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.