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I've been committed to board game design for a while now, I have a couple different notebooks or rather scrapbooks I'd call them at this point as I'm usually hit with ideas randomly throughout the day and jot them down on whatever paper I can find nearby. The process is fascinating and fun and I think the two biggest things impeding me right now are my strong desire for originality and also trying to make a game that everyone would enjoy. So it really bugs me when I have someone try out a basic prototype and they'll innocently ask "so this deck of action cards sets the length of the game like in Brass or Dominant Species?" which is something I had never even thought of and I'll immediately want to scrap that whole game because I'm convinced that I've simply pilfered the core mechanics of other games. I have to believe this is a very unhealthy way of thinking because no game of any slight level of complexity consists of all original mechanics. As for my second concern about trying to please everyone, this past year of 2012 I have played more games than any other year since I got into modern boardgaming about 5 years ago (played over 100 different board games this year) and it's helped me refine my personal preferences in gaming. That was a big step in being able to decide the target audience when designing a game. xopods posted:Skill factor: (W - 0.5) / 0.5, where W is the win rate of a perfect player over a random player. So something with zero luck has a (1 - 0.5) / 0.5 = 100% skill factor, while something completely random, where no player can have an advantage, has a (0.5 - 0.5) / 0.5 = 0% skill factor. I like your relationship between what you're calling "skill level" and the depth of a game. I would probably argue that the learning curve isn't a relationship between effort and "skill level" though but rather "effectiveness of tactics" and skill level. If I don't understand the consequences of my actions my effort can consistently be very low and have a wide range of positive and negative outcomes whereas my ability to be successfully tactical is more revealing of how deep a game is.
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Nov 24, 2012 19:33
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:18 |
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Actually one more thing I'd like to get some insight on; designing with a range of players in mind. I get hung up on this sometimes where I initially go through simulating a couple rounds of a real basic construct of a game at 4 players and then when I try the same at 3 or 5 players it completely breaks down. I tend to be the most productive when I design something with an exact player count in mind but apart from the niche of 2 player games that seems rather unappealing if my 5 player game can't handle 4 or 3 instead. Any tips for scaling games? Is it generally easier to do it from the offset or to first get a completed game and then find a solution for accommodating more or less players?
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Nov 24, 2012 19:51
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xopods posted:
I guess I still don't fully see the relationship of effort to skill level. If we are purely defining skill level as tiers of winning percentage and then correlating that to effort spent getting to some discrete skill level I feel like it doesn't account for a set of strategies with a sort of RPS relationship where more basic strategies can have higher winning rates over more complex strategies but lose to middle-of-the-pack strategies. Even when I generalize it down to saying that more effort boosts a percentage chance of being able to play a specific strategy as opposed to "unlocking" a strategy, I feel like I could create a set where effort spent has an inverse relationship to winning percentage? Sorry if that came across as convoluted, I'm posting on my phone at work cause I'm bored and love thinking about this stuff! Also I hope this doesn't come across as antagonizing you, merely going for playing devil's advocate.
