Stress

My daughter taught me Stress today.  Interesting game, but the design is weird.  The game is set up (and the object stated in such a way) so that it appears to be better to be faster at making matches.  However, if both players are competent (not even good, just competent), then the whole thing boils down to endgame, and who can set up the last winning play first.  The first 95% of the game is exciting but mostly irrelevant, since the faster player will nearly always end up just waiting for the slower one, who gains control of the game, because the faster player will be out of "smart" plays.  The faster player can try some tricky moves designed to hinder or trick the slower one, but it's mostly beyond his or her control.

I might have to play it some more, and play deliberately slowly, to see if the slower player can actually always engineer a win by virtue of control of the game and more options with the cards.  I suspect that might be possible, which would make the best strategy actually the opposite of how it seems upon first glance.

Yoggity help cards

I ordered copies of Yoggity for the Rio Grande competition today.  I added some informational cards - I hope they help the players at the Memphis GameCon understand the game more quickly.  TGC has shifted their card sheets to 18 cards, so I had some extra cards available for free thanks to the reformat, so luckily I get more cards for the same price.

Images are below - many games now have this kind of thing, and I think it sums up what you're supposed to do pretty well.  People will still have to consult the rules for the details, but hopefully this will help the learning curve. I'm probably going to do it for Diggity, too.  These images include a margin on the edge that would be cut off in printing, so there's not as much blue as it seems.

New puzzle game concept art

While waiting for art for Diggity, I've been thinking about a puzzle game.  I was playing some Snoodoku, and trying to figure out what made that fun, and came up with a new idea.  It's going to be a logic puzzle game, played on a computer, details still a bit fuzzy, but I've been working on some icons (see below).  Also learning Illustrator, which is a bit tricky for me.

Attack from Mars

I fixed (I hope) a nagging problem on my pinball machine today - replaced the opto sensor for the saucer trough so that it can detect balls again.  This is good, because previously, the game would pause six seconds and then flail around trying to find the ball every time it goes down there.

I managed to complete several tasks to do this:

• Figured out where to find non-Williams replacement sensor boards - non-trivial, because the manufacturer has been out of business for some time.
• Removed the broken sensors without breaking anything else
• Soldered the replacements ones into place, crossed my fingers, and turned it back on

My soldering skills are shaky at best (I won't be posting glamor shots of my silvery beads, let's say), but the game works again, and I've found that any job I complete successfully that requires soldering is one that I'm inordinately proud of - my burnt fingers are a badge of honor.

From a game design standpoint, this is a really well-designed pinball game.  It's fun for beginners, because there is obvious stuff to hit, lots of forgiving help, including a long ball saver, and a great sense of humor in the graphics and sound. Even people who've never played any pinball before end up having fun, laughing, and scoring hundreds of millions of points (the point scoring is ridiculous - my high is about 34 billion).  It's also really fun for more experienced players, because it's got six big goals (some relatively simple, some really, really hard) to complete to get to the final battle with the Martians, which I only manage to do about once in every 30-40 games or so, making it quite elusive.  Lots to learn there about designing other games, too - depth, theme, humor, and a variety of well-balanced overlapping goals.

Sandcastles rules

The rules to my entry for the BGDF contest are here.  Pictures, too.  It shares some elements with Diggity what with the map building, but I think it would play completely differently.  I might have to make up cards and test it to see.

Sandcastles wins!

My entry in the July BGDF showdown won!  Yippee.  I had fun thinking this one up.  I went with simultaneous movement for one phase the game - not sure how that would actually work, but I give the players something complicated to do with a common set of resources to draw from, so I think it would be fun to play.  It might be like Set, though, where I've found that natural ability is a big factor - it can be hard to enjoy a game where the emphasis is on a skill you just don't have.

I'm really enjoying these contests.  I've entered four times now, and won three of them, so that's gratifying - the games are always creative, and it keeps me active thinking up a new game each week.  And condensing the rules into 800 words is good practice!

July BGDF entries up

The entries for the July BGDF Design Showdown are up here.  Voting ends soon.  Only five entries this time, and they took a variety of different paths with the wide-open topic choice.  Some interesting ones in there.  I'll reveal mine next week when the voting is done (it's supposed to be anonymous).

Nothing new under the sun

I just saw a picture of some folks playing a mining card game that looked a bit like Diggity, and after some research, I realized it is called - Saboteur.  I've read the rules, and the game is really nothing like mine, other than the mechanic of using cards to build a map and the thematic elements.  It involves secret roles and bluffing, and the play looks totally different - more like the traitor/werewolf style games that are so popular these days.

