August catch-up

 I've been letting the blogging slide quite a lot recently but, although I've not been working at high speed on anything, I have been making progress on a number of projects over the last month or so, so here is a quick summary of what has been going on.

Scurvy Crew

There isn't a lot I can say about this right now, as this is being turned from my pirate card game into a product with a load of cool stuff going on in it, but most of that is still not finalised. There are now a couple more, very talented, people involved in the development team (and another incoming), and there are some elements being worked on that I am very excited about. Hopefully in the coming months I'll be able to start sharing some of the details.

Snails and Grails

This collaboration with Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer is chugging along very nicely. We've mostly been playtesting it online, but Dave was able to get a physical prototype to the table with some "new blood" players who were pretty much in the target audience, and it's looking like we're really getting somewhere.

The Castle War

This has been chugging along too, gaining somewhat in complexity but also, I think, in depth. The interface (wordings, iconography, layouts) is causing some trouble though, so I need to spend some time on cleaning that up.

The Castle War mid-game. This play was about the tensest I have had yet.

The Vinyl Age

This is actually a game created by Phil Tootill, which we played together the other day (my first face-to-face playtest with someone not in my family for months), and it's pretty damn good, but I have taken on the challenge to experiment with simplifying the game (we felt it either needs to be a bit lighter or a bit heavier than it is) and see what I can come up with. No guarantee I can improve on what is there, but we can at least try out some options and feed that into the game development.

Grab Bag Zoo

This is another collaboration, this time with Mike Harrison-Wood, and is unfortunately utterly unsuitable for online testing, relying as it does on tactility. We received some really useful feedback from a remote playtester, suggesting that we need to address issues of frustration that can ruin the game, particularly for younger players -- and this is so clearly a family/kids' game that we need to work on that. I think we had been too busy working on this providing a decent challenge for gamers that we had lost track of the heart of the game. We're moving in a slightly different direction now that is looking promising.

UK Games Expo

Finally, last weekend was the rearranged-date-turned-virtual-con for UK Games Expo, which was a bit of a weird experience. At the physical event I would normally spend a good chunk of my time volunteering at the playtest zone, some more running my own playtests, and a bit more having some meetings, with the rest of the time generally prowling and chatting to people I meet, with a little gaming in the evening. This time, I played one demo game and one early prototype (both via Tabletop Simulator), and spent most of the rest of the time watching panels and seminars, something I almost never get to do. I think the event as a whole felt a bit disjointed, with lots of jumping around between different technologies and Discord servers, but it did feel like an actual event with things to see and discover. And the food and beer were cheaper this way, with shorter queues!

Four Fings in February

I seem to have four game projects on the go at the moment, all of which are either collaborations or in development under external guidance, so here's a quick outline...

The one I have just spent a day working on has the working title of "Snails and Grails", and is inspired by 13th and 14th century manuscripts that show images of snails, monkeys and hares (as well as all manner of other bizarre beasts) in combat (and other) situations. My collaborators, Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer, and I had a few hours discussion about this a few weeks back, and each constructed different parts of a prototype, which we just stitched together, Frankenstein-like, into a somewhat creaky, but basically operational whole. Over three plays, which included a load of on-the-fly rules changes and writing on the components with Sharpies, we managed to refine the game into a magnificent, slightly less clunky version that we were really enjoying playing.  OK, so a long way to go on this one, but I think we are off to a good start.

Our third play of the day, with a load of scribblings on components.

Then, of course, there is Scurvy Crew, which you may remember is signed for publication with Braincrack Games, and we are slowly building into a campaign game, where you play a series of games, each of which introduces some new elements to change the focus of your strategy and, it looks like, you will be keeping a "captain's log", recording some of your achievements and earning power-ups as you go.  I'm really excited about where this is going now.

Next up we have something else new, which came out of a conversation with Mike Harrison-Wood at Dragonmeet at the end of November, and in early January turned into a physical thing. With the working title "Grab Bag Zoo", this is a real-time game that involved pulling wooden animals from bags in order to collect sets, and leans heavily into tactility (you have to choose an item by feel only). The game generally works, but there is a lot to tighten up about it, and we are both trying out assorted variations at the moment that we can compare and use to find the best way to play the game.

Finally in this little batch, we have a game about the history of popular music through the second half of the 20th century, which I am working on with Phil Tootill. I say "working on", but this is his baby so far and he has done all of the initial work, so only time will tell if this turns into an actual co-design or if it is his and I have just helped a bit. It looks like it could turn out really interesting though.

December Roundup

Another month nearly escapes me without a post. It hasn't been the most productive month from a game design point of view, but I did manage to get some stuff done.

Right at the end of November was the Dragonmeet convention in London, which I have attended for the last few years as part of the PlaytestUK team. We run an area for game designers to get their prototypes played by regular convention goers rather than the usual PlaytestUK meetups which are mostly designers playing each other's games.  I spent the first few hours helping to staff the area, which largely involves inviting passing gamers to join a game. This is usually a bit hard going at the start of the day, but as time passes you get more people just turning up looking for something to play.

I had a slot for playtesting myself in the afternoon, and introduced Tom Coldron's game Elvic to two different groups.  Things went very well overall, with players being well engaged, but a few issues were raised, largely relating to balance between certain options (some cards are perceived as strictly  better or worse than others), which need to be at least considered.  I've now sent the current play set back to Tom with some notes about how things have been going, so we'll see what he thinks.

Elvic at Dragonmeet.

Other than that, I got discussing a game idea with another of the designers there who was also volunteering at the same time as me. He had an idea about making a game that is largely about tactility and recognising items by the sense of touch alone, and our discussions moved towards a development of this. We've both been tinkering with this idea since, and have been communicating, and a basic version of a game is starting to form. Hopefully we'll be able to get together some time soon (we don't live too far apart) to see if we can develop things more in person.

