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Welcome to the Board Game Design Workshop thread! Although I am, as far as I know, the only regular of the Board Game Thread who has had games published professionally, an increasing number of goons have expressed an interest in designing games as a hobby, some with the eventual aspiration to get them into print. As such, it was suggested that I start a thread for discussing the theory and practice of game design, whether as an amateur or a professional. Things this thread is about : Riffing for inspiration, analysis of specific mechanics, soliciting playtesters and critiquing others' designs, talking about the creative process, tips and techniques for building prototypes, questions and answers about probability and other technical and strategic aspects of games, questions and answers about the game industry and the logistics of publishing or finding a publisher, post-mortems and analyses of your own completed games, etc., etc. Things this thread isn't about : Discussions about or reviews of published games (except as examples of specific mechanics), discussions about graphic design or illustration for games, complaining about bad experiences with publishers, artists or other designers, making GBS threads on other people's ideas in a non-constructive fashion, or really anything else not directly related to designing better games and/or trying to get them out to the public. Regarding self-promotion: Talking about or linking to your published game, print-and-play or Kickstarter project is totally okay for regular contributors to the thread, within reason. If you've never posted in the thread before, though, please do post a bit and get to know people, rather than just plugging yourself and leaving. First, A Warning about the Industry  So you want to be a game designer? Purely for the joy of it, or partly because you're hoping to get rich by inventing the "next big thing"? If it's the latter, I'm afraid I have to burst your bubble. There are a huge number of board games coming out these days, and only a limited number of consumers. As a result, the art and science of game design are progressing in leaps and bounds, yet only a very small percentage of games sell more than a few thousand copies. This makes it an exciting time both for designers and players, but a very hard time to make any money. As one publisher has put it, "The best way to make a small pile of money in board games is to start with a large pile of money and only lose half of it." Furthermore, only a small percentage (3-5% is a typical ballpark) of a game's sales go to the designer. Between printers, publishers, distributors and retailers, the pie is getting chopped up many ways, and unless you are self-publishing (which has its own problems, as detailed below), you will only get the thinnest of slices. If you're lucky enough to find a publisher at all. General Advice on Designing your First Game For a first-time designer, I have two very important pieces of advice: keep things simple, and don't get married to your idea. No matter how experienced you are as a gamer, understanding how a complex game works and designing one from scratch are two very different things... and although everyone dreams of creating an epic masterpiece, most attempts will result in a sprawling mess instead, especially if the designer lacks experience. I highly recommend working on something like a card game, dice game, or abstract strategy game as your first design, before attempting something with a lot of moving parts. Equally important is the ability to just let go of the ideas that don't quite work. A lot of beginners get frustrated because they went in with the notion that they'd take their first good idea and work on it until they've perfected it. Some ideas just aren't destined for perfection - I recommend rapidly developing first drafts of ideas as they occur to you, but then discarding 70-90% of them, only devoting effort to those that show the greatest potential. Don't worry - the best aspects of the discarded ideas will find their way into future designs. General Advice on Prototyping You'll find prototyping much easier if you get yourself well set up to start with. Here's a list of equipment that no game designer should be without:
Don't put too much effort into a prototype (either the art, or the physical production of it) until the game is very close to being finished. You'll be much more reluctant to discard or make major changes to your ideas once you've spent a lot of time building a prototype. General Advice on Testing Playtesting a game is hugely important, of course. There are four basic ways to test: by yourself, with yourself leading a group through it, with yourself present, but only watching, and entirely blind, where you simply give a group a prototype, allow them to play it in your absence, and receive their collected feedback later. It's important to do all of these, and generally in that order. Players will tend to follow your lead if you're teaching them, so you may never discover the strategies you hadn't thought of yourself if you're always involved... on the other hand, you'll burn a lot of good will if you ask a group to playtest something blind, and it turns out to be horribly broken, incomprehensible or unfun because you didn't really give it a proper try by yourself first. It's also important to distinguish between useful and non-useful feedback. In general, useful feedback is that which concerns how well the game produces the experience you intended from it. Non-useful feedback is that which concerns how much the players or group approve of that sort of experience. People have differing tastes, and you will never please everyone. If someone complains that your supposedly-deep abstract strategy game has too much luck, you might want to listen to them... but if they made the same complaint about your five-minute dice game, all that tells you is that they're not the best tester for that particular game. General Advice on Publishing You have five basic options for getting your game out into the wild: conventional publishing, self-publishing, crowdfunding, print-and-play, or digital publishing. Here is my advice about each: Conventional Publishing: This is the ideal route for most people and most games, if you can manage it. Be warned that it's likely to take a lot of looking and a lot of disappointment before you find a publisher, however. Identify games that seem to have the same market as yours and visit their publishers' websites. Each publisher has different submission guidelines, but usually the process is that you submit a "sell sheet" or nutshell pitch, and it catches their fancy, they'll ask for a copy of the rules, and if you're lucky, eventually a physical prototype. That initial pitch is very important, and critiquing one another's pitches is one of the things we can do here! Self-Publishing: This seems like a good idea in theory, but is usually a financial disaster. Printing games is expensive; most manufacturers will require you to do a minimum run of 2500 or 5000 (for several dollars per unit) and those that don't will have much higher per-unit costs. If you do go this route, try to make sure you have a distributor lined up beforehand. Getting your game on shelves will be very hard without one. The advice that was given to me when I was considering this route was that if I became a publisher, I would no longer have time to design games of my own, so I should choose up front whether I wanted to design or publish. I now recognize this as very solid advice and am glad I was talked out of self-publishing. Crowdfunding: This is preferable to self-publishing in that you don't incur any financial risk yourself, and you will effectively have preorders for at least part of your stock before you go to press. On the other hand, production is no trivial matter either, and I suspect plenty of Kickstarter project owners are finding themselves in over their heads when they do get funding. Additionally, most Kickstarter drives do not hit their targets, and a failed Kickstarter drive will probably do a lot of damage to your odds of finding a conventional publisher later, so think things through before trying to go this route. Print-and-Play: