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Hey folks. I'm making a couple of table-top games and I wanted to talk about one of them here. I'm hoping for some feedback and critiques of the system. I'm not necessarily planning on trying to get this published (mostly because it just seems to 'big' for a publishable game), but I want it to be mechanically sound. The first game is an "army-builder" game. The idea is to have an element of Dominion's deck-building injected into a quick and dirty tabletop miniatures game. Players are heads of land-grabbing businesses that contract a bunch of mercenaries to do their dirty work. In other words, players build their army from a pool of minis to complete their objectives rather than start with a set faction. The game is played in rounds. Each round consists of players declaring objectives, deploying units, and battling. Players declare an objective they will take on. The objective gives a player an advance of money to hire mercs, a scoring condition that will net the player tokens that can be exchanged for VPs or money, and a win condition that if completed results in an automatic victory for that player. Objectives also determine the turn order for that round when it comes to purchases and plays of units during battle. Objectives include things like "Occupy all zones to win" and "Claim a certain amount of control points" and so on. After players pick objectives, deployment happens. Players contract units from a set pool that all the players can take from. The way currency works in the game at this point is less that it is spent and more that it serves as a limiter for how many units a player can have at once (i.e. having X money means you can possess X money worth of units). Anyways, players take units from the pool and place them on the battlefield into sections of the map that are under control of that player or are in the same section as a hero-unit belonging solely to that player. The way I have minis marked as belonging to a certain player currently is by having a marker of a player's color that juts out just under a mini's base. That way players can have the same kind of unit while not confusing pieces. After units are bought and deployed, battle begins. The current way the game works is that the map is grid-less, and that players move their units via ruler. Instead of a "i-go-you-go" system, units take turns by type of unit rather than by player. Units can take one set of actions per turn as determined by a stat card (e.g. maybe a card lists an action set like "move 5" then attack for 2 damage). Once all types of units have gone, the round is over, scoring is calculated, and a new round begins. Game continues until a victory condition is met (one of which is "game ends when tokens run out, whoever has highest VP wins"). Other features/goals: No dice or random elements: No die-rolling for damage and no random card draws for movement or such. The only randomness is the initial board setup, similar to how dominion's card pool is randomized at the start. Modular setup. Zones/sections of map are divided into boards that align together, and the units that are drawn for each map are different each time. Hero units that belong exclusively to each player that lead their armies. A playtime of about 1-2 hours, with some victories possible earlier than that due to one player dominating. 2-4 players. I hope this is enough information to give a general idea of what I'm going for, and I hope that you all will provide some feedback for what should be changed or what should be added/removed. I know there's not enough detail in this particular post to give really detailed suggestions, but I can provide more detail if wanted.
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May 2, 2013 20:12
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quote:2-4 players At 3-4 player this sounds like it'll be an extremely political game; players have a big incentive to attack the leader and not bother with others. This is going to be especially prominent in a game with deterministic combat. It leads to the common behaviours of kingmaking (the player in 4th can't win, but can essentially decide who does via who he chooses to attack), kingstalling (everyone piles on the leader), and generally group-enforced rubber-banding (nobody attacks the guy in 3rd and 4th.. until everyone's tied for 1st on the last turn). You may also get the rarer butterfly of kingslayer-making. That is to say, if player 4 is going to win this turn if he's not opposed, player 2 can do little or nothing to stop him, and essentially force player 3 into committing. Very few games have kingslayer-making outside of toy theory games; this is because usually player 2 doesn't know exactly what player 3 can deal with (either because of hidden information, randomness, or lack of clarity to game state) and so has to commit reasonably equitably in order ensure a kingstall. I don't know how a game with prominent kingslayer-making would be to play, but I can guess it's going to be weird.. and I think players 3 and 4 in this scenario have a good chance of not liking it. To be clear, you do have some natural limits on politics. First: positional separation (ie. Catelynn can't attack the leader because she's not next to him)... but I think they will still usually be able to contribute (ie. it's in Catelynn's interest to release the Kingslayer, or at least not attack him from behind, and definitely not chop off his hand). There's also some interesting races possible - eg. A is close to meeting a win condition this turn, but if he doesn't then B will win on VP. This may muddy the state enough that more complex political behaviors are limited. Anyway, I'm not usually a fan of political games - but many people are and if those are the kind of dynamics you like then you're not wrong or something. But if I was making a game like this, I'd consider handling 4 players as two teams of two. I like team games and I don't think there's enough of them. Maybe support 3 through some kind of asymmetry?
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May 2, 2013 21:44
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I definitely will consider the possibility of team-play with 4 players now that you've mentioned it. There hasn't been a lot of playtesting with the recent objective set, but I did forget to mention that one of the objectives is to have a player "eliminated" (i.e. no pieces on the board). I hope that with the right win conditions, the game either ends before it gets to a stage where kingmaking/kingstalling is prevalent or that some players can win through different conditions where otherwise they would be kingmaking. As for asymmetry, I've been pondering the problem of a 3-player game using a square grid for quite some time, and incidentally my current solution may fix (or break!) the issue of that pesky player count. WIth the current build, players can choose their starting position on the board in any section they please; be it in the middle of the map or at a defensible edge. My hopes are that the modularity of the board combined with the fact that players choosing their starting positions are last to choose their starting minis will reasonably balance play. I will definitely do some more playtesting with 3-4 player to see how political the game gets, and report back in this thread the results.
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May 2, 2013 22:08
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quote:I will definitely do some more playtesting with 3-4 player Cool. I'm always up for game-theorycrafting (and obviously I'll talk on and on about games at the slightest provocation) but I'll also admit it's a bit of a wank; playtesting usually tells a very different story than what even the best theory or simulation would predict. On paper, Eclipse looks kind of like Space Risk Diceshit to me - but somehow between the different mechanics and dials and variance it doesn't feel that way at all when you actually play. I've so far never made a game design that was even OK the first time it got to the table; I'm usually horrified by how they function for new players, despite me always doing a good bit of solo play before bringing them out. (And that isn't some prelude to some great success story either; I've yet to design a game I like, despite a lot of attempts, study, and effort).
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May 2, 2013 22:51
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jmzero, most of the feedback from people who've playtested the game (barring my first really bad builds of it) were something along the lines of "this game has potential, but it needs more testing/balancing." I'm taking that as a positive. Sure I may need to do hours upon hours of work to make the game functional, but the idea is exciting enough for people to look into it. Personally, I'm excited about the idea of an 'army-builder' where building the armies you play against each other is half the game.
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May 2, 2013 22:57
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The Cards Against Humanity guys are taking submissions for a table top game. Top 16 get to demo their game at GenCon, winner gets $7,500 towards their first printing. I'll be submitting a party game that won the November Board Game Design contest right here on SA. 
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May 3, 2013 03:40
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Colon V posted:Back in the world of "designs for games I'll probably never actually make", I've been watching a marathon of the Harry Potter movies, and playing way too much Academagia. So, for some reason, I really, really want to create a "magic school sim" board game, with each player attempting to gather points. There would be a lot of different ways, doing well on your final exams in different classes would be the obvious one, but so would be 'having amazing adventures on the side'. I've been thinking about this recently, related to plot based tie ins (like Harry Potter) and how to become a protagonist. What I came up with vaguely was week-based worker placement. Like, there is plots for various terms, and skills required to graduate, and things like that. You place your four workers, ranked 1, 1, 2 and 3 on your weekly focuses: for Harry Potter, it would be Scholastic, Storyline, Sports/Social and Sanity. You need to have the right level of education for each exam period, enough sanity to not make mistakes and go crazy, enough Sports/Social to be popular enough to make your reputation known, and enough of those three to complete the Storylines for the semester. I haven't been thinking on this super hard, but it seems like there is SOMETHING there to work with.
