources".

We almost immediately simplified the tiles so that the ones that get played every turn are essentially two-square dominoes, largely for simplicity's sake, but we haven't really felt the need to change this, apart from having big tiles to add to the array when you complete a "project" (one of the objectives). 

The main changes apart from that have been to evolve the development cards that you are playing along the way, gradually adding more variety, restricting the number of developments you can have in your tableau, introducing a mechanism for upgrading from one development to another, and adding special actions to most of the developments. All this now means that there are all sorts of additional actions you can do on your turn, and you will end up losing access to some of them as you change your priorities in upgrading and rebuilding.

Up-to-date, with a three-player game and a lot more going on.

There is still a very long way to go in developing the game, but it seems to be evolving its own character and challenge. Last week we hit a milestone in having our first test play that involved a third player. While this definitely revealed a few shortcomings, as would be expected, our big takeaway was that the game did not completely collapse when played by someone who didn't design it. 

One of the most interesting points made by our third-party tester was that the game felt strategic but not tactical, and it that maybe there should be a better balance between the two -- or at least we should think hard about whether we want a game like that.  The observation was that to a very large extent you could make a plan early in the game, and then execute that plan, and the challenge was to complete the plan as quickly as possible, with minimal concern for what the other players were doing.

This is all a matter of perspective, as while the other player was executing his plan, Alex and I were getting in each others' way a bit, but the point stands: there was a different experience for different players and, at the very least, we need to decide if we are OK with that. And if we are not (in general, wildly different experiences between players might indicate a problem), we'll need to think about how to address it.

Did I make the talented and likeable Alex look good enough in this post? I guess only he will be able to rule on this. 

LCR Redux... Maybe?

You may have come across a simple dice game, usually known as LCR, or Left-Centre-Right (or, for that matter, Never Say Die, which was the version I was introduced to as a kid).  The idea is that there are three dice (usually three, anyway), each of which has three faces that are either blank or have dots on, while the other three sides bear markings to indicate 'left', 'centre' and 'right' respectively.  Each player starts with a pile of chips (or money, if you are feeling saucy) and, in turn, rolls the three dice.  Blank faces (or dots) do nothing, but the letters indicate whether to pass a chip to the player on the left or right, or into the middle of the table.  The last player with chips remaining is the winner -- and, if money is at stake, claims the central pot.

I have a fistful of LCR dice, acquired several years ago,
that have stars instead of "centre" for some reason.

This can actually be quite fun,  although, as you can see, there is no element of player skill or choice involved in the game.  You just sit there, roll dice and shuffle chips around, and then somebody eventually wins.  The neat idea is that the flow of chips to the centre means that the game steadily moves towards an end (on average, a chip should go to the centre on every other player's turn) and won't get stuck in endless chip shuffling. The other neat idea is that even when you are out of chips, there is a chance someone will pass you one and you will be back in the game.

I have been thinking about this and wondering how I could build on the basic idea of LCR to create something that actually functions as a game, with actual player choices to make.  This clearly doesn't need deep decisions: I would want to keep the fast flowing nature of the original, but if each player had at least one choice to make each turn, it would be great.

So, some general thoughts on this...

• Perhaps, instead of passing chips around, it is dice that get passed.
• Or dice and chips.
• There could be multiple coloured dice and one of the objectives could be to collect a set of one colour.
• I prefer to not rely on colour, but sometimes it can't be helped -- and anyway, as this game would require custom dice, there could be a shape on each face to help with differentiation.
• Maybe a real-time element, with more than one player able to be rolling dice at any given time.
• A real-time part to the game can substitute for decision making (at least to a point) as the game effectively becomes partly a dexterity game. 
• Possible decisions to make:
• How many, and which dice to roll at any given time.
• Who to pass dice or chips to.
• Trying to collect sets of dice faces.
• When to "bank" something.
• Taking an action to end the game, and timing when to do that.
• Whichever way, I think the game should have (most of) the simplicity and pace of the original.

Not really getting any closer to turning this into something, but I figure that if I at least write some of this down and publish it, it might be more likely that I do further work with it. That said, the amount of game ideas over the years that I have posted about once or twice but didn't go anywhere are extremely numerous.

