Rules for Mansion

Below please find my rules for Mansion, which I submitted to the BGDF monthly design showdown for May, which had a theme of "Home Improvement."  The contest rules and other entries are here.  These rules are expanded a bit from my entry - I didn't realize when making them that I was limited to 1000 words.

Mansion ©2010 by Dave Dobson For 2-4 players Clayton McMansion, the wealthiest tycoon in town, needs a new home. He is offering a $10 million prize to the builder who constructs the most elaborate mansion, something in tasteful Italian marble. Object The object of Mansion is to construct the most elaborate home. Players compete with each other for building materials and plans to construct new rooms in their mansions. They score points for adding rooms to their mansions, the more elaborate room the better. They must obey the building codes, and they earn bonuses for completing floors and creating taller mansions. Game Components 30 coin tokens 30 wood tokens 30 marble tokens 30 plumbing tokens Plans deck (80 cards, showing various rooms and staircases, the costs to build them, and the point value for completing the room or staircase) 4 Bid boards 4 Bid board covers Turn indicator board and pawn Setup Shuffle the Plans deck and deal a hand of five cards to each player. These cards are kept secret from other players. Flip the next four Plans cards face up and place them in the center of the table. Place the rest of the cards in a pile face down in the center of the table. Give each player 5 wood tokens, 5 marble tokens, 5 plumbing tokens. Place the remaining tokens in piles in the center of the table. Place the coin tokens in a pile in the center of the table. Give each player one bid board and one bid board cover. Place the Turn Indicator board in the center of the table, and place the pawn on Turn 1. Choose one player to go first. This player is the Starting Player. Game Play Game turns are broken down into two phases, the Bidding phase and the Building phase. Bidding phase Collect Income - At the start of the bidding phase, give each player five coins to use in the bidding. Players may also have additional coins remaining from previous turns. Placing Bids - In the bidding phase, each player secretly places coins onto the four areas of his or her bid board (wood, marble, plumbing, and plans), with the following guidelines: The player may allocate his or her coins in whatever way he or she wishes The player may leave one or more areas empty The player need not spend all of his or her coins; any unused coins are kept for future turns When finished allocating their coins, players place their bid board covers over their bid boards to conceal their bids from the other players. When all players are finished, they reveal their bids. No Bid Means No Reward - If, in any of the four areas, players do not bid any coins, they do not take part in that area and receive no resources of that type. Building Materials - The bids for the three building materials (wood, marble, and plumbing) are resolved as follows, depending on the number of players in the game: 4 players: the top bidder gets 4 of the material, the 2nd bidder gets 3, the 3rd bidder gets 2, and the low bidder gets 1. 3 players: the top bidder gets 4 of the material, the 2nd bidder gets 3, and the low bidder gets 1. 2 players: the top bidder gets 4 of the material, and the low bidder gets 1. If there is a tie, both players get the value for the tied rank, and the next lowest rank is skipped. For example, in a four player game, for marble, Alex bids 4 coins, Betty and Carlos bid 2, and Draco bids 1. Alex gets 4 marble for 1st place, Betty and Carlos each get 3 for 2nd place, and Draco gets 1 for last. Plans - For the plans bidding, players get their pick of the four plan cards shown on the table. The highest bidder gets first choice, and the other players pick in order of their bids. In case of ties, whichever tied player is closest to the Starting Player (going clockwise around the table) picks first. These plans cards are added to the player’s hand and are now hidden from the other players. Finishing up - When all bids are resolved and players have collected all their rewards, collect all of the coins they bid and return them to the pile of coins at the center of the table. Replace any plans cards taken by players with cards from the Plans deck, up to a total of four cards displayed in the center of the table. Building Phase New Construction - Beginning with the Starting Player, each player may use their building materials to build the rooms or staircases for which he or she has plans. Each plan card lists the costs for building that particular room or staircase. If the player has the resources required, he or she may pay those resources (by placing them back in the piles in the center of the table) to add that room or staircase to his or her mansion. Rooms or staircases added to the mansion are played face up in front of the player, arranged in rows according to which floor the player is working on. Building Codes - Mansions are divided into floors. As players construct their mansions, they start from the ground floor and may add additional floors as they continue. Players must follow the following rules in constructing their mansions, with no exceptions: Each floor of a mansion may contain from three to five rooms plus a staircase. Each floor of a mansion above the first floor must contain the same number of rooms as the floor below it, not counting staircases. Floors are built from the ground up. A player may not start a second floor until the first floor is complete. Once a player adds a room to the second floor, the first floor may not be expanded with additional rooms. The same pattern is followed for additional floors – once the size of the first floor is set, the other floors must contain the same number of rooms. Each floor must contain at least one bathroom. Each floor other than the top floor must contain exactly one staircase. The top floor need not contain a staircase, but it may. Let’s Make a Deal! - Players may not always have the building materials or plans that they need. In that case, they may trade materials, coins, or plans with other players. The terms are up to the players and must be mutually agreed and honored. Trading is restricted to resources the player currently owns – for example, "I’ll give you the next bathroom plan I draw for four wood now" is an illegal trade and is not allowed. Trades can be made at any time during the Building phase between any combination of players. Trades involving more than two players are allowed. Finishing up - when all players have had an opportunity to build a room or staircase, the Building phase is over. Advance the Turn Indicator pawn to the next space on the board. After 20 turns, the game is over; calculate scores and determine the winner. Otherwise, continue the game by starting a new Bidding phase. End of the Game The game ends after 20 turns. Scores are calculated as follows: Players score the points indicated on each room card and staircase card they have added to their mansion. Players get a bonus of 10 points for a two-bedroom house, a bonus of 30 points for a three-bedroom house, and a bonus of 60 points for a four-bedroom house. Players get a bonus of 10 points for a complete 1st floor. Players get an additional bonus of 20 points for a complete 2nd floor. Players get an additional bonus of 30 points for a complete 3rd floor. Players get an additional bonus of 40 points for a complete 4th floor. Players get an additional bonus of 50 points for a complete 5th floor. There is no bonus for a partially complete floor, but the player still gets the individual room scores. The player with the highest total score wins the game (and Clayton’s $10 million prize).

