Have you played the new board game 7 Wonders yet? It’s a clever little mix of civilization-building and Magic card drafting that scales effortlessly from three to seven players.

In the tradition of the Dominion Card Picker (which has been used over 300,000 times!) I wrote up a little script so that you wouldn’t have to waste sheets of paper calculating the score at the end of the game. It auto-scores and randomly generates a Wonder for each player for each game. You can ignore that if you wish, or ignore the side given, or whatever your house rules require.

On iOS devices, you should get the numeric keyboard when in the red row and the telephone keyboard in every other numeric row. It also has a home screen icon if you want to save it to your iPhone or iPad home screen.

Try it out, hopefully it saves some time and paper.

I’ll be tweaking it as I go.

You need to fail to get better. It’s a tenet of design, really any endeavor.

A few months ago, I commented on a board game I was working on that I was proud of called “Airport Rush”. No, don’t look. I’ve un-published the posts. I had worked on it for a number of months and had been stewing on the concept for even longer.

As you know from my Dominion randomizer, I’m a big fan of that particular card game. But I find that the cost balance is really decided by the group playing. If everyone tries to buy Chapel whenever it comes out, should it not be more expensive than two for that group? Should Treasure Map not cost five if it is bought in every game in your group? When you are dealing with cardboard instead of digital, you can’t make those switches on the fly without confusing house rules. But this stoked an interest of mine in designing a board or card game that was as self-balancing as possible.

So I spent roughly five months prototyping and playtesting and tweaking Airport Rush. In it, you get a number of passengers per turn and can fly them out or sit them on special cards that give you additional choices. The cards don’t have a cost. Whoever has the most passengers tied up on one gets the benefit. Thus, you spend the possibility of current points at a market rate for an ability which you judge to be worth more by endgame. The balance worked perfectly – I’ve never played a game, even with noobs, that was a runaway yet the player making the best decisions rarely lost.

I was excited enough about it that when my friend Mark said he was going to GenCon to pitch one of his designs, I was right there with him. My playtesters were asking to play Airport Rush. That’s a good sign!

After getting my appointment pushed back, I finally sat with one of the major board game publishers in the business. I removed the board and pieces from my backpack and gave some overview of the game. I had barely finished what choices one has on a turn when I got my first (and one could say, final) feedback.

“The theme doesn’t work.”

I paused. “What do you mean?”

“Who is the player that he can move passengers around an airport? Is he an airline? Then it doesn’t make sense that he can put passengers on flights to different cities.”

Now, it appears to me that there are two different methods to board game design. Either you can come up with clever mechanics to meet some sort of aesthetic end and apply a theme on top of it for flavor with a stronger coupling helping to flesh out that theme, or you can start with a theme and build mechanics around that theme. In the former case, you tend to get stronger systems with themes that are questionable at times. Look at Puerto Rico. How can you be a Governor and a Mayor simultaneously? How can you choose when there is a harvest? Why can you only have one type of good on a ship? Look at Dominion. Who the hell are you in Dominion? Look at Race for the Galaxy. That game makes absolutely no sense thematically. In the latter case, you tend to get very strong themes with more bland game systems. Obviously, I went the former route. The game systems work very well and I thought the theme worked well to support those but not perfectly.

I knew the publisher’s lineup and thought this fit. First impressions mean everything. I blew mine.

I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere with that, so I took out my backup. It was a card game called New York Minute. In it, you place New York landmarks and try to get three in a row.

“You are placing known landmarks. The Statue of Liberty isn’t next to Broadway. It doesn’t make sense.”

Scoop.

Later in the weekend, I met with a small publisher who expressed serious interest in New York Minute only to renege by email a few weeks later. GenCon was a bust. I was so defeated by my experience that I unpublished the Airport Rush posts I had made on here. Now that I’ve had time to reflect, maybe it isn’t such a failure. What should I do with the designs? Keep working on them? Shelve them and try something new? Try to produce them myself? Kickstarter? Keep sending to publishers I didn’t meet at GenCon? The games are good fun and unique, I know this and I want to share them.

