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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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The process of games design is like climbing a really big mountain – you know, you struggle up to the horizon bit that looks, for all the world, like you’ve finally achieved the Summit and it turns out to be a teasing undulation combined with an optical illusion…and you still have miles to go!
Today I thought I’d share a couple of play-test stories from Surprised Stare Games Ltd’s past.
[1] Fzzzt! – in ALL of the incarnations of my robotic fantasy right up to (literally) the week before we started laying out final artwork, there was a wholly-different Fzzzt! card in the deck. It was a money card with a good final score value but also, if played in a blind bid, could be sacrificed (removed from the game) to discard the card at the front of the line with the bid resolving to win the next one.
The idea was you’d just bought a pile of crap…
This would usually be timed to pull the rug from under a particular player, usually towards the end of the game when you have a rough idea what people are going for. In the fateful playtest, Richard Breese was a victim of this stratagem and was so horrified by experience that he fore-swore his usual genteel notes and just hit us with a faceful of disdain!
Richard was, of course, right to be upset: Fzzzt! has its interaction in the blind bidding – do I bluff three low cards to put everyone else off? How much do I pay for one particular card and be left with less money/bidding power later in the round? Can I sneak a tie-break on this card? Etc. It was wrong to then introduce a ‘take that!’ element to the bidding resolution – it was too swingy, it was too unfair and it necessitated a paragraph of rules all on its own!
The solution was very easy to come up with – a good bidding robot but useless to for Production Units and a minor VP penalty trade-off: still on theme and fair. This is an example of a mechanic that, on its own, undoes all of the good will built up by the rest of the game.
[2] Totemo – another example here of a mechanic/component that was core to the game from the very earliest jottings, but was cut-away in the final appraisal! Players originally started the game with the same set, in their colours, of joker tokens – a bit like those you get in Finca but Totemo was there first! They did things like ‘place an extra block this turn’, ‘swap the top block in a stack with one from your hand’, put a block(s) back into the bag etc.
These morph-ed into a deck of special effect cards that built on the tokens idea (excuse pun, please); you then hit key parts of the score track exactly to draw more of them, played them to manipulate the stacks and tweak your scores (so you could land on MORE bonus spots) etc.
It was that man again, Mr Richard Breese, who enjoyed the game but felt the card element got too much in the way – they were an extra layer of complexity that a) confused less experience gamers (timing, spotting good combos etc) and b) necessitated that all important extra paragraph of rules!
As much as I was irritated about a favourite part of the game being dissed so, I took the suggestion to abandon the cards altogether away…and came up with the bonus spaces that seed the score track at the start! The only bonus is the ability to play (and score!) another block – no more complicated than that!
The net effect of this change was people were still aiming to hit bonus spots but with less fiddling – it was about simple numbers. This is an example of a mechanic that made game-play cleverer (gamer-y) but at a cost to simplicity and elegance.
[3] Scandaroon – this is my much-maligned and mostly-ignored card game ‘with a score board’. It looks really bland, but it plays in a satisfyingly rich and interactive manner – honestly, it does! Scandaroon started life as a single, 54 card deck with a two-card score track; players built their lines and manipulated scores with the aim of either winning a round (most points, take their highest value card into their score pile) or coming second (second most points, take their lowest value card into their score pile). When a fixed number of rounds was played, whomever had the most points in their score pile was declared the winner. Full stop.
In this example, play-testing and development – see, I introduced a new word there – felt that the game was lacking a layer of interactivity and new ways of fighting for / earning victory points were introduced: highest score pile total was just ONE criterion, add points for 1/2/3 in a round and ‘highest overall’ score in the game were others. The score board expanded and, for some of the original players, the feel of the original was lost. Did we spoil the game at this point?
My view of the whole Scandaroon story is clouded, ultimately, NOT by it’s structure or even the flat presentation, but by the Essen at which it was launched (2007). I would be surprised if we sold more than 50 copies across the whole five days. On the Saturday, doors open at 10AM, we didn’t conduct our FIRST demonstration to a prospective customer until 3PM…FIVE HOURS of standing at the front of the booth, hands behind your back, smiling at the throng as they walk right passed.
That experience was compounded by International ATM transactions not working for the first two days of the show and there was a train (and U-Bahn) strike on the Saturday. Utterly bloody miserable.
The experience was nearly recreated when we set about producing Confucius a year later - but that's a whole different story with a cast of exotic characters, intrigue, deceit and missed opportunities. Maybe I'll get round to telling that another time - just need to get a Lawyer to look over things first.
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