This is the minimal-risk, minimal-reward route for people who just want to get their game out there and let people play it. You can offer it for free, or charge a few dollars for a downloadable PDF, but either way you should not expect too many people to be playing it. Publishers are split on the print-and-play issue; some will give preference to games that received a positive response when released as Print-and-Play, while others won't consider anything that has been released to the general public, and others are totally indifferent. If there are any particular publishers you have in mind, be sure to find out their attitude before releasing your game for Print-and-Play. Digital Publishing: You could also develop a digital version of your game for e.g. iPad, or the web, or any other platform. Unless you are a programmer yourself, however, this is likely to be a more expensive proposition than physical self-publishing. On the other hand, distribution won't be quite as much of an issue, especially if you plan to make use of services like Steam or the App Store. Nonetheless, I still would not recommend it unless you could do the bulk of the work yourself, as freelance programmers and game artists are not cheap. xopods fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 21, 2012 23:40
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A list of publishers openly accepting submissions (thanks mostly to Nemesis of Moles - post additions in thread or PM to me) http://www.indieboardsandcards.com/publishers.php - Indie Board and Card Games http://www.wishingtreegames.com/submit-a-game.html - Wishing Tree Games http://www.atlas-games.com/information_writer.php - Atlas Games http://www.brain-games.com/contacts/for-game-designers/ - Brain Games http://cocktailgames.com/en/cocktailgames/faq - Cocktail Games http://rprod.com/index.php?page=contact-2 - Repos Games http://www.miniongames.com/contact-us.html - Minion Games http://www.riograndegames.com/contact.html - Rio Grande: only accepts proposals in person; email to book an appointment to meet at a convention customerservice@alderac.com - Alderac info@nestorgames.com - Nestorgames - Does not like card games submissions@playrooment.com - Looks like they like simpler, younger people games mostly ideas@cambridgegames.com - Super Simple, non collectable stuff, no custom models. contact_us@asmodee.com - Asmodee Games max@otb-games.com - Out Of The Box Games - (Party games, simple stuff, etc) Other resources for game designers http://www.boardgamegeek.com - BoardGameGeek; if you're designing games, you probably know this site already http://www.boardgamegeek.com/forum/26/boardgamegeek/board-game-design - Game Design subforum on BoardGameGeek http://www.bgdf.com/ - Board Game Designer's Forum http://unpub.net/ - Unpub: a convention for showing off and testing prototypes http://www.gameparts.net/ - GameParts.net, a source for buying generic game pieces in bulk. Relatively cheap prices, but expensive shipping (at least to Canada... maybe reasonable within the US?) http://www.spielematerial.de/en/ - European game component supplier http://www.meeplesource.com - Another game part supplier, selling in smaller quantities than gameparts.net Blank playing cards for sale on Amazon Game-design sites created by thread contributors http://www.benefactum.ca/ - Owned by Xopods http://sandypuggames.com/ - Owned by Nemesis of Moles Not recommended https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ - Print-on-Demand game production service; poor quality, expensive prices. Not suitable for producing games for commercial sale, but possibly okay if you just want one copy of your design to play with your friends and family, and can't produce a nice prototype yourself. xopods fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2012 23:41
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A lot depends on the genre of game and the people you expect to be playing it. For instance, wargame grognards will put up with hour-long turns in which the inactive player does nothing except watch the position evolve, complain about the other guy's lucky die rolls, and try to plan his own turn. Casual gamers, on the other hand, tend to space out if they don't have something to do for more than 30 seconds at time, or even less. As far as level of tolerance goes, I'd say it's in proportion to the strategic complexity of the game, for three reasons. One, impatient people don't like brain-burny games in the first place. Two, a strategically complex game gives you something to think about during your opponent's turn, so you're still engaged even if you're not doing something. Three, a really difficult game is mentally exhausting, and having some downtime to rest your brain can actually be a relief. That said, reducing downtime where possible is one of the few things in game design that is just about always* a good thing. There are a few ways to do it, such as reducing the number of things (pieces, cards in hand, whatever) that the players have available to use, finding clever ways to avoid bookkeeping tasks (like reshuffling decks, replacing counters, etc.), and switching from a turn-by-turn system to a step-by-step one (i.e. instead of you doing ABC then I do ABC, you do A, I do A, you do B, I do B, etc.). And as jmzero points out, when the nature of the game doesn't let you do that, there may be ways to add opportunities for other players to do something during the active player's turn, be it trading, taking "interrupt" actions, making choices about the outcome of the active player's action (e.g. "opponent chooses: you get 2 gold, or 2 energy"), etc. Or introduce a memory component to the game, so that players have to pay attention and remember what they saw during an opponent's turn. EDIT: Or, of course, as has been brought up below, you can avoid the issue entirely with simultaneous turns... but they are of course not appropriate for all games, and introduce an element of chaos and chance that you might not want. *: The exception being if the game is primarily intended to be played digitally and asynchronously, in which case you'd prefer to be able to take your whole turn and then let the opponent take his, rather than having yours interrupted frequently while the opponent makes some mid-turn decision. For instance, something with Magic-like interrupt effects is terrible for async, as you'd have to wait after every single decision to see if your opponent wants to play an interrupt. xopods fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 01:18
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Secondly, for anyone that finds it helpful, here is a list of some small time indie publishers I found recently. Xopods can go over the list and be all 'No Nems those people just post junk on Kickstarter' and stuff. I don't know the other two at all, but Travis at Indie Boards & Cards is a great guy. He's just about the only serious publisher I know of who posts regularly in the BoardGameGeek Game Design forum, and is much more likely to respond to your pitches than most publishers, and at least tell you why he doesn't like your idea. (For instance, I pitched one of my designs to him, called Duck & Cover, which is an auction game about stocking up supplies to survive an impending nuclear war... he told me the theme was original, but that it was his professional opinion that auction games are unpopular in general these days. Not sure I 100% agree, and it's one of my better designs that I still hope will find a home somewhere one day... but it's valuable information to know that I should avoid games with auctions as a central mechanic if I want to pitch to him in future. Much better than the usual black hole that is a publisher's submissions address.)
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Nov 22, 2012 01:23
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Ebethron posted:Simultaneous actions should be default game design. I don't think anything should be the "default," really. I love simultaneous action selection as a mechanic, but simultaneous vs. sequential moves is a really big, high-level design decision, and I think the world of games would be much poorer if we labeled one of those branches as "inferior" and tried to avoid it.