May design showdown at BGDF

I've made an entry in the BGDF Design Showdown for May.  I won last month for Drunken Strippers Ahead; I think my entry this month is a better game, although the contest parameters felt more restrictive this time, and there are more entries this time (and I think more good ones, that are complete).  We'll see how I do - the entries are all listed here.

Rules - now with 50% more diagrams

I spent much of today editing the rules for Diggity. I incorporated all the feedback I've received from my playtesters, including a new rules change I mentioned a couple posts ago that Christina and I have tested out several times.

The rest of the edits included drafting new images and tweaking lots and lots of sentences to make sure my meaning is clear.  I've found that diagrms are a lot easier to understand than text; a number of my playtesters have gotten basic concepts wrong, concepts that were (I thought) clearly stated in the rules.  A couple of these, like legal card placement and connections, are very easy to address with images, and that's made me think that the more pictures and the less text I use, the better.

Also, crafting the text of rules documents is very, very tricky.  You have two goals which are diametrically opposed; on the one hand, you need to be a lawyer - totally complete, covering all possible questions, leaving no unlikely scenario uncovered, so players always know what to do.  On the other hand, you want to be a poet - you want it to be fun, clever, and easy to read, with simple, clear, engaging language.  That's tricky - there's a reason lawyers don't generally write poetry, and poets don't write contract boilerplate.

Another thing I did, which is really helpful, is read the rules aloud.  This sounds dorky, and believe me, if you'd walked by my basement office door and saw me orating my game rules, you'd know that it was.  But it's a great way to get deeper into your writing, to hear your sentences differently as they come to you verbally, and to catch any grammatical or construction issues that you'd miss on a quick silent reading.  I give this advice to my students in writing-intensive classes.  I don't know if they follow it, but I've been reading out loud any work that's really important since a writing instructor first suggested the technique to me back in college.

I'll get another crack at these rules in a few weeks when I get some more playtesting feedback, and hopefully I'll be able to continue replacing text with diagrams once the new artwork comes in.

BGDF entries are up

The May BGDF design showdown entries are up, including mine, but I obviously won't say which that is yet. Some really creative ones there - looks like people put a lot of thought into it. The average quality and completeness seems a good bit higher than last month, too.  We'll see how it goes.