Just for a bit of fun though, the dice themselves suggest some alternate uses -- and thank you to assorted Twitter people for bouncing more ideas around. For instance...

• Dice with "left", "right" and "★" (as well as the colours) on them might suggest a fighting/boxing game, either battling another player or trying to defeat "opponents" represented by cards.
• ...Or maybe something with a "Space Invaders" vibe, either with a similar mechanism as the boxing idea or with space ships actually moving on a board.
• ...Or some other retro-arcade type game, like the ones where you are trying to follow a winding path or dodge oncoming obstacles.
• ...Or Tug-of-War, with a rope being pulled left and right.
• ...Or something related to Twister. I think there is already a dice-based Twister game you play with your fingers -- but right now I can't be bothered to research.
• ...Or even a Yahtzee-style set collection game. Mind you, that is pretty much an option with any type of dice.

So there, a post with no conclusions or anything actionable. I'll think on this some more and write again if anything comes up. Input welcome! 😀

Making Faces in nanDECK

The other day I was working on a game in Screentop, and decided that I wanted the dice I had in it to be spotty dice rather than the digit dice that are the default. All this requires is uploading an image which shows the required faces (this works for any custom faces). If my image has a transparent background, then you can set the fill colour for the die to be whatever you want and then use the same image for a range of different coloured dice.

I figured that nanDECK would be an effective way of constructing the image, and it didn't take long to make the script. I thought I would share my script here as a kinda worked example. I'll break the sections of the script down with discussion about what each section does.

So, here goes...

BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0,MARKDOT

PAGE=21,29.7,PORTRAIT,HV

These lines are just boilerplate stuff that I put at the top of all my scripts, formatting a page for printing or creating a PDF at A4 size, with crop lines added. It's not necessary for what I am doing here, but I left them in anyway.

DPI=200

CARDSIZE=5,5

The next bit of the boilerplate, but a bit that I modify as necessary. My usual card size is 6.3 x 8.9 cm for poker-sized cards, but I want squares this time. As I am just making an image, the size doesn't really matter, so 5 cm square was just a convenient number.

[DotColour]=#000000

[CircleColour]=#999999

[TransparencyColour]=#ffbbff

It can be useful to define variables rather than using numbers in the guts of the code. Specifically the [DotColour] one meant that I could run the script once to generate an image with black dots, and then change the value (to #ffffff) in order to run again and output white dots.

The [TransparencyColour] is helpful because in nanDECK you can define a specific colour to be replaced by transparency in an output PNG file. As long as you select a colour you don't want to use in the actual image (I'm using a pink here), all is good.

RECTANGLE=,0,0,100%,100%,[TransparencyColour],[TransparencyColour]

So this is just filling the "card" with a solid background field of the colour I selected for the transparency.

ELLIPSE="1,3,5",2,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",0.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",3.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",3.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",0.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",0.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",3.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

That's the guts of it. You can look at a standard spotted die face as having seven locations where spots can exist, and each spot is present on some faces, so this sort of arrangement does the job.

It's worth noting that this is just outputting images for faces, without any thought about where on the die those faces are placed. For instance, the standard die arrangement of opposite faces adding up to seven is not covered here, but at present, Screentop appears to simply treat a die as a randomiser, with no physical analogue, so this point is irrelevant for my current use case.

DISPLAY="dottydice.png",1,6,3,,[TransparencyColour]

And that last line outputs the six faces to a single PNG image, three "cards" wide, converting the colour we specified earlier to transparency.

And here's the output:

Black on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

And, as an alternative, re-running the script with the white version of [CircleColour] gives:

White on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

I don't know if this sort of thing is helpful or interesting, but here it is anyway. 

From Spreadsheet to Screentop via nanDECK

 I have an old card game project that has been languishing without attention for a few years with the working title Monster Invasion, which was a solitaire game (which I could probably make into a cooperative multiplayer game) that I used to enjoy playing back in the day. I recently decided to give it a look again and see what I can do with it, which gives me a perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate my current workflow for building a virtual prototype on Screentop.gg, a 2D virtual tabletop that I am learning to love, with the wonderful nanDECK for creating the card graphics.

I'm not going to go into every detail of how this all works, but hopefully will give you a few pointers if you want to work in this way.

