A Bit of Game Design

It seems ages since I've spent any serious time on any of my own game designs. What with the day job (followed, after retirement, by the exigencies of moving to another state), the two expansions I helped design for Railways of the World, my musical activities, and the need to work hard on Solitaire Till Dawn, my own designs have been given short shrift for the past few years.

But I'm retired now, and we finished moving in a while back, so that's over with. Solitaire Till Dawn isn't done yet and is still getting most of my alert-and-working attention; but all work and no play makes Jack want to stay in bed instead of getting up in the morning. So I've given myself a few evenings and weekends off recently, and put some time in on one of my oldest and best designs.

I started work on Spatial Delivery in 2007, and it won the Game Design Contest at KublaCon in May 2008. At that time I thought it was pretty much done, but it wasn't. Experienced game designers know that you have to playtest a game a lot to discover its warts and inadequacies. Like a software product, a game design must be tested, evaluated, fixed, and refined many times before you can be sure it's done. (Just the other day I saw a major, successful game designer apologizing for a "bug" in one of his new games: he and his testers hadn't found it, but the people who bought the game did. He's working on a fix.)

In the years since that KublaCon, I've revisited Spatial Delivery a number of times. I've been aware of a number of flaws in the design, and searching for ways to fix them. I think I've made some solid progress. I hope to take the game out of the house and have some strangers play it in the next few weeks, after a bit more in-house polish and maybe the making of a revised card deck.

To reach this state I had to make a painful decision: I had to throw out the one really original mechanism in the design. That mechanism wasn't a completely awful idea and I may be able to use it in some other design; but it wasn't a good fit in Spatial Delivery. It had to do with how players acquired cards ("Goods") for delivery to worlds in outer space, and that phase of the game was plagued with a variety of problems. I can't count how many solutions I've looked at for that process; but I'm hoping my new design will stand up.

Without going into too much detail, there had been four different types of Goods (red, green, blue, yellow—they have thematic names and icons, but never mind that). No form of random and semi-random distribution or drafting was working: it was always too easy for a player to get screwed over by an unfortunate shuffle, and there was little challenge or interest in choosing which cards to draft. My nifty mechanism that let players challenge each other over card selections didn't make it any better. I had to throw out the whole notion of shuffling all the Goods cards together.

Instead, I separated them into decks by type, and I invented a bunch of "Card Powers" and gave one power to each card. So now you shuffle just the red Goods cards together in one deck, and the blues in another, and so on. When players draft cards, they can always see one face-up card in each color, and choose any one of them. That way, every player gets the color mix he wants. But the Card Powers come up randomly, because they're scattered evenly among the Goods types.

This gives the players more to think about, even while allowing them easy access to the colors they want. The Card Powers give them new options during the next phase of the game, when they play the cards they've drafted.

This opened the door to a good solution for another of the game's nagging problems: turn order. Turn order is fairly important; it's an advantage to be able to play before anyone else. That means that the turn order needs to change, every round. But the game only lasts for a small and odd number of rounds (too bad, but otherwise the game is too short or too long) so simply rotating the turn order every round isn't really fair. I solved this (I hope) by inventing a Card Power that affects the turn order for the next round. Players can now decide for themselves how important it is to go first rather than last, and do something about it if they're willing to pay the price by grabbing and playing a Turn Order card instead of a different one.

It's surprising how hard it can be to let go of an old design feature. Another change I made recently was to make it cheaper to travel longer distances as your spaceship goes to visit planets in outer space. Originally I felt that it was important to keep travel distances short; I can't even remember why. I had a somewhat cumbersome rule that allowed long-distance travel at a nearly-ruinous price. I've now realized that this was dumb. The price of travel is high enough anyway, and the incentive to make frequent stops is strong. The fancy rule wasn't needed and I threw it out. The game is now easier to understand and more interesting, because long-range travel is now easier to do when a player has good reason to do it.