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Nov 22, 2012 01:25
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JMBosch posted:For those looking at the self-publishing route, I've been told Superior POD and The Game Crafter are pretty good resources, but good luck with that whole distribution and turning-a-decent-profit thing. Print-on-demand is more or less the same "business" model as print-and-play, i.e. if you have no business aspirations at all, and just want to open the possibility for curious parties to try your game by buying it through your website. As far as outside distribution goes, your only hope is maybe you can get your FLGS to put a few copies on their shelves on consignment, especially if you run demos of the game at the shop. The reason it doesn't work as a serious business model is that the per-unit costs are much higher than mass producing. The MSRP you see in stores is generally something like 5-8x the manufacturing cost, because the publisher, distributor and retailer each double or close-to-double the price to make their profits. So maybe the game costs $5/unit when you get 5000 copies done in China, or $7 if you get 2500 copies done more locally, and it goes for $40ish in the shops... but if you got it produced through TGC for $20 and tried to do go through normal channels to get it into stores, it'd be $120 by the time it got there and no one would buy it. That said, they are great resources if your main motivation is just turning your brainchild into a physical thing that you can play with your friends and give people for Christmas. EDIT: Keep the links coming, by the way. After writing that huge OP, I had no motivation left to collect and organize a whole bunch of links, but once this thread hits a few pages, I'll go through and take all the resources people mention + some of my own and put them in the second post. xopods fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 04:18
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So here's something I'm interested in discussing. I've been having a little Facebook debate with a friend of my mother's who is... well, I actually don't quite know what field he's in, except that he seems to have an interest in pedagogy and economics, so I'm guessing an econ teacher or prof of some sort. Anyway, he and I got to talking because of some of my posts about this economics textbook I'm reading about game theory (Games and Information, 2nd Edition, Eric Rasmusen, if anyone's interested). The subject of luck factor came up, and he said something about its influence on the learning curve. I thought about it a while and said that I think luck factor and learning curve are actually independent variables. The debate is complicated a little by the fact that "learning curve" is a considerably harder concept to pin down (since it depends on subjective things like intuitiveness, and the point at which you can say someone "understands" a game). But say we consider strategic complexity vs. luck factor instead. 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: Chess + Luck: Same rules as regular chess, except that when checkmate is given, the player giving checkmate rolls a die. On a 1-5 he wins, on a 6 the checkmated player wins. Chess + Random Promotions: Same rules as regular chess, except that when a pawn is promoted, a four-sided die is rolled to determine whether it becomes a knight, bishop, rook or queen. Chess + Move Lottery: Same rules as regular chess, except that prior to a player's move, all the pieces he could legally move are written down on tickets and thrown into a hat. He draws one ticket at random and must move that piece, though he can choose any legal move for it under the regular rules. The first game clearly has the same strategic complexity as regular chess, since the only random element comes after the conclusion of the regular game, and does not change its objective (you would prefer a 5/6 chance of winning than a 1/6 chance, so you're still trying to checkmate the guy). All it does is reduce the advantage a strong player has over a weaker one, which is generally what we mean by "luck factor." But what about the other two? To me, it's clear that one of them is strategically more complex than chess and the other is less, but I'll save my argument until after I hear some other opinions. What do you guys think? Does adding a luck factor to a game always make it less strategically complex? Or more? Or can it work either way? What is your opinion about those two specific chess variants? (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.) xopods fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 05:00
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Railing Kill posted: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. 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.
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Nov 22, 2012 05:07
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I think there's a lot of room to explore in terms of alternative payout structures. There's a political wargame, for instance, Fief, where players can either win individually or as a team. It takes 4 points to win as a team, 3 points to win by yourself. Teams are formed by marriage between nobles, but if one of the nobles dies (e.g. by assassination), the team is broken. So if you've got 3 but your partner has 0, you can try to assassinate your own noble's wife to break up the alliance and thus win instantly on your own. Or even if you couldn't win right away, if you thought another partnership looked more promising, you could assassinate your husband/wife and then propose to another player if they were single. It wasn't my favorite game ever, but that particular dynamic was interesting. In mostly-cooperative games, you've got all sorts of options to play with... aside from the "win together or win alone" thing you're proposing, I was also thinking about one where there are three possibilities: "everyone wins, one person loses, or everyone loses." So some kind of escape or survival horror scenario, where if you work together and everything goes well, you can all make it out... but if things start going badly, it's a competition over who is getting left behind... but if you start that fight too early instead of working together, you're all going to die.
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Nov 22, 2012 06:00
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jmzero posted: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). 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. Most people felt you couldn't, but I always argued that when you can't read something out exactly, you're making a probabilistic decision that's not much different from estimating the likelihood that your opponent just made his flush in poker, or that you're going to draw enough to buy a Province next turn in Dominion. Sure, if your opponent is better than you, his assessment of the probabilities is going to be better than yours, but except in cases where you can actually read something out to the end, you're both going to make some mistakes, and there's luck involved in how many you make in a given game and how much they're worth. Otherwise even the slightest difference in skill would mean one person won 100% of the time. I don't know whether I agree with you about terminology, though, when you say that increasing complexity beyond a certain point decreases the effective strategic depth. That's where I'd go back to talking about "learning curves" and argue that increasing the complexity steepens the learning curve, thus increasing the amount of effort required to achieve a certain win rate over a static opponent. I.e. let's say we're both beginners at chess and have similar intuitions for it, so we're each winning 50%. Maybe if I study for a week while you don't play at all, 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."
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Nov 22, 2012 06:13
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First off, let me say that finding mutually agreed-upon definitions for certain terms was something I was hoping we could do in this thread, and part of the reason I left room for a glossary in the second post. So if someone says Game X is "deeper" than Game Y, we have an objective, agreed-upon definition of what that means so we can argue that point productively instead of just saying "I think X is deeper than Y," "No, that's just because you're dumb or haven't played Y enough, Y is clearly deeper." So if we can come closer to that through this conversation, that's something I was hoping for. jmzero posted: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) Here's my proposed definition of a skill level: in a perfect strategy, zero-information game, players are exactly one skill level apart if the better player beats the weaker twice as often, i.e. 66.7%-33.3%. In a game with hidden information or random chance, you have to normalize this relative to the margin by which perfect play beats random play. I.e. if perfect play only wins 80% of the time, we take that 16.7% advantage and scale it by (80-50)/(100-50) = 30/50 = 0.6. So one skill level difference in that game is when the better player wins at a rate 6% better than 50/50, i.e. 56% to 44%. (It gets more complicated if the game allows ties, but let's ignore that for now.) From there, we can define the learning curve as the function of effort to skill level for a player of average intelligence and instincts. So an extraordinarily complex game, even if it's theoretically a game of pure skill, might require you to put in a year of work just to get to the point of being able to beat completely random play by 2-1. quote: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. 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). Which it a funny thing because it's so heavily influenced by culture. Go has a ridiculous effective strategic depth, not only because of its massive position space and number of options at each node, but also because its long history and cultural importance means that it's reasonable to expect some people to literally dedicate their lives to getting better at it and advancing knowledge of it. Whereas if I design an abstract strategy game, we expect a relatively low number of players and low level of effort, so its effective strategic depth is hampered by factors extrinsic to the game itself. It may have absolute depth that is irrelevant in that it will never be plumbed. This is why some people may describe a game as "really deep" after a few games, because they've improved by one or more skill levels with every play, while others may describe the same game as "really shallow" because they've mastered all the easy strategies, and hit the skill plateau after which a huge effort in the calculating of subtle odds is required to achieve even a marginal improvement in performance. It's also why I often lament that if you designed Go today, you would never get it published. Designers of modern commercial games have to deliberately cut down on absolute depth in order to flatten out the learning curve and increase effective depth. quote:The opponent gets 1 point if they can name the digit of pi at that location (within a minute, say). There's actually a formula they discovered to calculate any digit of Pi without having to know any of the preceding ones. But I get your point.  quote: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. Hmmm... move-a-random-piece may have been a bad choice, actually. Now that you mention it, I think you're right that while I was trying to use it as an example of making the game "easier" while adding luck (by dramatically reducing both the ability to and importance of reading several moves in advance), what it actually does is just create a gigantic "step" in the learning curve - a wall which most people will stop at, thus limiting the game's effective strategic depth. (Random-promotion chess was meant as the example of steepening the learning curve, in that it increases the difficulty of reading out endgame positions, since you can no longer prune off the stupid promotion options that would never get chosen. I.e. if you have the choice between promoting your pawn to a Queen and letting your opponent do the same, or capturing his pawn and letting him capture yours... instead of comparing two resulting positions, you now have to compare 17). xopods fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 15:37
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lilljonas posted:Is this thread also an acceptable place do discuss designing miniature games, or is is specifically for board games? Sure. Basically anything with winners and losers, and which could be played as a physical game (even if it currently exists only digitally) is within the scope of this thread... I basically just don't want to get into: (a) Digital games, other than those which are meant to replicate a board/card game experience, (b) Roleplaying games, whose rules are vague and subjective, and which lack win and loss conditions, and (c) Sports (though dexterity games are a grey area and probably okay) Not because I have anything against any of those, it's just that the design challenges involved are sufficiently different that they deserve separate threads. Miniatures are probably similar enough to board games that they work here, even though the switch from discrete space (i.e. a hex-based tactics game) to freeform movement introduces a few design challenges you don't see in most board games.
