Making steps forward ("killing your darlings")

In a few of my games I have started with a specific mechanism or idea that, over the course of the game, has had to drop out, or change significantly. I'd venture a guess this happens in many, if not most, designer's games.

For example, in my first published title, Terra Prime, I began with a "great" idea for a supply/demand mechanism for the value of resources you deliver. Based on Power Grid's fuel market, you would get paid more for delivering Bluium if there hadn't been any delivered yet than you would if there were already some Bluium sitting there on the ships, ready to send back to Earth. Every once in a while, the ships would take off, and the resources on them would clear off, resetting the demand (and therefore the price). Each resource was supposed to have a different curve - maybe Yellium was worth 7 the first time it's delivered, then 4, then 1... so it's super valuable, but goes down fast. On the contrary, maybe Bluium would range from 5 down to 3, and be a lot more steady:

I forget the exact details, but the bottom line is that while I liked the idea, the mechanism just wasn't working in Terra Prime.

In the end I (thankfully) decided to replace the whole thing with a Demand Tile mechanism. Much more simply, each resource had a price, and tiles indicated how many were required. Once all the blue spaces were filled, the demand for Bluium dries up, no more can be delivered. As soon as one of the tiles fills up, it goes away and a new one comes up, which may bring back some demand for Bluium.

This worked a LOT better, and I'm happy that's how I ended up going in that game.

The point of that story is to show how a major mechanism that I really liked ended up changing because it wasn't right for the game. Recently, that dynamic has showed up again on one of my current active designs: Apotheosis.

One of the instigating ideas for Apotheosis was that your workers would level up when played, like the cards in Solforge. The crux of the game was intended to be whether you play out all of your workers before recalling, and leveling up your entire workforce evenly, versus playing just a couple of workers then recalling them and playing them again, and ending up with a few high level workers while the rest remain at low level. That idea being the whole point, survived the first several revisions, and many playtests. However, as of last week, I tried a new version -- instead of leveling up every worker you have played when you recall them, we said you could only level up one worker.

I was hesitant to try this, but I was hopeful it would fix certain issues I was having with the game. As we began the first game with that rule, I missed being able to play an extra worker before recalling in order to level them up, but pretty quickly I could see how certain aspects of the game seemed to be tighter and work better. All told, you're still choosing whether to recall early to level more often, or play more workers first for their effects.

One concern with only leveling one worker at a time was that it slowed things down, but that's just a matter of balancing costs, and could be easily fixed. However, in an effort to try something in between "level one worker" and "level all workers," we tried something that amounted to "level some workers." I had expected that to be better, with some of the benefits of the restricted leveling, and some of the benefits of the original idea. But in practice I found that it didn't really work as well, and it became clear that just leveling once per recall (and maybe a few special rewards for things could get you an extra level-up) is the way to go.

So there you go -- once again I've had to "kill a darling," so to speak, and remove or significantly change an instigating mechanism for a game.

As a side note on this topic, my friend Gil Hova (of Formal Ferret games) has a particularly aggressive auction mechanism from an old, unpublished game of his called Wag The Wolf (one which I thought was good!) that he keeps designing games around. He used it in Battle Merchants, but in the end cut the mechanism. He used it again in The Networks, and again cut the mechanism before the game was finished. And I believe he started his latest game, High Rise, with that mechanism, and eventually cut it from that game too!

The List - January 2020

Last month I reviewed The List, but I think I have enough of an update that it's worth taking another look. I'm adding a new section for games I've recruited (or am recruiting) co-designers for:

Published Games:
- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG)
- Isle of Trains (BGG)
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG)
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze

Finished But Unpublished Games:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Olympus on the Serengeti  (FKA Deities and Demigods) [Art starting]
- Exhibit (BGG) [Unlikely to be published due to conflict]
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [In line for art]
- Dice Works (BGG)
- Wizard's Tower (BGG)
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion)
- Suburban Sprawl
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]

Current Active Designs:
- Alter Ego (BGG)
- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe)
- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain)
- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG)
- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

Designs I'm Recruiting A Co-Designer For:
Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
- Automatown [a designer has showed interest]
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG) [a designer has showed interest]

Established designs that still need work:
- Reading Railroad
- Moctezuma's Revenge

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
- Rondel Role Selection
- Kilauea [a designer has showed interest]
- Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]

Idea stage designs that sound promising:
- Dynasty
-Scourge of the High Seas

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, for years:
- 8/7 Central
- Hot & Fresh

Old Ideas that Haven't Gone Anywhere (Yet) - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- Cruise line game
- The Untouchables
- Day labor game based on craps

Misc and Really Old Stuff:
- 9-Ball
- Blockade Runner
- Roman Emperors (my version of someone else's game)
- Admirals of the Spanish Main (my version of someone else's game)

Let's take a closer look at some of the updates:

Crusaders expansions:
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
The first expansion to Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) has been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer. The 2nd/3rd expansions are almost identical to each other, they each add one additional player: a red player, and a yellow player. The retail version art is done for both of them, and they're expected to release in October, 2020. I'm not sure exactly how we will support those who got the Deluxified base game, we will either make Deluxified versions of these expansions, or we'll offer some kind of upgrade pack.

Isle of Trains: the Board Game:
The publisher of Isle of Trains told Dan and I that instead of (or possibly in addition to?) an expansion to the card game, they would like to do a bigger box board game that's like Isle of Trains. So Dan and I have been working on a re-design of the game given the new constraints. We've made a little progress so far, and Dan has a prototype under construction, it'll probably see play soon.

Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG):
A designer friend of mine in Seattle has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. After so many years and iterations, I'm excited to see if he can help get this one across the finish line. He tells me he's got a prototype built and plans to give it a try soon!

Automatown:
A designer in Utah who had printed and played an earlier prototype of Automatown has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I'm excited to see this one move forward, because I'm sure it would have taken me a long time to get back to it. I got word that he'd played the latest version already, and has some specific changes he's going to try next!

Kilauea:
Based on my blog post, a designer I'm not too familiar with has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I've sent him my descriptions of the game and the rules I had written... we'll see if he can do anything with that.

Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]
Another designer I'm not familiar with expressed interest in Joan of Arc. I need to revisit that one and see what info I can send him on it.

2018-2019: a playtesting retrospective

Back in late 2017 I started formally tracking my weekly playtest sessions in a google doc. One up-side of this is that I can go back now and review what was played each week, by whom, and what aspect I was looking to test that day. It's also interesting to see how much time we dedicated to each game, or how much time passed in between playtests of a game.

I'd like to use this post as a sort of retrospective on the last two years (or 28 months) of playtesting. Let's take a little trip down memory lane...

2017

Late August 2017 was the first session I'd logged, and that day we were evaluating 3 games I'd brought home from GenCon for TMG: Margrave, by Stan Kordonskiy, which turned into Old West Empresario, Rolled West, by Daniel Newman, and Embark, by Philip duBarry. Not only did we end up signing each of these, but all three are on store shelves now!

