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jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

If its not my turn, there's no decisions for me to make, and I get bored if the time between turns grows to more than a minute or two.

I appreciated a point Richard Garfield made about Monopoly - the positive events (people landing on your properties) mostly happen to you when it's not your turn, and that makes other peoples' turns more enjoyable. I prefer games where there's a continuous flow of decisions and interactions (7 Wonders and Space Alert come to mind here), but barring that (it won't be possible for all games) I think it's worthwhile to consider other ways of making downtime more pleasant.

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jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Not that Monopoly is held up as a good example of design

It think it has some real problems, but (again paraphrasing Garfield) it's also very successful, and it's worth looking at for good ideas. The good idea here is that, even if there's no decisions to be made, having good things happen to you during downtime can make the wait more pleasant (and perhaps Settlers is a better example of a game with this property).

It's not the most direct way to address the problem, but it's an idea I've tried a bit in my most recent project. It's a co-op game, one feature of which is that players choose items for other players (rather than themselves).

(I definitely recommend Garfield's book: Characteristics of Games if you're interested in game design and analysis. It's not a "how to make a game" book, but it outlines a great framework for understanding them.)

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

What are people's thoughts on cooperative board games? These seem to be on the rise and have been for a while now. The differences in dynamics and balance make them an interesting challenge that I've tried to tackle with a couple of games.

I think there's a real opportunity for advancement in the co-op genre. Real time games are finally catching on, and people are coming up with novel ways to hide information and limit a single player's dominance over the game. But I think the biggest frontier is in automating the "enemy". Games like Forbidden Island and Flash Point, where hazards pop up randomly, whack-a-mole style seem to be played out. We're starting to see more stuff like interesting enemy action decks and even some simple heuristics to play against. I think there's some more clever answers waiting to be found that will make these games more interesting, and less "predictably unpredictable".

Some people have poked around a bit with using an iPad to automate parts of a game. I could see this catching on, especially for co-ops.

Right now many of these games feel like you win or lose on the strength of random events, rather than on how well you play (or, alternatively, they feel like puzzles that are only good until you find "the strategy"). As the enemy becomes more sensible, wins will get more strategic and more satisfying.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I proposed three chess variants to show how the introduction of a luck factor into a game can increase, decrease or leave constant the strategic complexity of a game

Garfield comes to essentially the same conclusion - luck and strategy components for a game are mostly independent. He even uses a similar example in his justification; he calls the first game you describe "Randochess". (Rather than "strategy" he is talking about the more general "skill" in his discussion, but it's the same conclusion.)

quote:

Not in terms of how interesting they are to play... clearly they're both worse than chess as games; we're just talking about their strategic complexity.

Strategic depth, for me, is inextricable from the nature of the players. If we played super-chess with 1000 pieces on a gigantic board, it would have a mammoth state space and tremendously more options. It would be much harder to solve - and experienced by some super-intelligent being, it would almost certainly be much more strategic. Experienced by humans it would be much less strategic, I think - the broad strategy would be very hard to grasp, and wins would be decided by randomness, endurance, and unsatisfying tactical skirmishes (like Go is often kind of random, and purely tactical, when two new players try it).

Similarly, I think introducing random elements would make chess harder to solve, but much less strategic - less of a measure of skill - for humans. Randomness would level the playing field in terms of people's ability to plan through them. Players would be less able to exploit differences in skill to win, not because of game-by-game random outcomes - which would tend to even out - but because of their shared inability to analyze effectively through the wall of randomness. It would be beyond us, a game for some more intelligent being.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I can now beat you 70% of the time. Maybe in your proposed "super-chess," to achieve that same win rate against you, I would need to study for a month... but I think that's just a steeper learning curve, not less strategic depth or more "pseudo-luck."

I don't think we'd likely disagree on our assessments of any real practical games, but I find the theory here very interesting so I've written a big wall of text below. Do skip this post if you're just interested in designing actual games. Sorry.

