Physical Artifice

So, The Artifact...

Of the projects I'm currently working on, this one is probably the one that has most consistently been developing over the last year and a half. It is a co-design with the inimitable Alex Cannon, who I got to know through a couple of Twitch streams in the first year of the pandemic, and who has an uncanny mind for puzzles. Since January 2021 we have been having an online meeting most weeks, usually working on or playing a virtual prototype we had built in Screentop.gg, and sometimes just chatting, partly about life and partly about the project.

Then a few days ago we managed to get together with a physical prototype and play the game on a real table. We sat in a coffee shop for a while, drank beverages, had a couple of plays through, and talked through some of the implications of what happened in the games we played.

A 2-player game (the blue meeples are replicants) coming close to an end.
Just off-camera to the left are project boards, which are the paths to victory.

Boy, I have missed this. While we have got this game a long way with essentially entirely online collaboration and testing, you can't beat moving components on a table, at least not when that is the intended playing format for the game.

The big headline is that the game felt pretty natural to the two of us to play, and took maybe half an hour or so per game. How it would feel to other people is unknown right now, but hopefully we'll find out sooner or later. The half hour of play felt pretty good -- a bit of brain crunch that might have been too much if sustained for a load longer -- but it occurs to me that maybe there are too many bits for a relatively short game. The setup and teardown is not exactly challenging, but... I dunno, it's just something in my head as I write this.

Just to catch you up, the central conceit of the game is that there is an alien artifact that has crashed to earth and we are corporations (or something) trying to research and exploit the technology contained within by assigning researchers to work on the expanding knowledge space that is represented by (mostly) domino-like tiles that get added on each player's turn. The game ends when one of the several project tracks off to the side is completed (each works a little differently with how they can be progressed and what benefits they provide, and there is a little interaction between them), and the completed project dictates the victory conditions for the game.

We've been tinkering with a new mechanism based on what we are labelling as alien slime (in this prototype it's to do with the yellow cubes and the black squares), which we think opens up some interesting possibilities, particularly adding more spacial elements to the game (which otherwise are less than you might think for a tile-placing game). The couple of variations on the mechanism we tried were underwhelming, but found some directions we could push in, and a later, virtual session experimented some more. Still a long way to go here, including considering whether we really should be using this. 

The Artifact has twisted and changed quite a lot in its 18 month history, with mechanisms added and removed along the way, but it has always revolved around the tile placement and use of workers/researchers to tap into knowledge resources on the tiles. We seem to have settled on a form of path to victory now, but in the last few months we have just been testing with the two of us while we made some major changes, so we don't have the important data from other people looking at what we have been tinkering with week in, week out, and that is potentially concerning. But I think we're getting to that point of going back to our friendly (but occasionally brutally honest) volunteers/friends and seeing what they think.

IDLEcon 2: Clockwise Boogaloo

Back in the dark days of December, the lovely Michael Fox, game designer, Twitch streamer and generally Good Guy, hosted a two day game jam called IDLEcon, during which time a bunch of us created something-and-write games and then played them live with participation of the audience of his stream. I collaborated with Chris O'Regan to make a game we called The Village on the River, which we have continued to work on since.

Back in the not-so-dark days of late June, Michael hosted a follow-up event, IDLEcon 2.

This time the format was different. While the original took place in the "dead time" between Christmas and new year, with most of us in some form of a lockdown, the second run acknowledged that most of us had work or other commitments, so the idea was to spend one weekend creating games, and the next weekend playing them; the intervening time allowed for more development or design, or just getting on with your life. The challenge this time was to make a game that could be played on-stream, with Michael, as host, playing with or against the people in the chat. 

Once again, the dual focus of the event was Michael's Twitch stream and his Discord server, where folk could chat, discuss ideas, team up, and so on.  I put a half-formed idea of a game into a channel and ended up talking with Bez (she of Yogi fame, as well as much else), throwing together a very rough virtual prototype (actually using a shared Google Drawing to work as board and counters) and spending the afternoon experimenting, testing and iterating until we felt we had something that was decent enough fun but needed "proper" playtesting.  I didn't have much available time over the following week, so we pretty much left it there, other than making sure that there was a usable virtual prototype on Screentop.gg and the rules were written up.

