How-To Publish Games, The Tasty Minstrel Way

* Provide a learning game variant. After receiving feedback about the first plays of Eminent Domain taking a very long time due to the tech decks, we introduced the learning game which ignored technology completely.

I think you need to be careful with this.

I think with some games (and groups), it's hard to ever get the full experience. The first time, everyone is new and they play the learning game. The next time, 3 of the players played before but there's 2 new players, so you do the learning game again. This continues on and on. Eventually, people get sick of the learning game and never even got to try out the full game.

Of course, it's less of a problem with some groups, but it's something to keep in mind.

I agree. I'm sick of every game having multiple sets of rules!

* If there is something that a player can do early which will prevent them from winning, then that should be removed from the game. The idea here is that every choice in a game should be from a pool of good choices. If the game allows me to do something stupid and I lose as of a result, then I will blame the game...

Nice insights as usual. Even though I'm not intending to be a game publisher ever I've really enjoyed following your blog though. Of course there are points I disagree on though.

For example, your mention of a learning variant in Eminent Domain. Personally I have never used it, and I've taught the game to a score of different people. The reason I've never used it is because in my mind the tech cards are what should drive your strategy. They enhance the game so much that I think its more worthwhile to play an extra 20-30 minutes on a learning game than to keep the game shorter and easier. You just have to explain that it takes awhile to understand all the card interactions in the techs. Another thing I do is when someone announces a research role I only give them the cards they can gain, and I tell them which planet stacks are focused on which things so they don't have to worry about picking between them as much.

In short, simplified learning variants are nice, but they can be a detriment to your initial game play if they remove a core aspect of the game. If you finish the game and didn't get any sort of "hook" in you then the initial game play failed. With EmDo I can see that happening easily without the technology cards. I find a better compromise in just giving advice. (I ask what they want to do; produce/trade, research, deck thin, colonize, etc.. and then give them a tech recommendation based on that).

That can be a good thing to remove in game design but not always. There are lots of things in lots of games that can take you out of the running early but help you win later. I think its a dangerous rule to hold fast and hard like that. Imagine if Homesteaders didn't allow you to gain VP's on your homestead because someone *might* just spend the whole game doing that. They would certainly lose, but they certainly shouldn't blame the game. Some things are necessary to have that way and the players need to be aware of it.

In your Terra Prime example I think you are a bit off as well. I agree that someone that rushes out there unprepared may lose a lot of their modules and some points and feel defeated, likely never to be able to catch up. That would be a horrible game experience and they would sit for another hour bored. However, if the option to move out into deep dangerous space was completely removed the game would lose a lot of its pizzazz. Much of the game is spent building up your ship precisely so you can move out there and blow up some aliens or dodge a bunch of asteroids.

A better idea IMO is to educate players within the rulebook. Use bolded sentences to point out a few basic things they should not do, or to reinforce some of the basic strategy things to consider. Homesteaders does this with a basic strategy arc and after explaining that I've never had a person that I taught try to produce VP's on turn 1.

To summarize I would say that some games need to just allow the players to play. If there are mistakes to be made it is up to the players to notice and avoid them. If they make the mistake they will learn from it, and if the game has enough in it to hook them it still will. Just be careful about making plays that are game destroying look like good options.

This learning variant was not available in the original game, but was a result of teaching the game to large numbers of people. It was often heard that there was too much going on with all of the tech cards being available, and having to learn how the game played and flows.

Also, it is important to discover common ways of playing the game incorrectly and specifically state not to do it. For example, with Eminent Domain, we found that people were taking influence points from the pool when flipping planets over. As you can imagine, this led to an incredibly short and unfulfilling game!

My guess is you were probably in a situation where you had to teach multiple games in a row as well. I usually am not. I can see where you would want to keep it shorter if you need to teach group after group, whereas I only needed to teach one group and thus a few extra minutes is not a problem.

Another thing I point out to people that helps them be able to "grok" the techs quick is that the level 1 techs are all improvements on the basic actions. Then they understand quickly that a card that says "Improved Research" lets them do a better research action. It keeps them from reaching for the tech stacks from the beginning of the game and be able to focus on gameplay instead.

I guess I also probably don't ask for as much feedback about the game as you do.

BTW Michael, are you still enjoying EmDo as much as you were when starting to play it? When it was first being talked about I remember you showing a lot of enthusiasm and I'm interested to hear how well you think it holds up to repeated, non-playtest related, plays. Personally I think it holds up well, obviously.

I still love playing Eminent Domain. Although, given my desire to continue pushing forward as a game publisher, desire to be at home/available to my children/wife, day job, and so forth, I have not played since I was at GenCon.

Everytime I play it, I still love it. So it is holding up incredibly well! Plus the upcoming expansion expands greatly on the current game play while adding very few new rules.

My first play of Terra Prime was indeed not great. We had the feeling the 2 players starting out had a big advantage (I now know that is not the case at all) and the game took ages (2.5h with 4 new players). Since playing it again I've come to love this game quite a bit, and it usually plays in 60 to 90 minutes. Just right!

Terra Prime can be unforgiving though, if you make certain mistakes, it can be hard to recover in time.