Explore and Make Cards

Moving back to a game that has been getting little love in recent months, the one that I have currently codenamed Explore and Settle, I have decided to actually set up the cards on the computer, so I can quickly make whatever cards I want in whatever quantities, and start moving towards a bigger and better prototype than I had before. And I figured I might as well share how I do this, in case anyone is interested.

So, if you remember, the basic idea is that we have playing cards divided up into a square section, showing a terrain type (and possibly other features, though I'm not worrying about that right now) and the remaining part of the card is a tab which indicates a resource production type, which can end up being obscured by another card.

...a bit like this.

My tool of choice for this sort of job is a program called nanDECK, which provides a simple programming language designed to allow you to create game cards (or, potentially, other printed components).  A short script can combine with a data file (which can be a spreadsheet or a comma-separated-values file, which is what I usually use) to provide a way to easily (once you have learnt the basics) produce sheets of print-and-play cards.  The program also has a visual editor, but  I have never used it as it is not how my brain works best, so cannot comment on how effective it is.

As an aside, nanDECK is designed to run on Windows, but my PC runs a Linux operating system, which is inconvenient in this case. Fortunately we have the Wine software available; this is basically something that allows a lot of Windows software to run on Linux, and it is very handy.  Unfortunately it is often more complicated than just installing and running and, in the case of nanDECK, I had to spend a little while chasing down libraries from the Internet to make everything work.  It's all good now, and it works fine, though I'm afraid I can't go into how I did this, as it was quite a while back.

Anyway, a short bit of nanDECK code like this...

BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0,MARKDOT PAGE=21,29.7,PORTRAIT,HV DPI=300 CARDSIZE=6.3,8.9 [VersionString]="Version 0.0" [AllCards]="1" ELLIPSE=[AllCards],1.5,2.5,3.3,6,#000000 ELLIPSE=[AllCards],1.7,2.7,2.9,5.6,#FFFFFF RECTANGLE=[AllCards],0.3,0.3,5.7,5.7,#000000 RECTANGLE=[AllCards],0.5,0.5,5.3,5.3,#FFFFFF FONT="Arial",6,,#000000 TEXT=[AllCards],[VersionString],0.5,8.5,5,0.5,RIGHT

...defines the size and shape of the card as well as the paper that I plan to print on, and lays down some background shapes.  Note that I also always put a version number on the bottom of the cards, which helps me keep my revisions in order, and also the "AllCards" bit is just a handy label for all the cards in my set, later on I will change it to something like [AllCards]="1-54" to define a 54 card deck.  That little script allows me to produce a basic template for the cards which comes out like this...

The intent is to stick a terrain image in the big square at the top, and put a resource icon in the outlined space near the bottom.  It's not the last word in graphic design, but the intent is simply to make something neat and presentable.

At the moment I am using five types of terrain for the game: grassland, forest, hills, mountains and sea.  I quickly made some rough terrain images that will be adequate until I find something nicer later on -- though I might not bother; we'll see.  I have also grabbed icons from game-icons.net to represent the basic resources: food, wood, stone, ore, gems.  These assets are all put into my project directory as PNG files (actually they are symlinks to the assets which are elsewhere, but that is irrelevant), and will be pulled in by my data file.

My card data file is pretty straightforward.  A spreadsheet might be easier in many ways, but I usually use a comma-separated-values (CSV) file because years of working on Unix/Linux command lines has pretty much made me happiest when using Unix tools to manipulate text files, and that is what these are.  So here's the contents of my data file for my first pass, just to check things work OK...

Quantity,CardTitle,Image,Resources 2,Grassland,tile_grassland.png,F 2,Forest,tile_forest.png,W 1,Mountain,tile_mountain.png,O 1,Mountain,tile_mountain.png,G 1,Hills,tile_hills.png,S 1,Hills,tile_hills.png,O 1,Sea,tile_sea.png,

And I can now add the following lines to my nanDECK code to pull in the data and put the images in the right places.  Note that for the resource icons I am using the ICONS directive which is a really useful tool to effectively turn letters into pictures, which is great.  I could actually also use this for the main image, which may allow for some interesting manipulation of the card data, but I'm not worrying about that this time.