But it's a bummer to have something look similar - I'd rather have mine be completely unique, but of course that's not possible.

Fun - the key ingredient.

A great post by Brett over at Brettspiel.com on one of the big pitfalls with game design.  The resulting game has to be fun, regardless of how cool or innovative the rest of your stuff is.  Fun is even more important than all that.  I was reminded of this while playing LCR with a group of friends recently.  From a design perspective, the game is, well, totally lame.  You roll dice and move chips around, and it's all totally luck-based and meaningless.  But it was fun.

The other thing I'd add is, what you think will make it fun is often not what makes it fun, and when you play your game, you shouldn't ignore what people are enjoying.  This happened to me with Cult - the thing people like the most is not the carefully designed game structure, the multiple strategies you can pursue, or the variety of special action cards.  The thing they like is the titles and realms, which are just silly, and don't actually impact the game much at all.  But if they can be "Flurb, Blood-Spattered Pain Warden, God of the Small Intestine," they love it, much more than anything I actually did in terms of design.  People even switch one meaningless title to get to a funnier meaningless title, all the time, even though it has precisely zero impact on the game, and yet they laugh hard while doing it.

What's the lesson here?  Brett's gotten to most of it, but I think you also need to think of the game not just in strategic terms, but also in social terms.  LCR is fun because you play it with other people, and the outcome is unknown, and there's not a ton of thinking - it taps into the core strengths of gambling, and allows you to be social while you play.  Cult is apparently fun (at least to some players) because some of the cards are funny, not because of the game itself.

Follow the fun.

Gentoo Rules

This was my entry (the winning entry) for the June BGDF game design showdown. The contest required a deck building component and also a slippery slope component, where a player who was ahead might tend to stay ahead.
(c) 2010 by Dave Dobson

Gentoo

A game of penguin procreation

Components:

• 12 Nesting Stone tokens 
• 20 Penguin tokens 
• 90 Gentoo cards 
• 20 Fish tokens

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Object:

Hatch as many new penguins as you can.

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Setup:

1.    Place six Snow cards in a Player Pile in front of each player. Any extra Snow cards will not be used.

2.    Shuffle the rest of the Gentoo cards. Flip the top four face up in the center of the table. These are the Choice Cards.

3.    Place the rest of the cards face down in a stack in the center of the table. This is the Draw Pile.

4.    Place the Penguin Tokens next to the Draw Pile.

5.    Each player flips their top three cards and places them in a row. These are the player’s Cards In Play. They will all be Snow cards at the start.

6.    Give each player three Nesting Stones.

7.    Give each player five Fish Tokens. These are used to pay for Choice Cards.

8.    The player who has been closest to the South Pole goes first.

Game Play:

Each player’s turn has two phases:

Phase I: Common Area

1.    Draw – flip the top card from the Draw Pile and add it to the Choice Cards in the center of the table. There should now be five cards there. If you run out of cards in the Draw Pile, shuffle the Discard Pile and use it as the new Draw Pile.

2.    Choose – You may choose one of the Choice Cards to add to your hand. Take the Choice Card and add it to your Used Pile next to her Cards in Play. You may not use this card this turn, but it will come into play later when the Used Pile is shuffled and turned into the Player Pile. Some cards have a cost shown as fish icons on the card. If so, you must pay the required number of fish tokens to choose the card. Eggs - The player may only choose an Egg Card if he or she has the required number of Nesting Stones indicated on the card.

3.    Discard – If there are more than four Choice Cards showing, pick one to discard. Move it to the Discard Pile.

Phase II: Personal Area

1.    Flip – flip the top card of your Player Pile and add it to your Cards in Play. If you have no more cards in your Player Pile, shuffle your Used pile to use as your new Player Pile. When you do this, restore your fish tokens back up to five tokens.

2.    Play – you may play any one of your Cards in Play. Choose a Card in Play, places it on the Discard Pile, and follows the instructions on the card. Hatching an Egg – you may hatch an egg only when you have both an Egg card and a Hatch card showing in your Cards in Play. Turn both of them in and collect a Penguin token. When you hatch an egg, you must give one of your nesting stones to another player. If you have no nesting stones, you can still hatch your egg.

