Why we use non-electronic games to teach (and learn) electronic game design

The following appeared (in slightly different form) on GameCareerGuide.com

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/602/pulling_the_plug_in_defense_of_.php

Why we use non-electronic games to teach (and learn) electronic game design

Introduction

Teaching game design with non-electronic games is a much more efficient use of the students' (and the instructor's) time that also teaches students more about game design than if they struggle with programming and art to produce electronic games. Learning game design with non-electronic games is much more effective for beginners than trying to produce electronic games. I’m here to explain why.

I'll summarize the reasons first, then discuss each in turn. Then I'll describe what happens when beginners learn using electronic games. (Henceforth I’ll use “students” and “beginners” interchangeably.)

! It's much more practical for beginners to make non-electronic prototypes--specialized skills such as programming and digital artistry are not needed.

! Much of successful game design is iterative and incremental; this is much easier for students to understand when they can quickly make and modify playable prototypes.

! Non-electronic games force students to concentrate on gameplay, not looks/slickness/coolness that have no staying power.

! Much less time is wasted on poor ideas–and most ideas are poor ideas.

! The greater simplicity of non-electronic games forces concentration on good gameplay.

! Students cannot "hide behind the computer" (the "easy button").

It's much more practical for beginning students to make non-electronic prototypes--specialized skills such as programming and digital artistry are not needed.

Less time is required for preliminary design of the non-electronic game. By their nature, non-electronic games are simpler than most video games, if only because there is no computer to control complexity. Moreover, you can reach the point of playing a paper prototype when you haven't figured out all the details, while an electronic game requires more detail before a playable prototype can be constructed. With a non-electronic game, if the designer is present he can make a ruling anytime a question arises that isn’t covered in the rules–the rules may not even be written, yet. This cannot be done with electronic games, the program must be fully functional, which means the "rules" must be complete and detailed.

A usable playable prototype of a non-electronic game can be made in an hour or two. A playable electronic prototype, even a simple one, will take new game design students dozens of hours on average for relatively simple video games.

If you’re familiar with how movies are made in the 21^st century, think of the storyboards and “pre-viz” electronic versions of the movie that are made before actual filming. These are all prototypes, in effect. But it is much easier, cheaper, quicker, to make storyboards or even the pre-viz, than to shoot the actual movie. The same is true for non-electronic games, they are much easier, cheaper, and quicker to make. (Many designers recommend making non-electronic prototypes to test ideas for electronic games, just as storyboards test ideas for films.)

For tips for making paper prototypes read:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050913/sigman_01.shtml

Much of game design is iterative and incremental; this is much easier for students to understand when they can quickly make and modify playable prototypes.

The playable prototype is what really counts; I tell students, “playtesting is Sovereign." The problem with any electronic production of a game is that it takes SO long, compared to making a non-electronic prototype, that students fail to do the most important part of design: repeated testing, and modification in light of that testing. They get a working prototype, play it a few times, and think they're done, instead of just getting started. Unfortunately, the emphasis in the video game industry, and in video game design books, is on planning a video game, in order to obtain funding to produce the prototype. This obscures the primacy of testing once you have that prototype. NO prototype is a really good game when it is first played.

The refinement process mainly consists of playtesting for modifications, not for bug finding. It’s important to “lose” any feature of a game that doesn’t contribute to good gameplay. A non-electronic game designer can simply wave his hand and change a rule, or remove a feature, of a game, whereas the video game designer faces a lengthy period of software modification–and tends to be reluctant to make changes.

The "natural" way to design a game used to be pursued in the video game industry, and may still be done for small games. A playable prototype is produced as soon as possible. It is played, revised, played, revised, played, revised, seemingly forever, until a stable "good game" has been produced. Sid Meier did this with Civilization. He programmed, he and (mostly) Bruce Shelley played, they decided what needed to be changed, Sid programmed, they played, and so on.

More recently, Sid Meier said on slashdot, "My whole approach to making games revolves around first creating a solid prototype and then playing and improving the game over the course of the 2-3 year development cycle . . . until we think it's ready for prime time. My experience in this area helps me to know what to do and where to start. I definitely spend a lot of time playing the game before I let anyone else look at it."

In a classroom we don't have the time (or the skills, usually) to create video games rapidly. But it's easy to create non-video games rapidly.

Furthermore, in a classroom context, it's easy for students to "redesign" traditional games like chess, perhaps one feature at a time. Because the games are quite simple, it's easier to discuss and predict the actual result of the changes. Most important, you can actually play the changed versions and see what happens.

You can "redesign" electronic games, but you can't put the redesigns into practice to see the results--it would take too long even if it was otherwise practical. Students tend to miss the point that design almost never turns out the way you intended, when you actually play the game.

Non-electronic games let students start out with small steps rather than attempt a big project that may fail for many reasons other than poor design.

For more about iteration see this recent article: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/577/iterative_design.php

Non-electronic games force students to concentrate on gameplay, not looks/slickness/coolness that have no staying power.

Many students equate good looks with a good game. If they’re making electronic games, they’ll spend a lot of time trying to make them look good, trying to reach AAA list quality even though that’s impossible in any reasonable amount of time.

With non-electronic games students quickly see that there’s no point in wasting time worrying about slick looks until the game is actually “done.” Paper game designs are, by their nature, utilitarian, though published paper games can be full of eye-candy and slick parts.

Students nowadays often have only played "traditional" non-electronic games such as Monopoly and Game of Life that are, in fact, somewhere between mediocre and downright bad game designs. Discussion of traditional games opens their eyes to what good design really is, and helps them think critically about gameplay.

Much less time is wasted on poor ideas–and most ideas are poor ideas.

Students tend to think their first idea will be "the best game ever." And if that doesn't pan out, the next one will be "great." Experienced designers know that they should have many, many designs "in the works" at any time. And they know that to get a few really good ideas you need to generate a great many ideas altogether.

