What's in a Name?

Names have a lot of power, and I had a reminder of this recently when a playtester was giving me feedback about Invaded.  To him, the game's title suggested that there would be armies and fighting, and in practice, an entire game of Invaded can go by without any actual combat happening.  The mismatch of expectations with reality was a problem for him.  (He also had some other very interesting bits of feedback, but I'll focus on this one for the moment.)

So, as the game has developed, I've started to think that the combat side of things is not really the default focus.  I think that the threat of violence is probably more important than the violence itself, and if there isn't actually any fighting, that is fine, particularly if the reason for there being no combat is that the players were actively working to avoid it due to the danger it promises.

Turns out it wasn't just the British getting up to this sort of thing.
By Anonymous French engraver 1883 - "Histoire de la France" Milan Jeunesse, p.209, Public Domain, Link

On a related issue, I have been calling the players' mobile forces "warbands", but was called out on this by another playtester at UK Games Expo, who suggested that a different name would align better with their usual function within the game.  He's absolutely right, and at his prompting, I have started referring to them as "hunting parties", which is starting to feel a lot better.

I'm really not sure about the best way to address colonialism.  In the real world, colonial invasions often ended up with some real atrocities being committed, and at the very least, indigenous peoples were forced to take part in systems that were not in their own long-term best interests.  The atrocities and injustices were considered to be justified in the pursuit of profit (or in order to bring civilisation to the savages, the classic bogus rationale), rather than being the objective.  With colonial invaders typically having such a huge technological advantage over the indigenous peoples, though, any resultant violence can inevitably be blamed of those holding the power rather than those who feel threatened and fight back.

A game exploring these themes, where humans are considered to be resources, obstacles, and even animals that need to be trained, could get really dark and heavy.  The problem is that I want this to actually end up being a game, something that people can enjoy playing and hopefully helps to generate stories.  Anything above that is cool, but I'm aiming at having a game rather than a history lesson or a polemic.  That said, I keep thinking myself round in circles, as the theme of Invaded is so influential in what design decisions I make, and the invaders need, at the very least, to treat the natives unfairly.

And the playtester's comment about the title has made me think.  Based on a 10 second description of the theme, this game could go in a number of different directions, and the way it plays at the moment could result in several of them.  I normally don't worry about game titles: for the most part they are working titles, and can change later, but in this case, the title is instilling expectations that often are not fulfilled.  If it was called "Game 2016-K", or "Steve", there would be no such baggage.

"Invaded" as a title might be best consigned to history, but what to replace it with?  Some of the ideas people have come up with over the months might be better, like "Colonised", "Colonialism", or "Indigenous" all have their own potential implications.

I guess that at some point I need to just choose something that seems to do a reasonable job of representing the game and its theme, and just live with it.  After all, if this actually ends up being published it may well get renamed or get a specific historical setting, so it's not really worth losing sleep over.

I realise that this post is a little incoherent as I am partly using it to help me think some things through, but I would love to hear anyone's thoughts about the subject.  Particularly if any of you have any insights into any of the periods of history where a colonial invasion has taken place, but general thoughts and opinions would be great too.

Timing of Colonial Activity

In a recent playtest of Invaded, there was a suggestion that the colonial power should move more often.  The current game has play zipping around among the players, and when they have taken all the actions they want to (or can) do, the non-player colonial power makes a few moves.  The suggestion was essentially to put the colonial power into the normal cycle of player moves, so the players all take a turn, then the colonial power does too, and so on.

This has superficial appeal.  It means that the Colonial power is advancing its interests more steadily, rather than making sudden lurches every now and then.  It also means that the non-player power is moving at a similar speed to the players, which seems fair.

The colonial forces have landed and are ready to advance.

I have had a realisation though.  Reading an interesting post about designing heavier games by the League of Game Makers, there was a section entitled "Be Wary of Non-Trivial Mid Turn Decisions".  Now, Invaded isn't a particularly heavy game, and this section's title may not appear to be relevant here, but bear with me.

Part of the discussion was about how a useful feature in some heavier games is where players are able to analyse the game state and plan their move on other players' turns, so that their own turn doesn't devolve into having to make big decisions at the time; they can just execute the plan, making minor adjustments for the latest developments.  In, say, a worker placement game, you might figure out a list of priorities of what you want to do: I'll get resources from this space, and if that has been blocked I will go here or here...  This can help keep the game flowing and prevent everything from just bogging down and stretching play time for too long.