Rules tweaks

I've been trying to incorporate the feedback I got from one helpful set of playtesters for Diggity.  They seemed to like the game, but they thought there were some balance issues with how the two-player game plays out. They suggested some pretty major changes to the rules to compensate - introducing a fundamentally different way to play for the two-player game compared to the "normal" way I had designed.

After playing some more, I agree with their criticisms - the two-player game can get pretty luck-intensive, and one person can get ahead pretty fast if things get out of balance.  But I don't agree with their fix. One thing I like about the game as it is now is how simple the rules are, and changing how gold is mined would change the whole balance of the cards.

So, I tried adding a simple fix - you need to play a few cards before mining gold.  This is in line with the simplicity of the rest of the rules, and isn't hard to understand.  Initially, I said you had to have four cards played before mining; playing with my wife, it became clear pretty fast that it would be better to have an odd number, three or five, so the first opportunity to mine for gold goes to the player who didn't get gold last.

What I wasn't expecting is how strongly this small change pulled at the two-player game in other ways.  With a guaranteed delay before gold can come out, it leaves you free to play less defensively and more strategically; you end up using different aspects of the cards (shapes, connections, location on the board, etc.) for different purposes during play, and you end up thinking harder.  Also, it's much easier to get carts, since people play more circle cards, which I wasn't expecting at all.

I need to play some more, to figure out if there are any other pitfalls to this rule change, and then I need to see if I want to add this rule to the 3-4 player game.  The problem of runaway advantage doesn't happen nearly so often with 3-4 players, so I don't think the fix is needed, but it might be nice both to have consistency in the rules for all player numbers and maybe to get some of the strategic benefits this new way of playing adds.  These effects wouldn't be as strong with multi-player games, because the players don't have as much control over how the game goes, but it might still be neat.  If it doesn't hurt anything, I think I'll leave it in for everybody.

It's remarkable how such a minor change in rules, meant to solve one problem, creates so many other possibilities. This is why I love messing with game design, and why testing is so important - I'm going to end up with a much better game because of my great initial testers forcing me to look at this problem, and because of the resulting tinkering.  Neat stuff.

Games with connecting cards

Here is the mockup card for Diggity I mentioned yesterday.  The green connections are the new ones; the red the old.  Just that little shift in layout has helped a lot.

I love games with connecting cards, but it's a bit hard to pull off graphically.  One of my other games in development (really long, like decade-long development) has this too.  This is Galapagos, where the cards are body parts for creatures that are interchangeable, kind of like those children's books where you can connect different animal heads on different animal bodies, or different people heads on different uniforms.  With six different body part types, that gets confusing, and very hard to draw, especially for someone of my limited artistic abilities.

That layout difficulty may be why more games don't do this.  I saw one new release, Hagoth, the other day which has this as a part of the rules, and my interest was immediately piqued.  I may have to give this one a try.  It's got a subtle Mormon theme - something I haven't seen before - but I don't think Mormonism is at all central to the game.  It comes from a pretty active game design group in Utah, and I guess everybody designs from what they think about a lot.

When geometry matters

I've spent parts of  the last few days trying to figure out exactly how to lay out my Diggity cards.  I've got an artist who's hopefully going to work on the game, so I need to give him some good guidelines, and the layout has been bugging me a bit during playtesting.

The card layout matters, because the cards act as tiles - players need to line them up to play them properly, and they're not allowed to overlap the cards - see the picture included in this post to see how it plays out.  There's one connection spot on the short side of the card, and there can be two on the long side.  In the initial design, I put the one connection in the middle of the short side (that was obvious).  For the two connections on the long side, I put them 1/3 of the way in from each side, which also seemed obvious.

But it turns out that position leads to occasional confusion.  One of the rules is that the cards aren't allowed to overlap when played, and given the 2.5"x3.5" size of the cards,  the one-third offset actually creates somewhat frequent questions about whether cards are overlapping or not.  The 1/3 offset looks nice; it's a natural ratio.  But shifting the connection points just a hair towards the outside seems to help a lot. It's a tiny shift - about 0.07 inches - but it makes a big difference in how the cards connect, and it doesn't change the look too much.