Michael attempts to avoid the robots on stream.

The basics of the game are that one player (intended to be the host of the stream) has the task of moving their character from one corner of a gridded board to the opposite corner. This is complicated by the five robots which move around pre-set routes, the distance each of them moves being tied to the results of a poll that is run for viewers to vote on. We have some general ideas about how this could translate to a tabletop version, and may work on that later, but for now it was just a game aimed at the specific challenge of the day.

The following weekend was set aside for playing the games on stream. I, however, was camping in a field, half way across the country so my daughter could take part in a folk music related activity, so couldn't really take part properly. I did get good enough mobile signal to be able to watch a bit of the stream live, and then caught up on the rest using Twitch's video-on-demand facility a couple of days later, though Bez was able to take part on the day.

So the game actually worked. There were a good few people taking part in the chat submitting their votes, so the polls actually looked like they had meaningful results, and there were points when the voters were trying to make sure that certain results occurred. It got interesting when Michael observed that the rules did not prohibit him from taking part in the votes, which mean that in some circumstances, he was able to force, or prevent, certain results.

It turns out that the way polls are implemented in Twitch, the tallies are shown while voting is taking place, which made it both easier for the chatters to know what was going on, and for Michael to throw his spanner into the works. This, combined with the predictability of the robot movements made things a little less than ideal, particularly in the second play of the game -- though the fact that everyone elected to play a second time was hugely gratifying in itself. There was a lot of discussion though about ways to introduce more chaos and unpredictability, as well as generally strengthening the game, so I think this went really well for a first "proper" play.

We've not returned to this design in the weeks since, but I think it could be interesting to have another look at it some time and see what we can make of it. Michael suggested that it could be good as a mass-play convention game, with people as playing pieces and some form of crowd voting, and that sounds like it could be great if we found the right people to partner with to make it happen. My thoughts are that it could be a one-versus-many tabletop game, with the "many" having cards with varying numbers of votes or moves for multiple robots, and everyone selects what they will play at the same time, hoping that they can coordinate without discussing the actual cards they have in hand.

Anyway, this was another enjoyable exercise, both from the angle of working with another game designer (a friend for years, but whom I had never created anything with) and of working with interesting restrictions and requirements. It's entirely possible that we'll never be able to make a commercial product out of this, but the creation can often be worthwhile on its own.

An Idle Village

One last post for the year...

Over the last couple of months I have been an occasional visitor to the Twitch stream run by Michael Fox of Hub Games, probably best known as one of the designers of Holding On: the Troubled Life of Billy Kerr. His stream is a mixture of live working on board game designs and playing stuff, with some really nice chat and banter alongside. He's a very warm and inclusive host, and has some very interesting thoughts and insights about game design.

Anyway, a few weeks ago he announced that he was planning an event in the week after Christmas, which was intended to be a game design jam and online community gathering to support anyone who just wanted some company and a distraction with fellow board gamers - and mostly designers. I cleared some time with the family and joined in.

Breathe in... Breathe out... Welcome to IDLEcon

The format was centred around a Discord server and Michael's stream. He would give everyone a challenge, then we would have about 24 hours to produce something playable, and everyone would then gather around the stream to play or watch the products of everyone's labours.

The challenge was three points...

1. Create a "something"-and-write game.

2. Include a second component in the game - something that  we could assume is easily available to anyone likely to play the game.

3. Must be playable solo, and also suitable for playing on the stream.

So basically, we were looking for a game where some component or set of components could be used to create input for player choices, and the players could write the results of their choices on some medium, and it shouldn't be necessary for everyone to be in the same location.

I ended up in the event's Discord chatting with Chris O'Regan, and we decided to work on something together, and after a bit of discussion we got working on a village building game (not the most original theme, but originality isn't always necessary) based on making use of cards from a regular deck of playing cards. 