Other than that it has been Scurvy Crew. I've not had playtesting opportunities on this, but I have worked a lot of ideas from discussions with BrainCrack into a new version of the prototype.  The basic gameplay is not changing significantly, but we are working on the campaign mode, which allows you to play a series of games (we're planning 7, to match the 7 seas and all that) with development of threats and opportunities as you work through it.  Plus, with the game being a relatively short one, the aim is to make it so that you can binge your way through the campaign in a day (maybe even an afternoon) should you wish. Anyway, I think the first official announcements about the game are likely to happen in the next couple of months, so we'll see how things go...

Anyway, I think this will be about it from me for the year.  I hope you have a good Christmas or whatever else you might celebrate at this time of year. Back soon... :)

Remember remember the rest of November

I seem to have slumped to a monthly blog posting schedule here, which is not exactly ideal, but is better than nothing, I guess.  With the nights drawing in I've been finding myself a bit tired and sluggish on many fronts, but I've not been completely off the game design path.  Most of my efforts over the last month have been working on one of three projects which are at very different stages.

Explore and Settle

This is an old design that I alluded to in last month's post, and one that has a pretty misleading name. It's what you could describe as a "3X" game (explore, expand, exploit, but not exterminate), and it is based on cards that overlap to form a grid of squares, but the additional "tab" of the card (the bit beyond the square) has a game effect until it is covered over, as well as providing uses when played from hand. The core mechanism is pretty fine, and gets a bit brain-burny (more than anything else I have designed), but overall the game is just not compelling, so I need to find an "angle" to use, and it may require a major redesign. 

At least it's prettier than it used to be.

This was the game that I took to this month's London playtesting meetup, as well as coming out for another game designer meetup I was at, and I got some interesting feedback, but I'm struggling to figure out how best to move forward.

Scurvy Crew

I'm still in a development phase here, working on building the campaign mode of the game. We have some really interesting ideas bouncing around for how we can carry threads on from game to game. There'll be missions and changing threats and opportunities through the campaign, but things aren't locked down enough for me to be able to talk about them much at the moment.

Elvic

This is the game designed by Tom Coldron that I've been doing some experimental development on. It's a fast-playing game (usually takes about 15 minutes), so we usually get to have at least a couple of plays in a row, often trying a small rules tweak in between to compare and contrast.  Small and quick games are so much easier to playtest. :)

I think I'm getting to the end of a development arc with this game though, so I have one last round of playtesting coming up (see below) and then, unless that opens up some new avenues that I want to explore, I think I'll probably send it back to Tom and see what the original designer thinks of the ways I have destroyed his original idea!

Dragonmeet

It's that time of year. As I write this, I'm avoiding getting ready for Dragonmeet, which is on tomorrow in London (Hammersmith, actually), though actually I've got most of what I need to do done.  I'll me spending most of the day at the Playest UK stand -- volunteering there until 2pm, after which I'll have a couple of hours playtesting the latest version (of mine) of Elvic.  If you are there (if you are in the area and want something to do, why not come along?), please swing by and say hello.

Recent Weeks

I definitely seem to have fallen off the blogging bicycle recently, but I have been chugging along with game design work over the last few weeks, even if I've not been charging forwards. So, just to get things going again, here are some of the things I got up to...

I had a really good playtesting and development session with Dave and Robin, other game designers who I meet up with most months. We've missed a couple of months for assorted reasons, but this got us back into the swing of things again and I was able to run tests of a couple of my projects as well as some of theirs.

Familiar cards, unfamiliar table, but with ships from Seafall (I think!)

Another really useful session was a trip to meet with Lewis from Braincrack Games to work on Scurvy Crew, face-to-face. This was the first time we had actually been able to play the game together, and it resulted in some great ideas bouncing around and some interesting plans made. I can't say too much right now as a lot is up in the air, but the plan is to provide the game with a campaign mode where you get to play a series of games, building your crew and improving your ship as well as meeting new challenges as you go along.

The monthly playtesting session in London happened last week and once again I took Elvic, Tom Coldron's game, where we had a couple of plays with a small tweak (a card being face-up instead of face-down, thus giving more information to players) between plays.  This game is so fast that playtest groups are often happy to do this, which makes iteration quicker than I am used to for other games. A lesson here, perhaps?

Other than that, I have been rummaging through my archives, and pulled an old project from 2016 back onto the table to see what I can do with it.  I've found a little inspiration here, so rather than discussing that right now, I'll post something more detailed about it shortly...

Developing Scurvy

Having signed Scurvy Crew to be published is far from being the end of the story from my point of view.  Different publishers work in different ways when it comes to developing games for publication, and the deal I have here is that I work with the Brain Crack Games to tweak the game into a form they are happier with before they finally hit the Big Red Button to make the game (with the help of a Kickstarter project).  I say "happier" because they were clearly keen enough on the game to sign it, but there are improvements that can turn the game into the actual product they want to ship. This is normal.

I'm not going to go into great detail about what we are doing yet, as a lot is in flux and it's not appropriate for me to be shouting about things that as yet may or may not be in the game, but we have been discussing a few tweaks and I have been trying out some of them with my playtest groups.

The prototype is still looking pretty scruffy, but there are plans forming to make something really nice.

The main intent is to add some more variability into the game, with more variety of merchant ships that can be captured as prizes as well as other things that can be found while hunting for booty, and a new mechanism allowing pirates to gain upgrades to give them additional capabilities.  It is interesting that I spent most of the six months leading up to successfully pitching the game pulling mechanics out and generally simplifying, but now we are adding a little complexity back in. Only a little, mind you, and all the new stuff is modular, so can actually be ignored safely for a lighter game.

