Thoughts on Mashups (also, Candyland + No Thanks = ???)

I like mashups.

What's a mashup?

A mashup is when you take 2 distinct things and, maybe literally, smash them together to make a new thing that's sort of a mix of the original two.

I solicited Twitter real quick to get some other people's off-the-cuff definitions, and they generally agree with what I said above:

@twentysides contributed the following:

Two or more things that are faithful representations of their type combined in a way that still works. So something that is kind of this and vaguely that, I wouldn't call a mashup. Something that is clearly this and very much that, now that's a mashup.

An the ever eloquent @belltowergames describe it thusly:

Two things that are unlike but are of the same kind are brought together to create a work that shares essential qualities of both.

I like all of these definitions, and I think they more than get the idea across. 

I'm trying to think of an obvious genre mashup TV show or movie, but nothing's coming immediately to mind -- maybe that's because I'm writing this in fits and starts as I scan documents for my real job, or maybe it's because I'm feeling a little light headed from my 2nd COVID vaccine dose, or maybe there really aren't that many of them (that can't be!) 

I guess I could point to Daybreak, [warning, I cannot vouch for the safety of that website -- it was recommended to me by someone, but I've never actually used it!], a 1-season TV series I saw maybe 12 years ago that's like Groundhog Day mashed up with a cop show, about a detective who keeps re-living the same day until he solves his own frame-up.

I suppose I could also point to something like Thor: Ragnarok, which mashes up a comedy with a big budget superhero flick. But I don't know if that counts -- is "superhero" really a genre all its own? Also, it's not a great example because I didn't love that movie, but I'm saying in this post that I do enjoy mashups...

The IDEA of mashups

So I guess what I'm REALLY saying is that I like the IDEA of mashups. I find them a good source of inspiration, and I think they can have the potential to take existing stuff I like, and create a new experience that I'm predisposed to like, but that's different enough to be interesting.

As you must know if you're reading this, I like games. I like playing games, I like thinking about games, I like thinking about game design, and of course I like designing games. So how do mashups come into it? Well, even more than a passive story like books/TV/movies,  mashups can inspire new game experiences that are significantly different than any of the games being mashed together. 

A good example of this might be Friedemann Friese' Copycat, which he (somewhat famously) billed as a ripoff of Agricola, Through the Ages, and Dominion. The thing is, Copycat was NOT a ripoff at all! It was inspired by those other three games (deckbuilding inspired by Dominion, worker placement/action spaces inspired by Agricola, and the card row inspired by Through the ages), but the end result feels NOTHING like any of those inspirations. Friese didn't copy those other games, he mashed them up, and then he did the design and development work to make a solid game out of Copycat... whether you think the result is any good or not is up to your preference, but it's certainly distinct from its inspirations. 

Another example could be the decks in the card game Smash Up. That game's whole thing is that you take 2 piles of cards, each with its own feel and flavor, and mix them together to get a deck that plays differently than other combinations. That game used mashups as a main mechanism, and it works rather well!

A starting point that inspires design

You see, a mashup is just a starting point that can inspire a design. You can't just shuffle 2 rulebooks together and press print! 

Like with Copycat, there's a lot of work to be done once you have decided you want to mix together equal parts Agricola and Dominion, and splash in some Through the Ages for flavor. Just like any other source of inspiration, that may be the starting point, but it won't be the finish line by a long shot.

I've entertained some thoughts on a mashup before, a combination of King of Frontier and the award winning Isle of Skye. Whenever I think about Skye Frontier it makes me want to revive the design, because I felt it really did work, and I had made good progress on it already. Just writing this post makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and work on a Tabletop Simulator mod for it! Maybe soon, but for now I've got my attention set on another mashup idea, the recent one about Candyland!

Let's do the Mash! (let's do the Monster Mash)

As a sort of proof-of-concept, I found a Candyland TTS mod, added a handful of checkers, and got my playtesters to try out a few rounds with me of a Candyland/No Thanks mashup. We literally just played Candyland, but instead of drawing a card to advance, we played No Thanks with that card: flipped it up, then either took it and advanced, or put a chip on it. When taking a card and advancing, you also get all the chips on it, just like No Thanks. Oh, and in this mashup, of course, progress down the track is bad!

We didn't play out the whole game, and indeed, with this mechanism, I think a Candyland board is way too long. But as proof of concept, it definitely did work! In No Thanks, a card could come up that's adjacent to one you already have, making that card excellent for you (free chips!) while still bad for everyone else. Every card in the Candyland version has a bit of this potential, as a red card might mean just 1 space of movement for me, but 4 for her, and 8 for you! There was no real analog for that dynamic in No Thanks where you have the 23 and 25, and the 24 comes up (something that's extraordinarily good for you), but with the shortcuts (assuming you MUST take the shortcut if you land on it), there were cards that were extraordinarily bad for you, which added a little consideration to taking a card that advances you a lot, but at least gets you past a dangerous shortcut. I liked the feel of that, and with a redesigned board maybe that dynamic could be exaggerated so it comes up more often. For example, perhaps the shortcut spaces could span 2 or 3 spaces, so as you approach, more cards could potentially land you on one.