First off, I think plotting out a learning curve is a really good way to talk about the skill component of a game.

For me, the strategic depth of a game is a measure of the number of "steps up" (how do you measure the size of a step? I have no idea) the learning curve a prospective player would practically be able to take. If a learning curve is too steep (for a human) it limits the effective strategic depth. I kind of see this "effective strategic depth" (the depth a human can see) as separate from the "absolute strategic depth", which I think is perhaps better defined as a measure of the complexity of a perfect strategy.

To clarify what I'm thinking, perhaps a simpler example game than chess: A player picks a number between 1 and 2 trillion (using some randomiser if they'd like). The opponent gets 1 point if they can name the digit of pi at that location (within a minute, say). For some level of intelligence, this is a highly skilled game where you can use a variety of calculation heuristics and practice to climb the learning curve. For a human, the learning curve is not really visible; the game is purely luck.

Conversely, for a less intelligent being, Tic-Tac-Toe could be very skill-based and interesting. They could slowly climb the learning curve as they recognized two-in-a-rows that could be completed, then started noticing those possibilities for their opponents, then maybe memorizing opening moves. The very dim players see a learning curve here, but for humans the curve is again pretty much invisible.

And it's not just absolutes; there's games where humans may only be able to climb the first rungs (Battleship is a good example here, it's far more complicated than Chess in absolute terms, but humans are very limited in the strategies they can implement and few people think of Battleship as a interesting strategic game) - or where only the best players can look back at the end of the curve (Checkers is close to being a game like this for modern computers).

I think Super Chess and Move-a-Random-Piece chess are both games that humans wouldn't be able to get very good at; and thus while they both have more absolute depth than Chess, they would have less effective depth for human players.

I think it's very fair to say all of this is just quibbling about terms. Again, I'm not really disagreeing with your assessment in any practical sense, I'm just kind of thinking out loud about how we might usefully define something like "strategic depth".

quote:

That's a very good point, and something I've often argued in the past... specifically in terms of Go, in fact. People on the Go forums I used to frequent would often argue about whether there was any justification for saying that you got "unlucky" in a game, given that it's a game of zero chance and perfect information.

Garfield does call this kind of complexity beyond players' ability to predict "luck"; in general his use of "luck" (which has very much leaked into how I think about these things) is pretty much "unpredictability". But he doesn't give a terribly satisfying way of extracting "luck" and "skill" elements from something cleanly measurable like play results. It seems like an awkward problem.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I think we could talk about "effective strategic depth" as the number of skill levels attainable within the maximum effort you expect anyone to expend on a game. So you take the best player who will ever exist in the world, and find someone he can beat 67% of the time (assuming perfect info, zero chance), and then find someone that person can beat 67% of the time, and so on... and see how many people you have to go through before you get down to someone who is just moving randomly (or your best approximation thereof, e.g. someone with no background in any games, let alone this one).

I really like this definition; it points at a reasonable result (one that matches my kind of intuitive feel about different games) for any game I can think of (real, trivial, or otherwise).

On prototyping:

I really like "Mod Podge Puzzle Saver" to improve the feel of printed materials. Glue a picture to a clay poker chip, put a little Puzzle Saver on it, and it feels really good for play.

For cards, my strategy for a while has been to put Magic cards (junk cards are essentially free) in Magic sleeves (cheap, available everywhere) and then slide in regular paper printed inserts in front of the Magic card. I've yet to find cardboard that both "feels" right for shuffling and also goes through the cheap color printers I have access to. Magic cards in sleeves shuffle very well, and being sleeved means you don't have to be overly careful cutting/etc.. If you print your cards a little small, sleeving them and unsleeving them (with the Magic card already in there) is very fast.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Skill factor: (W - 0.5) / 0.5, where W is the win rate of a perfect player over a random player. So something with zero luck has a (1 - 0.5) / 0.5 = 100% skill factor, while something completely random, where no player can have an advantage, has a (0.5 - 0.5) / 0.5 = 0% skill factor.

