Kingdom Realms (3-Lane Game Jam): details

In a recent post I mentioned three new game ideas. In this post I'll flesh out one of them...

3 Lane Game Jam - Kingdom Realms

Man, that title sounds like it was created by an AI ChatBot, doesn't it? 

Kingdom Realms was my submission to a little 2-week game jam. Here's the description of the jam criteria, though it was made clear they were more like suggestions:

Games where there are 3 areas in which you can play cards, and you have to "win" two of the areas in some sense. Of course, if your game needs 4 or 5 lanes, that's okay too, but try and keep the "win 2/3" (or 3/5) lanes idea in there somehow if you can. There's no limitation on the number of cards or other components

Taking inspiration from Animal Kingdoms and Rolling Realms, I made a game where you turn up 3 Realm cards, each with a rule governing play in that lane, and a win condition, governing who wins that lane. Then you deal some cards into a supply, and take turns drafting a card and placing it in one of the realms on your side. In the end, I added effects that occur upon playing the cards as well. Once you get through the deck, you check each Realm's win condition and see who wins 2 out of 3.

To be honest, I'm much less thrilled with this game than I have been with some of my other games, but it does seem to work alright. I generally think I'm not very into lane combat games, Riftforce being an exception.

Tabletop Simulator:

Here's the TTS workshop mod for the game, if anyone's interested in trying it out: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2890010667

Kingdom Realms (version submitted to 3-lane game jam) 

COMPONENTS:

30 playing cards (6 each of rank 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7)

14 Realm cards (see file)SETUP:

Shuffle Realm cards and deal 3 face up (creating 3 lanes)

Shuffle playing cards and deal out 5 face up

Randomly select a start player

ROUNDS OF PLAY:

1. Take turns drafting the face up cards, one at a time (you'll get 2 total each round), and assigning them to two DIFFERENT lanes

(If you have no legal play, add the drafted card to your hand for tiebreak)

2. Resolve the card's effect (see below)

3. When there is only 1 card left, the start player takes it and keeps it in hand (for tiebreak)

4. Deal out 5 more cards face up, start player changes hands

GAME END:

Once all cards have been played, the game is over

Resolve each Realm... Win 2 Realms to win the game

If there is a tie, the player with the highest total value of cards in hand is the winner

CARD EFFECTS:

• 3: You may play this card face down. If you do, turn another card here face down. Face down cards have value = 1
• 4: You may swap this card with the most recent card an opponent played here
• 5: You may re-play a card from here in a different realm (face-down cards stay face down and have no effect)
• 6: If possible, turn a face-down card here face up
• 7: No effect

And here are the current Realms:

You must play cards in ascending order - Most cards wins

You must play cards in descending order - Most cards wins

Alternate color (black/red), you may not play the same color as the last card played here by any player - Most cards wins

To paly a card here, you must turn one of your face-up cards in another realm face down (face down cards have value 1) - Most cards wins

You must play cards in ascending order - Largest total value wins

Only RED cards can be played here - Largest total value wins

Only BLACK cards can be played here - Largest total value wins

Only ODD cards can be played here - Largest total value wins

Only EVEN cards can be played here - Largest total value wins

Alternate color (black/red), you may not play the same color as the last card played here by any player  - Largest total value wins

Card effects do not trigger in this realm - Largest total value wins

Alternate color (black/red), you may not play the same color as the last card YOU played here - Largest total value wins

Alternate parity (odd/even), you may not play the same parity as the last card YOU played here - Largest total value wins

To paly a card here, you must turn one of your face-up cards in another realm face down (face down cards have value 1) - Largest total value wins

For each card you have here, add 1 to the value or number of cards in each other realm - Lowest total value wins

You must match either SUIT or VALUE of the last card played here by any player - Last player to play here wins

Kid's car racing game: details

 In a recent post I mentioned three new game ideas. In this post I'll flesh out one of them...

Kid's Car Race

My 4.5 year old son LOOOVES vehicles. No idea why, I'm not a "car guy" by any means, but he's just fascinated by cars, trucks, tractor-trailers, vehicle transports, excavators, etc, etc, etc. He especially likes sporty cars (with spoilers), and he "oohs" and "ahhs" every time we see a Camero in traffic.

I thought this might be a good way to get him interested in playing games with me. We have a copy of Monza, and he plays that (he tolerates it, doesn't get as excited about it as I thought he might), and he understands the rules - including a house rule we use.

I recently saw a new game called HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, and started looking into it a little bit to see if I thought my son could handle a simplified version of that game (I don't really think so).

What he has been excited to play lately is War. He loves playing War, and he tolerates Monza... so I thought maybe I could make a game similar to Monza that used cards like War. In the end I came up with something that is NOT like War at all.

In this ide, you use the cars, board, and Dice from Monza, but instead of rolling the dice to move forward on the board, you play a card (value 1-3), and move that number of spaces. Then, whatever color you land on, you look at the dice and move 1 more space forward for each die showing that same color, then you reroll those dice. 

I tried playing 2-handed solo a few times, and it seems to work alright! So I tried to get my son to play it with me... no luck (at least not yet)

So here are the rules to the game -- you could try it if you have a copy of Monza and a deck of cards or two handy: 

COMPONENTS:

12 cards (4 each value 1, 2, 3) [use more for more players, or for 2 laps]
1 game board (see Monza)
6 color pip dice (see Monza)

SETUP:

1. Put the cars on the starting space of the racetrack
2. Deal 3 cards face up (could be face down instead) to each player
3. Roll all 6 dice
4. Youngest player goes first 

GAME PLAY:

On your turn, play a card and move that number of spaces (per Monza rules). 

Then, check the color of the space you land on. For each die showing that color, move 1 space farther (in that same lane, stop at tire spaces). 

Finally, reroll those dice and draw a replacement card (when the deck runs out, just don't draw - or reshuffle or something)

Card+Dice drafting: details

 In a recent post I mentioned three new game ideas. In this post I'll flesh out one of them...

Card + Dice drafting

This second idea hasn't got a title, it was inspired by a conversation which was initially about how to do an autobattler in a tabletop game. Someone suggested a dice drafting game with an autobattler sort of flavor, and that got me thinking "what if you drafted a die and played a card to a programmed row, then you rolled the dice and resolved the first card on your row vs the opponent, or the top card of a deck or something"

From there I quickly formulated a game structure - no theme or anything, so I'm probably stuck until I figure out a theme. I'll post the details in a fresh post, but it's got entangled decisions, cards+dice drafting, and programmed card play.

Here are the quick rules I came up with:

Components:

Cards in 4 colors
d6 dice in 4 colors
Victory point tokens?
Re-roll tokens?
"+1" tokens?

Setup:

1. Shuffle cards and deal out 1 per player in a draft row

2. Mix dice in a draw bag and draw 1 out to pair with each card in the draft row

3. Deal 1 die at random from the bag, and 1 card face up, to each player, followed by 1 card face down to each player (you may look at your face down cards). Roll your die and place your cards ina queue, face up 1st, face down 2nd

Rounds of play:

1. Determine turn order: Compare each player's face up card's value, plus the total pips on their dice of that color. Take turns in order from highest total to lowest. In the case of a tie, play RPS or something

2. On your turn, you may activate your current card's effects (e.g. a Yellow card might say "[Red]: For every 3 pips, score 1 vp"), then draft a card/die pair. The card goes face down into your card queue, and the die goes into your supply

3. Discard your face up card, then turn the next queued card face up

4. Roll all of your dice and pass the turn to the next player

...

