KublaCon 2008

I went to KublaCon again this year. I had a really good time hanging out with Chris Hillary, Andrew Schoonmaker, Rick Holzgrafe, Derk and Aldie from BGG, Doug Garrett, JC Lawrence, and others. I also played a lot of games, some of which were very good, very interesting, or both!

Reading Railroad didn't do so hot in the design contest, but I expected that. I was a little disappointed in just how poorly it went over though, talking to the playtesters. One commented "I know what you're trying to do, you're trying to hit 2 markets." For some reason that comment hits me like an insult... I hate marketing, and I am not trying to weasel some shenanigans by trying to appeal to 2 types of gamers, trying to trick both groups into buying my game, which is the connotation I get out of that comment. Rather I am trying to make a fun, cool game - and in this case I think Reading Railroad could have "cross-market appeal." I expect some word game players would like it, and some eurogame players would like it. Sure, in either market by itself it might not be a smash hit, but that's not the point of the game. I did glean some good information which I hope to use to improve the game, some of which ties into things I already wanted to try. I think the game is good enough to continue to work on.

Rick Holzgrafe's entry Spatial Delivery did win the contest, and boy did it! Asmodee asked for a copy to review - they might want to publish it! Congrats to Rick on that! I remember when Rick first conceived that game for one of the Board Game Designers Forum Game Design Showdowns.

As for general gaming, I'm looking into a game purchase. There are some problems with this idea - some of the stuff I want isn't in stock at the moment. Also, I'm not sure I want to buy some of the games for one reason or other - I may have a blog post about that soon. I've been playing Container a lot, and I've grown to really like it.

Design-wise I've got some changes to make to Reading Railroad, and I've got some new ideas for that Airline game I'd mentioned. besides that, just more of the same. No movement on Winds of Fate, Dynasty, or Hot and Fresh :(

Precise planning vs Conditional planning

I'm coming to realize that there are 2 different types of planning you can do... Precise planning and Conditional planning.

Precise planning is when you have all the information you can, and the only variables are player-created chaos: what will the other players do?

Conditional planning is when there is an element to plan around that you do not know for sure, based on chance. Often you can use probability to decide how to go about planning around this element.

Some gamers prefer to have all the information, they prefer to plan precisely, dealing only with the chaos of the other players' actions. Other gamers much prefer preparing for the random element as well. Let's look at some examples...

Railroad Tycoon is one of my favorite games, so I'll use it as an example. There are 2 instances of Conditional planning in RRT:

• Random cubes which come onto the board via City Growth/Urbanization/New Industry
  
• Whether or not a particular Major Line or Service Bounty card will come up.

Under the standard rules, when someone adds cubes to the board, 2 random cubes are drawn from the bag. The result of this could be that a player in the late game chooses City Growth and either gets a couple of 2 point deliveries, or a couple of 6 point deliveries. At that point in the game, 2 point deliveries are fairly worthless, while 6 point deliveries are great. The random draw could decide the result of the game for that player (1st vs 3rd). The obvious answer to that is "build your network so that no matter what cube comes up, you'll have a decent delivery." That's a good point, and an interesting consideration when planning your network, but the problem still remains - suppose my opponent doesn't plan his network as well, but lucks out on the draw, and gets an 8 point boon?

Similarly, you can build track such that you can connect Baltimore and Toledo, Atlanta and Richmond, New York and Chicago, etc... and then whether you win or lose the game can come down to whether the Major Line card you've prepared for comes up. The player in the Southeast could get an 8 point boost because the Atlanta-Richmond card came up early, while the player who's built from New York to Kansas City is in last place because that major line never came up. While it's true you can't expect any particular card to come up. just the benefit gained by a Major Line coming up early in the area you're dominating is a huge advantage, and without knowing which Major Line will come up or when, there's no way to know where to build so as to take advantage of that boon.

Recently I tried playing Railroad Tycoon with a couple of variants to turn some of the Conditional planning into Precise planning:

• Remove Major Lines from the deck and make them all available from the outset.
  
• Display 2 cubes from the bag to be used whenever the next 2 "random" cubes are needed.

I enjoyed both of these variants because I think I prefer Precise planning to Conditional. It removes some of the uncertainty and maybe the need to build your network such that any cube is good, but it adds the ability to decide if and when to take actions which add cubes to the board, and where to put them if you do. It also takes the luck-of-the-draw out of the Major Lines, which are worth a significant number of points. I might like to try beginning the game with the Service Bounties all available as well. They don't seem as bad as the Major Lines though because they aren't worth as many points, and when they come up they can often be sniped by any player, not just the player who happens to have built in the area.

Reiner Knizia tends toward Conditional planning in many of his games. Ra for example is a perfect example: you evaluate each auction lot and make the decision to bid, or to wait for a better lot. This is something of a press your luck mechanism because whether the lot increases or decreases in value and by how much is entirely based on chance, not on player actions. A friend of mine cannot stand that, and feels "why should I even play if I'm just guessing if this is the right play or not?" While it's clear I prefer Precise planning to conditional planning, I don't mind as much as that friend seems to - I like evaluating the lot in Ra and thinking about the chances it'll improve. I likened my friend's play to "being greedy."

I think the main difference between Conditional and Precise planning is the idea of "working with what you've got," and it's tied to the difference between Tactical and Strategic thinking. In a game with precise planning, you can plan out a long term strategy, and your tactical play can deal with the chaos brought in by the actions of your opponents. In a game with Conditional planning you have to play a more tactical game, and there's less (if any) semblance of a coherent long term strategy.

What now?

Since I sent Reading Railroad off to the KublaContest, all weekend I've been feeling sort of weird about games - both design and just gaming in general. Maybe it's anxiety because I don't feel like Reading Railroad is as polished as some of my prior submissions, or maybe I just don't know what I want to think about now.

I have lots of ideas to choose from, but I think I might (finally) get to finishing a prototype of Dynasty. As I keep saying, the game is nearly done and just needs to be tested, and the prototype is nearly complete as well. Nothing has happened with this since those previous posts, but I think if I concentrate on it I can have a working prototype - I just need to stop getting distracted by other ideas!

This is why I like collaboration - there's always another person to sort of keep you honest. It's easy to let a design slip to the back burner if there's not another person mentioning it and thinking about it all the time (or even just occasionally).

