I think I’ve found a means to finally do away with my most inelegant darling, the troublesome calendar track in LXIX: The Year of Four Emperors, while still providing for a bonus action system. I think it’ll be something players can safely ignore, but will still benefit those who need it most, which is really what the bonus actions were intended to do. I’m eager to play test it this week at Board Games & Beer!
Category Archives: design process
thoughts on theme: to change or not to change?
There are two senses of theme we talk about in game design: big “T” Theme or theme in the literary sense, wherein a game is an expression or exploration of a concept, and little “t” theme, commonly used to refer to a game’s setting or situation.
For example, the Theme of Battlestar Galactica The Board Game might be “survival in an atmosphere of mistrust and deception,” while its theme is obviously “Battlestar Galactica the TV show.” The game’s mechanisms work to support and express both its Theme, in that it presents a series of challenges designed to whittle player resources down through attrition while instilling a deep sense of mistrust among players by hiding one or more antagonistic traitors among them, and its theme, in that it provides player actions and game effects appropriate to the characters and situations on the show.
Some very smart and talented folks have been discussing big “T” themes lately, and I strongly encourage you to read what they’re writing. This is critical to understanding games as more than simply entertainment. Daniel Solis covered these ably on his blog.
Today, however, I want to write briefly about a recent experience with little “t” theme.
“What’s in a theme? That which we call a game
With any other theme would play as well.”
Or would it?
Theme is marketing. Theme is your game’s face. It is the first impression you will make on players and is a primary determining factor in their buying decision. After all, if your theme doesn’t appeal to them, they are unlikely to even pick it up off the shelf.
But it’s more than that.
Theme is framing. Theme contextualizes your game’s mechanisms and is the filter through which your players will experience them. Theme is the heuristic by which your players will learn your game.
So what happens when your theme doesn’t feel quite right for the mechanisms you’re using? Or, to put it the other way, what happens when your mechanisms don’t really support the theme you’ve chosen? I ran into this issue recently on a new game design. Here’s how I addressed it.
In July, I started re-developing a small card game I had designed for a microgame contest back in February of 2013. The original design parameters required 20 standard poker cards and a handful of cubes. I designed a somewhat silly dexterity game with a somewhat serious theme. I called it Nuke It From Orbit.
Nuke It From Orbit was one of those designs that kind of just came together. I had been mulling over a vague idea for a game inspired by Ripley’s classic line in Aliens. Mostly, I had a title and a single mechanism. I knew it would be a card-based dexterity game, using a modified “Chaos Orb” card-flipping mechanism that I’ve loved since way back in the days when I first played Magic: The Gathering. The players would have to flip a card onto the table, but the effect would depend on which side was up when it landed. I figured I could create a microgame version as a proof of concept.
The limitations of the contest–20 poker cards and 10 cubes–would mean I’d need to eek out my theme where I could find it. The black-suited number cards had all those little spade and club icons, which might look like scrabbling swarms of deadly Aliens if you squint at them just right. The two through nine of Clubs and Spades gave me 18 cards with alien swarms. Aliens need a Queen and, hey, here was the Queen of Spades. I needed another card to round out to twenty and darned if that Ace of Spades didn’t give a vague impression of a face-hugger. So, I had my Aliens-themed deck of twenty cards. Now what?
If the suit sides were the Aliens, that meant the card backs were the Nukes. From there, the basic game play evolved. We’d start with a few Aliens on the table and flip Nukes at them to kill them. If your card landed Nuke side up and touched an Alien card, you destroyed it. If your card landed Alien side up, well, more Aliens had just spawned. I submitted it to the contest. It didn’t win. Still, it felt like there was a seed of something really cool there.
I submitted it to the contest. It didn’t win.
I play tested it a couple of times after the contest was over to mixed reactions, so I shelved it to work on other games. When I picked it up again, I’d just developed and sold one big game and was mostly done with another. I needed a break from serious, historical themes and Nuke It From Orbit was just the thing for it.
Non-historical themes are one thing, but I still wanted a game I could pitch to a publisher or even self-publish via Print On Demand services. That meant I’d need to replace the standard playing cards with custom cards and artwork and tighten up the rules. It needed to be simple, fast, and most importantly, fun!
Play testing the game with Sharpie-scrawled symbols and rudimentary artwork on blank cards from The Game Crafter, I became aware of what I perceived as a fundamental mismatch between the theme and the game play. The Alien creatures from the movies were scary, deadly monsters. Ripley didn’t even want to be on the same planet as them! My game involved flipping cards onto a table, trying to cover other cards; not exactly a military-grade tactical simulation. Sure, there’s a chest-burster hiding among the aliens in the cards, but that’s the extent of the danger to the players.
I’d already discounted using the actual Aliens likenesses as I assumed licensing the rights would be cost-prohibitive for any publisher interested in picking the game up. I thought maybe some sufficiently creepy Alien-esque critters would work. However, I had a threatening theme and a definitely non-threatening game. What should I do?
One option was to scrap the card-flipping and make a tactical bug-hunt game. Nuke It From Orbit! F-yeah! Get some! That has a definite appeal, but it wasn’t the kind of game I needed at the time.
A different theme was another possibility. There were some interesting and clever alternate suggestions; bees landing on flowers, ancient oak trees dropping leaves to cover acorns, cherry blossoms falling. I did some art for the oak leaves and acorns, but it was always unsatisfying to me. I wanted to make Nuke It From Orbit, not Falling Oak Leaves.
The option I settled on was to go for a broad, tongue-in-cheek parody treatment. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be a true Aliens vs Colonial Marines bug hunt game and, while I like the Zen-like gentle themes, this was a game that needed a good hook for a publisher. Nuke It From Orbit was going to be a cute, silly game with cute, silly aliens to blast into smithereens.
I sketched some alien critters in Procreate on my iPad and imported the sketches into iDraw for vector treatment. If you squint, you can just about see the remains of a Giger alien skull in their cute and cuddly noggins. After a couple hours of layout work in Illustrator, I uploaded files to The Game Crafter and had a few test decks printed. They turned out great and the game has been a hit every time I’ve taught it to new players and play testers.
Nuke It From Orbit started out as little more than a cheeky reference to a classic movie line. I struggled early in development to find just the right match between theme and mechanism and found a way to satisfy both. Nuke It From Orbit has come to life as a fun and silly game, just as cheeky as it was always meant to be.
Next up…?
game currencies in an economy of evolution
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.
die, my inelegant darling, die!
Over on their Tumblr, my friends at Cardboard Edison posted a quote from game designer Darrell Hardy:
“If you need to remind players of a rule, it may not be elegant enough.”
Origins Award-winning game designer Dave Chalker calls these “Hand Slap” rules, because he has to slap someone’s hand every time they forget that rule and reach for the board in error.
I have a game with a Hand Slap rule.
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?
designing good and accurate historical games
“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.
play without fear 