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Great OP. I'm not new to being a "serious gamer" (forgiving how odd that term is), but I am new to board game design. The publishing process is intimidating as hell to me and I'm grateful for the OP's break-down, suggestions, and resources. 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.
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Nov 22, 2012 04:47
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xopods posted:Personally, I think they're better when there's either a real-time, limited-communication or traitor element. From a game theory perspective, a cooperative game with equal payoffs for all players (i.e. everyone wins or everyone loses) and full communication isn't really a game at all; there's no difference between one player or another making any given decision, which is what leads to the quarterbacking problem. I'm with you on "semi-cooperatives" i.e. traitor mechanics and the like. One of the ideas I have for a game is mostly cooperative but allows for players to win singularly at times throughout the game. It's basically a way for me to tempt players into veering away from cooperation. It's kind of a psychological thing, but it has made for an interesting game so far. I recently tried a couple of real-time games which aren't cooperative but are interesting to me from a design standpoint. There's a print-and-play called Paper Route that is based on the video game Paper Boy. Two players face off, chucking controller button cards at a spread of houses in a race to complete the "button combinations" needed to score the houses. Similar is Jab, a game about boxing where you fling different punches at your opponent's body parts, or at your own in order to block. Both blow me away from a design standpoint because typical issues about gameplay are just gone in such frantic games. They're fun, but I can't wrap my head around designing one just yet.
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Nov 22, 2012 05:43
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A game that does roll-and-move not only well but also in a different way is Formula De. It's strictly roll-and-move, and there's little else to the game, but the randomness of "which space is the game going to let me land on" is replaced by careful risk/reward calculation on the part of the player with literally every roll. Every roll has to be weighed against clear odds, with huge payoff or pounishment for beating or being beat by those odds. I love it and I use it to show folks how roll-and-move doesn't have to be terrible once you wrestle it out of Milton Bradley's hands. On the topic of "unkingmaking" problems in games, that's an issue I've had with a few different designs. Simple free-for-all games like Munchkin suffer worst from this because it seems like the mechanics aren't robust enough to give the leading player enough options to get the gently caress out of the way. Munchkin can be endless with four or more players. I haven't played it in years, but I wouldn't even bother with more than four, or even three. But adding complexity to a game, in the form of contingencies or endgame mechanical shifts like in Talisman, seems like a rough way to combat "unkingmaking." There ought to be a way to unseat the leader, but the game also has to end. It's a huge pain in the rear end, and especially for already complex, long games where you don't want two or more hours of player strategy to boil down to a "musical chairs" style scramble at the very end. Turn/time limits, secret agendas, and endgame shifts are a few ways to handle the issue, but what are some others (for simple or complex games)?
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Nov 26, 2012 17:07
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I've taken some of the points from this thread and some of the linked resources and started researching publishers. Here's an issue I'm having: Most of them state that they do not accept unsolicited submissions. Mayfair Games is a good example but they explain themselves a bit more than most: quote:In general, we do not accept open submissions–submissions that arrive unannounced from designers we have had no previous contact with. In general, these e-mails are likely to be discarded unread. More importantly, any open submission prototypes that are sent to Mayfair will be discarded/not returned! Please do not send any unrequested game materials to us! Emphasis mine. I get that they don't want to be deluged with e-mails from ameteur designers who range wildly in skill and effort, but it's going to be tough for me to be heard since I'm not easily able to go to big cons. I live in the middle of nowhere and I don't have the disposable income to spend on plane tickets to Gen Con and poo poo. It's a tough spot because I want to be heard by these companies but I am not able to get in contact with them in the way they describe. This may just be me bitching, but is there another way? Is it possible to do some networking online or in some other way that doesn't require going to a con? If anyone has had any luck dealing with publishers online, I'd love to hear some advice. Just to be clear: I don't mind the idea of going to a con to network and promote my ideas, but I'm just not able to between my schedule, my location, and my budget. Any alternatives? Also: smaller publishers are probably more willing and able to look at unsolicited submissions, so has anyone had good luck with that?
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Nov 29, 2012 19:07
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Awesome. I had that feeling, but I just wasn't sure how similar board game publishing is to publishing writing. What you describe is pretty much the same in publishing fiction: little fish publish little fish, and big fish publish big fish. I only just started researching BG publishers, so I'm just getting a taste of where to look and what to look for when I'm there, so I'll be on the lookout for small, independent publishers. I just found ZMan's open submissions policy, but I'll probably not bother sending them an e-mail. If they're not likely to reply, I don't want to waste my time waiting for them if a smaller outfit is much more likely to give me the time of day. Thanks for the advice! Back to design for a moment: I'm interested in the somewhat new "dice building game" genre. Quarriors is fun but I've found it lacks the depth to stay fresh. I do like the idea of customizable games, be they CCG's or the much more managable LCGs or deck-building games. I also like using dice as the foundation of some games, from a design perspective, simply because the probabilities are easy to calculate and control, and making the components is a breeze. I have a few ideas for dice games that are also customizable, but I've only just begun fleshing them out. I'm just curious about the saturation of these types of games. Oversaturation happened to the deck building genre a while back, and I'm wondering if the same will happen (or has happened) to dice games like Quarriors.