Reading Railroad prototype pics

I decided to take some pics of the Reading Railroad prototype before sending it off to the KublaContest today. Here's a picture of the board the way it might look midway through a game:



And here is a Player Board. The Purple player is about to spell CLAWS for 9 coin. So far he's collected Q, U, I, K, T, and E, and bought a Factory. He needs a C and to make sure he have 5 cities connected if he wants to score 25 points for QUICK. If he also get an H and has 8 cities connected by the end of the game, he'll score 25 for QUICK and 9 for THE. At this point in the game Purple draws 3 Resource Letters at the end of his turn, 1 normally, and 2 more since he's filled up 2 rows of City Tiles.

Finally we have a close up of the Factory tile. Factories help you draw Resource Letters faster, which in turn helps you spell bigger words each turn and earn more Coins.


And now to make a final pass at the rules, pack up the prototype, and head to the post office!

Reading Railroad Rules

I've updated the rules for Reading Railroad after Tuesday's testing and brainstorming. This is going to have to do for the KublaCon game design contest. I feel like this game isn't as solid or "finished" as previous entries All for One or Wizard's Tower, but at least I think it's refreshing and new as far as games go. I guess I'll have to wait until the end of the month to find out what the judges think!

EDIT: Please feel free to nitpick the rules and leave a comment on this post as to what needs fixing! Typos, inconsistencies, etc.

EDIT AGAIN, 5/10/08: I updated the rules for submission to the contest, and uploaded them again. If you want to see the new version you can check that out now.

Ties and Tiebreak Rules

There has been some discussion lately at BGG and in the BGDF.com chat room about ties and tiebreaking rules. Jim Cote referenced an old blog post he'd made on the subject. I guess the big divide is that some players would like designers to include tiebreak rules, so there can be a definitive winner of the game even in the case of a tie. Other players prefer to treat the tie as a shared victory - or no victory.

JC Lawrence asserts that there should be no tiebreaks:

The goal of the game is to win. It provides a measurement of winning or not winning. You either did it or you didn't do it. Binary. There is one winner (or more in ties) and some number of losers.

That was part of the following conversation:
‹sedjtroll› If you and I run a race, and we get the exact same time, but I ran up hill the whole way, and you ran downhill the whole way, which one of us should win that tie?
‹clearclaw› Both of us. We were both competing for the same measurement. The terrain is beside the point.
‹sedjtroll› It's obvious running uphill the whole way is a bigger accomplishment than running downhill.
‹clearclaw› But the accomplishment isn't being measured, only the win.

I on the other hand am of the opinion, as I often am, that it depends. In this case, it depends on the game whether a tiebreak rule to determine a winner in the case of a tie score is appropriate.

A "win" is a measure of accomplishment, it has no other meaning. The game system defines the things to be accomplished. "I won, therefore I accomplished winning," while a valid statement, is not what I'm talking about - that's a different instance/use of the word "accomplishment." Having won a game, by definition, means having accomplished something else - as defined by the game system. Saying that that something else is "having collected the most VPs" in most games is meaningless - just restating the words "the winner has accomplished winning." The game system rewards certain accomplishments (often with VPs), and by winning you have accomplished whatever goals were defined by the game. In some games at least, there are multiple ways defined by the game system to "accumulate the most points;" multiple things that can be accomplished in order to win... and some of those accomplishments are bigger than others.

Therefore I think in many cases a tiebreak is perfectly reasonable. Like in my footrace example above, given the same time on the stopwatch, the winner of the race should be the runner who had the more difficult terrain (where difficulty of terrain is defined by the game system - in the runner example it would be defined by the physics of running).

Situations wherein a tiebreak rule is appropriate and justified:
* One strategic path is "harder" than another, or is otherwise encouraged by the designer
* Scoring is not fine grained enough to distinguish a winner when the delta is very small (the scores come out the same, even if one's theoretically incrementally higher than another)
* The game is intended for a competitive or tournament environment
* Games in which the goal can be reached more/less efficiently

Some people complain about arbitrary tiebreaks. I sympathize with those people to an extent, but I also wonder if their idea of "arbitrary" really applies.

A tiebreak rule can be used to subtly counterbalance a favorable (or unfavorable) starting position, much the same way that the first player in some games starts with fewer actions in the first round, fewer points, or less money than the later players. Nobody complains about those rules being arbitrary.

Tiebreak rules can be used to reward a player for accomplishing the game's goals more efficiently than another player - to finish with the same score, but with resources to spare.

Tiebreak rules can also be used by a designer to show a preference for a particular strategic path - be that for thematic reasons, or because that path was the one the designer thought most interesting.

It's important to note that a tiebreak rule is more/less important depending on how likely ties are to occur in the game. If ties occur frequently, then omitting a tiebreak rule would be unsatisfactory for the players. Also in that case, since it's likely to happen, playing such that you can win the tiebreak is a valid and important strategy. If ties are unlikely, then it may not seem worth your while to secure a decent tiebreak condition. However if you then lose on tiebreaks, you ought not feel slighted by such an "arbitrary tiebreak rule!"

I have little sympathy for the "arbitrary tiebreak" detractors because arbitrary or not (and it's not clear the rule is actually arbitrary to begin with), the rule is there from the outset and everybody knows it. The only case in which I'd agree with these detractors is in a game where the tiebreak is based on a random event, outside the control of the player - where a player could win on tiebreaks sort of on accident, through no fault of their own. I prefer a tiebreak rule which takes into account the actual play of the game, and rewards a player for playing accordingly - whatever that might mean for the particular game.

Reading Railroad 5/6/08 playtest #4 - 2p

Lowski and I played 2 games of 2p Reading Railroad last night, and I tried a few variations to the rules which I've been discussing over the last few posts. Seems like a lot of progress was made, but maybe that's just because it's crunch time and I need to get this in the mail this week (eep!)

I tried the following configuration:
* Start with 3 letters and $3
* Buy Vowels (cost: $1, income: $1/2/3... per tile used)
* Factory = 4 city tiles, cost $10
* Endgame trigger = 15 City tiles
* Add partial scoring - 2vp per letter not in a word, up to LN
* !$! tile = Pay $1 or discard each letter tile in hand.

