11.25.11 – Team Play, Pt. 2

Surely we must hang together, or we will surely hang separately.  Then again, perhaps that’s what some want…  We’re having a deeper look at team play today.  You can see a previous Game Mechanic article on team play here. 

Full Co-op:  Cooperative games have come some distance since since my previous article.  Forbidden Island, Ghost Stories, Flash Point; the list goes on.  One thing the games just listed have in common is a general formula of Action Point-based turns with a phase of the board beating on you between turns.  Nothing wrong with that formula; it works *really* well.  It keeps tension high the entire game.  But perhaps there are other ways to do it… 

• Wreck It All – Have the board completely wreck your trash before you even begin.  It’s then up to the players to rebuild as best they can within some kind of time constraint.  Essentially, this is the game taking most or all of its ‘bad’ actions all at once.  One potential drawback to this is a loss of tension as players start doing well and undoing the damage.  However, what if you combined Wreck It All with Pivot Point below, with the pivots being timers running out or things being fixed?
• Pivot Point – Players have breathing room of a set number of turns or until some key event occurs to get their acts together before something terrible happens and the game bares its fangs.  Betrayal at House on the Hill does this with its Traitor mechanic, actually; players scramble to gain as much stuff as possible before the Haunt begins and the board, under control of a Traitor player, tries to kill them. 

Hidden Role:  This is another form of team play that has seen serious burgeoning:  Battlestar Galactica, Resistance, and Panic Station are all good examples of this mechanic.  Players are dealt ‘role’ or ‘loyalty’ cards that dictate which team she is on and possibly what her goals are to win.  Games of this nature tend to focus on the tension of not knowing who is on your team; can you trust your neighbor with that really good equipment card, or will he just turn around and use it on you?

A possible twist on this is multiple roles per player.  In a Goal Completion style game, each role has objectives for the player that grant (or take away) VP and bonuses for doing them.  However, what if objectives on two role cards are at cross-purposes and can actually result in the player *losing* points for following the wrong objectives?  This could cause some cognitive suffering for your players.

Coopertition:  Coopertition, or working together while still trying to be the overall winner, has also seen some implementation; Castle Panic and the Renegade role from Bang! come to mind.  Perhaps it’s a business game where only one player gets to be CEO at the end, but if players don’t work together, the company will have to shutter its doors.

Be mindful, though:  if there is the possibility the players can lose if they don’t work together while pursuing a personal win, you may end up with a lagging player throwing the game to spite everyone else.  I’ve had prototypes have this issue, and it ain’t pretty to watch.

That’s all for now, everybody.  Now if you’ll excuse me, this loyalty card says I need to go stir up some revolution… I hear it’s a good thing to have every now and then.

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Scoring Timing, 9.8.09

In terms of broad concepts, scoring is in every game.  The end scoring in Coloretto, unit generation in Risk… the list can go on.  What makes each game’s scoring different?  And not just in what is scored; of course you get points for settlements and cities in Settlers of Catan and hexes captured in Memoir ’44.  One of the key differences (and the one we’ll be investigating today) is the timing of said scoring.  Are points score instantly?  Do you need to wait for the right time to cash in?  It doesn’t even have to be the final score you’re aiming for; hitting your opponent in a fighting game reduces his ‘Life Score’, bringing you closer to winning that particular match.  Lets have a look at the effects of scoring timing.

-Instant Gratification.  Players are rewarded instantly for their actions.  Whether it be reducing your opponent’s hit point total or scoring a goal in a sports game, this is about as straightforward as it gets.  This form of scoring is typically combined with other scoring techniques to create different strategies.  Ticket to Ride is an excellent example of  this.  A player is instantly rewarded points for placing trains on a route, but said route may or may not contribute to their destination cards (which tend to offer big point swings in the endgame).  In a combat game, each hit brings one player closer to winning and the victim closer to defeat; even if defeat is just losing a unit in a particular instance.  Even within the same way to perform scoring, the effect can be dramatically different.

-Save It Up.  Players save scorable resources until a time that it is most beneficial to them to cash in.  This scoring technique is all about timing and predicting what will (or won’t) be valuable later in the game.  This is often used in commodities/stock trade games.  You may have say, 30 shares of stock X, but you won’t score anything good at $1 per share as compared to say, $9 per share.  The Motley Fool’s Buy Low, Sell High is essentially this with the added spin that each share sold actually decreases further profits due to there being more supply available.  This creates a good tension if the commodities fluctuate a bit and increases if the scoring is based upon other players’ choices (much as in Buy Low, Sell High).

