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.

A World and Some Roles

This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a number of weeks now and I've been trying to find a way of expressing it. The story goes back to reading "The Well-Played Game" by Bernard de Koven, a book that is mentioned in many texts on game design. It is more a book of philosophy than of game design, and explores the interactions and tensions between "playing" and "games".  Games, in this case, including board games but mostly focusing on social and playground games and their extension, sports.

One of the lines of thought in the book included that a "well-played game" is one where the participants all take part willingly and enthusiastically, and can leave the game if they no longer wish to continue, and may even be able to change the way they play. There are plenty of angles to this well-played game explored in the book, but this is an area that had my mind firing off. Could I make a board game where players could come and go if they wish, and which allowed them to change the way they played?

As an aside, most roleplaying games I know about can be played in this sort of way: the core is the developing character narrative and a gamesmaster and the rest of the group can work together to adapt the play however the group wishes. I am certain there is a lot already written about this sort of thing (the RPG community has spent a lot of time thinking about how games are played), but that's out of my area these days.

After some sleeping on this, I started thinking about a world, growing from nothing, with players building the world, populating it, and guiding its inhabitants as stuff happens.  One player could be creating a map by laying tiles, another could be building villages on the map, and another could be an adventurer exploring the map, and so on.  You would take a role, which would give you a simple set of actions that you can take, and a way that you score points. When you choose, you may discard the role, take a new one and now, instead of being a terraforming deity, you are now a dragon gathering gold for its lair.

I threw together some tiles in nanDECK, going for an arrangement of square tiles, each of which contains four triangles that are put next to other triangles to make squares arranged at 45° to the alignment of the tiles. I'm not sure why I did that, but it seemed fun at the time. After printing and cutting a few of these I decided that I would actually take the opportunity to get some practice in playing with Tabletopia, so shifted my efforts to a digital version that I might actually have a chance at playtesting during the ongoing lockdown.

Printed tiles. You get the general idea

One of the advantages of an online platform is that you can import all sorts of components and just experiment. I have at home a good supply of assorted game components, but for tiles, cards, and so on, there is a load of printing and cutting required, which I have got pretty efficient at, but is still something of a grind. Tabletopia has a decent library of standard components (not covering everything, but good enough for many purposes) that can just be dropped into a game project. Preparing tiles and cards for upload and managing them in the system is a bit of a pain, especially at first, but there are some big advantages. Like, for example, when I decided I wanted twice as many tiles, I could just click on the existing stack and duplicate it.

I fiddled about with my virtual prototype for a while, building up a few of the roles that players could take, putting the instructions for them onto oversized cards that I added to the prototype, meaning that pretty much all of the rules would be within the game itself: each player could just take a role card, read it, and start playing.

Eventually I got to the point where I enlisted a friend to try the game out and see how it held together when I was not playing all the parts.

Testing with another human was very revealing.

As is so often the case, the game didn't play particularly well. The general concept of the game seemed OK, but it was just too damn complicated for the light-and-breezy type of game I was hoping for.  One of the big issues was that there was too much variation between the different roles, and as a player you were more or less having to learn a new game each time you took a new role. And the way that you played a role for as long as you wished before changing just didn't sit right.

At the start of the design process for this game I was wondering if it should be competitive or cooperative in nature, and I went for the former, mostly because it is what I know best and cooperative games can be so much harder to create. After all, not only do you need to make the game mechanisms work properly, but you need something for the players to be working against, and getting that right is hard.

Anyway, at this stage I decided that what the game really wants to be is a series of puzzles, where what one player is trying to achieve can interact with the other players' actions. And with this in mind, cooperative play could be best.  A game of this sort of form could be played against some sort of a timer, so the roles would now have an objective (on completion, or if you decide to give up, you switch to a new role with a new objective) and the aim would be for the players between them to complete a certain number of objectives before time run out.

A literal timer is out of the question for this. Real-time pressure, while exciting in some contexts, just adds stress and I don't want this to be a stressful game.  What I actually decided to go for is to introduce dice. A bunch of (six-sided) dice get rolled, players each take one in turn to use for the movement of their avatar, until there is only one left, and that die gets placed in a "timer" display, and a new fistful of dice are rolled.  When either one of each number (1 to 6) has been accrued, or there is three of a single number, the game ends. This way the players are partly at the whim of fate, but also have some control over how they allow the game to progress.

So building the next iteration of the game was largely about this timing mechanism and the idea that there should be core rules for everyone to learn and the roles just give minor variations, which may accumulate as you move through the game, but at no point should require anyone to absorb a large raft of new options. Getting these changes into Tabletopia can involve a little faffing, but I'm not having to print and cut physical components, so there is something of a trade-off.

I then managed to get a playtest with a couple of friends, who got on pretty well with the general concept of the game and its overall flow, but had plenty to say about it as well. I was left with a feeling that this iteration was definitely an improvement and I liked the game in its cooperative mode. The next thing to do would be to extend the selection of roles and sequence them so that there is something of an arc to their progression. One suggestion was to have three phases of play: one being to build the world, the next to add complexity and cause trouble and strife, and the third to heroically put everything right. Players then have to get through a certain number of roles, or complete some of the "ending" roles before the timer runs out.

A few turns in, working with the first set of "world building" roles.

I would also like to have some more significance to how the timer operates, maybe having events triggering when certain sets of numbers are completed, but I can worry about that later, I think.

As an aside, I have also figured out the "magnetic board" option on Tabletopia, which allows you to have components neatly snapping into position when you drop them, and have a grid board that makes placing tiles much easier.  What I made isn't as big as the potential play area, but it'll do, and you can always add more tiles alongside.

A "magnetic" board can make everything so much smoother and cleaner.

Last up, I need to think of a decent working title for this game. I've been calling it variations of "Role World Thing", which doesn't really have any sort of ring to it. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.