Version 5 and the Brink

Post by: Joshua Buergel and Grant Rodiek

Grant: When you reach a design iteration you dub “5.0” it may be time for what my mom refers to as the “come to Jesus meeting.” We’ve been scrambling for months to find a new framework for Hocus Poker. At the top of the Summer we threw away something that worked and had been received well because we didn’t think it was good enough. But, we’ve spent a lot of time since then trying to do it better.

Last week we tested Hocus Poker 5.0 and to be completely honest, had it not gone well, I think I might have walked away.

Josh: I’d have tried to talk you off the ledge, but it would have been time to question some fundamental assumptions. For instance, I’m not sure we could have continued on the path of having no separate betting tokens. It’s something we were keenly interested in getting right, for a number of reasons we’ve talked about before, but our iterations in this area have been unsatisfying.

Grant: To quickly reiterate, we wanted to craft a game that was cards only to save on production costs, portability, and keep the MSRP low. We were sticking to our guns of no player elimination in a game that is built on it. You know, poker.

Josh: But that was down the road. We had time to go for another major revision and see if we didn’t have another shot in us. But where to start? Grant had a playtest that didn’t go well, so that was our starting point. The 4.0 build wasn’t terrible, exactly, but it was unexciting. There were some promising bits to it, as usual, but it just didn’t leave the players excited.

This version had dual use cards (with points on the cards), some special cards in the regular deck, and attempted to feature a short decision cycle with small hands being built up gradually and a series of small showdowns.

Grant: One positive note was that my testers said it was much better than previous versions, but that was a low bar. Still, progress.

Josh: It was becoming clear that the showdowns were a problem, to me. They should have been exciting, fun, and surprises should have happened regularly. What was happening, instead, was really rote. The idea of having them happen as things went along just wasn’t quite working the way we wanted. A good idea, maybe, but not for this game.

Grant: More fundamentally, we had a lack of good decisions. You could see this in the Showdowns, building Hands, and betting. Sound probability indicated a very boring strategy: pick the best pair possible. This would often become a 3 of a kind or Full House once the Community was revealed.

We wanted players to have fun decisions throughout. That seems obvious for any game, but it’s really not. Or more accurately, how to execute against that is not. In Texas Hold ‘Em, you don’t get to change your cards. It’s all about bet management, which is done to bluff, bully, or accurately represent your hand.

In Hocus we  let players change their cards and reduced the importance of bet management. However, with such simple cards, it was basically just a matter of cycling to create the most sure thing you could. It was dissatisfying.

Josh: Full Houses have been a recurring problem for us. Honestly, we should be smart enough by now to recognize that if they’re popping up too much, we’ve somehow goofed.

Grant: Players felt like they were stuck on a ride. Get in, build a pair, see what happens.

Josh: I don’t think we’re aiming for a really agonizing game here, but there needs to be a skill component to things, obviously. It should be a lightweight strategy game, not an “experience”.

Grant: Yeah. Honestly, we were making the “It’s a Small World” of fillers, which I don’t think is a good thing.

Josh: To be clear, that’s a Disney reference, people.

Grant: Let it go.

Josh: BOOO.

At any rate, something had to give. We needed a way for people to have some planning in the game. It just needed to happen. Grant and I both had an idea kicking around in our heads, which was simple: why not give people a bunch of cards at the beginning of the round? They could then work on allocating things themselves.

Grant: Things being their hands, the community, or the pot. Collaboratively and competitively.

Josh: On top of that, we could retain the simultaneous hands by putting two communities in play. Now, we got to keep the idea of building multiple hands, which we liked from the previous version, while keeping some form of planning. Once those planks were in place, the 5.0 version came together quickly.

Grant: That’s a super key point I don’t want to gloss over. Previously, we let you build 2 hands under the guise of strategy. One for now, one for later. That didn’t pan out, but it WAS fun building multiple hands. Naturally, we needed a second place to use that second hand.

If 2-4 players are building a Community at the same time, there’s a little bit of volatility. By building 2 Hands, you increase your chances of capitalizing on one. Two, if you’re lucky or good.

Josh: I was briefly advocating for three simultaneous hands, honestly. Maybe for an expansion?

Grant: I think it might be viable as a wink wink 2 player version.

Josh: Honestly, the biggest problem in this version has been what to name things. “Hand” is overloaded, and people didn’t like “Holding” for what they wanted to call their “Hand.” So, we’ve had to juggle stuff around on names.

So, we worked this out, and Grant had a playtest. And, I would describe it as “triumphant.” He wrote to me, and his email was full of jubilant swearing, which is the best kind of swearing.

Grant: I was throwing hip hop hands in the air. For the record, I did not care.

Josh: Not quite ready to believe it, I ran a test myself last night with three of my friends, grizzled veterans of the Hocus Poker development process. These fine, determined gentlemen have played every major version of this thing, going back to the version with little tiles.

And, one of them said that “it’s the most fun he’s had with any version of Hocus Poker,” and another described it as “very polished.”

There’s clearly balancing work to do on spells, but after the first round, I was just playing the game. I was taking notes, sure, and noticing wording and things to tighten up. But I was just playing the game. It’s been the first time since some of the late 2.0 versions when I’ve had actual fun playing it. That sounds bleak, but we learned stuff from every one of those unfun games which I think we’ve applied. It actually seems good now!

So, where to go from here? What lessons can we learn? Persistence always pays off?

Grant: We have a lot of work left in spell balance, tuning, and proper wording. But, that’s a relatively easy part compared to where we’ve been.

As for high level, a big thing for me is that we kept slamming on the brakes. We threatened to stop the car and we actually stopped the damn car. It was really difficult to do again and again, but it really paid off. You have to hold yourself to a quality bar. There are just too many other good games to make something mediocre.

I also think we learned a great deal about identifying what we want to do with the game and how to get there. We never flailed. It felt like flailing. But, we went about it in a rather constructive and thoughtful way. We stopped repeating bad spells. We avoided known bad ideas that never seemed to work. Yes, we’ve tried Banished 30 times, but we all have to have a windmill or two at which to tilt.

Dude, so many sweet references.

Josh: At least we amuse ourselves.

I think we can identify something useful that came out of each major revision that has still stood up. 3.0 gave us the idea for individual spellbooks.

Grant: This was a huge breakthrough. Instead of all sorts of mixed actions, the spellbooks said: execute one of the four cards in front of you. Plus, your four cards are unique. Great for accessibility.

Josh: 4.0 gave us the gems on the creature cards. Those are integral parts of the game, which are solid ideas that are making things better.

Grant: I love multi-use cards. They are just so much fun. It also works really well for our poker setup. Do you use a card for its suit, strength, or Gem? 3 uses is very simple and easy to process. It provides a nice layer of choice. Looking beyond that, you think about building a pair, a straight, and how to best set yourself up for a bigger hand via the community.

Josh: Those revisions were not in vain, they just, you know, weren’t any fun. A careful post mortem of each playtest helped show which are the parts that were working, and we’ve been able to carry those forward. The ideas in 5.0 are ones that we’ve painstakingly chipped away from all the other ideas that have been floating around.

Maybe that’s a new benchmark for me? Try and salvage one really solid idea from every playtest, no matter how badly things went.

Grant: It’s a good goal and a very achievable one. I can finally talk about this — I learned a great deal working with Portal on York/Dawn Sector. They had no qualms saying “not good enough,” and I wanted to be good enough to emulate that in my own craft. But, man. It can be crushing sometimes.

I think, and this is bold, we should share the rules. You can read them here. They are about 1400 words from start to finish, which we’re really proud of.

Josh: It’s hard saying your own efforts aren’t good enough. This part was kicked off by deciding that a game that people had played and enjoyed didn’t make the mark. That’s rough enough, but continually kicking a bunch of revisions down because they weren’t fun was dreary, but it’s been worth it.

Self Doubt is my first Tester

Post by: Grant Rodiek

I have several games in the works right now, which on one hand diffuses my focus and may not be entirely healthy. But, on the other, all of them are in weird places: long term development, early testing, late testing, rules tweaking, pitching, and so forth. All of that stuff consumes one portion of my brain and the other side, the creative portion, has little ideas with which I like to experiment. Some emerge, some don’t.

