Yoggity Reader Mail

Reader Daniel writes the following about my recent post on Yoggity:

So have you decided how to tackle the judges' "ruling" (or maybe input should be a better word)? I am thinking you can go three ways: either add more strategy to the game, accept the rulings and maybe re-theme it as a kids game or ignore them because they are wrong and do not know better. But then comes the funny part if you choose door number three.

Why do you think the judges left out a big part of the strategy in the game? Did they miss it or did they not play the whole game? Or do they not think what you refer to as strategy is some mundane thing a 3 year old can do?

I would love to hear what you plan on doing with the judges feedback and whats your next step. 

Daniel sets up three possibilities:

• Add more strategy - I've considered this; I really like how the game plays now, but I understand that some folks (particularly boardgame enthusiasts) might want there to be a bit more depth. One potential weakness for the game (that doesn't seem to affect how much fun it is for me, but might for some) is that there's no overarching plotline to the game - you're doing mostly the same kind of thing in the last few turns as you are in the first few, although obviously a bunch of the scoring has already been decided by the end, and people have collected different resources and cards. It's possible that I could come up with some kind of plotline this way - something that builds up over time, that might solve both potential problems - complexity and plotting.
• Re-theme as a kids' game - Maybe a possibility, but I'm not sure it's a good one, for several reasons. One is that although the gameplay itself is pretty simple, being good at the game requires making complex strategic decisions about resource use and deal-making. So, younger kids might miss out on the part that makes the game the most fun. Another reason not to do this is that the market niche I'm looking at is probably boardgame enthusiasts - they're more likely to buy a fairly obscure game from a small publisher, I think, and I'm not so likely to get the widespread play I'd need to attract a kid-based audience. A kid-oriented game wouldn't sell well to this crowd. On the flip side, if I self-publish, I'm hoping to market the game also to my former Snood customers, and for those folks, a family-friendly game (which Yoggity certainly is) that's marketed that way would maybe be more appealing. So, I don't know what to do along these lines. My idea of a great game is one that both grown-ups and kids can play and want to play - it's simple enough to understand that kids can handle it, but fun enough and complex enough that adults enjoy it and would play by themselves. Checkers isn't quite at this level, although there are certainly grown-up checkers enthusiasts. Monopoly has become nearly exclusively child-oriented, but I think played by the proper rules, it's a fine game for adults.
• Ignore the judges - that's very tempting, but I don't know that it's a good idea. On one hand, it sounds like they didn't play the game the way it was supposed to be played, so any advice they give is not necessarily useful. On the other hand, they read my rules and chose to play that way, so either they didn't get it, or I didn't make it clear enough that trading makes the game much more fun and more complex for multiple players, and making good trades is the best strategy to win overall. My suspicion is that I could easily rewrite parts of the rules (maybe add a "strategy" section) that point out the benefits of trading in order to highlight that. I think that's maybe my best option now.

As to what they were thinking, I can't really speak to that; they obviously enjoyed the game, or they wouldn't have ranked it as highly as they did. I wish they'd tried the trading, and I need to get people to want to.

Thanks for the feedback - I have lots to think about here.

More on Yoggity and kids

The judges at Gamecon Memphis thought my game Yoggity was suited for 6-8 year old kids.  I certainly need to listen to that feedback and figure out what it means.  However, I think they're wrong, for a couple reasons.  As I said yesterday, they left out a major part of the strategy of the game, and that part of the strategy is the part that requires higher-order strategic thinking.  But a second reason might be that the game looks relatively simple on the surface, but the strategy is quite a bit deeper.

Think of chess for example - an eight-year-old could learn the rules, but a grown-up would always win.  Ditto for checkers, go, Othello - lots of games with simple rules have more complex strategy.  I think Yoggity (while admittedly not as strategically deep as chess or go) falls in the same boat - it's easy enough to learn how to play, but playing well requires some careful thinking.  I've lost a number of games of Yoggity because I made deals that ended up being bad, but I was convinced at the time that I was being very clever and helping myself out more than my opponents.

