Exploration of Multi-Function Cards -- Oh, and Some Settling

The game known as Explore and Settle (or Gamey McGameface, as I facetiously touted it online) has had its third visit to a London playtest meetup, and in a very different form to previous times.

After a load of thrashing ideas around and some solo playtesting (sometimes it's worth just playing against myself to see how things pan out), the game got a lot of components removed and a very different play dynamic added, and I was looking forward to seeing how it worked with real people.

So now I have got rid of gold, resource tokens and the like, and rolled loads of functions into a deck of cards.  Essentially, the terrain cards still have a terrain tile as their main part, and they still have a built-in indicator of resource production, but now they also each have a pair of actions that the card can be used for, including builds and settlement movements.  Oh, and the cards can also be discarded (or passed to other players) as payment, so the cards act as currency as well.  Each turn you draw some cards, and cities allow you to draw additional cards.

The big questions were, at this point, are the choices afforded by these new, multi-function cards interesting, does the game flow OK in this form, and do the options just make everything grind to a halt?

Our game at its end, with the blue player having constructed his third monument.
Note the hole in the middle, where there was a void where cards could not be played.

We had a three-player game, with me giving the caveat that I was wanting to look at overall game play and flow, and noting that the balance of costs, victory points, and so on, was likely to be horribly wrong at this stage.  That latter prediction did, indeed, turn out to be correct, but what else did we learn?...

It turns out, not surprisingly, that there is a fairly heavy cognitive load when figuring out what you can do on each turn.  Figuring out if you have enough cards to, say, build a monument can take some working through, and this can make for some periods of staring at cards and doing mental gymnastics to solve the puzzle.  None of it is actually too difficult, but it does take some concentration, and this is all something that could attract some players but put others off completely.  I will need to decide if this is something I am happy with in the design, or if I can simplify and smooth the play out.

My testers also had some difficulty just getting their heads around how the game works, with the combination of terrain, production, actions, and cards-as-currency, and there was a comment that some aspects (particularly the way cards are used to pay for certain things) are somewhat unituitive.  This is a potential problem, but given the way that the latter half of the play through went (pretty smoothly overall), I think it might just be that I need to improve the presentation of the game with better iconography, player aids, and rules explanations.

While cities and monuments were build all over the place, only one production location was built, which surprised me a little, but it was felt that there wasn't really any incentive to undertake these builds, partly as it was too easy for other players to move settlements in and poach access to these facilities.

On balance, though, this was a very positive test.  I think the overall shape of the game is now one I like, and with some more (or a lot more) attention to costs and benefits of things, I think I can make progress here.

This is definitely the heaviest game I have got to this stage of development, although it is probably still just a middleweight in the grand scheme of things.  I did get one interesting suggestion, though, which was to strip the game back down to a very basic level (need to decide what that is first!) and see if the gameplay is still okay.  While I am still wanting to work on a meatier game than others I have developed over the last year or so, this is probably a very worthwhile exercise to learn more about what I am doing here, and it may well help me find the elements that need focussing on.

Apart from testing this game, I of course played games designed by other people.  This time we had a short and chaotic game of queue manipulation, a game of storytelling with a stack of words you have to use (in order) in your story, and a game about building a telegraph network in mid-nineteenth century America.  As always some very interesting (and varied) stuff with great potential.

Has This Idea Been Done Before?

Every week on Board Game Geek there are threads started in the game design forums which basically say, "I have an idea for a game and want to know if it has been done before."  Essentially, they don't want to waste their time developing a game that is too similar to something that is already out there, and want to add something new and original to the market.

Totally understandable.

But pointless.

Shia has the idea.  Sorry, I don't know who made this image,
but Google tells me it is labelled for reuse.
Weird how hard it is to source things sometimes.