There's a wonderful company called The Game Crafter that can print and ship single copies of games on demand. It allows new designers to self-publish pretty easily, and it can be a great way to manufacture just a few copies of a game under development. When they started out their offerings were fairly limited, but they've been expanding. I see that I could now self-publish Spatial Delivery there, if I ever decide that it's ready for that. I'd like to license the design to a real game publisher someday, but in the meantime The Game Crafter is a good solution for turning out a few copies for playtests and publisher submissions. I won't do this until the design is a lot more finalized, though, and I'll have to drum up a few bits of artwork that I can legally use for symbols and icons on the cards and such.

Continental Rottweiler at Kublacon 2011

Helen and I were at Kublacon this Memorial Day weekend, as we have been every year for the past several. It wasn't as good a trip for me this year; I was too tired and sleep-deprived before the con even started. But there were a few high points anyway.

Continental Railways of the World
The highest point for me was certainly the four-and-a-half-hour, five-player Continental Railways of the World session that I hosted on Sunday morning. This playtest was very successful in several ways. First off, everybody seemed to have a good time! The game didn't bog down, and was competitive for its entire duration.

The Income Trough
I've been worried about a phenomenon we've been calling the "income trough". As RotW players will know, your income in the game is tied to your score. For most of a normal, one-board game, income rises as your score rises; but then income first tops out, then actually declines as your score continues to rise. In normal games this isn't much of an issue because by the time it happens, you've usually built most of the track you intend to build, and you don't need much money any more. But in the Continental game, you can find your net income dropping to near, or even below, zero just when the West opens up and you suddenly need to build a lot of track as everyone races west! A player who "bottoms out" at this moment can be seriously handicapped, and as a result will have no fun for the next two hours while he sits hopelessly in last place, cash-strapped and in debt, waiting for the game to end.

It would be easy to shrug this off and say "well, Player Red, you should have planned ahead." But I'd rather find a solution that allows such a player to take a less fatal hit, while still rewarding the players that did plan their income curve more successfully. I've had a couple of mechanisms in place for this, but they needed tuning. In this session, I think we finally had it tuned about right. Every player has a financial choice to make at the moment the West opens up; in the past, that "choice" has been a no-brainer. In this session, every player had to think it over, and they didn't all choose the same way. Furthermore, I was the player who was mired in the income trough, and sure enough I didn't win; but I was at least able to survive and progress. I think it worked out pretty well.

Paths to Victory
The winning player built a nearly coast-to-coast network, and one of the largest on the board. This was gratifying to me, simply because I love to see that kind of layout. But the same player won an earlier session by staying close to the Eastern board, with only a small extension across to the Western board. I'm pleased to see that there's no single approach to winning the Continental game.

Rail Baron Cards
Another measure of success for playtests is whether you learned anything new. I think I did. I was a bit shocked at the huge effect that the Rail Baron cards had for the more successful players. They were real game-changers.

I had "scaled up" the bonuses that these cards grant. In a normal game, they're worth (very roughly) 10% of your final score. Because final scores in the Continental game tend to be at least double a typical normal score, I made the Continental Baron bonuses much larger to match. But having seen them in action, I'm inclined to think that this was a mistake. Although the final scores were much larger than in a normal game, the differences between the winning player's score and his nearest competitors were not so much larger. The Baron Cards were overwhelming those differences, more than I think they should.

I plan to sit down soon and re-think those bonuses. I will likely tone them down to something in between their current values and those in a normal game. In addition, I'm tempted to look into making them incremental: instead of getting a single big all-or-nothing bonus, you'd be able to claim a partial bonus for achieving a portion of the goal. This sort of bonus already exists, for example in the Eastern U.S. Rail Baron card that awards 2 points for every connection you own into Chicago. Your bonus from that card can be 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 points. I may not be able to come up with a full set of such incremental bonuses, but I'll see what I can do.

Various Kinds of Progress

I usually try to keep these posts focused, but I haven't had much time for blogging lately, so you're getting an omnibus update today.