Starting with $3 and 3 Letter tiles seemed good. I had been starting with 3 tiles and no money, and I didn't like how some people had a word in front of them and some people had a pile of vowels. Starting with $3 is good because you can always build first turn, even if you don't have a word to make.

The biggest structural change I tried was probably Buying Vowels. I took out all of the vowels from the letter tiles. I also reduced the tiles to 2 of each letter (3 for the letters that had 4 or more in a Scrabble set). I kept the 4 Investor (!$!) tiles in. When building a word, you can use your tiles, and you can buy vowels for $1 apiece. You get paid for the tiles you use, then you pay for the vowels, so you can build a word even if you are broke. For example, if you have WDG you can make the word W-E-D-G-E, collecting $1+2+3 for the W, D, and G, then paying $2 for the 2 E's - for a net profit of $4. I liked this format a lot, it reduced the "can't make a word" factor tremendously, and it was kinda fun.

The Investor tile rule was bad. I finally drew one the turn I spent all of my cash, and buy the new rule I would have had to discard my hand. I think I had 4 tiles in hand at the time, and discarding them would have been pretty bad (one might argue I should have spent some!) In retrospect I might have forgotten that I wouldn't have to discard tiles drawn along with the !$! tile, but i didn't like the rule anyway... we brainstormed a little for a replacement rule and I decided that since the !$! tile was causing so much trouble, and wasn't doing what it was supposed to do, maybe better would be to remove it, and simply have a hand size limit to keep people from drawing and hoarding too many tiles.

After last Thursday's playtest I was worried about drawing too many tiles and making 7+ letter words turn after turn. A hand size would put a cap on that altogether. I decided to remove the !$! tiles and use a hand limit of 5 tiles, since I shifted the pay scale up*.

* You may have noticed I shifted the pay scale back up to $1 for the first tile, $2 for the second, etc. (rather than $0/1/2...) - this is because when buying a vowel, a 3 letter word such as D-O-G would pay $0 otherwise! now it pays $2.

I later decided maybe 6 would be a better hand size. I might worry that you could make $21 words and that would be too much, but that would be reduced by having to buy vowels (probably 2 or 3), and if you can only draw 4 tiles a turn then it won't happen every turn anyway.

Our first game was pretty cutthroat from the outset, Lowski grabbed a V and an E, going for OVER early, so I jumped in and took the other 2 letters he needed from the area. There are plenty of City tiles to go around though, especially O's and R's so he was able to finish that word eventually. He ended up with 13 cities in his largest network, $19 in coin, and he spelled FOX, LAZY, and OVER for a total of 19+9+16+16+2+2 (the +2+2 is from the 2 "unused" cities in his largest network) = 64 points. I ended up with 11 cities in my largest network, $12, and spelled JUMPED and BROWN for 12+36+25=73.

So I won by 9 points, and i spelled 2 bigger words than he did, though he did finish 3 words total, and had a larger network than mine. I think that's a reasonably close game, and was pretty happy with the outcome. The rules were sort of in flux during the game, so who knows how differently we would have played "for real."

Our second game was different. We continued to play without the !$! tiles, and all the same rules, but we allowed the Largest Network to be 'cheesed' - if you had built in adjacent regions on different builds such that it looked on the board like you had a contiguous network, then that counts as a contiguous network. I think that's horrible, but with the board as is I think the rule pretty much has to be that way.

In the first game nobody bought a factory, because we were after some of the same letters. this time I decided to go the factory route ans see how it worked. Lowski went for RAILROAD right off the bat. I played in various places around the board, collecting 2 City tiles at a time on turns 1 and 2. On turn 3 I couldn't afford a Factory, so I built another connection for 2 more city tiles. Turn 4 I could have afforded a Factory, but it seemed strictly better to get another 2 city tiles (cheaper, and I could use the City tiles). Turn 5 I did buy a factory and started to draw 4 tiles a turn. I never did have a 6-tile play, in fact the only time I had 6 tiles I couldn't use them all at once. I was raking in 5 or 9 points a turn, and I was still interested in placing track because I had the word BROWN (could have gotten QUICK instead if I'd tried). At one point I could have grabbed 2 city tiles and ended the game, but instead I went for connections to get my 25 points from BROWN, but in discussing it later it's possible that triggering the endgame might have kept Lowski from spelling RAILROAD (rather from connecting enough cities for it).

Instead I got my letter, and stopped building for a couple turns, trying to build up more Coin. The pressure was on Lowski (who was now winning) to end the game before my coin racked up too much. In the end, Lowski had 10 cities connected, $11, and 68 points from RAILROAD and 2 more tiles at 2 apiece. I had only 6 cities connected, spelled BROWN for 25 (+2 for an extra city), but I had $29 in coin. final score 79-56, Lowski destroyed me!

I think the point value for the big words (READING and RAILROAD is too high, and I think I've decided to bump them down to 40 and 50 respectively (from 49 and 64). these are nice, round numbers. I might also award partial credit for READ, RAIL and ROAD (16 points apiece), although that sort of defeats the purpose of having other words. Lowski mentioned something similar to one of the hidden goal words I'd already contemplated - he thought they could be like the Tycoon cards from RRT - you get one at the beginning, and you score if you make that word out of your City tiles in addition to the words you are already going for.

I'm also considering, with the Factories being so expensive now, I might try making them give +1 tile draw in addition to their filling up your board** with city tiles 9for more tile draws). I think with the hand limit and the cost of Factories that might be ok.

** One other thing I did last night was create player boards (with Lowski's help on Autocad), and Factory tiles as well. Maybe I'll take pictures and post them before I send the game off. The Factory tiles are sweet.

Reading Railroad playtest #3

Last time I said I wanted to try the game without the investor tile because I thought maybe it wasn't necessary - maybe the natural incentives to build track would be enough to keep people from hoarding (or to punish people appropriately for hoarding). I also thought I'd raise the payout by sliding the scale over a notch (1/2/3/4... for each letter in your word rather than 0/1/2/3...). I tried both of those modifications last Thursday, and I also tried a modification to the Factory: I made it a single tile (counting as 1 tile toward ending the game) rather than 4, and I made it give an additional tile draw. So in effect, the Factory became 1.25 City tiles toward letter drawing, but only 1 City tile toward game ending. I still made them cost $4, a completely arbitrary number that I made up when I first thought of Factories and not based on anything real at all.