There is a really good argument to get a game to its playable state as quickly as possible. Come up with an idea, yank out some cards to build it, and test. I don’t think that’s a bad approach, and for some peers that’s the only way they CAN do it, as their mind requires the tangible pieces to move about and consider.

I, however, especially this past year, have found myself moving through a long marination phase of consideration and introspection before I build the prototype or even build the rules. And lately, I find myself building a prototype, then taking another week or so to think on it further.

Self doubt is my first tester and I want to make an argument for such marination to occur. Not to say it’s the ONLY way to do something, or even that it’s the right way, but merely to suggest that you may find gems by doing such a thing.

Firstly, your testers are precious, or more accurately, their patience. If you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of designers, it’s possible to bring garbage to the fore and they’ll be fine with that. However, few have such a benefit. You should take the time to consider your prototype privately before exposing it to your test group, if only to make a stronger first impression. If your prototype is so mechanically broken that little promise can be seen, you’ve done yourself and your game a disservice.

Secondly, without a little marination, you, like myself, may find yourself relying on “old favorites” or “old habits.” I have a crutch upon which I constantly lean, which is action cards. I love them, but it’s stifling my creativity and unique approaches to problems. My first response “this needs spice” is to design 30 action cards. Nein! If you’re rushing to prototype, you’re only allowing your creative brain to conceive so much. You will fall back on comfortable trends, which again, is a disservice to your design.

My suggestion, is to take your core theme and core mechanic, then quickly build around it. If this includes your crutches, fine. Do it with abandon. Then, instead of taking the game to Billy’s, circle back and circle your less inspired concepts with red ink. Quickly list out alternative solutions to solve the same problem. And if something is in your design, you should know why, even at this stage. Challenge yourself from the viewpoint of using a simpler mechanic, or fewer components, or using a specific component to jumpstart the creative process. If you rely on cards too often, use hex tokens instead. If your favorite game in the genre uses a rondel for action selection, experiment with dice instead.

However you go about it, give yourself the time and put forth the effort to do things differently. Let your inner demon speak up and say, “Hey , can I be honest? You can do better.”

My final element to this simple treatise is that you need to be your game’s greatest champion. I was listening to Alex Bloomberg’s Start Up podcast this morning — hugely recommended, go grab it. In his first episode he’s pitching to a billionaire investor, who notes the most important quality to a company pitching him is their emphatic and devout belief that what they’re doing is important and will be successful. They aren’t saying “this can be cool” or “we think this is an idea.” They say, with conviction, this idea will change the world. This business will make money.

You need to allow self doubt to seep in to challenge your conviction. You need to battle it and emerge victorious. You’re going to receive input, especially early on, that your game isn’t fun, that it’s unoriginal, that it’s fiddly, overly complex, or isn’t as fun as a recent game from . They’ll be completely right now, but in the face of that, you need to know why they’ll eventually be wrong.

Allow the early criticism into your design from day one. Take the time to address the concerns, enrich the core, and become your greatest fan.

Ignoring Kind Feedback

Post by: Grant Rodiek

In Friday’s post, I noted that the folks at Cardboard Edison had asked me two questions. The result of the first question was Friday’s post. The second question is answered, or so I hope, in today’s post. Thanks again for two great prompts!

Today’s Question: What do you do when a tester says “You removed my favorite feature?” Or, more broadly, what do you do when your iterations conflict with testers’ opinions?

If you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you’ll notice a few recurring themes. The first thing that comes to mind to answer this is one of my most predominant recurring themes: what is your goal for the game? If you can answer that question succinctly, and I think you need to be able to before you do ANYTHING with your design, the choice is clear.

Before you respond to your tester in regards to any feedback, positive or otherwise, you must be able to answer these questions for yourself:

  1. What type of game do you want this to be? What are your high level goals for the experience?
  2. For whom are you developing this game? Who is your audience?
  3. What is the most important part of your design? To which part of your design will you allot the most complexity? Where do you want your players’ attention? What is their key decision point?

If you can answer those two questions, you can begin to answer these:

  1. Why did you make the change in the first place? Ideally, it was to bring the game more in line with the answers outlined above.
  2. Why do you think the change will do a better job of satisfying your goals?
  3. What were the alternates that you considered before deciding upon this change?

To be explicit in my expectations, you need to know why you’re making the change in the first place. Never make changes to your game just to change stuff. Understand fully what the problem is that you’re trying to solve and why you think the change will address it. Otherwise, you will meander for months or years with no forward progress.

Let’s circle back for a moment. You know the game you want to make and your target audience. Ideally, your target publisher as well (assuming you’re solely the designer). You know what makes your game special. You also know 2 or 3 areas where your game is falling short. You know what you want to fix in order to bring it closer to the goal. You act decisively and remove a feature that a tester enjoys. They speak up about it.

Quickly, I want to note what’s important here: You’re coming to the table as an expert. You’re bringing as much data, logic, and science as you can to this vile hobby of ours. You’ll need that.

Before you ask questions, I find it useful to come to an agreement on terms. Or, in absence of agreement (which really you don’t need, this isn’t a democracy), you can at least state your personal goals. Provide a lens: This is the game I want to make. This is what I think is important.

Your first question to the tester is, “Why is it your favorite feature? What did you love about it?” There are a thousand ways to boil and egg (are there?), and once you know what their end goal is, you can deliver that in a way that suits your goals.

Your second question is whether they agree that the problem you intend to solve is indeed a problem. This is a really good way to take their temperature on the end result. If, ideally, you can both reach agreement that you have a problem, then you can move forward. You can then brainstorm and discuss potential solutions that better preserve their favorite feature and still address your problem. This is why question 2 immediately follows question 1.

Really, this is about having a directed discussion. It’s your design, your project. Enter as the moderator and drive the conversation.

Many of us want to placate our testers. For the longest time, maybe years, they are our only fans. They are the only people who have played our game. They’re the only ones who know what we’re trying to accomplish. The difficult truth is, they may be our only testers ever if we don’t sign the game. But, and this is difficult, in the same way one must learn to listen to feedback and leverage testing advice, one must also learn to ignore it or leverage it accordingly.

Just as bad as changing a design haphazardly for years under your own direction is doing so at the behest of your testers. Never forget that it’s your design. You’re striving for your name on the box. It’s your vision.

In conclusion, know what you want. Know what you’re trying to achieve. Know what is sacred in your design and why it’s sacred. Then, work to know what your players like and why they like it. Or, on the opposite side, what they don’t like and why this is so. Enter every discussion knowing what works with your game and what isn’t currently working. Design is an art, but development can be more scientific. Identify issues and eliminate dead ends. Do this by understanding your design and your goals.

Feedback, positive or negative, is only valuable if you know how to use it. A tester who likes your game is fine, but remember that you’re seeking an audience of thousands, unless they’re buying the entire print run.

Planning the Set List

Euros

Post by: Joshua Buergel and Grant Rodiek

This week, we want to discuss the sets that players can create in Hocus Poker. By sets, we mean things like a Full House or Two Pair. Just like in normal poker, your goal in every round is to build the best set. Some sets are better than others, and as we narrowed down our list of sets, we found some choices were better than others.

This is a controversial topic and everyone has immediate expectations when they sit down to play a game with Poker in the name. We wanted to take a moment to prove we aren’t nuts and that we’ve made thoughtful choices to choose the right set list.

Josh: Obviously, at the core of Hocus Poker, is, uh, poker. It’s kind of right there in the name. Or, at least, it is now. If you asked people to say what poker is about, they will probably list a few things: betting, bluffing, and the poker hands. One of the earliest things that we tinkered with was exactly which of the poker hands we were going to have in the game.

One of the first questions that Grant asked me, when I came on board originally as a tester, was if I thought that it made sense to expand the number of hands in the game. Being a fan of strange stuff happening in card games, I thought it sounded great. One of the “hands” that comes up in poker is three pairs (ex: two 6s, two 3s, two Kings), which is always good for mocking your friends who have it. That one went in early, along with five of a kind, which was reachable sometimes due to spells.

