GameStorm 2009 at Halftime

This weekend I'm at the GameStorm boardgame convention, ostensibly in Oregon but actually just over the border in Vancouver Washington. For me the high points so far have been seeing my in-laws (Joan is an avid gamer), gaming with my design buddy Seth Jaffee, and presenting Hammer and Spike.

GameStorm has a "GameLab" track for game designers and playtesters. I got an appointment to present Hammer and Spike to a panel of local game publishers, not so much in hopes of getting it published but in order to get feedback on the game and its presentation. It was a good session, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. I got good advice and answers to a few questions I had about the industry. (For example, I learned that the game duration shown on a game's box is for new players, not experienced ones! I didn't know that.) There wasn't time to play the game so the panel doesn't really know if a game is any good. But they were impressed with what they saw, which was very gratifying; and I got invited to bring Hammer and Spike to an invitation-only playtest session on Sunday (tomorrow, as I write this) for the best of the games they have reviewed this weekend.

I had one informal playtest yesterday with Seth, his friend Jeremy, Joan, and myself. It went well, but we all agreed that it went too long. I currently set the game at a constant 20 rounds, but the game was definitely "over" after 17 or 18 rounds. This is a point I've been dithering over, and I now think that 20 really is probably too many. I'm going to try 18 for a while: a bigger cut than it sounds like, since the last rounds are analysis-paralysis festivals and take way longer than earlier rounds. I still want a typical game to come in at 2 hours or less.

It's now Saturday morning, and I'm looking forward to playing some of Seth's designs: Terra Prime, Homesteaders, and/or Brain Freeze. I played Terra Prime two years ago and I'm eager to see the changes he's made since then. Homesteaders (designed by Alex Rockwell, but Seth helped with development) and Brain Freeze are games I haven't played yet, and I'm eager to see them.

I'll update this post with a few links later on, but right now it's time to gather our aggies and head for the con. Game on!

P.S. Saturday evening—I've added those links, and here's another: Seth's GameStorm reports.

Adventures in Prototyping

My game design blogging has a split personality; much of it goes here, but some also goes up at the Board Game Designers Forum. This weekend I made a more durable board for the Nameless Rail Game, and chronicled the effort in some detail in my journal there. I felt that the content was of more interest to hard-core designers than to the more general crowd that reads this site, but if you're interested, follow the link.

I made the board because a flat, stiff, foldable board is a lot easier to transport than the taped-together big sheets of paper I've been making for home use. Helen and I are about to head up to Oregon to visit family and attend GameStorm, where I hope to get more playtesting done.

And the beast may finally have a name. The new board is labeled Hammer and Spike, which may not be great but is not in use by any other games. It will serve until and unless I hear a distinctly better suggestion. My thanks to all those who suggested alternate names, but I have to live with Helen and she didn't like some of them, so Hammer and Spike it is.

Picking Up Steam

Two more live playtests, at the Los Altos Games Day! The game was well received, and I was quite pleased with the results.

The changes I made after last week's session worked well. Playtime came in at about two hours, and I suspect would be a bit shorter with experienced players. Players successfully built transcontinental networks and made coast-to-coast deliveries by the end of the game. A few switchyards were built in each game, but never all six. That all seemed just right.

On the down side, my long-standing worries that the scoring system is badly balanced were borne out. The reward for connecting all six cities is so high that a player who fails to do so is almost guaranteed to lose. This would be okay except that it's usually clear which players will fail by around halfway through the game. It's no fun being the goat in a game in which there is almost always one designated goat.

The way to fix that is probably to raise the VP reward for building switchyards. The trailing player has an advantage here, in a way: if he is flexible enough to give up on the six-city goal early enough, he will save several actions and a fair amount of cash. He can then devote those resources to switchyard building, and remain competitive with the six-city players.

I have also recently revised the simulator to play by the new rules, and run another couple hundred thousand simulations or so. These were, as before, mostly explorations of balance. It has become quite clear that an intelligent first player has a huge advantage over his opponents, because the choice of starting locations is not even remotely balanced. This isn't unusual for rail games. The simulations show that it can be balanced by giving the players differing amounts of starting cash. In the game rules, I expect I will express this in two ways: a "standard game" in which the starting cash is simply dictated by the rules, and an "advanced game" in which the players hold an initial auction for turn order. Players will use the standard rules until they feel qualified to judge fine differences in starting positions, and can then advance to the auction rules. (Unlike Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon, I don't think this game needs a turn-order auction every round. One at the start of the game should be sufficient, and the turn order need not change after that.)

Finally, I came away with a clear understanding about the current inadequacies of the board graphics and the player aids. This is not part of game design (since I have no plans to self-publish), but a well-made prototype really helps newbies concentrate on the game instead of on decoding the board and remembering the rules. I have some ideas for improvements, and I will be playing around in Photoshop to try to turn those ideas into clear graphics.

