Back when I was contemplating starting a publishing company, a game I really, really wanted to develop and release was a rebuild of Puerto Rico in the setting of the great Jeremy Irons/Robert De Niro film "The Mission". Sadly, I reached out to alea, RGG, and the designer and they weren't interested in this. I've never done anything more with the idea but in the spirit of brainstorming new ideas this week, I'll take a brief stab at this one as well.
What resuscitated my interest in this idea this week was a brief look back in time at some of the mechanics I've come up with that I felt were original to me. This is not an incredibly long list, but still, these are ideas that I liked enough to build games around. These mostly live in games that I'm not actively working on, and so my thought was, could these be moved to other games so that they can still perhaps see the light of day?
One of these ideas emerged in my development of Collusion, which is another game I've been working on for years and that's currently a bit stuck. I'm trying to figure out how to revamp that one, but one of the things I think will end up getting cut out is the 'power discs' mechanic -- or even if it doesn't it could be useful elsewhere. The idea is that you arrange your power discs in even stacks going around a rondel, and each turn, you can either take an action, which costs a disc, or pass and move the stack from the current area to the top of the stack in the next area. But the 'power' of the action you take is given by the size of the stack. And, actions are limited. So you want to act early if you can, so as not to get closed out; but you want to act late so that your action is more powerful. This is a simple but effective source of tension.
So my thought was to ask how could this mechanic be used differently? For example: forget the rondel and just grow the stack by some prescribed amount each turn. Maybe add a disc each turn, or maybe double the size of the current stack, or whatever. But the focal point could be the same: act early, or act later. Except, if we divorced this from the idea of a fixed 'year', then it would just be a continuous flow of turns, and the decision would be to act NOW or act later.
I realized that this could provide a twist on a role selection system. One player picks a role, and then everyone may choose to use that role or pass. If you use the role, your 'power' for the action is given by the number of discs in your current stack, which you then expunge.
Why must these be discs instead of just having a 'power track'? Actually I'm not sure -- in the Collusion mechanic you could loan discs to other players in exchange for boosts, and your disc came back to you when it floated to the top of the other player's stack. So maybe that could come into play here. For example, I want to use role X, and have available power of 4 but only need power 2; I must spend all my discs, so, hey, does anyone want these 2 power discs for their stack, and what am I offered in exchange for them?
With regard to the action of the game, this isn't a direct port of PR but some of the concepts would be similar. I think the idea is that we're different orders running missions in the Paraguayan jungle, helping to cultivate the land and care for the native people, the Guarini. I think that we're situated along a river, and so the idea would be that role selection represents "we're bringing this particular personage up the river to assist our missions", and we can use that person's ability in seat order. Maybe within this construct there's a draft for each available action -- for example, the builder only has the materials to build certain buildings. I think we each have an area in which to place tiles, but it's more like Cuba than PR, in that the same area will contain crops and buildings. And I think that the boat also flows back down the river, so we need to load it up with crops or finished goods to sell in exchange for money.
The movie has an added political layer to it. The territory occupied by the Jesuit missions is Spanish, in which slavery is outlawed, but it’s being transferred to Portugal, where slaving is legal. The Jesuits want the Vatican to protect the missions against the Portuguese but the Vatican wants to preserve catholic unity in Europe. These aspects should affect the game st some level, with players having very limited ability to control them. But I think they should make the game very difficult — both mechanically, because it’s an uphill climb to resist the Portuguese influence, and emotionally, because the game’s ending should the Portuguese prevail is very sad. It remains to be seen whether this comes through in the player experience. What it at least points to is that the scoring system has to be built around the perceptions of the Guarini - did they perceive that your mission was a net good for their people?
Lots of vague ideas so far but I think the mechanical core is the role selection coupled with the timing mechanism. Do you act frequently, but inefficiently, or do you bide your time to take actions that are more impactful?
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Ultimatums
Our family has had fun over the years with Chinatown; everyone seems to really like the haggling and negotiation. My wife adopts an especially, shall we say, confrontational style to negotiation, with lots of threats and ultimatums and cajoling. It's kind of entertaining. But it got me to thinking several years ago about a game based on this concept -- a game whose central action revolved around issuing ultimatums to the other players. It would be a game nastier than Diplomacy, a game nastier than intrigue-rich backstabbing games -- it would be a game about stabbing people in the chest.
My first take on this was a territorial game a la Risk but with a diplomatic layer involving an obligatory issuance of an ultimatum to another player each turn. It never made it to testing, but I don't think it was quite what I was looking for. For one thing, our family doesn't play that kind of game, so it's not clear it would have been all that well received, and for another, having the ultimatums be something you must do, as opposed to something you can do, seems beside the point.
Nevertheless the core premise of a territorial game seems appropriate -- you're the ruler of some country and are trying to prop up your failing regime by appearing to be louder than your neighboring countries. So there are silly currencies like your country's disgruntledness and bluster tokens and so on. But the central absurdity of the game has to come from the ultimatums themselves.
Hence my next idea was/is that you're tracking several aspects of your nation -- its arts, its innovations, its public works, etc. There are cards that you acquire to promote these, and each has an intrinsic value but also an icon or two, which, when combo'd with other cards, gives more points. So there's something you're aiming for.
If you're going to issue an ultimatum, there has to be something you're going to threaten to do, so maybe each card has an associated failure mode, and you can play a failure mode to destroy someone's card, possibly taking out that card or all cards in the set with that mode or all cards in that set period.
