A game on the table is worth two (hundred?) in the mind

Over the last couple of years I have increasingly been giving advice to game designers who are even newer to the craft than I am that they should stop thinking about and planning their first game and make a minimally functional prototype that allows them to try out some small part of the game which can then be built on.  It is probably the biggest lesson that I have learnt and it has stood me in good stead.  But I still get caught in the trap myself.

Take the "TheoDemocracy" game I posted about a couple of times in May.  You might remember that this is intended to be a cooperative game with the feature that players are forced into attacking each other by external forces. I was spouting all sorts of ideas and trying to refine them and make a plan on how to build a worthwhile prototype.  I even started work on cards and player boards, but was struggling a bit of getting the full picture together.  Then I had to turn my attention to preparations for, and the aftermath of, UK Games Expo, and I have only just managed to get the brain cells back in line to work on this particular project.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?!  I was going against all the good practice I have learnt, and spent more effort planning and talking than actually doing.  To be clear, planning and talking is also really useful, but not as much as actually making a physical thing that can be played with.  Time to correct that mistake.

So I stripped most of the ideas away and pulled out my trusty piles of filing cards, flashcards, and random tokens and counters, and got to work.

Not much to look at, but that's not the point.

Within minutes I had three player boards, greatly simplified from previous plans, and a pile of 10 cards with simple objectives on them like "control 3 provinces" and "build a temple".  I had given up (for now) on the whole multi-purpose cards idea, and was simply turning up an objective for each player on each turn and seeing if they can fulfill the requirement; if a player fails, they gain an "unrest" token.  I basically made the rest up as I went along.

And, hurrah! This all basically worked for a dull and unchallenging game.  I am actually extremely happy with how that went for the couple of rounds I played solo.  What I can now do is add a few more objectives, add necessary economy/building/military rules to support these, and figure out a way to give a little more control to the players.  One idea for that latter requirement might be to deal everyone a hand of cards and you each get to choose one or more cards to send to each of the other players and yourself, and possibly discard a card or two that will come back later in the game; then everyone gets to deal with the cards that they have acquired in this way.  Just a thought.

So that is where I am now: the basics of an engine, with a few features that mostly work, and actually something that I can start building on.  Let the iteration commence.

Without God or Democracy There Is Just This...

Back to the development of this cooperative game set in a mythical version of classical Greece, and I've been discussing ideas for the game with a few people on BGDF and working on the basics for an initial prototype.  Having got through some far-too-complicated-or-fiddly ideas, I have got to a basic engine to build the game from.  The real guts of the game should be dealing with conflicting and sometimes painful demands from the gods and the people, but to make that work there needs to be some form of an economy.

What I have settled on is there being seven different commodities that can be produced: food, wine, cloth, wood, stone, bronze and silver.  I'm not sure what they will all be used for, but they seem a reasonable representation of different things that might be important in a setting like this.  I have discarded the idea of using either counters or score tracks to tally the amount of each commodity you have, and just have a load of locations that can produce things, and each of them either has things you can use or they don't.  A game like this could easily become a spreadsheet control exercise, so I am choosing to make it hand-wavey, with simple levels of "yes, we have access to wood" rather than "we have 17 units of wood".  (I note that this isn't entirely dissimilar to my approach in "Explore and Settle" -- am I developing a personal style here?)

Anyway, explaining this with words is probably harder than showing you a picture.  So here is my first pass at a player board to track stuff.  Actually, that is a lie, it is about my fourth pass.  Here it is...

It's not flashy because it's an early prototype. Hopefully it's usable.

So what you see above is your city state.  There is your city itself and two provincial regions nearby.  Within these regions are squares representing locations that can produce the various commodities. At the start of each player's turn, a production card is flipped over, naming two commodities that can be produced, and each player may choose one of those commodities and place a marker on each location they control that produces that commodity and doesn't already have a marker.  Channeling a little bit of Catan there -- opportunities happen on everyone's turn, though I have a minor concern that as there is a decision to make for everyone, that may slow the game down in some groups, but that is something to discover with playtesting.

Controlling a location? Well, you control a location if it is in a region on your board and nobody else has an army parked in that region, or you control a location on someone else's board if you, and only you, have an army in the region.

Which brings us to armies.  At the moment, I am thinking of a very simple mechanism where if, at any point, there are more armies of one player in a region than all other armies, then the minority armies are destroyed; anything else results in a stalemate.  This basically means that there can be situations where if you have one army controlling one of my provinces, and I need to reclaim it to use the resources, I have a choice of putting one army in there so you can withdraw or disband your army on your next turn, or I send in multiple armies to just wipe you out and clear the region quickly.

Back to those commodities.  Basically you can spend them to buy or do things.  So far I see bronze being used for armies, wood for ships (I actually typed wood for sheep there before correcting!), stone for temples, food for either maintaining or growing your population (will get into that another time), silver for upkeep of units (and probably to build anything).  I'm not sure if wine or cloth will be used for anything; if they aren't useful, I'll drop them.  I have an idea for trading with overseas powers, but that can wait for now.  When you use a commodity, you just remove a matching marker from a location.

That's enough for now.  I need to keep working on making this thing rather than just writing about it.  Next up: those demand cards to make things both difficult and interesting...

