YANGI: Mono-match game

Dobble, Spot-It, and "Mono-match" technology 

Lately I've been giving some thought to and old idea: mono-match decks/games (like Dobble/Spot-It), and specifically how one could be made that's *not* a speed recognition/reflex thing. 

In case that sounds like gibberish, Dobble (AKA Spot-It) is a game where you have 55 cards, with 8 little pictures on each one, out of a total of like 57 different pictures. The distribution is such that any two cards will match one-and-only-one picture ("mono-match"). In the game, you flip up 2 cards and race to spot the matching picture. It's pretty fun. 

But the coolest thing about that game might be the mono-match-ness of the deck. There's a good video online explaining various ways to create such a deck which guarantees exactly 1 match between any two cards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTDKqW_GLkw

I've long been interested in the idea of using this Dobble technology (the mono-match deck) to drive a more euro-style game. So in an attempt to leverage "Dobble technology" in a game that's *not* just speed recognition like Dobble/Spot-it, I have come up with this proof-of-concept 2-player, 7-card mono-match game in which you deal 1 card to each player and the other 5 to slots on the board labeled MUSTER, MOVE, FIGHT, BUILD, SCORE. On your turn, you'd choose one of the actions to resolve in the region where your card and the card in the slot match, then swap your card for the card in the slot. You'd take turns doing that until some game end condition is met, and the player with the most points wins. 

The actions I came up with are pretty bare-bones:

MUSTER: Add meeples to the board

MOVE: Move meeples around the board

FIGHT: Force opponent's pieces to adjacent regions (maybe also get some VP?)

BUILD: Place a building token from your player board in the region, increasing the scoring value of the region, and upgrading one of your other actions

SCORE: Award points for majorities in certain regions

I made a quick mock-up of this on Tabletop Simulator, and last weekend we were able to give it a shot. I observed while Rick and Daniel played a 1st draft of the game, and that test might be among the most liberal I've ever been with rules changes on the fly! 

After their game, we had a much better idea how things felt. Here's an updated rules summary:

2-player, 7-card mono-match game v0.2

* Deal 1 card to each player and the other 5 to slots on the board labeled MUSTER, MOVE, FIGHT, BUILD, SCORE

* On your turn, choose one of them to resolve in the region where your card and the card in the slot match, then swap your card for the card in the slot

* Alternate turns until some game end condition is met (Race to a VP threshold? Play until a player's meeples are exhausted?)

MUSTER: Add 1 meeple to the active region

MOVE: Use 2 movement points. With one movement point you may move 1 meeple between the active region and an adjacent region

FIGHT: For every 2 of your meeples in the active region, you may force 1 opponent's meeple from the active region to an adjacent region (maybe also get 1 VP?)

BUILD: Place a building token from your player board into the active region, increasing the scoring value of the region, and upgrading one of your other actions. In order to build a building of level X, you must have at least X meeples in the region: 

   Muster building: For every 2 Muster buildings, muster 1 additional meeple when you MUSTER

   Move building: For every Move building, use 1 additional movement point when you MOVE

   Fight building: For every Fight building, you may force out 1 additional meeple when you FIGHT

   Build building: For every Build building, reduce the build requirement by 1 meeple

   Score building: For each Score building, score 1 additional VP per area that you score

SCORE: For each region shown on the card in the Score slot, award vp to the player with the most meeples there (ties do not count). Score the active region (matching the player's card) double.

   Each region is worth 1vp, +1vp per building in it (so everyone knows which 3 regions will score the next time anyone does a SCORE action, but your card indicates which region scores x2)

This game plays like a 2 player abstract or something, it reminds me of Onitama or something. Come to think of it, I wonder if this will turn out to just be "bad Onitama" -- I will have to keep that in mind, and try to avoid it! 

I noticed a bit of the Strategy Triangle evident in the game... "Red" moves like scoring and fighting, "Blue" moves like mustering and moving, and Green moves like building. So maybe that's something worth keeping in mind as well.