3.    Move to Used – If you cannot or choose not to play a card, then if you have more than three Cards in Play, choose one of them and move it to the Used pile.

After these two phases, play proceeds to the next player.

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Winning the Game:

The first player to collect five penguin tokens wins the game.

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Cards:

·         Snow – Cannot be played. You may move it to your Used pile if you have more than three Cards in Play.

·         Egg – combine with Hatch to produce a penguin. Each Egg shows the nesting stones (3, 4, or 5) required to collect.

·         Skua (1 fish) – discard any Egg currently visible on the table (Cards in Play, Choice Cards, or atop a player’s Used Pile).

·         Stone Thief (1 fish) – take a Nesting Stone from any other player.

·         Good Nesting Site (1 fish) – reduces the number of nesting stones required to take an Egg by one. Discard when Egg is collected. Does not count as your played card. Limit one per Egg.

·         Hatch (1 fish) – Use to collect a penguin. Requires an Egg in play.

·         Leopard Seal (2 fish) – force another player to lose one penguin token.

·         Vicious Peck (1 fish) – blocks a Stone Thief card; you play this card out-of-turn to keep from losing your stone.

·         Confusing Blizzard – Reverse direction of play

·         Gone Fishing – The next player loses a turn

·         Thaw – if you have a Snow card in play, melt it. Discard both the Thaw and the Snow cards.

June BGDF Challenge Results

Looks like my entry, Gentoo, narrowly won the June BGDF design competition. Woohoo! This is the third month I've participated, and I've enjoyed it each time. This was certainly the biggest field of competitors - 11 entries and lots of good ideas.

This is my first entry that I actually printed out and playtested, which was fun. It worked pretty well after some iterations and rule changes. I think the requirements of the contest hurt the game a little bit, since I was required to include some elements that I'd otherwise avoid.
I'll get the rules up soon and comment some more.

CloudBerryGames

I've learned of a new site, CloudBerryGames.com, that looks like an effort to bring together designers, artists, and others to help games get designed, completed, tested, and produced.  They make their money by charging a small subscription fee to designers.  They say they'll actually publish some of the games submitted on the site, which would be cool - I bet the economics don't work for that until/unless they grow really big, but it's an interesting idea.  I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I'll look more later.

They just put up a blog post that markets them as a way to prevent idea theft - interesting, since most serious designers have moved past that particular fear so common in newbies.

Eleven entries!

The June BGDF design showdown received 11 entries!  I'm not sure why it was so popular this time - maybe because some versions of the theme (deck building) could lead to a CCG-style game, and I hear those are popular.  This leads to two concerns - one is that I'll have stiff competition; the other is that I now have to do a critique of ten other games to assign my votes!  That could take a while.

June BGDF Showdown entry in place

I finished my June BGDF Game Design Showdown entry today - I think it's a good one, but it was a tricky assignment this time out - the theme wasn't specified, but the mechanics and structure were quite closely regulated.  We'll see what the voters think; it's hard to predict how the voting will go and how the other entries will look.

I'll let y'all know which one mine is when the voting is done.

June BGDF Challenge

I guess I was going to run into Dominion sooner or later.  The June BGDF game design showdown is up, and it relies on Dominion's deck-building mechanic pretty heavily.  I haven't played Dominion, but my impression is that you've got a limited number of resources which you spend to buy cards; some cards give you more resources or moves or abilities, other cards give you points.  So, it's a tradeoff between stuff that will help you play and stuff that will help you win.  Sounds interesting.

The other part of the challenge is that they want a slippery slope feel.  This is where getting ahead gets you further ahead, and getting behind gets you further behind, or, in other words, a positive feedback loop.  This kind of thing has a tendency to end games fast and/or make them pointless to finish, but part of the challenge is to have a slippery slope tendency but not to have it ruin the game.

This is going to be hard to do, and hard to judge, since the rules submitted for these things are usually incomplete, making it hard to imagine the final game.  Since game balance is key here, and since that usually comes from iterative playtesting and tweaking rather than from rules, it's going to be tricky.

I'll see what I can do.

Grid Game

Eric Martin at Boardgame News links to a flash game called "Grid Game" (located here).  It's a fairly hypnotic thing to try once or twice, and it's interesting how it creates order out of randomness based on only a few simple rules.  Very elegant.

I don't think it has a lot of game value, though.  Like Bejeweled and a variety of other recent games, you make a single play that triggers others, and your eventual score depends on how all the triggering events stack up.  I suppose if you were some kind of Rain Man you could look at the board and see how your move would cascade through the playfield, but I doubt most folks can do that.

