Variety without Headache #2 – Debts and Bones!

May 22, 2024May 6, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

A large amount of game ideas I get revolve around a cool action selection mechanism (CASM, for short), which is a pretty popular subset of Euro games. However, when it comes to building out the actions for your CASM, there’s a pretty difficult line to toe: if they’re too similar, the CASM’s interesting decision space becomes a non-decision, but if they’re too different, you have too many subsystems to teach. Too simple, and the game becomes rote, but too complex, and they take the focus away from your CASM. You need to add variety without adding headaches. It’s quite a tricky tightrope, and it can quickly lead you astray.

This is the second installment in a series about CASM-focused games with an original system that gives you actions to add meaning to your core CASM and opens up the design space for more content, without adding too much rules overhead. It’s sort of a sub-series of SISIGIP (Stuff I’d Steal in Games I Play).

As a disclaimer, I want to point out that a game is not just a pile of mechanisms of systems. A game tells a story out of interesting moments, which come out of interwoven mechanisms. You can’t just take your CASM, plug in all these actions and call it a game. This is meant to be praising and analyzing excellent design, which can hopefully serve as inspiration.

Debts!

Garphill Games’ West Kingdoms trilogy is tied by its setting of medieval France, by its recurring characters, but also by its interesting Debt mechanism. While every game has its own twist on how they work and how they interact with the rest of the game, they all have a similar starting point: some actions, whether because they are too powerful or as a way of bypassing their cost, give you a Debt card. Debt cards cost you a handful points at the end of the game, because debts are bad, you see… or are they?

Each game also includes an action to Flip a Debt, which is much rarer than gaining Debts. Flipping a Debt not only rids you of the negative points, but also gives you a small immediate bonus, because paying off your debt increases your credit rating or whatever its equivalent is in medieval France.

One of the game, Viscounts, even went further, giving us Deed cards, a positive equivalent which you can spend a Flip action on to make it go from 1 to 3 VPs.

I find this mechanism interesting because not only is it incredibly simple and fitting in the series’ focus on corruption and virtue, but also because gaining a Debt card is both a cost (-2 VPs), but also an opportunity (using a flip for a resource). Gaining a Debt card is an unvertain value: you can’t know whether you’ll have time to flip it or not, nor how much you’ll need the bonus. That Uncertainty means you can’t perfectly math out the result, which makes the decision more interesting.

It also opens up so much design room. It adds three actions (Gain a Debt, Gain a Deed, Flip a card) with a single rules, and those actions are of different value, which opens up the possibilities of combinations to interesting places by offering a way to balance outlier actions. Maybe getting 1 Gold per worker is too strong, but what if we give you a Debt for it? It adds an interesting dimension to your design space.

Now, what if you built a whole game out of this mechanism?

Bones!

You’d get Good Puppers (also known as One-Deck Puppies after the publisher’s more popular game series), one of my favourite little card games in existence. Now I know this is a stretch for this series: this isn’t a “filler” action, it’s literally the entire game. However, counter-argument: it’s my blog and I do what I want!

In One-Deck Puppies, you play doggo cards to piles of other doggos of that race. Card backs have a Bone value on each side: 1 – 2 – 5 – 10, to say how many points they’re worth.

The game revolves around 3 actions: Bury a bone (place a facedown card from the deck behind this column, showing the 1-value bone), Flip a bone (increase it to its next value), and Move a bone (send it to a different column). The first two are conceptually equivalent to the Debts and Deeds we discussed above, although the Flip has the extra boost of having 4 values per card, instead of 2. The Movement, however, adds a LOT.

You see, a bone’s location can come up in a lot of different ways. It’s never just Flip a bone, it’s Flip a bone here, or Flip a bone under each column with X amount of doggos, or Flip half the bone in a specific column. It’s never just Bury a bone, it’s Bury a bone in every column without a Bone, or Bury as many bones here as you have doggos. Moving the bones to the right place can set up combos in a very, very satisfying way.

Both Debts and Bones are examples of resources which are also opportunities, which can make a game’s decision space richer and more nuanced without adding much rule overhead. It’s a simple system, but one rich enough to literally build an entire game around!

Can you think of another game that features a similar resource that is also an opportunity for a better result?

Variety without Headache #1 – Bracelets!

May 14, 2024May 6, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

This series looks at CASM-focused games with an original system that gives you actions to add meaning to your core CASM and opens up the design space for more content, without adding too much rules overhead. It’s sort of a sub-series of SISIGIP (Stuff I’d Steal in Games I Play).

