Kevin Nunn wrote about Game Currencies and gave us a definition of currency applicable to game design.
“something that players spend in the game to exchange for something else in the game.”
I’m designing a board game about Proterozoic organisms evolving in a primordial soup (think: the Cell Stage of Spore) and I’m pondering the sorts of currencies one might find in an economy of evolution.
Here are a couple of possibilities:
Population.
When an organism flourishes within its niche, it accumulates population.
Population can be spent to spread territorial range.
Change.
When an organism meets adversity and fails, it accumulates change.
Change can be spent to mutate and evolve.
What currencies would you expect to find in an evolutionary Ursuppe? I asked that question on Twitter and got some good replies.
I'm designing a new game about evolution. What currencies would you expect to find in an evolutionary Ursuppe? http://t.co/94EB8XxUUZ
When you play a card in LXIX: THE YEAR OF FOUR EMPERORS, the first thing must you do is advance the date on the calendar track, then you choose and execute an action. You earn a bonus action if you hit certain spaces on the calendar track. The bonus spaces on the calendar track add an additional decision point on your turn: do you play card A for it’s effect or card B for a possibly-lesser effect, but hit a bonus action space? It I feel it’s an interesting, if not entirely integral, piece of the game.
Everybody forgets to move the calendar.
I love LXIX. It’s one of my best designs. I’ve been steadily refining it for the last year and it really sings now, except for that darn, hand-slappy calendar move rule.
Argh! Why is that rule so frustratingly hard for people to remember?
Why can’t I just give it up?
I don’t know. Sure, yeah, it’s my darling so I’m supposed to kill it, but why can’t my play testers just get it right?
Obviously, this is a source of frustration for me. I should just get rid of the damn rule and try something different, but I’d rather people just paid better attention when playing. Then again, there’s already plenty to pay attention to in LXIX, and this one little rule probably wouldn’t be missed by anyone but me.
But it’s my darling, how can I possibly kill it?
First, a little background.
LXIX: The Year of Four Emperors has roots in CRIBBAGE. It was born as a four-player iteration of a system I designed for a two player game that borrows and adapts some of the mechanisms of Cribbage. In the conversion from two to four players, some of the cribbage mechanisms were dropped to compensate for other added complexities. The last vestiges of Cribbage in LXIX are the crib, in the form of hidden scoring regions, and the count, in the form of the calendar track. I hate to lose these last, tenuous connections to the game that inspired it.
So.
I have an idea or two about how to fix this problem. The calendar track is just too easy for people to forget to use. The calendar probably has to go, but I’d love to keep the bonus actions in there somehow, because I think it’s an interesting decision point and it feels good when you get one. They can also be a big help for someone who drafted a less than ideal hand.
In Cribbage, you score points if you match your opponent’s played card during the counting. Perhaps you can get a bonus action if you match your opponent’s card in LXIX? There’s no calendar track to remember and you only have to pay attention to the last card played. More importantly, If you forget it, it doesn’t affect the other players turns.
Another option is to remove the bonus actions entirely. I’m not as big a fan of this idea, but it has some benefits. For one, it would allow simultaneous card play. If you don’t have to pay attention to your opponents’ card values, you don’t need a strict turn order. The order of resolution becomes more important, leading to a simplification and strengthening of another mechanism in the game: the combined turn order and tie breaker mechanism.
The next step is to play test–ideally several games in succession with the same group–to assess the impact of these various changes. Any volunteers?
“Often we use history merely as a skin, and then leave the player to make purely gamey decisions within that setting.”
Extra Credits gets at the meat of a particularly tough nut here. How do you place your players’ actions within an historical* context and make them feel like the decisions they’re making are the decisions of a person from that time and place? It’s more than just getting the costumes right.
As a designer, I’m frequently inspired by history, but it can be a challenge to adequately convey that history in my games.
*This video specifically addresses historical games, but the ideas are applicable to any game where the intent is to generate a learning outcome.
Sure, it’s a gimmick, but it’s a clever one and I like it.
It works like this; place the five color-coded dice into the Pyramid, shake it, invert it on the game board, press and release the slider, and it deposits a randomized die on the table.
That’s it.
As Stephen said, one could simply pull dice from a bag and roll them. It would be cheaper to manufacture and maybe even easier in play, and that’s the way most publishers would handle it. But the decision to include the Pyramid die roller was a smart one, and might even have been a factor in Camel Up’s Spiel de Jahres win.
Bear with me.
Something I noticed about two of the three SdJ nominees–Camel Up and Splendor–was that both have an unusually tactile component that encourages players to playfully interact with the game in ways that most Euro games don’t.
In Camel Up, when a player wants to advance the camels, she takes a Pyramid tile and then must, “take the Pyramid, shake it thoroughly, and reveal one Die from it.” It sounds silly, but that element of playful physicality bolsters the players’ engagement with the game.
Additionally, that simple act of shaking the Pyramid and plunking it down to reveal a die adds a dose of drama to the proceedings. In my experience, the shake-up and reveal is never quite a smooth operation, and the other players invariably lean in, eager to see the final results. And as we know: drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
Splendor, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of mechanical gimmick.
What sets Splendor apart is its use of weighted, poker-style chips for the jewel tokens. Here is another game component that could have been made with cheaper materials to save money. It was a deliberate physical design choice by the publisher to use expensive, heavy poker chips rather than the usual punch board tokens.
Why use heavy poker chips?
Because they’re heavy poker chips. Splendor is a game about jewel trading, and these weighty jewel chips lend a sense of premium value with their substantial presence and through their association with gambling games. Here is a game component that, by its sumptuous nature, elevates a rather thin theme.
Poker chips encourage playfulness; they feel good in your hand, they stack nicely, and they make an enticing clink when you riffle and stack them. You feel prosperous as you sit at the table, counting and riffling and stacking your little hoard of clinking jewels. Punch board tokens just don’t inspire the same feelings in players. Without the weighted poker chips, Splendor would simply be a less fun experience.
Bruno Faidutti recently blogged about how different component choices affected the resolution of a rock-paper-scissors mechanism in a game he’s designing with Eric Lang.
First they tried secret dials, but set them aside as too costly to produce. Then they replaced the dials with cards. The results were similar, but players preferred the dials.
When they played the game by physically throwing hand symbols, they were surprised at the results:
Now comes the real experience. Get rid of cards and dial, and play this à la Rock / Paper / Scissors. A closed fist means War / Greed, an open Hand means Peace, a thumb up means 1. Theoretically, this system is equivalent to the two former ones. When playing, however, the feeling is very different, and it seems that the results are slightly more aggressive, with more wars and less peace. May be holding one’s arm makes one aggressive, maybe the requirement to play fast, without hesitation, makes us less careful? Anyway, it’s the same game, but it plays a bit differently.
I love Camel Up, but it just wouldn’t be the same drawing a die from a bag. And Splendor with cardboard jewels? Sure, ok.
I can’t say that the Pyramid die roller clinched the SdJ win for Camel Up or that those poker chips alone got Splendor nominated, but I do know that carefully considered components can greatly enhance the experience of games.
* Stephen’s tweet was in jest. I’m using it as a conversation starter.
play without fear 