Game Designer Wannabe

Titans of Industry was rejected. This did not come as a big shock.

The previous night I had seen, as I was leaving the board room, my game being played by people obviously working for the publisher to whom I had given it. I did, however, see that one of the players wasn't having a good time. I could tell by the game state that the game was only about 15 minutes old. However, one of the players was already clearly hating the experience. This person was staring off into space with the "what did I get myself into" look. I left, as I didn't want to watch and I had been heading to bed anyway. But when I got back to my room I got anxious and headed back. I walked by the table every 20 or so minutes but didn't say anything, as I didn't want to interfere.

In between, I spoke to some designer friends of mine who are at the convention. They told me that they had heard the complaints of the playtesters. Common themes among the complaints: long, boring, dry, repetitive. Needless to say I felt like crap at this point.

When the game was wrapping up, I listened to their postmortem. There seemed to be one person who liked it, one person who thought it was interesting but was unenthusiastic about it, and the one I mentioned who hated it with an absolute passion. After leaving the table to speak to someone, this person said pretty loudly "I just played a long, boring, stinky game" and that was "three hours of my life that I'll never get back".

(I want to be clear: I am not trying to paint this person with a bad brush. I am just trying to convey how strongly this person felt that what I have spent over two years designing was deeply, painfully flawed.)

I was pretty crushed. My game was apparently pretty awful. Although one of the players said he liked it, the others accused him of liking boring economic games. And even he said he wouldn't want to play it again for at least a month. After commiserating with my fellow Spielbany designers, I eventually made it to bed around 3:30am.

The next day I met back up with the publisher. He told me that the main problems were:

• Too long
• Too dry
• Too fiddly

He said that at 3 hours, it was far too long. I'm pretty sure that his timing estimate of my game must have included the rules explanation, because when I timed it with even more people it was still only two and a half hours long. I asked him what my target time limit should be and he said 90 minutes with 120 minutes maximum for new players.

As far as dry, I suppose that such a comment must have been about the lack of random events or a sharply curved game arc. I suppose that the end of the game does look a lot like the beginning. However, I feel that if I did cut down the time, then it would help make the "dry" feeling disappear.

I had thought that the "fiddly" criticism probably stemmed from things like my third-age inflation rule or maybe how payouts were handled. In reality, the publisher said that the problem was having to deal with all of the cubes. Unfortunately, this is the core of the game. Without all those cubes, the game doesn't exist at all. He said that he had discussed it with his people and they also couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the cube mechanic and still have it be the same game.

The publisher did tell me that the game was an accurate simulation of a market and that everything fit well with the theme. He said that is wasn't a horrible game, but that it was one that didn't make people want to play again. I was invited to resubmit at GenCon in August if I was able to work on the aforementioned problems.

After that meeting, I went to the board game room and thought about the design. It was a little hard to get my mind off of the rejection. My entire trip was structured around getting my game published and I had apparently not even come close.

Eventually I decided to abandon brooding and use the time productively. I looked over the criticisms I had collected and made a list of both minor changes and radical changes which I felt could possibly address one or more of the complaints. I finally decided on two which I could implement immediately.

The minor change was to add special abilities to the level three buildings. One special ability made every two cubes sold worth three market share points, instead of one per each. The second ability was that once per turn you could replace an opponent's cube with one that you were producing. The third special ability allowed you to destroy one of your cubes to also destroy three cubes not belonging to you in the same market.

The major change was to reduce the age-trigger mechanism from every fourth real estate card being built to every third real estate card being built. I was concerned that this would speed the game up far too much and prevent players from having the time to develop a strategy.

After making these changes, I set up the game in the board game room and waited for people to take a look and maybe get in a playtest of these new rules. Three hours later, I had yet to so much as have another human being speak to me. This was in stark contrast to Friday, when several people at least expressed an interest in playtesting at a later time.

I had given up and was putting the game away with the intention of taking a nap when a couple of friends of mine from Speilbany, John Velonis and James Murlock, showed up and asked to playtest the game. I said sure but that we would probably want more people. John, designer of Venus Needs Men!, went to look for people. When he came back, he had brought Doug and Anni, with whom I had traveled. He didn't even know that I was friends with them, making this quite the unlikely occurrence.