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May 3, 2013 03:52
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Trynant posted:Some stuff. My first impression is that I hate ruler based movements because you get situations like "I can totally move here and attack that guy" and someone else is like "no you totally can't, see". And its hard to objectively answer close calls, so I feel like it adds something to disagree about and be pissed about. But obviously lots of people don't mind so much. Second, it seems like declaring an objective every turn is going to get complicated. Am I going to have 5 objectives (times 4 players) to think about by the 5th turn? That just seems like a lot of information to process. Also, I don't know much about game design, but I have read what xopods wrote in this thread and I see a few red flags. First, this is your first game, and it's pretty complicated. It think it might be better to focus on a smaller game. Also, xopods says that if it doesn't work pretty well the first try, you should start from scratch. I kind of like the idea of a battle game where stuff is going to die pretty quickly, but its easy to replace on your next turn. So the focus becomes using what I have this turn to achieve something that will get me points, rather than long term planning. I'm not sure if that is what you had in mind, but thats what I thought of when I was reading your post.
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May 5, 2013 02:47
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modig posted:My first impression is that I hate ruler based movements because you get situations like "I can totally move here and attack that guy" and someone else is like "no you totally can't, see". And its hard to objectively answer close calls, so I feel like it adds something to disagree about and be pissed about. But obviously lots of people don't mind so much. First off, thanks for replying and giving feedback (and thanks to jmzero and others if I haven't said so already); I really do appreciate this stuff. The ruler-based movement is definitely going to need its kinks work out. The game for the longest time was just using a square grid (not hexes because there were buildings/large-based figures and so far square-grid is better for that). I kept getting really upset with the limited movement of direction. Considering the ruler-based movement is a new addition and the game seemed to work fine without rulers, however, it might be good to drop the idea before I push it forward more. I don't think I'm being clear on the objective system, because reading what you're critiquing gives me the feeling that I didn't elaborate on it enough. Each player only has one objective at any given time, and that objective resets between turns. Right now is 6 objectives for any given game; players pick one of them to go for at beginning of turn, and return that objective at end of turn. Maybe that is very complicated for a perfect-information game, but from previous playtests and just familiarity with other low-to-zero-luck games; it shouldn't be a huge issue. Hopefully.... As for red flags, I'm probably very guilty of making a game that's a little to big for what's essentially a first-time design. The rule set isn't too hard to grasp I feel, but the modular setup (e.g. pooling from a set of units each time) is going to be a lot of playtesting. Is it too big for me to handle? Well, I've felt like I'm learning a lot just by making this design, and it's something that seems to work; just something that needs a lot of fine-tuning. In regards to being attached to ideas, I assure you this is not the case. I've scrapped and rebuilt this thing left and right. In many ways although I've sunk time into it, the game is still being prototyped. And yes, I really want to make a battle system where each turn is something like an encapsulated minis game, with each turn shuffling objectives and units around. Trynant fucked around with this message at 00:20 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 00:18
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modig posted:Also, I don't know much about game design, but I have read what xopods wrote in this thread and I see a few red flags. First, this is your first game, and it's pretty complicated. It think it might be better to focus on a smaller game. Also, xopods says that if it doesn't work pretty well the first try, you should start from scratch. I agree that it sounds like he's biting off more than he can chew for a first effort... I just want to note, though, that the advice about throwing everything out and going back to the drawing board is assuming that you've taken the first suggestion about simplicity. If a simple game really doesn't work, then if you changed enough things to make it work, it would no longer be the same game... so you might as well accept that you're just going to have to make a different game, and not limit yourself by insisting on keeping elements of your failed design. By contrast, one thing that big, complicated games have going for them is that they tend to have enough parameters to tweak that you can more or less force them to work. You can't necessarily force them to be fun, and you certainly can't force them to be elegant, but you can force them to be balanced and strategically interesting, if you have sufficient time to invest in repeated testing and tweaking. E.g. I played Terra Mystica this weekend, and it's one of the clearest examples that I've seen of that approach to game design. It's basically an economy game, but it has four currencies (worker cubes, priests, money and mystic power) and a million different things to spend them on, and many of the things you get in the game (divine favors, city keys, etc.) give you several separate benefits at once, with the "fine adjusments" being clearly visible in the fact that e.g. the city keys give you various amounts of different currencies, but also ever-so-slightly different amounts of VPs... it's clear that this arose from them finding that they couldn't quite choose numbers X and Y such that X worker cubes are equally desirable as Y mystic points... if X worker cubes turn out to be slightly better, but Y+1 mystic points would be too many, then you just make the Y mystic points option grant one more VP at the same time to balance things out. Likewise, most of the powers that you draft each turn give you a small and variable number of bucks in addition to their primary effect, to balance their relative strengths (plus there's the Puerto Rico mechanic added on top of that, with additional coins being added to the powers that no one takes, until the extra cash makes it worth taking them). There are just so many different exchange rates and purchase options that it's a game that pretty much couldn't not work, if they were willing to spend enough time testing and adjusting those exchange rates and the costs and benefits of all the different options. xopods fucked around with this message at 17:06 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 17:01
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I'm working on a board game. It's a traitor game where you don't know if you're the traitor at the start - imagine Clue, but it matters if you're the murderer or not. It's kind of hard to explain. Anyway, I've done some small playtests, but I think I'm about ready to start scaling up the scope of the playtests. First, though, I thought I'd get you wizards to peek at it and give me your thoughts. It's kinda long, so I'll just link to the google doc instead of spamming this thread. You can comment inline on the doc or here. I'd really appreciate any feedback you could find the time to give :] (Also - note that the Visions and Anomalies lists are nowhere near complete - I intend on having quite a few more in the final product. But I want to work on those as ideas come rather than trying to hork out a bunch at once without regard to quality.)
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May 8, 2013 21:21
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hito posted:I'm working on a board game. It's a traitor game where you don't know if you're the traitor at the start - imagine Clue, but it matters if you're the murderer or not. It's kind of hard to explain. You need to cleanup that rulebook. It's a loving mess, halfway through it and I still had no clue how this was all supposed to go together. I know it's an alpha but right now it's borderline unintelligible.