The sum total of all of those changes was disaster, which I could have predicted, but I wasn't sure so I wanted to see it in action. Especially with no investor tile, people just bought factories as fast as they could (I didn't limit it to 1 per player), and were quickly drawing 5 tiles a turn, making big words worth a ton of coin... I had clearly overcorrected for the problem I saw before of people being drained of all their coin all the time.

It was so bad I aborted the game and started again. This time I put the Investor tile back in, and made a limit on how many factories you're allowed to have (no more than cities in your largest network). that seemed like a fair limiter (you should have to have cities to put your factories in, right?), and it meant you couldn't buy a factory until you've at least built 1 link, which is kinda nice. But at $4 they were still a must-buy, and so people bought them as soon as they could, ant here was no good reason not to. One player avoided it for a while, but decided eventually that that was ridiculous and gave in to the temptation. I also shifted the pay scale back because I didn't see any benefit to the higher payouts.

Things I learned about Factories are...
- I still think they are a good feature, but they need to be implemented correctly
- They need to take up more of your city tile space, to ensure you're not going to score a big endgame bonus if you get the Factories, because you should be earning more coin.
- They need to cost more... a lot more. I noticed that a sort of average income was 6 coin a turn (a 4 letter word), which I feel is a good number to keep in mind when setting costs. In this case, a $4 Factory can be financed with a single turns worth of word building, which means you're not giving up much in order o get the factory. you could instead build onto the board and get a letter tile, or pay the $4 and get the Factory, which is like 5 letter tiles (under the rules we were using). A far better cost might be $10, which means you have to spend at least 2 turns not laying track to build up to the factory. I also think the factory will go back to being a size 4 tile (equivalent to 4 City tiles) for simplicity and to fill up your City tile slots, and there will be a rule that you can't buy one if it'll end the game. So at $10 you're spending 2 or 3 turns getting "4 City tiles" which you can't use in endgame, vs getting 2 or 3 that you can - and in return you get to draw extra letter tiles.

This version of the Factory will also put a natural limit on the number you can buy - no buying 4 factories and drawing 6 tiles a turn! People were drawing way too much and getting far too many 7+ letter words on Thursday.

The Investor didn't help too much, because I exempted 3 tiles to keep people from getting screwed who weren't trying to hoard tiles. The problem was that (a) when you draw 6 or 7 tiles a turn, you don't have to try to hoard tiles, you just draw all you need, and (b) if you're making huge words, you can easily afford the paltry taxes. I found myself thinking that maybe Scott's idea to have the Tax tile affect all players was a better idea for that reason, but there are all kinds of problems with that rule as well.

A suggestion was given to me that you have to (or can) discard tiles you can't (or don't want to) pay for when the investor comes up. This removes the whole idea of Debt, which is fine with me, and it still has the effect of costing you potential points if you're holding the tiles. In fact, discarding a tile instead of a coin could be giving up even more points. but it allows you to discard "bad" letters and not have to pay for them. I think I might go with that rule next time. I might try to find a way to make the investor not hurt if you draw it early, like before you have been able to make a word. Oooh... maybe it should depend on your City tiles... like you pay X coin, where X is your number of City tiles. If you haven't made a word yet, you pay nothing. And if you buy a factory, this boosts your tax payment up by 4. That might be neat!

I also think players should start with a couple coins to help jump start the early game. I'll try 3 tiles and 3 coins per player.

Oh, another suggestion a friend had was that the letter tiles could all be consonants, and you can make whatever word you want, but you had to buy the vowels you want to use - probably at $1 apiece. you'd only get paid for the tiles you use, so the word C-A-T would pay out $1+$2-$1=$2 total. For this system I might slide the pay scale back up, lest C-A-T pay $0+$1-$1=$0! Players would start with some coins to make this feasible, and the rule would probably be that you collect the income and then pay for the vowels, so if you're broke you can still make a word.

I'm liking the "buy a vowel" idea more and more over time, and I hope to try that out sometime. I'm running out of time to be finding new things to try!

Interview with Pandemic designer on Google Talks

Jim Cote made a blog post about Pandemic, of which he's a big fan. I don't dislike the game either, it seems to me to be the best cooperative game yet because it really seems to encourage teamwork better than other games of that type (Shadows over Camelot and Lord of the Rings being some of the big ones).

Jim linked to this Google Talk interview with the designer of Pandemic, which is 50 minutes long, and is really interesting. He talks about the design process he went through, some of his experiences talking with publishers about the game, and then answers questions about it. It was a very cool interview, and on top of that, it's neat to see board gaming addressed in a sort of "mainstream" forum such as Google Talk. Admittedly, the target audience of Google Talk may not be mainstream America, but rather techy or tech savvy people who get their news from the internet rather than TV and the newspaper... but as far as board gaming goes, this seems like a big step outward!

Reading Railroad updates - in effect

Well, I just finished updating the City tiles for Reading Railroad. The endgame scoring phrase THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER LAZY DOGS - READING RAILROAD has the following letter distribution:
A:4 - - - J:1 - - - S:1
B:1 - - - K:1 - - - T:1
C:1 - - - L:2 - - - U:2
D:4 - - - M:1 - - - V:1
E:4 - - - N:2 - - - W:1
F:1 - - - O:5 - - - X:1
G:2 - - - P:1 - - - Y:1
H:1 - - - Q:1 - - - Z:1
I:3 - - - R:5

I began by using 1 City tile for every letter instance in the phrase. That's 49 City tiles. Then I added one of each letter, so there's enough to go around - enough for at least 2 people to get each word - for a total of 75 City tiles. I fear this may not be enough of each letter, especially the letters that only appear on 2 City tiles. I guess we'll see.

On the up-side, there were exactly 75 City tiles in the original set, so I didn't have to compromise or print more tiles!

The next playtest - hopefully Thursday night at game night - I think I may try it without the investor tile and see how that goes. I've been thinking that the rules for the investor tile may be more weighty than they're worth. I'll miss the tension as you sweat out your draw, but I'm curious if the whole mechanism is really needed for the game. I might also try bumping up the pay scale so the first tile you use is worth 1 instead of 0... so a 2 letter word is worth 3 coin instead of 1, and a 5 letter word nets you 15 coin instead of 10. This may be too much, another "we'll see" type of thing. The reason is because I want people to be able to lay track, even if they can only manage a tiny 2-letter word. The pay scale rewards longer words, so you'll probably always try to make the longest word you can, with the possible exception of holding back and going for an even longer word.