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Nov 29, 2012 19:52
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Crackbone posted:SUMO! is another "pushing game". If I remember correctly, Abalone is an abstraction of Sumo wrestling. It is also one of my favorite abstract games, but that's beside the point. I like to hear people's ideas about doing fresh things with tactical combat games. I'm not a big fan of the genre and I don't try to design one, but that may be because I see the genre as stagnant. Games like Attack! and Memoir '44 are fun but I just haven't had an experience with many of them that really stand out in my mind. They all just kind of... blend together. I just like to hear new ideas for the genre because I think it has a ton of potential in spite of this.
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Dec 4, 2012 19:46
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I'm kicking around this dice game idea I just had. It's still in the early stages so thinking aloud here might be a big help. "Rubicon:" The concept is a risk-taking, direct conflict game about the end of the Roman Republic. Players play Roman leaders who are jockeying for power in Rome in order to become its first emperor. I made this a dice game because I like the idea of a "dice-building game" and Romans loved their dice games. This one is like Dominion, but with dice. Build an engine, but rely on the luck inherent in any dice game. The idea is to "mark" other players with some dice, and later attack them with others. Successfully attacking players with any marks is the only way to score points to win the game, but marking other players leaves them open to attack form others, possibly before you can attack them. So, each mark is (or should be) a calculated risk. marks and attacks are different faces on some of the dice. Players can all roll defenses from their dice, which they can use to defend themselves or other players. Denarius is another die face that is currency used to buy more dice, like treasure in Dominion or Quiddity in Quarriors. Other faces are more utility stuff: rerolls, drawing more dice, etc. I'm brainstorming a few possible issues: -How can I keep defense a secret? I thought of players having cups to place defenses under until they're used. I'm not sure how clunky that'll be, not to mention I wanted to make this game as streamlined as possible (other than being a huge pile of dice in the first place). -How can I preseve and make the most of the risk/reward of the marks? I want marking to be a calculated risk, so I want players to have to wade through something - other player's turns, most likely - in order to capitalize on them. Then again, this is a game about Caesar's civil war, so a healthy dose of screwing your neighbor and taking advantage of opportunities placed by others should be a factor. I'm just trying to think of a simple way to preserve and generate that tension. -I'm trying to think of ways to avoid piling on the leader. Quarriors does this easily by making everyone attack everyone else automatically. This game doesn't compare all that closely to Quarriors, and I don't want to take that control away from players, so I have to think of some way for this game to avoid Munchkin's problem (in my opinion): one player gets close to winning and everyone sandbags defensive stuff to foil them, and the game grinds to a halt. -I'm also trying to think of more ways to incorporate the theme of power poltiics, alliances, and betrayal. I want ways for players to help each other and turn around and screw them. Defending other players (because they're marked and you don't want other players to score on those marks) is one way. I'm just trying to think of more.
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Dec 11, 2012 16:43
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Crackbone posted:- Why have defense at all on the dice? You've already got players committing dice + time to attacking. That way there's no defensive stockpiling when somebody is in the lead. At the same time, make winning contingent on accumulating points/resources that can't be taken away once earned, thus making ganging up on the leader pointless. Good point. I'm still early in the concept of this game, so I'm thinking about shifting sands now. I'm not sure if it fits or if it will make the game clunky, but I'll kick around some ideas for changing the value of specific attacks during the game. I have some ideas for why the defenses exist, but they're still evolving: -Defenses allow players to "block" other players' efforts to snipe "victory points" (or whatever they'll be called) from your marks. You play marks, but someone else can capitalize on them if you're not resourceful enough. -Being able to defend oneself prevents other side effects of being attacked, such as adding crappy dice to your bag or losing dice to roll on the next turn. Those are examples of a couple of the ideas that are still forming in my notes. Depending on whether or not some of these ideas are used, defenses may or may not be necessary. Regardless, the "victory points" needed to win can't be taken away, so there is less reason to gang up ont he leader. Still, if I saw someone at, say, 9 out fo the 10 needed to win, I'd throw what I had at stopping that player, even if it only kept them at bay and couldn't push them back. I can't win as long as someone else already has. In the time since my previous post, I changed the game to get more out of the "dice building game" basis. Players will start with crappy dice, like the copper in Dominion, and move on from there. There is also "Barbarian" dice which player add to their bag of dice when they are attacked. Again, not sure of that yet. With both of those, or even one, I've also added a "trashing" mechanic to let players refine their set of dice. I wanted to include that because it fuels the best deck building games and isn't used as much in the weaker ones. Quarriors, in my experience, doesn't make as much use of it simply because of the pace of the game. I want this one to be about building an engine: more like Dominion and less like Quarriors, but with dice nonetheless and with moe direct conflict than Dominion.