Theo-democracy

Continued thoughts on the potential cooperative game where you are forced to attack the other players...

It occurred to me that a great potential setting for a game like this could be a fantasy version of ancient Greece.  If I mashed together the gods and heroes from the mythical era with rival city states and Athenian-style democracy from the classical period, this could be a great starting point.

No wonder they are fighting, it looks really crowded in there.
Picture yoinked from wikimedia.org and is allegedly in the public domain.

The main thrust of the game is now that each player controls one of the city states and each turn you have to balance the will of the gods with the will of the people, and woe betide anyone who ignores them both.  Both of those demanding factions are fickle and capricious, so getting a random deal of cards (showing a demand from one or both of gods or people) each round should model that pretty well.  We can have a measure of divine anger and civil unrest for each player, and if those get too high, the game is lost, and those measures can also impact how other things work out.

I'm not yet sure how to win the game at this point.  It could simply be a matter of surviving a certain amount of time without the balance breaking down, but I think there needs to be more of an interesting finale to build towards.  I think this can be developed later -- knowing that the basic play of the game works is probably more important -- but I need to keep it in mind and come up with something before too long, even if that changes later.

Of course, this could all be so much easier if it was a competitive game, but that is not the challenge, and would probably end up with something rather more vanilla.

I want this game to have a board, rather than being just a card game, largely so we can see armies moving around on a map.  This might just get abstracted to a circle where you attack and defend left and right.  In fact that is probably enough for a first iteration, and if more scope for manoeuvre is found to be required, then so be it.  So that means that some of the actions available will boil down to deploying troops either to your left or your right, and using them to attack or defend.  Part of  the game would therefore end up being to fight battles and win glory, but not being too effective at it.

That would make for quite a dull game, so there needs to be more going on out there.  Building temples to the gods would probably be good. Something to do with games (of the Olympic variety), maybe.  Also economic elements, including production of goods domestically and trade, both with the other players and with off-board non-player powers.  To get with the mythical element, doing things like launching a thousand ships to attack Troy would be cool too.

As I write, I am starting to put together a very basic prototype to try the principles out, using a few of the ideas I have mentioned above.  Next time I write on this subject, I will relate how that went.

Before that happens, though, I am feeling a bit of a 24 hour challenge buzz...

Cooperating With Your Enemies

So I was having a discussion on Facebook, which started about whether there are any cooperative boardgames that are best with, or specifically designed for, three players.  This quickly developed into a bit of a design brainstorm about a possible game that could fit that bill given that people were suggesting games that were good with three, but nobody seemed to find one that was best with that count.   Huge thanks to Tim Cox and Koen Hendrix for throwing around some really interesting ideas and making this into a really fun evening's diversion.

One of the participants suggested Dune as a setting, and this got me thinking about how to create a true cooperative game, with no traitor mechanic or anything like that, but based in a universe where everyone is trying all manner of underhand tricks, including, but not limited to, assassination and nukes.  Once we got that far, I had fallen down a rabbit hole and I found there were ideas bouncing around that wouldn't let go.

A dune. Not sure those guys have properly set up stillsuits.
Pic yoinked from pexels.com

I don't feel inclined to create a game that relies heavily on an IP, but I'll use Dune as an example for what I am thinking about right now...  (I'll confess here that it is a long time since I have read any of the Dune books -- and I did lose the will to live before getting through the entire series -- so my thoughts here are based mostly on incomplete memories of the first book and subsequent screen adaptations.)

So, regardless of player number (it would be nice to hit that magical three, but this discussion is on to something else now), there needs to be a common goal which, if achieved, means that everyone wins.  In Dune terms, let's say that there needs to be a spice harvest to bring in enough spice, and at that point no single house must be in control of Arrakis. We will basically assume that, for the overall good of everyone, a stand-off is what is most desirable, even if the noble members of the various houses don't actually see it that way.

There also needs to be ways to lose.  As a first pass, lets say that if any house gets all their influence completely removed from Arrakis, that sufficiently destabilises things to end the game, as does one house becoming sufficiently powerful.

So if everyone wants stability to be maintained, surely that is easy.  And isn't it unthematic to think that there is any possible universe where a Harkonnen won't stick a knife into an Atreides back given a reasonable opportunity?

Yes, true.  So we will force this.

My thinking at the moment is that each round, every player is forced to make at least one move that is nasty and obnoxious and would work against the interests of maintaining a balance.  You know, I invest in this city, harvest some spice, negotiate with the Guild, and assassinate one of your leaders; yeah, sorry, I didn't have much choice there.

How can we make that happen? Well, maybe the game is card driven and you need to play all the cards in your hand each round.  Each card has a nice, positive effect that nudges the game towards victory, and also something unpleasant that screws everyone in general but one player in particular; then you have to decide which of your cards (or maybe more than one) you play for its bad effect.  So there may be some effects that are absolutely essential to provide any chance of winning, but that means that you have to deploy the house atomics against the last player who looked at you funny.

Combine that with some external challenges that need to be overcome and we may have a game here.  I'm on it and will see if I can get a basic prototype playable soon -- though I probably won't be using the Dune setting.  I have an idea for an alternate setting, which then suggests a load of developments.  I'll start building that and will post about it really soon.

To be continued...