Dragons and Cities and Gods, Oh My!

 

Cast your mind back to the end of November and the beginning of December, and imagine a game designer who has spent the time since then not getting around to writing about what he did regarding game design that week. OK, scene set.

I actually had two playtests of my cooperative dice allocation game Sympolis over the course of that week: one was virtual, on Screentop.gg, and one physical, at Dragonmeet. 

The first test ended in a loss for the players, with a small chance of a win on the final turn, but that chance really required great dice rolling at that point, which they did not have. There was a sense that another play could have a better result, but also some frustration at some aspects of the game (for example, the players were only able to generate one of the "wild" purple dice each round, due to an unlucky shuffle), and while I am pretty sure there were some decisions that could have improved the situation, the problem was mostly that the players were screwed by bad card draws and dice rolls and not by poor play. Besides that though, the biggest takeaway I had was how energised and proactive the players were: they self-organised quickly, discussing how to solve the problems presented by the game, and while there were frustrations (and not always in a good way), the vibe was really what I want for the game. Now I need to figure out how to bottle that!

I made a few small changes to the game in between, which effectively game a little additional resource and control at the start of the game, partly as one of the biggest problems with the virtual test was due to a dearth of resources (aka dice supply) and vulnerability to bad luck. And then there was a load of printing and cutting of cards to make an actual, physical prototype.

On to Dragonmeet. If you didn't know it, this is a nice, one day convention in London that was traditionally, and is still, largely based around tabletop roleplaying games, though there is a load of board game stuff there, including some great traders and a playtest area organised by Playtest UK - and every time I have been to the event, I have spent most of my time staffing the playtest area (with the exception of last year when there wasn't official playtesting, but a group of us got together and did some anyway).

I failed to take a photograph of play at Dragonmeet, so I faked one here
with some red fabric and components laid out to plausibly represent play.

Anyway, as well as staffing the playtesting area, I had a slot to test one of my games, and I had four great volunteers to test Sympolis. Once again, the players came out of the gates hard. They seemed to get their heads around the challenges pretty quickly and were actively and pretty intensely discussing their options, and we had pretty much the same apparent engagement from the players as in the previous test. Both groups were experienced board gamers, so maybe not fully representative players, but again I am very happy with this. As it turns out, the combination of the changes I made and the different random elements meant that this group won the game with a full round to spare. I think the two groups seemed to be making approximately equally good decisions (though they had different priorities), so it was probably the game setup and play state that made the difference.

A major note in the Dragonmeet play was that none of the players had problems with their wrath tracks, which record problems in the eyes of the gods and populace and provide one of the ways to lose the game. If your wrath tracks are low, it means that you can take bigger risks more confidently in the knowledge that misjudgement at least won't result in the end of the game, and thus you have an easier time of it. I had a useful discussion with one of the players afterwards, and we talked about mechanisms that compensate for things going too well; I have built up a number of elements that can mitigate "bad" luck, but now we have the opposite problem. One thought was that there could be some form of "push back" coming from having low scores on the wrath tracks: if the people are too happy, they get decadent and make bigger demands, for instance. I am pondering ways to approach this, but I like the idea and think it could work well.

One little aside... The current version of the game has a "wrath" card flipped at the end of every round, and these add an additional stressor to the game, which can make things get out of hand if players don't manage them effectively, and these also provide a timer for the game: the last of these cards flipped over means that the game is over. In general, I quite like how these work, but we run into the hoary problem of there being an upkeep action that isn't directly linked in to the game and the players aren't actually motivated to do. In the virtual test, one of the players was very good at being in charge of methodically flipping one of these each time, but in the physical test at Dragonmeet, it got forgotten (and needed reminding) a couple of times, and the rest of the time it was remembered as an afterthought. This is not ideal, and I need to figure out a way to make it so that the game requires the players to flip this card in order to proceed: maybe it actually triggers the gaining of resources, or something. Or, of course, I could find another way to ramp things up through the game: this particular mechanism isn't set in stone.

Aside number 2... With cooperative games there is a common concern about an effect that is often described as the "alpha player" or "quarterback" problem, which is where one player takes control of the game and can sometimes just tell other players what they should do, meaning that less confident players can find themselves just sitting at a table, watching someone else playing the game on their behalf. This seems to me to be a problem with a group dynamic more than anything, but game systems can mitigate this to make it so that an alpha player is less likely to emerge - or even, can't emerge. Examples include having restricted communication, or a real-time element to the game (Magic Maze is an example that has both of these). My inclination at the moment is to just not worry about it for this game. With a good group, it isn't an issue, and the energy at the table from having loose rules that give the players a lot of freedom appears to work well, and I suspect that any attempt to add a mitigation would damage that dynamic I like seeing. That said, I'm now wondering what the game would be like with limited player communication and a strict turn order; it would feel very different, but could be good. I'm staying focused on my current path, but this is a potential alternative for later.

Anyway, I just about managed to get this post in before the end of the year, so I'll wish you a happy Yule, Christmas, New Year, or whatever you celebrate at this time of the year, and all the best for 2024...

Zoo In A Bag

I think that one of the most promising designs I have in the works is the one that I am working on with Mike Harrison-Wood, Grab Bag Zoo. We have already pitched it to publishers (no luck so far) but it still needs a load of work, and we have basically spent the last year with the game on the shelf as we took a break from it.

When you are working on a project that hits a point where forward movement becomes really slow, taking a break and getting some distance can be a helpful approach. If you don't get back to the game, then maybe it wasn't so great after all.

This is most of the components from the most-recently tested Grab Bag Zoo version.

As I mentioned in my opening sentence, I actually think that this game has a lot of potential to it. A conversation with a publisher who took a look at it helped us figure out what the game has going for it. To start with, the combination of a cooperative game (you all win or lose together), which is played in "real time", and involves feeling in a bag for things is an unusual combination. 

The essence of the game is to complete collections of different types of animal by pulling shaped animal tokens from a bag without looking. Players take it in turn to have the bag, but have to work quickly as there is a sand timer running. If you complete all the collections before time runs out, everyone wins!

There are a few real time cooperative games out there; Magic Maze and Escape the Curse of the Temple are two that immediately come to mind. Grab Bag Zoo has a different kind of vibe to it due to the communication that the game affords. In Magic Maze, verbal communication is banned apart from at specific times, and in Escape everyone is so focused on their own dice that it is often hard to get much information across to your co-players other than "help, I need an unlock!" In Grab Bag Zoo, only one player is properly active (with the bag) at any time, and watching groups playing, there is often urgent encouragement and advice thrown across the table. ("Just pull anything out, dad!")

For bonus points, the fact that it is based on animal shaped pieces feels like a win for a lot of people. I get the impression (but no supporting data) that most folk get a warm, fuzzy feeling from handling animal toys. Additionally, you don't need to explain to people that this piece is an elephant and this one is a giraffe, you just need a picture and everyone gets it.

