Re-Invaded

I've done very little work over the last year on Invaded, my game about being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, but that doesn't mean that I have stopped thinking about it.  By May/June last year I think I was hitting a bit of a wall with it  -- for the previous year or so it had been a major focus of effort for me, and maybe I was burning out with it a bit.  Having a project staying on the shelf for a while is not a bad thing, though, as sometimes it means I can detach myself from the details and come back with a fresh perspective.  That worked with Scurvy Crew, and I feel it is about time to take another look at Invaded.

This is another "not actually done anything" post, like my recent one about puffins wearing hats.  I feel I need to make sure I don't fall into the trap of constantly writing about things I am planning to do rather than actually doing anything but, conversely, writing things down and sharing them can sometimes help keep me moving forward. I hope you will bear with me.

In case you aren't familiar with Invaded, the outline is that you are a tribe in a relatively peaceful land that has just been invaded by a powerful (non-player) colonial force that wants your land and your resources. It's a competitive game where you win by surviving the invasion the "best", though there are opportunities to change the way you score along the way, and as a result, strategies could involve trying to run and hide, collaborating, or fighting back. The actions of the colonial power are decided by the players by playing colonial activity cards: when it is your turn you take one action for your tribe, and one on behalf of the colonial power, and those actions generally tend to make the invaders expand their base, build forts, and attack the native tribes.

This is how Invaded looked in its very first playable version.
It has come a long way since then.

Anyhoo...  With some distance from my last substantive change, it is clear that there are several structural issues with the game that I had been trying to avoid thinking about too hard, including...

• The game has a lengthy player reference sheet that is largely reminding players of the actions available to them, and players usually initially spend a lot of time referring to this. Actually there are two sheets: the second is an icon reference.  Complex (or, at least, lengthy) reference materials may be an indicator of problems in the understandability of a game that is, or should be, relatively straightforward to play.
• The central "aggression" tracking board is a bit of a kludge, and several aspects of the game require cross-referencing with this board to see how those other elements behave. For instance, the colonial activity cards have different options based on the aggression level of the invaders, and it is easy to make mistakes with this.
• The fact that players make a move using a card and a move from a menu of options using pieces on the board feels like there are different mechanisms for different parts of what they do on their turn. Which there are. The different mechanisms, while arguably justified, do add a cognitive load on the players and leads to questions.

I have been pondering this all and am now starting to think that I may be ready to make some serious changes. I have a few notes, but basically I need to find some time to knuckle down and retool the entire game with the biggest change in components for a very long time.  It's worth a try and if it doesn't work out, I will be able to roll back, so it's just time (and a load of toner and some cardstock) at risk here.  A quick outline of what I am planning to do:

• Instead of the colonial activity deck I will try having a deck of cards with combined tribal and colonial actions. As with the recent iterations, you will have a hand of cards and choose what order to play them in, and will be able to decide whether to play the tribal or colonial action first, but you must do both if you are able. Playing tribal actions from cards will remove the need for the "menu" player aid.
• You will start with an initial hand of "low intensity" activity cards, which you keep from round to round, but as the game progresses you will gain additional cards which allow more powerful actions, but which also make the colonial power more aggressive, and you will be able to get rid of your starter cards over time.
• This may not be needed, but I will probably replace the aggression board with a small event deck, which gradually ramps up the game's intensity.  The developing hands of action cards will be another way to build intensity without needing the tracker board.
• The strategy/upgrade cards may no longer be needed, but I'll probably leave them for now, though making adjustments for the other changes taking places.
• Not really necessary, but I feel an urge to retool the location cards, partly to rejig the resource distribution, though I may turn them into actual hexagonal tiles to make everything look a little nicer as we move forward.

As a bonus little aside, there's also the theme to consider. This is an odd one actually: the game is very much linked to its theme (that of being at the receiving end of a colonial invasion, which is a push back against a common trope in board games), but I have shied away from actually linking the game to a specific location or period of history.  I was talking about Invaded with a publisher recently (one who I wouldn't expect to publish it, but who expressed general interest) and they said that I should stop being so squeamish and give the game a defined setting, which should give it some more character and make it more initially appealing, even if that setting gets changed for publication.

I'm thinking about this and am considering setting up an alternate world of some sort, so as not to commit to something historical, but at least to tie everything to something a little more coherent and less vague.  We'll see.

Puffins In Hats

As I have been drawing a picture every day this year, some themes have developed, more or less without planning, and one of those is puffins. I think I have drawn more puffins than anything else, and I have semi-joked on a few occasions that I would make a game about puffins at some point in the near future. The problem was that I had no coherent idea to base such a game on. Would the game be based on actual puffin behaviour? Would it have an ecological message? (After all, puffins, via their food supplies, are vulnerable to climate change as has been seen by the recent population crash in Pacific Tufted Puffins.) Or would I go for something lighter and cuter?