As first tests go, this game was promising enough that I expect I'll keep working on it. I don't know if I'll ever make the jump to multiplayer though... I think I'd need to go up to 13 cards with 4 symbols/regions on each (13 total regions), and that sounds a bit cumbersome to me. 

EmDo: Coalition update

 Since my last post, I've played EmDo: Coalition 4 more times, and I've been iterating on a few things. My main goal lately has been to reduce game length, because while it feels pretty good now, it still takes longer than I think it's worth.

Reducing Duration

My friend Steve had a lot of salient suggestions for reducing the games' duration. My first stab at it was to simply reduce the amount of stuff you need to do in order to finish the project. I lopped off a planet slot from each section of the sphere, and I reduced the initial resource slots from 3 per section to 2 per section. In addition to this, I made them resource-specific, because otherwise I think it's too obvious to go for [+1 Action/turn] first every time.

That worked a little, but not enough. My next attempt was to increase the frequency that you get benefits from the sphere. I divorced the technology slots from the resource slots, and where you get your pick of two role icons when you commit a particular pair of planets to the sphere, now you get the other one for committing the level 2 technology in that section. The abilities no longer require the tech, just the 2 specific resources. It occurred to me that to get the resources, you have to first flip planets, then produce, then trade... it takes a while, and it' not even engine-build-y (normally), so this seems like enough work to earn [+1 Hand Size] or [+1 Action per turn].

That's all I've done so far, the only trick I have left up my sleeve might be to use scenarios or something to jump start the players a little bit. But I'm pretty lazy, and that might be tough to design, so I'm kinda hoping I won't be need to do that *fingers crossed*

Endgame Tension

Something that's been a problem all along is that as you fill up the sphere slots with planets (for example), then Survey and Colonize become largely worthless. Similarly, as you fill up the tech slots, Research isn't really needed anymore. Near the end game you get to a point where there are a couple specific things that need to happen, and for several players, there's nothing relevant left to do. This is always disappointing; the game action needs to stay relevant the entire game!

I have two ideas to address that issue, and I'm torn as to which I think might be better for this kind of game:

Option 1. If you win, total everyone's personal Empire scores and refer to a chart to see how you did

Option 2. In order to win, require a minimum number of total Empire points (add everyone's personal Empire score for this)

One thing I like about option 1 is that players who struggle to finish the sphere in time could feel good about just accomplishing the task, and they don't have to worry about how "well" they did, while players who can consistently finish the sphere could still have a higher score to shoot for. Another thing is that you don't need to see the points as you play, which means you don't have to track people's level 2 tech buys so you know they have 2 "invisible" points.

A couple things I like about option 2 are that requiring the condition may keep players involved who prefer a pass/fail sort of game end, but are competent enough to easily complete the sphere. This can also be used as a difficulty tuning knob: for an easier game, use a smaller total score requirement; for a harder game, use a larger score requirement. In addition, this format could allow (or possibly even encourage) plays such as "you are set up to ship a lot, why don't you do that and rake in some points, while we concentrate on completing the planets and techs for the sphere". I don't know why, but that feels cooperative-y to me. On the down side, I feel like I'd want the Empire scores to be state-complete (you could walk up mid-game and count them), and having a level 2 tech in your deck complicates that... so I'd either live it not being state complete, or I'd not count the techs, which seems weird to me.

I really don't know which way to go here. But either way, I think this score reckoning will help keep the game action relevant, even as the sphere fills up. I'm open to other suggestions as well, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Tension from Aliens

I think the alien tension is kind of OK, I don't intend to change it further - at least for now. I'll probably revisit once I get the duration down and the endgame tension fixed (see above).

Coalition Actions

In an effort to clean up the Coalition tiles, I removed "Action: RFG an alien Spy card from hand" and simply made that an action on the Spy cards themselves. So as an action, you can play a Spy from hand to get rid of it. That's the same thing, but it makes space on the Coalition tile for something more interesting - though I'm not sure what that should be.