I was immediately quite curious what the actual odds were for three pairs, which I needed to know in order to slot it into the proper place in the ranking. Being that I’m a software developer, I decided to just write a simulator for the thing. I’ve done that a fair bit in the past for other games, and have always found it to be quite handy.

I could have computed the odds mathematically, of course, but the simulator is more fun to write. It ended up being a tool that we used quite a bit while working on the game. Three pairs was initially slotted below straight, but that turned out to be too low for that hand. We also added double threes (two threes of a kind) at this stage of the game.

Grant: Three Pairs, Five of a Kind, and Double Three (two sets of three of a kind) were all pretty intuitive as far as creating the hand. They also happened with some frequency and everyone always asked about them. Our players had the same gut instinct as Josh — this is already a goofy game, so why not?

This, ultimately, brings us to one of the core issues we’ve needed to deal with for every change in the game: how intuitive is this for players?

The answer was, not very.

For people who have played poker, which is a large number, we had issues when we changed the core set list. This, by the way, is:

  • Straight Flush
  • 4 of a Kind
  • Full House
  • Flush
  • Straight
  • 3 of a Kind
  • 2 Pair
  • Pair
  • High Card

Inserting a three pair in that list means we suddenly have more hands and things don’t mean the same. It’s like changing the meaning of a single word in a language and expecting people to just roll with it. We learned really quickly that we needed to be really thoughtful about how we altered these hands.

This forced us to take a step back and ask: If we’re going to change the hand list, for what reason? What justifies the change?

Josh: The tell (to use a poker term) is that even long-time poker players were constantly looking at the hand ranking list to see where the new hands fell. The upside was novelty, seeing fun stuff happen that you don’t see in poker. But the cost was significant, in terms of down time in the game as people scratched their heads and tried to figure out what they had and what they could make.

Was the novelty adding much? To my surprise, it seemed like the additional poker hands were worse for poker players and not novices. Novices were having to look everything up anyway, so another entry or two on the list wasn’t really hurting anything. But even just a few new entries on the list was almost reducing everybody back to a novice state, at least for a little while. As a consequence, due to that playability concern, we backed off of the goofy hands and went with a straight set of poker hands for a while.

However, there was another issue that was coming up for both of us: how common flush and especially full house were.

Grant: This problem became so bad at one point that if you didn’t have at least a Straight, you should fold. It just wasn’t right. It reduced our eight hand game to a three hand game.

When we started to solve this problem, the approximate setup for each round was 4 cards in the Square, which is our term for community. All players had 2 cards in hand by default. The two spells in EVERY round let you add cards to your hand OR add cards to the square. This meant players could have 8, 9, even 10 cards with which to make a hand.

We had some really crazy solutions to this, including changing the ranking of the hands (terribly non-intuitive), making it so that the same hand couldn’t win sequential rounds (band aid fix, adds new rule), or just cutting out lots of hands (non-intuitive, ruined our nice distribution of hands).

With time, the right solution was the simplest one — we decreased the number of default cards in the Square from 4 to 3. That one solution had a massive impact and largely restored the distribution in most cases, except for the Full House.

Now that we isolated the issue to the Full House specifically, we took the content route, as opposed to the system’s route, to fix it.

The fundamental issue was that Full House occurred too often for its relative strength.

Josh: If you remember, there was actually a period of time when we had 4 cards in the square and 3 in hand. Add in the extra cards from spells, and a full house was almost a minimum to compete.

Before we get to the full house problem, the next big change for hands was thinking about naming. At the time, we were looking at the possibility of pitching to publishers. We’ve mentioned that thought experiment a few times, and it was mostly good, but one of the blind alleys for us was renaming the hands. The thought behind it was that it would give a little bit more theme in the game, it would further distance our game from poker to help manage expectations, and for novice players, it wouldn’t matter too much if things were renamed. We figured that most poker players would probably just keep referring to the hands by their poker names anyway.

Here, again, our expectations weren’t really met. There were references to the hands in various places on the rules and cards, and people were having to unpack that reference each time we saw it. It was an unnecessary cognitive load on our players.

Grant: Just as a general lesson, never force people to re-learn things that are so common. This goes for a lot of things, and is a lesson for pretty much any form of design. For example, a video game developer is foolish if they mess up the super established UI framework of World of Warcraft when making an MMO. Or the FPS developer who tries to reinvent the console control scheme made standard by Halo.

In card and board games, if you have DOMINANT reference points like Dominion, Magic, and Poker, you want to tread very carefully when shifting standards that are just so well known by so many players.

Josh: It was around this time that we also started getting antsy again about the menu of hands. If we’re trying to distance ourselves from poker, the thought went, why not go all the way! Here’s where my simulator came into play again. I could pretty easily plug in a bunch of different hands and try them out. Why not? We could see where things fell in the spectrum and see what might shake out. Grant and I put on our brainstorming hats (Carmen Miranda fruit hats) and decided to see what we could cook up.

This was also the period of time when we were flirting with five suits.

Here’s the list of hands that were tested in the simulator:

  • Rainbow (one card of each of the five suits)
  • Three pairs (again)
  • Double triple (again)
  • Two pairs, but of adjacent ranks
  • Four card straight
  • Four card flush
  • Skip straight (every other rank), in versions of odd, even, or both
  • All cards ranked below six
  • Three and four card straight flushes

Some of these were clearly terrible, but testing them in simulation was cheap, so why not? Some of them were motivated by an idea that we might be able to transition things to a game where you really only care about straights and flushes, which might be an interesting twist. Due to a bug in my code, it looked for a while like Rainbow was going to slot in at an interesting place, so we tried that one out on the table. Grant played one game with it, and it was ridiculous, which led me to looking more carefully at my code. In the end, most of that junk just wasn’t worth the cost on the brains of our players.

At this point, we basically had the poker hands, minus full house. It was just still a little bit too common, too easy to go for. I want to say that we had also dropped something on the low end.

Grant: We dropped high card as a hand because it never happened and it’s actually not that intuitive. For a while I was really on a warpath about using only intuitive hands. Many of them actually are, except for full house, which is a bit strange.

This was one of those weird phases where we were both scratching our heads and most of our ideas were just bad. For a while I think we both worried about being overly negative — I know I did. Josh would send out a new report from the simulator and even when the probabilities seemed right, some of them just didn’t make sense. Or, they were too clunky.

I especially hated the four card hands. It just felt like a lame, Diet Coke version of the real hand.

Some of the other ones, like “the summed strength of your hand can’t exceed a certain amount” were interesting and may one day become expansions or variants. But, we still had this huge gap in probability between flush and four of a kind. A few times I suggested we just cut straight flush, maybe even four of a kind. Josh, rightfully, thought this foolish.

Many of these ideas never left our emails. For a brief phase, we just tested without a Full House in the set list.

Josh: We did keep getting tester push back about the lack of Full House in the list, though. Players who knew poker wanted it back in there. And, there was a gap in the probabilities as well. The leap from flush to four of a kind was a substantial one, and it would be useful to have something to fill in the gap. Just not Full House – it had proven itself as just a little too easy to get.

We strapped back on the thinking helmets and started firing ideas. What about the four-card straight flush? Would that be confusing? Anything else come to mind? I was standing around at a party holding a beer when I started just visualizing poker hands.

I was thinking that they’re composed of three basic elements: straights, flushes, and sets of same-ranked cards. We had a hand that combined straights and flushes (the, uh, straight flush). What about combining the other ones? Combining a flush with a set doesn’t make much sense. I guess you could do something like two pairs, which are also from the same two suits. But that seemed odd. Straight and set, though, that seemed promising. That’s when I thought about a three of a kind crossed with a three card straight.

