Coronas, Crowns, Zooms, and Another 24 Hours

It has been an odd old month. Scary for many, confusing for some, disruptive to everyone, and it looks like we're only getting started. From a game design point of view, having the country largely locked down (for some definition of locked) means not getting to meet up for playtesting (or even playing), events like UK Games Expo postponed or cancelled, and meetings with publishers and other designers are having to be severely rethought.

On the other hand, this is an opportunity to rethink some of how we do things. For instance, last week I attended an online playtesting session with a group of folk who would otherwise have been having a meetup in London, made a couple of new friends, and learnt that some sorts of games (many "roll & write" -- and similar -- games, for instance) work pretty well remotely.

This week I decided to have a go at the 24 hour game design contest for the first time in... oh... far too long.  The "requirement" was "Crown", and I decided to try making a game that could be played remotely, with nothing more than an audio connection and some trust that your opponent won't cheat.

I ended up with something that works OK, I think, and is actually intended to be a 2-player only game, a race to be the first to complete two out of three scoring tracks but also doing it before enemies arrive to destroy your stronghold -- those enemies being controlled, at a very basic level, by your opponent.

What pleased me here, though, isn't the game itself but the fact that it had a couple of playtests with people who are not in my house. A shout out on Twitter resulted in a Zoom meeting with a fine volunteer (thanks Nik) over which we played the game a couple of times, the first of which revealing that, if my explanation is not sufficiently clear, the game can easily go off the rails in ways that I would easily spot if testing face to face. The second play went way better, and showed that the game basically worked. A couple of hours later I was at an online playtesting meetup with a couple of other designers (thanks Ellie and Bez), who had a play and helped find a few issues with the game, some of which I was able to address before my 24 hours was up.

As always, the aim of a 24 hour contest isn't to really to make a great, well tested game, but to get to a playable print & play game that could be taken forward from there.   I usually figure I have done pretty well if one of my entries has had any playtesting at all with a player that isn't me, so having feedback and input from three people was amazing.  If you are interested, my contest entry is here, with links to the rules and playsheets.

And I think that this is where I wanted to end up with this post. While we are all pretty much housebound due to the Covid-19 pandemic and face-to-face gaming with anyone outside our immediate domestic situation is not a possibility, gaming doesn't have to stop. We just need to be a little more creative and flexible about how we do things. And, in my case, need to consider the current restrictions in my design activities.  (There are other options too, which I expect I'll talk about soon.)

Stay safe.

24 Hours of Pitchforks

It has been a while since I entered the 24 hour contest, but this weekend was the time to break the drought, with a game using the requirement "pitchfork", which is effectively an in-joke from a recent discussion amongst some of the contest regulars.

The idea that had been bouncing around my head since the start of the month was about a vampire, holed up in his castle, being assaulted by hordes of angry villagers with pitchforks and torches.  That sort of set-up is plenty enough to be a valid entry for the contest, and as I thought things over, a plan developed for a simple tower defence solitaire game, with lines of angry villagers attacking the castle from four sides, maybe with dice controlling what they do, and the player gets to (...mumble, mumble...) in defence.

Castle Crumpula: the first prototype. Totally functional, if nothing else.

By the time I started my 24 hours (and was officially allowed to actually make notes and stuff) I had managed to avoid forgetting everything I had been thinking about, and things had crystalised a bit.  I made an initial prototype, with cubes representing villagers, dice representing the strength of the four sides of the castle, and another die controlling where new villagers arrived.  I also made some cards with special powers on that the player could use to defend the castle, which you flip over to use, and flip back again when (...mumble, mumble...). I quickly added a few "special" villager mobs which brought friends with them, making the rate of their build-up less predictable.

Over a few test plays (including one with my long-suffering daughter) things developed some more. I added an additional "braver" type of villager, made tweaks to the vampire powers (actually changing them less than I thought I would) and gradually upgraded the prototype components to a submittable form.

The game is still very luck-based, probably with too low a chance of winning, and can sometimes take too long to come to a conclusion, but I'm pretty content with it.  I have all sorts of ideas for relatively simple ways to make the game graphically more interesting, and upgrade the components by mounting them on foamcore board, but the time constraint doesn't really allow such niceties, and I feel it is also good to keep things reasonably printer friendly.

Castle Crumpula: the version submitted to the contest. A bit prettier and a bit more functional.

So, if you are interested, here is my entry on the contest thread, which includes links to download the rules and components.  If you do take a look, then it's worth looking through the rest of the thread. There are some great looking other entries in there; it looks like this is a vintage month.


Edit: If you would like to see the full set of entries, here is the voting list.

24 Hours of Heat

Another month, another 24 hour game design challenge. This time the requirement for the contest was the word "heat", which seemed apt given the heatwave we've been seeing recently in the UK and other parts of Europe.  I wasn't really planning to do this one (it's quite a busy time at the moment from a family point of view, with school and music related demands), but I couldn't help but thinking about phrases, puns, and cliches related to heat.  When my brain stumbled across "packing heat" I couldn't let go, and ended up thinking about gangsters going on holiday and packing their luggage, including "heat" alongside their general holiday supplies.

This is a dangerous situation and I spent the next couple of days with the idea bouncing around my head. The rules of the contest are that you can't write anything down until you start your 24 hours, which makes it difficult to put ideas on hold, and it got to the point where I just had to do something.  Luckily on Saturday I had an evening to myself, and on Sunday all I needed to do was accompany my wife and daughter to a Race For Life event, then get the daughter to her dance exam in the afternoon. It would be fine.

