Keeping Up With The Joneses

 In my last post I teased a new game I'm working on. It's not really a secret, I just haven't had a chance to sit down and write out a post about it.

I haven't played on that TTS mod yet, but it looks like I'm going to have to update it, because I've done 2 live playtests and a few solo tests as well (something I rarely do), and I've made some adjustments here and there. But for the most part, the game works just like I envisioned it, which is always a promising sign :)

Keeping Up With The Joneses

One-up your neighbors in 6 different aspects of life, while trying to keep up with the Joneses up the street, who really seem to have everything together!

In this rondel game, each space on the rondel has a track representing a life aspect you can compete in: Job, Home, Kids, Cars, Charity, and Social. When you land on a space, you advance that track. Occasionally, an aspect will score in a majority fashion (farthest up the track gets 1st reward, etc), but if you are too far behind the Jones marker, then you don't score any status. 

JOB: whenever you pass or land here, collect income based on your position on the Job track. When scored, you'll earn Status points for having the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd best job.

 
HOME: either maintain your home (mow the lawn), make improvements, or pay extra money to do both. You compete with your neighbors and score based on your improvements, but you get a multiplier on that score based on your maintenance (it doesn't matter how many garden gnomes you have if your landscaping is too overgrown and unkempt). If you pass here without stopping, your maintenance track goes DOWN a space as your home falls into disrepair.

KIDS: Compete in 3 areas where your kids can excel: Grades, Sports, and Popularity. You'll score in each of those, and you'll get a multiplier for evenly advancing all three.

CARS: Every couple of steps on the Cars track will earn you a new car, which comes with an ability:

* Sports cars are flashy, they earn you Status points each time you collect income

* Minivans are convenient, they allow you to add 1 to your rondel move, making you more flexible

* SUVs are powerful, but expensive, they allow you to pay money to make additional track advances

* Hybrids are efficient, they give you extra money each time you collect income [or maybe a $1 discount any time you spend money to advance a track?]

CHARITY: either decrement your marker on that track to get a little money, or you pay (more and more) money to advance on the Charity track, and maybe collect a few Status points for doing so.

SOCIAL: advance on the Social track, then you may buy Status points for $1 apiece a certain number of times according to your position on the Social track.

On your turn, you'll first draft a card from a display with three slots labeled 1, 2, and 3. You'll resolve the card's effect, and then move your rondel pawn a number of spaces based on the slot it was in. Finally, you'll replace the card from the deck, then reference a number printed on the back of the new top-of-deck card. Move the Jones pawn that number of steps around the Jones track - the Joneses take 3 or 4 steps (based on player count) for each rondel space, and they advance a Jones marker on the track where they land. You must be within N spaces of that marker during scoring to qualify for any points at all (where N is the number of players in the game).

When the Joneses complete a lap on their rondel track, 2 areas will score. When they complete another lap, 2 more areas will score. After their 3rd lap, the remaining 2 areas will score, and after their 4th lap, the game ends and every area scores one more time.

The playtests so far

So far the game has been working well, just how I imagined it would. Sure, I'm finding lots of little details and balance issues to change, but the overall structure of entangling the rondel movement with a card draft (I expect to make a blog post about entangled decisions sometime soon) works well, and the majority scoring while needing to be "close enough" to the Joneses seems to be working out in 2 player games-it remains to be seen if it holds up at higher player counts.

Here are some of the things I've cut, followed by some of the changes I've made that have worked already or that seem promising:

I struggled at first coming up with enough interesting content to scrape together a test copy of the game, and I had a couple of effects that let you move the Jones rondel marker backwards or forwards. The idea was to control the speed of the game a little bit, and possibly also influence the scoring of different areas at different times. However, it simply wasn't very useful or desirable, so I took all of those effects out.

I was worried the Joneses would be too easy to keep up with, so I started out bumping their tracks when revealing which ones will score (at the beginning of a lap, giving you a few turns to act before those areas score). It turned out in my first test that that might have been premature. I reversed the decision, and it seems like the Joneses do a good enough job on their own. At least in my 2p tests so far.

For simplicity, I started with all the tracks scoring the same amount of points: 5/3/2 for 1st/2nd/3rd place. However the Kids track has 3 separate tracks in it, and each of them scores... AND you get a multiplier for even advancement that applies to each of those tracks. That was way too lucrative, especially in conjunction with too much money floating around, so I reduced the scoring to 3/2/1.

In the first couple of games, the money seemed a little too plentiful, which may have contributed to the ease of dominating the Kids tracks. I reduced the income a bit on the Job track to try and make the whole game a little more tight.

Originally, I had the Maintenance track drop when you get income (when you pass the Job space), in an attempt to keep all the bureaucracy clumped together at the same time. However, I did not like the dynamic that created, so I switched to a more thematic (and I think more interesting) method in which you only drop your maintenance if you fail to stop on the Home space, which is the space here that track resides. Now when you stop at Home, you can either advance your Improvement track or your Maintenance track, or pay money to advance both, and if you skip the space, then your maintenance track goes down 1 (reducing your multiplier).

I thought it would be interesting to have more cross-track effects, so I added some specific home improvements that you could get as you ascend the Home track (a 3-car garage, which advances your Cars track, for example). However, I think that was overloading that track, which already had a mechanism associated with it... so I took that back out for now. That kind of thing can come from the cards, I think.

I had originally started the kids track off with a multiplier of 0, meaning to get any points at all from that track, you had to advance each of the sub-tracks at least once. I didn't like that dynamic, and it became especially obvious when Kids was one of the first areas to score -- it was too easy for nobody to be able to get any points at all. I had thought I should either have a minimum multiplier of x1, or else keep it as-is, but start the players 1 step up the track, allowing for the possibility of going down to a 0 multiplier. But the more I thought of it, the more I disliked the idea of regression anyway, and so I adjusted the cost of advancing on those tracks so that you get 1 track for free, and you never drop, and I can just start the multiplier at x1.

I put a lot of thought and math into the distribution of numbers on the card backs which control how many steps the Jones marker takes each turn, aiming for +/-5 player turns per lap. In the end I decided on a distribution that should give an average of about 1.6 steps per turn, and a longer track for 3 and 4 players than for 2. I think that should yield a good number of turns (maybe only 4/player at 4p, hope that's enough) per lap. I was hesitant to go to 4 steps per rondel space for the Joneses because it seems like at that rate, they can really shoot up the tracks if they move just 1-2 spaces a couple turns in a row. So I figured out a way to avoid that eventuality -- I put a "no advance" icon on one of the steps in each space, so every once in a while the Joneses won't advance a track.

I've got some other tweaks to make, and I really would like to play with 3 or 4 players to see how that goes. Time to update my Tabletop Simulator prototype!