As I originally conceived it, the three of a kind needed to be the middle card of the straight, which makes your hand a cross when you lay out the cards. I plugged it into the simulation and, sure enough, it dropped right into the right spot in our probabilities. It then seemed obvious why: this was really just a Full House, but with fewer probabilities for the other two cards. When I proposed the hand, Grant suggested that we loosen it up so that any of the possible straights using the three of a kind would work, and that’s what stuck. It’s about half as common as a Full House, but still much easier to get than a four of a kind, so it slots in really nicely. I also like the way it adds just one unique hand to the list, just to give us that twist.

Grant: I love getting a crossways, so much that every time it happens I send Josh a picture. There’s something special in that it’s a hand that’s Hocus Poker’s. We’re very protective of it. We’re going to patent troll the stuffing out of it.

We did a lot of experimentation, but at the end of the day, the solutions were quite simple.

  • Four suits, not five.
  • Three cards in the square, not four.
  • Two cards in the hand.
  • Crossways instead of Full House.
  • The rest of the hands? Well, leave them as they’ve been forever. Don’t change what isn’t broken.

This exercise was a classic case of experimentation to confirm that things don’t really need to change. Sometimes you don’t need a massive change or complete overhaul. You just need a tweak. Our contributions in changing the game of poker came mostly in the form of removing player elimination, creating a market driven spell activation mechanic, and introducing spells in the first place. The sets? They worked (mostly) just fine.

Hocus Problem Solving Part 2

Euros

We could discuss every problem in every version of the game, but we think it best if we focus on the problems we identified and how we fixed them, roughly chronologically, for Hocus Poker as it exists today. If you have follow up questions about a specific portion of this, comment below and we’ll be happy to answer. This is Part 2 in this series. You can read Part 1 Here. 

Josh: We left off last time with the economy in pretty good shape. We had the market more or less sorted out, inflation sorted out, and the end game condition was feeling pretty good and, more importantly, testing well. But we weren’t satisfied yet. There were still concerns nagging at us.

Multi-Round Decisions

Grant: We had the concern that the game didn’t have enough multi-round decisions. It’s something you brought up and it was very insightful.

Every round was too self-contained. We wanted a way for a decision in round 1 to affect round 2, other than points. We brainstormed quite a few things, one of which was the Jokers and black magic mechanic. I miss that. Risk versus reward, but unfortunately too complex for what it gave us.

Here was the gist: If you had a joker, you could play it as a wild card. If you won the hand using it, you had to take a black magic token. This was worth negative points (back before our ultimately solution for the end game). There were some odd issues with risk avoidance and tuning and it was an oddly out of sync feature for what it provided.

Josh: Man, I still love this idea. It might be my favorite of the various ideas we’ve cut. In general, I really enjoy ambiguity in scoring like this, where you need to consider whether a short-term gain is worth a potential long-term loss. But there were problems with it, issues with how the rule could be written, and some odd incentives. If we could have solved one or the other, it might still be in the game. I still think there’s potentially an expansion in there.

Grant: I wonder if there’s a whole expansion where we just create a meta game out of poker? Both with scoring in examples such as this, but even hands that span rounds more than the “Save 1” notion does now.

Josh: There might be an Arcana suit in it, anyway. The costs/activation of everything are costly and double-edged. What about just having to spend a Rune to activate an Arcana card?

Grant: I’m curious if people would do that? It would need to be very powerful. That would work I think in longer games, but I question the value proposition, at the very least for player perception, in the regular length game.

Fold was the simplest idea that emerged from that conversation and stuck ever since. If you Fold, you can’t earn points. But, you get to Save a card, which gives you a future bonus. Instead of starting the round with 2 cards, you start with 3. The Mechana Suit also does this. Players who Build a Mechana card gain a semi-permanent passive ability, much like constructs in Ascension.

Josh: The nice thing about First Fold (which later became Yield) is that it’s simple and easy to understand, but it adds weight to one of the more significant decisions. We don’t want it to be trivial to decide what to spend your mana on, and we want people to have to at least think about if they stick in the hand at all. But making it only the first player had the fun side effect of lowering the incentives for subsequent players to bail out. That helps ensure that most hands end up in a showdown, which is fun.

There’s another area that we had a close look at, which was reintroducing something like a raise in poker. It was actually inspired by tester par excellence Robin Lees. He was playing a lot of two-player games, and he felt like it was too hard to drive the other player out of hands, that the decision to stay in was always the right decision. And it was basically true: once down to two players, it was very rare for players to drop out. The problem, then, was to ensure that there was still decision pressure even when there were only two people left in the hand.

Grant: We solved this in one way then, and added a new layer recently. With Robin’s help, we came up with Hocus Poker’s version of Raising — Surge. It was originally a 2 player only idea, but we liked it so much and there was no reason to remove it from the rest of the game. Raising provided a few elements to the game:

  • It gave players  a way to punish competitors who were too liberal with their spending. Money management is a subtle, but important part of the game that first time players miss.
  • It gave players a way to increase the pot on a hand in which they were confident. You want to stay in? It’ll cost you.
  • It gave players a way to make it difficult to make a spell they really didn’t want used too expensive. I’m looking at you, Tidal Wave and Swapsies.

The second way we solved it is by adding a simple rule that if the winner of the round wins because everyone else Yields, the winner earns a bonus Rune. This is most effective in 2 player, but still valid in 3+ players. This keeps a single player from constantly folding and saving a card to win big. As he does this, he’s just feeding his opponent.

Josh: This was inspired by the observation that, due to the way the economy is now zero-sum, you can just keep folding over and over in a 2 player game and just seal off the action until you have a saved card you’re happy with. That’s annoying, and it doesn’t make much to make that behavior unprofitable. A single Rune is enough to really defang the Texas Stall ‘Em strategy.

Spell Evolution

Grant: Something else I’d love to discuss is the evolution of Spells. When the game was first tested, every player was dealt 1 permanent spell at the beginning of the game. Then, the rest of the available spells were purely random from the deck.

There was a clear problem in that not all spells were equal. A spell that let one player draw a card, for example, was far superior to the spell that required a very specific situation to be utilized. This led to the suggestion: why don’t you have some spells always be in play?

Summon and Cauldron were the result.

Josh: I never saw the version with the first set of spells, so when I first encountered things, the idea of the basic spells were already in play. It’s a great idea, by the way. It strikes a fine balance between having things be too static and having too much stuff change between turns. That set of four spells available each turn is something that’s been basically constant. I guess in that version, there were only three spells each round in two- and three-player games.

Grant: It also has the subtle benefit of making it so players don’t have to constantly re-learn things. We have SO much content in the game and if everything shifts every round, it can be overwhelming. When I teach the game, I always clearly call out “you don’t need to relearn these. They are going to stay the same.” It’s comforting for new players. I wish the idea for the basic spells was mine. My good friend Matt suggested it.

Josh: In that version, the game still had the notion of players owning spells. One goal of the original design was to try and keep everybody in the game, so the players who were behind were awarded the two Advanced Spells from the middle. They could then use those on subsequent hands, giving them a broader set of choices. That rule had its heart in the right place, but there were a lot of issues with it. Among them: it divided player attention for where they should look for actions, it complicated the interactions in the game, it required additional rules in costs to handle, it provided occasional perverse incentives for players to try and game things to gain a spell, and as a catch-up mechanism, it didn’t really do a whole lot. Despite those issues, it persisted for a while.

Grant: One of the earliest ideas, which mostly died after the first test, was the notion that players were building a tableau of abilities throughout the game. Balance was such a massive issue, though.

Ultimately, the notion of keeping spells died less for the reasons Josh listed (which in hindsight are all fantastic), and mostly because the mechanic simply didn’t provide enough fun for the complexity it added. It required quite a few rules for a variety of edge cases and different player variants. That’s one of my favorite development tools. For any given feature, ask if it provides more than it takes. Provide being fun, the take being complexity. Little complexities over time feel like a death by a thousand cuts.

Josh: One problem that dogged us for a long time was interesting spells. I think you’ve kept track of how many spells we’ve cut over the course of the game, but it’s been a lot (Grant Note: We’re at 25 cut spells). And that cut count only counts the spells that actually made it onto the table. There were plenty of spells that never even got to that point, that had issues right out of the gate (Grant Note: As in, ideas we brainstormed but didn’t bother testing).