Let's talk for a second about an ultimatum. It is, to my understanding, something that conforms to this construct: "Do X, or else I will do Y". It's not "Do NOT do X, or else I will do Y". That's a threat. It's not "If you do X, then I will do Y". That's a promise. It's not "Do X, AND I will do Y". That's a deal. The key principle that this encapsulates is that you are commanding the player to do something specific, that they are permitted under the rules to do, and if they fail to do it, you are going to take the threatened course of action.
Immediately then we see a few things. First, it's essential that the thing you're asking them to do has to be something they can do immediately. It can't be something that ordinarily requires a turn action or that involves doing something to a third party; otherwise we need to track ultimatums that were issued and whether they were fulfilled or not. Second, it's essential that the thing you're threatening to do is also something that it's theoretically possible for you to do on your turn, but the other player should not know for certain whether you can or will actually do it. This suggests that those attack cards should be secret.
With these things in place, what I realized is that this game is actually technically a deal-making game, but it's a game about making negative deals: you are crafting two unpleasant options for your opponent and banking on their choosing the one that costs you nothing as opposed to the one that requires a turn action to execute. You want destructive actions to be difficult enough to set up that the other player isn't quite sure if you can follow through on it, although the opportunity cost of an action spent following through should be high enough that sometimes you'll choose not to follow through even though you're able to.
There are a few implications of this. First, it means that there has to be enough variety to your holdings that there's some scope for creativity. Again, you're crafting deals here. If it's simply "give me that card, or I'll blow it up!" that won't be very fun for very long. You want to be able to cook up more varied and creative schemes than that. So in addition to cards, the game may need a spatial layer and possibly an economy. The spatial layer can be quite simple -- perhaps each pair of players has a row of three tiles between them, and a marker showing the 'front' between them. You should want to push the front forward for some reason. The economy can be similarly simple, maybe you simply have to provide some amount of support for the tiles you control or must pay to acquire cards or something like that.
Second, it means that building the game around card acquisition would be misplaced. If I can acquire cards in some peaceful way or in an aggressive way, there are a lot of players who will choose the peaceful option despite the boisterous theme of the game. The game has to incentivize confrontational play. So maybe instead it's that we each have a randomly-dealt set of cards, which we allocate to our different cultural aspects. Surrendering or losing any of these is harmful in that it increases our disgruntledness, but it will nevertheless be the case that the set we're given at the start is random and other players will have cards that we'd like to acquire to form better combos for more points. So we want to craft ultimatums that get us better cards, and to be able to issue potential consequences that are harmful enough that they're likely to be accepted.
Of course there has to be the opportunity for petty diplomacy and retaliation, and maybe this gives a possible role for direct threats as a way of escalating in the case of an ultimatum -- you can say "no, you can't have X, but if you do Y, I will do Z!" Again this requires some tracking so it isn't great, but I like the idea of an aggressive action triggering a chain of aggression.
I haven't mentioned some of the other silly ideas like a turn action that lets you insult another player's country to gain some 'bluster' tokens, or the ability to use a free action to declare war on another player, which has no gameplay effect.
The game would of course need to place some boundaries on what you can ask for and what you can threaten as a consequence. It wouldn't make sense to be able to say "Give me X, or else I will do [an action that causes you no harm]".
I think this game has the potential to provide quite a different experience from other games, but my hope is that it can be substantive enough that it has more staying power than just a play-through or two for the silly experience of shouting at each other. It's not intended to be super-thinky but it should at least have some substance.
Alternatively the core idea of ultimatum-issuing could be used in some sort of truth-or-dare-esque party game, or could perhaps be used in a game like Gauntlet of Fools where we're going to run some sort of simultaneous gauntlet or race and the ultimatums are about handicapping ourselves as a result of ultimatums issued. But neither of these styles of games personally appeal to me so that's not currently the direction I'm taking this in, although it may end up there in the end.
My first take on this was a territorial game a la Risk but with a diplomatic layer involving an obligatory issuance of an ultimatum to another player each turn. It never made it to testing, but I don't think it was quite what I was looking for. For one thing, our family doesn't play that kind of game, so it's not clear it would have been all that well received, and for another, having the ultimatums be something you must do, as opposed to something you can do, seems beside the point.
Nevertheless the core premise of a territorial game seems appropriate -- you're the ruler of some country and are trying to prop up your failing regime by appearing to be louder than your neighboring countries. So there are silly currencies like your country's disgruntledness and bluster tokens and so on. But the central absurdity of the game has to come from the ultimatums themselves.
Hence my next idea was/is that you're tracking several aspects of your nation -- its arts, its innovations, its public works, etc. There are cards that you acquire to promote these, and each has an intrinsic value but also an icon or two, which, when combo'd with other cards, gives more points. So there's something you're aiming for.
If you're going to issue an ultimatum, there has to be something you're going to threaten to do, so maybe each card has an associated failure mode, and you can play a failure mode to destroy someone's card, possibly taking out that card or all cards in the set with that mode or all cards in that set period.
Let's talk for a second about an ultimatum. It is, to my understanding, something that conforms to this construct: "Do X, or else I will do Y". It's not "Do NOT do X, or else I will do Y". That's a threat. It's not "If you do X, then I will do Y". That's a promise. It's not "Do X, AND I will do Y". That's a deal. The key principle that this encapsulates is that you are commanding the player to do something specific, that they are permitted under the rules to do, and if they fail to do it, you are going to take the threatened course of action.
Immediately then we see a few things. First, it's essential that the thing you're asking them to do has to be something they can do immediately. It can't be something that ordinarily requires a turn action or that involves doing something to a third party; otherwise we need to track ultimatums that were issued and whether they were fulfilled or not. Second, it's essential that the thing you're threatening to do is also something that it's theoretically possible for you to do on your turn, but the other player should not know for certain whether you can or will actually do it. This suggests that those attack cards should be secret.