That brings up a question... without an investor tile to punish people for hoarding letters, will a player simply not make a word until they have an 8+ letter word on their 'rack'? I figure that might not be turn efficient. Maybe I should try that out and see how it goes. I think more likely a player will buy a Factory (or 2?) and then make 5 and 6 letter words every other turn or so.

Quick RR thought

The significance of the Largest Network is an idea that I think drives a lot of interesting stuff in Reading Railroad - you get more tiles faster if you build all over the board, not next to your existing network. So rewarding a player for their largest network is a perfect balance for that, but how to reward it?

The original/current rule is that you can't use more City tiles in the endgame than you have cities in your largest network. This is a great idea, and will likely remain to the final version of the game. I've been pondering other potential rewards instead or in addition to that, such as...

* Earn 1vp per city in your largest network
* When building words during the game, you can only use as many resource letters as you have City tiles in your largest network.

That last one just occurred to me - might it give players incentive to build 1 bigger network, so they can make bigger words and earn more Coin? Would it only effect the 'wordsmith' who will be able to make bigger words? Is it important to force the wordsmith to build a big network?

The reason it occurred to me was because I was thinking about the possibility of a player ignoring City tiles altogether and simply going all-out for Coins. That player would want to get some city tiles in order to increase their Tile income and make bigger words, but after a while they might just ignore the board altogether, which is kind of boring. Maybe that's only bad if it proves to be a winning strategy...

Anyway, it was just an idea. I don't think I'll monkey with that particular mechanic until several other things are worked out.

Political themed Area Control idea

Last Friday I was thinking about Area Control mechanics, and a game idea snuck into my head. I just re-read it, and here's a couple things that snuck in this time...

There could be some sort of Motion cards - representing an effect or event. A committee would vote on whether or not it would come into play. There could be different categories of Motion, and for each there'd be a different committee. When it comes time to vote, players would choose PASS/FAIL simultaneously, and when revealed the vote would be tallied. Each member of the committee would vote according to how his controlling lobbyist (player) indicated. Perhaps players would get some victory points at that time as well if their members voted in the majority - I could see someone putting a member in the committee at the last minute, not necessarily to influence the outcome, but to sneak a few points if they can manage to vote right.

I could see these Motion cards indicating a time value, which is the number of rounds until the vote occurs. A die or counter could be placed on the card, and each round it could be incremented (or decremented, whatever) until vote time, then the vote occurs and another Motion comes up (or doesn't until next 'term')

A 'term' could be a number of rounds. Actually, maybe better a 'term' is made up of 2 'years' - and a 'year' is made up of several rounds of play. congressmen could advance from level 1 (newbie) in their first year, to level 2 in their second year (worth 1.5 influence perhaps). Then they'd either go away or get re-elected. Maybe better they are level 1 (weak) in their first term, and become stronger if they get reelected.

I had mentioned that the congressmen might be able to be reelected, so they either go away or don't, and maybe you don't know for sure which it'll be. Players could take actions to improve the chances of their congressmen getting reelected... a simple way might be that the general rule is:

Roll 1d6 for each congressman, on a 6 they are reelected, otherwise remove them from the board.

Then via some actions, players could gain +1 modifiers to that die roll, probably for all of their congressmen as opposed to individual ones (just because of the scope of the game). In other words, through some investment, players could end up with Influence that sticks around for a second term, and maybe they carry more clout (are worth more influence) at that point.

Reading Railroad V2 playtest

I finally got a chance to try out the latest version of Reading Railroad! Tyler, Lowski, Michael and I played a game of it last night (before an 8 hour Magic: the Gathering binge *shudder*). The changes worked for the most part, but of course there is still a lot of tuning that needs to be done.

From a previous post:
* Start with 3 tiles in hand
I think this was fine - but 3 out of 4 people could not make a word on the first turn. I feel like the early game is a little boring just drawing 1 tile at a time, but maybe that's OK, as you ramp up to 2 tiles pretty quickly. The worst part about it is when you have all consonants and cannot make a word.

Hmm... I wonder if it wouldn't be good to go the Prolix route and allow any word to be made, and you get paid for the letters in that word that you use - so there's never the "I have no vowels!" case. Is that too much of a ripoff of that wonderful game?

Failing that, I think Reading Railroad needs the standard word game rule that you can dump tiles and replace them, in case the tiles you have simply don't spell anything (Q-F-Z-J).
* Turn options are
- - Make a word, get paid 1/3/6/10/15/21/28 coins for 2/3/4/5/6/7/8 letters
- - Buy track (costs vary) OR a Factory (cost 4 <- who knows if that's good?)
- - Draw tiles (1 + 1/4 city tiles). Factories count as 4 City tiles.
The pay schedule was pretty good. I was thinking that I might even bump it up a notch (so 2 letter words are worth $3) to make sure people can lay track even if they can only make a 2 letter word. Especially when we're only drawing 1 letter a turn. I worry a little that the 15 point 5-letter words in that case would be too many, but it's well worth a try.
* Investor (!!!) tiles only hurt the player drawing.
- - Pay 1 coin/letter, take 1 debt for each letter you can't pay for.
This was certainly better than punishing everyone but the player drawing tiles. The big question that's come up in my mind is whether the investor tiles are even necessary. Their purpose is to keep people from hoarding tiles, but maybe there's built in incentive to not hoard tiles (limited letters on board, maybe limited cheap spots to build), as well as incentive to hoard tiles and make longer words (bigger coin payout). I might try the next game without the Investor tile.

If games are consistently won by the player hoarding tiles and amassing coins rather than by players going for the endgame scoring words, then it might be necessary to add the Investor back in. Another reason to remove the investor is that sometimes the only reason you're "hoarding" tiles is because you have FCZMQ and can't make a word out of them. That's not the kind of thing that ought to be punished. If the investor tile is used, an alternate rule for it would probably be this:

"If you draw an investor tile and have more than 3 (2?) tiles in your hand, then you get 1 Debt chip. At the end of the game, Debt chips are worth negative points - 1 for the first, 2 for the second, 3 for the third, etc. So 4 debt chips would be -10 points."