There are things that all of our quality spells share:

  1. They should be broadly useful and not narrow (so spells with trigger conditions are bad ideas). For example, if a spell is only useful 1 out of 10 rounds, based on a specific layout of cards, it’s not good.
  2. They should be easy to read and understand. At times we’ve gotten carried away with too many conditional statements, such as if, then, and so forth. Our best spells, typically, say: Do this thing.
  3. They should be able to be cast many times in a round. Our spell cost mechanic is based on spells being used multiple times with an increasing cost.
  4. They should be fun. That criteria really narrowed things down. It’s probably worth looking at some spells that got cut and why.

Grant: Good call. I just opened up the Photoshop file to stroll down memory lane.

Some Cut Cards

  • Shared Pain: Essentially, you and a number of other players had to reveal some cards. This wasn’t fun and was rarely useful. If you know somebody’s cards, that doesn’t help you WIN. So why would you pay for information you may not be able to act upon?
  • See Thru: This let you view another player’s hand. Again, sounds great in actual poker, but not useful in Hocus Poker.

Josh: These are both good examples of things that seemed like a better idea on paper than at the table. I think both were fairly early, and it was at a time when we were still in a bit of a poker mentality. It sure seems like it would be tremendous to get a sneak peak at things, but it was pretty much always going to lose out to trying to chase cards for your hand.

Grant: (More Cut Spell Commentary)

  • Chicken: This created a side pot between two wizards. So much complexity and exceptions for a single card. Cut.
  • Bribery: This let you buy runes regardless. But, this defeated the core purpose of the game. Not fun.

Josh: I repeatedly chased this basic idea of things manipulating Runes instead of mana, cards, card state, or other stuff. It sure seems like another interesting thing to play with. It’s a currency in the game, after all, so it seems like you could make trade offs with it. But, compared to winning a hand, getting a small number of Runes was not very interesting. And it’s very important that people have the win-or-nothing mentality which makes the economy go. Softening that in whatever way is mostly a bad idea.

Grant: (More Cut Spell Commentary)

  • Spectral Wild: This card and others introduced the “Last Wizard” mechanic, which was this King of the Hill style activation scheme where only the last person who used the spell gained its benefit. A tracking nightmare and very confusing.
  • Numeras: This let you change the strength of a card, so, I could turn a 2 of Hearts into a King of Hearts. We had quite a few cards that used to change the state of a specific card. This caused a massive tracking issue where multiple people would have to remember what multiple cards changed to. This was a sad cut, but so necessary.

Josh: These were relatively late cuts. We really wanted these to work, because they’re fun and provide for some skillful play. We tried assorted tracking mechanisms, different ways to place cards, different orientations, all kinds of things. None of them worked. We just kept getting feedback from testers that they were confused. Sad, but we finally had to just dump them. They also fed into the problem we’ll talk about below, which was certain hands dominating winning pots.

Grant: (More Cut Spell Commentary)

  • Peek-A-Boo: I loved this spell. It let you flip any card in play to its opposite side. What often happened, though, was that people would reveal all cards in the square, then there’d be nothing left to reveal. If people tried to flip them back down, they’d be automatically revealed at the end of the action phase. It was, more or less, a broken card.
  • Dispatch Goblin: This is a good example of a spell that was fine, but too complicated. You chose another player, who had to pick one card to show just you. You could then tell them to keep it, or you could take it from them in exchange for another card.

Josh: At any given moment, we tried to identify what the weakest spell or two was, and then just be ruthless about it. Even when the spells might have been “good enough”, it was still possible to identify what the worst spell was. The question then became if we could improve it by changing it or replacing it. It strained our creativity times, but it was always worth looking at the runt of the herd.

Grant: For a few weeks, every Friday night would result in an email from one of us that would start with “What do you think about .” I don’t think any spell mentioned in those emails lived until Sunday.

Starter Spells

Grant: Interestingly, some of these problems evolved into other solutions. For example, remember the cards that were one offs, as in, they were only interesting once in a round, therefore violating Rule 3 Josh listed above? We turned them into Starter Spells. For these, we gave every player a single card, all matching, that could be used once per game.

Banish was one of them. Once per game, each player could use Banish to declare a single hand (ex: Flush) that was illegal for the current round. These were neat, but inelegant. They were also somewhat expensive. For each starter spell, we’d have to print 5 cards (1 per player). That meant 2 starter spells were the same as almost a third of our total spells. Not a good use of components.

Josh: I still think that stuff like that might show up as an expansion. Having a one-shot Banish was actually a really interesting strategic decision, and it meant that you could never truly feel safe with your flush if it looked kind of obvious. It gave a nice bit of cross-hand thinking, but component-wise, it was probably just not going to fit in the first go around of the game.

I also think that the notion of manipulating the ranking of Sets is something we’ll play with later, if we’re fortunate enough to be able to add some expansions to things.

Grant: I’d love to add expansions. If the ability were simple enough, we could just use a token instead of a card.

For a moment, we cut the starter spells. Then, Josh came up with the idea of Arcana. These were Suits that were normal cards, plus they had text you could use as specified. We wrote about them extensively here. They were one-off, nuanced abilities that violated 2 of our Spell rules, but that was fine because this was the appropriate medium for them. We cut Starter Spells and doubled down on Arcana.

Josh: What it does is gives us a looser set of requirements. After all, an Arcana card is useful on its own — it can form parts of Sets. That’s an extremely powerful base power. So, if the spell associated with it is kind of dodgy, or strange, or hard to deploy, that’s OK, you still have the card to use. It allowed us to unleash some more creativity, which is great.

Dominant Hands

Josh: From fairly early on, there was another thing we both noticed: there were a lot of flushes and especially full houses winning hands. It was somewhat exacerbated by the spell mix we had at the time, but it was still present. At some times in the game, it got to the point where if I didn’t see a flush developing, I’d just fold. That’s really bad.

What was happening, basically, was that if you look at the distribution of probabilities for poker hands, there’s a big gap in probability between full house and four of a kind. As you have access to more cards, four of a kind is still really rare. As a result, accessing more cards tends to bunch the winning hands up right around that cliff, around flush and full house.

I’d like to go into it in a lot more detail in the future, but I had a simulator that I wrote early on in the project to test the probability of various goofball hands (three pairs, two threes of a kind, others). I took a look at the probability of various hands winning in a four player game given certain sizes of hands and community cards, and full house just dominated.

We’ve tried a lot of fixes for this, which is probably worthy of its own post, but for this purpose, what we did eventually is disarm the environment. We took the number of cards in the community down to just three, and took each player’s hand cards down to just two. Without adding additional cards, you only have access to five. So, if you gain a couple cards (through various means), that just puts you back at the familiar seven-card probabilities, which is totally fine for our game.

Grant: I think the simulator you created is incredibly cool and it definitely deserves its own post. Typically designers rely on gut checks, or personally tracking data between tests. With Hocus, we gained the advantage of those two plus hundreds of thousands (not kidding) of simulated hands. It was incredibly useful.

One more thing to note is that although we managed to smooth out the probability of flushes and straights, we never quite solved it for full house. The hand is just too commonly obtained relative to its strength in the hierarchy. We had two choices, really:

Lower the strength of a full house, which is really non-intuitive.

Get a new hand. That is ultimately how we came about with the Crossways. However, I think it took us 2 weeks just to discover it.

Parting Notes

At over 3000 words, though, this post has reached its end. Until next time!

Designer pal Corey Young will be handing out TEN copies of Hocus Poker at the Origins Game Fair. Track him down and request a copy!

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?

Low Fat Design Diet

Post by: Grant Rodiek

Design peer John DuBois supplied me with a prompt for this post, and what a great prompt!

I love this idea and it’s been something I’ve thought about a great deal lately with many of my projects. Antoine de Saint-Exupery noted that “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This is a commonly uttered phrase for any form of design. Elegance and simplicity is prized by creators and consumers alike. Delivering a highly focused, high quality game experience should be one of your goals for every product, but how far is too far? When do you have the correct feature set? When do you have the right amount of fat? Because if you’re asking me, your game needs a little fat.