With these things in place, what I realized is that this game is actually technically a deal-making game, but it's a game about making negative deals: you are crafting two unpleasant options for your opponent and banking on their choosing the one that costs you nothing as opposed to the one that requires a turn action to execute. You want destructive actions to be difficult enough to set up that the other player isn't quite sure if you can follow through on it, although the opportunity cost of an action spent following through should be high enough that sometimes you'll choose not to follow through even though you're able to.
There are a few implications of this. First, it means that there has to be enough variety to your holdings that there's some scope for creativity. Again, you're crafting deals here. If it's simply "give me that card, or I'll blow it up!" that won't be very fun for very long. You want to be able to cook up more varied and creative schemes than that. So in addition to cards, the game may need a spatial layer and possibly an economy. The spatial layer can be quite simple -- perhaps each pair of players has a row of three tiles between them, and a marker showing the 'front' between them. You should want to push the front forward for some reason. The economy can be similarly simple, maybe you simply have to provide some amount of support for the tiles you control or must pay to acquire cards or something like that.
Second, it means that building the game around card acquisition would be misplaced. If I can acquire cards in some peaceful way or in an aggressive way, there are a lot of players who will choose the peaceful option despite the boisterous theme of the game. The game has to incentivize confrontational play. So maybe instead it's that we each have a randomly-dealt set of cards, which we allocate to our different cultural aspects. Surrendering or losing any of these is harmful in that it increases our disgruntledness, but it will nevertheless be the case that the set we're given at the start is random and other players will have cards that we'd like to acquire to form better combos for more points. So we want to craft ultimatums that get us better cards, and to be able to issue potential consequences that are harmful enough that they're likely to be accepted.
Of course there has to be the opportunity for petty diplomacy and retaliation, and maybe this gives a possible role for direct threats as a way of escalating in the case of an ultimatum -- you can say "no, you can't have X, but if you do Y, I will do Z!" Again this requires some tracking so it isn't great, but I like the idea of an aggressive action triggering a chain of aggression.
I haven't mentioned some of the other silly ideas like a turn action that lets you insult another player's country to gain some 'bluster' tokens, or the ability to use a free action to declare war on another player, which has no gameplay effect.
The game would of course need to place some boundaries on what you can ask for and what you can threaten as a consequence. It wouldn't make sense to be able to say "Give me X, or else I will do [an action that causes you no harm]".
I think this game has the potential to provide quite a different experience from other games, but my hope is that it can be substantive enough that it has more staying power than just a play-through or two for the silly experience of shouting at each other. It's not intended to be super-thinky but it should at least have some substance.
Alternatively the core idea of ultimatum-issuing could be used in some sort of truth-or-dare-esque party game, or could perhaps be used in a game like Gauntlet of Fools where we're going to run some sort of simultaneous gauntlet or race and the ultimatums are about handicapping ourselves as a result of ultimatums issued. But neither of these styles of games personally appeal to me so that's not currently the direction I'm taking this in, although it may end up there in the end.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Theme park-themed TCG (!?!?!?)
I've never played Magic or any other collectible/trading card game (CCG/TCG). However, I recently visited a well-known amusement park and had the idea that the park could provide a good context for a CCG to be played by attendees during their visit, with the following motivations:
- You have to wait in line a lot. What if there was a quick game you could play to spend some of that time?
- An app is the obvious thing here, but people spend way too much time on their phones already. A tactile experience could offer something more interpersonal and fun than yet another screen-based experience.
- Moreover, people from all over the world are at the park. It might be neat to be given the opportunity to meet a couple of these people. It's awkward to strike up a conversation with strangers but perhaps playing a short game with them creates a context for a brief social interaction. Maybe the game comes with a lanyard, so you know who the potential players of the game are if they're carrying the lanyard.
- The park's variety of attractions, and their associated gift shops, provide an obvious CCG tie-in -- each gift shop could sell booster-packs that are specifically associated with that attraction.
Ok, so this provides a possible motivation. What constraints do these set on the game itself?
1. It must be quick. A minute or so, maybe 2 minutes tops.
2. It must be simple. People who buy the starter kit have to be able to learn the game quickly, maybe while waiting in line for their first attraction. The gameplay has to be easy so that non-gamers can easily pick it up.
3. It must be language independent. That creates a problem for the rules document, but the game itself can't have text-based effects. Numbers and icons only, and the icon language has to be very simple.
4. It must be playable without a table. This is the hard one.
5. It would be nice if it could have some skill, or decisions, or deck-building. If you are supposed to acquire cards from different attractions, it would be nice if these offer something other than variety.
My first idea is to emulate something like one of my favorite childhood games, Slapshot. This is a hockey manager game where you draft player cards, and then play "games" against opponents in a simple fashion: you arrange your six players in order, then reveal one card at a time, simultaneously. If your number is higher than theirs, you get a goal. Most goals wins the game. Winning the most games wins you the season. It's simple and fun, and there's some doublethink involved in arranging your cards based on what you know the other person has.
Something like this meets all of the above criteria reasonably well. Maybe it's that we're going to play five cards and compare their numbers, and whichever of us plays the higher number 'wins' that point, first to three points wins the match. But this doesn't have much depth or promote much deck-building. Thus a better deck always wins and that's boring.
So, perhaps we add in a couple of simple combo effects. One could be that each card has one or several icons, and maybe icons from previous cards you played 'buff' the current card if it shares that icon, perhaps if they're all in a chain. Another could be that some cards have a 'react' power, which can be played straight out of your hand after both players have revealed their number card (or maybe it's that a previously-played card's 'react' power can be triggered at any time). Again, simplicity is key so there are only a couple of powers and they're extremely simple: something like "remove the opponent's card from play", "block the opponent's card (i.e. cancel its number)", or "steal all matching icons from your opponent and apply them to your own card", all simple things that can be communicated with an icon.