Knarr’s Bracelets

Knarr is centered around a really cool card play mechanism, where Viking cards have a colour and an action. When you play a Viking card, you activate its action, and that of all Vikings of that colour in your tableau. There are also Exploration cards, which give you a bunch of stuff, but to get those, you spend cards from your tableau. It leads to this push and pull where you want to keep your Vikings in your tableau for super turns, but you also want to spend them for the Exploration cards. Great central tension. First to 40 points wins. Simple, clean, elegant.

The actions you get are pretty straightforward: getting one VP, going up on a track (which eventually will give you VPs), gaining helmets (which are spent for Exploration cards)… and finally, bracelets. Thematically, bracelets are a sort of currency, and exploring opens up new trade routes. Mechanically, they do something quite interesting.

Each Exploration card has those three lines at the bottom, with some of them associated with effects. Bracelets are used to activate these: spend one bracelet to activate the leftmost column; spend two to activate the first two; spend three to activate all three.

At first sight, you could say this is just a second level of engine building in an engine building game, which it is. However, that simple mechanism (it can be taught in one sentence) opens up a tremendous amount of design space. Not only does it give you a fourth action at very little complexity cost, but adding that third variable on Exploration cards increases the variety of those cards exponentially, and makes the decision of when to explore much more interesting. Two birds with one mechanism!

Some CASM-focused games have a “travel” action as a filler, which usually has you move around a board to gain resources. They’ll give you 3 actions, and a fourth, which will be “move around to gain one of the other actions”. I, by en large, find those lazy and uninspired. Knarr takes this same concept and makes an action out of giving you stuff, but it feels so much more interesting. By combining it with the Exploration cards, which are an existing part of the CASM, it feels less like “gain a bunch of stuff”, and more like “activate these things I’ve fought for”. And then, the three columns give you an interesting decision: do I wait for a third, or send these 2 right now? Should I spend all 3, or spend 1 at a time for three turns?

So I have a few ideas for subsequent posts in this series, but let me know in the comments if you think of other mechanisms that fill this concept you’d like me to talk about!

What if money was useful? (SISIGIP #3)

May 9, 2024May 6, 2024Subsurface Games 1 Comment

Every now and again, I manage to play games, sometimes even play new ones, sometimes even good ones! And when I do, there’s often one mechanism that just sticks with me, a mechanism that I think about in the shower, in the car, in front of the fridge… This is what the SISIGIP series is about: Stuff I’d Steal in Games I Play.

Many games have multi-use cards: I’d even say it’s one of my favourite mechanisms. One of my own games, Mapping the World, uses it. Multi use cards have a lot of pros: first and foremost, they make decisions richer through the power of combinations, but also, they help mitigate random card draw, like in Race for the Galaxy (RftG), where you pay for stuff by discarding cards. Actually, “card as money” has been used in many different games, often with some twists, like in Bloody Inn, Summoner Wars, or even Gloomhaven.

Well, Dollars to Donuts takes it one step further. Dollars to Donuts (DtD) has multi-use Dollars.

Dollars to Donuts is a tile laying game where you try to match donuts to gain points, or mismatch them to get money. Money is mostly used to buy tiles from a river-style display with diminishing cost. However, the special thing is that Money is a square tile. On one side, it shows a dollar, and on the other… well, it’s a tile, just like any other tile in the game.

Where Donut tiles are 1 square wide, but 4 squares long, Dollars are a 1×1 tile, which can be used to go in and patch holes, or sometimes just give you more of a chance at the one donut flavour you’re looking for.

A Question of Perception

Mechanically, it is no different than the cards in RftG. Both can either be used individually for what they show, or spend in bulk to pay for stuff. What makes it different is how it is presented. In RftG, you draw cards, but any uninteresting card you can discard to pay for your tableau. In Dollars to Donuts, you gain money, and you can use a money tile to play in a gap. In RftG, the default is the card face; in DtD, it is the dollar.

However, it’s not just a question of labels, although the label is indeed important. It’s about which use is the main focus of the item.

In RftG, the point of the game is to play cards to your tableau: sure, most of the cards you draw will be discarded, but when you draw, you have to select which cards you’ll try to play, and the tension in that is what makes the mechanism.

In DtD, when you gain money, you usually do so because you intend to use it as money. When you look at the backsides, it often is an afterthought. Sometimes, you have matching donut holes (which score in pairs), or a small space on your board, or a donut flavour you can’t match from the market: then you look at your dollars, but they are dollars first. Because the odds are such, the most common emotional reaction to that draw is a pleasant surprise when you get a useful tile, not the disappointment when you don’t.

To be clear, I understand it’s not groundbreaking. A lot of what we consider innovative game mechanisms nowadays are less completely new systems than just presenting classics in a new, original way.

What does it do well?

In many games with money, you stack it, then spend it. Budgeting is a very rich strategic dimension in and of its own.

