Building vs. Upgrading, and a game called Scorched Earth

Lots of games are about building. Over the course of the game, you're creating a sort of engine that generates the conditions for victory. You start out with a few simple functions that you can perform, and as time goes on you add more and better functions. From a single corn field to a plantation processing coffee and sugar in Puerto Rico. From agriculture to nuclear power in Innovation. From a monster to an even scarier monster in King of Tokyo.

The Fire of Moscow (source)

What if we turned the building idea on its head? A while back my wife inspired me with an idea for a game called Scorched Earth. In this game, you would be a commander in charge of a slice of Russian territory as Napoleon's army advanced. Your goal would be to destroy as much as possible of your territory's assets, with the game ending when Napoleon's army starves or is forced to turn back from lack of food.

Thematically, Scorched Earth seemed intriguing. But building is a common game mechanic for a reason. It gives a game a sense of motion and purpose. Players feel like they're accomplishing something and creating something. When you're building, you're going somewhere. You're excited about the next piece you want to add and the steps you plan to take to get it.

The momentum and narrative arc associated with building suggest some problems with going the other way. I found this to be a problem with another game idea I had, a "deck destroying" game called The Fall of Greenland. In TFoG, players would begin with a big deck of cards representing elements of a Norse settlement, which they would gradually lose as calamities hit. Like Scorched Earth, the goal was to have the best stuff remaining when time ran out. In playtesting, though, TFoG fell flat. Strategically choosing what to eliminate from your deck wasn't as interesting as choosing what to add to your deck.

As common as building is, many games that seem to be about building are perhaps better thought of as being about upgrading. Building makes things bigger, while upgrading makes them better. The deck building genre, I would argue, is -- despite the name -- as much about upgrading as about building in the sense I'm using the term here. And that's revealed by the importance of being able to get rid of your early components. Dominion has a variety of cards that let you trash a card -- often, but not always, in exchange for a better card. Quarriors lets you cull a die whenever you score.

Why would you trash a perfectly good copper card in Dominion, or a perfectly serviceable assistant in Quarriors? Because the best strategy is not to build up a huge deck, but to make an efficient and streamlined deck. In these two games, you only have access to a random sample of your deck at any one time. So low-value components just dilute your ability to access your better ones. Simple components are useful only until they can be replaced with more powerful ones.

So let's apply that to Scorched Earth. Instead of just destroying your capacity, perhaps your real aim is to consolidate. If you can build a triple-size factory back in Smolensk, then you can afford to tear down the three smaller factories in Vilno, Minsk, and Mogilev (relevant map). The advance of Napoleon's army provides a clear incentive to streamline and trim the fat from your game engine.

I don't know that I'll ever develop Scorched Earth as a full-fledged game -- the theme is certainly outside my core competency, though I suppose it could be rethemed. But if nothing else it's a useful design exercise.

Kickstarter bonanza -- Vici and A Duel Betwixt Us

The gears at Game Salute have cranked away and finally spat out a couple games that ran Kickstarters some time ago, landing them on my doorstep last week.

Vici is a two-player battle game, in which players command ancient armies to attack each other's camp. The designer and artist, Ben Shulman, is a friend and game design collaborator, so I've gotten to see a number of iterations of this game as it made its way toward publication. It's very cool to finally see a manufactured copy with heavy chipboard pieces and so on. The published version highlights the good work he did on designing the ergonomics of the game -- it feels clean and intuitive to play.

Vici has a nice balance of strategy and luck. There are good strategic choices to be made about where and how to deploy units, but the outcome of their confrontation is not a sure thing. The unique powers of each unit add a lot of depth. The powers are well-designed to work together -- each type of unit plays off the others, such as having special strengths when battling certain other units or being able to initiate chains of battles in certain ways. The luck element makes it hard for one player to entirely dominate the game, though it can be difficult to come back from a deficit.

A Duel Betwixt Us is also a two-player battle game, but with a very different theme. In this game, players are Victorian gentlemen engaged in contests of strength to win ladies' favor. You employ miners to produce precious ore, which you then use to purchase and construct weapons and armor, as well as carry out various extra actions. Once equipped, you can challenge your opponent to a duel with various specific rules (swords only, no armor, etc).

The art for A Duel Betwixt us is absolutely gorgeous. It has a perfect humorously old-timey look to suit the feel and appeal of the game. This is one of those games that may be worth buying just for the art. The gameplay, on the other hand, was a bit disappointing. Most of the time in the game was spent building up the weapons for the type of duel you wanted to declare. Once a duel was declared, the outcome was almost entirely foreordained -- it was easy to pick out a duel type for which you were well-prepared while your opponent was not, and the various surprise tricks that could be played added only a little uncertainty. Conducting the duel merely consisted of counting up the attack and defense points for each player. Our favorite duel was the "throw everything" duel, because it involved a back-and-forth series of choices (what do you throw, what do you hang on to) that shaped the course of the fight. It was also the zaniest, which was important because I was expecting a much zanier game based on the theme. As a final note, the box for this game was far too large -- a few small decks of cards in a box nearly a foot square. I blame Game Salute for this particular issue, as the box is the exact same size as the one for Vici (which fit it better) and several other GS games I've seen.