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May 8, 2013 21:43
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First off, I think the game has a lot of promise. There's some good mechanical ideas here definitely, but from the rules it's hard to get a solid picture of how it functions. There's lots of rules that really aren't clear - like...quote:When every Avatar has taken a turn, a new round begins. (Remember: it takes four turns to go around.) ...made me pause for a bit, and I'm still not sure I'm reading it right. quote:During a Waxing Moon, a Surge occurs. (Other effects can also cause Surges to occur.) When a surge happens, roll a d10 and consult the following chart: Maybe replace this with a card draw? I hate chart lookups, and they're very rare in successful games. Actually, maybe replace it with nothing. I'm not saying it's bad, I just think you have too many things. Too many cards and text blocks and map spaces and moon-pies and events. I think a game like this is going to get lots of its joy from repeated, simple interactions between players. Look at Resistance: Avalon. You have some roles and some core hidden information, and everything else (it turns out to be a complicated game in practice) flows naturally out of that. You've got some things that are a good spin on the hidden role dynamic - the multiple roles and options and partial revelation and what not. I also like your core "hidden contribution" mechanic (mostly). But I think the interesting, clever gameplay of this core game is going to get swamped under the other stuff - the boons and the map and the spirits and what not. Pick a small subset of that stuff that you like the best, and get rid of the rest. Simplify your board state. Reduce the range of decisions, and you'll make the decisions more interesting and meaningful. You can still have most of the same ability effects, I think they just need to come from a more consolidated source. I'd consider dumping the whole map, and just having a set of card-based options that players bid on or something each round (these could be themed as your spirits, but also have spirits that do the same stuff as your boons do now, etc..). That gives you some interaction in terms of denying other players stuff, but also allows co-operation as required, and gives you a balance of when you want to really force an action vs. when you don't care. Once everyone's card resolves (maybe give the cards priority numbers?), everyone (or everyone who isn't "blocked" or something) contributes to a "leyline" pile (some of which might be public/whatever, some might be amplified by other players cards, etc..). If you want to keep some "combat" - cards for "fight" and "protect" or something could be hot commodities, but there'd be a balance between revealing yourself as a kill-happy traitor, claiming you're stock-piling for self-defense, denying the real bad guys, etc.. Regardless of whether you like any of that brainstorming: in general, I'd aim for shorter play time and less mechanics. jmzero fucked around with this message at 23:24 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 23:15
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hito posted:I'm working on a board game. It's a traitor game where you don't know if you're the traitor at the start - imagine Clue, but it matters if you're the murderer or not. It's kind of hard to explain. [edit: I realize that this comes off very critical -- but I really do think you have the core of something cool here with your traitor mechanic and I really like much of the fluff and world building. I just think that you need to start cutting and condensing! This is not a problem -- I have never seen a project, be it a novel or a board game, that did not benefit from starting grandiose and then being polished into a tight core!] I'm going to second Crackbone here (albeit in gentler terms) -- one thing that would really help is some redundant definitions. You are doing something that happened to me when I tried to write my first RPG, inspired by oWoD, where you invent a term for something, define it only once and then use it throughout your manual. At first that is not so bad, but by the middle you have sentences that are almost completely jargon terms and very difficult to parse: something like 'crystallizing an leyline with more Robust cards than..(and that is an example I understood -- there are definitely more confusing sentences). First, I would say get rid of as much jargon as possible. Second, it would help if you just reminded us what some of those terms meant in plain English. Let me give you an example, randomly selected: quote:Boon of Aether: Cleansing never costs you Power. Instead, how about this (consider how much flipping back and forth I had to do in the rulebook to find all of this information): quote:Boon of Aether: Cleansing(removing face down cards from a Leyline) never costs you Power. Of course, once you have done that, I would suggest just removing all the jargon words in general (so that the ones that need to be there: power, leyline, anomaly are more clear) -- I mean, seriously, you have like 8 different words that essentially mean 'spend your turn doing the action of this space'. I realize that it makes things more atmospheric but it also makes rules a pain to read. You also need to think more heavily about the organization. I realize that writing rulebooks is insanely difficult but one approach that I have found useful is to start by guiding players through their goals and usual turn before loading them down with complexities. Here, I would really suggest laying out the key options available to players and show them how to win (this is complicated here immensely by the multiple victory states). So, say -- quote:On your turn you can do the following: Second, I realize that you are going for an Arkham Horror vibe and there is a lot of 'stuff' going on -- but the danger of that is that it is very difficult to see how all of your elements fit together and conversely to balance everything. Even AH itself (which I think is a flawed game but many people find it enjoyable) is definitely weighed down by all of its stuff. I would suggest cutting what you have here by half, you just have too much going on... For instance, I don't really see the point of having 8 leylines separated by multiple spaces (or for that matter having such a huge number of spaces on the board). All this seems to do, in my mind, is let the players work far apart from each other... and in a game where you really want players working together (or at least close together so that the murderer can strike) I don't think this is an advantage. Thus, I would greatly condense your board. Similarly, there are way too many special abilities -- between the boons and the spirits. I would probably get rid of spirits entirely (but if you must leave them in, there should only be four of them). Also, a number of options on each space could be fruitfully eliminated. Basically, condense and cut as much as possible. Some specific problems I see -- isn't it in the good guys best interest to start every game by saying 'show all of your cards -- if you don't then we will assume you are either the murderer or a traitor.' I really don't see a downside to this -- so it should be prohibited in the rules rather than discouraged (as it is now). Also, in terms of condensing, I find the murderer reveal incredibly confusing... as I see it now, there is no way to tell if you are the murderer...until you kill someone. Is that correct (if not, the reveal information needs to be centralized)? It certainly doesn't seem like it should be. If so, probably the murderer card should be revealed after turn 1 or 2. Next, a key component of scoring in a number of victory conditions seems to be how many positive cards/negative cards are placed by individual players on a leyline -- how do you keep track of that? As I understand the rules, these cards are drawn whenever you attempt to influence a leyline (and presumably are not individual to each player)... so how I am supposed to remember that I played a +3 on leyline one and +2 on leyline two and a +3 on leyline four? What if players forget or if there are arguments? On that note, I am really not a fan of these cards being as random as they are. As I read the rules, it is entirely possible for a player who want to do 'good' but only draw negative cards (or vice versa)-- correct? For that matter, the randomized values seem redundant as well and way too swingy. I could be the most stealthy traitor in the world but if my card draw sucks, what am I supposed to do (without overtly revealing myself). If everyone had a hand of these cards at the beginning and slowly drew more (possibly with some way to manipulate your hand or to look at the hand of other players) this would at least present some strategic options... now it seems entirely too luck based for me. Finally, player elimination sucks. I get the feeling that this will be a long game -- and even granting that a murder begins the endgame, it sucks to be left sitting around an hour while everyone does their thing. At the very least it shouldn't be as easy as it is right now. But these are bandaid solutions -- I think you really need to focus on getting a core mechanic down before focusing on putting in more stuff. The more stuff that is in the game, the harder it is to see whether or not it is actually working. The big problem right now is that, as I read the rules, there is no real reason to work together and conversely, it is very difficult to see what you should be doing if you are a bad guy. The anomalies seems like the only possible threat... and, at present, it seems like (given the random nature of the card draws) you would be better off going it alone on each anomaly (even players who WANT to help may not be able to). With all that being said, I think that you are onto something with your implementation of the traitor mechanic -- it is just really hard to see under so much cruft. So, let me sketch for you a simpler version of your game to test before you start adding stuff in (this is just a really rough attempt to distill the feel you are going for into the smallest number of components). If the simple version is fun, then you can start adding in different stuff. So, keep your zodiac cards (although see my confused note on the murderer reveal above). Players can move one space and then perform one action. Each player starts with three cards (these are either positive or negative and have either a 1,2,or 3 value) and one special ability (taken from all of your spirits and boons above). Players cannot ever discuss the cards in their hand. They can make requests for specific cards. Have four well sites -- but being on a well lets you draw 3 cards (otherwise you don't get any). Have four leylines -- you can only play positive or negative cards on a leyline if you have not moved this round. If players end on the same space, they can give 2 cards (these must always be one positive and one negative card). --if they exchange, both players get to look randomly at one of the other player's alignment cards At the start of every round, if a leyline has been crystalized (four cards have been played on it) then reveal and discard those cards. If it is positive, give 1 victory point to the human side. If it is negative, 1 victory point to the traitors. A player is murdered if they are on a leyline space and, when the fourth card is placed on a leyline, the negatives are twice the positives. Murdered players lose all cards, cannot use their special ability, forfeit this turn, and return to the center space -- this give 1 point to the traitors. Every four turns is a round. Every round, the doom track advances 1 unless a leyline has been crystalized and is positive overall. Every even round, an anomaly is summoned (as described in your rules) and moved to a random location. If this is not dealt with, then the written effect occurs. Every odd round, reveal one of the zodiac alignment cards that has not been dealt with. When the doom track reaches 3, each player selects on of their cards (good, bad, or murderer) and writes it down. This is their permanent alignment for the rest of the game. When the doom track reaches 5 the enemy gains 3 points, if the enemy has more points then they win. Before revealing alignment,eEach player writes down the name of one player who he thinks is a traitor (if the player is already a traitor, he should just write an insult or something). For each correct guess, the humans get +1 point, for each wrong guess -2 points. DirkGently fucked around with this message at 00:07 on May 9, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 23:40