The state of the game as I got back to it was a nanDECK script taking data from a CSV file. This was last worked on in 2017, and I've developed my way of working quite a lot since then (even ignoring the shift to virtual prototypes), so my first task was to update the data source. nanDECK is capable of drawing data directly from a Google spreadsheet, as long as the spreadsheet has been shared appropriately (there are details of how to do this in the nanDECK documentation), so I imported the dats, made a couple of tweaks, and shared as appropriate.

My card data in a Google spreadsheet, all ready to go.

If you can see the image of the spreadsheet above, there are probably a couple of things to draw your attention to or at least explain. At the top right is the number 55; this is calculated as the sum of the values in the "Quantity" column, and I find it helpful to have something like that for my reference as I make changes. At the bottom is a line for a card back and a set of nine "blank" cards; this is to help me later build a card image for import to Screentop.gg later on. When I am working with physical cards it is convenient to work in multiples of nine, which is a good number to print on a single A4 page, and coincides nicely with a standard deck size for manufacturing purposes if we get that far. On Screentop I find it convenient to have sets of 55 cards in a five-by-eleven grid, which allows me that same number of cards plus a slot to use as a card back which, if I pad appropriately with blanks, I can make always appear in the last slot of the image.

As an aside, a similar strategy works well for Tabletop Simulator, though typically you use the final slot for a "blanked out" card face. Tabletopia required individual images, which are also easy to set up using the same tool chain, but I'm not doing that today.

As you may know, nanDECK is a system for building cards (and other game components) using a scripting language that allows you to have huge amounts of control if you want it. There is a "visual" mode to the system that I have never spent any real time trying to use, and I gather that works well for some people, but I can't offer advice on this. 

OK, so the nanDECK script. I'm not going to show you the whole thing here, but can show you some of the bits that are relevant...

The first part of my nanDECK script.

A few comments on this first part of the script, assuming you can see the image above...

The first few lines are there primarily for when I want to output a printable PDF document, but an important point here is line 3, which defines 'DPI=140'. This defines the resolution, and thus the file size of the output. Normally for printing purposes you might want to work with about 300 DPI (dots per inch) to get a high quality output, but for virtual prototypes you may have file size limitations, and so may need to reduce the resolution. In the case of Screentop, the limit is an image size of 4096x4096 pixels, and to fit within that constraint I need to either reduce the resolution to about 140 DPI as I have done here, or go for a slightly higher resolution and make the output image a more square shape than I have done.

Line 9 is the link to my spreadsheet. nanDECK is smart enough to recognise that this jumble of characters is a Google spreadsheet ID and acts accordingly.

Lines 11 to 20 define icon images to associate with the letters I am using in the "icons" columns of my spreadsheet. 

Lines 22 and 23 (and the earlier line 6) are a habit I got into long ago of printing a version number onto prototype cards so I can tell that I am using the set of cards that I mean to use -- and this can be important with a game that I am iterating over and revising rapidly.

Then at the bottom I start off the definitions of the actual cards, using an IF structure to select options according to the "CardType" column in the spreadsheet.

After skipping a few lines, here's the end of the nanDECK script.

Towards the end you can see the card back being made by drawing a coloured rectangle at line 55. I have got into the habit of using two-colour radial gradients like this (with various colour mixes) for place-holder card backs, sometimes with text over the top if that seems appropriate. I find them sufficiently pleasing for minimal effort.

Finally, line 60 is where the magic happens, outputting a single image file for cards 1 to 55 (i.e. all of them), arranged in a grid 11 cards wide. 

So, if I validate and build this script, I end up with a nice image of all my cards...

And here we have the output of my script: a big image ready for upload.

So, on to the next tool in the chain: Screentop.gg...

Screentop is a bit of a work-in-progress at the moment, but it is very useful as it stands and is being actively developed and supported. I like it because it does enough for most of the projects I am working on, and is far less demanding on computer resources than its 3D cousins, and just about anyone can join a game from their web browser if I send them a link. On the other hand, there are a few odd quirks to get past. One of these scares off a lot of people: rather than having intricate GUI elements, several of the tasks you may want to do will require using the "bulk editing" system, which uses a programming language and you need to type code into a window to make your changes. Back on the positives though, there is very useful documentation, which provides bits of code that you can just copy and paste as appropriate for most situations, and this makes it potentially rather less scary than the likes of nanDECK.