It seems hard to define a "random opponent" for a lot of games. Obviously games without cleanly discrete states and choices are a problem (eg. what does a random basketball player look like?). But even for clean discrete games there's going to be a lot of times where a generalized random opponent (ie. chooses from legal moves with equal probability) doesn't seem to work well as a measure.

Take "Maze Race", where players can move one orthogonal space each turn and attempt to get to the end of a maze first. For a sufficiently large board, a random player has close to zero chance of beating a real player, so the game is going to have a stratospheric skill rating. At the same time, for that same large board (and assuming time limits are in force for turns or something), this is going to be a very luck intensive game for human players.

For other games, a random player won't do nearly so bad; in 7 Wonders, it's very possible a random player could win. It seems like a random player is either hard to define (if their behavior is more complicated), or is measuring something else about a game (often it'll be something like "how bad does the worst legal move tend to be"). For example, having the option of offering a Doubling Cube makes Backgammon more skill intensive for human players - but just gives a random player a way to shoot himself in the foot every turn.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Nov 23, 2012

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Skill factor has nothing to do with human ability, only the intrinsic luck factor in the game.

Sorry - I do see what you're getting at, and I did kind of smush a bunch of your stuff together in my comment there. Let me start again, maybe.

Consider 7 Wonders. Your calculated skill factor is going to be lower than most comparable games because of actual randomness in the game - but also because the game kind of forces you to towards viable moves. Say we add in a horrible move that would almost never be taken by a real player. Our skill factor is going to go through the roof, because our random player is going to take it 3 times a game.

And then we use that factor as a starting point to calculate our other numbers. We're going to end up with very different results when we talk about the learning curves of our variants - that despite the fact that for non-random players the games are almost exactly the same.

quote:

...we have to start with intrinsic properties of the game itself...

What I'm saying is that comparing a random player and a perfect player will not allow us to separate the effects of randomness from other properties of the game; for one, we'll also be measuring the number and value variance of options available in the game (and we won't be able to restrict ourselves easily to any kind of reasonable subset of those options without ungeneralizing our random agent). This taints the rest of our calculations, and means we will have a hard time using these other numbers to compare different games in a useful way.

quote:

For instance, never visiting any space in the Maze Game a number of times greater than its number of exits.

Edit: Yes, sorry, that's very much what I was trying to get at. It just seems likely to be messy.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

The concept is kind of a cross between Cosmic Encounter and Munchkin.

Why not add in Galaxy Trucker there? Have the construction be a free-for-all of grabbing parts. Maybe you'll build a cruddy, partially functional robot that's wobbly and underpowered - but you did it fast so you get to attack first!

Also, maybe instead of one attacker and one defender, you choose a type of attack and it affects everyone else at the table (or specific people, but not entirely in your control - like the spells in Epic Spell Battle Wizarduelz).

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Cutting and rubber cementing faces on 100 dice is going to take foreeeeeever.

My normal process for dice has been to print on "full page sticky label" paper, stick those on, then apply Mod Podge Puzzle Saver. After being Puzzle Saved, the dice have kind of a plastic shell that feels nice (and the stickers aren't going to come off once that stuffs on). Not saying this is better, but something someone might want to try.

I'll need to go the fixative route (thanks for tip) for my next thing, which involves transparencies (and the transparent stickers are curly hell-garbage).

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

Just a small note to congratulate Muuphish on winning the October board game design contest with his mazebuilding cave horror game Speloink! (it's linked to in the Contest Thread if you want to have a look).

There was a lot of good entries, and it was fun going through them. If you're interested in game design, I recommend playing through a few rough print-and-plays like this; you get some general game design ideas, but more specifically you see what works and doesn't work in terms of presenting a game idea and rules.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

A common problem in Euro games is "illusion of choice," where the players merely feel they're making significant decisions,

I'm really feeling this right now. Our group had a bit of a Tigris & Euphrates binge, and moving back to other deckbuilders and what not the choices feel very fuzzy. Instead of making huge swings to board position each turn, you're grinding out small statistical advantages. Is there a good term for this kind of distinction?

