Up to Eleven

Looking back I see that my first post in this blog was in April 2014, so I've been blogging - albeit sporadically - about tabletop game design for eleven years. As this is a nice, round number, I figure it's probably worth a look back - and also a bit forward. 

I have a spreadsheet, on which I record all the games I developed as far as having a playable prototype and note its status, etc., and the earliest entry on there is from 2013, so pre-dating this blog. At present there are 58 entries on there. It misses a few entries, like some speed-design exercises done at an event last year, but it covers most of what I have done. Plenty of these games have had a test or two and been buried, never to be seen again. There were a good number of these games, however, that went through at least a few iterations of playtesting and improvement before being shelved, and I'll have a think about some of those in a bit.

I make it that eleven of these projects have got as far as being pitched to publishers. Some of these were a bit speculative rather than in any real expectation of getting anywhere, but four of them actually ended up being signed. Three of these fell through for various reasons - one of which did have a 30-copy limited edition made first though - leaving the one that is now out on shelves and available to buy.

5 prototypes. Clockwise from top left: Corlea, Invaded, Explore & Settle,
Boogie Knights, and in the middle, My Name is...

Thinking back over the past projects, there are plenty that I would like to go back for another look at. I went through something like this a couple of years ago, but I'm a bit more positive about game design in general than I was back then, so here are some of the ones that come to mind...

Boogie Knights is the first game that I took to a public playtest event, in 2015, and helped introduce me to the Playtest UK community. It was a game that I got to a state where it pretty much always went down well with players, but it felt like something was missing. I think there were some unnecessary complexities in it and a fresh look might find how to straighten it out.

Explore and Settle is a terrible working title for possibly the heaviest game I have designed yet. I think there was some interesting stuff in the game with resource management and map building that could have potential. It might actually be that a new title is the main thing needed here!

My Name is... is pretty much the polar opposite of the last game, and is a mind tangling party game with just a deck of cards and very few rules. For some people, this game just worked amazingly, producing laughter and agonised groans in equal amounts. There was never a satisfying end or win condition for the game though - in this sort of game, scoring and winning is rarely that important for most groups, but that aspect does need to be there for it to be sellable.

Corlea is a midweight Euro-ish game based on a real example of iron age people in Ireland building a wooden road through a peat bog. 

And finally for now, Invaded, my long-running white whale of a game with an interesting concept of being a competitive game with a players being residents of a land under attack from a powerful, non-player colonial force. I never really got this one firing properly, and have had thoughts about remaking it with squirrels, but I dunno... should I get back to it and take advantage of years of more experience, or just consign it to the archives?

That question applies to all of the games really, but I think I left Invaded in a state that is most in need of work before being worthy of a playtest. The others, though, maybe I can get them out and onto the table to see what can be done with them. 

To be fair, though, the last time I did a review of games I could get back to work on, it didn't go anywhere, so let's say that by UK Games Expo (which is just a month away), I'll have at least one of these games in a playable state and will see if I can get it to the table there, if not before.

Games to maybe resurrect...?

 Over the years I have started many projects. Most of them I have worked on for a while and then shelved for one reason or another. Some have come back after a while and I've done some work on them again with a fresh perspective. A few games have been around this cycle more than once. As I'm trying to get back into the game design groove, one of the things that I feel could be fun is to look at some of these old projects to see if any of them spark anything in me now. After all, they all had something that interested me back in the day...

So, I've been through the records and pics, and here are some of the games that I think might be worth having another crack at. Any thoughts from anyone reading this would be greatly appreciated. 

Also, apologies in advance for most of these having truly terrible working titles. Such things are not my strong point.

"Role World"... This one was a lockdown project which I used to learn a load about Tabletopia, and is kind of a map building and exploiting game. The idea is that players each have roles, with things that they can do and things that they score points for. To start with the roles all involve laying map tiles, but later on we move to building towns, roads and the like, and also things like dragons and their gold turn up. It wasn't well organised, and the idea that the rules and objectives change through the game raised some eyebrows (it's a different experience if you know what is coming up compared to just playing as a game of discovery), but I think there may be something here. And this one has never been in a physical form and I'd like to change that, as there is something pleasing to me about tiles being placed to build maps.

