Castles in Their Proper Places (ish)

A long story about a small game design decision.

I've not done anything with The Castle War for a little while, but have been thinking about it, particularly in light of some feedback I received.  If you didn't know, or don't remember, this is a two-player card game inspired by the 12th century civil war in England between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, which eventually led to the crowning of Matilda's son as Henry II. The game is based on a period of that conflict where there was essentially a stalemate characterised by a series of sieges and exchanges of castles, where there were no significant open battles.

Game play involves the two players deploying forces and using tactics and events across six castles that were all significant during the period. If one player ever controls all six castles, they immediately win; otherwise, whoever controls the most castles at the end of the game (when the card deck runs out) is the winner.

But with six castles, a tie is clearly possible. How we break that tie is a question that has taken some thought.

I drew a sketch map to show the (approximate) locations of the castles.

Originally, the castles were nameless and numbered, 1 to 6, to tie in with a dice rolling system that was used to open up opportunities to the players. Then if there was a tie at the game end, you added up the numbers on the castles you controlled and whoever had the highest score won. This meant that the high numbered castles were more valuable than the low numbered ones, but if you concentrated on defending the two highest scoring castles, the other player could win by capturing the rest, even though their combined score was not as high. This was fine, but somehow a lot of players seemed to have difficulty internalising that the scores were only useful for tie breaking.

To give the game a little extra flavour, I wanted to name the castles, so a little research yielded the six locations depicted in the rough map above. (Fun fact: I live in between Faringdon and Wallingford, and have visited the sites of both castles.)  Furthermore, I wanted to have the initial ownership of the castles reflecting history as best I could.  (Another fun fact: Wallingford castle is distinguished in having not changed hands throughout the conflict, despite being sieged and attacked with some vigour.) The problem here is that, in order to keep the initial scores balanced, I had to distribute the names of the castles along the line of six with no real attention to geography. This was fine from a game play point of view, but as this is inspired by history, it bothered me a bit.

So now a slight diversion. We'll bring this back in a bit.

Before this stalemate stage of the war, Matilda was in a very strong position and very nearly got herself crowned as Queen, it seems there were effectively three power bases that needed to be brought onside in order to become officially the monarch: the Church, the royal treasury (based in the old Wessex capital of Winchester), and the people (or at least the leaders) of London. Matilda had gained Church support and held the treasury, but never managed to convince the leaders of London to back her cause -- partly, it seems, due to her own arrogance, and partly due to the actions of another Matilda, this one the Queen, and wife of the then-imprisoned King Stephen.

Eventually, Queen Matilda and her allies managed to retake Winchester, capture some key prisoners, and arrange for an exchange, thus freeing the King and bringing us to the Castle War's stalemate situation.

Anyway, three factions that could be influenced... that gave me an idea...

If there was some form of way of tracking influence with these three factions or power bases, then whoever has influence over the most of them wins an otherwise tied game. There are a number of ways this could be handled, but I have decided to make each faction a simple binary: they are supporting either Stephen or Matilda, and I chose to represent this with a set of three flippable cards, similar to the way I have players flipping the castle cards to show ownership.

I then added an icon representing one of the factions to each card in the game, with an even distribution of these icons throughout the deck.  The plan now is that each player can now take an action on their turn to flip one of the faction influence cards by discarding a set of three cards with matching faction icons on them.  The set of three decision is intended so that, with a full hand (of six cards) you stand a decent chance of having a set, but using it will dramatically reduce your options for the next turn and you may have to give up on some other useful cards.

With the numbers on the castles being irrelevant for game end purposes, I can now arrange the row of castles in an order that follows a plausible route between them that you may see in the map, from Wareham to Wallingford, and as there are some minor elements of adjacency in the game, that makes more thematic sense now.

You wouldn't put the faction cards there for an actual game, but you get the idea.

A common question from players is about how to cycle out unwanted cards in hand, so this system will give a way to address that, assuming those unwanted cards can be combined into a set.

So far this seems to work OK, but I am a little concerned that collecting three matching icons to gain influence in something might just feel boring and unthematic to a lot of players.  I'm hoping that it's one of those elements of the game that if you totally ignore it you may be at a disadvantage, but if you focus on it too much, you will almost certainly lose.  It should give a small, but meaningful, additional option at some points in the game, without dominating.  Only more playtesting will show if this is actually a decent decision, and if the set collection doesn't work out, I am certain there are other options to allow us to do something similar in the game.