I think my prototypes have benefited greatly from my recent acquisition of a colour printer.

By the end of the evening I had made a set of components (the classic deck of 54 cards -- handy because it is a reasonable 6 sheets for a print & play set, and also pretty much coincides with a standard sheet of cards at a proper card manufacturer) and the basic rules written down. To be honest I had been more than a bit woolly about specific rules in my initial planning, but working on it broke the game down into two phases: one where you pack your luggage (collect/play cards) and one where some twiddling about occurs and scoring takes place. The idea was that you needed a set of holiday items in order to finish the game, but you won by having the most money.

I had already tried out other approaches in my head: top were some kind of push your luck system, or something where you could bluff about what was in your luggage and challenge each other.  Neither of these really crystalised though.

I didn't manage to get "real person" playtesting this time, but did some solo testing, with me playing multiple hands of cards at the same time, and this was effective in trying out a few options and seeing how different ways of playing with the components worked out.  In the end, my plans for the first half of the game survived with minor modifications, and the second half got changed quite significantly into a form of trick taking game using the luggage (cards) you had collected in the first half.

Achievement unlocked: my first trick taking game. Sort of.

Behold! The final card types. For now, at least. 

So, despite the hot, sticky weather we are having here, I did manage to get the first draft of another game sorted, formatted for print & play, and made available. It's always a good feeling to make that happen, even if that is all this game will ever be. Hopefully I'll get a chance to give it a proper test soon and decide if it has a future in any form.

If you are interested, my entry post for the contest is here, and includes download links for the rules and cards.

24 Hours of Eggs

The requirement for the April 24 hour game design contest is "Egg", and I had an idea bouncing around in my head. The problem here is that I really wanted to test the idea as early into my 24 hour period as I could, which made scheduling look challenging, given a load of other things in our lives.  Eventually, though, we hit a week where I was able to go to a Thursday evening gaming session where I didn't mind talking the others into playing a prototype for 10 minutes or so, followed by a (mostly) free Friday which I could use to finish things off and submit my entry.

The idea was not very ambitious -- a nine card microgame with a little bluffing and reading, and a lot of luck -- but not every game has to be particularly clever or complex. It's a kind of egg-based Russan roulette.  What happens is that everyone has (and looks at the face of) a card representing an egg, which can be either raw, boiled, or rotten, and there is an additional, unknown, card on the table. Each player announces what is on their card (lying is allowed) and places it in the middle of the table. After a short countdown, each player grabs a card and slaps it on their own head. The aim is to avoid getting covered with raw -- or worse, rotten -- eggs.

Blank cards plus Sharpies... a useful part of the toolkit, quickly resulting in a serviceable prototype.

By the time we got to testing the game, I had decided that one player announces what is on their card, and then everyone else makes the same announcement, regardless of what they actually have. This ensures that on most rounds, some players are lying, and some are telling the truth, and also takes a certain amount of pressure away from players who are uncomfortable with lying in games.

The result of the initial test game was sufficiently encouraging that, with a couple of minor tweaks, I could progress to writing up full rules and making a printable set of cards.  A post-play discussion came up with a few potential names for the game: I ended up settling on "The Yolk's on You".

Keep It Simple, Stupid. It's nice to be able to make really simple components.

The Friday was spent largely trying to make decent looking cards and finding graphics to use on them (this time the art is public domain stuff from Pixabay, with one of the images tweaked by me), as well as writing up the rules and wondering if I should try to fill them with hilarious egg puns. I decided that I rarely come across well when I try to be funny, but there may well have been one or two places in the text where I cracked.

So, that's my twelfth entry to the 24 hour contest submitted, and the first for this year. Hopefully I'll get at least a couple more done before the year is up.  In case you are interested, the game entry post is here, and includes links to the rules and print & play card files.

Reindeer FTW!

Knock me down with a reindeer, I won the December 24 hour contest with my game, Loading the Sleigh! Thanks to Kai for running the contest and to the kind folks who voted for my entry.

Prize! (Image is Kai Schauer's)

If you go and look at the entry, you'll see that there were very few votes cast last month, as often happens.  The point of the contest really is more about participation than voting and prizes, but it would be cool if more people did vote, and I'm not sure how things can be improved. But if you have a little time and you have a BGG account, it would be really appreciated if you could go and take a look at the entries for the January contest ("Hope") and thumb the one you like the look of most. Playing the games isn't really expected, but if you do so, all the better.

24 Hours of Reindeer

Over the last few weeks I have been struggling a bit on game design motivation and on energy in general.  This is the sort of thing that can easily slide into just endlessly doing nothing, so I needed to address this somehow.  I saw an opportunity in the monthly 24 hour game design contest on Board Game Geek and the fact that there were a couple of days where I could plausibly have a go at the challenge.  So this weekend I took the step.

The requirement this time was "reindeer".  As always, you are allowed to interpret the requirement in any way you like, and due to a cut & paste error on the contest forum thread, there were a few jokes about Star Wars and I was considering doing a joke entry about the Kessel Run, but when the time came I decided to go for something a bit more straight.

There is talk on BGG about a nine card "nanogame" contest that got me thinking about what I could do with nine cards myself, and when I then thought of the eight reindeer named in Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St Nicholas", I figured those eight reindeer plus a sleigh conveniently makes nine things that could be on a card.  This combined with my general keenness to play with dice and some thinking about push-your-luck games and games of chicken (Welcome to the Dungeon came to mind for some reason), and an idea started to form.

