Hunting Accidents and Annulled Marriages

This is an expanded and extended version of a Twitter ramble I went on yesterday about taking inspiration from some history books I have been reading recently, most of which have been about England (and the petty kingdoms that preceded it) in the period of a couple of centuries either side of the Norman conquest of 1066. Various bits of these books have started me thinking about game ideas, and this post is basically my way of making some notes that might lead to a prototype one day, but there is no guarantee. 

One of the ideas coming to mind is not at all original, but I feel could be fun when mashed together with a game style that I fancy working on.

So the thematic idea is essentially a struggle for the throne. In the period we are considering, the principle of primogeniture -- that the eldest (legitimate, male) child of the reigning monarch inherits the throne -- had not been established. During the Saxon era, for instance, the next king would be elected by a council of nobles with candidates being from a pool of "æthelings", who were generally close descendants of a previous king, and the selection process would have potentially got quite political to say the least. Later, we see situations where there were a number of potential heirs, and it was the one who managed to reach London or Canterbury the quickest after the death of the previous king who took the crown.

One royal misfortune was the White Ship disaster, which
took the life of the sole legitimate male heir of Henry I
 along with many other nobles.
(Image is public domain, via Wikipedia)

Added to this, it is notable how many men of royal blood came to a sticky and early end, whether that be a hunting accident, being waylaid while travelling, poisoned at a feast, or any number of misfortunes which may or may not have been accidental.

So, a game where families or factions of nobles are manoeuvring to claim the throne and making use of misfortunes to remove their rivals. This is, of course, about as original a setting as trading in the Mediterranean, but I don't care.

I always figure though that I don't really have an idea for a game until there is at least the basics of both theme and mechanism pushed together. In this case, the "throne war" setting makes me think of a "take-that!" game, where players are effectively just attacking each other until, typically, there is only one left. This can, of course, be problematic for multiplayer games as they tend to involve player elimination, meaning that players who are eliminated early can be left with nothing to do while the game continues.

There are ways to deal with this. For instance, if the game is sufficiently short, then being eliminated doesn't remove you from play for long. Similarly, if the first player elimination triggers the end of the game, you don't have too long to twiddle your thumbs, and may be entertained by the climax. Another approach is to allow "eliminated" players to play on in a different way, for instance as a ghost who might have new objectives or ways to affect the game. 

I haven't had a proper go at making a take-that! game, and quite fancy having a try.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the style of play in general, but there are exceptions. For me, the likely king of the genre is Family Business, designed by David Bromley and first published in the 1980's, though apparently currently out of print. The game is about mobsters who are trying to wipe out their rivals, and involves a multi-stage system for attacking each other, where you take out contracts on your enemies, thus lining their minions up against "the wall", and then the targets at the wall can be killed in the order they are lined up. Card play allows you to rearrange the wall, add or remove mobsters, and do out-of-order kills. To be honest, the game probably takes a bit long to play for a "last person standing" type of game, but it's a lot of fun if you are in the right mood.

I've been thinking for some time about ripping off taking inspiration from Family Business as a starting point to explore a take-that! design, and I think this could work pretty well.

My thinking at the moment is that players could trigger events like hunts, feasts, trips to war overseas (or at the borders), and other potentially perilous environments. Each player has a few nobles (represented by cards or tokens) which can be sent to attend the events, voluntarily or compelled by other players, and when they are there, they are vulnerable to having a misfortune, though there may be a benefit for surviving an event, perhaps gaining prestige which could lead to a victory condition. I think one family or faction (i.e. player) being wiped out from the game should trigger the end of the game in some way, but that can be experimented with if the core mechanisms appear to work.

I have a picture in my mind of throwing a "hunting accident" at an opponent, who responds by cackling as she invites one of my characters to a feast...

So I posted a summary of this thinking on Twitter, and ended up having a discussion with Jess Metheringham of Dissent Games (check her work out, it's really cool!), who had some great thoughts about introducing female characters to the game.  The initial idea was centred on claims on thrones sometimes being transferred via an heiress, but developing into thoughts on the political activities of noblewomen in general and how they could exert a lot of influence, plus marital alliances being a good trope to play with.  In the end we were trading ideas about how, in an age when divorce was not legal, petitioning the Pope to have a marriage annulled for trumped-up reasons became a semi-regular occurrence. 