-Endgame Scoring.  Different ways of doing endgame scoring itself has been previously covered here; this is going to deal more with the effect it has on play.  Endgame scoing creates more tense play in making the game uncertain until the very end.  Perhaps that player in third place has a bunch of Resource X she has been saving all game to cash in for big points.  Maybe the leader didn’t account for final scoring and overextended, causing him to come in a close second.  If it creates tension and uncertainty in the final outcome of a game, end game scoring is being used correctly.

 

Well folks, I’ve written enough.  It’s time to turn it in for final scoring.

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Combat, 9.4.09

Time to duke it out!  Combat is another staple of many games.  From the dice fest that is Risk to the calculated move/countermove of chess, combat takes many different forms in gaming.  Lets throw down some ways combat can be done…

-Dice.  Combat is determined by opponents rolling dice.  There are many, MANY iterations of this one alone, some of which I covered in my very first article.  Another way dice are used in combat is by placing symbols on combat dice that have different effects/results.  This approach has been popular lately, appearing in titles ranging from Doom to Memoir ’44.  The gist is this:  the dice you roll have different symbols on each face.  Different symbols have different effects on combat, from hitting the opposing force to forcing you to discard an ammo token.  God Dice takes this and turns it on its ear a bit; the symbols on the dice are used to match up different combinations on your character to determine what attack you use that round.

-Cards.  Players use cards with numerical values to determine combat results.  This is another common one.  Typically, each player plays a card and the high card wins the battle (or adds the card’s value to the unit’s base combat value).  Cosmic Encounter is probably one of the best representations of this.  Essentially, a player attacks an opposing planet with 1-4 ships and both attacker and defender play cards from their hand and add it to the number of attacking (or defending) units with high number winning outright.  But what if the cards represented ammunition?  Take a wild west style game where each player had a gun with different ‘stats’; ammo, firepower, accuracy, range, etc.  Each player also has a ‘bullet deck’ that she can draw from to load into her gun.  Each card in the bullet deck would have an shot strength, accuracy modifier and so forth.  Players would either ‘load’ their gun with as many cards equal to her gun’s ammo limit, creating an ‘ammo deck’ and shuffles them up.  Each time they fire, the top card of their ammo deck is flipped over to determine how good the shot is.  Once the ammo deck is empty, that player must reload by taking extra time/actions/etc.

-Capture.  Players determine combat results by moving two pieces onto the same space.  This one is probably among the simplest of all, with the attacker often being the automatic winner; chess utilizes this.  Stratego turns it around a bit by giving each piece a ‘combat ranking’, with higher ranked pieces automatically beating lower ranked pieces and the attacker winning a tie.  You could turn this into a ‘siege’ style mechanic by having capture still work this way, but requiring multiple units to capture a space/opposing unit.  Take a fantasy siege game where units represent armies, siegecraft and supply trains; each unit also has a ‘combat rank’ as in Stratego.  Players are trying to capture X cities from opponents by placing say, between three and five of their units in said opposing cities.  If armies encounter each other outside of cities, a battle ensues much like Stratego, but where combat rank can be altered by card play.  That sounds kind of fun…

Those took the fight out of me; I surrender.

 

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Cadence, 9.2.09

Games have a rhythm.  Dealing of cards, moving of pieces, bargaining… the list goes on as to what beats out the cadence of a particular title.  Choices in design greatly affect this basic cadence.  If you want a frenetic, fast moving game,  you don’t have the players reference 17 different charts to determine outcomes of an action.  Lets see some of the things that vary the pace of a game.  Also, please note that these do not account for Analysis Paralysis, or when a player is overwhelmed by the decisions available to him and ends up taking longer than the average player.

-Number of actions per turn.  As recently mentioned, the number of actions a player may take during her turn greatly impacts the flow of the game; with fewer actions typically increasing the pacing of a title.  Increasing the number of actions while reducing the possible options for each action is another way to keep the flow of a game faster.  There are exceptions to this due to other factors:  combat typically slows down a game (Warhammer 40k has only a few orders for each unit type, but resolving said actions short of moving involves several extra steps) as does a sheer number of choices (as in Go or Chess each turn).  Which leads us to…

