Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

I've been kicking around a couple of ideas in my head recently and wondered if anybody had thoughts on what I should try to tackle first, or if I should try either -

Idea 1:
A Godzilla-type game inspired by BSG. You have a nation built out of board pieces, each of which is a city. Each turn a crisis comes up in BSG style (point total needed to beat, each player plays in). Failure would results in damage to various cities. The twist would be it's a competitive game - each player would be assigned two cities to protect in secret. So failing crisis would be strategic and part of the game would be figuring out who's protecting what.

Idea 2:
From the general board game thread, inspired by The Wire:

Card game. Each player has a hand that represents influence in various spheres of power (Police, City Hall, DA, Unions, Drug Cartels, etc). Each sphere has different effects that can be played face up on the table. Police might make an opponent discard, Drug Cartels might force other players to pay him, Unions would have defensive effects, City Hall could peek at upcoming cards, etc.

Then there are "plot cards", which basically create a narrative. They're split into three types: People, scandal, resolution. They're revealed one at a time, come from randomized decks, and everybody gets to play/trade/negotiate inbetween them being revealed. Power cards change the power levels of cards: Carcetti would give City Hall cards +1 power, for example, while Avon would increase drugs. Scandal cards would create alterations to power cards - say Carcetti is bribing the police - now city hall cards can be substituted as police cards, for example. Finally, the resolution card would determine what happens - he gets away with it, or gets caught, or deflects blame onto the Drug Cartels. This is a modifier for end of round scoring - if he gets away with it all City Hall and Police cards score extra, etc.

All of the narrative cards could be examined, buried, or maybe even modified by paying certain costs from whatever influence deck.

You get to build a power base as you choose, and then use those resources to manipulate the narrative and gently caress over other people.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 18:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:38

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

xopods posted:

Instead of making it entirely competitive, though, what if you made it traitor-based like BSG, but with the added factor that not all the good guys win, only those who successfully protected their "pet" cities.

I could see that working, but I felt like there were two big negatives
- BSG Sleeper/Panic Station issues as you described
- Adding in another "role" to the game would complicate balancing significantly

My thought was is you don't have an "everybody loses" endgame it's one less thing to balance. I figured not having a cap on damage would mean nobody was every truly out of the running, and by each player having two cities to protect would mitigate runaway victory scenarios. Hell, I even thought of giving everybody 2 personal cities PLUS one of their opponent's cities to protect, as a tiebreaker/bonus points sort of thing, but that's probably too much.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 19:55

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

xopods posted:

How do you plan on avoiding it being a multiplayer solitaire game if everyone is only interested in defending their own cities, and the threat comes from the game itself and not the other players?

The thought would be threats would generally effect multiple people at once - for example:

Points needed: 10
Pass: No effect
Fail: Damage the city the monster is in for 10 points. Damage each city adjacent to the monster for 5 points.

And each person would contribute points to the check (hence the BSG comparison).

Another idea would the monster would "rampage" across the board. It has a set # of points to stop its rampage. 1st player would move the monster, damage the city it moves to. Then each player could throw in points to stop it. If the total isn't reached, the next player gets to move it, damage, and players can throw in points again (cumulative with the first round).

Was also thinking of maybe adding in some hand management - say you have a hand of 0-6, and you HAVE to contribute at least one card each turn, and don't get it back until all of your cards are played.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 20:07

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

I was thinking about this mechanic as well, which would mesh with the whole hand management idea:

A "technology funding" track. The track would have "discovery points" at different point values - say 10, 15, 18, etc. The player whose points contribution crosses over a discovery point would get a special ability card - like perhaps a bait token like you described. Players could play their 0 cards on it, but then they would have to contribute towards stopping the monster for that turn.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 20:32

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Hmmm..

Replace the monster crisis cards with "mishap" cards. Security breaches, lab accidents, stupid research assistants... failures would add breakout tokens to a player. Make the fail results primarily effect the current player but with some pain for others - basically make the current player bear the brunt of contribution to pass.

At certain points in the game breakouts would happen (maybe randomized in the mishap deck, or some other criteria) and the player with the most breakout tokens loses control.