Perhaps I just think that way because I’ve lived my entire life as a “heavy set fellow,” as my grandfather would say.

In purely scientific fashion, I propose you must view your design through the following lenses to gauge whether your game has the right amount of fat, or as our dear  de Saint-Exupery noted, requires a little more taking away.

After I write about the tools to use, I’ll provide some anecdotal stories that are a bit more fuzzy.

Does your game typically finish in an ideal length of time? This one is fairly standard. Games typically fall within a few categories of time, and note that time is the duration of the experience (setup, play, etc.)

  • Casual/Micro: 15 Minutes. Ex: Coin Age, Dragonheart, Love Letter
  • Filler/Light Strategy: 30 Minutes. Ex: Fairy Tale, Dominion, Star Realms
  • Medium Strategy: 60 minutes. Ex: Ginkgopolis, Ticket to Ride, Last Will, The Speicherstadt, Pandemic
  • Heavy Strategy/Experience: 90+ Minutes. Ex: Eclipse, Combat Commander, Twilight Struggle, Mice and Mystics

You should know, roughly, where your game lies on this spectrum based on the type of game it is. There are countless games by which you can compare your experience. If your deckbuilder takes 90 minutes, typically, you might have an issue (but of course, Core Worlds is the exception).

If your micro-game takes 45 minutes, it’s probably too long. If you observe your game is too long, that’s a good indicator that you may need to trim the fat, reduce complexity, and examine the design. Game length is a tool to notify you that you have a problem, but it can’t necessarily tell you what precisely to fix.

Does your game fit within an ideal price point when compared to similar products? This one may be more difficult for folks who have never grabbed a quote from a manufacturer, but if you use your good judgement and skills of consumer observation, you’ll be fine. Basically, find a game that has a comparable “heft” to your game. By heft, I mean the experience, general components. Does your game match within about 10% of the price?

For example, if I’m making a light drafting game meant for a 20 minute play period, if I have 300 cards and a bunch of chips, the game is probably too hefty. Why? Because Fairy Tale offers that light drafting game for about $20 and just a few cards.

Granted, yes, it’s a mistake to go up against some of the really big publishers that print a thousands of units. Clearly they’ll have lower prices. But, like the above, this is a tool to use. If your component (and therefore cost) is significantly greater than similar games, you need to trim and revise.

As a personal example, Blockade, now Sol Rising, used to require a lot of wooden blocks. The game would have cost a pretty penny. Think Pitch Car expensive. I knew I didn’t want it to be that expensive, so I completely overhauled the game.

Does your game include options, actions, or components rarely used by your testers? This is a good thing to look for in your design. When you’re play testing, do you notice players rarely use a certain card, a certain action, or a certain space in a worker placement? If so, perhaps the game doesn’t need it.Perhaps you can enhance another feature, or condense two of them, to create a single, stronger feature.

Always watch your players to see what they use. This may also be a good way to tune and balance your game in general. But, if 25% of your features aren’t in use, that may be a good reason to cut 25% of your features.

Does your game innovate or twist common expectations in more than 2 ways? This may shock you, but if you innovate too much, your game may be really difficult to play. People may fail to see the fun in the game you’ve created. Typically, you want to do 1 or 2 unique things, then rely on standards to fill in the rest.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you make a drafting game, but you twist the standard of how drafting games work. For example, in Fairy Tale you pick 1 and pass the rest. Then, let’s say you make it so Victory Points are a bad thing, instead of a good thing. Finally, let’s say your game features a rondel that goes counter-clockwise and instead of using the space you land on, you use the spaces you skip. All of these things might work individually, or one or two of them, but if you change the standards too many times, players are just going to be confused.

Don’t overly stir the pot.

Only you can judge the scale and breadth of your innovation, but you need to reign yourself in such that people can actually appreciate the few great things you did and not be overwhelmed with new, unconventional ideas.

If you use card text, does it fit on the card in a reasonable font size? I use action cards, or text-based actions, in all of my games. It’s just something I love to do and when I make games that don’t use it I find them soulless and stale. That’s something I need to improve, but it’s where my skills lie.

Please note: I’m not saying games without card text are soulless. I’m saying my designs that fit that description, to date, have been soulless.

When I’ve really begun to polish and refine the game, be it Sol Rising, York, or Wozzle, I have found that by setting an inflexible font size (12 pt or larger), and an inflexible box for text, I suddenly write MUCH better text. My cards become simpler, more elegant, and more accessible. I begin to remove unnecessary terms or phrases.

This has a massive overall effect on the game. This is an easy one to implement. Set a rigid canvas for your text and force yourself to fit within it. You’ll be so glad you did.

Can the game be setup and taught in a reasonable length of time comparable with similar games? Hopefully by now you’re detecting a theme. Your design is going to be released among thousands of other games, a slightly smaller number of which are directly comparable to your game. Publisher and customers will make these mental assessments, whether they know it or not, so it’s best if you get in front of it and do early analysis.

Firstly, you need to write your rules. You need to be thoughtful about how your game will be taught without you in the room to do so.

Secondly, you need to begin experimenting with methods of teaching. This takes a few iterations, but you’ll learn the order of operations when taught orally, as well as how best to explain the sticking points.

Once you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, you need to begin asking yourself the tough question of whether your game is reasonable to teach compared to other games in its weight class. If your micro game takes more than 2 minutes to teach, you’re in trouble. You need to simplify, starting with rules exceptions and unnecessary content.

Does the game match the catalog of the publisher you’re courting? If you pay attention and are honest, this is a very easy way to determine the appropriate level of fat your game entails. Many publishers have a fairly consistent catalog of games by which you can judge how appropriate your game’s heft is. You should always lean towards their recent releases and best sellers, as those are clear indicators of their habits.

Some examples:

  • Tasty Minstrel Games lately is very interested in light, micro style games. But, their soul has always been medium to heavy Euros. If you follow Seth Jaffee, their lead developer, it won’t take long to figure out their tastes. They probably don’t want your tactics design.
  • Plaid Hat Games likes trashy, highly interactive games. Length isn’t really an issue, but they want richly thematic experiences and tend to favor games with cards. They don’t want your euro city builder.
  • Indie Boards and Cards tends to enjoy games that support high player numbers, are very simple to teach, and predominantly feature a strong social element.
  • Academy Games is seeking themes rooted in historical premises. They enjoy variance, simple, elegant designs, and deep strategy. Their games tend to fit in that 1-3 hour mark and support more than 2 players.

I picked just a few, but hopefully you get the point. I’ve begun to loosely identify 1-3 publishers at the beginning of a design and I use that as a rough benchmark by which to scope, polish, and develop the game. If you’re seeking a publisher for your design, one of the best tools is simply their catalog. Use it to scope your game!

Some Anecdotal Notes

As I developed Battle for York, I worked fervently to trim trim trim. I tried to make the game as tight as possible with as little fat as possible. This worked to get it to a steady foundation, but in this game, the game needed more fat. It is possible to trim the spark out of an experience, and sometimes you need to add a bit of Spackle back to your sculpture, de Saint-Exupery be damned.

How do you know when you need to add some chub? Well, use the tools I just listed above. If you find you’re coming in under your throw weight in complexity, or your game is a bit light compared to your ideal publisher’s catalog, feel free to return to some of the ideas you trimmed. Now that you have a tight foundation, you may find they actually DO have a home.

Doing this is tough and it comes with experience. I needed help to identify it with York, but as a result I more accurately hit the mark with Sol Rising. More details on these later.

What do you think? Was this useful for identifying how to trim? Leave it in the comments below!

Restless Progress, New Wozzle

Post by: Grant Rodiek

This post is a continuation of my Windmills post. At the end, you’ll find a quick high level run down of the new features. But, regarding Windmills. It turns out I have more to say and discuss on the topic and it’s really important to me.