The Beginner's Tutorial for Screentop takes you through the steps of creating a deck of playing cards, and you can simply follow that, substituting your personal deck image (as I have just created) instead of the sample one they provide.  The tutorial only uses the necessary cards from the image, but I usually make cards for everything, including the blank cards, which allows for more flexibility and cleverness later, which I will go into shortly.

So, just a few minutes of work and I have a pile of cards, some of which are blank...

Cards now up on Screentop.gg - ready to go!

So the game is more or less playable now in it's present state, though I need some way of tracking two scores: power and threat. I can do that by adding some tokens, adding a little score board and a couple of tokens, or using one of the built-in component types, a counter. Or doing the tracking offline with physical components too, I suppose. I can leave that as an exercise to the reader, as I wanted to just show one little extra thing.

The way Screentop handles graphical assets is that you can upload an image and then divide it into a certain number of rows and columns, which are then indexable sub-assets. This is useful for handling entire decks of cards together or potentially other components like custom dice. (Tabletop Simulator is similar in this respect.) In this case, what this means is that once you have set up a deck of cards (or similar set of components), you can, with just a few clicks, upload a replacement for the graphical asset and it will instantly update the cards.

So, if I want to change the background colour of the boss cards, that's one line in the nanDECK script, and replace the blank cards with a pointless message, that's a quick edit of the spreadsheet. A couple of clicks in nanDECK regenerates the graphic, which I can then upload.

Uploading a fresh asset in Screentop is really quick and easy

And, ta-da!...

An updated version of the game in just a couple of minutes.

This updated version is actually the same session as the one in the previous screenshot, having refreshed the page a few times -- this behaviour is brilliant, but doesn't seem to always work first time. A fresh session would (and did) update the cards straight away.

Anyway, now we're all in place, I can start looking at the game and decide what I want to do with it. Card updates will be absolutely trivial with the basics now in place, so we'll see what inspiration comes. 

I'm not sure how interesting or useful this sort of post is, but I guess if you found it really boring you won't have got to this point anyway. Thanks for reading!

Possible Future Games of History Past?

One of the things I like doing other than designing and playing board games is reading about history -- albeit slowly; I am not a quick reader and I don't have the attention span to keep going for long periods. Over the last couple of years or so I've been mostly reading books about earlyish medieval England, mostly around the years roughly 900 to 1200 CE, but looking into some other periods as well.  Many of the stories and personalities I read about suggest subject matter for games, and I have a couple of ongoing projects based on these (see The Castle War and Ætheling Business), but I am slowly building up a list of historical things I would like to make games about and I thought I would mention a few of them here.

These are mostly thematic hooks that I would like to work with, and don't yet have more than the vaguest idea of how to implement them, but as I generally have more difficulty attaching a theme or setting to a mechanism than vice versa, so this seems a reasonable starting place, and a list I can go back to if I feel the need to work on something new.

So, some of these ideas, in no particular order... 

The coronation of Henry the Young King
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, where they 
assert that it is public domain.

Henry, the Young King, son of Henry II of England, crowned as co-king during his father's lifetime, died before he was able to take over the kingdom in his own right. He was part of a failed rebellion against his father, and then ended up touring Europe, racking up eyewatering debt but being a superstar of the tournament scene. This tournament tour thing -- which were more about ritualised, "play" wars rather than the arena-based jousts of movies -- sounds like it could be something interesting to explore as a game, particularly centred around a glamorous young man and his exploits. Maybe players are in Henry's traveling retinue and trying to excel on the tournament field and stay in favour by not outshining their leader.

The town where I live, Wantage, is probably best known as the birthplace of the Saxon king Alfred the Great, but there was a period leading up to the mid-19th century when it was a notorious and wretched hive of scum and villainy. This period came to an end when the town was cleaned up by a priest, the Reverend W J Butler, who encouraged and oversaw a period of building and regeneration, and many of the finer buildings in the town are directly linked to him. I would love to make a game about this period of Wantage's history, but make it so that it is reasonably accessible to non-gamers -- it would be great if it could be sold at the local museum. I kind of feel that I want this to be a tile laying game of some sort.