So now, if every turn you have to contribute to the research track, you have to choose between gaining new technologies or defending against mishaps which could wreck your lab.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 21:04

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

For the mishap stuff, I think there could (and probably should) be lots of variations on what happens to help keep each turn fresh. Your proposed scenario could be one. Another could be the play who plays the highest total gets a breakthrough AND a mishap. There's plenty of game theory scenarios you could use.
EDIT: Thinking about it, your proposal is probably better. Maybe introduce some randomness by making the breakthrough you get random each turn, but known to the players.

Then, once monsters hit the table, you have to use your cards to control them as well.

If you combine all that with a hand management (wherein you have to use each card once before you get them back) mechanic, I could see the game getting progressively harder as it goes on. You could even have breakthroughs that manipulate your hand or the mishap deck.

I like the idea of using a breakout as an offensive mechanic as well - say somebody purposefully tanks checks so their monster gets out first, then uses their points to rampage it across the board.

Crackbone fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Nov 27, 2012

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 21:24

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

This all sounds awesome and I should expect any attempt at a first draft will probably be horrible, right? :negative:

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 22:07

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Has anything Kevin Wilson done been good?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2012 16:34

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

En Garde uses a system that's intersting: You have a hand of cards with values of 1-5. When you attack you can lay down a card or multiple cards if you have matches (ie you could lay down 3 cards with value 4). You opponent must match what you laid down or you score a hit.

So your cards could serve as both maneuvers and attack/defense. It could potentially be a balancing mechanism as well - make your best maneuvers have the best attack/firepower values, thus forcing you to choose between speed or combat strength.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2012 22:19

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Nemesis Of Moles posted:

Board Games are just getting too big to consign all of them to one camp or another.

They were never small enough to do so, it's just a convenient shorthand.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2012 18:29

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

xopods posted:

Regarding geographical terms, there's plenty of precedent for this outside of gaming... if you tell me, for instance, that you're going out for Chinese food, I don't assume you're flying to Shanghai to get it.

The reason I like arthouse and blockbuster, though, is that I do think they convey the essence of the design philosophy: less is more vs. more is more. But if that's really all I'm shooting at, maybe minimalist and maximalist are more direct and obvious.

I don't know, but I'm willing to bet they're both at least 25 letters long and end in -spiel.

Amerikanerdummregel sounds right.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 03:01

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

SUMO! is another "pushing game".

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 19:20

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

EddieDean posted:

To this end, the current simple time travel mechanic I'm thinking about takes that INPUT > OUTPUT card flow and allows you to, if given a better card, go back in time to replace an older card with a newer one. So for example I might replace my 'INVESTMENTS: Money > 2 Money' card with 'CHEAT STOCK MARKET: Money > 4 Money'.

I'm interested in feedback as it currently stands, and also should mention that I haven't yet considered HOW players actually get their cards, so I'm interested in ideas there.

As you're describing this it doesn't sound Time travel-esque at all. It is literally just upgrading parts of your engine, which is a pretty standard game mechanic.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2012 20:38

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Xopods, you need to charge for your help!

So you end up having:

code:

             1900    1920   1940   1960   1980    2000
Player 1
Player 2
Player 3
Player 4

Each player starts in 1900 and every turn you naturally move forward one era. However, you can use your time travel to go back one or more ages - perhaps it costs a resource. You can jump to other people's timelines as well for a higher resource cost.

Maybe you could make scoring only happen at certain intervals? So you only gain points after everybody's had 5 full turns, but your engine "stops" at whatever age you're in during the scoring round. Maybe if you end up in somebody else's timeline during a scoring round they get bonus points.

EDIT: Ooh! Maybe mark both sides of your cards with different symbols or numbers or colors. If you manage to lay down a set of cards with matching symbols/numbers/colors that's how you create a paradox.

Crackbone fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Dec 5, 2012

# ¿ Dec 5, 2012 22:05

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

If you're getting all positivity from your group, they need to be harsher. I can't think of any game that doesn't have a valid complaint against it.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2012 00:49

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Fix posted:

What about doing a# of D6s instead of moving up a dice chain? Speed 1 is 1D6, Speed 2 is 2D6, etc. This will greatly reduce the variance you'd get vs a single d12/20/etc.

Now , for your maneuver issue, make pilot skills go from 1-5. When you do a risky maneuver, you roll a # of D6 equal to your speed. If any of the dice come up higher than your skill level it's a failure.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2012 14:49

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Railing Kill posted:

- Why have defense at all on the dice? You've already got players committing dice + time to attacking. That way there's no defensive stockpiling when somebody is in the lead. At the same time, make winning contingent on accumulating points/resources that can't be taken away once earned, thus making ganging up on the leader pointless.

