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.

I hear the creak of the big machine...

On Sunday of last week (once again I got distracted by other things before finishing this post) was my last major playtesting opportunity before UK Games Expo, and was the monthly trip to London. I always plan to arrive long before the start of the playtesting, so I can have a relaxed coffee and sandwich by way of preparation, and this time I bumped into Bez (of Yogi/In a Bind fame, amongst others), who was training a couple of volunteers for her stall at Expo, so I got "taught" a few short games (that I happened to already know) as part of their practice, which was good fun.

The prototype games designed by others that I played were a "Simon Says" style party game, a very nearly done game of city building, a real-time (app assisted) action, and a game about not being too good at your job.  Lots of good stuff in varying stages of development.

The game I took with me was the Steampunk Workshop game, having mutated into its "Big Machine" version and lost most of the features from its first couple of iterations and become something very different.

The machine is slowly extending, but has some way to go.

So the headline news is that most of the details of the game are broken -- the balance is all to pot and there are points where things can get gummed up -- but it looks like I have finally found something approximating a game here, so I can start working on tidying up the details.

The biggest issue here was that it took too long for players to be able to afford to buy the gadgets that act as victory points and special abilities. I did end up giving everyone some additional resources part way through the game to help this, but I think it was too late to see how the gadgets really effect the game.  Furthermore, there is one of the gadgets which shunts other players around, and this was seen to be overpowered and frustrating if you aren't the person who has it.  I rather like this particular gadget, but if it turns out to be more of a problem than a benefit (and it could dictate the flavour of the game) then it will have to go.  It will be interesting to see how it works in a game where everyone has more gadgets available to them.

There were plenty of other comments and observations, but the notable point is that they were pretty much all about details rather than the big picture, which was mostly left unscathed.  So I think I now have the basis on which I can build this game.  It actually doesn't include the mechanism that got me started down the track, but that is not a particularly unusual thing to happen. 

Testing the Workshop

April's London playtesting trip was delayed to avoid the Easter weekend, and then disrupted largely because of the London Marathon that was on the same day, but it took place nonetheless, relocating to a coffee shop up the road from the usual pub.

Once everything had been sorted out we had a great afternoon of testing. I played a nice midweight Euro and a few plays of a small card-overlapping game, both of which were enjoyable and showed some real promise. I brought along the "Steampunk Workshop" game I posted about a couple of weeks ago; it was still very much an early-stage design, but had enough about it to be playable, and I had three volunteers to give it a go.

Using a bag of resources and discs to put them on does make the game look a little like Azul.

Feedback was generally supportive, but critical. It seems that the flow of the game is pretty good, but the players had thoughts on the three main decisions you make in the game: which resources to take, how to distribute newly arrived resources, and which gadgets to claim. All of these are OK decisions to make, but in practice they are generally trivial and obvious when it comes to it.

We had a bit of a discussion about this and agreed that one issue is due to the way that I naively derived the values of gadgets from the resources used for them. I could approach fixing this by adjusting the values of gadgets according to the usefulness of the abilities they provide, but another  possible approach (which is not mutually exclusive) would be to add a level of set collection, which could make gadgets naturally become more or less valuable to players according to what they have collected so far. An extension of this (thanks to Dean for the idea being "for free"!) is that you could arrange your acquired gadgets in a tableau, and if you can match the edges of adjacent cards, there could be a bonus -- either for scoring, or potentially some sort of bonus actions or modifiers.

This last idea about edge matching has actually given me a further idea, which is kind of a development branch from this game, and I have been toying with it over the last few days.  I expect I'll be talking about that in the not-too-distant future.