This is the first time I have been through a process like this, with me doing development under the guidance of a third party, and I'm enjoying it so far, even though it is pulling my attention away from some other projects I would like to concentrate on.  Still, there is an end to the process, probably in a few more months or so, after which it will be mostly out of my hands and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the box ends up.

A small aside to finish off with: last week I received my Kickstarter copy of Ragusa, the new game by Fabio Lopiano (designer of the excellent Calimala), from Brain Crack Games. They've done a cracking job of making a great game (if you like mid-weight Euro games, watch out for more games from Fabio in the next few years -- he's very good at them) into a beautiful product, so I'm even happier working with them for one of my games.

Scurvy Contracts

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may know that my pirate game, Scurvy Crew, has been in the works for a long time.  OK, so it has spent a lot of the time on the shelf, but occasionally brought out for another round or two of development.  I eventually got the game to a state where I felt I could show it to publishers, and I approached a couple of publishers I thought might be most interested in the game, had a meeting with one of them at UK Games Expo, and they took a prototype from me.

Over the following couple of weeks I had assorted messages from the publisher, who played the game at least a couple of times (maybe more, I don't know) and started enthusiastically coming up with ideas to turn my game into their product.  And as a result of this and some to-and-fro discussion, I am pleased to announce that, as of today, Scurvy Crew is under contract to be published by Braincrack Games.

This is what the top of a contract sometimes looks like.
There's a lot of personal and business confidential stuff in there, so this is all you get to see!

If you don't know them, Braincrack is a small UK-based publisher with a steadily growing range of games.  Their first title, Downsize, is a nice, lightweight cardgame that we have played and enjoyed at work a bunch of times.  More recently, I was really impressed with their smallish-box tile game, Dead and Breakfast.  And I am really looking forward to getting hold of the currently-on-a-ship Ragusa, by the designer of the excellent Calimala, Fabio Lopiano.  Add to that the fact that they have a game on the way by the fantastic David Turczi, and this is a stable of games that I am absolutely delighted to be a part of.  I must admit that I am more than a bit nervous.

Anyway, that is where we are at right now.  There will now be a period of development where I work with the Braincrack team to turn the game that I am proud of into the final product that they want to publish.  Ideas are bouncing around at the moment, but I can't really reveal anything yet other than to say that there may be a change to the game's title, and that it is planned for a Kickstarter project some time next year. 

Other than that, I will be blogging and tweeting about this from time to time, but as we are now working on a product, and there is someone else's business involved, I can't really be completely open about everything that is going on all the time.  I'm looking forward to the process though.

Expos and Pirates and Castles, Oh My!

That was quite some weekend! I was at UK Games Expo from Thursday afternoon (the day before it started) until it closed on Sunday afternoon, when it closed, and I am now home, tired but very happy about how things went.  Here are some only slightly organised thoughts.

I'll start with the most exciting part for me: I had a couple of meetings to pitch game designers to publishers, and both went extremely well, and the upshot is that Scurvy Crew and The Castle War are both now being evaluated by publishers to consider for publication.  This is still a long way from actually being published, or even a contract being signed, but it's great to even get this far.  I'm not going to say who the publishers are right now, but if anything comes of either of these, I will let you know what I am able.

The main focus for my days was, once again, the Playtest Zone, this time hidden in the back corner of the enormous Hall 1, where I was volunteering for all three of the mornings, and the main task was trying to match players up with designers at the tables, and be there to answer questions and offer general help.  This can be quite a challenge first thing in the morning, when most people at the convention are wanting to explore and see everything before settling down to play things, or they are specifically looking for the latest hotness, but later in the end, we tend to see people wandering in, looking for something to play, and the challenge is then to find a designer needing players. 

The games presented varied from hand-drawn early prototypes, right up to beautifully presented and professionally printed games that are ready to publish.  I often have a bit of a grumble about people using the space as a cheap way to promote their upcoming Kickstarter, of which there are always a few every year, but it doesn't really do any harm and it's probably not particularly efficient marketing. Also, more serious vetting of games would just antagonise people unnecessarily and would risk making it harder for new designers to get onboard, and that is against the ethos of the space.

I failed to take photos other than a couple of this playtest of Scurvy Crew.

I had a 90 minute slot for playtesting Scurvy Crew, during which I hoped to get a couple of plays through (it usually takes about 30 minutes), but in the event we only managed one play as one of my three players was finding the game confusing and hard going.  This was entirely my fault: I was watching the two players opposite me as I explained everything and they got on well with everything, but I didn't check the guy sitting next to me, who it turned out wasn't used to playing hobby games, so would have appreciated a more thorough explanation with fewer shortcuts. Eventually (rather too late) I realised what was going on, apologised and stressed that his misunderstanding was my fault and not his, and helped him through a couple of turns, after which he started to get more comfortable and make more solid decisions. 

Aside from the issue with the struggling player, the game played pretty smoothly and engaged the players who found a couple of different approaches to playing. The players gave a few useful pieces of feedback, but mostly gave me a little extra confidence in the game, which didn't fall apart in any real way.

Later in the afternoon I had another play (I'd count it as a play rather than a proper playtest) with a couple of friends who wanted to check it out, and I actually really enjoyed playing it without feeling that I had to take notes or feedback.  All good for the confidence.

On Friday evening there was the Designer-Publisher Networking Event, which is ostensibly an opportunity for designers and publishers to meet in an informal setting, but there were few publishers, and to be fair, I'm not sure many of them would have welcomed being hassled by a swarm of us rookie designers wanting to pitch games to them after a long and tiring day.  What it was in practice was a comparatively relaxed opportunity to have a drink and a chat with fellow designers to compare war stories, and a couple of interesting talks from Alex Yeager and James Wallis, both good speakers, and both with fun topics -- one of the games I bought in the trade halls was a direct result of one of the talks.