This also leads to another point: as any game that develops out of this idea is not likely to be particularly historical, we don't need to slavishly stick to "conventional" gender roles. There were plenty of times in the period where a woman had great control over the crown, or came close to claiming it for herself, so we can lean into that and assume that in our fantasy version of medieval England, women were considered viable candidates for the throne more often. 

Jess' ideas around marriages and the like would probably make for a much more complex game with greater scope than I had envisaged, but one that could have some real spark to it. At the moment I think this project would be a low priority one, as I have several more pressing things to work on, but may get a bit of work done on it. Initially I would expect to go with the lighter take-that! play initially, and then consider if marriages, alliances, and the like would make for a good extension of the game or something that should be considered a separate project.

The Quarter Vinyls

 A few years ago I found that game designer Phil Tootill worked at the same place as me, and for a while we met up regularly over lunch to test each other's prototypes or show each other published games that we thought were interesting. Eventually Phil moved on to another job, but we've been keeping in touch and meeting up occasionally, but we never quite managed to find a project to work on together.

Early this year, Phil pitched a promising idea to me about the development of popular music through the decades, and some possible ways to approach this. We talked this through a bit, discussed via a Google document for a while, and then Phil got to work on building an initial prototype.

Then, not too much later, Covid-19 hit full force and the country went into lockdown.  Phil found himself furloughed for a while, and used some of that time to work on this game, which he gave the working title of The Vinyl Age.

Time passed, and after the restrictions were sufficiently relaxed, we finally found a time to get together and play the prototype as it was. 

So in the intervening time, Phil had put in a hell of a lot of work and built a crunchy card game with some real brain burning as you work through one deck of oversized cards representing recording artists, and another deck of standard cards representing records, performances and events, looking for combos and synergies to maximise your scoring. The popularity of five broad genres of music was represented by tracks covered by "fan" markers, and you could attract fans of the different genres to your city, revealing scoring and resource opportunities as the tracks become uncovered, while being able to make use of the fans as a resource in themselves.

My partly-there rebuild of the game in Tabletopia, as per discussion later.

The game as it stood was a cracking piece of work and played very well for the right sort of players. I lost pretty badly, but could see how Phil had worked with the resources he had available to build something of an engine, while I was just trundling along opportunistically. I'd have been able to play much more strongly on a replay.

We had a feeling though that the game would be difficult to sell. It was easy, particularly when new to the game, to get caught up in "analysis paralysis" (a cycle of assessing and reassessing options in an attempt to find the best course of action), and the game could get very "mathsy", particularly towards the end. It felt like the game had to be either a bit lighter and smoother, or double-down on the crunchiness and go for something really heavy. Given the theme of the music business, I felt that lightening things up might be better, and possibly this could be done by removing the financial aspect to the game and refocusing on the remaining elements.

After some discussion, Phil said I could have a go at trying some changes. So that's what I've been doing, putting together a virtual prototype in Tabletopia.

Of course, removing a whole element of the game's economy (cash, in this case) results in a lot of knock-on changes, and fixing up those results in even more.  The changes I have been making bind the acts and the other cards together more tightly than before, so we see a story developing more for each of those acts; and some feedback from Phil has suggested a way to enhance this even more.

The downside is that the game is otherwise a lot less coherent than it was before, particularly with the alternative paths of building a career for an artist and having them retire from their active career. This is the current focus, to actually add some detail back in to the game and find ways to balance out the alternative ways to manage an act. The game as it stands is not fully playable, and only works for a few turns, so I also need to build that up.  Fortunately we still have the data files with all the ideas and detail from Phil's build of the game, so I can gradually pull more of them into my version as I put more flesh back onto the bones that I picked clean.

At this stage, I am just tinkering with ideas and we don't yet know whether this will result in a viable line of development or not, but it is an interesting project to work on when spoons and time allow.  Hopefully I'll be able to report some interesting developments on this in time.