This seems crazily specific, but it's something that playtesting has really helped with.  Not blind playtesting, which is great for rules clarity but might miss this kind of thing.  What I needed here was to play my own game a bunch with other people and watch how they play and interact with the components.  Can't take any shortcuts, it seems.

UPDATE: It appears I'm not alone in sweating the small stuff

Rio Grande game design contest

Here's another game design contest, sponsored by Rio Grande games.  The contest looks really neat; unlike many others, there's no entry fee.  The fees, which can sometimes be pretty high, are usually designed to weed out the clueless and uncommitted, but this contest gets around this problem by imposing a kind of  "regionals" aspect.  To get to the final round, which happens at the CHI-TAG (Chicago Toy and Game Fair) convention in November, you have to make it through an internal competition from a local game-design group, which they call a Hosting Committee.  They're limiting the input to ten hosting committees, which means at the finals, they won't have so many games to work through.  They've given pretty clear guidelines for judging for the regionals, too.

The only problem I see with it, is that it could be a bit tricky to get access to these regional groups.  There are a limited number of them, and they're not evenly geographically distributed or the same size, so you're not necessarily going to be able to get easy access to them.  If you do, you won't have the same odds at each one.

But that's a quibble. This is a neat contest with real results - Rio Grande actually published a couple of the finalists last year.  And they've made it as open as they can without going the route of charging fees, which I appreciate.

I've found a group in Tennessee that's accepting submissions - GameCon Memphis. They run October 1-3, and they're in Memphis, which is about as far as you can get from North Carolina and still be in Tennessee.  The event looks neat, and would probably be well worth my time even without the contest, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get out there during the school year (my teaching schedule is sometimes tight).  I'll happily send them a copy of one of my games to enter in the contest. If I somehow made it through to the finals, I'd have to get to Chicago in person in late November, but I can probably make that work.

Looks like a neat opportunity! I wish there were more of these kinds of things.

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P.S. - I've written a few posts on various game design contests before - see here if you're interested.

The importance of theme, or how to choose an audience

Following up on yet another topic from my Paper Money discussion, it's interesting that the uber-gamers I've played with have usually been more excited about my game Cult than with what I think is my more mainstream game, Diggity. Whenever I bring both to my weekly Guilford game-playing group, among people who've tried neither, Cult usually gets people the most excited. That's always been interesting to me - I think of Diggity as an easier-to-learn, quicker-to-play, far-less-luck-intensive game, but among the gamer set, Cult is more appealing, at least for a first try.  I guess the premise of running your own cult and stealing followers from others is maybe a more gamer-y thing.  I've certainly built more humor into the cards, with silly stuff you can base your cult around, and cards that are called funny things and have quirky powers.

I enjoy both games a lot.  I think Diggity is the "better" one - more replay value, more strategic depth, less luck.  But the theme seems to be less of a draw to people who are dedicated gamers.  So, I'm left with several questions:

• Would the theme of Cult also be more appealing to a non-gamer audience? I'm not sure. People are sometimes squishy about religious topics. The mechanics, with lots of cards with lots of words and a more complex system of turns, are harder to learn.
• Would Diggity be more appealing if I re-themed it to something quirkier, or more geek-friendly? Maybe, but I don't think so. The mining theme actually fits the mechanics pretty well, which is why I picked it; I suppose I could come up with something else that tried to connect the card-linking and part-building aspects, but I don't know what that would be.
• Which is the better one to market? This is a real toughie. If Diggity appeals more to non-gamers, then that's a bigger potential audience. But if Cult appeals more to gamers, I need to keep in mind they're proven game buyers. Then it becomes a numbers game - a bigger audience, or a more responsive one - and I don't really know enough to answer that. Maybe if I get to the point where I have both games in release, I'll be able to; at this point, I can't.

So, I'm betting on Diggity for now.  Part of that is that it's cheaper and easier to produce - fewer cards, shorter rules, and no tokens required. I'd love to see Cult with better art in general release, too. We'll see how I do.

NDA? No way.

On the Paper Money broadcast, the topic of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) came up.  I think Ben brought it up in jest, and I responded to the topic.  The behavior in question here is the reluctance on the part of many newbie game designers to share what they've made with others.  In the most egregious cases, this manifests as something like expecting a game publisher to sign an NDA before even looking at a game design for potential publication. In less acute forms, it's refusing to post an idea, or to offer your game for playtesting, for fear of idea theft.