Maybe in addition to going early in turn order, you get something that amounts to VP, or a set collection type of thing. Or maybe the cards themselves have a set collection icon on them

Game end should trigger at some point, maybe when players have about 8-10 dice. Maybe just when the dice/cards run out, or maybe when someone reaches some threshold of progress

The different colors could have different flavors of effect - like maybe red gets points, yellow gets re-rolls, blue gets progress on some track (maybe a race track which triggers game end and gives bonuses for position), green gets some +1 token to be used on a future roll, or a token which lets you use an off-colored die, or something like that

Of course, I haven't tried this yet, but it seems pretty simple to prototype, maybe I'll make a TTS mod and subject my playtesters to it.

Yangi x3! 3-Lane game jam, Card/Dice drafting, and a Kid's car race

I've been doing some freelance development lately, so not much I feel right talking about on my blog.. but I have had a few ideas of my own as well... I'll make a separate, more in-depth post about each, but here are my 3 latest game ideas (since the recent 18 card game jam):

1. 3 Lane Game Jam - Kingdom Realms

Man, that title sounds like it was created by an AI ChatBot, doesn't it? 

Kingdom Realms was my submission to a little 2-week game jam. Here's the description of the jam criteria, though it was made clear they were more like suggestions:

Games where there are 3 areas in which you can play cards, and you have to "win" two of the areas in some sense. Of course, if your game needs 4 or 5 lanes, that's okay too, but try and keep the "win 2/3" (or 3/5) lanes idea in there somehow if you can. There's no limitation on the number of cards or other components

Taking inspiration from Animal Kingdoms and Rolling Realms, I made a game where you turn up 3 Realm cards, each with a rule governing play in that lane, and a win condition, governing who wins that lane. Then you deal some cards into a supply, and take turns drafting a card and placing it in one of the realms on your side. In the end, I added effects that occur upon playing the cards as well. Once you get through the deck, you check each Realm's win condition and see who wins 2 out of 3.

To be honest, I'm much less thrilled with this game than I have been with some of my other games, but it does seem to work alright. I generally think I'm not very into lane combat games, Riftforce being an exception.

2. Card + Dice drafting

This second idea hasn't got a title, it was inspired by a conversation which was initially about how to do an autobattler in a tabletop game. Someone suggested a dice drafting game with an autobattler sort of flavor, and that got me thinking "what if you drafted a die and played a card to a programmed row, then you rolled the dice and resolved the first card on your row vs the opponent, or the top card of a deck or something"

From there I quickly formulated a game structure - no theme or anything, so I'm probably stuck until I figure out a theme. I'll post the details in a fresh post, but it's got entangled decisions, cards+dice drafting, and programmed card play.

3. Kid's car race

My 4.5 year old son LOOOVES vehicles. No idea why, I'm not a "car guy" by any means, but he's just fascinated by cars, trucks, tractor-trailers, vehicle transports, excavators, etc, etc, etc. He especially likes sporty cars (with spoilers), and he "oohs" and "ahhs" every time we see a Camero in traffic.

I thought this might be a good way to get him interested in playing games with me. We have a copy of Monza, and he plays that (he tolerates it, doesn't get as excited about it as I thought he might), and he understands the rules - including a house rule we use.

I recently saw a new game called HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, and started looking into it a little bit to see if I thought my son could handle a simplified version of that game (I don't really think so).

What he has been excited to play lately is War. He loves playing War, and he tolerates Monza... so I thought maybe I could make a game similar to Monza that used cards like War. In the end I came up with something that is NOT like War at all.

In this ide, you use the cars, board, and Dice from Monza, but instead of rolling the dice to move forward on the board, you play a card (value 1-3), and move that number of spaces. Then, whatever color you land on, you look at the dice and move 1 more space forward for each die showing that same color, then you reroll those dice. 

I tried playing 2-handed solo a few times, and it seems to work alright! So I tried to get my son to play it with me... no luck (at least not yet)

The List - November 2022

It's been a while, and I've got some updates to make, so it's time to revisit The List, again!  

Published Games:

- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion) [new edition coming 2023 from a new publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG) [theoretically signed by a publisher!]
- Isle of Trains (Co-Design with Dan Keltner) (BGG) [new edition coming 2022/2023 from Dranda Games!]
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (Co-Design with Dan Keltner) [New edition from Dranda Games with included expansion]
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) [now available from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [no available from Renegade!]

- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [coming soon (2023?) from Renegade!]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [coming soon (2023?) from Renegade!]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze

Development projects - Games I've done freelance development on

I've started doing some freelance development. As games I've worked on come out, I'll add them here

- Amun-Re expansion [with Alley Cat Games 20th Anniversary edition]

Finished But Unpublished Games - in line to be published:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print] [theoretically signed by a publisher!]
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [Ready for art] [theoretically signed by a publisher!]

- Deities & Demigods (Co-Design with Matthew Dunstan) [signed by a publisher!]

- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe) [signed by a publisher!]

Currently Pitching Games - "actively" looking for a publisher (though I haven't actively been doing much of anything lately!):

- Sails & Sorcery [with Michael Mindes] [pitching to publishers]

- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG) [pitching to publishers]

- Exhibit (BGG) [pitching to publishers]

- Keeping Up with the Joneses [pitching to publishers]

- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain) [pitching to publishers]

- Alter Ego (BGG)

- Dice Works (BGG)

- Suburban Sprawl

- Harvest (BGG) (Co-Design with Trey Chambers) [pitching to publishers]

 

"Finished" But Unpublished Games - abandoned or backburnered designs that are "done":

- Wizard's Tower (BGG) [Abandoned]
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]
- Rolling Realms: Jaffee Realms (for Jamey Stegmaier's Rolling Realms)

Current Active Designs - these are the games I'm actively testing or working on:

- Worker Placement Microgame

- Press-Your-Luck Microgame (KBGames 18 card game jam entry, July 2022)

- Kingdom Realms (KBGames 3-lane game jam entry, Nov 2022)

Backburnered Designs - I kid myself into thinking that I'm still working on these:

- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

- Joan of Arc

- I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement

Promising Recent ideas:
- Worker-ception [with David Short]

- False Prophet [Mancala/Worker Placement]

- Come And Play [Sesame Street memory/rondel game]

- Candyland Game [Candyland/No Thanks mashup]

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

- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG)

- Reading Railroad [Abandoned]

- Moctezuma's Revenge

- Kilauea [a designer showed interest in co-designing, but that didn't go anywhere]

- Automatown [with Michael Brown]

- Dynasty [I still think this one has potential]

Misc and Really Old Stuff - most of this I'll probably never get back to, but I like keeping it around just in case:
- 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)

- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- The Untouchables
- Day labor game based on craps

- Rondel Role Selection

-Scourge of the High Seas [deckbuilding game with 2 center rows]

Wayback Machine: The League Of Gamemakers

 Some 7 years ago, I joined up with a California based group of game designers called the League of Game Makers, and I posted some stuff on their site. There were a lot of creative folk in that group, including Mark Major, designer of Chimera Station (which I developed for TMG, and is now available - at least in beta - on boardgamearena.com), and Luke Laurie, designer of The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire (a personal favorite), and several other titles since. 