Much further back in time, the Second Punic War was the one with Hannibal and his elephants rampaging around what is now Italy and causing problems for Rome. There were three major pitched battles fought on Italian soil, all historically won by Hannibal's forces, but he never quite managed to finish Rome off. In each of these battles, Rome fielded a fresh, full-strength army, while Hannibal had a dwindling portion of his original army, bolstered by whatever allies he had been able to rally to his cause. My plan is to make a game (probably a card game) where players compete over these three battles; the Rome player always starts at full strength, but the Hannibal player loses resources each time. If Rome wins any of the three battles, that player wins the game, so the aim is largely to make each of the earlier battles more costly for Hannibal than necessary.

Back to Saxon times, Æthelflæd was a daughter of Alfred the Great, who was married to the lord of Mercia, after whose death she continued to fight to reclaim her kingdom's lands from the occupying Danes, and alongside her brother, King Edward the Elder, made great progress in returning chunks of England to Anglo-Saxon control. One of the sources I have read tells of how Æthelflæd launched raids into the Danelaw to liberate relics of saints from the occupied areas in order to return them to safety, and that aspect of her story is one which appeals to me for making into a game. This could actually work as a solo challenge game, or maybe an asymmetric 2-player thing.

A few decades later, in the reign of Edgar the Peaceable, there was a period of monastic reform in England, where the various abbeys and monasteries were... strongly encouraged, shall we say?... to adopt the Rule of Benedict for their practices. One book I read on this period paints this as a case of the king promoting this in order to ensure that all the monks were praying in the "correct" way as part of a national defence policy. After all, what is the point of having swords and armour if you don't also have the favour of The Almighty? There has to be a game in that reform process, which sounds again like it might be a solo game, but I don't have any clear ideas yet here.

Finally, back to the mother of the aforementioned Young King, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This was a woman who was a Duchess in her own right for most of her life, married to the King of France, and then the King of England, went to the Holy Land on Crusade, had three of her sons crowned as kings (two reigned in their own right), spent 16 years imprisoned by her husband, who she survived, living on into her eighties, influencing European politics through her own actions and her offspring pretty much to the end. I don't have a clear idea of what part of her story to build a game around yet, but I'm thinking about it...

I have no idea what, if anything, I will do with these thoughts, but I am sure the list will grow longer. I am up for collaborating on some of them, if anyone I gel with fancies a try; and if someone beats me to making some of them, that is cool too. Ideas are just ideas, and useless until they are acted upon -- and these are only half ideas.

Who delivered all the pies?

Following on from the "IDLEcon" game jam at the end of last year, Bez (of Yogi and Wibbell++ fame) organised another game jam, this time spread over a week, with more participants and a load of "live jamming" with various designers appearing on her Twitch stream to take part during that time.

If you are not familiar with game jams, they are events where game designers have a limited amount of time to create some sort of a game, typically with a set of constraints or requirements announced at the start of the period. I gather these are semi-regular occurrences in the videogame world, but seem to be becoming more popular in the tabletop sphere as well, especially with recent online collaboration capabilities getting so much more advanced and a lot of game designers being isolated due to Covid-19 measures.

The requirements this time were essentially for a game that could be played on a Twitch stream and include players interacting through the stream's chat channel, with regular players needing nothing more customised than a printed sheet (though it was OK for the stream host to need custom components) and games had to, at least, be suitable for 3 to 7 players. There was also a list of optional challenges that could be used to inspire designs, including pies, something nautical, dinosaurs, miming, and so on. 

The first board image Rory shared with me for discussion.
If we were working in the same room, this would probably
have been scribbled on a bit of paper, but this is so much nicer.

Collaboration in this game jam was entirely optional, but it is a major attraction for me, and I was able to team up with Rory Muldoon, probably best known at the moment as the designer, artist and graphic designer of Skora, a recent release from Inside The Box. I had been getting to know Rory a little bit through Twitch stream chats, Twitter, and IDLEcon, and we were both keen to do something together, so had a chat over Discord to see what we could come up with.