Are there individual cases where game designs have actually been stolen, submitted by the thieves, and published? Yeah, there are probably a few, although most of them are of the "I knew this guy who knew a guy..." unverifiable variety, and the others are often cases where somebody saw an idea, modified it, and came up with a better way to implement it. In my life, I know a guy whose mother (the story goes) invented Monopoly, and the idea was copied by a guest (Mr. Darrow) and sold to Parker Brothers. But even that story doesn't line up with other versions of history. My own uncle was convinced that his idea for a train game had been stolen by a company he submitted it to, but without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate.

But even if you're swayed by this kind of story, going into full paranoia mode isn't warranted, I think.  Here's why:

• Your game idea isn't that good.  The odds that you have come up with a game even worth stealing are tiny.  It probably sucks, at least in its current form.  If you don't show it to anybody, it will continue to suck, alone, in the darkness.
• Even if your game is good, your game idea isn't unique.  There are probably fifteen other people who've come up with a similar idea, so it can't really even be stolen from you. There aren't that many ways to get people to interact in a traditional game sense, so there aren't that many possible game designs.
• Even if your idea is unique, your mechanics can't be protected. There's no way to copyright or trademark a game mechanic or theme.  I'm not a lawyer, but the rules are pretty simple to understand.  You can copyright text, artwork, and some elements of graphic design (these are easy to protect; it's nearly automatic as soon as you create it).  You can trademark words and artwork (these are significantly harder to protect). You can patent an actual physical invention or a method of doing something, but most boardgame patents are frivolous, over-broad, or end up being unpatentable.
• Even if your game is good, your idea unique, and your concept somehow protectable, the odds that you'll get published are minuscule. And forcing somebody to sign an NDA before even looking at the thing almost guarantees that you'll not even get looked at.

So, there's no real benefit to being so paranoid. Your game will get better if you show it to other people. You'll get feedback; you'll see it in action; you'll get to make changes; you'll get it out there to be considered by the world. Smarter people than you will tell you what's wrong and how to fix it. You'll see people trip over obstacles that you never imagined were problems. And ideally, you'll have the joy of seeing your work appreciated by others.

So, I'm going for the full disclosure strategy.  I've had my game rules published on the web for six months now, so if anybody were to copy anything, it would be obvious where it came from. And because of this, and because of sharing the game with anybody who's willing to try it, I've had the benefit of feedback, commentary, and discussion. The world can be a nasty, backbiting place, but I haven't found the game design community to be so. I guess I'd rather take part in it and learn from it than hide behind the door with a shotgun.

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UPDATE: Since writing this, I've run across this fine article by Shannon Applecline which addresses many of the same issues, with case studies.

Luck vs. Fun

Carrying on from my previous discussion here and here, I thought I'd try for a rudimentary analysis of the luck factor in games.  So, I chose a bunch of popular games, estimated (roughly) the percent of a game's outcome determined by luck rather than skill, then looked up the game's rating on BoardGameGeek.com.  I graphed these up, and found some things I expected to, namely:

• There's a distinct drop in rating at the high-luck end of the scale, indicating that players don't much like games they don't have control over.
• The ratings are split for games at the low-luck end of things; complex games are rated relatively high, while simple games (checkers in this case) are rated low.
• It looks like there's a sweet spot somewhere around 25-50% luck-determined where you could maximize enjoyment, but there are few games which fall in this neighborhood

Is this a cheesy exercise?  Yes.  Are my ratings arbitrary?  Pretty much.  Do I need more data?  Yes, particularly at the lower luck levels.  Is there a sampling bias among BGG raters? Totally; my guess is they are looking for less luck in a game than the average person.

And there are many more variables to consider - complexity, theme, ease and enjoyment of play mechanics, fun, etc.  But I think it gets at something fundamental in game design, too.  People want their decisions to matter, probably the most, but they enjoy a bit of chance in determining the outcome.

I may try to set this up as a survey-style thing, to let people add more games and to rate them themselves. That would help to remove my particular bias from the data.

More on luck

I recently posted on the idea of randomness in games, and I confessed to being one who likes a little luck in the mix.  I think serious game hobbyists tend to frown on such things - the term "Ameritrash" in reference to luck-heavy games is inherently pejorative - but I think that's silly.