Then one day, completely on a whim I drew a few sketches of slightly cartoony puffins wearing assorted hats.

Day 183: Puffins in Hats.

I'm not sure why I did that, but I had a load of enthusiastic feedback about it through social media and then the phrases "puffins in hats" and "nuffin' but cats" came to mind. Any pretence of a worthy, serious (ish) game went out of the window and I couldn't think of anything but that. 

Given that pair of phrases, my brain went to a game where you have cards, most of which have puffins on them, in an assortment of hats, and you are trying to collect either a variety of different hats, or all the same type of hat.  Some of the cards have cats on, though, and the cats chase away puffins, "poison" your hand, or otherwise cause you problems, so you are trying to avoid getting them. BUT, if you end up with "nuffin' but cats", you win the game (or at least the hand), a bit like "shooting the moon" in other games like, for example, Hearts.

I'm musing over ways to make this happen at the moment, and there are a load of options on how to do it: drafting cards in some way, auctioning, trick taking, etc.  My current favourite is a variation on trick taking, where everyone starts with a mixed hand of cards, and plays a card in turn (not quite sure on the way this is controlled right now), and whoever "wins" the trick (i.e. everyone plays a card and the "top" card is determined by some rule -- probably based on the cards having numerical values) takes all the cards into their hand. If they have a "legal hand" (a bit like going out in Gin Rummy), they declare it and win the hand, otherwise they start a fresh trick. If you win a trick and there is a cat in it, then you lose one or more cards, but if there is more than one cat in the trick, then it is handled in a different way which I am not sure about; maybe the highest value cat player wins in that case and something special happens.

I don't think this would be stable as it stands, and the changing hand sizes and the lack of cards actually leaving play (as usually happens in a trick-taking game) could be a problem, so I need to work on that.

Anyway, this is all just ideas at the moment, while I should be thinking about other things, but I thought I would write down and share my current state as it might encourage me to take the game forwards at some time.  I should actually be able to play a very basic test of the game using a regular deck of playing cards, to at least work out the general flow of play, though I think I probably want more than four suits (or hats) for this game. 

Mid-Year Musings

We're now just past half way through 2019, which seems a good time to do a little reflection to see how things are going this year.

Well, the big, rainbow-striped elephant on a bouncy castle in the middle of the room is, of course, the fact that I have a game newly signed for publication and another being evaluated by a different publisher, so by rookie game designer standards, that makes this year a rollocking success right away.  I'm happy to take that all as a win regardless of anything else.

Other than that, though, how are things going?

My basic plans were to "enter contests, pitch more games, work with other people more, playtest more", and I have had mixed success with that. I've only entered one contest (a 24 hour contest), and have talked about collaboration with a couple of other designers but we've not really got anything off the ground yet. I have done pretty well with playtesting with other designers (trips to London as well as more local sessions), but been less successful at organising playtesting sessions with "normal" gamers.  The pitching has gone well though: I have only done limited pitching so far, but I have had the good fortune to be aiming the right games at the right publishers so far, with one game signed and one still being evaluated.  On that last point, if you are interested, I haven't chased it up as it has only been a little over a month and, from talking to other designers, it seems that two to three months seems a sensible timescale for follow-ups.

A recent playtest of Scurvy Crew, coming along nicely.

I'm still reading assorted history books, albeit slowly, mostly based on the early middle ages (Saxon to Angevin), and the plan was to take some ideas and turn them into games, and I've not got any of that done yet, but a few stories are making me think and I may find a game in them sometime. For instance, there is Henry the Young King, basically Henry 2.5, who was crowned co-king but pre-deceased his father so was never king in his own right, and spent much of his (brief) adult life touring Europe with a spectacular entourage, competing in tournaments.  Or the fascinating Nicola de la Haye, who held several normally male positions, including Sheriff of Lincolnshire through the reigns of Henry II, Richard I, John, and Henry III. I'll still intend to make something built on these or similar stories.

Sharing playable games online was another aim, and the only non-contest game I have shared was a couple of iterations of Scurvy Crew, which is one that has been shared in various forms over the years, but as it had been languishing for a long time, I'll count that one.  Still more to do though.

Aside from game-related objectives, I have continued in my exercise to draw (and share online) something every day.  As I write this, it is day 190, and I have a folder on my laptop with 190 scanned drawings in it, which feels like quite an achievement.  Many of the pictures have been of puffins, and I have joked a few times that I will make a game about puffins using some of these pictures; ideas are starting to come, so this may actually end up happening.

Aside from puffins I've been doing assorted exercises like,
for example, these longsword guard positions.