LINKMULTI=Quantity LINK=exploreandsettle_cards.csv ICON=[AllCards],F,"icon_food.png" ICON=[AllCards],W,"icon_wood.png" ICON=[AllCards],S,"icon_stone.png" ICON=[AllCards],O,"icon_ore.png" ICON=[AllCards],G,"icon_gems.png" IMAGE=[AllCards],[Image],0.5,0.5,5.3,5.3 ICONS=[AllCards],[Resources],2,6,2.3,2.3,1.5,1.5,0,T

And I changed the "AllCards definition to fit that I now have more cards in my set...

[AllCards]="1-9"

And, after building all that, here are the cards I have generated...

So I just need to figure out how many of each type of card I need and I'm done.

Capital Playtesting

Yesterday I took a second trip to London for the monthly Sunday meetup organised by Playtest UK.  The travel this time wasn't so smooth.  I hadn't checked that rail services were running as usual, so when I got to Didcot to find that a huge section of train track was closed, meaning a ride on a replacement bus service to Reading, then a train from there to Paddington (moving more slowly than usual due to other work on the way).  Then, in London, the Circle Line was closed so I had to make a change in my trip to Victoria.  Ah well, I had allowed plenty of time and was still able to grab a coffee and lunch before going to the pub.

I took Boogie Knights with me again, and got to watch version 0.6 played by four players (one of whom had played an earlier version) as part of the first session of testing.  I was trying out the new rules and cards, with a target of 10 points for the win, which made the game run a little too long -- I'll be revising this number down a bit in future, and this is actually a parameter that can be easily tweaked any time to help hit my target play time of 15 to 20 minutes.

Aside from observations about game length, I made a few more notes and took down plenty of comments and suggestions from the players.  Possibly the biggest issue this group was feeding back was that they felt that there was not enough to do each turn, and there was a general feeling that they were looking for a little more complexity and depth.  I think this is the first time I have had that particular line of feedback, but it did come after I had cut a fair bit out of the game, so they may be on to something.  Or it might just be that this was the feeling after the game ran a bit long.  Or maybe this is just an out-lier result.

You see, this is one of those things about playtesting, and something I am only now really starting to appreciate as Boogie Knights has had a fair bit more playtesting with other people than any of my other games so far: feedback from one group may mean nothing, or it may mean everything, and it probably means something different to what they are actually saying.  One playtest just gives a data point, and that needs to be compared with others to figure out how it all fits together.  Sometimes (as with my previous couple of sessions), the message is clear quite quickly, but other times you just need to plug along and get more data.

Fortunately, I think this version is looking stable enough that it could stand a few more rounds of playtesting to help find what needs to happen next.

Of course, I played a load of other games at various stages of development: steampunk airships travelling through a portal in time and space to hunt dinosaurs; a team game where one member of each team is colour-blinded with red-lensed glasses and has to be guided to identify tokens of their team colour in a game of What's My Line? meets Guess Who; a boules-like game of frisbeeing beer mats; and a "saga-driven" game set in a battle for a Helms Deep style megafortress, where players are trying to earn their places in heroic songs, which could be by being involved in a tragic love affair just as much as by feats of heroic derring-do.

I totally love all this playing of prototypes.  Just being exposed to all that creativity is kinda intimidating, but it is also inspiring, and the level of mutual support being shared around is amazing.  Now, when can I get down there again...?

Boogie Five is Alive!

Version 0.5 of Boogie Knights is up and running, and after giving it a test with a table of players who hadn't tried it before, I'm pretty sure it is an improvement over the previous iteration.  The main changes for this version were that accessories had been fully done away with, along with the special moves, and I had added possibility of playing a face-down piece of equipment for a "quick change" (when you are challenged, you can choose to swap your quick change card into your equipment).

In addition, I had tried to speed the start of the game up a little by allowing players to discard and replace as many of their initial hand of cards as they like, and then play a card into their quick change slot before starting.

Oh yeah, I had some new kit cards too!

After playtesting we had a really great discussion with lots of suggestions flying around. While the game is basically OK, everyone spotted something that just didn't seem quite right for them.  Possibly the row of face-up cards in the armoury didn't feel like it added much to the game.  Or the magic cards didn't seem good value (and also seem a little incongruous in the setting).  Or the fact that the "challenge anyone" cards are strictly better than the "challenge left/right" ones might have been irksome.

So I ended up with a load of notes, and have been working in my head on ways to improve the game.  I had a load of thoughts about what to do next, and was intending to make a couple of minor changes and then getting on with more testing, working in a slow, incremental way.  I mean, I am planning to attend another testing day in London this coming Sunday, and I only have so much time until then, so can't really do anything major...