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Nov 22, 2012 15:45
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The most important thing in prototyping is to forget about making it pretty. I'm a professional graphic designer, and my prototypes are ugly as gently caress. Here are two images. One is the final card art for my upcoming game Creatures of Dark Manor. The other is what I made for the prototype. Can you guess which is which?   Aside from saving you time, making your prototype ugly and functional is a good way to make sure your game's mechanics are fun on their own, without needed to be carried by visual and theme appeal. (And publishers understand this too... the image on the left - which is the prototype, did you guess right? - is what I brought to my publisher, and what he played with his testers, and showed to his distributors, and so on. The final image was only done after contracts were signed and production was underway.) xopods fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 17:26
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Ulta posted:Just because nerds like to classify things, would this be a list that encompasses the skills that exist in board games (no it is not, but its what I can come up with at the moment, please add more) My breakdown would be a little different. I'd say something like:
xopods fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 17:50
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PaybackJack posted:One thing I'll say is that it's a good idea to label all the components either on the component itself or have a components overview in the game manual. For all FFG does wrong with their manuals, they always list what each component is. As someone who plays a lot of games with people who don't speak English very well, or German for that matter, deciphering what each piece is can be tricky for them if it's not clearly labeled. There's been a few instances where we had the quantity of each piece in the manual and had to figure it out that way. This is an area where an ugly prototype can work in your favor. Whereas in a finished game, you're concerned with aesthetics, and sometimes end up making compromises in terms of clarity (just look at the board for Dungeon Lords or Dungeon Petz!), when you're prototyping, it's unequivocally better to e.g. write "BLUE PLAYER HOME" in giant ugly block letters on your board than to try to draw a blue castle or whatever. You can be super explicit and save yourself effort at the same time by just labeling things as what they are instead of trying to come up with an iconography.
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Nov 22, 2012 18:09
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Personally I do all my prototyping in Illustrator and InDesign, but that's because I own those programs and know how to use them. I certainly wouldn't recommend shelling out for Creative Suite and taking the time to use those applications properly if it's only for prototyping. But if anyone does have them and a working knowledge of how to use them, let me know and I can tell you a bit about my process. Not that it's much of a process.
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Nov 23, 2012 03:01
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Here's a list of definitions I drew up (to send to the guy I'm debating with on Facebook). Let me know if anyone has any objections: Absolute strategic complexity: The size of the strategy set, which is basically the size of the position space multiplied by the average number of choices available at each node. Effective strategic complexity: Same as above, but after the choices that can easily be eliminated by a typical player have been removed, along with the game states that can never be reached without employing those choices (e.g. removing early game Go positions in which someone has played at the 1-1 point). Note that mathematical rigour is not required for these deletions... it doesn't matter if a given move isn't provably wrong, if no one ever chooses it. 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. Skill level: Two players are said to be "one skill level" apart if the better player's win rate is 0.5 + S / 6, where S is the skill factor. The reason for the 1/6 factor is that it means that in a 100% skill game, it means a player one skill level better wins twice as often (1/2 + 1/6 = 2/3, while the weaker player wins 1/3) , and you scale down from there based on how luck-influenced the game is. If a perfect player wins 75% of the time against a random player, then the skill factor is 50%, and one skill level difference means the better player wins 58.3% of the time. Learning curve: The function E(s) where E is effort and s is skill level. These functions are monotonically increasing up until the effort level required to solve the game, undefined thereafter (as there are no skill levels beyond solution, by definition). The first derivative is likewise typically increasing, but needn't be monotonically so; you can have steep bits where great effort is required to overcome a given mental block, followed by shallower areas where progress is rapid once the lightbulb has turned on. Absolute strategic depth: The skill level at which the learning curve becomes undefined, i.e. the game has been solved and no further progress is possible. Effective strategic depth: Same as above, but rather than starting from the solved game, start from the best player who exists or has ever existed. Note that this depends on the game's popularity. ------ Regarding the "Magic metagame," drawing the kingdom in Dominion, random chess setups, and so forth... these are ways of linearly increasing the absolute strategic complexity of the game, in that they increase the size of the position space, without changing the number of options at each node. By contrast, doing something like making the chessboard bigger, or having a 12-card kingdom in Dominion, etc. increase complexity in a non-linear way, because they both expand the position space AND increase your options at each node. You have to be careful about this, because it can rapidly make a game unmanageable. For example: Without accounting for symmetry and deleting illegal positions, Go on a 3x3 board has a position space of about 3^9 = 19.5k and something like an average of something like 3-4 legal moves in most of those positions. 19.5k x 3.5 is about 68k possible strategy sets. Go on a 4x4 board has a position space of about 4^9 = 262k and something like an average of 6-7 legal moves in most of those positions. That's around 1.7M possible strategy sets. So by making the board a bit bigger, you've increased the absolute strategic complexity by a factor of 25. (It's actually a bigger increase than this because we're ignoring illegal positions, and they make up a bigger fraction of the total positions on smaller boards). In the real world, Go used to be played on 17x17 boards, more than a thousand years ago in Tibet. Eventually they moved it up to 19x19 and that's kept us busy ever since. Computers still have quite a ways to go before being able to beat the best humans, but I've heard it suggested that when they do, we'll just move up to 21x21 and that'll set them back another few hundred years. (I'm not convinced of this, but it depends on how clever the AI techniques are... certainly if it's largely by brute force, a slightly bigger board makes it much harder for them than for human players). xopods fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 17:13