My tenacity is not the problem. I just don’t know what to do next. It’s not so much a design problem as a business problem. If you were looking for some lesson beyond “failure happens”, I’m afraid I don’t have one for you all on this particular post.

I’m not going to continue my posts about Airport Rush for the time being. I had a fantastic playtest session with some very talented designers at Eric Zimmerman‘s playtest group yesterday and I think I am going to make some major changes. While this is dangerous to do a month before I take the game to GenCon, I think it is absolutely necessary.

It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.

There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.

It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.

I was setting up a game of Power Grid this weekend and thought I was incredibly clever:

The other players weren’t as entertained as I.

I love this interview of a board game designer, even if it makes me a little depressed:

“If you design a set of rules, there are values inherent in them. There are things that get rewarded, and things that get punished. Designing rules can be a profound philosophical thing.”

Indeed and it is why designers can get so personally invested and defensive in making changes.

I’ve been really digging board games lately as some of my last few posts can attest. Just when I’m getting sick and tired of the same old mechanics day in and day out from digital games, I discover this world with a lot of fresh ideas. It’s a new source of inspiration. One of the greatest games of all time is based on a board game. Add to that the results in digital form from Dungeons and Dragons and the entire genre of wargames and you pretty much have 80% of the video game market, but you haven’t scratched the surface of the board game market.

So I’ve been going to these New York City Boardgame Meetups to get my game on and learn about some new stuff. You’ll see more reports from me as time goes on based on these events.

Last night, I got to play two games:

The first was Hansa Teutonica. I don’t know why the Germans have a love affair with feudal daily minutiae but so many of their games seem to be based on merchants or trading or land disputes. This game is based on the former. After a long, complex rules briefing, we were into the game which (one you get over the heavy load of info up front) is really quite digestible.

Actually, this brings me to my first aside. On the player skills board is a summary of the five things a player can do on his turn:

See them there on the bottom? Tell me what they mean. You can’t. I can barely interpret the icons and I’ve played the game. If the purpose of the icons was to teach me what I can do, they clearly failed. If the icons serve to remind me what I can do, they have also failed.

They could have had a player card that said:

On your turn you can use an action to:
- Move cubes from your storage to your usable supply. (See bag for amount)
- Place a piece on a road.
- Displace an opponent’s piece from a road.
- Move pieces. (See book for amount.)
- Establish an office or use a special ability from a full road.

There you go. Now the game is about filling up roads to either increase the skills on your skill list (above image) or claim offices that gain you points. There are some fiddly rules about office ownership and scoring but that is pretty much it. There are five cities on the board with special abilities where instead of claiming an office, you can upgrade the skill on your skill list. These grant things like additional actions per turn, additional cities where one can set offices, the ability to move more pieces per trun, &c., These are useful and integral, which leads me to an issue.

The cities that have the special abilities are so important that the rest of the game seems less so. What is ostensibly a game about building a trade network quickly becomes a game to control the roads nearest these cities, especially the city that provides additional actions per turn. This isn’t an amazingly huge problem in our first game, but since there is next to no randomness in the game (there are randomly dealt special effect tiles, but that is it), it seems like every game is going to play out similarly as all the players battle for the special abilities cities.

The game board itself is ugly. If you don’t want your eyes to melt, don’t look at the image below. For some reason the artist decided that serif-y white text on a grey background was essentially readable. The board is unnecessarily busy and it distracts from the game and makes it seem harder than it is. Maybe that was the point.

If I was redesigning the game, it would be re-themed and the board would be cleaner and clearer. I’d likely simplify the scoring system and make it so that the locations of the special cities moved and/or that there was some mechanic that stopped the game from focusing solely on those cities. Even though it is anathema to the hardest of the hardcore board game nerds, I would add some card mechanic or something more easily parsed than the current tile bonus system. That card mechanic could tie into the moving cities idea. The game needs the pruning shears badly. Mechanics need to be simplified, consolidated or let go.

