Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Modular vs Integrated expansions

Having recently done an expansion for Crusaders, and having done 3 expansions for Eminent Domain and one for Isle of Trains as well, I have noticed a particular style I like to use when creating expansions, and I've identified two distinct types of expansions: Modular and Integrated.

Modularity

A modular expansion is one with several distinct modules that can be added in various combinations. These can be good because they allow the players to use the modules they enjoy, and simply ignore the ones they don't care for. It allows players to customize their experience. Undoubtedly, this is something that some players will appreciate.

However, it also requires playing each module at least once to determine if it works well for your group, and it requires some effort to curate the expansion content to provide that perfect customized experience. For a group that loves a game and plays it all the time, one that's willing to put in the effort and plays to find the perfect combination of modules, this could be fine. But in today's market, I wonder if players will put in that time and effort? Or would they prefer to just buy a curated expansion, where the "best combination of modules" is the only thing provided?

Another down side to a modular expansion is that because of that modularity, the pieces of the expansion may feel bolted together and disparate rather than feeling like a seamless experience.

Integration

An integrated expansion is one where the new parts play off of each other and off of the original content. When done well, this type of content fits seamlessly with the base game, and it can be difficult to differentiate the new stuff from the old.

This loses the opportunity for customization provided by a modular expansion, but it gains the curated feel, and doesn't require any work on the part of the player to get to the "best" configuration.

Another down side to integrating an expansion is that it may be more difficult to remove the content when you want to play the game with new players. For an insular group who plays the same game many times, an integrated expansion may be preferable, while for a group where new players come and go with each play, it may be more difficult to pop the expansion content in and out.

My personal preference

It's probably clear in the above paragraphs that modular expansions aren't my preferred format. Well integrated, expansion content fits together with the base game in such a way that it feels like it was always there, or like it belongs. I find something attractive in the thought that the expansion integrates so well that a new player might not be able to identify the new content from the old.

Looking at the expansions I've done, I think it's clear I've attempted to go for integration over modularity:

In the Eminent Domain expansions, you simply add the new tech cards, shuffle the new planets into the deck, and the Fleet, Mining, and Political Influence tiles tie it all together.

When I first played Isle of Trains: All Aboard (which hasn't been published... yet) with the publisher, they were skeptical going into it that the game really needed an expansion. After we played, they said they were surprised how well integrated the expansion was, and that it was not obvious the expansion content wasn't just part of the base game in the first place.

Crusaders: Divine Influence is about to ship from China, so not many have played it yet, but my goal with that one was to seamlessly integrate the new content with the old. I replaced the Influence action with something more involved, and I added new buildings and a few factions. If you know the rules of the base game already, then playing with the new content should be easy to pick up. Learning the game for the first time with the expansion content included will be a bit more complicated than learning just the base game, but I have had some success teaching the game that way most of the times I have played the expansion with strangers.

Conclusion

There might be a temptation to make expansions modular, because as a designer it can be easy to think that's what players want, and it abdicates the responsibility of curating the expansion to the players. My advice for designers is to consider the game you are expanding, and that game's audience. In this day and age, with thousands of new titles coming out every year, is modularity really the best format for your expansion? Or would your audience be better served with a well integrated, curated expansion? For most of the games I work on, I think it's the latter.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Apotheosis - recent challenges and possible solutions

I have been testing Apotheosis quite a bit lately, and on a coarse grained scale, I think it's going pretty well. The structure of the game works and has improved with iteration, and the game action is fun (for me at least). One of my regular testers doesn't seem to love it (I don't think it's really his type of game), but the others still seem to enjoy it.

But games don't get finished on a "coarse grained scale." At least, they shouldn't! When talking about some of the finer details of the game, there are some challenges I'm still facing with it. Until these challenges are overcome, I cannot call the game finished. However I do think these challenges are overcome-able! Here are some of the bigger challenges I'm currently facing, and what I'm planning to try to do about them:

Challenge number 1: The Endgame

One of the biggest problems this game has been facing is an end game dynamic that is disappointing. The game is basically a race up some tracks, and players can see how many turns it will take them to "finish" the race, and can sometimes tell whether anybody can stop them. It's super anticlimactic to hear your opponent say "I can win in 6 turns. Can anybody do better than that, or should we just stop now?"

In an effort to keep this from happening, I was looking for a way to add uncertainty to the end game. I thought I had found something, but in my first attempt I implemented it wrong so it didn't work. But after trying it, I started to think it wouldn't be quite right even if implemented better.

