This is a pretty good talk by Matt Leacock about Pandemic's development, and game development in general.

The thing that struck the biggest nerve with me was the notion of finding the core(s) in your game and developing those being the most efficient route, otherwise you get caught up in minute iterations forever.

This comes across as very good advice to me, and has shaped my thoughts of playing/developing "Delivery/1955" in the past few days. I had already been thinking about how a "family" version of the game would work, and this helped to convince me to strip all the unnecessary "flavor" away, at least for the moment, and get a glimpse at how the core is working. Suddenly, I created a small prototype within a short amount of time, and the core of the game can probably be played in about an hour.

The stripped down version consists of the following reductions: no shares, no likes/dislikes, all countries beginning with the same amount of cash, the same minimum wages and maximum purchases, and much less cash differential (from $1 million to $200 million rather than $1,000 to $1 billion) (since the game will hopefully have exponential amounts of cash growth, this wouldn't be as big of a difference as it might seem at first glance).

And the core of the game appears to be setting your prices and wages. So playing around with that will be first order. But this can be worked on in a much shorter time than I was anticipating (I had been thinking of trying to start a prototype in June sometime, whereas this enabled me to begin with much less difficulty/time).

This doesn't mean the rest of it is expendable or useless fluff. In fact, I can see how the game is more boring with just the basics, everyone is doing similar things because there are less routes to go. I'm just finding it useful for getting some basics down and figuring out myself where the "simple" mechanics are running into frustrations (I'm having a mental image of land below a fault's locking depth moving and that fault occasionally rupturing as a result).


Last night, I played Reading Railroad for the first time. It worked differently than I was expecting/hoping, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

There were some major issues with the factories which was just a detail issue to balance out - Seth was thinking of capping the number of letters you can possibly draw at 6, but this still seems like too much to me. If you come up with 2 5-letter words, you're still having an excess of letters, of which you're going to build up a continuously growing pile of unless you have an expectation value of 6 letter words (which in itself requires you to get the right letters).

Tile drawing was too random by my count. It could be really neat to have every letter sitting up somewhere, with their "Scrabble values" (common letters are worth 1, more difficult letters are worth more [Qs are worth 10, I believe]). You can purchase them for some amount relative to their "Scrabble value" (so, maybe a base amount of $5, -"Scrabble value" to a minimum of 0: $5 - $1=$4 for an E, $5 - $3=$2 for a P). This would likely inflate the values of the coins such that connection fees would cost more on the order of $3 - $6 per spot, but given how much cash we were earning off the letters, this doesn't seem to be problematic.

The biggest problem I had with the game was not feeling connected to the final letters. They had no real interaction with the game itself, they were just some sort of bonus points at the end of the game (like # of tracks built in Age of Steam, albeit worth much more). I didn't like the mechanism of picking them up, as the most efficient way of doing so is simply to build a lot of sets of 2 disparate from each other and then connect them up later on (connect up one set early on so you can build more than 2 factories) - you'll nab a lot of tiles before others get a chance at them, increasing your chances of getting "good" letters.

A suggestion might be similar to the above suggestion: purchase your letters. Perhaps you get some sort of cash bonus for connecting up different cities, perhaps depending on your network size. At the end, you spend this cash to spell out as many words of "The quick brown fox jumped over lazy dogs. Reading Railroad" as possible in some fashion.

Or perhaps letters you grab from the cities are "permanent" letters that you can always use (up to your largest network). This would reduce the function of the factories, but would increase the number of tiles you're having to process at any given time. I think I like this idea best, as it integrates two disparate parts of the game best.

Well, next time...

Friday night playtesting/Quick test today

Friday night was a bit hectic (I was still finishing preparing things when people arrived - I probably shouldn't have made pieces for two games at once), but things settled down and flowed somewhat smoothly in the end, I think.