But then an idea that has been at the back of my mind for a while clambered to the front and has been clawing its way into my brain and refusing to go away...

So the idea develops from a simple thought that, instead of amassing tokens to count towards victory, players' progress is marked on a score track.  What this allows now is an easy way to see who is in the lead, and that suggests something thematic: surely there is more glory to be had from defeating someone who is more renowned than you than someone who is behind you on the track.

I won't go into all of my thinking right now, but where I have ended up is on a plan to scrap almost all of the challenge cards and only have "challenge anyone" cards for the two disciplines.  Then, if the person who wins is behind their opponent on the score track, they win two prestige, otherwise they win one.  Right away I suddenly have a simpler game with a lot less to explain and, potentially, added some more interesting decisions to make.  Plus I think this should address several of the issues that have been raised over the last few months.

Ah, sod it!  I can get this sorted before the weekend.  In fact, as I write this, I'm nearly done -- it mostly required deleting stuff out of my data file that I feed into nanDECK to construct my cards.

As a small aside, I'm also replacing the magic cards with "Dirty Tricks" cards, which allow you to swap two cards and then issue a challenge.

Time to get that card cutter out again...

Boogie Fails

Last week I finally pulled my finger out and produced version 0.4 of the Boogie Knights cards, and then this week I got to playtest using these and some modifications to the rules I had been working on, though I hadn't actually got around to producing a new rulebook to go with the cards.  We actually managed to have a couple of games using different rule variants, as I was looking for clues as to where I was to go.

The main change from version 0.3 to 0.4 was that I had removed the accessories and added "special move" cards that could be played on someone else's turn to give a bonus in a challenge and increase the element of surprise and uncertainty.  Rule-wise, I had also added the rule that you could discard and replace as much of the hand of cards you were originally dealt, and that you could play an equipment card face down in front of you and then, when challenged, you could choose to "quick change" into that equipment.

Pour encourager les autres

So the playtests of this new set suggested that the changes I had made resulted in a worse game overall.  The card mix was all to pot and the special moves just didn't really seem fun.  I was effectively adding a new card type and associated rules, without making the game more interesting or enjoyable.

Version 0.3 had some shortcomings, but stuck around for some additional playtests as it was a reasonable base on which to experiment. In this case, however, I detect a blind alley, and I'm going to abort and try something else.  It is possible that the special moves are fixable, and I may come back to them in another form later on, but for now, so long!

Actually it wasn't all negative.  The face-down quick change cards were deemed good, and I think they pretty much achieve what the special moves were meant to do, so that rule will stay for now.  And the optional mulligan at the start was good.

So, so long version 0.4, we barely knew you!  Coming as soon as I can manage, version 0.5...

They're creepy and they're kooky

OK, so I know I am planning to try progressing (and finishing off?) games as a main focus for this year, but I just can't help it, right?  I'm allowed a few new ones here and there.  After all, I need to find a load of bad games in order to unearth the good ones that are probably lurking somewhere around here.

Actually, I have a good incentive to work on one particular new game.

Another top quality prototype.

A little background...

For over a decade now, my family and I have been taking an annual trip to a big social event in West Wales, which started off being a medieval-style banquet themed on the Arthurian myths, but has developed into more eclectic themes over the years, while still remaining the general banquet structure (something like a dozen courses served over five or six hours).  The last few years have been based on a fairy court extrapolated from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Firefly 'verse, and A Game of Thrones.  One of the traditions from these events is that some of the regular attendees exchange small gifts, often (but not exclusively) home made craft or food products.  Usually, S. does a lot of work to make gifts (for the fairy banquet, for example, she knitted dozens of small, cuddly "goblins" to distribute) and I have been very poor at contributing to this.  But no longer!

As one of my main hobbies these days is creating tabletop games, why can't I make some games to take along to give as gifts?  Here goes...

So the theme for this year is loosely based on the Addams Family, and will be a gathering of weirdos, freaks and monsters.  I need to make a game that reflects that theme.  The aim is to create a small card game (hopefully 18 cards or fewer) that can be learnt and played quickly and easily.

My initial concept was to make a game with guessing, deduction and, hopefully bluffing.  I figured that I could have one set of nine cards, which are gifts that the characters might be receiving.  The usual sort of thing: chocolates, flowers, cakes, axes, whips, bombs, and so on.  Then another set of nine cards representing characters, each specifying two gifts that they want, and one that they definitely don't.  I made these cards up, and usually that would be enough for me to start tinkering about and figuring out the rules and interactions between the components and players.  The problem is this would be a multi-player game where the game is built around not knowing what other people know and trying to improve your situation in that environment, and that is something that is really difficult to test on your own.  Or at least, I haven't yet figured out how to do it.  Maybe if I keep notes for each "player" I could do something...