These threads usually result in a few similar seeming games (there really is nothing new), to which the original poster responds by saying one or more of:

• "I've never heard of them" -- indicating a lack of familiarity with the hobby as a whole; this isn't necessarily a problem as everyone starts somewhere, and you don't need to know everything about games to be able to create a good game (thankfully).
• "No, those games are different to my idea because..." -- indicating that the poster didn't do a good job of explaining his idea; and this is probably largely because it is just an idea and not developed into anything tangible. The ensuing discussion is sometimes interesting.
• "Oh well, back to the drawing board" -- suggesting that this person will never finish a game, as he is too worried about doing something unique to actually get anywhere.

Game design is a skill that can be learned and developed, like any creative skill.  I am still new and inexperienced, but over the last couple of years of projects of varying sizes, including many failures and blind alleys, I have got better at it.  Getting better at game design includes being able to find different angles to take and options to explore.  I am not saying that I am a very innovative designer, but I am finding that just getting on with designs I often find at least something in each design that makes it stand out from otherwise similar games.

Which brings me to the advice that most of these threads end up with: it doesn't matter if your idea is not the most original in the world, or even if it has been done a hundred times already.  If you are asking the question, then clearly the idea is one which interests you, so just run with it and see where it takes you.  If you end up with a decent game, chances are it will be sufficiently different to other games on the market to justify its place in the world, and if it sucks and you abandon it, you should have learnt a heap along the way.  Plus, by the time you are moving on you will probably be getting more ideas to try out.

Just do it!  Somebody should make that into their company motto.

Boogying at Expo Again

So, three spells of playtesting Boogie Knights at UK Games Expo and getting 19 strangers to play across five games has resulted in quite a lot of feedback and notes that I took at the time.

One of the 5-player games at Expo, running at Saturday lunchtime. Fun to watch.

Firstly, statistics.  I wasn't rigorously checking the play times, but we do seem to be fairly steady at around 20 minutes (plus or minus about 4), regardless of how many players we have, which is pleasing.  I recorded the number of reshuffles, and the end game scores for each game, noting the scores in player order (so first player first):

# players	Scores	Reshuffles
3	10, 8, 5	1
5	10, 8, 8, 4, 5	2
3	4, 10, 8	1
4	6, 6, 7, 10	1
5	8, 9, 10, 7, 3	3

In most cases, there seems to be an issue where one or two players lag behind the leaders by quite a large margin.  This is a little concerning to me, though there isn't yet enough data to see if this is really a thing.  I discussed this with some of the players and, in that discussion at least, it was felt that this is probably not a big deal and might actually be an issue due to inexperienced players making basic mistakes (like not being assertive enough).  I think I need to check this, and can do so by getting some testers to play a few times and see how the score distributions change as they gain experience.

My general observations in all the games were that the game generates a fair bit of laughter and the quick change and dirty tricks rules were very popular and used extensively, and often effectively.  I think I may have got them about right now.

From the feedback, both written and spoken, most people seem to like the game for what it is, but there were a few players who felt that the game needs some extra options or different actions to increase the variety of play. One player suggested that there could be a third area for competition aside from combat and disco.

I'm a bit cagey about adding more in, as I think the game seems to be working well at present, but I think perhaps I can think of some cards to add for an advanced game in case people want a bit more.  It would be nice to have some sort of expansion module that could be included, as it might spread the appeal, but perhaps crowbarring that sort of thing in might be working against what the game wants to be.  I'm sure it can be done though and I will get to that eventually.

I did actually make a very minor change to the rules based on feedback on Saturday (dirty tricks can now swap items with the armoury row as well as with other players), and this change appears to be for the better, so thanks to the guy who suggested that.

Other feedback included a suggestion that a soundtrack is needed for the game; a comment that the non-medieval elements of the game don't seem to fit in as well (this might be due to my dodgy art!); having too many challenges turn up too early can be a problem; and final artwork will be key to the game's appeal.

All in all, I owe a huge thank you to everyone who played over the weekend.  I'm starting to get some confidence that I'm now moving in the right direction, and that I probably just need to get the game played as much as possible and try to shake out any long-term trends to see what needs working on next.  Part of this is investigating what happens with experienced players, as discussed earlier.  And I think it might be time for me to start pushing a bit harder to get some blind tests done...