Cards for Bunny Money Gunny

We'll have an "early edition," pre-Kickstarter version of Bunny Money Gunny available at the Indie Game Developers Network's Indie Game Showcase at GenCon next month. Check out the great card art by Cynthia Lee!

Not every game problem can be solved with game mechanics

I think board game designers would learn a lot from playing a few rounds of Fiasco.

Fiasco is a story-focused one-session roleplaying game, in which you collaboratively tell a story about a wacky heist gone bad. In various sessions I've been a tea importer who dressed up as a mall Santa to destroy my competition, a cat who tried to convince the other cats to start a nuclear war with Russia, and a severed hand trying to stop my brother's clones from winning a bowling competition.

The key thing about Fiasco is that there is no win condition. By the rules, no individual can lose, nor can the group as a whole lose. Certainly there are end conditions, which determine whether your character's life turns out good or bad at the end of the story -- but it would be dysfunctional and counterproductive to the game for someone to treat those as "win conditions," organizing their approach to playing the game around achieving a specific sort of ending for their character. The rules of the game exist to support a group of people in doing something fun together.

Too often, I think that board game designers become fixated on the mechanical aspects of games. Don't get me wrong -- having solid mechanics in a game is essential. It's important to think about what kind of strategies your mechanics make possible and reward, and to adjust them if they produce dysfunctional results. But there's a limit to how much game mechanics can do. Not every problem in a game can be solved through game mechanics. If we get fixated on the idea that any undesirable strategy must be prevented or severely disincentivized within the mechanics of the game, we can lose sight of the larger picture.

A classic example of this issue is the problem of "captaining" in cooperative games -- the phenomenon of one player taking over and directing other players' moves, creating an essentially solitaire game. There are some cooperative games that inherently rule out captaining, as a natural consequence of their core gameplay (Hanabi does this beautifully). Others tack on rules to try to exclude captaining by fiat (e.g. forbidding players to explicitly name the cards in their hand, as in Shadows Over Camelot). But I've had an enjoyable time playing actual solitaire games of Pandemic and Forbidden Island -- something that would be impossible if they were mechanically captain-proofed. And I've had fun playing them with people I trusted not to captain, in social contexts that discouraged captaining. We didn't need something in the rules to force us to play nice.

Different groups will play the same game in different ways. The designer can't, and shouldn't, exercise complete control over the gameplay experience. A big part of playing most games is the informal social negotiation that occurs around the question of which strategies are legal but jerky. For example, in a recent game of Keyflower, we agreed that while it was legal to win two turn-order tiles (thus getting two ships and leaving another player with none), that it was kind of a jerk move and would be treated as such. When one player proceeded to bid on two turn order tiles, the rest of us stepped up to stop him, even when it might not have been a strictly optimal move in terms of maximizing personal victory points. We were all invested in maintaining the spirit of the game. (I should add that the person bidding on multiple turn order tiles wasn't doing it to be a jerk -- the move was taken, in context, as a sort of teasing.)

Bringing this back to Fiasco, someone could be a jerk in Fiasco. They could refuse to go along with the story, they could nitpick the allocation of white and black dice at the ends of scenes, or they could simply "check out" during the game. I've had all these things happen, and they make the game less fun. There's nothing in the rules that prohibits this kind of behavior.

The overarching goal in playing a game -- even more than racking up victory points -- is having fun together. And no game mechanic can guarantee success at that.

Updated Fiasco: You Are A Cat playset

I finally figured out the correct fonts and made a cool cover image for You Are A Cat, my Fiasco playset about being a cat. Download it here!

Game Chef 2014: Spy Party

This year I decided to take a shot at Game Chef, a 10-day game design contest. This year the theme was "there is no book," and the ingredients (of which 2-3 should be included in your game) were absorb, wild, sickle, and glitter. My entry is titled "Spy Party."

Spy Party is a one-shot RPG in which players are communist (hammer and sickle) spies who have come to a makeover party in suburban Washington DC in hopes of exchanging intel with their undercover contacts. They must absorb fragments of knowledge from other players to figure out the USA's secret plans and weaknesses, while keeping up their cover of frivolous gossip and trying out glittery nail polish. Players paint each others' nails different colors to indicate levels of trust, while certain color combinations trigger in-game events. At the end, the colors of players' nails allow them to determine each others' fate (e.g. who is put on trial for espionage? Who is rewarded by your home country?)