Furthermore, there's no reason to expect students to come up with excellent game designs when they're starting out, any more than writers or artists or composers start out with excellent ideas or results. John Creasey, who ultimately published more than 600 novels (mostly mysteries), was rejected more than 700 times before he made a sale. Science fiction novelist (and Byte magazine computer pundit) Jerry Pournelle says you must be willing to throw away your first million words (about 10 novels) if you want to become a good novelist.

Why let students waste huge amounts of time producing an electronic game that is a fundamentally bad design? When they design non-electronic games and very soon thereafter play their prototypes, they quickly discover that their "great ideas" are not very good, in practice. This helps them learn to critique their ideas at an early stage, and discard the obviously bad ones before spending a lot of time on them. In a sense, it teaches them humility, something that every designer must learn.

These are especially important lessons for the "millennial" generation in the “age of instant gratification.” Some people think they’re in “The Matrix,” where a quick pill is all they need to be an expert. Starting out with electronic games obscures the nature of these illusions.

The greater simplicity of non-electronic games forces concentration on good gameplay.

Students tend to identify "games" with AAA list games, rather than with much simpler casual games or games of 20 years ago (e.g., Tetris, Space Invaders). These AAA games are often terrifically complex. This is the kind of game most students want to produce, though as a practical matter most of them actually won't work for companies producing AAA list games, nor in an educational setting can they make such complex games requiring dozens of man-years of professional effort.

All this complexity obscures the actual game design in the games. That obscuring complexity rarely exists in non-electronic games; furthermore, the students aren't likely to design complex non-electronic games because they cannot expect the computer to take care of the details. Gameplay is a much more obvious element of non-electronic games than it is of video games. The result: the student is forced to concentrate on the most important part of the game, gameplay.

For example, beginners designing electronic games tend to concentrate on story rather than gameplay, usually a big mistake. When there's no computer, they're less likely to do this, because they don't have a computer to "describe and depict the world" for them.

Students cannot "hide behind the computer" (the "easy button").

Students tend to design an overly-complex electronic game and assume "the computer will take care of" problems that are, in fact, game design problems. I call this "hiding behind the computer." Unfortunately this is easy to do, because only at the end of a very long design and modification cycle will it become obvious that the computer cannot solve the problem, that it's a design problem.

People make computer games complex . . . because they can, because the "computer will take care of" things that would never be possible or tolerable in a non-electronic game. Often, the resulting game is too complex despite the computer.

Designers, especially novices, should live by the following: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery (French engineer and early airman).)

It's much easier to learn to do this effectively with non-electronic games.

With non-electronic games, there's clearly no "easy button"; when there's no computer, there's nowhere to hide. When you design something that results in a crappy electronic game prototype, you can blame it on the programming, or the art, or the sound, or something else. When you make a crappy non-electronic game prototype, you're out there on your own, it's your fault, so you are forced to figure out what you need to do to get better.

Designing non-electronic games is actually more challenging, for most people. And more educational for beginners.

Having described these reasons, now let's consider two important questions.

What happens when you start to teach (or learn) with electronic games?

If you begin with electronic games, in the end, you never actually teach or learn game design, you teach or learn game production, which is quite another thing, and you teach or learn it in an exceptionally half-baked way.

If the class uses a simple game engine, even something as simple as Gamemaker, this not only severely limits what games can be made, most of the effort goes into making the prototype work, not into the design and testing/iteration phases.

When you create electronic games for learning purposes, you’ll spend almost all of your time on game production elements that are not game design.

How IS electronic and non-electronic game design different?

Many video game experts say "game design is game design" whether electronic or not (e.g. Adams and Rollings, Game Design Fundamentals). This is a topic for another article, but I can point out the most important difference.

The obvious difference is scale, but this isn’t so much a design difference as a marketing difference. “Big time” video games are produced by dozens of people, cost millions of dollars, and in rare cases sell many millions of copies. “Big time” non-video games are produced by a few people with budgets in the thousands, with only a few titles such as Settlers of Catan and Risk selling as many as a million copies.

More important from a design perspective, electronic games tend to be one person (or group) versus the computer; non-electronic games tend to be two or more people playing against one another. “Multi-sided” games–more than one conflicting human entity (individual or group)–are the norm in the non-electronic world, the exception in the video game world. (Except where PvP is allowed, even an MMO is not multi-sided even if there are 70 people in a raid.) We are seeing more multi-sided video games, and there is a lot to be learned from board and card games. I’ll address that another time.

Idea Origins, originally on GameCareerGuide

I've not written much here lately because I'm working on a book and contributing articles to Gamasutra and GameCareerGuide. I'm going to put some of the older ones here. This one was "Idea Origins" 9 Dec '08, http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php. The following has been revised a little from that original version.


The idea is not the game

"Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as invention, you know. It's only magnifying what already exists." Allie Fox, character in the film The Mosquito Coast

How important are ideas?

Most novice designers think that their main task is to come up with a great new idea. They think a great new idea will necessarily become a great game. Also, to them an idea must be new to be great. You can see folks like this asking in online forums for help in turning their idea into a game; they almost never find a collaborator, because ideas alone are nearly worthless.

As Allie Fox says, the reality is that there is hardly ever a new idea--"nothing new under the sun"--rather there are new ways to use old ideas.

Furthermore, for every person who gets an idea, there are usually dozens or hundreds of others with the same idea.

Think about the category of novel writing. Almost all novels are variations of ideas used in novels published in the past. It's how the writer presents the ideas that counts, plus a dollop of luck. There is nothing notably new in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, but it has sold over 60 million copies. The same can be said about movies, hardly anything is new.

How often do we get a really extraordinary new idea in games? In non-video gaming, we have Avalon Hill'sStalingrad/Afrika Korps/Waterloo, TSR's Dungeons and Dragons, Wizard of the Coast's Magic:the Gathering. A game as successful as Trivial Pursuit or Settlers of Catan is a simple variation on games that came before. In video games, there have been many technical advances, but few really new games. The Sims comes to mind, but it was preceded by a game called Little Computer People which Mobygames calls “the mother of The Sims”; have you ever heard of it? A new idea does not guarantee a highly successful product, and highly successful games usually have no new ideas.

It doesn't make sense to try to come up with a "great idea": your chances are worse than one in a million of coming up with one. And if you did would you recognize it as a great idea?

