Game Designer Wannabe

Yesterday I held a playtest at a local Panera for my games Conglomerate and Battle Stations. I decided to experiment and record audio notes instead of relying exclusively on my notepad as has been my modus operandi. My hope was that I would be able to record more information as I wouldn't have to interrupt conversations to jot things down.

I listened to them last night and discovered that it is also going to help me hone my post-playtest interviewing skills. I definitely need to make sure I am less stifling, something I would not have realized but for this method.

I found the recordings interesting enough to post here. I probably won't make a habit of this unless it generates interest among you. So, if you want me to post more recordings of playtests, let me know by saying so in the comments to this post.

Some notes about the audio: the microphone was much closer to me than anyone else, so even though it might sound like I'm shouting, I'm not. There is a five second pause about a minute into the Conglomerate recording, that is where I pasted together the two files. Also, I have edited the recording of the Battle Stations playtest somewhat to remove some things I don't want posted online. Nothing removed was gameplay-related, just sensitive information relating to the business end of things.

Click on the green arrow to play, or right-click on the underlined text and choose "Save" to download the recording to your computer.

Conglomerate Playtest

Battle Stations Playtest

 Categories: Battle Stations, playtest, Titans of Industry

On Saturday I attended the wedding of two good friends who are part of my gaming group. Congradulations, Doug and Anni!

Yesterday I overcame exhaustion to head back to DexCon. I had told Carl Olsen, one of the designers at the Albany playtest a week ago, that I would be around Sunday so that he could finally take a look at Programmer, a game he had wanted to see at the playtest but was busy running one of his own games, Stellar Diplomacy, when I ran mine.

Here are my notes from the Programmer test we did on Sunday:

Programmer

troubles visualizing program
- first play is difficult, then game is understood
different flavor text for each copy of a card needed
- theme big part of the game
hand limit? yes. 5-7
more out-of-turn cards
more elegant way to track points needed
redo the look of x=?
Function() --> "Call Function" or "Copy Function"

After the Programmer test, Carl and his son played a game of the game previously known as Battle Stations, using the changes I came up with based on Andy's feedback from looking at it on Friday. Here are my notes:

Battle Stations

ent-d versus ent-d
started with 2 damage on each shield
reduce # of active cards and increase costs
choose starting hand
- hand limit?
shield heal option on hold card
choose drawn cards
only warp power
- no impulse power

 Categories: Battle Stations, conventions, game designers, playtest, Programmer

I mentioned in my last post that I'd begun design on Anniversary Gift. It's a deduction game that came to me because a couple of gamer friends are getting married later today. Essentially there are a bunch of gifts with different attributes, and you're trying to get a gift with as many attributes in common as the other person's ideal gift, which is drawn from a deck at the start of the game. It's right now a two player game, with each person trying to guess the other's gift. I might be able to retheme it and make it into a multiplayer game.

I would like to see this design make at least a late prototype stage, because I have had previous failed attempts at designing deduction games. I think being able to make a playable if not publishable deduction game would at least show to myself that I have the ability to make different types of games. I worry these days whether I am sometimes sharing too many mechanics between my own designs.

 Categories: Anniversary Gift, game ideas

Yesterday I went back to the con. I arrived about right after a bunch of events started, so I just milled around. Then played a couple of pick up games. The first, Mykerinos, seemed okay enough. However, the scoring track was too small, it was hard to tell which space my counter was on. Also, I can see the game getting repetitive fast. I can't see playing this more than a few times a year. The second, Hacienda, was much more interesting. We played on the dogbone map, and I took seven consecutive land squares on the center bottom early, which meant I was swimming in money the whole game. I won by like 30 points, thanks to the other players ganging up on the game's owner, the only one to have played previously.

Andy and his friends got there late because of a minor car accident. First they tested one of his friend's games while I tested Jeff Englestein's game, Horde. It's a Settlers-like game with elements of Caylus and Puerto Rico. After that I did the initial design work on a new game concept I came up with over the past week, Anniversary Gift.

Anyway, then we tested Andy's game, The Elemental Wars. It's a fusion game, combining Eurogame mechanics with Axis & Allies-like wargaming. I'm not gonna say too much about it, but it is definitely more interesting than most wargames I've played.

Before leaving, Andy took a quick look at the game that I used to call Battle Stations but now has no name. He expressed concern over both having to plan your moves too far out in advance and at the bewildering array of options a player is confronted with right at the start of the game. He said he was going to think about it and we'd talk talk about it today at the wedding.

 Categories: Anniversary Gift, Battle Stations, conventions, game designers, game ideas

Yesterday I decided to go to DexCon 9, contrary to my previous plans to skip it because I'm busy this Saturday. When I first got there I just milled around a bit and said hello to people I knew. Carl Olson, who played Television Executive at the mass-designer playtest last Saturday, did a dobule-take when he saw me, as I'd told people there I wouldn't be making DexCon.

The main purpose of going was to help Andrew Parks test one of his designs-in-progress, Elemental Wars. Andy had a couple of playtesters coming, but they got delayed and his test was postponed until today. So, this was a good opportunity to try out the second version of Conglomerate. We grabbed a third player and got down to it.

We played for over an hour before stopping. I have not come up with an end goal or trigger yet in this early stage of design, so we just played to accumulate victory points. I was glad that the game stayed interesting as long as it did. It means that the central mechanic of manipulating and meeting market demand was compelling to people who are not named Michael Keller.