If I can get people to recognize that complexity while still appreciating the simplicity of the rules, then I think I've got a game that's a winner for a bigger audience.  People justifiably don't like games that are too simplistic, but they also don't generally like games that are byzantine, particularly if they're non-gamers.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect the Memphis judges were pretty hard-core gamers (which you'd expect for convention goers who volunteered to judge a contest).  So, maybe they were looking for something they could really sink their teeth into, rather than a lighter game like Yoggity.

A real commercial success, like Settlers of Catan, has simple rules but complex interactions, which makes it both accessible and deep.  That's what I was shooting for with Yoggity, but the Memphis judges only saw the accessible part.  So, I have to figure out how to showcase the depth, too.

Memphis results

Here's the final wrap-up from the Gamecon Memphis competition.  My game, Yoggity, got third, with a recommendation that it might be better for 6-8 year olds.

One frustration - the testers apparently never traded anything, and trading is key to the game with more than two players.  With two players, you can actually collect enough resources to make things on your own, and the strategy comes in when you decide how and when to use your coins and when it's a good idea to cancel an order.  Plus, any trade is likely to benefit your opposition as much as you, so it's difficult to do anything other than zero-sum trades, so people tend not to trade much.

With more than two players, you don't often have all the resources you need, so you have to trade, and making good trades is a huge part of the strategy. I'm not positive the game was played by more than two at a time, so it's possible that's why they didn't trade.  But I'd think they'd try it with more judges than just two, and I think I made trading a clear part of the rules, so I'm surprised that they wouldn't try trades in that case - there's a clear strategic advantage in a three player game for two players to make a trade that hoses the third.  In multi-player games, the best traders nearly always win.

Without the trading, the game could be probably be playable by an 8-year-old (a six year old would still have trouble, at least the 6-year-olds I've known), but with trading, you have to be pretty smart, clever, and charming to come up with good deals that are appealing to all sides, and kids would not be able to make that kind of decision consistently well.

I guess that's a problem submitting a game anonymously - you don't get a chance to demo or explain the game.  But that's going to be the case if you're selling your game to the public, too, especially if they're picking it up off a game store shelf.  So, I've got to make it more clear in the rules that trading is key to the game.

Jump Gate review and the complexity of newfangled technology

Matt Worden is (at least superficially) like me - he's designed a number of computer games, is also into designing board games, and has published some of them through TheGameCrafter.

He recently had a pretty positive review from Tom Vasel via the Dice Tower podcast, which I'm sure is fun for Matt.  The game looks fun, and the review is thorough. As a guy who's publishing, at least initially, through TGC, It's interesting to me how Vasel critiques the components.  It's definitely true that the pawns and chips are generic at TGC, although Matt made use of the fact that TGC offers a bunch of different spaceship models, so his game happens to have a thematic link with the generic components.  But the cards from TGC are actually pretty great, and the little boards that Matt uses are thin but functional.  Also, the artwork for Matt's game is far, far above the average TGC game, definitely commercial quality.  The packaging (small white corrugated box, crumpled rules) that TGC offers are definitely not up to the standards of traditionally-published games, and that's tough - the game inside might be terrific, but the packaging isn't up to that level.  It shouldn't matter if the game is fun and the parts work, but with quality expectations high it's hard to compete when you're doing small print runs or print-on-demand.

It's also interesting to me that this whole process is so new-media - a guy designs a game, publishes it via a web-interface on a POD site, gets it reviewed by an avid and knowledgeable though non-professional critic, who posts it for free to be seen worldwide on a video sharing site.  This is not a process which would have even been imaginable in 1995, and now it just seems commonplace.

And here I am blogging about it.  We've come a long way in a short time, even if we don't realize it.

Rio Grande contest wrapup

I'm still trying to get a sense of what happened at Gamecon Memphis, but the result is clear; the winner of the regional there was a game called "Kings of England" by Rick Goodman.  I'm not positive, but I think this might be the same Rick Goodman who was involved in a lot of real-time strategy computer games, such as Age of Empires and Empire Earth, both of which I enjoyed.

The early feedback I did receive says that Yoggity was viewed favorably (maybe 3rd or 4th of 20 games) but was seen as as too child-oriented.  That seems weird to me, since a kid couldn't handle the negotiation part very well, but maybe the judges were looking for more of a hardcore wargame or something.

