NYC BGD Meeting - January 2012, Part 1

Saturday was the monthly meeting of the NYC Board Game Designers group. I playtested three games for other designers and watched the "beginner" version of Titans of Industry with four players.

The three games I tested were a storytelling-themed game, Gil Hova's Sword Merchants (née Pax Robotica), and Mark Salzwedel's Monorails of Mars.

The first game, about storytelling and lying, seemed to be relatively early in development. Very quickly I found holes in the incentive system that strongly discouraged both lying and calling someone out on a lie. These two activities were really the only fun thing about a game. The rest was just an obvious playing of a small number of randomly-drawn cards.

Design Tip*: incentivize the fun parts of your game.

Following that, I moderated the Titans of Industry playtest. There are some interesting issues to discuss in designing beginner's versions of an advanced game. I will give them the treatment the deserve in my next post.

Next, I played Gil's game. At this point, it's an action-selection/economic-engine game with too few actions and an economic curve that feels choked off. The highlight (for me, probably not for Gil) was when I forced him to change the rules mid-game by creating a way to abuse the special cards and get six consecutive actions in a game where it is incredibly important that you only get to do one thing at a time.

Last up was Mark's train game. Unfortunately, I don't think I was very useful in this test. I played the game fine. I even won. But I don't feel like my feedback helped much. The only thing I spotted was that his version of the steam-engine-level mechanic was much too expensive to justify purchasing the fourth (and final) level. The issue with me is that I'm just not able to engage well with train games, including the Railroad Tycoon-type games, to which this seemed to belong. It is odd, because my preferred game profile (heavy/economic/stock) would suggest train games are right up my alley. Somehow, they never clicked with me.

After the test, a handful of us went out to get some dinner and talk shop. I enjoy socializing with other designers. I feel camaraderie with the others yet unpublished and am reminded success is possible with the ones who have a box with their name on it.

*Design Tips are furnished with the caveat of eight years of design failure and zero published games.

My green rails won the day.

Titans of Industry v31

Yesterday I ran my first playtest of 2012. This also marked the resumption of testing after the predictable holiday unavailability of my testers. It felt good to get Titans of Industry back on the table.

The results of this test were a little odd. In the first age, the very first three cards drawn from the Progress deck were all the city cards. The second age also saw an improbably early draw. This meant that the game, overall, was about 5 or 6 turns shorter than normal distribution would have made it.

Normally this would not be a problem. However, my main testing focus at the moment is balancing Age 3 advancements and Titan cards. Both of these are late-game or end-game mechanics. If the game is shortened from 25 rounds to 19, players will not have time to use these effectively.

The players were still positive about the experience and liked the tension of the unpredictable end of the age, but I didn't get to see anyone try to abuse the Advertising advancement. My notes are below.

Off-Topic: Better Secret Santa

My extremely large family has done Secret Santa for many years to avoid bankrupting everyone at the holidays. After the first time we did this, I realized that some of us (myself included) were assigned to buy gifts for people for whom we didn't have any ideas.

To fix that problem, I created a tool that my family has used ever since that lets everyone designate who they'd be able to buy the best gift for, then assigns Secret Santas in a way that maximizes those selections. It has made Christmas quite a bit less stressful for all of us.

This year, I decided to share this tool with everyone and have launched Better Secret Santa. Please try it out for your Secret Santa group. It is absolutely free. Happy holidays!

Metatopia 2011 - Saturday, Part 3

My original schedule for Saturday was attending seminars from 10am until 2pm, then an hour for lunch, a playtest of Titans of Industry at 3pm, an hour to relax, and finally another playtest of Titans of Industry at 7pm.

However, because of my (great!) publisher meeting at 1pm, I forfeited both the third seminar as well as my lunchbreak. The first playtest ran a little long (as the city progress cards kept not coming up), which shortened my break to the point where it didn't make sense to leave, so I ended up being in that room almost continuously from 1pm until 10pm.

As an aside, thanks to Dan Cassar for grabbing a component I had forgotten and Mark Salzwedel for grabbing me a snack.

By the end of the second playtest, I was dead tired but still hungry enough to need to go out. I'm sadly starting to feel my age. Despite the physical toll of that day, I couldn't have ended it happier. Not only was I riding the high of the meeting, but the feedback I received was both positive and useful. My notes are below.

Metatopia 2011 - Saturday, Part 2

After the second seminar of the day, I rushed to grab my Municipality prototype and get back to the main game room. A publisher's representatives had made an appointment with me to check out Municipality at 1:00pm after seeing the reactions of the playtesters from the previous evening. After a few minutes of submission-form-filling and a rules explanation, we started playing.

We didn't get through the entire game, as we had waited a bit for two of the players to arrive and bumped up against the 3:00 events, but they did manage to see a significant enough chunk of the gameplay to understand it and see what I feel are the game's strengths. When we decided to adjourn to speak about the game, all three players were positive about the game, two of them especially so. Most of their suggested changes were related to making the board clearer, ie. adding labels in places.

The one real rules change they wanted was not allowing players to double their taxes when they are already at zero approval. I don't think it is a problem to allow it, but I also don't feel terribly strongly about that rule either, so I was prefectly happy to make that change. Other than that, they said that they were stretching to find things to change about the game.

My full notes from the test are below (they're a bit sparse because I was also playing). However, since the convention, the publisher has expressed a desire to take a fuller look at Municipality. The publisher hasn't actually asked me to send the prototype over yet, but I assume that things will move forward once the Essen/Metatopia/BGG.con stretch of time is over.

Up next: the toughest part of the convention - 6 more hours of playtesting without a break.