Because ideas on their own count for so little, publishers want games, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen; everyone in the game industry has ideas. Recognize that your "great idea" is probably not that great, not that original, and not that interesting to others. Virtually everyone thinks their game ideas are extraordinarily good, and everyone is wrong almost all the time.

This is hard for beginners to accept, partly because it’s easy to come up with a few ideas, so it’s nice to think that you only need to come up with a great idea to make a lot of money. No, there’s a lot of work in making a successful game, beginning with generating LOTS of ideas. The more ideas you have, the more likely you’ll have a few really good ones that can become really good games.

There’s a “pyramid” of game design (see illustration) that goes like this:
• Lots of people get ideas
• Fewer successfully go from general idea to a specific game idea
• Fewer yet produce a prototype
• Fewer yet produce a decently playable prototype
• Very few produce a completely designed game
• And very, very few produce a really good complete game

As we progress in this chapter I’ll talk about how to get ideas, what to do with those ideas, how to turn those ideas into specific game ideas, and so on to reach the prototype. Everything applies equally to video games and non-electronic games.

(For more about the worth of ideas alone, see Tom Sloper’s advice at http://www.sloperama.com/advice/idea.htm.)

How many ideas?

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Edward de Bono

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling

“Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning.” Robert Collier

If you have no ideas, you’ll never have a game. How many ideas do you need? The more the better. Most of them will never become games, let alone good games. It’s another sub-pyramid as show in the accompanying illustration (which ought to be much wider than it is tall, but is a conventional pyramid for the sake of clarity).

[Illustration miniature included here, larger version attached separately]




If all this is true, then you know you need to generate a great many ideas in order to have a few that might ultimately reach retailer shelves. Remember the conventional wisdom that upwards of 90% of the video games that are initially funded–that’s the plans that are good enough for someone to be willing to pay to have them developed–never reach the public. At some stage they’re canceled or the studio fails for other reasons. One of the more well-known boardgame designers estimates that 60% of his games will not be published. And for every idea that is good enough to try to turn into a game, there are many, many ideas that don’t make it.

You want to get to a point where you have far more fruitful ideas than you can possibly turn into games even if you live to be a hundred. Ideas beget ideas, so the more you come up with, the more you get. As novelist John Steinbeck said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” But this means you need a great many ideas.

There are creators who write just one novel, have just one hit song, publish just one game. In a few cases they may have had just a few ideas, though more likely, they had lots of ideas but only one “panned out”. If you want to be a professional designer, who publishes game after game, you need to be working on many games at once, and that means a very high volume of ideas.

How do you get ideas?

People ask novelists, “where do you get your ideas?” The answer is usually, “everywhere”. But what they don’t think to say is, they get lots of ideas because they’re working at getting ideas.

This is exactly the opposite of the common notion of creativity as “it just happens” or “it’s Art”. Creativity is partly inside a person, but most of it comes from working at it. For every genius like Mozart, who wrote music without thinking about it (“I write music like cows piss”) there are dozens of outstanding and great composers who work hard at getting ideas and revising those ideas. Beethoven filled notebooks with musical ideas. He wrote four different versions of the overture to his only opera, Fidelio. Yet both of these composers wrote music to make a living, not because of “art” or a high-falutin notion of “creativity”. "You can, for example, count on the fingers of both hands the number of musical compositions Mozart didn't write for money, and negotiating with Beethoven was like trying to take a steak away from a hyena." (Prof. Robert Greenberg in recorded lecture, "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition", Teaching Company) If even the extraordinary genius treated his creativity as work, most other “geniuses” as well as ordinary mortals work at creativity.

In my own experience, I used to get lots of ideas for games and game articles, and much was published. Then for 20 years I decided there were more important things to do (learning computing and networking, and making a living), and those ideas stopped coming. Several years ago I decided to get back into game design rather than write computer textbooks, and now I have a vast collection of ideas and more to do than I have time for. That’s because now I work at getting ideas and developing ideas.

In other words, there’s a way to push forward with ideas, rather than wait for them to come to you. Don’t waste your time! Like many other things in life, getting ideas is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Hence the number two lesson in ideas, after “you need a lot”, is that “you have to work at getting them”. You have to keep part of your mind aware of your search for ideas, so that everything you see and hear and smell and touch is examined as a stimulus for game ideas. You may even sit down and say, “I’m going to come up with more ideas,” or “I’m going to think up a new game.” It won’t always happen, but often it will, and the more often you do it, the more often the ideas will come.

[game design game example – finally cracked it driving to Jim’s]

Game ideas are often generated by association with something that isn’t obviously about games. This is why game designers benefit from a broad education, from diverse reading, from multiple interests: they have more to associate with than the narrowly-defined “gamer” (or “fanboy/fangirl”).

Game ideas come from asking questions. They come from reading of all kinds, history, fiction, science, etc. They come from looking at pictures and maps. They come from talking with other people, even from using everyday things. They come from reading game rules, from playing games, from reading game reviews, from reading postmortems by game designers, from reading books about game design. Yes, there’s a lot of reading there, because when you read you’re often exposed to a lot of ideas in a short time, and the association may generate game ideas in your mind. Finally, ideas come from thinking about the ideas you’ve already had. Often a designer will have an idea for a game, get stuck on some problem for which there’s no evident solution, and years later associate that idea with another one generated at another time. These will combine to solve the problem and push the game forward. Almost anything can give you ideas. I’ve designed boardgames by starting with a particular kind of piece in mind. (More about this later in this chapter.)




Record Your Ideas

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.” Hector Berlioz, composer of Symphony Fantastique
“Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard Aiken

I firmly believe that some ideas will come to me only once, and if I don’t record them, I’ll never get them again. Even if you don’t believe something similar, you’ll admit the inconvenience of having an idea, forgetting it, and having to wait until it comes to you again, perhaps years later.

Trying to keep all your ideas in your head is “a fool’s errand”. The only way you can do it is if you have so few ideas that you’re most unlikely to be productive.

