Great Tension

Post by: Grant Rodiek

Tension is one of, if not the, most important ingredients in a great design.

Recently I played a new game for the first time. I was very excited to play this game based on the initial read of the rules. I actually enjoy reading and writing rules and I find them the first point of excitement for me. This game had 2 really neat mechanics, one of which is called Tension.

As we played the game, it became clear that the Tension mechanic was a lie and that tension had been removed almost entirely from the game. It completely removed the fun, the excitement, and the thrill of the game.

Josh and I can relate to this from earlier versions of Hocus Poker. As we wandered through the iterative wilderness trying to find our game’s soul, our game lacked tension. We realized this about the same time we hit our eureka moment, but now it’s a notion that’s so stuck in my craw I daresay I shant forget it soon. In these versions of Hocus, players had no pressures on their decisions. They had few risks to take. The game rewarded conservative play and waiting until you could win it all.

There was no tension and as a result, our game suffered. When we added limited turns before the end of the round, which can be determined by your opponents’ play and schemes, and limited the amount of things you could accomplish? Hocus became a game.

Let’s talk about tension and why your game desperately needs it.

Tension has a few definitions. I know this is a cliche way to begin a discussion, but it’s relevant here.

As a noun:

  1. the state of being stretched tight
  2. mental or emotional strain

As a verb:

  1. apply a force to (something) that tends to stretch it

Let’s keep these in mind as we identify the key elements of tension.

Constrain

The definitions sound negative, and there are times when we fear we’re pushing players too hard, but that’s not the case here. You can’t always get what you want, in life or good games, and you’ll find that if you force a difficult choice upon your players, there will be great satisfaction when they discover what it is they really need

The state of being stretched tight is beautifully demonstrated in games like Ra, 7 Wonders, or Race for the Galaxy. Yes, you can try to dominate every category, but really, working on 2-3 is sufficient. Monuments and pharaohs? Perhaps! Science and military? Also valid.

Worker placement is also excellent in this regard. You have 3 workers. What resources do you most wish to collect? What is the chain of events you most need to see occur?

Eclipse does this simply with an economic limitation. Sure, you may wish to research a new laser, and conquer a new system, and assault your opponent, but all of those tax your limited and fragile economy.

Netrunner deckbuilding does this with a limit on non-faction influence. With a Chaos Identity, you can use all the Chaos cards you want. But you’re strictly limited on Shaper and Criminal cards. I think one of the most important deckbuilding decisions is not what cards you take from the limitless pool, but which you take from the finite one. These cards show your wit and innovation in play.

Constrain your players. Put a box around them! Do not force them through a narrow shoot, which is limiting and boring. But, fence them in and let them decorate their personal diorama as they choose with their actions.

Obfuscate

Obvious choices are poor ones and grow old after some time. Or, rather quickly. If everyone can easily ascertain the value of something in an auction game, it deflates the balloon of joy with all the pomp of a slobbery fart sound. If you are locked into a strategy, either due to the shallowness of the design or your choices, you may check out as the game meanders to a close.

Obfuscation leads to mental and emotional strain. The good kind! You want the situation where player A takes their turn, player B says “Damn you!” and player C groans and puts their head in their hands. Uncertainty and a lack of clear direction is so delightful.

Modern Art does a great job of obfuscation as you don’t know how much money (i.e. points) your opponents have and some of the auctions are blind. But, it’s not too opaque as you know the approximate value of what things are worth.

X-Wing has great obfuscation as you don’t know precisely where an opponent’s ship will maneuver. You know where they could go. You know where they should go. You know where you’d like them to go. But you don’t know where they will go.

Netrunner does a great job giving the Corporate player a wall of fog to put up before the Runner. Is that an Agenda that they can score? If so, how soon can they score it? Is it a trap that can kill me? Is that an Upgrade that’ll make my life more difficult? Is that an Asset that’ll give them a fat payout?

City Hall, if you pay attention, seems clear. You can see that Bob is trying to build more housing. You know he needs two actions. You also see he has quite a few cards in his hand, but you’re not sure how many are Influence, how badly the others want the action, and how much they’ll drive the cost.

Obfuscation is about eliminating perfect information, but also about curtailing the number of possibilities such that the strain is fun, not overwhelming. People are bored by indecision, both their own and that of other players. Games with too many possibilities feel directionless.

Tax

These elements are ingredients and optional ones. To have great tension you probably need a few of them, but not all of them. I say that as this one will be highly contentious. You need to tax your players. Things should come with a cost.

There are many ways to do this, ranging from simple to cruel.

  • Hand limits — you can only keep so many!
  • Discard to play (ex: discard 1 card to play this other card)
  • End of round upkeep (ex: feed your family)
  • Spend finite or recurring currency to pay for actions (ex: Netrunner credits or Magic Mana)

Taxation is similar to constraint, but in addition to having limited actions and choices, you also need to pay for it. You need to lose something to gain something. This additional trade off beautifully complements constraint.

You only have so many silver bullets. When, and at whom, do you fire them?

End It

I couldn’t think of a clever verb heading for this one, but the idea is that you must always be advancing the game’s end state. Like death and taxes in our real lives, players need to know that the game will end, whether they want it to or not, and they need to make the most of their finite time on this Earth. I mean game.

In Farmageddon, players draw from the deck every turn and when that deck is empty, the game ends.

Many games simply have a limited number of rounds.

Many games lately literally have a time limit. We call this “real time” (as opposed to false time?).

Constantly advance the game state and force it to conclude. This creates wonderful tension and makes the final decisions all the more agonizing. Force your players to create a strategic bucket list.

This is getting a bit long for a Friday blog. Your game must have tension to succeed. You must challenge your players to work within constraints, and force them to accomplish twice as many things as it seems they are able to do.

What are your favorite ingredients for crafting tension? What are some great examples of tension in games?

Cutting Cards with a Silhouette Portrait Cutter

Guest Review by:  Corey Young

Synopsis: The cutter makes quick work of cutting printed cardstock into cards.

As a game designer, I make a lot of cards. I mean A LOT of cards. I iterate my designs very quickly. If something is broken, or we find a typo, or for any number of reasons, I make entirely new sets of cards. Until recently, I used 80lb cardstock, usually duplex printed at my local FedEx Office. I’d then cut these using an X-Acto and straight edge, then round the corners with a corner rounding punch.

Ah, the joys of carpel tunnel syndrome. I had to find a better alternative.

This past week, I saw an ad for the Silhouette Portrait craft cutting plotter. It lists right now on Amazon for $109, down from $199. I thought that for that price, it was worth a try.

The installation of the software and driver was very easy. The software is easy to use and intuitive. I made a layout that mirrored my typical 9 card arrangement in under 10 minutes.

The first thing that you’ll have to get used to is the cutting mat. It’s a long sheet of transparent plastic, coated with a sticky/tacky surface. This holds the media (cardstock) in place while it’s being cut. At first, this can be off-putting because the cardstock tends to REALLY stick to the cutting mat. I recommend that you use a few sheets of scrap cardstock to break the surface in. It will tear the paper a bit, and leave bits behind. Once you’ve done this a few times, the surface will be “seasoned” for grabbing, without damaging, the media.

I was very concerned that my duplex-printed cards would lose ink to the cutting mat sticky stuff or be torn up, but I was delighted to discover that it actually made the cards pop off more easily. It left no marks on the cards. I over-bleed my backs, ensuring that the entire back is covered with ink. Again, I have FedEx Office do my printing, so the printing is of very high quality and saturation.

You may want to do a lot of trial and error calibration to get your cutter’s registration exactly where you want it. Here are a few things I’ve found that might help you.

  • In the software, set the cut speed to 3. Setting it slower wastes time and decreases the accuracy. The default cut speed for 105lb+ paper is 1, but I’d ignore that.
  • Set the depth on your blade to 4 or 5. It works just fine, and I’m thinking that it will help the cutting mat last longer. I am a bit concerned that my cutting mat will wear out faster than the manufacturer might think, simply because I’m always cutting the exact same pattern. I ordered 2 extra mats and an extra blade.

The registration (calibration) routine listed in the instructions are basically useless for getting the precise cuts that I need. They basically tell you to line up the black arrow centered between the white rollers on the cutter. The center point is not marked. You just have to eyeball it. Not good enough.

Why is it so imprecise? I suspect that the primary use for the device, cutting craft shapes out of monochromatic materials, does not demand the same degree of precision. If you want to cut a flower pattern out of yellow cardstock, it doesn’t really matter if the pattern is off by half an inch. For my purposes, cutting printed cards with almost no bleed, I needed to take extra steps.

I’ll provide a lot of detail here in the hopes of saving you the experimentation time.

  • The cutting mat has a nice outline showing where an 8½”x11” sheet fits. Carefully align your card stock to that.
  • When you’re feeding the mat into the cutter, look for the two parallel guides at the left. Align the left edge of the card stock to the inside (right) edge of the leftmost of the double guides. I know that’s confusing. I highlighted the line I’m talking about in the first image. The second image shows the card stock aligned correctly.

This will center the stock correctly every time. To make my life easier. I then took a Sharpie marker and marked the cylinder exactly where the black arrow on the cutting mat is pointing.

I’m now able to precisely cut 9 cards, with rounded corners, in about 45 seconds. This used to take me something like 5 minutes using my manual process. The time savings is certainly worth it to me.

I may start cutting my prototype tiles for Santorini with the Silhouette as well. These tile faces will be elongated hexes printed on adhesive-backed paper. I should be able to set the cut depth so that it cuts the surface material, but not the waxy backing material. This too will be an enormous time savings for me.

Conclusion: The Silhouette Portrait craft cutter is an inexpensive, worthy tool for game designers.