I'm getting to quite enjoy making these simple mock-up illustrations.

What I ended up with was a game where you add dice (in four colours, pulled from a bag and rolled) to the sleigh card, representing the load of presents, and add reindeer cards (each player starts with two of these) face down to be harnessed to the sleigh (to a maximum of four), or you bug out (in the style of Welcome to the Dungeon). When there is only one player left who hasn't passed, that player reveals the harnessed reindeer, manipulates the loaded dice/presents according to special abilities on the reindeer, and then if the total of the strength numbers on the reindeer is at least equal to the total values on the dice, they win a point -- otherwise everyone else gets a point.  First to three points wins the game.

Just for posterity, here's the original prototype. Unfancy to the max.

This has not been extensively playtested --  I managed a little bit of solo testing, with imaginary players (not ideal for a game with decisions partly based on hidden information!) and a two-player run with Miss B -- but it's rare that a 24 hour game gets much testing.  What I did suggests that this game, if anything is to come of it, needs a lot of testing and some serious thinking about how to make the decisions meaningful, or at least fun.  It's not completely dreadful for a first draft of a game, but it's not exactly my finest effort.

What it is, however, is a (just about) playable game and an exercise for the game design neurons, so I'm very much glad I got off my butt (metaphorically speaking -- physically I was sitting down for most of the process) and did something.

If you are interested, here is my entry, including links to the rules and print and play file.

24 Hours of Solo

On a bit of a whim I decided to have a go at the current 24 hour game design contest over the weekend. I knew that I had other things to do, but I managed to plan things so that I could allocate a few hours here and there to work on my project. A big part of the 24 hour contests is figuring out what you will be able to achieve in the available time, so while I wouldn't be able to achieve as much as I might normally, I should at least be able to get something done, which is pretty much the objective of the exercise.

This month's contest requirement was "solo", which of course has a lot of folks (myself included) thinking of solitaire games, but on reflection I started thinking about things like solo round the world flights, the classic card game Solo Whist (I used to play that with my grandparents as a teenager), and of course, Han Solo.  By the time I got to starting I was thinking about guitar solos, so that ended up being the core of my theme.  Remember that, in the 24 hour challenges, the requirement can be interpreted however you like, as long as your game incorporates the word or phrase in some way.

Possibly not the most compelling image of a game you're ever going to see.

What I ended up with was a game where you collect cards representing sections of a song (verse, chorus, etc.) and lay them out into a tableau representing your song, with each card restricting your options for the next.  After everyone has created their song, each gets scored according to various set collecting criteria which are randomly selected, some of them at the start of the game and some at the end.  I repurposed (or reinterpreted) a mechanism that I rather like from Doctor Who The Card Game ('Only be sure always to call it please, "research"'), where you pass your unused cards after taking your turn to the player on your right. In this case, you have a hand of six cards, of which you play two, keep two, pass two, then draw two and wait to be passed two.  I'm actually quite pleased with that. 

This game has had only very light testing at this point, and basically works, though needs a lot of work if it is to become a solid game. I also decided (as you can see from the picture above) to not bother with finding artwork to put on the cards; a search of free or CC images online would go a long way to making the game look a lot nicer.

If you are interested, then here is the contest entry, which has links to download the rules and print and play card file.

Spoons FTW!

This is news from a few days ago, but I was a little surprised but very grateful to find out that "One Day at a Time", my game-like activity about managing spoons, has won the August 24-hour game design contest.  It's not something to get massively excited about (my winning entry got 4 out of the 10 votes cast, so it's not exactly a huge mandate!) but it's a really nice, warm feeling.

I'm being really lazy here and reusing a picture. This may be in-keeping with the theme.

The surprising element here is that I deliberately avoided specifying any way to win or lose (which is why I refer to it as a game-like activity), and wasn't trying to make the activity particularly fun.  It's all based on playing the game in a series of "days", on each of which you have a pile of tasks to do and you have to choose which ones to do and which to postpone.  Sometimes you'll be able to keep things under control for several days in a row, but then one day will come when everything will fall off the rails and you end up with a massive pile of uncompleted tasks which roll into the next day. Sometimes you can recover from it and sometimes it just gets worse.

This whole exercise has prompted a number of conversations with various friends and acquaintances regarding the whole "not having enough spoons" thing. A few have asked if I'm going to be developing this more and getting it published.  My natural response to this is that I have no plans along those lines: One Day at a Time was an interesting exercise for me, and allowed me to explore (briefly) a different facet of game design to what I have done before, but I don't think I have the strength to turn this into a really good game while being respectful to its inspiration.  And trying to pitch the game is a prospect I don't relish; it would take an extremely specific type of publisher to want to make and try to sell this!

Of course, there are elements of the game that I may reuse, and it has given me a taste for playing with non-standard styles of game, so maybe it will lead to something else in future. But for now, I'm drawing a line under this one.   Thanks to everyone who has voted, commented, or otherwise shown support.

24 Hours of Spoons

I've been meaning to take part in the BGG 24 hour contest again for a few months, but I just haven't managed to line up the time and inspiration, but this weekend I figured I had a chance, though I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to manage the full 24 hours, so had to plan accordingly.

This month's requirement is "Procrastination". Cue a load of joking on the contest thread about putting off entries until later, and so on.