You should carry a notebook or other recording device with you almost everywhere, and when you get an idea, write it down (or record it by voice). I carry an HP PDA (personal digital assistant) that has one-button voice recording (not all PDAs do). I can record while driving because all I need is that single button on the side of the device. I can press the button, talk, and when I let it go it stops recording–a reasonably safe way to record things while driving. My cell phone can record, but this requires several steps, and I won’t divert my attention like that while driving. Moreover, my PDA goes into a cradle that automatically transfers my voice notes to my desktop at home and my desktop at work, so soon I have three copies. It’s easy to type the idea into my main idea database as I listen to my voice notes.

Students think I’m strange to occasionally talk to my PDA in the middle of class, but they soon realize the purpose. I call it “my memory”.

Don’t leave an idea as a voice file. Writing down ideas forces you to actually figure out and understand what you mean; many novice designers have "ideas" that are only in their head, and when they're asked to articulate them, they find out that there's a lot they haven't figured out (or have forgotten).

Aside from the PDA, I have a paper notebook in my “game box”, the box that carries games I’m playtesting. When I’m at game sessions, I can write more extensively in the notebook than I would record on the PDA. (And if I forget one, maybe I’ll have the other.)

Finally, I have a light laptop/tablet computer, and an even lighter, 700-hours on 3 AA batteries, solid-state storage, specialized word processor (an Alphasmart Neo) for note-taking when at game meetings. (You can’t type on a PDA, not with speed.) I don’t intend to lose any ideas.

I ought to have a recorder (such as my Olympus voice recorder) by my bedside for middle-of-the-night ideas, but I don’t want to wake my wife by talking, so I have a clipboard. And I’ve been known to get up in the middle of the night to write idea details into my computer.

In the 1970s and 80s the "data store" for ideas was notebooks and pieces of paper, sometimes typed (with carbon copies, if you were smart, as backups). In the 21st century the data store may still be notebooks, but preferably it will be electronic, whether word processing, or a specialist note program such as Info Select or OneNote, or voice messages to yourself, but it's got to be something that can easily be searched electronically and copied (backed up).

Computers are cheap and plentiful, and you should use some kind of free text database. A free text database has no fields such as you define in Microsoft Access or Oracle or (in older days) dBase. You type data in however you like, and the search facility of the free text database does the rest. Any word processor can be used this way, but specialized programs will be faster. Some designers prefer to use a spreadsheet program extensively, but I prefer the superior organization and searchability of a specialized program.

I have used one of the first free text database programs, called Info Select (www.miclog.com), since the 1980s. It is my “desert isle” program, the one I’d use if I could only have one piece of software. It is fast, easily allows subcategories, and offers many ways to search. (It can also be word processor, email program, Web browser, etc.) It not only allows me to organize information, it allows a full text search in the blink of an eye (because all the stored information is loaded into memory). Unfortunately it is pretty expensive.

Microsoft One-Note is another program of this type, somewhat expensive unless you’re properly associated with a school that subscribes to Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance (which makes it free). A very simple free program of this type is Memento, the equivalent of post-it notes, and there are many other freeware programs that can serve.

Or you can use a word processor or spreadsheet, and organize your ideas by file. Most computer operating systems allow you to search through files for particular keywords, or the word processor itself may do this. The trick in any of these programs is to have those keywords in the notes you’ve typed. If you have an idea for a first person shooter, be sure “FPS” is there with the details of your idea. If you have an idea for a card game, be sure “card game” is in the file. Otherwise, when you try to find ideas you won’t find all that you should.

You might think this would take a lot of memory; no, an entire novel is roughly one megabyte of text, so as long as you don't store a LOT of graphics, it won't put much of a dent in your RAM, let alone your disk space.

If you don’t work well from a computer screen, you can print out your ideas and put them in a binder using sheet protectors. Or just have them in a pile. You definitely want to periodically look through your old ideas, as this is one of the best ways to get new ideas.


Storing drawings and pictures results in slower searches, because graphics take so much more space than words. Often a program will only search the name of the file, so you need to use long descriptive names. You can use a photo-organizing program such as Picasa (free from Google), or use a database program that handles graphics well.

If you speak to groups, as a teacher or as a proponent of games, be sure to record yourself. An MP3 player with voice recording, such as the Sansa e250, makes this easy to do, and with free software such as Audacity you can turn your talk into a podcast.

In any case, BACK IT UP. All your work will do you no good if your hard drive crashes or you lose a notebook that is your only copy. If ideas are worth generating, they’re worth backing up.

You can get along without using computers to record your ideas, as we all did 35 years ago, but you’ll save a lot of time in the long run by using computers.

Organize Yourself

I play about 30 of my game designs in the course of a year, and there are many more than that in some stage of work. Some organization helps keep everything straight.

When you have video games as your ultimate goal, the purpose of the ideas you generate is to contribute to marketing documents, and later to the large game design document that fully describes the game. You will be writing a plan for your game, so the more you write and the better you write it, the easier your future tasks will be. For non-electronic games where the immediate goal is a playable prototype, less formal notes are adequate. As long as you can understand what you mean, you can tell someone how to play your prototype when you make it. Keep in mind, six months (or six days!) after you write a terse note, even you may not understand what you meant, so try to be clear.

When I'm to the point of organizing ideas into a semblance of a game, or a game design for a video game, I make a separate note for each category of rules or mechanics (such as sequencing, movement, fighting, economics). For non-electronic games, I usually print these out to help me when I'm playing solo or in early playtests with other people, write further notes by hand on the sheets, then make changes on the desktop computer. (If I were a little more organized I'd probably have a laptop with me when I playtest, but that's one more thing to carry and secure. So I don't. However, sometimes I use the much more convenient Neo.)

At some point for a non-electronic game, often after playing a prototype a few times solitaire, I try to write organized but rough rules, as opposed to notes. I can color code the notes to show me which ones will “translate” into directly into rules sections, as opposed to others that are comments or more ideas. For a video game, the game design document describing the mechanics of the game is a more extensive version of a rules set.