Finally I was planning to keep working on developing my proofreading and editing skills. I have proofread a handful of rulebooks so far this year, so keeping it ticking over, but I have not been pushing it too hard.  I do need to take advantage of my "Society for Editors and Proofreaders" membership and take another training course or two, though.

So overall, while I haven't made too much progress in my original plans, I am progressing overall. Just reviewing here is quite useful to remind myself of how I could keep myself moving forwards.

Scurvy Contracts

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may know that my pirate game, Scurvy Crew, has been in the works for a long time.  OK, so it has spent a lot of the time on the shelf, but occasionally brought out for another round or two of development.  I eventually got the game to a state where I felt I could show it to publishers, and I approached a couple of publishers I thought might be most interested in the game, had a meeting with one of them at UK Games Expo, and they took a prototype from me.

Over the following couple of weeks I had assorted messages from the publisher, who played the game at least a couple of times (maybe more, I don't know) and started enthusiastically coming up with ideas to turn my game into their product.  And as a result of this and some to-and-fro discussion, I am pleased to announce that, as of today, Scurvy Crew is under contract to be published by Braincrack Games.

This is what the top of a contract sometimes looks like.
There's a lot of personal and business confidential stuff in there, so this is all you get to see!

If you don't know them, Braincrack is a small UK-based publisher with a steadily growing range of games.  Their first title, Downsize, is a nice, lightweight cardgame that we have played and enjoyed at work a bunch of times.  More recently, I was really impressed with their smallish-box tile game, Dead and Breakfast.  And I am really looking forward to getting hold of the currently-on-a-ship Ragusa, by the designer of the excellent Calimala, Fabio Lopiano.  Add to that the fact that they have a game on the way by the fantastic David Turczi, and this is a stable of games that I am absolutely delighted to be a part of.  I must admit that I am more than a bit nervous.

Anyway, that is where we are at right now.  There will now be a period of development where I work with the Braincrack team to turn the game that I am proud of into the final product that they want to publish.  Ideas are bouncing around at the moment, but I can't really reveal anything yet other than to say that there may be a change to the game's title, and that it is planned for a Kickstarter project some time next year. 

Other than that, I will be blogging and tweeting about this from time to time, but as we are now working on a product, and there is someone else's business involved, I can't really be completely open about everything that is going on all the time.  I'm looking forward to the process though.

Expos and Pirates and Castles, Oh My!

That was quite some weekend! I was at UK Games Expo from Thursday afternoon (the day before it started) until it closed on Sunday afternoon, when it closed, and I am now home, tired but very happy about how things went.  Here are some only slightly organised thoughts.

I'll start with the most exciting part for me: I had a couple of meetings to pitch game designers to publishers, and both went extremely well, and the upshot is that Scurvy Crew and The Castle War are both now being evaluated by publishers to consider for publication.  This is still a long way from actually being published, or even a contract being signed, but it's great to even get this far.  I'm not going to say who the publishers are right now, but if anything comes of either of these, I will let you know what I am able.

The main focus for my days was, once again, the Playtest Zone, this time hidden in the back corner of the enormous Hall 1, where I was volunteering for all three of the mornings, and the main task was trying to match players up with designers at the tables, and be there to answer questions and offer general help.  This can be quite a challenge first thing in the morning, when most people at the convention are wanting to explore and see everything before settling down to play things, or they are specifically looking for the latest hotness, but later in the end, we tend to see people wandering in, looking for something to play, and the challenge is then to find a designer needing players. 

The games presented varied from hand-drawn early prototypes, right up to beautifully presented and professionally printed games that are ready to publish.  I often have a bit of a grumble about people using the space as a cheap way to promote their upcoming Kickstarter, of which there are always a few every year, but it doesn't really do any harm and it's probably not particularly efficient marketing. Also, more serious vetting of games would just antagonise people unnecessarily and would risk making it harder for new designers to get onboard, and that is against the ethos of the space.

I failed to take photos other than a couple of this playtest of Scurvy Crew.

I had a 90 minute slot for playtesting Scurvy Crew, during which I hoped to get a couple of plays through (it usually takes about 30 minutes), but in the event we only managed one play as one of my three players was finding the game confusing and hard going.  This was entirely my fault: I was watching the two players opposite me as I explained everything and they got on well with everything, but I didn't check the guy sitting next to me, who it turned out wasn't used to playing hobby games, so would have appreciated a more thorough explanation with fewer shortcuts. Eventually (rather too late) I realised what was going on, apologised and stressed that his misunderstanding was my fault and not his, and helped him through a couple of turns, after which he started to get more comfortable and make more solid decisions. 

Aside from the issue with the struggling player, the game played pretty smoothly and engaged the players who found a couple of different approaches to playing. The players gave a few useful pieces of feedback, but mostly gave me a little extra confidence in the game, which didn't fall apart in any real way.

