One or Two?

I am prepping Municipality for presentation to publishers. Part of this is finalizing how I would like the board to be laid out.

Originally the game's roles were cards that players grabbed. Eventually, someone (apologies to whomever it was for my failure to remember) suggested just leaving the cards where they were and placing player markers on them. I quickly then changed the non-moving cards into a second board for the game what was just all of the roles in a row. This morphed into the double-sided role board show below.



I've thought about spicing up that second board. Perhaps overlaying the roles on a graphic of a building, á la Clue (but for purely aesthetic reasons with no gameplay implications).

This layout has several advantages:

• Add to the theme of the game by allowing for graphical representation of roles instead of just a title
• Visually separated from the main board, reducing clutter
• Physical separation from board reduces probability of knocking over one thing when reaching for another
• Space available for rules summary, reducing burden (and size) of player cards

However, I am also considering an alternate layout.



This layout would put everything on a single board by reducing the size of the spaces on the main board from 3" squares to 2.75" squares. Since the maximum number of objects that can be placed on a tile was reduced from infinite (one ownership plus numerous population cubes) to 6 (one ownership marker and 5 stars), they don't need to be so large. The roles in this layout would then go around two of the edges.

The advantages of this method are:

• Reduce (by a huge amount) the table space required to play the game
• Single board to look at means eyes have to travel less to get all game information
• Health Commissioner and Campaign Manager can be placed near the tracks they affect

So, which would you prefer?

1. Two boards with interesting graphics taking up 600 square inches
2. Single utilitarian board that centralizes information taking up 400 square inches

Erasing Expectations

I hosted a game day on Saturday and it went very well. After a couple of games of Zendo and a human victory in Battlestar Galactica (woohoo!), someone asked to play Municipality.

During this session, something unexpected happened. One of the players expressed extreme dissatisfaction with how population growth now works.

He preferred the original method, where population cubes went directly on the buildings and the growth chart indicated absolute growth, not relative standing. Why does this one tester dislike something that everyone else has said was a marked improvement?

Then I realized: he hasn't played Municipality since version 1.0 over seven months ago.

I believe what may have happened was that this tester was expecting to play a specific game. When the game he did play ended up being significantly different, he was unable to form a new strategy to deal with the new dynamics. The results of his choices varied so widely from his expectations that I'm sure he felt somewhat cheated.

I know that if I game I enjoyed enough to ask to play again suddenly changed rules, my opinion of the new rules would be colored by how I think the game "should" have stayed. I would not be objective.

I don't think this is a reflection on the game itself, but instead it reveals something about how to manage a playtest group. It might have been a mistake to allow such a long time between this player's sessions of Municipality. I need to keep in mind that it is not enough to manage individual playtests. I must also manage the entire, months-long arc of playtesting, including the testers.

Below is a clip of the end of the playtest. I am in the lower-left corner and am using the light brown pieces.

NYC BGD Meeting - June 2010

I previously asked for opinions on a new, alternate way to show the interactions between building types in Municipality. The response was shockingly negative. Even though I was skeptical before I even showed it, the uniform response against basically obligated me to actually try it out. I was worried that this reaction was the effect of viewing the diagram in absence of the game itself.

I am not rarely accused of being a contrarian. I usually deny this.

This weekend the NYC board game designers met again and I used the occasion to see if this diagram is actually as bad as you guys claimed.

First game tested was Master Spy by Mark Salzwadel. There were some things I liked about this and some I didn't. It will surprise absolutely no one that I liked the analytical gameplay but hated the die rolling. That's just who I am.

Next we tested Municipality. While I did have a couple of relatively minor gameplay changes from the previous test, I really wasn't interested in them. The game is mechanically where I want it to be and am generally more than happy with how it plays out. My top priority for this test was to see how best to present the growth information to the players.

To the right is what I used to test this. On it are both the original growth chart as well as the new diagram which was universally booed. In addition, I added something suggested in the comments of that prior post. Between the chart and the diagram I put a text description of the interactions. With all three methods presented on the same player card, I'd let the players play and discover the one to which they pay the most attention over the course of the game.

Here are my findings:

• The diagram is utterly incomprehensible
• The chart's blank spaces make it difficult to read
• Text is by far the best method

This completely surprised me. I thought that people would recoil from the text and prefer the most visual method. I am wrong again.

After Municipality, we played Tristin's cash-accumulation game. I don't think my feedback was very useful, as I am too far from this game's target audience to be of much analytical help.

Next we tested a new version of Dan Cassar's game from last month. He has simplified the more-complicated scoring rules somewhat, but it still needs some tweaking.

That was followed up by another round of Master Spy, with different maps.

Finally, we tested an extremely early version of a drafting game by Dan. I can see where some interesting decisions can appear in this game, but it's mechanics make the decks players draft far too fragile.

Off-Topic: Grid Game

Via Boardgamenews, Grid Game is shallow, but I think the sound is what makes it astonishingly satisfying. Play it and you'll wake up an hour later not knowing where the time went.

It reminds me a lot of The Game of Life.

My best score so far is 1421. Can anyone top that?

The Blind Leading the Designer

It's about time for me to end development on Municipality and move on to other designs while I shop it around to publishers.

For this game, I'm going to do something I've never done before: a remote blind playtest.

A blind playtest is where the designer does not explain the game to the testers. Instead, the testers are given the prototype and a copy of the rulebook and they have to figure it out for themselves.

Although I have done blind playtests before, I have always been on hand to observe. This has had the advantage of being able to see in real time which sections of the rulebook were the least comprehensible, it has also resulted in my jumping in to prevent the players from using an incorrect interpretation during gameplay.

It has also meant that the blind test was conducted by people who knew me. This might have affected their parsing of my rules language.

This time, I want to see what happens when a group of people whom I have never met playtest Municipality outside of my presence.

So, if you are willing to organize a playtest and report back on it, please let me know by e-mailing gdw@gamedesignerwannabe.com.