I'll keep an eye out for more results - the organizer of the Gamecon competition has indicated he'll post more information on BGG.  I'm obviously disappointed, but I'm grateful for the opportunity.

For Yoggity, it's on to Hippodice...

Robin Hood BGDF contest

The entries are up.  Some interesting ones - the Robin Hood theme made most of them overlap in terms of plot  and layout, but the minigame thing led to some interesting design choices.  Votes are due tomorrow - I'll let y'all know which was mine when the results are up.

Sell sheets

I haven't spent any time trying to convince publishers to pick up one of my games, but this post on sell sheets from Jay Cormier seems like really good advice.  A document like this does a bunch of jobs at once - it shows that you're serious and professional, it gives you a quick, colorful summary of the product you're describing (and describing boardgames merely verbally can be really hard), and it gives the person you're talking with something concrete to hold onto and take home.

I'd be curious what the batting average is for approaching publishers cold at conferences - my guess is, it's not great, but better than e-mail or postal requests.  But e-mail's free, and postal submissions are cheap; just to be at the same conference as a publisher can run $300-$500 per day with travel and lodging.  If your game gets picked up, that's worth it, but spend 10 days at conferences and you could probably afford to self-publish at least a short run (although distribution and marketing would still be problematic).

A document like this works for e-mail and postal submissions, too, though, so it's definitely worth doing if you're trying to go the submit-to-established-publishers route.  I think a website for the game is another easy way to share info and make yourself look serious and professional - another easy, cheap, must-do for aspiring designers.

BGDF contest for September

I got my entry in for the Robin Hood BGDF contest for September.  In addition to a Robin Hood theme, you had to include two mini-games, where you had a game-within-a-game to handle various parts.

This is always tricky - the minigames can end up being dull and uninteresting, and end up hampering gameplay, or they can end up more fun than the actual game.  I got two in my design that I think work, would be fun without being obtrusive, and  still fit the overall style of the game.  We'll see what other folks think.

In some ways these contests, because of their restrictions, actually get in the way of making excellent games, because you have to honor the restrictions.  In that sense, they're more like etudes for musicians - they push your skills, but they don't necessarily sound the best when played.  I hope I get a chance to make a protoype and try this one out, though - I think it could be quite fun.

I'll post a link to my entry when the voting is over - can't reveal it until then.

Gamecon Memphis competition is now

Yoggity's being played today for the Rio Grande competition - I'm frustrated I can't be there, but excited about the feedback I hope to receive.  It ends tomorrow, so I should know something shortly.

Still another Kickstarter project

Here's another one, this one the game Scoops from TableStar Games.  TableStar seems to have a pretty extensive lineup of other games, which gives me more data on a question I'd been wondering about - if Kickstarter would be feasible for a company that's already established.  I'd think Kickstarter appeals would be more appealing to funders if you have that indie do-it-yourself community-raising-a-barn thing, and less likely to work if you've already got a company with products.  But TableStar doesn't think so, in this case, and apparently Tasty Minstrel is thinking along the same lines.

In these cases, you're kind of using Kickstarter as a pre-selling site rather than a dream-launching site, although I suppose if you're careful, you might be able to make it look like you're doing more dream-launching than pre-selling and collect some sympathetic investors that way.  And, if you couldn't afford to publish a game without the Kickstarter funding, then I guess it's pretty legitimate.

Tough to figure out - you'd want to maximize your chance of it working while still maintaining some integrity.

Another Kickstarter project

Lines of Fire. Neat - this one got funded rapidly, for a small but effective amount of money, for a short-run (100 copies) of a card-based game, printed on business cards.  I looked into this before - it's tricky; in order to get them cheaply, you have to print a whole bunch of one kind at once, and if you have lots of different cards, then you're ordering 1,000 of each one, and your expenses are similar to just getting the game printed commercially.  But it sounds like this particular game got around that through design and careful, miserly use of limited components.

Having a cute-as-a-button little girl to put in your appeal video probably didn't hurt, either.