Let's say the value of attacking specific players changes during the game, then it becomes an issue of when instead of who to attack.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 17:21

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Alternatively, if you have an iDevice:

http://www.machwerx.com/apps/machdice/

For an extra couple bucks you get the ability to create custom faced dice, as many as you want. It's really quite nice and not terribly hard to do.

Here's an example where I made a set of virtual Descent 2nd Edition dice:

Seems like it'd be really handy especially if you're prototyping.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 19:31

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

xopods posted:

I'm guessing it doesn't have the feature set required to support a dice-building game though.

Programming rules and such, no. But you actually do up to 100 dice on screen at once, and lock down dice individually from rerolls, etc.

It might not be pretty but you could rapid prototype something and do a few playtests with an ipad pretty quick.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 20:03

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Can you make a flowchart that fits on one page of paper and allows you to come within a couple of points of a human? If so then there's probably an issue somewhere.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 16:41

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

It'd term it "optimization games" - tiny adjustments that will win the game, but generally aren't obvious to new (or maybe even intermediate) players.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 19:15

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

My question is what purpose do the tiles actually serve? Based on your description it sounds as though it could easily be abstracted to a card format without losing anything other than the "neat" factor of a tile layout. You're right in that your proposed setup would be a setup and production headache.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2013 22:58

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

I agree. The dexterity portion is highly problematic IMO. I don't see it adding anything of real value while excluding a large swath of potential players, not to mention the problems with different hand sizes and finger reach. A piano player would have a measured advantage vs. somebody with carpal tunnel or a disability. I doubt that's the intent.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 16:37

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Nemesis Of Moles posted:

I hate to tangent again from the awesome news xopods, but I had a new idea for a game I want to run past the thread, see what you guys think.

My games club recently got Wiz-War, the new FF version. I started playing with a group and it was a hell of a lot of fun and comparisons to things like Quake and Unreal started arising. It got me thinking, a FPS deathmatch arena style game may be some fantastic fun. The madcap run-grab-shoot mechanics of Wiz-war already were fantastic, and I'm wondering what speeding the game up, adding powerups and maybe random weapon pickups would do. I'm gonna finish up the two games I have right now, and then maybe mess with Wiz-War itself first, but I was wondering if this is already a game, or if anyone had any ideas/thoughts on it.

Frag by Steve Jackson games tries to do this, but it's not very good. Might be worth looking at for some pointers on what not to do.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2013 01:56

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Nemesis Of Moles posted:

What is Frags main mechanic, just out of curiosity? Thanks for the tip, fella.

D6s. Oodles and oodles of D6s.

But on another note, I really dug Gears of War (the board game) using a hand of cards as both special abilities and health. Using cards to do both creates some inherent tension and emulates playstyles - going for broke on an attempted kill, or grabbing the super-armor and trying to outtank the other player's damage.

DirkGently posted:

Also, on an unrelated note, since discussion of the Firefly board game has been tossed about in the main Board Game thread (concerning how it seems to miss the point of the show) it got me to thinking -- how would you make a GOOD game based on Firefly?

I dunno, how you translate flippant dialog into a board game?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2013 02:27

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Fix posted:

I am not a professional graphic designer. Is this too busy a card front?

It's a 3x4.

That's pretty solid for a first draft! My thoughts (though I'm not a professional either):

- I'd drop the gradient on the D6 chart on the left. It makes the last couple numbers on the bottom hard to read. I'd say stick with a straight color all the way down. Alternatively, change the gradient so it doesn't get lighter (which interferes with your text).

- I would shrink the width of the character rules a little so there's more margins on the left and right.

- I'd shrink the width of the character box to something closer to a standard "portrait" size, and move the name box so it's not overlapping the character rules.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2013 13:37

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Two other thoughts - I'd drop the transparancy on the red and blue boxes, and I would enlarge and extend the background pattern ("checkered flag" I think?) across the whole background. Maybe increase the pattern size 100% That might make it too busy but right now it feels a little disjointed with the pattern in seemingly random places.

EDIT: Are the red and blue boxes corresponding values? Like Speed 1 is a D4 roll, etc? If they are, it would make sense to put them together rather than on opposite sides of the page. Not a huge issue really, but consolidating related info is always good.