We sat down and I decided to let them play without me, as I wanted to focus on observing the effects of the changes and not be distracted by having to play myself. I got the rules done in 15 minutes, which beat my previous record by a full 10 minutes. I would still like to cut the explanation down to under 10 minutes, but at least this has improved.

The special abilities on the level 3 real estate cards were only used once. This is because they aren't normally built until the game is about to end. This made them a non-factor, as the only player to gain any benefit netted but three measly points.

The game lasted 90 minutes. Success! I had successfully reached the magic number. The age lengths broke down to 25 minutes, 15 minutes, and 31 minutes, with the rest used up by the three scoring rounds. Unfortunately, I don't know how many turns each player took.

The final scores were: Doug 95, John 77, James 76, Anni 65. This was actually one of the largest spreads this game has seen. I have no doubt that the shorter length contributed to that. Still, Doug was far, far behind at the end of the second age and still came back to win it convincingly.

Feedback from the playtest:

• factories and oil wells seem to lack value
• maybe I should lengthen the game by adding just one more real estate card to the first age
• the game is at its best with at least five players
• component issues: facility icons too small to distinguish from across the table; the lack of market icons on the board made the connection between the rings and the demand icons difficult
• the game scales in such a way that the experience changes drastically
• not enough / imbalanced competition with only four player
• the marginal build costs feel high
• give players a free "second action" card at start of game
• increase cost of "second action" advancement card

I decided the best way to incentivize using the oil well and factory was the lower their labor costs to make them cheaper to use than the basic resource facilites. Since I had a meeting with a second publisher that night, I set about making the changes.

While I was doing so, someone came over and asked me about the game. After I gave him my five minute speech. he told me that he owned Jolly Roger Games. He said that he wasn't looking for submissions at this point, but that he liked economic games and wanted to help me out with some advice about getting published. He told me meet him the next day at his booth.

Eventually, I met with the second publisher. Unfortunately, by that time it was impossible to find anyone who wanted to playtest the game. So I ended up just walking the publisher through the game's concept and rules. He asked me some questions about it and immediately identified a problem.

I had told him that the game could theoretically be played by three people but that it really needed at least four to work and preferably five or six. He said that I needed to work on it and get it to work with three people. This is because almost no game can be sold if it doesn't support three players. He was right that almost every game out there allows three-to-five players. He said that the upper limit didn't matter that much but that he couldn't publish a game that didn't support three. I told him I would work on the problem and he said that he liked the concept and was willing to look at it again when I had done so.

So my goal for Sunday was to come up with three-player rules and to playtest them.

Just a quick update:

Yesterday, I met with the first publisher of the weekend. I gave him my five-minute Titans of Industry spiel (no pun intended), as that's really all the time he has. I don't yet know what he really thought, but he did ask to hold onto the game for a day so he could have it playtested.

Clearly, that's better than outright rejection. It means that my concept is appealing on its face. However, handing him my game and then having to wait until later today to hear back from him led to an anxiety-ridden night that drove me up the wall. There is a longer story here, but I'll write about it after I know the final outcome.

Sufficient to say that my hope for success got shredded.

On the BoardGameGeek forums, someone asked me if I had ever considered self-publishing. In truth, I have thought about it at times. Heck, I think about it every time I get rejected by a publisher (so it is on my mind quite often). However, I see several issues:

1. Money
   I have heard an estimate that to get even just a simple card game through a small print run will cost at least $5,000. A full game with a lot of components, such as Titans of Industry, might cost at least three or four times that. I won't have that kind of "throwaway" savings for at least another couple of years.
   
   
2. Time
   Selling your game to distributors has got to be absurdly time-consuming, especially when they've never heard of you. I expect it to be a full order of magnitude worse than selling to publishers. I don't want to spend my time cold-calling distributors. I want to spend my time designing games.
   