In Dollars to Donuts, your relationship with money is different. Every dollar you make is like a lottery ticket: will it be the tile you need? Sometimes, you have 5$, but 2 of those dollars you want to keep as tiles: the decision on whether or not to spend 4$ is much more interesting, because adding that factor makes any two potential moves much harder to compare, which makes it more interesting (LINK).

Every dollar being unique also has an interesting impact on how you spend. Also, where in most games, money is a zero sum thing, in Dollars to Donuts, spending 5$ to gain 5$ is often a great move, as those are 5 new shots at getting a tile you need. Therefore, it makes people hoard less, and makes that economy more dynamic.

How would I use it?

I don’t think it’s a mechanism that requires much modification: aside from changing which actions are linked to money tiles, there isn’t much we can play around with. It’s also not a mechanism you can build a game around as much as just one you include in a game to make a part of it more interesting (EDIT: Since I wrote this, I played Salton Sea and was proven wrong. You can definitely build a game around this).

Like I said above, the mechanism disincentivizes hoarding money, making the economy more dynamic. In a way, it can help with the Healing Potion effect. I have a few prototypes I’ve worked on where I’d like to give people an avenue to use up their money without adding a new mechanism to the game, and so I gave them a try.

Two pitfalls I identified when using this mechanism (and by identify I mean “fell right in, face first”) are that those effects have to be (a) simple, and (b) not add new rules. There’s a side mechanism in Mapping the World which had bothered me for a while, a currency which people were getting but hoarding. I switched it up to individual cards with their own effects… and now players got confused about what the tokens did, and what about this one, wait, is that different from X?

The next time I use a mechanism like this, I will try to keep the effects simple: spend this when doing action X to gain more stuff, or at a lower cost, that kind of things. No new mechanism, no nuanced effects of “this might make it better”, just a clear “when you do X, use it to do more”. Using your money cards for the boost is the interesting decision point, you don’t need to be cute with what the effect does.

Game Designer Organization

May 7, 2024May 6, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

I’m a strong believer in “work on more than one game at a time”, because it prevents tunnel vision, helps give you distance from the project, and maintains momentum when you hit a roadblock with one project. But that requires a lot of organization. I also have ADHD, which requires a lot of organization. I developed a method, and I thought, hey, that would definitely be useful, why not share it?

Disclaimer: This is a method that works for me. If you have a different method, awesome! If this one doesn’t work for you, I’m sorry! This is just meant as an example: you can try it out and see what sticks.

So first, this method is going to be digital. Look, I work in IT, and I am usually an advocate for people using physical tools over digital ones, but for this purpose, I gotta have something that holds all of my info in one place and… well, organizes it. I need to be able to look at the data how I want to, without having to make a brand new table. I need one source of truth, which is hard to maintain on physical media. I can’t have stuff fall between the cracks, with multiple versions and having to remember whether final_final or final_for_real is the latest one.

The method works on paper or on any other software, but it will be optimal when using the platform it was designed for.

Speaking of platform, I used to organize stuff in Excel, then OneNote, and now I swear by Notion. I use Notion because of its different views: I have a view for individual games, a high level overview table, a timeline, a to-do list. It’s quite handy. I also will point out this isn’t sponsored in any way and all that jazz. I just like Notion.

For each project, I have seven fields: Project Title, Stage, Excitement, Pitch (“A game with…”), Description (“What’s this again?”), Next steps (“So what now?”), and time requirement of those steps (“How long”?).

Project Title is a working title, just so I can identify what project this is about. Obviously, I’m not going to publish a game named “Kaiju Emotional Growth”, but until I figure out what that title will be, I still need a way to refer to the game. Obviously.

Stage is how I can keep track of where I’m at with each of these. As of right now, there’s about 20 projects on the list. I don’t write every throwaway idea in there, but I do once I start doodling about it, talking about it with my wife, with my friends. These are the stages I use, because they’re (almost) the ones I use in my day job, and they’re obvious to me:

SHELF are games I used to work on, haven’t actively thought about in a while, but still would like to get back to;
BLUeprints is for when it’s in doodle mode: I haven’t really nailed down what the pitch is (I design pitch-first, and you should too!), or the central mechanism.
SandBoX is when I’m filling out that experience into something playtestable and working on a first prototype. Best practice is to get the game to the table as quick as possible, but I often consider building my first prototype to be a first playtest.
DEVelopment is the early discovery stages of testing. Those tests are usually with other game designers, or with my wife. There’s a very common advice in playtesting not to test your game with your wife, but people who say that haven’t met *my* wife, who will happily destroy my little baby project.
QuALity is when I have figured out the shape of the game. The quality stage is where I fine-tune systems, create and test out content, and balance the game. Ha, just kidding, I don’t balance games.
PRoDuction is when what’s in the box is figured out, and all that’s left to do is get the game out there. It’s either being pitched, or waiting to be prepped for a Kickstarter.