This was the first game of Trishula I'd played where I was not the Invaders. Kaly took on that role. It was interesting to see someone else at the helm, particularly since she made some "obvious" mistakes. The most likely reason she made these mistakes was being unable to track who was going next, and move to the appropriate places to minimize her impact. I might add a little track to the Invader player aid to make this potentially easier. The other, more major changes will be changing how the Trishulans get their primary resources (based off Cumulative rather than Species aggression); and that the game will last only 7 rounds. 5 Actions is likely too much of a maximum, will cut it off at 4 (only at the highest Aggression level) and will change the Aggression thresholds. The game keeps "working" for about 2/3 of the playtime, and then suddenly things get static, and hopefully this reduction will both keep things very challenging for everyone as well as reduce this static-nature. The Morale cards played a nice role in this session - the Invaders lost by 1 unit due to them. Although Kaly "should" have been able to win easily, by my count - the Trishulans were killing each other a little too much. We also didn't get to see the new flipping-aggression mechanism more than 2-3 times, which should improve with a change in Aggression thresholds.



I also got to try the new one, Hand of God (previously referred to as Perfect World), on Friday with Seth, in a quick 2-player game. The first sessions were relatively disastrous; having 10-max levels and being able to play 4 cards at once is too powerful. Played it again quickly with Anna again this morning after breakfast (it's such a fast game, less than 10 minutes), using a rule of playing 2 cards maximum on your own board at once. Things flowed much more smoothly with this, although the first blue spot became a horribly easy pocket in which to find yourself.

Two changes for next time:
-Allow the deck to reshuffle: with all of the changing timelines, the number of cards provided is too few - we ran out of orange cards, for example, where that particular set is crucial to the game. I'd at least reshuffle the discards in, if not allowing the whole deck to be reshuffled when out of cards. The cards on offer would fall under the same category, because no one wants a blue when the greens and oranges just came out.

-Make each space "worth" a certain number of cards. For example, there is a pocket of 3 blues very early in the game. If the first one cost two Blue to play, the second 3, and the third 5 (ending the timeline), then falling into that pocket would be incredibly more difficult to obtain (particularly given the hand limit). Meanwhile, the chain of 4 yellows on the left might be relatively cheap to get to, although going to areas of less points.

I might also want to consider a way to throw away a large number of cards at once, since one can no longer play more than 1 card onto someone else's board. The board itself is preliminary, and needs restructuring.

One nice thing about a game this short is that you can playtest it very quickly and improve things swiftly. Initial impressions seem to be positive, although the game is still rough enough to have not worked properly. The decaying timeline mechanism is fun.

Just had one interesting thought - forcing a player to correct the timelines before they can advance their own. So if a single yellow just got played onto your board, you would have to play your own yellow before playing on your own board, otherwise your original path decays. Possibly too random and could make games take half an hour; too long for this one.


I'd really like to try Indonesia, it seems mildly similar to Delivery, but only on the surface perhaps? Maybe we'll do some league of six and then see if we can't try Indonesia on Monday. If not, Anna and I will have to give it a go sometime in the next week, although I suspect it plays best with more players.

Intro Post

I've been creating some prototypes, and in a burst of inspiration by others (sedjtroll in particular), am creating this blogspot blog to mark my gaming/prototyping life. I have a LJ, but my friends/audience on that won't care so much about detailed aspects of game discussion, and this is likely a better location for this.

What games do I like? I really enjoy heavier games, longer and with more depth. This doesn't mean that I like *all* heavy games, I don't like a heavy game for the sake of it being heavy. Nor does this mean I don't like lighter games. I'm a really big fan of Pandemic and Galaxy Trucker at the moment, and enjoy games like Yspahan and Treasure Fleet as well. Usually, I get a little burned out on these games pretty quickly, however, and they fade into the distance, while the heavier games tend to stick around for a much longer duration of exploration and fascination (and other -ations).

What I tend not to enjoy are simple randomness in a longish game. If there is an element of randomness, I tend to dislike it more as the length of the game increases, or the randomness must be dealt with in an interesting/randomness reducing manner. Why would I want to play a 1.5-2 hour game where a card coming up or not means I win or lose, unless there's something more interesting behind the game itself?

You can find my BoardGameGeek user info here: http://boardgamegeek.com/user/blueatheart for Top Ten/Hot Ten/Games Played and other info.


