Shooting in London

This weekend was 2016's final Sunday playtest session in London and, having missed the last couple, I was eager to get along.  My plan was to take Invaded (the game about being attacked by a non-player colonial power) along, but over the last couple of weeks a new opportunity has come up, so I rethought things and I ended up taking along a game that is rather early in its development life but that I managed to get far enough with that I felt it was at least playable.

My basic prototypes definitely have a "look" to them.

Right now I don't feel I can go into great detail about this project for a couple of reasons, but in essence, what we have is a game of big game hunters going out to "bag" fantasy-style monsters.  I had four volunteers to try the game out, so I sat out to observe and act as the rulebook.

And then I experienced one of the most brutal take-downs of my game that I have had so far.  It quickly became apparent that there were too many rules, and many of them didn't make sense to anyone but me.

BUT...

But the general consensus was that there was a lot of fun to be had with this game if I can clear the deadweight away and tidy up the bits that are left.  We identified the parts of the game that were the most fun, and which just got in the way, so now I have a lot of information to be going on as I develop the next version.

I think that this is one of the most important skills to learn as a neophyte game designer: the ability to take criticism, to avoid being defensive, and to see what the feedback is really telling you.  Here, I actually had four people telling me what they wanted to do in this game (and what they felt was fun) and letting me know what parts of the game are making that harder.  What they wanted to do mostly lines up with the main concept of the game, and most of the bits that were getting in the way were elements that I thought would add more interest to the game.  Based on this, I think most of those extra elements will be dropped for the next iteration, but some of them are ideas that I may be able to reintroduce in a modified form later, if the game needs them (and it may not).  In the meantime, though, I need to find the core of the game and make it as much fun as I can.

Before moving on, I'd like to just extend special thanks to David Turczi. All of the testers were hugely helpful, but David put a lot of effort into questioning just about every part of the game, accepting some of my responses, arguing against others, and highlighting all sorts of problems, while also giving some solid general advice and saying a few very nice things about some parts of the game.  His, and everyone else's, input left me feeling a bit bruised, but really positive about the future of the game.

Of course, this being a playtest meetup, it's not all about my projects, and I was able to play a good selection of other games varying in completeness from just about ready to publish down to very early and creaky but showing promise.  So I played a micro-wargame about the War of the Roses, a game about printing money to rescue struggling businesses, a car racing game with a really interesting "exhaust" mechanism, a game about time travel and saving the world, and a really cute game about rescuing baby dragons.    It's really inspiring to see the huge range of what is being worked on -- and these only amounted to barely a third of the games being tested on the day.

So, I now need to get back to working on that Shooting Party game.  Time is a-ticking.

Keeping Score in My Name Is...

In my recent tests of My Name Is..., one of the key elements I was trying to figure out was how to keep score.  A game of this sort probably doesn't really have to have a totally robust scoring system as playing it is mostly about the interaction between players on a social level, but it still needs a way to determine a winner that feels reasonable to the players.

The original version of the game had counters which moved around as challenges were made, and they provided a measure of success.  In the latest iteration, the counters have gone and scoring is being done with cards themselves: if you successfully challenge someone, you add the cards in their "live" stack to your score pile, and if your challenge is unsuccessful they gain your stack.

Some games look compelling when they are set up on the table. This is not one of those games.

This now opens up a question: should the winner be determined by who has been "correct" in the most challenges, or by who has accumulated the most cards in their score pile?

Luckily, it's possible to try both methods out simultaneously.  If one approach or the other is chosen, it might change how some people play the game, but I figure that those players would be in a minority, and possibly not the core target audience anyway.

So, what I have done for recent playtests is ask players to keep the cards they gain in challenges in separate piles so we can count how many "tricks" (that's technically an inappropriate term but it's what I'm thinking in my head) they win as well as how many cards they have in total.  I can record both sets of scores, along with what I call the "people's choice", where I ask everyone who they feel did best in the game and thus deserved to win.

This last point is one that I need to remember for the future.  It won't be appropriate for all games, but I think that for many it would be a really useful piece of feedback to ask for.  Where scores aren't being obviously tallied in a game, players often have a perception of who they feel is doing the best.  This is often mistaken, and surprise turnarounds can really add excitement to an endgame, but I think that seeing how well players' perceptions line up with the actual result may be very interesting.

I have so far only run a couple of test games using this game, but in both cases, all three measures lined up pretty well.  The player who everyone believed did the best amassed the most cards and either took the most "tricks" or tied for the most.  I am planning to do a few more playtests using this approach, but it is actually looking like whichever scoring scheme I settle on will probably be fine.  I'm guessing that the "just count the cards" system is probably best (pending further data) as, while there is a bit more counting, it is simpler (people do manage to get mixed up trying to track those tricks) and has the added benefit of being far less likely to result in a tie.

Meeting Dragons

I have been meaning to go to the Dragonmeet convention for many years.  It is a one-day annual event that has been held in London for decades, and has a great reputation for being fun and friendly.  The focus has traditionally been roleplaying, but these days it seems to be a general tabletop gaming event.  Finally, this weekend I managed to make the trip.