So after a couple of weeks of pondering (this is allowed as long as you don't write things down or create any game materials), the idea came, but it was a weird one, and it might merit some discussion, so please bear with me while I wander off-topic a little.

For the last few years I have been seeing occasional posts on Facebook from some of my friends saying something like "Out of spoons."  This is a reference to a thing that is sometimes referred to as "spoon theory", which is basically a metaphor for suffering from a long-term condition that results in you having limited resources of mental, physical or emotional energy to deal with the challenges in your life.  The idea is that each day you have a limited supply of "spoons" (the reason for this particular image is due to the physical items that happened to be available when this way of looking at things was first explained), and everything you do uses up a spoon.  When you run out of spoons, that's it, there is no more "you" available to deal with anything else.  You may be able to borrow spoons from the future, but tomorrow you'll feel that deficit.  Furthermore, for many sufferers of certain conditions, the activities that use up spoons may seem totally trivial to the rest of us, so sitting up in bed might use a spoon, then getting out uses another.  Maybe you'll appear to be fine in the morning, but if you haven't been careful with how you use your limited spoons, you'll be good for absolutely nothing by lunchtime.

This does not seem obvious material for a game theme, but there was something nagging in my head for a while making me want to do it. After all, the idea is simply about making use of limited resources to do as much as you can, which is hardly a new concept in gaming, and the "procrastination" aspect comes from the fact that as part of play you will have to put off many activities until later.

My game materials. I think if I hadn't been so tight for time I would probably have added images to the cards to make them look a little nicer.

The problem is that, when working with subject matter like this, it risks trivialising struggles that many people really experience and, probably even worse, passing judgement on or preaching to them.  For instance, applying the concept of winning and losing to something that people go through every day as they deal with a condition they have, seems fundamentally wrong to me.

My solution to this might seem to be a bit trite, and I'm sure I haven't got things right here, but I decided to call this a "game-like activity" for one player, which you play for as long as you like, and which has no victory or loss conditions.  You play through one "day", completing what tasks and activities you can, and then move on to the next day, and repeat if you wish.  I have taken some significant liberties with the concept of spoon theory, not least of which that the game is a series of decisions about which of two or three activities to complete, rather than purely being about managing your spoon supplies, but the whole spoon theory is just a useful metaphor rather than anything scientific, so I hope my changes work OK in general.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, from the limited testing I have managed so far (I have 24 hours to make components, test, revise, write up rules, and upload all game materials, remember) the project I now call "One Day at a Time" works more or less as intended.  Some days are straightforward and cause no problems, then after a while you end up with a nightmare day or two where you just have so many tasks to do and so little time or energy to do them.  I'm not sure I will do any more with this project, but it has been a very interesting process.

If you would like to see the rules and game materials, they are all available via the contest entry post on Board Game Geek.

Hares FTW!

The votes are in, and I am delighted to say that I won the March 24 hour contest!  OK, so there weren't many votes this time, but there rarely are.  Thanks to everyone who took part and everyone who voted -- and especially to Kai for organising it.

Thanks to Kai Scheuer for running the contest and for the "prize" image.

So, I'm planning to do some more work on March Hares and tidying up a few loose ends in the rules, then maybe it could be my next entry on Board Game Geek as a free print & play game using Josh's awesome artwork.

24 Hours of Hares

It has been a long time since I took part in the BGG 24 hour game design contest -- nearly a year, as it happens -- and I've been meaning to get back into it for some time.  While I have plenty of other projects that I work on, the challenge is a fun one and there is a small, but excellent, community built around the monthly contest.  But finally I have got myself organised enough to have another go.

As always, the month kicks off with a word or phrase to be used as a "requirement" in the game.  This could mean a theme, a component, something mentioned in the game's background blurb, or whatever you like, but it is a useful jumping off point.  The requirement for the march contest was... "March". Natch.

After some chat on the forum thread, I was leaning towards something to do with March hares, though I was also considering the Grand Old Duke of York, marching his men up and down a hill.  Then over the next couple of weeks, ideas formed around the hares idea, and it was settled in my mind.

Just to go over the basic rules for a moment, this contest allows you to spend as long as you like thinking about an idea, but once you start actually putting anything down on paper, or on a computer, the clock starts ticking and within 24 hours you must post the rules and other files needed for anyone else to play your game.  Yes, it is possible to cheat if you want, but what is the point of that?

So, on Thursday evening I cleared the table and started working on a design I had been pondering in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks.  The idea was for a simple card game for two players about March hares doing battle.  I made three "suits" of cards, representing different things that a hare could be doing: boxing, running or jumping.  Cards in each suit also had the numbers 1, 2 or 3, and also an action relating to manipulation of cards: draw cards, return a card to your personal deck, or force your opponent to discard.  The idea was that you are trying to follow your opponent's played card in terms of either suit or number, and the various actions and penalties for failing to play legally gradually reduce your options, and you lose if you get stuck.

On Friday, Miss B tested the game with me when she came home from school, and S had a couple of plays a bit later.  During this process I made a change to the way penalties are applied, and changed the distribution of numbers, but given the nature of the challenge there is only so much testing and revision you can do, particularly when you have to pay attention to real life, so eventually I just gave the rules and card documents a quick once over and submitted my entry.

If you are interested. the discussion/submission thread for the contest is here, and you can get the rules document and the print and play cards from Dropbox.