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Nov 26, 2012 17:19
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I was inspired to go back through some of the games I've conceived and spent the last day or so ruminating over them. I thought I'd pick one to share, maybe get some inspiration on the couple points that are mental blocks for me. I've never really bounced ideas off anyone at this stage where I've got something mainly put together but it's still a ways off from prototype. Summary Each player captains a ship, employing a group of seasoned pirates. To take any action they must send a pirate off on the task and similarly they must choose which pirates to risk in combat. Each pirate plays a specific role on the ship so as a captain you must make choices as to which pirates to give up...do you send a worker that's manning the sails off on a mission, thus reducing how fast you now move each turn? Or do you send one of your cannoneers away reducing your attack strength? Or maybe you can do without a cook and not use food as efficiently. You might even be stuck with a skeleton crew until you make it back to port to hire new crew members. Through it all you aim to collect what every pirate desires; gold and infamy. Gameplay and Components I think these are shared on google docs. Player Board Each player would have one and would start with a few pirates employed. You receive the bonus by having a worker placed on the space next to it. There are spaces for deck hands (owned but unemployed pirates), gold, infamy points, and a track for food. Main Board This would house Sea Cards, Merchant and Naval ship tokens, and Infamy tokens. The edge of the board is also where the location Sea Cards are placed. You can see the initial card placed off the edge, each player may place one of the 3 available cards at any place around the board. The edges of the board are continuous, and moving over an empty space counts as 1. Sea Cards either have a basic effect when simply moved over or are destination ports. Example Sea Cards here On your turn you simply place one of the 3 cards around the edge of the board, then move your ship token and then take an action. You can move a number of spaces equal to the number of sails men (+1 movement) you have employed. Travelling over an open sea card allows you to just take either food or gold if you have the fishing or looting pirates placed on your ship. The combat stations affect combat between players and between players and non-player merchant shipts. Those open Sea cards also have a symbol at the bottom that indicates how the non-player merchant ships move across the cards or when to spawn one. Ports allow you to hire men and to trade in non-player merchant ships you have attacked for points. edit I didn't really touch on this. When you use men the pieces are physically moved to the closest port to your ship. Each port can only hold up to 5 men and have 2 or 3 initially when placed down. Attacking, trading at ports (both goods and trading in merchant ships) and taking bonus looting or fishing actions requires you to remove pirate workers from your ship. You can re-employ them at ports as an action, and it also requires gold to hire pirates at a port as deck hands, and then requires food to move a deck hand to a station. When players enter a space occupied by another players ship or a non-player ship they attack that ship. Combat merely has the attacker wagering a certain value of strength from pirates and the defender must beat that number. If the attacker wins he takes gold/deckhands/merchant ship tokens equal to his the margin of strength he had over the defender. Both players lose the pirate workers spent. Any battle also gains both participants infamy points, with the victor taking 3 and the loser 1. When a player defeats a non-player merchant ship he holds onto that token and may trade it into any port that matches the color of that merchant type. The attack strength of merchant ships and also value traded in is related to the number of their ports on the board. There are 2 or 3 of each merchant type available to enter play. He may also then immediately choose to purchase an infamy token with infamy points he has collected. Infamy tokens are more of a fun element, not as involved in gameplay. They are both constant and end of game VP bonuses and take the form of 3 different types of tokens; *DESCRIPTOR* *AFFLICTION* *ROLE* . There would be a spread to choose from, and each player can only have one descriptor, one affliction and one role. My idea is that descriptors would have some VP triggering condition, afflictions are straight up VPs, and roles are end-of-game VPs calculated from something. So for example a player, Tom, buys all 3 slots over the course of the game and they are now SAVAGE Tom the ONE-EYED DRUNK. SAVAGE gave Tom 1 VP every time he won a battle, ONE-EYED is worth simply 5 VP, and DRUNK is worth 2 VP for every port. Another player, Mary only bought two and became QUICK Mary the PEG LEG. QUICK gave Mary 1 VP every time she moved 5 spaces on a turn and PEG LEG was only worth 3 VP compared to Tom's 5 VP ONE EYE. The only other way to get VP is to bury your gold on a treasure island (trade gold for VP at the start location) -------------- That's the core game I put together. I experimented with more types of resources (rum, weapons, treasure maps, generic goods) but I think that makes it too fiddly when I'm looking for a core experience of balancing your workers. I want players deciding what bonuses/abilities they need and how they plan on attacking those merchant ships while still remaining strong enough to fend off other players before getting back to port. I'm not a fan of my combat system at the moment but I don't really know which route I want to take. Dice is an option, with outcomes weighted by the pirates on the ship. I was considering maybe some sort of hand of action cards, too. Like ATTACK, LOOT, DEFEND, FLEE. And you can only use each one once until you return to port and that lets you restock your hand. I definitely need to simulate it a few times to work out how many men are expended during battle as well. It might not make sense to have it be all that are wagered because ships may never truly be able to have any large size of workers if they're losing them quickly when attacking those merchant ships. I'm also thinking that ports have a few different symbols on them (rum bottle, fish, wool, etc) as opposed to simply a color and the backs of merchant ships have these symbols and you need to trade in at matching symbols. This would allow the destination port for a player to be kept secret. I would love any feedback and suggestions. I think I'm going to keep focusing on this one for a bit. Admin Understudy fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 23:27
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What if the component slots or system layers had a secondary purpose for the card drawing and combat actions. Like as long as you had a card in the legs slot you got to draw an additional card for construction each round, a card in the body slot is increased hand size or something, each arm lets you conduct combat less randomly.