I just checked, and it appears their website has gone the way of the dodo, but thanks to the archival prowess of The Wayback Machine Internet Archive, I was able to dig up those posts I had made, only some of which had been cross posted to this blog in the past.

So if you're looking for something game-design-y to read, feel free to peruse these articles. I had a lot to say about game design back then, and some of it even sounded kinda smart!

Low Hanging Fruit

I find that when developing a game, there is usually some low hanging fruit - some obvious tweaks and changes that would likely improve the game. That seems like a good place to start, before diving deep into a development project, before stripping a game to studs and rebuilding it, might as well try the obvious tweaks and pick off that low hanging fruit!

I suppose that's a product of experience, where a designer who hasn't encountered certain situations or design problems makes relatively common "mistakes," and another designer or a developer who has seen that situation before immediately notices it.

I've started looking into taking freelance development jobs, and as an example, on one of them there happens to be a lot of this low hanging fruit. So before I really get in there and start messing around under the hood, I'm starting with some of the more obvious stuff, like false or uninteresting decisions (decisions made without proper context), unreliable abilities, unnecessary layers of randomness, and obvious card imbalances.

When you design, or develop, what kinds of low hanging fruit have you come across?

May The Riftforce Be With You (also: custom guild ideas)

 Riftforce

Riftforce is a recent lane combat game (like Battle Line or SolForge or something) that I've been playing a lot on BoardGameArena lately. I haven't played a whole lot of this type of game in the past, and frankly, the ones I have played didn't excite me that much for on reason or another. I kinda liked SolForge I guess, but that was about it.

But Riftforce... Riftforce is pretty awesome. You start out by drafting a team of 4 different Guilds which will make up your deck. Each guild (or suit) will have 9 cards (4x 5's, 3x 6's, and 2x 7's), and each guild has an effect - how much damage it deals, or in what way, when activated.

On your turn you simply choose from 3 options...

1. Play: Put up to 3 cards (matching guild or value) into play in the same lane, or each in an adjacent lane
2. Activate: Discard a card from your hand to activate up to 3 cards matching that card's guild or value
3. Check & Draw: Collect points from any lane where you have unopposed cards, then refill your hand to 7 (you can't do this if you already have 7 cards)

Activating a card allows it to do its thing - dealing some amount of damage to an opposing card and using whatever its guild effect might be. Cards can take their value in damage before they're discarded.

You score 1 point for each opposing card you kill, and 1 point for each lane you control when you Check & Draw, and it's a race to 12 points.

And that's it. The rules are simple, but the game play is varied and interesting, especially due to the way you draft your guilds for the game. There are 10 total guilds in the base game, and each player plays with 4 of them per game. During setup, each player is dealt 1 guild at random, then drafts 3 more from a supply of 7 (the last one isn't used). Since each guild has an ability or effect, they can combo together in interesting ways. Removing 1 guild and being dealt one at random go a long way toward keeping you from always leaning on the same guilds.

To be honest though, since you use 4 guilds per game, and some of the guild effects are kinda similar, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're playing a wholly different game each time. but there's an expansion coming soon (is it out yet?) that adds 8 more guilds, which I'm sure will help, I look forward to those being added to BGA.

Base Game Guilds

Here are the 10 guilds in the base game:

• Crystal: Deal 4 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. When killed, opponent gets 2 points instead of 1
• Fire: Deal 3 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Deal 1 damage to the ally directly behind this card
  
• Water: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Then move to an adjacent lane and deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at that rift
• Air: Move to any other rift, then deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift and each adjacent rift
• Earth: Deal 1 damage to the each opposing card at this rift when this comes into play. Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift
• Plant: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at an adjacent rift, then move it to this rift
• Thunderbolt: Deal 2 damage to any opposing card at this rift. If it dies, deal 2 more damage to any opposing card at this rift.
• Light: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Heal 1 damage from any ally
• Ice: If the last opposing card at this rift is damaged, deal 4 damage to it. Otherwise deal 1 damage to it
• Shadow: Move to any other rift, then deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. If it dies, score an additional point

Expansion Guilds

Here's what's to come in the expansion:

• Beast: Move this beast to an adjacent location. If there is damage on that beast, put 3 damage on the first enemy in that location. Otherwise, deal 2 damage on him.
• Lava: Deal 2 damage each to the first enemy in the adjacent locations. Put 1 damage each on this lava and all allies in front of this lava.
• Love: When playing this love remove all damage from an ally in that location. Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location.
• Magnet: Deal 2 damage to the last enemy in this location. Move this enemy and magnet to an adjacent location.
• Acid: Deal 3 damage to the first enemy in this location. Deal 1 damage to the second enemy in this location. If the acid destroys an enemy, you will not receive a Riftforce.
• Sand: Move this sand to any other location. Deal 1 damage to each enemy in this location. Remove 1 damage from this sand.
• Music: Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If that enemy is destroyed by the music, play it on your side of the Rift at an adjacent location.
• Magic: Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If you have less than 7 elementals in hand, draw 1 elemental.

Custom Guilds

I see that someone has posted a fan expansion on BGG with 15 custom guilds in it. Here are some of my own ideas for guilds (some might be similar to the ones on the fan expansion, I wrote them down before seeing that):

• When activating and there's no card opposing, +1 Riftforce
• When activating and there's no card opposing, opponent loses 1 Riftforce
• Choose an enemy (any card?) at this location with damage on it and return that card to its owner's hand 
• Do 2 damage to the first enemy in this location, then shift 1 damage from one opposing card to another
• When activated, get 1 Riftforce and discard this card. Opponent does not gain Riftforce for this
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. After you Check & Draw, deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location.
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. Before you Check & Draw, each of ~this move 1 opposing card from their lane to an adjacent lane
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If they die, draw a card
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If they die, activate any one other card in play
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. You may put a card into play at this location
• Move all damage on opposing cards in this lane onto one card
• Move up to 2 damage from allies in any lane to any enemies in that same lane
• Heal up to 2 damage from any card(s) in play. For each, deal 1 damage to any card opposing the healed card
• cards that don't have to come into play adjacent to each other or something... "After coming into play, move this to any lane"
• would it be useful enough to have a Trap sort of effect: "Opponent's cards at this Rift cannot move" (trap water, air, shadow, and I think one or 2 of the expansion ones)
• Destroy the first enemy at this location. You may not activate any other cards this turn. [meaning they must activate alone]   
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. When ~this comes into play, heal 1 damage on any ally

And a few ideas from my friend David: 

• Deal 1 damage on the first enemy at this location. Add 1 card from your hand to any location. This new card comes with 1 damage on it
• When you play this card, it comes with 2 damage on it. [When activated] Discard this card with no effect, add two cards to two different rifts
• If this is the first ally at this location, deal 3 damage to the first enemy at this location. Otherwise, deal 1 damage to any enemy at this location

It might be nice to see some guilds with non-standard card distributions - an all-5s guild that's weak, but easy to activate. A guild with some 9s (instead of 7s?), which can only activate each other, but are very hard to kill. I saw that the fan expansion linked above had some of that in it.