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jmzero posted:It seems hard to define a "random opponent" for a lot of games. [...] You're mixing up "skill factor" with what we discussed re: effective depth. Skill factor has nothing to do with human ability, only the intrinsic luck factor in the game. A perfect player WILL beat a random opponent 100% of the time in the limit of an infinitely large maze, and that's the result we want, because "Maze Race" is a perfect information, zero chance game (once the game is underway, that is: there is randomness in the generation of the maze, but since this happens prior to any player making a move and the results are known to all players, it doesn't introduce any luck into the game itself). In 7 Wonders, the perfect player will occasionally lose to the random player, and that's also as we want it; the skill factor will be less than 100% (though still very high), because the random player will occasionally luck into better draws than the perfect player, and if he then gets further lucky to make all the right choices, he'll win no matter what the perfect opponent does. Keep in mind the hierarchy of the definitions: "Skill factor" is based only on the effect of a game's intrinsic randomness on the game's outcome. It reflects what the hypothetical maximum win rate is (assuming the opponent isn't actively trying to lose). 100% for chess, 83.3% for the "Chess+Luck" game, where you can win the main game 100% of the time and still lose the die roll 1/6th of the time. "Skill levels" reflect players' abilities to beat one another, and have to be defined relative to the skill factor of a game - otherwise Chess+Luck wouldn't have as many skill levels as Chess, but obviously the strategic considerations are the same in both, so the number of skill levels should be equal. "Effective strategic depth" is where the limits of human ability come into play - the range of skill levels achievable by humans. ----- We could, however, perhaps refine our definition of effective strategic depth by chopping off the low end of the scale, since for most games, even a complete beginner will do better than random play: Absolute strategic depth = skill levels between perfect play and random play Effective strategic depth = skill levels between best player ever and average skill level of a first-time player ----- I understand that you want our definitions to reflect how the game is experienced by actual players, but to get there, we have to start with intrinsic properties of the game itself, and bring in the human aspect later. We need to define skill factor in order to talk about skill levels, and we need the definition of skill levels in order to talk about learning curves, and learning curves to talk about effective depth... if you go back and try to make the definition of skill factor depend on the game's effective strategic depth, you've created a circular definition which is of no use to anyone. What's actually happening with the "VERY VERY BIG Maze Game" is that you've expanded the position space to the point that the learning curve has become very steep... eventually steep enough that not even one skill level of improvement is possible in a human lifetime. That doesn't make it a game of chance, it just makes the effective strategic depth very small. Essentially, effective strategic depth is limited by one of two things; either the point at which the game becomes solved, for simple games, or the point at which the learning curve E(s) hits E = Emax, for more complicated games, where Emax is the maximum effort you expect anyone to ever spend on your game. To achieve the maximum effective strategic depth, then, you basically want the shallowest learning curve possible without allowing the game to become solvable. In general, increasing the absolute strategic complexity of a game will increase the absolute strategic depth, but also steepen the learning curve. So if a game is too simple, you can increase its effective strategic depth by complicating or expanding it... but if the issue is that the strategy gets beyond human grasp at a certain point, you can actually increase the effective depth by reducing the complexity, allowing people to get to those higher levels of skill in a more reasonable timeframe. ----- On further thought, it may be worth inserting a definition for "effective skill factor," meaning the different between a perfect and a random player after the game space has been pruned in the same way we use to get from absolute to effective complexity. I.e. the advantage of a perfect player over one who merely rejects the moves which are "obviously" wrong (by some definition of obviousness) and chooses randomly from the rest. For instance, never visiting any space in the Maze Game a number of times greater than its number of exits. But the question then is at which point we make the step from absolute to effective when we're establishing the subordinate definitions... i.e. do we calculate skill levels based on absolute skill factor and then just chop off the learning curve below E(s) = Eobv (where Eobv is "the level of effort required to recognize the obvious")? Or do we go straight to effective complexity and base everything else off of that, forgetting that the "obviously wrong" part of the game space exists at all? xopods fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 18:34
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jmzero posted: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. Yep, if you look at the stuff I just edited in while you were responding (down at the end of my post), you'll see I was starting to come to the same conclusion. It's probably more useful (though much harder to work with) to define things in this sequence: code:code:EDIT: I have to do some serious work now, but I'll think about this a bit more and try to draw up Definitions 2.0 tonight or over the weekend based on this "more useful but harder to work with" chain of contingency. It does mean, though, that everything is going to hinge on a very fuzzy notion of obviousness... and that means down the road we're going to have shouting matches about what it is and isn't reasonable to expect to be obvious to a total beginner. xopods fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 19:23
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wins32767 posted:It gets even worse than that. I've been trying to teach someone who is a world class Magic player how to play wargames on the high end of the complexity scale. Stuff that is obvious to other people that have played hex games (what are the key hexes for a given defensive line for example) is a challenge to someone who has mostly only played Magic. Even someone with excellent abstract reasoning capability is going to be at a disadvantage in their first game against another beginner that has played a game from the same family. Right, well, I think for our purposes we're talking about "obvious to anyone capable of understanding the rules, regardless of any prior gaming experience or lack thereof." You can always chop off the beginning of the learning curve at a certain point and talk about "effective depth" and "learning curve" given a certain level of prior knowledge if you want... i.e. "the learning curve is steep for true beginners, but manageable if you've played other worker placement games." ...but when I say "obviously wrong" I mean things that are really, really obvious, like sacrificing pieces for no gain whatsoever, or buying something and immediately reselling it for half the price, or tapping lands and not spending the mana, just giving yourself mana-burn for no reason. Things that should clearly be omitted from the choices for a "random" opponent if that's your model for a complete beginner. xopods fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Nov 24, 2012 |
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Nov 24, 2012 05:05
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By the way, I hope I'm not driving anyone off with all these extremely nerdy megaposts about defining things. Please do continue to bring up more down-to-earth issues and questions! As a possible lighter topic, does anyone have any mechanics they feel are underexplored? (As opposed to, say, worker placement, which seems a little overdone these days... the roll-and-move of the early 21st century?)