The Scenario Framework

Post by: Grant Rodiek

I recently acquired Legends of Andor and after four plays it’s really making me happy. The game is scenario driven and does some very intelligent things to add replay value, but also present a specific story in each scenario. It’s a great mix of focus and unpredictability. In many ways, it’s similar to Robinson Crusoe. I broadened my thinking and began pondering the scenario design of Memoir ’44 and Combat Commander: Europe. Finally, I’m considering Mice and Mystics.

I sense a blog post.

Each of these games holds a high place in my heart, but also do things slightly, or dramatically differently to accomplish their goals. On the recommendation of Todd Edwards, and the seconding of Josh Buergel, I’m going to write about the various tools used by these designers in each game to present unique, dynamic scenarios. Three of these games are cooperative, two of them are competitive. They also scale nicely in terms of complexity.

We’ll begin with Memoir ’44, as it’s the simplest, and progress upwards in terms of complexity.

Memoir ’44: I gotta get a Luger for my kid brother

Memoir ’44 is a 2 player (more, with an expansion) tactical war game during World War II. Players command infantry, special forces, tanks, artillery, aircraft, and a slew of special weaponry (ex: machine guns, mortars) to win the battle.

How to Win: Point Driven. Points are earned by eliminating enemy Units and holding key positions.

Setup: No variation between plays. Units of a defined type and quantity are placed in specified places on the map. Terrain (forests, hedgerows, bridges, towns, etc.) are also placed in specified locations. Mission 1 is always the same at the start.

The slight exception is that in the campaign mode, your performance in previous missions can affect which reinforcements you bring to subsequent missions.

Variance: Variance comes about in a few ways. For one, the Allied and Axis force allotments and positions are different and not always equal. Players may have differing objectives. For example, the Allies may gain a Point for taking a specified point, whereas the Axis gains no point for doing so.

The game actually recommends, especially in competitive play, that players play twice, switching sides after the first game, and tallying their combined scores. As an example, I may play the Germans better than you, but tie you on the Allies, for a net positive performance.

Once the game begins, variance comes about primarily through player actions and combat resolution. For the former, players are both given a large hand of cards, often 5-7, drawn from a shared deck. Although there are a few very powerful cards that let a player move every Unit, or counter-attack, most are simple variations on a simple premise: move X Units in the defined sectors.

If you haven’t played Memoir, the game is divided into 3 sectors. Cards tell you how many Units in what sector can be activated. When activated, Units can Move, then Attack. For example, a card may say: you may active 2 Units on the left sector.

Though a player may get lucky on occasion with incredibly good draws, by and large, and over the course of many games, the draws are relatively equal between players. The skill comes from timing and knowing what card to use, on what Units, and when.

The final form of variance is through combat resolution. The attacker rolls dice to see if they can get a hit. The probabilities are identical for Units of the same type. Therefore, an Axis Infantry will have the same chance of shooting an Allied Infantry Unit, and vice versa. There are some variations in special units, but the rules are deliberately clean to avoid too many exceptions.

Naturally, probability being the beast it is, one player may have very favorable dice for the duration of a single game, but over the course of ten games, they should even out.

Conclusion: The game uses relatively standard variance mechanics via card draws and dice resolution to add spice to historically driven scenario setups. Playing a scenario multiple times, without adding in your own variables, or introducing expansions like Breakthrough or the Airpack, won’t be as compelling as playing a new one.

I believe Days of Wonder and Richard Borg know this as they’ve produced an astonishing amount of content. I own 98% of it and I’m telling you now, I can play Memoir until I die.

Legends of Andor: Let’s save the kingdom through story

Legends of Andor is a 2-4 player fantasy cooperative game set in the fictional kingdom of Andor. The game features 5 unique scenarios, the first of which actually teaches you the game as you play. It’s very novel, but not the topic of this post.

Side Note: Legends of Andor has quite a bit of expansion content, including a large expansion releasing this Essen. Unfortunately, save for the base game, none of it has been translated and brought over. Quite a shame! There’s a free, official 6th scenario on BGG if you’re looking for more content.

How to Win: The goals for every mission of Andor are unique. From what I can tell from the first two Missions, one common goal will always be to protect the castle. The game has a tower-defense like core mechanic where monsters are constantly rushing towards the castle. It’s really smart, because it gives you a common, shared back pressure.

I found designing Sol Rising that you always want to give your players an amount of grounding so they aren’t shocked when you reveal something else. A new scenario shouldn’t feel like 2.0. More like 1.5, or even 1.3.

In addition, every scenario features a number (2 each, so far) of additional objectives that must be accomplished. In the first mission, a letter had to be picked up and carried safely to the other side of the board. The players had to avoid contact with the enemy while doing so. In the second scenario, I had to find the witch, obtain the herb, bring the herb to the king, and destroy an enemy castle. Again, all of this while protecting the castle from the hordes.

Setup: There is a handy standard setup card where you place the fog, wells, Event deck, and various tokens. The specific scenario will then define where the heroes begin, what enemies are placed, any unique elements (like runes, or destroyed bridges, for example), and any starting items, stats, or gold.

There is a tracker on the right side with letters (A through N). Every scenario comes with a set of big cards with story and scenario details. Tokens are places on defined letters that pair with the cards so that when the marker moves to space C, for example, the C card is read and resolved.

There are 4 heroes, but if you play with fewer than 4, the ones you choose will alter the group. Furthermore, the number of heroes in the game determine how many monsters can reach the castle before you fail, and in my experience, alters the strategy you must employ quite significantly.

Variance: While there are quite a few elements locked in, such as the hugely important story cards, there’s also quite a bit of variance to evolve the game between plays. I’ve played scenario 2 three times now and it’s been quite different each time, not just in the skills employed by my group as we improve, but how the elements panned out during the scenario.

  • The Event deck is rather large, shuffled, and only a (small) portion is experienced each scenario. Some of these significantly alter the scenario by decreasing your stats, granting bonuses, or modifying the terrain.
  • There are 15 Fog tokens spread across the map. In the second scenario you need to find the Witch in one of those 15 fogs, so where she appears can really change things. Twice we found her near the castle, but the third time she appeared on the other side of the map. In addition, the fog might reveal additional Event cards, bonus Gold, stat bonuses, or even more enemies. What spawns, and where, really changes things.
  • Various entities spawn in variable places. Every space is labeled with a number (1-80). For example, the enemy fortress spawned on a space that was 50+1d6. The Crystals spawned at the number of the first die + the number of the second die. The Herb spawned based on 1d6 and a chart reference. The designer used 3 different dice mechanics to add things to the map! He knew he wanted the castle to generally spawn in the second place, hence the light variance of 50+1d6. However, the crystals and herb emerge in dramatically different locations.
  • Although the story cards always resolve when the letter space is reached, the timing of that moment being reached can be sometimes controlled by the player. For example, the Prince leaves at Space G on the tracker. Therefore, you might alter your plans to take advantage of his presence before he left. The pawn that moves along the lettered spaces moves every time you defeat an enemy or end the day.

You also have light variance in the form of combat resolution (dice roll), mini-objectives accomplished (not required, but optional to gain bonuses), and things you buy from the merchant, for example.

Conclusion: I find the system incredibly interesting as it combines a fairly rigid structure in the objectives and order of the story cards, but still adds a great deal of spice in the form of Event cards and scattered map elements. I’m very intrigued to see how the system evolves as I’m only on mission 2 and I know it’s probably still lighter on the puzzle nature of things.

So far, this is a really interesting mixture of story-based scenario design with replay variance still in mind.

Mice and Mystics: Hey, let’s play Rat Zelda. 

Mice and Mystics is a story driven cooperative game for 1-4 players. The game revolves around short-tactical combat with some strategy in regards to how you build out your party and whether to solve bonus objectives.

How to Win: Most scenarios involve getting from point A to point B, which usually entails 4-5 large square tiles, all of which are double sided. You must defeat all enemies along the way, making this primarily a game about team-based tactical combat. There is often a boss fight, or tough situation waiting for you at the very end (the final tile).

More and more, especially in the expansion, players face more side objectives, like rescuing a friendly peddler from the drain, finding a particular item, or bringing supplies from one place to another.

Setup: The game defines which tiles to use and in what orientation, as in, how they are placed in relation to one another. Typically you’re allowed to pick any four heroes, but sometimes you have heroes that you MUST use, or heroes that you cannot use, plus a few of your choice.

The game will often have you shuffle a set of Event cards that define which enemies emerge, though sometimes the game will tell you to set a specific type and number of enemies on a defined tile.

The game also defines how much time you have to complete the scenario. Some scenarios specify certain weapons to be used by specified characters

Variance: Mice and Mystics is somewhere around Legends of Andor in terms of variance. I find that I don’t often replay missions, as the game is so story driven, except when I fail. In this sense, I think Legends of Andor has a leg up in replay value as it is a bit more system driven.

While individual scenarios don’t have an extensive amount of variance, the variety between scenarios is significant. The designer clearly strove to create a slew of fresh experiences. You can see variance in Mice and Mystics in the form of:

  • What enemies spawn as you enter the room. The card will specify which enemies spawn based on what Chapter you’re on. If it’s Chapter 4, something different will spawn than Chapter 2. As your luck and choices change this between missions, it can be significant.
  • Combat resolution (roll custom d6). In Legends of Andor, your combat success (for me so far), largely dictates how much time it takes to defeat an enemy, or whether you can defeat them in the current day. For Mice and Mystics, combat goes both ways. An aggressive enemy can deal a lot of damage and convey powerful effects, like webbing, poison, or fire, that will greatly alter things. The mice can have a really bad day sometimes and it’ll alter the game.
  • The rate at which the cheese wheel fills up. If the enemies are rolling well, things will escalate quite quickly. Filling the cheese wheel causes a surge, which spawns more, badder enemies, but also decreases the amount of time you have left in the scenario.
  • Your success with the Search Action (you need to roll a certain symbol), as well as the quality of items drawn from a rather large deck. Some of the cards, Treachery, will do bad things that have a big impact.
  • Which characters you choose can have a dramatic impact. With the base game you have Collin (leader, warrior, balanced), Nez (warrior, heavy offense, bad defense), Lily (archer, ranged, support), Maginos (mage, range, offense), Filch (rogue, heavy offense, good defense, support), and Tilda (healer, decent offense and defense, support). With the first expansion you get another character and the new expansion adds two more. It really changes things and is probably the best reason to replay — can you beat it with x, y, z, and w?
  • Choosing a side objective can not only influence the difficulty of the current scenario, but will also dictate choices in later scenarios. Had we not rescued the King in a prior scenario, it would have made a latter scenario much more difficult.