Once again I totally failed to take a usable photo, so here's this year's t-shirt design, totally yoinked from the Dragonmeet website. I hope they don't mind.

I can't tell you much about the con overall as I spent most of my time in the Playtest UK area, but I can say that there was a good trade hall, which included spaces for gaming of various types (including the "best of Essen" tables and the playtest zone), and roleplaying games, seminars and other stuff was taking place somewhere or other.  Oh, and the venue was comfortable, reasonably spacious, had good toilets, and was only about 5 minutes' walk from the nearest tube station.

Anyway, hanging around the playtest area allowed me to see a lot of great looking prototypes, and managed to play a few of them: a game about building skyscrapers, a game based on running game shows (with a modified Monty Hall mechanism), and a game about rolling dice to build gene sequences.

I had taken along "My Name Is...", which I am now usually describing as an ice-breaker game of memory and mental agility, which seems to both scare and intrigue people.  We had two plays of the game with different groups (I joined in on one of them) and had very different experiences with them.

The first group provided a constant flow of questions, suggestions, arguments and interruptions, identifying quite a lot of issues that need thinking about.  There was one player in particular, who was quite assertive in poking at the game and at me, but it was in good humour and he was genuinely being helpful (and, pleasingly, on the feedback form gave the game top marks for "fun").  This group had some roleplaying of opinions that turned up on cards, and some fairly tight policing of the rules about when turns finish and challenges are allowed.

The second group was a great contrast, just grokking the idea of the game immediately (with one or two questions after starting) and playing in a really relaxed way.  A few turns in and it looked like this group were old hands, and I could just sit back and watch as they played at their own pace, effectively house ruling an easy-going attitude to the challenges.  I have to say that while the feedback from this group was less informative in itself, it was the best feeling in the world to just watch a group chatting and laughing about the game and (to my eyes) thoroughly enjoying it.  This tells me that the game as it stands definitely has an audience, and that I am not heading up a blind alley.  Of course, I need to make the game work for more groups than this one (though it definitely worked for the other group too), but it's a good start.

Overall this was a really good experience and a helpful session, and I have a few notes for things to experiment with, including some possible alternate titles.

I should also mention that last week I started a thread on this game on Board Game Geek, asking for help for card subjects, and had a few people giving some very useful suggestions (some of which made it into the card set I was using here), plus a really interesting idea to try making the game into something other than the love/hate a subject that it is now... I will be thinking about this as it could be really cool if I can figure it out.

Grimmly Available

The last few weeks have been slow for me from a game design and testing point of view for a number of reasons, but they haven't been entirely unproductive.  My big achievement has been to get my second game into the BGG database.  As of earlier this month, Giftmas with the Grimms has officially been a thing, and if you go to its BGG page, you can find the files allowing you to to make a print and play set.  

What is more, I managed to get a few sets made up using cards printed via ArtsCow and distributed at the event the game was designed for.  I haven't heard if anyone has played it yet, but I consider it a small success.

Giftmas with the Grimms, with ArtsCow cards and spread on a bit of baize (not included).

Other than that, I have started to make some headway with my reverse-colonialism game, building a new set using what I have learnt from early tests (which used components plundered from other games).  And finally, I am preparing for a trip to Dragonmeet in London this coming weekend, where I am planning to spend most of my time around the Playtest UK zone, where I have booked a slot (13:00 to 14:30 -- come and say hello!) to test My Name Is..., my lightweight (but occasionally painful) game of memory and mental agility.  I will report on all this stuff soon.

Thirsty Playtests

After a bit of a playtesting drought over the last couple of months, things have started to improve.  I have managed to persuade a few people to try my "Secret Satan" game, which is now known as "Giftmas with the Grimms", and is my most popular prototype with my daughter, Miss B.  And better still, I was able to get to a Playtest UK meetup in Oxford.

Oxford is a load closer to me than the London meetups I have been attending, but it is an evening meet, which has disadvantages, and the dates haven't fallen right for me previously, so it was nice to finally get along to meet a different group.  This meetup takes place at the Thirsty Meeples boardgame cafe, which unfortunately means paying a cover charge to sit at a table, and it's a little cramped, but it is also a totally awesome place with brilliant staff who bring you good coffee.

There were seven of us there last night and we were given two tables between us, and had games running on both tables for much of the evening.  I was lucky enough to get a five-player play of Boogie Knights in, getting half way through before the last couple of people turned up.

I don't have a photo to share from the meetup, so here's a picture of some modified Boogie Knight cards.

This was a big deal, as I have made a fundamental change to Boogie Knights, which had been working consistently well in playtests, but I had been bugged by a steadily flow of comments asking if it would be possible to remove the dice.  I know some people love the tension of using dice to resolve contests, but that also a good number of people feel that using dice in this way is a terrible mistake that removes both fun and challenge.  Recognising that whatever I do I won't please all the people, and also taking onboard some games industry insider advice that in general it is good to reduce the number of types of component (so cards plus score markers is more attractive to some publishers than cards plus score markers plus dice), I resolved to at least experiment.  I pencilled a number (from 1 to 6) onto each card, decided that in challenges players choose a card from hand to act as in lieu of a die roll, and made a few other rule tweaks to support the change.  This was quite a while ago and I just never quite managed to get the new version of the game into a playtest.