"Puffins in Hats"... A few years ago I did a personal challenge of drawing something every day for a year, and during that year I drew a lot of puffins for... reasons. One day I drew a bunch of puffins with hats on, and that got an idea into my head that there should be a game called Puffins in Hats. I did a set of passable digital art of these puffins, which is a deft way to start a game design, but nobody stopped me. Then I tried out a couple of variations of rules based on the art, and never found anything that felt much good, so this is the least functional game on this list, but I'd still like to figure out a game here.

"Corlea"... This is one of the most Euro-like games I've worked on, and it has been through a couple of iterations, being something more-or-less like a worker placement game about building a wooden trackway through a bog in iron age Ireland, all inspired by a visit to a fascinating site in County Longford. This wasn't terrible, but not quite engaging enough as a game of its type, but I still like the idea of basing something on this setting, and the overall mechanism of communally processing wood in order to build the trackway.

"Steampunk Workshop"... This one is not really an engine building game in the way that most hobby gamers would understand it, but rather a game where one of the core elements is assembling a shared "machine" of tiles with half-cog connectors. You then have the ability to traverse the machine in different ways to essentially convert resources, plus there are a load of gadgets with steampunk illustrations (which came out of that period of lots of drawing I mentioned earlier) that can help you in different ways. There are potentially some interesting interactions in the "machine" as different tiles get connected and player agents get in the way of each other, but I think the game felt a bit plodding in its pace when I last tried it.

"Courier"... You're a small courier company charged with delivering packages around the city. This was my attempt at a pick up and deliver game; in this case your playing pieces are card stands that you can move around, and the consignments are cards that slot into the stands, and which show where they come from and go to, and the amount that they earn for you. Actions are card driven, so you can upgrade your capabilities by buying more stands or more cards. The big problem I was having with this was in managing how the consignments could be brought out in a way that feels right for the game. 

"Explore and Settle"... This was a bit of a beast that was way too crunchy for its own good. I don't mean that good "solve a puzzle" crunchy, but more of a "way too much to think about for what it is" combined with a bit of confusion about one of the core mechanisms. It's largely based around a map build using standard cards, where the main part of the card is a square of terrain, while the remaining "tab" produces resources and other benefits, but only until it is covered over by another card. I think there is probably something good here, and I've not looked at it for a few years, so I might have some new insight.

"Monster Invasion"... This is a little solo game about defending a fantasy village from a monster horde, where each card constrains which cards can be played next. Some cards increase "threat", some allow you to power up in preparation to use magic, and some cards reduce the threat level. If you can't play, you can draw a card and increase the threat. Too much threat and you lose; get through the deck and you win. I rather liked this one, though the play was often tense and edgy until it wasn't, and then the game just played out. That's a matter of tweaking and balancing. I was also trying to figure out how to get boss monsters into the game in an interesting way. 

"Roll-Move-Race"... So I wanted to try making a roll & move game, so this one involves racing robots across the table on a track that you build as you go, with the potential to gain upgrades that provide various boosts and luck mitigations. I quite liked this (though it certainly had a long way to go) and I'm not sure why it fell off the "active" pile, so I should probably pull it out again and give it a fresh look.

I think that'll do for now. I'm sure I can make some good progress on some of these, but we'll just have to see what grabs me most. As I said, any thoughts, questions, or input would be gratefully received.

London Bog Castles

Muppet that I am, I wrote up a post about my London playtest trip last month and then forgot to post it. I only realised this today, more than a month later.  So, please note that the following was written weeks ago...

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This month's playtesting trip to London coincided with St Patrick's Day, and realising this a week or two in advance nudged me into dragging Corlea, my game about building a trackway through a bog in Iron Age Ireland, back onto the workbench and seeing if I could get it into shape following some serious problems with it a few months ago.

A big element of the original concept of the Corlea game was that building the trackway created new action spaces that you could use, and players would progress along it in a "Tokaido" style (the player at the back can move as far forward as they wish).  This never worked as I wanted it to, and I decided that this was a darling that I should kill, and so I rebuilt the game with something closer to a regular "worker placement" mechanism.  And that is what I tested.

