Even more Kickstarter analysis

A good, thoughtful article on Kickstarter funding (actually, the second half of a longer good thoughtful article - read Part I too) from Chris Norwood over at GamerChris.

Rules writing tips

Some good advice here from a reviewer - somebody who likely reads a good many more rules documents than your typical game designer.

Game Design Notebook - Horde - Step 2: Revision and Prototype

In my last post, I mentioned my newest game project, tentatively called Horde.  The original submission was for a contest entry at BGDF and was constrained by the contest restrictions and the 200-word limit on entries.  Once the contest was over, free from those restrictions, I liked the idea enough to create a prototype and try it out.  The original idea had used small figures of different colors; I shifted that to cards, and created a deck of cards with six "suits" - typical fantasy stuff: fire, water, sun, moon, forest, royal - and five monster types - troll, ooze, golem, dragon, skeleton.  I doubled each of these, for sixty total cards, which would be more than enough for people to pick a couple of them on each of 11 turns (5 monsters + 6 suits = 11) and have enough.

Art for cards

But, as I was making these up and doing some rudimentary art, I thought of some ways to make the game more interesting, by having special additional monsters that allowed for special plays or special scoring.  That added a bunch more cards, and because those cards are generally more powerful than the regular ones, I needed new rules to balance out these cards.  The mechanism I tried initially was this: whenever somebody chooses a special card, everybody else gets another one.  More on that in my next post in this series.

I wanted to make the prototype at least look nice, so I collected some art for it, shown at right.  The art that I used came from four sources:

1. stuff I made myself - generally crude or bad, although some of them were OK
2. stuff I already had access to - I commissioned some art for a previous game, Zombie Ball, so I had art for skeletons and vampires already in place.
3. online clip-art - I didn't want to use clip-art that was licensed or of unclear origin, so I went with royalty-free open-use stuff.  There's a pretty extensive clip art library at clker.com which purports to be all  royalty free.  There's another one at openclipart.org which is even more clearly royalty free.  Clker includes nearly everything at openclipart.org, so you can get more options at clker.
4. art from expired-copyright books - for this, I used Google Books and searched for books from prior to 1923 - anything in those is in the public domain.

I include examples of each of these below.  The result is not publication-worthy, but it looks good enough.

I got the background textures for the cards from a variety of sources, but a great one that I use a lot is Mayang's Free Texture Library (http://www.mayang.com/textures/) - this has high-res texture images of all kinds of things.

Once I had art, it was easy to go ahead and order a prototype from TheGameCrafter.com - and because I was curious, I even went ahead and got one of their medium boxes, which is cool - I'll discuss that later too.  

I did the ooze using PowerPoint
and some GIMP effects

The final prototype

A knight from a fairy tale book,
once colorized, became my Elvenking

Clip art borrowed from clker.com

Game Design Notebook - Horde - Step 1: Contest entry

So, I entered a game in the newly-shrunken monthly BGDF design showdown in January.  I got second in the voting. I'll put up a few posts about it here, the first being my entry there.

The restrictions for the contest were (1) that players had to make permanent rules as they go (inspired by New Year's Resolutions) and (2) that things have to come in pairs.  These aren't that important, but they did lead me to a game design I like a lot.  The new word limit for entries was 200 words.  In case you were wondering, it's very difficult to make a robust game whose rules fit in 200 words; none of the other entries described a full game.  Here's my entry:

Horde 

2-6 players

Object: 

Build the highest-scoring horde of monsters

Components: 

10 Rule cards – 5 colors, 5 monsters (red, yellow, blue, black, white; ogre, dragon, knight, goblin, ooze) 

50 monster tokens - pairs of monsters (2 each of five colors and five types)
Scoring board – 10 score spaces (0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10) 

Setup: 

Shuffle the rule cards and place them and all other components between players (rules face down).

Play: 

Each turn, a player first draws a rule card and places it on the board on any open scoring space. This establishes (resolves?) the scoring for the monster or color shown. Next, the player chooses one, two, or three monsters from the common pool. None of the monsters can match (same color or same monster). The other players then each take the same number of monsters from the pool. These monsters also may not match each other. Players unable to take the full number legally must take fewer.

Scoring: 

Game ends after ten turns (all rules played). For each rule card, the player with the most of that color or monster type gets the point value shown for that rule on the board.

Chicken Caesar

Image from the Game Salute site. SBBQR? 

Here's a game-production Kickstarter campaign for a game about recreating the Roman empire in a chicken community. I am really curious how the game got going - was it just a title first, or did they build the game and then theme it based on the title, or did it just arise organically?  The name is a terrifically funny fit to the theme of the game, and the fact that the theme is so improbable and unusual just makes it funnier.  The art and graphic design looks really good, too - simple, clear, and totally evoking a chicken-themed Roman milieu (whatever that is).

So, they've got a great name and theme, but what about the details?  They've used the Springboard service from Game Salute, a service about which I'm curious.  There is precious little detail amidst the pretty pictures and hype on the Game Salute site, but what it appears to be is a program where independent game designers can get assistance with publication, including playtesting, advice on game design, publication, and launching a Kickstarter campaign, in addition to a "Seal of Quality" thing.  Of course, these seals are only as useful as their reputation; I'm familiar with some of the games they list on their site, and the ones I know are good games with strong production values.