Anyway, I haven't yet been able to get this in front of an appropriate group of players, so if I'm going to progress the game, I'm going to need to do some more thinking and they grab some players when the opportunity comes up.  I know that the basic moves in the game would have to be a combination of gaining information about who is holding which cards, and swapping cards around, but beyond that...?

My next step was to start a thread on Board Game Designers Forum, outlining my thoughts so far and seeing what might turn up.  This has, at the time of writing, Yielded a couple of bits of input, one of which suggested basing the game on Happy Families/Go Fish.  I liked this idea, though it wasn't entirely clear to me how I could fit this into the (limited) plans I had so far.

As an aside, this also fits in to my long-term plan to take "classic" games that gamers don't take seriously and try to make more interesting games based on them.  Happy Families would be a perfect fit for that list.

After sleeping on this, ideas started to congeal a bit.  The basic Happy Families mechanism is asking other players for named cards, which they have to give you if they have them.  My game could have an element of that (if you want, say, an axe, you ask another player if they have one), but allow instead of it being a one-way street, you have to trade a card for the one you receive, so everyone keeps the same number of cards.  Furthermore, if someone asks you if you have a particular card, you don't have to answer truthfully, and the actual identity of the card you pass will only be revealed to the recipient when they actually receive it.

So that's about where I am at the moment (more or less), so I'll continue to fill in the gaps until I get a few players together to try it out, at which point hopefully we'll be able to try a few variant sets of rules to help narrow things down.  I'll play to write more about this after something has happened...

Anyone for mammoth?

Over the last couple of weeks I've had another fresh idea stuck in the head. This isn't the most original idea I have ever had, but it is what it is, and if I worry about originality all the time I will never get anything done. The aim is to get some practice in, right? Learn the craft, make lots of stuff, and eventually some of it will either be good or I will hopefully learn how to make it good.  I don't know yet if this is potentially good or utter crap, but I do not that it is not good right now.  It is, however, no longer purely in my head, which is a relief.

So the idea is for a game of building and developing a prehistoric tribe, starting with a ragtag bunch of hunters and gatherers and hopefully growing them into a settled and organised proto-civilisation with farms, permanent buildings, and the beginnings of culture.

Not much to look at right now. Also not much to play. But a thing, nonetheless.

Mechanically, I've been working on this as a deckbuilding game where you expand your tribe by adding families, specialists (people like hunters, fishermen, builders, etc) and technologies to your deck, combined with a board game where you move and expand
I can actually pin down the main inspiration for this: listening to a Ludology podcast about deckbuilding games (and when they were discussing games that blend deckbuilding with other elements) the day after listening to John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (a sketch comedy show on the UK's Radio 4) which had a sketch about prehistoric hunters and gatherers.  Funny how things work out sometimes.

My first attempt at this game was to start scribbling on flash cards, an approach that I usually take for card games.  The idea is that I can get a subset of the cards required very quickly and start figuring out whether or not the basic idea is viable with a quick solo playtest or two.  Then, if it looks OK, I can either make more cards (or modify the ones I have) or get onto the computer to start putting together a more complete set using NanDECK, my go-to tool for card prototyping.  This is all part of the "fail faster" approach: get something, anything, to the table as quickly as possible and start working on the problems that inevitably turn up right away; and if the whole thing is fundamentally flawed, I stand a chance of spotting that sooner rather than later.

The problem is that this time, I started making the cards and then hit a wall.  I was just totally stuck and those ideas that seemed so clear in my head beforehand turned to incoherent mush.  So was it the idea that was stupid, or was I going at this the wrong way?

I decided that it was probably (at this stage at least) that I needed to be a bit more methodical at this point, so I opened a text document and wrote down my thoughts so far and then started listing cards that I thought should be in the game (starting with "hunter" and "gatherer") and what each should do.  So hunters and gatherers gather food, obviously. As a result we need something to do with the food; each turn your tribe needs food according to its size.  Hunters can gather large amounts of food, but with some risk (still need to figure out that risk), while gatherers have lower returns but are safer.  Then how about having farms? Take some setting up but allow for steady production of food.  Perhaps the tribe starts nomadic, so can move around (using a "nomad" tech card?), but can later settle (trade the nomad card for a settle card?), allowing for farms and potentially other developments...