But yeah, It's hard not to go a little AP playing T&E - you don't really get any softball choices.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Apparently it's a 'Fun and unique concept' but the pirate theme limits it to the hobby/niche market.

Perhaps this has an easy fix - instead of just being pirates, the game could assign a variety of identities (perhaps even more than one per game round). Makes it much more replayable too, though I suppose you'd have to ditch the props.

Or maybe you have to go even broader for this to work. I think there's probably a market for a game that assigns a variety of situations, roles, and rules/objectives to teams in a party setting (ie. each player has one team member compete each round, while the rest of the players act as judges). In one setting both players might be trying to be good pirates who score based on their natural use of certain words. In another, you're a robot and maybe you get points for getting the other player to say a word from your secret list. You could take this all kinds of way - and all the activities don't need to be super amazing, you just have a lot of them of decent quality supported by a broad, simple framework and a few helpful components (timers, etc..)

Overall, I think if you're going to sell this as a party game you need to be providing more potential content. People can sit around and talk silly without buying a box - you've got to be providing a bunch of humor-fuel.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

I've been bouncing around an idea for a "card-building" game.

Quick gist: players are given a bunch of set, basic cards, and then a certain number of random transparent cards that clip onto those base cards. There wouldn't be any particular order to these, you'd just slap on as many as you'd like (there might be a practical limit in terms of legibility - you'd have to be able to clearly see to the bottom layer) to randomly replace (or modify) effects, characteristics, parts of the name, parts of the picture, and parts of the cost.

There'd be no real attempt to balance possible outcomes, and indeed a lot of the fun would be assembling "broken" cards with absurd effects. Countering this tendency would be:

1. A very, very short time limit for assembling cards, and rewards for having multiple, varying cards in the end. It would hopefully be normal for players to just throw together a few last cards at the end and hope they work.
2. Mechanisms to directly limit the effect of a single powerful card (ie. this card has won this much VP, so now it's gone)

The natural thing to have these cards build is obviously monsters, and the game I'm considering now for the actual "play" part is a very basic game of monster combat. I'm thinking this part should be fairly quick and simple (and the only decision basically "what order to play my monsters out in") to focus time on what I think will be the more fun part (building cards).

I think the ideal would be 2 teams of 2 players, so that players could have interesting interactions in terms of splitting their shared pool of random cards (by resource types, function, combo options, etc..)

The theme I'm considering now is fairly light and open, a universe ruled by the 4 elements: Necromancy, Money, Lightning, and Booze. I've thrown together a starter list of cards. Things kind of seem to work OK and result in fun, goofy cards.

My next step, I think, is to print off some test cards to see whether it works physically. I'm thinking the base cards will have plastic poles on the top, and the modifier cards will have holes that line up. To start I might just use binder clip things, but I don't want alignment to be an issue. I think some of the fun here will be just the tactile fun of assembly.. if that isn't fun (or is fiddly) the game will really suffer.

Any thoughts?

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Sounds like a lot of complexity in the components. Would be really hard to manufacture.

I think you may be imagining something different than I am. The cards would be normal (and all the same size) - they'd just be printed on transparent plastic, and have a couple holes at the top so the sections of the cards line up. I don't expect my prototype to take long to make.

quote:

Is there something you're doing with the cards that you couldn't do with e.g. little boards with space to put 1-4 smaller cards or tokens on top of them?