The relevance here (and it is a little tangential, but this is how my brain works) is that the colonial power is the biggest perturbing factor in the game -- or it should be; it isn't at the moment, and I need to fix that.  If your every move needs to take into account the fact that the colonials might mash your position in between any of your turns, that makes planning so much harder, and would probably disincentivise any even slightly risky manoeuvres.  That the colonials should be a threat is fine, and is pretty much the point of the game, but as the game is turn-based, with players taking small actions in turn, it makes sense that players should have a chance to get their ducks in a row, at least partly, before those nasty invaders start shooting at them.

The driver behind the playtest suggestion to have the colonial power activating between player turns was because so far the colonials have not had a sufficient impact on the flow of play.  On reflection I am pretty convinced that this suggestion is the wrong solution to a definite problem (see my previous post on the subject for some thoughts on better solutions) but I can always keep the idea in my back pocket in case I need to change my mind.

Colonising London

This weekend saw another trip to London for a Playtest UK meetup, and this time I took along Invaded, my game of indigenous tribes in a land being invaded by a strong colonial power.  These particular meetups start at around 1pm, and comprise a series of 90 minute slots with a few minutes' break between each.  There are generally three slots in the day (I think four have been known), usually with three or four tables running during each slot.   I was invited to run my game in the first slot, and got three volunteers to try it out.

A first ever 4-player game, including a slightly reticent colonial power.

I set out the prototype and stumbled through my rules explanation, and got surprisingly few questions.  That doesn't tell me anything in itself; it's what happens later that counts.  So, what did happen later?...

Well, the biggest thing that came out of this test is that the colonial forces took far too long to actually engage with the players, and only really did so as the game was coming towards an end. The activities of the non-player force is pretty much the raison d'être of the game, so its influence should begin to be felt pretty much from the beginning.  In discussions across the table we came up with a couple of relatively simple things to try and that, combined, should take us in the right direction.  First, there needs to be incentive for players to set up near the colonial landing ground, something which can be done by making those lands more productive from a resource point of view.  Secondly, the colonials need to be more proactive in moving forward and not have cards in their deck which often have no effect.  The plan for this second point is to put more than one action on the cards in the colonial deck, so each card is effectively of the form: "Take this action; if that is not possible/relevant, take this other action."  The next iteration of the game will be testing these tweaks.

There were plenty of other issues that came up, most of which are entirely relevant, but I am judging to be of lower importance right now.  Here are some of them...

• The "press your luck" aspect to gathering resources worked fine, but the consensus was that the fact that you were effectively gambling with your action opportunities didn't seem right and it should be more about what resources you are looking for.
• Gaining colonial favour could be made more interesting if, say, the player with the most favour could have some influence over colonial actions.
• The resource market is uninteresting, and only really came into play a couple of times.
• Gaining enmity from other tribes seems an interesting concept, but the downside to it is very small at the moment.
• The balance of victory point rewards from objectives is completely wrong, and there is not enough variety in the objectives.

There was also an interesting comment that the game is very different to most other hobby games.  Whereas players are generally used to building something and developing greater efficiency throught a game, Invaded starts with players in relatively strong positions and things tend to go downhill from there.  Or at least they would if the colonial power did anything interesting.

Aside from the various comments and criticisms, the general flow of the game went well, downtimes were short (mostly longer while I was taking notes about something), and the overall concept really grabbed everyone's attention.  This was another great session for me: I got a feeling that I am definitely right to be working on this game, but we found some problems and identified directions for me to take in its future development.  I'm definitely looking forward to moving it along some more.  Huge thanks to J, W and M for their help.

Colonial Advances

Resurrecting the "Invaded" game in the midst of all the other business going on, I have a new prototype, with its own map cards, resource cards, and so on.  You'll see from the picture below that I have replaced the map hexes with rectangular cards; I'd still hope for a final game to have hexes, but this arrangement has the same adjacency features and it is a heck of a lot easier to iterate a prototype if I don't have to keep cutting out hexagons.

Three times through the (18 card) colonial action deck with no natives.

Incidentally the circle and square in each space is an attempt to track the use of tribal units for various actions: rounds alternate between being "circle" and "square" rounds (yeah, a "square round", I know...), and during each round, used tokens get put into the appropriate shaped space to indicate their status.  The next round they move into the other shape, so we don't need to reset things between rounds.  I even have a card with a circle on one side and a square on the other to indicate which round we are on.  This seems to work OK so far, but I need more testing to see how it goes down with a variety of players.

