Puzzling out game mechanisms

In case you hadn't heard, I recently ad my hip joint replaced with a shiny new one. Literally shiny:

So I've spent the last couple of weeks at my parents' house. My mother is fond of jigsaw puzzles, so I've been spending a little time helping her put some together.

If you're reading this post, then you know I'm a game designer at heart. So it stands to reason that I might start to think about jigsaw as a game mechanism. I've actually thought about this before - sort of...

Some time ago I worked with Juan Carballal (from the Board Game Designers Forum) and Andy Van Zandt (now a developer for TMG) on a "dice building" game about hunting pirates called Admirals of the Spanish Main. The idea was to try to outdo Quarriors! as a dice building game. More accurately perhaps: to make a game with dice building as a mechanism rather than a Dicebuilder in a way similar to how Eminent Domain is a game with deck building that's not a Deckbuilder (or Dominion clone).

In Admirals of the Spanish Main you would take actions, each associated with a particular colored die. These actions would move your along the board, earn you new dice at ports, allow you to fight and capture nefarious pirates, and let you collect pieces of a treasure map.

It's that last one, the treasure map, which is relevant here. In AotSM, certain rewards allow you to draw map pieces out of a bag, the object of which is to piece together the treasure map pictured on the player board below. Duplicates of the same piece are useless, but there's a large end game bonus for completing the map, so one strategy you could employ involved earning many map piece draws, hoping to complete the map by the end of the game. There exist benefits in the game such as "when you draw map pieces, draw 1 additional piece and then discard one," giving you better odds of finding useful pieces.




Sadly, playtest feedback largely amounted to "if we're playing a game with pirates, we want to BE the pirates!" So we sort of gave up on that one, though I would like to revisit it one day, because I thought it had potential.

One Idea

Getting this blog post back on track, the point of that interlude was to talk about the similarity of that map mechanism to a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, I just used square tiles, but puzzle tabs would fit here, and would be novel. Of course, it may be awkward to draw tiles blindly out of a bag, and have some edge pieces and some not. This could be handled by making the player board be the edge of the puzzle, then all of the pieces could have tabs.

But is this using jigsaw in a meaningful way? Obviously not, as I did approximate it with square tiles. Though it could be a nice, novel way to present that aspect of the game. How then could jigsaw be used as a mechanism? Well, building on the map mechanism I was just talking about, here's one thought I had:

First, create several different (maybe 3?) small puzzles like the map above, 3x3 or maybe 4x4 in size. Presumably the images would be similar enough that it's not immediately obvious which puzzle each piece goes to. There would be multiple copies of each, of course, so that players can all draw from a common pool. Another option is that each player could have 1 copy of each puzzle to draw from, ensuring nobody is blocked out of completing a puzzle due to luck of the draw.

Then, have some aspect of the game involve drawing tiles at random, and solving a puzzle could be the point of the game, or could confer some benefit. The idea that sparked this line of thought was that players could work on putting together their jigsaw puzzles off turn, for something to do during down time.

Another Idea

The above idea was interesting but still doesn't really feel like using jigsaw in a meaningful way. Again, those could be replaced by square tiles. Another, different idea for using jigsaw in a more meaningful way might be this:

Imagine a deduction game in which there are like 9 different puzzles. Each puzzle would be similar in art style, and have maybe 3 common features with each other puzzle (thanks to the technology of Spot It). The reason for all that is to obfuscate which puzzle you're working on in any given game, for replayability.

Each of these puzzles would be in its own bag, and for any given game you'd use only one of them. Over the course of the game, pieces would come out at random, and players would need to piece together the puzzle, either as the goal of the game, or maybe better in order to then glean information toward the solution of the game.

Perhaps this would work well as a cooperative game, with a crime-fighting theme. I think that would be pretty thematic, as hunting down where pieces of a puzzle goes feels like a reasonable approximation of using clues to solve a crime. All players working on the same puzzle seems like it would lend itself nicely to a cooperative game, and has the added benefit that someone like my mother, who is not fond of games, but does enjoy jigsaw puzzles, to enjoy such a game with someone like me, who enjoys jigsaw puzzles as well as other challenges such as solving a crime.

