Meaningful Decisions: Benoit Turpin on Design Choices in Welcome To...

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Benoit Turpin, the designer of Welcome To…, about roll-and-write games, randomness and control, low-interaction designs, game rhythms, and more.

Welcome To... is often grouped together with roll-and-write games despite the fact that it doesn't have any dice. Instead, the game uses a deck of cards to control the random output from which players select their actions each round. Was this core system always the same, or did it change during development?

Actually, not at all. The core system was originally dice-based. You had three custom D8 dice with a color and a number on each side. You rolled the three dice and then combined them two-by-two, numerically and chromatically. For example, you would get a 2 blue and a 3 yellow, and that would make a 5 green. So you had, in the end, three combinations with numbers ranging 1 to 16 and six different colors corresponding to the six effects. That was the system I came up with, with the express desire to make a game system as pure and elegant as can be. Three dice and nothing more; but lots of possibilities. So at its core, Welcome to... is definitely a roll-and-write.

However, during the development phase, two things came up: One, the game length was too long. Around 40 to 45 minutes a game. And a good chunk of the game was dedicated to figuring out the three combinations each turn (six mathematical operations every time). And one of our playtesters (a local store owner) felt that the game was not a dice game in the sense that the player rolling the dice had no benefit compared to the other players. He was just “the Randomizer” (a cool title but still...).

So we went on looking for a better way to randomize the results (after a brief but painful phase where I had to say goodbye to the basic principle of my game--a necessary evil and a good lesson for a new game designer like me, but ouch...). The first goal was to replicate purely the dice roll without any dice. And we tried many things, from tokens pulled out of a bag, tokens dropped on a board, and many variations of card dealing. It was not easy to replicate the breadth of possible combinations without having an insane amount of components or a very clunky interface. But when we tried the card system present in the final game, we knew we had found the solution. Having the combination created by pairing the different sides of the cards allowed both the replication of the dice randomizer to a T, and got rid of the lengthy math phase. Suddenly, the game was 15-20 minutes shorter.

And from there, new options came: altering the gaussian bell curve to better fit the flow of the game; adding the effect on the top part of the number side to give player a bit more info to make their decision; and also, quite naturally, give the players a sense of control to the randomness. So, even though this “better control of the randomness” is often hailed by reviewers as a key part of the game system, it is just a byproduct of a completely different game design issue… And from my perspective, controlling randomness is important but not always a good thing...

Are there things that designers of roll-and-write games (or flip-and-fill games, as Welcome To… has been called) can or should do to mitigate randomness and give players more predictability or control?

In a roll-and-write, randomness is structurally a factor players have to take into account. Sure, there is a wide range of randomness from Yahtzee to La Granja: No Siesta, but if there is no randomness, then it is not a roll-and-write. It becomes a very different type of game, more akin to worker placement or action selection than R&W. So mitigating randomness should not be the ultimate goal when designing a R&W. For example, in Welcome To..., players can know the distribution of the cards, and can do a bit of card counting, but we limited this control by allowing at least one reshuffle of the deck during a game. Why? Because if players had access to complete information, then AP (analysis paralysis) could set in, and the game would just be a solvable, dry math problem. And that’s no fun… (at least for me).

So “things designers can or should do to mitigate randomness” are two very different questions...

Should they do it depends on the kind of experience they want to create. For example, Avenue has more randomness than Welcome To... and it gives a very different feeling: more highs and more lows because players are less in control, so they enjoy more having a break (feeling lucky is feeling good) and whine more (or is it just me?) when the fourth golden card comes too soon. And it is not a problem at all. It makes the game more accessible thanks to the lack of mitigating mechanics. It also can make games meaner, in Qwinto most notably. In Qwinto, the design is so sparse that there is very little luck-mitigating elements. And it can feel brutal sometimes. But this feeling is also explained by the type of randomness involved in these games.

Qwinto and Welcome To... share some similarities (most notably the three lines of ascending numbers) but the type of randomness in these games are very different. Qwinto has what is called output randomness: players make a decision (roll one, two or three dice) and then the die roll gives a random result and players have to deal with it. The designer mitigated the randomness using two tactics: First, by allowing the players to choose which die to roll, he gave the players control of the bet they were making. And then, the players can reroll if the result isn’t satisfying. But as you made your decision beforehand, the stakes are very high with each roll.

In Welcome To..., there is rather input randomness: players are randomly dealt three choices beforehand, and then they decide what to do with it. This type of randomness gives the player a bigger sense of control (it’s the same one you get in euro-style games; whereas output randomness is more akin to “ameritrash”). You pretty much always have the opportunity to adjust your strategy to the random result, and you get a feeling of “building something” more coherent. But at the same time, you won’t quite get the thrill of rolling the perfect number after sticking to your bet. You do get a bit of it, bingo-style, waiting for the 10-pool you so desperately need, but the stakes are lower.

So “should” is very much a design philosophy, and many great games went opposite routes on that.

As for “can,” designers have a very large panel of options. The most frequent design strategies are allowing the players to re-roll, allowing some players (usually the passive players in R&W) to refuse using the results; and giving several options to pick from the random result: In Ganz schön clever, for example, as the active player, you get to reroll and pick from several dice.

Designers can also use modifiers, powers that allow the player to manipulate the result of the die roll (+1 to a die, turning a die on its opposite side, etc.). For cards, Welcome To... uses a system where players know the effects of the next turn, but not the numbers, so that they can form a bet, akin to the dice selection in Qwinto. In Roll to the Top!, the designer used another system where players can adjust the random factor of the die by picking a different die, from a D4 to a D20, forcing the players to choose between safety and potential high rewards, which is pretty smart.

But personally, one of the best ways to mitigate the randomness is not by controlling the die roll or card flip, but rather by giving the players decisions to make after the random result. What I mean is that if the only thing to mitigate the luck you have is to act on the die roll, you will feel pretty helpless once you used all your tricks (rerolls, modifiers, etc.) if you have only one place to put your result in. Just imagine playing Qwixx by rolling one white die and one colored die (that you chose). You would feel very dependent to the randomness. As soon as you give players options on the result (which dice to use in Qwixx, which line to write your number in Qwinto, which route you connect in Avenue), then not only do you mitigate the luck, but you give the players a feeling of control over their game. And the best games are those where this decision is crucial because whatever you do, you always give something up in the process.

There are various ways to score points in Welcome To..., which allows players to pursue a variety of strategies. At the same time, each score track is capped at a certain number, which usually forces players to diversify at least somewhat. How did you settle on this approach?

Even though all score tracks are capped in Welcome To... the way they are capped is different. The goal of this is to give the game different rhythms. Parks have a very low cap, meaning you can get a feeling of achievement during the game, giving it a rhythm of small victories after another. Pools, on the other hand, have a very high cap: You aim for the target and fail most of the time, until that one epic moment when you finally get all the stars aligned and complete all the pools. It gives a different feeling for the player. Temp workers have a very high cap as well, so that you wouldn’t focus on it but rather on the race with the others. As for the real-estate agency, the rather low cap was made to avoid creating too big of a discrepancy between players not using the real estate and players using it. It was for balance purposes only. As for the Bis, I’ll get to it later on.

The way we settled on this approach was intense playtesting, trying all strategies to balance the game while aiming for different feelings corresponding to the different strategies. And the last phase of the development--with the graphic designer--helped us also define the structure of the score tracks. We needed something simple and common to all score tracks to make it easy for the players to follow their progress. The way Anne Heidsieck implemented that with the effect always being “crossing off the topmost available box” and the result always being “the topmost non-crossed box” was amazing but not compatible with other ways we explored without any cap. So it took the whole development for us to reach this final state.

How much leeway should designers give players for certain kinds of experiences? Are there times when giving players more or less freedom to pursue one strategy single-mindedly is appropriate?

All depends on the amount of leeway a designer wants to give the players… Giving a lot of freedom to players is a great but risky approach because if you remove any incentive to “play well,” you run the risk of having players playing very poorly and blaming the game for it, or feeling very bad.

For example, in Avenue, you are free to do pretty much what you want with each card. That can lead to very wide scoring differences (from -10 to 120 in the same game at my house) which can be frustrating but also exhilarating for players scoring very high, because they feel they earned it completely.

Usually, you need some kind of control over which strategy the players will use or you risk having a flaw in your game design.

For example, in Qwixx, you cannot end a line without having five numbers crossed previously, to avoid rushing. In Avenue, you have the “-5 if you don’t score more than the previous village.” In Twenty-One, you must cross off the numbers from the left to avoid players biding their time. In Ganz schön clever, the designer used different caps for the scoring tracks to give leeway to the players. They can play purple and orange as much as they want, while the others are more constrained. But he used the foxes to balance out that leeway (to paraphrase the rugby quote, “no fox, no win”).

I don’t pretend to know all the designers’ intent, but from an outside perspective, giving a sense of freedom to the players is probably better than giving them actual freedom (but don’t put that out of gaming context... it sounds awful).

The box for Welcome To... says 1 to 100 players can play at a time, but theoretically any number of players can play at once if they all have a play sheet. This makes the game a relatively low-interaction affair. Was this always your intention?

The very first iteration of Welcome To… was much more “take that-ish” than the final game, but this high interaction brought so many problems that it got cut off progressively during playtesting. At first, players could lock out other players from certain estates, or lower the value of their estates. But that created timing issues in a simultaneous game and could not be properly scaled for a large number of players. It was also some of the most hated parts of the prototypes during playtesting.

It is very difficult to have high interaction in a roll-and-write due to its indelible nature (at least until now) and its tendency toward simultaneous play. And we felt it was not a needed feature in the game.

Not all games need high interaction between players, and there are many advantages to low (but not altogether absent) interaction. As soon as we settled on this gameplay, we tried to remove any hurdle to higher numbers of players, especially around balancing issues. For example, we made the City Plans scalable to any count by allowing all other players to score the lower value of the card. Being first still mattered, but then everyone could still play.

What can designers of low-interaction games do to make their game accessible to a wider range of player counts?

Well, should they? Sure, it is always great to put on the box “1 to 100 players” as it is a good marketing tool, but using such a scale is very rare and probably not very interesting. And games such as Ganz schön clever did not need any of that to succeed: It doesn’t scale very well, especially at four players, but no one cares because it is such an amazing one- and two-player game. Players (and publishers) tend to want everything: a 1-100 player game with high interaction, fast-paced but strategic, deep but fun, thematic but thinky... But I believe a game should fit a specific niche rather than aim at the impossible and remove what makes it unique.

That said (sorry for the rant), if designers want to make games accessible to a wider range of player counts, there are a few things they can do. First, they have to look at it from a component perspective. To have a higher count, you need to take into account the need for each player to have all that they need. Roll-and-writes are structurally pretty good at this because you can put all a player needs on the sheet, without any need for multiple copies of tokens. Other designs need to find a way to minimize component gloat.

One way is to adapt your gameplay to fit that structure: You cannot have any mechanism that requires players to grab central tokens. You cannot have a “complete race,” with every position mattering. You cannot have limited action spots for a turn. Working on the sequel to Welcome To… with the express goal of making it also 1-100 players, I felt a bit limited in my scope of mechanics when I wanted to interject some interaction. I had to rely on a few that scaled well: majority, semi-racing (first gets better, rest gets a little).

You can also stick to “non-interacting mechanics,” with which you’ll have greater freedom. In games like Qwixx or Noch mal!, all passive players can pick from the “remains” of the active players. You can also have games where everyone use the same random result: Criss Cross, Knister or Avenue, for example; the variability coming from the individual positioning. From that initial stance, then designers can go to any mechanics that don’t affect other players (route building, hand management, etc.)

But at some point you must also consider simultaneous play (or semi-simultaneous with passive players still engaged on the active player’s turn). You probably will have to turn away from turn-based, drafting mechanics because variability in game length can be a dealbreaker if you want to increase player count.

The Bis action allows players to advance more quickly toward completion of a goal card, but at a penalty. How did this action come about?

It started as an action that let players write the card number next to a previously written identical number: You have a 7/Bis card and if there is a 7 somewhere, you can place another 7 next to it. It was meant as a tool for players to soften the harshness of the draw and erase some of their missteps. But it was very random depending on your game state and not that effective. Then we switched to “you place a 7 and then you can place another 7 next to it.” But it was clunky and also too luck-based. So we went to the actual Bis action: You can place a 7, and then anywhere on the board, you can write the same number next to a previously written number.

Bear in mind that it was developed before the City Plans/goal cards. So it was useful for players to get themselves out of a tight spot and finish a housing estate. It became much more powerful with the goal cards as it was also a way to race these. So we had to come up with a penalty. And there came into play psychological balance... We first gave a fixed penalty for each Bis. And it was statistically pretty balanced. But players refused to use the Bis action, seeing it as too costly (which it wasn’t). It was left unused, except by experienced playtesters who would crush the others by rushing Bis. By switching to a more progressive penalty, we almost completely erased that psychological barrier, and people started using it way more, even though it is statistically costlier today.

Are there things you learned from developing the Bis action that would help other designers who want to allow players to take risks in pursuit of a goal?

The most important thing is to make sure there is a real risk. If the action is just an alternate way of progressing through the game at a faster pace for a cost, there is a chance that some players will be able to math out the equation and find the exact amount of Bis that should be used. In Welcome To..., you are not guaranteed that your bet will pay off. If you fail to get goal cards or finish up housing estate even though you used Bis, because other players played differently, then it was not a worthy strategy. And that is important.

Another thing, as I mentioned before, is psychological balance. If your gain-to-risk ratio is perfect but players feel that it’s too good or too hard, then you have a design problem. And it happens in great games. And you can’t math-talk your way out of it. Players’ perception always wins, even when they’re wrong. And it is hard to make sure both mathematical balance and psychological balance are fine.

Finally, this action revealed an unexpected boon: It speeds up the game by cutting 2-3 turns. And in this day and age of impatient gamers, that is pretty interesting (and it led to a fun new action in the sequel). It turned out well for us, but I think it is important to look further than your expected target when introducing a new action like that because it can lead to unexpected results, both ways.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: Rob Greanias, Peter C. Hayward, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole (Escape Velocity Games), John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Neil Roberts, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Dark Forest Project, Stephen B. Davies, Adrienne Ezell, Marcus Howell, Thiago Jabuonski, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Mike Sette, S GO Explore, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Cardboard Fortress Games, Kiva Fecteau, Guz Forster, Scott Gottreu, Aaron Lim, Scott Martel Jr., James Meyers, The Nerd Nighters, Matthew Nguyen, Marcus Ross, Rosco Schock, VickieGames, Lock Watson, White Wizard Games

Meaningful Decisions: J. Alex Kevern on Design Choices in World’s Fair 1893

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with J. Alex Kevern, the designer World’s Fair 1893, about guiding and incentivizing players, cohesion in a design, identifying your audience, the development process, and more.

Players start World’s Fair 1893 with a certain number of supporters already on the board. They also receive a bonus based on where they are in turn order. Was this always the case, and how did you settle on the specific setup rules to get players into the meat of the game from the first turn?

In the initial prototype, players chose their starting spots in reverse turn order. For more experienced players this was a good solution, but for players new to the game, they would either choose a spot randomly, or agonize too long over it.

We decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, so we settled on assigning the starting placements based on turn order. Those later in turn order get more “sole” majorities to start, and more placements on locations with lower card limits where there will be less future competition. This provided the needed balancing, without bogging down the start of the game.

What determines how much early guidance players should receive, without being too heavy-handed or too lax?

As designer I think the best thing you can do is make the value of things explicit. If you can clearly articulate what is rewarded in the game, players know what they are shooting for and they can fill in the gaps of how to get there themselves.

In World’s Fair 1893, the primary ways you earn points are by a) having majorities, and b) matching your exhibit cards to where you have those majorities. Players can then fill in the gaps and quickly figure out that placing a supporter in an area that contains an exhibit card of the same type is a good decision, especially if it also gives you majority there. I’ve found players often grasp this even on the first turn of their first game.

Where you need to be a bit more heavy-handed, like pre-determining the starting placements, is where the value of things is more obscured. There is inherent value in having your starting supporters in the Fine Arts and Electricity areas, as each of those locations can only hold up to three cards (as opposed to four in the other locations), so there are typically fewer supporters placed there over the course of the game--meaning more value for each supporter placed there. Given that’s not something less experienced players would be considering, it made sense to be more prescriptive with something like starting position.

Every turn, three cards are added to the board, but each location can hold a maximum of three or four cards. Why implement a cap rather than allow cards to continue stacking up at a location until a player takes them?

We did do some early testing without a cap, but it often led to too few interesting locations to choose from each turn. Once a location reaches three or four cards, it will always be a viable option for players to consider, so there wasn’t a reason to continue incentivising that spot, as it would end up being chosen within the next few turns anyway. It made more sense to improve the other locations, increasing their viability, and creating more interesting options for players to choose from.

How can a designer know when it's better to add hard restrictions and when it's better to let incentives guide the player experience?