That said, the game might work better thematically if players were trying to pull parts to fix a spaceship, or service a formula 1 racing car. The whole "collect this set of animals for some reason" thing feels a little weak at the moment, but I can't help but feel that the response of most potential players to that would be, "OK," rather than, "Why? That doesn't make thematic sense." I'm happy to be proven wrong.

So if the game has so much going for it, then what is the problem? Why isn't it already on shelves in my local game shop?

(Deep breath...)

OK, so fundamentally there is the trilemma of the cost to produce, what the game delivers, and the complexity of the rules. I will explain...

The game as we originally built it had 45 wooden animals, 5 each of 9 different designs, plus some cards, a bag, a sand timer, and maybe some other tokens. Working out an approximation of production costs, it turns out that the game would be likely to retail for something like £30 to £40, unless a publisher could do a huge print run in order to bring the costs down. That price is pretty fine  for hobby games, but the game play was a lot more like a family game, and most families feel that £20 is quite a lot for a board game. 

If we make the game more interesting for hobby gamers, we probably don't bring the price down, and we risk making it more inaccessible for families, who we would really like to be able to enjoy it. Having more to think about is likely to make the game harder to teach - unless we can come up with some really clever angle. In essence, we need to square the triangle of:

1. Reduce the cost of production as much as possible
2. Make the game really easy to pick up and start playing, even for very casual gamers
3. Make the game interesting enough for folk to keep wanting to play it

I think that right now a good starting point would be to deal with those first two points on the basis that if the game can be picked up, played, and enjoyed really quickly, then there can be optional additional challenges and wrinkles that can be added in later. Let's try to make the core as slick as we can.

First off, the number of components... We started with 9 different animals because it felt like a good selection, but then we ended up trimming this back for a starter game, introducing more types of animals over the course of a few plays. This wasn't terrible, but it did mean we still had a lot of wooden components and there was more sorting out of stuff in order to get playing, which pushes against point 2, which is to make it easy to get started.

So I have decided to try simply reducing the number of types of animal in the play set to 6, with 4 of each, and created a set of collection cards featuring only those animals; the set isn't well thought out at the moment, but it's a start.

Aside from that I have a slightly expanded set of "helper" and "challenge" cards; the previous iteration also had these, with mixed results, and I want to explore that space a bit. Again, I have gone for a "throw it at the wall" selection that will allow me to try out various combinations of options and see what grabs people's interest.

Finally, I have changed the time track to be a small pile of cards which can be combined to provide the same effect, and I have done away with other tokens for the time being.

This all means that the game components are down to 24 "animeeples", 1 bag, 1 sand timer, 20 tarot-sized cards, and 25 poker-sized cards, which feels a bit more manageable, though, and actually gets the wooden components to fewer than classic kid's game Tier auf Tier, so that feels like a bit of a win.

I think I should have a couple of playtesting opportunities over the next couple of weeks where a game like this would be suitable, so I wanted to be ready as I have been very lax at this sort of thing over the last few years. But now, I'm ready... I think...

Getting Systematic For That Dungeon

It has been a while since I wrote about my solo dungeon crawl project, and to be honest, I've not done a lot of work on it in the meantime, but neither have I been entirely idle, so here's a catch-up on where we are.

You may remember that I decided to try making a solo journalling roleplaying game based on a fantasy dungeon crawl. So you play a character on an adventure in an underground cave complex, the game provides prompts, challenges, and situations to overcome, and you write a record of what occurs in the developing story.

I've been trying to figure out a game system to handle this, and last time I wrote on the subject I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to be light on rules and light on detail, leaving room for the player to fill in details. 

Since then, I have been leaning even further into the light touch territory. So here is an outline of the game system as I am currently writing it up. This is going over a fair bit of stuff I talked about in the previous post, but it feels to me like it is getting more solid.

If I were to make a dungeon crawl game, I'd be very tempted
to go for an unoriginal (some might say classic)
"adventurer entering a dark cave" image for the cover.

As a player, you control a hero and their sidekick. The narrative conceit is that you are actually the sidekick, recording the exploits of your more mighty companion.

Character creation is essentially rolling for (or choosing) some broad skills from a couple of tables, which could result in, for example, the hero might have athletic prowess along with a quick mind and knowledge of natural things, while the sidekick might be good at armed melee combat and solving puzzles. I have tables for generating this, but I don't think I have them "right"; they are, however, something to get started with.

You also have a number of health points (run out of those and the hero dies) and fortune points (run out of those and you can't escape any consequences of things going wrong).

When something happens to your little team, you basically have to decide which of your characters' abilities could be used to overcome the problem and write this into your journal. I won't provide detailed guidance about what is and is not applicable - it's a matter of deciding for yourself. I was previously thinking that there would be a limit to the number of times you can use each thing, but for now, not so much. Each thing that you apply adds a +1 to your ability to overcome it. Then you roll a die, add those modifiers, and if you meet or beat a target number, you succeed and write this up as appropriate. If you fail, then failure by a small amount results in the loss of either health or fortune as you sustain an injury or ride your luck to get out in one piece, or if you fail by a lot, you lose both health and fortune. 

I reckon you can probably award yourself additional fortune if you use an ability you haven't used before, or if you are able to write in a thematic link to something that you had previously encountered - in particular, omens, which I'm planning to introduce as part of the journey to the dungeon.

Yes, this can easily be abused, but having decided that this is more about writing up an adventure than it is about detailed Old School style dungeoneering (there are plenty of very good options it that's your jam), I feel freed and able to just go with the flow. Of course, once I share a playable version with other people, feedback could completely blow my assumptions, but we'll see. 

Just as a little aside, in board game design I would always advise that it's a good idea to just get something, anything that is even remotely playable to the table as quickly as possible, even if it is just for a solo test, and not spend too long "theorycrafting" and thinking about how best to create everything in the game. So why am I not following that advice in this project? 

Well, it just feels like the style of game this is allows me to just think it through and gradually write more stuff down. I can even try rolling on tables I create and think about what I do with the results, so in a sense I am testing as I go, but if I am honest, I am not doing that very much. I feel that what I should be doing is settling down for an evening or two and blasting out a first draft that I can then try playing through, but I think my brain isn't really in the right place for that yet. So I plod onwards, and every entry in every table that I create is a step in the right direction. We'll get there eventually.

I was going to go further with this post, but I feel that I would be better off just posting smaller bites for now and try to get the momentum rolling. Next up: travelling to the dungeon, omens and stuff, and maybe the start of the dungeon itself. And I'd better also actually get my working document into a state that I can share.

Civilization 1: No, not the computer game

I'm going to try something a bit different here and start a deep dive into a classic game, looking at some of the things that make it great and some of the things that I might want to change, and thinking about how I might create a game that takes some of its ideas and implements them according to my own design aesthetics. This may or may not turn into a playable game, but we'll see how things go.