Crackbone fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Feb 25, 2013

# ¿ Feb 25, 2013 16:21

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Fix posted:

No, the speed is on the left, and powerup tracking is on the right. The powerup numbers will correspond to a list of items that changes based on the track card selected.

I wasn't feeling the gradient either, to be honest. I tried just darkening some of the lines on the numbers and it helped a bit, but I think I'll re-examine and simplify.

I went with the slightly larger portrait area because it's going to have to contain both a shot of the pilot overlaying one of their ship, so players will be able to pick out their model more easily. I can probably trim it back vertically to better align with the side tracks, but I suspect I'm going to need that horizontal room. As for the Rules area, I don't even know, since I've bumped up against the size on some of my test rules. What's the minimum reasonable/readable font size you can really do for text?

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

In my experience 8pt font (depending on typeface) is the lower limit before reaching non-legible. I also have good vision though. The other thing to consider is technical writing. In my experience most people are very bad at it - it's possible you could make the text fit with some rewriting or potentially creating keywords that are placed in the rulebook rather than the card.

As for the ship, are all the silhouettes distinct? If so you could use that as the card background instead of putting it in the picture. Other alternatives include using color-keyed cards. The green ship would have a green background, or a green power-up grid, or green rules box, etc.

EDIT: One more thing, are you thinking of doing the design yourself, or is this just prototyping? If it's just prototyping I wouldn't take it too much further as a potential publisher will probably have somebody who'll handle it. Alternatively, if you plan on doing it yourself you should think about getting some help now so this work isn't wasted when a professional has to redo it.

Crackbone fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Feb 25, 2013

# ¿ Feb 25, 2013 18:35

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Fix posted:

edit: sorta what I had in mind for the character pic layout, also stuff has been moved:

I just noticed you posted this in an edit. I think it looks solid. The only thing I'd say is get the nameplate moved so it doesn't overlap on the rules box (I'd suggest having it wholly contained in the portrait), and consider a different background graphic/placement. Its current position makes the pilot/hull graphics look muddied.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 17:58

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

The problem is that under your scenario, rolling higher is still better. Having more options is always better than less. On top of which, I have a strong suspicion players are going to really dislike the randomness and probably perceive rolling high to be MORE powerful than it really is.

Additionally, it sounds like you have a solid concept but are trying to find somewhere to force randomness in.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2013 19:25

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

It comes down to how much granularity you really need in a game. Practically, there's not a lot of situations where you need 5% increments of success, it's a holdover from D&D times. I'd argue any game where you're rolling a D20 probably didn't work to create a tight ruleset. D6s have lots of nice properties, especially when you start rolling multiples, which creates a nice bell curve of probability.
Descent's system is interesting as they basically created multipurpose D6s; instead of requiring 4 rolls (range, to hit, special abilities, damage), they bundled it into a single roll. Descent has a pretty narrow focus though, so it can afford to boil down mechanics to a set of 6 dice total.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2013 19:21

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Railing Kill posted:

In board games, as opposed to RPGs, you usually don't have shades of success in single die rolls. You either succeed or you fail. RPGs are often more like "how MUCH do you fail? How MUCH do you succeed?"

But even then how often would you require more than a D10 for that? Hell, in most cases you could boil it down to a D6 with modifiers, with anything over a natural roll (ie 7 or higher) being a big success with lower than natural (0, -1) being a huge failure.

TalonDemonKing posted:

For example; if DnD rolled To-hit and Damage into one roll, would it be better for the defender to have a target number for hitting (Therefore truly one roll), or would it be better for the defender to have a roll for defending (Defense and Resistance).

I'm personally leaning towards the latter, even though it slows down the game, due to actively interacting with the defending player, even if it just rolling the die.

On that subject, a quick question too -- A +# modifier vs an additional die -- Mechanically if they averaged out the same, I'm eager to say that adding dice is the correct choice for making gameplay, but I can't tell you why. I know that + modifiers are boring and should be avoided; but isn't that what a die is, except for more random?

It sounds like you don't have a clear vision in your head of what your goal are - I don't mean that in a bad way, a lot of people get hung up on mechanics over function. What do you want to achieve in your ideal system?
- How much player interaction do you want in a rolls?
- What's your upper/lower limit on how many die rolls you want to resolve a single [combat/action/etc].
- How swingy/variable do you want your combat to be?
- How does power level correspond to chance of winning (ie, can a lvl 1 guy ever take down a lvl 15 guy)?
- Do you want to reward really good or bad rolls?
- How much does your system need to scale?