I write the full documents in a word processor, WordPerfect. Much of the preliminary writing is done in Info Select, then transferred. But there are many, many revisions to a set of rules or a game design document, and those are done in WordPerfect, including revision dates. I am not fanatical about it, but I usually save each significant revision as a new file, so in the course of designing and developing a game I might end up with 20 versions. Microsoft Word is a more commonly used word processor; Open Office is a free substitute for Word.

WordPerfect makes it easy to make usable cards for games. I print on business card stock using the WP template, then put the cards in protectors for collectible cards (which can be had pretty cheaply, on sale, at Dave and Adam's Card World on the Internet, or at conventions sometimes). The protectors make the cards easy to shuffle, the card stock gives them sufficient stiffness. These are usually text-only cards; I've seen many prototypes with beautiful graphical cards, but I am not interested in spending the time needed to do this, preferring to concentrate on gameplay. Moreover, if I did spend a lot of time to make a playtest prototype, I'd be reluctant to change it, and that is truly a Bad Thing. Change is the norm when designing and developing games.

I am not an artist or a graphics person. I draw maps in CorelDraw, which does a fine job except that I haven't yet figured out an easy way to shade things. CorelDraw is a vector graphics program, not bitmap, and while this makes printing very flexible, it seems to make shading elusive, at least for me. So I export to PhotoShop, add shading, and import back in. You can see some examples on my Web site at www.pulsiphergames.com/projects.htm

I get base maps from the Internet (out-of-copyright historical maps are available, especially at the Perry Castaneda Library (google it)). CorelDraw usually won't autotrace them satisfactorily, so I laboriously trace (with a mouse) what I need. This is not fun, but is quite practical. (Tracing with a tablet PC or Wacom tablet is easier, because you're using a pen, but I rarely use my wife's tablet laptop.)

Online (unpublished) boardgame

Those who were interested in my discussion of connections between online games and boardgames might want to look at War of the Realm, a free online "boardgame".

http://waroftherealm.com/About/PressReleases.aspx
Or click the title of this article.

I haven't figured out how they're going to make money, yet. Advertising, I'd guess.

ADDITION: I've now read the rules for the game. While I have only read the rules for A Game of Thrones: the Boardgame (FantasyFlight), War of the Realm reminds me *very* much of that game. This is perfectly legal, mind you (you cannot copyright ideas), it's just an observation. And the most remarkable part of that is that AGoT:tB was designed specifically to mimic simultaneous movement as much as possible without requiring anyone to write down anything. (I've heard someone call AGoT:tB a Diplomacy variant, though I'm not sure I'd go that far.) Yet for online computer-refereed play, simultaneous movement is no problem at all. But in going through the many phases of the boardgame online player by player, you slow everyone down!

Why not devise a game with simultaneous movement? Perhaps the company expects to retail the game as a boardgame at some point.

I also see that the company offers memberships, about $5 or $7 a month, that provide various perks (such as being able to play more than 4 "casual" games (play once a day rather than play real-time) and no ads). These memberships emphasize the community. It would be really interesting to know how many people (what percentage of player) will go for these memberships.

PrezCon

PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA late in Feburary appeared to be somewhat smaller this year. Two people who might know said 20%, but I don't know if that was from pre-registrations; the organizer himself said he didn't know the attendance. Attendance last year approached 500. This obviously is an effect of the poor economy. I was told the prices at the auctions were lower this year, as well.

PrezCon is a mini-WBC (World Boardgaming Championships), with the main activity being lots of tournaments with multiple heats and a final played Saturday or early Sunday. Many people don't stay around for Sunday, or leave quite early in the day. There are vendors selling games, both independents and publishers, but that's not the focus of the event, though my focus was talking with some of these people, of course.

I don't play in tournaments at conventions--I can play published games without traveling 250 miles and spending lots of money. I like to talk with people (publishers and players) about games, and I watch some of the Britannia tournament, as well as watching people play many other games. Sometimes I'll read rules to a game that looks interesting. Sometimes I'll play one of my games solo and talk with people as they come by.

I did get Eurasia played twice. It is hard, at a small tournament-oriented convention, to get people together to playtest. Several people offered to play Barbaria, but I couldn't get all together at the same time.

There were five boards of Brit in two rounds, which is a good turnout for PrezCon. Oddly, blue won four of the five, yellow the other (and the final as well). So NO wins for red or green. I wasn't there for the first round, but in the second, the score in one game was (IIRC) 248-241-238-238, very high, while the other was 232-202 and two scores below 200 (this was the lone yellow win in the heats)! I've not heard of such a high average score before (average for each nation is something like 216). Certainly, it was a polite game, lots of "sorry to attack you, but this one would starve otherwise" and "I'd be happy to retreat if you fail to kill me". And very close at the end,

One view of the difference in yellow's win in the final was Harald taking a boat trip to kill Svein in Norfolk. If I recall correctly, Barry Smith won that one, other players Rick Kirchner, Sean Smallman, and Mark Smith. (The winner of the very high-scoring game, Brian Carr, didn't get into the finals because his margin of victory was so small (over Jim Jordan).)

My roommate stayed up past 5 one night playing Robo-Rally (his favorite by far, and he won the tournament for a second time on Sunday). I was in bed before 1 every night.

On the way home we experienced heavy snow and were down to 20 miles an hour in one lane on a wide US route (two lanes each way). But we got over some kind of hump, and the weather rapidly cleared to occasional rain, with no snow in sight, just as we got into Danville. Thank heaven.

If you like playing tournament games, PrezCon is excellent, and perhaps slightly less "cut-throat" than WBC in Lancaster, PA in August.

I'll be at PrezCon

I'll be at PrezCon next weekend, thought I'd describe some of the games I've been working on, which I'll have there to discuss or play.

Eurasia--a cross between Vinci and History of the World with a little Britannia thrown in. Rise and fall of 80 historical empires, no dice, played on a a 46 area map of Eurasia (surprise!). 90 minutes or more if lots of players (2-6). Works really well. Event cards optional. There's an option to use dice.