Until last night.  The headline news is that basically it works, and the players were enthusiastic about the change (I explained the previous form of the game).  There are a few rough edges to deal with, but this looks like I could be heading in the right direction.

Following that I got to play one of someone else's games, this one being a cooperative puzzle solving game which I had actually played an earlier incarnation of at UK Games Expo.  There have been a few tweaks since I last saw the game, which I think have been for the better, and I really enjoyed this play.  It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Finally, and actually rather surprisingly to me, I got to test Giftmas with the Grimms with four players, and got some more useful insights.  It's nice to get a few playtests of a game close together as you start getting a real feel for the characteristics of the game.  And, of course, now I really need to finish writing a rulebook...

So, overall a really useful evening out and I'm sure I'll be back again if the dates fall right.  Apart from anything else, it's great to have more opportunities to chat with like-minded people.  I find it's great for morale.

Run To The Hills... Run For Your Life

I have made some progress.  After my recent post on the subject of a game focused on the struggles of peoples being invaded by a colonial power, I managed to throw together a prototype to try out some ideas and then build on that.  

The first go involved hand-written cards to try out a simple "artificial intelligence" to control the non-player colonial power.  Then when that looked OK, I turned to the trusty nanDECK to make a set of cards and plundered my Settlers of Catan box for terrain tiles and resource cards, and my general component stock for everything else.

Solo testing a Frankenproto.  The sharp-eyed may spot some components I stole from elsewhere.

Pro tip: for quick prototyping, having copies of Catan and Carcassonne lying around is really helpful.  I actually have a big stock of random meeples, cubes, other wooden shapes (in various colours), coins, dice and other tokens and the like, but those two games provide a really handy variety of components that can be insanely useful for throwing together a prototype to test a concept, and both games are relatively inexpensive, easily available, and good games that belong in just about any board game collection anyway.

Having had a couple of solo plays I discovered that (a) the game I had at that point seems to fundamentally be Not Completely Awful, which is probably the first major quality threshold to pass, and (b) I don't really have the imagination to play a game as multiple different players and actually do any useful testing.  Luckily, at this point I was able to persuade my friend, D, to have a go at playing the prototype instead of using that valuable time playing something that has already been published.  This test involved a few on-the-fly rules changes, and we didn't get through the whole thing, but it was enough to get some good insight into the state of the game.

I now have a handy list of points that I need to address, which largely breaks down to:

• The colonial power as it stands is not aggressive enough.
• I need to think out combat better, both between different players and between the players and the colonials.
• I have players potentially collecting "antagonism" tokens when they annoy the colonial power, but I have not yet clearly defined how they affect game play.
• Loads more bits that are currently not as important.

Overall, I have a really good feeling about this project.  It may develop slowly, but I definitely want to make some more progress here.

Being Invaded

I was listening to the always-interesting Perfect Information Podcast the other day (episode 25) and enjoying the deep, opinionated discussion (also loquacious and somewhat sweary) about some of those tricky subjects that get glossed over, ignored, whitewashed or romanticised in games.  Like slavery, or representation of indigenous peoples in colonial settings.  There are a lot of interesting thoughts there, but the one that really caught my attention was the assertion that while there are many games where players control colonial powers, there aren't any which treat the indigenous peoples as anything other than an obstacle to be overcome.  Okay, so there is Archipelago, which is a little more nuanced, but I think the point still stands.  The general assumption is that the colonial powers are the "good guys" at some level.

So why are all the games from the point of view of the colonisers and never about the colonised?

I gather it doesn't always go well for colonial powers.
Source: By Melton Prior (1845-1910). - The Illustrated London News May 14, 1881, vol. 78, p. 469. Scan provided by The Library of Congress., Public Domain

So this got me thinking.  Can I make a game where players actually control indigenous tribes in a land, getting on with whatever alliances and rivalries they have, and then an external colonising power arrives to steal their lunch?

This is still early stages, but I think I can go somewhere with this.  I'm writing this post largely to just put something into a more tangible form which might encourage me to actually turn it into something playable.

Just as some rough notes for now...

• Tribes can have a number of possible strategies:
• Fight the invaders.
• Trade with the invaders.
• Collaborate with the invaders.
• Flee.
• Aim to get rich.
• Try to use the invasion to wipe out a rival tribe.
• I'm not sure about overall objectives, but presumably being in a better position than other tribes at a certain point is important.
• The invaders can be assumed to be almost unstoppable and with technologies that the tribes can't really compete with.
• This could be cooperative, but I would like it to be competitive.  Maybe there could be different play modes.
• Basing this on a historical period and location (colonisation of Africa, North America, South Pacific, etc) could offer some really great opportunities for a really interesting game.

That's about what I have right now, but I've had a chat with a game designer friend about this and some more ideas are starting to swirl around, so the next step is probably to put something basic on the table.