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Dec 11, 2012 17:44
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Sammyz posted:Hey BG designer folks, please critique my outline for my new design and if possible give me a rating 1-10 on how much you'd like to play it based on this description. I like the drafting mechanic because it adds a bit of control to the otherwise random luck of the draw. It's interesting in a two player game. I also like the base line scoring with a hidden agenda in addition. The combination gives the players enough knowledge to try to stop the other player, but not quite all the information. It's a good split, depending on what the closing arguments are worth compared to the base line. I'd try this out. It sounds quick and fun, and 12 Angry Men is amazing and you've captured the concept pretty well. 6/10, I guess. 7 with the drafting.
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Dec 11, 2012 17:56
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xopods posted:You could have defense counters, mixed up face down at the beginning of the game, each with say, 0, 1 or 2 shields on it. Rolling defense results lets you draw defense counters, maybe up to some maximum that you can stockpile at once (to help with the gang-up-on-the-leader problem). This ought to work. I wasn't thinking outside the dice box yet, but this is a fairly streamlined fix, and the bluffing gets right to the risk/reward basis of the game. Thanks, Xopods! (That ought to be the thread title). On a related note: does anyone have any tips for making custom dice? I'm going to have a ton of dice ot buy and print faces for, so before I get in on that, does anyone have do's and don'ts for making your own die faces?
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Dec 11, 2012 18:39
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xopods posted:I bought 200 blank dice from a bulk game components distributor. The dice themselves only cost like $20, but shipping was like $45 for some reason... but still, $65 for 200 dice isn't bad, and now I have more than I'll probably ever need. I also use them as generic markers/counters/game pieces sometimes. Luckily, my wife is an artist so our apartment is full of crafty stuff. We have some of that fixative, but I may not have thought of that myself. I'm going to have about 100 dice to make, so printing is going to be the way to go. I found a brick of 100 dice online for about $12, so knowing that price isn't too steep is helpful. Thanks again!
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Dec 11, 2012 18:52
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jmzero posted: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. Hmm. I might try this. I just ordered 200 blank white dice from a site I found: https://www.gameparts.net. They do a lot of custom stuff in huge quantities, but I was able to get 200 blank d6's for $18 + $18 shipping. Not too shabby. I may just get a labeling marker and do that for the prototype. I'm at least going to try the other two methods, though, just to see how much of a pain in the rear end it is. The icons I need on the dice aren't so intricate that I can't marker them on myself, but I have a tendency to fuss over prototype components. Might have to set that aside for a game that is essentially a huge pile of dice.
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Dec 12, 2012 02:48
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Something that I'm always striving for in all my game designs in theme. to me, it's what separates a memorable game from a bland but equally good one. For example, Lords of Waterdeep is one of my favorite recent games, but it is essentially a cube-pushing euro game. Not much new to it. I just think it executes its theme better than most Euros, and its theme is more unique and compelling to me (don't get me wrong: trading in the Caribbean or Mediterranean can be cool, but man has that poo poo been run into the ground). So, how much or little do people think theme matters? What challenges or triumphs have people had with theme? What are some good ways to incorporate theme into a game design? I have a quick story about that last question. This dice game I'm designing now has the players like Caesar: taking big risks to seize all the power in Rome. I've tried to incorporate theme throughout the design process, so much so that there's this line in my rulebook draft: "The most Caesarian player goes first! (?)" I don't even know what that means. It's just a placeholder, but I want to think of a fun little touch of flavor for that obligatory "figure out who goes first" mechanic. Some great games have great ones: One Upon a Time has "the player with the longest beard goes first," which is funny and thematic. it's little stuff liek that that helps draw me into a game and enjoy it more.
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Dec 13, 2012 22:30
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I agree. I love a game of Dominion as much as the next person, but I find myself building a little narrative in my head based on what I buy and what I'm playing, just to fill the void. The last two games I designed were based on some mechanic that called out to me and theme came later. This current one, which I'm calling "Rubicon" for now, had its initial impulse from theme. It's about Caesar crossing the Rubicon. My thought was, "this story or risk and rivary for power would make a good game," and it absolutely has to be a dice game ("The die is cast," and all that). I already wanted to try my hand at a "dice-building game," so off I went. I'm not sure if this difference in theme-as-source rather than mechanic-as-source will help me or hurt me here, but it's been a fun experience because I enjoy theme so much. There are some games that capture theme in subtle or unusual ways. Abalone comes to mind. It's an abstract on its face, but it's about sumo wrestling. When you play the game, that theme is pretty well communicated by the mechanics, if not the components. Black and white balls don't need to resemble sumo wrestlers if the mechanics are strong enough to support the theme. As long as something maintains theme, I'm happy.