The Corlea board could definitely do with a redesign: it gets hugely cluttered!

When playtesting it is important to know what you want to get out of the exercise and can also be useful to let your players know what you are wanting from them.  In this case, I knew that the balance of the scoring elements of the game, and the usefulness of various cards and possibly action spaces, was likely to be questionable at least.  I asked my testers (who were, remember, game designers themselves) to try to ignore game balance for now and just see how the game flows and help me decide if I had something that felt like a game rather than an exercise in frustration like the previous version.  If it passes this test, I can start looking at the details.

So how did we do?  Well, I think the game passed the initial smell test.  Quite a lot went right: turns zipped along, so downtime was not long, total playtime was just short of an hour, pretty much nailing the sweet spot I was aiming for, decisions felt reasonably interesting most of the time (though got less so later on), we saw some variety in styles of play thanks to some of the skill cards and, slightly comically and unexpectedly given that I was certain that the game had horrible balance problems, the end game scores were reasonably close.

There were plenty of problems we found.  For instance the set collecting part of crafting and burying offerings just didn't hang together properly, there was no lure to get players to try collecting "King's Favour" (one-off, instant effect) cards, later in the game the positioning of workers in various tasks became rather stale, we ran out of one of the stacks of cards, and various effects felt either over or under powered.  All these things are totally solvable, and I count this playtest as a huge success: the game overall mostly worked and I now have a list of things to look at next.  Onward!

After playing a couple of other games from another designer, we reached the point where everyone who had brought a prototype had had at least one play, and the afternoon was getting fairly late, so people started to leave.  I did, however, manage to get a quick test of my two-player Castle War card game with a designer I was chatting with.

This play of Castle War was basically a casual play-through, with only a minor tweak since my last try of it, hoping to largely get another perspective on the issues identified in other recent tests.  The outcome was that the minor tweak (which was just a slight nerfing of an effect) seemed to have been positive, and the feedback I got closely aligned with feedback and observations from my last play or two.  Essentially the game could do with a little more ability to manoeuvre troops, the unit types didn't seem as distinct as maybe they should (though maybe that's not actually a problem), and occasionally you can end up with a hand of cards that is just useless in your current situation, so we want a little more flexibility there.

So, all in all another really enjoyable and productive day. Thanks due to everyone who attended and made it so good, as always.

What's been going on?

I've not been very good at blogging lately, but I have been moving a number of projects along, so I thought I'd just write a quick post about some of the things I have been working on lately.  If you know me personally or have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I tend to flit around between many projects and am not very good at concentrating on one thing until it is "done", but I am finding a sort of rhythm where there are a number of games that I bring back after months (occasionally years!) of lying fallow, and on going through a few iterations like this with several games, it looks like the time spent is beginning to pay off.

The main game I've been working on over the last few months is Scurvy Crew, a pirate game which has its origins some five years ago, but has finally got to a stage where I think it is mostly there.  I stripped out a load of complexity, while leaving some engine-building aspects of card play (where you can spend part of the game building an "engine", in this case a set of cards, which you then move on to exploiting as you push for victory), leaving a game that generally only takes five minutes to explain and around half an hour to play.  I'm still not happy with the end game, and the balance of the cards needs looking into, but I really feel I'm getting somewhere now.

Scurvy Crew heading towards a conclusion. 

The Castle War, based on a 12th century war in England, is a game that hasn't been on the back burners for more than a few weeks at a time, and is less than six months old as a project, but has come fairly quickly to be close to how I want it to be.  I think it is a bit more of a "Marmite" game than Scurvy Crew, but I'm pretty pleased with how it is going.  There are some fairly serious balance issues to work through, but it's a small game and I feel pretty confident about it right now.

Mid way through The Castle War, which saw some interesting swings and roundabouts.