With simple rules like these, you can achieve the kinds of things one wants from a game like this. Namely, you want some multi-card synergies, and the ability to construct decks that potentially work together. But you also want this to be somewhat fragile, such that your deck can't just be on autopilot every play. You want every card to be potentially useful in the right situation or deck, and you want some of the combos to be emergent; i.e. you want there to be room for some player creativity in putting together interesting decks.
And most importantly there are in-game decisions to be made. Maybe you get your icon-heavy cards out early so they can boost the later cards, but they may themselves lose points. Maybe your best 'react' abilities are on cards that are also high number cards, so do you play them for their number or hold back for their react ability? Or if instead it's that previously-played cards' react powers are actionable, it's the same consideration as with the icons -- do you get those react powers down early to put the other player on edge? This, relatedly, may shake up your own play -- maybe you were going to play a run of three "magic wand icon" cards, but your opponent's second play was an icon stealer, so maybe you have to go in a different direction.
============================
It's hard to imagine how to get a theme park to buy in to this concept or to even get them to hear the pitch, but as a thought experiment it's interesting. So instead, maybe this is a tabletop game that simulates the experience of going to a theme park, acquiring cards, and playing matches against opponents along the way, such that each 'win' you achieve is a point and you win the overall game by winning X matches. Maybe there's an added 'time' economy whereby each attraction has a certain time cost associated with it, such that getting the attractions with better 'booster' packs eats up more time. Or maybe each area has cards on display and they can be drafted with the Vinci "draft cost" construct. Perhaps just walking around the park eats up time as well, so criss-crossing the park to get the best cards would be time consuming.
Actually, this table-top game sounds like a mix of two of my favorite childhood games, the aforementioned Slapshot and Fun City. Hmm...
- You have to wait in line a lot. What if there was a quick game you could play to spend some of that time?
- An app is the obvious thing here, but people spend way too much time on their phones already. A tactile experience could offer something more interpersonal and fun than yet another screen-based experience.
- Moreover, people from all over the world are at the park. It might be neat to be given the opportunity to meet a couple of these people. It's awkward to strike up a conversation with strangers but perhaps playing a short game with them creates a context for a brief social interaction. Maybe the game comes with a lanyard, so you know who the potential players of the game are if they're carrying the lanyard.
- The park's variety of attractions, and their associated gift shops, provide an obvious CCG tie-in -- each gift shop could sell booster-packs that are specifically associated with that attraction.
Ok, so this provides a possible motivation. What constraints do these set on the game itself?
1. It must be quick. A minute or so, maybe 2 minutes tops.
2. It must be simple. People who buy the starter kit have to be able to learn the game quickly, maybe while waiting in line for their first attraction. The gameplay has to be easy so that non-gamers can easily pick it up.
3. It must be language independent. That creates a problem for the rules document, but the game itself can't have text-based effects. Numbers and icons only, and the icon language has to be very simple.
4. It must be playable without a table. This is the hard one.
5. It would be nice if it could have some skill, or decisions, or deck-building. If you are supposed to acquire cards from different attractions, it would be nice if these offer something other than variety.
My first idea is to emulate something like one of my favorite childhood games, Slapshot. This is a hockey manager game where you draft player cards, and then play "games" against opponents in a simple fashion: you arrange your six players in order, then reveal one card at a time, simultaneously. If your number is higher than theirs, you get a goal. Most goals wins the game. Winning the most games wins you the season. It's simple and fun, and there's some doublethink involved in arranging your cards based on what you know the other person has.
Something like this meets all of the above criteria reasonably well. Maybe it's that we're going to play five cards and compare their numbers, and whichever of us plays the higher number 'wins' that point, first to three points wins the match. But this doesn't have much depth or promote much deck-building. Thus a better deck always wins and that's boring.
So, perhaps we add in a couple of simple combo effects. One could be that each card has one or several icons, and maybe icons from previous cards you played 'buff' the current card if it shares that icon, perhaps if they're all in a chain. Another could be that some cards have a 'react' power, which can be played straight out of your hand after both players have revealed their number card (or maybe it's that a previously-played card's 'react' power can be triggered at any time). Again, simplicity is key so there are only a couple of powers and they're extremely simple: something like "remove the opponent's card from play", "block the opponent's card (i.e. cancel its number)", or "steal all matching icons from your opponent and apply them to your own card", all simple things that can be communicated with an icon.
With simple rules like these, you can achieve the kinds of things one wants from a game like this. Namely, you want some multi-card synergies, and the ability to construct decks that potentially work together. But you also want this to be somewhat fragile, such that your deck can't just be on autopilot every play. You want every card to be potentially useful in the right situation or deck, and you want some of the combos to be emergent; i.e. you want there to be room for some player creativity in putting together interesting decks.
And most importantly there are in-game decisions to be made. Maybe you get your icon-heavy cards out early so they can boost the later cards, but they may themselves lose points. Maybe your best 'react' abilities are on cards that are also high number cards, so do you play them for their number or hold back for their react ability? Or if instead it's that previously-played cards' react powers are actionable, it's the same consideration as with the icons -- do you get those react powers down early to put the other player on edge? This, relatedly, may shake up your own play -- maybe you were going to play a run of three "magic wand icon" cards, but your opponent's second play was an icon stealer, so maybe you have to go in a different direction.