I had made some other tweaks as well... with Basic Coalition, you can spend an action to EITHER Bolster OR Repair a card in the sphere. It then goes on to explain what BOLSTER and REPAIR mean, which is reasonable, but maybe another ability would be better (the rules could go into the rulebook). I do like a good player reference...

I tried a version where the tile let you spend an action to commit a card to the sphere. At that time you could commit for free when you obtain the card, or as an action later, as a way to allow players to use their cards for a while and then push them into the sphere. But we didn't waste actions on that, we just did it for free upon obtaining... so the latest rule is that once per turn you may commit one card to the sphere for free (does not cost an action). I think this works better, so it can probably come off the tiles as an action.  

With Improved Coalition, you can both Repair and Bolster in one action, and you can send a ship to defend a stack. I'm pretty happy with the usefulness of Improved Coalition but I'm worried that the Basic side isn't enough -- any thoughts on that would be appreciated!

EmDo: Coalition progress

A while ago I posted about some early ideas I had for a cooperative mode for Eminent Domain. Well, after iterating through half a dozen playtests, I'm happy to report that Eminent Domain: Coalition has come together pretty well!

Since I haven't said much about it yet, here are some details of the early version of the game:

Players have formed a coalition (United Empires?) and are working on some common project - building a Dyson Sphere - that requires players to commit some planets, resources, and technologies in order to complete it. So each time you flip a planet, you choose to either keep it for yourself (to use is abilities), or commit it to the project (to further the victory condition)

Similarly, if you buy a tech card, you can either keep it, or commit it to the project. And if you trade resources, you put them into resource slots in the project board (I imagine a board with slots for all of these things)

Meanwhile, some semblance of "bad guys" (hostile aliens?) antagonize the players - they can put 'curses' into the players' decks, which makes them less efficient, and whenever a curse comes up, maybe that advances a "bad stuff" track, and every so often on that track a bad thing happens, like maybe some progress on the shared project is reversed

Maybe players could use ships/warfare to get rid of these curses, or spend their actions researching them away. If you don't keep the bad guys in check, then they'll keep coming up, and the bad stuff will get worse and worse!

Perhaps the Bad Guys get a turn after each round of player turns, in which they randomly (or algorithmically) remove a card from the stacks to hurry the game timer along, and also resolve some sort of effect

Players win if the project is completed before 1-2(?) of the stacks are depleted, and lose otherwise

Maybe players gain some kind of benefit for completing quadrants or certain portions of the project

How do the Bad Guys work? Maybe there could be a "Bad Guys" deck, and you'd flip a card from it after each round of player turns (or after each player turn perhaps, so it scales?), it could indicate which card to remove from the stacks, as well as what effect or action the bad guys take. Stuff like...

• If it's a warfare card, they power up their fleet (no attack, but increase their strength)
• If it's a colonize card, then they attack the planets in the project -- VP value is their "hit points," and players can defend by discarding VP tokens that they have collected
• If it's a research card, maybe the same thing but they attack a tech card in the project
• If it's a produce/trade card, then they knock out resources that have been placed in the project
• If it's a survey card, then some other bad thing happens

In any case, you'd reference their strength track to see how hard they attack, and maybe if they don't have anything in the project to target, then players take curses to make up the difference

When curses come up in your hand, maybe the bad guys strength track increases

Also, when bad guy cards come up maybe it's like "each player takes a curse for each [Advanced planet] in their empire, so some variable attack-type cards\

As I said, those were early thoughts. When I finally made a prototype. I stayed pretty true to the original ideas, but of course some things changed and evolved since then.

