Building in the Valley

Following on from my post about my "drafting" game a couple of weeks back, I have spent a little more time on the game and am getting closer to a complete game.  There's still a little way to go, but it's coming along.

This game has been developing along an interesting path. What I did was to start with enough components to just about play a first round with three players, and solo-played all three positions myself, adding extra components when I needed them.  Unusually, by my recent standards, I was working by drawing on bits of card, something I usually only do for initial experiments with small parts of a possible game.

The big, green pawn, by the way, is a first player token.

This is a method that works pretty well with a supply of index cards, sharpies, scissors and a paper trimmer, and assorted "stock" components. The game starts with five actions available (claim location, produce goods, sell goods, buy goods, and select score cards), so the game can pretty much be started with knowledge of what those actions do, and more introduced as they are added from the deck, including the opportunity to build locations and roads, and expand your control from claimed locations.  Some of these required additional components to be added, and I was making new action cards when I thought of them.

At this point, the only thing really preventing the game being playable all the way through is a lack of score cards (I just fluffed through that when it came up), and I'll need to throw something together there before I can get much further.  The idea is that when the "select score cards" action is chosen, everyone gets to select a single score card which gives them a scoring condition to apply at the end of the game. Each player will acquire maybe three of these through the game, and not all of them will be in play in any given game. The idea is that your strategy is shaped by the score cards selected as the game progresses.

One major decision (which is reversible if I don't like the outcome, so it's not really a big deal) is whether victory is based on how much money you have at the end of the game (in which case the score cards give you bonuses to your earnings), there is a victory point tally, or something else is used. Victory points seems natural to me as a gamer, but they can be unintuitive and seem very arbitrary, suggesting that it is usually better to have some other measure of success.  I'll probably plump for "have the most cash" as the victory condition to start with.

Anyway, that's where we are at right now. Once I have an initial set of score cards I'll start pushing the game at playtesters, starting with some who I know are OK with incomplete and terrible games.

Goofing About in an Airport

We were away in Ireland over Christmas and on the way back we found ourselves with a few hours to kill in Dublin airport, given our tendency to schedule travel very conservatively, so when everything runs on time we end up with space to fill.  My daughter, Miss B, and I spent a little while improvising a card game, which turned out to be good, if chaotic fun.

This is how things went...  We started with a pen each and some blank cards (kit I usually have with me while travelling).  We could either write whatever we liked on a card, or (later on) use a card made earlier in the game, and we would each select our card for the round simultaneously.  Once we had both chosen our card, we would reveal the cards and decide who had won.  The winner would take both played cards into their hand, but could not use them again immediately.

Some of our cards. Beautifully presented they are not.

At first things were a bit random (the first two cards were "An Elephant Wearing a Cowboy Hat" and "Squirrel Girl"), but as we went on, we started to create cards that could give more flexibility or special effects, or provided a counter to an earlier card (Squirrel Girl, being naturally unbeatable, is nevertheless vulnerable to "Delicious Nuts That Make You Go To Sleep").  Where a winner was not clear, we just discussed and decided between us -- with my wife, S, as an impartial judge when we weren't sure.

Obviously this is just a bit of dumb fun, and it was a great way to pass a bit of time, but it seems (in principle, at least) a good way to organically develop some card interactions, particularly if we crack the cards out again and continue to expand the game using a combination of pre-existing cards and, probably, a limited number of blank cards each time.  We fully intend to do this in the future.

This game is actually fairly similar to one called 1000 Blank White Cards, which usually starts in a Fluxx-like "draw 1, play 1" pattern and then can go off in any direction from there, and again uses a combination of blank cards (which you can turn into anything you want when you have them) and pre-existing cards created during a previous play.

1000BWC in turn derives from Nomic, a game where the rules change during play due to player votes, and I assume the commercially-produced Fluxx must have been inspired by one or more of these other games.

In just the limited amount of play we had of our little game, we quickly started seeing a metagame emerge, and if we do play some more, I would expect that to continue.  I really don't know what to expect, but I think this is the point.  I think it's a little like doing improv workshops to develop acting: just learning to roll with whatever happens is valuable in itself.