============================
It's hard to imagine how to get a theme park to buy in to this concept or to even get them to hear the pitch, but as a thought experiment it's interesting. So instead, maybe this is a tabletop game that simulates the experience of going to a theme park, acquiring cards, and playing matches against opponents along the way, such that each 'win' you achieve is a point and you win the overall game by winning X matches. Maybe there's an added 'time' economy whereby each attraction has a certain time cost associated with it, such that getting the attractions with better 'booster' packs eats up more time. Or maybe each area has cards on display and they can be drafted with the Vinci "draft cost" construct. Perhaps just walking around the park eats up time as well, so criss-crossing the park to get the best cards would be time consuming.
Actually, this table-top game sounds like a mix of two of my favorite childhood games, the aforementioned Slapshot and Fun City. Hmm...
Thursday, February 15, 2018
The Palace of Dreams
Sands of Time is now available for preorder, and I've become a bit stuck on my other main project, Lost Adventures, so to get a bit of a break I'm brainstorming some new ideas. I'll fire off a few posts about those mostly to capture some ideas about them and perhaps motivate myself to see at least some of them through.
I just re-read The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, and realized that lying behind the story is a potentially interesting game concept. The book tells the story of Mark-Alem, a 20-something member of a powerful family in a 'vast but fragile' Balkan empire. Mark receives a post in the Palace of Dreams. In the belief that dreams may hold clues to the future, the empire mandates that all of its people submit their dreams for review by the Palace of Dreams, which sifts through them trying to find the "Master Dream" to submit to the Sultan each week, for clues on possible future events or guidance on how to run the empire. The Palace is a bureaucracy on steroids but it wields considerable influence in the state. The story is about how Mark progresses through the bureaucratic levels of the palace and some events that transpire during his time there.
But what's interesting is the machinations that happen off camera, that we only get brief glimpses of. The Sultan treats the Palace of Dreams with utmost seriousness, which means that whatever it identifies as the 'master dream' is extremely influential. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is wrangling that goes on between the key factions (the bank, the foreign ministry, the church, etc) to shape the output of the Palace. The details of this are vague and aren't specified in the text, but it suggests the idea of rival factions trying to manipulate the palace so as to control the state. There is also the sense that the palace can be weaponized as a means for a faction to take out a rival faction.
All of this seems to provide a promising set-up for a political game. I had the vague thought that the game might include a quirky partnership system, such that the game is won by exactly two players. The twist is that there are two factions that you are notionally allied with and one that you oppose. So you can potentially win with either of your allies but must pick one or the other in the end. I don't know what winning means yet but have some vague sense of some climactic event-driven ending whereby two factions make a victory attempt, the other factions attempt to repel it, and if it succeeds that's that. Or perhaps it's something like Dune, whereby if an alliance is in place that meets the victory condition at round's end, the game ends.
I might also like to add a layer of indirection, namely that your faction's identity is a secret. So you know what people are doing and you know which factions you're potentially open to allying with but you must work out which person is affiliated with which faction. This isn't part of the story and would only make sense as a way of heightening suspense and uncertainty and mistrust.
The center of the game has to be the palace itself, but I don't entirely know how it should work. The game could simply be a control game where you place and promote members of your faction in the various layers of the palace, giving you influence over its decisions. But because of the nature of the palace's work -- the interpretation of dreams -- I feel that dreams themselves must come into play somehow, as a way of steering the game's action. Something vaguely Dixit-like could work, where you have dreams represented as illustrations that are open to interpretation. And maybe you try to connect events with dreams, with accurate 'predictions' earning you something. Or maybe it's that you are presenting predictions to the Sultan and these cause him to variously gain or lose trust in the various factions. Maybe it's even that winning isn't something you attain, but rather it's subtractive -- i.e. when only two factions are left standing in the government, they have won.
The problem this presents is that it introduces a subjective element into the game that may be incompatible with the expectations of strategy gamers. I don't know for sure how to reconcile this but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility a priori either. Exploiting the subjectivity and ambiguity of dreams is the centerpiece of the novel and should be the centerpiece of the game, but setting boundaries on this so that it can't be manipulated unfairly by players not looking to play in the spirit of the game will be a concern.
I don't have a clear picture for how the mechanics should work but in the book the palace has a selection department, an interpretation department, and a master-dream department (among many others). So it could be that having personnel in the selection department lets you look at some dream cards and choose which to send along. Then these get shuffled and given to people with personnel in the interpretation department, who must decide what the dreams mean. Maybe they write it out or maybe there are a few scripted explanations, like "war", "economic collapse", "insurrection", "corruption", etc. Then the master-dream department takes these, picks one, and presents it to the Sultan. Perhaps the palace is a pyramid such that fewer and fewer players can place people in the various layers, with perhaps only two players eligible to be in the master-dream office. But those people still have to work with what they're given.
The action in the game should be relatively simple, so as to give maximal scope to the interplayer interactions. It's an influence game at the core but you're trying to gain influence indirectly, because the path to influence flows through the palace. This combined with the novel alliance system might make for something unique and interesting, perhaps.
I just re-read The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, and realized that lying behind the story is a potentially interesting game concept. The book tells the story of Mark-Alem, a 20-something member of a powerful family in a 'vast but fragile' Balkan empire. Mark receives a post in the Palace of Dreams. In the belief that dreams may hold clues to the future, the empire mandates that all of its people submit their dreams for review by the Palace of Dreams, which sifts through them trying to find the "Master Dream" to submit to the Sultan each week, for clues on possible future events or guidance on how to run the empire. The Palace is a bureaucracy on steroids but it wields considerable influence in the state. The story is about how Mark progresses through the bureaucratic levels of the palace and some events that transpire during his time there.