The game I want to look at is Civilization, an epic game about the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean basin, designed by Francis Tresham and first published in 1981. To be clear about my own credentials with the game, I am not an expert in it, having only played it a handful of times, and not for a good few years now. Part of the reason for this is that, while I very much enjoyed every time I played, the game is huge and long - the back of the box I own says that the full game takes 6 to 8 hours, and I feel that range is optimistic if any of the players are inexperienced. This is a game that I would normally say that you should start in the morning and not plan anything for the evening. 

My copy of Civilization: box, board, and photocopy of rules from a different edition.

And to be absolutely double clear, I am not trying here to "fix" Civ, or make a new, better version. I'm just taking a closer look at something that has been stuck in my brain for quite a while now to see if I can learn anything from it. There are whole communities of people out there hacking the game in all sorts of ways and there is no way I can compete with their knowledge, so if you want to see what the real fans have got up to, Board Game Geek's forums for the game might be a good place to start looking.

Anyway, this is all way too much for a single post, so I'll just look into some aspects of the game this time, and hopefully continue in future posts and see where it takes us.

The version of the game that I own is the late-80's Gibsons edition, but with a missing rulebook that got replaced at some point by a photocopy of the rules from one of the Avalon Hill editions. I don't think it matters that much (apart from things like tokens being different shapes to what is described). I'll be basing this discussion on that edition (though I might go looking online for more material) and not on any expansions or other developments of the system like Advanced Civilization or Mega Civilization. If you think I'm missing out on something important because of this, please comment to let me know.

By way of overview, Civ is a "sweep of history" game for up to 7 players, set in the area around the Mediterranean Sea, and takes players from a period of growing tribal kingdoms up to a period around the time when the Republic of Rome were developing a significant beef with Carthage and Archimedes was advancing scientific knowledge by taking baths. The game sees players expand the influence of their nation by settling (and sometimes fighting for) new lands, forming cities, trading goods with each other, developing new technologies, and withstanding calamities that strike from time to time. This takes place over a series of rounds, and at the end of each, time moves on and, if they have achieved certain goals, the players all move along the snappily titled "Archaeological Succession Track" - and whoever gets to the end of the AST first is the winner!

Where to start?

Sidebar, kinda: I've been sitting on this topic, and then this particular post in an unfinished form for quite a long time. What if the post isn't interesting? What if I get bits wrong? What if I just look like a clueless idiot? Eventually I just figured, what the heck? Plenty of my posts in the past have probably been interesting to nobody but myself, but then some of the ones I though uninteresting resulted in someone contacting me to say thanks for introducing them to something. So I guess the real message is to not listen to that voice in my head that keeps questioning and being negative: if I just write stuff down, then I at least have thought something through and can move on, and there is always a chance of being useful or interesting to someone. Anyway, sorry for the digression (this post is partly about thought processes, though!), and on with the actual plot...

I guess the board is a good place to kick off. It is a map, divided into land and sea areas, with the land areas further divided into regions, different combinations of which are used for the game depending on player count, which can look a bit weird during play, but works well to keep gameplay tight regardless of how many of you are playing. The areas vary dramatically in physical size, in an attempt to mimic the effects of real life geography, which does mean that tokens can get very crowded in some locations.

To get more tokens on the board (you start with one in your home area) there is population expansion: at the start of each round, you add tokens to locations where you already have tokens, which represent your population (though they represent your economy too, as we'll get to later). You can move each token by one space on the board during the movement phase. Then later in the round, any locations with more tokens in than the location's population limit (as marked on the map) loses the additional tokens.

So far, so straightforward. There are boats too, which can be important, but I don't think I need to go into them for the line of discussion I am on here. The area movement and population limits thing is simple, easy to explain, and quick to do in practice. 

Conflict, then, and this is another element that is shockingly straightforward. Different players can coexist in an area, but if the total number of tokens in an area is greater than the population limit, then tokens get removed, one at a time, starting with the player with the fewest tokens, and continues until the population limit is met. In principle, players can coexist all over the board without much in the way of conflict, but in practice, this doesn't happen much due to the drive towards cities...

Cities are quite literally essential for progress in the game - you need an ever increasing number of cities to move along the aforementioned Archaeological Succession Track, and cities provide you with trade cards which provide the currency to acquire civilization cards, which provide helpful advantages to your people as well as forming part of the final victory conditions - but I'll leave discussing all that for a later date.

If you gather either 12 or 6 tokens in a location (the number depends on which location you are in), you can remove them and replace them with a city token, thus getting tokens back into your supply, which brings us to one of the really clever and subtle parts of the game which feels like it belongs in a far more modern Eurogame: the tax phase, which occurs at the start of each round, before population expansion, once cities are in play.

When not on the board, you store your tokens on a player mat that has two areas: treasury and stock. For the most part, tokens move between the board and the stock area. During the tax phase, you must move two tokens from stock to treasury. If you are unable to do this, your "untaxed" cities revolt and get taken over by another player, which is a pretty brutal punishment for miscalculating, but I don't remembering it happening often. 

A player mat and a bunch of tokens, cities and ships.

These treasury tokens can then be used towards purchasing civilization cards or for building ships, in which case they go back to stock, and as the game develops you will need to make sure this happens, in case you become rich but unable to collect taxes. This does sometimes lead to the weird phenomenon of players cycling their tokens by scrapping and rebuilding ships, which I think is a kink in what I think is an otherwise smooth and awesome mechanism. I think that if I made use of this system in a game, I would want to make the treasury tokens more generally useful than they are.

Anyway, that brings us pretty much full circle on a round, other than the little, clunky matter of the census phase, which involves counting up tokens on the board in order to determine who goes first in the movement phase. This makes sense (it means smaller nations can react to the movements of their larger neighbours) but a few minutes of everyone simultaneously counting tokens on the board is not much of a good time. 

The stuff I have discussed so far is actually pretty much all you need to know for the first couple of rounds or so (I absolutely love that!), but once cities come into play you get those trade cards, which opens up the rest of the game and most of the complicated stuff, which I'll discuss another time, as and when I have the spoons.

So far I've only really been thinking about the game from a mechanical point of view, but of course, its theme, and the way the theme is expressed through mechanisms, is a whole other kettle of fish that I might get into later, but if you are interested, Georgios Panagiotidis wrote an interesting critique of the game a few years ago, picking up on a load of stuff, both thematic and mechanical, that he found jarring.

Until next time...

Sen's Lens

You may have come across Sen-Foong Lim, an experienced game designer with an impressive portfolio, and part of the Ludology and Meeple Syrup teams, as well as plenty of other cool things he has done. Well, he recently shared an image titled, "Your Board Game Critique. Things I'd probably tell you if I had playtested your game", I believe initially on Facebook, but it soon started getting passed around on Twixxer, Bluesky, and I assume other bits of social media too. I gather there was a bit of pushback due to the slightly blunt language, but I was instantly taken by the truth of the document. I have heard most of the points Sen makes aimed at my own designs over the years, as well as at other people's games.