I Got Game

Saturday the long-awaited live playtest of the nameless rail game finally happened, and I'm pleased to report that it went very well. My playtesters were Candy Weber, John Portley, Helen, and myself. (John and Candy brought designs of their own that we also tried, and those went well too. But I don't know if they want Internet coverage, so I'm just going to talk about mine for now.)

There was good news, and bad news. The good news was that all players agreed that the game presented interesting and difficult decisions; it wasn't just a matter of turning the crank. (I was worried about that.) The bad news was that it took over three and a half hours to play!

Everyone was very nice about the length of it, and pointed out that it was a learning game for everyone except me, and that we also stopped periodically to discuss the design. True, but I think those excuses only go so far. I don't want the game to last more than two hours. In my playtesting it usually takes only two hours. But you have to allow time for people to chat, and I also don't want a newbie's first experience to be a marathon. So I'm going to give some attention to speeding up play. This probably means reducing the number of rounds and tweaking things to allow players to get stuff done in fewer turns. I received some very good suggestions about how to accomplish that, and I intend to try them out. The best idea I heard was to change a couple of actions into non-actions, so that you can get a bit more done in your turn. I think that will not only speed things up, but also remove some of the major sources of player frustration that I observed.

Between those suggestions and a few tweaks of my own that I've been thinking about for a while, I have a laundry list of things to experiment with. But none of these items are major changes; they all amount to streamlining of one kind or another. I'll try them out in solo play over the next week or two, to see which ones help and which don't. In two weeks there's a Games Day, and I'll probably bring the latest version to that and see if I can get another live test. After that I can bring it to GameStorm in Portland at the end of March, and eventually KublaCon at the end of May. I can hope that by then it will be pretty stable.

Know the score!

A game's scoring system is what motivates the players. It's the carrot that the designer dangles in front of the players, to entice them to go where he wants them to go. A large part of the work I've put into the nameless rail game has been tweaking the scoring system. I want players to build wide, continent-spanning networks, and use their networks to make long deliveries. I want them to compete with each other for the best routes and for connections to cities that not everyone will be able to reach. I want to inspire track-building races.

The scoring system has to reward this kind of behavior. But to be really good, it needs to do more. Jonathan Degann has written about the "big bomb" notion in scoring. A "big bomb" (put simply) is a high-scoring accomplishment that more than one player can strive for, but only one can achieve. Ideally the competition to claim the "bomb" involves some commitment from the competing players: the player who succeeds will see his investment pay off big, while the others will lose whatever they invested. This makes tension during the competition, and a big emotional pay-off when it's over: triumph or tragedy. Drama!

In the nameless rail game, I have been motivating players to build wide networks by designating six widely-separated junctions as cities (as opposed to mere towns). Players are rewarded with victory points for the number of cities in their network at the end of the game. Each additional city gives a bigger bonus than the previous. The first three or four cities are easy to get to, and the rewards are small. The fifth is harder, and gives a big slug of points. The sixth is hardest of all, and yields a really big slug of points. The board is laid out so that not every player can connect to every city, so the competition for fifth and especially sixth cities is fierce. This is one form of Degann's big bomb: for much of the game, players are racing to get to all six cities. Getting there first not only guarantees that you get the big reward, it also virtually guarantees that somebody else won't get there at all.

But I didn't want that to be the only way to get a big score, so I added another kind of bomb. This notion took me longer to come up with, and many iterations to refine. (I'm probably still not done with it.) It is the switchyard. Each of the six cities may have one switchyard built there. The player who builds it gets a big VP reward. This counts as a bomb because only one player can do it (per city), and because of the obstacles that must be overcome before the switchyard can be built.

First, you can't even start trying to build a switchyard until at least two players are connected to the target city. That guarantees competition. Second, you can't build a switchyard until you have made at least one delivery to that city of each of the four different kinds of good. Therein lies the race and much of the tension. Finally, after finishing the prerequisite deliveries, you need to come up with a big payment. Often two players will both finish the deliveries, and then it's a matter of who comes up with the cash first. The player who does will roughly double the value of his cash, while any who don't have wasted much of their effort.

I'd like to make that race more poignant if I can. There's more tension if the players have to invest something real in order to compete for the bomb. Currently, the only real investment is that players may forgo more lucrative deliveries in favor of ones that fill their switchyard prerequisites. And maybe that's enough. But I am considering making the players pay a piece of the switchyard cost up front, every time they "record" a delivery. The total cost of the switchyard is still the same, but you would have to pay some of it just to try to build the switchyard; and if you fail, you won't get any refunds.

What worries me about this notion is that it may become a disincentive: the potential loss may frighten players away from trying to compete for switchyards. If so I might try to lead them into the commitment gently: charge only a little for the first delivery, so it feels safe. But now the player is invested and wants to protect the investment, so if someone starts to compete he may be willing to pay a little more to keep up, and so on. I dunno, I'll have to try it and see how it goes!

How many players?