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Dec 13, 2012 22:49
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Yeah, I usually work "bottom up," deriving the theme from the mechanics, but this project just have me working in a different mode. It's weird.
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Dec 14, 2012 02:49
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hito posted:As a heads up, BoardGameGeek seems to be running a design contest of their own, for two-player print and play games. It doesn't officially start for two months, which I don't quite understand, but I'm assuming that we can start thinking of it now and the thread/feedback is the bit that waits until Feburary? That sounds like a great idea for a game. Keep us posted! Going back to the custom dice discussion for a sec: I've decided to use markers to make the dice. I have seven types of dice and I want to try to color-code them. That would just make it a lot easier to play the game. The problem is that CD/DVD markers come in four colors, from what I can tell (Sharpie sells a pack with black, green, blue, and red). So now I'm thinking of using regular Sharpie on them, which will give me all the color options I need, but seal them with the aforementioned epoxy or puzzle saver to keep the marker from rubbing off. My question is: will this work? I have 200 blanks here and I only need 100 for the prototype (yeah, only 100), but I'm a few days from making the dice so I figured I'd put it out to the thread before I start experimenting. I assume it will work, but I just want to make sure whatever I use to seal the dice doesn't have some weird reaction to the marker.
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Dec 16, 2012 20:57
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So, still hammering out details on the dice building game. I've solved one problem and found another. I want the game to be about taking risks. One way I thought to do this was to have player resources dedicated to both setting up getting "victory points," and other resources spent to capitalize on that. The risk is in timing: if you set someone up to be scored upon but someone else comes along and spikes what you set up, you not only lose what you set up, but someone else gained from it. My initial issue was how to allow for that kind of timing. I originally had one type of die face be a "mark," which would set you up. Another was a means to attack, to capitalize on those marks. I never really likied the "mark" faces because they just seemed like clutter on an otherwise simple attack/defense mechanic. My solution was to eliminate the "mark" faces and use attacks for both: when you succeed at an attack, you can either mark the defender or cash in whatever marks they carry (yours or someone else's) for victory points. There are other options for successful attacks, just to add to the strategic depth of the game (adding bad dice to the defender's collection, making the defender discard dice, for example). The problem I now have is in what to do with the vacated die faces. I had all the die types and all their faces planned out, but now the "mark" face is kaput. I just want to make the most of the components and add to the existing mechanics, so I'm looking for something interesting from the sudden space I have in the dice designs. So far, the die faces I have are: "Attack" "Defense" (to draw the aforementioned Defense Tokens) "Legion" (can be used as attack or defense) "Denarii" (currency, to buy new dice or draw more for next turn) "Draw" (draw and roll more dice) "Reroll" (reroll it and other unused die/dice) "Cull" (remove an rolled, unused die from your collection) "Discard" (forces an immediate discard of a rolled, unused die. Only on bad dice). I have the basic attack/defense, a way to build an engine, a bad face I can use for bad (or for good but risky) dice, and some basic dice game utilities. I guess I'm just looking for something fresh that adds to the game's theme of risk. One idea I have is to make it a gambling mechanic. The die face would let you risk victory points you already have to earn more. You roll the die again looking for...something, and if you get it you gain VPs, but if you don't you lose what you risked. Other players could risk their own VPs to bet against you, to gain something if you fail. Another idea is to incoprorate "the Prisoner's Dillema" as a different form of gambling. If the face comes up, you pick another player and both choose "win" or "lose." If both choose "win," both gain 1 VP. If one chooses "win" and the other "lose," then the "lose" player gains 2 VPs. If both choose "lose" they both lose 1 VP. While I like the idea of gambling adding risk, neither of these mechanics are related to the other mechanics other than their use of VPs. That's ok, I guess, but I'm not totally sold on either of them. I'm just thinking aloud here. Does the gambling thing sound good? Any other ideas?
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Dec 17, 2012 18:20
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ZebraByNumbers posted:I like the idea of gambling VP away. I used something similar in my own idea up thread. I think your "earn to spend to earn more" mechanic is almost there. "Dice building game" is the nonsensical term coined (as far as I know) by Quarriors. It's is called so because it plays like a deck building game, but with dice: you get a set of dice at the beginning of the game, but use those to buy into better dice during the course of the game, and use those to eventually win the game. These games tend to be about how efficiently you develop your unique means to win, rather than being given all of those means at the start of the game. My game has players roll five dice per turn. There's ways to get more, and ways to get dinged and have less to use for a turn, but that's more rare. I decided to go with the Prisoner's Dilemma for the last die face. The rules in general seem solid enough to start testing, and I have the components sketched out. Time to start making some dice!