   
3. Expertise
   Being a publisher is a business job. You need to know how to do things like marketing, supplier relations, cash flow management, etc. Now, I am not completely lacking in these skills. I have taken many business courses and will soon begin pursuing my MBA. However, I know enough to know that I do not know enough about business in general and the game industry in particular to effectively publish and sell a game.
   
   
4. Name Recognition
   Let's face it: the euro/hobby game industry is like many other industries that serve consumers. There's the top 1% and then everyone else. Name recognition goes a long way towards selling your game. People know what to expect when they hear that a game comes from Fantasy Flight or Days of Wonder. Even publishers with diverse offerings, such as Rio Grande, are at least known for their quality. As difficult as it would be to get my game through distributors and onto game shelves, it will be sheer luck to have anyone even know about my game to begin with. Most enthusiasts keep abreast of major offerings from major publishers. They are certainly not scouring the internet for the latest press release from GDW Games. (Yes, that is what I would call my company.)

So, while I appreciate the suggestion, self-publishing just isn't in the cards for me anytime soon.

I finished the rulebook for Titans of Industry Wednesday night / Thursday morning. Sent it to my confederates back home for review. Doug, one of my friends with whom I am traveling, also reviewed it and found a couple of omissions. Apparently, writing at 2am and then at 7am the next morning isn't the best way to write.

One of my meetings is tomorrow afternoon. I've been warned by a game designer friend of mine, Andy Parks, that I'll get only five minutes with this publisher. Needless to say, I'm pretty stressed out right now.

I've been passing the time so far this convention with various activities. I've played some games for the first time, most notably Louis XIV. I am a fan of influence games, and Louis XIV is a pretty good game. Brass is a great economic railroad-type game. Taluva was just too weird for me to understand on a strategic level. Hacienda and Basari are both games that I haven't played in a long time, but was glad to get a chance to try again.

I also spent some time in the exhibit hall. I spoke to some publishers, trying to get another meeting during the convention. No luck. I was also searching for good components to buy while I'm here. I've searched out both components sold as such and games with nice pieces that are on clearance prices that I can buy cheap and then cannibalize for parts.

I was talking to Paul, who works for Zev, and who I met years ago. He has playtested a couple of my games for Zev. We were talking about how hard its become to even get a meeting with publishers these days. He suggested that a get an agent, someone he has known for a while. I spoke to the agent and he does seem like he could help. At the very least, it would mean that I could stop subjugating myself by personally and pathetically begging publishers to give me a sliver of time. I don't know if I want to put even another layer of bureaucracy between me and my games. I need to think about this.

This morning I leave for Origins. While I look forward to playing new games and spending time with my friends, this trip has a singular purpose. I have scheduled meetings with two publishers so far, and will try and get meetings with more by just walking the exhibit hall.

I have brought two prototypes with me: Titans of Industry and Privateering.
The latest version of Titans of Industry looks spectacular. I have tremendous respect for the artistic skills of a friend of mine whom I commissioned to do the artwork for this game, Dan Glaser. It is astonishing what this guy can do with a couple of hundred pixels. In fact, here is a sample:

I'd like to thank Dan and another friend, Jon, for the help they gave me in preparing my pitch. I am not a person who is naturally good at making something sound interesting. These guys have far more ability than I at crafting both a visual and a verbal message that is effective.

Last night I practiced my pitch on another couple of friends. They said that the concept of the game interested them, but that they didn't really understand how a player's turn worked. I am really glad that the concept seemed interesting to them. If a person (publisher) doesn't like the concept, then he or she will tune out the rest and stare at his or her watch. However, it is good to know that I need to be more careful about explaining how a player interacts with the mechanisms I have set up.

I still have to put together a rulebook for Titans. Thankfully, my friend Doug is the one who will be doing the driving to Columbus today, which will give me time to write up the rulebook during the eight-hour car ride. I hate making rulebooks. As I've related previously, it does not come naturally to me. Recently, I had to rewrite the rulebook for the Star Trek CCG. It hadn't been updated in about five years, and the supplemental rules documents published since then were becoming unwieldy. The new version I wrote is undergoing review and I'll post a link to it when it is published.