I have a habit of designing my multi-player games for a "sweet spot" of four players, and then testing and tweaking to see whether they will also gracefully support more or fewer players. While I don't recall this being a conscious decision, it makes sense to me. Four is a nice, balanced number: two couples, or a family with two kids. It can mitigate the excessive downtime that some games suffer with more players, and avoids the two-against-one dynamic that can ruin a lot of three-player experiences.

But I don't want to design exclusively for four. Any game will sell better if it can be labeled for "3 to 5" or "2 to 6" players. And any game will be more popular if it actually works for the given range. (All experienced gamers have seen games that really don't play well at the low or high end of the claimed range.)

So recently I broke from my usual simulated four-player rail game sessions, and tried a five- and a three- player to see what would happen. I'm pleased to say that the game survived, and seemed playable. But unsurprisingly the game gives a different experience with different numbers of players.

With four, I've tried to tune things so that the winning player will likely connect all six cities, and build a switchyard: the two highest-scoring achievements. Usually two of the remaining players will get one or the other goal, but not both; and one player will get neither. This makes for vigorous competition to link up the cities, which is one of my design goals. It also often results that most players have little money left at the end of the game: although money is also worth victory points, you're usually better off spending it on connectivity or switchyards if you can. The losing player may actually finish with the most money, having been unable to spend as much of his income on connectivity and switchyards as the others; but sometimes such a player prospers so well just making deliveries that his cash hoard pulls his score up into the middle of the pack.

In the three-player game, there was much more elbow room. All players were able to connect all cities, which soaked up more time and money than in the usual 4p game. It was a less competitive, more open game. I found that I prefer the four-player experience, but some players may enjoy the easier, free-wheeling nature of the 3p game.

In the 5p game, the board was crowded and tight, and competition for connectivity was fierce. Only one player connected all six cities. Also the board filled with track rather faster than in the 4p game, so players could tell early on when (for example) it was clearly impossible for them to reach New York or Seattle. That meant more concentration on switchyards: five were built, and one player built two. This game ended with a lot of money in circulation, because more players were simply making deliveries in the late game rather than building.

Unsurprisingly, the game seems to have a different character depending on the number of players. With three, it's relatively open and easy-going. With four, competition is tight but most players are going to be able to do well. With five, money is tight in the early game as players race for connectivity, then piles up in the late game as players concentrate on lucrative deliveries.

J. C. Lawrence says a game should end when the winner is clear. I think he's right, so I was watching these games to see whether they ended too soon or too late. In the 4p game, 20 rounds seems exactly right. (I originally had a variable end-of-game trigger based on running out of goods, but decided it didn't work well.) I'm prepared to alter the 20-round figure for the 3p or 5p games, but so far it seems to hold up. The 5p game, for example, might have ended at 17 rounds; but then some serious new delivering and building took place in round 20, enough to convince me that the final three rounds weren't empty activity.

Another way to balance the game for different player counts is to alter the map. A smaller map for a 3p (or 2p) game, a larger one for 5 or 6. I haven't gone there yet, but of course I have the possibility in mind. Completely different maps is one way to do it, but it might also work to vary the main map by adding or removing junctions and connections. But before I go there, I want to shake down the current design some more. When (if!) I'm really comfortable with the 4p game, I'll look harder at variations to improve the experience with other player counts.

Rails: Ready to Roll?

This weekend I put in some more hours on the rail game (now code-named "Iron Horse With No Name" until I settle on a new title). I'm pretty pleased with the results.

It continues to surprise me how much difference a small rule tweak can make sometimes. I recently introduced the notion that deliveries can only go so far without "refueling." You refuel at Stations, which hold Fuel cubes. Each time you refuel, you consume a Fuel cube and your delivery is able to continue for up to another three towns. With multiple refuelings, very long (and very profitable) deliveries can be made. Refueling from your own Station is free; to use someone else's Station, you pay them $2 (equal to a little less than half a Victory Point). When a Station is emptied of Fuel cubes you can pay to refill it.

But a solo playtest with this mechanism produced a game that moved too slowly, and that bogged down at the end. There was not enough incentive to build Stations—every player wanted to wait for the other players to build them—so the long, high-paying deliveries could not be made.

I reworked the costs and benefits to make Stations more attractive, but then I started to worry: maybe the Fuel cubes were unnecessary mechanism. Why not get rid of them and simply always allow refueling at every Station? So I tried that next, and it almost worked. I got the wide networks and long deliveries I wanted. But the players' decisions were not challenging enough. Stations with exhaustible fuel added complexity and interest to those decisions.

So I tried again, putting Fuel back in the game but with the new costs and benefits I'd worked out. And that, thankfully, seems to work. The latest solo playtest had interesting and challenging decisions, players were able to build the big networks and reap the big profits I was after, and the game never bogged down.

Well... I think the decisions were interesting and challenging. I find that very hard to gauge when all the players are me. But I believe it's finally time for some live playtests. (Huzzah!) So I'm going to spend the next week or so re-drawing the board and creating some good player aids, and then I'll start bringing it to local game days and nights and see what other folks think of it.