The other real issue here is that this setup gives Stephen an advantage, winning the tiebreak if nothing else changes, so Matilda gets the first turn, which also appears advantageous.  Again, playtesting should help reveal if one side has a significant advantage here and if there is, there are plenty of ways to mitigate that.

Grab Bag Hare

I haven't been to a 3rd Sunday playtest at the Jugged Hare in London for a couple of months, but finally managed to get myself in order for a trip last weekend, taking with me Grab Bag Zoo, my co-design with Mike Harrison-Wood, who managed to make the trip too, for our first face-to-face meet since we started working on the game.

There was a little uncertainty as to whether I would actually get into London as we had just been hit by the second big (by British standards) storm in two weeks, causing all sorts of problems for travel (not to mention people's houses getting flooded and property damaged) around the country. Checking the situation before I left home everything looked OK for my planned route, and the train was close to being on time, but we ended up being delayed by an hour en route due to a problem that emerged later. Unfortunately this meant I was not able to meet with Mike before the main meetup, but I managed to arrive comfortably before the playtesting started anyway.

Thanks to Mike Harrison-Wood for taking a much nicer photo than I managed to take!

While waiting for everyone to arrive, we had a quick play of Grab Bag Zoo for five players, including me, with Mike sitting out and taking notes. This worked pretty well, but the players fell massively short of winning. We suspect that the game is just too hard for larger player counts.

A little later, with the whole group assembled, we were able to get some more plays, this time for four players, this time including Mike while I observed.  One of the key things I learnt from this is that for a fast-moving, real-time game, it can be difficult to take meaningful notes about what is going on!

The group was enthusiastic overall and there was a lot of intense activity in the game, and they were keen to play a couple more times, meaning that we managed to try out all four of the zoo board sets that I had brought along between this session and the earlier game. The idea is that the game has a number of different sets of boards, each providing a different style or intensity of challenge, and this proved to be the case: the players took a different approach to each set of boards. The balancing of the board elements isn't right yet, but we are learning how the different options affect play.  However, we are also learning that some of the rules we have for the game are just too complicated and can easily get missed or wrongly applied.

So, I think that this was a really helpful testing session. We got feedback that the game is pretty compelling, but also identified a number of problems that need addressing, and we are getting to work on that.  I'm also discovering the fun of working on a very short game where you can easily just say, "Let's try that one more time, with this change..."

Of course, there were other games there, and it was fun to work through a few games designed by others: an interesting "short straw" game, a game about being a band, recording music and going on tour, and a nicely stripped back investment game. It's always good to get a look at some of the projects other folk are working on.

Four Fings in February

I seem to have four game projects on the go at the moment, all of which are either collaborations or in development under external guidance, so here's a quick outline...

The one I have just spent a day working on has the working title of "Snails and Grails", and is inspired by 13th and 14th century manuscripts that show images of snails, monkeys and hares (as well as all manner of other bizarre beasts) in combat (and other) situations. My collaborators, Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer, and I had a few hours discussion about this a few weeks back, and each constructed different parts of a prototype, which we just stitched together, Frankenstein-like, into a somewhat creaky, but basically operational whole. Over three plays, which included a load of on-the-fly rules changes and writing on the components with Sharpies, we managed to refine the game into a magnificent, slightly less clunky version that we were really enjoying playing.  OK, so a long way to go on this one, but I think we are off to a good start.

Our third play of the day, with a load of scribblings on components.

Then, of course, there is Scurvy Crew, which you may remember is signed for publication with Braincrack Games, and we are slowly building into a campaign game, where you play a series of games, each of which introduces some new elements to change the focus of your strategy and, it looks like, you will be keeping a "captain's log", recording some of your achievements and earning power-ups as you go.  I'm really excited about where this is going now.

Next up we have something else new, which came out of a conversation with Mike Harrison-Wood at Dragonmeet at the end of November, and in early January turned into a physical thing. With the working title "Grab Bag Zoo", this is a real-time game that involved pulling wooden animals from bags in order to collect sets, and leans heavily into tactility (you have to choose an item by feel only). The game generally works, but there is a lot to tighten up about it, and we are both trying out assorted variations at the moment that we can compare and use to find the best way to play the game.

Finally in this little batch, we have a game about the history of popular music through the second half of the 20th century, which I am working on with Phil Tootill. I say "working on", but this is his baby so far and he has done all of the initial work, so only time will tell if this turns into an actual co-design or if it is his and I have just helped a bit. It looks like it could turn out really interesting though.

What's my 20?

Having looked backwards a few days ago, I guess it is time to look forwards to my game design plans for this year.