Edited to add:

• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. Move an ally from this location to any other location. deal 2 damage to any ally in that location and 1 damage to that ally
• Deal 1 damage to each enemy at this location
• Deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location. Activate another [~this] that has not been activated this turn
• Tank: deal 1 damage to first enemy here and move to the front of the rift. For each damage dealt to this Tank, heal 1 damage from a non-Tank ally
• Deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location for each [~this] here. Only the frontmost [~this] in the location may activate 

This game lends itself well to making custom guilds, and it would be easy to play them... if I had the game and played in real life! Playing only on BGA, I will have to be content thinking up fun guild powers and never playing with them. Hopefully the expansion will be implemented soon (though the base game is only in Beta, so it might be a while)

Have you thought of your own guilds? Post them in a comment below! 

ONE 18-card game design jam, THREE microgames!

18-card game jam

In the KBGames Community discord they just did an 18 card game design jam -- which is an exercise to think about designing a game under certain constraints - much like we used to do with the Game Design Showdown at BGDF.com back in the day. The only restraint on this jam was to use 18 cards and nothing else, but it was made clear that this restriction was more like a guideline, and not a hard and fast rule...

Worker Placement Microgame

I've posted recently about the progress I've made on a Micro Worker Placement game, inspired by an offhand comment I read on Twitter. I haven't really played that game again since that last update (I'm still keen to see how it plays after whittling it down to 16 cards in the deck), but I know that the game works, and isn't terrible, but I'm not sure whether I can claim it's really very fun, though I enjoy it.

I figured I might submit that Micro Worker Placement game to the jam... is that cheating? I came up with it before the jam started, but I didn't spend any more time on it than would have been allotted. The current version only uses 17 "real" cards, but it does use 8 more to track things, so it really comes in at 25 cards, which is over the limit by almost 40%. Maybe that's fine, but the point of the jam is to come up with a new idea. I wasn't particularly interested in making another 18 card game, but lo and behold, an idea came to me...

PYL Microgame

Inspired perhaps by all the Living Forest I'd been playing on BGA (that's a good game, by the way, and recently won the Kennespiel des Jahres!), I thought maybe I could make an 18 card Push Your Luck game with that blackjack mechanism like in Living Forest or Flip City.

So I did that. Of the 18 cards, 2 are for tracking your gems and points (you need 8 tokens, 4 per player, to track those things on these cards), 1 is a double sided "objective" card, and the remaining 15 make up the deck. There are 5 cards each of red, blue, and gold colored cards, and each card has a gem, and some number of letters on it. Originally each card's gem matched the card color, but then I decided to mix it up a bit, so for example, 3 of the 5 red cards have red gems, but 1 has a blue gem and one has a gold gem.

On your turn, you start flipping cards off the deck until you chose to stop, or until you "bust" by getting 6 or more of the same letter (A, B, or C). You are allowed to pay a gold gem to veto a card as its drawn (set it aside by the deck), then either stop drawing or draw again (up to you). This could be used to keep from busting, or to keep a particular color from scoring (see below).

After you stop, you collect gems: all gems of 1 color if you busted, two colors if you didn't. Then you get the opportunity to use the objective card to pay some gems for a star (stars are victory points in the game, it's a race to get 9 of them): 2 red + 1 gold on one side, 2 blue + 1 gold on the other, after using the card, you flip it over. Finally, you discard the cards and check to see if any colors score. 

The discard pile is kept organized - sorted by card color, and splayed so you can see the information on each card. This information allows you to make informed push-your-luck decisions. After each turn, if there are 4 (or all 5) cards of a color in the discard pile, then that color will score. It's possible more than one color will score at a time!

When you score a color, the player with the most gems of that color gets a star, and loses some gems of that color. The colors have a rock-paper-scissors relationship for breaking ties - for example, if tied for red gems, then the player with the most blue gems wins the point for red. Originally the rule was that you lose one gem when scoring a color, but once you started to get a big lead in a color, it felt pretty easy to keep it, and losing just 1 gem didn't close the gap very much. I'm torn between upping that to 2 gems lost, and something even more impactful, like 1/2 your gems (round up), or even all your gems. For my next test I'll try losing 2 gems and see if that feels like enough. Maybe losing 1 gem is fine after all.

I have to say, this game has just worked ever since the first playtest. The only tweak I made was to up the bust threshold to 6. I started with 5, but that led to a lot of turns where you only draw 2-3 cards and they weren't very interesting. 6 is much more dynamic!

Not only does this game work - that is to say it's a fully functional game - but I think it might actually be pretty good. As I've played more and more games I've found there's definitely some subtlety to it - when to stop not just to avoid busting, but to control which colors score, when to hit into a probable bust, when to spend gems to veto a card, and even when and whether to use the objective card.

I figured this might be a better candidate to submit to the 18 card jam, partly because I came up with it in the week between when the jam was announced and when it actually began (so that's closer, right?), and partly because it's 18 cards instead of 25... however it does require 8 tokens to track gems and stars. Still, that's less cheat-y, isn't it?

Lane Combat Microgame - Rift Paper Scissors

Another game I've been playing a lot of (and enjoying!) on BoardGameArena lately is Riftforce. To be honest, I've never been a big fan of lane combat games, I haven't even played very many of them. I liked SolForge I guess, but I don't recall playing any others I really enjoyed much.

But Riftforce is very cool. You start by drafting a team of 4 guilds, and they encourage different teams by (a) removing 1 team from the draft each game, and (b) dealing you a random guild to start off with - so you can't be sure to get your favorite team. Though truth be told, a lot of the combinations don't feel terribly different from each other, and in any given game I feel like I effectively ignore one of the guilds in my deck, so I'm not sure the games feel all that different to me. I look forward to playing with the expansion some day, which adds a bunch more guilds... and I even had a little fun thinking up custom guilds, something this game lends itself to easily for anyone so inclined. Maybe I'll make a new blog post to share those. But I digress...

Since I was thinking of 18 card games for this game jam, my mind ran through a few main mechanisms to see if anything jumped out at me as a way to do them in a small deck game. So of course, my mind quickly jumped to the idea of a small deck lane combat game, like a mini-version of Riftforce. Since I didn't have the componentry to track damage on all the cards like in Riftforce, I thought maybe I could use a Rock Paper Scissors relationship to resolve little combats.

A long time ago, after Brainfreeze became an iPad app, I had some thoughts about a follow up game - specifically for digital implementation - in which you would have cavalry, archers, and footmen cards in a deck, and you would place them in different lanes (probably 3), or else send them to train, which would occupy the card for a few seconds, then level it up. Every so often (maybe every second for example), the computer would "resolve" each lane, comparing the bottommost cards and removing the loser - where a level 2 card would beat a level 1 card, but if both cards are the same level, then there'd be a rock-paper-scissors relationship to determine who wins (in the case of a tie, like two level 1 archers against each other, maybe they're both removed). If you had cards on a lane when it resolved and the opponent did not, then you would get a point. Come to think of it, that decade old idea had some similarities with Riftforce!

So in my lane combat microgame (affectionately known as Rift Paper Scissors, due to the RPS combat resolution and the Riftforce inspiration), I figured there could be 3 battlefields, and you would have a small hand of cards that are either Rock, Paper, or Scissors. On your turn you would play 2 cards of the same type (rock, rock), play any 1 card and activate it, or discard a card to activate 2 cards of that type on the board. Activating a card meant attacking an opponent's card in the same lane. A 4th option you had on your turn was to resolve 1 lane and refill your hand. When resolving a lane, which was represented by a face don card from the deck, the player with the most cards in it would score it, which would give you some kind of effect, as well as some stars (vp). When there were no longer enough cards to refill the lanes, the game would be over, and the player with the most stars would win.