We quickly realised that neither of us would be able to put in a vast amount of work on creating a game over the week due to other life commitments, so we would work on something with modest scope. From the prompts, we fixated on pies and nautical elements, and were soon talking about having a ship delivering pies to a chain of islands. This then developed into the idea of players voting for the course of a shared ship, and then making pies and selling them according to the demands of islanders along the way, recording decisions on a piece of paper while the voyage of the ship is tracked on a central board that everyone can see.

Over the next week we put bits of work in on the project as we were able, and had a couple of chats over Discord to play the work-in-progress. I put together a project on Screentop.gg to provide a board and a boat token which could then either be screen shared, or players could visit Screentop to watch the game directly. Rory designed the board using his magical skills and software, while I used a Google document to create the playsheet and written rules. 

Over the week the main change that was brought in was to introduce special abilities that you could buy when the result of the vote went against your choice, meaning that there are some additional choices to be made, and planning your preferred route and voting strategy started getting a little more interestiing.

Eventually, on the Saturday, we were able to play our newly minted game live on Bez's stream, with me joining on camera and Rory taking part from the chat. It went well, I think, but it turns out that managing voting in this sort of situation can be tricky. Still, we were very happy with how things went.

Playing the Nautical Pie Delivery Co. Ltd. game on
Bez's stream with Rory playing from the chat.

As a little bonus, I took part in an online board game session with some old friends that evening, and they agreed to play. The game didn't fall apart and seemed to provide a reasonable experience for seven of us on a Zoom call, though again the voting was a bit awkward. We could set up an online tool to allow for votes to be tallied, but I think that is a minor issue. 

I'm not sure what we will do with this game next. It works well for something that was quickly thrown together and not yet extensively tested, but obviously there are issues, largely related to numbers, to be looked at. I think the game could work well around a table, collecting and exchanging tokens rather than writing things down, or just sticking with the something-and-write system could go well too. I think we will be discussing this again and seeing what we fancy doing before too much longer. It was certainly fun to work on so far.

I Want To Play With My Ætheling*

So, that game idea I talked about a few weeks back with the hunting accidents and the like, well it has developed a bit and I have built a playable prototype on Tabletopia. Then I decided to get some practice on other technology and now I have an upgraded prototype on Screentop as well.

The idea has filled out a bit. We have three "locations" -- I need a better name for these, but essentially they are places with things that are going on that nobles might go to: a hunting party, a feast or banquet, and a war. As a player you have four (currently -- it could easily be a different number) members of your "family", and play cards that send members of your, or your opponents', families to and from these three functions, or cause unfortunate incidents to occur at the functions (often killing off attendees). In various situations (like surviving attendance of a function) your family may get prestige, which counts towards victory at the end of the game, as does the "rank" of any family members who survive.

This is on Screentop.gg - solo playtesting a multiplayer card game
is a bit fiddly, but a heck of a lot easier than with a physical prototype.

If all of your family members are killed, that's you out of the game... sort of. Well, actually it isn't. The idea is that if you are knocked out, you get a bonus character, the papal legate, and you get to (secretly) predict who will win the game. If you are correct in your prediction, then you share victory with that player. The game then ends when the next family has their last scion dispatched.

I am pretty sure this arrangement will work best with four or more players, but we will see.

I'm enjoying how this already drifting away from its original mechanical and structural inspiration, Family Business. Most of the cards in the game are analogues of those in the older game, but are now taking into account the multiple sources of peril for the characters. Initial testing suggests that it works at least a bit, but I am concerned that this diffusion of the game might make it more unwieldy. We will see how it works over a few playtests.  

One thing I have already discovered is that my current card mix doesn't give the right dynamic in the game, and play tends to result in almost all of the nobles being moved to locations before anything much else happens.  This may not actually be a bad thing, but it did feel a little dull as it stands. 

In Family Business, there is the concept of a "mob war", which is triggered in a number of ways, including there being a sufficiently large number of mobsters on the "hit list", and when this happens, at least one mobster will die on every player's turn until the war is over. This is a really effective way of driving the game forward, but I feel I don't want to do that in this game, partly because, while I am OK with creating a game that borrows/steals a lot from another game, I don't want it to be a rip-off, but also very much because that doesn't really fit thematically. 

I don't yet have a solid idea for how to address the pacing and arc of the game, but I'm sure something will come that will make the game feel more of a thing in its own right.