This may be a more thematic use of jigsaw as a mechanism, but is it meaningful? Or can the pieces all be square tiles there as well? I suppose it's possible that puzzle tabs could be used to help solve a jigsaw puzzle in addition to the art on the tile, so maybe that counts?

In either case, even if it's not really a meaningful use of jigsaw, it seems to me like both of these ideas could have some merit.

What kind of chicken do you like? Caribbean, jerk!

I have never been much for cruises - my parents like them, but I've never been on one, nor have I ever been particularly excited about them.

BoardGameGeek.com is a very handy website, and if you're reading this then I assume you know about BGG already. You probably also know that they host a convention in Dallas every year, and I've attended every BGG.con since it's inception over a decade ago. When they announced BGG@SEA - a small game convention aboard a cruise ship - I was torn. On one hand, it sounded potentially awesome... like a regular game con, but with all the food and entertainment options available on a cruise. On the other hand, it was super expensive, and I wasn't sure how well I'd be able to handle the constant motion of the sea.

After some consternation, I decided this could be a good opportunity to see if I liked cruises, and to go on a vacation with my girlfriend, so I went ahead and signed Michelle and myself up for BGG@SEA. I spent last week aboard Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas, unplugged from the world, soaking up the extravagance, and playing some games!

Some of the highlights of the trip included...

• Hanging out with Peter Hawes (game designer from Australia), Jeff Anderson (one of the BGG crew that runs the conventions), and even Scott Alden (owner of BGG) for a little bit.
• Winning a copy of Royals in the Royals tournament for scoring highest in the tournament (despite losing in the semifinal round).
• Swimming with a dolphin in Jamaica - though I kept thinking "smartest species on the planet, and we make them do tricks for us?" Michelle pointed out that the trained dolphins are well fed, and that it's not dissimilar to paying an athlete to play professional basketball.
• Thinking up ideas for a cruise themed worker placement game.

Some time ago, the League of Gamemakers had a blog post called Steal This Game Idea, which inspired me to write this comment:

The basic idea is that you place workers in different locations, and then when it comes time to resolve each location, you zoom in and it’s another worker placement game.
So you have workers that are essentially groups, and you assign 1 group at a time to the areas, and upon resolution of that area, you reassign the members of that group to the worker spaces in that area.
I imagine the different areas would be sort of themed – like if you’re gathering resources, you assign a worker group to the Resource acquisition area, and if you’re expanding your borders you assign a group to the Expansion area… then within each area there are multiple spaces (collect wood, collect stone, collect ore… move 3 units 1 space each,move 1 unit up to 3 spaces, etc)
I suppose you could start with groups of 1 or some small number of workers in them, and over the course of the game you could maybe increase the size of your groups, or maybe split a group into 2 smaller groups. It’s also possible that the groups could be “better” at certain types of actions, so the way you distribute workers between your groups might make a difference in your strategy.

On the airplane to Texas for the BGG cruise, I started thinking about the cruise, the excursions we'd looked into, and I started formulating a game structure. With that idea for a worker-group placement mechanism rattling around in my brain, I started putting these two ideas together, and I think I've started a design that could work. I thought about it on and off over the course of the cruise, even sketching out how I thought the board and some of the cards could look. Basically, it'd be like this:

Imagine a board with 4 major quadrants - maybe each quadrant is a different cruise line (like Royal Caribbean, Princess, carnival, or Celebrity for example). [Alternatively each quadrant could be a part of the world where one might cruise (Caribbean, South Pacific, Alaska, etc)]. Within each cruise line are a number of standard worker placement spaces that do standard actions such as get money, get VP, translate money into vp, or get discounts on future placements on that same cruise line. In addition, each cruise could have between 1 and 3 Excursion spaces - blank spaces the size and shape of a 1/2 size poker card. These spaces would house Excursion cards drawn from a deck (perhaps that deck is sorted by type, or by area of the world perhaps?

My thought is that some of the standard worker spaces would be exclusive, like most worker placement games. Others might fit a specific maximum number of workers at them, and perhaps the excursions can fit any number of workers, and the player who places the most workers there gets to keep the card for additional bonues or something (a little bit of area majority).