Later in the afternoon I had another play (I'd count it as a play rather than a proper playtest) with a couple of friends who wanted to check it out, and I actually really enjoyed playing it without feeling that I had to take notes or feedback.  All good for the confidence.

On Friday evening there was the Designer-Publisher Networking Event, which is ostensibly an opportunity for designers and publishers to meet in an informal setting, but there were few publishers, and to be fair, I'm not sure many of them would have welcomed being hassled by a swarm of us rookie designers wanting to pitch games to them after a long and tiring day.  What it was in practice was a comparatively relaxed opportunity to have a drink and a chat with fellow designers to compare war stories, and a couple of interesting talks from Alex Yeager and James Wallis, both good speakers, and both with fun topics -- one of the games I bought in the trade halls was a direct result of one of the talks.

Aside from all this, I managed to have half-decent meals in the evenings (a definite improvement from previous years) and then spend some time with friends, old and new, playing a few games. These days it's proving not-too-hard to find gaming space in the NEC halls in the evenings (though still a nightmare at the Hilton end of the Expo), and I managed to stumble into playing with strangers on two separate evenings, which was nice.

Lots of people post pics of their "haul" from conventions, so here's mine.

So I reckon that this year was my best overall experience at UK Games Expo so far, probably helped somewhat by the fact that I was really comfortable and slept well in my hotel, another thing that rarely happens.  I'm really looking forward to next year, and need to get started on figuring out what games I'm planning to pitch at that point.

I hear the creak of the big machine...

On Sunday of last week (once again I got distracted by other things before finishing this post) was my last major playtesting opportunity before UK Games Expo, and was the monthly trip to London. I always plan to arrive long before the start of the playtesting, so I can have a relaxed coffee and sandwich by way of preparation, and this time I bumped into Bez (of Yogi/In a Bind fame, amongst others), who was training a couple of volunteers for her stall at Expo, so I got "taught" a few short games (that I happened to already know) as part of their practice, which was good fun.

The prototype games designed by others that I played were a "Simon Says" style party game, a very nearly done game of city building, a real-time (app assisted) action, and a game about not being too good at your job.  Lots of good stuff in varying stages of development.

The game I took with me was the Steampunk Workshop game, having mutated into its "Big Machine" version and lost most of the features from its first couple of iterations and become something very different.

The machine is slowly extending, but has some way to go.

So the headline news is that most of the details of the game are broken -- the balance is all to pot and there are points where things can get gummed up -- but it looks like I have finally found something approximating a game here, so I can start working on tidying up the details.

The biggest issue here was that it took too long for players to be able to afford to buy the gadgets that act as victory points and special abilities. I did end up giving everyone some additional resources part way through the game to help this, but I think it was too late to see how the gadgets really effect the game.  Furthermore, there is one of the gadgets which shunts other players around, and this was seen to be overpowered and frustrating if you aren't the person who has it.  I rather like this particular gadget, but if it turns out to be more of a problem than a benefit (and it could dictate the flavour of the game) then it will have to go.  It will be interesting to see how it works in a game where everyone has more gadgets available to them.

There were plenty of other comments and observations, but the notable point is that they were pretty much all about details rather than the big picture, which was mostly left unscathed.  So I think I now have the basis on which I can build this game.  It actually doesn't include the mechanism that got me started down the track, but that is not a particularly unusual thing to happen. 

Let's Go Expo...

If you are in the UK and care about such things, you are probably aware that UK Games Expo is coming up at the end of this month.  I'll be heading up there once again and have been making plans, as is necessary. So, here we go (everything may change, but this is the plan so far)...

I'll be heading up to the NEC on Thursday and hopefully meeting and chilling with a few people on the eve of the event proper.  The show runs from Friday to Sunday, and I have volunteered to help out in the Playtest Zone for all three mornings, so you know where to find me (stand 1-184, apparently).

A pic stolen from the UKGE website. In a game of Where's the Wally, can you spot me?

I have meetings for a chunk of Friday afternoon, pitching some games. I'm not going all-in on pitching, but have been talking to a few publishers with the intention of slowly building up relationships.  Friday evening is the Designer-Publisher networking event from 9pm, before which I hope to have something to eat and maybe even play a game.

On Saturday afternoon I am booked in to playtest Scurvy Crew from 3 to 4:30. Hopefully that will be enough time to get a couple of play-throughs, given that the game usually takes about half an hour, and only a few minutes to explain.  If you fancy having a go, come on down! (Or you can collar me any other time you find me free.)  I may end up getting another playtest slot some time, but we'll have to see.

Looking forward to seeing lots of people in a couple of weeks -- and I may even get to play a few games!