I'm not sure why modifiers are boring; but I'm not a RPG guy either.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2013 20:12

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

hito posted:

I'm working on a board game. It's a traitor game where you don't know if you're the traitor at the start - imagine Clue, but it matters if you're the murderer or not. It's kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, I've done some small playtests, but I think I'm about ready to start scaling up the scope of the playtests. First, though, I thought I'd get you wizards to peek at it and give me your thoughts. It's kinda long, so I'll just link to the google doc instead of spamming this thread. You can comment inline on the doc or here. I'd really appreciate any feedback you could find the time to give :]

(Also - note that the Visions and Anomalies lists are nowhere near complete - I intend on having quite a few more in the final product. But I want to work on those as ideas come rather than trying to hork out a bunch at once without regard to quality.)

You need to cleanup that rulebook. It's a loving mess, halfway through it and I still had no clue how this was all supposed to go together. I know it's an alpha but right now it's borderline unintelligible.

# ¿ May 8, 2013 21:43

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Standard disclaimer: Sirlin is a :sperg:, etc, but his design articles are pretty drat interesting. Here's his most recent.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/7/asynchronous-games-and-codex.html

His site also has a bunch of design info on Puzzle Strike, which is a pretty good read as well.

# ¿ May 13, 2013 17:56

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Been refining my idea I posted way back in this thread. Elevator pitch and question -

Basically, this is a BSG-inspired game that leverages prisoner's dilemma concepts.

The map is a grid of ~18 hexes, with 12 cities. Each player represents a regional governor trying to defend their country from a monster attack and other various disasters while trying to curry favor for the next election for president. There are three major components:
- A population tracker, which represents the current country population
- A crisis/monster attack deck, which represents the calamities the city befalls
- A technology track, which represents various projects the government is working on, which confers the players various special powers.

Each player is assigned two cities in secret at the start of the game, along with a hand of ~7 cards which represent their funding levels, 0-6 Million dollars. Note 0 is an option as most things in the game require you to contribute, so you're allowed to ignore 1 funding request a turn. Funding cards are played for a variety of uses, but can only be played once a round (a full set of player turns), and then each player receives all of their funding cards back at the start of a new round.

Each turn, a player must:

1) Assign one of his funding cards to the technology track. The tech track starts at 0 and has various "funding levels". There will be 3-4 technology cards face up at any point. The current player plays a card from his hand, and adds the total spent to the funding track. If his contribution meets or exceeds a "funding level", he can take the first face-up card on the tech track. The catch is that it's the funding levels are impossible to reach in one turn. So, you MUST contribute, but there's no guarantee that you'll be the player to hit the funding level.

2) Move to a city and perform the action. Normally this costs nothing, but during the game cities will become damaged. If a player wants to use a damaged city, the player must use a funding card that meets or exceeds the amount of damage that the city has.

There are multiple types of cities, 2 of each kind on the board.
Science: Look at the top card of the crisis/monster deck, and keep/bury it.
Financial: Return funding cards to your hand
R&D: Rearrange the order of cards on the technology track.
Construction: Repair 1 damage to a city.
Propoganda: Adjust population up or down.

3) Draw a Crisis card and resolve it. This is very similar to BSG, where there is a funding level to beat, with a pass/fail effect. Each player must put at least one card in. Generally, the fail effects will be damaging a city and/or lose population. The important part here is that if the Crisis passes, the player who contributed the most will earn victory points (votes) equal to how much the check passed by. I plan on a ton of "mind game" Crisis scenarios. The other important part goes back to each player having 2 cities assigned in secret at the start of the game. At the end of the game, players will lose victory points depending on how damaged their cities are. So the inherent tension in every check is that most of the time you don't want to save a city, since it will probably hurt your opponents, but it's also the main mechanism to score points.

The game ends when population hits a certain level (hence the ability to adjust it via a City).

So now that I've vomited up all this, the question: is there any advice on how to do a baseline planning for the balancing out all this poo poo? The game kind of depends on the right balance of passing and failing Crisis, population loss, victory points, etc. I don't want to just make poo poo up but don't know how else to start - I feel like there is probably something that could help shortcut the process and give me a better starting point.