-Number of options per turn.  Similar to the previous point, the number of choices available to a player can be overwhelming in some instances; Agricola and Tikal are both good examples of the sheer plethora of choice that can make for a slower paced game, with Agricola having the added weight of resources to allocate optimally.  Chess and Go can also be very long as it is expected for each player to take a reasonable amount of time to weigh every move.  It should also be noted that reducing options available doesn’t necessarily increase the pace of a game.  If each option triggered a different type of phase (production, combat, trade, etc), the flow would be more based upon the phase complexity of your chosen option…

-Turn phase structure.  More complex turns tend to lead to slower cadence games (or games with streaks of ‘quick play’ amongst slower moves).  If a turn has 8 phases in a particular title, odds are decent that there is a LOT going on for players to keep track of in the game.  Twilight Imperium is a good example of a complex turn structure.  Each player takes turns taking various actions (with each action having several steps) until everyone passes, then players perform upkeep on their systems, planets, ships and so forth.  The complexity of the turn structure is necessitated by how much is going on in a typical game of TI 3, though.  Compare that to say, Revolution.  Players place their bids, then each potential bid on the bid board gets resolved.  While being a 45 minute game, it has a good cadence to it thanks to simultaneous action choice in the bidding and the quick resolution of each bid.

-Level of player interaction.  Similarly, longer games with high player interaction can feel like they have a good flow.  Both a good and bad example at once is Diplomacy.  In Diplomacy, players negotiate with each other in timed rounds before turning in written orders for how their units move.  The negotiations with the other players are key to a player’s survival or being taken down.  We will look at Austria and Italy in the early game, respectively.  At the beginning of the game, Austria typically feels as though there isn’t enough time.  She must speak with Turkey, Russia, Germany and Italy (as all four of them are on Austria’s doorstep) while trying to come out on top.  Italy, however, has Austria to deal with, and possibly Germany in a stab at Austria.  Until the midgame, Austria and Italy remain this way; one overtaxed by the time limit (and feeling a frenetic play), the other underwhelmed by the interaction that everyone else (except Italy) is receiving.

There are a variety of ways to affect the cadence of your title.  Just be sure the cadence you choose for your game keeps your players marching on with the flow of the game.

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Downtime Reduction, 8.31.09

Downtime, or the time between turns, in games is often acceptable, provided it isn’t too long.  It can get out of control, though; Tikal is probably the most egregious offender.  While an excellent game, you can often take a nap between turns as other players optimize their moves.  The ideal ways to minimize this are to have a little something for everyone to do on every turn or streamlining the rules.  Lets have a look at a few ways to minimize downtime, shall we?

-Trade.  If the game allows for it, trade is a good way to allow players to do something when it isn’t their turn.  It encourages players to pay attention to what the active player is doing so that they can offer up an optimal trade.

-Turn Structure.  Remove extraneous and repetitive steps from the turn structure.  As an example, if players are required to count how many areas they control every phase (and there is notable change between each count),  your game is gonna bog down due simply to counting.  Either do a control assessment once each round or have a ‘leader board’ that tracks it for everyone (although this can still potentially cause issues due to fiddlyness).  Or, if players have LOTS of action points each round to the point of causing excessive cognitive suffering, reduce the amount of action points (and corresponding costs) and see what happens…

-Simultaneous Action Selection.  Players select their key actions to perform at the same time as the other players.  While players will still need to wait for everyone to choose their action(s) and perform it, choosing what to do all at the same time reduces the AP factor a bit.

-Streamline Combat.  Make combat as swift and simple as possible.  This is one of the most common sources of excessive downtime.  Unless you’re designing the next ASL, your combat system should resolve quickly while still giving players some strategy to their moves.  Modified die rolls, card play, rock-paper-scissor unit types; the list goes on as to what can be implemented.

Now if only downtime were as easy to get rid of in real life…

 

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Power Grid without Power Stations, 8.31.09

Time for another design experiment.  Lets throw another game out of whack this week as another warm up.  Power Grid needs power stations, right?  Out they go.  What happens to the game?  Is it still feasible?  What else would need to change?

Here’s an example while keeping the ‘Power Grid’ theme…

-To stay ‘Power Grid’, the game would need a way to compensate for the power stations’ loss…

• They are what generate your income each turn, and allow you to increase said income.
• The power stations transition the game into ‘Phase 2′ and are the end game condition.
• A level of depth is lost to not needing to plan out your ‘route’ any more.