The Privateering prototype is in a far less developed state, graphically, than Titans. However, its rules are "finished". There really is nothing else I would want tacked on to this game, as I want to keep it in the "light-weight" category and it is already approaching the border of "medium-weight". Because the physical, graphical, aspect of Privateering is not very polished, I'll only be showing it to a single publisher. This is because I have somewhat of a relationship with this publisher already, and I don't think that he would judge the game or my skills based of the lack of graphical pizzazz. I cannot assume the same about other publishers.

I must say, I am really very proud of Titans of Industry. When I compare it to my previous games, they look comically simplistic next to Titans. That isn't to say that Titans just has more rules. It has more dimensions. There are multiple strategies available, and players are forced to weave between them to avoid being left behind. I believe that, even if this weren't my personal design, I would still love this game.

I think this prototype is really a milestone in my development as a board game designer. Now I just have to hope that some publisher sees in this game what I do.

Last Thursday saw a playtest of version 8 of Titans of Industry.

Here is a recording of that playtest. Following that is a brief analysis.

• Titans of Industry v8 - Rules Explanation
• Titans of Industry v8 - Gameplay
• Titans of Industry v8 - Post-Mortem Discussion

The first thing that strikes me is that I've finally gotten the game under two and a half hours. As I've said before, this time marker is very important. That such a hurdle was cleared when two of the players were not only completely new to Titans of Industry, but could not even be reasonably called experienced board gamers, makes me happy. It means even a group of gamers playing this for the first time will be able to finish this within the prescribed length.

The final scores were:
John - 75
Jeff - 48
Michael - 77
KB - 66

This was another high point, as after the second age it appeared to all of the players, including myself, that I had run away with the game and had become unstoppable. The final margin was incredibly close, such that for a moment it looked like I had been overtaken.

The last source of satisfaction for me was the result of the gamble I had taken with the new board layout. It was a radical departure from the previous design, a greater change than any since the changes seen in version 5. It vastly improved the game. It initially caused some confusion for one player, but I believe that can be remedied with a change to the color scheme.

In fact, most of the changes for the next version will be cosmetic as I attempt to use visual organization to speed up players' comprehension of the rules, especially those related to scoring.

As far as rules changes go, I am going to revert to the old rent scheme, where all properties had the same rent, regardless of their level. The new scheme was too complex and slowed down turns as it added several seconds to each turn to calculate the proper amount of rent.

In addition, I am completely scrapping the ranch and beef. I have wasted far too many versions of this game trying to get beef to work and it has either been completely useless or completely overpowered each time.

I am also going to make research a basic facility in terms of labor cost again. While version 7 saw far too many advancements purchased (23 out of 24), version 8 saw only a single advancement purchased, by the only person producing research, no less.

I am going to have one more playtest before departing for Origins, where I currently have appointments with two publishers. I haven't been this excited about one of my designs in a long time.

I had another playtest for Titans of Industry (and Privateering) yesterday. For a list of changes from the previous version, check out the conclusion of my analysis of that test.

One of two changes not listed there was a switch from a single market track for each sector to a set of parallel tracks. The reason for this change was to discourage players from immediately setting their prices at zero. When players do this, it shuts the game down, as there is nowhere left to maneuver.

The parallel tracks, one per player, meant that if one player bottomed-out his or her prices to start with, he or she guaranteed that his or her opponents would do the exact same, and everyone would be worse off than if they all had "colluded" to keep prices high. However, such an attempt at collusion carries risk of someone breaking the pact. This adds the pricing tension back into the game, as the players are faced with something akin to a "prisoner's dilemma".

Unfortunately, this change did not have the intended effect. There were too few available prices (as the price choices were reduced by two-thirds) and too many goods being produced (a result of the change I'll discuss next). This meant that there was really no price choice at all, as markets were filled beyond all capacity.

The other unlisted change was an end to single pricing. Previously, if a player priced multiples of a single good in a single sector at different prices, he or she would be forced to sell all of those goods at the lowest price of any of them. I removed this rule because I felt it was difficult to explain to players. Unfortunately, though the new rule, where every goods cube sold at its specified price, was simple to explain, it was a nightmare to carry out.