Each card would replace some random subset of stuff across the whole card. If it only replaced part (or if you had this kind of control over what it affected) you'd lose some design flexibility and you'd add order to the build phase (and you'd likely be able to sort your cards somehow). The idea is that one card might replace the second "cost" box with a lower number but also blanks out a multiplier on HP (which is what you wanted from that other card), or doesn't cover up another negative you wanted to get rid of. And because these things are so messed up and disorganized, you just kind of have to pile stuff up and see how it goes.

quote:

The only thing remotely similar I can think of is one of Richard Garfield's stranger games, Filthy Rich,

I just had a quick look to see, and it turns out there was a game that's quite similar (using transparent cards and combining their effects to build monsters) called Hecatomb (published by WotC). I wasn't super smug about my little idea or something, but I'll admit there's enough similarities that I can feel my ambition draining.

quote:

If I remember right that game has a little plastic card-sized valley to stack your cards in as you play them; something similar might work for your idea?

Edit: Yeah, that's a better idea - simpler and probably work better. I'm obviously not up on what the cool kids are playing, as that game is apparently very popular (though, I suppose, not exactly in my demographic).

My ambition is totally gone now that I see the space is already well explored, but I'm glad I asked.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Dec 31, 2012

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I wouldn't say the space is "well explored" if there are, like, two games out there. Don't get too hung up on being super-original.

Yeah, I suppose what I was thinking was more like "the low-hanging fruit has been picked here". I really need some kind of hook to sell myself on working through a game idea these days, and originality was the only real hook this idea had for me (my MS Paint Booze Dragon was looking pretty good too, I guess).

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

"chain store paradox"

Having a random game length/end condition can help a lot in cooperate/defect games.

quote:

(e.g. when two red sides of the cards match you get a damage/victory point bonus etc.)

Perhaps have a look at Carcasonne. Lots of stuff works different in Carcasonne than what you've described, but it might give you some good ideas. I think you might get more joy having a shared board.

I'm also not sure about the "resolve now" mechanic. Maybe have a set condition for a round ending, then do some kind of "doubling cube" mechanic? It seems like it hampers potential strategy if you can call for points to be counted any time you're ahead by a card or more.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I also considered speciality dice that, instead of rolling 1d6 + 2, you would roll a dice that has 3-8 on it. Would that be too...strange?

I'd suggest maybe even going further and having a variety of dice customized for different units. And maybe not just numbers. Instead of totalling all your dice and doing 37 damage, maybe allocate dice showing appropriate faces to kill individual units (eg. you need 5 attack symbols to kill a skeleton, but "bow and arrow" symbols don't count). Maybe upgrades let your heroes swap one of their dice for a magic die with wildcard spots, or give you (more?) rerolls or something. I like dice, and I like rerolling subsets of them - I think it's a good mechanic theory wise, and its tactile fun too (but it's a bit lame if you're just rerolling your low numbers).

I think it was xopods a while ago was talking about using non-transitive dice to represent combat between different kinds of units (or I may be making that up). I think there's some really fun ideas there too.

Summary: I think custom dice are awesome and you should go hog wild with them.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

1) Come up with a new fourth category. This is preferred, but I can't think of any. Traps and Puzzles had to be folded together into Mechanisms, things like Trickery or Challenge are too vague and difficult to conceptualize.

Maybe break Monsters into "Beasts" and "Villains" (or some other split - Monsters is a pretty big class)?

Rival? Tournament? Treachery?

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

That said, if you can find a collaborator who is on the same wavelength in terms of work ethic and interest, it can be fantastic.

My new rule for collaborators/artists/whatever is something like this: "I'm running the project and get final say in everything. This is because I'm paying you money for your work - and that money is all I can guarantee. I'm going to do whatever I want - including, possibly, get bored of this project and bury it."

I've gotten tangled up in hazy collaboration stuff before where visions drifted and motivations waned and feelings got hurt. I've never had anything really blow up or something, but it takes the fun out of things. Paying money means I'm paying money, but it sure makes things simpler and more pleasant.

VVV: My relationships with the people still tend to feel collaborative. On my current video game project, I've given the artist very little direction and he's pretty much just drawing whatever characters and bits he feels like (he has a good sense for the type of game and what kind of stuff will probably work). But the fact that, yeah, deep down, it's not actually a collaboration is very liberating.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Feb 6, 2013

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

You'd need to have everything in such a rigid layout that it'd be a pain in the rear end to actually adhere to it.

