Sympol Numbers

I've had a few tests of my cooperative game, Sympolis, over the last month or so and am now pretty comfortable with the overall shape of the game, but of course, the devil is in the detail and now I am trying to get that devil pinned down. 

So here's the thing: if you make a competitive game, the players provide a lot of the balance; in a cooperative game, the game systems have to do all the work. I'll unpack that a bit. If I want a cooperative game to feel challenging to experienced players as well as newbies, the mechanisms, set-up parameters, etc. need to provide that challenge and have a way to scale and adapt. With a competitive game, an experienced player can usually get more challenge by playing against other experienced players.

One of my traditional blurry photos of a recent playtest of Sympolis.

The last few playtests of Sympolis have all been won by the players fairly easily, with a period of perceived pressure mid-game, followed by that pressure easing off until we reached a relatively straightforward final round that felt more like a victory lap than a finale. The level of that feeling has reduced as I have tweaked settings, but it hasn't gone away. One of the focuses of the game is the pair of "wrath tracks" for each player, which indicates the level of trouble you are getting from the gods and the people of your city respectively. If either track gets too high, your city falls and everyone loses the game. In recent iterations, if the tracks go too low, you gain complications due to the people being too lazy and hubristic, or the gods getting jealous of the pampered people. It turns out that the "high wrath" situation is currently too easily managed, which reduces pressure far too much.

In essence, the game asks players to walk a tightrope, but that tightrope is more of a footbridge, with handrails that look insubstantial, but are actually pretty solid when you test them. 

And that's what I'm trying to deal with now. My usual approach of making games is to just make general guesses about numbers, quantities, and so on, and then revise as I get a feeling for how a game plays out. I think that in this game, I may have got to the limit of how far I can go by doing that - or at least, further progress will be slowed massively unless I adapt.

So that's what I am attempting to do at the moment. I have a spreadsheet page counting up numbers from my main card data source, which is another page in the same document that I use as an input into a nanDECK script in order to build my card decks. This is giving me a decent view on the state of my card decks, but there are things that aren't easy to capture automatically, like figuring out the number of dice that are likely to be required to complete any given challenge card, or even group of cards. 

I think that a potential approach would be to come up with a system to provide a rating for each challenge card, working initially on the expected number of dice needed to complete it, maybe boosting it a bit if there is some complicating factor like requiring precise numbers. In fact, I could extend this and rate the production use of each card also, maybe with production of a die giving 1 point, and provision of some die or card manipulation ability having probably some fraction of a point. Then I should be able to analyse the likely production rating at any given time and compare it with the likely challenge rating on a given turn. Once I have that information I will be better placed to tweak numbers to get the game to the challenge level I am looking for.

How much wrath is too much wrath?

Probably the biggest problem with making a cooperative game (i.e. one where the players all win or lose as a group, and not individually) is getting the challenge level right. If the game is too difficult, most players will just get frustrated and not bother trying again. If the game is too easy, players just win and don't feel motivated to have another go. 

What we are usually looking for is where defeats feel like a victory was achievable, and victories feel like they were just by the skin of our teeth. And, ideally, we want this to be reliable, so we don't see wild, swingy changes where one time a given group has an easy time, and the next play, with the same initial setup, the same group has a nightmare where the whole thing falls apart in a couple of rounds. Oh, and we need to have varying difficulty levels or alternative scenarios, so that once a group masters the basic game, they have a new challenge to move on to.

We'll not worry about that last point for now, as it seems to me pointless to worry too much about varying scenarios until the basic game is solid but, that said, it's worth keeping an eye open for where opportunities for varying the game come in.

So, just to recap on where we are at here: Sympolis is a cooperative game that I am currently working on, where players are each the leaders of city states, inspired by a mythical view of classical Greece, where they have to deal with various demands from both the gods and the people of the cities. Those demands might be to build a new building, to hold a festival, or to attack one of the neighbouring cities. Fail to deal with the challenges and the gods or the people will get angry. If either of these influences get too angry, or if an attack ends up sacking a city, everyone loses as a neighbouring empire takes advantage of the situation to sweep in and crush the collective culture.

This is what it might look like when you are about to lose the game.