Crackbone fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 29, 2013

# ¿ May 29, 2013 03:40

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

What's funny is I don't know the rules of your game but the obvious fix is "you must move off your spawn point the turn you spawn". Boom, 5 seconds.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 00:42

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Rotten Cookies posted:

What are the design flaws of Munchkin I should be avoiding? Random monsters, treasure-hording for later use against would-be-winners, enjoyment from humor rather than gameplay?

The game is highly random with no mitigating factors. You have little to no control over draws, so right off the bat there's a lack of meaningful decisions. This also leads to highly random outcomes between players - player 1 may have a fantastic turn from a random draw while you may get bent over the table. In broad strokes, each player should have similar outcomes between them assuming they have no decision making involved.

This also snowballs where one player can clearly be in the lead with the other players have no plausible chance to win. Not fun when you know you're hosed but have to spend another 30 minutes going through the motions.

From there, the next issue is kingmaking - people who have no chance to win can instead decided which other player wins the game. In essence, it turns the game into political BS.

Finally, it also suffers from gently caress-the-leader syndrome. Whoever's close to winning is dogpiled by other players, and this typically repeats on and on and on and on.

Note that it's not so much that any one of these alone is a mortal sin. It's when you starting adding in multiple problematic design choices, a game quickly turns bad.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 22:34

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Countblanc posted:

Ok so this is a bit weird, but here me out. Two nights ago I had a dream about a board game which I had apparently designed. It was a worker placement, resource gathering game akin to Stone Age, except it also had rotating role cards like in Citadels. The trick was that the roles functioned both as a boon to the player taking them ("take the Banker to gain an extra two money this turn," or whatever), but also as a sort of meta-guessing game.

Every/most space(s) on the board would correspond to a different role - the Bank and the Banker, the Smith and the Blacksmith, etc - and taking a specific role would give you ownership of that particular space for the turn. Now, ownership could mean a lot of things, and it doesn't have to be a universal mechanic. Maybe owning the Bank means every player who took that action this turn must give you one money, or owning the Smith means you get to choose what items are available for sale that turn (like a "draw 5 cards, pick 3" thing). Additionally, not every structure would be owned every turn, so there'd be times where you'd want to risk taking a spot which would pay off in spades if no one took it, but might be much riskier/not worth it if someone did.

Mostly what I'm asking is, does this game exist anywhere? I'd hate to reinvent the wheel, and before I really sink my development teeth into the game past the general mechanics I want to make sure that isn't what I'd be doing.

Part of what you're describing is in Witch's Brew, a game I adore. There are 12 different roles each with a "big" benefit that pays off at the end of the round and "small" benefit that pays out immediately. Each round every player selects 6 of them in secret. Then, starting player reveals one role and must choose the "big" benefit, then passes to the next player. If that player has the same role, they must show it and have two choices:

A) "Steal" the role, and the player before him loses all benefit from the card.
B) "Defer", where they take a smaller payoff, but the first player keeps the "big" benefit.

Play goes around all players like this, and whoever still owns the "big" benefit at the end of the round earns it. I's always a guessing game; should I steal the big benefit but risk somebody else stealing it from me? Additionally, if you can figure out what other players will be playing, you can try to take roles the other players aren't and get a huge payout for the round. It's a really fun mechanic.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 00:08

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

CodfishCartographer posted:

Well, while I'm working on straightening out the design for the game a bit more, I figure I may as well bring up two other projects I've worked on - one to get some advice on, and another just to see what you guys think. Hopefully it'll spur a little bit more conversation, as I'm sad I didn't find this thread a year ago when it was bustling.

The first originated from the idea of making a strategy game with very few units for each player, rather than a huge army. The system I came up with was each player has three units - a warrior, a mage, and a rogue. Before the game begins, each player selects skillsets for each of their units. So one player's rogue might have an assassination skillset, while the other would have a trapping skillset. The skillsets are where the complexity of the game comes in, as there would be maybe a dozen or so different skillsets for each of the three units. It's up to players to select interesting combinations that complement one another.

I've run into a couple issues. The first is that strategic choices are relatively limited once gameplay's gotten going. Selecting complementary skillsets is fun and interesting, but since there aren't many units on the board things get pretty samey pretty quickly. I took a lot of effort to give each class a specific role - mage is for dealing damage, warrior is for defending your units, and rogue is for hindering enemy units - all of the skillsets for each class more or less fulfill these roles. This created some more interesting choices (do I take out their mage, which is the biggest damage threat? or their rogue, which is making life difficult for me), but not really enough I feel. The board is just a simple 7x7 grid, and combat is the sole driving force of the game right now - there aren't any resources to manage aside from unit health and position. I'm not entirely sure if I even want to add resource management, as I enjoy the chess-like aspect of unit selection and positioning being the most important part of the game.

