A Village with Fewer Darlings

 There is a bit of clichéd advice from the writing world that has carried over to the field of game design: "Kill your darlings". The idea is that if there are characters, plot elements, etc. that you love but don't further the overall story, then they should go. In the case of game design, that mechanism or component that you feel is totally awesome but which gets in the way of the intended play experience... axe it!

One of the more contentious parts of The Village on the River -- the "flip and write" game I am working on with Chris O'Regan -- is the way that resources are gained. The game was initially designed to work with a standard deck of playing cards, where the number cards of three suits represented resources that you could acquire, with the twist that each number indicated a unique "block" of that resource. So, you could claim the 7 of Diamonds card and circle the 7 of Diamonds spot on your playsheet, which meant that you gained a unit of money which you could spend later. There were some other ways to gain resources too, which meant that you could choose a spot to circle regardless of that number. If, on a previous turn, you had gained money and represented this by circling the 7 of Diamonds, then if the matching card came up later, you could not choose to take it as that block was already claimed.

This was something that grew out of the use of the playing cards, and stayed when we revised the game to use custom cards where the "suits" were actually people, stone and money rather than Hearts, Clubs and Diamonds. Spades became construction actions, if you are interested. Also the numbers turned into letters, but that is even less relevant.

My playsheet from the latest test. And a win!

Anyway, some players have enjoyed the quirkiness of this system and the texture it imparts to play, but overwhelmingly players have bounced off it, sometimes because they just find the rule unintuitive or hard to understand, and sometimes for other reasons like it feeling like the game was sometimes randomly punishing them for choosing the wrong thing and having no information about that choice in advance.

So... Eventually we decided that we could at least try the idea out. All we needed to do is play the game but ignore the letters both on the cards and on the play sheet and see how it went.

The first play doing this felt OKish to me, but a bit wrong to Chris. One of the things we had observed was that the method we had built in for players to keep track of the resource cards that showed up in the game (should they so wish) now felt really wrong, and our standard ways of playing just didn't feel quite right. 

We left it a few weeks after that, with both of us doing other things and not getting around to further work or meetings. Then the next time we played, with a little distance from the original decision, everything pretty much fell into place. The resource tracking still didn't sit right for us, but otherwise we both felt that the game was easier to play but still felt like it had decent levels of challenge.

Our current thinking is that we will try testing the game with other people with the simplified rules, which looks likely to become the "standard" way to do things. We think that the "resource letters" may be kept as a sort of advanced play mode, but we'll see how things go.  

Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed Invaders

If you have read some of my older posts, you may remember a game I have been working on, on-and-off, for several years now, with the working title, Invaded. It is based on being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, where players are trying to respond to the overwhelming force of the non-player invaders. I had a game that showed a lot of potential, but had various things wrong with it. For instance, it was too fiddly for its depth of play, was uneven in its experience (some plays were compelling, while others were quite dull), and I think generally insufficiently focused. All of this is potentially fixable, but it has been on a back burner for a while now while I have done other things.

Recently, though, I had another wave of inspiration about the game, largely based on a few things that have been rattling around my mind...

• A publisher I was talking to a year or so back, who said I should commit to a setting for the game rather than the generic setting I had been working with.
• A discussion from all-round top chap Adam Porter in a YouTube video, suggesting that a useful exercise is to make a "junior..." or "my first..." version of a game you are working on to try to find the simplest version of a design that is true to it's core idea.
• Squirrels. Over the last few months of working from home and/or being in lockdown, my wife and I have been taking mostly-daily walks around the neighbourhood, where there is a decent population of squirrels, and we have had a running game of seeing how many we can spot. Our best so far has been seventeen.

"Squirrel Invasion" in Tabletopia.
I think that might be the new working title.

So, challenge accepted, I guess. After some monkeying about, I have a just-about-playable game for two players as an attempt to at least try out some concepts before I flesh things out some more.  It even has some features that seemed like a good idea, but I'm not yet quite sure what to do with.

The game is now set in a woodland, inhabited by assorted squirrels, which is being invaded by a population of nasty and aggressive grey squirrels. Instead of having the assorted resources that you could gather and spend in the old versions of the game, there is just one: acorns, and you are trying to gather enough acorns to feed your "clan" before winter comes or the greys take over entirely.

The old version had a series of rounds, during which you played through a hand of cards that activate the invading force in various ways (with a system that ramped up intensity as play progressed), while also taking actions for your tribe, selected from an action menu. What I have now are cards that each require you to take one action on behalf of your own clan and one for the greys, and the way to gain more cards is to trigger an event from a selection on display, and several of the events push the game towards an end.

Initial tests suggests that this works passably at the level I expect it to -- which is to work for a few turns for two players. The balance of actions isn't right, and there are some big holes in the gameplay, but I think it is worth extending the decks to allow for more play.  As with most of this year's game design work, I'm building the prototype online (in this case, in Tabletopia), which means that I don't need to be doing printing, cutting and sleeving, and also that I can get nicer pictures of the work in progress, but it is missing the immediacy of physical components. 

With several other projects also ticking along, this is a few down in priority, but it at least has some pretty straightforward tasks to do with it for now, so it might keep moving along for a while.