In September of that year we continued evaluating games: Pixel Factory was a neat one, but ultimately TMG did not sign it. Back to Earth was also neat, and we did sign it, but due to unrelated circumstances we ended up releasing it later. Railways is a game by some British designer friends of mine, and I liked it, but it needed some work. We did suggest the new title: Railblazers. My understanding is that at this point it has improved greatly, but the main mechanism which I was interested in (like the Mancala-rondel in Crusaders) has changed completely.

October saw us switch gears a bit. We spent a lot of time playing my games: Eminent Domain Origins (a Terra Prime reboot) and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (a dice game version of EmDo -- I should add those to the BGG database). This went on into November as well.

December was spent almost entirely on a dozen games of Embark, which had been signed by that point. I also see a lone play of Eminent Domain Origins at about Christmas time.

2018

We started off the new year with 2 more games of EDO, but then spent the rest of January, February, March, and half of April playing about 3 dozen (!) games of Old West Empresario, working on game balance and player powers. The only other playtests in those months were a few games of Harvest to test some potential expansion characters (unfortunately, we never did do an expansion to Harvest).

Late April through mid-May we tested the Crusaders: Divine Influence expansion, which was in pretty good shape to begin with, but we hammered out a few details. That one has now been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer in China and should be out later this year.

My son was born at the end of May, and my playtest sessions went on  hiatus. The only other testing that happened in 2018 was at Rincon -- Michael was in town and we played a game of Deities & Demigods (now Olympus on the Serengeti), and several games of Imminent Domain (now Sails & Sorcery, but that title might not be final either), which is the game Michael designed based on the deck learning of Eminent Domain and the area control of El Grande.

2019

After an extended hiatus, I finally got back to regular playtest sessions in February of 2019, and we spent that first month back playing Eminent Domain Origins some more, fine tuning some last details.

March was spent on Emperor's Choice. TMG is doing a Deluxified version of that game, and we developed a 2 player variant which went over well with Richard Ham of Rahdo Runs Through, who famously only plays games with his wife.

April and May were dedicated almost entirely to developing Sails & Sorcery, changing up the format so it would play better, but keeping the core ideas of the game.

June was spent working on a new design of mine, Apotheosis. We iterated through several big changes as we quickly honed in on what worked and what didn't.

We started out July with a quick couple tests of a 5/6 player expansion to Crusaders. This worked out well, and we've got art done, but this won't come out until October. Then it was back to Sails & Sorcery through August. Most of the game was pretty solid by that point, but we were trying to fix this one niggling dynamic that just didn't work right.

We switched gears again and spent September and half of October playing Alter Ego, my co-operative deck learning game. We played quite a few games considering that one of my main testers doesn't like co-op games!

We ended October and spent most of November working on expansion content for Pioneer Days that we got from the designers.

We revisited Alter Ego once in November and once in December, and spent the rest of December testing Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory, and another one of my games: Riders of the Pony Express. Riders was in pretty good shape, but was a bit fiddly. We fixed a couple of small issues, and brainstormed how to remove some of the process a little bit.

In addition, we played a few non-playtest games including Tapestry (which did not go over well), In the Year of the Dragon (my favorite Feld game), and we tested a game for one of my playtesters (we actually did this a couple of other times, but I hadn't recorded those). Also, I took my players out for an annual Playtester Appreciation Day to see the new Star Wars movie (we saw Solo last year, and Episode VIII the year before that) -- only one of them could make it though.

Finally, we capped off the year reviving my oldest game design that was any good: All For One! I initially got involved in that co-design 17 years ago, and it had been so long since the last playtest (2012?) that I didn't try any changes, we played straight from the rulebook. It was great to revive this old classic, and we started off 2020 with some significant changes to All For One, which worked well and felt great!

Recruiting Co-designers / Assembling a Design Team

Ever since I recruited my friend Rick to work on Apotheosis (FKA Worker Learning), that game has made a lot of progress where it would certainly still be sitting in my notebook otherwise. That arrangement is working so well that I would really like to recruit other designers to help me progress my other stalled or (or un-started but promising) designs.

Here are a few of the designs I could imagine handing off to another designer at this point and letting them run with for a while, or working together with another designer on...

Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
* Automatown - worker placement/resource management game about building an army of robots (which are your workers)
* Odysseus: Winds of Fate - Adventure game about Odysseus on his way from Troy to Ithaca. Play as the Fates, who don't care what happens to Odysseus, but pass the time by betting on his progress (and then influencing it)

Established designs that still need work:
* Reading Railroad - Build words (a la Scrabble) to earn coins, spend coins to build track. Connect cities to earn pieces of set collection scoring

* Moctezuma's Revenge - push your luck / deduction game about looting temples, but some are cursed

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
* Rondel Role Selection - Shared rondel / resource management / Role Selection game about splicing DNA to make hybrid creatures such as Hippogriffs
* Kilauea - Mancala game about spreading your people across an island, and sacrificing them to the volcano gods to control the lava flow

* Joan of Arc - Bag building game with shared piece movement. Play as a voice in Joan of Arc's head, vying to get her to accomplish your goals.

Idea stage designs that sound promising:

* Dynasty - Spread your villages across China, upgrade them to Cities, and fill your player board with Culture. You'll assimilate other players' culture, and they yours. When someone becomes Emperor, the winner is the player who's culture is best represented.

* Scourge of the High Seas - Deckbuilder along the lines of Ascension, with 2 buy rows (Tortuga, where you buy crew, equipment and ship upgrades, and the High Seas, where you spend crew and equipment to plunder ships)

Any takers?

R.I.P. Matthew Frederick, one of the great unpublished game designers

Some time ago -- almost 2 decades now -- I stumbled across a website called the Board Game Designers Forum. At the time I had recently graduated college and gotten a job, many of my friends had moved away, and I was looking for something to fill my time. It was a perfect storm that led to my eventual career in game design, development, and publishing, and it all started on that fateful forum.

In the early days of BGDF, I read a lot of posts, I wrote a lot of posts, and I spent a lot of time in the IRC chat room with some of the forum regulars. Several of those regulars have gone on to see great success in the game industry as designers, artists, or publishers (or all three)!

One of those regulars, an admin in fact, went by the handle FastLearner. His name was Matthew Frederick. Matthew was ever-present, always insightful, and always made sure the forums were going strong. He's the one that created this BGDF logo:

A logo I placed on the back of the box for both Terra Prime and Eminent Domain, as a nod to the role the forums played in the design of those games.

One of my favorite aspects of the site was something called the Game Design Showdown, which turned into a monthly design challenge where, given a week and a theme, component restriction, or other guidelines, you could submit an entry. Entries were posted anonymously, and then voted on. There was no prize, and the submissions were not intended to be finished, tested games anyway, but the challenge was a good way to exercise the design muscles, and I know of several ideas from the GDS that went on to become fully fleshed out (and in some cases published) games. I say that's what the GDS turned into, but it started as a sort of real time challenge in the chat room, run by FastLearner, where instead of a week to come up with a game idea, you had just minutes! We only did that a couple of times, but it was great fun, and it opened the door to the larger Game Design Showdown, which still runs today if I'm not mistaken.