In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure that my game actually is a worthwhile game; it seems a bit chaotic and unpredictable.  It is possible that when you know the game well, you can get in control and have a good duel with your opponent, but I am not experienced enough to tell for sure at the moment.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to play it a few times with someone and find out sometime.

Now, back to the "proper" projects...

Edit: the voting list for the March contest is now up.

24 Hours of Wet Treasures

The last time I took part in the BGG 24 hour game design contest was in December of last year, and I am trying to progress existing designs as my focus this year (please ignore the recent discussion about that co-op game!), but sometimes I can't help myself.  The 24 hour contests are such a good exercise, and such a great buzz when they work out well, that I plan to keep doing them every now and then.

Just as a reminder, the contest is structured so that each month the organiser, Kai, gives a requirement, which is often interpreted as a theme, but really is just something that has to be included in the game in some way.  Then participants have to find a time during the month to work on their game, starting by announcing their participation on the contest thread, and finishing by posting up to two files, one for the rules and one for any print and play components that are required, within 24 hours of their initial post.  This isn't policed: it is certainly possible to cheat, but there is no incentive to do so as the whole thing is more as a personal challenge, and the community around the contest is a fairly small and very supportive one, so people are more likely to disqualify themselves than try to bend the rules.

The requirement for April was 'Atlantis'.  While some people were thinking of the Space Shuttle and other stuff, I went for a more literal interpretation and decided to create a push-your-luck game about "rescuing" treasured from the mythical city as it sinks beneath the waves.

Four players versus the rising sea levels...
Well, OK, so all four were me, but nobody else was available at the time.

The plan was to have the general shape of the game being for each player to turn over a card from a deck and add it to a line, and decide whether to stay in the round or not, putting their personal marker onto the latest card if they are dropping out.  If a certain number of cards with "sea" on them are turned up, then anyone still in the round misses out, and those who retired get to draft the cards that have been set out, though only having access to the ones between the start of the line and the location of their marker.  The draft is in order of when the markers are placed, so if you drop out early you get the first pick, but you are likely to be able to take the fewest cards.

Of these cards you are collecting, most of them are treasure cards and collecting sets of treasure scores points in different ways.  Some of the cards are sea monsters, and collecting a pair of them forces you to discard one of your treasures.  There are sea cards, of course, and boats, which you can discard to allow you to put your marker onto a sea card.

A short time fiddling around with nanDECK set up some usable cards, with the help of a bunch of images grabbed from game-icons.net, which remains my favourite source of simple images, even if they don't quite have something for every occasion.  Then some solo playtests to try a few possible variations of the rules and I settled on something that seemed to work OK, so I started writing up the rules.

After picking Miss B up for school, she was happy to help me out with a playtest and gave me a definite thumbs up for the design ("better than Boogie Knights" she said, though she isn't a fan of that after playing it quite a few times early on) so I finalised the rules and submitted my entry with only a day of the month left to go.

I'm reasonably happy with this game but, of course, a game created in 24 hours will never be perfect.  It needs a heap of playtesting to shake out whatever problems it has, and I already have one significant change I would like to try, which is to give everyone a limited number of tokens that they can use, so effectively everyone can only participate in a limited number of rounds, and that might add some extra weight to the decisions. Only playtesting will show if that works how I think it might.  I think I may keep this game in my set of reasonably active games, at least for the time being, so we'll see how things go.

Update: the voting list is here if you would like to see all the entries.

24 hours of angels

I haven't taken part in one of the BGG 24 hour contests for a while, and I really wasn't expecting to find the time to do so until the new year.  Furthermore, the December requirement of 'angel' just didn't speak to me (OK, I admit it, I didn't get overwhelmed by a need to make puns in this case), so it looked like I was going to pass again.  But then some inspiration came to me and I figured out that I could find a day where I should be able to spend a reasonable amount of time on the project, so angels are go!

So, the idea was more seasonal than would normally be expected for a grinch like myself: decorating Christmas trees, with the angel requirement being met by players being able to add an angel to the top of the tree to "complete" it and lock the scores in.  The requirement of the contest is just something that has to be incorporated into the game in some (any) way, and not necessarily as a major part of the theme or setting.

Yellow is doing pretty well, despite no angels placed yet.

The game, now it is mostly designed and functional, is essentially a very simple area control game.  At any given point there are four trees that can be decorated, and access to these is restricted by rolling dice.  At the end of the game, points are scored for being first or second place in terms of having the most decorations on each tree, and there are bonuses for anyone who manages to place an angel.

I've already started thinking of places to improve the game -- first among which is the way that the dice are handled and passed between players, as I definitely didn't nail this.  But overall, I think I am reasonably content with how this one turned out, given the restriction.

Incidentally, something that has just occurred to me is that I seem to be becoming more willing to use dice in a game.  I went for a long time wanting to avoid rolling dice, but maybe it is a result of my recent exploration of lightweight games that has shifted my perspective.  Dice are just so widely accepted by "normal" people as a part of games that they can often be slotted in to smooth over aspects of a game that might otherwise need to get far more complicated.  Many "hobby gamers" might push back against their use, but then the games I have been working on lately haven't been aimed at them, so it's fine really.  Maybe I should think about this some more and figure out what is going on here.

If you are interested in this latest game, An Angel On Top, you can look at the files here...
An Angel On Top v0.1 rules on Dropbox
An Angel On Top v0.1 cards on Dropbox

And you can look at the December 24 Hour contest and see what other folk are doing too.