Conclusion: Legends of Andor and Mice and Mystics are both heavily story driven fantasy experiences. There are many comparisons to be drawn. Whereas Legends of Andor’s variance is largely meta, in that it affects the overall scope of the session, Mice and Mystics’ seems to come about in the moment to moment gameplay. Your trip through scenario 2 might feel, overall, the same, but tile 3 might have a dramatically different feel to it between plays.

The combat resolution has a significant effect on Mice and Mystics, which makes sense as that’s the meat of the game. As I’ve said, Mice and Mystics is largely a game about tactical combat. Therefore, the combat effects, attack, defense, health management, and diverse breadth of enemies really shines. I believe strongly that you need to put the majority of your complexity on your game’s primary element. For Mice and Mystics, that’s combat. Therefore, the moment to moment variance is much stronger than its meta-variance.

Robinson Crusoe: This island looks nic — DEAR GOD SAVAGES!

Robinson Crusoe is a cooperative game for 1-4 players that throws them on a deadly island, forces them to find shelter, gather food, invent helpful items, and solve whatever devious problem the game throws at them. I consider it a master worker of scenario design and referenced it (and Mice and Mystics) heavily to design Sol Rising.

The game uses a central worker placement mechanic, heaps of event cards, and a neat dice resolution mechanic to determine precisely how you’ll fail in this notoriously difficult game.

How to Win: I’ve played two of the scenarios and examined a third. Each of them has a completely unique victory condition. In the first, you must gather and set enough wood to create a large signal fire. In the second, you must extinguish the cults throughout the island. In the third, you need to build a boat, find treasure, and, oh, avoid the volcano.

The back pressures for each scenario are identical, plus the occasional twist. For example, you need to eat every night. If you spend the night without shelter, you suffer penalties. There’s always a twist.

Setup: There are a few standards for each scenario, including:

  • Shuffle each individual Event deck for gathering food, exploring, etc.
  • Choose 1-4 characters, plus Friday and the Dog if you are playing with fewer than four or want to ease the difficulty.
  • Place a number of standard inventions (9?).

Then, things change. You create a central Event deck where you draw a very small number of cards from two very large decks. There are approximately 80 cards and you may use 12 or so in a scenario. These have a massive impact on the scenario.

You may be instructed to add specific tiles and items on those tiles on the map. You draw about 6 inventions from a deck to flesh out your total number of about 15 Inventions. The inventions can dramatically alter the strategy you pursue. You draw 2 items that the group shares from a large set.

As I noted above, the victory condition changes with every scenario. Furthermore, there are new rules introduced and the game’s generic tokens (icons) mean different things. The game is a huge sandbox on which the designer (and the community) can create new stories.

There’s quite a bit of variance during setup and with the goals, but most of it comes during the game.

Variance: Dice resolution is by far the most significant contributor to variance in the game. Whenever you take an action without devoting a full day to the work, you must roll 3 resolution dice to see how it went. If you’re building a structure, you roll 3 brown dice. If you’re gathering food, you roll 3 gray dice. There are different probabilities between the different colors. Each die represents something different:

  1. Whether you Succeed or Fail and gain 2 Morale
  2. Whether you are Wounded or Not Wounded
  3. Whether you go on an Adventure

There are quite a few combinations already! In building that structure, you may succeed, take a wound, and go on an adventure. If you go on an adventure, you draw the top card of the specific Event deck. For example, there’s an Event deck for building and a different one for Exploring. This card forces you to make a choice or has an immediate effect. Sometimes they are discarded, but other times they are shuffled BACK into the primary deck to affect you in the future.

Success has huge implications. You may not gather food, which will have consequences at night. You may not invent the Map, which has consequences on your next day’s plans. You may not build shelter, which has consequences at night. Most challenging is that you must choose what to do before you know what will succeed. If you’re confident, you might only have one person gather food. If you’re worried, you may have a guarantee on the food, but then will skip out on doing another action.

In addition to this, an Event card is drawn at the start of every day. These are almost always significant. Furthermore, the deck may contain cards added from the specific Event decks. The game is an ever-shifting mess of quicksand. It’s about risk, careful planning, and a little luck. There’s no Wilson on Ignacy’s deserted island.

Conclusion: There is a relatively simple structure the designer created that allows for nearly infinite possibilities. There is SO much variance in the Event cards, thanks to the combinations of the 3 resolution dice, but also, the sheer variety of the cards.

However, the foundation is where the true variation comes into play. The tokens which contain simple icons allows the designer to affix unlimited new properties to them. The game contains no points or other trappings, but has the same back pressures. This means, like the monsters rushing the castle in Legends of Andor, players have their feet rooted firmly, but the walls can change all around them.

I find the slew of compelling Event content really impressive. There’s so much. I particularly like how the central Event deck grows based on your adventures on the island. But, the framework of unique victory conditions, consistent back pressures, and malleable tokens is where each scenario becomes truly distinct.

Combat Commander: War is erratic hell.

Combat Commander is a tactical war game for 2 players that tends to take 2-3 hours. It is brilliant for its simple, card-driven play, but also how stories and moments evolve dynamically over the course of the game. This is why the game tends to take a while — things take time to evolve. Small moments need room to grow and breath into epic stories.

As you read the rule book, you’ll find there are only a few paragraphs devoted to telling you how to play. That’s because the game is play a card, do what it says. But, the sheer amount of stuff? Whew. Get ready!

How to Win: The game will sometimes have a victory condition, such as taking an objective before time runs out (or holding that objective). Many include simply having the most points (earned by defeating the enemy and taking valuable ground) when the timer runs out.

Setup: The scenario dictates which Units to use and which map to use (the game comes with 12). You’ll sometimes have pre-defined objectives, other times you’ll draw others that snap into the game quite simply, or may even be private for each player (which is fun). Each player has an action deck of 72 cards, which they shuffle. These action decks are designed for a particular army, so the Italian deck varies from the German deck.

The scenario dictates initial point values, often tied to an objective. For example, the Germans may begin in control of a house that’s worth 15 Points, giving them 15 starting points. It also defines when the scenario ends.

Sometimes the scenario dictates where Units begin on the map, but often, players decide where to place their units within a defined region. This can have an enormous impact on the course of the game.

Variance: Variance for Combat Commander comes as a result of the cards, which dictate everything. On a turn, the active player may only take an action using a card from his hand OR discard cards in his hand to cycle through his deck. This is a key decision and is used often, especially when you have a hand full of Command Confusion cards (dead cards).

The cards have Orders. Each Unit may only take one Order per turn, but you can otherwise play them until you run out of cards. Cards then have Actions, which can be played on your turn OR an opponent’s turn to modify an Order, like firing or movement. An order may be to Move, whereas an Action may be to throw a smoke grenade (to cover that movement) or Opportunity Fire (as the inactive player) to shoot on that Move.

Finally, cards have an Event, which is only triggered when drawn for specific moments, a 2d6 dice roll (which might have an Event), and a hex.

Let’s say you play an Order to attack. To shoot, you tally your attacking Unit’s firepower, then you each “roll” a card by drawing the top card of your deck. You use the dice roll drawn. The dice for either or both of you might have an Event. Let’s say the Event is Sniper! You draw the top card and reference the hex. Any unit on or adjacent to that hex is broken (i.e. wounded). Let’s say the dice just say Event. You draw the top card of your deck, which might say a blaze forms. Where? Yep, draw the next card and reference the hex.

Over the course of the game, a fire may force defenders to evacuate a crucial position. A hero might emerge to charge a machine gun nest. You may stumble across a minefield, or rally broken troops back into the game. Unexpected reinforcements might arrive, or your artillery might break.

The game isn’t about making plans that won’t change. It’s about determining a strategy and dealing with everything that happens along the way. Combat Commander’s victory conditions are dead simple, much like Memoir ’44s, and the rules rarely change. However, the cards create an incredibly broad swathe of possibilities with a gillion different combinations.

So, what did we learn, kids?

Some conclusions one could draw from the previous 4000 words include:

  • In scenario design, additional complexity in the form of new knobs and mechanical layers lends itself to greater replayability. In Combat Commander there are dozens of things that can enter and affect the battlefield. In Mice and Mystics, there are tons of new enemies. In Robinson, there are gobs of Event cards and tokens.
  • A core rule set that is shared by all scenarios is essential to ground players and also rein in the designer. This goes for both cooperative and competitive, though it’s especially true for the former. In Andor, protect the castle. In Robinson, eat and have shelter.
  • Event cards are a fantastic way to add spice and variance to a scenario. However, to keep it thematically appropriate, look to Robinson and Andor, where they have unique scenario cards for each moment.
  • Don’t be afraid to add new rules. If you adhere to bullet #2, a few new rules can go a long way towards making something unique. This was a cornerstone of Sol Rising and in testing, it took an hour or less to setup, learn the new rules, and play. It’s possible, just be reasonable.
  • Introduce a method of variance for common actions. All of the scenario games listed use dice, or a dice like mechanic to resolve conflict and adventure. All of them give you a slew of cards, be them actions or events.
  • Finally, and I’ve said this before, strongly consider the framework of your scenarios. Time invested in the system will pay dividends when it comes time to create content. All of the games above introduce variation and unique moments easily because they have such strong frameworks. If you’re doing it right, you’ll just need to repaint the house and re-arrange the windows for each design. Not start over.