* If you didn't know, Ætheling is the Anglo-Saxon name for a member of a royal family who was considered a valid choice to become king, back in times before formal lines of succession were established and monarchs were effectively elected by a council of nobles.

Twenty-one Today (and Beyond)

Frankly, I have no idea what 2021 has in store for us. The Covid-19 situation has an end in sight now that vaccination programmes are in progress, but it's going to be months -- maybe the rest of the year -- before life can begin to return to normal and even then, it's going to take a long time for a lot of people's lives to recover. Add to that the fact that Brexit is beginning to affect us and who know how that will pan out in the longer term; already it is difficult to send post in and out of the UK and some peoples' livelihoods are coming under threat from international trade and travel problems. Basically, it feels like we are in a holding pattern, waiting until we find out what is going to happen.

On the positive side, so far our little family has stayed healthy and our main incomes have not been threatened, so we are in a very privileged position on the balance of it.

Early work on a game with squirrels, co-designed with Dave Mortimer.

In a discussion on plans for this year a week or two back, I said that for my part I wasn't intending to make any specific plans or objectives, but will be thinking more in terms of a direction of travel. One friend suggested that I should probably nevertheless come up with some SMART* objectives. He was probably right, but right now I'm sticking with my looser thinking.

So what is this direction of travel then?

Well, I have been talking about getting involved in collaborations for years, and 2020 was the year that this actually started to happen, with Grab Bag Zoo and Snails and Grails getting going early in the year, and Squirreled Away and The Village on the River at the end. I'm now in the early, brainstorming stages of another collaboration too, which looks promising. So, one of the major strands is to lean into that, work with those co-designers to make the best games we can, but also learn more about the process and figure out what I contribute to a collaboration. I know I can and do add to these endeavours, but I've not got to the point where I can really describe my strengths and weaknesses.

Other than that, I have signed up as a mentor for the Tabletop Mentorship Program (at the time of writing, applications for both mentor and mentee positions are open -- check it out), having talked to a few people about their experience in it. I'm not sure if I will even be allocated a mentee, or how things will go, but I will give it my best shot and hopefully be of some help. If all goes well, it seems like something that would be good for me to keep doing after the initial 3-month run.

Pitching games... I'm not worrying about it too much at the moment. I have a feeling that a game or two should get to a solid, pitchable state over the coming months, and if so, we'll give it a go. As a result of the lack of conventions last year, it seems that a lot of publishers are receiving pitches via some sort of online meetup, with game demonstrations via the likes of Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, which means there are potentially more opportunities which may in some ways actually be better than a physical pitch (for a start, nobody is trying to keep awake and hydrated in a noisy and crowded hall), so maybe we can roll with that if am appropriate game gets to the right point.

And while I am thinking of conventions, I'm not at all confidant that there will be any this year, and if there are any, they are likely to be shades of their normal selves. I have a room booked for UK Games Expo, which would normally be the highlight of my year from a gaming point of view, and where I would catch up with a lot of friends who I don't often see elsewhere. I have, however, made sure I have a room booking that can be cancelled, so while part of me really hopes to go, the greater part of me recognises that, even if the event takes place, it may not be appropriate or possible to go. The same goes for other events I might otherwise be going to. I really miss catching up with friends, doing face-to-face playtesting, chatting with publishers, designers, and gamers, and all of that. All of this stuff will just have to be a "wait and see".

In other, adjacent areas... I have been enjoying reading history books over the last couple of years (mostly early medieval Britain/Europe) and these books have been generating occasional game ideas, which is cool, and I'll continue this reading. I'm currently reading about Eleanor of Aquitaine (wife first of Louis VII of France, then Henry II of England), who was clearly a formidable character in her own right, and have a book lined up about Isabella of France, wife of Edward II of England, and who also had a rather colourful life. 

Also, maybe I'll do a bit more proofreading training. We'll see... I've continued to do the occasional proofread or rule review, and will keep doing this as and when.

So, that's as much of a plan as I have for 2021 other than I'll try to blog a little more often. Let's say I'll aim to do at least two per month. See, that's pretty SMART!

* SMART is a way that management consultants and trainers tell you to organise your objectives and has been expanded in a load of different ways, usually something along the lines of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.