The Rise and Fall of Assyria: History of the Ancient Near East. Sargon to the Persians. Uses many of the systems of Eurasia but much less free-form, all 28 nations must be played in roughly historical order. There's a version that, like Britannia, assigns each nation to a particular player and turn of appearance. 2 hours plus if you play the whole game, 90 minutes for shorter version. 2-6 players.

Dominance of the Old World--While Dominance is intended to be a Risk replacement, it doesn't have Risk's "purity". Risk is all about attack-attack-attack. Dominance is more about strategy, and there are things you can can that aren't just attack.

Fills the same niche as Risk in who can play, but much shorter, little chance, little downtime, no player elimination, and many fewer pieces.

No dice, but there are event cards.

Played on a map of Europe and the Med, 25 land areas, 6 sea areas. 2-6 players. 90 minutes.

Barbaria--history of Europe 406-1250, something like Britannia but much shorter, streamlined. While the first play of the shorter version takes over 3 hours, it has been played in 1:40. 33 land areas, Europe and the Mediterranean. There are actually two versions, the first (6 turns) uses "picture dice", essentially you need two hits to kill an army.; second, longer (11 turns), uses battle cards and no dice. This is the natural successor to Britannia. The problem, as always, is the damn balance.

Zombie Escape--This is a game played with cards, the cards providing the board, the "pieces", and the events and occurrences. 110 cards and one die required.

Young people (and some older ones) love zombies for some reason. This game is about escaping from a reform school building that has become overrun with zombies. Each player is a character (described on a card) with varying capabilities. As they try to escape, characters come across zombies, potential weapons, and other useful items (such as fire extinguishers).

There is no player elimination: if you lose a fight, you just retreat back toward the starting location.

Whoever finds a door to the outside, and manages to get it open (they're all locked), wins the game.

About 45 minutes for five players, works with almost any number of players up to nine or ten.

Party Nominee--a "political" game with cards, though not a traditional cardgame, but not like Zombie Escape, either. Uses one deck of cards and play money (coins). Under an hour. 2-6 players.

Electronic productions of non-electronic games

I was asked recently by someone who is VP of a computer services company what potential there is for boardgame play online, and for electronic versions of boardgames in general. In responding I’ve ended up with a fairly long disquisition, and I’m sure there are many online efforts I don’t know about. So I’m posting this on BGG and here, then I’ll revise it and send it to the VP.

So the question for today is, how do boardgames (and card games) tie in with digital, especially online, production? Is there money to be made? Who makes it, and how?

Here are some of the categories I’ve found:
• Pay to Play Existing game in online version
• Make your money from advertising
• Make money retailing the games people are playing online for free
• Board or card game playable only online, probably at just one site
• Sell a physical version of a game first offered free online
• Online play to help encourage people to buy a game first offered physically
• “Casual” games
• Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs)
• Second Life and others like it

But first, Free Play with online assist
First, though, we need to note that some games are playable by mail or email through hobbyist efforts. For example, Britannia is played by email with the help of a dice roller that has a version specifically for Brit. Diplomacy has been played since the ‘60s by ordinary mail with the help of a neutral referee, and is now played with the assistance of online non-commercial “judges”, programs that adjudicate moves. No human referee is needed. There have been two commercial software versions of Diplomacy, but I don’t know whether either was intended to assist online play, and both certainly received heavy criticism and must be regarded as failures, particularly where computer opponents are concerned.

Wargamers have Vassal, Cyberbox, and ACTS available to assist play of two-player games by email (PBEM)--most traditional wargames are two players only.

“VASSAL (http://www.vassalengine.org/community/index.php)is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games. It allows users to play in real time over a live Internet connection (in addition to playing by email). It runs on all platforms, and is free for personal use.”

Cyberboard (http://cyberboard.brainiac.com/) is a “PBEM Boardgaming System for Windows”. It’s individual setups are called Gameboxes or Cyberboxes. “The system allows you to easily graphically design the various parts of a board game on your computer. The players can make their moves and exchange recorded versions of the moves with their opponents. The opponent can then play back the moves. Although many types of games may be created using CyberBoard, games that use counters or chits such as war games work particularly well.” As with Vassal and ACTS, there is no computer opponent.

Both systems have been around a long time. These two involve graphical depictions of boards, hence copyright questions come into play. It can be especially touchy as we get into an era when electronic versions of boardgames may be retailed–already are through Xbox Live. What will a publisher of an electronic version think about a Vassal/Cyberboard version? If they’re smart, the main purpose of their electronic version will be a computer opponent, and facilitating online play will be secondary, nonetheless they may object to these free versions.

The Automated Card Tracking System--ACTS (http://acts.warhorsesim.com) helps people play wargames that use cards, especially “Card Driven Wargames”. ACTS only manages the cards, not the game as a whole, but it’s the hidden information on cards that prevents such games from being played by email.

None of this costs a dime; none involves making money.



In general, keep in mind that it is much easier to create an electronic game to be played by humans, than to be played by a human against the computer. The computer opponent is pretty difficult to create (as the commercial Diplomacy debacles showed us).

Pay to Play
The first thing that might come to mind for making money in this context is “pay to play” games that have a physical version, via computer online. This has been a bust. There’s a mindset in general on the Internet that most things are “free” (even though that free may be advertising supported). Add to this physical games that you can buy and play at home for free. Why would anyone pay to play online? Lack of opponents would be the only reason, and that doesn’t seem to be enough.

The most well-known of these sites is HexWAR (hexwar.com) . For several years these folks have been computerizing old out of print SPI hex wargames, which subscribers can play online ($12.95 a month or $10 a month when signing up for a year). They also do some Decision Games (Strategy & Tactics magazine in large part). I'd guess this has provided a modest income that doesn't seem to be increasing with time (remember that hex wargames aren't a big industry now, and are not growing).

Face to Face Games (http://www.f2fgaming.com/) tried this, beginning with Hammer of the Scots (Columbia Games), a well-known “block game”. (Block games, having hidden information, do not lend themselves to PBEM.) They were at WBC one year, trying to recruit business, and the next year they'd gone to free play rather than subscription but were not actually at a booth, and I'm not sure they're an *active* business now. The site has not been updated since 2006 but is still there.