I hope this was interesting and useful. What did you find compelling? Where do you disagree? Was such a deep dive into a single topic fun? Tell all in the comments below!

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , combat commander, game philosophy, game theory, legends of andor, memoir, , robinson crusoe, scenario design | 4 Replies

Asymmetric Beginnings

Post by: Grant Rodiek

Maybe it’s the simple fact that I managed to write a post at all, but I was so excited about my asymmetry post from Monday that I decided to make it asymmetry week here at Hyperbole Games! Woohoo!

Now that we’ve discuss asymmetry at a very high level in terms of symmetrical, light asymmetry, content-based asymmetry, rules-based asymmetry, and 2 games in 1, we now have a foundation upon which to craft a design. At least, a theoretical one. For this post, the goal is to discuss how to go about beginning an asymmetrical design.

Therefore, where does one start?

Step 1: Identify Purpose

I think the key to a solid asymmetrical design is thinking about what every role means. What makes it special and unique? Where does it excel? Where does it fall flat? This was fairly simple to answer in York, at least at the outset, due to the clear thematic inspirations from the time period I was sampling.

  • High mobility army: Moves quickly and can reach distant battlefields quickly. Inspired by the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg, Israel during the 6 Day War, or the American army today (carriers that give long reach to distant lands).
  • Highly disciplined, defensive army: Can hold ground better with fewer men. Tough to dislodge, but also, less mobile. Inspired by the British army of the 18th and 19th century or the Japanese in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
  • Guerrilla Army: Can appear and disappear and hit their foes anywhere. No ground is safe. Their mobility is exchanged for difficulty in holding ground. Inspired by the Vietcong or Spanish Guerrillas of the Napoleonic Wars (the origin of the name).
  • Irregular army of peasants. A people’s uprising. The idea is that they would avoid direct conflict, and instead work behind the scenes (assassination, spycraft), or have sudden popular uprisings to disrupt the status quo. This idea was inspired by French and Polish partisans during World War II, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.

If you’ve read my blog, you’ve probably heard me promote the notion of goals early in the design process to preserve focus and move things along. Asymmetry is no different. Now that I had 4 high level ideas, it was far simpler to design content that fit with each of them.

Really, every asymmetrical component should have a very clear purpose or theme. If it doesn’t need to exist, if it doesn’t have a purpose? Cut it and move on. In fact, if you can’t justify the exception at an early phase, and asymmetry is just that — exceptions — you should focus on a symmetrical design.

Step 2: Recognize the Knobs

Remember in the previous article when I discussed the various nobs available to the designer in Summoner Wars for content-based faction? At a very early level, you need to think about the important factors that can be modified through tuning for your game.

If you’re making an economic game, your knobs might be:

  • Selling cost
  • Buying cost
  • Taxation and Upkeep values

If you’re making a game that involves hand management, your knobs might be:

  • Rate of drawing cards
  • Discard rate
  • Modifiers on drawing (ex: draw 2, keep 1)
  • Hand limit
  • Limiting or de-limiting the number of cards that can be played

If you’re making a military game, like Risk, with spatial elements, your knobs might be:

  • Movement properties
  • Army size limitations
  • Number of dice that can be rolled in combat
  • Rate of recruitment

You’ll notice for each of these that I only list a few nobs and if you’re using Content or Rule based asymmetry, you only need a few! Keep it simple! One of the key challenges — and thrills — of asymmetrical design is squeezing blood from the turnip. Seek to fully exploit your systems as they stand without adding too many exceptions and one-offs. Remember that asymmetrical games are fundamentally more difficult to learn for your players than symmetrical games. Keep that in mind as you design.

Therefore, try to identify the parameters you need from the outset. Think about all the different things you can do with them through the lens of your roles.

Step 3: Test the Base First

If asymmetry is a fundamental element of your design, you should test it sooner than later. However, while trying to test your asymmetrical elements you may overlook the fundamental flaws with your core mechanics. Before you test ANY asymmetry, create a single generic faction or force and test your mechanics in a symmetrical environment. At most, your players should deal with Light Asymmetry, which provides them with variable starting positions, differing initial cards, and so forth.

Sol Rising, a game that features light asymmetry and scenario-based asymmetry, was tested 30+ times before I created a single scenario. I had to validate the core knobs of movement, dice for combat, formations, and ship abilities.

Likewise, York was tested 30+ times before a single faction was introduced. Now, earlier in York’s life I didn’t even know it was going to be a faction game. But, once that became apparent, I still had to ensure my systems of Tactics, Reinforcements, Movement, and Scoring were relatively solid.

Asymmetry is a fundamental pillar for your game, but it’s not the foundation. Design the foundation with asymmetry in mind, but don’t chase the variation too soon. It’s like redecorating your house while it’s on fire.

Step 4: Test 2 sides first

I’m fairly certain Colby Dauch knew he wanted multiple factions for Summoner Wars relatively early. But, he built and tested the game with just two factions to begin with (Shadow Elves and…one other?). In the same way you don’t want to test the core game with asymmetry before you know the core game works, you don’t want to spend design cycles on most assuredly bad content before you have a few examples of “what good looks like.”

As you design and test a few factions, you’ll get a feel for a few key things. How many variations and twists should the faction have? What kinds of things, at a high level, should every faction have? Much of this design work is organic and will be discovered through development and experience.

For example, while testing York, I began to recognize a framework for every faction.

  • A strong, passive quality/ability.
  • At least 1 Offensive Tactic.
  • At least 1 Defensive Tactic.
  • At least 1 Support Tactic.
  • 4 Factions total.

I began to work within these constraints. Initially, I didn’t even have Defensive tactics. But, I realized they were not only essential for the experience, but another knob. Out of this, my defensive/disciplined faction was born. Support tactics emerged due to the need to change things outside of battles. Had I attempted to design all the factions to begin with, I would have spent an extensive amount of time, much of which would have been wasted. Furthermore, updating all of those factions per testing input would have been laborious and would have only slowed improvement in a game when rapid iteration was needed.

Similarly, to create scenarios for Sol, I designed a single one first. I tested it about 15 times before I designed other scenarios. By focusing on one, I learned about troop distribution setup, approximately balance of forces, how to create objectives and persistent effects, how to design dynamic events, and how to write the story.

Identify what good looks like, then spread it to other pieces of content.

Here’s my attempt at creating an early road map for asymmetric design. What do you think? Useful? Where would you start? Leave your comments below!

The Evolution of Dune to Rex

Post by: Grant Rodiek

Frank Herbert’s Dune released in 1979. Based on the novel of the same name, the game was, and still is, considered to be one of the best games of all time. On BoardGameGeek the game is currently ranked 109 overall, 21 for thematic games, and 75 for strategy games. This is an incredible legacy for a game that is now about 35 years old if my math serves me correctly.

In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games released Rex: Final Days of an Empire. They licensed the mechanics, developed them, but were unfortunately unable to attain the license, hence their use of their wholly owned Twilight Imperium universe.

Before I go further, I want to provide context. Dune is one of my favorite books of all time, easily top 3. I’ve read it multiple times and am currently in the middle of re-reading the series. I love this universe. One of my side projects for the past few weeks has been to chase down an original copy of the board game, almost purely due to my love of the franchise, cost be damned. As luck would have it, my friend Josh had a spare copy (what?) and I had some games in which he was interested. The trade hath commenced.

This past Sunday I played Rex for the first time and just loved it. I should have played it years ago, but I must admit I was turned off by its reputation. I expected a 35 year old game to be a clunky mess, and, paired with FFG’s reputation for very complex games, I think that’s fair. But, the game was anything but. It was actually simple, incredibly thematic, and very deep. Yes, I’m a very experienced board gamer now, so simple is a relative mark.

The thematic intuitiveness of the actions and characters was so strong I could identify Dune’s fingerprints throughout without having read about the original game. I could practically taste the spice. I didn’t see Rex’s characters, but those of Dune. I just loved the game and found myself on BGG reading the rules for Dune the following morning to see the differences.

I began taking notes to email my friends about the differences between the two versions and it was a very fascinating exercise. It provided a glimpse as to Fantasy Flight’s thinking as they developed the 1979 game for 2012. It seemed like an interesting, though admittedly niche post, to analyze these things.

This post will be more interesting if you’ve played either Dune or Rex, or have at least read either of their rule books. Familiarity with the fiction will also help.

  • Ilya’s Dune Rules: This is a super cool BGG community effort to revise the original rules for clarity. They also combine the advanced modes, variants, and commentary.
  • FFG’s Rex Rules

Final Note: This is NOT meant as a gameplay or strategy analysis. Absolutely not after a single play of one of the games. Also, I might get a few notes wrong. If this is the case, please leave a comment and I’ll correct it!

A quick overview to Dune and Rex. This is meant to give you a general idea to how the games play. It is meant as a summary for the purpose of this article, not a conclusive run down.

The board is divided into territories, some of which are strongholds. The game is won if a player controls a certain number of strongholds. Players may ally and they win together if they control a number of strongholds together, which is in excess of those needed for a solo victory. Alliances can be broken and changed at specific times in the game.

Every player has a unique, asymmetric ability that outright breaks the game. This is from the team that brought you Cosmic Encounters. It made me giggle even before playing the game.