A day or two later, Sen released an updated version with slightly softened and also tightened up language, but making the same points, and I've added this version below.

I first saw the list just before a planned chat with Alex, who I am working with on The Artifact, a game project that I need to blog about again soon (though this post kinda counts). We're working through some structural ideas at the moment and trying to figure out if we are on the right path, and Sen's points proved to be a really useful starting point for discussion. We went through the list, point by point, and had a discussion about whether that criticism applied to our project. 

So, is there too much going on? Is anything detracting from the core experience? Maybe - we have a couple of elements that are currently a bit extraneous, but overall we think the game is about the level of intricacy we want.

Is the audience ill-defined? We have to admit that we're basically making a game that we'd like to play together rather than having a strongly defined target, which probably isn't great for when we get around to pitching the game.

Would the game be painful to manufacture? We don't think so - despite having been developed mostly in virtual form, it is manufacturable with a pretty standard number of cards, a few punchboard sheets for tiles, and not-that-many additional tokens (maybe wooden, maybe punchboard), plus a board, so while it won't be a budget game, it shouldn't be a problem.

...and so on. We got to identify a few things that need further thought, and had some good discussion  about some other areas that should help us move forward. We've both worked on assorted games before, and this game has been through a good few playtesting loops, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't be too far off the mark here, but it's interesting how revealing it can be to just work through some of these basic points.

If you're working on a game yourself, I'd really recommend having a look and asking yourself to answer honestly to each point: does this apply to my game?

 

How much wrath is too much wrath?

Probably the biggest problem with making a cooperative game (i.e. one where the players all win or lose as a group, and not individually) is getting the challenge level right. If the game is too difficult, most players will just get frustrated and not bother trying again. If the game is too easy, players just win and don't feel motivated to have another go. 

What we are usually looking for is where defeats feel like a victory was achievable, and victories feel like they were just by the skin of our teeth. And, ideally, we want this to be reliable, so we don't see wild, swingy changes where one time a given group has an easy time, and the next play, with the same initial setup, the same group has a nightmare where the whole thing falls apart in a couple of rounds. Oh, and we need to have varying difficulty levels or alternative scenarios, so that once a group masters the basic game, they have a new challenge to move on to.

We'll not worry about that last point for now, as it seems to me pointless to worry too much about varying scenarios until the basic game is solid but, that said, it's worth keeping an eye open for where opportunities for varying the game come in.

So, just to recap on where we are at here: Sympolis is a cooperative game that I am currently working on, where players are each the leaders of city states, inspired by a mythical view of classical Greece, where they have to deal with various demands from both the gods and the people of the cities. Those demands might be to build a new building, to hold a festival, or to attack one of the neighbouring cities. Fail to deal with the challenges and the gods or the people will get angry. If either of these influences get too angry, or if an attack ends up sacking a city, everyone loses as a neighbouring empire takes advantage of the situation to sweep in and crush the collective culture.

This is what it might look like when you are about to lose the game.

I tend to think of games having a set of "knobs" to twiddle to tune the experience, making it more or less challenging, increasing or decreasing the importance of a subsystem, or whatever. In this game, some of those tuning knobs are the number and proportion of the different types of cards (eg. ones that produce useful resources or abilities vs those that are primarily challenges), the costs of cards, the failure points on the wrath tracks, the details of the "wrath cards" that turn the screw as you play as well as how those cards are added to the game, and so on. There are quite a lot here, maybe too many; like in any complex system, a lot of the elements are interdependent, so tweaking too much at once could have dramatic and unpredictable results.

And thinking of unpredictable results, one of the issues I have with this game currently is at least partially due to there being two independent sources of randomness: cards and dice. This setup feels natural for this game, but there is a big difference between drawing a challenging set of cards and getting the "wrong" dice rolls, and having a game where everything goes right for you. Bad (or good) luck can really compound in a way that can be frustrating for players. Conventional wisdom in game design circles is that, for games that are meant to have strategy or other thoughtful elements, multiple sources of randomness is usually not a good idea. If I am going to keep both sources of random uncertainty in the game, I need to also include ways to mitigate against the bad luck - and maybe even limit the impact of good fortune.

I'm still pondering ways to do this at the moment, and I'm not sure of the correct approach. Right now I'm feeling that I should give the players more tools to allow them to be clever and get around the bad luck, while making the game more consistently punishing. Now, how to twiddle knobs to make that happen...?

One way to address the first part of the equation is with the starting setup. At the moment, each player has a couple of buildings in their cities which produce dice that can be used to deal with challenges. Some of the additional buildings that can be gained allow for dice manipulation, but if these don't turn up, life can be really hard. Maybe the starting selection of buildings given to players could include some dice manipulation options, so some of that flexibility is available right from the start.

Then there is the "investment" track on player boards. At the moment, dice of any colour or value can be used to push a marker up this track, and this investment can be cashed in later for more dice or reductions in wrath. This works fairly well, but I think I will try allowing the fruits of investments to be sent to other players, thus allowing an opportunity for "richer" cities to bail out their neighbours at their time of need, introducing some more flexibility in how the games challenges can be approached.

Up to this point, the game setup has involved each player having two starting buildings in their city, as mentioned above, and each turn providing a base number of challenges that scales with the number of players. This actually will mean that, amongst other things, the number of turns in a game will vary with player count. I'm starting to think that maybe there should be a set number of starting buildings in the game (divided amongst the players) and a set number of challenges each turn. This would mean that a smaller player count would mean each player has a lot more to deal with, which might either make the low player counts feel too busy, or the higher player counts seem too simple. This sort of setup would allow for a single, more stable configuration to the game that would allow me to work on that consistency more easily, but it's not a silver bullet.

Of course, I could require numbers of cards to be added or removed according to player counts. This wouldn't be the end of the world - many other games do it, and the current number of cards in this game would make it relatively easy to do - but I am a fan of games where you pretty much take things out of the box, shuffle the deck, and then go.

I guess I'll just need to try some of these options.

Finally for today, just some thoughts on what I call the "wrath cards". These are cards that provide a condition that increases the tension in the game, for instance, populations getting more angry if a war demand is unprosecuted, or an earthquake hitting everyone if the gods are sufficiently displease with any one player. The idea is that these periodically enter play, providing a thematic and mechanical incentive to "get a move on" rather than simply spending ages building up production systems. The problem is that I have tried a number of ways of introducing these to the game, and while the effect of the ramp up feels like something I want to keep in, every mechanism so far has felt like a bit of a kludge.

My latest approach is that, at the end of each turn, one of the wrath cards gets shuffled into the "easy" challenge deck (the one that mostly provides production buildings), thus making it riskier to take the easy route each turn. This, of course, provides yet more randomness that can make the game even more swingy than otherwise. I've had a couple of tests using this mechanism, and in one, hardly any wrath turned up, and the other flooded the table with nastiness very quickly. The challenge of the cards was cool, but the brutality was not.