This was because a debilitating amount of math was required to figure out players' income at the end of each age. On top of that, the amount of money in the game skyrocketed. Flush with cash, players then proceeded to activate their facilities more times in a single round than was ever intended. This flooded the market with goods, helping to cause the pricing problem described above.

One of the other changes was a simplification of my diminishing marginal returns mechanic. Previously, the rule started with the following sequence:
1-2-4-8-16-32-64
To have a facility activate n times in a single turn, a player had to add the first n terms of that sequence. For instance, to activate a facility once in a turn, it cost $1. To activate it four times in a single turn, it cost 1+2+4+8 = $15. If the facility was a non-basic facility, the total cost doubled. If it was the second age, that total doubled. If it was the third age, it was tripled instead of doubled. This mechanic, though very strong in modeling the desired effect, was a disaster gameplay-wise. Players became unable to do the math.

I changed it to limit players to activating a facility no more than three times per turn. The costs for those activations were as follows:
Basic Facility: 1-5-10
Non-basic Facility: 2-10-20
There was no summing involved. If you wanted to activate a basic facility three times in a single turn, it simply cost $10.

The last major change to this version was an alteration to how the end of an age was triggered. Previously, each age ended when all of that age's real estate spots were built (4 for age one, 8 for age two, 8 for age three). You were not allowed to build in another age's spots until that age was reached.

I changed it so that each age would end the moment any five real estate spots were built. This had a few effects. First, it opened up player choices. No longer did the fourth building built have to be of the type not yet built. Players could completely ignore a sector's construction over the course of a game if they wanted to. Second, it made demand more variable. Sectors were no longer guaranteed to have demand that was approximately even. In fact, they might end up with no demand at all. Third, the variability of demand would push more players to compete in the real estate market in order to ensure that demand was created for their facilities' goods. Last, it lowered the total number of buildings that would be built in the course of a game from 20 to 15.

These effects culminated in a drastic decrease in the length of the game. Whereas the previous version lasted about 4 hours, 7 minutes. There were 182 turns taken (about 36 per player) with an average turn time of 1 minute, 15 seconds. This version lasted 3 hours, 19 minutes. There were 153 turns taken (about 39 per player) with an average turn time of 1 minute, 10 seconds.

I was glad to see that players were taking faster turns. This was probably a result of the simplified diminishing returns mechanic. More important to the near-hour drop in total game time was indeed the change to end-of-age triggering. The game is still too long, but I have an easy fix for that which I am certain will get the game to less than two and a half hours. I feel that this is the magical amount of time where game length becomes acceptable to the masses. While the 90-minute mark is the most popular game length, most people are willing to go an hour more than that, if they feel the game's strategic depth justifies it. Any longer than that and most people will refuse to play outright.

Here are some notes made by a couple of my playtesters:

Jeff

I did not like the new market scheme where only 3 people can enter a market because someone could be shut out of the market before it's even their turn (as with dan). Although this accurately reflects how it would work in real life, I think gameplay wise it's not that great because the game is taken in turns. I prefer the old scheme where everyone can product in a given market as long as they have the building to do so. What if you took the last versions marketing scheme, expanded the prices, and limited producing and buying to the 1/2/3 rows depending on the age?

I also did not like the products being sold at face value as opposed to the lowest value. This introduces a lot of math to the equation which will make the game longer because more time is needed to calculate money/points at the end of each age.

Obviously research needs to be tweaked a bit as we all just kept buying research during the second age until it was all gone. I think cheap research needs to be eliminated somehow by increasing the cost to purchase research every age.

the game is also kind of long although I can't see how you would reduce that time. I felt that we had a good pace going and it still took a long time to complete.

As dan and you mentioned before, this is a game where the order of players greater affects the game depending on who ends the age. Maybe at the beginning of the new age we switch the player order?

Elliot

This game seemed quicker however the previous version of it seemed more competitive, meaning that it was more ruthless. Every market was filled with backstabbing whereas this version takes this type of excitement out of the game. Three players can play side by side in a market rather than against one another.