I tend to think of games having a set of "knobs" to twiddle to tune the experience, making it more or less challenging, increasing or decreasing the importance of a subsystem, or whatever. In this game, some of those tuning knobs are the number and proportion of the different types of cards (eg. ones that produce useful resources or abilities vs those that are primarily challenges), the costs of cards, the failure points on the wrath tracks, the details of the "wrath cards" that turn the screw as you play as well as how those cards are added to the game, and so on. There are quite a lot here, maybe too many; like in any complex system, a lot of the elements are interdependent, so tweaking too much at once could have dramatic and unpredictable results.

And thinking of unpredictable results, one of the issues I have with this game currently is at least partially due to there being two independent sources of randomness: cards and dice. This setup feels natural for this game, but there is a big difference between drawing a challenging set of cards and getting the "wrong" dice rolls, and having a game where everything goes right for you. Bad (or good) luck can really compound in a way that can be frustrating for players. Conventional wisdom in game design circles is that, for games that are meant to have strategy or other thoughtful elements, multiple sources of randomness is usually not a good idea. If I am going to keep both sources of random uncertainty in the game, I need to also include ways to mitigate against the bad luck - and maybe even limit the impact of good fortune.

I'm still pondering ways to do this at the moment, and I'm not sure of the correct approach. Right now I'm feeling that I should give the players more tools to allow them to be clever and get around the bad luck, while making the game more consistently punishing. Now, how to twiddle knobs to make that happen...?

One way to address the first part of the equation is with the starting setup. At the moment, each player has a couple of buildings in their cities which produce dice that can be used to deal with challenges. Some of the additional buildings that can be gained allow for dice manipulation, but if these don't turn up, life can be really hard. Maybe the starting selection of buildings given to players could include some dice manipulation options, so some of that flexibility is available right from the start.

Then there is the "investment" track on player boards. At the moment, dice of any colour or value can be used to push a marker up this track, and this investment can be cashed in later for more dice or reductions in wrath. This works fairly well, but I think I will try allowing the fruits of investments to be sent to other players, thus allowing an opportunity for "richer" cities to bail out their neighbours at their time of need, introducing some more flexibility in how the games challenges can be approached.

Up to this point, the game setup has involved each player having two starting buildings in their city, as mentioned above, and each turn providing a base number of challenges that scales with the number of players. This actually will mean that, amongst other things, the number of turns in a game will vary with player count. I'm starting to think that maybe there should be a set number of starting buildings in the game (divided amongst the players) and a set number of challenges each turn. This would mean that a smaller player count would mean each player has a lot more to deal with, which might either make the low player counts feel too busy, or the higher player counts seem too simple. This sort of setup would allow for a single, more stable configuration to the game that would allow me to work on that consistency more easily, but it's not a silver bullet.

Of course, I could require numbers of cards to be added or removed according to player counts. This wouldn't be the end of the world - many other games do it, and the current number of cards in this game would make it relatively easy to do - but I am a fan of games where you pretty much take things out of the box, shuffle the deck, and then go.

I guess I'll just need to try some of these options.

Finally for today, just some thoughts on what I call the "wrath cards". These are cards that provide a condition that increases the tension in the game, for instance, populations getting more angry if a war demand is unprosecuted, or an earthquake hitting everyone if the gods are sufficiently displease with any one player. The idea is that these periodically enter play, providing a thematic and mechanical incentive to "get a move on" rather than simply spending ages building up production systems. The problem is that I have tried a number of ways of introducing these to the game, and while the effect of the ramp up feels like something I want to keep in, every mechanism so far has felt like a bit of a kludge.

My latest approach is that, at the end of each turn, one of the wrath cards gets shuffled into the "easy" challenge deck (the one that mostly provides production buildings), thus making it riskier to take the easy route each turn. This, of course, provides yet more randomness that can make the game even more swingy than otherwise. I've had a couple of tests using this mechanism, and in one, hardly any wrath turned up, and the other flooded the table with nastiness very quickly. The challenge of the cards was cool, but the brutality was not.

So maybe the way for this is for the wrath cards to not be random at all, or at least the pace of their arrival not random. Perhaps we just have one flipped each round, also using this as a timer for the game as a whole - hey folks, you have 6 rounds to appease the gods... good luck!

Anyway, this has been long, rambly, and not really resolved anything, but writing it has helped me work out some ideas in my head, so it's time to put those ideas into a new iteration of the game. If you are still with me (thanks!) and have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, please do feel free to comment.

Theo-democracy

Continued thoughts on the potential cooperative game where you are forced to attack the other players...