Every round follows these steps (orders vary between versions):

  1. Influence Phase. Determine where currency is located on the board. This is the best way to get income and forces players to move around the board. It’s a balance between claiming income and taking over strongholds. One player gets to see where it’ll be placed the previous round, which gives her a way to plan ahead.
  2. Bidding Phase. Players bid openly on very powerful cards that nobody can see. The cards are all face down. Oh wait. One of the players has a power that she examines them! And one player receives all the income that’s paid to buy them, essentially making them the bank and the richest player in the game.
  3. Recruitment Phase. Players have a limited reserve of Units. When they die, they go to the recruitment space on the board. In this phase, players pay to remove them from this space and add them back to their reserves to be deployed back to the board. This can be a huge drain on your economy. Players may recruit some units for free based on their faction. This lets some players play fast and loose with their casualties.
  4. Maneuver Phase. Players add units to the board and move units.
  5. Battle Phase. If multiple players occupy a space, they fight. This is a brilliant design. Players simultaneously and secretly choose how many units they are willing to lose. They will lose these regardless and may spend up to the number in the space. They then must select a leader, who has a value (1-6, typically). They may also play 1 defense and 1 attack special card (the ones bid upon earlier). They then reveal. Players compare their Leader’s Value + Sacrificed Units value + card modifiers. Highest number wins. Loser loses all units. There is a twist in that players start with 1 traitor card (one player gets more). This matches a specific leader. For example, I may have the Traitor for your 3 value Leader. I can play it in the battle after you reveal your leader. This kills your leader and immediately cots you the battle.
  6. Collection Phase. Remember the currency placed earlier? For every unit you have in a space with currency, you gain 2 of the currency.
  7. Bombardment Phase. This is a fleet of ships in Rex and the storm in Dune. Every round it moves 1-6 spaces in order around the board. All currency and units it passes over or stops on are removed, except in specific cases. This is brilliant in that it forces you to move, prevents passive, overly defensive play, and can create opportunities on the board. Oh, one player knows about the storm’s movement.

The game is a fairly straightforward game of managing your income and units to hold territory on the board and maximizing your character advantages. It is, however, full of deception, unexpected moments when people cash in their secrets, and treachery.

A List of Changes from Rex to Dune.

  • The storm phase is at the beginning of the round in Dune, not the end. I’m curious  why they would change this. Perhaps it’s easier for the player to think “end of round equals destruction” instead of beginning of the next, which can be overlooked?
  • The storm and first player rotates counter-clockwise in Dune. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that doesn’t seem to have a good reason. Generally, clockwise is the correct decision unless you have a very good reason.
  • Players arrange their pawns around the board, almost like positions on the clock. The first player for the round is the player whose pawn will be next passed by the storm. This is a slightly more complicated way than just passing a first player token, as in Rex. However, this mechanic DOES mean that first player might not shift every round, which is interesting. Complexity and variance versus simplicity and more predictable rounds?
  • Dune ends after 15 rounds (if nobody has met the victory condition), instead of 8. However, an official variant recommends 10 rounds for a more reasonable length game. I felt 8 for Rex was a smidge short in terms of need to progress the game, though with 4 new players, 8 rounds took us 2.5 hours.
  • In Rex, verbal deals are non-binding, but you cannot exchange Influence (currency) at any time . In Dune, verbal agreements are binding. Furthermore, you can exchange Spice (the currency), but it can only be claimed at the end of the round. Here, I prefer Dune’s way of doing things. I’m curious why the change was made. My power was that I could give my ally money during the bidding phase. This is even more powerful if money passed in deals can only be claimed at the beginning. I, however, can give it to my friend when he needs it — now.
  • In Rex, everyone gets 2 free influence from the bank in addition to any they claim. In Dune, you only get 2 spice only if you have nothing. Pay attention here as this is one piece of the core differences — the economy.
  • In Dune, currency is only added to a single territory each round. In Rex, it’s added to two territories.
  • In Rex, once you pass in a bid for a single card, you cannot obtain that card. In Dune, if you pass, but the bid increases past what you passed on, you can re-enter the bidding. I think this is a subtle element that is probably fine to smooth out, though it does allow for a hint more in the way of bidding tactics.
  • In Rex, you may recruit up to 5 killed Units each round. In Dune, it’s only 3.
  • Dune has a fairly complex rule that states if a Leader is killed and revived, if they are killed again, they cannot be revived until all other killed leaders are revived and killed again. I think. I found this rule very confusing. I believe the intent here is to prevent you from just spamming your best leader repeatedly with abandon. It makes the Traitor mechanic more potent, in my estimation. I’m not sure the rule is worth the complexity though.
  • In Rex, you must move units first, then you may add new units. In Dune, you add units first, then you move them. This is a curious change. The cost to add units to enemy-occupied territory is more expensive, so I assume this forces you to move Units into the territory first, then add additional reserves at the higher price. Rex is generally looser with money than Dune, so I can see the reasoning for the change. With Rex, you have more money, so they need to put in new costs, which this change seems to supply.
  • In Dune, adding Units to a stronghold costs 1 per, or 2 per anywhere else. In Rex, it’s 1 per to an empty or friendly space, or 2 per to an enemy occupied space. This puts a greater emphasis on the strongholds in Dune and slows the game down slightly. It puts greater emphasis on managing your supply lines and planning ahead it seems.

dune___board_game_map_by_ilya_b-d34h16b

  • Dune’s board (see above) is divided into slivers, like a clock, which are called territories. During movement, players can move between sectors in adjacent slivers, but their units are always in one sector. Sectors may span multiple slivers. A battle is triggered if multiple enemies exist in a territory (the sliver), even if they are in multiple sectors. They can, however, be blocked by a storm in the middle as the storm moves between the sectors. Rex’s board (see below) just creates numbered sectors. I’m very curious how the balance changed, if at all, but I can say with absolute frankness that Rex seems to have streamlined this very appropriately. Of all the sections in Dune’s rules, the territory versus sector confused me the most. Typically, players see sectors as a control point and a path for movement. Dune abstracts that strangely and I feel, without playing Dune, FFG made the right call.

  • In Rex, you simultaneously select your Units to spend and your leader. However, after revealing these,  you may choose which cards to play (though you pre-determine whether you will play cards, and you must use them if you chose to do so). In Dune, you submit everything at once. I think I prefer the tension and simplicity of Dune’s method.
  • In Dune, the winner of a battle gains Spice (currency) equal to the strength of all leaders killed in the battle. This bounty is a great boost in income that I find very compelling. In Rex, only certain cards do such things.
  • In Dune, once you use a Traitor cards, it’s shuffled back into the deck. In Dune, you regain the Traitor card. I find this fascinating. Once a traitor, always a traitor, eh? It also means you have a permanent, but now know disadvantage against certain enemies. The first step in avoiding a trap is knowing it exists, right? By the way, this bullet is full of sweet Dune references.
  • Players in control of certain spaces in Dune gain the Spice Harvester card, which grants them additional spice. It’s purely a flat rate in Rex, typically.

In addition to the main game, Avalon Hill released an advanced set of rules to develop the game further. Some elements of it are considered essential to the experience, whereas others are quite controversial. I’ll only discuss the ones that pertain to Rex.

  • Originally, Dune’s economy was considered overly strict. The new edition added Carryall and Smuggler bonuses, which were granted for controlling specific sectors and granted additional income. Rex handles this by giving everyone a flat 2 Influence every round. I actually like both methods. Rex’s mechanic is simpler, but Dune’s carries some nice nuance.
  • Advanced added the concept of supporting Units in battle. You could support each Unit in the battle at the cost of 1 spice. Supported Units gave their full value, whereas unsupported units provided half. Therefore, it would take 2 unsupported units to equal 1 supported unit. This is a bit complex and added a layer of math. It seems to be generally disliked by the community. I agree with this group.
  • In the Advanced Dune, they modified the amount of spice added each round from 1 to 2 territories, which is precisely what Rex employs. This added quite a bit more to the economy, which is potentially why they introduced the notion of supporting units. FFG inflated the economy, but removed some of its costs, as well.
  • Finally, the addition of the supported rule put the Fremen faction at a strong disadvantage. To address this, Fremen were considered supported (for free) when fighting outside of strongholds. In Rex, the faction I believe to be a Fremen faction is able to add units for free to certain zones and gains Units in the recruitment phase at a higher rate. Essentially, they have an economic advantage when bringing forces to bear in certain situations.

My Analysis. It seems very clear that Dune, overall, is a slower game, based primarily on its economic tuning. Units cost more to add to the board, they take longer to bring back from the dead, there is less money in circulation, no default income except when you are broke, and leaders are more difficult to revive.

The game, in this sense, is probably played with greater attention towards long term planning. Units are sent to battle more cautiously. It also gives a very big incentive for gaining the treachery cards (battle modifiers) and killing leaders via traitors. In our game of Rex, the cost of the Treachery cards was generally relatively low, primarily to hinder the player gaining the income for their purchase. I think if Treachery cards hold more weight, this bidding phase will be more lively and compelling.

For my personal tastes, and I think modern tastes in general, cutting the game in half (from 15 to 8 rounds), making sure everyone has income, and increasing the rate of bringing back troops seems to have the advantage of speeding up the game with fewer negative consequences.

However, I believe the best version of the game is a bit of the advanced Dune with some notes from Rex. 10 Rounds, with the Carryalls and Smugglers, 2 Spice blows, and binding negotiation throughout seems to be a really strong way to play. Regaining Traitors and having a bounty for killed leaders looks fantastic and really puts a proper edge on conflict. Also, with the troop limitations, but a little more income, I think it leaves a little currency for bribery and increasing the bids on the treachery cards, which then increase in value.