One goofy thing about Candyland is the specific treat spaces, which can catapult you all the way across the board, straight to the end (woo hoo!), or even all the way back near the beginning (oh no!). In this mashup, I think I'd just make those "advance to the next special treat" (rather than a specific one) so it's more of a game. Again, those could be not-that-bad (if you're just a few spaces from a special treat), or awful for you (if you just passed one), which is just the dynamic I think this game needs to thrive.

So there you have it, a light, accessible game, along the lines of No Thanks. Is it heavier or lighter than No Thanks if you replace the numbers with a Candyland track? I think it has legs, and I plan to give some of the design details a little more thought.

[last minute thought, just wanted to jot it down... in this mashup, you can clearly see which space you'd advance to, which is a good thing in general. There could however be some subset of cards that have a plus sign or something, meaning that if you claim the card, you also must draw another card and advance per that one as well -- something to make cards a little bit more scary] 

Theme informs design

I've been known to say that even mechanics-first designs are really theme-first, or they become theme-first pretty quickly, as once you have the main mechanism in mind, the theme informs the rest of the design.

As for a theme for this mashup, one idea (sticking with the Candyland aesthetic) is kids binging on Halloween candy, last one to get a tummy ache wins. I like the nod to the inspiring game there, and the theme makes some sense, though I'm not sure it really necessitates movement on a board, but maybe that's not the end of the world.

Another, slightly more grown-up idea is paintball/laser tag/snowball fight, where you spend "luck" tokens to not be the target of an attack, and when you take a card, maybe it has an evasive maneuver on the back (I like the production hook there, take an "incoming snowball" card, and flip it over to show that you dove behind an embankment -- even if it's not mechanically relevant)... eventually your luck runs out and you get hit, last player standing wins. 

Or even more grown up than that, maybe a Battle Royale theme, like Fortnite, where the track board is your health bar. As you take hits, your health goes down (advances toward 0), and when you run out of health, you're knocked out, or dead, depending on the specifics of the theme!

All of these themes seem like they'd work. I kind of dislike the health bar idea just because it makes the shared track board irrelevant - it would be neat if the game board were non-trivial (though I guess in all those ideas the board is kind of trivial). 

I'm open to other theme suggestions, leave 'em in the comments below. And let me know what games you'd like to see mashed together!

Candyland, but a game!

(apologies in advance for the weird white background formatting - that happens when I paste stuff, and it's a huge pain in the butt to fix, so I'm not going to bother) 

There seems to have been a rash of threads on social media a couple weeks ago about whether or not Candyland is even a game, let alone a shining example of design. Perhaps they were in response to noted developer John Brieger's tweetstorm about how "Candyland is a masterpiece of game design that designers should be studying and dissect as one of the best examples EVER of game design craft for specific audiences." In any case, John decries the notion, put forth by many "game snobs," that Candyland is not even a game.

Of course, whether you consider Candyland to be a game or not depends entirely on your definition of "game." As one reply from GeekNights host Rym Decoster pointed out:

It fits the definition of 'orthogame' in that it has mutually agreed rules and a method of ranking players. It also fits my favorite definition of game: "An interactive amusement". It's not an ideogame. Nor is it a "series of interesting/meaningful decisions"

As for my thoughts on whether Candyland is a game... I'd say it is and it isn't. It's not a "game" like I like to think of games, because it doesn't have any choices to make. But in a more general sense, I think it's considered a game by a lot of folks. Is that just marketing? It comes in a game box, it is sold in the games section at Target, and people have been calling it a game for decades So yeah, it's all down to definitions

I generally enjoy Keith Burgun's 4 interactive forms, but I'm not sure that's much help in categorizing Candyland:

• It's not a toy, because it does have a goal (be the first to cross the finish line) 
• Is it a puzzle, because it's goal is meant to be found (you're meant to get to the finish line)?
• Is it a contest, because crossing the finish line first is a measurement?
• But it's not a game, because there's no decision making to be had

Based on that, I guess Candyland is a "contest," though the thing that's being measured is questionable -- your ability to raw the right cards? To unknowingly sit in the pre-determined winning seat? Feels a little fishy to me. But with no decisions to be made, I don't think Candyland qualifies as a game.

BUT THAT'S OK.