It occurred to me that a great potential setting for a game like this could be a fantasy version of ancient Greece.  If I mashed together the gods and heroes from the mythical era with rival city states and Athenian-style democracy from the classical period, this could be a great starting point.

No wonder they are fighting, it looks really crowded in there.
Picture yoinked from wikimedia.org and is allegedly in the public domain.

The main thrust of the game is now that each player controls one of the city states and each turn you have to balance the will of the gods with the will of the people, and woe betide anyone who ignores them both.  Both of those demanding factions are fickle and capricious, so getting a random deal of cards (showing a demand from one or both of gods or people) each round should model that pretty well.  We can have a measure of divine anger and civil unrest for each player, and if those get too high, the game is lost, and those measures can also impact how other things work out.

I'm not yet sure how to win the game at this point.  It could simply be a matter of surviving a certain amount of time without the balance breaking down, but I think there needs to be more of an interesting finale to build towards.  I think this can be developed later -- knowing that the basic play of the game works is probably more important -- but I need to keep it in mind and come up with something before too long, even if that changes later.

Of course, this could all be so much easier if it was a competitive game, but that is not the challenge, and would probably end up with something rather more vanilla.

I want this game to have a board, rather than being just a card game, largely so we can see armies moving around on a map.  This might just get abstracted to a circle where you attack and defend left and right.  In fact that is probably enough for a first iteration, and if more scope for manoeuvre is found to be required, then so be it.  So that means that some of the actions available will boil down to deploying troops either to your left or your right, and using them to attack or defend.  Part of  the game would therefore end up being to fight battles and win glory, but not being too effective at it.

That would make for quite a dull game, so there needs to be more going on out there.  Building temples to the gods would probably be good. Something to do with games (of the Olympic variety), maybe.  Also economic elements, including production of goods domestically and trade, both with the other players and with off-board non-player powers.  To get with the mythical element, doing things like launching a thousand ships to attack Troy would be cool too.

As I write, I am starting to put together a very basic prototype to try the principles out, using a few of the ideas I have mentioned above.  Next time I write on this subject, I will relate how that went.

Before that happens, though, I am feeling a bit of a 24 hour challenge buzz...

Cooperating With Your Enemies

So I was having a discussion on Facebook, which started about whether there are any cooperative boardgames that are best with, or specifically designed for, three players.  This quickly developed into a bit of a design brainstorm about a possible game that could fit that bill given that people were suggesting games that were good with three, but nobody seemed to find one that was best with that count.   Huge thanks to Tim Cox and Koen Hendrix for throwing around some really interesting ideas and making this into a really fun evening's diversion.

One of the participants suggested Dune as a setting, and this got me thinking about how to create a true cooperative game, with no traitor mechanic or anything like that, but based in a universe where everyone is trying all manner of underhand tricks, including, but not limited to, assassination and nukes.  Once we got that far, I had fallen down a rabbit hole and I found there were ideas bouncing around that wouldn't let go.

A dune. Not sure those guys have properly set up stillsuits.
Pic yoinked from pexels.com

I don't feel inclined to create a game that relies heavily on an IP, but I'll use Dune as an example for what I am thinking about right now...  (I'll confess here that it is a long time since I have read any of the Dune books -- and I did lose the will to live before getting through the entire series -- so my thoughts here are based mostly on incomplete memories of the first book and subsequent screen adaptations.)

So, regardless of player number (it would be nice to hit that magical three, but this discussion is on to something else now), there needs to be a common goal which, if achieved, means that everyone wins.  In Dune terms, let's say that there needs to be a spice harvest to bring in enough spice, and at that point no single house must be in control of Arrakis. We will basically assume that, for the overall good of everyone, a stand-off is what is most desirable, even if the noble members of the various houses don't actually see it that way.

There also needs to be ways to lose.  As a first pass, lets say that if any house gets all their influence completely removed from Arrakis, that sufficiently destabilises things to end the game, as does one house becoming sufficiently powerful.

So if everyone wants stability to be maintained, surely that is easy.  And isn't it unthematic to think that there is any possible universe where a Harkonnen won't stick a knife into an Atreides back given a reasonable opportunity?

Yes, true.  So we will force this.