But what's interesting is the machinations that happen off camera, that we only get brief glimpses of. The Sultan treats the Palace of Dreams with utmost seriousness, which means that whatever it identifies as the 'master dream' is extremely influential. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is wrangling that goes on between the key factions (the bank, the foreign ministry, the church, etc) to shape the output of the Palace. The details of this are vague and aren't specified in the text, but it suggests the idea of rival factions trying to manipulate the palace so as to control the state. There is also the sense that the palace can be weaponized as a means for a faction to take out a rival faction.
All of this seems to provide a promising set-up for a political game. I had the vague thought that the game might include a quirky partnership system, such that the game is won by exactly two players. The twist is that there are two factions that you are notionally allied with and one that you oppose. So you can potentially win with either of your allies but must pick one or the other in the end. I don't know what winning means yet but have some vague sense of some climactic event-driven ending whereby two factions make a victory attempt, the other factions attempt to repel it, and if it succeeds that's that. Or perhaps it's something like Dune, whereby if an alliance is in place that meets the victory condition at round's end, the game ends.
I might also like to add a layer of indirection, namely that your faction's identity is a secret. So you know what people are doing and you know which factions you're potentially open to allying with but you must work out which person is affiliated with which faction. This isn't part of the story and would only make sense as a way of heightening suspense and uncertainty and mistrust.
The center of the game has to be the palace itself, but I don't entirely know how it should work. The game could simply be a control game where you place and promote members of your faction in the various layers of the palace, giving you influence over its decisions. But because of the nature of the palace's work -- the interpretation of dreams -- I feel that dreams themselves must come into play somehow, as a way of steering the game's action. Something vaguely Dixit-like could work, where you have dreams represented as illustrations that are open to interpretation. And maybe you try to connect events with dreams, with accurate 'predictions' earning you something. Or maybe it's that you are presenting predictions to the Sultan and these cause him to variously gain or lose trust in the various factions. Maybe it's even that winning isn't something you attain, but rather it's subtractive -- i.e. when only two factions are left standing in the government, they have won.
The problem this presents is that it introduces a subjective element into the game that may be incompatible with the expectations of strategy gamers. I don't know for sure how to reconcile this but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility a priori either. Exploiting the subjectivity and ambiguity of dreams is the centerpiece of the novel and should be the centerpiece of the game, but setting boundaries on this so that it can't be manipulated unfairly by players not looking to play in the spirit of the game will be a concern.
I don't have a clear picture for how the mechanics should work but in the book the palace has a selection department, an interpretation department, and a master-dream department (among many others). So it could be that having personnel in the selection department lets you look at some dream cards and choose which to send along. Then these get shuffled and given to people with personnel in the interpretation department, who must decide what the dreams mean. Maybe they write it out or maybe there are a few scripted explanations, like "war", "economic collapse", "insurrection", "corruption", etc. Then the master-dream department takes these, picks one, and presents it to the Sultan. Perhaps the palace is a pyramid such that fewer and fewer players can place people in the various layers, with perhaps only two players eligible to be in the master-dream office. But those people still have to work with what they're given.
The action in the game should be relatively simple, so as to give maximal scope to the interplayer interactions. It's an influence game at the core but you're trying to gain influence indirectly, because the path to influence flows through the palace. This combined with the novel alliance system might make for something unique and interesting, perhaps.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Other games in development
This blog has mostly been about Sands of Time, but in case there's interest, here's a more-or-less comprehensive list of the games I've worked on (well, the ones that are worth mentioning, anyway...):
Finished or Nearly Finished
Sands of Time (Accepted by Spielworxx, publication anticipated 2016)
Civilization-building game set in classical antiquity. Distinctive features include a board based on an ancient map, a scoring system representing players boasting about their grandiose accomplishments, and an economy in which players' costs to take actions are set by their empire's unrest level.
Lost Adventures (Submitted)
Co-designed with Steve Sisk. Indiana Jones-themed artifact hunt with two phases, a globe-trotting information gathering phase followed by a temple crawl. Uses a simple system through which the game "knows" the whereabouts of the lost artifact. Players visit "theme cards" to acquire information, but must avoid and outpace "The Enemy" in their pursuit of the artifact.
Real-time cooperative game about running a restaurant. Players are each assigned an individual role in the restaurant, and must coordinate their activities so as to provide the highest quality dining experience possible to customers without them leaving in frustration. Key feature is the use of 20+ sand timers to coordinate all of the different processes happening in the restaurant. Super-frenetic and always fun; everyone has been to a restaurant at some point so the gameplay feels quite intuitive.
Santa's Reindeer
Breezy card game in which players are breeding reindeer for Santa's team. Players play cards to present silly reasons why a current deer on the team is unfit for service, and must then propose replacements; but Santa needs to keep things simple, so replacement deer must preserve the original rhyme scheme.
Downhill Racer
Solo card and dice game about the Olympic Downhill. Course is composed of cards, each of which represents a different element (a turn, a jump, etc), and symbols on the dice are used to pass these elements. The player chooses how aggressive he wants to be on each element, and then rolls to see if he held his line. If so, he increases his speed, if not, he must pay "save" tokens equal to his current speed, or else crash. So, speed management is key to successfully navigating the course with the best time possible.
Ninjitsu
Dexterity game in which you toss "shuriken" tiles at "ninja" pieces, trying to knock down as many as you scan. Semi-cooperative; each round one person tossses tiles to show where the ninjas will be placed, and the other players then toss shurikens to try to achieve as high a group score as possible. Has been a very big hit with younger players especially.