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Dec 20, 2012 01:58
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lighttigersoul posted:One of them does have that mechanic actually! It was either the Minotaur's Labyrinth, the Dragon's Pass, or the Pirate's Treasure one, but the mechanic let you add colored pips to the side of the die you rolled until it was full. Then the colors on each face corresponded to actions in the game. (I want to say it was dragon pass, and it was movement for that color figure.) A buddy of mine and I have an idea for an epic Lego game along these lines. Each player would have their own personal die to roll along with a generic die each turn. The personal die can be modified by adding die faces to it as you find them along the board. The game would play kind of like Talisman: a race to the middle of a big board, but when and how you get there is up to you. You can take a risk and go early (with less useful stuff on your die), or you can adventure around the board for more and better die faces to give you a better chance at the center. Also: Minotaurus and Creationary are both pretty nifty games and people should check them out. I am told the out-of-print Lego Pyramid game is designed by Rainer Knizia, so there's that. But, yeah, Lego games are literally "dice- building." Quarriors and the like just use the name because of the similarity to deck building games.
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Dec 20, 2012 16:08
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I have a ton of extra blank dice (100, to be exact) from making this Roman-themed "dice-building game," so I decided to make a little dice game for my wife's birthday. She's a gamer but also horseback rider and trainer. Horses can be jerks sometimes, and the interaction between a horse and rider when the horse is acting up can be very much like a brinksmanship game. If the horse is being a jerk, the rider can't just capitulate or else the horse will learn that it can get away with whatever it is doing wrong. That leaves the rider to find a way to make a 900 pound animal do what the tiny human asks. If the horse realizes "hey, I'm bigger than you and you literally can't push me around," the game, so to speak, is over. The longer this goes on, the worse the consequences of failure for the rider will be. I thought of this to be about risk-taking and brinksmanship, not unlike Farkle. Farkle is a dice game essentially about gambling with winnings you already have for the turn. Each roll could ruin all that you've gained, but then again if you keep rolling your winnings pile up faster than if you just took it easy every turn. This "horses are jerks" game has a similar dynamic, but uses custom dice for the theme (and is frankly less completely about luck than Farkle). I've been designing it to be light-hearted and comical, but thematic. By the way, I went with stickers and puzzle sealer to make the dice. I'm just using stickers for now until I can finalize playtesting the Roman game, but I have experimented with some of the suggestions to seal the dice and they all work well. 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of uncut sticker paper were on sale at Staples a week ago, so I got 30 sheets for $8. I'm able to make 100 dice worth with only 5 sheets, so it's more than enough. The Roman game is going to end up costing me about $25 worth of materials, which isn't too shabby considering it is 100 dice and a few token components.
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Jan 1, 2013 01:47
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xopods posted:My advice would be, unless there are immediately obvious changes you could make to remedy the issues, to go all the way back to the drawing board. I've wasted huge portions of my life iterating endlessly on ideas I thought had a lot of potential, but were way off the mark on the first try. Although they become okay games in the end, the rules end up littered with the "artifacts" of previous iterations and aren't really of publishable quality - instead of Part A and Part B linking up seamlessly, their mismatched connections are patched together with Part C, which in turn needs Part D to hold it up. By comparison, everything I've done that has been or is likely to be published worked pretty well from the first try. Yeah. I've had to do this quite a few times, sometimes a few times for one game. It's not a bad thing when it happens, too. I see it as a natural part of the process. It's also what makes designing a game with a strong thematic core a bit easier: when you blow it all up, the theme remains the same and you at least have that to start anew. I suppose you could do the same if you were building a game up from a core mechanic, as long as that core mechanic isn't what is so fouled up. As long as you have a clear core of an idea, it's not the end of the world to blow it all up and start from scratch.
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Jan 8, 2013 19:08
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I just watched the Grime Dice video. They're admittedly cool from a probabilities perspective, but I don't like them. They're either a way to cheat your friends out of beers or just mathematical wankery. Neither of those applications are games. I see it more as a magic trick, but using math in lieu of sleight of hand. That said, the core idea of the rock-paper-scissors trump mechanic is a good core for a simple game (and has been used many times). I just don't think Grime Dice are worth the trouble of trying to use them in a larger game. I'm not sure why, but I have a dozen ideas buzzing around in my head about a drafting-based deck-building game. I always loved draft tournaments best in Magic the Gathering and VTES, and I like how it's used in things like 7 Wonders. I'm scheming on a way to make it the core of a deck building game, rather than the buying system that all of them use. Right now I'm just trying to organize the chaos of the idea (and finish up a few older projects that I really ought to finish first).