This first draft of the game did not work at all - it was far to common that you simply had the right card to dominate any card your opponent played ("you played Scissors there? I'll play Rock there and activate it"). And the effects I chose for winning a lane didn't even make sense - I had put "draw a card," but by definition you'd be filling your hand when you score it, so that wasn't great.

I made a 2nd attempt, expanding the cards to a sort of 6-way RPS... I gave each card a letter (A-F), and each letter had 1 letter it was really good against (deal 2 damage), one letter it was terrible against (deal 0 damage), and 4 letters it was evenly matched with (deal 1 damage). The 1st damage on a card would turn it sideways, the 2nd damage would remove it from the game. 

When I made the prototype for this, I started from the file that had red borders for rock, blue for paper, and yellow for scissors, so I ended up with 3 copies of each card, one with each colored border. I figured maybe the way to go was again, like Riftforce, to say you could play or activate 2 cards of the same letter, or the same color, or play 1 card and activate it. In general, this felt a little better with respect to game flow - the cards started to build up in play, but there was still something very wrong with the format..

In discussing this with a friend, Mohan suggested drawing 3 cards and simultaneously playing all 3 of them, 1 to each lane. That sounds potentially promising, so I might try something like that next. Perhaps after 3 rounds of placing the cards in their respective lanes, each lane could resolve by comparing the front-most cards head-to-head over and over (like my old iPad game idea), until only 1 side has cards remaining, and that side wins the lane.

With only 18 cards, at that point I think you'd have to shuffle everything up and begin again, maybe keep doing that until someone has won X lanes? Most of these ideas would work better with a larger deck, but with a larger deck, I might as well just play Riftforce!

ANYWAY... back to the game jam

The lane combat idea seemed like the best candidate to submit to the game jam, since I thought of it during the actual timeframe of the jam, and because it conforms to the actual rules of the jam (18 cards, nothing else), BUT I haven't been able to get it working, so I went ahead and submitted the Push-Your-Luck game instead.

So that's what I've been thinking about the last few weeks!

Micro Worker Placement game progress, and the "Strategy Triangle"

I recently posted about a micro worker placement game that had come together pretty quickly from idea to 1st prototype. I mentioned a lot of brainstorms in that post to improve the game. Since then, I have played 8 more times, iterating and making tweaks after each game.

Since joining the Keith Burgun Games Community Discord, I have not only played a lot of Dragon Bridge, but also participated in a lot of great game design-y chats, some of which centered around a concept known as the Strategy Triangle. That link is to a long post from Keith's describing the Strategy Triangle as he sees it. Here's a video of him talking about it which might be a little more succinct (the video is really long, but it should be queued up to his description).

I like the idea of this triangle, but it seems clear that no 2 people really agree on some of the details. A course grained reading of it, or my interpretation at least, is this:

•  An extreme "red" strategy spends all of its resources on direct progress
• An extreme "blue" strategy spends some of its resources more efficiently countering or slowing the opponent's direct progress, leaving some resources to invest, allowing for more progress later
• An extreme "green" strategy invests ALL of its resources, allowing for even more future progress

Given that, generally speaking... 

• Blue has an advantage over red, as they hold off the red strategy with efficient defense long enough for their investment to come online 
• Green has an advantage over blue, as any "efficient defense" is wasted, and green has invested more resources than blue, giving green a resource advantage for buying progress later
• Red has an advantage over green, as unhindered, they could bring the game to an end before green sees a return on its investment

In discussing this, I drew a crude graph to show advantage over time:

In any given matchup, you could look at this graph and see which strategy has an advantage at any given time (which line is higher). But more importantly, the area under the curve would be cumulative advantage, so depending on when the game ends, you could look at the area under the curve for each strategy and see which had more cumulative advantage, that would be the winner. 

Said another way, if you're playing an aggressive "red" strategy, you'd better end the game quickly, before your opponent's cumulative advantage overtakes yours! By the nature of the colors as descried above, in red vs blue that is probably going to be rare, while in red vs green that is probably going to be common.

I decided to try and use this micro worker placement game to sort of express that triangle fairly directly. I called one resource Red gems, one Blue gems, and one Gold gems (instead of green). As I alluded to in the previous post, I added an effect on each resource tracker that you would resolve whenever you collect more of that resource (when you collect some red gems, first resolve your current red ability, then collect the gems). 

• I tried to make the red effects kind of "rushy:" collect extra red, buy a star, take an additional turn after this one, get an additional star for free, and when you overshoot the top of the track, get 1 star and then reset to 2 red
• I tried to make the blue effects directly hinder red: opponent discards red gems, steal a red gem from the opponent, and when you overshoot the top of the track, get 2 stars and then reset to 0 blue
• Gold, being the "econ" strategy, does not give discrete effects when you collect gold. Instead, having gold means you have some number of Green gems - effectively Gold/2, only instead of doing math, you could just look at your tracker card and see how many green gems it currently shows. Several of the buildings give additional red or blue gems for each green gem you possess. When you overshoot the top of the gold track, you don't get any stars, but you get 3 each of red and blue gems, triggering your current red and blue effects

Also as alluded to in the previous post, I did add a countdown tracker (a "dragon"), which gives you an additional star if you score a star using the resource (red or blue) matching the color currently face up on the countdown tracker. The countdown ticks down any time:

1. You place a worker of matching color
2. You place in a building of matching color
3. It pays out a bonus star
4. The deck gets shuffled (every 7 turns)

The game started with a deck of 18 cards, but in one update I added two, going to 20. Either way, there were 7 turns before a reshuffle, with each player adding 1 card from the supply to the board, and then using another card from the display as a worker to place into one of the available buildings. In my latest update, I cut some cards and combined some others to bring the deck down to 16 cards, which will mean 5 turns before a reshuffle. I haven't tested that yet, but I suspect it'll be OK.

So far it seems like this game is shaping up for something that's just 16 cards (plus 9 more for trackers)!

Here are the current cards as of 7/7/22:

(fronts - ignore the crossed out ones)

(backs)

These files are set up for Tabletop Simulator more than for print and play, but you're welcome to print them out and give it a try (I'm sorry it's not easier to do so!)

At this point, I think the game works pretty much as intended. If you start gaining one color of gem, you have incentive to get that color some more (your action of that color will be improved, and you'd be closer to scoring a star by overshooting, or by the building that rewards you for having 4 or 7 like gems). If I see you gaining gems of a certain color, I can play against that by getting gems of the color that has an advantage against that - if you take red gems early, I can take blue gems. If I take blue gems, you can start taking gold gem, etc.

I think I've tuned the effects such that, for the most part, if someone were to bull-headedly go for red gems all game, and their opponent were to go for blue, the blue player would likely win, and similarly, bull-headed, extreme green would beat extreme blue, and extreme red would beat extreme gold. The game could probably use some more tweaking in that respect, but I thin it's on the right track.

One thing about this game though is that you can't necessarily go bull-headedly into any color, because while you do have 7 (out of 16 existing) options available to you on your turn, you don't have every option. Some cards aren't out yet, others are occupied, and others still have been turned face down as workers. So you have to have some flexibility as well, and you might have reasons (in the early game, or in general) to go for one strategy over another when you don't have gems yet.

I'm pretty happy with this game in general. It's not the deepest game ever, and attempting to keep it under about 18 cards is probably holding it back from being significantly better than it is. That may make it difficult to get published, but I think it does a fair amount with very little components, and as microgames go, I don't think it's half bad! 