So maybe the way for this is for the wrath cards to not be random at all, or at least the pace of their arrival not random. Perhaps we just have one flipped each round, also using this as a timer for the game as a whole - hey folks, you have 6 rounds to appease the gods... good luck!

Anyway, this has been long, rambly, and not really resolved anything, but writing it has helped me work out some ideas in my head, so it's time to put those ideas into a new iteration of the game. If you are still with me (thanks!) and have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, please do feel free to comment.

Preparing For That Dungeon

I have thought about a bunch of things, read through the basic rules of another game, D100 Dungeon (hat tip to Andy J for the recommendation), and written a few more bits into my working document, but not made a huge amount of progress in the last month. I'll use this post to discuss some of the decisions I have made so far, and muse about a few of the other bits that are up in the air...

One of the key things I have noted from the games I have looked at in the solo dungeon crawl space is that they are almost exclusively pretty highly "statted" games with very much a D&D vibe to them with skills, attributes, equipment lists, classes, levels, and so on. This is not a bad thing - dungeon crawling as a genre feels to me like it should be a tactical challenge as much as anything, so rules for a game of this type will, of course, support this play style.

Let's not do that.

Stepping back a little, one of my favourite roleplaying systems is in Over The Edge by Jonathan Tweet (I'm basing this off the 1st edition). I admit that, while I really enjoyed reading the book, I have never played the actual game in its original setting. I have, however, used its core system in other settings (it worked well for me for a 7th Sea one-shot, for instance) and love its simplicity and flexibility. The basic concept is that you have four traits: one is a central trait (often a profession, trade, or similar), two are side traits (hobbies, interests, side-hustles, etc), and one is a flaw. The positive traits give you dice to roll to achieve things that fit within the scope of that trait (fuzzy definitions to be decided by the games master) and the flaw causes dice to be deducted from your rolls when it applies. 

I'm not proposing to do this myself, but using this as partial inspiration, I think character creation will effectively be to simply define some broadly applicable strengths. I may add in some sort of flaw later if it seems appropriate. The OTE system relies on agreement between the game moderator (as OTE expands GM) and the player on the interpretation of whether a trait or flaw is applicable at any given time. That won't work in a solo game without either heaps of lookup tables or challenges in the game being defined with a set of applicable traits. I'm reckoning on focusing on the journaling aspect of my game, so the important thing is more to provide interesting writing prompts rather than a tactical game, so it'll be mostly left to the player to decide. If you want to cheat, fine, this sort of game isn't really about winning or losing, it's more about having an engaging experience and creating an interesting story.

The idea is that you play a party of two characters: a renowned hero with mighty skills, and you, their sidekick, who can help out from time to time, and who will record the tale of the adventure for posterity.

How does this all fit together to actually make a game? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure yet, but what I am working on as a core mechanism is that an encounter in the dungeon has a description, including a suggestion of what sort of challenge it is...

"You enter a cavern with a pool of water in the middle and two other exits. There are a whole buttload of goblins, counting their saucepans. There is a boss goblin who looks angry. This could turn violent."

I mean, not Shakespeare (or even Gygax), and I need a way to generate that, but this is a problem for future me, who I'm sure can handle it.

As the player, you decide how you will use the skills and traits (as well as equipment, magic items, etc.) to deal with the situation. I currently think that each of the things you can bring into play may have a number of times you can use them (boxes to tick off), and each thing you use adds +1 to a die roll to resolve the encounter. The modified roll is checked against a results table (with other factors being taken into account) and you get an outcome from that which indicates how successful your efforts have been, so then it's down to you to turn that into some narrative in your journal. If things don't go perfectly, you are likely to lose some luck or health (two scores tracked on your character sheet), and maybe be forced to retreat or something.

I'm currently in the process of writing up the character generation element, which effectively takes place at the tavern in the village while getting the call to action. Then the idea is to have a "travel to the dungeon" section, where there can be some sort of encounter that could set the tone for the rest of the game. Finding a way to link encounters together thematically will be an interesting challenge; to a large extent this can be left to the player's narrative, but there should be some help or encouragement for this from the game mechanisms, maybe something like gaining a checkbox somewhere if you make a link between certain things.

One step at a time though. My aim for the next few weeks is to get the character generation and travel sections into a first draft form, so it can be played to that point. Oh, and also work on some other projects along the way.

Three Books I Found Useful

There's a lovely chap called Adam Porter, who is a talented game designer, and who also has a YouTube channel called "Adam in Wales", where he mostly talks about game design from a number of different angles. This week he released a video entitled "10 Books Every Board Game Designer Should Read"  and, as always, it's a great bit of viewing. Please do go and watch it, and if you like that, watch more of his stuff - he has a lot of interesting insights.

Anyway, I have read more than half of Adam's recommendations (and agree with them), and the others have gone onto my wish list, but this made me think of what books I would recommend for a game designer. I'm not going to try to come up with a thorough survey of the field, but here are three books which I would suggest for a reading list.

Adam recommends a book by Austin Kleon, "Steal Like an Artist", and I would absolutely support that, but to be honest, I think I got more out of another of Kleon's books, "Show Your Work", which is full of more great advice, but is more focused on the idea that sharing your creative process and your output is a great way of building community, getting feedback, and generally developing as a creator. It was one of the driving forces behind me blogging about what I am doing in game design.

"The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" by Jesse Schell is one of those books that gets recommended a lot - or did when I was first looking for reading material a few years back - and for very good reason. While coming from a mostly video game angle, almost all of it is still relevant to tabletop games as well, and the book effectively provides a set of questions for you to ask yourself about a game you are working on, in the hope that thinking about the game through the lens of some of these questions might cast light on what is going on (or wrong) with the game. There is also an adjunct set of cards (both physically and a digital version in the form of a mobile app) that distils the key points of the book into a form that you can basically just carry around and fiddle with.

And finally, what is probably my favourite book about game design: "Uncertainty in Games" by Greg Costikyan. This is a small book, focusing on one thing, but which pretty much blew my mind when I first read it. Basically, a game needs uncertainty, but that uncertainty can come from many different sources from whether you will roll a six to if you can flick that tiddlywink into the pot, or if that other player has a plan that you hadn't thought of. The book catalogues a load of sources of uncertainty and discusses how they are (or can be) used in a game.

So that's my three for today. There are a load more I could suggest, but I have to stop somewhere. If there is anything else you can recommend, please do share in the comments. I'm always on the look out for good new stuff.

Alone in the Dungeon

I've been tinkering around with yet another project, and one that is very different from others that I have worked on in recent years, and is one that I don't expect to ever pitch to a publisher, or even try to monetise. This is just something to play with and use as a learning experience. 

But I'll build in to that... First a little background...

