The Changing Landscape

Today, we're going to take a look at the evolution of a prototype game board. Specifically, we'll examine the first three versions of the board for Municipality.

This is from the very first version of the game. At that time, the board was just a simple 16 spaces arranged in a square. At the bottom is a track to mark each player's current Approval Rating. During the first playtest it was discovered that this layout meant that anything built in the center four squares had a dominating effect on the rest of the board. Also, towards the end of the game almost all squares were connected by roads. This made the Developer action extremely complicated to carry out. Addressing these two problems required a radical redesign.

In version 2 of Municipality, the board had been divided into three areas. This reduced both the amount of adjacencies (buildings touching each other) and connections (buildings connected by roads). This made the Developer action easier to understand and meant it was harder to sabotage other players' buildings by placing a factory next to them. In addition, there are now 24 spaces. This 50% increase from the first board necessitated a rule change to avoid lengthening the game. Now, instead of the entire board being filled, a mere 15 spaces being filled will trigger the end of the game. Lastly, I also modeled this board after a real city. This should help give the game some flavor, as well as provide opportunity for expansions through new map. For those that don't recognize it, the board features New York City through Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the lower half of Manhattan.

In the third version of Municipality, I got rid of Staten Island and increased the size of Manhattan. Version 2 of the map saw players reluctant to build on Manhattan because it was a small area with only two connecting points to the eastern half of the map. I also extended the river to completely separate Queens from Brooklyn. This should also help shift the center of gravity back towards Manhattan, as well as make it more difficult to build a special building that is adjacent to more than four other buildings. (This had been a slightly-too-powerful strategy in the previous version.)

I have another playtest coming up this week. I'm certain that, this early in development, I'll discover a need to tweak the board yet again.

Also, once the New York City map settles down I plan on creating another map to test with as well. The city should be both well known and have an interesting shape that is broken up by geographic features (rivers, canyons, mountains, islands, etc.)

What city do you think should be represented on the second map? Let me know in the comments.

Urban Sprawl

A reader posted the following in response to one of my Municipality playtest summaries.

Tim Harrison said...
Your game is beginning to sound a lot like Urban Sprawl, by Chad Jensen, the designer of Combat Commander:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/62220

The rules are available on GMT's website. You might want to take a look.

First off, I'd like to thank Tim for letting me know about this game. The last thing I want to do as a designer is waste time designing and developing a game that someone else has already made.

Secondly, after some investigation, this does not seem to be such an occassion. For a primer, take a look at the Urban Sprawl rulebook.

Reading through this, I came to the conclusion that Urban Sprawl and Municipality are two very different games which occupy the same thematic space and, therefore, use similar terminology to describe some very different game mechanics.

I think Tim's conclusion that they were similar was caused by this terminology overlap. For instance, both games use "Permits" and have players gaining temporary control of various political offices.

However, the differences between these two games are along the lines of the differences between Carcassone and Caylus.

Urban Sprawl takes the latter route. It is detailed and highly strategic. Municipality, on the other hand, is simpler, shorter (between 1 and 1.5 hours instead of 1.5 and 3 hours), and more abstracted.

Also, when you dig down to it, Urban Sprawl is a city-building game and Municipality is, at its core, a bargaining game. Much the way that hotel construction in Acquire is just a pretext to drive the real meat of the game (stock purchasing and selling), Municipality uses city construction to force players into its main activity: bargaining of Political Capital.

So, I will continue development of Municipality. Despite the thematic collision, I truly believe these are two distinct games occupying different segments of the market.

I want to again thank Tim for alerting me to this in the first place. There aren't enough hours in the day for any of us, and the time I can dedicate to gaming gets spent mostly on design and testing. I don't have enough time to keep up with what other designers are producing. So, if you spot something that bears a similarity to one of my prototypes, please let me know in the comments.

I wish designer Chad Jensen the best of luck with getting his game published. You can pre-order it here.

Municipality - Week 2

Municipality is coming along swimmingly. The last-minute radical change to the game's structure ended up being the most fun part of the game. To think that I was afraid of making such a fundamental change right before my first playtest . . . this game could have ended up so much less fun had I not changed course.

Here are notes from the last week of testing.