In a very different style, Corlea is the closest thing I have made so far to a regular "Eurogame".  It's inspired by an archaeological site in Ireland, and is about building an oak trackway through a bog.  My last attempt at working on this one was last summer, and it just wasn't working, but I have stripped out one big element of the game (building sections of trackway that you could then use to activate actions within the game) and moved much closer to an ordinary "worker placement" game (you have "workers" that you put in various parts of the board to take actions).  I'm still having all sorts of trouble with this but I think it's now moving in the right direction, so we'll see how it goes over a couple of playtesting sessions.

A three-player (though all of them were me!) game of Corlea just before I abandoned it.

Apart from these things I have also created early prototypes of two (count them!) very different games inspired by the bizarre instances of snail-related warfare in early 14th century illuminated manuscripts.  Not much to report on those for now, but we'll see.

Making Tracks in London

Having missed a month due to reasons of having a family and a life with them, I got back to the London Sunday playtest meetup this weekend, and this time took along my game, Corlea, inspired by an iron age wooden road through a section of bog in County Longford in Ireland. I first did a little race game based on this site a couple of years ago, and then last year added this Euro-style game to my pile of works in progress, and came back to play with it some more this year. (Click on the "Corlea" label below to find the various posts.)

Anyway, this was the first time I had playtested the game with anyone other than one of my local friends, so I was hoping to learn some new things about the game. I knew already that the game end was woolly, balance was poor, and pacing was uncertain, but what else...?

About mid-game, with most of the worker cubes on the board,
and some very fine elbow modeling from the testers.

We had a three-player game, taking only about half an hour, which was something of a surprise: all the tests I had run of this over the last few months have been solo, so I really had no idea of how long it would take with real players.  This is a fine example of how, while solo testing is a really useful approach for getting rough assessments of progress, you really do need other people to know what is what.

Overall I think the game was less dull than I had feared, but was very much underwhelming -- though, given its early stage of development, I'm not going to beat myself up over that.  Some of the key observations we had were:

• The trackway got completed rather quickly, with chieftains (player pieces) still only half way along.
• Once a load of worker cubes had been placed, competition for the various action/scoring spots pretty much stopped.
• The dice for scoring and action difficulty were reasonably popular, but seemed too chaotic in the way they are being used.
• The various types of card are probably the key to the game, but at the moment they don't quite get there, and the incentive to acquire them might not be enough as yet.
• There was a feeling that the game is entirely tactical, and you can't really make any strategic plans.

There were a load more comments, which I have noted in my logbook, but I think these are the main ones I want to address in the short term.  My plan for the next iteration is to remove cubes from action spaces every time an action is completed, and to try a different way of handling the scoring dice to make them more predictable.  I also need to work out a smarter end to the game.  From then on, we'll see...

This was, of course, an afternoon that was not all about my game, and I was able to test and give feedback on several other prototypes.  This time we had a clever auction game, a sneaky negotiation and voting game, a tense cooperative alien hunt, and a frantic real-time dice game, and missed some other great stuff at other tables.  Looking forward to next month already...

Back to the Track

It seems to be developing into an annual tradition, posting each summer about making a game based on the Corlea trackway in County Longford, Ireland.  So, this year's post comes from a little thinking about the game and reworking the prototype based on notes from the last playtest (nearly a year ago) and the intervening time spent away from it, thinking about other things.

So far, 2018 seems to have been a bit of a year of going back to some of the old projects and applying refreshed (and more experienced) brain cells to some old problems that needed some new insight. I'm totally standing by this approach.  Some other designers seem to be very good at concentrating on one design and iterating until it is done.  As the last few years of posts on this blog attest, I tend to flit around, concentrating on one or two projects for a while, then moving on to others.  Some games get revisited and progressed later, and some just get buried and forgotten.  If I needed to rely on game design for income (and thankfully I don't) I might need to work differently, but for now this seems an effective way for me to keep moving.

About the middle of the game, with a couple of fresh trackway sections built. Green to play...