And so on.  Soon I had a good list of cards and some idea of how to proceed, so I build myself a spreadsheet of a subset of the cards (the ones I judged would be usable for the first few turns of the game), including first-pass text for the effects of the cards (I left a couple blank because I reckon I'll figure out some of the details later), acquired some roughly appropriate icons from game-icons.net to cover the cross-card support plans I had, and threw together a basic NanDECK script to assemble the cards.  Very soon I had a deck of 36 cards for my first test.  For a board I did a bit of scribbling onto a sheet of hexagons, then having grabbed a few bags of wooden cubes from the stock I was ready to go.

Unsurprisingly the game was really quite dull.  But mechanically it seemed to be not-too-bad for a first pass.  The biggest problem so far (aside from the fact that the game seems rather less than gripping) is that I am using markers for the various sources of food so that they can be depleted as they are used, but I don't yet have any way to replenish the resources.  It would seem right that, even after you have grabbed all the nuts and berries in a woodland, there should be something else to forage later on.

The idea I am working with at the moment is to have a separate deck providing events, many of which would be an instruction to replenish food supplies in some way.  There could also be some negative events which cause problems for everyone (like a wet spell causing some of everyone's food reserves to spoil, for example) to spice things up.  And this suggests another idea, that there could be separate event decks for summer and winter, with the summer deck being mostly positive and providing more food, while the winter deck is mostly negative.  We can then have different decks being drawn from, depending on the stage of the game.

So that's where I have got to.  I'm working on a basic event deck (just doing happy summer type stuff to start with) and am nearly ready to try the game again to see how this goes.  Another couple of rounds of development and I'll hopefully be ready to ask the Long-Suffering-Wife to play a few turns and tear it all apart.  Looking forward to that...

Playtesting in London

Yesterday was another big step for me, as I took a day trip into London for an afternoon of playtesting organised by the Playtest UK group.  These are the guys who ran the playtest zone that I went to at UK Games Expo last year, but the difference with these more regular meets is that everyone (more or less) is a fellow game designer, so you probably get a different style of feedback to when you are testing with either friends or members of the gaming public.

I neglected to take a photo while at the meet, so here's a recreation of the scene. The actual players on the day might have been a little larger and, you know, not made of Lego.

I will admit to being very nervous on the way down, but I found the pub venue easily and the one guy who was there before me was very welcoming, and very enthusiastically discussed my game with me until everyone else turned up a few minutes later.  The everyone else was just as friendly and comprised a good mix of people ranging from seasoned veterans with several published games to rookies like myself, and the atmosphere was very relaxed throughout.

The afternoon was divided into ninety minute sessions, during each of which there were two or three tables running, and organised so that each designer who wanted to run something had the opportunity to do so, though to make time, some tables ran a couple of shorter games, one after the other.  Boogie Knights, being a short game, got to share a slot with another game (a chaotic dungeon crawl), but benefited from having a five-player game where I could just sit by and watch.

Pleasingly, once I had explained the game, everything flowed along quickly and I only needed to clarify things on a couple of occasions.  The game was played with good humour and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves (despite one player grumbling comically about the dice).  I've come to the opinion that one of the most useless questions you can ask playtesters is "did you enjoy the game?" as, certainly if you are present for the game, it should be pretty obvious just by watching who is engaged and who is drifting.

What is really encouraging was that once the game finished, we were instantly into some very interesting (to me) discussion about various points about the game.  The magic still seems to need work and the difficulty-to-reward relationship for challenges may be off, for example.  We even got into some really interesting suggestions that I really like and will see if I can work them into the game, like that these players would like to see reactive cards that you can play off your turn, possibly to give yourself a temporary bonus in a challenge.  This thought developed into having special moves like, for instance, having a special dance moment where you moonwalk and gain +2 disco.

All this has resulted in me having a sizable list of comments and ideas which I will have to think about.  I think I would like to have another test or two with this set of cards (maybe with slightly tweaked rules) before I do another iteration of the card set.

So this was a great experience overall and has fired me up about the whole game design process.  Getting to sit in with some far more experienced designers was also really instructive as everyone seems to have their own way of going about playtesting, so just observing the way some of these guys work is helping me to figure out how to improve my own methods.

I'm certainly hoping to get along to another of these meetups in the not too distant future, and I am even more determined to take more opportunities to test locally.