I have learned so much making Wozzle. It’s been an absolute avalanche of learning and I’m so glad the weird idea came to me in the first place. Most importantly is that I’ve found a fantastic designer partner in Joshua Buergel. The constant back and forth of ideas, counters, inspirations, and polish is just so useful. I’m having a hard time thinking about solo-design now. More on our future adventures, oh…later this year.

One thing I realized in developing Wozzle is that game design is somewhat like trauma, in that you must isolate the biggest problems, fix them, and move to the next. But unlike trauma, which is usually resolved in hours, game design is a total marathon. The mind is unable to fully process everything at once. Something that seems fine one day may turn out to be completely unacceptable in the new light of another day. Opportunities may not emerge for weeks, months, or years. You really need to know everything about the game to truly take it where it needs to go.

Perhaps the better comparison is not to the trauma surgeon, but to the general practice doctor you see your entire life? Yes, he’ll help you with your heart problem and your knees after the accident. But, he’s also there to help you get your blood pressure down, reduce stress, and shave a few pounds.

Yes, I like that more.

Game development is months or years of care and more than ever I’ve learned that you can’t truly know your game until you’ve played it, pounded it, and loved it for a really long time. There are just aspects of the story that can be unraveled until you truly know the guts.

Now, since my initial release of Farmageddon on The Game Crafter I’ve known games need more time to bake. I took that lesson devoutly to heart. Battle for York turned 3 years old last month. Sol Rising is over a year old. And Livestocked and Loaded, a “mere” expansion, had about a year of development (or more?) before it hit the factory.

I always felt that Wozzle would be a quicker game. Not an easier one, but a quicker one. I thought this for a few reasons:

  • The game plays quickly. Shorter games are easier to test.
  • The game plays well with gamers and non-gamers alike. My first 15 tests were with people who rarely play games. Typically, I can only test a game like York for example with a very specific audience.
  • The game is built upon the core of Texas Hold ‘Em. This meant we had a really strong foundation. A winning, beloved foundation.
  • We knew, generally, what we wanted to do with the game. There was a very clear goal at the outset.

The thing is, every few weeks we would hit a solid spot. We’d feel good. Then we’d get restless, or ambitious. Really, it alternated. We’re constantly throwing away cards that just aren’t good enough. Cards that are too verbose. Cards that are too complex for the amount of fun they provide. Cards that lead to less interesting or frustrating play. Inevitably, we come up with something new. Something clever. Why? Because we’ve played the game so much we know what it needs.

We had lingering concerns about poker comparisons. Lingering issues of just expecting people to know such things. Then, we examined how other publishers handled the problem. We looked to Gamewright, Z-Man, Iello. We asked how other designers resolved the issues we had. The result is a presentation breakthrough that immediately opened our eyes to an incredibly cool new mechanic that fits so naturally with the game, adds depth without undue complexity, and preserves the heart of the game. We knew how we could experiment and we were able to do so fruitfully. Early in a design you’ll make wide, swinging changes that miss the mark or worsen things. But here? We knew how to isolate it and tackle it.

I can blab forever, but here’s the important thing: we have a new release of Wozzle and we’d love you to test it. This is the one to test. We’re closing in. If you have an existing Spell set, in most cases, we’ve just optimized the wording. You may find a small number of new Spells and some old friends out the door.

Let me walk you through the changes.

  • We cut a page of rules. Going from 5 pages to 4 pages is HUGE. It means we cut a page of unnecessary and over complicated junk.
  • There are now 4 unique suits of Froggles, Goblins, Ghosts, and Arcana. They each number from 1-12, for 48 cards total. We did this to eliminate the confusion of Jack/Queen/King/Ace, step away from a direct poker vibe, and make it more of a card game. Also, 1-12 is just more intuitive..
  • The Arcana suit is special, in that the cards are both a rank and suit, but they also have a power. As an new action option, you may use the Arcana card as indicated by its text. This action does not cost mana and keeps you in the round. This mechanic is inspired by Tarot and adds a new devilish mix of private and public possibilities. It adds a new layer to the game. If you don’t like it, or find it too complex for your first time, simply ignore the text!
  • The Arcana suit is a preview of things to come. We are now designing 2 additional Arcana suits, also 1-12, that will each have a new mechanical twist. Players can swap out Arcana suits for different experiences, or swap them with non-Arcana suits for ridiculous game. Not recommended for new players!
  • We’ve polished the list of hands to create a more intuitive and natural set. We also feel this gives us the right flow of probability. We feel comfortable with this based on our own tests, gut checks, but also a fairly cool simulator that Joshua coded. However, we need your help here.
  • Since our last PNP push, there have been at least 5 new editing passes on the cards and Rules text.
  • We’ve modified the amount of Mana players begin the game with to improve the economy.
  • We’ve continued to balance the base cost of Spells.
  • We’ve added a Wozzle Junior variant that plays with 2-6 and is intended for novices and a younger audience.
  • We’ve continued to revise and improve our terminology. If you’ve played a previous version, pay attention! We’re sorry that construction is happening.

We would really appreciate your help in testing and promoting this version so that we can figure out where to take it. Basically, help us chart the future of Wozzle so that we can all see a real, professional version one day.

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions in the comments!

Flipped Visual Preview (Part 2)

Post by: Grant Rodiek

I’m attending UnPub in Sacramento this Saturday. I decided Monday night to upgrade my Flipped prototype from hand drawn index cards to something with a little graphical polish. This isn’t final or anything I could sell, but it’s a nice step forward for the prototype and I think it’ll be a better test candidate as a result. I really enjoyed putting together the first visual preview, so I thought I’d compile another to demonstrate the iterations.

Important Information

  • Name: Flipped
  • Player #s: 2-5
  • Time: 60 minutes or less
  • Primary Mechanic: Worker Placement
  • Hook: Dynamic demand model
  • Theme: City Builder/Urban Planning

The Explanation

There’s a score track lining the left and bottom sides of the board. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. Points are earned by developing properties for clients. The game ends when the Property deck runs out.

The game’s core mechanic is worker placement. Your workers are currently cubes. You have a team of 5-6 (depending on number of players). Different actions require a different number of cubes. Cubes are returned at the end of the round.

Here are the Properties available for purchase from 6 different neighborhoods (currently just a color). The cost is shown on the card. This is refilled at the end of every round. To obtain Roosevelt County 2 (an address, essentially), I would use 2 of my cubes.

To put a little pressure and move the game forward, the right-most property at the end of the round goes into decay. The card is removed from the board and a decay token is placed on the space. I’ll explain decay later, but for now, know that you can pay a high rate to buy the property and remove the decay token.

If I buy the above card, I’ll be able to develop on the 2 slot shown in the picture. Again, think of these cards as deeds for an address.

Clients can be obtained in two ways: I can directly obtain the ones shown, or pay to draw blindly. Satisfying clients is how you earn points. However, clients you don’t satisfy are a penalty at the end of the game.

Clients represent 3 entities: Housing (families, bigger projects), Business (both jobs and places for the citizenry to go), and Infrastructure (Schools, Fire Departments). In the top left you can see one of the 3 symbols for these entities, the demand satisfied by developing the property (more on this later), and points awarded.

Some clients also have end game bonuses (shown next to the lamp). These provide bonus points if the composition of the neighborhood matches their request. For example, a family with young children wants to live in a residential neighborhood, preferably one with a school. This is a point of interaction and  hopefully more long-term strategy.

Before you can sell the property, you must meet certain requirements. These are most often improvements. There are some varied ones as well that are experiments to see how far I can push the system. Really, I need to identify what all is possible and fun.

There are four improvements: Landscaping, Painting, Electrical Work, and Remodeling (costs above). Some clients also require permits, which has a slightly different mechanic, in that as more players obtain Permits in a round, it costs more. I was thinking of the line at the DMV here.

The Park in the image above (or in the bottom right corner here) indicates 3 Landscaping icons, or 3 of those green disks. To save space, the symbol is under the disks, but I’ll improve that in the future.

To add improvements, I must move a contractor (white cylinder) to the neighborhood. While he’s there, anyone can simply pay the cost of the improvement to hire him. However, if he needs to be move, he costs an addition 1 cube. This is intended as a point of interaction and blocking.