Of course it was far from perfect, but I was pretty surprised at just how well the initial prototype actually worked. The biggest problem I had was that it took far too long, and even more importantly, it took too long for players to interact with the Sphere. In retrospect, this made some sense -- EmDo is more-or-less an engine building game, and in any engine building game you first build your engine, then switch over to earning VPs. And in this case, filling up the sphere was the VPs of the game, so it makes sense that the first 1/2 or more of the game players would just build up their own empires, then start to deal with the Sphere. This was lame, and worse it rendered many of the "bad guy" (hostile alien) cards mostly ineffectual for half the game. Sure, they removed cards from the stacks, but many had no effect otherwise until you started actually working on the Sphere

Dysen Sphere

The solution here was simple, but took a few iterations to figure out: make the sphere also an engine building type of thing. I had initially thought it might be good to give a reward for finishing a section of the sphere, but that takes too long. I needed a strong, globally good effect, usable by all players, that would encourage them to engage with the sphere from the get-go (or at least very early in the game). I tried a few things, and in the end (well, currently) I settled on this: in each section, I connected 2 planets into a pair. If you complete that pair, then you get a benefit: all players gain access to a role icon. There are 3 sections of the sphere, and 6 role icons, so I dealt 2 role icons to each planet pair during setup, and now when you complete that pair, you decide however you want (as a group, individually, etc) which one comes into play, and the other is removed from the game

Then I connected the level 2 tech card slot in each section with the 3 starting resource slots, and said that when you complete those, you gain an ability. My first draft was "hand size +1" on each of them, but the current version has just one hand size +1, and the other two are the Streamlining ability (each turn you may remove 1 card in had from the game), and "+1 action per turn." I worry that +1 action might be the most obvious best thing, which would be lame, so it might need a nerf or something, but for now that's what I'm going with

In order to win, you need to contribute 2/3/4 planets per section (6/9/12 total) based on player count, one level 2 tech card per section (3 total), and one total level 3 tech card, as well as 9 resources, plus whatever resource slots are on planets committed. And you lose if the aliens attack an empty stack

Coalition Tiles

Like the Fleet, Mining, and Political Influence tiles from the expansions, I added a Coalition tile to the game -- a reference tile that allows you to do a couple of specific things as actions instead of playing a card. And just like the reference tiles from the expansions, you can upgrade to Improved Coalition via research to improve those actions. The actions on this tile give you a way to remove the 'curse' type alien cards from your deck (in an inefficient way), repair damage to the sphere or bolster it against attacks, and send ships to defend the stacks - if the aliens attack a defended stack, instead of taking a card, they remove the ship defending it. 

Hostile Aliens

The antagonistic force that challenges the players is a deck of Hostile Alien cards. Every so often (originally once after each round of player turns, but more recently I've tried effectively every 3 player turns, using the old Guards mechanism from All For One for 4 players), you draw a card from the Hostile Aliens deck and resolve it:

1. Note the stack that gets attacked. Remove a card in that stack from the game (unless that stack is defended, in which case remove the defending fighter instead). If that stack was empty (defended or not), game over -- the players lose.
2. Resolve effect printed on the card -- increase the Alien Strength track, attack a certain type of planet (in the sphere and in all Empires), attack all cards in a particular section of the sphere, attack the players (giving them all some 'curse' cards), attack permanent techs/techs in the sphere, or reshuffle the discards (and then maybe draw/resolve another card or two).

Whenever the aliens attack you, you take Alien Spy cards into your discard pile. When these come up in your hand, of course they don't help you -- they have no actions or role icons. Also, whenever they are discarded from your hand, you must increase the alien strength track. So they are pretty bad, especially if you ignore them and build up a handful in your deck. Your Coalition tile allows you to remove 1 of the Spies from the game as an action, and of course a Research action can remove up to 2 of them from the game

A newer rule I added in an attempt to disincentive to leaving the sphere empty too long was that they get stronger (advance the strength track) whenever they try to attack some type of card in the sphere, and there is none. I thought maybe that way if players don't build int he sphere, the aliens will get really strong really fast

Damage to the Sphere

My original thought was that when the aliens attacked the sphere, they would do so with strength based on the strength track, they would deal more damage the stronger they were. Then the VP value of the card being attacked would be the card's "hit points" - the damage it could take before being destroyed. But that led to some problems, and things like Bolster and Repair being equivalent

I figured out a better way, so the new rule is that the VP value of a card in the sphere is its defense, and the aliens damage the card only if their strength (per the track) is greater than or equal to the card's defense. Therefore it pays to Bolster -- you might be preventing multiple damage by keeping the card's defense out of reach of the alien strength for longer. And it still pays to repair, assuming that there's some down side to having a damaged card in the sphere