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Jan 14, 2013 20:14
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xopods posted:Okay, if you think he's going to pull his weight, go for it. I have nothing to go on about this guy specifically, only personal experience with other people... This. A million times, this. My wife is a painter and has gotten roped into doing some work for other people's projects. She fell into that trap that you mentioned, as it turned out the people she was collaborating with had done very little in the first place. She held up her end of the bargain and took a lot of her own time putting art assets together (for dice-and-paper RPG books), and because the other folks only had that initial spark and not enough perseverance to finish, it never got off the ground. Visual arts get a lot of this, I think, because it's a skill that a lot of people know right away that they don't have. Writing is a skill that people are bad at in equal numbers, but a lot of people just don't realize it with quite the same "thud" as with visual arts. A lovely drawing is obvious form first glance. A lovely piece of writing usually isn't as obvious. 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. I, as someone with absolutely no visual art skills, am happy to have a wife who is a gamer and is willing to work with me. I feel our work is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Feb 6, 2013 17:26
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Crackbone posted:In my experience 8pt font (depending on typeface) is the lower limit before reaching non-legible. I also have good vision though. The other thing to consider is technical writing. In my experience most people are very bad at it - it's possible you could make the text fit with some rewriting or potentially creating keywords that are placed in the rulebook rather than the card. I teach technical writing and I agree: most people are bad at it. It's just a skill that most people never get in normal English courses in high school or college. If you take tech writing in college you get it, but otherwise you don't. My students have to write and present technical instructions later this semester. I drew from my recent experience applying technical writing techniques to game design and I wrote the assignment to have the students design a board, card, or dice game, write the instructions, and present them in class. I think the students will have a good time with it, but more importantly game design really does demonstrate the necessity of the finer points of technical writing in a specific context.
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Feb 25, 2013 18:48
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Whalley posted:Blank Playing Cards That's a good link. Thanks. I've been designing and printing cards on regular paper and then sleeving them with cheap decks of cards from dollar stores. Being able to write or draw directly onto blank cards will help in design and might speed up making prototypes of certain types of games. If it's a game with a ton of unique cards, I could see these as being more beneficial. I have a prototype that uses a couple decks of cards with a lot of duplicate cards, so printing is a bit easier for that, for example. But, yeah, going to buy at least two of these boxes. Gotta chase that dragon...
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Feb 28, 2013 15:07
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In board games, as opposed to RPGs, you usually don't have shades of success in single die rolls. You either succeed or you fail. RPGs are often more like "how MUCH do you fail? How MUCH do you succeed?" That's where the d20 can come in handy (and is still squandered anyway, if you're playing strictly by D&D rules. I used to add flourishes to descriptions based on degrees of success when I was running games, because the d20 let me do that). I actually kind of like new World of Darkness for its elegance. They boiled down actions into four shades: dramatic failure, failure, success, and exceptional success. That's much closer to what a board game would need in terms of what the mechanics require from individual die rolls. Doing so also bundled all the annoying extra rolls form old WoD games into one roll. You don't roll to hit, roll to dodge, roll to damage, and roll to soak. You just roll to hit. Defenses are factored into the roll in the first place, and the successes are damage. It gets a lot of milage out of dice, like Descent (in an odd and indirect way). I've often thought of it like trying to boil your dice down to the smallest number of dice and the smallest number of sides and still be able to randomize whatever range you need. If a decision is a 50/50, for example, then a "d2" (AKA a coin) is all you need. It's only when you get into more modifiers and mechanics that you need more sides: d6's, d10's, etc. The d10 is elegant because it is metric and odds are easy to calculate. But it's got all those sides that you usually don't need if success/failure is 50/50, 66/33, or 75/25. You can get all those out of a d4 or a d6 or two. I've always liked d6's for this reason. The odds are well-known and flexible, and they're easy to get and prototype custom sets. But if I'm thinking of die mechanics for board games, I'm thinking like new World of Darkness: keep it as simple as possible. Get all that poo poo into one roll, if at all possible.
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Mar 18, 2013 19:44
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Crackbone posted:But even then how often would you require more than a D10 for that? Hell, in most cases you could boil it down to a D6 with modifiers, with anything over a natural roll (ie 7 or higher) being a big success with lower than natural (0, -1) being a huge failure. I guess that's my point. d20's are usually unnecessary if you think about it that way. I prefer d6's like I said, but d10's do have the elegance of being decimal and make things easy to calculate during design and during play. Oh, and when I said "one roll," that's a related group of actions bundled into one. Old World of dArkness had seperate rolls for hitting, dodging, damage, and damage resistance. New World of Darkness has one roll whose pool is the attacker's hit - the defender's defense. Dodging and damage resistance are built into things as well. What can be taken from this about any game design is how many ways you can modify die rolling mechanics, and that you can boil rolls down into simplicity for the players if your modifiers are handled cleverly (like Descent). You can modify the die pool, the odds of success, or the die result itself. World of Darkness uses all of that to boil down a whole combat action into one roll instead of four, which makes the newer games' combat go a lot faster. That's important in an RPG, but its arguably more important in a board game where players are taking quick turns and rolling dice every turn. Gotta keep things snappy.