I think that meat is useless. Two games in a row the person pursuing the meat has lost, and there is only one very specific market that meat is in.

Dan

Players should be able to buy their way into a market if they are willing to commit the necessary resources.

More spaces are needed for meat.

Residentials will always be the first to be built because they only require one resource type.

After discussing the game some more today, I have not yet decided whether to revert to the old market pricing scheme. However, I am making a radically new board. This new board will consolidate some sectors, dropping the total from twelve to eight. I think that this consolidation will help defeat the bottoming-out strategy, as it will increase the amount of demand in any single sector.

I am also increasing the facility costs for multiple firings. Hopefully this will halve the number of goods produced in any single turn, which would make it less likely that any player could close out a market in a single turn by a multiple firing that bottom-outs on prices.

I am doubling all the costs for activating a University. Combined with the increase in multiple-firing costs, this should make research scarcer. Players bought 23 out of 24 advancements during the last game. Preferably, I would not want them to buy more than 16 out of 24.

I am also reinstating the lowest-price rule. This should also discourage bottoming-out.

Finally, I am changing the ratio for converting money to victory points. Previously it was $10 = 1 market share. Now it will be $5 = 1 market share. This, again, should discourage bottoming-out, as it doubles the incentive to accumulate wealth through high prices.

I will be holding another playtest this Thursday with the new board. Hopefully I can make a decision on which market pricing mechanism to use by then.

The other game I tested yesterday was Privateering. It was played with the bounty-pairing, bounty-value reduction, and crew retention suggestions I received at Spielbany.

The playtesters reacted favorably to this one. The only criticism was that towards the end of the game there were too many crew members collected, making decisions on whom to play where more difficult and time-consuming.

For the next test of Privateering, I will remove the deckhands (previously known as stowaways except this time they had all flags and were worth 1 strength). I think that this game is actually pretty close to finalized, rules-wise. It is a simple enough game that I'm surprised how much thought players gave to their decisions. That is always a good sign.

In my previous post, I linked to a recording I made of a playtest for Titans of Industry. Over the past couple of days, I have listened to that recording and taken notes.

The rules explanation took about 20 minutes. I need to find a way to pare this down. When you're showing a game to a publisher, 20 minutes spent on the rules is too much. It makes the game seem overly complicated. I think the cause was not the rules themselves, just my inexperience at explaining this particular version's rules.

There were five players (in order): Elliot, Ray, Jeff, Cynthia, and Dan. The first age lasted 27 minutes and 33 seconds, with each player taking five turns. This means that the game moved at a healthy clip of about 1 minute, 6 seconds per turn at the beginning of the game, meaning a player's average downtime between turns was under 4 and a half minutes. As this was the first time any of these people had seen the game, I feel that this is an acceptable turn time for a game aimed at the heavy-strategy end of the market.

The scoring after the first age took 2 minutes, 13 seconds. Again, I was happy with how quickly the players were able to do this, as the scoring system for Titans of Industry is relatively complex.

The second age, which was designed to have twice the length as the first, took 2 hours, 12 minutes. This was way slower than I'd hoped. I intended for this age to take no longer than 45 minutes to an hour at most. However, some of this time can be chalked up to a need for me to step in for Cynthia, who had to leave shortly after the second age began. There were 22 full rounds plus two turns taken during this age. Players took an average of 1 minute, 18 seconds per turn. I had hoped that by this point in the game, players would be using less than a minute per turn. If that had been true, it would have saved over half an hour. As it was, players saw an average downtime between turns of 5 minutes, 12 seconds.

The second round of scoring took 6 minutes, 3 seconds. This was a little slow for my taste. Even though the scoring was more complex this time around, looking back at what needed to be done, there was no reason it couldn't have been finished in less than 5 minutes.

After seeing the amount of time that the second round had taken, I decided to find an easy way to shorten the game without reducing the complexity of the economic model or cutting away potential strategic choices. After some thought, I decided that instead of an age ending when all of its real estate spaces were built, it would end the moment a majority of its real estate spaces had been built. Since the third age had eight spaces (two for each of residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation), this cut the necessary number down to five.