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Nov 28, 2012 19:44
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So I've hashed out a bit more on the pirate game (and I'm not married to that theme, but it seems to fit OK). I was forcing some content on the game to try and flesh it out and see what I could get out of it and it was too cluttered for me, so I took a step back. What I want first and foremost is a worker placement game where removing, not placing, your workers is the primary action. I want this to be rapid, as in multiple workers should be coming back and getting used each player turn. I also want it to require some cost-benefit analyzing, I want multiple routes of worker placement to be effective and for the state of the board to affect what you're going to do. Secondarily, with ship tokens moving from a location to another I want a non-standard setup. I don't want a grid or hex board, I wanted something a little more abstract. Primarily to keep it a bit more elegant but also to try and keep the focus on managing the "crew" of workers and not on any sort of area control or network building. My initial thought was players would draw a card from a deck and place them in a frame around the board, and moved ships from card to card. I turned this into tiles with each base location to place a tile being either FOOD or GOLD (or an X which I'll get to in a moment). When players move they choose to "loot" or "fish" and take a corresponding resource for each tile with that symbol they pass over. Here's my rough sketch: main board Players will have a selection of 3 tiles and as an action may "explore" and take a tile to cover up one of the base FOOD or GOLD locations. The replaced tiles will have a variety of actions and be a way to get the other 2 core resources than FOOD or GOLD I'm calling GOOD A and GOOD B for now. The main board also has ports, which can be accessed merely by being adjacent to them on one of the 3 central tiles on each side. Ports do 2 things: allow players to recruit men and allow players to sell any of FOOD, GOOD A, or GOOD B for gold. Gold is VP and is used to activate some tiles and hire men. So for the worker bonuses I'm thinking 10 is a solid number to start with and have: 1. MOVE +2 2. MOVE +2 3. MOVE +2 4. FISH +1 5. FISH +1 6. FISH +1 7. LOOT +1 8. LOOT +1 9. LOOT +1 10. FIRST MATE (prerequisite placement for certain crew size, more than 5 maybe) A basic graphic aid similar to the first one I made player board Having a worker placed on any spot gets you that bonus. To take an action you remove a worker. I'm trying to keep it simple so the actions are "move & loot", "move & fish" or "explore". So if after removing a worker, I decide to "move & fish" and lets say after my worker bonuses I can move 5 spaces and fish twice. That means I can move up to 5 spaces and activate any 2 tiles I pass that have a fish symbol on them. To start, the base tile locations would simply give me 1 food for activating them but maybe a different tile placed there has a fish symbol but does something advanced like "trade in 2 FOOD for 1 GOOD B". Taking a cue from Glen More, I think this works really well if I have players moving counter-clockwise from the X on the main board and the player that has moved the least space gets to take the next action. To prevent lapping, I'll have a "naval blockade" token that stays 1 space behind the last player and that cannot be passed. This naval blockade token also serves a purpose in if an entire round passes with no player taking the "explore" action, then a red X tile is placed under the naval blockade. These red Xs, including the one that's on the board to start have the effect where any ship token passing over them must lose 1 crew member. Selling to ports, restocking workers and using workers are not actions and may be done when at any port. I may call those port actions I suppose. My last thing is apart from selling GOOD A and GOOD B to ports, they are kept secret on your board and used for player combat. If I move my ship exactly on top of yours I initiate an attack. We both them take a secret collection of FOOD, GOOD A, and GOOD B cubes from our stash. We calculate strength with GOOD A being worth 3 strength, GOOD B 2 strength and FOOD at 1 strength. The winner gets something, I can't figure out if it should be gold from the loser based on the relative strength difference or if it should be a choice of goods remaining in the loser's secret stash. I need an incentive to explore, so I'm thinking each player gets a number of flag tokens and you place these adjacent to a tile when you explore there and these are end of game VP bonuses. I'm probably going to make a prototype of more or less this setup. I still of course have to plan out the effects of the different location tiles. As always I would greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, or suggestions.
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Dec 5, 2012 23:50
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Not owning a good printer I've printed a couple of my prototypes (I've only done this twice now, and then a third time just to update one) at a Kinko's center which was easy enough albeit expensive for what it is. I just throw my files on a flash drive, plug it into their printer, swipe a credit card and then print. Prints at full color on thicker paper are a little pricier close to $1 a page but standard copy paper is cheaper. They also have those guillotine paper cutters available which I also don't own so that's nice, too.