The style of game was conducive to quick, online collaboration. We had a voice conversation over Discord, while tinkering about drawing things in a Google Drawings file where we could edit simultaneously. It was like using a whiteboard initially to sketch things out, but then we were able to refine this into a usable playsheet (which Chris then was able to add some shinier elements to in Photoshop).

My first ever play of The Village on the River,
on the first iteration of the playsheet.

While all this was happening, Michael himself was running a screen in which he was working on his own game to the same specification as the rest of us. I popped in there a few times for a bit to exchange a bit of banter. It was also lovely that people who were not actually working on games themselves were popping in to chat and support, both on the stream and the Discord. Also some other people were even streaming some parts of their work via Discord. It all made for a really enjoyable space to hang out with a heap of other very lovely designer people.

I managed to get a couple of tests of the game in the evening, including with another designer in the jam, whose really interesting game I also played. Based on that and a bit more play and discussion with Chris the next morning, we did a bit more revision and posted our files on the Discord channel set aside for the purpose, with several variant playsheets (all functionally the same, but cosmetically different).

The second afternoon of the event basically consisted of Michael leading a play of most of the games on his stream (this expanded onto the next day to cover the games that didn't fit in), with him doing the generation of random inputs as appropriate, so the rest of us could play along. I played along with a few, and played another on my own later.

Michael builds Upper Idleton live on stream while 
others of us play along.

The creativity and variety of games shown was really impressive, using dice and cards in various configurations, and also one memorable game using flipping through a book to generate some random inputs. Every game had something interesting and admirable about it, and I think they all stand a chance of becoming really solid with some more work on them. I think I was most taken by the clever dice usage and tricky decisions of the game about filming and releasing a science fiction TV series, and the elegant simplicity of the one about sailing around islands looking for treasure, but there was so much great stuff.

In the end we got some really positive feedback and a few helpful suggestions for our game, so we're delighted with what we achieved in the time. In the past I have done a number of 24 hour game design challenges, but they differed from this largely in that those challenges were to be done individually and that you could have some time to think about the "restriction" beforehand.  But the additional big difference was that this jam resulted in (almost) all of the games being played by multiple people right away, and feedback being given. That is a golden opportunity right there.

Chris and I have decided that we will do some more work on our game and see where we can take it. We'll probably switch to a custom card deck to make the game easier to understand, and I'm sure there will be tweaks to the buildings that can be constructed and so on. But that is all something for the coming weeks and months.

If you would like a look at the game, here is the set of rules we submitted and here is one of the playsheet variants.

In the meantime, it is New Year's Eve, so I'll sign off by saying that I hope that whatever sort of year 2020 was for you, 2021 is brighter and more positive for you. I know I am really hoping to see more people in person, as I am really missing all that. But big thanks are due to Michael for helping some of us to finish the year on a high.

Peace.

The Quarter Vinyls

 A few years ago I found that game designer Phil Tootill worked at the same place as me, and for a while we met up regularly over lunch to test each other's prototypes or show each other published games that we thought were interesting. Eventually Phil moved on to another job, but we've been keeping in touch and meeting up occasionally, but we never quite managed to find a project to work on together.

Early this year, Phil pitched a promising idea to me about the development of popular music through the decades, and some possible ways to approach this. We talked this through a bit, discussed via a Google document for a while, and then Phil got to work on building an initial prototype.

Then, not too much later, Covid-19 hit full force and the country went into lockdown.  Phil found himself furloughed for a while, and used some of that time to work on this game, which he gave the working title of The Vinyl Age.

Time passed, and after the restrictions were sufficiently relaxed, we finally found a time to get together and play the prototype as it was. 

So in the intervening time, Phil had put in a hell of a lot of work and built a crunchy card game with some real brain burning as you work through one deck of oversized cards representing recording artists, and another deck of standard cards representing records, performances and events, looking for combos and synergies to maximise your scoring. The popularity of five broad genres of music was represented by tracks covered by "fan" markers, and you could attract fans of the different genres to your city, revealing scoring and resource opportunities as the tracks become uncovered, while being able to make use of the fans as a resource in themselves.

My partly-there rebuild of the game in Tabletopia, as per discussion later.