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Nov 24, 2012 14:24
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Wow, a whole pile of posts that I'd love to respond to individually at length, but since I should be going to bed, I'll just quote en masse and respond to more briefly.Nemesis Of Moles posted:I think Roll And Move could really do with some exploration. There isn't really such a thing as 'Bad Mechanics', only underdeveloped ones and rolling a big load of dice can be a lot of fun on a base level. I agree. Actually, one of my games coming out in the next year is vaguely in the same spectrum as backgammon, which I guess makes it a roll-and-move (though the movement is two-dimensional... it involves monkeys climbing and jumping through a bamboo grove). There's nothing inherently wrong with tracks, and semi-random numbers to move pieces along them... the two main historical problems with roll-and-move is that it was used in just about every unoriginal game during a certain dark period in history, and that its typical implementation involves absolutely no control on the part of the players, which makes it not so different from a more cumbersome equivalent of just drawing a card from a deck or a chip from a bag, which is what we tend to do now instead. Guildencrantz posted:Voting! I find the area of decision-making in democracies fascinating, and it's one that board games could explore very well on a small scale. A while back I had an extremely vague idea for a political game in which players are politicians with public agendas according to their party platforms and hidden agendas, and propose and vote on legislation. Way more complicated and less abstract than my usual stuff... but I love the idea of voting as a mechanic if you can get around that intrinsic gang-up-on-the-leader thing. I was pleased to see in the design contest that there were a couple of games along those lines - the abstract voting one and the semi-cooperative Rome one where there's a winner in the end but you have to work together or everyone loses. (I'd have to go and look at the thread to remind myself of the names of the games and who made them, but I hope we see more of them in this thread). Admin Understudy posted:I would probably argue that the learning curve isn't a relationship between effort and "skill level" though but rather "effectiveness of tactics" and skill level. If I don't understand the consequences of my actions my effort can consistently be very low and have a wide range of positive and negative outcomes whereas my ability to be successfully tactical is more revealing of how deep a game is. We're not talking about the effort made by the player during the current instance of the game, but the total effort made to learn the game up to that point - whether simply by playing repeatedly or deliberately studying the strategy. I.e. if you've played 20 times at 2 hours each (40 hours), spent another 5 hours total discussing the game with opponents after having played with them, 10 hours lying in bed thinking about the game, and another 5 hours reading strategy-related articles about the game online, you've put 40 + 5 + 10 + 5 = 60 hours of effort into learning that game. If at that point, you're beating a total beginner 98% of the time, the game has a shallow learning curve, because your skill has obviously improved in leaps and bounds. If you're still only beating a beginner 55% of the time (and it's not a game with a huge amount of luck), then it must have a very steep learning curve, because you're still not understanding much more of the strategy than when you started. (Obviously the next step is to say that not all effort is equivalent... for players at a certain level, doing Go problems might be better than playing Go, while at other levels, playing is better, etc. But straight-up hours devoted is a good enough first approximation). Nemesis Of Moles posted:Quit [worrying too much about being original]. This is like, the silver rule next to 'Accept criticism' and 'Learn How to Type' an poo poo. No game is unique, ever. Absolutely. There's an analogy to be made with music... unless you're going to the crazy, extreme, experimental end of things, you're using the same notes and chords as everyone else, and a lot of the same progressions. But the neat thing is that there are enough possible variations on and combinations of those basic building blocks that new and interesting songs - and games - keep coming out that make use of all those common patterns without exactly duplicating anything that came before. Personally, I think the surest recipe for a great game is to take awesome thing A from one game, and awesome thing B from another, and then come up with original thing C that makes them work together. Sure, there are a few gamers out there who will hate on anything if they can tell where the inspiration came from, but gently caress'em. The games they like were also inspired by something, they just haven't played it themselves, so they don't recognize it. Admin Understudy posted:Actually one more thing I'd like to get some insight on; designing with a range of players in mind. Any tips for scaling games? I don't know if they'll answer any of your questions, but I wrote a series of blog posts about how your design challenges change with the number of players you're targeting. They start here and the other ones are linked from the first one: http://www.benefactum.ca/?p=120 I guess read those and if there's anything you're wondering about that's not covered, bring it up and we'll talk about it! ----- Okay! Enough for one night. I'm glad this thread is getting traffic though, and some interesting things being discussed. xopods fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 07:18
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Oh, just one other thing about learning curve. In the example I give, I know some people are going to say that it sounds like an easier game on beginners where the more experienced player is only winning 55% than 98%. But you have to turn things around and look at things from the beginner's perspective, vs. someone who beats them a certain % of the time, and how long it's going to take the beginner to catch up in skill. If, after 60 hours, you're only beating a beginner 55% of the time, then that probably means another guy who is beating the beginner 98% of the time has been playing thousands or tens-of-thousands of hours to become that good. So, from the beginner's perspective, given that they're facing an opponent who can beat them 98% of the time, they're asking how long it'll take them to catch up. If the other guy only took 60 hours to get that far ahead, it'll likewise only take the beginner 60 hours to be able to take that guy on, assuming he doesn't improve much more in the meantime. On the other hand, if 60 hours = 55%, then to catch up with the guy who is winning 98% might take a lifetime. xopods fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 07:37
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Chutes & Ladders + Diablo = Talisman  As for this thing itself, it's kind of an interesting project... an attempt to make a better version of Vassal or whatever. But it's funny; this kind of thing is very typical of the programmer mindset. Prior to teaching myself Cocoa, I briefly tried to partner up with a programmer to do an iOS version of my game Picnic Blitz (by far my least well-received game on BGG, but as a dice game, I thought it might be good for a casual iOS audience). I gave up after he spent the first couple of weeks fussing with physics for the dice and deciding on the most efficient data structure to represent the board position (which consists of at most 24 pieces on six tracks of a maximum of 10 spaces... i.e. not a situation where efficiency is remotely an issue) and still had barely done any actual game logic. Programmers...  ---- When I think about "improving roll-and-move," I'm thinking about increasing the players' options so they're not just at the mercy of the dice. For instance, this as-of-yet-untitled game I'm putting out next year (the backgammon-like one with monkeys climbing and jumping in the bamboo) has the players rolling two dice and either moving one monkey with each, or the same monkey twice, like backgammon... but both players have a third die set aside, that they can swap with either of their rolled dice. So for instance, if you have a 3 set aside and roll 5-4, you could take your 5-4, or take 5-3 instead and leave yourself a 4 for next turn, or 4-3 and leave yourself a 5 for next turn. That same mechanic could be dropped more or less directly into regular backgammon, or Monopoly, or any other roll-and-move game with more than one die being rolled per turn. Aside from giving the player more options so they're less likely to be screwed by a bad roll, it also provides more opportunities to think ahead, in that you're not only thinking about which two dice are best for the current move, but which one is most likely to be useful next turn. For instance, in the monkey game, you can often make a move where you leave yourself the right number to hit the opponent's monkey on your next move, thereby forcing him to reposition that monkey. It gives the game a more positional, chess-like strategy than backgammon, in that, although you still have to worry about the rolls your opponent could get, you have to focus even more on the number your opponent can certainly have if he wants it. Another example, this one hypothetical (though I wouldn't be surprised if such a game existed), would be a game where the board is composed of tiles, and players have the ability to spend cards or resources to rotate, flip or swap tiles after rolling; if you can't control the dice, at least you can control the track itself. A game with railroad-style junctions and switches, and with the option to reverse the direction of movement, would also work, with players fighting to control the flow of traffic and get themselves to their destinations while routing opponents into detours, hazards, or futile loops. xopods fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 18:35
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:So, thanks to SomethingAwfuls board game contests, and this thread, I've finished the first game I consider to be fairly viable. I'm going to wait a week or two to get back some more playtest stuff before I begin, but I'd really love some input on how to shop games to publishers. My degree is all about Business and stuff so I know a lil about proposal writing, but I figured, we have this thread for a reason. It really depends on the publisher. They all have their own priorities and submission processes and policies. Usually, though, you're going to want to send them a sell sheet, which should include, as concisely as possible, sections describing:
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Nov 26, 2012 17:54
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Admin Understudy posted:Ok effort as time spent does make more sense. I think you should make it come full circle with effort being a function of complexity, although that's simply my desire for a perfect collection of functions. Circularity is exactly what we want to avoid if we're trying to come to a mutually agreed-upon definition of something. I'm trying to take this nebulous notion of "depth" and tie it to objective quantities like win rates and position spaces. If all our fuzzy concepts are only defined in terms of other fuzzy concepts, we'll forever run into situations where two people seem to be disagreeing about something but in fact they just using the same word to mean two different things. quote:I guess I still don't fully see the relationship of effort to skill level. If we are purely defining skill level as tiers of winning percentage and then correlating that to effort spent getting to some discrete skill level I feel like it doesn't account for a set of strategies with a sort of RPS relationship where more basic strategies can have higher winning rates over more complex strategies but lose to middle-of-the-pack strategies. Even when I generalize it down to saying that more effort boosts a percentage chance of being able to play a specific strategy as opposed to "unlocking" a strategy, I feel like I could create a set where effort spent has an inverse relationship to winning percentage? A truly good player doesn't always employ the same strategy, though. Part of the skill of a game is identifying the strategies your opponents are employing and choosing a good counter. You're right, however, that one-dimensional players who are very good at one strategy but never do anything else can throw a monkey-wrench in the definition, as it might be possible to find players A, B, C such that player A beats player B 60% of the time, player B beats player C 60% of the time, and player C beats player A 60% of the time. I suppose what we have to do then is define skill levels in terms of player groups, rather than individuals: A group of players is said to be of the same skill level if every player in the group has a total expected win rate of 50% when playing an equal number of games against each other player in the group. Thus, the group {A,B,C} above is of the same level, in that each of them beats one guy 60% but only wins 40% against the other, for an average of 50% for each of them. We'd then define relative skill level between groups the same way - Group X is one skill level ahead of Group Y if the total win rate is Q after a series of games pitting each player in Group X against each player in Group Y. (Where Q is the previously-defined win rate: 0.5 + S/6, with S being the Effective Skill Factor) EDIT: Of course, this doesn't actually solve our problem, because you could have a whole group of players who all play like player A above, and another group who all play like B and another group who all play like C. So I guess you have to go a little further and say that to establish a skill level, you have to find the largest possible group of players who all have a 50% win rate when playing equal games against everyone else in the group. Although this sounds impractical to the point of impossibility to do in reality, it's pretty close to what will happen naturally if you have a large pool of players and give them ELO ratings, and then study win rates in order to map ranges of ELO rating to our definition of "skill level." (i.e. maybe a typical player in the 1600-1750 range wins 66.7% against a typical player in the 1500-1600 range, so those are two skill levels, etc.) xopods fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 18:07
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I played a guy's prototype this weekend. It was a realtime negotiation game, but for me the neat thing was that it was actually a pair of simultaneous, linked games. The players were divided into two groups and, although players in the two groups interacted with one another, in the end, there would be two winners, one from each group. It strikes me as an interesting and almost completely unexplored niche. In the game in question, the two groups were landlords and merchants. Each was competing to become the richest within their group. The landlords made money by buying properties and renting them to the merchants, and the merchants made money by renting valuable properties and earning more money by using them than they paid in rent. But there are all sorts of other themes that could work... For instance, you could have a game in the evolution genre, but with two classes of players, herbivores and carnivores, with one winner from each group... the winning carnivore player would be the one who successfully ate the most herbivores, while the winning herbivore would be the one who got eaten the least. Anyone care to brainstorm additional ideas that would fit this model? Anyone know of any published games using such a system?
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Nov 27, 2012 03:08
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wins32767 posted:A game set in a civil war might work pretty well if we tweak the premise a bit to where the linked games are competing with each other. Interesting idea. Two teams fighting against each other, but also against themselves internally... the overall winner is the winning player on the winning team, but second place goes to the winning player on the losing team. So if you're ahead on your team, but it looks like someone else is going to overtake you, you can try to sell your side out and bring the game to an early end while you're still ahead in order to take second.
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Nov 27, 2012 03:35
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Hmmmm, the problem is if you go with a scoring system and assign the win to whoever has the highest score at the end, that's not really linked games, that's just a single game with an asymmetric setup. The neat thing about the prototype I played on the weekend was that, although the landlords and merchants are in conflict because the landlords want to charge as much as possible and the merchants want to pay as little as possible, the landlords don't care at all which merchant is winning, and vice versa. Whereas if there's one overall winner determined by the highest score between the two teams, you do care what's going on in the other team...
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Nov 27, 2012 04:13
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fosborb posted:If web resources get posted eventually, the board game designers forum (bgdf.com) really should be on that list. Yep, I'm planning on including it. Definitely better and more professional than the BGG Game Design forum, though there's still a lot of chaff to be sorted through to find the wheat.
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Nov 27, 2012 16:38
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modig posted:Separate question... how finished should a game be before you submit it to a publisher? I assume they want input on component size/shape/quality for manufacturing reasons at the least. I would guess they'd help layout the rulebook, will some/all have artists to touch up your art, or do art from scratch? It depends on the publisher, but unlike with submission processes, where everyone is different, here there is a norm, and just some minority of publishers that differ from it. The majority of publishers want:
That's about it. You're responsible for the game itself and nothing else... all the branding, art, writing, etc. will usually be taken care of by the publisher. In fact, they may be turned off if you seem to have put a lot of work into those things, as it may be a sign that you're too committed to your own vision of the game and won't be willing to surrender creative control to them. The exception is the rules text, which as I said, you want to be as clear as possible... but don't put a bunch of work into thematic text, backstory and the like, as the publisher will probably want to have a big hand in that. xopods fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 17:22
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I think the first of those ideas has more legs. The mechanics of the other sound a lot like many people's first game ideas: "decks of cards that are divided into categories that do different things and then some other cards that give modifiers to the various categories." I find that most of the games that are built around those kind of mechanics end up feeling very samey and uninspired. By contrast, I like the idea of a game where everyone is ostensibly trying to protect a country, but different people have more motivation to save specific regions... Instead of making it entirely competitive, though, what if you made it traitor-based like BSG, but with the added factor that not all the good guys win, only those who successfully protected their "pet" cities. So, for instance, you have the Mad Scientist who is the traitor. He wins if sufficient devastation is caused, e.g. if three cities are destroyed. Everyone else wins only if the Mad Scientist is stopped and their own city (which is a secret) has survived. For it to work, players would have to have some control over where the monsters attack, so everyone's trying to keep them out of their own cities. The Mad Scientist, meanwhile, wants to know what city each player is trying to protect, so he can send the monsters to some city no player really cares about, putting them in a Prisoner's Dilemma/Tragedy-of-the-Commons kind of situation, where the good guys would like the city to survive, but everyone hopes someone else will take care of it so they can save their cards to protect their own city. I guess there's still a question there of what happens to a player after his home city is destroyed. Player elimination is something a lot of people don't like, but if you e.g. make people flip sides and become traitors after losing their home city, then you get the BSG sleeper agent / Panic Station problem of people being reluctant to work too hard towards their current win condition if they think it's likely they're going to end up on the other team. xopods fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 19:40
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How do you plan on avoiding it being a multiplayer solitaire game if everyone is only interested in defending their own cities, and the threat comes from the game itself and not the other players?