Now game design is not just forward process. Sometimes, while making my first prototype (Sandbox), I realize the pitch doesn’t actually interest me, and the game goes back to Blueprints. Sometimes, a Quality-stage playtest breaks down a side system, and we go down to Development. It happens oh so often, and there’s no shame in it. There’s also no shame in fighting it before accepting that you’re not as close to the finish line as you thought. As long as you end up accepting it, it’s all good.

Second property is Excitement level. I track my projects’ excitement level for two reasons. First, because every now and again, I just need to get excited again, and that field helps identify which project can help. Second, when I lose excitement for a game, it often is evidence that something about the game doesn’t work.

Then comes “A game with…” As I said above, I design pitch-first. My goal is to have a compelling pitch before I start working on a game. When the pitch is determined, I find design a lot easier, because you just… work towards delivering on your pitch. And if you can’t find a compelling pitch for your game… then maybe the game isn’t worth spending time on?

The name of that field is mostly a suggestion. I often write my pitch as “A game with X, but Y”, and having the first bit written helps me avoid blank page syndrome. Works for me, might not work for others.

“What’s this again?” is where I write my high-level idea of what the game is. Titles change all. the. time. Early, the pitch might not be established yet. What’s this again is how I keep my ideas straight. This mostly came after a period where I had a cool theme idea (Dream Weavers Inc, a corporation that steals dreams from the population to build tailormade dreams for the highest bidder), and tried to apply it to every. single. game. I worked on. It got very hard to track what was actually in the Dream Weaver folder on my laptop, so I instead went with a high-level description of the mechanic.

Finally, “So what now?” is where I keep track of what my next steps are. Having this up-to-date means I can peruse it when I have a free half-hour and get a quick win. It also helps me focus on progress when playtesting: WHAT am I actually trying to glean from the playtest? It’s combined with the How long? field, which helps me identify how doable stuff is in a given window of free time. “Update prototype” sometimes is a 10 min affair, and sometimes is a 3-hour chore.

Overall, what I try is to keep this list focused on action: what do I need to know to push these games forward. I also keep it to a minimum: the larger the table, the harder it is to keep up-to-date, and the worse it is when it falls behind.

And let’s be real, it’s not completely filled up all the time. White space is fine. I used to push off making this list because there would be white space, and that led me to be disorganized for a few weeks longer than I needed to. It’s been over a year using this, and it still isn’t completely filled, but it’s usable, and that’s okay.

Subsurface’s New Game!

April 7, 2024June 10, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

After wrapping up the fulfillment of With a Smile & a Gun in 2021, I had to take a little bit of time off for myself. The business side of game publishing (and also the whole pandemic thing) had burnt out much of my creative juices, and it took a while to get them back.

But now, I’m writing this to announce a new game, Puppets in High Places. It is a thematic sequel to With a Smile & a Gun, another 30-min game for 1-2 players, set in the same fantastical Prohibition setting of Gattory City. It is a completely standalone game, but with a few callbacks to the first game. Where the first game is about rival mob bosses fighting over the city’s illegal trade, Puppets takes place after that fight is settled, and the bosses are now setting their sights on securing a foothold in City Hall.

And it is launching on Kickstarter on May 28th! If you want to make sure you don’t miss it, the easiest way is to join our monthly newsletter:

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Dynamic Markets… in reverse! (SISIGIP #2)

January 23, 2024January 17, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

A lot of games have dynamic markets, where an asset’s cost changes over the course of play: many games feature a card river, where a card’s cost decreases the longer it stays in the market; in Rococo, the cost is based on how many choices are available; in Jorvik, a card costs 1$ per player in line to buy it.

These mechanisms take the decision of “do I buy X?” and make it into the much more interesting “do I buy X now, at this price?” That comes with a certain amount of push-your-luck, and the variable amounts helps balance each asset to a group’s particular meta, keeping things fresh and pushing players to vary their paths from game to game. Whether the game is entirely built around that dynamic market, like Jorvik or Spyrium, or if it’s a secondary mechanism, dynamic markets are great.

Rival Networks goes in a different direction: its market is static, but the money itself is dynamic.

Rival Networks is a 2p game about running a TV station. The game is centered around building TV shows in each of three timeslots, scoring them for majority at the end of a round. Instead of money tokens, Rival Networks gives you Ad cards, which have two values: a basic value, and a higher one if you, when you use it, hold the majority in its stated timeslot.

*Who doesn’t like hair in their burgers?*

What it does well (and less well)

The Ad mechanism offers a similar core decision as a dynamic cost would: it adds a timing, push-your-luck element to buying cards. Instead of “maybe the price will go down…”, you think “oh, maybe I can take the morning majority this turn and buy it the next”. The main difference is that it gives agency over the change in value, rather than something that just happens to you.