Version 2.0

Changes from v1.0:
New board
Connected only requires road connections, does not get restricted to within a certain range.
Players start with one random land, all starting land must be non-adjacent.
Players start with one permit (R,C,I) of their choice and immediately place it on their starting land.
Players start with $20 instead of $10.
City Council role has been removed.
Industry now has built-in tax of $5 instead of $10, Commercial has a built-in tax of $3 instead of $5.
Population ceilings reduced as follows: Industry - 5 down to 3, Commercial - 10 down to 5, Residential - infinite down to 15.
End game now triggered either by a player with 10 Approval announcing an election at the start of a round which take place at the end of that round or by a 15th permit being placed on the board, triggering an election at the end of the following round.
========================================
Rory Parsons - 140 (10 x 14)
Greg Costikyan - 126 (6 x 21)
Michael R. Keller - 125 (5 x 25)
Deputy Mayor confusing
Early game is tedious
Campaign manager not valuable until the end
Maybe add more empty space to the board
Consider non-player-owned buildings
Change to a Hex map? Would make connections clearer.
Should some permits have two roads, some only have one?
Difficult to tell who is winning until the game's end.

Version 2.1

Changes from v2.0:
Diagonal connections no longer allowed.
Players start with two land cards instead of one. all land cards must be non-adjacent.
Players start with one of each permit (R,C,I) instead of just one. They may place any one immediately and keep the other two. This should encourage balanced development.
========================================
Playing Time - 1 hour 45 minutes
Dan Glaser - 60 (10 x 6)
Elliot Black - 0 (0 x 11)
Michael R. Keller - 0 (0 x 7)
Need to fix endgame so last round isn't so anti-climactic; make it so keep going around until all roles are picked in last round.
Deputy Mayor will always be picked by whoever is going last. Make it so it is influenceable, that way there is a reason to not take it. Since now only lobbyist cannot be influenced, just make everything influenceable.
Campaign Manager useless at start of game. Make it so it automatically gives one approval when taken.
Mark properties with player tokens so you can tell who owns what.
Development calculation still confusing.

Version 2.2

Changes from v2.1
All roles will be picked during final round of the game.
Deputy Mayor and Lobbyist can now be influenced like the other roles.
Campaign Manager gives one level of approval for free. Additional levels cost $10 each. No Political Capital must be spend on this role.
Developer no longer requires Political Capital to use.
Player-owned properties will be marked.
========================================
Lauren Roberti - 16 (2 x 8)
Zhen Wang - 12 (2 x 6)
Michael R. Keller - 8 (4 x 2)
Cynthia Tang - 6 (2 x 3)
Change the development grid to use person icons. Current arrows don't make it clear that it relates to population. It is getting confused with taxes.
Cynthia wanted a chance to build more.
Board - extend river from B3 into C3 as well.
Subway - was difficult to understand. Perhaps make it an "advanced" card?
Special Permits - Too easy to forget their Approval ability by the time it comes up.
Player card - Remove the tax column, adding it to the tax card. Add a revenue column. Also, add a population cap column.
Board - do grid numbers need to be on all four sides? Or just two?

Playtest Notes - Municipality v1.0

Last week I finally made the first prototype for Municipality. As I was constructing the prototype, I had a brainstorm on a radical way to change the rules. Luckily, It required only minor modification to the original prototype.

Anyway, here are the notes from the first playtest session:

Playing time: 2h 15m
Dorsey - 230
Michael - 170
Jonathan - 160
Jeff - N/A
Central industrial tiles made development of Commercial spaces impossible.
Dorsey and Jon ended game with an Approval Rating of 10. Michael had an approval rating of 5.
Dorsey employed heavy-industry strategy, taxing over and over to collect money, turning that into Political Capital with the lobbyist.
Michael's initial Commercial space never developed. Michael relied on two mid-game Residential spaces and developing multiple times.
1) Too little money at the start slowed down the game. Increase from $10 to $20.
2) Industrial tax revenue is too high, reduce from $10 to $7. Commercial tax revenue drops from $5 to $4.
3) New board layout will decrease negative effect of Industry (fewer adjacencies), reduce complexity of development action (fewer adjacencies and connections), and reduce total number of cubes on the board (because of the reduced adjacencies and connections).