The Excursion cards I imagine would come in various types:

• Adventure: Zipline, Bobsled, Dunn River Falls
• Archeological: Chichen Itza, Tulum Ruins, Cuzco
• Aquatic: Dolphin Swim, Stingray Bay, Barrier Reef Snorkeling

Stuff like that. I imagine some excursions could be in multiple categories. Each excursion would have a cost to go on (payable when placing the worker on it), and my current thought is that it would have a game effect you get immediately. Perhaps every worker who goes on an excursion collects Excursion tokens according to the category (in addition to the afore mentioned game effect, or that IS the game effect), and the player with the MOST workers (tie break to first player to get there) collects the card a well, for extra such icons and/or end game set collection scoring.

The game structure would have players playing stacks of workers to the quadrants in turn order. I figure players would start with 3 worker groups, with 1, 2, and 3 workers in them. When placing in a quadrant, you'd place a whole group on the next available (numbered) space, so the first player to place in a particular quadrant would place in space 1, the 2nd player to do so would place in space 2, etc.

Once all players have placed the worker groups, the game would zoom into the different quadrants to resolve them, and they'd be resolved by placing the individual workers from the group into the individal spaces in the quadrants, one worker at a time, in turn order based on placement (the numbered spaces). Therefore if I go to space 1 of Quadrant A (let's call that A1) with a 3 worker group, and you go to A2 with a 1 worker group, and Bob goes to A3 with a 2 worker group, then when resolving quadrant A, placement would go me-you-bob-me-bob-me.

I figure the quadrants would just be resolved in order, A-B-C-D, but to spice that up, perhaps players could go in a strict turn order, and on your turn you place any worker (or workers) where you are next in line? That's nearly the same thing, I think, with the exception of some timing bits.

Anyway, that's the crux of it. The unique mechanism is placing worker groups into super-spaces, then distributing them (in competitive worker placement style) to sub-spaces within those super-spaces.

For some reason I really like the Excursion aspect. I think I like the idea to have them spice up what actions are available for the round, but for some reason I really like the idea of set collection scoring for the various excursion symbols (maybe you score for 1-of-each symbol, and also majorities for eah one - or perhpas you have a secret goal with respect to symbol collection - the Thrill Seeker is eager to have Adventure excursions!)

I currently have just money, VP, and Excursion icons as resources, but perhaps one more wold be good, to allow for more standard spaces. I would like to focus each quadrant on a particular apect of the game, like maybe all cruise lines have a Buffet that collects you 1vp, but one line has a 5 star restaurant that earns more VP, or a better buffet where you get 1 point per worker assigned to that space (max 3). I could see a Casino which doubles your money up to a certain amount, or another location which just gives you a couple bucks. Maybe another resource such as Stress (people go on cruises to relieve stress, right?) could be involved... though that might start to be similar to another prototype that TMG might pick up anyway.

That's the basic idea. One stumbling block (thematically) is what the actual role of the player is. You're sending people out on cruises and excursions - different groups of people... maybe you're a travel agent? but then why do you get money when your clients go to a Casino?

I'll keep working on it. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this game - do you like the sound of it? Would you like to see it become playable?

Thanks!

Tips for Rules Writing

Rules writing is HARD!

Rules writing is a pain, but it's super important. Players will not be able to play your game if they cannot read and understand the rulebook. The number of people who are willing to put in the effort to research rules online and figure out how to play your game is embarrassingly small, and it's equally embarrassing to expect people to go through that effort. Players should be able to learn a new game easily, and the rulebook is the only interface they are guaranteed to have. The increase in great how-to-play videos and reviews has done wonders for the hobby, but, as designers, we cannot rely on them for players to learn our games. Too many games have poor, unapproachable, or useless rulebooks. If we expect people to actually play our games, we cannot allow that trend to continue.

Correct, but approachable

Historically, I have considered rules writing to be like technical writing - it has to be precise, and it has to cover all cases. I used to write rules as concisely as possible, following good technical writing protocol such as "don't repeat things, reference them instead," like one would write computer code.

But there's a problem with that: users have a tough time reading technical manuals! Nobody enjoyed reading the instruction booklet that came with their VCR. Nobody really understood it. As a result, it became cliché that nobody knew how to set their clocks.

My current preference is to write the rules in the 2nd person, as if you're talking directly to the reader. Don't say "each player takes..." Instead, say "give each player..." Don't say "On his or her turn, the active player chooses..." Instead, say "On your turn, choose..." etc. I find that this simplifies the language and becomes a lot easier for the reader to understand and follow.