As it happens, Matthew lived in Phoenix, AZ -- just up the street from my hometown of Tucson. A couple of times I drove up and got together with Matthew... we talked about our game designs, even played each other's games. Matthew was one of the players who I wrangled into may first two playtests of UK designer David Brain's prototype: All For One, and we did a prototype swap (I left 8/7 Central with him, and brought home his mountain climbing themed game: Everest). I recall several of Matthew's games that I played, and they were all very good:

Everest was a middle-weight euro-style game about drafting a team of climbers (with sponsorship from various countries), and climbing Mount Everest. There were different terrain types to navigate, and your climbers were better at some than others. You could set up camps along the way where you could rest your team. There were rewards for reaching certain elevations first, including a large reward for reaching the top of the mountain. It was a real, honest to goodness game, on par with a lot of the stuff I've played off store shelves.

Velociracers was a card driven game where you, a Velociraptor, raced around an island grabbing up eggs and trying to keep ahead of the T-rex that was hot on your heels. Each turn you would play one of your cards, and you wouldn't get them back until you did a special "rest" action. There were mechanisms in place to keep the dinos bunched in a pack -- a headwind to keep the front runners from getting too far ahead, and cards that let you advance more the farther back in the pack you were. Fall too far behind and the T-rex will hurt you, much like taking damage in Snow Tails. Like all of Matthew's games, this felt fully fleshed out, even if he wasn't happy with it.

Elvencraft was another excellent design, where you would move around an Elven village in the trees, connected by bridges (which I think you would build, if I remember correctly), collecting items and crafting them into better items. I don't remember all the details of this one, but I do recall it feeling like a real game as well.

Cow Tipping was a small, Rummy-style card game that a nascent TMG considered publishing. It had adorable art and a cute theme of gangs of cows taking revenge on people by tipping over vehicles stopped in traffic. Motorcycles required a smaller gang (set or run) of cows to tip, but are worth fewer points. Buses were the most valuable, but of course required the largest gangs to tip. I recently re-read my email threads with Matthew about this game.

As a neophyte developer, I was perhaps overzealous about wanting to change Cow Tipping a lot. In the end, TMG did not publish that game, but Matthew gave me some important feedback that I still need to take to heart at times- he said something to the effect of "with all those changes, what exactly are you licencing from me?" That is a significant question for a few reasons. Not only was it a wake up call to me as I stepped into the game industry as a professional developer, but it also stands in stark contrast to some of the sentiments I've seen in modern designers who might submit an unfinished game with the expectation that the publisher will finish it for them. In contrast, all of Matthew's games were fully fleshed out, thoroughly tested, and more complete than many submissions I've received over the years.

About a decade ago, I lost touch with Matthew. I wasn't hanging out in the BGDF forums anymore, and I didn't travel to Phoenix very often. I didn't have much occasion to reach out to him, and from what I could gather, he had a very busy life, sometimes plagued with additional hardships outside his own control. I did follow Matthew on Twitter, and occasionally saw some snippet of his life scroll through my timeline, and every time it made me wonder "what ever happened to that guy?"

Back in October, just a few months ago, Matthew sent me a Twitter DM, seemingly out of the blue. It was a very complimentary message, just saying that he was pleased and impressed to hear how well I'm respected in the industry. Apparently Matthew had followed my career, or was at least aware of it. He followed that with another message:

Perhaps one day we’ll get together again and reminisce about the old days and talk about what’s happened in the intervening years.

Two months later, I was sad to hear that Matthew was gone. I had gathered from tweets I'd seen that Matthew was sick -- fighting some kind of cancer. I know now that his message to me was something of a "goodbye," and I'm sorry I didn't drop everything right then and there and drive up to Phoenix to see him one last time, maybe play a game, or do that reminiscing he mentioned.

Matthew, I'd like to thank you for being the man that you were. The pillar of the game design community which brought me from a casual Magic player to a professional game designer. You are far and away the best designer I know, and the gaming world is poorer now that you're gone.

You will be missed.

All For One revisited -- again

It's now been about 17 years since David Brain first sent me a prototype copy of All For One, can you believe it?

The last time I had played the game was maybe back in 2012 at a protospiel event. I might have played it one more time since then, but to be honest, I don't remember if I did.

Well, I decided to bring it back to life at my last weekly playtesting session of 2019, and since I didn't remember what changes I was considering, we played it as-written (circa 2012). Then we discussed the game, and I brought it back out today, and played 2 more games, with some significant changes. Good news: I think the changes were for the better!

Since it's been so long, I'll run down the basic rules as I'd write them as of right now:

Setup:

As before, place the plot tokens and character figures in their home spaces on the board. 

Shuffle mission cards and deal 4 to each player. 

Give each player a reference mat and 1 One For All card. 

Deal each player a secret goal card (using only the ones for the appropriate player count).

Set a pile of VP tokens in a supply

NO GUARDS AT ALL

Game play:

On your turn, you have an Action phase and a Draw phase. 

Action phase:

During the Action phase you can do any number of actions from the following list, in any order (most are limited to 1x/turn):

a1) Move (1x/turn): Choose any 1 character and move them up to 3 steps. You may double back, but you must stop the move action upon encountering another character. If carrying a Horse, may choose to have the character ride instead, moving exactly 4 steps, jumping over tokens and figures.

a2) Pick up tokens: While moving, you may have the moving character pick up any number of tokens in the spaces you visit by discarding 1 card for each. Note that when riding, you may not pick up the tokens you jump over. Characters have no capacity limit. (you may pick up the a token in the location of another character you encountered - wording above might make it sound like you can't since I said the move action ends)

ONCE PICKED UP, TOKENS ARE NEVER DROPPED. In order to move them to another character, a Demand action is required (see below)

b) Demand a plot token (1x/turn): If 2 characters are in the same location, you may have one of them demand a plot token held by the other. In this case, a duel ensues to determine the outcome. Note: You do not have to use the same character that you moved - more than 1 character can act on your turn.

c) Complete a mission (1x/turn): Choose a character. If the conditions of a mission card in your hand are met, you may complete the mission with that character (some missions require a specific character to do them). Receive points based on the type of mission and the tokens you deliver (see below), and then bump 1 of that character's favored story tracks per token delivered (max 1 bump per track per mission). ONCE A TRACK HAS MAXED OUT, IT'S COMPLEMENT TRACK IS ALSO LOCKED IN AND NO LONGER MOVES.

c1) Duel missions: 3vp (and draw 1 card)

c2) Character delivery (either/or): 4vp for 1 token, 6vp for both

c3) Any Character mission (2 req'd): 5vp

c4) Standard delivery (req'd/bonus/bonus): 4/6/8vp for 1/2/3 tokens

d. Play One For All card for some effect:

d1) Play when completing a mission to gain an additional 2 VP

d2) Play when picking up tokens to cover the discard cost of all pickups this turn (so max 3 tokens, since you can move up to 3 steps)

d3) Play during a duel for 3 offensive moves (or during another player's turn for 0 offensive moves, but you get it back immediately)

d4) Play during the draw phase of the turn to draw 2 additional cards

d5) Play to immediately end your turn (skipping the draw phase) and start another. This allows for a 2nd move action, a 2nd demand action, or a 2nd mission.