The next issue is that once a player is behind, it's very hard to catch up. If a player loses one of their units, they are at a huge disadvantage, and will generally only win if the enemy makes a mistake. The combat and damage system works off of (custom-made) dice-rolls, so there is potential for (un)lucky rolls to even the playing field, but then it'd just relying on luck which isn't much better. My solution to this and the previous issue would be having really short, fast-paced games that focus primarily on the pre-game of drafting skillsets just as much as the game itself, but I'm not sure how well that would go over. Alternatively, increasing the number of units on the board (either by adding more classes of skillsets, or by maybe allowing players to have multiples of the already existing classes)

The last issue with this game is that a lot of the interesting effects and abilities are done with counters - and as such, this game would be SWIMMING in tokens and upkeep throughout gameplay. I found that adding a 'timer' to these tokens as well as imposing a limit helped players remember them better: each unit can only have 3 counters on it, and as new ones are added (and at the start of each unit's turn) the counters move one space in the queue, pushing out old counters. This helped the issue, but didn't really solve it. Any suggestions for possible fixes?

General thoughts:

For the falling behind issue, what if you separate "action points" from the actual units? For example, you get 3 "activations" per turn, regardless of how many units you have left (so after losing two characters your last one could do three things a turn)? Losing a character is still a disadvantage but only in losing tactical options.

For the memory issues, why not make a hard cap of 1 status effect on a unit at any time, and playing a new one erases the previous? This simplifies bookkeeping but also adds some interesting choices - what do you value most at a given point for a unit, do you spend your unit activations buffing your units or debuffing your opponents, etc.

Finally, do you really need dice for combat? Dungeon Command, Dungeon Twister, and Kemet all have non-dice based combat. Gears of War uses a system where cards in hand also represent health, so the more you do the more vulnerable you become. I know that pushes into resource management but mitigates the luck factor and makes it more like chess.

If you want to play up the tactical nature, if you haven't done it yet, what about making each ability VERY dependent on range/positioning? As in, (let's assume a hex grid) the Warrior has three abilities, but one only works in front three hexes at range 2, one ability only works in contact but only from side hexes, and he has a defensive ability that only works if his teammates are in his rear arc within 2 spaces.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 14:51

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:38

Crackbone: May 23, 2003; Vlaada is my co-pilot.

CodfishCartographer posted:

I thought about that as a possibility, but didn't think too much on it. Now that you mention it, it actually sounds like it might work out rather well. My main concern with this is that I'd be worried the game would just turn into "Who can burn down the weakest enemy fastest?" But then I suppose it opens up some interesting play with having to put forth effort to effectively protect weakened units while still forming an offensive. Also form a thematic standpoint it doesn't make much sense - just because you lose one unit, why do the others immediately concede?

IMO losing after the first character dies means everybody's immediate instinct will be to burn down a single character, and you're going to have a hell of a time fixing that in design. Even if you fix the game so that it's not the best option, it's going to make people frustrated that it's not. Fighting against a player's instinct oftentimes results in them having a bad play experience.

quote:

The action points idea has got me thinking that maybe instead of drafting individual turns, it would always goes Player 1 then Player 2, and they choose which unit they want to use on that turn. My only problem with that is that players might just only choose one or two units to use every turn, only using the other one or two units in specific niche situations. Or would that be more my responsibility to design each class to constantly be in use all the time?

I'd do "rounds", where each round is three activations, but each character must be activated at least once each round.

quote:

Right now each ability does have a maximum range, to force positioning - also, units have pretty limited movement. Abilities aren't limited to direction facing, though. Which is an interesting idea that I've wanted to mess with - a hex strategy game with very limiting ranges of effects. I might rework the current system to be hex-based so I can get more advanced ranges and areas of effects. It would probably also require a reworking of movement so that the direction a unit faces is actually taken into account, as right now unit direction isn't even a thing.

Might be a good idea, as you sound unsatisfied with the actual gameplay depth right now; making positioning more critical should help add depth without having to add more bookkeeping effects.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 19:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Board Game Design Laboratory: Igor, get the meeples

«‹›2 »