Current prototype:

The Invasion of Trishula: This is a light wargame hybrid where three species on a distant planet have been fighting for thousands of years, evolving to respond to their enemies. It is 200 years in the future, and humans have first found the planet and then become bored with it. Only a small team of researchers remains to observe an ancient temple of unknown
origin, but great importance to the indigenous species begins to operate. Within a day, several Portals to another dimension have opened up, and this new dimension has begun spreading across the land. The humans investigate the temple, and for the first time their presence is discovered. They are revered as gods who have returned to make the temple work, and the species, while still fighting, rely upon their new gods to deal with the menacing Invaders. The small team of humans, having no way to stop the invaders, tell the indigenous species that whichever species fights against the invaders the best will receive large amount of technological knowledge from the humans. As time progresses, the species become more and more desperate in their fight against the Invaders, and their focus becomes more and more on fighting them off and working together, and less on fighting amongst each other. I'll probably upload the rules to this at some point, as I have them in PDF.

Works-in-progress:

Evolution: In this game, each player controls one animal species and 2 plant species on an island. Animals have attributes such as size, speed, defense, reproduction rate, and ability to eat other species; plants have attributes such as required sun, required water, defense, seed number, seeding by wind, seeding by digestion, and size. The animals all start off on the same area, while the plants have dispersed across the island. Only the animals may make actual actions, but their actions will directly affect their attributes, as well as the attributes of other life around them. They may attempt to eat either a plant or animal species (which can increase their ability to eat that species, but also increases that species' defense levels), migrate (which will move a certain amount of animals to an adjacent space, increase their speed, but reduce their reproduction rate), or reproduce (which will increase the population of the species, but reduce their speed). Players simultaneously choose which number of their species will do what (written down on a piece of paper), then reveal. Any species which becomes separated from their fellow species members by more than one tile at the end of a turn becomes a new species. At the end of the game, animal species get differing amounts of victory points depending on if they are "king of the island," an herbivore, or something in between; plant species get VP simply for their numbers.

Perfect World: In this card game, each player is a God trying to create as perfect of a universe as possible in parallel universes. Unfortunately, the God of one universe is the Demon of every other universe. At the center of the table is the Big Bang. From this, there is a split-off that may occur - a yellow reality and a purple one (in which a galaxy forms or does not form). In chronological fashion, the next event has either a continuation of the yellow reality, a continuation of the purple reality, or a blue split-off from the yellow reality (the galaxy formed, and now a solar system is formed, whereas in yellow, the galaxy formed, but a solar system did not). Players choose from a set of cards available similarly to Ticket To Ride. They may play up to 4 cards onto their own reality instead of taking cards, or play up to 3 on someone else's reality. If choosing a new split-off, the first card of that split-off must be played (i.e., you can't switch from one reality to another without using the appropriate split-off). You have a "current reality" indicated by a sideways card. The card existing at the latest time in a parallel reality is discarded every time you take a new card or place new cards into a separate reality (so if you have a 3rd-level blue and a 4th-level yellow, but the last card played was blue, the 4th-level yellow would disappear; if this happened again, the 3rd-level yellow would disappear, leaving you with the 2nd-level yellow/blue, where the split-off occurred; from here, no more cards would disappear).

Delivery: In this economic simulation, a random amount of money (averaging $10,000,000,00 globally cumulative) is placed into 8 worldwide regions (North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Far East, Russia, Oceania). Each region has a corresponding wealth associated with it, as well as minimum wages, production costs, and purchasing ability (these are all the associated with the same track). No more money is ever introduced into the game. Each region also begins with a random like-dislike level of every other region, between 5 and -5. The regions will also get random properties (such as a social state or big on human rights) which will influence the way players may interact with that region. This is (hopefully) the only source of randomness in the game. Each player begins the game with 1 company in each of 3 different production industries (so 3 companies altogether). These companies are large but local companies.