Draw phase:

Draw 2 mission cards from the deck.

You may play One For All to draw 2 additional cards.

Then reclaim your One For All card.

Max hand size = 8 cards (including One For All). If you have more than 8 cards, discard mission cards until you have only 8

Game ends when all 3 story tracks are maxed out

Duels:

Duels between characters are triggered by Demand actions and by Duel missions. In any case, when you trigger a duel on your turn with a character (the one making the demand, or one of the two in the duel mission), you choose one of that character's story tracks to fight for. Announce the chosen character, the nominated track, and if applicable the token being demanded (and maybe from whom, to help other players out).

All players must play 1 card simultaneously, then reveal. Blue cards are worth 1 offense (2 if it's that character's signature move), red cards are worth 1 defense, white cards (riposte) are worth 2 defense. Add up all offense and all defense. If there is more offense than defense, the the duel has been WON. If there is more defense than offense, the duel is LOST. If there is the same amount of offense and defense, then the duel is TIED.

If WON: NOMINATED track is bumped. Token IS moved in the case of a demand.

If LOST:  OPPOSITE track is bumped. Token IS NOT moved in the case of a demand.

If TIED: NO track is bumped. Token IS moved in the case of a demand.

One For All card played by active player is worth 3 offense.

One For All card played by any other player is worth 0 offense, and they get it back immediately.

Abilities and Signature Moves: as before. Aramis' ability to avoid guards must change (since there are no guards now): You may discard a card to move beyond another character. If that proves too useless, maybe it doesn't need to cost a card.

--- End Rules ---

So the big differences from before are:

1. No guards at all

2. 8 card hand

3. Draw 2 cards per turn instead of 1

4. Pay cards to pick up tokens (making that more intentional)

5. No such thing as dropping tokens or hand-offs, it's all just demand actions

6. No "active character" for the turn - you can act with different characters in a turn (move Aramis, demand with Athos, complete a mission with MiLady)

And to clean up some exceptions:
7. Make all Meeting missions into Duels (so they're all the same)

8. Allow riding a horse over dashed lines (ferry crossing and catacombs)

Both 4p games we played today took about 60 minutes, and this mix of rules seemed to work really well.

I added a few connections on the map, and I think a few more might be in order. Might want to sort of revisit the whole map and also the mission cards to make sure that (a) named locations are sort of evenly spaced out (ideally not less than 4 steps between any 2 named locations), and (b) based on token starting locations, no missions are doable on the first turn (at least not without using the One For All card for extra actions)

Due to the higher hand size and extra card draws, the deck almost ran out in our 4p games, and I suspect for 5 players it would definitely run out, so more missions are needed. I'd begin by making more missions with Horses as required or bonus tokens.

I think this is a big improvement over the previous version with respect to fiddliness and rules overhead. It feels good to see some progress on this game -- the biggest disappointment of my game design career is that nothing has ever come of this game.

Riders of the Pony Express - map board thoughts

I originally tried to use a thematic prototype board for Riders of the Pony Express:

(I had drawn routes on this image)

But while iterating on the design, I quickly switched to a more schematic type of board:

A few iterations later, and that schematic turned into a bigger, more grid-like schematic:

I had originally wanted the routs to be asymmetric, so the board geography would be more interesting, but then I realized that that's what the hazard tiles are for! So I made the symmetric board shown above, with the "shortest" routes being the north-south and east-west ones, and the longest routes being the diagonal ones. The "cost" of the routes is supposed to represent the distance and danger of taking the route, and you pay it by advancing that number of spaces on the time track. At the end of the round, you collect a bonus based on your position on the time track - the farther you have gone, the less money (points) you receive as a bonus.

Hazard tiles will be placed in each of those red squares along the routes, which will add anywhere from +0 (tumbleweed) to +5 (mountain) to the route. These randomly placed hazards serve to make the board asymmetric, and to make certain towns easier to get to than others, or certain routes more expensive than others. This way, the board itself can be a simple grid, but the routes can be dynamic and interesting.

That's all well and good for testing a prototype, but when it comes to getting serious about the design, it would be great to figure out how to represent this schematic board in a more thematic way. In addition, the game is currently a bit fiddly to set up due to having to draw a bunch of hazard and items tiles, place them on the board, and then return some of them to the bag. One of my testers had the great idea of combining a few of the hazards onto single, bigger tiles, so that setup is easier, quicker, and less fiddly.

I wasn't sure how to do that at first, and I'd prefer to also make the board look less like a grid and more like an organic map. However, so far I've only managed to come up with this tessellation, which I think will work just like the schematic above, but with the hazards printed on them. Some of those hazard spaces could be empty, to be filled in later rounds as normal:

 This could work out OK, but I don't know if it attracts me as much as an organic-seeming geography. In any case, it could be a step in the right direction.

If the board were made up of tessellated tiles like this, then it might be good to keep the name of the towns fixed. To facilitate that, I was thinking that each tile could have a hole in it,  so the town would show through the holes. This could hep keep it both thematically more accurate, and also easier or players to remember which town is where!

So what do you think? Should I stick with this tessellated tile idea? Or find another way to improve the board for the game?

Riders of the Pony Express update

A few months ago, I dusted off my Riders of the Pony Express prototype. It went over really well with my current playtest group, which is always nice to see -- they don't love every game, and it makes me feel bad forcing them to play the ones they don't enjoy enough to "finish" them.

I played RotPE a couple more times lately, and tried the changes I listed in my last post:
1. Increase value of Bears from +2 to +3. I wanted to make the Bears more different from the Bandits (which are +2), and I wanted to make the Shotgun item better... a shotgun can be discarded to remove a bear or bandit from the board, but that's really not worth using ever. This change to +3 accomplished both of those goals, though the shotgun STILL wasn't good enough. Yesterday I tried an improved version of the shotgun: ONCE PER ROUND you can "kill" (turn face down) a Bandit or a Bear. This way you can use it twice, for 2-3 each time, which is a little better - maybe worthwhile. But I'm considering not even having that limit (after all, removing the tile helps other players too!)

2. Deal mandatory parcels face up instead of face down, they don't use up inventory slots. This change seemed good, and simplifies the rules quite a bit. Along with this change, I reduced the max inventory back down to 4 items. Of course, this means you must deliver it before the end of the round.

3. Instead of random parcels for rounds 2 and 3, let players draft from a face up supply of N+1 parcels when they arrive back at the post office. This worked well. It might be a little awkward to have to deal more cads out when you're done auctioning cards for the turn -- maybe better is to deal them at the same time you deal he cards to auction (put the auction cards on one side of the board and the new parcels on the other side)? Anyway, it seemed like a good change.