If it were to stay ‘Power Grid’, it would more be ‘Power Grid Light’.  Make the board smaller, remove the connections, and have a numbered ‘Demand’ track for each city that is kept in the game.  Each turn, players generate power one plant per player at a time and chooses a city to provide the power to.  Then, slide the corresponding ‘Demand Track’ marker as many spaces as power was generated for that city.  Once a city’s demand has been met, no further player may provide power to that city.  Further, players get paid piecemeal for each power plant individually, as some power may end up being wasted on ‘oversatisfying’ a city’s Demand Track.

So what can you chappies come up with?  Something positively electrifying, no doubt.

 

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Storytelling, 8.28.09

An underutilized concept in board games is telling a story.  Sure, in a sense, many games tell a story.  But not in the same sense of a movie or a book.  Movies, books, even video games, can portray stories of astonishing depth and complexity leaving the viewer with a sense of loss, wonder or even a need for introspection.

It is a problem with the medium itself.  A board game is a competition where specific rules must be followed in order to play.  A game may be dripping with theme, but necessarily more attention is given to the play of the game by its players.  While not every game needs to have emotional impact, it could take a good game and make it a great game.  More significantly, a game often needs to have a winner (and a clear ending).  Other mediums can leave story elements unresolved intentionally to provoke emotion.  What if we were to sneak storytelling into the play itself?  Here are a few specific examples of what I mean…

-Moral Ambiguity.  Take a post-apocalyptic game where every player is a survivor in a small encampment.  There are other ‘NPC’ characters that offer abilities, VP if they survive, etc. represented by cards, as well.  Over the course of the game, food and other supplies would be divvied out to NPC and player alike (with supplies given to NPCs simply ‘returned to the bank’).  If any loses too much health (or doesn’t eat enough), they die.  Basic enough premise, yes?  Curveball:  some of the characters are worth a fair # of VP but have less ability in terms of special skill or are fairly frail (a child, elderly person, etc.).  What kind of choices would players make as to who to save or give supplies to?  Purely from a rules system perspective, some options will be better than others;  keep the special skilled characters alive and so forth.  What about from a gameplay perspective?  In a situation like this, a child is a liability; they frighten easily, are very dependant upon others, the list goes on.  But it’s a child.  It’s human instinct to protect them.  This kind of trick should not be mistaken for sensationalist design (although it could indeed be used that way).  The point of this approach is to make people make difficult decisions and deal with the consequences.  What would you do in a similar situation?

-Episodic Content.  Have the game itself tell a story over several titles.  Each game could play as a stand-alone game (or be an add-on) of the original title, with each subsequent release bringing the story proper closer to the final curtain.  This approach would also allow for ‘campaign’ play, with the results of playing a previous title affecting starting conditions of the next installment in addition to stand-alone play.  The trick would be to incorporate the story into the mechanics of the game to make each one feel satisfying to play on its own, but leave the players wanting the rest of the story.

This the ending, the ending of the po-ost.  The ending.

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Special thanks to Mike Purcell and Chris Rock for their insights regarding this particular article.

Kingmaker, 8.26.09

Kingmaking is typically associated with a player that has little chance of winning arbitrarily helping a player in contention for the lead win.  Lets expand that definition a bit today.  What if kingmaker were a situation where an advantage must be given to an opponent in some form?  This could open up possibilities like these…

-I Knight Thee.  A player must choose an opponent to give a special ability to.  This could create fun tensions where players must weigh whom to favor benefits with.  Should I give this combat bonus to the player running a commerce strategy?  Then his transports will have better defense if I raid them.  Certainly not to the military player; she already has major firepower… GAAH!  While more suited for a game with a large variety of things going on such as Twilight Imperium 3 (and TI3 does have small bits of this particular mechanic), it could easily be adapted to more Euro-stylings.  Perhaps the benefit is free resources when mining.  Or reduced cost in building widgets.  The list goes on…  and so does your players’ pain (which is the reason to include something like this).

-One For You, One For Me.  Resources gathered are split between two (or more) players of the gathering player’s choice.  The split need not be even, either.  Take a Mafia-style game where players can extort money from businesses with ‘Protection Insurance’.  When doing so, the collecting player must ‘pay tribute’ to another player’s Don as a show of respect.  Which player should you give it to?  The player lagging behind?  Every other player doing this will bring said lagging player back into the lead…  A player you’re neck in neck with?  Mmmm…. Cognitive suffering.  For a spin on this, a player collecting the Insurance money could only choose from players to give to who have goons patrolling the area.  Sure, you could knock over the bank, but if the only player patrolling the area is the leader, that may not be the best choice…

-Free Rides.  An action taken applies to the player that takes it and at least one other player.  This would be more for games of worker placement or simultaneous action.  Race For The Galaxy actually implements a form of this in its action selection.  While other players may not get the bonus you do for choosing to Settle, they do still get to play Planets whether they chose to Settle or not.  Or spin it a bit.  Each turn, a player takes multiple actions and chooses one player to perform one action.  This could simulate real time in a neat way.  Take a multiplayer military game.  On each player’s turn, she does her maneuvers, attacks and so forth.  She must also choose someone else who gets to do one of those things during her turn.