Don't Cross the Streams

 Just a very quick post to say, in case you are interested, that tomorrow (Friday 23rd) I will be joining Alan Paull of Surprised Stare Games (with whom I am working on a couple of projects) at 11am (BST) for a discussion on Twitch.  The title is officially "Ideas Into Mechanisms", and we'll basically be talking about just that, how we implement an idea or theme in a playable way, with reference largely to the two games we are working on together: Snails and Grails, and the Castle War.

SSG on Twitch

So, if you are free, it would be great if you would come along and say hello in the chat and see if I can sound slightly interesting or informed.

Link to Surprised Stare on Twitch.

One Day at a Time

I know a lot of people have had it way worse.

I know it isn't a competition.

I also know that I am struggling, and have been for some time.

It is over six months since I have been to the office where I do my day job, and since then, said day job (which I am able to continue to do reasonable effectively from home), game design work, game playing and playtesting, and get-togethers with friends have almost entirely taken place in the same little room.  I am fortunate that we have a house with a garden and other rooms to sit and do stuff in, but the reality is that most of my waking hours are spent doing things in this room, and almost all of that involves looking at a computer screen.

My wonderful wife made this badger for me.
It makes me smile.

This is an environment that I was pretty positive about at first, with the challenge of creating games that could be tested remotely, and learning about technologies like Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator was interesting and opened up more opportunities, but the longer we have gone, the more I realise that I really rely on the energy of other people sitting around the table and the physicality of the game, whether playing a published game for fun or working on a new design. 

Most days, by the time I finish work I often have little energy and motivation to do anything more, particularly without the payoff of seeing other people moving components on a table. As a result, my productivity in the last few months has been shocking. 

It's not all down though. A few weeks ago I was able to meet a game designer friend face-to-face for a few hours and as a result I have been managing to get some work done on developing (or butchering) one of his projects to see what happens if we remove a couple of the play elements in an attempt to streamline it. Even this has been moving very slowly, but it is at least something.

I have also been reading a bit more than previously, mostly books about medieval history, so there may be some game inspiration on its way.

This post doesn't really have a point. I don't have any epiphany I can pass on, or advice I can give, it's just me feeling a bit sorry for myself. 

I will say, however, that whoever and wherever you are, I hope that you and your loved ones find a way through the current troubles, however they are affecting you. If you want a chat and have my contact details, please feel free to use them; otherwise, look me up on Twitter (@harperrob).

August catch-up

 I've been letting the blogging slide quite a lot recently but, although I've not been working at high speed on anything, I have been making progress on a number of projects over the last month or so, so here is a quick summary of what has been going on.

Scurvy Crew

There isn't a lot I can say about this right now, as this is being turned from my pirate card game into a product with a load of cool stuff going on in it, but most of that is still not finalised. There are now a couple more, very talented, people involved in the development team (and another incoming), and there are some elements being worked on that I am very excited about. Hopefully in the coming months I'll be able to start sharing some of the details.

Snails and Grails

This collaboration with Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer is chugging along very nicely. We've mostly been playtesting it online, but Dave was able to get a physical prototype to the table with some "new blood" players who were pretty much in the target audience, and it's looking like we're really getting somewhere.

The Castle War

This has been chugging along too, gaining somewhat in complexity but also, I think, in depth. The interface (wordings, iconography, layouts) is causing some trouble though, so I need to spend some time on cleaning that up.

The Castle War mid-game. This play was about the tensest I have had yet.

The Vinyl Age

This is actually a game created by Phil Tootill, which we played together the other day (my first face-to-face playtest with someone not in my family for months), and it's pretty damn good, but I have taken on the challenge to experiment with simplifying the game (we felt it either needs to be a bit lighter or a bit heavier than it is) and see what I can come up with. No guarantee I can improve on what is there, but we can at least try out some options and feed that into the game development.

Grab Bag Zoo

This is another collaboration, this time with Mike Harrison-Wood, and is unfortunately utterly unsuitable for online testing, relying as it does on tactility. We received some really useful feedback from a remote playtester, suggesting that we need to address issues of frustration that can ruin the game, particularly for younger players -- and this is so clearly a family/kids' game that we need to work on that. I think we had been too busy working on this providing a decent challenge for gamers that we had lost track of the heart of the game. We're moving in a slightly different direction now that is looking promising.