On the plus side, it was easy to see your opponent’s tactical ideas. Play certainly didn’t seem to be randomly evolving. Since I could tell what they were going to do, I could plan for it. This is the strategic meat of the game and it is excellent. Because of this, the game moves quickly unless someone’s plans are foiled. And if that’s the case, something interesting probably happened so the interruption in game flow is not unwelcome (to use a double negative).

Overall, I had a great time. I had thought I won only to be eclipsed by three points in the final tally because I didn’t fully understand the eight-part scoring system. Again, either needlessly complex or simply presented poorly. I’ll play this again if folks bring it back as I am interested in how repeated plays hold up, but I probably wouldn’t buy it.

I tried so hard to get people to play Agricola with me so that I could play a cube pushing game that I knew, but I got railroaded into a game of Acquire. Never again. The less said the better, but Acquire is a lot of sitting around waiting for someone else to move and then a lot of counting the board and cross-referencing a card. I found it chaotic. It was tough to plan any kind of strategy at all with the board changing. The first player to be acquired seems to have a huge advantage if he plays it well since he will have more resources than anyone else for the longest time. I came in last because I just wanted the game to be over and the winner wasn’t really paying attention the whole game. Since it is an older game, I’m sure there is a lot of nostalgia around it. I still play Monopoly, but by today’s standards, it has similar issues.

There’s an article on BoardGameNews talking about the good and the bad of Tobago, a new board game that makes people brain burn on set theory in a nice little island theme with some beautiful pieces. I bought Tobago sight unseen last month and have had the chance to play it twice. But this post isn’t so much about Tobago as it is about the Game Design Rule at the bottom of the article:

For myself, I simply mark down another game design rule: if you create a thoughtful mechanism, make sure it’s strategic too.

And that’s such a limiting hardcore game-nerd rule.

It reminds me of my time at EA when I would suggest features that I believed would make our games more interesting to play, but were vetoed down for what I think is the same reasoning. In my case, the objection would always be: “How does this affect gameplay? Does this raise your stats?” or something similar with the underlying suggestion that if it didn’t offer strategic advantage, it wasn’t worth a designer’s time.

Gameplay isn’t just who wins and loses, it is all the choices the players make and the results of those choices. But to the author of the article, and many of the people I previously worked with, gameplay is ONLY the choices and results that affect who wins and loses. Everything else is window dressing.

When you play Rock Band, do you choose which song you play based on how well you will do – which song will give you the highest score? No, you choose based on a number of factors that are an attempt to maximize p(fun). Not p(win). But hardcore gamers of all brands (cardboard and digital) like to make that equation: p(win) = p(fun). Therefore, to them, anything that doesn’t increase p(win) cannot increase p(fun). They smile at the quaint sentiment that you can have fun losing a game. Some may even believe that but only insofar as it provides lessons that increase p(win) for all subsequent games.

So what the above author is REALLY saying is: “If you create a thoughtful mechanism, make sure it is strategic too because I like strategic thinking because it can make me win.”

Tobago‘s treasure elimination mechanic is fun to me not because it allows us to create solutions to puzzles that make us win, but because it allows us to formulate answers to puzzles that make the game space more interesting.

But to make a “game design rule” about what is fun to me would leave me with a narrow set of rules for a singular audience.

This is the first that I’ve heard the nomenclature of a “Living Card Game”, but it seems to me to improve on CCGs in every way, shape and form:

You have your customizable deck of cards that you make beforehand, before you play. It has the same type of strategy elements that you would find, the depth of play, in that every game plays out differently, the same strategy.

They differ in the fact that it’s not collectible. You know what you’re going to buy in the packages that you buy. You don’t have to chase cards to build decks. You can play with the cards that you want to play with.

Post-Dominion though, I’m not entirely sure the build-your-deck-before-the-game has much more in it.