May 29, 2008

Spielbany May 2008, Part 2

In my previous post, I described the results of the test last Saturday of Titans of Industry. That same day I was also able to get feedback on Privateering.

Privateering began life as a drafting game where players were building competing television shows. However, based on feedback from Zev of Z-Man Games, I decided to retheme the game to avoid similarities with already published games. While doing so, I ended up adding another layer of gameplay on top of the drafting mechanic. The new mechanic is both flavorful to the new theme and strategic, without severely complicating the game. The second point was important, as I don't want this game to stray from light territory into a medium-weight game.

Here are my notes from the playtest:

6:56 pm_______7:05____7:14____7:24_____7:31
Jeff___________11______11______33______61
John__________20______20______30______30
Gil____________8______24______24______24
Michael________21______44______69______87

pair up bounties
crew cards do double duty

After winning two big showdowns in rounds 1 and two, it was basically impossible for the other players to catch up to me, which was unfortunate. I don't want players to be able to lock in a victory before the end of round 3 at the earliest. Mathematically, it was theoretically possible for them to catch up. But as a matter of practice, no, it wasn't going to happen. Certainly not while they were still competing with each other for points in addition to chasing me. Ideally, no one should feel comfortable of a victory until the draft for round 4 is complete.

The consensus at the table was that the major problem was that the showdown mechanic I had added was too much of an all-or-nothing proposition. Not only did someone who lost a showdown have nothing to show for it, but he or she had also blown so many cards on a lost cause that it was now that much more difficult to catch up in later rounds.

The solution devised (major credit to Jeff on this one) was to create pairs of bounties, instead of just individual ones. This served two purposes. First, it meant that you had two chances to score points when you gambled resources by sending a crew out after a bounty. This mitigated the previous all-or-nothing proposition.

Second, it increased the strategy of drafting. Originally, a player would likely identify one bounty and go after the highest-value cards that had that bounty's flag. Now, with bounties of different flags paired up, there is an incentive to draft cards that might be of a lower value but which can help capture both bounties in a pair. This is because I designed the crew cards to have an inverse correlation between value and number of different bounties against which they are effective.

The other fix I decided on for Privateering was to reduce the range of possible points for any one bounty. In the tested version, bounties ranged in value from 2-24. I had thought that balance was achieved in the long run through a distribution among flags that was even overall. However, the problem was that in any one round, only one or two bounties out of four really mattered, which led to a drafting frenzy focused on those bounties' flags.

Oh, and I ditched the bluffing cards. The players said that they really didn't add much, and were more fiddly than anything else. With the new paired-bounties rule, bluffing would become even less important of a strategy, as there will already be uncertainty as to for which of the two bounties any given player is aiming.

Thankfully, the fixes for Privateering are relatively minor, component-wise. I should be able to get another test of it together before too long.

That day I also helped test some other designers' games. One was a card game whose cards contained words and their components. The game played out essentially like a game of dominoes, where players created chains of matching components.

The second game was an Indiana Jones-themed adventure game called Lost Adventures. This game used components quite cleverly to implement a clue-hunting mechanic distinct from and far superior to that used by the likes of Clue and Mystery of the Abbey.

The last game I played was a word-creation game where you weren't limited to the letters on the board, but those were the only letters that could score. This mechanic certainly distinguished it from existing word-creation games.

May 25, 2008

Spielbany May 2008

I went up to Dobbs Ferry yesterday to show off and get feedback on Titans of Industry (formerly called Conglomerate) and Privateering (a re-themed Television Executive).

Here are my notes from the Titans of Industry test:
2:00pm_________2:30 _______4:00
yellow steel ______13 ________33
green wood _______2_________28
black steel _______4 _________30
blue stone _______12 ________53
red wood_________1 ________28
white stone_______1__________6

Mule - computer game look it up
Cuba - board game check out laws
age-specific advancements
warehouse option?
age-restricted pricing
end of age 1, only one good in consumer market
is free labor when broke problematic?
reconfigure board
$3 per real estate per turn
$50 starting
look at monetary flows on a macro level
think about expansion costs
use wood or stone to build a forge
multiple firings of facilities
starting goods
need more competition in consumer market
eliminate one sector
reduce demands
combine resource with
The first section up above is a quick game state summary. Once the rules were explained, the game started at around 2:00. The colors listed are the order of the six players, as well as the starting facility that player chose.

The first age ended quite quickly. In fact, when the last first age building was built, only a single good had been placed in the consumer market, even though there was demand for over two dozen in total. Needless to say, this was an unexpected result. I think the neglect in the consumer market is the reason the first age ended in half an hour, when I had aimed for it to take closer to 40 minutes.

In the second age, players hit a cash flow problem. Even though there was a rule that waived labor costs which you could not afford, the problem was that everyone was poor, so no one could buy the resources everyone was producing. Even though there was rental income from the real estate market, it was not enough to offset the labor costs.

The reason I had not seen this coming was that when I had designed the labor costs, I had designed things on a per-player level. In previous versions of the game, there were no labor costs. The result was that players always priced their products as close to zero as possible. The labor costs were designed as a way to force players to start the pricing war above zero, lest they go bankrupt. This way, there would be room to undercut other players, whereas before players would start at zero and could only go higher.

So I added labor costs, starting at $4 per facility activation. I figured that bankruptcy would not be a problem, because a player low on money would be sure to price his or her goods high enough to make a profit, so he or she would make a net profit on any activation of his or her facilities. Since bankrupt players could still run their facilities, selling their freely-produced goods to other players gave them a way to climb out of a hole. However, this line of thinking was pure folly.