4. Movement change: Move from town to hazard, or hazard to town... This was proposed by Hoss because he did not feel like it made sense the way I was doing it (move from town to hazard, and on your next turn, finish moving into the town you were heading towards). However, we found hazard-town-hazard to be sort of tedious, and didn't like how that felt. As a compromise, we went back to what I had, but explained it a little differently: you move from town to town, but you ACT at the BEGINNING of your turn, not as you arrive in a town. So you move to the next town, paying whatever cost (by moving your time marker). Then next turn you deliver (if you have anything, costs 1 time), buy an item (if you want, costs 1 time), and then move to the next town (costs some amount based on route, hazard tile, and items you have). This format worked well, and I think it communicated better also.

In addition to those changes, one of my players had a good suggestion: the time track started out going down $1 per space, then later along the track it went 2 spaces per $ drop, and eventually 3 spaces. Aaron pointed out that that felt backwards... once you're already spending a lot of time, spending even more time didn't really cost you anything. So I reversed that... now at the beginning of the track you move several spaces before your reward drops, but farther along the track you lose $1 per space, and near the very end of the track you actually lose $2 per space! I also added a dead stop at the end of the track -- if you hit that, then your delivery phase is automatically over, and you lose $10 for each undelivered parcel. Those changes have all helped combat dynamics I didn't like in the game, and they work toward making sure players care how much they bid for things.

As I mentioned above, I beefed up the shotgun item, which is a definite improvement (side note, it combos with Spurs now, since you can remove the hazard AND then get your spurs discount). In addition, I tried changing the maps to say "ignore the hazard tile when moving to town X" rather than a discount of 2. This made the maps a little more variable, potentially more attractive (at least in some cases), and reduced some of the match involved in calculating your route. As it turns out, this makes maps better for Mountains (+5) and Bears (+3), the same for Banidts (+2) and Lost! (+2), and worse for Snakes (+1) and Rivers (+1). At first I didn't like that (I fear the maps are already not good enough), but you CAN discard them to any Lost! tile, and players seem to think they're worth getting, so maybe they're fine. I think I'll try the "ignore hazard" rule again to see if I want to keep it.

Similarly, Compass should say "ignore Lost! tiles" to help minimize the arithmetic in the game.

Finally, one of the worst parts of the game is the fiddly setup -- drawing a million square tiles and placing them on the board, then removing the tumbleweeds and snakes. Then in week 2, adding more tiles, only to remove tumbleweeds again, etc. I'm looking for a way to do bigger tiles that each cover several hazard spaces, so that setup can be simpler but the map board could still be somewhat variable with respect to where the mountains, rivers, and Lost! tiles are.

It would be cool to make the map not look like a schematic/grid as well!

The List - December 2019

It's been a while since I've taken a look at The List... Time to once again take stock of my published games, as well as current and back-burnered designs and prototypes! I'll try and be more thorough, like last time.

Published Games:
- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG)
- Isle of Trains (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (expansion)
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG)
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze

Finished But Unpublished Games:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Deities and Demigods  [In line for art]
- Exhibit (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game)
- Dice Works (BGG)
- Wizard's Tower (BGG)
- Now Boarding
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion)
- Suburban Sprawl
- Watch It Played

Current Active Designs:
- Alter Ego (BGG) [moved to Active]
- Apotheosis (FKA "Worker Learning") [moved to Active]

Recent Designs That Are Not On The Front Burner:
- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG)
- Automatown
- Moctezuma's Revenge
- Joan of Arc

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, for years:
- 8/7 Central
- Hot & Fresh
- Dynasty
- Kilauea
- Reading Railroad
- All For One (BGG)
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG)

Old Ideas that Haven't Gone Anywhere (Yet) - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- Scourge of the High Seas
- Rondel Role Selection
- Cruise line game
- The Untouchables
- Day labor job based on craps

Misc and Really Old Stuff:
- 9-Ball
- Blockade Runner
- Roman Emperors (my version of someone else's game)
- Admirals of the Spanish Main (my version of someone else's game)


Let's take a closer look at the games that have seen some movement recently:

Published games:
Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
The first expansion to Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) has been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer! I played two games with a sample copy at TokenCon in Oklahoma City this year, where I was a special guest. Divine Influence adds new building types, and replaces the Influence action with something more intricate and involved. There are 4 new Knight Orders as well.

Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion)
The third (and final) expansion to Eminent Domain was released about a year ago, and is in stores now. Oblivion adds Clout tokens (1-shot role icons), and a Politics role. Using Politics, you can flip over the new Prestige planets in the set, and you can "vote" public agendas into and out of play. These agendas have lasting effects that apply to everyone. So far I haven't seen a lot of comments on this expansion, but the ones I've seen have been pretty positive, so that's nice.

Finished But Unpublished Games:
Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]
All of the art is done for this Terra Prime re-release, but the production is on hold for various reasons. The game is an update to my first published title, Terra Prime (BGG), and includes an as-yet unpublished expansion I made years ago. The art and theme has been changed to the Eminent Domain universe, as the game fits perfectly as a prequel to Eminent Domain. 

Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
I have art ready to go for another Crusaders expansion, this one just adds red player pieces for a 5th player. If things go my way, we'll print the same exact thing in yellow to facilitate a 6th player in an "Amber Knight" expansion box. There's a new rule which allows space for more players to play on the same sized board -- you're allowed to build the same building as an opponent has built in a region. So if you built a Farm in a hex, I can build a Farm in that hex as well. This rule means the building spaces don't completely dry up with 5 or 6 players, and it adds an interesting dynamic as well.

Olympus on the Serengeti (FKA Deities and Demigods)  [In line for art]
The theme for this one was so commonplace that, when getting an artist involved, I tried to find something new and different. I landed on animals of the African plain... sort of like The Lion King is Hamlet, but with African animals, Olympus on the Serengeti is Greek mythology, but with African animals. Unfortunately, I wasn't liking the direction the art was going in, so the project has been set back a bit. I've got a different artist lined up for January, so hopefully this one will start moving forward again soon.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion)
I think it was 4 years ago that Dan and I gave the publisher an expansion to Isle of Trains, and while it kept getting pushed back, I have seen some art that they had made. My understanding is that it's in fact all done, however the publisher now would like to instead do a bigger box game that's like Isle of Trains including the expansion (!) So Dan and I have to figure out whether and how we'd like to re-design the game given the new constraints. One idea they had was to create a game that could use the base Isle of Trains game as an expansion to it... but that seems unlikely to pan out. Unfortunately, we haven't really made any progress on the re-design yet.

Current Active Designs:
Alter Ego (BGG) [moved to Active]
I have revisited Alter Ego after what appears to be 2 years, and I've been playtesting it quite a bit lately. My playtesters finally convinced me that the turn sequence was too confusing, so that's been simplified. And I came up with a new format for the Arch Villains: instead of bringing one or more of them into play at some point, all three Villains will be in play from the outset. Their henchmen will be placed below their Villain mats, and each turn, before you get to fight, each Villain will resolve a Villain Event card. The effect of the card depends on the Villain (the Sadist takes extra hostages, while the Mastermind limits your access to certain abilities) is worse if the Villain has 3 or more henchmen in front of them, so you have incentive to keep the henchmen at bay. So far this new format has been working very well, but the game isn't quite done yet.