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Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, everyone.jmzero posted:First off, I think the game has a lot of promise. There's some good mechanical ideas here definitely, but from the rules it's hard to get a solid picture of how it functions. There's lots of rules that really aren't clear - like... Hah, that was just a simple mnemonic because I know people confuse "turn" and "round" a lot, so it's a little thing to remind that turn is what one person does and four people make a round. If it's causing any confusion I can axe it for sure - it's just a personal thing. quote:Maybe replace this with a card draw? I hate chart lookups, and they're very rare in successful games. It's funny, Surges seem so bland on paper but in practice the surge being rolled is like everyone's favorite part of the game! Still cake is delicious too but it doesn't mean it's healthy. I'll think on this one. quote:You've got some things that are a good spin on the hidden role dynamic - the multiple roles and options and partial revelation and what not. I also like your core "hidden contribution" mechanic (mostly). But I think the interesting, clever gameplay of this core game is going to get swamped under the other stuff - the boons and the map and the spirits and what not. Pick a small subset of that stuff that you like the best, and get rid of the rest. Simplify your board state. Reduce the range of decisions, and you'll make the decisions more interesting and meaningful. Well the issue is that, essentially, there needs to be a tradeoff between the three facets of discovering your own position (requires power, is fairly obvious, and crucially, has random information popping up sometimes, so observant players can see exactly WHEN you figured out what you are), discovering the position of other people (requires even more power, aggressive, and wasteful IF the target turns out to be clean - which is what traitors can whinge about when you discuss hurting them), and acting towards your interests (principally altering Leylines and investigating Anomalies). So, at minimum, there needs to be those three options that players must continually choose between, because otherwise analysis is impossible. Bidding could potentially replace the map - I admit it's not an avenue I'd considered. Altering, gaining power, using spirits, and coercing - I think they all need to remain in some form for the deductive/bluffing gameplay to really be there. quote:If you want to keep some "combat" - cards for "fight" and "protect" or something could be hot commodities, but there'd be a balance between revealing yourself as a kill-happy traitor, claiming you're stock-piling for self-defense, denying the real bad guys, etc.. It's actually not "combat" specifically I want. There just needs to be a way to learn the signs/visions of other players that's actively aggressive and extremely wasteful. DirkGently posted:[edit: I realize that this comes off very critical -- but I really do think you have the core of something cool here with your traitor mechanic and I really like much of the fluff and world building. I just think that you need to start cutting and condensing! This is not a problem -- I have never seen a project, be it a novel or a board game, that did not benefit from starting grandiose and then being polished into a tight core!] Hah, no worries man. When I was sensitive about it I kept it to myself, posting the fork on SA means that I'm ready to have it rough and really get working on it. quote:I'm going to second Crackbone here (albeit in gentler terms) -- one thing that would really help is some redundant definitions. You are doing something that happened to me when I tried to write my first RPG, inspired by oWoD, where you invent a term for something, define it only once and then use it throughout your manual. At first that is not so bad, but by the middle you have sentences that are almost completely jargon terms and very difficult to parse: something like 'crystallizing an leyline with more Robust cards than..(and that is an example I understood -- there are definitely more confusing sentences). First, I would say get rid of as much jargon as possible. Second, it would help if you just reminded us what some of those terms meant in plain English. Yeah, I guess that's what happens when I spend so much time with a game - I forget how much jargon overhead there is for new people. I'll probably try throwing in redundant definitions but keeping most of the jargon first; it really is useful to have these terms defined when writing Anomalies and Visions, but that's no excuse not to have clarity! (Also, while a glossary was always a plan for the final draft, I really should put it in now.) quote:Of course, once you have done that, I would suggest just removing all the jargon words in general (so that the ones that need to be there: power, leyline, anomaly are more clear) -- I mean, seriously, you have like 8 different words that essentially mean 'spend your turn doing the action of this space'. I realize that it makes things more atmospheric but it also makes rules a pain to read. Yeah - it's a tough divide because we're trying to preserve theme as much as possible (hence only using the word "player" in the explanation of what the game is, and "Avatar" everywhere else). I'll keep the idea to slash the theme words with general purpose things like "use" in mind, but if redundant definitions + glossary is enough I'd rather keep the rulebook themed. quote:Second, I realize that you are going for an Arkham Horror vibe and there is a lot of 'stuff' going on -- but the danger of that is that it is very difficult to see how all of your elements fit together and conversely to balance everything. Even AH itself (which I think is a flawed game but many people find it enjoyable) is definitely weighed down by all of its stuff. I would suggest cutting what you have here by half, you just have too much going on... The idea behind having the map is essentially to put a time lag for what you want to do - by making you commit to options you want in stages, it gives observant players a chance to react. Probably the prime example is someone going to the Undertaker. They're likely going to see the alignment card (the times when someone would want the other Undertaker effect are generally pretty evident.) Which means that one of their signs is very likely in the House of Blood, and they're going to see whether or not they're the murderer. Well, there's a 1/3rd chance they're going to learn it's them, and if so, what's their power? If they're low, but start stockpiling after, that's a pretty big murderer tell. If they stay low and just alter nodes after, it's probably not them. If they have a lot of power NOW, you'd better stock up just in case they're the murderer. etc. That being said, I literally had not considered action drafting/"worker placement" as an option for this game until it was said here, so maybe there's a way those mechanics can facilitate this. quote:Some specific problems I see -- isn't it in the good guys best interest to start every game by saying 'show all of your cards -- if you don't then we will assume you are either the murderer or a traitor.' I really don't see a downside to this -- so it should be prohibited in the rules rather than discouraged (as it is now). Huh, I must have miswrote something somewhere. It's explicitly forbidden to show cards without an effect making you, because if you could instantly confirm you were telling the truth the game would be bad. It's not at all forbidden to say what your cards are (since you can lie) - the Traitor's Strike phase of the Reckoning is what punishes players all claiming at the start. I really don't like soft-line enforcement rules, so if mass claiming signs and visions at the start of the game even without being able to reveal your cards was ever useful, I wouldn't make that forbidden, I'd just nerf it more by making Traitor's Strike stronger or make some other weird thing happen. quote:Also, in terms of condensing, I find the murderer reveal incredibly confusing... as I see it now, there is no way to tell if you are the murderer...until you kill someone. Is that correct (if not, the reveal information needs to be centralized)? It certainly doesn't seem like it should be. If so, probably the murderer card should be revealed after turn 1 or 2. Various effects reveal the Sign in the House of Blood, the Undertaker lets you see the alignment card to know which of the 3 signs is the murderer. It's designed to gate it so the Murderer doesn't know right away but can take steps. It is sort of tucked away in that list of spirits. quote:Next, a key component of scoring in a number of victory conditions seems to be how many positive cards/negative cards are placed by individual players on a leyline -- how do you keep track of that? As I understand the rules, these cards are drawn whenever you attempt to influence a leyline (and presumably are not individual to each player)... so how I am supposed to remember that I played a +3 on leyline one and +2 on leyline two and a +3 on leyline four? What if players forget or if there are arguments? Don't blame you for missing it, it's just one sentence: "Place a personal token on the Barrier card denoting it as being altered by you." quote:On that note, I am really not a fan of these cards being as random as they are. As I read the rules, it is entirely possible for a player who want to do 'good' but only draw negative cards (or vice versa)-- correct? For that matter, the randomized values seem redundant as well and way too swingy. I could be the most stealthy traitor in the world but if my card draw sucks, what am I supposed to do (without overtly revealing myself). If everyone had a hand of these cards at the beginning and slowly drew more (possibly with some way to manipulate your hand or to look at the hand of other players) this would at least present some strategic options... now it seems entirely too luck based for me. This is kind of a really interesting design thing so I'm gonna get maybe more in to detail than you want. A hand of cards is something we tried and didn't like. The reason is that we absolutely wanted a chance to want to do good and only draw bad cards (in this case, it's a 1/8th chance). If someone has a hand of cards, then when facing the Anomaly or putting the last Barrier on a Leyline, they can say "Yeah, I have a positive card - it's no problem." And when players can enforce that, there's just no opportunity to deviate if there's any chance you'll be seen. Instead, the mechanic is design such that occasionally a good player will get draws that force strange things. Consider the draw +4,+4,+5. It's very rare (I realize I forgot the card distribution in the doc, my bad - it's a normal curve with +1 and -1 being most common and equally likely, +2 and -2 less common but both equally likely...) but it can happen. In that case, a player will have to discard a +4 face up and say "Sorry guys, but I swear, the other two cards are +4 and +5". Now consider a player with a They Who Wait aligned Vision and one of their signs in the House of Traitors. They draw -4, +4,+5. What do they do? Well, the safe option is to accept their hurting their faction, play the +4, discard the -4 faceup, discard the +5 facedown. Or they can be cheeky, play the -4, discard the +5 facedown, discard the +4 face up and say "Sorry guys, but I swear, the other two cards are +4 and +5". If they're doing an Anomaly and it won't decisively swing the game towards They Who Wait, they'll want the first one. If they're under heavy suspcion and are a likely Coercion target, they might want the first one anyway. But the second one really helps their gameplan, if they think they can get away with it. It's interesting choices like THAT that the play one, discard one up, discard one down system is trying to provide, and having a hand would completely kill that. There absolutely needs to be a chance to occasionally get a draw