Typically I think hard restrictions--like strict hand limit--are only necessary when not having one would  a) potentially break the game, by pulling too many cards out of the deck, for instance, or b) ruin the experience for the other players playing in the spirit of the game. Otherwise, if you want to keep buying Copper cards in Dominion, for example, that’s fine--there are plenty in the supply, and it’s not impacting the other player’s ability to pursue their legitimate strategy, so you can just enjoy your coppery deck until the game ends.

However, if you do find you need to impose something like a hand limit, sometimes it can be enforced through a game mechanism rather than a strict rule. For example, there’s no explicit hand limit in Catan, but anytime you have more than seven cards, you must discard half of them when a 7 is rolled. Other games allow players to take cards from the player who has the most. So there are other ways of enforcing various “soft” limits on things, rather than simply putting a hard cap on it.

World's Fair 1893 went through an extensive development process after it was signed with Foxtrot Games. What core ideas guided that process?

We knew we wanted to make a gateway-style game, with cohesive mechanics and interesting decisions. The idea of cohesion guided a lot of the development process--for example, originally the cards that moved the ferris wheel “game timer” forward were something separate from the Midway cards. There were only nine or 10 of these “timer” cards, and the round would trigger once four were taken, which made round length far too variable (presumably, all four could come out in two turns). After trying a few different things, we discovered the solution of making the Midway cards the game timer--there were a few dozen of them in the deck, which meant that the round could end after 12 or so were taken, leading to a much more predictable round length. It also removed a whole superfluous element from the game, and created something that was much more cohesive.

It could have gone a different direction, where instead we could have added cards or mechanisms to make it work properly. But, because of the style of game we wanted to make, we were focused on a development process centered boiling down rather than building up.

What should a designer keep in mind during the development process? How can they know what to try to hold on to and what to let go?

The most important thing is articulating what you want the game to be, its purpose, and who is the intended audience. Developing a game that you are intending to be played by experienced hobby gamers will be very different than developing a game you want to be in the conversation for the Spiel des Jahres. If you can articulate what type of experience you are trying to create, from there you really just have to “listen to the game.” It will tell you what it needs--more player control, more long-term strategy, less analysis paralysis--and it’s up to you as the designer to listen to those signals the game is telling you and figure out what adjustments to make. Playtesters can help you listen and help you hear new and different things, but in the end you have to trust your ears, and follow the sound.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: Rob Greanias, Peter C. Hayward, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Neil Roberts, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Dark Forest Project, Stephen B Davies, Adrienne Ezell, Marcus Howell, Thiago Jabuonski, Samuel Lees, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Mike Sette, S GO Explore, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Cardboard Fortress Games, Kiva Fecteau, Guz Forster, Scott Gottreu, Aaron Lim, Scott Martel Jr., James Meyers, The Nerd Nighters, Matthew Nguyen, Marcus Ross, Rosco Schock, VickieGames, Lock Watson, White Wizard Games

Meaningful Decisions: Bruno Cathala on Design Choices in Kingdomino

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Bruno Cathala, the designer of the Spiel des Jahres winner Kingdomino, about putting restrictions on players, variable turn order, rule changes for different player counts, and more.
 

In Kingdomino, players select tiles using a drafting system that makes players weigh a tradeoff between getting a better tile now versus getting better drafting position next round. Where did this system come from? What other aspects of the design rely on it for the game to work as a whole?

This system is one example of what I call a “blessing in disguise.” In my games, very often, when I’m offering something very good to one player in the short term, he will pay a kind of counterpart. This is the case here: If you choose to draft the best domino, on the next turn, you will have no choice at all, just having to accept what other players don’t want. This kind of mechanism really helps to get a good balance.

One other aspect which is important in the game, is the distribution of different land categories. You have a lot of wheat fields and forests, but few crowns inside them. You have few gold mines or swamps, but many more crowns inside. And as far as points are, at the end, the result of multiplying the number of spaces by the number of crowns, you will be able to get a satisfying number of victory points, never mind the category of land you chose at the beginning.

Do games that allow players to vary turn order have any particular design considerations or pitfalls to avoid?

I like systems that break the basic “clockwise turn sequence” because it avoids having to always play after the same player. If the player is not very good, it gives you an advantage, and when it’s a very good player, you have a disadvantage. The counterpart can be increasing downtime, when you go first on one round, and last on the next one.

Players in Kingdomino must build their kingdom within a tight, five-by-five grid. This forces players to plan ahead or risk being unable to place a tile later on. Did the game always restrict players to that five-by-five grid, and what was it about that restriction that made you decide to use it?

In a game as simple as Kingdomino, tension comes from restrictions: If you were in a position to always place your tiles the way you want, you would lose some tension in the game. That’s the reason why I introduced two restrictions: You must be connected with your castle and/or to the same color, and you must stay in a 5x5 grid. Two simple restrictions which create a tension that increases throughout the game.

Also, it’s a way to introduce a little more interaction between the players. If I’m playing before you, I will make my choice analyzing what is good for me, and what could be absolutely bad for you. (Maybe I can force you to discard one tile because you have no solution.)

My first prototype, to validate the concept, was on a 4x4 grid, with eight dominoes per player. It was nice, but not long enough. So I increased it to 12 dominoes. At first, there was no castle, and players had to fulfill a 4x6 grid. But it was confusing for some of them. That’s the reason why Sébastien Pauchon (Jaipur), who is a friend and a talented game designer, suggested to me to add the castle tile, allowing players to play on a 5x5 grid.

How do you know if a particular restriction on players will be fun or just frustrating?

First of all, my personal theory is that frustration is the main mechanism which leads to games you want to play again and again. After your first game, if you have absolutely no frustration, you don’t want to play again. If frustration is too high, same: You don’t want to play again.

So I try to find a good level, which is not easy, because we all have our own frustration limits. For example, for some players, rolling a die and having no chance to change the result is too frustrating.

Then I have to say that I’m designing my games… for myself! I’m always working on the game I want to play. So the final balance for frustration is the one which is satisfying to me.

I consider a game designer to be someone who shows a path and then tries to convince people to follow him in that direction.

In the two-player version of Kingdomino, each player uses two pawns instead of one. This means players can and should plan further ahead each round. How did the rules for the two-player game come together?

This change to the rules was necessary to keep some tension during the choice of dominos with fewer players. Imagine that players have only one pawn. Selection would have been very automatic. No tension at all. So it would have been uninteresting.

As you know, I’m really a fan of two-player games. I myself play a lot at only two players. So I wanted the game to be interesting for two. I don’t like when it’s written “for 2 to X players” on the box, but with the game being very flat at two players.

So… It seemed to me that playing with two pawns could be a good solution. This was confirmed the first time I tried it.

And moreover, at two players, you can play on a 7x7 grid, using all the tiles, which is probably my favorite configuration.

When a game has to change some rules for certain player counts, how do you decide how different the game should be when it is played with that many players?

I don’t really care to have exactly the same game experience depending on the number of players. The thing which matters for me is to create the best game experience possible, never mind how many players you are. So, to keep that interesting game experience, I have no problem making the changes which seem necessary to me.

---

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: Rob Greanias, Peter C. Hayward, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Neil Roberts, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Stephen B Davies, Adrienne Ezell, Marcus Howell, Thiago Jabuonski, Samuel Lees, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Mike Sette, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Cardboard Fortress Games, Kiva Fecteau, Guz Forster, Scott Gottreu, Aaron Lim, Scott Martel Jr., James Meyers, Tony Miller, The Nerd Nighters, Matthew Nguyen, Marcus Ross, Rosco Schock, VickieGames, Lock Watson, White Wizard Games

Meaningful Decisions: Matt Grosso on Design Choices in Dead Last

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Matt Grosso, co-designer with Andy Patton of Dead Last, about player elimination, minimal rules, the “prisoner’s dilemma” and more.

Players in Dead Last can get eliminated for portions of the game. Player elimination is generally avoided in most games these days, so what makes it work in Dead Last?

Player elimination usually is something that I try to avoid. No one likes watching other people play a game. I think that the elimination in Dead Last works for two reasons. The first is that the rounds are very fast. You are rarely out of the voting for more than about two minutes. But the second is really why I was OK with having elimination in the game. Just because you are dead in this round does not mean you can't participate in the game. In fact, I find that most of the really effective scheming and communication takes place among the players who are “dead.” While the other players are still focused on the current round, the best players are working with the other dead to plan the next few rounds in advance. The play really never stops.

What are some ways that designers can implement player elimination in a way that is acceptable to modern audiences?

I think that the speed and the weight of the game really factor into the acceptability of player elimination in modern games. People will tolerate being eliminated if they laugh on the way out and are back in in short order. But I think games with elimination need to consider ways to have the “eliminated” players still able to participate. Just because you are out of the running now doesn't mean that you are out of the game for good.

The Ambush card makes it hard for the group to gang up against any one player effectively. Was this its intended effect, and how did it become part of the game?

Sure, it can be hard to gang up on someone too obviously but I think that's the crux of the game. The goal is to effectively gang up on someone without letting them know you are coming for them. One thing that tends to happen is that people who have collected some gold in previous rounds become obvious targets. But the Ambush card puts the wrinkle in the game. A group doesn't need to waste their votes on the leader if they can just get the leader to believe they are the target. Let them eliminate themselves with a misplayed Ambush and then take out a second target. In the end, the best players are those that can consistently see the attacks coming and there's no better feeling than correctly ambushing your enemies.

Being unable to counter other players who want to gang up against you is generally a bad experience in a game. Is this something more game designers should consider? 

Of course, any game design is trying to maximize the enjoyment of the players. I think some games miss the mark when only the winners had a good time. I can always tell a great game when I lose but I want to play again right away.

The lines between rounds in Dead Last--and even between what's in-game and what's out-of-game--are often blurry. Was there ever more structure to the game during its development?

Absolutely, the very first iteration of Dead Last had a complicated scheme involving white boards and passing information in an awkward and structured way but before we even playtested it the first time we thought, "Would this work if instead of lots of structure we had no structure?" So we tested it and it turned out it worked great. All along the way there were times where we would try adding something in to fix some issue or another and, like is almost always true, simpler choices were always better designs.

Are fewer rules always better? Are there limits to how much "game" can be shifted from the rulebook to the players?

Writing rules is hard. I think that generally speaking fewer rules is better but you can't take it too far or else there won't be any game left. I think the goal is to establish enough rules that the game works and leads the players into fun choices. After that, just get out of the way and let the players have fun with it.

The final two players in a round of Dead Last face off in a variation on the classic “prisoner's dilemma.” How did you settle on your variant?

Yeah, the genesis of the final showdown came from a British game show called Golden Balls. That game had participants working together to build up a pool of cash and then had them do a pure prisoner's dilemma to see if they could share the money. It's a great premise but it didn't work in its purest form in Dead Last because we play over several rounds. If we didn't include the “Grab One & Go” option, it would have been possible to guarantee that your opponent didn't get any money. So if the person with the most gold is within striking distance of winning the game you would always just steal from them. If you take that out to its logical conclusion you end up with a game where everyone gets within striking distance every time and then two people just decide to duke it out. In short, not fun. So, we added the Grab One & Go variation so that someone can always move forward.

What did you learn about what works--or doesn't--when coming up with variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma?

As with anything else, don't over-design once you've got a good thing. The prisoner's dilemma is super fun; we just needed to solve for our peculiar issue with multiple rounds.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: 421 Creations, Peter C. Hayward, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Stephen B Davies, Scot Duvall, James Griffin, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Mike Sette, Kasper Esven Skovgaard, Isaias Vallejo, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Darren Broad, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, Knight Works, Scott Martel Jr., The Nerd Nighters, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble

Meaningful Decisions: Gil Hova on Design Choices in The Networks

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Gil Hova, designer of The Networks, about incentivizing interesting behavior, elegance vs. fiddliness, solo modes and more. 

You've said that one of your design philosophies is to "incentivize interesting behavior." What are some design choices you made in The Networks to incentivize interesting player behavior?

I think the biggest one was to make sure players stayed engaged in the core activity of the game, which is constantly canceling and developing TV shows. If a player stops doing that, the game gets dull.

Each show has a number of viewers that it gets over the course of four seasons. Generally, shows start strong, maybe get a little stronger or weaker in their second season, weaken in their third season, and are horrible in their fourth season. There are a couple of exceptions here and there (like the show "Broken Worse," which starts slow but peaks significantly in its third season), but every single show is terrible in its fourth season, and most are bad in their third season.

At the same time, there are three decks of Show cards that you use across the five seasons of the game. One is for Season 1, one is for Seasons 2-3, and one is for Seasons 4-5. Each deck is more powerful than the last, so Season 4-5 shows generally get more viewers than Season 2-3 shows.

These are both deliberate design decisions. At the start of each season, players will generally have one show in its third season, and a few shows available to develop that would be significant improvements. Some testers suggested a show that would get stronger in its fourth season, but that would do exactly the opposite of what I want. It would incentivize players to disengage from the core of the game, and that would make the game more boring.

Same thing with money being only a tiebreaker in the game. For a long time, I had a conversion of money to viewers at the end of the game, and then a bonus for most money. I found that was incentivizing hoarding, which is boring in this game. The Networks is fun when you're spending money, not when you're saving it. So there are no significant in-game rewards to have lots of money on hand, except for a couple of Network Cards and the 5-Show Genre Bonus (which you really need to work towards).

What can designers do to identify the interesting behavior that their game could bring out? Is this the same as the maxim that designers need to "find the fun" in their game?

Yes, I think that's generally the same thing, unless you're making a transformative/experiential game that is engineered to highlight disturbing or uncomfortable behavior. In that case, you're incentivizing something that isn't necessarily fun, but that should be rewarding if the design does what it should.

The biggest thing a designer can do here is playtest. Theorycrafting doesn't really get you very far. I recently worked on a small commissioned design, and I got it on the table as soon as I had a protean ruleset. I built the game around one aspect of the art of the cards, but I found that there was only one rule about passing cards that players were really having fun interacting with.

So I threw out all the art-related rules I had and rebuilt the game around passing cards. It was much better, and it only took me a few playtests to discover it. I would have never discovered it theorycrafting.

Related to this is: Don't be precious about your idea. Ideas are cheap. If I'd been precious about my art-based idea, I never would have been able to let go and pivot to the passing-cards idea. Let your initial idea be your scaffolding, and don't hesitate to dismantle that scaffolding once you find the soul of your game. You owe your original idea nothing.

If you're not used to this way of working, it can be very uncomfortable at first. There's a lot of blunt honesty, especially when you find a group of good playtesters, instead of the close friends and family that think the way to support you is to praise what you do, regardless of how they felt about it.

But if you're going to be a designer in this industry, blunt playtest feedback is just the beginning! You have all other sorts of great stuff to look forward to, like publisher rejections, failed Kickstarter projects, negative reviews, public criticism of your game (which is preferable to public indifference to your game), convention-goers rudely walking away from you as you start your demo, 1 ratings on BGG, and at least one GeekList notification of your game for trade, sale, or auction per day.

If you feel uncomfortable with any of the above, I would advise against designing games for anyone past your immediate circle of friends.

Sorry, I drifted a bit, but that's an important topic.

Each round, players score viewers and then age their shows. Why do players score their shows a second time at the end of the final season, instead of once as they do for every other season?

That's an important mechanism in the game. Without it, Season 5 would be short and anticlimactic. A show you get in Season 3 would be in its third season, so you may not feel the need to replace it. Also, Season 5 shows only score their first seasons, so they never get a chance to blossom if their second seasons are more powerful.

With the extra scoring, Season 3 shows will crash in final scoring, so players will need to replace those shows too. The end of the game becomes more urgent, critical, and dramatic. And Season 5 shows don't feel cheap.

When should designers create exceptions that sacrifice some consistency and elegance for a better play experience?

This is a very tough line to walk, and there's no consistent answer. One piece of writing that influenced me as a designer was Kory Heath's design blog for Zendo (which is still a fantastic read, and worth it for anyone interested in game design). Kory is almost religiously elegant in his game. He sweats and bleeds to make sure his games have no exceptions or weird edge cases. It's a fascinating mindset, and when I've tested with his friends, they are always pushing to streamline, streamline, streamline.

On the other hand, you have great games like Terra Mystica, Power Grid, and Brass, which almost flaunt their exceptions and edge cases. Remember when someone first tried to explain how the Bowls of Power work? How many times have you forgotten to discard the cheapest power plant in the market entering Phase 2? Don't even get me started on the freaking Birkenhead virtual link.

Obviously, there's a very big difference in weight, complexity, and play time between Brass and Zendo. So the bigger your game, the more tolerance it will have for exceptions and edge cases. 

It's impossible to quantify this relationship. It's one of the many reasons why I'm such a big advocate of getting games on the table and testing them. Watch your players dealing with your game's edge cases. See if they enhance the fun of the game, or immediately attenuate it. If players keep intuitively thinking that a rule doesn't exist, it's a good sign that the rule shouldn't exist, and you had better find another way around the issue it's supposed to address.

This is also a good time to bring out another design maxim: Try to mix up your playtest groups. Don't test exclusively with a single group. After a few plays, your group will adapt to your game's fiddliness, but it's worth watching how another group tries to deal with it. If a bunch of groups have a hard time adapting to your game's complexity, and they're players you're specifically trying to target, then your game should probably be streamlined.