Apotheosis (FKA "Worker Learning") [moved to Active]

Michael suggested the name "Apotheosis," which describes the game very well. Thanks to the help of a new co-designer, Rick Holzgrafe, we've made some serious progress on this game. I set it aside this summer and it's been simmering on the back burner since then, but pretty soon I'll probably try some of the latest ideas we've had for it.

Recent Designs That Are Not On The Front Burner:
Riders of the Pony Express (BGG) & Automatown

Each of these games got a playtest recently, which generated something new to try, but they quickly got set aside for other projects. My playtesters don't love Automatown, but they really enjoyed Riders of the Pony Express, so I should bring that one back into active development!

Maybe next time I'll add games I've developed (or am developing) for TMG... would that be something you'd like to see? Let me know in the comments... it's a pretty long list!

Alter Ego progress

Alter Ego has been around forever, and it's about time I finished it up! In order to light a fire under myself to get it done, I actually hired an artist and graphic designer to start working on it...

So last week I brought Alter Ego out again with my playtest group. Looks like it's been about 2 years since it hit the table! I think the overall structure of the game is solid, but there are still a lot of details I think need work. Here's some stuff that's happened just in the last 2 playtest sessions:

Deck Size

I have always used a starting deck size of 12 cards -- 4 each of Job, Family, and Support cards. Actually, since I added "character" cards (each with a unique fight icon and a specific starting deck configuration), the decks started with 13 cards. The game takes about 5 rounds to play... I could lengthen it, but I think it would drag a bit. However, this means that you only add 5 cards to your deck, which isn't very many for a deck learning mechanism...

I don't have much in the way of deck thinning in this game. There are a couple of equipment cards that do it, but mostly I had decided that instead of thinning your deck, players could focus on Family, thereby drawing a ton of cards instead. This is equivalent in some way to deck thinning, and it means that if you want a "thinner" deck, then you have to focus on Family. If you focus on other things and neglect Family, then you will suffer from deck bloat.

I think I chose 4 of each card (plus or minus) so that you could reasonably have 3 of them at a time. If you play 1 Family card, you avoid a penalty and draw +2 cards next turn. If you play 2, then you draw +4 cards. But if you commit 3 of your 5 cards to Family in one turn, then you draw + cards AND you get a Teamwork token, which is valuable.

Similarly, if you play 1 Community card, you avoid a penalty and draw 1 extra henchman to choose from. 2 is a little stronger (draw +2 henchmen to choose from). 3 Community cards means you draw + 3 henchmen to choose from AND you get to call the police on one of the henchmen in play.

Job cards are a little different in that you gain $ tokens, which you don't have to discard. Playing 3 at once doesn't do anything too special, but most of the equipment costs about 3 to obtain.

Anyway, because of all that, I wanted to make sure players had enough cards to invoke those more powerful plays if they wanted to. However, I might try reducing the starting decks to 3 of each (10 cards if you include the character). Then if the game lasts 5 rounds, then at least a larger portion of your deck will be changed. Also, with the changes below, it's possible I could add a few rounds to the game, further impacting the amount your deck changes over the course of the game.

Villain Format

Since the games inception, the Arch Villains would sit there, out of play, until one (or more) of them were triggered to enter play. Part of the point of the game was to make sure the "right" one came into play, the one you'd have an easier time beating based on the cards you'd taken into your deck throughout the game.

Last week I tried a slightly different format, which I think has a lot of good things going for it. Instead of being "out of play," the three Arch Villains could be in play the whole time. When henchmen come into play, they are placed in front of their affiliated villain, in a way protecting them. During the game, you can't attack an Arch Villain if there are henchmen in front of them. Theoretically, this could lead to more interesting decisions about which henchmen to defeat (you want to save certain colored civilians so you don't lose, you might want particular trophies, you might want to defeat what you can afford to defeat, and you might want to "dig" toward one of the Villains in particular). This way you could also have to face decisions mid-game such as "do we defeat this henchman over here, or do we hit that villain while we have the chance, since he has no henchmen in front of him?"

This format seemed to work, though it'll require some tweaks and changes to fully implement. I think it feels more like a real game this way. It might mean cutting the few henchmen that are affiliated with multiple different villains, and I'll have to decide if unaffiliated henchmen are in front of no villain, or all villains.

Turn Structure

It had come up before, more than once, that the turn structure was not intuitive. I have considered changing it, maybe even tried changing it once, but never liked the results. After playing a couple games with my regular testers, I finally conceded that the turn sequence needed to be different. What I had was this...
1. Income phase: collect $ based on what you have in play
2. Support phase: draw cards based on what you have in play (now you have cards in play, a hand of cards, a draw pile, and a discard pile)
3. Patrol phase: draw henchmen based on what you have in play
4. Fight phase: spend icons in play to defeat henchmen. Once in a while you maybe have a card you can play from your hand, but mostly you have a hand at this point to help decide what to do this turn based on what you could maybe do next turn.
5. Recoup phase: discard everything in play, play new cards from hand to use next turn, then discard hand.

The long and short of this was that players were having several problems:
* Confusion between the hand, draw pile, discard pile, and display
* Planning the turn, then having to re-plan the turn once new henchmen were revealed (in the patrol phase, right before fighting)
* Confusion between cards in play that they could use this turn, and cards in hand that they can't use until next turn

There had been suggestions of putting the Support phase right before Recoup, so you draw cards right before using them. I think I even tried this once, but it didn't really solve the problems, and I didn't like it.

I have finally decided to re-organize the turn to actually address those problems. The new sequence is:
1. Support phase: draw cards and play some of them into your display
2. Income phase: collect everything you collect ($, teamwork tokens, penalty tokens)
3. Fight phase: use icons in play to defeat henchmen currently in play
4. Patrol phase: NOW bring new henchmen into play
5. Recoup phase: note how many cards you're supposed to draw, then discard EVERYTHING, hand and display.

So now you still technically have a hand, display, draw pile, and discard pile, but you don't access them at weird times. You draw cards ant the beginning of the turn, use them during the turn, and then discard them at the end of the turn.

Putting Patrol after Fight means you only have to plan each turn once. This is not only less confusing, but it speeds things up quite a bit, and makes a lot of sense. It also approximates other cooperative games in which players get a turn, then the AI they're fighting against gets a turn.

So we tried that a couple of times, and it definitely seemed smoother. I personally sort of missed the ability to know what you would be able to do next turn, but I also didn't have a problem with the old turn sequence. Other players weren't using the info about next turn, and were getting confused, so the obvious right thing to do seems to be reorganizing the turn like this. Also, while you don't know exactly what you'll be able to do next turn, you DO know the general contents of your deck, so you should know what's likely or possible.

On the down side, this new structure introduced a new issue. Now you plan out the turn at the beginning, and then you resolve it. As nothing changes between when you play your cards and you resolve them, there was something a little off about the very end of the game. When you could win, you would know it during the planning stage, and that felt bad somehow. You're sitting there figuring out your turn, making your plans, etc, and one of the other players just says "GG guys, we win this turn." So anti-climactic.