This does a number of things...
1. Protects the player who has a couple lousy tiles
2. Punished players who hoard tiles, but only really punishes them if they consistently hoard tiles.

So I think it's a better rule. But again, maybe the investor is unnecessary altogether.

EDIT: I think if using the investor tile, draining peoples cash is maybe not the best way to go. I might rather see just the debt chips, meaning an end game penalty, not a mid-game penalty - you risk losing all the cash you've been saving, so what's the point in saving cash?

* Investor (!!!) tiles are replaced
- - Always draw the right number of letter tiles each turn.
This is absolutely better than not. If there is an investor tile, it should get replaced when you draw it. Unless a Coin strategy is super-dominant, this rule could be reversed as a subtle way to hinder it a little. I think people feel cheated if they cannot get their full allowance of tiles though, and I don't want players to feel cheated by the game.

* Game ends when someone collects their 16th City tile from the board.
- - Factories count as 4 City tile toward this.
I'm still not positive I like the game end trigger here. Maybe I'm just bad with game end triggers in general (see: Terra Prime development). I like limiting the number of City tiles players will have, so that endgame scoring won't get too ridiculously out of control, and I like the game ending early enough that it's something of a challenge to connect the 9 or so cities you want to be in your largest network (unless you purposely build together). I like that the Factory fills up your slots, but I don't like that after you have 12 tiles you can end the game at any moment by buying a factory.

I'm thinking that the Factory should be a single tile, taking up 1 space, and it should say "draw 1 extra tile" on it... so it's really 5 tiles with regard to how many resources you draw, but only 1 with regard to ending the game. On the down side, that negates a lot of the nifty "you'll have fewer city tiles to work with" effect. However, that effect isn't as big in a game with targeted endgame words, and you still lose out on a city tile the turn you buy the factory... so maybe it balances itself out. I think I'll try it with the factory being just 1 City tile (instead of 4).

Also, I had allowed only 1 Factory to be bought, because I didn't want someone to be a jackass and buy 4 factories in a row and end the game. With a "smaller" Factory, I could allow more to be bought. Not sure what the costs should be, and whether they should increase or not (to help dissuade people from buying a bunch of factories). Or... maybe 1 Factory is enough, and maybe taking up 4 spaces is good. there could be a caveat that you can't buy a Factory if it'll take you to 16 tiles or more... which would keep the jackass factor down.

* Maximum total City tiles you can use is based on your largest connected network.
This is a great rule, and I think it's one of the solid backbone rules of the game. I think it works well.

* Endgame words are free form.
- - Points are based on number of letters in the word, squared.
- - I still plan on having some sort of targeted endgame words in the end.
Per a prior post, I finally made some endgame scoring words. In that post I detailed what I liked about the words I chose, and what I didn't like. After playing with it once, I am of pretty much the same opinion. Though I think it would be better if there were more overlap between the small (3 letter) words and the big (7/8 letter words) - so if you are going for a big word and you fail to get the whole thing, you could get a sort of partial scoring from the small words. Alternatively, each City tile could be worth 2vp at the end (any tile used in a word is worth 3/4/5/6/7/8 vp, depending on which word) - which would help reward people who got letter tiles but didn't get to use them. It sorta seems like everyone should have almost the same number of letter tiles though, so this really just adjusts the City tile scoring vs the coin scoring, which may or may not be necessary.

As I mentioned, I think the game ought to have some rule allowing a player to dump their tiles and replace them. I think I'd phrase it like this:

"Instead of making a word, you may set aside any number of resource tiles from your hand, draw replacement tiles from the bag, then discard the set aside tiles into the bag. If an !$! tile is drawn this way, pay taxes as normal and replace it."

Then you would still do the build phase and draw phase of your turn as normal. One more thing that was discussed was that hard-to-use letters could have a coin printed on them, rewarding an additional coin when used in a word. Similarly, easy to use letters could have a red number, and when an investor tile is drawn - instead of punishing a player per tile, the player would just add up all their red numbers and pay that amount. This way hard letters like Q and Z would have no Investor penalty associated, and if you save E's and S's then you'd have to pay for it.

In our game it was difficult to get the letters you needed for the endgame scoring, but that's mostly because the distribution of letter on city tiles was completely independent of the distribution of letters in the endgame scoring words. The tiles are definitely going to have to be re-done to better represent what's needed for endgame scoring, so for the 'current' set of words, there need to be more O's and R's for example, and probably at least 2 of each letter, more of commonly used letters.

Area Control mechanics

I was thinking about Reiner Kinizia's upcoming release Municipium (which I don't know much about) and an old favorite of mine In the Shadow of the Emperor. Both are Area Control games where you move your influence around the board. In ItSotE your influence also "ages" and falls off the board, which I find a very interesting twist.

I was wondering how I would go about an Area Control game, and with the thoughts of those other two in mind, the following popped into my head:

Players are lobbyists for special interest groups, with congressmen in their pockets. 'Assign' your congressmen to various committees in an attempt to control them, and earn the benefit of the committee while you control it. Over time Congressmen's terms come up and they go away, or maybe they have some chance of being reelected so they only MAYBE go away.

Regarding committees... maybe each congressman gets a vote, and you might want the same thing out of the committee as one of your opponents, so you don't need majority control of a committee all by yourself yourself to get what you want. I imagine the committees would be in charge of making some kind of decision which would affect the game state, so players would have a stake in what their 'decision' will be.

These were just some thoughts I had, so I thought I'd jot them down in case I ever want to pursue the idea further. for the time being I'm working on Reading Railroad for the KublaContest, and on getting Homesteaders (and Terra Prime?) published.

I'll try this...

I settled on the following for endgame scoring, at least for a first try:



Things I like about it:
* Good distribution of word sizes: 3/3/4/4/4/5/5/6/7/8.

* Uses all letters of the alphabet.

* Reward (letter count squared) increases a lot as the word length increases.

* Largest word is 8 letters, worth 64 points - no scoring 170 or 200 points off a really long word!

Things I don't like about it:
* Not thematic or at all related to the game. I thought about using

"READING RAILROAD - NOT YOUR AVERAGE WORD GAME"
But that (a) doesn't use all the letters (and would therefore require me to remove some of the City Tiles, and there might not be enough left) and (b) Doesn't have a good distribution of word lengths.