The Ad mechanism also gives you a first level strategy, which in and of itself is valuable (LINK). That pulls double duty in a majority game, where early turns can feel meaningless as you are more likely to get passed before scoring happens. The Ad mechanism makes you focus on one specific timeslot and gives you a reason to go for it early.

The one thing where it falls short of a card river is the balancing. Some groups who play Yokohama repeatedly will develop their own meta, and if they decide that University is an overpowered technology, they’ll pay the big bucks and get it as soon as it shows up. Similarly, the river might push players to take a card they wouldn’t usually go for, just because it’s dirt cheap. Rival Networks doesn’t have that: if you and your opponent play the game repeatedly and decide that Auditions is an OP card and Spinoffs is worthless, you won’t get nudged away from that.

How I would use it

Despite that weakness, I think that the dynamic currency is an interesting twist on a card river. I can think of three uses:

The first idea is focused on minimizing that weakness by limiting the variety of assets you can buy with those. Rivals Networks uses it to buy special ability cards, which usually are high-variety assets that you want your players to explore. You could instead make the market a scoring system. Rather than scoring a majority after each round, a player can determine when they score by, say, spending a turn to buy point tokens for 10$ each. For an added twist, the point values go down, incentivizing you to snatch them early. Basically, we’re taking the first-level strategy perk of this mechanism and making it into the central scoring system. It also means you can avoid a round-based gameplay.

If you really want to do an upgrade market, something where you want players to dig into new territory over repeated plays, you can combine this mechanism with a little bit of a dynamic market: you don’t want to have both variable money and variable costs, which would be much too swingy and frustrating, but you can go the Puerto Rico way and add a small bonus to every unchosen card. Eventually, those bonuses pile up, the forgotten upgrade will get snatched up, and that player will feel good about getting 6 points with their upgrade, even if they missed out on their favourite card.

My third idea goes in a different direction. Rather than focus on what you buy, I’m thinking about changing how you buy those assets: specifically, I’m thinking of an auction. Let’s imagine a tile-laying game a la Carcassonne, where players take turns building out a landscape and claiming parts of it, with the cards in their hands giving them objectives to fulfill (for example, 1$, or 4$ if there are at least 3 lakes). You go around like that until a player calls an auction. Maybe we’re auctioning off a special ability, an extra placement, or a unique tile, it doesn’t matter. Suddenly, the question “do I buy X now?” takes a new meaning: will you spend a card at less than its full value to take the opportunity? When do you give up on the increased value? That, to me, feels like a different decision space worth exploring.

Conclusion

I hope my appreciation for this mechanism came through in this post. While not perfect, it is an interesting twist to all of the dynamic market mechanisms we see in many games, and one I hope we’ll see more often in the future.

Have you played another game with a similar mechanism? If you’re a game designer, how would you use it?

Reviewing “Go-to Questions to Ask Playtesters”

January 17, 2024Subsurface Games Leave a comment

A few years ago, I wrote this post about my go-to questions to ask playtesters. The last one was this:

What do you think should happen? This is more of a question during games, but it still is one of my favorite tools: if players run into a corner case and ask “so what happens now?”, even if I know what the official answer is, I ask them what seems intuitive to them. If they come to the right conclusion, great! If not, that’s okay… unless it happens all the time. And if you didn’t have an answer yet, it gives you (1) a proposition, and (2) some time to think about it. In that case, you know you’ll have to figure it out, and you just want to make sure it doesn’t break the rest of the test.

It still is my favourite question, and I do believe it should be used more often. That being said, I would like to amend that paragraph in a few ways.

First, I changed the wording from “What do you think should happen?” to “What would you like to have happen?” The former often had testers resist: I think part of it is some people understand it as a quiz of their memory of the rules I taught, also because it suggests there’s a right answer, and with it, a chance they get the wrong answer. It also asks them to think of rules, of why they exist, of interacting systems: not everyone likes to do those things. In a way, it also positions them as an expert, which while some people enjoy, a lot feel intimidated by.

On the other hand, “What would you like to have happen?” is 100% subjective, no wrong answer, no experience required. I have yet to find a playtester who didn’t have an answer to it, although sometimes you get a “oh I would like for this to give me a million dollars”, which forces me to bring out my retail worker face from 2006 when people hit me with a “Oh, it didn’t scan, it must be free”.

That switch is also a parallel to the adage “playtesters are great at telling you problems, but poor at giving you solutions”. I trust playtesters to tell me how the game made them feel, but less so to analyze how to make them feel differently. When I ask “What should happen?”, they often start brainstorming: “oh, this could work like in Terraforming Mars” does not solve the problem of “what do I do when I land on my opponent?”, it just opens up a discussion that takes away from the playtest. When I ask “What would you like” and they say “I think I should get a bonus in this case, it’s so hard to do”, it means they feel like the game doesn’t appreciate their achievement enough. That’s a direct screenshot of their emotion.