Aside from all this, I managed to have half-decent meals in the evenings (a definite improvement from previous years) and then spend some time with friends, old and new, playing a few games. These days it's proving not-too-hard to find gaming space in the NEC halls in the evenings (though still a nightmare at the Hilton end of the Expo), and I managed to stumble into playing with strangers on two separate evenings, which was nice.

Lots of people post pics of their "haul" from conventions, so here's mine.

So I reckon that this year was my best overall experience at UK Games Expo so far, probably helped somewhat by the fact that I was really comfortable and slept well in my hotel, another thing that rarely happens.  I'm really looking forward to next year, and need to get started on figuring out what games I'm planning to pitch at that point.

Let's Go Expo...

If you are in the UK and care about such things, you are probably aware that UK Games Expo is coming up at the end of this month.  I'll be heading up there once again and have been making plans, as is necessary. So, here we go (everything may change, but this is the plan so far)...

I'll be heading up to the NEC on Thursday and hopefully meeting and chilling with a few people on the eve of the event proper.  The show runs from Friday to Sunday, and I have volunteered to help out in the Playtest Zone for all three mornings, so you know where to find me (stand 1-184, apparently).

A pic stolen from the UKGE website. In a game of Where's the Wally, can you spot me?

I have meetings for a chunk of Friday afternoon, pitching some games. I'm not going all-in on pitching, but have been talking to a few publishers with the intention of slowly building up relationships.  Friday evening is the Designer-Publisher networking event from 9pm, before which I hope to have something to eat and maybe even play a game.

On Saturday afternoon I am booked in to playtest Scurvy Crew from 3 to 4:30. Hopefully that will be enough time to get a couple of play-throughs, given that the game usually takes about half an hour, and only a few minutes to explain.  If you fancy having a go, come on down! (Or you can collar me any other time you find me free.)  I may end up getting another playtest slot some time, but we'll have to see.

Looking forward to seeing lots of people in a couple of weeks -- and I may even get to play a few games!

Scurvy Guild

For the last few months I've been having once-per-month-mostly meetups with a couple of game designer friends from a town that is a little over an hour's drive away from me.  Most of the time they have been coming to my house, but this month we expanded our meet to include several other designers from the general vicinity, and one of them hosted the event. This is what we considered to be the inaugural meeting of the "Wessex Guild of Game Designers", named for the ancient Saxon kingdom we live in -- they near the middle and me near the edge.

While a group of the others played a cool sounding race game in the other room, I had a couple of designers playing Scurvy Crew with me, trying out the relatively small changes I had made since last time.

As I remember, Blackbeard was about to discover a big treasure ship which Yellowbeard used all his capabilities to swoop in and steal, but received a retaliatory broadside from Blackbeard. Redbeard sought his own quarry.

The game was a little slow, but this was largely due to having a new player and doing quite a lot of chatting as we played.  Even so, the 45 minute playtime didn't seem unreasonable for the style of game. I usually use a playmat to keep the game in order, but didn't this time, and everything was fine. During play, there was a suggestion to use a supply of tokens to mark the sea spaces that have been cleared of merchants. We rolled this into play as we went; this actually worked really well, and for the cost of eight tokens, there was a nice, easy to track countdown to the end of the game. I'm now starting to think that these tokens could even have some sort of an effect, but that's probably unnecessary at this point.

The play didn't really identify any substantive problems, though I still have work to do on getting the cards balanced up properly  There was another suggestion that I liked: some of the merchant ships could provide you with additional crew when you capture them. We decided to have another play and implemented this by reducing the points value of some of the merchantmen, but allowing you to draw a card from the crew deck if you captured these ships.

This change didn't make a huge difference to the game, but it did seem to add a small extra decision sometimes, fit the theme of the game, and added almost nothing to the complexity. The numbers we used were probably not right, but the change seems to add nicely to the game, so I'll take a look at how to incorporate this in a more solid way.  This second play came in at bang on half an hour, despite being quite tactical and cagey at times; I am very happy with that.

Apart from my own game, I also tested a game about building up a town and trying to stop it falling down due to the ravages of time (the designer describes it as a "1X game"), a lightweight car racing game, and a game about building robots, all of which are well on their way. As is usually the case for this sort of event, I missed out on some other great looking stuff too, but them's the breaks.

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.

Pieces of Eight

So, another month another trip for playtesting in London, and a cracking afternoon it was too.  These particular meetups are generally run as a series of 90 minute slots, during each of which everyone divides up to sit around a few separate tables, with a game being played at each.  If there are shorter games in the mix, they often get teamed up so that one table plays through two (or sometimes more) games in a row.  Most recent playtests of Scurvy Crew (last month's London test notwithstanding) have been fairly consistent at around 40 minutes or less, so I was sharing with another designer for a spell.

The other game, a bicycle racing game, was really good, by the way, and is in one of those states where it just needs relatively small tweaks to become a great little game.

First off, I was delighted to find that this play of Scurvy Crew (now on version 8) took almost exactly 30 minutes for a 4-player game. I didn't time how long it took me to explain, but it can't have been much more than 5 minutes.  Of the players, one had played the game last month, and one had played it about a year ago, when it was in a very different state.

Version 8 was a fairly minor revision, mostly being some tidying up of terminology (still not perfect!) and some tweaks to presentation, but it was also trying out a different way of handling end game scoring, making the primary scoring a "Knizia-like" (you score the smallest set of things you have collected, thus incentivising you to diversify your collecting of stuff) system, with a tie-break based on the crew you have deployed. 