24 hours of mammoths

I missed out on the 24 hour game design contest, partly due to struggling for inspiration given the requirement ("Geisha"), but mostly because August was a bit of a manic month, comprising school holidays and trips all over the place meaning that I didn't manage to arrange for the time to put together an entry.  However, this month life afforded me a little space, and at some point I started thinking about mammoth races, given the contest requirement of "Ice Age".

So, my 24 hour window arrived, running from Thursday evening to Friday evening, I got everything I needed lined up, dealt with the evening's chores and settled down to work.

A pile of components and a beer. In retrospect, the beer may not have been ideal for productivity.

I had figured out a basic plan: a race course made up of tiles, each with a 3x3 grid of squares, this course extending during play, and some form of dice drafting for movement.  After my first couple of entries into the 24 hour contests being pretty much straightforward (ish) card games, I have been trying to do something very different each time, and it occurred to me that given the title of this blog I have been very remiss as regards dice.  Dice are an excellent piece of kit, and I keep hearing people talking on game design podcasts about how "roll and move" games are bound to be rehabilitated and become the new Big Thing, so maybe it's worth exploring that design space, right?

So half an hour with some bits of card, scissors, a ruler, sharpies, and a box of assorted spare components, I have a prototype, and a rough idea of some rules, so I set up for a solo playtest...

A solo playtest of one of the first attempts. The squared cutting board is irrelevant.

...Which sucked.  Royally.

Actually I spent the next couple of hours thrashing around, tweaking rules, occasionally hitting rules with a sledgehammer, and generally looking for a game that I was certain was somewhere in the vicinity.  In the end, I think I found it, so quite tired by this time, I noted down the rules I had arrived at and got some sleep.

The next day, after doing the school run, I looked at my barely coherent notes and started trying to tidy them up.  A little experimentation suggested that the game was in reasonable shape and I was happy with the component requirements, so I got onto the computer to start on some print and play files.

So, tools used: Pinta for knocking up some simple graphics alongside one picture of a mammoth from pixabay.com, nanDECK for creating tiles and mammoth tokens (I fancied making little stand-up mammoths), pdfmerge.com as an online tool to combine the tile and token files into a single PDF to meet the requirements of the contest, and Google Drive/Docs for creating the rulebook.

After school pick-up, Miss B agreed to have a play of the game with the PnP components, and I think the game isn't best for two, but it basically went pretty well.  There are definitely decisions to be made and we had some fun playing.  To make it work properly, there definitely needs to be a LOT more playtesting, but no such luxury is available when doing this contest, so I spent some time finishing off the rules and submitted the files.

...And Miss B helping me try out the print and play version.

So, that's the challenge done for another month.  It's pleasing that I have managed to get several games "out there" this year, even if they are all half-baked.

If you would like to check the game out, the entry is here, along with the discussion and entries from other players.  And for convenience, the download links...

• Mammoth Run v0.1 rules on Dropbox 
• Mammoth Run v0.1 PnP components on Dropbox

Knock me down with a feather!

I really didn't expect this, but with the voting finally being wrapped up a few days ago, my entry to the June 24 hour game design contest won!

Run, run, run, run and climb tree, blam!

Actually, this is only a very small contest and for this month, only four people voted, but I got two of those votes and can thus bask in the small amount of glory that is available for a short while.

Of the games that I have submitted over the last few months, this is the one that I am least happy with, mostly because I just didn't have the time to do all the tweaking necessary to be a reasonably balanced game. I'm not sure if I'll continue developing this one, but I may end up reusing the basic mechanic some time.

24 hours of obscurity

I'm really getting into these 24 Hour design contests.  They have been a great catalyst for thinking about new games and an effective incentive to get a game to a playable and shareable state in a very short period of time.  Plus, as an exercise in scope management, they are excellent: I have to be able to envisage a game that can actually be considered finished (in the sense of being a complete, ready to print and play game) in just a few hours.

The different colour cards are pleasing aesthetically, but they should probably all be the same.

The July contest had the requirement, "obscure".  As always, this is not a theme or title, but just something that needs to be in the game in some way.  Of course, interpretation of the requirement varies between people, so while some participants were thinking about fame versus obscurity, or hipsters liking obscure bands, I was among a group who were thinking about using things to physically hide (or obscure) other things by positioning them on top of each other.

For some reason I fancied working with circles, so I used a pile of circular cards (in three sizes) that I had acquired for game experimentation purposes.  I wanted to have some sort of symbols to obscure or reveal on the cards, so I used some rubber stamps depicting playing card suits (spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs) to print these onto the card discs.  This selection of symbols has the advantage that regular playing cards can be used as an additional component; and, in fact, I went with this, using playing cards for providing scoring objectives: if you have, say, 1 club card you score 1 point for each club showing in the pile of discs.

For a while I was thinking about making this a dexterity game, having players tossing their discs onto the table, with rules about what makes a legal play.  This could actually turn out to be a lot more fun than the game I actually produced, but there would be a lot to think about regarding what comprises a visible or obscured symbol, and so on.  Maybe later...

As usual I managed to get a small amount of playtesting done for the game, with Miss B having a go in the afternoon (and giving a general thumbs up), helping me find a few minor changes.  Then, after some feverish activity in the evening creating rules and a print and play file, Miss B played again in the morning with the slightly revised rules, followed by a three-player game including S.  At this point I was starting to think that perhaps the game would be better without the  smallest discs (with one symbol each), but the deadline was fast approaching, so I made a couple of small tweaks, completed writing up the rules and submitted.