Living Forest - PYL Deckbuilding done right

 A month or two ago, I  stumbled across a game on BGA that I'd never heard of before. The art looked nice, but I knew nothing about it. After seeing it a few times, I decided to give it a try.

Living Forest is a deckbuilding, press-your-luck (PYL) game that uses a blackjack type of "hit me" mechanism to produce resources, then let's you spend those resources on 2 different actions (or just 1, if you push your luck too far and go bust). Like Flip City or Mystic Vale, each round you will play cards off the top of your deck, one at a time, until you decide to stop, or until you hit too many "bad" icons. In this case, the "bad" icons are black circles indicating that a card is a "Solitary animal," I guess having 2 solitary animals together is ok, but they draw the line at 3!

Each card in Living Forest has some number of icons on it, Sun, Water, Seeds, Spirals, and Flowers. Once you stop flipping up cards, you'll total the icons you have showing, and then get to do 1 or 2 actions:

1. Buy cards with Suns
2. Extinguish fire with Water
3. Plant a tree with Seeds
4. Advance on a rondel with Spirals (gaining the effect of another action depending where you land)
5. Flowers aren't a resource, but if you get enough of them in a turn, you win the game
6. Forget the icons and take an "X" token, which you can use later to veto a card draw

You take these actions in an attempt to pursue victory, which you can achieve in 3 different ways:

1. Extinguish 12 fires
2. Plant 12 different trees
3. Draw 12 Flowers in one turn

There are some other details, such as the Victory Tokens that you start with, giving you 1 point toward each of those conditions, which you can steal from your opponents by lapping them on the rondel, or that the trees each give you some permanent icon that counts every turn, or that buying cards created fires that can later be extinguished... etc.

The Strategic Evolution

Everyone I've seen talk about this game (and this includes myself) says the same thing at first... Fire is the only way to win! You can buy a lot of cards on the turns your opponent goes first, generating fires, then extinguish them the following turn, when you go first and they can't stop you. I'll note that I had only played 2p at that point, but based on BGG threads I've seen, the dynamic isn't much different in multiplayer.

I believe it's the case that the Fire victory is the most obvious, most straightforward victory to go for, but I've noticed (as everyone seems to eventually) that as players gain experience, it becomes harder to pull off a Fire victory, and easier to win via other means. Some people have said that once players learn to play around a Fire victory (by buying fewer cards, putting out fires yourself to keep them from your opponent, etc), the Tree victory is the way to go-but I don't agree. So far I've found the Tree victory to be too slow - you're only allowed to plant 1 tree per turn, and while you do start with a victory token and a tree pre-printed on your board, you still need 10 more to trigger the win, and they have to be unique. When I've gone for this, even when I've succeeded, I've found that I also won by Fire or Flowers at the same time, so the Tree victory was irrelevant. Most of the time I think Fire or Flowers can both be faster than Trees. So why do people think Trees is best? I think it's because Flowers takes more nuance (and maybe more good cards for it in the supply). I'll note that you can get 8 flowers from planting the 4-cost and 9-cost trees on your board, and filling that center row, so you really only need to draw a few flowers. There are some good cards for quick Flower win, and if they're in the supply, it might be worth considering that approach... there's a 5-cost tier-1 card that has 2 flowers on it, and there's a mid-rang card with a white circle (which cancels out a black circle, allowing you to hit more on your turn without busting) and a flower that's also good.

Don't get me wrong, trees are important no matter what because they give you that engine building support for both other strategies, but so far I haven't found a reliable way to win with them that beats doubling up on certain trees and going for Fire or Flowers.

Press-Your-Luck done right

Something that's always a challenge in PYL games is the balance between the benefit of flipping one more card vs the detriment of going bust. Many PYL games are very swingy and light, you can't take them too seriously - by their nature they're very luck driven. Sometimes you see a game that tries to use PYL but also take itself seriously, and that's, as they say, a tough nut to crack. Living Forest pulls this off better than any game I've seen (I hear good things about Quacks of Quedlinburg, but I haven't had a chance to play it). If you get too many solitary animals and go bust, you are out an action - that's 1/2 your turn! However, you get the icons on that card, so you could afford a better single action than either of your two actions had you stopped. And sometimes there just aren't 2 good actions for you to do, so by hitting once more when you might bust, you are risking a mediocre action in exchange for a more powerful single  action. In that respect, sometimes it could even be a good choice to bust on purpose, which gives you the added benefit of getting one more solitary animal out of your deck, so your next turn can be stronger.

I really like the way Living Forest implements PYL, and despite that mechanism, I think it's a game you really can take seriously. It's no wonder Living Forest got nominated for the Kennerspiel Des Jahres!

What I'd Do Differently

Whenever I play a game, I always have something I'd do differently, like if it were my game, or if I were developing it, and this is no exception. In the case of Living Forest, after a handful of plays and some discussion, there are 2 tweaks I would love to try (too bad you can't use house rules on BGA):

1. Turn order based on Flowers
   The current turn order (P1 passing around the table) feels arbitrary, and can lead to that undesirable dynamic I mentioned earlier about the Fire victory. Also, Flowers are a win condition, but they do absolutely nothing in-game. Flowers doing nothing doesn't bother me on its own, but I'd like to see turn order each round be based of the number of Flowers drawn. That way you could get some flowers even if not going for that victory, in order to get more favorable turn order more often 
2. Discarding fires when getting X tokens
   Currently, any defense against a Fire victory amounts to "also go fire." That's kind of a bummer, and it contributes to the feeling new players get that Fire is really the only way to go. It would be cool if there were a way to defensively remove fire without extinguishing it yourself, and my proposal here is that whenever you get an X token for any reason, you may choose to discard a fire token from the center (without keeping it)

Those are 2 house rules that I have high hopes for. I have another few ideas that are probably unnecessary as well, but those are the tweaks I would actually try if I had a physical copy of the game. It's very possible that these tweaks are only needed for, or more relevant to, the 2-player game, but I actually think they might help in multiplayer as well.

"Challenge" vs "Difficulty"

I was thinking about Challenge vs Difficulty (particularly in cooperative board games) recently. At a glance, they sound like the same thing, but if you think about it, they're really not.

Definitions

I looked up "challenge," and the definition in this context is: "a difficult task, especially one that the person making the attempt finds more enjoyable because of that difficulty," while "difficult" is simply defined as "hard to do, requiring much effort." For the purposes of this post, I will sum those up as follows: 

Difficulty in a game is the extent you're unlikely to succeed.

Challenge in a game is the extent to which overcoming the difficulty is fun or rewarding.

I've found that these terms come up a lot in the context of cooperative games, where the players need some sort of AI or algorithm to play against rather than the cunning and guile of a human opponent. A good cooperative game is challenging, it sets a task for the players, and they have fun trying to overcome obstacles to accomplish that task. One of the nice things about these games is that an optimal set of plays is not clear, and the whole point is to make that optimal set of plays, or close enough, that you achieve the goal of the game in the time allotted.

However, some cooperative games aren't challenging so much as just difficult. In those games, the chances of losing even with an optimal set of plays is too high, so it doesn't feel as fun or rewarding when you win.

The Components of Difficulty

There are 2 major things that can make a game more difficult - they both reduce your likelihood of winning: Increased depth, and decreased fairness, where depth is the amount of good play required to win, and fairness is the degree to which that good play determines the outcome.