Crazy

I haven't had a lot of time to write posts recently - work is heating up, and most of my game stuff is behind the scenes or waiting (contests, artwork, etc.).  I should have some good stuff to post on soon.

Oh, and I like Starcraft II better than I did at first.

Tasty Minstrel Games Refer-a-Friend

Tasty Minstrel Games has a new refer-a-friend program, where you post customized links to their pages, and if your friends go to the site and buy stuff, you get some free stuff.  Seems like a reasonable way to get some free viral marketing, and might be something I'd try with Plankton Games once I've got products to sell.  It's tricky, though - you can't promise too much in the way of free gifts, or you lose the value of the sale.

A quick example - suppose sending a free game out costs you at least $6 for postage and handling, plus your cost for the game.  Figure your cost per game (not just the printing, but including royalties for art and design, warehousing, website, etc.) is something like $5.  So, to send a free game out you need to make $11 to break even (and that's conservative).

Suppose your direct sales price for your game is $18.  But you have to deduct your costs for the game, which are $5.  So, your top margin there is $13.  Seems like you could almost do a buy one, send one free thing for that, right, and clear $2 on selling two games.

But there's overhead for running the affiliate program, and some of the people who buy in the program might have bought anyway, and you actually want to make more than $1 per game or you're in the wrong business.

Michael at Tasty Minstrel has gone for a buy three, get one future game free ratio.  That's a healthier margin.  Plus, if some of your affiliates get you 1-2 sales but not the three that would trigger their free product, your costs are nearly nothing for free advertising and sales.

The question is, are people willing to sort of spam their friends and blogs and Facebook on the hope of maybe getting a free game in the future?  We'll see; it should be possible to search for the affiliate links in a month or so and see how many of them have been posted.

New monthly BGDF contest

A Robin Hood theme, with TWO OR MORE minigames, and robbing from the rich worked in somehow.  Man.  This is tough.

Snood digs deeper into pop culture

My game, Snood, was mentioned on last night's episode of 30 Rock.  Pretty awesome.

GameCon Memphis Schedule

They have the schedule up - Yoggity's on tap for Saturday early morning and early afternoon, plus I guess they could play it during the open sessions.  Some of the entries seem to require 3-4 hours.  Yikes.  Yoggity is usually pretty manageable - 45 minutes to an hour, although it can take longer with more folks and is sometimes noticeably slower the first time people play.  I hope the 1-hour timeframe is enough for it, especially if they need to explain the rules as part of that.

Exciting, though!  Woohoo.

Splitsville for SuperiorPOD and TheGameCrafter

After a relatively short marriage, SuperiorPOD and TheGameCrafter are parting ways.  Here's the official announcement.  I've posted about my experience with both companies, and I think those differences are what drove them apart here.  SuperiorPOD produced fine quality work for me, and had a wider variety of printed materials, but working with them was somewhere between frustrating and maddening - very little communication, and a long delay (40 days) in getting my stuff.

Recent posts on the TGC forums have highlighted some production quality problems at the SuperiorPOD facility - cards sent with parts blank, bad cutting, no rounded corners, etc. - so I think TGC's decision to pull out to maintain their reputation for quality and service was probably a good one in the long run, although obviously the transition (retransition? untransition?) will be difficult.  TGC occasionally has made printing mistakes (see mine here), but they're generally quickly addressed.  I think the head of the company, Tavis Parker, occasionally lets his emotions run too free on their forums (see the ongoing discussion on my link above, and then this thread here).  Sometimes, it's better to have the customer, no matter how misguided, get the last word.  But he runs a good company that provides good quality service, and I'll certainly keep using them.

Hippodice timing

OK, so, I have two good candidates for the Hippodice competition - Diggity and Yoggity.  Cult I think is too language-dependent; part of what makes it funny is the cards, and the jokes wouldn't be as funny in another language, even if most Germans do have pretty good English.  Galapagos isn't ready yet.  But those two games are both mostly language-independent (Diggity even moreso than Yoggity) and I think they'd appeal to the Eurogamers over there.