Journalists
A game for the Decktet; drafting game in which you pay "time chips" to draft cards and then either use them in your newspaper or spend them to get "attestation cubes" in an amount equal to their rank. You distribute these cubes to cards in your paper that match the suit of the card you just spent, and only cards with a number of cubes equal to the card's rank count in the end.
The Ministry of Knowledge
Another Decktet game. A bidding game, in which the lowest bid receives chips equal to the bid card's rank; players then use chips they have won to publish papers, but number of chips paid must equal the rank of the paper being published. You use the same cards to bid and to publish as papers, so good hand management is essential.
In Progress
The Acts of the Evangelists
Third in a planned trilogy of games about the first century of Christianity. This game is about the process by which the "evangelists" composed the four texts we now refer to as the Christian Gospels. Players will travel to various cities of the Roman empire, accumulating stories about Jesus of Nazareth, interviewing eyewitnesses to those stories, and arranging them into a pleasing literary account. Two "prequel" games, Disciples and Apostles, are also in the works; Disciples is nearly complete but perhaps getting a big overhaul, Apostles is in the idea stage but seems to be converging.
Collusion
Medieval-ish game of intrigue. Players have "scheme" cards representing end game states they're trying to steer the board into (e.g. "[This] barony is biggest", "[That] Faction controls 2 cities"). Build a power structure to enable you to execute the actions you need to perform to achieve the schemes you're trying to achieve. Form marriage alliances and utilize the power structure of your allies. Most interesting characteristics are the importance of aligning your goals with those of other players, and the use of "loaned power" to access your allies' power, and to bribe other players into supporting you in elections.
I Am Spartacus
Co-design with Rich Durham. Recreates the iconic scene at the end of the classic film. Large-group game in which most players are slaves, a few are Romans, and one is (secretly) Spartacus. Romans ask for volunteers to confess, then some slaves declare "I am Spartacus!" Romans must judge which slaves to execute, the confessors or those not confessing. A promising idea but still needs some work.
Just Ideas at This Point
Sherlock Holmes
An entirely "visual" microgame consisting of 20 cards: 4 locations, 4 victims, 4 scenes, and 8 suspects. Choose a victim, location, and scene to setup. Players examine the cards to attempt to identify the common visual element that connects the three, and then figure out which suspect it implicates. Game will have a built-in difficult system so that some cases are easy and some are nearly impossible without copious background knowledge.
Zapruder
Brand new idea about the investigation into the JFK assassination. Collect evidence, interview witnesses, and chase down the conspiracy before the threads evaporate.
Superheroes
A game in the "Le Sablier" family; this one is a real-time strategy game about a villainous mastermind hatching schemes, and the heroes who are attempting to thwart his plans. Diverges from conventional hero games -- it's not so much about comparing power levels and dealing out damage points as it is about time. The villain tries to distract the heroes with irrelevant threats while his real plans (hopefully) go unnoticed. Heroes must coordinate their action and time management to protect the city from the villain's major schemes!
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The time of Sands
[Is there anything more irritating than blog post titles that try too hard to be clever? I don't really think so.]
Feeble attempts at cleverness notwithstanding, as Sands gets closer to publication, I have been thinking about possible areas in which the game's theming might need to be polished; the terminology and whatnot that one uses in playtesting are mostly arbitrary, because one just wants to know if the systems work, but now that the design is "done", it's appropriate to take a step back and start considering those aspects more carefully.
One criticism that pretty much all civ games receive, and almost all deserve, pertains to how they handle time. On the one hand, these games are supposed to cover time periods spanning centuries or perhaps millenia. On the other hand, you have individual actions like battles or construction projects or piece movements that seem quite out of proportion with the overall time period covered by the game.
Now I think that Sands is guilty of this criticism in spades. But, I thought it might be interesting to see whether judicious choices of terminology, and thinking about the game in the right way, might be able to produce at least a hand-waving harmonization of the game's action and the time scale it purports to cover.
With its Roman-era map and Greco-Roman structures and advances, Sands is understood to occur primarily within classical antiquity, which (roughly) covers the period from about 800 B.C. to about 400 A.D or so. (This is entirely contained within the Iron Age). So, that's about 1200 years. It's not crucial that every single thing that happens in the game occur in exactly the right chronological location or sequence, because we're remaking history here, but just roughly, the game should feel like it covers about 1200 years. Good.
Now, there are two different "clocks" we therefore need to synchronize with this overall duration: the population growth clock, and the individual player turn clock.
The basic unit of time in the game is the player turn, each of which consists of two actions. Turns are grouped into multi-turn "clusters" of 2-4 turns (currently called "generations" in the ruleset, but let's just call them "clusters" for now). Scoring happens after a certain minimum number of turns have elapsed (6, 7, or 8 turns, for the first, second, and third scoring round, respectively), but only after the current "cluster" ends as determined by a die roll. So, let's refer to these groups of turns (and, simultaneously, groups of clusters) as "scoring rounds"; a scoring round, it can be seen, typically contains 2-3 (or rarely, 4) "clusters". And the total game lasts 22 turns or 44 actions.
If we divide 1200 by 22 or 44, we get 54 or 27 respectively. So, could we simply view each action as taking ~25 years, and call it good?