My latest revision of Corlea includes the following changes:

• I have dropped the "recruit workers" and "produce food" actions, and combined the remaining "village" actions (train workers, craft offerings, and king's favour, which all provide cards that might help you) into a single action, while keeping them as separate locations for the purposes of assigning worker cubes.
• As a result of this, I have reduced the number of action spaces on the trackway board segments from eight to six.
• Instead of having a "shop front" of available cards when you use the village actions, you draw a number of cards from the relevant deck and select one to keep. The number of cards you draw is equal to the number of worker cubes you have in that space, so the more you take the action, the more control you have over its outcome.
• To control the difficulty (number of workers required) of each of the scoring actions, I am now using a die (d6) for each action location. If there are enough workers, the location is scored and the die rerolled; otherwise you get a small individual score and reduce the value on the die.
• And there are a load of changes to cards, basically to take into account this set of changes, as many of the old cards no longer make sense.

Having diligently worked these changes into a new prototype, I sat down to run a solo playtest of the game, with me controlling each of four different "virtual players" to at least exercise the mechanisms and see how things went before I try putting the game in front of real people. A game like this is reasonably easy to play solo in this way: whose turn is next is immediately apparent from the state of the board, and what limited hidden information exists is not game breaking if I know all of it.

Half an hour or so later and I had...

Oh God oh God oh God oh God... This game is terrible! I suck at game design! It's never going to work. Why do I bother? Sob sob...

OK, so it's not quite as bad as that, but it really isn't any good as things stand. The thing is that this game is very much in the "Euro game" school of design, a style of game that centres on resource management, creating efficiencies, controlling areas of influence, indirect player competition, and so on. This sort of game usually builds on a number of mechanical systems which lock together to make a machine that players each influence parts of, and much of the engagement of the game should come from figuring out how to interact with the parts of this machine that you are working with better than the other players manage with their parts. I'm aiming at Corlea being towards the simpler end of the spectrum of games along these lines, but as it goes at the moment, player choices don't seem particularly meaningful or interesting, and often the machine simply stutters and stalls.

From what I can make out, this is something that hits all boardgame designers, pretty much all the time. The trick is figuring out either how to move forward, or how to get over the sunk cost of getting the game this far and give up on it, either temporarily or permanently.

I think that there is enough in the game that is usable, and I don't really have experience developing this type of game, even though I love playing them, so I am choosing to push onwards for now. The key mechanical problems at the moment, as I see them are:

• While players should have to work to move resources through the system, right now it is all just too slow.
• The village actions provide handy bonuses, but right now the opportunity cost to go for them are just too great in comparison to the benefits.
• The game start is a bit slow, so it takes a few turns for things to get moving, and that first part is tedious, so it should be skipped.
• It's not clear that there are any real strategic decisions to make.

The first three of these points should be relatively easily addressable, but the fourth could be a big problem if things don't change when I deal with the others.  So I will have a go at dealing with the issues I have identified so far and see where that takes me.  

Returning to Corlea

You may remember last year I wrote about a trip to an archaeological site in Ireland, where an impressive iron age road made of oak had been discovered in a bog in County Longford, and how I made a simple race game inspired by it.  I didn't do any further work on that game, but the idea of basing a design on the Corlea trackway stayed in the back of my head, waiting for another idea to combine with.

I'm not really particularly imaginative about game mechanics, but thoughts about combinations of mechanisms that might be fun to fit together jump into my mind once in a while. And so it was that I started thinking about an area control game (players put tokens in various areas and, at various points in the game, score points according to whoever has the most points in each area) where the placement of these tokens is controlled by a worker placement system (players put "workers" onto spaces on a board to take actions, and these placements limit those available to other players).  The action spaces on the board would, however, be on a modular board that grew during play, so every now and then a new "slice" of board would be added, opening up new options.  Thinking about this a little more I thought that it would probably make sense for the workers to always move forwards along this extending track, and the turn order would be decided by the worker furthest from the front taking the next action, taking a cue on this from the delightful game of taking a walk in Japan, Tokaido.

That was all well and good, but some basic mechanisms do not a game make, for me at least, and I feel that I need some sort of theme (which may change later) to guide my decision making as I build and develop a prototype, so I was pretty much stuck until I remembered the Corlea trackway.  Slices of a board that grow during play could representing building sections of the trackway, and there are several tasks that can form the core of the game: cutting down trees, splitting the logs into planks, transporting the wood to the bog, and building the trackway itself.  It all started coming together...