Return to the Expo

So UK Games Expo, in its new and shiny home of the enormous NEC Hall 1 (as well as the Hilton that it has been in for the last few years!) has been and gone, and I attended for all three days, a fair bit of which was spent in the Playtest Zone (organised by the awesome Rob Harris of Playtest UK), with time divided between running games of Boogie Knights, playing other folks' prototypes, and helping to draw innocent victims in to the tables.

Proof that I actually had the attention of some players, despite wearing an obnoxious shirt.
Thanks to Namgyal Chatral for the pic.

I had two sessions of testing Boogie Knights, and during each session I managed to get two plays in, and it was pleasingly easy to fill the tables, though that was largely down to the efforts of the volunteers roping in passers-by.  In total that made for 17 people who hadn't played the game before, most of whom gave helpful feedback (mostly very positive, but some interesting points raised), and I even got an extra play that I joined in back at the hotel on Saturday evening with a couple I met, so this has extended the number of people who have played the game quite significantly.

I'll write another post to discuss the feedback I got in a couple of days or so.

Aside from that I got to play some really interesting prototypes, including one that has a The Resistance sort of vibe but is based on the prisoner's dilemma and ultimately has you choosing your own side, and a clever cooperative game about moving animals around fields.  Even volunteering at the zone for a while and wearing the Red Shirt (which makes us far more likely to suffer an unpleasant fate than the yellow-shirted Expo volunteers) was really rewarding, and I'll try to spend more time helping out next year.

Both at the Playtest Zone and elsewhere I enjoyed meeting people (several who I had previously met online) and making new friends and contacts.  Highlights included getting high-5's from numerous people; learning to play Guilds of London from the designer; Tony Boydell, and then listening to Gil Hova deconstructing it afterwards; a brief chat with Paul and Pip from Shut Up and Sit Down; cramming into the packed open gaming halls on Friday night and then having a really quiet little gaming session at the hotel bar on Saturday; discovering that the little coffee stall in Hall 1 near the Playtest Zone made damn fine coffee; and just getting to talk game design with heaps of interesting and interesting people.

Imminent Expo

Lately most of the game design portion of my brain has been focussed on the forthcoming UK Games Expo, which takes place at the Birmingham NEC between 3rd and the 5th of June, and preparing for this has been one reason I have temporarily dropped a few projects.  I will be attending the show for all three days for the first time, and am looking forward to having extra time to be playing, exploring, talking and so on.

So what will I be up to?  Well, the focus for me this year is on playtesting.  I have two 90 minute slots booked in the Playtest Zone, where I will have some table space for a few games of Boogie Knights.  The idea is that Boogie Knights seems to have reached a fairly stable form and I would now like to see a heap more plays before making more changes.  The game probably does need more tweaks, but first I would like some more data, especially from people who haven't yet played the game.

So, if you would like to come and say hello and try out Boogie Knights, I will be running games between 11:30 and 13:00 on Saturday, and 10:00 to 11:30 on Sunday.

I will also probably be hanging around the Playtest Zone at various other parts of the weekend, and have volunteered to help out in (and wearing one of those natty red t-shirts, I think) on Friday afternoon.

So that's my main bookings, but I am hoping to also get along to the Wyvern's Lair session on Saturday afternoon.  As you may remember, I submitted Boogie Knight for this event, but unfortunately didn't make the cut for the final twelve entrants.  While this is a little disappointing, it does mean that I can relax a little more for the weekend and just enjoy myself without stressing about my pitch.  It will be nice to get along and just watch and learn from other people's experiences this time, and maybe I'll give it another go next year.

I'm not sure what I will be up to in the evenings.  Last year I stayed over for Saturday night and had a great time making use of one of the open gaming areas for the evening, so I'll probably do something like that, though there has been talk about a load of prototype play in the evenings too, so that would be great as well.  I'll be taking a couple more games along, just in case the opportunity arises.