A game with no luck involved isn't really a game.  It's difficult to think of anything (other than a direct physical contest) that would even qualify as a game with no luck - you're reduced to something like arm wrestling, the 100 meter dash, or weightlifting.  But even those activities have some luck - the fastest runner might trip, or the strongest lifter's pants might rip at an inopportune moment.  OK, but suppose we have a game that's entirely devoid of luck - is it any fun at all?  Only if the activity itself is fun, and even then, it can be a stretch.

Chess is often cited as the end-member of luckless games.  Of course, there's still technically luck - the chance that an opponent might not see a move, or fail to predict a board setting seven moves ahead.  I suppose at the lofty heights of the grandmasters, this becomes less common, but a human mind can only contain and foretell so much, so there's still the element of luck - you need your opponent to fail before you do, and when that happens is not all under your control.  But there's no built-in randomness, so the luck factor is minimized.

Tic Tac Toe is actually parallel to chess in this regard; it's just simplified.  Unlike chess, where the variety of moves and outcomes complicates gameplay, there's always a best move in Tic Tac Toe, and it's trivial to figure out what that is.  So, there's no luck at all.  Except that the only way to win is when somebody screws up and doesn't make that best move, and you have to be lucky for that to happen.  But nobody wants to play Tic Tac Toe once they've mastered it. I'd argue that's because the element of chance is gone from it.  Imagine a Tic Tac Toe variant where you flip a coin before moving, and you only get to make a move if you flip heads - a much more interesting game, with more replay value, although largely luck-based at that point.

Let's look at the other end member - 100% random luck.  The coin flip, or high card cut, or a slot machine, or a lottery ticket.  There's no element of skill at all (although like the luck in arm wrestling, I suppose there could be a tiny bit of skill at the margins, if you're a good card shark or die roller or coin flipper).  All of these pure luck games are totally boring, and not really games at all.  They're not worth playing, because they're pointless.  They only work if there's something else interesting going on - money riding on the outcome, or perhaps another kind of stakes - spin the bottle, anyone?

So, if luck in games is a spectrum from none to all, where none is Tic Tac Toe and all is a coin flip, then both end-members are trivial and uninteresting, and the only fun place lies in between.  Contests like arm wrestling, chess, and darts may be out on another dimension entirely - where skill is involved, and the fun comes in proving yourself more skillful than the other players.

In boardgame design, then, there's a sweet spot, although exactly where it is will vary for different folks. Enough skill that skill determines the outcome most of the time, but enough luck that a less skilled player has a shot at winning.  It's tricky to find that spot, but the best games leverage luck against skill to create something better than either alone.

Blind playtesting results

I mentioned earlier I've been trying to do some blind playtesting. I've gotten some good feedback from a playtester I found on BGG.  He and his wife had some very insightful comments and questions about the rules, catching small but important details and interpretations I had missed, even though he eventually interpreted nearly all the rules the right way.

He also had a rules change suggestion which would completely redesign how the game works in the two-player game.  I'm not sure how that will fit in, and I admit to being a little hesitant to make such a major change after all the other testing I've done, but I'll have to give it a try and see what I think.  I know I need to be open to feedback.  I had identified the problem he's trying to help me address (one player getting an advantage early on that's hard to overcome), but based on my playtesting experience, I thought it was relatively uncommon and tolerable when it happened; apparently it came up more for them, so it may be an issue I need to head off.

Another playtester has tried the game, coming up with a manufacturing suggestion (don't fold the rules so many times), a potential problem (not being able to make a legal play) that's actually already covered and resolved in the rules, and a general sense that the 6-point scoring card is too powerful.  I'm not sure how much they have played, and I'm hearing the feedback second-hand through a relative.  Hopefully I'll hear some more feedback if they play again.  Unlike the testers mentioned above, this feedback is looking less worth my effort (and a $12 copy of the game), but I guess that's the way it goes.

I didn't try to give any explanation of the game before handing out these copies (hence the idea of "blind" playtest), so ideally I'm getting a good idea of what it would be like for a customer who buys the game and has to figure out how to play from the rules sheet alone.  I've got another testing copy out now to still another tester I found through TGC - hopefully I'll get some more good feedback.