Though this reduced the age-end trigger by 37.5% percent, I felt that it would actually speed the game up by more than that amount. This is because previously each sector was guaranteed to get two building's worth of demand. Now, that demand might have varied in one direction or the other, but only by a difference of one to three demand. That meant that it was possible for a player focused on the energy, durable, or consumable markets to focus on those markets to the exclusion of the real estate market. With the rule change, the difference in total demand could be as high as five or six, which could significantly hamper a player counting on that demand to score points. Such a player would be forced to compete in the real estate market as well to ensure that the demand for his or her goods was plentiful. This competition would drive the game to the age-end trigger faster than normal.

I decided that even though the second age took over 2 hours, the rule change should push the third age to under 45 minutes. Given how poor my previous assessments have turned out, I was due to get one correct . . . right?

The third age took 1 hour, 9 minutes and each player took nine turns. The average turn length was 1 minute, 33 seconds and the between-turn downtime was 6 minutes, 9 seconds, which was disconcerting to say the least. This time the problem stemmed from the mechanic I am using to simulate diminishing marginal returns. This mechanic does nice double-duty as a money sink in case too much cash gets injected into the game's economy. The mechanic just proved too complex for players to calculate on the fly, leading to turns that took a couple of minutes even when the player knew exactly what he or she wanted to do before the turn even began. In addition, this age saw much more table discussion, which distracted players from their turns.

The scoring after the third age took 10 minutes, 20 seconds. I am fine with this, because game-end scoring involves more factors than previous rounds.

The final scores, after converting each player's money into additional victory points at a ratio of $10 : 1 point, were:
Elliot 73
Ray 105
Jeff 81
Cynthia / Myself 67
Dan 105

However, after converting the money to points, Dan had two additional dollars left over, so we declared him the winner. Two interesting things can be gleamed from the score distribution. First, the spread between the winner and last place is quite large. This is unacceptable and I will have to examine why this happened. Second the two players at the top were separated by an incredibly thin margin. This is a really good sign because these players followed wildly different strategies. It shows that there is definitely no single path to victory. Realizing that was the bright point of my day.

I plan on holding another playtest for this game during this upcoming weekend. On my list of changes to implement before then:

1. Remove inflation until the third age.
2. Trigger the end of an age after any 5 buildings have been built.
3. Add a build cost of one wood to the University.
4. Radically simplify the diminishing returns mechanism.
5. Create more advancements and make them age-specific.

Linked below is the recording I made of last Saturday's playtest test of Titans of Industry. I've broken it down into three parts: rules explanation, gameplay, and post-mortem discussion. be forewarned, the gameplay segment is long.

• Titans of Industry v6 - Rules Explanation
• Titans of Industry v6 - Gameplay
• Titans of Industry v6 - Post-Mortem Discussion

I have begun analyzing the recording for information to help me alter the game's design. I should finish this up sometime tomorrow and will post an update then.

I have gotten a meeting with a publisher at the upcoming Origins game convention. In preparation for this, I held a playtest for Titans of Industry today. I will go into greater detail on the results of the playtest tomorrow.

One thing I will say is that I have already decided on what changes need to be made to the game, so I have decided to try to hold another playtest next weekend. Three tests on three versions of a game is definitely a first for me. However, I want to make the most of my meeting at Origins. This is especially true because of how strongly I feel about Titans of Industry. I think it is likely that I will never make a game to top this one. If I can't get this game published, then I might as well give up on ever getting a game published.

So, even though it will mean the third week in a row that I give up my weeknights to make a new version of a game, It will be worth it if I can get one more playtest in before Origins.

After testing Titans of Industry, we tested the games of two other designers, one of whom is a friend of mine. They were both bank robbing games, as the two designers had originally collaborated on the core idea and then took divergent paths in their individual designs.

It was actually interesting to see the differences that occurred as a result of the parallel design. The obvious question to ask is which one is better. However, each game had its own unique qualities and its own drawbacks. In the future it might be possible to say one is "better" than the other, but it is far too early in either game's development to do so.