Let’s say I obtained the Bookstore client shown above. It requires a Painting Improvement. Here, I moved the contractor to Roosevelt County and grabbed a painting disk.

You can see the two here put side by side. Now that I’m selling it (an action), I satisfy 1 Business demand (top left corner).

There are three demand tracks. At the start of the game, they are populated as shown above. The demand for these three types of properties will change every game (more on that in a second). Three things to see here:

  • If you satisfy demand above the up arrow, you gain bonus points. This abstracts high demand.
  • If you satisfy demand below the down arrow, you’ll lose points. This abstracts low demand.
  • If the Infrastructure demand is maxed and you build again, you take a decay token. This will penalize you at the end. This abstracts poor municipal services, power outages, pot holes in the streets, and more.

Remember we satisfied 1 demand for the Bookstore. Therefore, we remove 1 token from the appropriate demand track. We revealed a speech bubble, which I use to indicate a change in demand. These are points on some, but not all of the circles.

When demand changes, we flip the token over. Here it says that we increase Infrastructure by 2. The 2 inside the box indicates I’d gain or lose 2 points if I sold above or below demand, respectively.

Now, I place this token on the address in Roosevelt county. Remember those end game bonuses? If I need to be in a Business Zone to get the bonus, I need a plurality of red disks.

However, if there is too much decay in a neighborhood, NOBODY receives in game bonuses for that neighborhood. To refresh, decay is gained in two ways:

  • If a player builds when the demand for infrastructure is maxed out.
  • If a property decays off the property track. Unless developed, that property is decayed.

One more thing. Some homes have this symbol on them. When they are available, you place an Inspection token face down. These properties are cheaper, but something is wrong with them. Upon purchase, you flip the Inspection token to reveal one of the four Improvements. This improvement MUST be added before the home can be sold.

Good players will pair these with Clients to take advantage of them.

Art and Visuals

I’m currently using a 1 inch circular punch to quickly create tokens using colored construction paper. That’s why you see so many circles. Ultimately, I intend the properties to be smaller squares with appropriate art on them to convey “home” or “business.”

I’d like the demand chart to represent a bar graph like you might see in a newspaper or economic advisory report. I think that can look really slick and thematic.

Don’t look into any political commentary there. I believe the chart is from England. It just has the right visuals.

I think the game has potential to be thematic, at least as far as a game about property/city development can be thematic. I’m actually really excited by potential art styles. I especially love the idea of architectural sketches to show the potential of the city, as if to say “Hey player! You! Build this!”

Here are some of my favorite samples. You can see my entire Pintrest board here.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I really appreciate any comments or thoughts you have. I’m excited to take this game to UnPub to see what’s wrong with it and how I can make it better. Aside from obvious balance quirks, I’m looking for ways to increase interaction and add depth and strategy.

I’d like to think that if I continue refining the core, I can begin focus on balance testing and tweaking to ultimately pitch to a publisher.

Any questions?

Posted in Games | Tagged euro, flipped, , , pictures, prototype, visual preview, worker placement | Leave a reply

Risk 2: Risk Harder: Son of Risk

Post by: Grant Rodiek

I spent $30 at Target last night buying Risk: Battlefield: Rogue, a poorly named, poorly marketed, poorly manufactured tie in to Electronic Art’s massive first-person shooter property. I barely found out about the game. I work at EA and didn’t hear about it, it wasn’t on Amazon, it wasn’t on Target’s site, and it wasn’t on Hasbro’s site. Hell, the BGG entry doesn’t even have a proper cover photo, but is a photo taken by someone in a warehouse or something.

This all sounds like a really bad idea, but I’m not going to lie — I’m really excited. Of the board games I played before my current, modern outlook into the non-Hasbro games, Risk was my favorite. Yes, it takes too long. Yes, you might get screwed really early. But, the game is pure and it tells stories of betrayal, defying great odds, or merely conquering the world after a quiet, yet massive build up in Japan.

This post isn’t a defense of Risk.  I did that for Monopoly and see no need to re-theme that article. Instead, I want to briefly touch on what Risk: Battlefield: Rogue offers and the sheer potential and coolness, as a designer, of modifying such classics.

Who are you, you Rogue!

This new Risk features a lot of really compelling elements.

  • Six double sided modular boards (like those in Mice and Mystics). More scenarios and more sandboxy.
  • 4 sets of really neat soldier minis, of which there are 4 sculpts: Assault, Engineer, Sniper, and Support. If I hate the game, I’ll use them for a proto!
  • A pile of custom dice! What’s really neat is that there is the standard attack and defense die, but also upgraded attack and defense die for use when you have a tank, or are attacking from cover. This is a really neat way to represent a unit’s power or superior position.
  • There are helicopters and tanks.
  • There are special powers you can draft mid-game.
  • Before every battle, combatants play up to 3 of their cards face-down. This introduces some luck mitigation and hand management to the mix.
  • You draw more cards based on your territory holdings.
  • The game has 3 tiers of difficulty, so that it works with really base-level gamers, or more advanced folks like myself.
  • Every class of soldier slightly augments your capabilities. Recon (snipers) let you shoot farther. Engineers heal your tanks. Assault soldiers can hit and run.

I’ve only read the rules, but there is a lot of really neat stuff here, all built onto the a.) choose how to move and b.) choose where to attack simplicity of Risk. Best case, I just added a fun game built on an engine I love. Worst case? I just received a ton of ideas on how to make a classic better. The balance and scenario design might just be atrocious.

Note: The components are generally sub-par. The box lid was stickered on all 4 sides and I ripped off the label somewhat just getting it open. The dice are indented blank dice with stickers, like the ones I buy for prototypes. The cards feature no art and are bare bones graphic design with some really simple icons. The minis are really slick, and the cardboard is fine (punchboard is mostly punchboard), but the components, especially coming from a company as big as Hasbro, are a tinge budget.

Why Risk Still Matters?

Risk has some really simple elements that build great experiences. Attackers roll more dice, but lose in the tie. Keep attacking? Push your luck? There’s also the entire social game. Remember that first time when you were a child and your friend said “Hey — if you leave me alone in Africa, I’ll not push into North America.” You felt clever. Granted, less so when that same friend punched you with 20 soldiers in a betrayal that would surely repeat itself for years to come.

Instead of raging against Risk, perhaps the goal should be to steal some of these elements and revise them in a better, more modern engine?

Some of my favorite games are clearly inspired by Risk. The excellent 1812: The Invasion of Canada and 1775: Rebellion take pushing dudes on a map, teamwork, and knowing how hard to push in an attack and just make the entire package more interesting, more strategic, and perhaps most importantly, shorter!

The designers and Academy really did some smart things, such as adding custom, symbol based dice instead of the numbered pips. They put little tweaks (based on the faction) into the dice rolls, and added slight variability in the cards. They also varied the classic, well-understood movement mechanic in ways that are very clear to players.

Risk spawned Risk Legacy, which hopefully is just the tip of the iceberg in a fantastic and long-lived legacy genre. One of the designers just announced Seafall in cahoots with Plaid Hat Games. Think for a moment how this designer took a few classic mechanics, even the classic map, and built a game with memory and history, a game that grows and organically changes.

One of the reasons I created the Classic Game Re-Mix Design Challenge (which ends Tuesday) was to see how people design within very strict constraints, their own nostalgia, and the expectations of thousands, to make something fresh and cool.

Risk Legacy does that. I think Risk: Battlefield: Rogue might do it. 1812 does it as well.

Finding the completely unique, original idea is like finding a unicorn. Well, not that hard — it’s actually possible to create a unique idea. But if you’ve designed for a while, you know how long you can stare at a wall fruitlessly with your favorite album just looping endlessly. It’s difficult. Instead of sitting still, you may find a spark and learn something by re-envisioning a classic. Perhaps not even to sell, but just as an exercise to get your mind going.

Be that classic Risk, or Scrabble, or Euchre, don’t overlook the benefit of letting something else give you a head start so you can focus on creating something unique and special. Not always, but sometimes.