Thas all I has fer ya today.  I dub thee, Lord (or Lady) Designsalot.

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Turtling, 8.24.09

Turtling, or playing very defensively, is often seen as a passive way to play.  Most common in games with a combat system, you throw up your walls and ignore everyone else unless you absolutely have to interact with them.  Rather boring.  Lets look at some ways to make turtling a more dynamic way of playing…

-To The Last Man.  Players are working together to last as long as possible in a losing situation.  Consider an Alamo-style game, where the board spawns wave after wave of doods to attack the players’ fortress.  The first few waves of grunts won’t be too bad; some minor damage to the fort itself, maybe some units lost.  Once the board starts spawning stronger units (siege, ranged units, etc.), things start getting bad.  Spend resources to repair your crumbling fortress or to activate units to fight?  Tieing it thematically to the players ‘holding the line’ while others escape is often a good touch, as well. Castle Panic is a game that utilizes this, minus the guaranteed loss aspect.  Players work together to maintain their castle while killing monsters that attack them.  If the castle falls, everyone loses…

-Turret Defense.  Players must build up their defenses (typically the aforementioned turrets) to withstand attacks from other players.  Commonly a solo play game using Starcraft or Warcraft units, this can be easily adapted to players building their own castles and turrets to defend against each other’s marauding hordes.  As above, players will have to balance building and upgrading their castle with sending out attacks against other players to keep them in check.

-Safety vs. Risky Gain.  Players must weigh the relative safety of a ‘home location’ against venturing out into the (very dangerous) wilderness.  Best suited for apocalyptic or horror based games, players must choose each round whether to take ‘home base’ specific actions (heal, repair base, repel ‘invaders, etc.) or go out into the wild to gather resources, achieve goals, etc.  This can create a very tense cooperative game after a player has a particularly bad trip ‘out there’ and must spend several turns recouperating while everyone else carries the dead weight, so to speak…

There ya are, folks.  Thanks ag… did you hear that? Oh no!  ZERG RUSH!!!!  I gotta get ou–*transmission lost*

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil

Bash The Leader, 8.21.09

It’s inherent human nature:  take down the person on top and maybe you can take their place… this occurs in many games naturally as a way to control runaway leader; Risk being the first to spring to mind.  However, once a leader is thoroughly bashed, they are often out of the game just for being ahead at the wrong time.  No fun.  What if Bash the Leader was accounted for in the design instead of just being a style of play?  If combined with suggestions from yesterday, you might get something like this…

-Scrappy Underdog.  A player in last place gets an advantage to compensate for position.  You need to be careful with this one.  Lets take our combat racing game from yesterday.  If the last place player were to get some sort of gnarly weapon as a potential catch up mechanism, he cannot use it on the leader.  Everyone else between him and the leader, though…  Give the weapon to the second (or third) place person, however, and it specifically hits the leaders only.  Combined with the speed boost the leader gets, you get tense play.  Can you take out the leader and take his place?  If you do, can you maintain your lead?  Or will you be blown up by that small yield tactical nuke as well?

-Target On Your Back.  Create a special ‘Target The Leader’ deck/set of actions.  Being in the lead is great, but it gives others opportunities to act against you.  This works best in games where rounds are short and/or taking the lead isn’t to do.  Perhaps in a claimjumping game other players may steal gold from mines of the leader with less penalty.  In an First Person Shooter style game, players could get bonus attacks against the leader.  Combine this kind of mechanic with some form of bonus for being in the lead and you have quite a frenetic game, indeed.

Bash The Leader-style games should focus on making the being the leader exciting and terrifying at the same time.  Make being the Leader something fantastic… the leader will need it with the entire board turning against her.  It should also focus more either on shorter rounds of play (to end the leader’s misery if completely destroyed and give others the chance to become the Leader).  If you’ll excuse me, I have a small yield tactical nuke that is begging for use…

Keep on designing, yo!

Phil