The issue?  They want only unpublished games, which both currently are.  They define unpublished more generously than other competitions; they suggest the games haven't been submitted to a publisher (true in both cases), that they not be commercially distributed (definitely true for Yoggity.  For Diggity, does TheGameCrafter count?), and that they be under 100 total copies produced (definitely true for both - Diggity is at about 23 copies, all but seven of which reside with me or friends and family, while there are only four copies of Yoggity in the world; I have two, one's with the artist, Jason Greeno, and one is in Tennessee waiting for GameCon Memphis).

So, I think I'm OK entering both.  The trick is, if I actually somehow get Diggity up and running, there's a chance I'd have more than 100 copies by March 2011, which is their final round.  I have to get the art finalized and in the right formats, and then I'll probably have to re-quote it, since it's been a while since I got most of the quotes and most of them are only guaranteed for 30 days or so, and then the printing takes a while.  So, if I figure it will take at a minimum at least a month to get the art ready, then a month to re-quote it, then 2-3 months for printing and shipping, plus holiday delays, I'm actually almost to when they're judging.  If it takes longer than those timeframes, as it likely will, then I'm easily in the clear.

So, I think I'm OK.  I can always withdraw it if things go faster than I expect, and just have Yoggity in there.

Flash Duel

Yesterday, I mentioned Flash Duel from Sirlin Games.  It sells for $13-$16 in the normal version (cards and rules only) and $30+ for the deluxe version (includes cards, tokens, board, etc.).

Sirlin has moved from video games to boardgames, which is what I've done here, too.  He worked on the Street Fighter series, so the fighting card game angle is probably related to what he was doing for the other games.  I loved Street Fighter (E. Honda can head butt you back to the stone age, by the way).  It looks like Sirlin has some really high quality production values here - good art, nice components, etc. - and a consistent line of games that include the same characters, which could lead to the growth of a brand centered around his fighters.

The prices he's selling for are on the high side of what I'm trying to do - e.g., I could get a tuckbox version of my game made with more cards for probably $2-3 per copy, and then sell it for $9-10, while the nicer setup-box version (more like his Deluxe version, although without a board and tokens) would be more like $4-5 per copy and sell for $16-20.

Anyway, neat stuff, and another example of a guy having a go at this business on his own.

Amazonian regulations

An interesting post from Sirlin.Net - he's making small cardgames as I hope to do, around the same price point, and is selling them online himself and through whatever distribution he can find, which includes Amazon.  Apparently, you can't just put stuff online and always sell there; he mentions a lower limit to be listed during the busy Christmas season.

I was hoping to get onto Amazon myself, although the fact that they're feuding with North Carolina, where I live, is making some of that painful or impossible.  For example, I can't create an Amazon Associates account because of this issue - Amazon has (apparently only to apply pressure to the state) banned NC residents from linking to them and trying to earn commissions by driving buyers to Amazon.

I haven't looked into it for a bit, but I'm hoping I'll still be able to sell there.  If I have to sell multiple copies there just to be listed over Christmas, then that might be hard to figure out the rules.

GameconMemphis contest in two weeks...

Here are the competitors. Fourteen in all, with others maybe still to come.  Looks like a lot of interesting games.  At least three are in the hand-made prototype stage, with the rest at varying levels of polish. I'd put Yoggity in the middle there somewhere - it looks nice, but it doesn't need a ton of components, and I was limited by the parts I could get through GameCrafter.  I think it will look professional enough, though.

There are what look to be at least two wargames, with territory control and little units.  Two abstract games, both with wooden parts.  One racing-themed game - maybe a good fit for Tennessee?  One hex-tile-based space exploration game.  A couple that look like economic games.  One that seems to be entirely card-based, maybe CCG or Dominion style.  One with robots and infantry.  A huge variety, which will probably make the judging even harder for the volunteers.

One of them, Ops Mundi by Jason Roth, appears actually to be his senior geography thesis.  Pretty cool.

Awards != Sales

As I consider entering all these competitions, it's good also to heed what Tao over at Starlit Citadel writes - that award-winning game designs don't necessarily sell well.  I think that's true in a whole bunch of settings; commercial success and quality are correlated on a first-order basis, but one person's "quality" is another person's crap, and there are some pretty big second-order effects.  And what you play (and what would be fun) is very situational - I've probably played much more Barbie Uno than I have played better games that I like far more.