counter to your interests, so that you can bluff about getting that draw when you're being sassy. The question is just a matter of tuning, and I think the 1/8th chance of all 3 cards aligned with one faction seems to be about right. quote:Finally, player elimination sucks. I get the feeling that this will be a long game -- and even granting that a murder begins the endgame, it sucks to be left sitting around an hour while everyone does their thing. At the very least it shouldn't be as easy as it is right now. This is just a me-writing-rules-poorly problem then, the Reckoning isn't going to be an hour, not even close. Ten minutes maybe, and that's only if there are undecided players table-talking what faction to throw in with. I agree, player elimination sucks, which is why one murder ends the game (and murderering is against your interests unless you've either learned you're the murderer OR you're absolutely sure the guy you're killing is the murderer.) quote:But these are bandaid solutions -- I think you really need to focus on getting a core mechanic down before focusing on putting in more stuff. The more stuff that is in the game, the harder it is to see whether or not it is actually working. The big problem right now is that, as I read the rules, there is no real reason to work together and conversely, it is very difficult to see what you should be doing if you are a bad guy. The anomalies seems like the only possible threat... and, at present, it seems like (given the random nature of the card draws) you would be better off going it alone on each anomaly (even players who WANT to help may not be able to). The idea is that players working together are more efficient at spending resources (they're not Coercing each other) and can find the murderer easier (the power they save is being spent on Spirits to investigate and generally keeping things nice.) Who knows if I actually pulled that off though. quote:With all that being said, I think that you are onto something with your implementation of the traitor mechanic -- it is just really hard to see under so much cruft. So, let me sketch for you a simpler version of your game to test before you start adding stuff in (this is just a really rough attempt to distill the feel you are going for into the smallest number of components). If the simple version is fun, then you can start adding in different stuff... While I like simplicity, I think there needs to be a minimum amount of complexity (enough that players can analyze the signals being given off by other players, BUT players have some ability to somewhat bluff their signals while still achieving their goals) or it's just not the same game about finding out who others are, finding out who YOU are, and advancing your goals when you've figured out who you are. It's always a danger that the game will end up bloated and unwieldy as a result, but I really do think this game could end up too simple as well, if that makes sense?
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May 9, 2013 01:14
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hito posted:
I feel you -- in the game I am currently working on, to keep the theme all of my key terms were originally in Latin (and that was tough to understand). But I stand strongly by the fact that, if you change nothing else, you should make all of the 'activate this space/cards power' terms the same. I think that would be a big help to the readability of the document and would not really impact your theme all that much. quote:The idea behind having the map is essentially to put a time lag for what you want to do - by making you commit to options you want in stages, it gives observant players a chance to react. That being said, I literally had not considered action drafting/"worker placement" as an option for this game until it was said here, so maybe there's a way those mechanics can facilitate this. That sounds like fair logic but I think the map is an unnecessary distraction -- there have got to be more elegant ways of getting this effect -- worker placement is an excellent one (and pretty simple at that), as is jmzero's idea of making the spirit powers a revolving purchase thing (although given how critical some of those powers are, you are going to have to plan for the eventuality that they may only show up at the wrong time). Any game that has too complex of a map when it is not actually all that essential to gameplay is a big warning sign for me as a purchaser... see Arkham and Android. quote:Huh, I must have miswrote something somewhere. It's explicitly forbidden to show cards without an effect making you, because if you could instantly confirm you were telling the truth the game would be bad. It's not at all forbidden to say what your cards are (since you can lie) - the Traitor's Strike phase of the Reckoning is what punishes players all claiming at the start. I really don't like soft-line enforcement rules, so if mass claiming signs and visions at the start of the game even without being able to reveal your cards was ever useful, I wouldn't make that forbidden, I'd just nerf it more by making Traitor's Strike stronger or make some other weird thing happen. quote:Various effects reveal the Sign in the House of Blood, the Undertaker lets you see the alignment card to know which of the 3 signs is the murderer. It's designed to gate it so the Murderer doesn't know right away but can take steps. It is sort of tucked away in that list of spirits. quote:Don't blame you for missing it, it's just one sentence: "Place a personal token on the Barrier card denoting it as being altered by you." quote:This is kind of a really interesting design thing so I'm gonna get maybe more in to detail than you want. If I am reading you correctly, what you are trying to do is implement a way for someone to give some information (discarding the one card) while still actually performing a hidden action (putting the card on the leyline). The chance to 'fail' (get all bad cards when they wanted a good card) or succeed wildly(+4,+4,+5) is only important so long as it makes the appearance of discarding X card viable (I can discard a negative card to look good while still secretly playing a negative card). I submit to you this though -- this actually makes any sort of deduction (presumably a goal of your game) much harder because you have to account for too many variables, what cards could have been drawn (unless you are really good at counting cards), why did he discard that card, what card did he actually play, etc. As a counter example, following the Resistance -- whenever you influence a leyline, you are given two cards: a +1 and a -1. You place one on the leyline face down. The other you discard face down (in this scenario, you can't mark which cards you played -- but I think that is a good thing). If someone reveals the cards on the leyline, they are forced to shuffle them first. When they reveal them they will only know that, of the people to visit the leyline, someone played X card. This is actually a valuable piece of information that can be followed up on by investigating other leylines that you influenced. The way you have it now makes it a little bit easier to lie and it is certainly more complex but, I think, in a way that works against the game. But again, it may be a thing that works better on the table than it reads -- and in a game with this many moving parts it is really difficult to see how everything comes together. I also understand your point about the maths too but I still think that it is swingy. I realize that +5 is rare but even one +5 suddenly means that even my two -3's are not looking so hot -- and the fact that I get them entirely randomly is a bit of a bummer. Randomness is good but not when it works against player skill and there is no real way to mitigate it. I can tell you that my group would absolutely hate this level of randomness (I know because in earlier drafts of my game, the card draw was on the same curve as yours) -- but then again, people (not us) love Arkham and it is randomness incarnate! To keep some of what you are going for -- does it really hurt things to keep the draw exactly as you have it now but just make everything +1 or -1? That was you can still legitimately fail when you want to succeed (or vice versa) and still discard a positive because you "got a hand of nothing but positives" while keeping you from undermining someones work when you get a lucky break. Just a thought. quote:This is just a me-writing-rules-poorly problem then, the Reckoning isn't going to be an hour, not even close. Ten minutes maybe, and that's only if there are undecided players table-talking what faction to throw in with. I agree, player elimination sucks, which is why one murder ends the game (and murderering is against your interests unless you've either learned you're the murderer OR you're absolutely sure the guy you're killing is the murderer.) quote:The idea is that players working together are more efficient at spending resources (they're not Coercing each other) and can find the murderer easier (the power they save is being spent on Spirits to investigate and generally keeping things nice.) Who knows if I actually pulled that off though. quote:While I like simplicity, I think there needs to be a minimum amount of complexity (enough that players can analyze the signals being given off by other players, BUT players have some ability to somewhat bluff their signals while still achieving their goals) or it's just not the same game about finding out who others are, finding out who YOU are, and advancing your goals when you've figured out who you are. It's always a danger that the game will end up bloated and unwieldy as a result, but I really do think this game could end up too simple as well, if that makes sense? I totally agree -- but I also caution against equating 'stuff' with 'complexity'. Again, as something that I am guilty of, it is very hard to tell what is and isn't working/necessary when it is concealed with so many moving parts. For instance, you wanted people to be balanced between finding out about themselves, finding out about others, and personal interests. That is great... but as I read the rules (as stated before, not always understanding them) I really don't see much motivation towards finding out about others... certainly not to the extent that I would waste resources on it. In addition, if I know from the get go that I am a good guy (with no possibility of being a turn coat), I think that optimal play suggests just staying away from everyone and influencing as many leylines as possible on every turn... basically ignoring all of the options. I might be wrong but it is hard to see. So, I wasn't at all suggesting that you actually stay with the barebones version that I put forth (which I am not sure even holds together)... more that, as a mental excercise, you should try making the absolutely simplest version of your game that you can that still accomplishes your design goal. If that is still fun, then you know you have a winner, and can and should start adding stuff back in. Not to mention that adequately playtesting a game of this level of complexity is a nightmare. So, I would take this statement to try to design a barebones version: quote:So, at minimum, there needs to be those three options that players must continually choose between, because otherwise analysis is impossible. In other words, I would ask myself -- if there need to be three possible options on a turn can I make a game that ONLY has those three options (and not subdivided into a million choices). Dodging your point about the map for a second -- why is there not a single get points option (affect the one leyline), a single spend wasteful resources to find out about someone/yourself, and a single 'get resources' node? Starting with something like this means you only add stuff when it is absolutely necessary. Still caveat emptor! Make the game that your group wants to play! Also, boiling it down to this level brings up one further question -- why is everything tied up with power except the way that you get Victory Points (influencing a leyline)? It seems disconnected -- is there a reason it needs to be disconnected? Seems to me that if you had to spend power to draw cards, that would eliminate some of my concerns regarding the randomness (it would at least give some control of it).
