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.

Back to the Trees

In a change from the recent obsession with one game, I recently dusted off an old design and gave it a test play at work.  The game in question was An Angel On Top, which was my entry for the 24 hour game design contest back in December 2015.  I just figured that it might be worth a look to see if it had any merit.

An Angel On Top (previous post here) is basically a simple, area control game where you score points for putting the most decorations onto Christmas trees, and more points for putting angels on top of them to finish the tree off, with your opportunities and choices constrained by a bit of dice rolling.  I tidied the old prototype up and tried it out with a friend at work, Phil, who happens to also be a game designer.  We sometimes play each other's prototypes over lunch, and this was what I brought in one day.

The game sort-of worked, it was a bit of fun, but got frustrating when the dice ended up combining with the available tree cards to give little or no choice on your turn.  We had a useful discussion and ended up with a few ideas for improving the game.

A bunch of components that comprise version 2 of An Angel On Top.
The trees could do with being coloured in.

A week later we got to try an improved version: bigger cards (tarot sized) with different sized trees on them, decorations that you could add as long as you could physically fit them on the tree without touching another decoration, special actions you could take when you placed an angel, and a few more dice to increase the available options.

The improvements were definitely improvements, and there was definitely more of a game there, though it still felt like it was missing something.  I think that the main issue is that the dice selection mechanism is a bit dull.  Our discussion on this suggests that maybe if you could use different sets of dice to take different actions (a pair does one thing, three-of-a-kind does another; a run-of-three is something else, etc.) you might have some more interesting decisions to make.

So, that's what I will do for the next iteration.  I doubt this game will ever be particularly unusual or groundbreaking, but it might be nice to have a half-decent, light Christmas game in the collection.