This is a question that fascinates me, though. I would love to design a deep, meaty, three-hour mega-Euro. But I have a tendency to streamline my designs, and they usually clock in at 90-120 minutes. I see other designers getting away with fiddly rules that my playtest groups and I would deep-six immediately. 

The root cause is that those heavier games get their heaviness not from one or two complex systems interacting, but many simple systems interacting. New designers usually try to make games with many complex interlocking systems, which tend to be too opaque for players to be able to strategize through. But a good heavy game gets its heaviness from a few simple systems whose chaotic interactions open up all kinds of scenarios. This sort of chaos tends towards exceptions and edge cases. 

If you take away one of those simple systems, you'll take away a lot of the exceptions and edge cases, but you'll also take away a lot of the game's meat. Think of Brass. Fundamentally, it's pretty simple; it's a few interlocking systems (coal/iron, cotton/ports, ships, canals/rails, cards, money/turn order) that are all easily explained on their own. But the way they interlock makes the game. If you removed half of those mechanisms, say, coal/iron and canals/rails, you'll have a simpler game, but one that's missing a lot of the meat that fans of the game were attracted to in the first place.

Splotter games are the same way. Food Chain Magnate, Great Zimbabwe, and Roads & Boats are all surprisingly elegant games, but they take some time to teach, learn, and play because of the complex interactions between all their systems. For all their complexity, they're surprisingly streamlined, and any further reduction in complexity would remove the souls from the games.

This might make a nice game design exercise. Find a 2+ hour game and try to shave an hour off its play time by removing at least one mechanism, while still making it engaging and interesting (albeit with a different level of engagement, as it will be a lighter game once you're through). It's amazing how much more bland the game will end up being; eliminating 25% of the rules could remove 75% of the fun!

The Networks' solo mode adds an immediate loss condition, in addition to the win/loss endgame goal. Why?

Jane McGonigal points out that all games have goals and feedback. You take actions to advance to the goal, and the game gives you immediate feedback letting you know how much progress you made. This is a truth that all good games share.

I found the opening of the solo game was rather boring. You have a goal of 265 Viewers, but the game has a slow ramp-up. So let's say you have 50 viewers at the end of the second season. Is that good? Bad? There wasn't any feedback there at first, so I had to do a couple of things.

First, there's the immediate loss condition. So even before the 265 viewers, there's the question of if the solo player will even make it to the end of the game. Tension and stakes are present from the very beginning, especially if the player makes a risky move in the first season. The game is giving feedback on the immediate-loss axis, so there's significant meaning to early play.

Second, there are bonuses to hitting score targets in the second and fourth seasons. This helps offset early risk-taking. More importantly, it provides the critical long-term feedback the game was missing. Now, having 50 viewers at the end of the second season shows that you're 15 viewers short of the bonus that removes those nasty cubes from the board. Even though it's only Season 2 in a slowly-ramping game, we know we must take risks to hit 265 viewers and win the game.

What can designers do to add tension to a solo mode, in the absence of tension from the other players?

An immediate loss condition is one good thing. It focuses early play and makes early decisions meaningful. In my first game, Prolix, you're trying to hit a steadily-rising point target. If you miss, you're out. 

My newer version of the game, Wordsy, has a slightly different solo mode. There's no immediate-loss condition, but there is a penalty if you don't hit a point target within a few consecutive rounds. That felt right for the game, as it plays so quickly, an immediate loss didn't really feel very significant.

Another good thing to do is to make sure early plays have clear and meaningful implications later in the game. I helped test the solo version of Cobras. Early on, you got one King Cobra card at the start of each of the three hands. I suggested getting two King Cobra cards at the start of the first hand, and being able to win a single King Cobra card by hitting a point target and the end of each hand. This way, the decision to hold or save a King Cobra card in the first and second hands is incredibly meaningful, as it's not guaranteed you'll have one in the final hand. You may even gamble and play two King Cobras in a single hand, if you feel confident you won't need one next hand. Instead of having each hand be an isolated atom, your play in one hand will have an impact in the next hand.

One thing about solo play and me: I don't like point grades at the end of the game. I don't want to know if I did "great" versus "good." To me, a binary outcome is more interesting: did I win or lose? I'm OK with a "critical win" or a "critical loss" to differentiate outcomes, or deciding on a higher point threshold when beginning the game to make the game scale better for experienced/inexperienced players, but if I finish a solo game just to see that I did "average," I'm not going to find that as satisfying.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: Peter C. Hayward, RetroIn Games, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Koen Hendrix, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Matthew O’Malley, Marcel Perro

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Danica E., Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Isaias Vallejo, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Knight Works, Scott Martel Jr., Mike Mullins, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble, Diane Sauer, Smarter Backer

Meaningful Decisions: Phil Walker-Harding on Design Choices in Imhotep

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Phil Walker-Harding, the designer of Imhotep, about designing for an audience, player control, adding variable elements and more.

Certain players seem to be attracted to certain sites, each of which awards points or benefits in a different way. One rewards well-timed maneuvers, another is about edging out the competition, another is puzzle-y, and so on. How did you settle on the way the different sites behave? Was appealing to different types of players a conscious decision?

More than appealing to different types of players, I was really trying to make each site feel like a unique and interesting mini-game. So I suppose it makes sense that different players prefer the different styles of mini-games! In the very early stages of the design, the players were just building the pyramids, and straight points were awarded based on the position of each stone. But quite quickly I realised things would be much more interesting with multiple monuments that scored differently. Obelisks came to mind next, and it immediately made sense that they should score based on who had the tallest. The temple was inspired by Arkadia and Blokus 3D, where having your pieces be visible from above is important. I also wanted a site that used spatial connections, and this idea developed into the burial chamber. I have always been very influenced by Reiner Knizia's use of different methods (especially in Ra), and how they can drastically change the whole way you feel about some element of the game. So I am sure the lessons I have learnt from him were also at play as I designed the sites.

Are there ways a designer can make a game that "has something for everyone" by appealing to different types of players? Are there pitfalls to trying to do this?

I think it is really important that a designer has a specific audience in mind during the design process. I think the best way to be broadly appealing is actually to know your audience really well and then try and design a standout game for that audience. This way your game might jump out from the crowd and hopefully be found by other audiences who might enjoy the design. For example, when I designed Sushi Go! I was aiming at those who like quick cute colourful filler card games with just enough decision making to keep older players and even gamers a bit interested. Now that is quite a broad audience, but I did everything I could to hit that mark. I think if I had set out to include "something for everyone", for example some extra planning to appeal to advanced gamers, the design would have lost focus. It can be tempting to put disparate elements into a design in the hope of wide appeal, but I think it usually leads to more muddled designs that don't hit the spot for either audience.

Players are allowed to sail a ship even if they don't have one of their stones on it. This means you rarely have total control over what happens to your stones. Was this always the case?

Yes, this was always the rule for sailing ships in Imhotep. I briefly tried some other rules but they were nowhere near as fun or interesting, and also presented other problems. For example, the timing and turn flow in Imhotep is very interesting to me and very important to the feel of the game. Every turn is a whole action and therefore crucial, so to place prerequisites on any of the actions (for example, you can't move a ship without any of your stones) would mean this structure would break down. An influence on this part of the game was the classic Coloretto. In that game you either add a card to a row or take a row of cards. When playing Coloretto I don't really think of the cards as mine until I have actually taken a row. Rather, I am focused on setting up each row to benefit me. So I suppose this was in my thinking as I designed the sailing mechanism. I was much more interested in the decision of how to best place your stones so that they are of some use, no matter where they are sailed. This also brings the players into all sorts of subtle conflicts and alliances and is really the core of the interaction within the game.

In general, how much control over their fate do players seem to be willing to cede to other players? Are there guidelines for designers to keep in mind?

This is of course pretty subjective, and there are many different tastes in game style. However, I do have a bit of a guideline for myself. I think it is very important that players have a strong sense of involvement in their own fate in a game. I am always trying to make sure the players' decisions feel important and respected by the game environment. For example, in Imhotep even if someone takes a ship somewhere I wouldn't prefer, I at least know that I chose to place my stone when and where I did, and that I left myself open for that ship to be moved. This is much more interesting to me than a straight "take that" mechanism--for example, where an opponent plays a hidden card on me that means I lose something. I had no involvement in that moment happening, and so it feels more like an attack or just bad luck. For me, the ideal in very interactive games is to make sure the players feel active in their destiny rather than like they are just being acted upon.

Imhotep comes with a second set of sites. How did you decide which sites to include on side A and which to include on side B?

The B sides were actually something which came along later in development in order to increase the game's replayability. I first thought it would be quite easy to find four new board designs, but it actually proved very tricky! The structure of the game was so tight that many ideas that I thought would work really didn't. So in the end there were only four new sites that both myself and the publisher felt were really keepers. The secondary versions of the palace and pyramids are more complex rules-wise so we put them on the B sides. The B side of the obelisks and burial chamber are quite similar in complexity, but I was so used to my original versions, and I slightly prefer them, so it felt right to keep them on the A sides. Since the game's release I have managed to come up with some more site designs, should an expansion ever happen!

Are there things designers should keep in mind when creating alternative mechanisms or scoring conditions for their game?

Adding variable elements to a game is a really interesting part of designing to me. Dominion is recognised for introducing the deck-building mechanism, but I think it has also been very influential in showing how fascinating it can be to have high variability in a game's setup. My advice when attempting this would be to first do a huge brainstorm of many different ideas. Think about all your favourite games and if there are any elements in them that could be adapted into the gameplay of your design. Then it is a matter of testing them all out and only persisting with those that really feel "within the spirit" of the original game. Having elements that seem different to players but not so different they don't belong can be a hard balance to find. I think the aim is to have each alternative seem like it naturally belongs in the game, rather than feeling strange or like a gimmick. Also, it should be said that not every game needs huge variability. Sometimes throwing extra ideas in just because you have them can confuse players learning the game or just dilute the way the game presents itself.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: Peter C. Hayward, RetroIn Games, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Koen Hendrix, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Matthew O’Malley, Marcel Perro

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Danica E., Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Isaias Vallejo, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Knight Works, Scott Martel Jr., Mike Mullins, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble, Diane Sauer, Smarter Backer

Meaningful Decisions: Dan Cassar on Design Choices in Arboretum

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Dan Cassar, the designer of Arboretum, about game progression, scoring systems, balancing cards and more.

Arboretum has a very simple structure: Each turn players draw two cards then play one and discard one. How did you settle on this?

The structure is simple but it's pretty unusual. From the start, I knew from very early on that I wanted players to be building paths that would grow organically in many directions, and I also wanted players to have to manage their hands carefully. So there were two parts of the game that needed to have cards feeding it every turn.

Originally, I tried it with the traditional rule of drawing one card and either playing or discarding it. But then it was too easy to sit back and not commit to which colors you were going to score. Increasing the number of cards coming into your hand each turn allowed me to feed both systems at once. I could force you to both commit something to your tableau as well as have to make a choice about what cards you're going to hold back.

The other nice side effect of drawing two each turn is that you can actually dig through a discard pile because you can remove cards faster than it will get filled. This means that any card that gets discarded is potentially playable at some time later in the game. This is something I always wanted to do in traditional card games like Gin or Rummy, but never could.

How important is it for a design to naturally progress toward an endgame state, and what can designers do to ensure their game has forward momentum?

Progression is one of those non-obvious but really critical aspects of game design that I struggled with a lot when I first started. It's something that I never thought too much about explicitly until I heard Geoff Engelstein talk about it on Ludology when he was on with Ryan Sturm a while back, and then he and Mike Fitzgerald mentioned it recently in their Game Design Checklist: "What drives the game towards a conclusion?"

I'd agree with them and say momentum is absolutely critical. Since games run in loops, it's natural for them to want to return to the same state they had in a previous turn. But if you allow that to happen, then your engine stalls. Game state progression is the plot of the story. Everyone wants to know how a good story ends.

Players only score paths if they also have the highest sum of that suit in hand. This one rule has numerous effects on how players interact with the game and their opponents. What are some of them, and were these outcomes entirely intentional when you were designing the game?

The issue I was actually trying to solve was how to determine which player got to "own" a particular color. Thematically, I wanted one arboretum to be known for magnolias and dogwoods, and another to be recognized as having an especially attractive collection of cassias and willows. I wanted there to be competition for control of individual colors, but since paths were allowed to have many colors (as they do in a real arboretum), it was common for several players to have valid paths. When I allowed multiple players to score a single color, the strategy was not about choosing which colors one would focus on, but instead everyone would try to score everything.

So when I thought about it, I reasoned that if a player has several cards in their hand of a particular color and has additional cards of that color in their tableau, they really controlled the majority of that color throughout the game. Therefore, it made sense that they would gain the right to score that color. So I figured I'd try it, and suddenly it made everything fall into place. The game felt like I had originally envisioned the game feeling.

I once heard someone say that your scoring system is your game, and I think this is a lesson one really needs to take to heart. Things in your game are important only insofar as they contribute to your score. Everything else is either an intermediate step to getting there or else it’s just a distraction.

So if the designer says that you only score if you do a specific thing, that necessarily makes that thing your number-one priority as a player.

Players are allowed to draw from any player's discard pile. What effects does this have on the design?

The open-information draft is an underutilized mechanic, in my opinion. It's one of my favorites because it's so simple and yet can create great tension by controlling how much information each player has. I wanted a drafting element to the game because I wanted players to have more control over how their arboretums would be built.

Having a separate discard piles for each player that are fed each turn by each player created a simple way of creating a drafting element to the game. It automatically scales with the number of players and it ensures that there are always new cards to choose from.

What are the risks and benefits of giving players some control over the game clock in a design?

I never really thought about this idea until I saw it in Lost Cities. I loved the way that it created tension, especially toward the end of the game. It creates those situations where you're ahead now, so you want the game to end sooner, so you can draw from the deck to help hurry things along. Or maybe you want to surprise your opponents by scoring a color you introduce in the last two turns of the game.

The risk of putting that control in the players' hands is a danger of stalling somehow. But as long as your game state progression is built in, it's a neat thing to have in the game because it just offers one more thing for players to consider during the draw phase of their turn.

During scoring, the 1 card in a suit reduces the 8 card in the same suit in an opponent's hand to 0. Why?

This was the last rule that I added to the game, but I feel it was an important one. I was playtesting Arboretum pretty extensively at conventions, and one thing I noticed was that 8's were rarely ever played to players' tableaus. The reason why was because it was the most efficient way of gaining points toward gaining the right to score.

So it was an automatic decision what to do with an 8 when you drew it. You held it. Automatic decisions are no fun, so I wanted to come up with a way to create some uncertainty around the utility of the 8 in hand.

What can and should designers do to address potentially overpowered cards or strategies in their designs?

The biggest problem with an overpowered card is that it's boring. If you get that card, you win. If that card is in your hand, you play it. There's no decision there. Other cards become irrelevant. So bringing everything in line makes things more fun because the strengths and weaknesses of the cards become situational as opposed to structural.

---

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Peter C. Hayward, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, Michael Gray, JR Honeycutt, Scott Martel Jr., Mike Mullins, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Doug Levandowski on Design Choices in Gothic Doctor

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Doug Levandowski, the co-designer of Gothic Doctor, about player choice, balancing powerful cards, endgame triggers and more.

The rules for Gothic Doctor tell players to remove any action cards they want to before starting the game. Why?

Gothic Doctor is a broad enough game that it could be good for younger gamers or gamers more interested in a light experience--and with the Partial Treatments variation in the expansion, it can be good for players who want to make more risk vs. reward kinds of decisions. With that in mind, John McNeill, the game’s co-designer, and I decided--even before the expansion--that we wanted to put this caveat into the rules.

Some players want to play more of a multiplayer-solitaire game, and some players (especially in set collection games) really hate having their sets disrupted; on the other hand, some players want to have a stronger take-that element to the game. So in light of that, we decided the easiest way to make the game fun for all different kinds of players was to give players the option to alter the balance of the action cards however they wanted.

We sort of stole that idea from Dominion. Don't want curse/attack cards? Cool! Leave them out! Want to attack nearly constantly and have high score in the game be, like, 7 points? Cool! Witches for everyone! Moats for no one!

Then, as we developed the Partial Treatments expansion, that ability to change the action cards mattered even more; the more you can affect the waiting room, the riskier it is to partially treat a patient, especially to drop a bunch of treatments on a higher-value patient. So if we had any doubt about that caveat before, giving players the ability to skew that risk/reward ratio became something we were really excited about.

What are the pros and cons of giving players the ability to change the type of experience they'll get in a game?

I think the most significant pro is that it allows players with some experience with the game to alter the balance of what will happen in the game. My friend Ian Reed and his significant other Devon are really aggressive players, so he recently told me that when they play, they take out many of the action cards that are neutral to the other player; they want that sort of experience where they can really screw over the other player even if that means low scores in the game. My wife, on the other hand, wants to play friendly games, so we take out the aggressive actions. My experience with games with variable card powers is that every player has some that they absolutely love and want to see every game--and some that have the potential to ruin the game for them. So a serious pro is letting players mold the game to the kind of experience they want to have.