Sure, at SOME point in every game there will be an instant when you've realized you will win. But that should really be you're resolving the action, not when you're planning it. What really ought to happen is that you play the cards, then something happens such that you don't know for sure whether you'll win or not. In the old format, you'd plan your turn, maybe see that you can win this turn, then you had to add new henchmen which might lose you the game before you resolve the fight phase. that wasn't perfect, but it was enough to counter that anti-climactic feeling which appeared as soon as I changed the turn sequence.

So, how to solve this problem, while keeping the improvements of the new turn order? Well, I need something that happens between card play and resolution that could change or foil your plans...

Villain Events
Fortunately, there's something I've been meaning to add to the game anyway: effects each villain could have, which make the game harder, and make the villains feel more different from each other. I hadn't designed those, but I had a few ideas for some effects. For example, the Sadist could kill civilians (you don't get them back when you defeat henchmen), and the mastermind could block access to some of the rules (no calling the police, for example).

So I made a small deck of cards for each villain with some effects on them. At the very beginning of the Fight phase, before anything else happens, you'll flip the top event card for each villain. Their effect will occur, which may be immediate, or may be a static effect that stays active until the next turn's fight phase when a new card replaces this one. These effects could very well foil your plans, making them exactly what I need to keep the game interesting. For example, if you plan the turn and decide that you're able to win this turn, and then all of a sudden, the Anarchist makes you draw new henchmen, and they happen to go in front of the villain you were going to defeat, then you'll have to wait until next turn. Or perhaps the villain you were after suddenly requires 1 more Strength icon to hit -- can you still afford it? Or perhaps they take an extra hostage - can you hit them one more time? Maybe next round...

Further, I wanted to make sure it wasn't all about picking 1 villain, and just piling up the other two with henchmen while you beat up the chosen one. Therefore I put 3 effects on each card, each more severe than the last. The effect in play depends on the number of henchmen in front of that villain. The first tier is currently "no effect" for 0-1 henchmen, but it could also be some small, mostly insignificant effect. This way, if you have the villain's henchmen mostly under control, then the event won't hinder you that bad.

The 2nd tier (2 henchmen) is a bigger effect, often local to the villain and his henchmen. Things like "my henchmen cost an additional Smarts to defeat" or "I cannot be attacked". This has the potential to mess with your game, but not in a huge way.

The 3rd tier (3+ henchmen) is an even bigger effect, often global, affecting all villains or henchmen. Things like "ALL henchmen cost an additional Smarts to defeat" or "no villain can be attacked this turn".

I brainstormed enough effects to make 5 cards per villain:
* The Mastermind effects mostly limit your access to rules (can't call the cops, can't use Teamwork, Equipment costs extra to buy/use).
* The Sadist mostly deal with henchmen and hostages (bring new henchmen into play, rescued hostages are removed from the game, remove civilian tokens from the game, take extra civilians hostage).
* The Anarchist has wild or chaotic effects (players take penalty markers, players draw fewer cards, players draw fewer henchman to choose from)

This is just the first draft, but I'm excited to try it out tomorrow. Assuming the structure works, then I think a little testing and development of those abilities will really make this game feel like a proper co-op.

Riders of the Pony Express - current status and new ideas

Back in August I had found an old strategy article I'd been looking for, which applied directly to one of my game designs, but I didn't revisit the game itself at the time.

The other day I posted about a playtest session in which I took that old prototype off the back burner and got it to the table: Riders of the Pony Express (BGG link - looks like I ought to edit that description a little bit!).

As I mentioned in the August post, I have experienced an issue, mostly with the 5-player game. And as I mentioned in the playtest report post, I found a hand-written rules edit that I don't remember every trying before, which may solve the 5p problem for me as well, at least in the blind bid version of the game (the one which is the most gamer-y, and which I will probably stick with):

The winner of the bid must leave their winning bid card face up on the table, it is not available to them for the rest of the round.

That's it! It's so simple, and it made for some very interesting bidding dynamics all around.

With respect to the 5p problem I outlined in the August post, I had showed some math which explained why winning each bid for the minimum of $3 was fairly dominant -- you would get $24 while each opponent would get only $14. Sure, you would have to spend more traveling, and you would get a lower bonus upon returning to the post office, but even if that did kind of even things out, it isn't fun for the other players to just go through the motions of riding across the board while you visit town after town to deliver all your parcels.

In the comments on that post, I posited two solutions which could change the math, evening up the amount of money you would get compared to each opponent if you won all the bids at $3: upping the total amount from $10 to $15 in a 5p game, or allowing a minimum bid of $2 instead of $3. Neither of these really solve the problem, they just punish the player who does the annoying thing. That's a sort of "soft" solution, in that players who are trying to win probably won't do something so bad, therefore the game won't be ruined. However, the reality is that, whether they want to or not, players don't always "play to win" as much as you might think. This is especially true in the case that they haven't played before, or fully analyzed the costs of delivering.

This new solution of leaving the winning bid card face up DOES solve the problem, because it means you simply CAN'T bid $3 on every auction! If players really think that bidding the minimum is the way to go, then at least the parcels will be spread around between the players. And savvy players may start to realize they can do better if they bid higher (though if a different non-savvy player does undercut them every time, it might not be very fun, even if they do win).

I'll note also that the current rules give each player a mandatory parcel to deliver. This may be thematically awkward, but it means everyone is going SOMEWHERE each round, making certain other parcels "on the way."

Things to try in the next test
As I mentioned in the last post, I had a hard time finding something I thought really needed changing. Here are a few changes I'll try for the next playtest:
* Increase value of Bears from +2 to +3. This should make them more distinct from Bandits, and will make the Shotgun item more valuable (currently it is probably not really valuable enough)
* Deal round 1 mandatory parcels face up instead of face down, to see if that makes the auction phase any more interesting (it might actually be worse, but it's worth a try!)
* Instead of dealing mandatory parcels for rounds 2 and 3, layout N+1 face up and let players take one when they arrive at the post office (so drafting them in the order they finish the round).
* Treat the mandatory parcel just like the ones obtained by auction - keep it face up and you're required to deliver it that round

Currently the mandatory parcels are face down, they take up space in your inventory, and they aren't required to be delivered until the end of the game, while face-up parcels obtained in the auction phase are required to be delivered that round, but they don't take up your inventory space. Here's a quote from a previous post when I implemented it:

One issue that's come up in the past is the face down parcel cards. Some players feel they "force" a certain path, and I can see that... so I tried a change. Face down parcels aren't from your boss, they're like side jobs. You're not REQUIRED to deliver them each round, but they take up space in your inventory. I made player boards to help show this - you have room for 1 face down card and 4 items (expanded from 3), and if you don't deliver your 1st face down card, then the next one takes up 2 of your item slots (this is obvious graphically). Currently I'm saying that you have to deliver them by the end of the game, but another option is to simply apply a penalty if you don't (so if it's more expensive to deliver than to take the penalty, maybe you just take the penalty).

But you do get the mandatory parcel before having to claim other parcels, and now maybe you'll have chosen it (per tweak listed above), so maybe it'll be fine to treat them the same as the parcels you get in the auctions. I could do with more elegant rules here, so maybe all parcels should just be face up, required to deliver that round.