But, economics aside, it’s difficult to ignore some of FFG’s improvements. The new board is far simpler and in the best way. Having a guaranteed first player rotation might remove a layer, but it’s not one I think most people would miss. Shifting counter-clockwise to clockwise is just an obvious choice.

Some of the tactical decision are, I think, streamlined in the right way. Instead of stronghold versus non-stronghold, FFG put the increased deployment tax on enemy-held regions, which means you can move into open spaces freely. This makes them quite valuable, but you can’t just hot-drop into an enemy space without paying. They also swapped the order of movement and deployment. Therefore, while speeding up the game’s flow, they still preserved some difficult decisions on where and when to allocate troops.

I can’t wait to receive my copy of Dune. I fully plan to play it with a hand-picked assortment of rules to find the right balance of theme and mechanics. What a great game!

Conclusion. If you were to bring a classic into the modern era, what would you change? What would be your game of choice? Would you prioritize pacing and overall game length, reduce complexity, or seek to improve balance?

This also forces one to ask what must be preserved for the fans of the original. What considerations must be paid to new players? In fact, when you’re revising a classic, do you give consideration to the existing fans as customers at all, or do you plan to sell to a new generation? Money dictates planning and this is a great case where that’ll come into play.

Fantasy Flight have quite a bit of experience with this, with the list including Rex/Dune, Nexus Ops, Fortress America, Horus Heresy, and surely others.

I hope you enjoyed this lengthy piece. It’s a little different than my standard fare. My hope is that it has provided context to you for thinking about not just classics to revise, which is unlikely to be something you deal with, but revising your current designs to be more appealing to the current market. The ability to develop, revise, and iterate upon your design never really goes away. You really just have to choose a direction and stick to it.

What’s your direction, young Atreides?

Wizard Poker Development

Post by: Grant Rodiek

One of my goals for 2014 was to design smaller, simpler, weirder games that, if possible, can support a larger number of players. I’ve been making a lot of smaller prototypes, typically involving cards (Draftaria, Fool’s Brigade, Wizard Poker, Clarity) and it has been very productive and very fun. I really recommend wild, mass experimentation. It strengthens your other designs, is good design practice overall, and is just really fun.

I’ve been crunching on York and Sol Rising lately. Also, a little bit of Flipped. All of these are bigger, more complex games. Wizard Poker is one of my simpler little prototypes, and it’s been really fun to play, so it has received most of my attention these past few weeks after I finish the high priority work. It’s always easier to work on something like this. Diving headfirst into a problem child is less fun.

Wizard Poker has provided a lot of interesting lessons. The idea for the game came to me when discussing using Poker for a deckbuilding engine. That original idea is now buried under about 5 iterations, but the heart remains: What if you could play a poker-like game with wild abilities that lighten the spirit? What if poker were a filler that could be enjoyed at lunch or at the start of game night by people who don’t like poker?

Terminology and Key Words: When you’re building an engine atop a game as popular and well-known as poker, you need to tread carefully. You need to adhere to the proper terminology and NOT change what those terms mean. I tried to use “Fold” differently for quite some time and it caused a great deal of confusion. This applies to other games. If you’re making a deckbuilder, you need to not use a term that Dominion uses and change its meaning.

Really, using key words in a game that has abilities is so fundamental and crucial to your game playing smoothly and being easy to learn. Magic: The Gathering is a great example of this. Hearthstone is another. They create a glossary of terms, such as Wall, Battlecry, Haste, Flying, and they adhere to them. If you’re making a game that uses text and actions on cards, try to re-evaluate it through the lens of “what key words can I use repeatedly?”

This is something I started doing in Sol Rising and York and it really helps. It’s also something I’ve done in some parts in Wizard Poker, but as I develop the game, I’ll need to do it more thoroughly. For me, these are things like:

  • Draw: This single word means “draw from the top of the deck,” which is less text than “Draw from the top of the deck.”
  • Reveal: This single word should mean “place one card from your hand face up in front of you.”
  • Flip: This single word should mean “flip one card in the center to its opposite side.”

And so forth. Remember, key terms reduce text, simplify cards, and essentially act as building blocks for you to craft more complex, nuanced experiences. Instead of having one wild idea, have several simple ones that work in concert with one another.

Expectations: Another interesting thing to remember is that people have certain expectations when they play a poker-like game. And, for the sake of this being broadly applicable, you can replace “poker-like” with any classic game or standard genre. For poker, players want to bluff. They want to bet. If you jumble those concepts or overlook them entirely, there will be a lingering hint of dissatisfaction in players’ minds.

When writing rules for a game built on a common framework, it’s doubly important to not gloss over those features. If you begin tweaking things, even tiny things, your omissions become enormous, gaping holes. It was like I had to learn how to write rules all over again. Never assume that because something seems obvious or seems familiar, your players will just get it.

For me, this was really made clear when I introduced the concept of a final betting round. I did this to provide an opportunity to bluff and bully, but I did so in a way that doesn’t conflict with one of my core goals: no player elimination. My initial rules for this were two sentences. Oh, how wrong I was! The current rules are longer and they precisely outline every step. Never assume, unless your assumption is that you need to over explain.

Eliminating Elimination: It has been a real challenge to design a poker game that doesn’t involve player elimination. The winner is the player with the most Coins at the end. Coins are also used to activate special abilities, called Spells. Therefore, Coins are both points AND currency.

My first idea, which has persisted, is to give players a way to earn coins through, essentially, folding. Now, I had to revise the wording because using Fold for this caused a great deal of confusion. “Wait, he folded. Why did he get coins?”

Now, it’s called “Cash Out.” Initially, using Cash Out was too good, so players simply did that instead of playing. Not good. I then decreased the amount given, but it was still too good.

I then made it so Cashing Out helped you AND the pot, which meant those still in the hand would also benefit. Close.

Finally, I put a limit on who could use it, which meant the player in the lead couldn’t simply stay there by using Cash Out. There are still some quirks, but it is ultimately a relatively simple way to make it such that players who are losing can quickly Cash Out to get back in, but also, the best way to earn coins is to win the pot. The incentive should be clear.

Catch Up Mechanics: In a game like this, where players can lose a lot of coins quickly AND I don’t want elimination to exist, there need to be more catch up mechanics. It can’t just be tacked on. It needs to be core to the experience.

I gave players a way to gain spells for themselves. This was actually one of my first ideas, but back then it was the game, not a catch up element. There are two Basic Spells that exist in every hand. They are constants that never change. There are then 20 Advanced Spells. In a 2 or 3 player game, you draw 1 per hand to pair with the Basic Spells. In a 4 and 5 player game, you draw 2 per hand. This means every hand is unique and offers different abilities and bonuses to take advantage of.

In the original version, the player who won the hand gained all the coins in the pot AND a spell of their choice. There was a spell for everyone, so the game was about tableau building. The problem was, not all spells are created equally. If a player both won the hand AND took the best spell, he or she would be very difficult to take down.

This was also very complicated. Players weren’t sure if they were vying for spells or coins (it was both). It meant I needed to balance everything very differently, which I didn’t really want to do. Not because I’m lazy, but because it’s fun when wild, ridiculous things come out in this game. It’s only for one turn for everyone and part of the game is using this power.

I reduced the number of Advanced Spells out each hand and made it such that the winner of the hand took the coins. Then, the players with the fewest coins gained the spells. This worked, mostly, except if a player won early hands, his opponents would have so many powerful abilities. They could easily out-spell him. It discouraged winning early. I guess when I said it worked mostly, I mean it didn’t work at all. Your game should never discourage victory, or at least not confuse it.

A few iterations passed, and ultimately I’ve settled on this (until it turns out it doesn’t work): The player(s) with the fewest coins at the end of a hand take the Advanced Spells. They may use them once only by paying to the Pot (like normal spells, which simplifies the rules). Once used, they are removed from the game. Players may instead Purge them, which means the Spell is removed and the player gains 2 Coins. It’s a catch up mechanic with 2 flavors: coins or a powerful ability only you can wield.

The PNP: I’ve never designed a game that was simple to Print-N-Play. I released a PNP for York and one for Sol Rising. The former had zero plays, the latter 2 or so (which was immensely helpful). Even Farmageddon‘s PNP, shared during its Kickstarter campaign, required you print and cut 108 cards. Wizard Poker is the simplest PNP I’ve ever made and I’ve already had at least 4 people cut it out. Hopefully more?

Four may not seem like much, but I think it’s pretty good. The game has “poker” in the title, so I know that’ll turn some folks off immediately. Which is why I need to change the name.

The point here is that if you make a PNP, try to make it simple. Make it easy to print, easy to learn, and give folks a good reason to try it out. Joshua Buergel and Jay Treat have been giving me piles of feedback and it has been immensely helpful. PNP is a great route to take if you’re interested in it.

The Next Trick: I don’t know what will happen with Wizard Poker. It’s testing well and it’s a game I really like. It’s fun to play and fun to develop. I feel like it’s this odd combination of Texas Hold ‘EmCoup, and Ascension rolled into one. It’s a good candidate for Drive Thru Cards or The Game Crafter, so perhaps I’ll do that and watch tens of cents roll in!

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or comments, send ‘em below!

Public Information and You

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Post by: Grant Rodiek

One of the most important lessons I took home this year was how to properly use public information in my designs. Battle for York is full of public information, specifically, the abilities of your faction and location of your armies.

One of York’s greatest flaws is a direct result of this public information, magnified by the number of factions. Players are constantly leaning over the table asking “what can you do?” and then 3 minutes later, “What can you do again?” It’s the wrong way to handle public information.

There are some signs of bad public information:

  • The information is critical to all players. If I need to know everything you have or can do, then that info should be in front of me. I define critical as it being something that will greatly impact and affect the decisions of others. For example, abilities for a deterministic battle system (ex: York).
  • There is too much information. If I address the above point by showing you everything…you now know everything. Everything can be a lot. Folks will disagree, but I find Smallworld‘s reference sheet entirely overwhelming.