A pretty serious potential con, which I think we avoided in Gothic Doctor, would come if the change to the experience could make the game unbalanced in some way. In Gothic Doctor, players can't (for example) change the number of Panaceas in the deck or get rid of one type of treatment. If they could, that would change how easily doctors could cure patients, and that would really skew the core of the game. But the actions cards don't run into that issue in my experience.

Another potential con is if there are elements that have the potential to ripple out in unexpected ways that players might not understand, especially after only a game or two. Altering the core elements would definitely lead to that--like if players could decide how many rounds they wanted the game to last for. That seems superficial, but in Gothic Doctor, it has big implications for things like the specialist and generalist bonuses.

Gothic Doctor ends after a set number of rounds. Did it always, or did you test other endgame triggers?

Heh, no, it wasn't always that way, and this is one of my embarrassing first-time-designer stories. Originally, the game ended when a doctor had treated 650 pounds worth of patients. (Typically in a current game, scores range from 325 to 500 pounds--so they were much longer games.) But I really liked playing to a certain value, since the theme of the game is that you're trying to make partner in a practice, and it made sense to me for the practice to be saying, "When you've made this much, then you're partner."

John found that the people he was playtesting with were saying, "This is pretty long..." but I was absolutely dead set on keeping it, so I said, "Fine, then we lower the value!" We argued and argued about it--pretty forcefully, actually--until one day, he said, "Sit down. Play it this way." And within three rounds, I was absolutely convinced how right he was.

With the round-based endgame, we were able to say thematically, "You have this many hours of night. Go!" and that makes a lot of sense, too. It also prevents players from having to be counting their score constantly, which was very tedious, though we could have mitigated that with a score tracker. And, more importantly, playing to a set number of rounds gives you a strong sense of moving towards a conclusion, which is helpful in the arc of the game: "I only have two more rounds, and I need to get another Bestial patient to get that Veterinarian bonus!" or "I just have to keep my opponent from getting another Insane patient for three more rounds..." There's a lot better tension this way than, "Oh! I have enough to win! Game over."

So, the takeaway for me here was to playtest something even if you think it's going to change the DNA of your game. If it does, it might change it for the better.

We also briefly kicked around the idea of having to treat all of the patients in the deck. Super tedious... That lasted half of one playtest.

Are there ways a designer can tell what type of endgame trigger is best for a particular game?

Experimentation is really the best way, I think. If you can think of something to try, my really strong stance is that you should just try it. After one test, it might be clear that it won't work--but even if it stinks, it might open up some other ideas that could work in other ways.

But along with that, I'm a strong advocate of the fusion of theme and mechanics. So if there's a thematically relevant endgame trigger, that's the first one I'd test. More importantly, though, the game has to end before players are bored with it. So thematic concerns have to be adapted to make sure that the fun's still there. Luckily, theme can usually be massaged to make that work.

When drawing cards, players may draw from either the treatment deck or the action deck, in any ratio they choose. This gives players the flexibility of crafting their hand of cards. Why did you divide the cards this way, and why did you make both card types contribute to the seven-card hand limit?

This decision came down, again, to player choice--but it also had a lot to do with controlling randomness in the game. Originally, the decks were shuffled together and you just drew from them--but it could be really, really frustrating to keep drawing action cards when you need to treat a patient. So we split the deck.

In keeping with the elements of choice that we worked into the game, we wanted players to be able to balance their hands however they wanted. I mentioned how aggressive Ian and Devon are with each other; they're heavy action card users too. Some people don't use them at all (which is a thing that newer players tend to do before they see just how much some of them can affect the game). But ultimately, that's one of the strategic elements in the game: If you can cure one patient in the waiting room with the cards in your hand, do you take an action card? They're very powerful, but almost all of them are conditionally very powerful--higher risk, higher reward. Or do you take another treatment card to have a more balanced hand? John and I were really, really happy with this change and the control it gave players over the management of their hand.

How can a game's rules accommodate different players' preferences? Should there be limits to how much flexibility a game gives players?

Player interaction is a key way to do this; it's something that I've picked up from playing Jay Treat's designs (especially Grandeur and Merchants of Araby) and your Sultana, which has one of the best interactions I've seen. Players can decide in these games how much that interaction matters. In Merchants, you can build your engine on your own, or you can work very collaboratively, especially in early rounds. In Sultana, you and your opponents get to choose which path(s) to victory you're focusing on.

At the same time, though, with high collaboration games, there's a sort of paradox there: It can also limit the ability of players to exercise their preferences. When what other players do influences optimal play, it makes it so that what they do alters the options you have, usually not increasing them. But at the same time, it also expands them. It's weird that way.

Another way to accommodate players' preferences, of course, is modular setup--anything from altering what action cards are in the game to changing the setup of the board to encourage or discourage certain paths to victory. And then of course there's something like 504 where even the core mechanics are variable, though I haven't checked that one out...yet. Actually, given how different 504 games can be (from what I understand), that's like saying that you can accommodate players' preferences by letting them choose what game they play...

In terms of limiting flexibility, I think choice should be bounded by the fun in the game. To some extent, that's about protecting players from themselves. Even great, great game designers have ideas that sound awesome in their heads but wind up being unmitigated disasters on the table. So I don't want any of my rules to be so loose that a player could make the game unfun. There are house rules, of course--but then players would know, hey, this isn't allowable in the core.

The Panacea cards are especially powerful because they're required to treat the most valuable patients, and they can be used as wildcards in place of other treatments. How does the game counterbalance this?

Super powerful--and unlike the action cards, Panaceas aren't conditionally powerful. They're powerful every time you treat. So, to counterbalance that, we did a few things. First, drawing them face up costs two draws instead of one, decreasing your hand size until the end of your next turn.

Second, you need them in order to treat the more valuable patients, so they serve more than one function in the treatment process.

Third, we put 13 of them in the treatment deck--while each other treatment card only has 5. When you have a very powerful card, I think you want to make them more widely available to reduce the imbalance based on luck for the number that players draw--as much as is possible in a game based, in some ways, on the luck of the draw.

Fourth, the fact that they are so powerful leads players to have to make decisions about whether to use them as a wild--and when. People tend to not throw them around given how valuable they are, so that helps a bit to mitigate it.

In the playtesting, we tested towards the end for whether having more Panaceas pass through their hands correlated with higher score. They didn't, so, good to go!

Are there go-to ways of counterbalancing powerful cards that designers can keep in mind?

Conditional power is a big one, for sure. For example, one really powerful action card allows you to take a treatment card into your hand when an opponent uses it. So, it's basically a free Panacea--but you have to wait until an opponent drops a Panacea to use it. Sometimes that's nearly immediately, but I've waited more than three rounds to be able to use that card as it takes up space in my hand. And since that's keeping me from having one extra card to create a set, that's a big deal. So making a great card only actually great in a specific situation is good.

The more powerful the card has the potential to be, the rarer the condition should be. But there's also a balance to that. A card that's so, so rarely useful makes it so rare that having it at the right time becomes more luck than calculation. I don't have the exact number here--I think playtesting is the trick here. Mathing it out is great, but ultimately, I think it comes back to having it feel subjectively right to most players during actual games.

Another way is making them more difficult or costly to acquire, as discussed above--though it could also be more expensive to use. One of the things we toyed with was forcing players to spend 25 pounds to use the Panacea, but that proved to be too much of a disincentive. But if a game employs action point allowance, having to spend more action points to use more powerful cards is a way too.

Mitigating the ways in which cards are randomly acquired is important too. If it's all blind draws, then more powerful cards are more problematic since acquiring them or not will always be luck-based.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Peter C. Hayward, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, Michael Gray, JR Honeycutt, Scott Martel Jr., Mike Mullins, Marcus Ross, Sean Rumble, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Anthony Amato & Nicole Kline on Design Choices in RESISTOR_

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Anthony Amato and Nicole Kline, the designers of RESISTOR_, about private and public information, shifting game states, two-player games and more.

The double-sided cards in RESISTOR_ restrict information to one player or the other, while giving each player more information overall than they'd get from single-sided cards. What role does information play in the game, and how did you decide to parcel it out to the players?

Information gain is important in RESISTOR_. We tried to tie the times you gain information mostly to when it's not your turn, so it was a way for us to reward the inactive player for paying attention--or lose an advantage. It's also important in how the cards in hand work. We could have just had each player hold four one-sided cards, but because the cards are double-sided, when a player takes a card for themselves or uses it, they're taking an unknown card away from their opponent. This reinforces that both the board state and your choices available are constantly changing. It also adds an interesting psychological dynamic to the game. Because you're holding two cards, you think of those cards as "your" cards, and the cards in your opponent's hand as "their" cards, when in reality, you're just sharing those four cards. So when a player does the Draw and Trash action, they often say, "I don't want to give you this card, so I'll trash a card from my hand." Even though the information is very clear, physically holding onto that information changes the way players look at it and treat it.

Are there any lessons here that can be useful to designers when figuring out the right mix of public versus private information in their game?

The right mix of public versus private information really depends on the kind of game being created. If you're making a cooperative game, there's not a lot of reason to have an excess of private information unless you want to constrain the players' ability to communicate.

But in a game like RESISTOR_, the top faces of the board and both sides of every card in the discard pile are the only public information, because so much of your turn relies on that hidden information. Also, the use of private information really reinforces soft gotcha mechanics, since you might be sitting on something that can really change the game. How information is delivered, for us, was highly tied to the physical manipulation of the pieces, and we thought that this was a explorable area.

Thinking about the game as a physical thing can be a very informative angle to look at problems as well as look to your greater game design. Jaipur does this very elegantly with how it handles the camels. You could hold those in your hand, but that would be awkward, and so they made a choice for you to put them face up in front of you. This idea messes with public and private information and also speaks to what the players are physically doing at the table. Another good example is Sheriff of Nottingham--the bags aren't necessary, but the action of the sheriff physically taking the bags and threatening to open them once they're out of the players' hands adds so much to the feeling of it.

The Resistor cards shake up the game in several ways, including by shortening the circuit required to hit your opponent. This pushes the game toward a resolution and gives it an arc. How did you decide what effects the Resistor cards would have in the game?

Before the Resistor card was in the game, we had many problems we needed to solve, but we knew that we needed to keep the game short and simple for our audience at the time we created it. We had to solve as many problems as we could with as few mechanics as possible. Because each player has three actions afforded to them each turn, one player could continuously undo what the other player had done, which made the game feel stale, and often ended in victory for the first player who scored. The Resistor stops this from happening because it has the potential to change more on the board than you could with your normal actions, but due to its chaotic effects, it adds in a risk/reward dynamic.

We also felt that adding in the healing element helped to balance it as well, not only because it can help a player gain footing, but also because the player who got healed then discards their hand and draws a new hand, which burns through the deck quickly. The Resistor card is more likely to punish the person with the most advantageous situation at the moment, because if you are fully connected across the board, you are more likely to be affected.

In conjunction with the Draw and Trash action, the Resistor adds in a mechanic where the game destroys itself. So it's dangerous to the person in the lead, helps the person who is losing, and shortens the game, which ends up upsetting the memory balance of the game, since some people have a hard time remembering the card faces. But it also adds risk, because using a Resistor has the potential to be chaotic, and could reveal more Resistors, which can shorten the board way more quickly--or end up unexpectedly flipping cards back over again.

All of this enhances the idea that you should use cards in the moment or expect to lose them, and also prevents players from counting or remembering cards, since they can be discarded before you see both sides of them.

How important is it for a short game to have a changing game state and arc, and what are some ways of achieving this in a short game?

This is important in both short and long games, especially those in which there's a chance you could be losing very early on and never have a way to catch up. Nothing is more demoralizing--or less fun--than a game where you feel like the loser left behind. In a shorter game, you might even be able to get away with less of this, since sometimes the change happens so abruptly that the game ends. But in a longer game, it's important because it's part of what keeps players engaged.

If a shorter game doesn't have an arc, then you want to ensure every playthrough experience is different in some way. Hive is an example where it's a short experience but there's a chance that it's going to be exactly the same, depending on strategies. Seven7s is the opposite: every time you play it, you're going to get to the ending in a completely different way. By that we mean, the end state is always changing, and the values of the cards change as you're playing. So you're constantly making choices about whether you think the value of the cards in your hand will go up or down, and whether or not they're worth keeping or using. There's also no guarantee about the length of the game--one player could feel they have a good hand and try to rush the ending, while another might slow it down to get better cards. But it's never entirely in your control.

RESISTOR_ is strictly a two-player game. Did you ever consider expanding it to handle more players?

Absolutely. We considered this often, but when it wasn't coming together quickly/easily, and it felt like we were really trying to force it, shoehorn it, it just didn't feel like it was natural or intuitive. Eventually, we hit a point at which we decided that our efforts would be better spent making it a really good two-player game than trying to make it an inferior four-player game. Of course, we still have ideas for a multiplayer version, but RESISTOR_ as it stands is a finished product. If we did revisit the four-player idea, it would likely be as a totally different game, or a sequel to the game. We have some cool ideas for it, though...

What are some special considerations for designing a strictly two-player game?

Generally, a two-player game should be shorter. Obviously, that isn't a hard rule or anything, but it feels like if you're making a long-form game, you're making it for more than two players.

With our game, because of the double-sided cards, the players must also literally face each other, which is interesting, because most games don't have any kind of physical requirement to optimally play them.

Also, in a two-player scenario, it's especially important to make sure that both players are engaged at all times, which is why we tried to make sure that all of the actions available to a player on their turn also in some way affect the other player, even if it's just that they're gaining information. When you're designing a game for more than two players, it's more understandable that there will be some down time. But given the length of a two-player game, players shouldn't have down time, and the tempo should be tight.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, Michael Gray, JR Honeycutt, Scott Martel Jr., Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer, Steven Tu

Meaningful Decisions: Matthew O'Malley on Design Choices in Diner

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Matthew O’Malley, the designer of Diner, about designing for contests, real-time games, real-world themes and more.

Diner was created for a design contest. How did this affect your approach and the design choices you made?

Pretty much every decision that was made had to do with the contest. If I’m designing on my own, I usually have myself in mind as an audience. When designing for this contest, I always had the judges and the publisher’s customers in mind as an audience.

I also had to keep in mind the constraints of this particular contest, which was that the game was supposed to use only 54 cards. That specific rule I actually broke just a little bit, because Diner also requires 5 tokens to play, but when I submitted the game, those 5 tokens were suggested to be anything the players had sitting around, ideally diner-themed: sugar packets, spoons, etc.

What are the pros and cons of designing within a set of constraints, either self-imposed or for a contest?

I don’t think there are any cons. Constraints lead to innovation and interesting combinations of previous ideas. It is possible though to hold too tightly to constraints, which could be to the detriment of the game. If you’re designing a game that just begs to go a certain direction, even if you had some constraints in mind, I think you should let the game take on its own life and see where it takes you.

The double-sided cards came directly out of the contest’s constraints. These cards were inspired by Bohnanza, which has the beans and their sets on one side and coins on the other. The table side of the cards in Diner are both the coins (the tip as reward) and the order you have to fill (which is the set collection bean side in Bohnanza). The plate side of the cards in Diner are the bean side but without anything else. While the cards are multi-use, there isn’t a decision about which way to use them, because that would have added too much complexity in a real-time game.

Any advice for designers who are working on a game for a contest?

Read the instructions. Then read them again.

Ideally, start working on a brand new design specifically for the contest, rather than trying to make a pre-existing design fit the guidelines.

If you can, learn as much as possible about the judges. This isn’t some trick, it’s because you need to know your audience. Every game is targeted towards certain players. A contest is easier than most, because you can be really specific about your audience. If it’s for a specific publisher who’s well-known for quick, short, thematic games, don’t present them with your three-hour abstract masterpiece. Even if it falls within the contest guidelines, it’s not likely to win.

Was Diner always a real-time game, and how and why did you settle on the game's action token system?

Diner was not originally a real-time game. Originally, you were gathering plates for tables (with the same double-sided cards), but the cards would rotate after every player’s turn, “aging” and getting less and less valuable. This was meant to mimic the tip a table would give based on how quickly they were served.

While it worked, it wound up being pretty slow and required a fair bit of upkeep.

I was playtesting the game at a Table Treasure Games meeting when Josh Tempkin suggested adding action tokens to the game. Josh did a huge amount of research on real-time games while developing his game WarTime (excellent game, by the way). I believe the idea of turn tokens originated in Tom Jolly’s Camelot in 2005, though I didn’t know it at the time.

We tried out Diner with action tokens a few times, and it added a lot of excitement to the game, and really made the players feel more like they were in the world of the theme. Then it just became a matter of figuring out how exactly to make them work, and the right quantity, and how to make everything else fit together.

I had also played your game Tessen earlier that year, and really enjoyed it, and I remember discussing with you whether there was a way to make it multiplayer (for more than two players). Diner with the action tokens satisfied that design itch.

How can a designer know if their game would be better as a real-time game or turn-based?