One thing I'm realizing through this process is that the rules have to be very, very clear.  Nearly every group who's played one of the eight or so copies I've sent out for testing has either had major questions on how the rules work or has misinterpreted the existing rules in some way.  There have only been one or two cases where my rules actually didn't cover the situation mentioned, and I remedied those a long time ago. In most cases, I thought the rules were clear enough to resolve any questions, but they apparently weren't; in some cases, the rules section covering the issue was present and reasonably clear, but was missed by the reader or misinterpreted.  This rules-writing business appears to be a real art form, and I'll need to hone my technical writing skills for the final version.  I'm thinking more pictures, less text, and a quick handy summary card is probably the way to go.

Role of randomness

Greg Costikyan has posted a slide show on the role of chance in games which is a pretty exhaustive analysis of the topic. I've always enjoyed some randomness in games (probably why I've never gotten as deep into chess as many of my friends have). I think it's because, as Greg points out, it's an easy way to ensure variety in how a game plays out, which, to me, very much increases the replay value of a game.

My recent designs, which rely heavily on cards, have by nature a fair amount of luck. One of the early bits of feedback from a playtester is that they felt that getting a big-value score card fall early (the score cards range from 1-6 points) makes the rest of the game seem less meaningful, since the winner may already be determined. Some of my family felt this to be true, too. In my playing of the game, that hasn't seemed like a common problem - it's usually possible to catch up, and having the high value score cards adds a bit of a thrill to the game, even requiring some strategy as players decide how to use their resources and how their plays can distribute score to other players. But I have to be careful not to let my preference for a little more luck blind me to what others might want out of the game.

In each case, the people who mentioned this hadn't played very many times, but that may not matter, because you only get a few plays to fix people's opinion of a game, and if one of them is determined largely luck, you may not get another chance.

Diggity playtest and onlooker allure

I had another four-person game of Diggity on Friday, with one of my new customers and some students.  Total sales of Diggity are now at 10 - two from strangers, one from a friend (the copy above), and the other seven from another friend who gave them as gifts to a bunch of still other friends.  So, my current business model seems to be pegged mostly to people I know, which isn't a great long-term strategy, unless I become better at making lots of friends.

The game went well, I thought; one player hadn't played before, and he came in a distant 4th, which makes me think that there is legitimate skill/strategy to the game that you can learn over time.  The four-player game comes occasionally with a certain degree of kingmaking*, and that happened a bit here today, some of it intentional and some unintentional or misunderstood.  But that also allows the game to be balanced by the players - if somebody gets ahead, the other players do usually have the power to deny him or her more score.

An onlooker commented that she had trouble figuring out what was going on.  That's a little bit of a problem, since it's harder to grow by word-of-mouth if people can't catch on to what's happening.  I'm considering including some guidebook cards (a single card with the key rules on it) to hand out to each player.  Once you've played for even ten minutes, the rules are clear, but there's an initial hurdle to get over because the game doesn't play like most other card games.  But I think I can boil the rules down to about seven key points that I can fit on a card - I think that would be helpful.  I've seen that kind of thing used to good effect in several other games, and I think it will help.

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*by this I mean one player can't score, but gets to choose which other player does - this comes up fairly regularly in multi-player games of Diggity.  It's not without its strategy, because you have to decide how to use your resources, and using yours forces others to use theirs.

BGDF design showdown

It appears I've scored a narrow victory in the April Boardgame Design Showdown at BGDF.com with my game concept Drunken Strippers Ahead.  I discussed my entry here on PGJ earlier here and here.  Pretty neat. I'd like to thank the academy...  No, I digress.

Is the game something people would actually enjoy?  I think it might work at a party, and could actually be pretty fun; I'll have to print it out and try it out sometime with some friends.  I'm not positive that the art is in the public domain, which is one tricky aspect of actually producing it.

Some good critiques of all the entries are here.

BGDF entry - Drunken Strippers Ahead

In this post, I mentioned I'd entered the monthly design contest at BGDF.com.  Here's my entry, Drunken Strippers Ahead.  There are five entries, so it will be interesting to see how it goes.  Some of them use the icons in creative ways, and some have a great deal of backstory built into the game.  One has beautiful art for the sample cards.  Some of them invoke components and pieces that don't actually exist, such as decks of cards and other elements which would require careful design. That's interesting - I guess they're relying on the voter's imagination of what these parts would look like rather than actually designing them.  Other folks lay out all the components, at least in mock-up form, which is understandable.