I actually don't think it'd be too bad (I've done a little optical recognition work). QR codes are much more information than you need (you don't exactly have trillions of pieces you need to distinguish) and that kind of presentation (tiny black and white squares) would probably require too good of a picture when you have a lot of pieces to capture at once.

But since you're designing the pieces, you can give them a few shapes and a few colors and they'd be pretty easy to distinguish and place. In terms of the board, you'd just need to do some fairly basic stuff - don't get stuff too close to boundaries or overlap, everything has to be visible to the camera, etc. Space Alert would actually be a pretty easy one to do, though you'd probably want to centralize the action boards a little more, and give them a set orientation. All you need to capture is what threat cards came out (and at what times) and what action cards were played - and cards are big flat spaces with lots of room to encode information.

I think there's probably a lot of opportunities for mixed electronic/board games (and there's been a few). Involving a camera is really a good idea - could even do silly stuff like little AR animations for battle resolutions or something.

But yeah, I find Space Alert resolution fun and easy, and I've never felt any temptation to automate it. Might be different if it had little custom animations for dying to a space octopus though.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I want to know dream scenarios.

I think it'd be fun to do a game involving more realistic interactions with computers. There's a whole bunch of established cyberpunk ideas - stuff like "ice-breakers" and what not, realized most clearly in Netrunner - that only exist as part of this kind of fiction, and don't map well onto any realistic computer concepts (now or in the foreseeable future). None of it was ever terribly realistic, but at least in the 1990s it didn't feel silly. Now it feels silly.

Building a realistic game would require a lot of reinvention and much less reliance on established "objects", but would be a lot more satisfying and fresh I think. Computer security isn't overly dry in the here-and-now real world - and we can extrapolate at least semi-realistically into a future where it's more tactical, creative, and generally interesting.

I guess I just think it's kind of sad that the cyberpunk genre is stuck in a paradigm that's less realistic than, say, the last Bond movie (which was obviously crazy goofy plot-wise, but at least had a reasonable basic paradigm for lots of its technical stuff).

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I think a lot of my designs go out of their way to take the silliest and most endearing parts of their themes.

I think there's something like Poe's law operating here. I mean, your game idea is clearly a parody when presented like above... but what about every other game in the genre? I mean, is Android: Infiltration supposed to be making fun of the setting, or is it earnestly, uh, cyberdark? What was the last thing in this kind of setting that was reasonably serious? Bladerunner?

Edit: to be clear, I fully support you doing whatever - go for it - I'm just saying my dream scenario is someone doing a serious take on this kind of world. I think it'd be cool.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Anyone know of existing games like this, or have any feedback on the general concept?

In a general sense, Ticket To Ride is somewhat about taking contracts (deciding how many you take and how ambitious).

I'd be a bit concerned that having both failure penalties and fulfilment values on a contract; could make the game very swingy. Adding "insurance"/hedging could work, but also gets complicated fast. (Edit: I guess in a strict sense it probably doesn't matter whether there's penalties and rewards or just rewards, and it does allow you to manipulate your exposure to risk to have it broken out - I just think there might be "game player psychology" type consequences to having both).

In general, I really like this kind of mechanic - it mixes two really satisfying mechanisms: push your luck and "general prediction", both of which I really like. Overall I think this is a super cool idea.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 13, 2013

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

sorta what I had in mind for the character pic layout, also stuff has been moved:

Still feel like the background is making the pilot/hull stuff feel messy. Maybe a box behind the icons? Maybe a lighter background pattern?

(Oh, and the dog car is absurdly awesome)

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

The second is his process of black boxing the rules. As a software engineer and a fan of automated testing, I'm wondering how he did it, and if you could generalize it in such a way as to create a toolkit for other games. A rigorous, automatic, mechanical way to ensure game balance would probably be a good thing for the industry, especially if you could get it out to the little guys, who just don't have the budget for large playtests.