* Not a lot of overlap - many letters (even "common" letters) are only used in 1 word. I think the City Tile distribution would need to change to reflect this.

I hope to get a playtest of reading Railroad in tonight and see how it goes now with targeted goals and proper (?) coin rewards for words in-game.

No news is good news?

Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games took a copy of Homesteaders to The Gathering of Friends with him to test out. That's pretty exciting news, and as you can imagine I'm anxious to hear back about how it went. I emailed Jay once since the Gathering ended, but have received no reply, so I really have no idea what his thoughts are on the subject.

However, I've managed to deduce that at least 3 sessions of Homesteaders have occurred, 2 at the Gathering, and 1 last Saturday (in Maryland it would seem, though I'm not sure about that). I've talked to a couple of the people who have played in these sessions, and it seems the players have enjoyed the game from what I can tell. 2 players rated the game on BGG - a 6 in one case and an 8.5 in another.

I have not been able to glean Jay's reaction as yet... so the wait continues!

Reading Railroad - Endgame scoring

There have been a number of different schema discussed or suggested for endgame scoring in Reading Railroad. The "current" scheme, and the only one used in any of the 3 playtests so far, has been "Free-building" - free form word building with your collected Letter tiles, where you are limited by the size of your largest network as to how many tiles you can use. Scoring is based on the lengths of the word or words made, squared.

This was the original rule in Scott's first draft of the rules, and it was nice because it didn't require any components like scoring cards, nor any work to figure out whether the goal words should be private or public, and how you actually go about getting them. However, it defeats the basic design goal of the game, which is that the game is not a word game, it's a connection/set collection game with word building as a main mechanic.

The heart of the game is supposed to be collecting the correct set of City tiles in order to satisfy the Goal cards. Reading Railroad could be expressed another way, and it would look more like a euro cube pusher: the City tiles could be colored cubes, and the Goal cards could indicate an assortment of cubes in demand The game is about collecting the appropriate cubes to fulfill the demand cards by connecting cities on the board. It just so happens that the mechanic for connecting cities is spelling words out of scrabble-style letter tiles. This is exactly the game I'm trying to make out of Reading Railroad - a cube pusher with word building as a mechanic. I thought it would be more fun to go with the theme of word building and make the cubes into letters (i.e. there are 26 colors of cubes). The Demand cards are specific groups of these cubes (letters) which happen to spell a word. I feel this emphasizes the uniqueness of word building in a non-word game.

What Reading Railroad is not is a word game at heart. That's the whole point.

So it's always been my plan to replace the Free-building endgame with some kind of targeted word scoring. Some kind of card or list which tells you which set of letters to collect, so you can reasonably plan which cities you want to connect. I'm as yet unsure how I want to accomplish that. here are some of the ideas that have been floating around thus far...

* Each player gets a secret goal card with some 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and maybe 8 letter words on it. These are the words they're trying to spell with their City tiles. Maybe one of these cards is face up for everyone to use as well.

* There could exist cards which have 3/4/5/6 letter words which build on each other (add a letter and anagram to get from 1 word to the next) which are either available to purchase and would be secret, like Tickets from Ticket to Ride, or which are in a face up pool for players to claim at some point during the game. there would be N-1 pools to ensure competition, and there would be an innate risk/reward in whether you claim the card with a 3 letter word, or hold out for that 4th or 5th letter (because it would score better that way) and risk someone else taking it from you.

* There could be stacks of cards for 3/4/5/6/7 letters, the top of each face up for players to claim during the game. the deck of 3-letter words would be the largest, and the deck of 7 letter words would be tiny. This could result in a viable small-word strategy vs a long-word strategy. In general small words will pay off worse than long words, but they're much easier to accomplish.

* There could be a set of words (a thematic phrase) printed on the board which constitutes sets of letters to collect. The scores for these could be printed on the board as well, right under the word. This could be by itself, or in addition to some hidden goal scoring.

* There could be a deck of cards with 8-letter words on them, and each player could be dealt 4 or 5 of those, from which they choose 2 to keep. In order to qualify to win the game, the player must be able to spell both of their 8-letter words using their city tiles. Players that qualify then use the Free-building endgame scoring.

Today while considering which endgame scoring system to use, I thought of this hybrid:
* Pool of N-1 cards - each card with 3/4/5/6 letter words that build on each other.
* When you would take a city tile you could instead take a card, as long as you can spell one of the words on it.
* At the end of the game City tiles are used, once each, and no more of them than the number of cities in your largest network, to spell the words on the cards you've taken.

I am going to continue to ponder this, but I need to make a decision soon. I need to send the game to the KublaContest in about 2 weeks! If worst comes to worst I could submit Reading Railroad with the free-building endgame, but I'd rather not... it's a whole different game!

Reading Railroad rules updates

I updated the "official" rules doc. for Reading Railroad in anticipation of the next playtest - which will be who-knows-when. Here's the current value of the things in flux:

* Start with 3 tiles in hand
* Turn options are
- - Make a word, get paid 1/3/6/10/15/21/28 coins for 2/3/4/5/6/7/8 letters
- - Buy track (costs vary) OR a Factory (cost 4 <- who knows if that's good?)
- - Draw tiles (1 + 1/4 city tiles). Factories count as 4 City tiles.
* Investor (!!!) tiles only hurt the player drawing.
- - Pay 1 coin/letter, take 1 debt for each letter you can't pay for.
* Investor (!!!) tiles are replaced
- - Always draw the right number of letter tiles each turn.
* Game ends when someone collects their 16th City tile from the board.
- - Factories count as 4 City tile toward this.
* Maximum total City tiles you can use is based on your largest connected network.
* Endgame words are free form.
- - Points are based on number of letters in the word, squared.
- - I still plan on having some sort of targeted endgame words in the end.

Reading Railroad playtest

I had a good test of Reading Railroad on Friday in which I got some good suggestions from players and cemented an opinion about the Investors that I've been worried about... basically that they don't do what they're supposed to. But that's easily fixed.