* Treat each hazard and each town as a space, and let players move from space to space, rather than from town to town. One of my players thought this would be way more intuitive, and it does have the advantage that if 2 players arrive at the same town at about the same time, the one that fiddles around less (spends less time acting int he town) will leave first, irrespective of turn order.

Originally, I had players moving from town to town. Here's another quote from a previous post about why I changed that:

to better represent what's going on (and to make fair races between players), I specified that you don't move from town to town - you move from town to hazard tile, then on your next turn you arrive in the town, discard any parcels, pick up an item if you like, and then move to the next hazard.

So now you basically move from hazard to hazard, and do some stuff in a town as yo pass through. Though it has't bothered me at all, it IS a little weird. So I'll try alternating (move from hazard to town, town to hazard, etc). I thought it might be odd to have twice as many turns, where half of them are 0-1 time cost. When paying 0 time, do you just go again right away? If that's the case more often than not, then why make it a separate turn? But maybe I should make town turns a little more costly -- like you spend 1 time for each thing you do, minimum 1. So like, you had to rest or change out your horse at the very least (1 time), and if you go around making deliveries or shopping for items, it'll cost you more time.

So for a hazard space you spend the listed amount, plus hazard modifier, minus item modifiers (minimum 1). And for a town space you spend 1, plus 1 for each delivery you make, and for at most 1 item you pick up. Which means you could spend 1, 2, 3, even 4 time in a town (in fact, I think it could theoretically max out at 5 if you have both parcels and a package item to deliver, and if you pick up an item).

This change will make longer, more circuitous routes quite a bit more expensive, which might have the side effect of encouraging players to bid higher on parcels, or more often say "no thanks" and let the auctioneer take the parcel. I'd like that to be something that can happen if you choose wisely and want it to, or choose poorly and get stuck with it, but hopefully not too often because things are just too expensive! I'll have to see if that goes too far.

Playtest day: revisiting Automatown and Riders of the Pony Express

The ball is back in Michael's proverbial court for the game I've been testing lately (Sails & Sorcery), so Saturday I brought two games I've had on the back burner for a while: Automatown and Riders of the Pony Express.

Automatown

It's been 2 years since I initially prototyped this worker placement game where you use your workers to build more workers, and it's been almost as long since I got it to the table. The basic premise is that you're building robots out of head, arm, torso, and leg pieces of high, medium, and low quality (as well as scrap). You can make a generic robot with anything, which gives you another works, and adds 1 strength to your army of robots, but if you get the correct combination of head, arms, torso, and legs, then you can complete a blueprint and make a better robot -- stronger, or with a cool ability you can use each time you send it out.

Challenges with this one include things like (a) the scary look of 13 different resources (even if there are really only 4, each with 3 levels of quality -- but since the blueprints require specific levels of quality, it kinda IS like there are 13 different resources), and more importantly (b) the "combo-y" nature of the abilities does not seem to be coming through, so there isn't a strong feeling of engine building to be had.

I got some good notes, some of which had come up in previous tests, but it's been so long I'd forgotten about them, and I hadn't updated my prototype (friendly reminder: keep our prototypes up to date!). Things like making a specific set of starting worker placement cards, to ensure the first round has useful actions for example. Also, reducing the game end trigger for 4 players, so that the game ends before players have 10+ workers each and the blueprint deck runs out (also, I could make more blueprints). Also, I think I need to improve the engine building aspect / combo-y nature of the robot abilities (again), because it seems like players weren't feeling like they were able to build combos.

Some good ideas that came up this time include:
* Rather than taking any card from the 3 available blueprint cards, take the 1st (if you placed 1 worker), 1st-2nd (if you placed 2), or 1st-3rd (if you placed 3 workers). Ether that, or take any one you want, but to access the cards deeper in the row, pay resource cubes onto the ones before it (as is common in games with a card row). I like both of those ideas, and I'm not sure which I like better.
* Possibly making the higher level resources cost more to get, since currently it felt easy to get what you needed. Currently things are designed and balanced such that the high quality resources are worth more than the low quality ones -- a low quality torso is worth 2 (scrap + upgrade), and a high quality torso is worth 4 (scrap + 3 upgrades), which IS more, but with so many workers, and so many ways to get, upgrade, and swap resources around, it didn't feel hard for players to get what they needed (though by definition, they were paying more for it). I think overall the system might just be too flexible. If I re-balance things so that going up a level requires not just an upgrade action, but also a scrap (+2 units), then that might make the higher level resources somewhat harder to get, and it might also simplify the worker spaces, some of which are oddly designed in order to get the values right.
* Maybe cut a whole resource type, and just have head/torso/legs, reducing the resource variety by 3, and the cost complexity by 25%

Some ideas that I'm less sure about, but which certainly bear considering or trying include:
* Separating scoring from building robots. Make it so you build robots for workers and abilities, but then do scoring some other way.
* Making a sort of Master Blueprint that you could improve/update, to give a better sense of "that player wants that type of resource," so that you can plan and block better.
* Maybe don't require 1 of each type per robot -- instead maybe have a robot that requires multiple heads and only 1 torso, for example. Or change the resources to be things like actuators and power cores instead of heads and torsos. With good iconography, the costs would be clear enough, it's not necessary to make sure each robot has each of the 4 types of resources. This may also help the engine building aspect, since you won't need to always get all 4 resource types (something the swap ability was supposed to help with)

I definitely got a lot to think about for this one, and I'll be revisiting my prototype soon to try another version.

Riders of the Pony Express

This is another "oldie-but-a-goodie" from the back catalog. My last blog post about playtesting this one was 4 years ago (whew!), but I might have played it since and not posted about it. The premise of this one is that you're a rider for the Pony Express, tasked with delivering parcels to various towns on our way from Missouri to California and back. You haggle with your fellow riders, trying to get people to take your parcels for you, and offering to take parcels that are on your way, before riding from town to town to make deliveries. This was my attempt at a low-bid auction, initially a "count-up" auction, where the auctioneer would count up from 1 to 10 or until another player jumped in to claim it, I think it works better as a blind bid (even though generally speaking I hate blind bids). However, it's possible that the "count up" auction could be a variant rule, because non-designer/social gamer types seemed to like it.

This game went over pretty well with my playtesters, and a new rule I found hand written on the rules page was a great change that I don't think I'd tried before. In the past I'd had some trouble with the 5 player game, and decided maybe it should just be a 4p max game, but this new rule might actually make 5p work just fine after all. The rule is that you leave your bid card out, so you can't bid the minimum ($3) over and over again. We clarified that to be that the bid winner leaves their card out, which must be what I had meant in the first place :)

I was hard pressed to find anything I really wanted to change for the next test of this. I think I'll boost the Bear hazard up by 1, to make them more different than the Bandits, and to make the Shotgun item more attractive. I also might try a tweak to the delivery phase based on some comments that one of my testers felt strongly about.

All in all, a good playtest day. We even played Dave's video game prototype, which is a pretty fun spaceship building/dogfight/king-of-the-hill ting based largely on one of my favorite old arcade classics, Rampart.