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May 9, 2013 04:17
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DirkGently posted:I feel you -- in the game I am currently working on, to keep the theme all of my key terms were originally in Latin (and that was tough to understand). But I stand strongly by the fact that, if you change nothing else, you should make all of the 'activate this space/cards power' terms the same. I think that would be a big help to the readability of the document and would not really impact your theme all that much. Yeah - that makes sense. quote:That sounds like fair logic but I think the map is an unnecessary distraction -- there have got to be more elegant ways of getting this effect -- worker placement is an excellent one (and pretty simple at that), as is jmzero's idea of making the spirit powers a revolving purchase thing (although given how critical some of those powers are, you are going to have to plan for the eventuality that they may only show up at the wrong time). Any game that has too complex of a map when it is not actually all that essential to gameplay is a big warning sign for me as a purchaser... see Arkham and Android. Hmm. Well, the goal of the map is to texture people's choice - I wonder if stealing the brilliant bidding mechanic from Revolution! or something similar might be the way to go. As long as it textures the choices so there's more than one reason you're choosing something... quote:I think I just misread this -- it says that you are only supposed to reveal your card in dire circumstances but, on reflection, I realize that you mean reveal 'vocally' (and could be lying) rather than 'actually show the card'. Possibly this needs to be made explicit in the rules, possibly I just failed at reading comprehension. Yeah, I do use "reveal" in the sense of vocal reveal, I should not do that. Nice catch! quote:That is a crap ton of tokens on the board. Probably not a problem for you but in my game, every token added was an additional layer of confusion. Not to mention that when someone looks at you playing and sees a sheet covered in stuff -- it is sort of off-putting. But that is just a personal aesthetic thing. I agree on a bunch of unique tokens, just ones for ownership I personally don't think are any worse then something like Pandemic. Personal on my end too, though. quote:Thanks for the explanation -- it is always good to see where people are coming from. I really like your explanation of how you see the cards being played but (and this is just my gut, because unlike you, I have not actually played the game) I wonder if you are hitting a disconnect between how you imagine the mechanic working in an ideal sense and how it actually works (this is something that I fall afoul of all the time). It is a really nice system when it runs, but it does sort of require you to be very comfortable with the distribution, and now that I think about it, most people don't like counting cards. quote:I also understand your point about the maths too but I still think that it is swingy. I realize that +5 is rare but even one +5 suddenly means that even my two -3's are not looking so hot -- and the fact that I get them entirely randomly is a bit of a bummer. Randomness is good but not when it works against player skill and there is no real way to mitigate it. I can tell you that my group would absolutely hate this level of randomness (I know because in earlier drafts of my game, the card draw was on the same curve as yours) -- but then again, people (not us) love Arkham and it is randomness incarnate! Well the idea is that the randomness averages out and you can suss out who has a signal of "worse draws than average" indicating they're a traitor actually lying about some of their draws. Although it does occur to me that I'm asking rather a lot of players to try to manage that analysis over the game... quote:To keep some of what you are going for -- does it really hurt things to keep the draw exactly as you have it now but just make everything +1 or -1? That was you can still legitimately fail when you want to succeed (or vice versa) and still discard a positive because you "got a hand of nothing but positives" while keeping you from undermining someones work when you get a lucky break. Just a thought. It has some benefits that the +1/-1 method doesn't (namely the empower tokens, which really mix things up) - but then, +1/-1 has some benefits as well. Will have to think... quote:Nah -- your rules are pretty clear that it is the endgame, I just made an inaccurate estimate of the time it would take (for me lots of rules pertaining to a section = takes a long time to resolve but that is not a given, certainly). If the eliminated player still has a chance of winning (via his team) then I don't think that it is much of a problem... although I couldn't find a section that says whether or not the dead player gets to declare allegiance. You do have an allegiance, but no choice. If you're the murderer and kill someone, you win. If you're the murderer and are killed, you're forced to side with They Who Wait in the Declaring of Alignments. And if you're neither but were killed, you're forced to side with Humanity. quote:I'd have to see it in play but given how large the potential negatives are of working together (eliminated and lose the game) versus the positives (more efficient resource use), as a player I would absolutely avoid it unless it was absolutely necessary to keep us in the game. Well remember, too, the biggest aspect of working together isn't actually being together on a space - it's whether you trust someone when they tell you what X sign is / what a players vision is / what the alignment card is / etc. quote:I totally agree -- but I also caution against equating 'stuff' with 'complexity'. Again, as something that I am guilty of, it is very hard to tell what is and isn't working/necessary when it is concealed with so many moving parts. For instance, you wanted people to be balanced between finding out about themselves, finding out about others, and personal interests. That is great... but as I read the rules (as stated before, not always understanding them) I really don't see much motivation towards finding out about others... certainly not to the extent that I would waste resources on it. In addition, if I know from the get go that I am a good guy (with no possibility of being a turn coat), I think that optimal play suggests just staying away from everyone and influencing as many leylines as possible on every turn... basically ignoring all of the options. I might be wrong but it is hard to see. Well, even if you know you're good, you want to find if someone ELSE is the murderer, and kill them before they kill someone else. This is the principle goal for investigating other people. And it's almost impossible to know from the get go you're a good guy, since if you have one Heroic sign and one unknown, that unknown sign could make you the murderer. It is true that someone who cashes out of the investigation games early for whatever reason does have a pretty dull time of it, though. quote:Not to mention that adequately playtesting a game of this level of complexity is a nightmare. Live testing is tolerable. Play by post is horrific. quote:So, I would take this statement to try to design a barebones version: It's an interesting idea. My suspicion is that the deduction would be far too trivial - but it's worth playing it as a light bluffing game and figure out WHY it's broken, I suppose! Thanks for the idea. quote:Still caveat emptor! Make the game that your group wants to play! The idea is to make it so it's costly to throw a fake signal that you're searching for your alignment when you know your alignment (because you're gaining power instead of influencing leylines, which you actually want to do), so that the efficient play is also the one that gives the other players the biggest clues about where you are. One of the things I'm really trying to encourage - in the game structure, in the 3 card mechanic, etc. - is having players choose between efficient and transparent and less obvious but slower/more expensive. Thanks again for all the time you spent!