• In a fair game, the outcome is less often dominated by factors outside your control. If you play well, you'll win more often.
• In an unfair game, too often the outcome is outside the player's control. There's a significant chance you'll lose even if you were to play optimally
• A deep game has a high skill ceiling. You have to build up to the point where you can hope to play near-optimally
• A shallow game has a low skill ceiling. You can be confident your play is near-optimal without too much time, effort, or study

In order to examine this more closely, I thought I'd make a graph of Depth to Fairness. Plotting a game on that graph could allow us to visually see some of these relationships and make sense of them:

WAIT! Why am I using UNfairness on the bottom axis instead of Fairness? Difficulty comes from both depth and unfairness. A deeper game is more difficult to win because it requires better play. A more unfair game is difficult to win because despite good play, you might lose due to chance. So both of those things can increase difficulty. I use Unfairness for the axis so that moving away from the origin in either direction makes the game harder.

Now we can locate games on the graph, draw a vector to them from the origin, and the length of that vector relates to how hard the game is to win: 

Magnitude = Difficulty

"Challenge," then, is how fun or rewarding it is to overcome that difficulty. In this graph, the slope of that vector (rise over run: depth over unfairness) relates to the amount of challenge the game has to offer. The deeper the game, or the fairer the game, the more rewarding it is to overcome its difficulty, and therefore the more or better challenge it presents.

Practical Application

Let me lay some ground rules on what this graph applies to, how it can be helpful, and what it's limitations are.

For one thing, you'll notice that there are no numerical values on these axes. I am not sure how these aspects could possibly be measured! Also, those gray, labeled boxes are completely arbitrary, and can be deleted or redrawn wherever you'd like, so a single data point on this graph is meaningless. This graph only allows us to make relative comparisons between multiple games. As soon as you get 2 data points, you can begin to compare them and see, in a qualitative sense, which is more Fair, which has more Depth, which is more Difficult, and which is more Challenging.

This information might work best for 1-player games, solo modes, and co-operative games, when the "opponent" has a consistent skill level. It does not make as much sense for a multiplayer game, where the difficulty depends on your opponent's skill level as well - although you might be able to gain insight into questions like "how hard/challenging is it to play various different games vs Steve?" If the opposition is fixed as that particular opponent for each game, then I think the model will still allow comparisons, which could be fun to do amongst a group of friends who play vs each other a lot. 

Similarly, I think this could be used to compare factions or characters in an asymmetric game - not in general, but if you look at various factions/characters vs a particular faction/character, then you might be able to glean some useful balance (or strategic) information about matchups.

Something I think might be a stumbling block in reading this graph is that we're not talking about the outcome of a particular match here. We're talking about the difficulty of the game in general -- overall win rates, not whether you win or lose this instance, or this play of the game.

A Worked Example

Pandemic is a popular cooperative game for 2-4 players, and you can adjust the difficulty from "easy" to "expert" by using 4-6 Epidemic cards in the deck. The game is obviously harder with more Epidemic cards, but I've also observed that the game gets harder the more players you have due to logistical concerns. Let's take a look at some of the configurations you can play Pandemic in, and plot them on this Difficulty chart:

The way I drew that I'm saying that 2p-expert and 4p-easy are approximately the same difficulty, but in 4p it's more rewarding to overcome that difficulty

Good Difficulty vs Bad Difficulty

We have learned that Difficulty comprises two aspects: Depth and Unfairness. One of those increases Challenge, and the other does not, but both increase difficulty. I don't think I'm out on a limb saying difficulty that increases challenge is "Good Difficulty," and difficulty that does not increase challenge is "Bad Difficulty." 

There do exist cooperative games where added difficulty does not seem to increase the challenge. I remember when Ghost Stories came out, it was the talk of BGG.con that year, and all the buzz was that the game was really difficult. After finally playing Ghost Stories I remember thinking "I'm not sure a higher chance you can't win is the kind of 'difficult' you want in a game." Of course, that hasn't stopped the game from being incredibly popular over the years!

I've recently gotten to try The Princess Bride Adventure Storybook Game, and it strikes me as a game with a low skill ceiling. It's fairly easy to figure out what to do, and you can go through the motions to do it, and then you see if you were able to finish in time. You can reach the point where you can achieve optimal or close-to-optimal play with some confidence, but even with optimal play, often whether you win or lose a chapter seems to come down to chance. In this game's defense, I've only played it with 2 players, and it's possible that, like Pandemic, the game is more challenging (or at least harder) with more players.

To be fair, that's always the case with cooperative games -- given optimal play, there's still a chance you'll lose the game. Most (all?) cooperative games have that dynamic, lest they become "solved," and that's probably a good thing. But perhaps each game has an Unfairness threshold, a percentage chance that you lose anyway, even with optimal play, that is acceptable. Under that threshold, the game could be considered "Fair" (or fair enough). Above that threshold, the game could be labeled "Unfair." In a good cooperative game, the amount of Unfairness would be closer to that threshold, whereas in a bad game, the Unfairness might be much higher than the threshold. Unfortunately, I don't have a good feeling for where that threshold should be, and it is almost certainly different from game to game.

Conclusion

The best case scenario in my mind is a deep/fair game, where winning correlates to amount of good play, and the chance you lose even with good play is within acceptable limits. This offers more challenge, and it's therefore more rewarding and more fun to overcome the difficulty. A bad game in my mind is one that is shallow and unfair, where winning does not take much good play, but does require a lot of luck.

I'll try to keep this difference between "challenge" and "difficulty," and this Depth-to-Fairness ratio in mind when designing, especially when working on a cooperative game. For example, if I ever finish up Alter Ego, maybe I'll apply these lessons to ensure that to the extent the game is difficult, it provides "good difficulty," not "bad difficulty." It's important for games to be challenging, not just difficult!

Post Script on Effort

Another thing that could be considered is when a game requires more effort: doing lots of simple math, moving pieces around, grinding actions, that sort of thing. Busywork. Since these things don't require any particular skill (except maybe stamina to endure them), I'm not sure they make a game harder to win, they just make it more annoying to play. They could be said to reduce the Challenge, because they make it less fun and rewarding to overcome the difficulty of the game, but they do not themselves contribute to the difficulty. Therefore I don't think we need to consider Effort in this model.

3 new ideas... 1 new game! ... Part 3: Micro Worker Placement

 In part three of my 3-part post, the 3rd (and final) idea I'll discuss was inspired by another comment on Twitter, this one about designing an 18 card game. I recall that Eminent Domain: Microcosm was originally a 16 card game with some tokens -- those tokens became cards as well, and in all the game has 32 cards and nothing else.

This time, the idea is a worker placement game, where each card has a worker on one side, and a placement space (or "building") on the other:

Micro Worker Placement

In this idea, a deck of 18 cards would be shuffled, and some cards would be dealt out building-side-up to make a board. Here were my initial thoughts on how it could work: 

Use a 3x3 board of worker spaces, then that leaves 9 workers for the players to use.

If it's a 2p game, maybe 9 is more than enough, maybe you start with only 2 workers, an can get 1-2 more over the course of the game, and the rest of the cards can go into the board (and maybe they add in over time, like Agricola)

OR, maybe (like Microcosm) you DON'T start with workers, but they're in a deck/supply, and on your turn you draft 1 and place it on one of the spaces

Obviously, the spaces resolve based on what's printed, but maybe they get better based on color matching or printed info on the workers/spaces.