UK Games Expo

Finally, last weekend was the rearranged-date-turned-virtual-con for UK Games Expo, which was a bit of a weird experience. At the physical event I would normally spend a good chunk of my time volunteering at the playtest zone, some more running my own playtests, and a bit more having some meetings, with the rest of the time generally prowling and chatting to people I meet, with a little gaming in the evening. This time, I played one demo game and one early prototype (both via Tabletop Simulator), and spent most of the rest of the time watching panels and seminars, something I almost never get to do. I think the event as a whole felt a bit disjointed, with lots of jumping around between different technologies and Discord servers, but it did feel like an actual event with things to see and discover. And the food and beer were cheaper this way, with shorter queues!

Playable Puffins

So this is yet another game project. I'm not going to go into great detail about it as it's basically just a toy I'm playing with. Long story short, last year I drew (on paper) a picture every day, and I got really into drawing puffins, and it was mentioned that a game about puffins might be fun. This jumbled around in my head until, for some reason, I got the idea of puffins in hats stuck there. (I actually wrote about this almost exactly a year ago, as it happens.)  

Some months later I decided to learn how to use a digital paint package (Krita, seeing as you asked), and soon I ended up with a bunch of pictures of puffins wearing hats.

I don't know much about art but I know when it's got puffins in it.

Actually, that's a lie, or the "soon" bit is anyway. It took bloody ages. I have even more respect for jobbing illustrators than I had before.

Anyway, I did actually have the foresight to do the art in such a way that I could separate the hats from the puffins, made some cards (adding in some cats -- this time using stock cat icons as placeholders -- because the game also needed cats, natch), loaded them into Tabletopia along with some coins and stuff, then managed to gull some innocent bystanders into trying the game.

As expected the game wasn't good, but I got some useful feedback and have tried to tern things around a bit.

The mark 2 e-prototype, now with a First Player Puffin.

So far I've just tried this iteration on my own with three other mes across the table, and it's difficult to tell if it is an improvement over the precious one. At least the changes didn't feel too aukward. Hopefully I'll get some friends to give it a go soon and we'll see what shakes out.

A World and Some Roles

This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a number of weeks now and I've been trying to find a way of expressing it. The story goes back to reading "The Well-Played Game" by Bernard de Koven, a book that is mentioned in many texts on game design. It is more a book of philosophy than of game design, and explores the interactions and tensions between "playing" and "games".  Games, in this case, including board games but mostly focusing on social and playground games and their extension, sports.

One of the lines of thought in the book included that a "well-played game" is one where the participants all take part willingly and enthusiastically, and can leave the game if they no longer wish to continue, and may even be able to change the way they play. There are plenty of angles to this well-played game explored in the book, but this is an area that had my mind firing off. Could I make a board game where players could come and go if they wish, and which allowed them to change the way they played?

As an aside, most roleplaying games I know about can be played in this sort of way: the core is the developing character narrative and a gamesmaster and the rest of the group can work together to adapt the play however the group wishes. I am certain there is a lot already written about this sort of thing (the RPG community has spent a lot of time thinking about how games are played), but that's out of my area these days.

After some sleeping on this, I started thinking about a world, growing from nothing, with players building the world, populating it, and guiding its inhabitants as stuff happens.  One player could be creating a map by laying tiles, another could be building villages on the map, and another could be an adventurer exploring the map, and so on.  You would take a role, which would give you a simple set of actions that you can take, and a way that you score points. When you choose, you may discard the role, take a new one and now, instead of being a terraforming deity, you are now a dragon gathering gold for its lair.

I threw together some tiles in nanDECK, going for an arrangement of square tiles, each of which contains four triangles that are put next to other triangles to make squares arranged at 45° to the alignment of the tiles. I'm not sure why I did that, but it seemed fun at the time. After printing and cutting a few of these I decided that I would actually take the opportunity to get some practice in playing with Tabletopia, so shifted my efforts to a digital version that I might actually have a chance at playtesting during the ongoing lockdown.