My thinking at the moment is that each round, every player is forced to make at least one move that is nasty and obnoxious and would work against the interests of maintaining a balance.  You know, I invest in this city, harvest some spice, negotiate with the Guild, and assassinate one of your leaders; yeah, sorry, I didn't have much choice there.

How can we make that happen? Well, maybe the game is card driven and you need to play all the cards in your hand each round.  Each card has a nice, positive effect that nudges the game towards victory, and also something unpleasant that screws everyone in general but one player in particular; then you have to decide which of your cards (or maybe more than one) you play for its bad effect.  So there may be some effects that are absolutely essential to provide any chance of winning, but that means that you have to deploy the house atomics against the last player who looked at you funny.

Combine that with some external challenges that need to be overcome and we may have a game here.  I'm on it and will see if I can get a basic prototype playable soon -- though I probably won't be using the Dune setting.  I have an idea for an alternate setting, which then suggests a load of developments.  I'll start building that and will post about it really soon.

To be continued...

Defence against the horde...

I've been doing this game design thing enough now that I am starting to get the "problem" of unbidden ideas taking over my head for a while.  For the last couple of days it has been for a card game that wouldn't go away until I created a prototype.  What happens next, I don't know.

To step back a bit, some time ago I was thinking about the very enjoyable Sherlock Holmes the Card Game, which I used to play quite regularly and features a nice mechanism where each card specifies what types of card can follow it, allowing a pleasing (though occasionally silly) narrative to develop.  So, while in the country, Holmes may find a clue, which leads to suspicion of one of the players, who has an alibi, after which Holmes is compelled to catch a train back to London.  The rules can be explained quickly (though the end of round scoring can take some work!) 

Alone against the monster horde. Luckily this wandering mystic has come to my aid.

I was trying to think of a way to play with this basic mechanism to come up with a game that built a narrative of a conflict between opposing forces, ideally where players are at least mostly on one side, but possibly with one (or more) of them taking the role of either an adversary or a traitor.  This never really developed very far; I had a very basic attempt, which mostly worked, but wasn't really interesting enough and relied too much on the game that provided the inspiration.

Months passed and then this weekend, for some reason, I started thinking about the concept again.  What got me moving again was some looking at the wonderful website, game-icons.net, which does pretty much what it says on the tin, and deciding that the card types could be labelled with icons representing different parts of the story (characters, events, actions and so on) and each could allow for a small number of other types of card (by icon) to be played next.  So far this just changed the representation of a concept: text in Sherlock Holmes is turned into graphics in my game, which is no change at all, really, but sorting through some candidate icons the ideas started flowing.

The game would be about the players helping to defend a village from an invading army of monsters.  I was trying to come up with victory conditions for a competitive game, but eventually thought that the setting lends itself to being cooperative, and that is a style of game that I haven't yet tried designing (or, for that matter, solitaire).  Eventually I came to the idea of having a "threat level", which would be increased by some cards and reduced by others.  This still didn't seem enough, so I also had a magical "power level", which could be increased to allow magical defences to come into play.

Usually I would rough out a prototype with pens and bits of card, but I was confident enough of the most basic functioning here that I turned to some very basic nanDeck coding plus the icon assets I had downloaded, worked out a basic selection of cards, and soon had printed out a small deck of 36 cards to play with. 

By this point I had thought of a couple of ways for players to lose the game -- if the threat level reaches 10, or the deck of cards run out -- but I hadn't really figured out how to win.  Never mind, start playing anyway...

By half the way through my first solitaire test, I had figured out the main win/lose conditions: if the threat reaches 10 you lose, as previously planned, but to win you need to work through the deck and then get the threat level to 0 with whatever cards are left over, otherwise you lose.  Also, if you are unable to play a card you add a threat and draw an additional card.

This seemed to work. I lost my first three games in a row and found some frustrating points where there were no playable cards for some time, which was largely due to the icons on the cards not meshing with each other properly.  A small change or two with a pen and I won a couple of games.  Yeah, balancing this is going to be difficult, but at least there is the option of having selectable difficulty levels thanks to varying hand size, starting threat level, and so on.

Now the game is out of my head and in a tangible form that makes me think I might like to keep working on this.  I definitely need to think through the card mix carefully if we're going to progress, and one problem I've noticed is that on many turns there are no real choices to make: you just have to play the card that fits.  OK, so every few turns there can be really interesting decisions, but the rest can be scripted.  That seriously needs to change.

Much still to do...