Then on Sunday, after my second playtesting slot, I am expecting the family to join me for the last day of the expo.  I know Miss B wants to play in a couple of the roleplaying games for kids, so I'll get her booked in for them, but apart from that we'll just have to see how it goes.

Exploration and Monumentalisation

Sunday saw me having another opportunity to go to London for an afternoon of playtesting.  Unfortunately this session was a little truncated due to the pub being booked for a private function for the evening, but thanks to a slightly earlier start than usual and some careful wrangling of game designers, we still managed to get three 90 minute sessions.

This time I was up in the first slot, which was a little disappointing in that I missed out on a couple of games I really wanted to try, but that's always the problem: so many games and only so much time to play them.  This meetup was a little lighter on people than previous ones, so I ended up joining in for a three-player game of Explore and Settle -- though a fourth arrived half way through, too late to join in, but he watched and was able to contribute feedback at the end.

Slightly blurry picture, but then so was the game itself.

My latest iteration of the game had a few elements added in an attempt to fill out the game and address some of the issues raised last time.  I had added more variety in the monuments that could be built, introduced objective cards which provide victory points for various things (each player is dealt two to start), made some actions more costly in terms of gold, and changed the resource supply mechanism, and this last deserves a paragraph of its own.

Previously you were able to use resources if you could trace a path of no more than three cards back to a location that is producing that resource.  This seemed OK, but we weren't sure about keeping track of where everything was coming from, so you couldn't just use resources from the same location repeatedly.  This time round I went for a different approach.  Each time you added a card to the map, the card you added would trigger production in some locations -- you may see resource icons in circles, in the corner of the cards in the picture above; these are the triggers.  To stop things getting too messy, I figured that resources were only produced in locations that didn't already have unused resource markers there; so a maximum of one resource per card.  I also added "trade goods", effectively a wild card good that you could buy with gold from cities by the sea, and these were produced whenever a sea card was played.

Our three-player game wasn't disastrous as a game, but it wasn't a lot of fun.  As a playtest, though it was pretty good, as we found several issues that were a problem and were able to talk through several ideas that may allow me to make things better.  Thanks to Dan, Dave and (later) Mike for providing really valuable feedback here.  Some of the major points discussed were...

• We got a bit resource starved for one of the resources in the early part of the game, which made things rather frustrating for a while. There was acceptance that there are sometimes plays like this, and it's not necessarily a huge deal, but I feel that I should try to avoid creating a game where the first few turns are full of frustration.
• One possible way to ease the early game is to make the start cards special ones that always produce and never lose their production. Possibly even make the start cards coastal.  Thematically this could be a good decision for a game with an exploration element.
• The way resources were being produced, there is a real incentive to do your best to use everything up on your turn, as anything you leave is an advantage to someone else.  Later in the game most resources were fairly plentiful, so this became less of a thing, but it seems a bit of a design smell.
• Some of the choices I made about how money moves around were unintuitive, largely because it relied people to remember when they pay other players and when they pay the bank.  Need to think about this.
• There was a feeling that monuments were too hard to build, though later on, with money and resources being more available this eased, so I think this may not be a problem: when it becomes easier to build monuments, that is the end game approaching.
• The objectives look very unbalanced and a couple of them are far worse than the others.  This is something that I suspected, and will certainly pay more attention to it for future versions, as I like the idea of keeping them in.  Another thing to think about, however, is the balance of where points come from because it would be nice for there to be multiple paths to victory.
• Given that the resource production system just didn't seem right we discussed a few possible options, including going back to my previous way of doing things.  One suggestion that I very much liked was that you use your settlements to activate locations on the cards where they are sitting, so you can effectively generate one resource somewhere for each settlement you have.  This potentially means that there is an incentive to have more than one settlement on a card.  It also suggests that they aren't settlements, but clans or something.
• Finally, we had a lot of discussion about whether it is allowed to partly cover a production tab on a card.  I've always said not, but thinking about it, I could rearrange the design of the cards so that production is indicated by icons in the corners  rather than the centre of the tabs.  That way, one tab could neatly cover over one of those icons, but not the other.  This has all sorts of implications that I am thinking about.