My next attempt was a more subtle thing, which won't stop a player from figuring out how many turns it'll take them to "finish," but might obfuscate whether or not someone else can beat them to it (thereby keeping the game interesting enough to play out the last few rounds):

  1. Give players a face-down adventure which they could do instead of one of the face-up ones. This way you can't be sure whether your opponent can advance on a track, or what they need to be able to do so.
  2. Try player screens to hide resources, so it's harder to tell what your opponents can do.
  3. With player screens, maybe add more instances of getting things at random (resource cubes, equipment, Side Quest cards, etc) so that it's not all Hidden Trackable Information (HTI). There are already random equipment draws currently, and we could easily hide the Side Quests in hand, maybe that's enough.
In addition, we required a Tier 3 adventure to actually win the game. That way the final push to win couldn't be sort of cheesed with a surprise bump from a side quest (because that's kind of anticlimactic), or using the worker space that inefficiently moves you up a track (because that's not only anticlimactic, but also basically unblockable, which means you can see it coming several turns ahead, leading to the problem I'm looking to solve)

Having tried this format once so far, I think it has helped a little bit, but may not have completely solved the problem.

One thing that occurred to me as I was thinking about this challenge is that there are games -- popular, well received games -- that have a similar dynamic. Just about every time I played the 2014 title Istanbul, by Rudiger Dorn, I was able to see that I could "finish" the race to 5 gems in 4 or 5 turns, and often I could see whether or not anybody could stop me or beat me to it. That made the last 4 turns or so feel like something of a slog, but the game hasn't seemed to suffer from it.

So maybe I'm overly concerned about this "problem" in my game. I think if you can call the game in 4 turns or so, it wouldn't be so bad, but 6-8 turns out i maybe too much. So maybe I don't need to solve the problem 100%, but rather make sure that if it DOES happen, it only happens within 4-5 turns of the end of the game.

Challenge number 2: Equipment not pulling its weight

Equipment in this game is basically a secondary resource, a little harder to get, and useful mostly for one particular aspect (an aspect that players could mostly neglect if they wanted to, but theoretically is more efficient if they don't). I think Equipment is nice thematically, but the mechanisms for getting it are a bit overblown and maybe too random for the relatively small role they play.

One solution is to cut Equipment altogether, reducing the number of resources (by 4, technically, since there are 4 types of equipment). Some of my testers seem to think there are too many resources in the game, and cutting equipment would certainly help that. But I fear that would just mean you use the stuff you're already collecting to pay for the valuable stuff Equipment was supposed to buy you, which seems lame to me.

Another solution is to make Equipment a bigger deal in the game. My first attempt at this, partly to try and salvage Equipment, and partly because removing it would mean I'd need to do more updating to the prototype and design work before testing again (and I had other things to test), had to do with the attempt mentioned above to add some uncertainty to the end game. That may work in some format, but having tried it, I'm not sure I like it as much as I'd hoped.

My next attempt was to add Equipment as a cost for the 3rd adventure tier. The 3rd tier requires a few worker levels of any type in addition to what's needed for tier 2, and currently has no additional resource cost (but I think it should). The rewards are a handful of Blessings (which are a flexible commodity), and a track bump (vp) of your choice. Originally, instead of Blessings, the reward was a Spoils -- a special resource you need to do a certain thing (it's kind of like 2 points and a power). The only other way to get those is by (a) Side Quest cards, which cost Equipment, or (b) spending a large number of blessings (which is hopefully inefficient by comparison). So maybe putting the reward back to a Spoils instead of Blessings (which is kind of thematic anyway), and adding an Equipment cost, then it makes some sense: Equipment is always for getting Spoils -- if you do it through an Adventure, then you also get VP, if you do it through a Side Quest, then you maybe get something else with it.

In addition, I added some worker placement spaces that care only about your worker's class (that was partly to address some other issue I was worried about), and one of them lets you get Equipment, so now there are a few ways to get equipment, and a few ways to spend it. Since you can't always guarantee you get the TYPE of equipment you want, I also added the option at one of the worker spots to trade in any 2 equipment for the one you want.

So far I think this is promising, so I'll try it again. I'm sure those same playtesters will still complain there are too many different resources :)

Related to Spoils, it might be nice if  there were 1 more thing you could do with it. Because currently you only need a maximum of 4 or 5 in the game, and you can technically finish (though I don't know if you could realistically win) with only 1. I don't know if I like being able to buy them with Blessings, because that means you can avoid dealing with Equipment altogether. Is that OK?