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Mar 19, 2013 16:56
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So I've been revising a semi-cooperative game I made a few months back and we just did a ton of final testing the the past week. The bigger concepts are proven and now I'm down to fine-tuning the numbers, which I can do myself for the most part. I've been testing this for a few months in different stages, so now I'm trying to figure out when it's "done" enough for a pitch to publishers. I found a great way to network with publishers (this "Twitter" thing that all the kids are talking about), so I think I have a good shot of getting some honest responses from a lot of folks. I'm still concerned about components and art, though. My prototype components are pretty rough and the game has none of its art assets put together yet. Maybe that's alright and publishers will worry about that, but I'm not sure. I guess I'm just thinking aloud here about when a game is done enough for publication, and how valuable Twitter has been to me. I wouldn't have said this last year or even a few months ago, but I really recommend Twitter for this stuff. My account is pretty much exclusively for networking with game players, designers, and publishers, mostly because it's tied to my board game podcast. Because most of my followers are gaming industry people, it's a good one-stop-shop for publishers, both small and large. I had a hard time manually slogging through the 'net for small publishers, but Twitter has amassed quite a contact list for me over the last few months.
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Mar 30, 2013 22:01
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'd love to hear more about this. How did you start connecting with people through Twitter? What kind of things do you do to maintain that presence? I was never interested in Twitter up until last year but everyone in our podcast signed up for it to chat with listeners and other podcasters, so I did the same. Links to our Twitter feeds are up on the podcast page, and because it is a board game podcast, the folks finding my account tended to be board game people. Those connections spiraled outward like social media does, and I now have game publishers, designers, and players following the account. I've maintained the account for about ten months and I have a couple dozen small game publishers on my list. I don't have to do much to maintain it, either, which is nice because Twitter still kind of bugs me. I see it more as a networking tool than a personal social tool. I just post a tweet every few days, usually about the games I'm designing. Checking in on the thing every few days and posting 140 characters is about how much I want to be engaged with it, but it still works like that. Even at the lazy pace I use it, I get at least a few new followers every week. I'll get more if I go out and look for them, which I do for publishers more and more these days. So I guess it helps to have some draw to your account that attracts board game people if that's who you want to connect with, but it's not necessary. That just speeds up the rate you make followers and gives you a regular stream of new followers. You can build a list of followers manually, though, by finding a board gamer's account and following their followers. The etiquette on Twitter is that you follow people (who are actually people and not bots or scammers) who follow you (unless you're a celebrity that has too many followers to make that practical). So if you find board game folks and follow them, they will in turn follow you. It might take a couple months to build up a list of publishers like that, but once you've done that it's a good one-stop-shop for getting in contact with them all. I've compartmentalized my following list into groups of publishers, designers, and so on, so if need be I can tweet just at those groups. I haven't done much with that yet, but it's a good tool.
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Apr 5, 2013 15:42
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xopods posted:Hey guys, thanks for keeping this thread alive while I was gone. There's some good stuff here that I haven't had time to respond to... just wanted you all to know that I'm not dead, just a new father, and I'll get back to this thread more once my life resumes a slightly more normal schedule, which I would expect will be in eighteen years or so. Wow! Congrats, Xopods! We'll hold down the fort. I finally put together the time and materials to make this dice game I've had on the back burner. I might post info tomorrow to get some feedback. Some days I'm just excited to be physically making stuff, rather than just writing. Tomorrow is going to be one of those days. I might also post a summary of the revised rules to the co-op game I've been focusing on. It's gone through a bunch of testing in the last couple months and I like where it is right now. I don't want to rest on it yet, though, so I want to see what folks here think.
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Apr 6, 2013 01:37
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Let's talk about drafting. I think it's a neat mechanic because it's inherently balanced and it can add a touch of strategy to lots of types of mechanics. I've been experimenting with drafting in a dice game I've been building. It started as a "dice-building" game, i.e. a game where you buy dice during the game like you buy cards during a deck-building game. I haven't scrapped that idea, but I am experimenting to see if drafting is a better fit for this game. The game is heavily tactical in that you roll dice and then decide how you're going to make the most of what you rolled by choosing how you spend them and in what order. Players take turns spending dice that might impact the dice their opponent has yet unspent, so you have to prioritize what you're doing to protect your potential gains. In the end, it's a race to a certain number of points. The "dice-building" form of the game put more deliberate emphasis on players building a good set of dice during the game, going from a weak starting set and getting stronger during the game. The reason I think drafting might be a better fit is that the buying/trashing mechanics were taking up too much of the game, so if I let players strategize and build a good set of dice at the start of the game with drafting, I can presumably avoid the game getting bogged down with buying/trashing in the middle. That addresses one problem I have always had with Quarriors, a game I otherwise enjoy: too much of the game is spent building an engine, and the game ends before anyone's engines really get chugging. Drafting lets players put all that together form the start, so it puts the emphasis back on the tactics during the game, which is what this game should do. So far a practical problem I foresee is giving players a way to quickly look at what is on each die. Quarriors, the alpha "dice-building" game, has cards accompanying each set of dice that tells you what is on each face, so you don't have to goof around looking at each face of the die you're holding. This game doesn't have piles of dice in the same way, so that wouldn't work. 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.