It's a very hard problem to even get started with. It's easy for a computer to explore a general state space, and for many games this will be good enough to play against a human - but the computer's play will not look like a human's without human-designed heuristics or a much more advanced approach. It's easy to find a game that's balanced under optimal play, but doesn't work at all for humans.

Solving games (a much simpler problem) is a fun little hobby though, and I'll sometimes dig for a few to try on the BoardGameGeek forums. Games with sequential play and perfect information are fairly simple - the most you'll usually need is a little Dynamic Programming to make things finish on time (unless the state space is too large, I don't usually bother with those because AB search is boring). Games with hidden information quickly become mixed-strategy equilibria - then you have to bring out a bunch of linear algebra to work out percentages (and, later, Simplex when the matrices get too big). These are the most interesting (and most applicable to analysis of modern boardgames).

Games with more than 2 players are almost always a mess, I don't bother with them either.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I want to find some way for players to easily refer to what is on each die they pick up. Not sure what to do about this yet, but I may have to think outside the box for this one.

Perhaps part of the solution is giving each dice some character. I did a RPG'ish dice game a while back, and the extra dice you could get were things like a pet bear. The bear dice had bear-y pictures as well as the normal "effect" symbols. Nobody confused the dice, and while you might not know all the sides immediately, you got the general idea from the theme.

I like the idea of a dice draft in a game like this, though it does make it a bit harder to have the draft be secret.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Between the cards that alter the board, the cards that manipulate the deck, the cards that copy and reuse other cards, and the actual math cards, I feel like it is trying to be too many games at once

...and yet in the end it sounds like it's only one game: chip-taking (ie. the quintessential political game... aka. "Munchkin"). The strategies you describe as effective (hide your strength, make one big push by hording defense, fly under the radar, etc..) have nothing to do with math or the unique mechanics of the game, they're just the standard strategies of a game where politics is dominant. Many people like political games, but it sounds like you want other aspects of the game shine a little brighter. The simple fix is to remove player targeted effects or tone them down.

The other property that is perhaps a challenge here is lack of tactical clarity (in particular, your immediate options on a turn seem likely to be very scattered on the board). It's also unclear from your summary the kinds of longer-term strategies or game heuristics a player might employ or learn. It might be easiest to approach this last part head-on: just grab a "gamey game" mechanic like drafting, bidding on cards, or betting, and things will naturally tend to shake out to a more strategic game with a cleaner learning curve.

In any case, I don't think you'll get a significantly different game with tweaks to cards and what not; I think you'll need at least one big new mechanic to make the game shake out differently.

I do like the idea of a game with non-trivial math - a modern Rithmomachy with a bunch of arcane stuff would be cool (maybe do a forbidden math summons Lovecraftian horrors type theme).

jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Apr 13, 2013

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I think if I can boil it down to just 100 very math related cards, and with an eye on keeping player targeted effects minimal, I can get it to play a little more like I want.

Sounds good to me (and I may not have conveyed my legitimate enthusiasm here in my previous post). A game that rewarded some mathematical intuition would be super cool, and reasonably unique.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

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?

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

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).

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

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

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

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.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

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

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

I'm working on a game. Character cards need two stats:

1. Their effectiveness in individual-combat/adventuring/surprise-fight type situations
2. Their effectiveness in a war/pitched-battle/big-group-fight type situations

Anyway, I need to refer to these stats often in other text, but I can't think of a good name to differentiate them. The exact theming of these stats is flexible - basically you'll accumulate played characters and initially their value (which will be hidden, unless "things happen", long story) will be based on stat 1.. until you hit the maximum count at which point all the cards are revealed and their value is based on stat 2.

I can't think of any words that say what I want here clearly and concisely. Any ideas?

VVV: Thanks for the suggestions!