The distribution of resources to the hoppers is an interesting point too, as in the game's current state, when you put new resources out, the logical thing to do is to minimise the absolute value of the resources in any given hopper where you can.  This is possible because the resources are set up to have distinct values, both in terms of rarity and what they contribute to the victory point value of gadgets they buy.  The point above about making gadgets have different values according to circumstance could at least partially address this, but we also had some discussion about how resources get delivered to hoppers, which could be more random (no player agency in this part), or follow a set path, maybe with a "supervisor" figure circling the hoppers, indicating where the next delivery is placed. Another possibility would be to "recycle" resources as they are spent, putting them back into hoppers.  All of these could be a big improvement in available decisions, so I plan to try out some variants along these lines.

In the meantime, though, I'm temporarily diverting course to the "edge matching" tableau game to see where that goes. It is entirely possible that this could merge back in with the resources-in-hoppers game. We shall see...

Working up a steam

Sometimes ideas just come. I'm not sure where this was from, but it has some similarities to the rather great game, Azul, and a couple of other things.  The idea was for a simple mechanism where you take items from a location (on a ring of spaces) and then draw a couple of items from a bag and place them on adjacent locations on that ring.  Then a game could be built around collecting and using those items.

Version Zero: minimum viable prototype.

I made a quick prototype with a bag of gems in three colours that I had lying around, a quick, hand-drawn board, and some cards scribbled on the back of some old cards from a previous prototype, to provide something to spend the gems on.  This was all perfectly fine for a proof-of-concept sketch of a game.  I had a couple of plays with this, playing multiple virtual "players" myself, and it seemed to be not terrible.  Bear in mind that this was pretty much the minimum I could do to make something that was actually playable, intended to check that a core mechanic is at least plausible, and as such I think I gave myself a thumbs up on this one, so decided to try progressing the game a little.

At this point, the game was just an abstract mechanism, and experience has taught me that I cannot develop an abstract game: I need some sort of theme to guide me in future decisions.  This theme might change later, but it would be something to work with along the way.  Fortunately, another project came to my rescue: this year I have decided to draw (and share online) something every day of the year if I can. This is old school: drawing on paper, though the implement I use to make the drawing can be whatever I fancy at the time, as can the subject matter.  As I was putting together this prototype, I drew a page of random steampunk-style gizmos, and this actually looked like it could be the start of a theme.

My first sheet of steampunky things, based on pics found all over the place.

So, what I ended up with was the idea that players are apprentices in a workshop, tasked with putting the finishing touches to various gadgets before they are dispatched to their final owners. You might even be able to make use of some of these gadgets to help you in your task, but if you break it you have to fix it!  The resources are still abstract coloured gems, but I can work on that later.

With this all in mind, I made use of the artwork I had, with a cog icon as a default for cards that didn't have their own picture, and made a new prototype for some solo testing once again, this time setting up a NanDECK script, pointing at a Google Sheet, to build cards that I can quickly print and cut out.  Some of the gadget cards had special abilities and a chance that they would break when you use them (they always work, but you roll a die to see if they then break), a cost in resources to complete, and a score for completing them (based on the resources -- which are of varied rarity -- required to complete them).

Version 1: more like a game, but not a good one yet.

It turns out that a bunch of MDF discs I had lying about were handy instead of having an actual board (though it starts looking a bit like Azul) and a silicone cupcake case is perfect to sit in the middle to collect discarded resources.

So at this point, the game works mechanically, but is somewhat dull.  My idea that you can use the abilities of gadgets is fine (though the abilities I had here weren't great) but the risk of breaking them was really harsh, and disincentivised using them quite dramatically.  I really should have learnt by now that there is a tendency for players to want to avoid risk of loss, and this sort of mechanism rarely works very well when I try it.

I am now overhauling the game, removing the potential punishment for using actions, but doubling down on the idea that there are actions to use.  I'm aiming to make this a game that has a similar complexity and pace to, say, Splendor, and to be fair, the flow of play (gain resources, then use resources to acquire things that win you the game) is fairly similar. I'm not too worried about that at the moment, and there are solid differences, but I will need to be sure that having an inspiration does not result in the game being too derivative.