I'm going to investigate further; if the Game Salute service is relatively inexpensive, it could be great; if they want a huge chunk of the game's budget, then it would be hard to see how it can work with  the already tenuous profit margins on games unless they also can give a big marketing boost.

The only data I've got on that is indirect - the minimum level to buy a game of Chicken Caesar is $40, which seems to include postage.  That's pretty expensive for a game you can't look at a real copy of before buying, but it's consistent with what I know of printing costs for small print runs (at their $20,000 funding goal, $40 means 500 games).

Mini-cards!

Mini cards (2.5"x1.75") now available at TheGameCrafter.com - this is a big deal; those could be super-useful for not only cards, but also currency, markers, tokens, abilities, etc.  They're far cheaper per card than the regular size at about nine cents a card (if you can get your game into sets of 32).  Very cool - this is one I've been waiting for.

UPDATE: The pricing for these cards isn't actually cheaper than the bigger cards, which is weird.  I was wrong.  I suppose that the cutting and handling are more difficult for these, but they're definitely saving on printing and ink, so I'm not sure what the economics are.

BGG Ratings

BGG Ratings counts as of 2007, by BGG member Joe Grundy

My last post, which discussed BGG ratings of a few games, got me wondering what the actual distribution of ratings is.  Google led me to a partial answer - the image at right, referenced in the posting by Joe Grundy on BGG here.  This is ratings actually given by individual users, while I was really looking for the composite ratings given each game.  I'll keep looking.

Kickstarter and publishing

The folks at the Opinionated Gamer visit several past themes on the value of Kickstarter to designers, publishers, and players.  It was interesting to me that most of these folks, who are designers, enthusiasts, and players themselves, were lukewarm on the idea of Kickstarter, and several said the equivalent of 'I'd never fund something there, of course.'  It makes me wonder who does.

One of the authors who did buy, Ted Alspach, said he'd been unimpressed with most of the games he'd gotten and specifically called out a couple of them, Carnival and Creatures, as disappointing. I explored on BoardgameGeek.com.  Creatures looked kind of like a card-only version of one of my designs, Galapagos, but with fewer body parts, and it only got a 5.8 on BGG's scale, which is a pretty low score for BGG.  Carnival, at a slightly-higher 6.3, looked interesting, but some reviewers (like Ted) said the gameplay was rough and sometimes boring.

Most of these guys agreed with the gist of what I and others have said here before, which is that Kickstarter is:

1. all good for publishers - their risk and investment is reduced
2. mostly all good for designers - there are more possible routes to publication, risk is reduced, and self-publishing is far easier, but there may be a temptation to rush to publish an inadequately-tested project.  N.B. I see this in myself, totally, in spades.
3. a mixed bag for customers/players - they get access to more variety of games, and may see designs that wouldn't get made any other way, but they have to invest before seeing the game and seeing it reviewed, so their money is at risk

The opinionated gamers wanted to add another perspective to this, which is "good for the industry" - I'm not sure anybody can really figure that one out, because you'd have to define what "good" meant.  Lots of little incompletely designed or tested games clamoring for attention and money sounds bad, but lots more people engaged in design, publishing, and investing in the industry sounds really good.

What are some takeaways?  Here are mine, from a various parts of the post:

• Graphic design sells Kickstarter projects
• Post your rules with your Kickstarter project so that people can see how the game plays
• There's significant fear on the part of Kickstarter funders that the game projects won't get made and their money will be lost, although that is rare to unheard-of so far.  Sounds like this might be worth addressing in the video or promotional materials for a Kickstarter project.
• These guys (admittedly a small sample of game enthusiasts) often buy based on a designer's reputation or past products, and are suspicious of unknown or unpublished designers.  This kind of attitude (while probably helpful to them) is a barrier I'll have to overcome, although it's the same old Catch-22 that exists in all kinds of endeavors - we only publish published authors, or we only hire people with experience. 
• Kickstarter has reduced the number of design submissions to traditional publishers
• As I suspected, self-publishers with basements full of unsold games are a real (and sad) thing, and there's apparently a lonely Hall of Failure somewhere at Essen populated by them.

Reviewers willing to take on independent games

The Gamer's Table, a boardgame review site, has started what is to become a series on independent games.  For their first episode, they took a look at Xavier Lardy's Haunted.  From the review, I found it a little tricky to figure out how the game worked, but they seemed to like it after some initial confusion about the rules.

More importantly to me, though, this might be a way to get some exposure for independent games - they seem to have pretty good production values on the videos, and the hosts seem to have played the game and taken the time to think about it.  I've seen more detail in other video reviews (e.g. Tom Vasel's videos through the Dice Tower), but these might be a good way to get some exposure for a new release, even if it's a self-published or print-on-demand one like mine at TheGameCrafter.com

The first episode of The Gamer's Table seems to have about 7,400 views at the time I'm writing this; some from the more recent season have more like 400-500, so it's not a huge audience, but presumably it's a dedicated one seeking out this kind of content.  Tom Vasel's seem to have more like 2,000-3,000, but these are games that probably start with a wider audience already by being published.  Might be worth submitting my stuff.

UPDATE: They're actually up to five episodes on independent games. I watched the fifth episode just now, and the explanation of the game was more detailed and easier to follow.  Neat stuff.

Guiding design principles

This is a good article, with lots of advice I should take to heart but don't always.