So the core of the game is about those four key tasks: cut timber, make planks, transport planks, and build trackway.  Each of these actions is triggered by moving a "chieftain" (the tokens used for action selection) onto an appropriate space on the trackway.  When an action is triggered it moves a wood token along the board, indicating its current status and availability for further tasks, and points are scored according to who has the most "workers" (wooden cubes indicating clansmen as labour resources) assigned to that task.  Workers get moved around as part of various actions.  I also added a fifth task, which is to feed the workers, which scores points and allows the points scored for each task to be rearranged (this is indicated by little score tiles on each task space.

Finally I added a little extra interest in the shape of three types of special cards which can be acquired by sending a chieftain to appropriate action spaces... Offerings are items which you craft and can dedicate to the gods when you build a section of trackway (as an aside, these trackways commonly had offerings laid beneath them, but the archaeology of the main Corlea trackway showed surprisingly little evidence of this) to give you end-game scoring bonuses for sets. Skills are bonuses that apply to your workers all the time, like breaking ties for scoring on a task.  King's favours are one-off bonuses that you can make use of at an appropriate time.

I've done a bit of solo testing of this so far and just the one try with another player, and it plays OK and isn't terrible, but doesn't quite hang together right yet.  In particular, the trackway sections all seem a bit samey (there is some variation, but it is minor) and the way workers get deployed and moved about just doesn't feel right as it is.  I think there is a basis of a game here, though, so it will be staying in the development heap for a while to see what I can do with it.

A Road of Oak

A few weeks ago, during a holiday in Ireland, we took a fascinating trip to the Corlea Trackway in County Longford.  This is an amazing piece of archaeology: a well-preserved section of a walkway constructed in the 2nd Century BC, that has been painstakingly preserved and put on display in a really nice visitors' centre.  The trackway is a road built from oak planks, designed to traverse sections of the bog and was both a marvelous feat of engineering and something of a failure, as it appears to have sunk into the bog under its own weight after only a few years.  If you are in the area, I reckon it is well worth a look as it is a pretty unique site with a fascinating history.

After this visit I couldn't help thinking about the box of lollipop sticks I have sitting in my stash of stuff at home, and pledged to myself that I would try making a game based on the trackway.

There is some (to say the least) debate about the actual purpose of this trackway.  It seems like overkill for simply allowing the locals easier access to or across the bogs (after all, it was built from oak, which was normally reserved for higher purposes).  The alignment and positioning of the route suggests that it might be part of a path connecting major royal sites in Leinster and Connaught.  Of course there are suggestions of a spiritual or religious purpose too.  I have proposed an alternative theory, based on extensive ludological research: it could have been a race track.

So my first attempt at a game had me marking lolly sticks with colours so that there were six colours (matching the six colours of meeples I have in the general stock), and on each side of the stick there were two different colours.  I then got the relevant meeples and asked Miss B to help try the game out.

Play basically involves pulling one of the sticks out of a bag and adding it to the growing trackway as a plank, and you get to choose which way up to put it.  You then move the meeples of the two colours showing on your new stick: one of them moves one space, the other moves two.  Each of us was secretly supporting two of the colours (randomly assigned) and we scored points for the race position we were in when the sticks ran out.

Miss B loved the game.  I have no illusions that this would entertain hobby gamers for more than the first couple of seconds, but I think impressing a 9-year-old, who is not afraid of being very critical of my games, is a good start.  I think we may have a viable core mechanic, but something far more is needed here.  In particular, I don't think that there is either enough room for strategy or enough chaos in the game; it may seem contradictory, but the game probably needs more of both.

So, some things that I may experiment with include:

• Some sort of board which may provide some sort of restriction on how planks get played.
• Possibly the board could grow and be made from cards or tiles.
• Another class of sticks which may do something different to just moving two meeples.
• Maybe "legs" to the race, so moving along stretches of trackway between islands.
• Sections of the track might sink.
• The different meeples could have special abilities.
• Drafting sticks/planks instead of pulling them from the bag.