A significant part of the early part of the year is likely to continue to be development of Scurvy Crew, which may end up with a different name, and which I am still actively working on in conjunction with Lewis of Braincrack Games.

I forgot to mention in my roundup that, while I did pretty well for organising playtesting sessions for the first part of last year, I pretty much sucked for the second half. Every year I say I will try to get better at managing playtest groups, and this year will be no exception.

Collaborations... Now this is something that is big for me. I have been saying for some time that I have wanted to collaborate with other designers. This is partly in order to learn from others, but also because I seem to be more productive in many ways when I am bouncing ideas back and forth with other people. I have had a few collaborative projects over the last couple of years that have nearly, but not quite, got going, but it is looking like 2020 is going to the year of collaboration for me.

Over the last few weeks I have been discussing ideas for a light "tactility" game with another designers and this week this finally turned into a playable prototype that I tested with a couple of other folk, and the other designer, Mike, is really enthusiastic at his end, so I have a good feeling about this.

The first play of the "pulling animals out of a bag" game -- and it wasn't terrible.

I also have a get-together with a couple of other designers in a few days' time to work on a potential joint project that we are all keen on, so that's another thing.

Another thing I forgot to add to my retrospective post the other day (which is increasingly looking like I did a really poor job of!) was my collaboration with Tom Coldron, with him doing some development and testing of my old game Boogie Knights and me looking at his game Elvic.  I still need to have some further discussions with him but it was an enjoyable process for me and I'd be well up for doing similar things in future.

How about pitching games? I'm not sure this year, as it may turn out to be more of a "load up the queue" year, so I might not end up with pitchable product by UK Games Expo. I'm just going to wait and see on this front.  The "tactility" game I mentioned above could easily get to a pitchable state by the summer -- or totally crash and burn, only time will tell. Other than that, I would love to get one of my older projects (maybe Corlea, which has been rattling around for long enough) up to scratch in the next few months, but with the planned/possible collaborations, it may be that I have enough on my plate as it is.

Finally, something really specific. This year I'm going to create and illustrate a small card game involving puffins. After all the drawing of puffins last year, and a few general comments along these lines, I figure this should be a fun way to carry forward some of that art practice. I only expect this to end up as a print and play game, but we'll see how things develop.

N...n...n...n...Nineteen

Happy new year!

So, looking back on my plans and intentions from last year, how did I do?

I said I would share more games as print and play prototypes, and utterly failed at that. 

I also said that I would continue to read up on historical events (I have mostly been reading about the middle ages, focussed on the C9th to C12th), and have a number of ideas jotted down in a notebook, so that's something. I did say that I would make some of these ideas into prototypes, and I failed to do this (mostly), but am sure I will develop some of these concepts.

Sometimes research for a game involves playing with a pile of toy animals.

The reason I said "mostly" there is that I have talked with a couple of game designer friends about the bizarre "medieval battle snails" that appear in various medieval manuscripts, and did make a light card game prototype inspired by this as well as a very rough version of a more serious boardgame on the same theme.  Neither went beyond that, but more recently I have been discussing with these same friends something more solid, and we are planning to get together very soon to see if we can rough out the basis of a collaboration.

I also didn't do another proofreading course last year, but I have the intention of signing up for one in the next few weeks.  I have worked on a few rulebook proofreading jobs over the last year; they have all been pro bono, done for people I really wanted to help out, but I feel I should probably start charging soon.

So what did go according to plan?

Well, I successfully ploughed through the year drawing a picture on paper every day and sharing a scan of that picture on Twitter.  This did contribute to wiping me out a little some evenings, meaning that I was short of energy for other things, like game design. Overall, though, I feel really good about this whole project -- I think the average quality of my pictures improved a bit during the year, the speed of my work certainly increased, and I got to experiment with some different media along the way. Plus I am very proud of a few of the pictures.

Other than that, a year ago I was talking about wanting to work on a couple of my game projects, and that was a definite success, with Scurvy Crew now signed (and in development), and The Castle War still with a publisher who has not given a final decision but has said some positive things, and I will be seeing them next week so will be able to discuss it at that point.

I mentioned collaboration earlier, and something else came up towards the end of the year. I was chatting with another designer at Dragonmeet, and ideas started bouncing around. We've been exchanging emails on this since and are working on an initial version of the game (I'm just waiting for the arrival of some components), and hope to meet up soon to see where we can take the idea. This is something exciting for me, partly because the collaborator is such a nice guy, but also because it is a style of game I probably wouldn't have approached on my own. 

