Game Design Diary – December 2018

And just like that, Christmas slips into New Year, and the pair go tumbling down in a crash. It’s 2019 and if you embrace such activities, it’s a time for new plans, new routines, and overly ambitious goals. But before we get to those, how did I get on in December?

• Rulebooks – I finished a draft rulebook for Catch the Rainbow! I did not start a rulebook for Wren’s Churches.
• New Designs – I made some progress on a new design: Skyscrapers! More below.

I actually managed to do a bit of everything I set out to do! Nothing fully, mind, but still. That feels like progress!

Skyscrapers

Right! The exciting new things! Skyscrapers is a game about building and populating your own tower block, inspired by Sim Tower. You start with a skeleton frame of a tower and add rooms and tenants over the course of the game. There’s a reasonable similarity to city building games in how you’ll care about the position and types of rooms you add to your tower. But more important is how I wanted to create a global supply/demand effect. The idea is that building apartments adds people which creates demand for jobs, so it’s a good idea to start building offices, which adds demand for better quality housing as more wealthy tenants become available.

Skyscrapers is in the very early stages, so I won’t go into too much detail yet. I’ve got a working theory for the core mechanics, and I have started putting together a prototype. But it is definitely one of the more complicated designs I’ve tried to put together and it requires quite a few components, so I expect it will take a few weeks to finish off. There’s a good mix of designing special room types to do, and a bunch of simple but tedious cutting out jobs for doing in front of the TV. Hopefully I’ll have made some good progress by the end of the month.

Catch the Rainbow

There were a couple of jobs to do here. Firstly, I needed to figure out the 3 player setup. For 4 players, there were an even number of Each card type, so it was easy to just divide the deck exactly in two. But that wasn’t going to work for 3 players. I had tried randomly discarding a few cards but that made for some dissatisfying asymmetries in the amounts of certain colours. Not so good when you’re trying to build rainbows.

The challenge was to figure out which cards should be added to the 2 player deck to create roughly the same distribution of colours as in the 2 and 4 player games. An hour’s trial and error working with a notepad brought it together. Now, each card features a 2/3/4+ in the corner to indicate whether it should be included. It’s annoying to have to sort the deck like that before play, but not unusual and the game kind of needs it.

The next thing I wanted to do was add in a degree of randomness to the game end, so that it wasn’t possible to count the remaining cards and predict the game end. Especially as that would encourage closely analysing each player’s player board to check their draw rate. So I took the standard approach of adding a ‘game end’ card to a certain region of the bottom of the deck.

It now felt like all the core elements of the game were in place so it was time to write the rulebook! Writing a rulebook is tough. Especially when you have games with strong spatial elements to them. Things that are quite intuitive when teaching become a lot harder to explain in words. Of course, diagrams help there, and so I spent a fair few hours putting together digital copies of cards and diagrams. Which means I have also done a lot of the work for creating a printable digital version of the game! Still a fair bit of formatting required for that but I think the core elements are there. Nice little bonus!

Blind Playtest

Just in time for writing this article, I ran my first ever blind playtest! With my wife being the guinea pig. It’s not ideal to play in a blind Playtest as other players can pick up the correct rules from you, and I didn’t do a very good job of NOT explaining things, especially once we got going. But it was still helpful as a first pass through the rulebook.

A couple of interesting things to think about came out of the playtests too. Firstly, the upgrade track structure, increasing your hand size, play rate, and draw rate doesn’t offer you as many options as might appear at first glance. You’ll never want to be able to play more cards than your hand size, and there’s a kind of natural switching point from increasing hand size to increasing draw. I would have hoped for more options to be coming out of this system, or for the system to be simpler.

My wife also ignored pots of gold in both games and I think the current upgrade structure contributes to this. Pots aren’t worth much early in the game but it’s hard to hang on to them for later without driving up your hand size. Which is the “alternative” approach the current upgrade system allows for but it’s not obvious. Which I think should be fine but at least in two players this came as a bit of a shock when I got half my points from a single play of multiple pots on the final action. There is a fair bit to think about in all of this.

January Aims

With us starting a new year, or in my planning cycle, a new quarter, I want to once again make game design more of a focus. To that end I’m thinking about a couple of things:

• Playtest UK – I haven’t been able to attend a meeting since October so it’s time to get back into that fortnightly routine!
• Daily Game Design – this is a bit more ambitious. I want to do a little bit of design related stuff everyday. Designing a new card or a tiny bit of prototyping or reading an article count so it doesn’t have to be a huge change. I’m hoping the small but regular progress inspires me to get even more done. We shall see! This aspiration was inspired by @emmalarkins and the #GameDesignDaily on Twitter.

What about specific tasks?

• Develop and test improvements to Catch the Rainbow (and update the rulebook)
• Cardboard Edison Award – this annual design contest is a pretty big opportunity for designers so I’d love to pull together Catch the Rainbow in time for this. It closes on the 31st of January so we will see how the next few tests pan out, assuming I can get to them soon enough.
• Skyscrapers prototyping – would be nice to have a finished prototype to test by the end of the month. There may be a fair bit to do though so we will see. I’m hopeful if I can pull off daily design that this will tick along very nicely.
• Wren’s Churches rulebook – well, it certainly won’t get done if I don’t put it on the list, now will it?

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I hope you have some big bold aims for the new year? Let us know what you’re goals are in the comments!