Information Redesign

I have previously spoken about my attempt to deal with growth in Municipality being complicated. The last time, I sought to address this through reducing the frequency of consulting the growth chart.

Unfortunately, in further playtests, this didn't seem to do the trick.

This time, I've figured out a way to get rid of of the chart entirely.

Here is the chart that has proven to be so opaque to my testers:



The way it works is that you locate the property type in the second column, then follow it to the right to determine what affected its star rating (previously known as growth).

And here is its replacement:



In this version, you locate the property, and any stars leading out of it show you what stars it gains or loses for each association.

To be fair, The new version does not contain all of the information of the previous one. I have moved the Bonus Tax Revenue and the Star Limit to other components. However, I have not been forced to alter the actual growth mechanic to accommodate this new method of displaying it.

I'm not sure that this version is actually better. I need to do a couple of playtests first.

Does anyone think the chart version was clearer than my new one?

A Great Line . . .

. . . and a good point from BrettSpiel:

How many game designers does it take to change a lightbulb? All of them. One to fix the light, and the rest to say that they wouldn’t have fixed it like that.

The Wrong Side of the Tracks

So far, we've seen Municipality's new Office Tower tile and its new Housing tile. It is now time to round out the trio with the Factory tile.

I wanted this tile to look very polluted. Factories are the only way to actually lower the star rating of other tiles. I came up with two versions, one with only ground pollution and one with both ground and air pollution.

Which one do you like better?

Housing Art Tweaks

In response to some comments on my last post, I have decided that removing a couple of the houses from that tile might be necessary. However, before I go that far, I wanted to try a different option.

What do you think of the below change? Is it enough to make the card readable? Or do I still need to actually remove the overlapped houses entirely?

Where the Heart Is

Last week I showed you Municipality's new Office Tower tile. This week's treat is the redesigned Housing tile.

You might notice that I made the stars larger. They were going to be a half-inch in diameter, but that is too small for a token to be easily grabbed, so I had to enlarge them. I will apply the change to the Office tile, but that shouldn't change its appearance too much.

Again, here are the old tiles for comparison.

I'm a tad worried that the image is too busy. Maybe I should remove the upper-leftmost house. What do you think?

Off-Topic: They Should Call It Battlefun Galacticawesome

I played my third game of Battlestar Galactica today (all three times were with the Pegasus expansion). I was again a human and successfully outed one of the two Cyclons. I, of course, credit my admiraling skills with our escape from New Caprica.

My only regret is that I did not get to send Ben (my gaming nemesis, who I am destined to decapitate one day to absorb his power, as there can be only one) to the brig. He was actually human this time, which was unfortunate. I did, however, strand him on New Caprica to be executed by the Cylons while we made our getaway. That felt good.

I don't think I ever want to be a Cylon, even though I believe the math of the game is 80-20 against the humans. Hunting down the Cylons and deducing their identities is just too fun.

This is a flat-out fantastic game (except for the die-rolling). I've never been so thematically engrossed by anything else. Yes, I'm a fan of the show, but I don't get into the theme of other licensed games which I enjoy.

You should play this game.

Shiny New Office Tower

Following up on my prior post about redesigning the look of Municipality's permit cards, below is the new version of the Office Tower permit.

Although I originally only intended to do this for aesthetic reasons, I actually added gameplay functionality changes as well. I am now including the star limit on the permit card itself rather than placing it on the player reference card.

What do you think of the new look? (Here is an image of the old permits for comparison.)

NYC BGD Meeting - May 2010

This weekend the New York City Board Game Designers had their monthly meeting. There were five of us in attendance, including a visitor from the U.K., who managed to avoid being tarred and feathered by roving bands of Tea Partiers during his stay.

First up on the block was Municipality. This was the third test of Municipality since the major changes I had finally relented on making.

The test went very well. Although the players still found the permit relationship chart to be difficult to translate onto the board, the fact that the chart was used far less often made this pain not noticeable until after the game was over. Other than that, the players had positive impressions of the game.

Personally, I liked how players who seemed out of it in the middle of the game were able to come back and make it a nail-biter at the end. My only problem was that the game took a little bit longer than I would have liked. I can fix that by tweaking one of the end game conditions. When there are multiple end game conditions and only one needs to be met to trigger the end of the game, speeding up one will force players to also act more quickly on the others.

Estimate time to completion: 1 month

After Municipality, we tested a game by Brett Gilbert, our British visitor. The major mistake with the game was that it gave players lots of information about the future, but the mechanics of the game made predicting future turns a pointless exercise. This meant that the board was cluttered with things players couldn't care less about.

The lesson to draw from this is to not give players information that they cannot meaningfully use. That extra information just overwhelms them.

Next to hit the table was an auction game, MacGuffin Market by Gil Hova. This game actually uses the unique auction mechanic that Gil had taken out of his other game, Pax Robotica (which I tested two months ago).

This game just didn't have its math lined up correctly and I broke out into an early, insurmountable lead by going all out on the first turn and then continuing that strategy. Also, although the game had two resources, only one could be used at the auction for the other and the other was far more efficient in the action round. This dictated my strategy (which proved to be correct).

The lesson from this test was that you cannot have two resources which are both interchangeable yet strong in different areas. That only ensures that one will always be spent in one place and the other will be spent in the other areas. You must make sure that

• one cannot always be used in place of the other; and
• the opportunities to exchange them are limited

The day's last game was a tile-laying game by Dan Cassar.

Incidentally, Dan was the one who came up with the current, better layout for Titans of Industry. Later, he won Rio Grande's 2009 game design competition.

This game seems pretty simple, rules-wise, while having some room for mid-level strategy. This is a good, highly-marketable combination. The only problem was calculating scoring was a tad onerous. Luckily, a player might only have to do this once or twice each game. Dan is in a good position with this one.

That was it for this month's meeting. Hopefully by next month I will be "finished" with Municipality.