In other words, once I know how the players want to feel in this situation, I can figure how to get to that result on my own.

The other reason to return to it is that I also want to nuance the reasoning behind that phrase. My design process has changed a lot over the past few years, and now I treat playtests, especially early ones, as much more exploratory. I come to playtests with an incomplete ruleset. I change games on the fly a lot more. I leave rules ambiguous on purpose. I use different icons or terminology to represent the same thing, just to see how players react to them, which ones stick and which ones don’t.

Which means players ask me a lot more questions, and more importantly a lot more questions to which I have no answer. In that post, I said I wanted to see if they’d guess the right rule: I still think that’s a useful way to gauge a rule’s intuitiveness. However, that doesn’t apply to my current design process. When people ask a rules question, it’s often a Schrodinger’s rule: until they guess it, there is no right or wrong. When they guess it, based on how much it messes up everything else (a process I discuss in this post), I can decide whether I say “sure, let’s go with that”, or pretend there was already an existing answer that I make up on the fly.

When playtesters have happy accidents

July 20, 2023Subsurface Games 2 Comments

You spend so much time preparing your prototype. You rethink stuff as you write cards, go back to correct stuff, remember early playtests and adapt your corrections. You write rules, sometimes a bullet point list, sometimes a full-on rulebook. You call friends and buy snacks. Yes! Ready for the playtest.

And then, on the second turn, someone plays a rule wrong. Maybe they forget to stop their movement when they pass over an event token, or they pay for a building card with magic tokens instead of bricks.

Most designers would correct the tester, but I don’t.

Let me clarify. Sometimes, you have to because it would nullify your playtest: if you’re testing how tight your economy is, you can’t let a player forget to pay for an action. However, most tester mistake don’t break much, and I let them slip.

Before I explain why, let’s remember why we playtest. We playtest to gain information, we use that information to iterate, and iteration is progress. A good playtest is one that gives a lot of quality information, and that means that the right behaviour in a playtest is the one that will yield more or better information.

In a recent playtest of With a Smile & a Gun 2: The Smilegunnening (working title), a player misunderstood a rule. The game has a rondel, and players can skip one space for free, but moving farther costs one meeple per space. This playtester had apparently played too much Mac Gerdts recently, and assumed that they could skip up to 2 spaces: that’s how it works in games like Navegador or Antike.

Should I correct them? Which decision would bring the most and/or best information?

Correcting them would give me some information: first, the player misunderstanding the rule is an important data point. It could mean the teach was lacking, that I need a reminder somewhere, a clearer graphic design, that it’s counterintuitive, or any number of things: I will clarify that later, after the game ends.

Second… there’s no second data point. That’s the extent of what I’m learning by correcting them. I learn that they messed up, and I might learn why.

If I let them play it out though, here’s what I learn:

I still learn that the player made the mistake, just like if I correct them;
I can see if their opponent corrects them, which can help me nuance or reinforce the previous data point;
I can see if the mistake breaks the game: like it or not, players make mistake even when playing a simple published game, and knowing how bad it will be if they do is important;
Related, if the game works just as well (or even, gasp, better) without the missed rule, I know I can drop it without breaking anything;
I can better see the pace and flow of the game when I don’t interrupt.

That’s a lot more data.

In addition to that, I find that interrupting a playtest from the outside often leads to the playtester clamming up. Most of the time, I want playtesters to forget it’s a playtest, and to just play the game. I want them to forget I’m next to them, watching, judging. Interrupting them reminds them I’m here, staring at them and taking notes about how they act. Judgingly. It’s kind of like a reality show, and I guess I’m Tyra Banks?

So I let that player play a la Mac Gerdts. The other player corrected them at some point: the wider span of options made it too difficult to “block” their opponent – while not broken, it affected the game negatively. Since then, I’ve added an icon to the board that specifies how far you can move before paying. Maybe I’ll add a special power that breaks the rule, to help people remember it.

In a different playtest of WSG 2 Smilectric Gunaloo (told you it’s a working title), a playtester dropped the meeple they paid on the space they jumped over. To be clear, I never said anything close to that, that was not a thing in the game, but hey, why not. Eventually, their opponent paid a meeple to the supply, and the player in the wrong “corrected” them. A few turns later, one of them landed on one of their meeples, and took it back in their hand, no questions asked – I love it, they’re unknowingly designing a cool concept for my game, with no input on my end. They did ask for my input when player A landed on player B’s meeple: what do they do then? And that’s when I served them one of my favourites: “What would you like to have happen?”