Maybe you play multiple rounds, where each round is:

1. Shuffle all 18 cards, deal a board
2. draft and place 8 or 9 workers
3. reshuffle for next round

If you draft and then play a worker from a supply, there's no real ownership of workers... but there IS a record of the type/color of workers in play -- like Splendor, perhaps that could matter: Something is cheaper for each Gold worker in play, or you get more wood for each brown worker in play. All of that doesn't care who placed the worker

Quick progress

While visiting a design-minded friend, I described this idea, and we had a pretty good discussion about it. Mohan talked bout defensive drafting, and we ended up with an idea to have 4 or 5 buildings in the supply, and on your turn you'd choose 1 to add to the board (pre-seeded with 3 buildings), then you'd choose another card from the supply, turn it face down, and place it as a worker into a building. This sounded neat, because it would offer multiple chances to draft each turn (which building to remove from the supply and turn into a worker, then which building on the board to block up with that worker).

Since it seemed so simple, we ended up making a quick mock-up and giving it a try! The first draft game worked alright, so when I got home, I made a few tweaks for version 1.1, and made a Tabletop Simulator module for the game. Perhaps I'll get a chance to play some more soon. Here's what the current version (v1.1, as of 5/22/22) looks like:

GOAL:

Be the first player to gain 4 Stars. Gain stars by accumulating resources of 3 types, and exchanging them for stars.

SETUP:

1. Shuffle deck and deal 3 buildings into play
2. Deal 4 (or 5?) more buildings into supply
3. Take turns until there is 1 card left in supply
4. Reshuffle cards and repeat setup

TURNS:

1. Place 1 building from supply into play, adding it to the board
2. Place another card from supply face down (as a worker) in an unoccupied building in play
3. Resolve that building as much as possible
4. Replace the 2 buildings from the deck

• Use tracker cards to track resources (rotate/flip as needed)
• When getting more than 7 of a resource, gain a star and reset that resource to 0 (extra is lost)
• Note that some buildings let you exchange resources for stars at a better rate than that
• First to 4 stars is the winner

Untested ideas - already

While I'm pretty confident that the above game will work (indeed, v .0 technically worked), I'm not sure it'll be any good. I've already got some ideas of things I might like to try out once I get a playtest of the above v1.1 in:

It might be nice if the 3 different resources had a different feel or flavor. For example, maybe overshooting a resource dial (getting to 8+), instead of just getting a star, maybe 1 resource gives you 2 stars, one gives a star and another resource of your choice and the 3rd gives you 3 resources of your choice (then you play to 7 stars instead of 4, probably)

Currently there's no much in the way of "player positions" in the game... you temporarily have certain resources, but those are ephemeral, and it doesn't strike me as being really enough to base your moves on. But if you gained power/benefit somehow as you ratcheted up your trackers, then that might give a more lasting effect of your actions, and make it matter more whether you went for red or for blue. I've been talking to Keith Burgun, finally learned his 2p card game Dragon Bridge, and playtested his next evolution of that game into a deck building game. Dragon Bridge is pretty cool, actually -- it's a back-and-forth game where you're on a bridge with your opponent, and there's a dragon at one end, and you either want to push your opponent into the Dragon end of the bridge, or escape through the other end. However, every once in a while the dragon moves, making both of those objectives more difficult.

I wondered if I could take a lesson from Dragon Bridge and apply it to this worker placement game. I think what I'd need is incentive to go for one resource over the others, where that incentive changes over time. Well, it might take a few more cards (just 1?), but I think I figured out ho that could work:

Of the 3 resources, let's treat one of them like an "econ" strategy, where you build up some sort of resource, and then later turn that into power somehow. Maybe that's the resource which, when you overshoot it, you gain 3 resources of another type instead of stars.

Then let's treat the other 2 as sort of opposed to each other, maybe blue and red. Like in Dragon Bridge, where you're MOVING toward escape, and BUMPING your opponent toward the dragon, only in this case, each of those is just ratcheting up a tracker. 

So what if there were another tracker card, which was red on one side and blue on the other. Like the resource trackers that you rotate and flip to track your resources (0->1->2->3-FLIP->4->5->6->7->REWARD), this red/blue tracker would count down and flip. This countdown tracker could be an always-available worker placement space (maybe one that can take multiple workers) that lets you exchange a particular resource for stars at a really good rate (so it's great to use it) - and which resource it takes depends on which side it's on (red vs blue).

Since the other worker placement spaces basically let you gain resources, and trade them back and forth (or trade them for stars), this would be kinda like "I'm building up X, because that's what's "good" right now -- but pretty soon, the card will flip, and Y will be better, so then I might try and exchange my X for Y to score that better," like you're switching direction

Thinking about it even further, maybe the effect shouldn't be a worker placement space, but instead (or in addition?) should be that when you collect your 8th resource of a particular type, it should be much better if that countdown tracker matches the resource you pegged than if it doesn't. Like maybe you get +1 or +2 stars in addition to what you were already going to get. So based on whether you think the card will flip too soon, you might do well to stick with what you were pursuing (X or Y, or Z which is Econ, which would help you get more X or Y), or you might do well to try and exchange it, via some building that says like "pay 3 X, gain 4 Y" or something. Or maybe it could act as a modifier for the buildings that allow an exchange of that resource for stars (like: "pay 1 less resource of that type, get +1 star")

Some of that might add incentive to go for one of those 2 resources over the other. But they key to Dragon Bridge is that the dragon moves. Without that aspect, it's just a game of Tug-o-War. So in this game, the "dragon moving" would be that card flipping over, reversing which of the resources are super-efficient to go for. Some effect that happens regularly could tick down that tracker, which would go 4->3->2->1->FLIP, the card would flip over and the countdown reset. I'd like for that trigger to be intuitive or elegant and easy to remember.. Here are a few thoughts that might work:

• Whenever anyone flips over a tracker card for any reason (going from 3 resources to 4, overshooting a resource tracker, or spending down from 4+ to 3 or less)
• Whenever someone buys a star
• Some buildings could say to advance (or turn back) the countdown timer as part of their effect

There may be other possible triggers, maybe some combination of those will make sense when I try it.

If I can manage, in the scheme outlined above, I'd like to differentiate "red" and "blue" more than just "this one's "better" right now because of the state of the countdown timer" as well. As I said, maybe overshooting red could give you *2* stars instead of just 1, while blue gives you 1 star and 1 resource (or you steal a resource from the opponent?). Maybe along with that, red is slightly harder to collect a lot of at a time. Maybe blue-gaining actions tend to steal resources from your opponent, or otherwise make things harder for them?

Oh, and one more thought... perhaps the effectiveness of some buildings, at least in part, could be tied to how many of a particular resource you already have.

Like maybe resource Z is good at getting more resources (economy)  so maybe a building says something like "gain Z/2 units of X, or gain 1 Z" (meaning if you have 3 Z, you'd get 2X, but if you have 7 Z, you 'd get 4X).

Then there could be buildings for X and Y that somehow care how much you have already, like "gain Y/2 units of Y" perhaps? Or "gain X/3 stars, then lose 3X"?

I'm sure more of this will become clear with a little playtesting. In a way, it might be cleaner just to have a simpler, more straightforward microgame like v1.1 as-is, but all of this sounds good to me right now.