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  • The information is text and/or exception driven. It isn’t just a few facets, but a great deal. Soon, players’ cups will runneth over.
  • To complement the above point, the most important thing people need to know IS the text, not other, more easily consumed statistics.

Before I use my own designs as anecdotal examples, I thought I’d point out some examples of good, AAA public information.

Summoner Wars: Basically every card (i.e. unit) has text that grants it a special ability and rule exception. But, there are a few reasons this works just fine.

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  • A unit’s attack power, and whether it’s ranged or melee, are easy to see. These are really important regardless of the exception.
  • All similar commons share the same information, which means if you learn it once, you learn it multiple times.
  • Movement and attack rules are, by and large, the same across the board (with some exceptions).
  • The cards are on the board face up when in play, not tucked away in front of a player. This makes them easy to view.

To be fair, the first time or two you play a faction, you’ll play a little slower checking things out. But, I do not think that is a problem with how they present the information, but the fact that, hey, it’s an asymmetric, faction-based game.

The Speicherstadt: Over the course of the game, players amass many cards (up to a dozen or more) of varying types. This could be very confusing, but it’s not.

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  • The cards a player has acquired will influence his future decisions, but they won’t grant new powers or change the core interactions of the game. A contract might inform you “Grant needs green cubes,” but Grant will still interact in the same way (third person apparently).
  • The cards have no text, other than a few numbers. They use very simple, well-designed iconography.
  • Many of the cards, once used, don’t matter for the rest of the game. With the exception of one card (the Port), once a player claims a ship, it no longer factors into the game.

The two most important pieces of public information you need to know are how much money a player has, and how many workers he has left to place.

Applying My Lessons

Looking at York as a guide post for something that wasn’t quite working (but can be solved), I started applying these lessons to my current games. Mars Rising uses a lot of simple tricks to simplify the fact everything is public in the game.

  • When a defensive ability (like shields) is active, you place a token on the board. The other player can still ask for specifics, but ultimately this informs at a glance “This squadron will be harder to kill.”
  • Squadrons that have already attacked (once per round) have a marker, so you know you don’t need to worry about them shooting you in the immediate future.
  • Squadrons that have used an ability (once per round) have a marker, so you know you don’t need to worry about any funny business in the immediate future.
  • Ship classes generally define behavior. Interceptors shoot fighters. Destroyers are very flexible, but not particularly strong in any one area. Battlecruisers kill capital ships. People can eyeball a squadron and instantly know “they do this” without needing to know, specifically, the stats.
  • Current formations are shown with a token on the board. The rules surrounding formations are very simple. If I see a wedge formation, I know what it means.

Most importantly, your opponent’s information isn’t necessarily critical to your success. They can’t do anything on your turn. The goal is typically to destroy the enemy, with some exceptions for scenarios. Therefore, it’s most important to know what YOU can do and decide who to destroy.

Flipped, similarly, has a great deal of public information that doesn’t hinder the game. Yes, I see your properties. If I know you’re heavily invested in downtown, I can use that information to evaluate whether I want to go there and whether our clients’ end goals coincide or conflict. If I can hinder your score, then I might go there. Furthermore, knowing where you intend to develop aids my strategy towards manipulating the contractors. If I know you’re developing in downtown, I know whether we’ll be jockeying over the contractors and the movement penalty.

The other driving factor is that, in line with many euro games, I can only hinder and affect you so much. Yes, we’re vying for properties (timing on acquisition) and trying to support our neighborhood bonuses, but there’s only so much I can do in order to ruin your day. The game is about efficiency, optimization, and taking advantage of opportunities. Not hurting others. Therefore, I use your public information to guide my decisions, not to crush you.

Finally, I found it’s much simpler to place the cards in front of me so I can plan out my improvement schedule and the work that needs doing. I didn’t like holding cards in my hand and referencing them. It was unnecessary secrecy.

In both of these new games, someone with chronic AP could chew on the information for some time. But, that person would do this with a private hand of cards, or even a dice roll. The key in dealing with AP folks is to mitigate their sickness, not seek to solve it. There is no cure, as noted by the World Health Organization and seconded by the UN.

In closing, some good public information tips.

  • Public information works better in games where your decisions revolve mostly around what YOU are doing, not others’ decisions.
  • Good public information is simple and can often be represented with symbols. Lengthy text is best left to private information.
  • Use simple aids and reminders to tell people the most important aspects. Often, they don’t need to know everything. Think of the attack rating in Summoner Wars, or the defensive marker in Mars Rising.
  • Public information tends to work better with fewer players.

What are some of your favorite examples of good public information? Any additional tips? What did I get wrong? Share in the comments!

Inspirations of Late

Post by: Grant Rodiek

I’ve been inspired by a few standout games lately. It’s a bit shocking to me when I read interviews with super famous designers who note they are too busy testing their own games to play games from others. I love playing other games to learn about new mechanics, see clever component tricks, and even just find ways to diversify my personal designs.

I find my tastes are changing quite a bit. In the past I was far more mechanically focused. Lately, I find myself far more focused on some fuzzy aspects and holistic product design. Things like the experience, the components, and the vibe I want to convey.

There are a few constants I have always sought in all of my designs:

  • Hour or less play time.
  • Low complexity. I fail here often, but I try. It’s something I pursue constantly.
  • Interesting card play. So far, this has meant dual-use cards for me.

Here are the things I’m challenging myself to think about more and more as my tastes shift.

  • Story! By this, I mean compelling characters, a fiction and developed universe/world, and persistence. For example, can my choices in one scenario affect another? Note: I want to be careful to say I’m trying to make games more thematic. I feel that adjective is tossed around a bit erroneously. I’d like to tell stories.
  • Dice! I’ve dabbled with dice in a few designs (Frontier Scoundrels, Poor Abby Farnsworth), but they’ve never been front and center. I want to grow creatively and change that. Dice allow for uncertainty and calculated risk. They allow for EPIC moments. They are also a great way to make your game more accessible, something I’ve learned from Dawn Sector, where the majority of the outcomes in the game are certain (and therefore nerve-wracking for new players). That being said, LOTS of randomness doesn’t necessarily excite me. I like to find ways to use it in a compelling fashion.
  • Miniatures! Or, perhaps more accurately (and vaguely), neat components. In my personal play habits I find I’m way more inclined to get a game with neat pieces instead of, say, cube fest. More and more I’m a “eurotrash” guy — I want elegance and strategy in the design with fun presentation. Many scoff at miniatures for being that component that nets millions on Kickstarter. But for me, personally, and for many of my friends, they make things more exciting.

Krosmaster Arena: Visually stimulating!

Bora Bora: Not visually stimulating!

  • Toy-like! This is somewhat related to the miniatures property above, but is more abstract and difficult to precisely describe. Sometimes a great game shares more in common with a favorite child hood toy in that it ignites your imagination. You find yourself making sound effects and “moving” the pieces like a total kid. Toy-like also means it’s delightful to hold and feel. It’s something a video game can’t do.

A few games have really stood out to me lately to inform these new design desires.

X-Wing Miniatures Game: A poster child for awesome components and quality design. Super toy-like as well! The game is filled with constant, simple choices and is visceral. You move pieces, roll clunky dice. It looks and feels great.

Risk Legacy: A story you and your friends write every game. The stickers are also incredibly fun. The take on this has been 50/50 from my friends, but it really hit home for me.

Mice and Mystics: Story, persistence, presentation, and dice, oh my. Honestly, Plaid Hat Games is a poster child for beautiful games that have crazy pieces and relatively smooth gameplay. Mice and Mystics is just a goofy toy chest.

Rory’s Story Cubes and The Extraordinaires Design Studio: These creations from Rory O’Connor and Anita Murphy are just awesome. The simply look delightful, are fun to hold, and immediately broaden the imagination.

My hope is to demonstrate these qualities with my latest game, which I’m tentatively calling Blockade. You can read about my early thoughts and brainstorms here and here. The physicality of Blockade will hopefully stand out immediately. Big blocks stacked next to and on top of each other. A pile of colorful dice. And cards with awesome, colorful, highly stylized characters. Maybe like these?

Can’t you imagine a stuffy admiral with a big mustache and this glorious noggin’? I can.

Speaking of the admirals (and others), they’ll have names. Stories. Their abilities will be extensions of their personalities and they will live and die gloriously as you play through their stories. You’ll have moments of fanfare and seconds of terror. Well, mild, completely manageable amounts of board game terror.

So really, little terror.

Perhaps it’s due to my job, which is overly stressful lately, or the fact I find it so difficult to get my friends interested in more serious fare. Maybe it’s a byproduct of my frustrations in developing Dawn Sector? There’s something about the need to create something playful, even at the expense of being a serious game, that is moving me forward.

It’s an evolution and an interesting one at that. It seems I’m returning more to my roots (Farmageddon), at least for now.

How do you evolve as a designer? How have you changed? What excites you lately? Anything I should be playing to reference?

Within Your Reach

Post by: Grant Rodiek

If your mother was anything like mine, you may have heard the phrase: “Don’t worry about what they are doing. Worry about what you’re doing!” We tend to over think and overreach towards the things outside our control instead of focusing on what we CAN control.

That’s the silly side of human nature — chasing what we can’t manipulate instead of firmly gripping what we can. In discussing this with a friend, we realized there was a simple blog post to be had. After all, so much of our time as designers is spent fretting over publisher feedback, play tester feedback, reviews, BGG comments/ratings, and more. It’ll kill you if you let it.