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May 9, 2013 05:09
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Standard disclaimer: Sirlin is a :sperg:, etc, but his design articles are pretty drat interesting. Here's his most recent. http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/7/asynchronous-games-and-codex.html His site also has a bunch of design info on Puzzle Strike, which is a pretty good read as well.
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May 13, 2013 17:56
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I just wanted to pop in and say that the last game I designed is being tested by a publisher! This thread gave me some awesome ideas and I doubt I'd have taken this so far without you guys. I'll keep you all posted on how this goes.
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May 25, 2013 18:02
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I just wanted to pop in and say that the last game I designed is being tested by a publisher! This thread gave me some awesome ideas and I doubt I'd have taken this so far without you guys. I'll keep you all posted on how this goes. That is super awesome -- congrats! Which game was it (as long as you won't get in trouble for saying it)?
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May 25, 2013 18:38
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I doubt it, I'm not under any NDA or anything. To be safe I'll just say its the last game I was asking for help over in here.
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May 25, 2013 19:13
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Been refining my idea I posted way back in this thread. Elevator pitch and question - Basically, this is a BSG-inspired game that leverages prisoner's dilemma concepts. The map is a grid of ~18 hexes, with 12 cities. Each player represents a regional governor trying to defend their country from a monster attack and other various disasters while trying to curry favor for the next election for president. There are three major components: - A population tracker, which represents the current country population - A crisis/monster attack deck, which represents the calamities the city befalls - A technology track, which represents various projects the government is working on, which confers the players various special powers. Each player is assigned two cities in secret at the start of the game, along with a hand of ~7 cards which represent their funding levels, 0-6 Million dollars. Note 0 is an option as most things in the game require you to contribute, so you're allowed to ignore 1 funding request a turn. Funding cards are played for a variety of uses, but can only be played once a round (a full set of player turns), and then each player receives all of their funding cards back at the start of a new round. Each turn, a player must: 1) Assign one of his funding cards to the technology track. The tech track starts at 0 and has various "funding levels". There will be 3-4 technology cards face up at any point. The current player plays a card from his hand, and adds the total spent to the funding track. If his contribution meets or exceeds a "funding level", he can take the first face-up card on the tech track. The catch is that it's the funding levels are impossible to reach in one turn. So, you MUST contribute, but there's no guarantee that you'll be the player to hit the funding level. 2) Move to a city and perform the action. Normally this costs nothing, but during the game cities will become damaged. If a player wants to use a damaged city, the player must use a funding card that meets or exceeds the amount of damage that the city has. There are multiple types of cities, 2 of each kind on the board. Science: Look at the top card of the crisis/monster deck, and keep/bury it. Financial: Return funding cards to your hand R&D: Rearrange the order of cards on the technology track. Construction: Repair 1 damage to a city. Propoganda: Adjust population up or down. 3) Draw a Crisis card and resolve it. This is very similar to BSG, where there is a funding level to beat, with a pass/fail effect. Each player must put at least one card in. Generally, the fail effects will be damaging a city and/or lose population. The important part here is that if the Crisis passes, the player who contributed the most will earn victory points (votes) equal to how much the check passed by. I plan on a ton of "mind game" Crisis scenarios. The other important part goes back to each player having 2 cities assigned in secret at the start of the game. At the end of the game, players will lose victory points depending on how damaged their cities are. So the inherent tension in every check is that most of the time you don't want to save a city, since it will probably hurt your opponents, but it's also the main mechanism to score points. The game ends when population hits a certain level (hence the ability to adjust it via a City). So now that I've vomited up all this, the question: is there any advice on how to do a baseline planning for the balancing out all this poo poo? The game kind of depends on the right balance of passing and failing Crisis, population loss, victory points, etc. I don't want to just make poo poo up but don't know how else to start - I feel like there is probably something that could help shortcut the process and give me a better starting point. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 29, 2013 |
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May 29, 2013 03:40
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Congratulations Nemesis! I'm still too busy with parenthood and work to contribute anything of great length to the thread, but I wanted to drop in and mention a concept I just stumbled across... I was visiting my parents and my dad has a copy of R. Wayne Schmittberger's New Rules for Classic Games (published in 1992 - he's the current publisher of GAMES Magazine, incidentally). Anyway, at one point he discusses the "three-player petty diplomacy problem," i.e. the fact that, especially in perfect information abstract strategy games, the two trailing players will gang up on the leader and thus the game inevitably becomes the "chip-taking game" as Richard Garfield calls it, or basically a game of diplomacy and kingmaking, while all the seemingly strategic decisions built into the mechanics themselves fall by the wayside. Short of cutting way down on the level of interaction and making the game something more like a race, there doesn't seem to be any real way to resolve that issue, but Schmittberger mentions something interesting: New Rules for Classic Games posted:I have seen some very clever attempts to solve the petty diplomacy problem. The best one was a three-player hexagonal shogi variant invented by Tanigasaki Jisuke around 1930. [...] The inventor carefully defined situations in which two players were considered to be simultaneously attacking a third. When such a situation arises [...] the game automatically transforms into a two-team game, with the two players teamed up against the remaining player. Just an idea someone might want to grab and run with... I doubt Tanigasaki Jisuke will mind if someone builds a new game on a similar principle, given that this dates back to 1930.
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Jun 1, 2013 02:53
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This isn't a specific game, but I wanted to mention here that Fantasy Flight Games is hiring, including a position for a game designer. Not something you see every day. You have to be willing to relocate to Minnesota, though.
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Jun 25, 2013 03:56
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I've been working on a board game off and on for about the last year and a half. One of the greatest feelings in the world to me is sitting down to work on a minor aspect of the game, getting the spark of an idea, and following it through long enough to look up hours later and find you've made something that enhances the entire game better than you could've hoped.
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Jun 25, 2013 17:13
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Retardog posted:I've been working on a board game off and on for about the last year and a half. One of the greatest feelings in the world to me is sitting down to work on a minor aspect of the game, getting the spark of an idea, and following it through long enough to look up hours later and find you've made something that enhances the entire game better than you could've hoped. This is the upside to the often-frustrating general principle that in game design, there are no small changes*. In a good design, everything is related to several other things, so replacing one rule often ends up changing other rules, either by actually requiring modifications to them or simply changing their strategic implications... sometimes, these changes propagate through the whole system and you end up with a radically different game than you started with. This can be a bad thing when you've got a game that's almost right, but you can't figure out how to fix the bit that's bothering you without breaking everything else... but yeah, it can also happen that fixing one issue ends up fixing several others almost by magic. *: This is an exaggeration... things that are quantifiable numerically can often be adjusted slightly without long-reaching repercussions: changing the number of Stone tokens in the resource bag from 12 to 13, or nerfing hovertanks' defense from 5 to 4, for instance. And indeed, if you're making a more complex game, it's actually a good design decision to include some tweakable parameters like this so you can fix minor balance issues without making dangerous changes that risk the domino effect. But qualitative mechanical changes to one part of a game often change the game as a whole.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:48
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So I'm basically abusing this thread a bit to toot my own horn, but I won Quantuum Magic's prototype contest today! http://quantuummagic.com/wp/win-prototype-contest/
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Jul 30, 2013 20:40
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:So I'm basically abusing this thread a bit to toot my own horn, but I won Quantuum Magic's prototype contest today! Booya! Nice job.
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Jul 31, 2013 03:14
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OK some friends and I were spitballing about 12 months ago looking at maybe putting a game together despite a complete lack of experience both in designing anything and a lack of knowledge of the industry. It mostly just came down to how we were amused by it. Every now and then (usually when I'm bored at work) I'll think of it again and get the desire to give it a crack, but that thought tends to lose out in the battle for attention when I actually have free time. Theme-wise we were attracted to the idea of creating a serial killer within a variable framework of characteristics and then having to go out and commit murders in order to please the dark lord Satan. Very tongue in cheek, really. Your choices for character attributes would lead to changes in stats, but nothing overly complicated. You'd have choices for things like gender, age, marital status, preferred targets, preferred method, occupation etc. For example, choosing to have your character be married would make you seem less suspicious on the whole by playing up to the whole family man thing, but also make it harder to get away with your crimes because you had less privacy from your family. The creepy loner has more freedom to commit crimes and dispose of bodies, but is automatically more suspicious when the police start investigating. There would be a risk/reward part to it whereby the more gruesome outlandish murders would please Satan at a quicker rate, but increased scrutiny from media and police means you risk getting busted. Naturally it fell apart when it came to actual design and having to work with numbers and make real effort, but it was fun to discuss and have a laugh about.