In Bejeweled, a whole bunch of your score comes directly from the random number generator - what jewels get created and fall onto your board.  That's always frustrated me with Bejeweled and similar games. This Grid Game is more deterministic than that - you have all of the information you need to predict what will happen, but the complexity of how it plays out is beyond the scope of what people can reasonably imagine.  Your score just happens to you - you don't earn it.

Assuming I wanted to turn this into a game, rather than a toy, how would I improve it?  If you reduced the board to a much smaller size, say 5x5, then it would become more reasonably predictable, and there could be some skill to playing it.  Designing some pre-set scenarios with specified maximum scores would be fun, too - you'd need to puzzle out what move gives you the best score.

Story Arc

Jonathan Degann has an interesting post here from 2003 at the now defunct Games Journal about the concept of a story arc in a game.  He makes some interesting points - games that have you constantly doing the same thing over and over are harder to like, while games that have some kind of story built in have an advantage.  I don't know that I'd agree that it's always better to have a story arc, but it can help.

Some very popular games have this kind of thing - chess, for example, plays out as an extended drama, with characters leaving (and later entering) the mix.  The game always goes through this story, with progressive limitation as pieces are removed, while the ones that are left gain expanded power because the crowding goes away.  Monopoly has a structural story built in - at first, nobody has any properties, and there's a race to gather them.  Later on, the game moves to a trading phase, as players try to collect sets.  Then, there's an end game, where it becomes kind of like an extended version of Russian roulette, seeing who's going to land on the hotels first.

However, even games without this structurally demanded story arc can be really fun, and they often create their own plotlines as they go.  As a kid, I heard my relatives discuss their bridge games endlessly, and that game doesn't have a built-in plot - you bid, you play the tricks, you score; repeat.  Same thing with nearly any game with dominos.  Basketball is 40 minutes of doing the same thing over and over, but games are really exciting to watch, and the score (and the fouls) become the story as leads grow and shrink.  Many pub games - darts, pool, foosball, etc. - all are very fun but are by nature completely repetitive.  Plenty of card games don't have a plot, either - see casino, poker, cribbage, Uno.  You would be hard-pressed to find any kind of plot here other than the changes in scores, but they're still fun.

Diggity, as a card game, is less about story than most games, but I think it still has one.  The basic plays are repetitive (every turn you add a mine card to the table), but there's an overarching story there - the tools come and go from turn to turn, people have to decide to use them or not as the gold comes out, tools get stolen, the lead changes, people sometimes gang up on the leader.  Shakespeare it aint, but there's still some drama there.  I'll need to think about my other designs and see if I can add some to them, too.

Playtest reports

I played Diggity and Yoggity with a game-enthusiast friend last week.  Both were completely new to him.  It went pretty well; in Diggity, I got some good cards at the start and built a lead he couldn't ever come back from, which isn't an ideal first-time experience, but should be somewhat rare.  The gameplay was better; it continues to surprise me that I've actually gotten a lot better at Diggity - I wouldn't have thought of it as having very deep strategy; you have a relatively small number of decisions to make, and there's usually one that seems like an optimal one - but every time I've played recently, I've noted some more subtle strategic decisions creeping in, and I tend to do consistently better (having played it more than anyone in the universe) than my opposition, which suggest there's some kind of skill (or at least an enhanced understanding of the rules) at work.

Yoggity, which I've entered in the Memphis regional of the Rio Grande competition, was much more balanced; I ended up slightly ahead, but the outcome was in question for most of it, and there was a definite impact from drawing cards.  The major strategy in the two player game there is when to collect and use your coins; the 3-4 player game, with item trading, requires much more shrewd deal-making.  The 2-player game is still a lot of fun, but it's just very different from the multi-player version.

The three-cards-before-miner rule that I added in the last rules revision continues to work well, although it is still hard to explain.  Not hard to understand; just hard to explain, which is weird.  I'll have to work more on the phrasing.

Anyway, an interesting (and thought-provoking) couple of games.