One of the big challenges with the game so far is in building a deck of cards to control the colonial forces.  The idea is that each round, a couple of cards are drawn from the colonial deck and this results in the colonial power moving around, landing new regiments, building forts, and attacking natives when they feel like it.  I've so far had a play with the deck running unopposed to see what it does.  As you can see from the picture, it didn't result in anything particularly interesting happen, apart from the single regiment detaching and plunging into the wilds before building a fort.

Of course, this is not a natural situation for the game: there would always be at least one tribe sharing the board with the invaders, but it does indicate things aren't exactly ideal.  So, still more work to do...

Run To The Hills... Run For Your Life

I have made some progress.  After my recent post on the subject of a game focused on the struggles of peoples being invaded by a colonial power, I managed to throw together a prototype to try out some ideas and then build on that.  

The first go involved hand-written cards to try out a simple "artificial intelligence" to control the non-player colonial power.  Then when that looked OK, I turned to the trusty nanDECK to make a set of cards and plundered my Settlers of Catan box for terrain tiles and resource cards, and my general component stock for everything else.

Solo testing a Frankenproto.  The sharp-eyed may spot some components I stole from elsewhere.

Pro tip: for quick prototyping, having copies of Catan and Carcassonne lying around is really helpful.  I actually have a big stock of random meeples, cubes, other wooden shapes (in various colours), coins, dice and other tokens and the like, but those two games provide a really handy variety of components that can be insanely useful for throwing together a prototype to test a concept, and both games are relatively inexpensive, easily available, and good games that belong in just about any board game collection anyway.

Having had a couple of solo plays I discovered that (a) the game I had at that point seems to fundamentally be Not Completely Awful, which is probably the first major quality threshold to pass, and (b) I don't really have the imagination to play a game as multiple different players and actually do any useful testing.  Luckily, at this point I was able to persuade my friend, D, to have a go at playing the prototype instead of using that valuable time playing something that has already been published.  This test involved a few on-the-fly rules changes, and we didn't get through the whole thing, but it was enough to get some good insight into the state of the game.

I now have a handy list of points that I need to address, which largely breaks down to:

• The colonial power as it stands is not aggressive enough.
• I need to think out combat better, both between different players and between the players and the colonials.
• I have players potentially collecting "antagonism" tokens when they annoy the colonial power, but I have not yet clearly defined how they affect game play.
• Loads more bits that are currently not as important.

Overall, I have a really good feeling about this project.  It may develop slowly, but I definitely want to make some more progress here.

Being Invaded

I was listening to the always-interesting Perfect Information Podcast the other day (episode 25) and enjoying the deep, opinionated discussion (also loquacious and somewhat sweary) about some of those tricky subjects that get glossed over, ignored, whitewashed or romanticised in games.  Like slavery, or representation of indigenous peoples in colonial settings.  There are a lot of interesting thoughts there, but the one that really caught my attention was the assertion that while there are many games where players control colonial powers, there aren't any which treat the indigenous peoples as anything other than an obstacle to be overcome.  Okay, so there is Archipelago, which is a little more nuanced, but I think the point still stands.  The general assumption is that the colonial powers are the "good guys" at some level.

So why are all the games from the point of view of the colonisers and never about the colonised?

I gather it doesn't always go well for colonial powers.
Source: By Melton Prior (1845-1910). - The Illustrated London News May 14, 1881, vol. 78, p. 469. Scan provided by The Library of Congress., Public Domain

So this got me thinking.  Can I make a game where players actually control indigenous tribes in a land, getting on with whatever alliances and rivalries they have, and then an external colonising power arrives to steal their lunch?

This is still early stages, but I think I can go somewhere with this.  I'm writing this post largely to just put something into a more tangible form which might encourage me to actually turn it into something playable.

Just as some rough notes for now...

• Tribes can have a number of possible strategies:
• Fight the invaders.
• Trade with the invaders.
• Collaborate with the invaders.
• Flee.
• Aim to get rich.
• Try to use the invasion to wipe out a rival tribe.
• I'm not sure about overall objectives, but presumably being in a better position than other tribes at a certain point is important.
• The invaders can be assumed to be almost unstoppable and with technologies that the tribes can't really compete with.
• This could be cooperative, but I would like it to be competitive.  Maybe there could be different play modes.
• Basing this on a historical period and location (colonisation of Africa, North America, South Pacific, etc) could offer some really great opportunities for a really interesting game.

That's about what I have right now, but I've had a chat with a game designer friend about this and some more ideas are starting to swirl around, so the next step is probably to put something basic on the table.