I'm expected to vote in the contest, too, and I have to split ten votes among the entries.  I can't vote for mine.  From a strictly game-theory perspective, I suppose I should split my votes as evenly as possible so as not to advantage one of the other contestants.  Or maybe I should dump all my votes toward the game I think will lose, so that my votes don't go to help anyone.  Some prisoner's dilemma-ish stuff possible here.

But that would be weaselly.  I'll vote for ones I think are best.

BGDF design showdown for April

I entered the monthly design contest on BGDF for the first time this month. The prompt for the contest was to use this image of warning signs in some way: I don't think my entry (called Drunken Strippers Ahead) was stunningly original, as it borrows mechanics from several different games (e.g. Dictionary, Apples to Apples, Dixit) and the principle of the joke (misinterpreting warnings) from something I saw on the web a couple of years ago, but I imagine it might be fun to play, especially if you're with clever, funny people, as I often am. We'll see how the contest goes. I'll link to my entry when it's up, and let you know how I do.

I love the title, if nothing else. And I suppose having something involving drunken strippers on my blog here might drive some traffic, although not the kind of traffic I'm looking for. We'll see what Google Analytics says.

Blind Playtesting

I'm working on getting some playtesters who'll try playing my game with no contact or help other than my written rules.  I have a couple folks in the pipeline now, but I'm looking for others.

Some of my early playtests were essentially blind trials - friends and family to whom I sent copies around Christmas of last year.  They all misunderstood the rules in different ways and to varying degrees, which is no good.  I've rewritten the rules now, adding a number of pictures and examples, so I want to see how it goes with a new group of fresh eyes.

I've got two new folks whom I've never met, one an acquaintance of my father-in-law, one a guy from Boardgame Geek, so hopefully I can get some advice and input from people who don't mind giving me the cold, hard truth.  Assuming they write back, and give me some feedback, this will be well worth the investment of sending them a free copy of the game.

Puzzles as games

I just posted a review of Ricochet Robots, and as I was writing it, I was thinking about the kind of game that's really just a competitive mental puzzle. Ricochet Robots is definitely an example of this, and so is Set. I think good games scratch an itch, and these games scratch a couple of them at once. The games are designed to create a random series of logic puzzles, and its fun not only to solve the mental puzzles involved, but also to compete against others to find the solution first.

There are plenty of computer games that have the first part of that. Hardcore players of my game, Snood, mostly wind up playing the Evil level, which is essentially randomly generated, over and over. The same goes for the other popular puzzle games (e.g. Minesweeper, various solitaire games). Whenever I make a puzzle game (others of mine include Snoodoku and Snood Towers), I always try to make at least part of the puzzles randomized to give the game some replay value. As long as the puzzle part is difficult enough to provide a challenge but also able to be solved, and the solving process is fun, then people will enjoy the game, and often be willing to play over and over.

This is harder to do in a board game. It's difficult with simple components to create randomized puzzles that hit that sweet spot (possible to solve, hard enough to be challenging, and fun to solve). That's part of where Ricochet Robots and Set are so clever - the design is simple, but the game is fun because the puzzles usually work. Both can produce trivial results (easy to spot, or very simple to solve) or impossible or nearly-impossible results, but generally, they work.

If you've got a fun puzzle like this, then it's easy to turn it into a game - just have players race for the solution. The good thing about this model is that it supports multiple players (and sometimes a LOT of players) very easily. One bad thing is that they're often very skill-based, so it's sometimes difficult for new players (or players who just aren't very good at them) to enjoy them or feel like they're accomplishing anything.

I'd love to do a boardgame like this - the puzzle games I've written are really fun to design and tweak. I had a great time writing code to generate sudoku puzzles (and two different versions of a sudoku solving algorithm) when writing Snoodoku. When you don't have computing power behind you, it's a good deal harder to come up with varied, interesting puzzles that hold players' attention, but when it works, it's a lot of fun.

So, here's to puzzle games - once I get up and running with my other more traditional games, maybe I can try my hand at one of those.