When the game began to break down as everyone simultaneously going bankrupt, one player, Jeff, made a very astute observation: that while individual players had a strategy for making money, on a macro level this would not work because it relied on other players having money. When you looked at the total amount of money in the game, the labor costs were sucking more money out of the game than real estate rents were injecting back in. The consumer market was also designed to inject money back into the game, but consumption happens only three times per game, and one of those is at the end of the game. This meant it couldn't be relied on as an early game income source.

I wanted to get a timing on the game (I had designed it as a 90-minute game, but this was the first test with this version) so I instituted some mid-game rules changes and asked the players to continue. The first change was an increase in real estate rent payments from $1 to $3. The second change was a one-time $20 payout to all players, effectively increasing the starting money from $25 to $45. These two seemed to do the trick, as there was now enough liquidity to allow the inter-player markets to function.

During this time, players appeared to focus on the consumer market, generally ignoring the resource market. For every good placed in the resource market, there were about five placed in the consumer market. This was the polar opposite of the first age, in which the consumer market was the one to suffer neglect.

We only played until the end of the second age, as by then I had gotten a sufficiently good idea of the game's timing and knew how to proceed with the next version of this game.

What I found interesting was the score distribution at the end of the second round. The players had expressed a concern at the start of the game that there might be an imbalance in the starting facilities. However, the age two scores do not bear that out. The two players who started with steel forges averaged 31.5 points, lumber camps averaged 28 points, and stone quarries averaged 29.5 points.

The big disparity between individual players' scores (high of 53, low of 6, median of 29) was not a function of starting facilities but of strategy. On of the stone quarry players decided to ignore producing stone early on and built universities to produce research. This meant that the other player who started with a stone quarry was able to quickly corner the stone market.

The players generally had positive things to say about the future of Titans of Industry, in spite of the changes that clearly need to be made. The also suggested I check out an old computer game, Mule, that they said was well known for its market mechanics. They said many attempts had been made to turn it into a board game, but that my game was actually the closest anything had come to approximating its complexity while still retaining the level of abstraction necessary to keep this fun.

The only two suggestions that I rejected out of hand were a) an ability for players to "warehouse" resources for them to use without placing them on the resource market first and b) game-automated non-player creation and purchase of resources. I don't want to implement the first one because it would drastically decrease player interaction. The second one violates my core design goal for this game: a player-controlled economy where external pricing factors are minimized. All the feedback was appreciated, but those two points are the only ones I was unwilling to think about using in the next version.

Changes slated for the next version:
  1. Decrease initial labor costs.
  2. Increased labor costs as the game goes on.
  3. Higher starting money.
  4. Combine resource and consumer markets.
  5. Change physical design of buildings from rectangular cards to square tiles.
  6. Lower total demand.
  7. Age-restricted pricing to prevent gouging early on.
  8. Replace demand numbers with easily-countable icons.
  9. Make small market share counters.
  10. Allow multiple use of facilities for an increased cost.
  11. Allow different resources to be used to construct basic facilities.
In my next post, I will discuss the Privateering playtest.

Reorganization

I've created index pages for each of my games that I've talked about on this site. This way, you can easily track the story of each individual game from the very beginning.

There will be a list of the index pages on the right-hand side links.

Titans of Industry

This is the index page for Titans of Industry.

This game was previously known as Conglomerate.

Weighted Dice
Conglomerate
DexCon 9
Playtest Recording
Manumation
Evolution of a Design
Spielbany August 2007
Spielbany May 2008
Testing Blitz
Titans of Industry Recording
Titans of Industry Playtest Analysis
Titans of Industry v7
Titans of Industry v8
Origins Looming
Origins 2008 - Thursday
Origins 2008 - First Publisher Meeting
Origins 2008 - Saturday
Origins 2008 - Sunday and Final Thoughts
DexCon 2008, Part I
GenCon Playtesters Needed
Titans of Industry Rulebook
GDW's GenCon Schedule
GenCon Fallout - Part 2
GenCon Fallout - Part 3
Designer Stories
Titans of Bizzaro-World
New Titans Rulebook
New Round of Submissions

Privateering

This is the index page for Privateering.

This game was previously known as Television Executive.

Arrested Game Development
Television Executive
TV Executive Playtest
New Logo
Retooling the Show
Spring Break
Conglomerate
Third Season
Designer Testing
Designer Testing - Part 2
Designer Testing - Postscript
Fourth Season
Spielbany August 2007
Spielbany May 2008, Part 2

Utopia

This is the index page for Utopia.

Requiem for a Game
A Watched Game Never Boils

Theme Park

This is the index page for Theme Park.

Playtesting - Part 3
Theme Park
Graphic Design
Let's End This Already
Originality

Programmer: Battle for Bandwidth

This is the index page for Programmer: Battle for Bandwidth.

Dreamation 2006 - Saturday
Dreamation 2006 - Sunday
The Birth of Programmer: Battle for Bandwidth
Rulebooks
The First Round of Submissions
My First Response from a Publisher
Rules for Programmer
Our Continuing Saga
Another Bite
Face to Face
Graphic Design
An Answer
Just a Spud
Let's End This Already
An Expectedly Unexpected Rejection
Download Programmer:BfB
Recompile
Designer Testing
Designer Testing - Part 2
Designer Testing - Postscript
Shoutout
DexCon 9 - Part 3
DexCon 2008, Part I