As a teenager I played quite a lot of roleplaying games; mostly Middle-earth Role Playing, D&D, or AD&D (yes, at that time, Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were separate products), but a few others here and there, including homebrews. One of the things that really interested me at that time was a few pages in the AD&D (1st edition) Dungeon Masters Guide: the first few appendices were for generating random dungeons, wilderness areas, monster encounters, etc., enabling you to play a D&D-based adventure game as a solo. It was kinda like a pencil-and-paper "Roguelike" game, and it was a fun thing to do when not playing "properly". 

There were also choose-your-own-adventure style books, like the Fighting Fantasy line, for your solo adventuring needs, if that fit your requirements.

Anyway, time passed and my engagement with roleplaying games varied. I've relatively recently been catching up a bit with developments (and playing a little), and one of the things that has been growing in popularity is "journaling RPGs". Whereas my old solo AD&D games involved drawing a map and then rolling dice for fights against monsters, and then rolling for loot acquired, this newer style is more about randomly generating events and writing prompts, which allow you to write a story about your character's exploits and develop their life through a series of journal entries. This was absolutely possible to do with the AD&D rules, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and the system was way more complicated that is necessary to provide the appropriate prompts.

A few solo dungeon delves and journaling RPGs: Notequest, 
Zimo's Getting Up, Apothecaria, 2D6 Dungeon, and Four Against Darkness

I was spurred into looking into this sort of gaming partly by my wife discovering them over the last couple of years or so, and then a bit more by a friend creating one about being a graffiti artist earlier this year, and as a result I developed an urge to try making a dungeon crawl game that leans into the journaling RPG form a bit more. 

I've done a little looking around for comparable games, and posted about the idea on Mastodon (my main is on tabletop.social, if you want to come and say hello) and got a few suggestions for things to look at too. Most of the clearly dungeon crawl games that I have seen (e.g. Notequest and Four Against Darkness) are effectively smoother versions of the solo AD&D: draw maps, battle monsters, acquire loot. There are some others (of those I have seen, Colostle is probably closest) that do something dungeon-crawl-adjacent, while being a proper journaling game. I've seen a few other games that are more or less adjacent to what I want to do, but nothing quite in the same zone - not that that would be a problem anyway. My searching hasn't been exhaustive though, so if you know of something that sounds a bit similar, please do let me know in the comments (or elsewhere).

So what am I planning and what have I done so far?

This is very much a background/side project for me to tinker with when I have any inspiration, and it is currently a document with some section headings and I am starting to fill in text and tables for randomly generating stuff. I've not got enough to actually play with yet, but there are odd bits and pieces that I'll start connecting up soon.

I'm not trying to come up with a flexible game system or a full campaign yet, instead creating a single adventure to play through, albeit one with some variation in how it can play out. The idea is that you, the player, are the companion and chronicler of a great protagonist or hero (think Watson to Holmes, or Ukko to Sláine), and you arrive together in a village and get sent to a nearby dungeon to deal with the evil wizard. You journey to the dungeon, work your way through a few levels of challenges, and eventually confront the wizard to, hopefully, save the day. All this time, you are creating a map to show the path of your adventure, and keeping a journal to record the daring deeds done in the dungeon. If the hero dies, maybe you escape to recount the tale; if you die, maybe the hero finishes the journal on your behalf.

I was originally planning to have a relatively lightweight combat/encounter system that would allow for some detail in how things work out, but on reflection I have decided to abstract out a load more, so that effectively there is a single die roll, applied to the situation, after which the hero and companion can apply special abilities to improve the result. This should effectively result in an outcome that could either simply be written down (if you aren't wanting to do creative writing), or could be used as a writing prompt. So, an example outcome could be: "3 orcs attack in the passageway. The hero uses her great axe to fight them but it looks like she will be seriously injured and have to retreat. The companion uses his stealth to help, and the hero uses her acrobatics skills. As a result, the orcs are slain and the hero only takes a minor wound." It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a basis to build a journal entry around, detailing how those skills are used to affect the outcome.

Remember how I said that I'm planning some variation in how the game plays out? One aspect of this is that you record certain events and encounters in an area of your character sheet, and some of these things affect the likelihood of other things happening. So, for instance, if you start encountering undead creatures, that increases the chances of meeting more undead, and makes it more likely that the wizard at the end is a necromancer or some sort of undead spellcaster. Again, this isn't crazy clever stuff, but it would be nice if things link together in some sort of a thematic way as it all plays out.

There will be a load of tables to roll dice against. This is a thing I used to love making, so we'll see if I still have the chops to do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I figure that at least writing a bit of this stuff down should solidify some of it in my head. 

Challenge to self: make some more progress and make another post on the subject next month.

Backs to Fronts

I have a prototype production pipeline (inadvertent but pleasing - to me - alliteration there) that I use for a lot of projects, that involves data in a Google sheet, pulled in to a nanDECK script which sets up cards or tiles, and that script then outputs a PNG file with a grid of card images that I can import into Screentop for a digital prototype, as well as a PDF that I can print out for physical components. 

Some of the games I make have multiple decks (in this context I'm meaning groups of cards with a common back), which I generally build with the same script, and the sizes of those decks can change from time to time. In the case of Sympolis (formerly the City State Co-op Game), there is currently a set of eight starter cards, and two other decks with 20-odd cards each, the relative sizes of these two decks varying as I tweak the card sets.

When making the physical versions of the cards, I just put the cards into colour-backed sleeves according to which deck they are meant to be in. My data spreadsheet has a column in it for which deck a card belongs in and I use that information to adjust the front (e.g. using a coloured border or shaded background) to make it easy to spot how to divide the cards. 

In the case of my virtual prototypes on Screentop, I need to tweak a field for each card to indicate which of a set of possible card backs is required. I can do bulk updates, so this task isn't too onerous, but it is still a little fiddly and can lead to mistakes.

After doing this for, like, a couple of years, it occurred to me that I could get nanDECK to do this fiddly bit for me.

The way nanDECK generates cards is, if left to its own devices, it just reads through the data file and generates that many cards, which seems logical to me. If, however, you reference a card in the script beyond that "natural" range of cards, it loops back of the data. So, for instance, if you have data for 10 cards, but you ask nanDECK to output an image file of 20, the system will loop through the data twice.

With that in mind, and the fact that I have been working with sheets of 55 cards (generally ignoring the last slot in order to have a convenient 54 cards for printing, which is 6 sheets of 9), I had a plan. 

Bits of nanDECK code.
The first bit defines stuff that is useful later.
The second bit creates card backs and creates image files.

I defined two ranges, cards 1 to 55, and cards 56 to 110. Then for cards in the first range I defined layouts for the card faces, and for cards in the second range we have a distinctive coloured background and a character printed in the middle to reinforce the information, based on the contents of the "[Deck]" variable, which comes from a column in the spreadsheet. It's not a sexy, final version, but it is neat and clear enough for prototype usage. Then I used DISPLAY directives in my script to output the two files.