More GTS09 talk notes - Self Publishing

Here are my notes from listening to another talk from GTS 2009 - this one called Publishing Your Game Yourself (mp3 link here)

The speakers are from Bucephalus Games:
- Anthony Gallela
- Dan Tibbles

Here are my notes:

Opening comments

• Very difficult to sell your own game
• Design, production, manufacturing are easy
• Selling is far harder than all of these
• Important to figure out who target audience is - there's a risk that the game is unsellable
• 75% of new games are essentially unsellable, or they don't sell through their print run

Designing a marketable product

• What's the key to your game?
• Theme?  If so, then the game must pursue the theme at the expense of all other parts
• Mechanics?  If so, then nothing else can get in the way
• Listen to testers - be willing to change the game - don't be too invested
• 1st 3,000 copies are sold based on appearance and artwork - NOT on theme or gameplay
• Shelf appeal is therefore key
• The box should reveal what the game is like - no surprises, no hidden stuff
• Refining a game is key - it often involves removal of features and rules, boiling it down to the central, pure elements
• Blind playtesting - very important; creates a much better rulebook
• Should you be in the room?
• Anthony says yes; your observations will let you see what assumptions they made when there were rules gaps or problems
• Some say no; reasons cited are that the players won't be honest
• Consult retailers and distributors - they are your initial direct customers
• GAMA has free focus groups at the conferences
• Talking to others is key

Selling to a publisher

• Very unlikely to happen
• Game design is easy; everybody has one, so they're cheap and readily available - it's the marketing and selling that's harder and much more expensive
• Game companies don't want to work with you
• They'll often prefer to work with in-house designs, or they're small, and are actually publishing the owner/operator's design
• The numbers for this happening are a fraction of a percent chance - a few games are printed out of thousands of submissions
• To do this, you'll need to do all the development ahead of time - the testing, the rules, the layout, the winnowing out of rules
• Might be worth doing, but expect rejection
• If you're going to do it, look hard for submission guidelines, and then follow them
• Show them a good prototype - they can imagine it better, but you need to make it look good, and make it look how you want it to
• Royalties - no advance, probably 3-10%, average of 5%
• Make sure you retain rights, and you get the rights back after 18-24 months out of print
• 3,000 to 5,000 copies is a good run in the hobby market

Self-publishing

• Don't publish with money you can't lose all of
• Don't start with a big print run - go with 3,000 max
• You'll always find flaws
• You're probably blowing your money
• Maybe 30% of games can sell 3000 copies
• Maybe 2% of games can sell 5000 copies
• Nearly nobody sells more than that on a first game
• There are 1,000 new games published every year - most of them don't get much distribution, don't get sold
• Companies are usually willing to share their sources for production in Asia
• Designers are often blind to flaws - missing words, missing typos, etc.

[Dan Echoed a bunch of the China sourcing talk here]

Distribution

• Game stores nearly always buy from distributors - there are only a few of these
• Toy stores don't use distributors - instead, they'll order directly or from sales reps
• GAMA is a good way to meet up with distributors
• Reps might also be an option if you can interest them
• Market is multi-level
• Distributor
• Retailer
• Customer
• You should talk to each of these folks to gauge marketability
• Alliance would be a good source to talk to; building a relationship with them (and listening to their feedback) is very useful, since they're so big

Post-Talk Q&A Session

• Majority of new game companies fail - 90% of them fail
• Breaking even is success
• Art costs - can be a couple thousand dollars even for simple games
• Might be worth it, but only if you're definitely self-publishing, and even then probably not
• Art schools, commissions are ways around the costs
• Why do game companies fail? 
• It takes lots of work, and you may not be able or willing to put in that effort
• Unreasonable expectations
• Very limited return, and gets frustrating on all the work
• Lack of preparation - getting the design, production, or marketing wrong
• Patents are silly
• Game designs are very difficult to steal, and also very difficult to protect
• Stealing isn't worth it
• Ideas are duplicated

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This was also good stuff - not quite as new to me or as insider-y as the Chinese manufacturing talk, but good to hear lots of my suspicions and intuitions confirmed.

Second place

Close but no cigar in the May BGDF Design Showdown (I tied for second).  These competitions are tough - the rules are often restrictive, and the voting is hard to do.  This month, there were a number of creative entries, but with the 800-word limit on the rules, and the absence of real components, it's tricky sometimes to imagine how the games will actually play out. Also, a lot of the design (in the form of art, decks of cards, etc.) can be left to the imagination.  When you're voting, you end up sometimes deciding between a well-specified game that seems OK or a game that could be really great if the parts and rules that are not specified are done well.

Tricky.  But a fun contest - my congrats to Simon Stump, the winner this month, and my thanks to Seth Jaffee for running it.