This was one of those occasions when I just couldn't think of a decent name for the game, so I just titled it "Obscure".

Download links, in case you are interested:
Rules on Dropbox
Components on Dropbox

As a final note, I'm definitely getting a lot from these contests, as a bit of fun, some focus and discipline, and some exercise in exploring different types of games.  However, this means that I am not concentrating on developing the games I have in progress and want to get to a better state.  In recent weeks I have actually managed to do a little work on both Scurvy Crew and Boogie Knights (itself, of course, the output from a 24 Hour contest), but there are others that are really languishing, in particular Space Station 7 and El Tiddly.  I guess this is all part of the discipline I need to develop.

So here is the plan for the near future...  I want to get a new release of Scurvy Crew completed (this is actually pretty close) as a priority.  Boogie Knights needs more playtesting with the version 0.2 rules/cards before working on another version.  Then I think SS7 goes up the priorities a bit; what I really need to do is find some testers to battle for a while through the incomplete mess I have at the moment.  We'll see how it goes...

24 hours of assassins - and follies

This month's 24 hour game design contest had the requirement "assassin", which clearly had lots of people thinking in all sorts of different directions.

For my part, memories came back of a scene from one of the Inspector Clouseau films (it turns out that it was The Pink Panther Strikes Again) where Clouseau is bumbling his way through Oktoberfest in Munich looking for clues, while an international horde of assassins hunt him down because the now-insane Dreyfuss has convinced the entire world that only the death of Clouseau will prevent the use of a doomsday machine.  Or something like that.  Of course, the assassins are almost as incompetent as the Inspector, and only succeed in accidentally killing each other off one by one.  For a dose of Peter Sellers versus the world (and dubbed into German on this occasion, though there is little dialogue), you can look here.

An innocent bystander wanders closer to harm's way...

So I wanted to make a game inspired by that scene, but was acutely aware that I could fall into just reimplementing the very silly and fun Kill Doctor Lucky, so I needed a different angle.  I decided that what I would do would be to create an asymmetric two-player game, meaning that each player would have different objectives and, in fact, different ways to play the game. One player would play a team of assassins, hunting their target (and trying to avoid getting in each others' way), while the other player would control their hapless prey.

If you have tried designing this sort of thing before, you will know that asymmetry is hard.  You have to ensure that everyone has an interesting play experience and that everyone has a chance of winning.  To achieve this you either need to do a lot of modelling, followed by a lot of playtesting and tuning, or you need to just do a heck of a lot of guesswork and a ludicrous amount of playtesting.  All this before you really have a game that's even worth playing.  As with any of this game design racket, you can get better at it, developing your instincts and your toolbox of tricks, but this is still a hard class of game to challenge.

I then compounded my folly by deciding to move out of another design comfort zone.  Over the last couple of years I have really come to rely on cards in my designs, even in games that are not what you might call "card games", having some aspects handled with cards is really convenient.  You see it all around: a very large proportion of modern hobby boardgames include an aspect of card play.  So I decided I would avoid the use of cards this time.

Actually, this was a good decision, I think.  I have a stock of meeples, counters, tokens, etc. for prototyping use and I don't really get great use of them at the moment, so this was my moment.  Plus, instead of having to create several sheets of cards to print and cut out, I ended up with two pages of print and play components: one being a map/board, and the other being a player mat to track the actions of the assassins.  Everything else was just meeples and tokens.

I spent my first few hours on the game repeatedly playing partial games against myself on a hastily thrown together map board, each time revising the rules a little in order to improve on something that started extremely shoddy and half-arsed.  A few changes worked out, some didn't, and I ended up with something that mostly worked.

The next day I did a load of work at writing up the rules and creating materials suitable for submission to the contest, and when Miss B returned from school she helped me by playing through the game a couple of times.

By the time I submitted, I had made a last couple of minor changes, but it looks like the "prey" player has a definite advantage, and actually more interesting decisions to make than the assassin player.  The game is deeply flawed, but has provided a fascinating learning experience.  I don't know if I'll develop this game further, but I think I'll be taking another shot at an asymmetric two-player game again some time.

If you would like a look at the game, here are the download links...
Frank Must Die version 0.1 Rules on Dropbox
Frank Must Die version 0.1 PnP Materials on Dropbox

24 hours of knight

After a couple of months where the times just haven't fallen right, I managed to find a day to spend on the May 24 hour game design contest on Board Game Geek.  The challenge this month is "knight" which, as usual, can be interpreted as you like.

Early on in the month, one of the regulars posted a list of titles of (real) books, films, etc. which involved knight puns: "A Hard Day's Knight", "Dead of Knight", "Knight Shift" and so on.  I find it hard to resist a pun contest, so I weighed in with a few that were, as far as I am aware, not yet in use, but perhaps should be.  My list got as far as "Boogie Knights" before I had to stop because I was giggling too much at the thought of armoured warriors and glitterballs.

The original, hand-scribbled prototype #1.  In years to come this may be a valuable artifact.  Or possibly compost.

So after a week or so of mulling this over, I started the clock and went in to my 24 hour period knowing that, actually, I only had about 20 hours as we had a family outing planned for the next day which I didn't want to miss.

I did my usual trick of hand-scribbling some basic cards for the game and mucking about with them myself for a while, before starting to write up rules and nanDECK code and data for generating a "proper" set.  Later on, S and B were available for a bit of playtesting, so we sat down and played a few rounds with the hand-made cards, and discovered that the basic game seemed to work reasonably well and could possibly even be described as fun, but we didn't have nearly enough cards to make the game really playable.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself, though, and feel I should probably give some idea of how the game works and how I got there.