Printed tiles. You get the general idea

One of the advantages of an online platform is that you can import all sorts of components and just experiment. I have at home a good supply of assorted game components, but for tiles, cards, and so on, there is a load of printing and cutting required, which I have got pretty efficient at, but is still something of a grind. Tabletopia has a decent library of standard components (not covering everything, but good enough for many purposes) that can just be dropped into a game project. Preparing tiles and cards for upload and managing them in the system is a bit of a pain, especially at first, but there are some big advantages. Like, for example, when I decided I wanted twice as many tiles, I could just click on the existing stack and duplicate it.

I fiddled about with my virtual prototype for a while, building up a few of the roles that players could take, putting the instructions for them onto oversized cards that I added to the prototype, meaning that pretty much all of the rules would be within the game itself: each player could just take a role card, read it, and start playing.

Eventually I got to the point where I enlisted a friend to try the game out and see how it held together when I was not playing all the parts.

Testing with another human was very revealing.

As is so often the case, the game didn't play particularly well. The general concept of the game seemed OK, but it was just too damn complicated for the light-and-breezy type of game I was hoping for.  One of the big issues was that there was too much variation between the different roles, and as a player you were more or less having to learn a new game each time you took a new role. And the way that you played a role for as long as you wished before changing just didn't sit right.

At the start of the design process for this game I was wondering if it should be competitive or cooperative in nature, and I went for the former, mostly because it is what I know best and cooperative games can be so much harder to create. After all, not only do you need to make the game mechanisms work properly, but you need something for the players to be working against, and getting that right is hard.

Anyway, at this stage I decided that what the game really wants to be is a series of puzzles, where what one player is trying to achieve can interact with the other players' actions. And with this in mind, cooperative play could be best.  A game of this sort of form could be played against some sort of a timer, so the roles would now have an objective (on completion, or if you decide to give up, you switch to a new role with a new objective) and the aim would be for the players between them to complete a certain number of objectives before time run out.

A literal timer is out of the question for this. Real-time pressure, while exciting in some contexts, just adds stress and I don't want this to be a stressful game.  What I actually decided to go for is to introduce dice. A bunch of (six-sided) dice get rolled, players each take one in turn to use for the movement of their avatar, until there is only one left, and that die gets placed in a "timer" display, and a new fistful of dice are rolled.  When either one of each number (1 to 6) has been accrued, or there is three of a single number, the game ends. This way the players are partly at the whim of fate, but also have some control over how they allow the game to progress.

So building the next iteration of the game was largely about this timing mechanism and the idea that there should be core rules for everyone to learn and the roles just give minor variations, which may accumulate as you move through the game, but at no point should require anyone to absorb a large raft of new options. Getting these changes into Tabletopia can involve a little faffing, but I'm not having to print and cut physical components, so there is something of a trade-off.

I then managed to get a playtest with a couple of friends, who got on pretty well with the general concept of the game and its overall flow, but had plenty to say about it as well. I was left with a feeling that this iteration was definitely an improvement and I liked the game in its cooperative mode. The next thing to do would be to extend the selection of roles and sequence them so that there is something of an arc to their progression. One suggestion was to have three phases of play: one being to build the world, the next to add complexity and cause trouble and strife, and the third to heroically put everything right. Players then have to get through a certain number of roles, or complete some of the "ending" roles before the timer runs out.

A few turns in, working with the first set of "world building" roles.

I would also like to have some more significance to how the timer operates, maybe having events triggering when certain sets of numbers are completed, but I can worry about that later, I think.

As an aside, I have also figured out the "magnetic board" option on Tabletopia, which allows you to have components neatly snapping into position when you drop them, and have a grid board that makes placing tiles much easier.  What I made isn't as big as the potential play area, but it'll do, and you can always add more tiles alongside.

A "magnetic" board can make everything so much smoother and cleaner.

Last up, I need to think of a decent working title for this game. I've been calling it variations of "Role World Thing", which doesn't really have any sort of ring to it. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.