I think that this scoring did work out a bit better than the previous version, but it's still not right.  It seems a bit bizarre that I have an almost complete game now other than the fact that it has no satisfactory way to determine a winner.  This is something that needs fixing as soon as possible.

There is an often-quoted adage that you should "kill your darlings", and I think that one of my darlings in this context is the whole thing about collecting sets of treasure icons.  I have tried it in various forms, and while it's fun to be gathering treasure chests and jewelry, it has never really felt right.  I am now thinking that I might just go for a simpler option and simply have a points score for each merchant ship captured and see how that goes.

Several other issues came up, including some very interesting thoughts from one of the players who came up with a number of suggestions for ways to improve the thematic feel of the game.  He was absolutely right about them, though in the majority of cases, they had actually been part of the game in the past but changed for gameplay reasons.  It is really useful to get a "reality" check like this from time to time, as it is a reminder that remaining connected to the game's setting and themes is really useful, and where compromises are necessary they should be done carefully.  I don't think I will go back on these particular changes, but I shouldn't shut off the option completely.

Time to get to work on version 9, I think...

Hunting the Scurvy Hare

We've just had the first of 2019's monthly Sunday afternoon playtesting session in London, which I make the third anniversary of my starting to attend the event.  This time I took along the venerable Scurvy Crew, in its seventh major iteration, along with my new, hand-drawn play mat to help organise the card layouts.

The group I had playtesting Scurvy Crew felt a bit different to what I usually get at the PlaytestUK meetups, and seemed to me a bit more like a slot I might have had at UK Games Expo.  Two of my players were game designers (one of whom had brought his own game, which I enjoyed testing later in the afternoon), while the others were enthusiastic people who just wanted to play something.

This resulted in a different type of playtest to what I was expecting.  Usually meetups like this result in some pretty intense and nit-picky feedback from designers, but the two non-designers in this group were inexperienced in this sort of game, and were struggling to get their heads around some of the concepts, so I instead got a good view of what parts of the game might confuse the unprepared.  The players were lovely and kept reassuring me that they were having fun, but the way they played and the questions they asked were quite revealing.

Heading towards the end, and the play mat works!

The main issue I saw recurring again and again was that they didn't understand the core card mechanism: you "recruit" crew cards by taking them into your hand from a display on the table, then "deploy" them by putting them face-up on the table in front of you, and "withdraw" them (take them back into hand) to use their skills and abilities.  Actually the "withdraw" action is a little more complex than this as you put the used cards aside and then take them into back your hand at the end of your turn.

I need to think about this.  While most players who have tried the game have had no difficulty with this mechanism, the fact that less-experienced gamers can get so mixed up is worth pondering.  It is entirely possible that the rules are fine and my explanation just didn't click with these players, or it might be that there is something more fundamentally wrong with the game.  Given feedback from the other players I am inclined to think that the terminology I use in the game may not be ideal, and also I need to figure out a cleaner way to explain the game.

Developing this thought a little more, I also think that the detail of I handle "withdrawing" a crew card to use its action is not quite right: you put a card aside to use it and then draw it into your hand at the end of your turn.  The reason that you can't just pick it up into your hand (something that you could do in an earlier version of the game) is to make the timing of card interactions clearer and prevent loop effects that would totally break the game.  I could get rid of the effects that are potentially loopable, but I think that they add more to the game in terms of potential "combos" (combine the right set of cards in the right way to make for exciting plays when you are able to do it) than they cause problems -- and this has been borne out by playtests so far.  So, on balance, I want these effects in play, so I need a mechanism to control timing of them.

I'm pondering this, but I might try simply flipping cards over when you use them rather than putting them aside.  It's more an explanation thing, but it might help a little.  We'll see...

One of the players also raised another issue which I was kinda aware of but hadn't really been thinking about.  Basically, two of the skill icons on crew cards ("navigation" and "repairs") work differently to the others: navigation can be withdrawn to give extra movement, and repairs used to counteract damage to your ship.  It's not too taxing, but it does mean two extra rules for players to remember, so if I can find a way to reduce that cognitive load a little it should make the game that bit easier to play.

Finally (for the purposes of this blog, anyway), a player suggested that another bit of complexity comes from the way that there are different actions available depending on whether your ship is in port or at sea.  I'm not sure that this really is an issue in itself (and can be addressed pretty well with a simple player aid card), but the additional comment he made was interesting: is it as much fun to be in port as at sea?  It clearly isn't: in port you are picking up crew cards and putting them on the table, while at sea you are blowing stuff up and amassing treasure!  I like the two-part nature of the game, but this comment tells me that I should at least consider making the port actions more powerful so that you can spend less time there.

Notwithstanding the handful of issues shown up, all the players said nice things about the game, which is really gratifying alongside the more actionable results.  Playtesting is mostly about trying to improve a game by finding its faults, but morale does need a boost from time to time.

Open Up and Say Arrrr!

Scurvy Crew is my oldest game in development, going back to pretty much the start of this blog -- it grew from an experiment that I discussed in my first "proper" post.  It is a game that has repeatedly come back into focus, had some development and testing, and then been put back on the shelf for a period of quite a few months.

The last few weeks have been one of those periods of activity after the game came back to mind for some reason (possibly actually that one of my local friends who sometimes playtests for me mentioned it not that long ago).  The issue that had been vexing me throughout the game's development is similar to what I see in many of my games: it took too long to explain and too long to play for the type of game I was trying to make.  I was previously aiming at under an hour, but on reflection I think this is another game that feels to me that it should be playable in half an hour and take maybe 5 minutes to explain.  I was running at well over double that.

With a few months of distance on the design (never underestimate the value of leaving a design for 6+ months if you are stuck) I decided that the system I had for players using multiple actions to capture a prize ship and then score according to who had contributed the most to the capture, was interesting but just slowed the game down.  Similarly, the mechanisms I had for player-versus-player battles took everyone out of the main flow of the game and slowed things down even more.