In summary, then, 2019 didn't really take the shape I had originally intended, and for various reasons I had spells of being unproductive, but overall things went really well for me. 

December Roundup

Another month nearly escapes me without a post. It hasn't been the most productive month from a game design point of view, but I did manage to get some stuff done.

Right at the end of November was the Dragonmeet convention in London, which I have attended for the last few years as part of the PlaytestUK team. We run an area for game designers to get their prototypes played by regular convention goers rather than the usual PlaytestUK meetups which are mostly designers playing each other's games.  I spent the first few hours helping to staff the area, which largely involves inviting passing gamers to join a game. This is usually a bit hard going at the start of the day, but as time passes you get more people just turning up looking for something to play.

I had a slot for playtesting myself in the afternoon, and introduced Tom Coldron's game Elvic to two different groups.  Things went very well overall, with players being well engaged, but a few issues were raised, largely relating to balance between certain options (some cards are perceived as strictly  better or worse than others), which need to be at least considered.  I've now sent the current play set back to Tom with some notes about how things have been going, so we'll see what he thinks.

Elvic at Dragonmeet.

Other than that, I got discussing a game idea with another of the designers there who was also volunteering at the same time as me. He had an idea about making a game that is largely about tactility and recognising items by the sense of touch alone, and our discussions moved towards a development of this. We've both been tinkering with this idea since, and have been communicating, and a basic version of a game is starting to form. Hopefully we'll be able to get together some time soon (we don't live too far apart) to see if we can develop things more in person.

Other than that it has been Scurvy Crew. I've not had playtesting opportunities on this, but I have worked a lot of ideas from discussions with BrainCrack into a new version of the prototype.  The basic gameplay is not changing significantly, but we are working on the campaign mode, which allows you to play a series of games (we're planning 7, to match the 7 seas and all that) with development of threats and opportunities as you work through it.  Plus, with the game being a relatively short one, the aim is to make it so that you can binge your way through the campaign in a day (maybe even an afternoon) should you wish. Anyway, I think the first official announcements about the game are likely to happen in the next couple of months, so we'll see how things go...

Anyway, I think this will be about it from me for the year.  I hope you have a good Christmas or whatever else you might celebrate at this time of year. Back soon... :)

Remember remember the rest of November

I seem to have slumped to a monthly blog posting schedule here, which is not exactly ideal, but is better than nothing, I guess.  With the nights drawing in I've been finding myself a bit tired and sluggish on many fronts, but I've not been completely off the game design path.  Most of my efforts over the last month have been working on one of three projects which are at very different stages.

Explore and Settle

This is an old design that I alluded to in last month's post, and one that has a pretty misleading name. It's what you could describe as a "3X" game (explore, expand, exploit, but not exterminate), and it is based on cards that overlap to form a grid of squares, but the additional "tab" of the card (the bit beyond the square) has a game effect until it is covered over, as well as providing uses when played from hand. The core mechanism is pretty fine, and gets a bit brain-burny (more than anything else I have designed), but overall the game is just not compelling, so I need to find an "angle" to use, and it may require a major redesign. 

At least it's prettier than it used to be.

This was the game that I took to this month's London playtesting meetup, as well as coming out for another game designer meetup I was at, and I got some interesting feedback, but I'm struggling to figure out how best to move forward.

Scurvy Crew

I'm still in a development phase here, working on building the campaign mode of the game. We have some really interesting ideas bouncing around for how we can carry threads on from game to game. There'll be missions and changing threats and opportunities through the campaign, but things aren't locked down enough for me to be able to talk about them much at the moment.

Elvic

This is the game designed by Tom Coldron that I've been doing some experimental development on. It's a fast-playing game (usually takes about 15 minutes), so we usually get to have at least a couple of plays in a row, often trying a small rules tweak in between to compare and contrast.  Small and quick games are so much easier to playtest. :)

I think I'm getting to the end of a development arc with this game though, so I have one last round of playtesting coming up (see below) and then, unless that opens up some new avenues that I want to explore, I think I'll probably send it back to Tom and see what the original designer thinks of the ways I have destroyed his original idea!

Dragonmeet

It's that time of year. As I write this, I'm avoiding getting ready for Dragonmeet, which is on tomorrow in London (Hammersmith, actually), though actually I've got most of what I need to do done.  I'll me spending most of the day at the Playest UK stand -- volunteering there until 2pm, after which I'll have a couple of hours playtesting the latest version (of mine) of Elvic.  If you are there (if you are in the area and want something to do, why not come along?), please swing by and say hello.