Sometimes, however, the cost for not interrupting is too high. In a third test of Smiley Smiley Gun Gun (I’m trying stuff out), I did decide to interrupt the game and correct the tester. Players amass resources, which they use to bribe politicians and score points. The tester somehow missed that each politician can only be bribed with resources of the same colour. The game loses most of its meaning if all resources are wild and all politicians are the same, and that outweighed the extra data from letting it play out. Still, before I corrected them, I allowed a bit of time to see if their opponent caught it, see if they would correct them themselves – that’s not an outside interruption, affects the tester’s headspace a lot less, and again, is a data point about the rules’ clarity.

So yeah, sometimes, it’s worth interrupting. However, in my experience, it happens much more often than it should. Letting those errors slide is a useful tool, one that makes you a better designer if you have it in your belt.

On a separate note, the game is now called 2 Smiles 2 Gunrious.

Randomness & Mitigation

June 22, 2023Subsurface Games 3 Comments

You might not think that from my Euro leanings, but I love randomness in games. Or, well, I love well-used randomness. I love dice drafting, I love card draw, I love modular setup, I love randomly seeded markets. Randomness can add a dynamic element to games which would otherwise get repetitive. It makes it so, even in a game I’ve played dozens of times, I still get surprised.

However, some games go too far with the randomness. Like an oversalted dish, the randomness takes over and breaks the nuances and subtleties of gameplay. Mostly, it robs players of their agency: where in a dice drafting game the dice give you a new puzzle to adapt to and enrich the decision making, in a “roll-to-succeed” game, it often supersedes your decision making entirely. In some games, magically trading in your ability to choose your actions to gain the ability to choose die results would increase your odds of winning. That’s pretty low agency, if you ask me.

Why follow that paragraph with a picture of Risk? Oh, no reason.

“Yeah Amy, isn’t that just input vs output randomness? It’s 2023, this is nothing new!”

Except no, it’s not just input vs output. King of Tokyo has an incredibly random output randomness: you don’t choose what you do, you roll and do what the dice command! That’s all of this roll-and-move stuff people complain about! However, you also get the ability to reroll any amount of dice twice. It is still random, but because you choose which dice to reroll, you still feel like you have agency. You decide whether or not to you reroll attacks because you don’t want to end in Tokyo; you choose whether or not to reroll Hearts because you feel threatened; you choose whether or not to try to get that third 3 for a risky but rewarding strategy. While the final result is still random, you have taken decisions throughout.

“Oh, so it’s about mitigating randomness?”

Yes, but not only that. Mitigating randomness is an important dial to consider when you include randomness in a game, but too much mitigation takes away the whole emotional impact, the whole tension of the randomness: if you have infinite rerolls, there’s no point in rolling the dice, you should just choose your results.

I think it is less about mitigating than about how you present the random result, and how you allow the luck to be mitigated.

Recently I had a discussion with a designer friend about a Push-Your-Luck mechanism in a card game she was working on. Players had 3 cards in hand, and every hand, following the players’ actions, 3 cards were added to the middle of the table. Amongst other things, each card is worth between 0 and 2 stars, and rather than straight up points, she was working on a push-your-luck mechanism for those stars.

The original mechanism was that if there were an even number of stars in the middle, each star in hand gave you a point; if there was an odd amount, stars in hand were negative points. It’s a 50-50 odd (with a bit of player control over which card went to the middle), and each player can decide how many stars to hold on to, whether they go big and risky, or small and safe.

During the test, I didn’t like that mechanism. It’s technically a push-your-luck system with agency: I can decide whether to take a big swing by keeping high cards, or keep it safe, and I could even have a bit of impact on the final result. When mixed with the rest of the game system, it made for some really tough decisions. Yet, if I kept a big hand and busted, it was frustrating; if I scored it, it felt unearned. Truly, it was the worst of both worlds.

Then, they tried a Blackjack-like system: as long as you don’t have more stars than the center row, they’re worth points. However, if you do have more, you lose that many points. Suddenly, every 2 in the middle is permission to keep a 2. If you start with three high cards, you can try to replace one of them and add it to the center. If you start with only low cards, you can use them to make your opponents bust. Whatever happened was a strong moment: busting on a big hand was dramatic instead of just being hit in the face; busting with a small hand at least felt good because others lost more; and winning the points by staying close to the margin felt amazing. All in all, the reveal of the last card became a nailbiter.

Those emotional responses are why we mitigate randomness in game. Not because mitigating randomness makes the best people more likely to win, but because having a say over the random result gives you agency, it makes you feel involved, and when you’re involved… well that’s when a simple die roll can get you to jump out of your seat.