Being a game or not being a game is not what lends value to Candyland. Breiger outlined the value of Candyland pretty thoroughly in his thread.

Perhaps what's really in view here is the difference between game design and product design. Designer/Developer TC Petty replied to Breiger thusly:

I’d say all your points are “it was a good product.” It has no other game design craft qualities to study as evidenced by no mechanics to discuss nor how they were implemented or evolved. Product design: yes. Game design: no.

And while I am on record disagreeing with everything TC says, in this case I think I agree. John's points are all valid, but they're more about the product design of Candyland, and not the game design.

I hadn't really thought about the design of Candyland before, so I found the following assrertion in Breiger's thread interesting: 

A few mechanical considerations that go into designing Candyland board length space distribution shortcut placement color distribution composition of the deck (1's vs 2's vs special)

And it prompted this follow up from me: 

For a game without choices, ARE those considerations important? What does tuning them change? * Duration (important) * Movement range per turn (important to a point) 

Anything else?

 and he said:

Since there aren't decisions, the mechanical choices sort of funnel into 3 outputs that create a lot of the experience: Duration Pacing / Movement Range Surprises and Volatility The 3rd is pretty important to the what makes Candyland exciting for kids (big swings)

 and I said:

Looking at the board images above, it appears the order of the colored spaces are simply a repeating pattern: ABCDA... with occasional special spaces inserted I won't say that's NOT intentional, but am I out on a limb to think it's a default starting point?

The special spaces are more or less evenly spaced as well I'm not familiar with the card mix, but how much does it differ from an even mix of all the possible 2-color combinations?

You suggest these things were carefully chosen and intentional, but I'm not convinced there was a lot of design thought put into them That doesn't make Candyland any less special or good at what it was! But are there really under-the-hood design lessons for modern designers?

I don't think I saw a response to that, but it was interesting to think about anyway. It was also amusing to see some of the other comments being tossed around, like TC's argumentative ones, and the typical tangent from Jeff Warrender (author of You Said This Would Be Fun) in which he proposes turning Candyland into a game by adding a handful of convoluted mechanisms:

Since Candyland is the game of the moment, how about this variant: Candyland bid-to-move. Give everyone 30(?) coins. Each turn, flip a card. Everyone bid (closed fist?), high bid moves to that color. Ties friendly. Out of coins, eliminated(?).

Probably, if everyone is past a special space, when its card comes up it’s discarded. A mean variant would be, bid to avoid it, everyone but low bidder pays, low bidder moves back. Like bad cards in High Society.

A bidding game wants everyone interested in every bid. In a track game like this, "I only bid for big moves" will be common. So small moves have to have value. You also want/need asymmetry.

I think maybe instead of special spaces there are "conveyance cards" which you can win in a bid, and if you later land on a space with that conveyance you get to skip some of the track.

Easiest way to get asymmetry is from different or diverging paths. Maybe there are side quests, maybe those are what give those conveyance cards or some other treasure thing.  

Maybe rank order matters or there are checkpoints (e.g. it's a rally of some sort)

My idea to make Candyland into more of a game

In my mind, an attempt to "make Candyland into a game" should really maintain the general scope of the game. If changing it too much, and changing its scope and category, then why even include the original game at all? However, I think Jeff was orbiting a solid idea in there, which I would like to reach in and extract here:

What if we simply combine Candyland's board with another very simple, straightforward game: No Thanks. In No Thanks (now on BGA!), you flip a card with a number, and then take turns either paying a chip into the pool to avoid the card, or taking the card (and all the chips in the pool). Chips are good because they allow you to say "no thanks" to bad cards, and they're worth a point at game end. Cards are bad, because their value subtracts from your score. There's a twist however: if you can get a run of multiple cards in a row, then only the lowest value counts. So if I hold the 33 already, then the 32 is -32 points for everyone else, but actually +1 for me!

Imagine this mechanism, but instead of just collecting numbered cards that are bad, you advance down the Candyland board when you take a card with a color on it, and the goal is to be the last player across the finish line. This way, any given card could be better or worse for any given player, and then also there's the number of tokens you have to consider, making it a million times more thinky than Candyland as, but still a super accessible, simple game.

What theme would lend itself to wanting to be 'last past the post'? One follower suggested a political race, where "advancing down the track" is like scandals coming to light, and "reaching the finish line" is like having to drop out of the race due to an abundance of, I don't know, shame?

Let me know what you think. I actually suspect this idea could have some legs, and if I work on it any further, I may well get into some of those design questions such as distribution of colors in the deck, order of colored spaces on the board, number and spacing of shortcuts, etc. Maybe there's intentionality that could go into that after all - though I still find it hard to believe there was much intentionality behind it in Candyland!