At the beginning of the game, these companies gain $5,000 for themselves, and $1,000 for the owner (who begins with 0 cash). The money comes from the company's starting region, which is chosen by each player during setup.. The owner may choose to upgrade one of these companies for $5,000, at which point the company gains $10,000 for themselves, and $2,000 for the owner each turn. The player may then again upgrade another company to this level, or upgrade a company at the 10,000/2,000 level to a $15,000/$3,000 level for $15,000. This part of the game could consist of about 20 quick rounds, hopefully about 10 minutes, with players simply gaining enough cash to begin the game as well as see which companies will be begun on the global scale and act accordingly.

Once a player has enough money, they may announce one of their companies is going public. In this case, they decide to issue a certain number of shares, of the player's choice, and how much each share is worth. The player must be able to purchase at least 60% of the shares at this time, however, to maintain control over the company. The other shares await investors in a global market pool. Shares of a company may be purchased by other players or by other companies. Once a company has gone public, it must use the money generated by the player to purchase a production facility, as well as a retail facility, in any region (they can both be in the same region).

At this time, a transportation company also goes public with the same number of shares at the same price. Players and companies may purchase into the transportation company, with the player with the most shares taking control. The transportation company does nothing more than build ships between regions, to help facilitate the transfer of goods across regions (and taking a nominal fee). In any game, there can be either (# of players -1) or 3 transportation companies, whichever is lower.

Players operate the companies simply by producing goods for the production price of the region + employees' wages, transporting the goods if necessary, and selling the goods for a price near the regions' wealth, minus employees' wages for this region. Each company is also liked and disliked by each region, depending on how much these regions like or dislike the regions where your production facilities are and your retailers are. For example, in the current political realm, someone producing in Middle East and selling in North America will have more difficulty than someone producing in Europe and selling in North America. If a company is liked in a particular region, they may sell their goods for more. Each region will purchase from one industry only a certain number of times, depending on the wealth of that nation. If two companies of the same manufacturer are selling in a particular region, it is the cheapest one (adjusting for liked and disliked levels) who sells first, so they will likely sell more than the other players with higher prices.

Stock prices increase and decrease depending on how well things are producing and selling. The owning players may sell their shares after 100% of the initial offering has been purchased, and from there companies may exchange hands frequently, either by being purchased for a certain amount of money, or by hostile takeover. Companies may also issue more shares (which decreases the value but gives the company more money for expansion), or buy back shares (which increases value but depletes the company of money), but the decision may be stopped if the other stockholders have more than 50% of the stock and they agree against it.

The game ends when a player has more money (in their pockets, not the companies') than there is globally. The round finishes and whomever has the most money wins.




I host a weekly game night, Brettspiele and Bier, on Mondays. Last night, I got to play Seismic, Galaxy Trucker and Antiquity (although a dumbed-down version of it, due to everyone being pretty new).

Seismic: not a fan, just sort of boring. I wish the earthquakes acted differently, although the tension of one coming soon can be okay.

Galaxy Trucker: I'm liking this game more and more, although we're either giving ourselves too much time or we're already too good at it, as ships aren't getting too destroyed. The game needs 4 players to really shine, and 2 is "too easy," 3 is a little harder but still difficult - it has a similar correlation to Pandemic in terms of difficulty by # of players. I want to try the Rough Road Ahead cards, as they have some really fun sounding variants.

Antiquity: It's been a long time since that first game 2 years ago, but I remember that very well. It made a large impression on me (and took 7 hours, due to incapable players), and while you get brain-burnt by the end of it, I really enjoy it. The game was likely unbalanced/too easy without the famine and pollution phases (and only took 2 hours). One of the things I enjoy most about this game is that you are subtly conflicting with the game more than with each other, and this doesn't happen with those phases removed. Looking forward to playing it again properly soon - this will probably become one of my favorite games again, although I do also get annoyed at the fiddly-ness of it at times.

So, that's enough for now. I'll post more about current games being played and developments with these games later(it seems like I'm coming up with new ideas for games about once a month, before another game is even fleshed out enough for a prototype). I'm hoping this also kicks my ass into gear to be more active on BGDF, and get support from that group.