Download Spy Party

Fiasco: YOU ARE A CAT

On a whim I created a Fiasco playset titled YOU ARE A CAT. We tried out a three-player game that went well.

Our story began with nearly-identical fluffy tortoiseshell cats Robin (male) and Arthur (female) stuffed into the same cat carrier on the way from the animal shelter to their new forever home. Their new human had intended to adopt Arthur, but due to a mix-up at the shelter, both cats had gotten put in the carrier. They arrive home and the human -- a single woman -- discovers that she now has two cats. Robin decides to act extra adorable to try to convince the human to keep him and not send him back to the shelter. He's in luck, as the human is unable to get through to the shelter on the phone to complain about the mix-up.

Arthur soon discovers a third cat in the house -- this one also a nearly identical fluffy tortie -- emerging from the dryer vent. The new cat introduces himself as Killer, Robin's future self come back to warn his past self against making a grave mistake. He demonstrates his future knowledge by telling Arthur not to eat a certain tasty-looking houseplant, as it is poisonous. The human discovers Killer and assumes he is Robin.

Later in the day, Arthur is curled up in the human's lap being adorable when Robin enters the room. Arthur tells Robin about Killer, but Robin is unconvinced. To try to prove Killer wrong, he eats a big bite of the tasty looking plant -- and immediately pukes all over the floor.

The next day, Robin is sitting in the human's lap while she does some work on the computer. He sees her log into something labeled "TOP SECRET HIGH SECURITY," and the screen shows "Nuclear Launch Code: password123." Robin bats at the keyboard, accidentally initiating the launch sequence, which the human quickly cancels and then shoos Robin off her lap.

Killer confronts Robin, explaining that he is Robin's future self come back from a terrible post-apocalyptic dystopia with a dire warning. Killer insists that Robin should forget all about the nuclear codes he saw. Robin denies this, and loudly proclaims "password123! password123!"

Arthur wanders by and overhears the nuclear code and asks Killer about it (though she can't remember whether it's "password 123," "password 456," or "password321"). Arthur completely believes Killer's story and becomes very concerned about what Robin might do with the nuclear codes.

That night, Robin goes back on the computer to research what "nuclear launch codes" are. He Googles a bunch of information about the Cold War, and -- lacking any knowledge of historical and geopolitical context -- becomes convinced that Russia is located just around the bend in the road that they can see from the front window of the house. He is also certain that Russia intends to attack and destroy them, and that Killer is a Russian double agent.

Killer offers to take Robin and Arthur around the bend to show them that it is not, in fact, Russia, and to convince them of the terrible fate that awaits them if they do not forget about the nuclear launch codes. They all slip out through the dryer vent and walk around the bend. They meet another cat, named Coby, who knows Killer. Robin accuses Coby of being a Russian agent and asks him how to spell his name in Cyrillic (to which Coby replies "spell?"). Robin sees a teddy bear inside one of the houses on the new street and takes this as proof that this is in fact Russia, since Russia's symbol is a bear.

Killer leads the other two cats through a crack in the fence into a junkyard in order to show them what kind of future awaits them. He kills a mouse, to show what they'll have to do for food after the nuclear war. Arthur is worried because the mouse has no sauce on it (unlike good wet canned food). Robin dismisses the concern, because he finds an old pizza box with cheese stuck to the lid.

Back at the house, Robin decides to launch a preemptive strike on Russia. He gets on the computer and starts logging in to the nuclear launch site. Just before he is able to enter the launch password, Killer chews through the computer cord, shutting it down. He runs away as the human -- hearing the ruckus -- comes downstairs to find Robin typing on a dead computer. She takes him upstairs and shuts him in her room to prevent further mischief.

Killer talks to Arthur about a more long-term solution to Robin's insistence on starting a nuclear war. They decide that they can get him in trouble by peeing on everything, since that is a male cat behavior. They pee everywhere in the house -- except in the bedroom where Robin is sleeping.

When the human comes out in the morning, she initially blames Arthur. However, Robin emerges and takes the pee as a sign that he should pee everywhere too. The human gets upset and takes both Robin and Arthur back to the shelter. The shelter personnel figure out that Arthur was the cat she meant to adopt, and they take Robin back.

In the end, Robin is given several rounds of gross medicine for his urinary "problem," but is then adopted by a new family. They do not have access to the nuclear launch system, but he discovers that "password123" gets him into their bank account, Amazon account, eBay, etc. With their finances ruined by Robin's meddling, they are forced to send him back to the shelter.

Arthur lives a nice life with the human. He overhears Killer telling Coby about how he tricked these other cats into believing he was from the future, and so Arthur drops a flower pot on him. The human discovers Killer and takes him to the shelter, where he is promptly adopted by a nice family.