The Investor tile makes everyone pay (lose points) for each Resource tile they have in hand. It's supposed to punish people for building up tiles in hand. Of course, that's sort of like gibberish if there's not a good reason to build up tiles. Under the current rules, the only real reason to build up tiles is because you have letters you can't make a word out of. There's not really a strategic reason to build up tiles in hand. I tried to add a strategic reason by adding the coins, but I failed to reward longer words with enough coin for it to matter.

So number 1... I need to change the coin payout to (much) better reward building a longer word, and number 2... the Investor needs to punish the player hoarding tiles, not all the other players. Currently drawing the Investor tile has the following effect: You get penalized a little, but no much because you just spent most or all of your tiles, and everyone else gets penalized for all the tiles they drew at the end of their turn - even if they spent every tile they had before drawing new tiles. That's the opposite of the intent. The Investor should only tax the player drawing tiles.

A minor rule change to go with that... if the Investor hurts only you for hoarding tiles, there's no good reason not to draw another tile to replace it (currently you don't). It would be pretty harsh to get double punished because you happened to draw an Investor tile!

The players had some suggestions about the endgame scoring target words, which have not been implemented yet, but I described after the game. The suggestions were along the lines of having cards with words on them, rather tan the idea I had about having a set group of words (a thematic phrase) on the board. Several of these cards would be face up, and as soon as you've collected the right City tiles to make the word, you can claim the card. You'd 'cash in' your letter tiles to do so.

One suggestion was that there be a larger number of 3 letter word cards (maybe 10), fewer 4 letter words (8?), maybe 6 5-letter words, 4 6-letter words, and 2 7-letter words, and the game would end when one (or 2, or whatever) of the stacks ran out. This would lend validity to a 'short word' strategy vs a 'long word' strategy, and sounds pretty good.

Another suggestion was that the goal cards be like the Tickets I described in my last post in that they have several words on them, so you can choose to score a smaller word, or go for a longer word and risk someone else taking the card out from under you. Under this scheme, there probably wouldn't be private Ticket cards, and there would probably be a pool f N-1 face up cards to work towards (where N is the number of players). When one is scored, another is turned up to replace it. The game end in this case could be all city tiles on the board are used, or the deck is exhausted, or a single player scores 4 cards, or a single player collects a certain number of City Tiles, or anything, really - I'm not sure what would be best.

I'll have to talk to Scott and put some thought into the game end conditions and how exactly to do the endgame scoring words. I think he'll be happy if I quit pushing for private Tickets which you buy - I think that was adding too much complexity for his liking.

In Friday's playtest I also tried another new idea. I thought (and still think) there ought to be a way to invest in getting more tiles at a time, so that you can build up to a bigger word, which you'll play for more Coin. The investment should end up costing you potential endgame, since it will help you get more points in game. It would be an option for someone going for a "Wordsmith" strategy. My idea was to have a "Factory" which you could buy for a number of Coin, and the Factory would count as 4 City tiles, so it would put you up to the next threshold so you would draw 1 more tile per turn. I used a game end trigger of 15 City tiles, so buying a factory means you'll have a MAXIMUM of 11 tiles to use, which seems like it would impact the endgame pretty significantly. In the end though, no one bought a Factory, and the 15 tiles may have proven to make for too short a game. Although, when one player got 15 tiles, another had 14 and the third had about 12. Maybe that's a good enough number of tiles... then again there were several tiles left on the board, and I think it might be better to allow players to collect them.

I think the coin value of letters which I used did not properly reward longer words, so there was still no incentive to save tiles. Therefore the wordsmith strategy didn't make much sense, and nobody was interested in a Factory. Next time I will a triangular payout for words - 0/1/3/6/10/15/21 for 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 letter words. That should give a lot (maybe too much) incentive to store up letters to make bigger words. Contrast that with playing small words to get first dibbs on City tiles, and to get more City tiles overall, not getting hit as hard by the Investor, and not having to know big words and I think that will better represent a wordsmith strategy vs a non-wordsmith strategy.

So to get this game ready for the KublaContest, I need to try it with the new coin payout, see if any sort of Factory idea will work, and figure out endgame scoring. I think it can be done in the next 2 or 3 weeks, and then I can send it in!

Precogniscience

I just watched a movie with Nicholas Cage called Next, a wholly unspectacular movie about an exceptionally cool character who constantly sees 2 minutes into his own future. Anything that will directly affect him within the next 2 minutes he can see. The implication here is that he can start to do something, and if he doesn't like the outcome (up to 2 minutes down the road), he can instead do something else.

I've been thinking about that ability a lot, and in some respects it's challenging teleportation as the coolest impossible ability ever! Just think - infinite do-overs! And it's "balanced" (to use game terms) because often there are long term ramifications of actions, which won't manifest in 2 minutes. In light of that the ability suddenly doesn't sound so great. However it's still a huge advantage over someone who doesn't get infinite do-overs!

In a lot of ways this ties in to something I've thought about before - the parallel between precogniscience and simply the ability to anticipate really, really well. In the case of the movie, the guy could see things that would affect him, irrespective of where they're coming from or what he could observe otherwise. That's clearly different from observing something and then using logic or physics to determine what will occur next. For example, if I let go of this pen, it will fall to the table - that much I can tell you. In fact, I can "see" enough into the future to put my other hand in the right place to catch the pen. However, I could never anticipate that a bird my boss just let into the office will come screaming around the corner and catch the pen between the time I let go and the time it hits the table - which this guy would see.

My friend Mike was telling me about a game idea he had stemming from a similar precognition ability of certain characters in the book Dune (which I'm not familiar with). His idea was that you could put Prescience tokens on the board, and if an opponent's piece were close enough to it, it would have to do a particular thing... the long and short of it is that you could control your opponents' pieces to an extent by basically saying "I looked into the future and saw you do that" - and therefore they have to do that. He's got some further ideas how that might develop, so I'm interested to see where he goes with it.

I on the other hand am thinking more along the lines of the movie... suppose each player had this ability to see their own future up to 2 minutes. On your turn you could do whatever you want, and if you don't like the outcome you could change your mind and do something else. But you wouldn't be able to repeat the same action looking for a better result, and you wouldn't be able to try everything and pick the outcome you liked best. Any strategy you choose will take more than that turn to unveil, so you wouldn't get complete control over your destiny - but each step along the way you'd get as many do-overs as you like.

I have no idea what the theme, story, or point of this game would be, but I'm amused that this really cool ability could so easily be modeled in a game.