Word choice and consistency

In a rulebook you have to be very careful about language, word choice, and consistency. Grammatical correctness is important, because bad grammar sounds awful and makes people lose confidence that you know what you're talking about. Writing clearly and correctly is the best way to ensure the reader will understand what you are trying to say.

Terminology needs to be consistent. Using two different terms for the same thing, or the same term for different things, is bound to cause confusion -- don't do that!

On a similar note, consistency of punctuation and capitalization helps people read and understand rules better. It's easy to want to capitalize lots of game terms that might not be capitalized in regular English text. My current preference is not to do that - it just invites mistakes, and It Can Be difficult and Annoying to Read sentences Where Every third Word is Capitalized.

The same thing goes for bold and italics... too much of that is also annoying to read, so that type of emphasis should be used sparingly, if at all. Sen-Foong Lim just told me his current preference: use bold for key game terms in their first instance, then never do anything special with them again after that. To me that seems better than emphasizing every instance of a key word, but I'm not sure it's really necessary either.

Proofreading

It should go without saying, but have your rules proofread. More than once. By different people. It's easy to miss mistakes that you yourself made, and it's easy to follow what you've written because you already know what you meant to say! Get someone else to read your rules and comment on what's clear and what's not.

Reading your rules backwards -- from the end to the beginning -- can help you spot typos and spelling errors.

Images, images, images!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The more images and illustrations you can use, the better. The best rulebooks include images of each component as well as graphical examples wherever possible.

Political correctness

Gendered writing is something that has always been an issue, but today more than ever is on the forefront of people's minds. No matter what your opinion is on the matter, antagonizing anyone is a bad way to get more players playing your game! Inclusiveness is important.

That said, reading "he/she" or using the singular "they" can be confusing or off-putting as well. Careful word choice and sentence structure can avoid most of that, and using the 2nd person (as mentioned above) helps as well. I like to use specific characters/people in examples to avoid these sorts of problems completely -- just make sure to include women in your example characters!

Organization

Most rules list components first, with images. That's nice. I like to flip back and look at the images while I read the setup. You know what might be better than that? Combining the components and setup sections so that I don't have to flip back and forth! TMG developer Andy Van Zandt taught me this trick, and I have yet to use it on a big box game, but picturing a component and then describing what to do with that component during setup seems like a great idea.

Rules organization can really help players understand the game better. Every rulebook should include the following items:
* Thematic Overview (including your role as a player and your goal in the game)
* Components & Setup
* Game Overview (including your ultimate goal, and what you'll be doing each turn in pursuit of it)
* Outline of game structure
* A Game Turn
* Game End
* Determining a Winner
...and in that order.

Writing for different readers

There are really 3 audiences you're writing your rules for:

1. The first time player looking to learn the game
   The new player is the most important audience; you must ensure they can follow and understand the rules or they will never be able to play your game! All of the information above is aimed at writing rules for players that are completely new to the game.
2. The intermediate player looking for reference information
   Often times, even when you know how to play a game, you find yourself looking up certain reference information. "How much money does each player start with?" "How many cards do we deal out in a 3-player game?" "How many Dragon cards before you have to fight a dragon?" It's best to break any such information out in some way -- put it in a boxed note, a chart, or summarize it in a sidebar -- to make it easy for players to find without reading through the rules text. For example, never write "Deal 5 cards each for 2 or 3 players, and 4 cards each for 4 or 5 players." Instead make a little chart like this:
   
   2 players: 5 cards each
   3 players: 5 cards each
   4 players: 4 cards each
   5 players: 4 cards each
3. The expert player looking for loopholes and edge cases
   While you're not really writing rules specifically for a rules lawyer, it's best to ensure your rules stand up to such careful scrutiny. I said before that the rules need to cover all cases. If a situation can occur that is not covered by the rules, then the players may be unable to continue the game. Don't leave such edge cases undefined! Even if a situation never came up in your playtesting, once thousands of people are playing your game, the edge cases will eventually occur. A proper rulebook will not leave loopholes or edge cases undefined.

I have found myself editing a lot of rules lately, and I have started to adopt these guidelines. I'm liking the results so far, and I'm hoping to find that players have an easier time learning and understanding them. They'll be able to enjoy the games so much more without the rules getting in the way.