So, what's the key to marketplace success?  A great game, sure, and hopefully one that could win awards, but maybe more importantly, one that is eminently playable - not too long, accessible to newbies, easy to set up, visually attractive, cheap and available, and fun to play over and over again.

Hey, I just described Barbie Uno, didn't I?

More on the Hippodice contest

The Hippodice contest is one of the best from a designer's point of view - it's widely known, run by serious game enthusiasts, has a relatively low entry fee, and is open to all.  There are English rules here, and then there's a detailed entry description (English on the second page).

They wisely review these descriptions and then solicit entries from those, so they don't get a bajillion games submitted.  I think that's a recent development - I think they used to just take all entries and then wade through them, but that probably got too tiresome.

If your game is selected, it's 5 Euros plus a copy of the game sent to Germany, plus return postage if you want it back, although setting up a prepaid return and customs forms through German mail is probably pretty difficult and not worth the hassle and expense unless your game has lots of expensive components or is hand-crafted or something.

One tricky bit - if you get selected, because Germany has VAT, and because you're sending them goods, you'll have to do a customs form that describes the contents appropriately to avoid there being tax due when it gets there.  I had a variety of different experiences that way in Munich when getting sent stuff from the United States last year.  Most of it came through fine, but a couple items got held up for a while because the documentation wasn't in order, and it wasn't always clear why one thing made it quickly and another didn't.  It might be worth ponying up for one of the international shipping companies (DHL is affiliated with the German postal system) if you're nervous about regular mail.

Barriers to publication

The Boardgame Designers Guild of Utah apparently has a recurring newsletter now.  A recent issue has a neat article on the barriers to entry to the boardgame market by Benjamin Stanley - good stuff.

Hippodice

The perennial Hippodice competition is rolling around again, with a submission deadline of November 1st.  I'm thinking of entering Diggity and Yoggity, but I'll have to figure out what I want to do following the Rio Grande competition at the end of the month here.  Could be interesting; I think maybe I would try rewriting the rules in German in that case.  I regained some of my German (and designed both games) while working in Munich last fall, so that seems appropriate.

More on Spy Alley

I commented on Spy Alley yesterday.  Looking at their site some more, I found some sales figures and history:

Interesting Facts:

Spy Alley was created in 1988 under the name International Spy. It was turned down by all of the game companies that were approached for licensing. The name was changed to Spy Alley in 1992. In 1996 Spy Alley Partners was formed to market the game. The 1st year it sold 320 copies. As of 2008 it has sold over 170,000 copies in 7 countries and 3 languages.

I'd take that kind of success.  It does sound like a self-publishing deal, which gives me some hope.

Review: Spy Alley

We played Spy Alley tonight, a simple boardgame which seems to be published by a small independent game company, Spy Alley Partners LLP.  They look like they've adopted the model I'm looking to implement - they have a small line of games, and they sell through distribution and through their website.  They're bigger than I'd be starting out; the game is lots of places (many online retailers, although I think we got ours at a regular store), and it's well-constructed and appealingly designed.  It looks from the BoardgameGeek entry like there have been earlier, cruder versions in production.  So, it looks like this group has made a go of independent publishing, and may be doing well.

The game?  Eh.  We've played it a number of times.  It's fun enough, and there's an interesting mechanic at the core.  You are trying to collect all your nation's spy gear while not letting on to the other players what nationality you are.  The spy theme isn't really integrated heavily into the game play; you could be collecting four of anything.   But,  the game wouldn't be much without some kind of theme to put it on, and the spy motif fits the hidden information well, so it works.  The ending is very luck-determined, though; you roll a die to move every turn, and your choices are pretty severely limited by what squares you end up landing on.  As the game progresses, you sometimes gain more control of your movement through move cards (a mechanic borrowed from the classic Careers).

You have the option of taking a very high-stakes gamble at any time - trying to guess an opponent's nationality.  If you succeed, the opponent is out of the game; if you fail, you're out.  You win either by eliminating all opponents (or letting them eliminate themselves) or by collecting all your gear and making it to your embassy (one hard-to-reach space on the board).