With respect to population growth, this seems to work. Each player starts with 9 "citizens" (6 peasants, 3 warriors), and population growth is abstracted: rather than occuring every turn or cluster of turns, it occurs automatically in three specific turns of the game (4, 9, and 15, currently), and adds a single peasant to each of the player's owned territories. Making an allowance for the addition of warriors (which happens through an independent process), and sort of roughly compensating for war losses, a typical population growth curve might be:
Turn -- Pop
0 ---- 9
4 ---- 13
9 ---- 18
15 ---- 23
0 ---- 9
4 ---- 13
9 ---- 18
15 ---- 23
(No mention of how many people each citizen represents -- it's "quite a few" -- because the main thing is to get the rate of growth roughly realistic)
If we make the above assumption that the full game spans about 1200 years, then 15 turns should correspond to about 750 years, and this would give a population growth rate of 0.2% annually. The actual growth rate in the Roman Empire from 1100 BC to 200 AD was about 0.1%, according to an extremely reliable source (wikipedia). So, for a crude system, it seems that population growth gives a pretty decent model of the "correct" behavior under the time scale we're assuming.
The individual player action clock may be a bit more problematic. Let's
look at a few actions, and ball-park some time estimates that we might associate with those actions:
- War -- A decade or less (?)
- Major building project -- Several years to a few decades (?)
- Establish a regional trade route -- A decade (?)
- Implement a tech advance -- Several decades to a century (?)
- Manage unrest through reforms, etc. -- Several years to a decade
This suggests that a turn (two actions) might be about 10-20 years or so. (Call it 15, split the difference). That would make a cluster of turns, which, again, can be 2-4 turns, 30-60 years. I've called that a "generation", i.e., the reign of an individual ruler; and maybe that's about correct.
As for a "scoring round", which typically contains 2-3 "clusters" or "generations", the game currently refers to that as an "epoch" which is clearly wrong. At 90-120 years, a scoring round seems to coincide not-too-unfavorably with a "dynasty", i.e., the length of rule of a typical ruling house before it falls or is overthrown or dies out or whatever. So maybe "epoch" should become "dynasty".
There's a problem, of course: at 15 years a turn, the 22 turns of the game only correspond to 330 years rather than 1200 years; and with only three "scoring rounds", only three dynasties rule over a 1200 year period, which also seems wrong.
I can see two possible reconciliations, both of which require a compromise to accuracy. The first is to view the turns as lasting about 50 years each, and then the clusters are "dynasties" and the scoring rounds are "eras" or "periods". The compromise this requires is that it over-estimates the time scale of the individual actions (more egregiously for some than others).
The other option is to view the turns as 10-15 years, the clusters of turns as "generations" or "reigns", and the scoring rounds as "dynasties", BUT, the idea is that we're not tracking EACH AND EVERY ruler or dynasty, but only the MOST CONSEQUENTIAL ones. There is, to me, great thematic appeal to this reconciliation -- it acknowledges that some rulers didn't do that much or didn't establish a reputation that was preserved for posterity, and this is in keeping with the game's theme. What I also like is that it keeps the theming of the player-as-individual-ruler intact. Yes, with each generation, the player "magically" becomes the next ruler in a succession, but at any individual instant, the player's representation is concrete: he is the current ruler of his civilization, and his current horizon is simply the length of the current "generation" -- his own life span, which is uncertain.
So I tentatively prefer the second, but ultimately, it's mostly a cosmetic consideration, and decisions of this sort ultimately fall to Spielworxx to implement. Happy to hear any other comments, suggestions, or considerations that others have on this subject.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Solo play
Back into the weeds for a bit.
A while back, I wrote about how, originally the game had an idea of "trade routes" as adjacencies between players' cities, but my good friend John Velonis (designer of, among other things, a really fun beer and pretzels game, Venus Needs Men) observed that these were a pain to visualize, and additionally weren't entirely historical -- trade routes were about access to resources that were far flung over a vast geography. This prompted an addition to the board of "trade good" spaces (the star spaces that show up in the image in this post) and of "caravans" (think Settlers road pieces) that players use to connect their cities to those trade goods. In the present ruleset, connections to trade goods are a scoring category, but connecting caravans to other players' cities or to trade goods let you increase your heritage and other players' caravans that touch your cities authorize you to hit them up for tribute.
Now the nice thing about this is that, somewhat like Knizia's Lord of the Rings, different player counts give a different feel. The more players in the game, the more potential cities you can connect to (more access to heritage) but the more exposed you are to tribute demands from other players (and of course the more players you can potentially collect from). With fewer players, you can still get heritage from your caravans, but you'll have to build longer routes to reach all the stars (at the same time incurring less tribute risk), or you can rely more on the other means of acquiring heritage.
But what took me a while to realize was that, for the first time, none of the core scoring mechanisms depend on the presence of other players, and in fact, it's possible to play the game solo. I've tested a solo variant a number of times now, and it seems to play pretty well. I'm hoping it will end up included in the ruleset inside the game's box. It's a variant because it does include two ghost civs, which exist merely to give you someone to attack (so military development is still a plausible path) and to give you some risk that you have to factor into your plans. The AI for the ghost civs is trivially simple -- when population grows, they add a warrior in each of their territories, and each time you roll a 6 when testing for the end of a generation, one of them attacks one of your territories. (Since the game lasts 21-24 turns, statistically you'll face about 3-4 attacks per game, and this feels just about right). They don't build or advance or anything like that, so you have to do the legwork of caravaning mentioned above by yourself, and there's no one to discover new techs on the tech tree for you, so scores are probably a bit lower on average, but it's still a fun way to get to play the game and a good way either to learn the game or to play around in the sandbox and try some new strategies.
I don't know if players who only plan to play solo would seek to acquire the game just for solo play, but I do think it provides a pretty similar experience with only a very few simple additional rules, so it has some value. And it would be neat to be able to say that the game seats 1-6 players; I don't think too many civ games can say that. Because the lion's share of the game time happens in the simultaneous action planning, the game length shouldn't really change much with player count in principle, but of course in practice 5 or 6 players will generally take longer to play than 1-2 players.
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