I think the trick is to figure out which works better for the theme, and follow up with how you want the players to feel while playing.

First, the theme. Some themes just cry out to be real-time. Operation is great fun for kids, but if you add a timer, suddenly you have a real-time game that works perfectly thematically and could even appeal to adults.

But I find that real-time adds either excitement and fun or stress and frustration. I think the game itself needs to be relatively simple, and usually pretty short, so players don’t feel too invested in the outcome. Then they can laugh when they make a mistake and won’t take it too seriously. A two-hour real-time game in which people have invested a lot of effort would probably be mostly stressful and frustrating.

Looking at real-time video games, you have platformers and FPS-style games, in which you are obviously engaging in a challenge of dexterity and speed. I can get into playing those.

On the other end of real-time video games, you have RTS games, which I never did enjoy. I find that in those larger-scale strategy games, I would much rather be able to take the time I need to think and consider my options, then make a decision, so in my opinion turn-based games work much better for that.

Is speed an essential aspect of real-time games, and are there ways to make speed a less-important skill for players in a real-time game?

I want to tag in Josh Tempkin to answer this! He’s done so much research into real-time games and has a whole set of real-time mechanics with the pros and cons of each at his fingertips.

I suspect that speed is a requisite skill in real-time games, but there are definitely ways to mitigate it. I think they all involve ways of giving players a minimum amount of time, or delaying or obfuscating things so that sometimes the quickest choice is not always the best.

Take Codenames, for example. Not a real-time game, but the Assassin element is something that could be added to a real-time game to slow things down a bit. You can make your decisions more quickly than your opponents? In most real-time games, you’ll win. But what if you also need to be able to notice something else (like the Assassin) or you’ll lose outright?

How did you pick the theme of a waitstaff racing to earn tips? Did you ever consider alternatives?

That was the theme pretty much from the beginning. Since I was aware of the publisher at the beginning of the design process (because it was for the Dice Hate Me Games contest), that gave me a lot of direction for the theme. I’d played other Dice Hate Me games and I knew Chris Kirkman’s design aesthetic, which seemed to me like early to middle 20th-century Americana. I also listened to the Dice Hate Me podcast pretty regularly, and several times in the previous months the crew mentioned going to diners.

That plus the fact that the Silver Diner is one of my kids’ and my favorites, and we regularly go to Tastee Diner for game nights… Those diners have an amazing aesthetic appeal and are just fun places to go, so once the theme occurred to me I looked no further.

The theme also led to some other nice little elements of the game, such as calling out your orders when you deliver them: “Burger, Burger, Pancakes!” It has very little mechanical impact on the game other than letting other players check your order, but it adds theme and excitement and helps the game draw a crowd at conventions.

Are there methods that designers can use to identify promising game themes in everyday life?

I’m a huge advocate for finding themes that are fun, beautiful, unique, challenging, but generally not the kind of thing I run across every day. I’m not at all interested in designing a game about driving in traffic (I think kids enjoy Rush Hour because they don’t have to drive in it).

But even if it’s something that you see every day, you might be able to find a fun way to look at it, or a beautiful moment in time, or something that may be commonplace to you but is a particularly challenging puzzle.

Frantically waiting tables in a Diner is something I see pretty often, but not something I have to do (though I did a stint years ago). So while it’s a part of everyday life, it’s not a part of everyone’s everyday life, at least not in a participatory way. Games are all about stepping into someone else’s shoes. The game is like a movie or a play, but you actually get to participate in it. Think about what someone would like to be, or like to do, and you’ll find an interesting game theme.

I like to think of game designers as directors creating rules for a play in which the players/actors make it up as they go.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, Michael Gray, JR Honeycutt, Scott Martel Jr., Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Donald X. Vaccarino on Design Choices in Dominion

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Donald X. Vaccarino, the designer of Dominion, about deck-building, expansions, politics in games, variable setups and more.

Dominion established deck-building as a game mechanism, and many other games have sought to play around with the formula. How did you settle on the core elements around drawing, purchasing, discarding and reshuffling?

The premise was that you were building a deck while playing, and that everything was in the deck.

Since everything was in the deck, resources were in the deck. I didn't want to have it be too easy to get a small deck; so resources stay in the deck, you don't lose them. They're income.

Initially I considered having a variety of resources. It's simpler to have one, and means you don't draw a bad mix of them.

Initially I considered having to play a card to buy a card. But you'd always need those cards; maybe you'd lose yours or something and have nothing you could do. And some turns you wouldn't draw one. So, you can buy a card every turn, it's built in. And Copper costs $0, so you can always gain a foothold.

If you just drew one card a turn, it would take forever to see the deck you're building. So, you draw 5 cards a turn. You recycle everything so you can keep drawing it.

Initially I thought the choice of cards to buy would be like a line of cards, and when you buy one it's replaced. I worried though that too much of the game would be having a good card turned over when you got first shot at it. When it came time to try the game, I hadn't solved the problem. So I just put everything on the table at once. I figured, it would be easy to find the broken cards, and if the game worked I could refine it later. Of course it turned out we liked being able to buy everything. Then when I added more cards, I limited it to 10 that vary from game to game, because it's hard to keep track of even 10 different things, and 10 changing gives you plenty of variety.

You play a single Action card on your turn. This was a very simple approach I'd already used in other games. It meant I could have cards that let you break that rule, which was a significant attraction. Similarly only getting to buy one card is simple and creates the opportunity to make cards that give +1 Buy.

It's hard to shuffle a very small deck. So, you at least start with 10 cards. I didn't want to make any decisions for you for how your deck was built; so the 10 cards are bad.

Since everything was in the deck, victory cards were in the deck. I made three sizes thinking you'd be able to go for a faster or slower strategy. In the end the game aims heavily towards Provinces in order to keep the game long enough to have fun building your deck.

I needed an answer to the question, what if a pile runs out? At the same time I needed an end condition. So the initial end condition was, the game ends when any pile runs out. Later I changed it to fix a problem (if two players went for Duchies, everyone had to).

A more in-depth history.

You've designed numerous expansions for Dominion. Did you have expansions in mind when you made the base set, and did you have particular goals when you set out to make each expansion?

Initially there were just some cards. There were enough cards that I split it up into a 25-card main set and two 15-card expansions. I moved on to other projects, but my friends just wanted to play Dominion, so I expanded the expansions and made more of them. When I showed the game to Rio Grande Games, I had a 25-card main set and five 20-card expansions.

The expansions have several goals.

• They try to add something new and exciting to the game, while still being just more cards.
• They try to play well by themselves. My feeling was that some people buying an expansion would initially play the expansion by itself.
• They try to have certain game elements at certain frequencies. For example, about 1 in 8 cards gives +2 Actions or otherwise plays extra cards ("villages"). This is essential in order to have it be that, whatever mix of expansions you have, you'll get a decent game experience.

What strategies can designers use to find new design space for an expansion for their game?

An overriding concern is that the expansion be good for the fans of the game. You don't want to veer off too much. People who didn't like the base game aren't trying the expansions, so it's not like, say, a bidding-themed expansion could open up Dominion to bidding fans. The one thing you know about the audience for your expansion is that they liked the base game. So the expansion should shake things up some, but stick pretty close to the main set's premise, especially in terms of what the fun part is.

There are two kinds of expansions: ones that really change the game, and ones that are just more stuff. I have leaned heavily on just having more stuff. Dominion has cards, and you don't use them all each game, so an expansion can seamlessly add more cards. Kingdom Builder has boards and you don't use them all; the expansions add more boards. But other people also make expansions that aren't like that; Cities & Knights is a big change to Catan, not just more of the basic stuff.

I don't know what advice I can give on expansions that really change things. I personally haven't done them, and might lean more towards making a spin-off rather than an expansion there.

For expansions that add more of what you've got, there are several good basic ways to find stuff to do.

• General functional theme. Anything you can do normally here and there, you can focus on doing a lot of in one expansion. Wizards of the Coast does this a bunch with Magic; any set may have artifacts, and then one set will have lots and lots of artifacts.
• Program flow theme. This is where there's some basic what-you-do logic that you do a lot of. This is a major source of Dominion expansion themes. Intrigue has "choose one" as a theme; Seaside tries out "now and next turn"; Hinterlands has "when you gain this"; Dark Ages has "when you trash this."
• Qualifier theme. Cornucopia has a variety theme; several cards care about cards being different from other cards. It's an aspect of things rather than what-you-do.
• Flavor theme. You can start with flavor instead of functionality. This is a better fit for games that allow more complexity; when you have very simple cards, it's harder to hang meaningful flavor on them. Again, Magic does this one a bunch.
• Break conventions. In Dominion the convention is that Victory cards don't do anything else, they're just worth points at the end. Intrigue breaks that convention by having Victory cards that do things. A good trick here is to establish conventions, planning to break them later.
• Add data. Adding data to the game requires components to track the data, but it's otherwise a great, always-available way to find new things to do.
• Add a value. Alchemy adds Potions as a resource. It gives you a new potential cost for cards.
• Add rules. This makes your game more complex, and if you add both data and rules, it's like you added a game to your game. Still, sometimes adding a rule will get you somewhere good. Guilds adds both coin tokens and the rule that lets you trade them in.

Attack cards are the most direct form of player interaction in Dominion. Without them, player interactions are much more subtle. Did you seek to encourage certain types of player interaction in Dominion, or did you want to allow the players' preferences to determine this?

Dominion is a game where a lot of the interaction is "incidental," meaning, it comes from the card mix rather than the rules. To make sure there will tend to be a good amount of interaction, I have a certain proportion of interactive cards. It's gone up slightly over the years, though the percent that's attacks has gone down.

There are a few different kinds of interactive cards, not just attacks.

• Attacks!
• Cards that give something to other players. Council Room has the other players draw a card.
• Cards that get data or a decision from other players. Contraband has the player to your left make a decision that limits you.
• Cards that interact with something the players share. City cares about empty piles, which all players affect.
• Cards that push competition for the cards. These are more mild but I count them for a fraction. For example, Gardens can cause us to compete over the pile.
• Cards that feed off of attacks. I don't count these towards my quota since they don't increase the percentage of games with interaction, but they do interact in games with attacks. For example, Moat stops attacks.

I am strictly anti-politics. By "politics," I mean situations in a game where it's possible to talk other players into decisions that benefit both of you to the detriment of other players. You can't completely get rid of politics from interactive multiplayer games (that aren't reduced to 1-2 teams). You can dial it way down though, and that's what I do. So Dominion's attacks and interactive non-attacks all involve everyone else. Militia makes everyone else discard down to 3; you don't pick a player to hose. For me this is just key to enjoying the game. There are players who like to pick who to hose and, well, there are games out there that cater to them.

So: I try to have a good amount of interaction (though it varies with the cards used); I specifically avoid politics; and otherwise it's just down to what I can manage to do on cards.

What can designers do to encourage or discourage certain types of interaction, or to put the level of interaction in players' hands?

My games strive to have variety. Some of them get it in a player-selected way--the varying cards in Dominion, the varying boards in Kingdom Builder. That is all I do to give players control over how much interaction the game has. Anything else is just play style.

I am interested in most ways players can interact. What I do not like, again, is politics.

The main way to reduce politics is to remove the common ground. When I attack you in Risk, every other player benefits. They can try to talk me into attacking you; it's good for them, it's good for me. In Dominion, Witch attacks everyone else; no other player shares in benefiting from me playing it.

Hiding information can also reduce politics. When you are choosing between playing Militia or Adventurer and I already have 3 cards in hand from someone else's Militia, I could try to talk you into the attack, which would hurt at least one other player but not me. But I don't know that you're considering those options until after you've decided.

Simultaneous decisions involve hidden information but further reduce politics. We're all busy during the time I'd spend trying to talk you into a mutually beneficial attack; I don't want to reveal what I'm doing at all via saying what I want you to do.

There are more extreme measures. You can reduce decision-making; reduce interaction period; have all players on one or two teams (a co-op or team game).

Encouraging interaction is not an issue. If the game provides ways to interact, well, if they're mandatory everyone will do them, and if they're optional then the people who enjoy them will do them. Providing ways to interact is important, but people need no encouragement there.

Dominion allows players to choose which card types to include in each session, giving the game a great amount of variability. There are also suggested setups. How did you determine what options to give players?

I tried to keep the set-up simple. The simplest thing is to have one kind of thing that varies, so I try that first. For some games you might be stuck having multiple kinds of things to vary, but this wasn't necessary in Dominion. For Kingdom Builder I vary the scoring separate from the boards.

I try to have games vary as much as possible but not too much. I don't want it to change so much that it's not that game you like, but otherwise I want to really shake things up.

My expectation is that, when there's a set of things to pick from randomly, many people will pick randomly! So that does affect what things are in the set; for example, if something is no good for new players, it might be stuck waiting for an expansion (or never happening). If a combo is too dominating, you might have that combo, so I have to fix it.

The suggested setups, after the first game one, exist because the thought was that some people might like them, as a way to not just jump into pure random. Originally I did not put much work into them; after all, the game is supposed to work with random cards. So I picked cards that went together in whatever ways and they were played once each and that's that. For much later sets, it was clear some people played all of them, and I started playtesting them and tweaking them a little. They are still not all that polished; again the game is supposed to work with random cards, and if it does then these lists will work too.

How much guidance should designers give players in variable setup? Do they need to be wary of an abundance of variety creating an unpredictable experience?

It's a concern in two ways.

First, you want the first game to be as good as possible. If you leave it up to chance, it will sometimes be the very worst case for a first game. So, just specify what portion of the variable setup to use for your first game. Dominion says, play with these 10 cards.

Second, there are all the other games, after the first game. If there's something you need in the game, you need to make sure it's there. For example if it was important to always have a +2 Actions card in Dominion, and I didn't want it to always be the same one, then there would need to be, say, a separate pile of those, so you took nine random regular cards plus one random +2 Actions card. It's nice to avoid having to complicate the set-up like that, but you may have to.

Players can play with whatever cards. If they pick randomly they'll see certain things as often as I like them; for example, a typical game will have a +2 Actions card, but some games there won't be one, for a different experience. But some players may wish to always have +2 Actions, or always have a defense if they have an attack, or whatever, and that's fine. They'll know how much they like it and can stop doing things they don't like. They can always go back to random.

The cards in the game almost all directly help you build up. So it's hard to have a random set of 10 that doesn't give you ways to move forward (without just buying treasures). A big trick here is that smaller effects will have basic resources attached, like the +$2 on Militia.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo
 
JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat
 
ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro
 
APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Scott Martel Jr., Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: T.C. Petty III on Design Choices in VivaJava Dice

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with T.C. Petty III, the designer of VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game, about balancing different strategies, dice manipulation, player engagement, variable abilities and more.

Players in VivaJava Dice will advance on one of two tracks each turn: performance points, which bring them closer to victory, or research points, which let them build a game engine to score more performance points. How did you settle on this dual-track framework and balance both approaches?

The key to making VivaJava Dice feel balanced even when there is this weird and major randomization agent called dice is to balance the ways to score points.

I wanted players to have an obvious and easy way to score points: make coffee blends. But, I also wanted a way for players to build their own engine with little interference from other players: Research. What makes the game an unsolvable, interactive puzzle is that your choices can impact other players’ choices on a tactical level.

By making the most obvious way to score also the most vulnerable to player interaction, it provides an interesting short-term goal. Enter the king-of-the-hill mechanic. Players can create a Featured Blend with their coffee dice to score major points, but if another player is able to make a better Featured Blend, they can replace your Blend before those points can be locked in at the start of your next turn. Also, to make sure that the decision matters on either side, when a player decides to risk their Featured Blend, they lose their ability to Research. So, while an aggressive player may be scoring points, they cannot invest in abilities. I also added a second Blend called the Rainbow Blend which is even more volatile, but allows the player to both score points and take Research.

Research not only gives players new abilities, but it allows them to score points as well by reaching the end of these tracks. However, to balance this out, I made it so that once scored, you lose the ability listed on the Research track. Suddenly, tactical timing also becomes important.

Blending represents short-term goals that can be scored multiple times, while Research represents long-term investments that can be cashed in for short-term rewards. This mix of tactics and strategy and luck makes for some satisfying easy decisions and some crucial agonizing decisions.

How can designers ensure that their game accommodates the two playstyles of going for points versus engine-building?

I’d actually recommend that designers play Saint Petersburg. Like, really sit down and play Saint Petersburg about 15 times. It’s a fantastic game, and the engine-building in it is possibly the simplest and most satisfying. But it’s really strict and unbalanced. And that imbalance is only apparent after many, many entertaining plays. Experienced players will absolutely destroy new players. However, it taught me several huge lessons in game design and how to improve upon games of the past. “Nobles.” That’s all I’m saying.

Don’t just break out a spreadsheet. Make sure that player interaction is your balancing mechanism. Juicy points should exist in a fragile space, require excellent timing, or have a negative effect. Investment should be rewarded, but if it exists within a personal space isolated from other players, it should never trump the interactive points (unless players allow it to).