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Dec 15, 2012 18:09
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I've been designing a game where players go to work Mon - Fri and then on Sat they go out to dinner with their boss and try to impress him the most. "Work" on Monday through Friday is drawing a card off of a pile of one of 4 different categories representing projects this business is working on. At the end of the work week this categories are ranked in order of completion (smallest pile to largest pile) and in a random order they are brought up as topics of conversation at the dinner with players using single or combination of cards to come across as the most knowledgeable on these topics in order to gain respect points from their boss. This would continue over a few weeks/rounds until one player hit a respect point threshold. So the categories would give different amount of respect points based in the level of completion and then players would vie for them with the cards they played. I'm not set on how i want the cards to work, it needs the element of "display 3 knowledge of topic X" against another player's "display 2 knowledge of topic X" with the higher amount winning more VPs/respect points. I would like to make it a bit more involved and interactive than that though with some elements of conversation that have differing effects. Stuff like tell a joke, reference something personal, defer conversation to someone else, etc. I don't think a deck of 100 different cards is the way to go, Im leaning towards requiring multiple cards being played by a player for a combined effect. I toyed around with a system akin to Epic Spell Wars where players would play a Topic, a Tone, and a Level of Knowledge card together to various effects. But I just can't shake the fact that a similar cars interplay in my game would be scaled down a bit from Epic Spell Wars so why make an inferior version of an existing game. I'm more liking each card being two things, the topic of conversation and then on the edge it has some sort of modifier or effect. Basically you'd play a category topic card and the other card partially underneath that would have a various effect on the main card played. I have a few more elements I'd like to involve, for one each day players would have the option to either work overtime and draw an additional card or to rest and discard a card from their hand. But first I want a good system for actually conducting the conversations, I thought I might get some suggestions here. Edit- I apologize for the abhorrent spelling and formatting, posting from a tablet while I'm waiting on someone, I swear English is my first language! Admin Understudy fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 19:08
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I like that idea a lot. I would play that game. One dimension I might add to it is movement over tiles differing between resource type. For example, forests with 3 or more tokens are not traversable, mountain "mines" with no resources also could not be passed over, lakes with 2 or more fish can improve a movement by an additional space, etc.
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Feb 15, 2013 03:03
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I proposed a design play-test night to my game group and there was plenty of interest and encouragement, but no takers. So I'm just going to play test 2 of my designs with them in 2 weeks and have been finishing up those prototypes recently. However, I want to propose a game here real quick, something that came to me last night and get some feedback. For now I'll say the theme is spaceship creation (it's been done so I'll probably try and brainstorm something else for theme). The creation part would be laying out a blueprint of say ~7 cards that were core sections of the ship: cabin, engineering, mess, weapons, etc. These cards would then need to be augmented with wooden pieces that fulfilled some aspects: long thin rods to act as a framework connecting cards together, short fat rods connecting "hot zones" as thermal connectors, flat cylinder life support systems that had to go on any card that housed crew, cylinders with one rounded side that had to go any place that needed a local computer, small round tokens for torpedoes, small cubes for batteries. All these pieces would be thrown in a bag to be blindly drawn from on your turn, hoping to fulfill the exact needs of your ship. The catch would be that you could only make 3 grabs from the bag (4 for smaller child hands!) and so you needed to try and keep track of what was in your hand while fishing for the pieces you needed. Drawing an excess of pieces would be costly. Now there are 2 things that keep this process challenging. First is that your blueprint is random, 1 initial card is revealed that's atop 3 rows of 2 cards, these rows are revealed throughout your building phase. Secondly, while your one hand is inside fishing for pieces, you are simultaneously flipping through a deck. It's to be a somewhat simple process of flipping over 3 cards, keeping 1 or 2, and repeating, trying to get 5 that share color/suit. Each time you complete a set of 5 you can look at the next row of cards in your ship blueprint. The 3 sets of 5 cards you end up with will represent 3 trips your ship will take with color, suit and number representing different beneficial and harmful effects. To keep this hastened, during your construction phase the other players will be drawing from a collective deck and simultaneously playing cards. I don't know the exact mechanics I want, but again something where they're collectively trying to make sets; these sets representing the threats the active players ship faces. Something where the goal is a flush or complete set, but whatever cards have been played are finalized as the threat whenever the active player finishes his own set and unlocks the next row of blueprint cards. So this gives the active player incentive to move quickly in completing his sets of cards, but this in turn lessens the amount of time he has to fiddle around in the bag of components. Would this be fun? Do you think I'm over-estimating or under-estimating the challenge of searching for specific pieces in a bag with one hand while attempting to make simple sets of cards with the other hand? Any suggestions for mechanics of the non-active players?