Advertising
Many Web sites offer free play of games–usually Flash games, but they could be boardgames–and make a modest income. The games are often free ones that the sites have gathered from all over the Internet, not ones the site owners have created. In a recessionary economic climate, however, advertising dollars dry up rapidly (NASCAR fans really know what this means...).

Game Table Online (http://www.gametableonline.com) for several years offered online play for a monthly subscription of a selection of boardgames. They have now switched to an advertising-based model, as far as I can see. They certainly have more users online now (155 in early afternoon Sunday 18 Jan) than they did when using the subscription model (less than 10 typically).

Here is an interesting look at the participants: “According to our April 2008 user survey, our users:
• Are primarily male (81.1%)
• Between the ages of 31 and 49 (67.6%)
• Spend between $20-$50 per month on tabletop games (36.9%)
• Spend between 2-4 hours per week playing games in person (30.6%)
• Enjoy a wide variety of games (82.6%)
• Primarily come to our site so that they can fit more gaming into their schedule (75%) “

Make money retailing the games people are playing online for free
Brettspielwelt.de is a well-known site for playing boardgames online. They don’t advertise, and they don’t charge fees. I’m not sure how they support the costs, but they do offer you a way to purchase physical copies of the online games, so this may be how they offset expenses. I wouldn’t think it is a profit-making proposition.
http://www.brettspielwelt.de/?nation=en
http://www.brettspielwelt.info/ English Helper server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brettspielwelt
It uses a download client for the graphics for all games.

Board or card games playable only online, probably at just one site
This seems to be rare. Tower Games (http://towergames.com/index.jsp) is the only site I know of using this model. They began in 2003 with an American Civil War (ACW) game with many scenarios, charging $1 per play, and attracting mostly ACW fans (such as re-enactment people) rather than typical gamers. Recently they started to offer a WW II game. Some years ago I was going to have a simple two-player boardgame of mine, The Princes, hosted on the site, but ran into terrifically unrealistic expectations of one of the proprietors. Then my programmer, who had made a brilliant computer version of one of my games in Visual Basic, wasn't sufficiently familiar with Java, which is how they host games, and so the project died stillborn. The site is still running, but clearly is not a high growth hub.

There may be potential here–think about it, MMOs are games that can only be played online at one place–but I think there’s more potential for offering a game first online, then selling a physical version.

Sell a physical version of a game first offered free online
This is a form of the next “method”. I don’t actually know of any site doing this. The difference would be to offer the game first online, later physically, instead of first physically, then online.

Online play to help encourage people to buy a game first offered physically
This is quite common. Days of Wonder, publishers of many Euro games such as Ticket to Ride, offers free online play, and TtR has been played literally millions of times online. Many people play online specifically to help them decide whether to purchase a game. From that point of view, every publisher ought to offer online play of every game they publish, but that’s an expensive proposition.

“Casual” games
In the video game world, “casual” games attract a different group than the hard-core AAA list video games. They are generally 2D rather than 3D, programmable by a small team instead of 150 people. They are sold through Web sites, usually offering a downloadable version that can be played for 30 minutes, and a $20 downloadable full version.

Some of the games are Xbox Live and competing console-based services fit in this category. Electronic versions of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, at least, are available through XBL.

One might expect a market for boardgames in electronic form of this type. Certainly some of the “casual” games available are not far from boardgames. Lately this category has been filled with many competitors, yet the most successful casual games support growing companies (such as the company that makes Bejeweled).

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs)
This is where a great deal of money is in the video game world. These games can only be played online, there is no version a person can play without participating in some fee structure. This usually involves a monthly fee (World of Warcraft), after you buy the boxed product. Less often, buying the boxed product gets you free play (Guild Wars), and frequent expansions provide the continuing profit. (Of course, WoW has expansions as well.) In many cases, microtransactions, sale of temporary (or permanent) benefits in the game, provide the revenue stream. Maplestory, Combat Arms, and many other MMOs use this model, primarily with an Asian origin. See http://maplestory.nexon.net/WZ.ASPX?PART=/CashShop/ItemGallery for an example.

I don’t know of a boardgame-based MMO, though there are certainly massively multiplayer games played online that resemble boardgames.

In particular, I’ve not heard of an MMO that offers players the opportunity to purchase a boardgame with much of the flavor of the MMO. This is certainly possible, and I’ve done some design work for such an enterprise, but I have no idea how much demand there might be for this kind of thing.


Second Life and others like it
Some people think of Second Life as a game, and Linden Labs is certainly making money. But I don’t see any connection with boardgames. I have read that someone designed a game in Second Life that was later published in the real world because it was popular in SL, but I know no details.




So generally, people play online to help them decide whether to spend the money to buy the physical non-electronic version of the game, or they play games that they cannot play any other way.

Standalone electronic versions of boardgames or cardgames can offer a computer opponent to players who cannot find local players. Computer opponents generally aren’t as crafty or as good as live human opponents, but they can be better than nothing. I don’t know of any online games that provide computer opponents other than MMOs–and an MMO without other human players is going to have limited appeal.

So the purpose of a boxed retail electronic version of a boardgame would be first to provide a computer opponent or opponents, second to make playing online especially convenient--but a dollar cost to play online is not at all convenient.


Insofar as a big draw of boardgames is the face-to-face contact and company of other players, online already has a strike against it. How big a strike? I don’t know.

Why Design Games?

I failed to point this one out when it was published earlier this month:

"Why design games?" Game Career Guide. You can click on the title of this post.

Design lesson from Fallout 3 (PS3)

I don't often talk about specific video games here, but there are aspects of games that are much more common in video games than in non-electronic games, and one of these is the user interface. Yes, non-video games have a user interface, but it's very different from the on-screen and control interface of video games. In this case, I'm talking about the PS3 version of Fallout 3.

Fallout 3, more or less a role-playing game, is first and foremost a PC game. The PC keyboard provides far more options than the PS3 controller, hence inevitably the game will be more awkward to play on the console unless it is substantially redesigned.