Not good enough resolution for you to really see what's going on,
but hopefully you'll get the gist

Then, all that I needed to do was upload the two image files to Screentop as assets and tell the card components to use the same index number for front and back and take their image from the correct asset. As long as I always update the two assets at the same time, the card fronts and backs will always stay in sync.

Of course, when all that is uploaded I still need to sort the cards into the correct files, but that's straightforward enough, especially as I have some "deck holder" containers to help with stuff like that - but that is another story.

Cities Together at the Expo

So that was UK Games Expo 2023, and another great weekend it was. I worked at the Playtest Zone for most of my time there (at least during the days, anyway), met fine people new and old (in relationship terms, at least!), talked a lot, playtested my City State Co-op Game, ate mostly overpriced burgers and pasties, bought a bit of stuff, and played very few games. I'll talk about my playtest first and then move on to some more about other things, though still mostly about the playtesting.

While I was spending most of my time helping other folk at the Playtest Zone, I also had a 90 minute slot booked for testing one of my own games. As it turned out I didn't need to wait for players as I had been talking to a few people about the game through the day, and a couple of them turned up specifically to play, each bringingong a friend to make up a perfect table of four.

As an aside, my opening line when asked about the game was, "It's a cooperative game where you have to attack each other", which is probably the strongest hook I have ever had for a prototype, as it always resulted in some sort of a "tell me more" response. Well worth remembering.

A few turns into the game, showing cities developing very differently.

I wasn't sure about how long the game would run, but guessed about 45 minutes, and it actually came in at almost exactly 50 minutes, which was pretty good, and the players commented that it didn't feel that long, which is definitely a very good sign. I think I took over 10 minutes to teach the game though, which I feel was probably a bit long. I think this was partly because I am not yet used to explaining the game, but may also be a sign that the game is a bit fiddly.

The dynamic was interesting. One of the players quickly took to being a sort of MC, stepping through the turn order and starting discussion. This could have turned into an "alpha player" problem (where one player effectively dominates a cooperative game), but there was definitely discussion with input from all players, and when we talked about this afterwards, nobody seemed to feel that they were being railroaded or anything. I think that this game could easily suffer from having a dominant player, so I will need to consider whether I will address this or not.

My biggest problem with this game is now, I think, trying to get a meaningfully "difficulty arc", as you might call it. In this play through, the players had a fairly gentle start, then in the mid-game they felt that they were under serious pressure, before the last round or so eased off and allowed them to cruise home. From my position of just observing, and knowing what was likely to happen, I could see that the mid-game pressure was illusory, but it was amazing to watch (they felt that they were about to be punished for earlier decisions), and something I would really like to see happening in the game. Basically, what I would like to see is a tense ending, with a few points of tension, with partial release, through the rest of the game. 

We had a good discussion after the game, and I think that one of the biggest points to address is that it turned out to be way too easy to defend against each others' attacks, and the most obvious fix for that is to greatly limit - or maybe even remove - the supply of buildable defences. Without the city wall cards, there would be a lot more pressure and more difficult decisions to make. I might try that on its own (with tweaks to rebalance the decks to compensate) and see how that goes. There was also a turn-by-turn reveal of cards from an additional "wrath deck", which kinda worked, but was an extra thing that needed to remember an additional (simple) action each round, which was easy to forget, and I have a couple of thoughts about how to address this, though I may leave that until later.

After playing, the players asked for a reminder of what the game is called. I told them my working title, which of course is not exactly evocative of its theme. One of the players I had is actually a Greek speaker, and as the setting of the game is currently based on a mythical view of classical Greece, she had a suggestion for a title that we all liked.

As a result, the City State Co-op Game now has the new working title of "Sympolis", which apparently can translate as "cities together", which seems a great option. Thank you so much, Vilma!

Anyway, that was part of my Saturday afternoon; there was a lot more to the weekend.

I arrived on Thursday afternoon to help with the setup of the Playtest Zone. This is actually pretty light work, the hardest bit being deciding how to lay out the tables and chairs, and the rest being largely putting the trademark red cloths on the tables and sorting out the various bits of stationery we have. Other than that it's a good opportunity to say hello to a load of people - although many of them are busy setting up their own stands.

The rest of the days were spent working, mostly welcoming designers and players and trying to put them together, alongside a core team (five of us in total) plus a small army of volunteers turning up to do shorter shifts, and an extra who came to help whenever he had spare time. There were a few quiet spells (largely Sunday lunchtime, but a few other periods too) where we had to work to bring in potential players, but a lot of the time we were finding people just coming up and asking to play something, and far too often there was no space at that point. It's a shame when we can't seat people who are keen to playtest, but I guess it's a good problem to have.

Its-a me, standing by the Playtest Zone.

The way things work is that most of the tables are booked in advance for a period of either 3 hours or 90 minutes, but there are a few tables available to be booked on the day for designers who haven't been able to sort things out beforehand. It turned out that demand for tables greatly outstripped availability. A note for anyone who is considering joining us for playtesting at future events: seriously, book in advance if you can.

On the Friday evening was the designer-publisher networking event. This is an event that typically involves having a drink or two with fellow designers (my experience is minimum publisher attendance) and listening to a couple of talks, generally one from the event sponsor (Panda Game Manufacturing this year) and one from some other industry insider (past years have included luminaries like Alex Yeager and James Wallis). This year it was straight to the drinks and no talks. There was a point when someone was speaking over the PA, but the noise of conversation was so loud that most people didn't even seem to notice, let alone hear what was being said.

Other than that, my evenings were largely catching up with people and very little actual game playing. I can play games at other events, I guess. I managed to spend my breaks looking around the trade halls, and even managed to get out to watch the vikings telling a story, complete with illustrative acting, throwing of water at each other, and bad jokes.

For all the lack of game playing, and the fact that I always leave with aching feet and a befuddled brain, UK Games Expo is one of the big highlights of my year. Attendance at this year's event comfortably surpassed the biggest pre-Covid year (and Saturday seemed ridiculously busy), and I heard really happy noises from a lot of small traders. I'm already looking forward to the next one. 

Expo Ahoy!

It's that time of year. UK Games Expo, the biggest tabletop gaming event in the UK is just a few weeks away (the 2nd to 4th of June at the Birmingham NEC), and I'm getting a bit excited.

As I have done for the last few years, I will be there for the whole event, working pretty much full time at the Playtest Zone, where we will be providing tables for game designers to get feedback from regular gamers who can just rock up and join a game. There will be somewhere between 15 and 20 tables on the go, with games played on them most of the time, so plenty of opportunity to come and play something. I know there are some players who always come over to join in, and a good number who just stay and move table to table. Unpublished games are definitely A Thing.

The Playtest Zone at UKGE 2022

If you're reading this and you are a designer who wants to come and test your game, at the time of writing there are a few slots available to book, and you can go here for the information you need to get registered. If you just want to check out the games and play something, come and find us - I don't yet know where we'll be, but there'll be a pretty big area marked on the map in the show program. Or just come along and say hello - it'll be great to see you.