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Feb 21, 2013 14:31
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I created a game for BGG's 24 hour design contest with the theme Wild West. Here's a link to the PDF Fair warning, the artwork is terrible. It was fun, I'll probably do this again occasionally. I'm happy enough with the design considering 24 hours is a ridiculous time frame. Obviously I really need some more time to balance it out.
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Aug 18, 2013 21:05
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:18 |
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I'm going to give the BGG 24 hour contest another go, theme this month is dice. I had some errands to run today so I spent the last 6 hours just brain storming and drew this up when I got home. I'm off to Kinkos now to print it up for some brief play testing but then this evening I'll probably write up a PDF of rules and pages to print out. Space Dice Game 2-5 players ??? Minutes Components needed: 1 Ship sheet & pen for each player, 1 more than 1 die per player Players are space pirates attempting to build up their ship and deliver cargo without sustaining too much damage. On a turn, the active player will roll all the dice, select 1 or 2 for himself, and then in player order each player must select another die if able. When selecting dice, each player will indicate what aspect of their ship that die is being applied to. There are 2 slots each for the ship's Computers, Weapons, Cargo, Crew, Engines, and Shields. A player simply writes the number of the selected die into the corresponding component slot. After all dice are selected, there may be 1 or more remaining, the active player may then select one of these to fill the crew component or as an attack on other players. Then pass the dice to the next player clockwise and repeat. Play continues until all players have filled all components on their ships and then 1 final round takes place. Here's the basic layout of the ship sheet (It will be labeled a bit differently, left a little vague at the moment so I can alter it while play testing more easily)  What the ship components do: A.) "Computers" determines player order for selecting dice after the active player has made their selection, higher totals pick first, any ties just continue in clockwise order B.) "Weapons" determine when dice can be used as attacks after the primary selection phase, reverse correlation, div/2 rounded up. So higher = better, a total of max value 12 allows you to pick any die to attack with. a minimum of 2 means only a 6 could be selected as an attack. C.) "Cargo" is not entered as a value on the ship but marked off on the side & is the primary way to score VPs. When you make a selection, you scratch off that value and at the end of game you score that many points. Obviously only the active player could select values 7 through 12 as they require 2 dice. D.) "Crew" is not selected during the primary phase, but similar to attack is only selected by the active player from any excess dice. There is a total component value (ship cost) limit of 40 for the components outside of Crew, and the value of Crew raises that number. E.) "Engines" determine rerolls. div/3 rounded up rerolls as either active or non-active player. Active player gets to make this number of total extra rolls, meaning TWO rerolls could be used as re-rolling 2 dice one time, or one die twice. F. "Shields" are extra slots that can take damage from attacks. When selecting dice values, you first place a value in the left side of the ship. Once the left component has a value, you never have to choose a lower value for the right component when you're not the active player. So for example, if you have the left side filled in with 4 Weapons, 4 shields, and 3 engines and only a 2 or 1 was remaining for selection, you are not required to pick that. Computers are not affected by this rule and are not required to be filled in ever. More on attacks: selected from a potential remaining die, your "Weapons" total must be high enough to use that selected die. Each other player takes damage equal to the number of pips. This damage is tabulated under "Structural Integrity" on the right, the top row of 12 slots represents your ship, the bottom row is potential slots from shields. I'm thinking every 2 slots filled in, you must X out a component of your ship that can never be filled in with a number but counts towards ship completion. You lose 1 point for each non-shield slot checked off. This is a little stream of consciousness, I apologize, I'll get a nicer looking rulebook up for review after some playtesting. I'd definitely appreciate any insight in the mean time though.
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Sep 8, 2013 21:02
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