On that note, originally damage meant the card could be destroyed, reversing your progress. This felt pretty harsh, so I looked for something different. Since then, damage has just been something that you need to remove in order to win. So if a card got damaged, then you couldn't win unless you repaired it by the end of the game. But I wanted players to feel pressure to repair damage sooner rather than later, or risk some bad thing happening, so the new rule I am going to try in the next playtest is this: If a damaged card gets damaged again, then something bad happens. For starters I'll try "destroy it"

I'm pretty excited about this new damage format, with reasons to bolster cards before they get damaged, and reasons to repair them if they do (note that you could leave a card damaged for a while, and it's not bad unless that card gets successfully attacked again)

TTS Prototype

That's a long, rambling summary of where this cooperative mode currently stands. I think it's very promising, but it'll take a lot of testing and data to get all the details nailed down, and I have several big comments/ideas from my playtesters that I'm still considering. I'll post again in the future when I have more news about this. In the meantime, here's a screenshot of the TTS mod for the game :)

Playtesters welcome

I'd be happy to have fans of Eminent Domain give this cooperative mode a try! Let me know if you're interested, I could share the TTS mod, and maybe I could put together print-and-play files if anyone were so inclined

Currently Active designs - Taiko Kiri, EmDo: Coalition, The Great Goballoon Race, The Sixth Realm, Isle of Adventure

 I feel like I'm overdue a blog post discussing the games I've been working on lately. Ideally, I'll revisit each of these with a dedicated post in the near future, but here are the most recent projects I've been playtesting:

Taiko Kiri

In this co-design with my friend Steve, players are rebuilding Japan during reunification. It's a tile laying game where each round you place a tile into a common grid, and then either gain resources, or spend resources to start a project. Projects are scoring opportunities who's value depends on the configuration of the shared board. 

You can have two active projects, so whenever you get a third, you must score one of them for its current value. Most of the projects can increase in value over the course of the game, so there's some juicy decisions to be made with regard to which project to take on, when to score it, and when to keep working on it.

In addition, whenever you start a project, you add buildings to the board at the corners of the tiles, creating a network. There's a global network bonus based on the size and configuration of your network.

This game strikes me as having a similar scope to something like Cascadia, or Tiny Towns. I'm excited to think the game might be that approachable, and I hope other people find it as fun as I do. My only real concern at the moment is that it seems to take kind of a long time, but maybe it's not too bad. 

EmDo: Coalition

I thought I was done with expansion content for Eminent Domain, but a few months ago I figured out a way to add a cooperative mode to the game. That seems interesting and different enough that it's worth pursuing. The way it works is that you play Emmet Domain as normal, however instead of counting influence points, there is a group project that you're working on: building is a Dyson Sphere. Anytime you flip a planet or buy a technology card, you may choose to keep it for yourself as normal, or commit it to the Sphere. The players win together if they are able to complete the Sphere in time. Meanwhile hostile aliens are hassling the players, so you must build your engine, fend off the hostile aliens, and complete the project before time runs out.

I'm happy to say that this idea seemed to work right off the bat. Of course, I had to iterate a bit to make the details work, but the general format was pretty good. Probably the biggest hurdle, which Steve helped me get over with a great suggestion, was giving players incentive to add things to the Sphere early, rather than just build up their own engines until later, then putting work in on the communal project. The answer is to make contributing to the Sphere it's own sort of communal engine - once certain groups of cards have been added, *all* players gain access to extra icons or special abilities.