So am I playtesting something? Well, I'm mostly there to help other folk, but I'm planning to bring my City State Co-op game along, and I have a slot booked for the last spell of Saturday, from 16:30, so please do drop by if you are free.

Are you going along to UK Games Expo this year? If so, please let me know what you are planning to get up to. Hopefully I'll get to at least say hello at some point.

Cities in the Smoke

It has been a while since I last made it into the monthly Sunday playtest session in London, but this month the stars aligned, so I got on a train, with my City States Co-op prototype in the bag. I tend to allow plenty of time to travel, so I have time to have a walk around, sit in a coffee shop, or whatever when I get there. This time it was a nice day and I felt like a walk, so I went down the road, across Vauxhall Bridge, along Albert Embankment, returning to the North over Lambeth Bridge, and then back along Millbank. A pleasant enough walk, and a change from my usual environs.

Anyway, at the Jugged Hare, the venue for the meetup, there were only four of us at first, joined by a fifth after we had got started on a game, but this new arrival was happy to observe and was able to helpfully contribute to the discussion at the end. The first game we played was my prototype, run as a three player game with me observing, which was pretty much my dream situation for the session.

So how did the test go? Well, I was already a little uncomfortable about the early phases of the first round or two, where players all contribute dice to central pools associated with challenge cards. My initial discomfort was that in the first turn or two this is effectively not a choice, though one of the players did say that it was cool to have some aspects of the first turn or two acting as a training phase which expands later. The problem was that in practice, this whole part of the round throughout the game just felt fussy and the players didn't really feel that it added any interesting decisions; one of the players couldn't engage with this at all and pretty much zoned out.

We had some discussion about stuff related to this and one of the players was asserting that actually if the cooperative element was all about distributing challenge cards between players and you own your own dice, that should just do the job. 

This is potentially painful to me as one of the central points of the initial discussion that lead to this prototype's form was about sharing dice, and the thought that unrolled dice are a resource that are full of potential that may or may not pay off as you hope. I really liked that thought. It might be that I could find an expression of that concept in this game, but right now, I'm going to explore the feedback and observations from this playtest, scrap the whole dice sharing part of the game, and then adjust the rest of things to fit with that.

Another random comment came from as we were setting up. I have two decks of challenge cards, one of which is nominally "harder" than the other. The idea I was working with was that the aim of the game is to empty the tougher deck, and you can choose which deck to draw cards from (this was actually an idea that was a bit spur of the moment) each time you draw. One of the players said something about the first deck being the "engine" and the other being the objectives. This was partially true, and tickled me, and I think I might lean into that some more: deck 1 could mostly provide capabilities and deck 2 mostly problems. 

The difficulty curve was also off, but I'm not really worried about that yet. Actually the game ended up with a very narrow defeat for the players, which is cool, BUT most of the real pressure hit early on, and the rest of the game was trying to make up for that. This could be great for some groups, but I'd rather we had a general ramp up (with a few comparative lulls). It's all a matter of tuning, once the main structure is more solid, but the new approach to the two decks should help control this.

So, there are plenty of problems with this game, but I felt that the flow of the game was mostly looking pretty good and I have a feeling that the game might be "a thing", that is probably worth some more time. I think I know what to do for the next iteration now...

Back to the monsters

I'm looking back at one of the games I mentioned a few weeks ago as possible targets for resurrection. This is currently a solitaire game (though it could become a co-op) with the working title of Monster Invasion. This is a project that first got going in late 2015, had its last serious bit of work in the summer of 2017, and then saw a little bit of poking in early 2021. As you can see, some of my projects can get dropped for a very long time.

The idea of the game is that your village is under attack from a horde of monsters. You play cards that represent the waves of monsters, the actions you take to fight them off, and the adventurers and strangers who might turn up to help you. Two quantities are tracked, "threat", which is represented by red counters in the picture above, and "power", which is the blue. Threat increases mostly when monsters arrive or when you need to draw an extra card to allow you to play, and can be decreased by fighting back or using magic. Power is your ability to use magic, and goes up and down as you take magical related actions or encounter certain monsters and visitors. If you get through the deck and manage to reduce the threat level to zero, you win. If the threat level reaches ten, you lose. Why ten? It's a number that seemed about right when I was doing the initial work on the game.

How the cards actually get played involves chaining icons together. Cards all have one or two icons in their top left corner (most have one) indicating the card type, and up to three icons at the bottom. When you play a card, the next card you play must have a card type matching one of the icons at the bottom of the card you just played.

By way of example...

In the picture above, we start off with the arrival of some Orcs. That has a running person icon at the bottom, so we are able to play the Run and Hide! card. This card in turn has a book icon, which means that while we are hiding, we can find an Ancient Tome and do some research in order to raise our power level via the Summon the Power card we are able to play next.  That gives us a sandtimer icon, which allows us to have A Quiet Night, after which we are well enough rested to fire off a Power Blast that reduces the threat level.

This all actually worked pretty OK, and gave me a fairly fun way of spending 10 minutes or so. While something like this can be really lifted by nice presentation, and well-directed art could really help suggest a developing narrative in your battle, the game as it stood probably wouldn't engage most people for very long, and it really needs to do that without an investment in art.

The last couple of iterations of the game were toying with the idea of boss monsters, one or two of which could be added to the game, possibly seeding them into certain parts of the deck. The boss monsters could potentially have special effects that shape the way you approach playing the game, perhaps making certain actions you can take more or less effective. Boss cards might just be like the other cards in most respects, or they could stick around as modifiers until you find a way to get rid of them. I built versions of the prototype with a selection of bosses, but tests so far have resulted in lacklustre effects, though I was only using them as "normal" cards other than you having to play them as soon as you draw them.

Another issue is that sometimes you can just be caught for ages without drawing a playable card, building up threat as you keep drawing more cards, looking for something that won't get you killed. In some cases this happens due to a bad decision, but it can also just be that you draw eight times in a row and get nothing. This is bad, and may be fixable by tweaking the icons present on cards, or it may require some sort of special action like being able to play any card regardless of the continuity of icons. It may just be as simple as having too many different icons.

I think that, having had a bit of a play with this again, I want to have a bit more of a play to see if I can make this game a bit more solid and reliable. As a result I spent a little bit of time putting together a set on Screentop.gg, with a playmat that helps organise the components and make playing a little easier. I far prefer playing a game like this (as with most games) with physical cards, but once the basics are in place, I'll be able to iterate over this far more quickly, and will be able to share it with other folk who might be interested in taking a look.

If you look closely at the above, things like the sideways Orc Spellbinder card don't make sense, but they are set up for when I try something different for the boss cards. Aligning them sideways makes them stand out visually as a reminder that they should be used in a different way.

So, that's where I am right now. I have an urge to create some basic card art, which I may or may not do (note: this is entirely because I like having this sort of project sometimes, not because it is really needed), and will look at how the boss cards affect the game and how the icons are grouped and distributed.