VVVV: Thanks for all the continued suggestions. I'm currently leaning towards something like "Strength"/"Leadership". I prefer some of the suggestions below, but the wording ends up sounding goofy if they aren't clearly descriptive of the character. Or I may scrap the bloody mechanic, because it's not playing out well in testing so far.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Aug 15, 2013

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

I know sometimes breaking one thing can show how other things are broken, or offer ideas on smarter fixes for the game, but 4 hours spent on one issue thats fix is exactly the same as when we identified it? That's not really a productive use of anyones time.

In these kind of initial playtest sessions I think it makes sense to introduce new rules if you need to fix a problem. Obviously that requires the right attitude from the testers to not balk at that (and it sounds like maybe that would have been a problem here), but it's better than a wasted session.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Also, what games are out there that utilize dice well while maintaining a strong strategy component?

Not sure if you've tried these, but Alien Frontiers uses dice for worker placement (you roll, and depending on your rolls/combinations, you can then place the dice in different spots). Kingsburg is similar. Castles of Burgundy uses dice to control available actions in a pseudo-worker-placement/tile-draft game. Escape: Curse of the Temple uses dice rolls as sort of a dexterity/concentration mechanic, where your targets are fairly clear but you have to be rolling fast and communicating with your team-mates to get results before a real-time clock expires. Many games have a re-roll/dice-draft system, like King of Tokyo (or, well, Yahtzee). Quarriors is a "dice-building" (deck building where you buy dice instead of cards) game where players are sad and I hate Quarriors.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Richard Garfield gave an interesting little talk about Luck in Games. I had no idea he wrote a textbook about it too.

I'm a big fan of Garfield and his approach to design, but I will say I was a bit disappointed by the textbook (Characteristics of Games). Part of the problem is that he does such a good job explaining his ideas in his various lectures, podcasts (the Three Donkeys podcasts are really strong), etc... that for me the book felt like a retread.

I was also disappointed in that he didn't attempt some grand unifying theory of skill/luck - I was hoping for, perhaps, mathematical tools or approaches by which we might tease out some solid numbers for these things.

Still, he is bloody great.

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

Yeah - I don't usually feel bad for failed Kickstarters, but sometimes I cringe at successful ones that have bitten off a lot. Like these guys making what's now called "Leaders: the Powered Board Game" (I've been following this one for a while; I find it fascinating even though I have no interest in the game). They have $8000 to deliver a custom board, minis for soldiers and tanks and aircraft, custom dice, a ton of art, and some random backer bonuses (handfuls of T-shirts and tablet covers). Oh, and a complicated tablet app for Android and iOS.

For their initial batch, they have to make ~70 copies of the physical game. 70 is a huge load to kludge together manually, but too few to really mass produce. I have no idea how I'd go about making 70 copies of a board game other than that it would be costly or painful. Maybe it'll all work out for them somehow, but if this is all they do with the game then they're going to be doing hundreds of hours of work for negative money.

Meanwhile, these guys made a game that's just cards in a box. And the cards are just centered text on white backgrounds. Maybe they won't make their $15,000 goal, but if so then they haven't lost that much effort. And if they are successful, they'll likely be making a reasonable profit on each unit. Again, I'm not interested in the game, but these people have set themselves up for either success or painless failure.

I understand people get satisfaction out of running a project and having people buy it, but that satisfaction surely can't be worth the pain that many of these projects are signing up for.

jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Sep 20, 2013

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jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

What would be the best way to go about marketing the Kickstarter to make sure it succeeds?

Do make sure to post on the "Trad Game Kickstarters" thread here; it gets a fair amount of traffic, and generates a lot of purchases; there's always people looking for good games and are more inclined to support a goon. If you just want to spend naked ad money, BoardGameGeek is probably not a bad idea. I've heard good things from Kickstarter runners about response from BGG ads.

And pay attention to little stuff - your project icon thingee is very important as is your name and brief description; many people browse places like KickTraq where that's the only thing they'll see.

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