Basically, the inspiration for the game was the title, "Boogie Knights", and this somehow brought to mind those three-part flip books for kids where you have the top, middle and bottom part of a person and can flip the pages to combine them to make different, bizarre, combinations and end up with something the head of an alien, the body of a policeman and the legs of a ballerina.  I figured that you could combine parts of knights and disco dancers for hilarious (?!) effect: I loved the thought of an armoured knight in roller boots.

All this, I figured, could be handled with cards; you could play top, middle and bottom cards to the table in front of you to show how your knight is currently equipped (plus, maybe one or two accessories like a glow stick, or a lance), and then knights could challenge each other to battles, either physical combat or on the dance floor.  Each piece of equipment could make the two disciplines (combat and disco) either harder or easier, so it would be a case of trying to challenge your opponents to a contest where you currently have an advantage.

Play each turn involves playing a card, either to add equipment to your display or to launch a challenge (those are handled by cards too) and then drawing a card from a face-up selection in the middle of the table.  The idea is that the other players can see when you have drawn a challenge card and will have one turn to prepare for the possible challenge, if they are able (and choose to).  The first player to win a set number of challenges (I guess 5 at this time) wins the game.

I don't really have the artistic skill -- and definitely didn't have the time -- to do even remotely decent flip book style art, so decided to just have each card depicting a piece of equipment that could be worn or carried, and found basic illustrations for most of these in the icon selection available on The Noun Project, roughing out my own illustrations for items I didn't find a decent fit for.

The upshot of all this is that I successfully managed to submit a "complete" game comfortably within the 24-hour window, and it's a game that I'm reasonably proud of.  Miss B says that she prefers the Tooth Fairies game but I think that this one, despite being rather simpler (or possibly because of it) has a little more potential for development.  Actually, maybe it is more a case that it is closer to being a "finished" product.  Hopefully I'll be able to do some testing and development on both of them and see how it goes.

And the next day we had a bit of an upgrade: printed cards and many more of them to boot.

I think that part of what I'm learning from these contests is in scope management: it is important to have an idea of what is achievable in the time frame and to not lose focus on it.  It is also great to start building up a stock of games that are in a state where I can happily put them in front of playtesters without having to give a pep talk about how early in the development process things are.  They are still a long way from publishable games, but they are better than I have managed in the past.

In case you are interested, I didn't win the last time I entered, but I got a vote, which was nice!  The community around the contest, though, does make me feel that everyone is a winner.  After all, it's a decent challenge.

You can see my submission post on Board Game Geek, which includes download links to the print & play files here (or you can go straight to the rules and the cards on Dropbox).  You can also see on that thread the other submissions.  These will be converted into a GeekList for voting on at the beginning of June.  If you do take a look at the game (and especially if you play it), please do let me know your thoughts, good, bad or indifferent.

24 hours of fairies

As I stated a couple of posts back, one of my objectives this year was to enter at least one game design competition.  Well, I have now done just that.  It was a very small competition, but it counts for all that.

Prototype 3 in play.  The mug of tea is not an essential component but it was helpful.

So, since the summer of 2012, a guy called Kai, who goes by the handle of schattentanz (I love that name!) on Board Game Geek, has been organising a monthly 24-hour game design contest.  The idea is that he gives a word or phrase that is intended to inform theme or give some sort of restriction, and then at some time in the month, participants spend a single 24 hour period working on a game, at the end of which a game must be made available for judging.  A winner is decided by interested parties "thumbing" the respective submissions, and the whole thing is run on an honour basis, and is intended as just a bit of fun.  It is also a really interesting challenge.  If you want to find out more, you can look at this BGG thread.

I have just completed my attempt.  This month's theme is "Fairy", which can be interpreted however you like.  After some pondering (you are allowed to think about it as much as you like, but no creating anything at all tangible until your window starts) I decided to work on something about tooth fairies paying children for their teeth and presenting sets of teeth to the king and queen of the fairies in exchange for rewards.

On Friday, just after lunch, I got started on the project and made an announcement in this month's thread, and started off by writing up my initial thoughts on rules and scribbling out a small selection of cards (it was going to be a card game) on a pile of blank cards I keep around for just this purpose.

I had to pick up my daughter, Miss B, from school that afternoon, but she helped me out by playtesting the cards and rules I had come up with so far, and this showed that the basic game seemed OK, but flagged up plenty of improvements that were needed.

That evening I worked on an expanded set of cards and tweaked rules, working my design into some nanDECK code and data, printing out a set, mucking around with it a bit and then scrapping it in favour of another set of cards.

This third set of cards got playtested on Saturday morning (this time with both wife and daughter), which threw up a few more tweaks which I managed to implement before bundling up a couple of PDF files (one for the rules and one for the cards) and submitting my entry with half an hour of time to spare.

So now it's a matter of waiting; voting will happen in early March.  I'm pleased with how Tooth Fairies has turned out so far, but there are still a lot of changes that need to be made before I consider it "done", but in the meantime we have a new game that the family enjoys and I have gained some valuable experience.  All good.  I think I'll try doing more of these 24 hour challenges.

If you want to take a look at the game, you can download the rules file and the cards file.  If you play the game (or even if you don't), please let me know how it went and if you spot any problems with it.