I ended up just scrapping all that, making prize ships just a one-shot to capture (the capturing player just keeps the prize ship for scoring -- and I thus scrapped the treasure deck too), and bringing all the player-versus-player stuff onto a few of the crew cards that can be activated to use instead of having a whole subsystem for combat.  Instead of having merchants/prizes in a row that needed upkeep, I just dealt them out into a grid (a stack of two cards per location) that players could move around to hunt their prey.  A few tweaks here and there to support these other changes and we were able to play...

A four-player game of Scurvy Crew v7, still early days with a lot of targets out there.

First we had a three-player game that took almost exactly half an hour, towards the end of which a fourth player turned up.  I went off to make a fresh round of coffees, leaving the experienced players to explain the game to the newcomer.  This was a bit cheeky of me, but I wanted to see how that worked out.  As it happened, by the time I brought the coffee, the new player was pretty much fully briefed -- it turned out later that he had missed a couple of points, but the experiment did show me that the game was now far easier to explain that it was in previous iterations.

Our second play, this time with four players, took a little longer, about 40 minutes, which I was happy with under the circumstances.  End game scores in the second play were somewhat lower than in the first, which I think was largely due to the set-collection system I am using for scoring being a bit disrupted by the extra player.  I'm not entirely convinced that the game's scoring system is right, but it's not too bad and didn't seem to produce unfair scores.  I'm not going to worry about it too much right now.

The flow of the game was, overall, pretty good, and it was nice to see a few variations in strategy being used, with one ship repeatedly returning to port for refitting and then making use of navigation skills to skip around the "board" rapidly, while another was staying at sea for long spells by cycling crew in and out more, for example.  There are, however, a whole load of cards that are either over- or under-powered as they stand.  I am happy enough with the general shape of the game right now that I think I will start looking at getting the balance issues addressed.

Trying to Find a Balance

Over the last few years of learning to design games, I've picked up all sorts of tricks and techniques, but possibly the most interesting things I have learnt have been about my own processes and how I design games, as well as how those processes have changed over the years.

Many years ago, back in the 80's and 90's when I occasionally dabbled a little in tabletop game design, the games I came up with worked OK but were invariably duller than ditch water.  I never really got very far with any of those designs.

More recently, as I have been making a more concerted effort to develop my game design skills, I have come to realise that one of the reasons I had previously failed was that I obsessed too much about balance, and almost certainly misunderstood what balance is about in the context of tabletop games.  I probably still don't really have a complete handle on it, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

My current feelings on the matter are that balance does not mean making everything in a game equally powerful, but rather to mean that there are no strategies and no individual components or elements that as good as guarantee victory.  And similarly, there should be no component in the game (I'm talking cards, units, etc) that is never any use in a winning strategy.

I have some confidence that these two cards are reasonably well balanced.

So to make things a little more concrete, in the example of Scurvy Crew, it is totally fine for some crew cards to be more powerful than others, but there should not be any combination of crew that you could acquire without other players being able to stop you, that would make your ship into an unstoppable, loot gathering juggernaut.  Similarly, every crew card in the deck should be of enough utility that experienced players would at least sometimes choose to recruit them.

Incidentally, in this case, having crew with special abilities and skill icons, as they do, is a decent way to help this: if an ability proves to be too powerful, I can reduce its effectiveness, or decrease the icons provided by the card; conversely, a card with a weaker ability could have an extra icon added.

Thinking about this has brought be to a realisation about how my game design process has developed. Where once I worried about balance from the very start, I now leave such matters until very late on, when most of the game is settled into what I think is close to a final form.  This seems to work well for me, as it allows me to concentrate on getting the flow and the experience of the game where I want it, and it also means that I don't waste too much effort on balancing elements of the game that might change dramatically, or even disappear from the game.  See, it all comes down to constructive laziness.

I only recently started working on the balance of Invaded, after it had been in development for more than a year, and the main focus of my balancing efforts, the strategy cards, didn't even exist for a lot of that time, though they are partly based on the objective cards that I had in some early iterations.  Stressing about balance much earlier would have led to wasted effort.  And, going back to my earlier point, as I balance these strategy cards, the aim is not to make them all equally useful, but rather to make all of them compelling in some situation, even if that situation only comes up in the occasional game.  Some will get chosen most of the time, while I hope the others attract "remember that time when..." stories for those moments when they were perfect.

This delayed balancing approach does have its down sides though, primarily for me when dealing with playtesters.  When testing a game, players give their feedback based on how they perceive the game and how things go for them, so it is not unreasonable that they focus on issues that they see as being wrong with the game, and that is quite often when they see that a particular strategy or decision is stronger or weaker than they expected it to be.  One data point does not necessarily mean that there is a problem, but it can muddy the waters when, for instance, I am wanting to see how the game flows and if there are any parts of the game that cause cognitive hiccups for the players.

This sort of issue is actually more about how I handle the testers than about them, and while I have been working on games for a few years now, I still consider myself relatively inexperienced, particularly at running playtests with a wide variety of players.  As such, I am trying to learn the best ways to brief testers on what to expect from the session, and how to read their reactions and respond to them.  I feel that it is fine to tell the testers that, in this particular test, I am not looking to concentrate on balance, but when they come up with these points, it is best to just write the concern down and move on if possible. After all, knowing about the perceived imbalance may help later, and it may be easy to fix for the next prototype iteration.

Oh, and this whole "balance later" thing is, as with so many things, more of a guideline than an actual rule. Sometimes it's worth tweaking and balancing along the way, if only to remove a distraction. But remember: a little imbalance makes a game far more interesting.