Afterwards we hashed out some issues with the game. Below are my notes from the kibitzing. But Andy was very complementary of the game. He felt it was the best design of mine that he had seen yet and said that it had some "Euro" elements. Even though there were those issues, they were more fiddly and not core to the thrust of the game and Andy said the design was on the right track. It was nice to hear this from a designer and friend whom I respect as much as I do and from someone whom I know would thankfully not pull punches at a playtest. Anyway, here is a transcription of my notes on Conglomerate:

Conglomerate 2.0

end-game trigger
auto-consume:
- when all filled, go around once + consume, player who filled first shot at empty
new potential vehicle on segments 4-6
gametext on cards
- accelerate the game
bonuses for being the sole seller of a good to a type of place
- geometric increase
stone needs to be more important (stone-> Factory)
oil rig 2 steel
office 2 stone 1 steel
balance good - prevent mass buy
careful of lynchpin player
increase competition for markets
bonus for house owners
season changes more predictable

I'd like to take this opportunity to congradulate my good friend Andrew Parks on winning "Board Game of the Year" at the Origins Awards this year. Andy won for his game, Parthenon: Rise of the Agean.

As you may recall, Andy made the game that really transitioned me into serious boardgaming, Ideology: The War of Ideas, which remains one of my favorite games to this day. It was also this game, and the fact that a friend of mine made it, that first inspired me to try my hand at this quixotic attempt at board game design. Seeing him win this award is therefore an encouragement for me to keep trying, despite my frustration stemming from an inability to get published so far despite the non-trivial effort I've put into this. So, congradulations, Andy, and thanks for your inadvertent effect on me.

Jack said...

What did Zev make of Programmer? I'm interested to know how your publishing efforts are going.

Zev did not get a chance to play Programmer on Saturday, as he was testing a game that went longer than expected. However, he took my prototype and said he'll test it at DexCon this Saturday. I'll let you know what I hear.

Below is a scan of the notes I took on Saturday. The first two pages are from the playtest for Television Executive, then next two are from the games of Programmer. Click on the pictures for a larger version. We only played through the third round of Television Executive because the Blue player was forced to take a couple of high cost cards in the first round which crippled his ability to draft for the rest of the game, as the situation repeated itself since he was always drafting last and he had no chance to recover. More thoughts on the day later.

Played a few games. This place is packed. Television Executive needs a major overhaul, but I know what to do. Zev is here. Going to show him Programmer when the next game split-up occurs. Will post my notes from the Television Executive later.

Today I am up near Albany, NY for a playtest session with other game designers. I was invited to this meeting by way of my membership on the Board Game Designers Forum. I just got here and the others should be arriving within a half an hour. Despite the ridiculous sum I am spending on gasoline to get here from central New Jersey, I think it will be worth it.

This is because all of my previous feedback on my designs have been from friends of differing levels of game-playing experience. Today I will be getting feedback from people who are not only other designers, but whom I have never met in person before. This will make the comments received come from a perspective that I have not previously heard from (save for my experience at Dreamation 2006).

It will also mean that those comments are unbiased by friendship. While my playtesting experiences with my friends have been invaluable, I have always suspected that they were holding back their criticisms in either volume or intensity to avoid hurting my feelings. This is of course ridiculous, because they take every other opportunity to hurt my feelings.
;-)

In addition, Zev from Z-Man Games might be coming by today. If he does, I am hopeful he will like the changes I have made to Programmer, which came in response to his comments at the aforementioned Dreamation convention. He did express interest in the previous version, save for the overbearing complexity of the game. Therefore this could represent a very strong chance at getting my first design published.

So, I am looking forward to seeing how the day progresses. I have brought two of my prototypes with me today: Programmer and Television Executive.

I had another couple of playtest games for Television Executive on the 4th of July. They went very well. This third version of the game had the "repetitiveness" mechanic removed. This was a difficult thing for me to do.

Avoiding repetition was one of the key aspects of making a t.v. show that I wanted to emulate with this game. However, doing so just slowed the game down far too much when the players remembered to mark repetition, caused backtracking when they forgot, and made strategies more difficult to implement cause it essentially tripled the number of things players needed to look at when making decisions.

So, I made the gameplay-over-theme decision and canned it. The new draft mechanic I put in in version two continued to work well. I'm actually pretty sure I've never seen anything like this particular way of drafting. This look as if it is going to be a very decent game. I'm certainly not a dispassionate third party, but I really do think this is publishable as a "gamer's game".

Yesterday saw the very first test of my latest design, Conglomerate. For simplicity's sake, I did not include the event cards I have been internally debating which I spoke of in my last post. Sadly, after less than fifteen minutes it was clear that I had completely failed to emulate the key economic concepts for which I had been shooting. Specifically, I had wanted to bring the tension of both complementary and substitute goods in a marketplace that was controlled head-to-toe, soup-to-nuts, A -to-Z solely by the players' actions.

The test consisted of three players, including myself. I quickly ran away with the game by focusing on an oil-heavy strategy while the other two players went after farms. The problem with this is that there was no actual demand for oil, as no one had built so much as a single car or office and only a couple of apartments were constructed before the game was almost over as I'd achieved 67 of the necessary 100 victory points while my opponents were barely in double-digits.

On an upnote, I do think the game is fixable and have high hopes for its potential. I believe this game could eventually carry a satisfyingly complex web of strategies with a relatively simple rule set.

Also tested yesterday was the latest version of Television Executive. This new version played much more quickly by using a draft game style instead of the previous bidding mechanic. There is still a major speed bump, but I have identified it and think I know how to effectively deal with it. I'll have the next version of it done today and might be able to even get in a quick test or two of it.

Conglomerate's next version will take at least a week, as the changes I've chosen to make are non-trivial both in terms of rules and in terms of components. In the meantime, I'll post a picture of the board I made for the first version of it, as it was no small effort and now I'll have to throw it out completely.