So while my ego took a knock or two here, the outcome of this play was amazingly helpful and leaves me with a lot to work on.  Now I just need to make some changes and get a playable set again and get it in front of people soon.  I've set myself a target of having a playable set for UK Games Expo at the start of June; I won't be running an "official" playtest of it there, but hopefully there will be some opportunities in the evenings.

But I do seriously need to come up with a new name for the game.  Any suggestions would be appreciated so that I don't end up resorting to Gamey McGameface.

The couple of other games I played were a deckbuilding game set in space, with similarities to the excellent Star Realms but including the development of planets and colonies, plus some interesting other mechanisms, and a true analogue game of motor racing, where you move your car using measurements on a ruler and have to plan acceleration and braking by estimating distances on the race track. And, of course, there were some great sounding games that I missed out on too.

Without God or Democracy There Is Just This...

Back to the development of this cooperative game set in a mythical version of classical Greece, and I've been discussing ideas for the game with a few people on BGDF and working on the basics for an initial prototype.  Having got through some far-too-complicated-or-fiddly ideas, I have got to a basic engine to build the game from.  The real guts of the game should be dealing with conflicting and sometimes painful demands from the gods and the people, but to make that work there needs to be some form of an economy.

What I have settled on is there being seven different commodities that can be produced: food, wine, cloth, wood, stone, bronze and silver.  I'm not sure what they will all be used for, but they seem a reasonable representation of different things that might be important in a setting like this.  I have discarded the idea of using either counters or score tracks to tally the amount of each commodity you have, and just have a load of locations that can produce things, and each of them either has things you can use or they don't.  A game like this could easily become a spreadsheet control exercise, so I am choosing to make it hand-wavey, with simple levels of "yes, we have access to wood" rather than "we have 17 units of wood".  (I note that this isn't entirely dissimilar to my approach in "Explore and Settle" -- am I developing a personal style here?)

Anyway, explaining this with words is probably harder than showing you a picture.  So here is my first pass at a player board to track stuff.  Actually, that is a lie, it is about my fourth pass.  Here it is...

It's not flashy because it's an early prototype. Hopefully it's usable.

So what you see above is your city state.  There is your city itself and two provincial regions nearby.  Within these regions are squares representing locations that can produce the various commodities. At the start of each player's turn, a production card is flipped over, naming two commodities that can be produced, and each player may choose one of those commodities and place a marker on each location they control that produces that commodity and doesn't already have a marker.  Channeling a little bit of Catan there -- opportunities happen on everyone's turn, though I have a minor concern that as there is a decision to make for everyone, that may slow the game down in some groups, but that is something to discover with playtesting.

Controlling a location? Well, you control a location if it is in a region on your board and nobody else has an army parked in that region, or you control a location on someone else's board if you, and only you, have an army in the region.

Which brings us to armies.  At the moment, I am thinking of a very simple mechanism where if, at any point, there are more armies of one player in a region than all other armies, then the minority armies are destroyed; anything else results in a stalemate.  This basically means that there can be situations where if you have one army controlling one of my provinces, and I need to reclaim it to use the resources, I have a choice of putting one army in there so you can withdraw or disband your army on your next turn, or I send in multiple armies to just wipe you out and clear the region quickly.

Back to those commodities.  Basically you can spend them to buy or do things.  So far I see bronze being used for armies, wood for ships (I actually typed wood for sheep there before correcting!), stone for temples, food for either maintaining or growing your population (will get into that another time), silver for upkeep of units (and probably to build anything).  I'm not sure if wine or cloth will be used for anything; if they aren't useful, I'll drop them.  I have an idea for trading with overseas powers, but that can wait for now.  When you use a commodity, you just remove a matching marker from a location.

That's enough for now.  I need to keep working on making this thing rather than just writing about it.  Next up: those demand cards to make things both difficult and interesting...