I’ve always been a fan of victory points. I know it sounds ridiculous, but when you play a lot of “classic” games, you start to notice that games either end at a finish line or by most cash. The stuff you do during the game doesn’t convert to victory points and it usually funnels your strategy down one specific path. Being able to convert “things” into points in various ways is what creates interesting decisions and multiple paths to victory.

Dice manipulation is a common way of mitigating the luck inherent in rolling dice. How did you decide on the particular dice manipulation abilities in VivaJava Dice?

I’d actually disagree with this statement. Dice manipulation, aside from re-rolling, has only recently become a “thing.” Dungeon crawlers, RPGs, and some war games have implemented modifying the result with plusses and minuses, but rarely do you see dice manipulated in a direct way--other than the Yahtzee re-roll, of course. I was actually extremely surprised that someone had not created a similar system to VivaJava Dice before. After Alien Frontiers, it just seemed so obvious to do this and maybe it’s so obvious that people assume it’s out there in some form, but it just didn’t exist.

Deciding on dice manipulation abilities wasn’t really a decision. I used every single dice manipulation ability that exists. Re-roll. Flip to opposite side. Add a pip. Remove a pip. Choose any side. Dice are really limited in this sense. Anything past this point starts becoming convoluted, so if there was any real decision, it was to exclude any abilities that couldn’t be explained in about 10 words or fewer. Dice manipulation should be easily understood.

The only manipulation ability that I regret not using after the fact is “Choose another player. That player turns the die of your choice to the face of their choice.” This advanced ability would have increased player interaction and made for some interesting above-the-table moments.

What should designers keep in mind when formulating dice manipulation abilities?

I just listed all the dice manipulation abilities above. Memorize them and tweak them to your needs.

If you decide to use more complex dice manipulation than the standard re-roll, make sure each of the different faces of a die are important. Many times in VivaJava Dice, players will manipulate their dice to lower values in order to research a specific ability or to create a stronger blend. This is because each die face is significantly different and their importance varies between players and between games. If rolling higher is always better in your design, then your pool of manipulation abilities is limited even further. Most game designs have no reason to include “remove a pip” or “flip to opposite side.”

Also, know the classics. The Yahtzee re-roll is a form where players get an initial roll and then are allowed to re-roll any or all dice of their choice two more times. Be prepared for your game to be called a “Yahtzee variant.” Another classic is the Lock & Re-Roll. What this means is that a player may re-roll as many times as they want, but must lock in one or more dice with each new roll until all dice are locked. You will be compared to these.

Getting a good blend means it may be in a player's best interest to sit on the blend and effectively forfeit their next turn for points rather than roll and allocate the dice. How does the design keep players participating in the game's core fun activities?

In all honesty, there are a few people that dislike this mechanic. I think these people play games way too slowly. A turn in VivaJava Dice is supposed to last somewhere around 15 seconds, otherwise I’d agree that choosing to skip your own turn for points is not a “fun” mechanic.

Players also have to degrade their Blend after scoring. Which effectively means they are making their Blend worse and more open to destruction by other players before they decide to skip their turn and hope to score more points on the next. As the game continues, this decision becomes even more crucial. The fun portion is watching other players’ turns and gritting your teeth if they come close to besting your Blend. As I mentioned before, Blends are a huge source of points, but also the most dangerous way to gain them.

Are there ways that a design can actually discourage players from having fun, and what can designers do about it?

For me, the equation is Fun equals Engagement. Even when a game is so bad that it’s entertaining, the fun is in the anticipation of the next cringe-worthy moment, or awkward butt-touching social event that will be thrust upon players. Once a player becomes bored, underwhelmed, overwhelmed, jilted, or the illusion of control is broken, the game ceases to engage the player.

The easiest way to avoid players disengaging, is to minimize downtime. The only reason a game like Through the Ages, which may have 10 to 15 minutes of downtime between turns, works, is because when it’s your turn, it’s blissfully challenging, interesting and filled with exciting mini-goals and long-term achievements. A dexterity game like PitchCar would never work if players had to wait 15 minutes for their turn. In VivaJava Dice, turns follow a simple sequence of events and are over very quickly. Roll, make a choice or two, pass the dice.

VivaJava Dice does another interesting trick though. It makes another player’s turn and actions important and, many times, exciting to watch by having an interactive element tied directly to scoring. If you play VivaJava Dice by looking only at your coaster and ignoring other players, you will lose. And the race for a point total is so immediately accessible that the metagame begins very quickly. Giving players a central goal, something to overcome or stop or avoid, keeps engagement levels higher even when players aren’t directly involved in the action.

In a dice game, avoid wasted turns or dice. If you find that your game has people stating, “Well, I can’t really do anything with this,” fix your game. And avoid random screw-over moments, either by a single die roll or by some weird randomly rolled combination that affects all players. It’s very discouraging. And make sure players get to roll their dice. It’s why people play dice games.

VivaJava Dice comes with a lot of research abilities that players can randomly select at the start of each game. How did you design, select and balance all of these abilities?

I’m somewhat of a perfectionist, so I have to curtail my own tendency to refine and rebalance and tweak right up until the last minute. Determining which abilities were used in the game was the most time-intensive aspect of development. It took longer than expected because of my own stubbornness.

When I released my first print-and-play for the game, I had included 18 abilities. I found out very quickly that a completely random starting setup caused problems. And most importantly, players want to roll dice in a dice game. So, no matter what the setup, I always included Re-Roll on the White bean face of the Research tracks. To make sure that every game had a balanced set of abilities, I placed each of the abilities into one of three categories, and made sure that these symbols appeared on the coaster board that allowed for customization. Players could still customize their board, but it gave a guideline to keep every game moving along.

I made some pre-designed coasters, that provided players a quick-start set of abilities that was balanced. The problem was, it was broken for new players. Scott King, a playtester and friend, told me multiple times that he could win the game consistently by spamming one of the abilities. I kept dismissing his advice until I heard another set of playtesters mention the same thing. It wasn’t until Scott visited and we played two-player that I relented. I was able to win without using the ability, but I had to employ an extremely reactive strategy. So, even though it was possible to win, it required an experienced player to do so and this was supposed to be the lightest introductory set of abilities.

The key is blind playtesting and swallowing your ego when something doesn’t work correctly. It’s an extremely difficult skill. Another playtester, Ryan Sanders (of Inquisitive Meeple), fed me ideas during the process and was instrumental in me continually questioning the final mix of abilities. Listen to people. Pick apart their brains. Sometimes they have terrible ideas, but many times they can also solve problems that you never knew existed.

I also wish Creamer, one of the most mean abilities from the Game of the Year expansion (it pretty much ruins another player’s turn at the cost of a token) was included in the main game. It creates such an interesting meta game.

What can designers do to come up with compelling game powers, choose the best mix, and balance them against each other?

Usually game powers that are simple are the most overpowered. Magic: The Gathering’s initial sets were highly chaotic due to the simplicity of the text. The key to Magic’s continued success is essentially nerfing or underpowering every single card ability so that it doesn’t do the one thing you really want it to. They’ve spent 20 years fixing the chaos of the initial sets of cards. But, if you also notice, Magic is just as stubborn and resistant to change as an amateur designer’s ego. It took 15 years for the designers to realize that specific cards were always used in certain color decks. The initial band-aid was to limit cards to only four copies in each deck. But that isn’t a solution, it’s side-stepping the issue. The thing is, if a power is always the best for a certain type of strategy, then you should always have four copies of it, and if that’s the case, the card is too powerful.

So, given that the most popular hobby game in the entire world was unable to find a good balance between cards and still struggles to temper dominant strategies, don’t expect to be perfect. But the most important thing is to be acutely aware of any powers that players always go for. If there is never a reason to diverge, swallow your ego, and figure out a solution that either increases the power’s cost, makes it appear later in the game, or increases the allure of other options. Certain abilities may emerge as better or worse than others, and that’s OK as long as they are all interesting and fair in cost or require good timing to acquire.

There’s no magic spreadsheet for abilities. It’s always going to be by feel if these abilities have text that break different portions of the game. But embrace statistics and the concept of “expected value.” If you have no mathematical skill in this area, find someone who does that can give you the expected value of a player’s investment or random outcome. Certain dice manipulation abilities are better than others. For example, the Yahtzee re-roll is actually worse percentage-wise than flipping a single die to its opposite face. It’s important to have this knowledge when making cost decisions if something is clearly better than something else.

And also, make sure that players aren’t making too many decisions that sacrifice fun for strategy. The strategy should be part of the fun, so make abilities that are both fun and strategic, and players will thank you with their hard-earned cash.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Jason Tagmire on Design Choices in Maximum Throwdown

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Jason Tagmire, the designer of Maximum Throwdown, about table presence, designing factions, making a game fun even when you lose, and more.

Photo by Scott King, scottking.info

Players play Maximum Throwdown while standing around the table, instead of sitting. When it’s played in public, it always draws a crowd of spectators. Was this an intended effect of having the players stand?

It wasn’t intentional but it became apparent very early on. Some of the earliest playlists were late at night at conventions, and played on big 6-foot round tables. These were practically made for Maximum Throwdown. Players were all at equal distances from the center, and the center was three feet from the edge of the table. I don’t think I’ve experienced a better playing surface for the game.

In a very memorable session at Unpub 3, it was myself, a few recurring playtesters, and Jeff Quick from AEG. This was a particularly rowdy group, and it drew a decent-sized crowd. I feel like the tone of that game, along with the crowd that it drew, had a big impact on it getting picked up by AEG.

What can designers do to get the attention of passers-by and increase their game’s table presence?

Add some height. Card games are often hard to catch someone’s eyes, as they are very flat and two-dimensional. It’s even hard to photograph them and make them look exciting. If there is any way to add height, it will dramatically increase the visual appeal.

Each of the game’s factions plays differently, yet they all share the same set of actions. How did you achieve this variability?

I wanted to have each faction feel unique, but I didn’t want to clog up the game with a lot of icons/abilities. Most of the abilities in the base game are required to keep it moving so I couldn’t pick and choose specific abilities for specific factions. With those issues in mind, I decided to play with the numbers.

Dragons will often hoard their gold, so the dragon faction is all about points. It has more point icons than any other, but has fewer abilities to activate during their turns. Pirates are thieves, so their ability was naturally the steal ability.

Each faction started with the exact same icons and I added and subtracted from there. Very lightly at first, just to keep it as balanced as possible. In the end, each has a larger amount of one specific faction, but not enough that all players will notice the first time around. It’s subtle because of the balancing required, and also because of the base icons needed to propel the game along.

With Maximum Throwdown: Overload, I took a less subtle approach by making six new card abilities. This gave a pool of 12 abilities to choose from, with six basic ones (and three of them being the basic building blocks of the game: Draw, Throw and Points) and six all-new abilities. Each faction had a unique combination of six icons that no other faction had, and each faction played very differently than any other. Balancing these factions within the set, as well as against the previous set, was pretty intense.

How can designers create factions that play differently, aside from the typical approach of adding unique rules for each player?

I’ve been enjoying the Magic: The Gathering approach recently. Each type has a distinct play style that is very different than the next. The combination of those makes for unique, personalized gameplay that may be creature heavy with some deck destruction, or fast and protective. This is much different than giving every player a unique player power as it lets the player craft their own experience.

The card-throwing mechanic creates moments of excitement when a thrown card lands just right, but just as often a poorly thrown card results in laughter. Did you make any changes to the design to emphasize this?

We had some slight additions in the late development process to emphasis this. An example would be the initial base card setup. It’s a selection of cards that are placed in the center of the table and used for the targets for the first cards that are thrown. Cards are required to land on other cards, so we had some fun with the bases. One is a ring of five to six cards with a big open hole in the middle. If the first player throws and lands in the middle of the “ring of death,” then their card is discarded and play passes to the next player. It’s one of those things that happens every now and then and makes for a memorable experience.

Is this unique to dexterity games, that fun results even when a strategy fails? What can designers do to ensure that their game is fun to play even if they don’t win?

Dexterity games are rare in that they are enjoyable to play and also to watch. There’s an unknown element to dexterity games, and it’s often just gravity. It’s neat to see things teeter back and forth and exciting when they do or do not eventually fall down. It often becomes a spectacle simply due to the nature of dexterity games.

I don’t think this is exclusive to dexterity games though. Party games will share some of the same qualities. My most memorable game of Spyfall was when I was a spy and played so terribly that my loss triggered an eruption of laughs from the other players. I was happy to be a part of that, even as a player that lost the round. Storytelling/RPGs also have a way of engaging all of the players.

I think designers can make their games fun for losing players by creating incremental victories. Video games have nailed this through achievement systems. These are small, satisfying goals, that are often visible from the beginning. Leveling up a character in a video game also has that same feeling of accomplishment, especially when it opens up more opportunities. Looking at how video games reward a player is a great place to start.

Players only score at the start of their turn, rather than immediately after throwing a card. Why did you decide to set up scoring this way?

I thought a lot about this early on and I decided that points shouldn’t be awarded for landing a throw. Instead points should be awarded for surviving a round of play. It changed the way players would throw during their turn.

If players scored at the beginning of the turn, players just threw to the closest location. If they scored at the end of the turn, they had the opportunity to disable the points of any upcoming player. It could be the player right after them since they will score next and there are no other players to assist in slowing them down.

What are some ways you’ve discovered to use scoring to achieve more in a design beyond giving players a goal to aim for?

In the end, it’s essentially a goal that players are aiming for, but during the game can mean more than just who wins the game. Immediate effects of scoring can incentivize a player by impacting turn order or by having a direct effect on the amount of resources a player gets during their turn. Having current score double as any other part of the game opens it up into new territory.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICES: Kevin Brusky, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Brad Price, Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Jamey Stegmaier on Design Choices in Euphoria

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Jamey Stegmaier, co-designer with Alan Stone of Euphoria, about cooperation in a competitive game, point structures, player freedom, presenting information to players, and more.

Even though Euphoria is a competitive game, players are encouraged to cooperate in several ways, such as by jointly completing the constructed markets, advancing the allegiance tracks and digging the tunnels. How did you identify areas in your design where players could cooperate?

In Euphoria, the idea of competitive cooperation stemmed from the theme. Classic dystopias often have individuals who leverage each other to rise up the ranks. I knew I wanted players to build things in Euphoria, and I had several factions (allegiances and tunnels), so in both areas I saw opportunities for players to have shared interests.

What should designers who want to incorporate some form of cooperation into a competitive game keep in mind? How can the two playstyles work well together? Any pitfalls to watch out for?

For me, the key thing I look at is, “How can I give players self-serving choices that also benefit other players?” In a competitive game, players aren’t going to cooperate or collaborate just because it’s fun or thematic. It has to be self-serving. I think the great thing about games that mix the two together is that it creates positive interaction between players. Instead of blocking other players, you actually benefit the most by working together in certain areas.

The biggest pitfall, though, is that such cooperation doesn’t necessarily scale the best at all player counts. Euphoria has much less of this cooperative interaction at two players. It still works, but it’s more about doing your own thing (like most Euro games) than working with your opponent…since there’s only one opponent in a two-player game!

Each star-shaped territory can take a limited number of authority tokens, which forces players to diversify their actions rather than hammering on a single strategy. Why limit players' options in this way?

I wanted to encourage players to build interesting engines and combos, but not to let anyone run away with a particularly powerful engine. That’s why there are limits—you might have a good thing going that will net you a few stars, but once that territory fills up, you need to be able to think on your feet and have a backup plan in place.

Do some games need to give players more or less freedom of choice? How can a designer determine the right level of player freedom for their design?

I think it varies widely based on the game, but I would say for most games, limiting players through increased costs is the best way to go. For example, in Tzolk’in, the designers could have made a rule saying, “You can never place a worker beyond the third space on a wheel.” But it would have been an arbitrary rule, one more thing to remember in a complex game. Instead, they added a cost (more corn) and a limitation (each previous space on the wheel must be filled up), giving players the expensive choice to go as high up on the wheel as they want.

As for the right level of player freedom, I always like to return to the fun. If players would have more fun with more or less freedom, I’d make adjustments based on that.

In contrast to most games, you win Euphoria not by gaining points, but by getting rid of authority tokens. What purpose does this serve in the game's design?

Right, Euphoria amounts to a race game—you’re racing to place your 10th star before anyone else. If you do, you win. This is largely a thematic design choice. The stars represent your control over the dystopia, and if you’ve reached the tipping point, you wrest control away from your predecessor.

This serves a few purposes in the game’s design: One, it removes the need for giving the game a set number of rounds (in fact, Euphoria has no rounds, just turns). I don’t like it when a game tells me how many rounds I have unless that number is strongly thematic. The stars double as an end-game trigger. Two, I generally just don’t like points in my designs. I put up with them, but they’re so abstract. Who is awarding these points? What’s their real-life equivalent? There are lots of different ways that we gauge success in real life, but “points” aren’t one of them—they’re a game construct.

How can a game's point structure influence players' experience?

This race element creates a lot of tension. The game is always moving forward, never backward (there is no way to lose stars). It also gives players the immediate satisfaction of completing an important goal every time they place a star, as there are only 10 of them. The downside—particularly in that there is no hidden reveal at the end of the game—is that sometimes you can see that a player is about to win, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. I think that’s more a flaw in the game’s ability to let you impede another player than in the star system itself, though.