Credit where credit's due: I've been thinking about this subject for a while, but it came to the front thanks to an as-always interesting post on Bastiaan Reinink's Make Them Play blog.

Scurvy Treasures

The game of the moment is definitely Scurvy Crew, and I have managed to get another playtest group assembled to test the changes I have made over the last couple of weeks. The main changes involve the way treasure is handled, with custom treasure cards, plus a treasure bonus for the player who sinks each merchant ship in addition to the "area control" rewards.

Towards the end of the game, with treasure and tea nearly run out.

So, some of the take-aways from this play included:

• The game took 70 minutes to play, with several pauses where I needed to clarify some rules. Without those pauses and bits of confusion, the game would have been within an hour, and almost certainly a load quicker with more experienced players. This I take as a win.
• BUT those pauses for clarification are a huge problem. Part of the problem is that the terminology I have on the cards is woolly and inconsistent, so fixing that should reduce confusion significantly. I will also have to think long and hard (and observe more) to see what complexity in the game is unnecessary and should be cut or simplified. There is bound to be something.
• The bonus treasure for actually sinking a merchant was an incentive for people to jump in and actually finish them off, but when the final scores were reckoned, it turned out that these bonuses didn't effect anything and were in practice disproportionately small. Shouldn't be hard to fix that.
• The set collection aspect of treasure collecting didn't really pan out as hoped: there was a feeling that you were getting random rewards and then you ended up with some sort of a score that you had little control over. 
• Balance is terrible.  I know this, and am slowly chipping away at it, but my style of play is to not worry too much about balance until late in the development process. The players were aware of this, but it can be hard for them to not worry about it. Maybe I should rethink my process a bit here.
• There was general agreement that there should be parrots, monkeys and rum. :/

I ended up with plenty more notes than this, so I have a lot to be working with. Big thanks to the Some-Mondays group for some great feedback.  My next opportunity to playtest is likely to be next week, so I'd better get to it...

Three pirate ships, two pubs, and some prehistory

This weekend I made my almost-monthly pilgrimage to London for an afternoon of playtesting thanks to Playtest UK.  For the second time I brought along Scurvy Crew, my card game about pirates, incorporating some changes to address issues identified last month.  I had two playtesters to work with this time, and I joined in to make a three.

As an aside, it is generally more effective to sit out and observe a playtest, which allows you more easily to watch what the players are doing, and make notes as you go along.  I find, however, that at this stage of a game's development, where it is changing quite rapidly, being involved can be a very effective way to get a feel for how the game plays, even at the cost of weaker in-play notes.

My usual blurry photography (not got effective shake compensation on the phone),
but going for more interesting angles this time.

My players were atypical for the Playtest UK meetups, as neither were game designers, they were just a couple of keen gamers who wanted to come along and try something new and potentially wobbly.  This meant that I could probably expect their feedback to be a little gentler and less critical than from the regulars, but getting thoughts from people I don't know at all (and watching them play) is generally useful.

As it turned out, the game ran smoothly, and these two players were really enthusiastic about it.  There were a few areas where the rules were less than perfectly clear and I had to re-explain a few times, and we cut the game off at about an hour of play, as it looked like it would run maybe another twenty minutes or so before ending.

A few really useful take-aways from this session:

• Adding a full set of crew abilities so that every crew member had some text ability paid off, and I think most of the abilities in play were actually used at least once. Some fun combo play emerged, but I'm going to need to go through the possibilities carefully (and some of the details of card play) to ensure things don't get out of control.
• Thinking of the details of card play, I have a couple of suggestions on how to tidy things up, and one of the players instinctively found a really efficient way of laying out their card tableau.
• The game, as I mentioned before, was running long, which is partly because as it stands, player-versus-player combat just tends to make the game longer.  I have a couple of ideas to help here, including ways to keep the treasure and merchant decks ticking over, but also...
• The treasure deck as it stands is just a regular deck of playing cards, which has been more or less adequate so far, but now really needs to be rethought. My feeling at the moment is to have a smaller deck, containing three "suits", with many cards providing treasure for more than one suit, to make set collection both easier and more interesting.
• As for the p-v-p combat, this went down remarkably well, with one of the players building a crew that made it effective for them to attack other players, while I managed to build a crew that could generally evade attacks and recover quickly if that didn't work out.

Overall, while we didn't find deep problems (I always feel suspicious when that happens), this was a really positive experience, with both testers giving me a lot of encouragement to keep moving forward. I'm sure to find more problems in the coming weeks and months (I'll certainly be looking!) but it's nice to know that even in a flawed form, the game can, at least sometimes, entertain. That's a great place to be.

So my focus for the next iteration is to get the playing time down.  I would really like the game to play in less than an hour -- and if I can get it down to within 45 minutes I'll be a lot more confident about it's future.  

After the first round of testing, there was a bit of disruption due to our usual venue having a large party booked from the later part of the afternoon, leaving no space for us to stay.  During the first round of testing, our esteemed leader had taken a trip to another nearby pub and negotiated a room for us to use. So we went on a short walk to the new place and a function room that was comfortable, spacious and quiet, perfect for our needs.

Once we were relocated I only really had time to play one other prototype, but it was a fun one, inspired by Japanese hanafuda cards, and made into a game of prehistoric hunting and gathering. Very enjoyable.

Scurvy London

Having revived Scurvy Crew over the Christmas and new year period, made a new version of it, tested it solo, then hastily revised the revision, I took the rather scrappy prototype to London for the first Sunday playtesting meetup of the year.

Once again the journey was not uneventful, as the skies saw fit to drop quite a lot of snow on me, starting just before I got into the car to drive to the station, making the half-hour drive far more hazardous than expected, and the wait for the train rather colder and wetter than normal, but the rest of the journey was just fine.  The snow appears to have followed me to London, where it started falling a couple of hours or so later, leaving rain behind at home, so there was no sign of snow on my return.