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Nov 27, 2012 19:58
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Could work. I think it'd be more interesting if you could find a way to work in options to either defeat the monster or just send it somewhere else so it's not your problem. E.g. instead of cards, players commit defense tokens, either to the city the monster is in, or adjacent cities. Like the cards, they're committed face down and mixed up before being revealed, so you don't necessarily know who put in what. If the defense tokens in the city itself exceed the monster's rating, it's defeated. Otherwise it damages the city and then moves to the adjacent city with the weakest defenses. But then you've also got some kind of "bait" tokens (damsels in distress or, I don't know, nuclear fuel, or whatever the monster likes/needs)... which, if you put them in an adjacent city, act like negative defenses, and if it brings the total below 0, the monster will immediately move there rather than damaging its current city. Something like that.
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Nov 27, 2012 20:14
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Oh man... just had a sick idea. It'd be a considerably more complicated game than what you have in mind, but I could see it being so much fun. The players are all mad scientists, who have (initially secret) labs in several cities. They're competing for prestige by genetically engineering bigger and more impressive monsters. As you say, there's a scientific discovery track, and the player who passes certain thresholds reaps the benefits... either an advancement in the monsters themselves (granting a VP bonus, but making the guy's monsters more deadly if they get loose) or technology to contain the monsters or fight them if they do get loose. Periodically, monsters get loose and start causing havoc. It's semi-random whose monster gets loose, but you can do things to sabotage your opponents and make it more likely that it's one of theirs. When a monster gets loose, the owner has to reveal one of their labs and place the monster in that city. Thereafter, everyone can either try to stop it or lure it in a specific direction as we discussed. The owner has the most incentive to stop it, because for each turn it remains free, he loses prestige... however, other players may also want to stop it, as they lose VP at the end of the game for damage done to cities where they have labs. So at the end of the game, you get total VP equal to the awesomeness of the monsters you've bred, minus points for damage caused by your monsters when they've broken free, minus points for damage to cities where you have labs.
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Nov 27, 2012 20:50
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Maybe everyone plays a research card and depending on the total of all cards played, one of three outcomes happens: Low total: The players with the two lowest cards suffer mishaps. Medium total: The player with the lowest card suffers a mishap, while the player with the highest card achieves a breakthrough. High total: The players with the two highest cards achieve breakthroughs. Thus, when you think everyone else is going to be fighting over breakthroughs, you've got a safe moment to dump a low card. On the the other hand, if you think most other people are going low-to-medium, you can try to pick a card that's going to give you the highest value without going into "two breakthrough" territory (as you'd prefer to leave the low card stuck with a mishap rather than giving the second-place card a free breakthrough by riding on your coattails). Regarding breakouts, I like the idea of breakout tokens. Then when a breakout happens, whoever has the most is the one whose monster gets free as you say... but he gets to discard his breakout tokens. So it's basically going to happen to everyone eventually, but you can postpone it and/or have it happen less frequently to you over the course of the game by avoiding taking any more breakout tokens than necessary. (And of course postponing the inevitable has value because it lets you keep the location of your bases secret as long as possible, since you have to reveal one when there's a breakout.) xopods fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 21:10
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Crackbone posted:For the mishap stuff, I think there could (and probably should) be lots of variations on what happens to help keep each turn fresh. Your proposed scenario could be one. Another could be the play who plays the highest total gets a breakthrough AND a mishap. There's plenty of game theory scenarios you could use. Sounds good to me. For the randomness you want, maybe there's a research deck, each card in which shows a breakthrough, a mishap, a green number and a red number. The numbers indicate the thresholds for "High" and "Low" results (i.e. less than or equal to the red number = two mishaps, greater than or equal to the green number = two breakthroughs, in between = one and one), while the breakthrough and mishap tell you what you're going to get/suffer for winning/losing the minigame.
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Nov 27, 2012 21:39
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Crackbone posted:This all sounds awesome and I should expect any attempt at a first draft will probably be horrible, right? It's pretty complicated for a first game, so yeah. The odds that everything's going to come together nicely are pretty small. A reasonable result to hope for, though, is that even if the game as a whole doesn't quite work, one aspect or another turns out to be pretty cool. Then you can try to think of a simpler game that reimplements that mechanic, but without all the stuff that didn't work so well. Definitely, in putting it together, try to avoid adding further complexity... if two parts don't seem to fit neatly, see if you can adjust one or the other, rather than sticking in an intermediate part. Come back and tell us whatever problems you run into and we can brainstorm some more. Also make sure to ask yourself for each thing if it's really necessary or adds enough to the game to be worth it - for instance, now that we've put in all this other stuff, having a tile-based map may be overkill... the game may be plenty deep and replayable even with a fixed map. xopods fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 22:16
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Evil Badman posted:Apologies if I'm in the wrong thread: I'm doing a reskin of Catan for a friend as a present, and am trying to figure out the best way to print (sturdy) hexes and cards. Does anyone have recommendations? (1) Choose something to mount them on, like foamcore, mat board or even just bristol board. Depends on how sturdy you want them, but keep in mind the final thing will be made sturdier by the attachment of an extra layer. Even just bristol board with light cardstock attached ends up pretty rigid, but for Catan tiles you probably want something a bit thicker. Foamcore is nice and thick, yet lightweight, but keep in mind it's basically impossible to cut without crimping the edges a bit. (2) Laser print your artwork on light cardstock. (3) Spray it with an aerosol fixative of some sort (available at art supply stores, usually used to stop drawings from smudging). This will stop the toner from wearing off during play. (4) Coat both the back of the artwork and your substrate with two-coat rubber cement. Allow to dry. After they're dry, press them together. This creates the strongest bond. (5) Cut out your tiles with a ruler and utility knife, or with a guillotine. If you're going to use a guillotine, of course you have to print the tiles out so each one lies on its own in a square region, rather than tessellating them, since it's hard to end a cut precisely with a guillotine. If you're using a knife, then tessellate them because you can fit more on a page. (6) If you want to avoid injuring your friend, rub down the edges with a hard object like the side of your knife. Otherwise, if your knife was very sharp and you cut cleanly, the edges of your tiles will be razor sharp and perfect for giving paper cuts. xopods fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Nov 28, 2012 |
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Nov 28, 2012 17:55
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 20:42 |
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Hmmm. What if people built their robots in layers? So, like, the back layer is vital systems, like the computer brain you have to destroy to "kill" someone, and power supplies and stuff... and the middle layer is offensive systems, and then the outer layer is defensive systems. People attacking you have to destroy the outer layers to get at the stuff behind it. Maybe it's built pyramid style, so you need more of the inner layers to support the outer ones (but a single card in an outer layer can protect two cards underneath it): code:
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Nov 28, 2012 19:07
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