You’ll actually see the next evolution of this system in Scythe. The end-game is triggered by stars (achievements in different categories), but scoring happens after that in the form of an accumulation of wealth based on each player’s end-game state (plus money they earned during the game). Unlike victory points, money is a concrete, real-life gauge of success.

The board in Euphoria is laid out to emphasize the thematic purposes of the worker spots, rather than grouping them by their strategic functions. For example, the commodity-generating areas are found near each associated faction's location, rather than in one place. Why did you choose this type of layout?

Well, mostly out of ignorance. :) I made the mistake of describing the art of the world to my artist and having her illustrate it without any influence from my graphic designer, Christine Bielke. At the time, I thought my graphic designer could just plop the design down onto the art, no problem. As it turns out, it’s a big problem!

That said, even if Christine had been involved earlier in the process, I probably still would have requested that each of the factions be separated into their individual areas, because that’s what the world of Euphoria looks like (or maybe I just can’t see it any other way at this point).

How can designers increase the usability of their games, and when should thematic or strategic considerations take precedence?

Work with your graphic designer to plan the layout of the board before your artist does anything! Learn from my mistake. :) I really think that’s the key, because if you work with your graphic designer, they’ll help you make sure the board is intuitive to players, and then your artist can make it beautiful through thematic illustrations.

Beyond that, study the things other board games do to make actions intuitive (or unintuitive). Players shouldn’t have to remember anything—everything should have a visual cue. For example, in Euphoria, the three types of action spaces have different elements to them to show players the differences between them: One is big and solid (lots of workers can go here), one is square and solid (one worker, can’t be bumped), and one is square with a dotted line and an arrow (one worker, can be bumped).

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Aaron Lim, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICES: Gino Brancazio, Kevin Brusky, Keith Burgun, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Brad Price, Marcus Ross, Diane Sauer

Meaningful Decisions: Gil Hova on Design Choices in Battle Merchants

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Gil Hova, designer of Battle Merchants, about thematic-mechanical fit, scaling, expansions and more.

The Kingdom Cards that give players special abilities and spice up the gameplay all have thematic explanations that fit the world of the game and help make sense of the mechanics. What was your process for coming up with them?

I came up with the base rules of the game, and then looked for rules that players would occasionally want to break. If I had a rule that said “you can’t do X,” then I came up with a card that said “you can do it now.”

Then I had to balance the cards. If a card was too powerful, it was the only interesting decision, and was boring. If it wasn’t powerful enough, no one took it, and that’s boring too. It helped to come up with a baseline of about how much a turn was worth (about $3), and then base each card’s payout off of that.

So we have a card that comes out late that gives you $7 (and remember, most money wins). We have other cards that come out earlier that can give you as much as $12, but they take up a valuable card slot. One card gives you as much as $20, but you may have to spend all your money in order to take advantage of it. It was these interesting choices I was going for.

How can designers learn to use theme to make their games’ mechanisms more intuitive? Are there tricks to the process?

Here’s one tip: avoid flavor text. Seriously. Try to let your players tell your game’s stories entirely through your mechanism.

For example, if you have a card called Space Pirate Attack, and you have a paragraph of flavor text, but its effect is to simply lose a card, then that’s not much of a story you’re telling. On the other hand, if you have a planet in your game where you think the Space Pirates like to congregate, then you can say that the player closest to the Pirate Planet loses two cards. And now you know you’re not just discarding two cards; the Pirates are taking two cards from you in a raid.

Maybe you can then insert a mechanism for another player to raid the Pirates and take those cards! Adding mechanisms for mechanisms’ sake isn’t always the right thing to do, of course, but when a mechanism and a theme are tightly linked, you have a lot more license; players will find those a lot easier to absorb.

Too many designers look at theme and mechanism as opposite ends of a spectrum. It’s not about one or the other in isolation, nor does it matter whether you start with one or the other. The important thing is that you find a good place for them to intersect. The right place might be “nowhere” (as in an abstract game or a word game), but it’s probably going to be somewhere that will let the players tell an interesting story.

And remember: as the designer, you’re not telling the story. You’re just supplying the language. The players will tell the story. If you want to tell a story, write a book.

Some of Battle Merchants’ rules change depending on player count, most notably the double-sided board. Why did you make these changes for different player counts?

I found that the 3-player game needed a smaller board. The board tracks demand, and there are too many spaces to sell to on the 4-player board. The game needed to feel tighter.

That meant a lot of topographical changes. I had to vary the assets players start with in a 3-player game, but I think I did it in as smooth and streamlined a way as possible.

The 2-player game took more work. It was boring at first; one player would get Craft, and the other would get Kingdom Cards, and neither really interacted. I changed the rules for 2 players so that when a player took a Kingdom Card, a Craft Card would get discarded, and vice versa. That shook things up wonderfully, and introduced a great zero-sum element. If I know you want that Craft Card, and it’s linked to a Kingdom Card I want, I can help myself and hurt you in the same move!

I also needed to shrink the board even more, but I couldn’t put a third side on a 2-sided board! And I didn’t want to ask my publisher to make a totally different 2-player board. So I introduced a mechanism called “Salesman Steve” that sells a weapon to the board after each player sale. And again, since Salesman Steve works off an algorithm, you can figure out how to use his sales to best deprive your opponent of demand.

What should designers watch out for to make sure their game scales well?

As a designer, you must pay close attention to how your game plays with different player counts. In Battle Merchants, I needed the game to get tighter with fewer player counts. I didn’t need to change any mechanisms for the 3-player game, but I needed to introduce new rules to make the 2-player game compelling. You might need to do the same thing for your game. Try to make the changes as simple and gentle as possible, but it’s better to have an interesting version of the game with more rules than a boring version of the game with the same rules.

Be mindful of player experience. Look out for downtime. I don’t believe downtime is necessarily a bad thing; in games like Myrmes or Princes of Florence, you’re spending most of your downtime planning out your next move, so in those games, I actually want a bit of time to think!

But if you look at 4-player Ascension or 6-player Alhambra, you can see problems. In those games, it’s not that the downtime is long; it’s that it’s not interesting. The game state changes too much between turns for you to want to pay attention to anything in between. That consequently lengthens the downtime, because players don’t bother planning between turns, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Also, be forewarned that 2-player games are not at all like games for more players. They’re a completely separate animal. In a game with 3 or more, what I do might help Suzanne but hurt Chris. In a 2-player game, anything that helps me hurts you. It’s completely zero-sum. So mechanisms that rely on other players to force interesting decisions don’t always work with two players. That’s why I needed to make those changes to Battle Merchants.

Consider adding a solo version to your game. The solo community isn’t huge, but they’re very vibrant and vocal, and they can give your game a nice push. I couldn’t find a way to do it in Battle Merchants, but my next game, The Networks, plays very nicely solo.

Also, don’t rush to lock in the rules to your game before exploring how it plays with a bunch of different player counts. You might find a rule that helps the 2-player game also helps the 4-player game. Or, a modification to the 4-player game helps the 2-player game.

Your new expansion to Battle Merchants, New Kingdoms, adds fresh Kingdom Cards to the mix but leaves the rest of the game as it is. What were your goals for the expansion, and why did you focus on the Kingdom Cards?

I was working with a publisher edict: I needed to make the expansion available on DriveThruCards specifically. So I couldn’t change anything that wasn’t on the cards. (I did modify a couple of existing rules, but those are small tweaks.)

I also felt like I could explore some interesting space in the Kingdom Cards. I had been working on an expansion that was tied to the Craft Cards, but when I moved those powers to the Kingdom Cards, it felt a more natural fit.

There were also a few complaints about the base game I wanted to address. First, new players sometimes ran themselves out of money. I had put some money on the Kingdom Cards to help them out, but this wasn’t always an interesting option for them. So for the expansion, I removed a lot of the Kingdom Card money bonuses, and instead included a Tzolk'in-like rule where a player could spend his entire turn going up to 5 coins.

I had some more limitations on that at first (you couldn’t have any forged weapons), but I found I didn’t need that; spending your entire turn just to get a few coins was rarely optimal, and if you kept doing it in the game as late as Autumn, that was a good sign you weren’t having a good game. New players found the game more forgiving this way, and experienced players couldn’t exploit the rule, even after I streamlined it to remove the forged weapons requirement. I was delighted to see it work so well!

Second, while I’m happy with the balance of the original game, there were some cards that bugged me. Instigator was more boring than I expected; I had made a change to it close to finalizing that nerfed it too much, and it wasn’t valuable. Scavenger was balanced in some games but overpowered in others. Desperate Times was an interesting card, but I had an idea of how to make it less fiddly.

Third, I wanted more variety. In the base game, you’ll see almost every Kingdom Card; you may not see some of the later ones if you end the game quickly. I wanted to see if I could come up with a Kingdom Card deck that was bigger, which would let players shuffle out certain cards during setup. This would add some nice variety to the game.

Fourth, players hated asking each other for Craft levels. They kept asking for some kind of Craft Tracker. This was my chance to give them one!

I realized I could address all these points with a single new Kingdom Card deck, plus a couple of rules and a few extra cards. That fit in with my publisher’s edict, and it let me add some new possibilities to the game and address some nagging issues.

What are some ways designers can use an expansion to change up their game?

I’ve found that different people want different things from expansions. Some insist that an expansion must introduce a new mechanism. Others want to see refinements to the base game. Still others want a game that feels different. Still others want the flavor of the original game. And so on.

These are mostly good reasons, other than the “refinements” one. Sadly, I’m a fiddler; I love to tweak my game, no matter how late we are in the process! This caused Minion Games no shortage of angst during Battle Merchants’ production, I’m afraid. So the expansion made my game-tweaking side happy.

That said, it’s quite normal to see a big improvement to your game well after it’s too late to include it in your base game. So an expansion isn’t a bad place to put it. Just don’t make a habit of it, and don’t release base games that are clearly suboptimal or broken!

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICES: Gino Brancazio, Keith Burgun, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Brad Price

Meaningful Decisions: Daniel Solis on Design Choices in Belle of the Ball

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Daniel Solis, the designer of Belle of the Ball, about drafting games, character creation, humor in games and more.

Photo by Hayley Helmstedtler

The core mechanism in Belle of the Ball features two columns of cards from which players can draft. Was the two-column draft always a feature, or were there previous versions you can tell us about?

The first version of the game mixed all of the cards together in a single deck, meaning that sometimes you had to decide whether to take a special action (from a Belle card) or start building up your party (from a Guest card).

Sometimes you’d hit streaks where the whole line was all guest cards or all Belle cards. It also meant that our currency (Regrets) would often get clogged up with a single hoarder. Later in development with Dice Hate Me, we decided to split the lines.

This divided up the Regrets a bit so they were more liquid. It also meant what was an occasional decision between Action or Set Collection now occurred *all* the time.

What tips can you share with designers who want to create a compelling drafting mechanism?

Drafting is just one way of acquiring cards. It could just as easily be a random deal to each player. The heart of a drafting game is giving players reasons to prefer one card over another. That’s the minimum standard. Ideally, you give them reasons to want to keep *all* the cards available.

Set Collection is the most common method of making drafting a compelling decision. You see it in 7 Wonders, Sushi Go, and in Belle of the Ball. However, I like it when there is a whole other layer of decision-making *after* you’ve selected your card.

Look at games like:

• Among the Stars, where each card is a module of your space station;
• or Citadels, where each card is a special action;
• or Gravwell, where each card determines when and how fast your ship can move.

Finding the reason to draft X, Y, or Z is what makes a drafting mechanism interesting.

Belle of the Ball features a wide range of characters representing various colors, genders and body types. How and why did you ensure this would be the case?

You can actually download the art direction document I sent to Jacqui Davis.

We have a LOT of unique guest characters in Belle of the Ball, which to me meant there was no excuse to have a homogenous appearance for the whole cast. It would just be so bland! Also it helps for gameplay to be able to quickly and easily distinguish one guest from another.

I knew Jacqui Davis was particularly skilled at creating unique silhouettes, which is why I really wanted her for the job. I wanted a wide spectrum of ethnic diversity and gender expression, from stern Victorian aristocrats to colorful artistic bohemians. Jacqui could draw it all and fast.

What are the benefits of including diverse characters, and what are the drawbacks?

The benefits are numerous. Everyone who plays the game has their own favorite character. The marketing has no shortage of funny-looking characters to show off in publicity material. And we don’t run into the representation-problem that unfortunately is too common in board game art.

The only drawback is that we needed a suitable art budget for the job. It’s a big investment, but well worth it in the end.

Should designers have these aspects of their games’ characters in mind throughout the process, or is it primarily a consideration once the game is nearing publication?

It depends on your relationship with your publisher. Early on, I had publishers who really wanted to change the theme of Belle to something else. That would mean all these characters never would have even been created.

For any designer, I advise that they focus on the game’s design foremost. If the theme is really that important to the designer, the mechanics should be fundamentally and inextricably tied to that theme. So tightly, that decoupling them would pretty much make it a different game entirely.

Belle of the Ball brings out a lot of laughter from players, both through the silly names and titles of its characters and through surprising and clever uses of the Belle cards. How did you work humor into the game?

Humor in games is tricky. Belle is a funny game, but it isn’t a COMEDY game. Comedy games really try hard to make you laugh, but that’s really not sustainable. After the first time you see a joke on a card, the humor fades fast.

So I first acknowledged that any humor I inject into the game myself would have a short shelf life. I knew that I could get a chuckle by making players announce some tongue-twister names. Individually they’re amusing, but get funnier in rapid succession, like Eddie Izzard’s Englebert Humperdinck routine or Key & Peele’s East/West Football sketch.

Because it’s unlikely for the same player to take the same guest in multiple games, that extends the humor just a bit. You get to watch some other chump stumble over Capable Canklerack or Fffffff Flippinbird.

But aside from that, the game isn’t really trying too hard to force a laugh. It just allows players to make funny choices and express a touch of exaggerated regality. It’s not really trying too hard for the joke, you know?

Is there a difference between humor derived from flavor text and artwork, and humor that emerges from gameplay? What can designers do if they want the focus to be on one or the other?

Ack. I think I answered this question above. Sorry about that!

Well first of all, writing comedy is HARD. I used to work in advertising with some very funny people and that takes WORK. Then you tack on the job of designing a game around that? No way, that ain’t the job for me.

So my advice to designers is to focus on the game and collaborate with someone skilled at comedy writing to handle that kind of flavor text.

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Zachery Cook, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICES: Gino Brancazio, Keith Burgun, Kiva Fecteau, Scott Gottreu, JR Honeycutt, Brad Price

Meaningful Decisions: Adam P. McIver on Design Choices in Coin Age

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Adam P. McIver, the designer of Coin Age, about the rise of microgames, player-supplied components, endgames and player control, and more.

Coin Age was designed to play on a single wallet-sized card using spare change that players would have readily available, making the game extremely portable. Are player habits changing in favor of lighter, quicker, more portable games? Do microgames have any other, less-obvious virtues?

I do think there has been a growing market for smaller games, but I’m not sure it’s solely because gamers are looking for shorter games. Portability and price point are big factors as well. It seems like most gamers (including myself) would rather take a dozen smaller games to a gathering than three or four large ones, especially if the smaller games pack as much of a punch.

Before Coin Age was picked up for publication by Tasty Minstrel Games, players had to use their own pocket change to play the game. What made you decide to require players to bring their own components to the table? Is this approach only valid for microgames, or can other types of games do it?

Well, Cheapass Games has obviously been following that model for years, and if your target audience is hardcore gamers you can be sure they have a plethora of bits laying around that they can sub into a game. The trick is to make sure your consumer doesn’t feel shorted when they have to provide their own pieces. Most of us can scrounge up $1.56 in change by checking a few pockets or looking under couch cushions. I thought most of the 100 or so copies I handed out at Gen Con 2013 were just going to get tossed in the garbage as soon as I was out of sight, so handing out $1.56 to each person as well just seemed like overkill, haha.

Coin Age ends under certain conditions that are within the players’ control. Are there any pitfalls that designers should be aware of if they choose to give players the power to set the endgame?

It’s a double-edged sword; it feels great to perform the final, winning move BUT it can feel pretty crummy to see your opponent plop down several coins, end the game, and win by a mile. A large portion of the strategy is limiting your opponent’s ability to end the game, or leave the board in such a way that if they do end the game, they won’t have the most points. Ultimately, the saving grace of Coin Age is its short playing time. If you allow your opponent an easy game end, you can clear the map and play again!

If you’re designing a game and intend to give the players control of when to end the game, try to make sure that players won’t feel like they were shorted by the experience. The longer your game, the more players are likely to notice the amount of time they are investing in turns, and therefore they will be more likely to feel slighted if their opponents receive more turns.

You created a series of new Coin Age maps for the Kickstarter campaign. Each one plays differently despite their small size. What did you learn about making maps for games, especially when working within tight constraints?