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Apr 6, 2013 19:42
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Anniversary posted:I really like the idea too. I'm actually wondering why Railing Kill said that they couldn't do it as a card draft. It seems like you could have players draft cards with the stats of the dice on them during the draft portion and then after the draft was over pick up the corresponding dice and play, but I guess there's an as yet unmentioned design issue preventing this? Cripes this is a way better solution. No, there isn't a reason I can't use cards in the draft. That solves my problem. I'd still want to do something like what jmzero suggested and graphically differentiate the dice, just so players could more easily dig out the dice that match the cards they drafted. I guess that was more what I was worried about, no matter how the draft is conducted. I'm going to put this together and share more of it here if people are interested.
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Apr 7, 2013 19:45
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xopods posted:The only problem with that is twice as many components. Not a big deal when you're designing for fun, but your odds of finding a publisher diminish exponentially with production costs... one of my early designs was kind of like that. Wrights Gone Wrong, a game about building a crazy flying machine... the core mechanic was auctioning parts, but they had to be drawn randomly and they came in different shapes like Tetris pieces... so in order to prevent players from feeling around for the shape of piece they were looking for, I had to have a deck to draw from to decide what was available for auction... Aside from being a bit of a pain for the players, it was just way too many components for the game to be manufactured at a reasonable cost. That is something to consider. Hmm. This game is already essentially a huge pile of dice (70, give or take a few) and little else, so I might be able to get away with it. I won't necessarily need 70+ unique cards, as some of the dice will be duplicates. As long as I can find a way to use jmzero's idea, I can match dice to cards even if they aren't unique. I might need 30 or so cards, which might be feasible.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:20
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The math game sounds like it would be a good educational tool for teaching different mathematical functions and concepts to kids. That isn't a bad thing, either, as it sounds like a decent game in and of itself. "Roll and move games," i.e. games where decision is all but absent and you just roll dice and move along a track, can be pretty awful simply because they're not games if there's no player decisions. Your game, though, adds player agency both by being able to choose your turn order and by being able to choose what cards you play. It reminds me of the "Calculator" class from Final Fantasy Tactics: the class chose targets for spells based on mathematical parameters and multiples, such as "height, prime number," or "level, 5." It let you do all sorts of crazy things and it was a lot of fun for the same reason your game could be: playing with math to find big opportunities with the game. I'd try your game! Edit: If you're concerned about focus, just trim down the deck. The basic idea is sound, but if you're game is all about math, just try it without all the cards that don't specifically affect mathematical functions or concepts. The copy cards and direct player conflict can go. If players want to screw with each other, make them do so through math.  I guess that's why I mentioned the Calculator from Final Fantasy Tactics: the calculations could target anything as long as you had the right parameters, but sometimes you had to choose a calculation that hurt you a bit as well as hurting the opponent a bunch, or one that would help a couple opponents but helped you a whole bunch. Just sticking to math could do the same for your game and give players interesting risks and choices.
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 14, 2013 |
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Apr 14, 2013 13:50
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So real life and work have kept me away from game design for a while (and with it this thread). I just caught up though and all the cool ideas people have been bouncing around have me reinvigorated. I also recently played Galaxy Trucker for the first time, way too late. that also picked my rear end to make a good game or two. Holy poo poo is that a good game, but I digress. I have three games that are complete enough for blind testing. One is a Roman-themed dice game, one is a semi-cooperative political game, and one is a deduction/push-you-luck game based on the film Casablanca. I have a few practical questions about the business side of things: What advice to people have for a con newbie? I've only been to a few cons over the years, and they're not really my thing. But I figured I should get over it if I'm going to be able to network with publishers. Should I get a table of my own to show off my games, or should I find the publisher's corner or whatever? xopods gave out great advice a long time ago here that said (to paraphrase), "small, unestablished game designers should look for small, unestablished publishers. Established designers look for established publishers." Is there a better way than cons to network with small, independent publishers? What advice do people have for blind testing? My thinking is to prepare a note-taking guide to go out with the testing copies. I want the rules and the rule book to speak for itself (otherwise it's not a blind test), but I figured doing the testing group a courtesy by helping them take notes would be a good idea.
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Nov 11, 2013 17:07
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xopods posted:I wouldn't get a table unless you have something to sell... the publishers are going to be working their own booths, not going around looking for designers to talk to, so you need to go to them. That's good, because cons are kind of intimidating. (I'm not a shut-in, I swear. I just don't like cons, specifically.) It's just good to hear that pitching at cons isn't the only or best way to go about business. Edit: That's about what I was thinking for the blind test questionnaire. There's a couple questions there that I hadn't thought of, so thanks again for the help! Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Nov 13, 2013 |
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Nov 13, 2013 17:40
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