Spicing up your resource management

November 14, 2022November 15, 2022Subsurface Games 2 Comments

I like Euro games. I like indirect interaction, engine building and puzzly, interrelated systems. I like Victory Points and delivering cubes to get them. And there’s also resource management.

Resource management is one of those things that is in most games, but often doesn’t seem to have had much thought behind how it was implemented. However, some games have interesting, well thought out resource systems, and they really shine. Kinda like mashed potatoes at a restaurant: it’s often the forgettable, bland side dish, but sometimes, you get something creamy, buttery, savory… Hmmm, I love me some creamy resource management.

I think the biggest pitfall of resource management is that resources are interchangeable. We collect green cubes and black cubes and blue cubes, we get all of them by placing workers and use all of them for recipe fulfillment. The only thing that makes a blue cube different from a black cube is which recipe I have access to right now.

If your design is suffering from bland resource management, here are a few solutions for you to try out!

Assign each resource a specific action

If all resources are used in the same way, it’s very hard to make them feel meaningfully different. If the only difference between a Stone and a Wood is that building cards use them in different amounts, then there is no inherent difference between the two.

By comparison, look at Viscounts of the West Kingdoms: there are four actions in the game, and four resources. Writing costs Ink, Building costs Stone, Trading costs Money, and Influencing costs Gold. Each action is different, therefore each resource is different.

However, some games are too simple for this, and have one main way to convert resources into action: in that case…

Make some resources more valuable / rarer

In a game like Century, you use your spices to buy point cards, and that’s the whole game. However, the four resource types are not equal: some actions will turn lower quality cubes into higher ones, or a single higher one in many of lower values. This difference in value inherently means that having a handful of turmeric cubes will feel different from a handful of more expensive cinnamons, even if they still are only used to fulfill the same kinds of contracts.

Similarly, many worker placement games like Lords of Waterdeep will assign resources a different value. You can easily see that based on how many of them you can gain from one action: 4 coins, 2 fighters, but only 1 wizard. Or Lost Ruins of Arnak, where the basic actions give 2 Tablets, 1 Arrowhead, 1 Ruby with a small cost. It doesn’t seem like much, but it makes quite a difference.

Power Grid has an open market for resources, all of them having a different rate of refill at the end of round, and a different distribution amongst the factories that consume them. While it is player driven, the market system will still tend to make Uranium and Oil safer bets, and Trash and Coal more swingy.

Sometimes, available resources are randomly revealed, and some resources are simply rarer, making them more valuable: games like Five Tribes and Rococo go in this direction. Depending on how the rest of your game functions, that might be an interesting system.

Give some resources a specific mechanism

Obviously, saying “find a cool puzzle to build your game around” is neither satisfying nor helpful, but sometimes, a simple mechanic that applies to some resources but not others is enough to open up a lot of design space.

One of the best examples of this is Brass: Lancashire. This classic has three resources: money, coal, and iron. Money does not have anything special about it: it is earned, and kept until it’s spent. Coal and Iron, however, are associated to buildings, and when a building is emptied, its owner gains both income and points. Additionally, Coal and Iron are different in one important way: Coal must be transported from the building containing it to the city where it will be used through rails or canals, while Iron does not require this infrastructure.

Another example which we’ve grown accustomed to because of its ubiquity in gaming is Agricola’s resource trifecta: Animals must be held in a pasture or building and can reproduce; Plants can be sown so you get “income” for the next few turns; and Materials, which are earned then spent. Its thematic obviousness sorts of dulls its impact, but that is quite a mechanically interesting system.

I also want to point out that both of those examples also support a theme or core aspect of the game: for Brass, it’s the infrastructure growth, while in Agricola, it’s the idealized farmer life. Not only do these mechanisms make the game more interesting on their own and serve as starting points for other mechanical elements, but they also participate in making the game feel like a whole, rather than a pile of ill-matched mechanisms.

A few more rapidfire examples:

In The Rocketeer, you have two resources: Grit and Clout. Grit is assigned to one of your three characters, while Clout is shared amongst your team;
In Barrage, your money is earned then spent, but your tools are only temporarily unavailable when used;
In Keyflower, you have resources which are on tiles and must be moved around, and skill tiles which are held behind your shield;
In Space Explorers, you can either pay for your cards by giving resources to the player to your left, or by discarding cards from your hand to the public market.

In conclusion, going from a “soulless cube-pusher” to a richer, more interesting experience, often relies on making each resource feel different to add a bit of oomph. Whether that’s by associating each with a specific action, by toying with value and frequency, or by adding a different mechanism to some of them, you can both make your game spicier and more thematic.

Think about some of the resource management games you’ve played recently: how did they differentiate between those resources, how did they make their system more attractive? Of course, feel free to share in the comments and like and subscribe and all that jazz!