As a designer, your first and only task is to focus on the things over which you have direct control. Not everyone will like your game, as people have opinions, tastes, and preferences. But, reasonable players, who are the only ones with whom we shall concern ourselves, will appreciate a basic average of quality and craftsmanship. Your goal should be that the worst review you get says “It’s a good game, just not for me.”

The question then is “What can I as a designer control?” For a moment, let’s pretend the publisher won’t change every little detail. And for some designers, who use Print-On-Demand and Kickstarter self-publishing methods, this is an accurate assumption as YOU are the publisher.

Things firmly under your control include:

Game Length: One of the first decisions you should make is about the length of game you’re targeting. This is a front of box detail that will greatly dictate who buys your game and when it’s played. Aside from absurd analysis paralysis folks, this is under your control with the game’s end condition, length and complexity of player turns, overall complexity of decision making, and more.

Quality of Rules: The rules are a publisher’s, player’s, and reviewer’s first exposure to your game. It is the foundation of their entire experience. If your rules are poorly written, poorly laid out, and of insufficient quality for explanation, you are unlikely to have happy players. Take the time to proofread, test, and iterate. You control this. If you have confusing elements, fiddly exceptions, or pockets of “whaaa?” step back, refine the mechanic, and try again.

Theme: The quality of your theme is very much within your power as a designer in a few ways. Firstly, the quality of its integration. Does it fit, or did you just tack-on steam punk to make it more marketable? Do the art, text, and components reinforce the premise of your game? Also, is the theme appropriate for your audience? If you’re targeting a broad gender neutral market or a younger audience, half-naked females (I hate this cliche) aren’t appropriate.

Theme is most assuredly a preference. Some prefer elves to space marines. BUT. How appropriate and well-suited it is executed is in your court.

Number of Supported Players: One of the first questions a designer must answer is “how many people will play this game?” Although it is tempting to expand what you say the number of players is, you need to do what’s right for the product and your customers.  2-6 players looks way more marketable on a box label, but if 3-5 is correct, you need to say 3-5.

In addition to your honesty, it’s also within your power to do the design work to make your intentions a well-executed reality. Modifying the rules and content to support that extreme player number is a pain, but you never want a review to ding you for bad player numbers.

Art and Layout: As noted above, art is purely suspect. However, there is a quality bar that you can avoid, namely, does it resemble a piece of work made by a child using MS Paint? The layout of your board, cards, and rules is also very controllable. You can prove that it works through testing and iteration. Furthermore, there are best practices like using clean, easy to read typefaces, using a sufficient font size (6 point font is a no), avoiding distracting or aggravating colors, and putting things together in a way that lends itself to how people read and process information.

If all else fails, blatantly lean on the best layout work of some of the well-established publishers. If you know a game has a great card layout, use it. Start from there.

Mental Accounting Required: One of the things most designers overlook, especially on initial prototypes, is that players can only account for so many things. If they are holding 5 cards, each with 6 pieces of information, and must examine a board, and a reference board, and dice, and 6 opponents, their heads will explode. Focus your design such that the key elements towards making decisions are the ones in play. Strip away the rest.

Things firmly outside your control include:

One’s appreciation or fondness for your mechanic: Some players hate deckbuilding games. Or dice, or randomness at all for that matter. Take-that can be hugely controversial and some people absolutely despise direct interaction between players. But, for all those examples I listed, there are more people who love them. Hell, there are people who love Monopoly and the original Risk. Do your best to focus on those who might love your game, not those who absolutely won’t.

Empire has random turn order. This will probably be noted in every review of the game. But, those who play it find it’s not a problem and that it works for the game. So it goes.

Bad Players: You simply cannot count on player skill. If you create a game that has strategy, depth, and at times complex decisions, some people will simply play your game badly. For example, Trajan hurt my skull and I’m not really inclined to play it again. Between the mancala bowl puzzle and the broad range of choices, I couldn’t quite make heads or tails of things. The game isn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me. I was bad at the game.

One of the things that was most difficult to balance for Empire is that some factions are less obvious and straightforward. Skilled players had a fair and balanced experience. Poor players would be trounced by the more straightforward factions. You can deliberately choose to widen or narrow the skill requirement, but at the end of the day, some will simply play poorly…and many will curse you for their mistakes.

A Group of Random Players: If you’ve attended a board game convention and played with a random assortment of people, you may notice the game experience varies wildly than when you play with close friends. For better or worse, this will affect everyone’s opinion of your game and you can’t quite control that.

For example, I played a very interactive, take-that game at KublaCon. It was a 6 player game with me and one other solo player, then a boyfriend/girlfriend couple and a father/son duo. The game quickly became tedious and not fun because the two couples played as a team, so I was a solo player versus two combined factions. It wasn’t fun or fair and I don’t look on the game experience fondly.

On the opposite side, I notice when playing Farmageddon at GenCon that some children ALWAYS pick on their sibling or their parents. They aren’t playing “to win” per se, but they are playing for schadenfreude and the poking often accompanied with families. This didn’t ruin a parent’s experience — they are used to it! But some siblings grew VERY angry. When asked if they want to play my game again, I would wager many would shout “No!”

Your game simply might falter in a convention demo or at a random game night. It happens.

Did I pick all the right elements? Did I miss something? Do you disagree with me? Let’s chat in the comments.

Convergent Design

Guest Column by: Jay Treat

A friend of mine has been thinking about a game for years that lets your group play as the crew of a starship bridge. Each player would play his own mini-game that determines his station’s performance and the group’s individual successes would add up to determine how successful the mission is for the whole team. And then Stronghold Games printed Space Cadets. It’s not just the same theme and execution, there are even specific mini-games in common. He was understandably disappointed and I knew exactly how he felt because I’ve been there. A lot.

I was able to console him with the reassurance that this happens all the time. I’d be surprised if every one of you hasn’t experienced something like this yourself. Which is why I want to reassure you that’s it not just you. I call this phenomenon Convergent Design, after Convergent Evolution, the idea that animals with little-to-no evolutionary relationship have developed distinctly similar features through unrelated paths, largely because those features are fairly optimal and their development inevitable.

Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison independently invented the lightbulb within five years of each other. Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and Pixel Lincoln were all released within a year of each other. The same year I finally got publisher traction for Assault on Khyber Station, I found Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space on a dealer’s table and a week later I heard people raving about Escape, which turned out to be The Curse of the Temple. While that last one is more coincidence than a duplicated idea, you can still see a clear trend. Even Space Cadets isn’t alone: Artemis is the same idea for the PC and Spaceteam for iOS.

I attribute it all to the global zeitgeist. While every human is as unique as a snowflake, we all consume the same media and participate in the same culture. Modern communication has reduced the latency of this effect from years to mere minutes and even mitigates the previously large cultural differences between nations and continents. With several billion people laughing at Seinfeld and holding their breath for Harry Potter, it’s no wonder that a few of us are going to wonder “Hey, what if you could set reminders by location instead of time?” all at once.

In the Unpub zone at GenCon this year I watched a Rick Collins game, Scrapbots, in which players build robots from junk and battle them against each other. Each robot’s abilities and well-being are defined by card slots in their hit locations (head, chest, arms, legs). In one fell swoop, I saw two of my designs preempted. I might have been crushed, but I’ve been in this position often enough to know not to take it personally. Instead, I laughed that I never did get around to developing either of those games, so if my goal was to see those ideas realized, I just got a present. I save hours of headache and hard work while someone else does it all for me, and I’ll get to just buy his game and enjoy it already completed. Thanks!

Now, I am being optimistic here. If the game does get published and is as awesome as it can be, then all is well. If, on the other hand, the game fails to be published, not only am I back to square one, but I basically have no chance selling the game to the publishers that turned down the original. And if Scrapbots does get published but turns out to be bad, then I’m really screwed: I won’t have a sweet game to play, I won’t have my desire sated to see those ideas well-realized, and making the game myself to do it right would be a fool’s errand because no publisher will want to touch a game seemingly derivative of a well-known flop.

When I was 15, Wizards of the Coast was accepting external Magic set submissions. I put together something I’d be too embarrassed to show anyone today, but with a few solid ideas in it just the same. The same year I mailed that off, they announced the big policy change and stopped accepting anything. I never got a response whether they even read my stuff. But that Summer, they released a bunch of new cards and mechanics that they obviously stole from me.

Except they didn’t steal them. I know this because it takes considerably longer to develop, template and print a card than the time they had to steal my idea.

Last year, I led a team that designed a Magic set that I am quite proud of. Not only were there a half-dozen nearly identical cards printed in Wizards’ version of the “same” set, there were cards released while we were still working that matched brand new designs and forced us to remove or drastically change them.

And that wasn’t surprising, because not only were we working in the same medium (this ubiquitous magepunk TCG) with the same frame of reference (the preceding 18 years of Magic sets), but we were even working within the same parameters (to design a flavorful core set that’s easy for new players to learn but interesting for established players to draft) toward the same goal (to lead into a multicolor-themed fall set named Return to Ravnica). In fact, one of the reasons I consider the project successful is the number of solutions our team shared in common with the Wizards’ team. If we hadn’t hit some of the same touchstones, it would have been a sign that we were off in our understanding of where Magic is and where it’s going.

When I go back and apply the same logic two decades ago, my old anger at having my ideas “stolen” is replaced by pride that even as bad a designer I was at the time, I was still on track enough to come up with the same things the professionals did. When Jason Tagmire learned about concurrent Lincoln movies, he used that as fuel to help market Pixel Lincoln. When Edison learned about Swan’s work, he sent goons to eliminate his competition. Wait, bad example…

The point is, it’s up to you how to respond when someone beats you to the punch with your own idea. You can throw a fit and let it eat you up inside. You can take it as validation. You can thank them for saving you the effort. And you can even team up with them and use it to your advantage.

You might even reevaluate what it means to ‘own’ an idea. But that’s another article.