There's another major luck factor, though - there's one space on the board that lets you make free guesses to try to eliminate opponents.  In our games, that's usually how people are knocked out, and that's how I went tonight. There are six nationalities, and I got free-guessed three times, knocked out on the third.  Not very satisfying; nothing I did mattered much, and the end came suddenly.  That's fairly typical in our experience.  It's more fun the longer you last, though.

When you knock somebody out, you get all their stuff, which is imbalancing but makes the game go faster (and accelerate as it goes on).  There are some other clever design elements too, although a lot of it is just random.

But, the kids like it, and it's a relatively quick family game.  As an added bonus, we have fun trying to talk in the accents of the various nationalities, and the light-hearted deception mechanic is fun.

---

Photo above by Chris Hawks, borrowed from BGG.com.

Diggity art

I'm making some progress getting the art completed for Diggity.  The new stuff looks nice - way better than what I was able to do, which is what I was hoping for.  I'll post some pictures when we're farther along.

Dang it!

Following my comments on one of my games, Galapagos, commenter Jay points out that the name has been adopted by a game that came out this year.  My game is completely different from the new one, which takes the Galapagos theme more literally by reenacting Darwin's visit, but that probably means the name is lost to me.  I'm not sure they'll have registered the trademark, so it might be legally possible to have the same name, but even so, it would probably be better to avoid the confusion and find a new one.

A bummer, because my game has been Galapagos in my head since I first came up with it back in the late 1990's, and it was a great fit for the evolutionary theme.  But, I'm not close to publishing that one, so I have time to cogitate.

Rio Grande contest judging standards

With my entry in the Rio Grande game contest sent out, I'm eagerly awaiting the results.  The judging is based on total points in a number of equally rated categories:

Decision Driven (How much is the winner determined based on their decisions, as opposed to luck factors?) Originality Wait Time (How much time do you spend without interacting with the game/other players?) Unpredictability (How often is the outcome of a turn/round known before it ends?) Broad Appeal (Would you teach this to someone who is not a serious game player?) Replayable (Do you want to play it again soon?) Interactive (Do the player decisions impact other players?) Equal Opportunity (Does every player have an equal chance of winning regardless of turn order/role?) Fun  Simple to Learn (the rules were clearly stated and communicated) Scale for each criterion is set at 1-5. For each criterion that does not positively or negatively impact the game (or simply doesn't apply), the criterion is scored at 3. If a criterion does impact the game, the score is adjusted positively or negatively and a note/comment is made to explain the decision.

That's actually an interesting way to judge the contest.  Obviously, the intent is to get a "good" game out of the competition.  But that's very subjective; a Scrabble fiend might hate Settlers of Cataan, and a chess player might despise Monopoly and vice versa.  Breaking it into the ratings above is maybe useful, but weighting them equally is maybe misleading; I'd value "Fun" and "Replayable" as far higher priorities than most of the others.  You could put together a snoozer of a game that scored well in 8 of 10 categories but got a 1 in Fun and Replayable, and it would stand a better chance of winning than a wildly fun game that wasn't, say, as interactive or original or balanced.

This comment by Mark Salzwedel on BGG tries to get deeper into the categories, and it sounds like he's even providing guidelines for the judges at his regional contest.  I think that's a good idea, although tricky to standardize; I have no idea if they'll do something similar to that at the Memphis regional, where my game will be.  He worries that the "Decision Driven" category is a problem - since some folks like more luck and others more strategy, maybe a 3 is the desired outcome, but I think that ignores the instructions at the bottom, where you're actually supposed to rate from 1-5 depending on the impact of luck on the game itself, not on the amount of luck actually involved.

For Yoggity, my entry, I think the framework above might actually help me, since the game's strengths are a reasonable fit with the categories.  My game is more of a family game, and some of the other entries in my regional contest (shown here) look a bit like heavier wargames, although you can't tell too much from the pictures.  Games like that, even if they're awesome, are going to be more likely to lose points in the Broad Appeal and Simple to Learn (and often Wait Time and Replayable) categories.

Of course, it will all be up to the volunteer judges and how they decide to apply the categories, so there's no sense worrying too much, but it's interesting to ponder.