The most recent change I made had to do with player scaling... In a 4-player game, with the Aliens acting as another player, I felt like there needed to be more cards in each stack, like there would be in a 5--player game (according to the Escalation setup rules). Fortunately, Rio Grande intends to put Escalation in the same box as the base game, so anyone playing the new edition would necessarily have those 5p cards to add to the stacks. However, what happens if we want to play the co-op mode with 5? Then I had a new thought: borrowing a trick from an old version of All For One, I added an Alien marker to the game. In a 4-player game, it would start with the last player in turn order. Anytime it's your turn, and you hold the Alien marker... GUARDS! You'd resolve the aliens, then pass the marker to your right, so the aliens would get one turn for every three player turns, rather than every 4 player turns. I'm not sure whether to also use it in 2p, 3p, or 5p games, but so far it's worked alright the one time I tried it at 4p!

The Great Goballoon Race

Based on a race algorithm that I originally came up with when thinking of kid's games to play with Corbin, and inspired by the recent award-winning Challengers! (which has decisions punctuated by an algorithmic resolution phase), this game is about a hot air balloon race. But the players are not racing the balloons, rather the various high fantasy denizens (elves, dwarves, etc) are racing, and they have disallowed goblins. So when it's time for the annual balloon race, the goblin clans get together and have their own contest... As chieftain of a goblin clan, your goal is to toss goblins onto the balloons that you think will win the race. However, the more goblins hanging off a balloon, the slower it moves.

I had a little trouble making this mechanism into an actual game until I got that last idea, that backing a balloon actually reduces its chances of winning, from somebody's comment on Discord. Now I think the game actually works pretty well. It's kind of swingy with wild twists of fate, but I think that's good for a game like this.

There are five balloons, and to begin each round you deal an effect card to each. Then players simultaneously choose which one balloon to toss a goblin onto. Once these are revealed, from left to right you resolve each one. Every balloon with at least one incoming goblin has its effect occur once, then the incoming goblins board the balloon. Once all incoming goblins have been resolved, race cards are dealt per my race algorithm: Flip up four cards from a deck of 10 (2 cards for each balloon). For each card that comes up, that balloon moves forward. If that balloon is at high altitude, it moves six spaces. Middle altitude, it moves four spaces. Low altitude, it only moves two spaces. Altitude is determined by the number of goblins on the balloon - 3 or more drag the balloon down from high altitude to medium, 5 or more drag it down to low altitude. This way, adding your goblins to a balloon makes it more likely you'll control that balloon in case it finishes the race, but also less likely it will finish the race first.

At the end of any round if a balloon has crossed the finish line, check to see if anybody has won. The winner is the player with the single most goblins, in total, on all balloons that have crossed the finish line at the end of any given round. If a player has the single most, they win. If not, keep playing. So far it seems at least half the games go until 2 or 3 balloons have crossed the finish line.

The Sixth Realm

Back in November when I first played the heavily developed version of Deities & Demigods, The Six Realm, I was a little worried because not only was the game a lot heavier than what I had designed originally, but it was also kind of messy. I didn't feel like it was really finished enough to be going to crowdfunding that month. 

Fortunately, they had decided to delay this game's kickstarter launch until their previous project had fully shipped, which meant there was more time. I passed on my biggest concerns and ideas to the developer, and he took most of them to heart. I recently received an updated version, the version he says went to reviewers, and it was a lot cleaner. As yet I have not played a full game of The Sixth Realm, because it's taken about 45 minutes for the rules and about 45 minutes to play the first round (of three), and I just haven't had time in my sessions to play a full game.

My original design was kind of like a deck learning game with a common deck. This version eschews the deck of cards, and instead has almost like a rondel mechanism, but the result is similar. Each turn you'll activate one of the guilds (either the active guild, or one of the adjacent guilds if you pay a resource). Each guild has its own set of actions, more or less flavored towards a particular part of the game. For example, the merchant's guild has to do with resources; resetting them, gaining new ones, etc. There are six guilds, and you'll probably be trying to specialize in some combination of them each game.

Isle of Adventure 

I've met with Dan a couple of times about Isle of Adventure, and we've spoken at length about how it could work. There are a few ways that parts of it could go, and the last time we met I think we had a good idea for something to try, now it's just a matter of getting a prototype together and trying it. Dan is working on the prototype cards, and I will be putting it all into tabletop simulator when it's ready, then I'll be able to start testing it at my regular sessions.