The game as it stood was a cracking piece of work and played very well for the right sort of players. I lost pretty badly, but could see how Phil had worked with the resources he had available to build something of an engine, while I was just trundling along opportunistically. I'd have been able to play much more strongly on a replay.

We had a feeling though that the game would be difficult to sell. It was easy, particularly when new to the game, to get caught up in "analysis paralysis" (a cycle of assessing and reassessing options in an attempt to find the best course of action), and the game could get very "mathsy", particularly towards the end. It felt like the game had to be either a bit lighter and smoother, or double-down on the crunchiness and go for something really heavy. Given the theme of the music business, I felt that lightening things up might be better, and possibly this could be done by removing the financial aspect to the game and refocusing on the remaining elements.

After some discussion, Phil said I could have a go at trying some changes. So that's what I've been doing, putting together a virtual prototype in Tabletopia.

Of course, removing a whole element of the game's economy (cash, in this case) results in a lot of knock-on changes, and fixing up those results in even more.  The changes I have been making bind the acts and the other cards together more tightly than before, so we see a story developing more for each of those acts; and some feedback from Phil has suggested a way to enhance this even more.

The downside is that the game is otherwise a lot less coherent than it was before, particularly with the alternative paths of building a career for an artist and having them retire from their active career. This is the current focus, to actually add some detail back in to the game and find ways to balance out the alternative ways to manage an act. The game as it stands is not fully playable, and only works for a few turns, so I also need to build that up.  Fortunately we still have the data files with all the ideas and detail from Phil's build of the game, so I can gradually pull more of them into my version as I put more flesh back onto the bones that I picked clean.

At this stage, I am just tinkering with ideas and we don't yet know whether this will result in a viable line of development or not, but it is an interesting project to work on when spoons and time allow.  Hopefully I'll be able to report some interesting developments on this in time.

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!

Grab Bag Hare

I haven't been to a 3rd Sunday playtest at the Jugged Hare in London for a couple of months, but finally managed to get myself in order for a trip last weekend, taking with me Grab Bag Zoo, my co-design with Mike Harrison-Wood, who managed to make the trip too, for our first face-to-face meet since we started working on the game.

There was a little uncertainty as to whether I would actually get into London as we had just been hit by the second big (by British standards) storm in two weeks, causing all sorts of problems for travel (not to mention people's houses getting flooded and property damaged) around the country. Checking the situation before I left home everything looked OK for my planned route, and the train was close to being on time, but we ended up being delayed by an hour en route due to a problem that emerged later. Unfortunately this meant I was not able to meet with Mike before the main meetup, but I managed to arrive comfortably before the playtesting started anyway.

Thanks to Mike Harrison-Wood for taking a much nicer photo than I managed to take!

While waiting for everyone to arrive, we had a quick play of Grab Bag Zoo for five players, including me, with Mike sitting out and taking notes. This worked pretty well, but the players fell massively short of winning. We suspect that the game is just too hard for larger player counts.

A little later, with the whole group assembled, we were able to get some more plays, this time for four players, this time including Mike while I observed.  One of the key things I learnt from this is that for a fast-moving, real-time game, it can be difficult to take meaningful notes about what is going on!

The group was enthusiastic overall and there was a lot of intense activity in the game, and they were keen to play a couple more times, meaning that we managed to try out all four of the zoo board sets that I had brought along between this session and the earlier game. The idea is that the game has a number of different sets of boards, each providing a different style or intensity of challenge, and this proved to be the case: the players took a different approach to each set of boards. The balancing of the board elements isn't right yet, but we are learning how the different options affect play.  However, we are also learning that some of the rules we have for the game are just too complicated and can easily get missed or wrongly applied.

So, I think that this was a really helpful testing session. We got feedback that the game is pretty compelling, but also identified a number of problems that need addressing, and we are getting to work on that.  I'm also discovering the fun of working on a very short game where you can easily just say, "Let's try that one more time, with this change..."

Of course, there were other games there, and it was fun to work through a few games designed by others: an interesting "short straw" game, a game about being a band, recording music and going on tour, and a nicely stripped back investment game. It's always good to get a look at some of the projects other folk are working on.

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.