I can now say that my "Rottweiler" project, about which I've maintained a mildly coy level of secrecy, is the Railways of the Western U.S. expansion to Railways of the World. FRED Distribution (aka Eagle Games) has announced that it will be published in Q1 2011, less than a year from now. (Regular readers already know that Railways of the World is the new reprint of the original Railroad Tycoon board game, pretty much my favorite game of all time.) I'm very excited about this, but I am trying to be patient about waiting till next year to see it in shrinkwrap at my FLGS. (As always, I want my instant gratification, and I want it now!)

The fate of Continental Rottweiler is still to be decided. Stay tuned.

In my last post, I wrote about returning to Mac programming and re-writing my venerable Solitaire Till Dawn product. That project is coming along nicely, although I wish I had more time to devote to it. Just a few minutes ago, I reached an exciting milestone: I played and won an entire game of Klondike in the new version. Now that may sound like it's almost done and ready to go, but that's not true at all. This is about the stage where the monster tries to stand up from the slab and take a few uncertain, shambling steps. The polished performance of "Puttin' on the Ritz" is still a long ways off. But I'm encouraged, and starting to think about choreography (so to speak).

Last weekend Helen and I again attended KublaCon, probably our favorite boardgame convention. We had a great time as always. This year I found myself mostly concentrating on unpublished games: Spatial Delivery and Rottweiler both got a workout, and I was privileged to play Seth Jaffee's expansion to his own Terra Prime. (Here's a sneak preview: I really liked it.) And our good friend and member of our weekly gaming group Marlin Deckert won the KublaCon Game Design contest with a really elegant abstract game he calls "Tripletts". I hope and expect to see it on store shelves in the not too distant future. (And by the way: that makes three members of our game group who have won that contest: Marlin, Candy Weber with her game Leftovers, and yr. obed. serpent, myself.)

As always, we came home with more games than we set out with. There were no exciting new releases to look for this year, which was a bit disappointing. We had already seen all the hot new games. Nevertheless, we improved our collection by trading away a few things we've found we didn't care for, and their slots on the shelf will be filled with our new acquisitions. These include Canal Mania, Attika, the Alchemy expansion to Dominion, Mission Red Planet, and a few others.

And now I'm going to go clear off the game table so we can play one or two of them!

My Designs at KublaCon 2009

Hammer and Spike suffered a setback recently, when we found a strategy that was successful, simple, and dead boring to play. To fix it I've adjusted the scoring. The bad news is that the scoring is now even more complex, but the good news is that the fix seems to be working. I hosted a four-player game at KublaCon that included a couple of new players and a couple of experienced train gamers, and I liked the way it played out. The winner was JC Lawrence, who also pointed out a problem I hadn't seen before (but which will be easily fixed, I think) and who gave some good feedback and advice.

And there is finally some news about the fate of Spatial Delivery. In our last episode (and the one before that, and the one before that...), the prototype had been sent off to a publisher shortly after winning the KublaCon game design contest in 2008. There followed nearly a full year of dead silence. I restrained myself from attempting to contact the publisher, reasoning that publishers were busy, they'd get to it when they had a chance, and there was no point in making a pest of myself. But this weekend I spoke to a company rep and learned that they'd recently had to fire a clerical worker for incompetence. This worker had made any number of bad-for-business mistakes, and one of them was losing my prototype (along with my contact info, of course). Fortunately the rep I spoke to was the very person who should have received the prototype in the first place. I had just built a new copy and had it with me hoping to play it, but instead I gave it to the rep. He told me it would be played next weekend and that I would hear something back within just a few weeks. So Spatial Delivery is back on track!

Now I just have to hope that the publisher actually likes it. But if they don't, I have a backup opportunity. The KublaCon contest director tells me that she has been talking the game up to a second publisher. I'm going to stick with the first until they make up their minds (at least, if it doesn't take another year for them to do so), but I would be perfectly happy to go with the second publisher if things fall out that way.

The lesson learned is obvious: keep in touch. I still think it's a bad idea to be a pest, but from now on any such publisher who hasn't contacted me within the last three months will hear from me. I don't intend to lose an entire year again.

And now I have two designs being actively evaluated by two publishers, and backup publishers for both. Cross your fingers for me! I'm hoping to have at least one game on its way to market, maybe two, by next year's KublaCon.