I'm British. We talk about weather.  Sue me.

Anyway, at the meetup, I got to play an early prototype of a worker placement game that was quite a lot of fun.  It was a bit fiddly, and had issues with the scoring, but was engaging and had a lot to think about and I was surprised when the designer said it was only the second playtest of the game, as it felt like it was a complete game that just needed a bit of tidying, streamlining and balancing.  Good stuff.

I was up in the second session and my pitch for Scurvy Crew (the routine is that everyone tapped for a slot gets a minute or so to outline their game so players can choose what they will play) was full of caveats about how wonky and untested it is, and how I had no idea of how long it would take to play.

Mid-play, with a couple of merchants being engaged, and the black ship in port to resupply.

So, we had four of us playing (thanks to Rob, Kieran and Gavin for playing and valuable feedback), and the game mostly went OK, though had some terrible balance issues (we made a couple of tweaks to the rules during play -- something that is easy to get away with when you have game designers testing) and ran long (we called it off after about an hour of play), but gave me a very good feel for how it works at the moment, and yielded some great feedback. 

Some of the main points that came up:

• My mechanism for scoring treasure (gaining cards from a deck of regular playing cards and scoring your longest suit at game end) was very warmly received, which surprised me a little as I had pretty much just thrown the mechanism in as a place holder. This was made even better by the option to discard (an increasing number of) treasure cards to get extra actions.
• Men o'war weren't handled quite right: they caused big problems and there was no incentive to do anything other than steer clear.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing as such, but it didn't seem much fun. Some changes introduced during play improved this, but I have a few other ideas to try.
• There was no real incentive to attack other players, something that the players wanted to do in a pirate game.  We had some discussion about possible ways to improve this, and I think it is actually going to be my biggest challenge for the next version.
• Overall, most of the mechanisms of the game seemed to have good thematic resonance, including the overhead of spending actions to move between port and sea, and from the general sea area to go hunting merchants, which provided a nice reward for ships that were able to stay at sea for longer.

I have a lot of work to do, but the main changes I made in the last revision (the new way to handle hunting and capturing merchants) seems to have been a real success, even if the balance is way off at the moment.  There was a lot more discussion about the game, identifying many other problems, but I am really happy with how things went.

So next up: rethink player vs player battles, take another look at men o' war (I definitely want to keep them), set up some crew cards for starter hands, a little tidying and simplification, and see how we go from there...

The Crew is Still Scurvy

Over Christmas I started thinking about Scurvy Crew, a game I was working on ages ago, before I discovered the 24 hour game design contests or the Playtest UK community.  It has been sitting on the shelf for nearly two and a half years, having got to a state where it was playable but not particularly enjoyable.  One of the issues was that I had got about half of the game working fine, but the other half, which was basically the bit that allowed you to score points and win the game, was terrible.

The decent (though still flawed) part of the game was crewing a pirate ship by collecting cards and building a tableau in front of you, and the mechanism of either discarding cards from the tableau or taking them back into hand in order to trigger special actions.  However, hunting and capturing merchant ships was, at various times, boring, fiddly, and/or anticlimatic.

Me versus me in a battle for treasure on the high seas.

So I had an idea about how to handle hunting merchants, which kinda turns that aspect of the game from a make-a-decision-take-a-chance mechanism to a more Euro-style system, which involves overcoming a series of challenges by expending crew resources, and rewards coming when all the challenges have been completed according to who has done the most.  Yes, this is more or less an area control game, which doesn't sound too piratey, but I wanted to give it a try.

This required a fair bit of chopping and changing the game around, which I did over the last week or two, until I finally had myself a playable prototype again.  Where possible, it is worth doing a bit of solo testing before arm-twisting my friends into giving it a go, so I have done just that and can report that the game seems to have improved.  I didn't have a system for player-vs-player attacks, and I think the game is currently weaker because of it, but other than that, I think I have at least taken a step in the right direction.  It's worth sorting out the PvP aspect before the game leaves the house, but it feels nice to make some progress with an old design.

Weigh anchor and prepare to make more changes!

They say that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I think it can also be said that no prototype created by a relatively inexperienced designer survives contact with a decent playtester. This weekend, my latest version of Scurvy Crew, which I was hoping was close to being released and put in front of anyone who is interested as version 0.2, went through a brutal ordeal with my star playtester: my wife.

Sharpies: your best friend for quick changes.

S. is not a regular gamer, so has not internalised all the shortcuts and conventions that I have absorbed over many years of playing board games. She is also used to having her work and those of others put through the intense scrutiny of scientific peer review, and as such is used to spotting weaknesses in an argument (or rule set) and asking very pertinent questions. In particular, if I have a rule that I introduced because it seemed to improve game play options or balance, but doesn't sit nicely with the theme, she will go straight to it like a BS-seeking missile and call me on it.

This is absolutely awesome and really helpful.

In this case, within minutes, we were making modifications to cards with Sharpies, and tweaking the rules regarding what actions are allowed at what time.  I think I now have a much better handle on what is working in the game and, more importantly, what is not.  As a result of this playtest, at the top of my to-do list are the following items...

• There needs to be some sort of hand limit to stop card hoarding. 
• There probably needs to be a limit for number of deployed crew (maybe a characteristic of the ships?) 
• The sailing icons are mostly useless at sea, so we need something to help that -- I thought that maybe a crew can allow sailing to be used in attacks. 
• The balance of prize ships is well off -- too many man o'wars in the deck, and it is pretty difficult (and requires quite a lot of luck) to capture a prize.
• As we have decided that players should be able to transition backwards and forwards between sea and land, more or less at will, I need to find a nice way to handle this.