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Dominic Crapuchettes
United States
Bethesda
MD
This overtext is brought to you by the abstract strategy game Battle of LITS and the number 20.
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At North Star Games, the last Friday of every month is reserved for play testing.
February's session was dedicated to a card game I've been working on recently. Although prior testing was good enough to prompt publication discussions, the game took a big leap forward with this play session. People were having such a good time that they kept playing after I went upstairs to put my son to bed. In fact, they kept playing until I had to break up the party for waking up Daniel several times. After much discussion, we have decided that we will try to release it by February 2012!
(Emphasis on try. This is not a release announcement.)
The game is inspired by Tichu. Although I had played Tichu several times at conventions, it wasn't until I got the iPhone app that I grew to love the game. Even so, I have a big grip with it. It's the same gripe I have with most games: People get over-whelmed when I try to teach it to them.
Last December I received Through the Desert, Tichu, and Ubongo from my Secret Santa (thanks Santa!). My parents were over, so it seemed like the perfect time to play Tichu. They were excited to learn the game, but their eyes started glazing over half way through the explanation, so we played Ubongo instead:
We had a lot of fun, but I wanted to teach a portable game that we could take on our frequent outings. So I set out to distill the essence of Tichu into a game with one quarter of the rules. One problem was that my mom didn't know the standard poker hands, so she was already over-whelmed with the types of hands that can be led before we got to the scoring or the special Tichu cards. Another problem was that I had to bypass several game teaching sessions until there were exactly 4 players, since Tichu is a partner game. Some of my design goals were:
1) Card game
2) Easy to learn
3) Considerable depth
4) Playable by 3 - 6 players
The first thing I considered was how the target market for my game would differ from the typical Tichu player. There is no reason to create a game that scratches the same itch as Tichu - Tichu already does that! My goal was to design a strategy game that could be enjoyed by the "typical" North Star Games customer. This is a tricky endeavor, since all of our previous games are party games. Releasing a strategy game is liable to confuse and frustrate someone who is expecting a party game, which is why we've been slow to move in this direction.
I concluded that our typical customer might be familiar with Hearts, Spades, and Gin Rummy, but probably little else. So to create a bridge to the familiar, I would draw upon mechanics similar to those games, but not from mechanics common to only Euro games or poker. Drawing upon elements that are familiar allows a designer to increase the depth of a game without dramatically increasing the amount of time it takes to learn the game. For instance, most gamers are familiar with worker placement, area majority, attack/defense/movement powers, and deck construction, so none of these concepts take long to explain to them. But explain any one of these concepts to my Mom and you're in for a long night!
The first thing I did was reduce the number of possible hands to two different types. Then I figured out a simple scoring structure that created increasing rewards during play. My initial rendition worked fairly well, but the game hit it's stride when I figured out a way to simulate the tension you feel when you are worried that someone might play a "bomb" on a trick that you are expecting to win (a bomb is a hand that can always be played in Tichu, regardless of what was led). The solution is very simple, and I'm happy to say that it works extremely well! This tension of taking risks coupled with an increasing reward structure is the key to the game.
Quick History of the Genre:
Once we started thinking about publication, I decided to do some research on the genre. My fear was that I may have arrived at something similar to another game that already exists. As it turns out, there are a lot of variations on the concept but none of them very similar to our game. Here are some of the games that I looked into:
Tichu
Gang of Four
Big Two
Lexio
Haggis
Tien Len
Zheng Fen
Zheng Shangyou
Daihinmin
Tien Len
The basic concept comes from mixing poker with a trick taking game. Different variations have became popular in Vietnam, China, and Japan (and probably several other Asian countries). I think the earliest versions emphasized playing your cards as soon as possible, by giving players negative points for cards left in their hands. Later version like Tichu added positive points for taking certain tricks.
I'll keep people updated if we decide to publish it for 2012. We'd like to, but we have so many projects on our plate that we might not find the time. Part of the reason that we're excited to publish this game is that it would require very little development work. We're used to publishing games for which it takes 3 people several months to develop questions. This game seems like a cake-walk by comparison. Perhaps we're missing something...
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This overtext is brought to you by the abstract strategy game Battle of LITS and the number 20.