Having multiple maps wasn’t my intention at the beginning of the process, but I had playtested several arrangements to land on my favorite. When it became evident that backers really wanted a variety of maps, I was able to bring back some of those runner-ups. All the maps we included in the final version follow a few general ground rules, such as keeping the number of overall spaces the same. During playtesting, I realized that fighting for majority is fun, and tying for it generally isn’t. Because of that, I made sure that each map only has a few regions with even numbers of spaces: players can’t tie for control in a region with an odd number of spaces!

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Richard Durham, Matthew O’Malley, Isaias Vallejo

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Stephen B Davies, Luis Lara, Behrooz Shahriari, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Robert Booth, Zachery Cook, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Marcel Perro

APPRENTICE: Gino Brancazio, JR Honeycutt, Brad Price

Meaningful Decisions: Matt Leacock on Design Choices in Forbidden Desert

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Matt Leacock, the designer of cooperative games such as Pandemic, Forbidden Island and its successor, Forbidden Desert, about reusing game elements, creating “artificial intelligence,” variable player powers and weaknesses, and more.

Forbidden Desert is a sequel to Forbidden Island, borrowing some of its overall structure from its predecessor. Yet it also introduces new mechanisms that make it much more than just a retread. Where’s the line between reworking and rehashing? How can a designer know when a mechanism shared with another game is too similar? How can they know when it’s too different?

I imagined the Forbidden games as being episodes in an adventure serial. So when I set down to design Forbidden Desert, there were some structural things I wanted to maintain. I figured players would expect to have a role, work cooperatively, and manage a budget of actions each turn with a common goal in mind. That said, I really wanted the game to stand out on its own by giving it some unique elements.

Part of the fun of designing Forbidden Desert was coming up with twists on Forbidden Island. Some of these were inversions: In Island, you often drown because there’s too much water, while in Desert, you run the risk of dying of thirst. In Island, the land around you gradually disappears, while in Desert, the sand piles up around you, threatening to bury you alive. Rather than dress up Forbidden Island in new clothes, my approach was to take many of the existing components and concepts and twist them into something new.

That approach was pretty clear for me from the start—I wanted to create a new game. By holding some things constant (pawns, roles, action-point allowance system, and a card-driven threat engine) I was able to give players a game that had familiar elements so they could more quickly get playing. But by twisting things, I tried to ensure that they were getting something new. While testing the game I repeatedly asked people if they felt the game was different enough—would they consider owning both—and got consistent feedback that it was and they would.

The storm in Forbidden Desert is controlled by a single deck of movement cards, creating a sort of “artificial intelligence” that bedevils players. It’s an even simpler version of the location cards in Pandemic and Forbidden Island that guide the games’ opposition to players. What have you learned about developing an AI that’s easy for players to implement yet challenging to play against, and that’s predictable enough to not be chaotic but not so predictable that it’s solvable?

I’ve learned that they take a lot of work to balance! Forbidden Desert required a tremendous amount of testing in order to ensure the game was winnable across the different numbers of players, different role mixes, and the various difficulty settings. We logged several hundred plays (and at the time, I got quite good at the game). As an aside: I’d encourage people to start out on the easiest level when they start as there’s plenty to learn through the course of repeated play.

I aim to create elegant, emergent systems: games that generate a lot of complex problems through very simple procedures. I don’t want the players to have to do a lot of bookkeeping in order to determine what their virtual opponent is doing on a given turn. So far I’ve relied on AIs driven by dice and cards since they’re familiar and immediate. The trick is getting the right procedures baked into the cards and the correct card mixes into a deck.

Getting an even, steady-state challenge that the players have to beat back is hard in itself. The bigger challenges come from creating a sense of increased pressure and finding ways to provide waves of hope and fear from their virtual enemy. I don’t want the whole experience to be a plateau (which can feel like grinding) and I also don’t want a steady, evenly increasing ramp for the players. Instead I try to modulate the tension to increase engagement, like a good story would.

I don’t have a silver bullet here for doing this. When doing expansions, I’m fortunate that I can easily riff off of my own prior work, but each time I’m creating a new game I stare at a blank sheet of paper like the rest of you and just have to buckle up, play, experiment, cherry pick, and refine.

There are several ways players can lose in Forbidden Desert. The sand storm meter can top out, the sand tiles can be used up, or one player could run out of water. As a result, players must guard against threats from multiple angles. How did you decide the right number of “threat vectors”? What happens if a design has too many or too few?

Oh, I think a single threat vector can work just fine for a simpler game. The games I’ve done work better with multiple threats since it gives the players more to attend to over the course of a 45-minute game. If you have too few vectors, the game may feel a bit simplistic or flat. If you introduce too many, however, you run the risk of creating too much cognitive overhead and/or confusion.

On a related note, sometimes these game-ending threats help you out of tricky game design situations. For example, in Pandemic, I wasn’t sure what should happen when the players ran out of cubes or cards. Introducing the simple rule, “you lose” solved the problem! It just so happened that this was also a fun way to ramp up tension.

I’ve introduced (and pulled out) other loss conditions that were similar answers to design problems. For example, in Forbidden Desert, for a short time, the players lost if a part of the airship appeared in the center of the storm. Testing revealed that players consistently felt cheated by this though, and so I quickly removed the rule. At the time though, it was a simple way to explain what would happen in the situation.

In addition to variable player powers, Forbidden Desert also gives certain players variable weaknesses, since some characters start out with less water than others. How did you decide on these handicaps? Do variable weaknesses influence player behavior any more or less than variable powers?

Since some roles were slightly more powerful than others I tweaked the canteen levels as a counter-balance to their power. This also helps give the players a bit more individuality. You as the Engineer can feel really powerful since you can remove a lot of sand each turn. But you have to acknowledge your Achilles heel—you can die of thirst during the first pass through the Storm deck.

The positive role powers influence player behavior far more in Forbidden Desert than the (smaller) individual weaknesses. I rarely see anyone attracted or repelled by a role because of its canteen. The players’ focus is usually squarely on the powers.

Variable weaknesses of a greater magnitude would be a fun area to explore for future games. I usually try to make the role powers sound so amazing that (on first read) players may assume that they’re broken. That sets the challenge then to make the game hard enough to be worthy of the powers and also to make the roles equally attractive. Perhaps roles in a future game could be even more powerful if each of them came with a significant handicap.

Read more in-depth interviews with board game designers in our Meaningful Decisions series.

Meaningful Decisions: Ben Rosset on Design Choices in Mars Needs Mechanics

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Ben Rosset, designer of the tight economics game Mars Needs Mechanics, about modeling real-world economics in games, sources of randomness, simplifying a design and more.

The way the prices of goods rise and fall in Mars Needs Mechanics is a function both of how recently they’ve been purchased (demand from players) and how frequently they turn up in the component deck (supply from the game). Are there pitfalls that designers of economic games should be aware of when modeling supply and demand? If the model diverges from real life, is that a flaw or can it be a design feature?

First, thanks for the questions! I think the biggest thing to be careful about when designing economics games is having a system with wild, chaotic price swings. Players need to have enough control that they feel like their decisions are meaningful and consequential. I think the model can certainly diverge from real life as long as it works in the game.

Are there examples, in your design or others, of economics that diverge from real-life models, and what makes them work?

I love realism because I think audiences can more deeply connect with it emotionally and learn to play faster and more intuitively. Brew Crafters [another design by Rosset] is not an economics game, but one of my design goals was to make it intensely thematic and realistic. I want the game to be fun, first and foremost, but I also want players to feel like they’ve learned a little bit about what it actually takes to brew beer and run a brewery. I know I’ve gotten right to where I want to be because even people that have no interest in beer (are not beer drinkers) tell me they have a lot of fun learning about the brewing process while playing Brew Crafters.

There are two main sources of uncertainty in Mars Needs Mechanics: game-controlled randomness from the component deck and player-controlled randomness from your opponents. How did you decide the proper balance for your game, and what hints can designers look for to determine the best source of uncertainty for their design?

The player-controlled randomness of what your opponents do is going to be a part of every game (unless you truly have a multi-player solitaire game where you aren’t affecting the other players). So be careful about designing too much more luck or randomness into the game beyond the effect your opponents are already having. Mars Needs Mechanics is interesting because it plays very differently at two players versus four players. In a two-player game, each player has much more control over what happens in the market. At four players, there is less. So I had to find that sweet spot where the game would still work well at both ends of the player count. It turned out that having eight cards in the market each round hit that spot really well. Seven just wasn’t enough, and at nine the rounds lasted so long that early round decisions became too meaningless. Eight was just right.

The mechanism cards were added to Mars Needs Mechanics after it was picked up by publisher Nevermore Games. The cards add variety and color to a very tight core game and open up new strategies. What should designers be aware of when deciding how much to trim from their designs? How to decide between elegance and color?

I say, “always go for elegance.” Find the core of your game, and take away everything else that doesn’t directly support that. That’s what I did with Mars Needs Mechanics. A 45-minute elegant game is always better than a 75-minute sloppy game that has a lot of color that doesn’t need to be there. I talked a lot more about simplifying your designs in this talk that I gave a couple months ago.

What are some key points designers should keep in mind when simplifying their games?

This is one of those “the most important thing is to remember the most important thing” answers. For new designers, the instinct is always to solve a problem by adding something to the game to balance it out. Ninety percent of the time the correct answer is to simplify the problem away. Take something out instead. Remembering to do that, though, is surprisingly difficult. So difficult that I’ve got a big sign above my desk reminding me to do it!

The other key point to remember is to design to get rid of exceptions. If you have 10 different types of cards in your game, and nine of them act the same way, but the 10th does something totally different, ask yourself if that’s really necessary. Because for every exception to the players’ learned expectation about how something should behave, the more mental energy they have to spend remembering that exception and the less mental energy they have for actually playing the game and having fun. I’m working on a new game right now that my co-designer and I are hoping falls into the “gateway game” category. We are evaluating every single mechanic, symbol, and rule to see if it’s really needed or if it can be simplified or just plain gotten rid of. It’s an integral part of the design process. If you’re designing something like a heavy euro, you have more leeway to have more rules complexity and exceptions, because your audience will be expecting that. But even in that case, less is still almost always more.

Meaningful Decisions: Jesse Catron on Board Game Design Choices

In our Meaningful Decisions series, we ask designers about the design choices they made while creating their games, and what lessons other designers can take away from those decisions.

In this edition, we talk with Jesse Catron, the designer of fish-racing game Salmon Run, about modular boards, endgame conditions, interactivity and deck-building games.

Salmon Run uses a modular board to increase replayability. How did the game’s board reach its final form, and what should designers watch out for when they create variable setups? Is there a danger of too much variability creating an inconsistent or unbalanced play experience?

My early prototypes had a fixed board. In the back of my mind I knew I would need some way to vary the setup, but I wanted to first concentrate on the game’s mechanisms. Once the mechanics were better refined I would readdress the board. The spatial aspects of all the obstacles and special hexes in Salmon Run are vital to the gameplay, so I knew some variation was needed or else optimal paths upriver would quickly be discovered and the game would become stale. One approach would be to make multiple complete river boards but, again, the problem of optimal paths for each river remains. Also, production costs would increase significantly. It became very evident that a modular system was needed.

There are a few significant things to consider when creating a modular board system. The first is whether one should do so or not. Modular boards are a great way to introduce variability in the game experience while keeping the players engaged game after game. Modularity is a great way to instill replayability. Another plus is the flexibility they provide in varying the game’s difficulty or length or both. Also, with a well-designed modular system, it’s very easy to later add in expansions. The downside is also the variability. Like you mentioned, too much variability can and does create inconsistent experiences. With a fixed board, the designer has complete control over all the board’s interactions. The designer knows with certainty which spaces or resources are beside each other, choke-points can be integrated as desired, and terrain effects can be easily balanced, etc. This is not as easily accomplished with modular boards.

After deciding to use modular boards, a designer should think about what degree of modularity is required for his or her game. The more modular, the more variability but less control. Settlers of Catan is a good example of a very modular system. Each terrain type is its own hex, which can be arranged in countless ways and patterns, and each terrain hex is given a semi-random resource generation value. This allows for a very replayable experience since each setup has new “optimal” locations. The incredibly high amount of variability works well for Settlers because each “board” contains a small amount of information–its terrain type and a number for resource generation–and the boards are redundant with multiples of each type.

On the other end of the modularity spectrum is a game like Kingdom Builder. It uses modular boards in only four quadrants. While a fairly simple system, Donald X. Vaccarino was able to control all the terrain interaction as well as the location and distribution of the special hexes within each quadrant. Maintaining that control in the design is vital to its gameplay, while its small modularity helps prevent the game from becoming stale. Interestingly, he added variable scoring conditions to further increase its replayability.

Salmon Run falls in between these two. It couldn’t be too modular because that could lead to impassible areas, nor could the modules be too large and easily “solvable.” In the end, I made them just large enough to balance the obstacles and special hexes while allowing for enough space for consistent junctions between the boards.

That brings me to the next thing to consider about modular boards: how they fit together. Salmon Run is a linear race, so I only had to be concerned with junctions in the vertical direction. The main concern with fitting the boards together was preventing impassible areas, since mechanically the salmon can’t swim backwards and only progress forward. For instance, the modular system should not allow a waterfall to be directly adjacent vertically to another waterfall. So I designed the entrance and exit of each river section to be identical in width and composition so all boards fit together seamlessly.

Depending on the module’s shape and complexity, the designer will have to be concerned with their junctions in one or more directions. Since the junctions between boards were identical in Salmon Run I could use rectangular boards and bisect some hexes. If the junctions aren’t uniform, more complicated modular shapes may be needed, like in Kingdom Builder.

Lastly, a designer should decide how much information or complexity to put in each module. This is very much related to the choice of how many modules to use. The number of modules to use is inversely proportional to the size and complexity contained within each module. A few, large modular boards can contain lots of information and complexity easily, and the designer can more easily balance them and their interactions. Large numbers of small modules are probably best designed with limited information/complexity to prevent aberrant and unwanted board interactions. I’m sure there are exceptions.

In Salmon Run, each river section has its own little theme and set of choices, like taking the shorter direct path over the waterfall or the longer gentle path around it or perhaps a waterfall choke-point to tighten the pack and ensure some fatigue is incurred. The special hexes also tend to be split into choices between say speed (Double Swim) versus maneuverability (Wild), or Bear versus Eagle, etc. I rated each river section as Easy, Medium, and Hard so the game can be accessible to a variety of gamer types. The modularity also allowed me to vary the river’s total length and therefore its playing time.

For me the benefits of using a modular system were great, and those who like the game seem to really enjoy its great replayability. Admittedly, some who don’t like Salmon Run don’t like it because the variable setup in their first play created an experience that was not ideal for their expectations–often a “gamer” who plays a short setup with many easy boards. Particularly in an environment where new games often get judged on one play, there is surely some risk that variable setups will result in a lackluster play experience and cloud a player’s opinion. While a designer can mitigate this somewhat, it’s certainly something to be cognizant of when designing modular boards. Nevertheless, I’m very happy with the modular system I used in Salmon Run and am a huge fan of modular systems in general.

Salmon Run is a racing game where reaching the finish line first isn’t necessarily going to win you the game–you also have to have fewer Fatigue cards than everyone else who reached the end. Why didn’t you go with a simple first-to-finish win condition?

In a racing game, or any game really, each player should start with an equal chance to win. In Salmon Run, and in many games, the player to go first is randomly chosen. It would be unfair to randomly give out a first-player advantage, so it was important that each player had the same opportunity and number of turns to finish the race. A large part of Salmon Run is managing fatigue: avoiding waterfalls or not, attacking other players with the bear, resting in reeds, and pacing oneself. Therefore it was fitting to use fatigue as a factor in the race results. It’s also thematic, salmon that are less fatigued are more fit for procreation.

Deck-building games have a reputation for being low-interaction affairs. You’ve gotten around this in Salmon Run with several take-that cards, like the Bear and the Eagle, and some more subtle cards, like Current. What should designers of deck-builders be aware of in regards to interactivity?

There are many types of gamers. Some are perfectly content to put their head down, build their engine, and play a multi-player solitaire game. Others are more social and crave loads of player interaction. Most fall somewhere in between. Each designer should be aware of his or her target audience and what kind of experience he or she is trying to convey. If you decide to include interactivity, you need to make sure that the method of interaction is not less valuable than not interacting. For example, if I play a card to hurt Player 1 instead of playing a card to help myself, Player 2 benefits most from the exchange. It’s not really benefiting me to interact. The design should lend itself that players will want to interact.

In Salmon Run, I encouraged (or forced) interaction by including a bear card in each deck. Also, the bear can affect multiple players at once, as does the current and rapids. It was designed to be very accessible to both families and gamers, so I knew I wanted interaction but not to the degree where feelings would get too hurt or gamers would scoff at its take-that elements. Consequently, I limited the interactive cards to have fairly mild immediate effects but can have more strategic long-term effects. The bears add fatigue instead of killing you, the current moves everyone (potentially), etc. Also, playing these special cards doesn’t contribute to over-fatiguing your salmon for the turn the way playing swim cards do. There is little to discourage players from interacting.

The key to instilling interactivity is to know your audience, ensure it’s worthwhile for players, limit/mitigate its effects, and make it readily available.