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Aug 1, 2013 23:07
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quote:OK some friends and I were spitballing about 12 months ago looking at maybe putting a game together despite a complete lack of experience both in designing anything and a lack of knowledge of the industry If it's cheap to make (just cards, for example) such that you can sell for $25'ish, and you can find an artist that's basically competent, your serial killer game would almost certainly have a successful ~$8000'ish KickStarter. You won't make much money most likely, but there's never been (and will probably never be) a better time to publish a small game. I've been watching small KickStarters for a while and trying to figure out patterns. By far the most important factor is an attractive visual style and layout (you can predict a Kickstarter's success pretty much completely from the icon, if you want). A "fun sounding" theme is important, and your serial killer idea is a sure winner on this front. It's also important to have a few happy reviews (there's plenty of "review mill" type blogs that will supply these on demand (in exchange for a prototype, anyway). I probably sound very cynical here - but that's not my intention. I'm just saying it's a good time to jump in and do it if this is something you want to do.
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Aug 2, 2013 00:03
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I've hit a brick wall with my board game. The issue is how to elegantly display and track the stats for each player's ship. The general layout I've been using has the card with the stats and special abilities in the center of a slightly larger mat that has areas to put their crew tokens and money. As a reward for some of the obstacles you defeat in the game, you can earn upgrades to your ship stats. I've looked at different ways to handle this, so far focusing on dials akin to King of Tokyo. The main issue is that right now a player would be looking at three different numbers for each stat: the base stat on the ship card, the max for that stat (one dial), and the current stat (another dial). I'd be looking at a total of eight dials on each player mat. I've thought about using a slider system with two markers to represent the current and max, but I'm open to ideas or other games I could look at to see how they handle it. The game has a medium level of complexity, but I'm doing my best to streamline where I can. Ideally a clix-style base would be fantastic, but it's too bad they're patented.
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Aug 7, 2013 21:56
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quote:I've hit a brick wall with my board game. Could go kind of Eclipse-ish here. Each ship mat has spots for a given number of cubes or discs or something. Your upgrades are cardboard chits with spots on them for more cubes (like the orbitals in Eclipse). VVV: To be clear, the ships in Eclipse don't work this way (just the orbitals/planets do). But in general the game has a lot of clever design stuff that's worth looking at (whether or not you think it's a good game overall, it's amazing design). jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 22:13
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Thanks! I'll check it out. I think there's a guy in my gaming group that has a copy.
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Aug 7, 2013 22:16
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Retardog posted:I've hit a brick wall with my board game. The issue is how to elegantly display and track the stats for each player's ship. The general layout I've been using has the card with the stats and special abilities in the center of a slightly larger mat that has areas to put their crew tokens and money. As a reward for some of the obstacles you defeat in the game, you can earn upgrades to your ship stats. I've looked at different ways to handle this, so far focusing on dials akin to King of Tokyo. The main issue is that right now a player would be looking at three different numbers for each stat: the base stat on the ship card, the max for that stat (one dial), and the current stat (another dial). I'd be looking at a total of eight dials on each player mat. I've thought about using a slider system with two markers to represent the current and max, but I'm open to ideas or other games I could look at to see how they handle it. The game has a medium level of complexity, but I'm doing my best to streamline where I can. Ideally a clix-style base would be fantastic, but it's too bad they're patented. I really like dials in general but for what you are asking, I think that the the slider system is the way to go. Two wheels and a number listing 'base' stat will take up a HUGE amount of real estate on a player board and, in addition to limiting the number of stats you can display, will also drive the cost of your game up a ton (although if you are using a series of interlocking wheels it might work). I have knocked up a prototype of what a standard slider might look like here (because I worked up something similar in the past) -- the Eclipse trick is to use cubes to cover the values that you are not using (Eclipse really makes this awesome because it has indentations around each number so that the cubes don't move). (Click for large)  So, you read the board in the following way: it has marked on it the 'base' stat (a red square on the game board). You then cover all the 'upgrade' squares with tiny cubes (available very cheaply). When you upgrade, you remove one of the cubes -- you will note that the cost to upgrade is included as a smaller number and an arrow under the currently revealed space. Your current rating is marked by a tiny transparent circular chit (also available very cheaply). I really like this approach because I think it communicates a lot of information very quickly even to other players. Its big downside is that it is really easy for a player to hit the table and make little blocks go everywhere (which again, Eclipse solves by custom boards). Alternatives: For a similar system you could create a series of two sided circular cardboard chits with a red side and a green side. Every time that you upgrade, you get a new chit -- so the number of chits equals the max power. When systems are damaged, flip chits to red (or even stack them together in a designated area), so the current value of the stat is the number of green chits. Finally, you could also use different sided dice. So, on an upgrade you go from d4 to d6 to d8, etc. The number of sides of the dice indicate the maximum stat and the currently showing number is the value of the system. I have no idea what the cost of this would be for your game (although for prototyping you can get dice pretty cheaply) -- the only big problem with this approach is that I find it takes me a little too long to find the side that I need of a dice. But yeah, looking at Eclipse in general is a good idea because the system of upgrades and they way they display everything is incredibly elegant. DirkGently fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 23:57
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DirkGently posted:(Click for large) Which Eclipse are you talking about? This definitely isn't the 2011 Eclipse.
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Aug 8, 2013 00:11
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Mind if I ask a prototyping/production question? What do you need to make these things? I've been interested in "Constructable Card Games" like Wizkids' "Pirates", where the ships are made by punching out pieces from a credit card sized piece of plastic and assembled. They're printed in full color, and I've seen toys a while back which were constructed in a similar manner. With their particular design, you received rules for the pieces on the card, and parts to build ships, terrain, and sometimes monsters or buildings and so on. The cards came out of the pack like so:  Here's the result:   As you can see, fairly neat looking and the packs were maybe three or four dollars a pack which had two ships, some terrain, rules, random pieces and a tiny die. The shape of the ships were reused frequently, but the printing varied considerably. I've read enough of this thread (and the related game business thread) to know that I'd be crazy to think of this as a great way to make money, I'm looking at this from a "just for fun" type of thing. What I'm curious about is how are these sorts of things made, printed and cut out? What sorts of equipment are needed to print on plastic about as thick as a credit card and able to punch pieces such that they remain in the card until actually popped out? Is it just a bunch of custom dies and presses? Some crazy job outsourced via Ali Baba? Thanks in advance, I've been trying to find this out for the longest time!
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Aug 8, 2013 00:43
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Roughly how big are those ships, just out of interest?
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Aug 8, 2013 00:47
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There's a D6 in the left photo so I guess that gives you a rough idea.
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Aug 8, 2013 00:49
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The dice for Pirates of the Spanish Main were tiny. The ships themselves aren't that big, but were pretty sturdy. The hardest part of putting them together (at least the early sets) were that the masts sometimes didn't want to go in their slots, so you'd end up bending or breaking off the tab. The tallest mast on the ship on the right is a good scale indicator. It's about as tall as a standard playing card.
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Aug 8, 2013 01:01
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thespaceinvader posted:Roughly how big are those ships, just out of interest? The ships are 2-3 inches long, and tend to be taller than they are long. The card you see in the first picture is about the size of a baseball or credit card. Tunga posted:There's a D6 in the left photo so I guess that gives you a rough idea. That d6 is loving tiny, they fit inside the foil package. Here's some scale for you:  EDIT: Wait, this takes care of everything: 
Solkanar512 fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 01:05
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