I recently watched my brother play this game (on a 46" hi-def screen, no less). I can see why people might like it, though it seemed a little tedious to me (the buying and selling and walking from place to place) compared with paper RPGs, as well as lacking in the essential ingredient of paper RPGs--comradery with other players. However, I'm not here to review it, just to talk about one interface failure.

When you (your character) "talk" with another character, the game shows that other character's mouth movement and you hear a voice actor speak the words. You're then presented with three or more choices to "speak" back to the other person. Here's where the problem is. Even if there are more than three options, the on-screen display shows only three, with a little arrow to indicate when there are more than three.

My brother (and I) did not initially notice the arrow, so habitually he would hold down a button/joystick to scroll down using the PS3 controller to the bottom of the reply list, then work his way back up reading the possible responses. This was time-consuming in any case, and he was in the habit of trying to scroll down even if there were only three responses. We'll avoid the question, "why not show all the responses at once"--I'll suppose that for aesthetic reasons the designers didn't want to cover up the picture of the person you're talking with, though I personally would much much rather see all the responses at once because the graphic doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.

No, my question is, why didn't the designers put a number on that initial screen that showed exactly how many possible responses there were? This would not only have been more obvious than the little arrow, it would have carried additional information to the player. The player wouldn't have to just hold down a button or joystick to get to the bottom of the list, he'd know how far he had to go. This would have saved the player time and aggravation, in comparison with the arrow. In some way, the designers took the easy, "ordinary" way of dealing with scrolling lists in computers, instead of thinking about the specific situation.

And that was completely unnecessary. I wonder if playtesters pointed this out, or if the designers just ignored the question.

Why I "don't play"

Many people find it strange that I don't play lots of different games. This is partly a matter of time (I only have time to play my own new designs), partly a matter of interest (I don't like to play games "against" other people), partly a matter of point of view (I like to play my favorite games, and have no interest in *playing* "new" games, though I spend lots of time watching people play them.

TIME: This is my avocation, not my job (which is teaching). I try to make at least one new game a month. Each of those games must be playtested solo ("alpha test") by one person, me. On average I probably play each one that is halfway successful about four times. That's the equivalent, in multi-player games, of playing the game about 16 times. How many of you play any given game that many times?

INTEREST: I more or less quit playing games against other people when I was 25. (So I played D&D, which is not against other people, it's a cooperative game.)

POINT OF VIEW: In a sense, my favorite "game" is the "game" of designing games. For me, the interesting and meaningful challenges, in Sid's phrase, are to make games that interest a variety of people. I have had only a few favorite games over the years, and I prefer to play the really good ones rather than the "new" ones--I have no interest in what seems at times to be the "cult of the new".


I don't like to play when my games are playtested by other people. I don't play as well as I ought, because I'm trying to see how the design as a whole is going, and I don't see how well the game is doing if I'm distracted by playing it. It's widely known to those who study multi-tasking that when you multi-task, you don't do any of the tasks as well as you would if you concentrated on it. Further, the designer playing in his own game skews results, as players tend either to think "he's the designer, let's gang up on him" or "he's the designer, I don't mind if he wins" and acquiesce to this. (In fact, a designer isn't likely to be the best player, or necessarily even an especially good player, but not everyone realizes that.)

Why don't I play my games after they're published/"done"? Because I'm not designing games for me to play, I'm designing games that other people will enjoy playing. If I were just going to play a game "for me", I'd play first edition D&D. And I've never tried to design a role-playing game, because I'm satisfied with D&D--with options/house rules/character classes/monsters that I've devised, of course . . .

Community Creation in boardgames?

In video games we are seeing emphasis on games that enable community creation that in turn contributes to the enjoyment of the rest of the people who play the game. This has existed for a very long time in the form of mods and variants, but it is now "institutionalized" in games such as Spore and Little Big Planet; in fact, in the latter it appears to be much of the point of the game. The creators of these games have made it very easy for players to create additional "content" that can easily be used by others, even more than the scenario editor in Civilization games or the level editors in shooter games such as Unreal Tournament.

This is a form of "crowd-sourcing", using non-professionals to provide content sometimes as good, or nearly as good, as professionals can provide, but at no cost. Video game companies simply cannot afford to create the vast amount of content gamers now expect, yet gamers want it for no additional cost (complaints about the $60 standard price for video games are common). So they're finding ways to have the fans create the additional content.

My question is, how do we incorporate such "community creation" features like modding/creature creation into boardgames? Collectible card games have something like it except it's all publisher-created. RPGs have had it (all the D&D monsters, classes, adventures) since their beginning. Diplomacy has it in the hundreds of variant created over the years. Some wargames have it in additional scenarios created by fans. But is there a way to make it part and parcel of a game or of gaming?

How do we get something that supports the game and is created (and distributed free) by the fans, the players? BGG is as close as we get, generally, but how many players come to BGG on a regular basis? Not many, really.

Well, if I knew the answers, I wouldn't be asking the question.

More articles at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

More of my writing at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

"Opinion: Why Immersion Shouldn't Be The 'Holy Grail'" Dec 19. Not strictly of interest to board/card game designers...

"Characteristics of Successful Game Designers" Dec 23

Origins of Games

Another article on GameCareerGuide (you can click the title of this post):

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php

While it's a video game site, the article applies just as much to non-electronic games.

Source for game pieces

I like to use stackable plastic pieces for some of my prototypes, and people sometimes ask where I get them. Here's a link (you can click on the post title):

http://www.eaieducation.com/530841.html

As I write, they're $9.50 (plus shipping) for 500 in ten colors.

EAIEducation is also my best source for plastic cubes, two-sided disks, one-inch plastic square counters, and other useful game components, usually in bulk.

Why We Play Games

You might want to read my design article "Why We Play" on GameCareerGuide. You can click on the title of this post.

Article on GameCareerGuide

"The Idea is not the Game", 23 September

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20356

(You can click on the title of this post.)

This should be of interest to anyone who wants to design games.

Game buyers want the advantage of your game design skills

As an exercise ("challenge") in my beginning game design class I gave each group a large vinyl chess board and some "Clout Fantasy" pieces. And I said "Make a game". I also had a great array of other kinds of pieces, in case a group just didn't get along with the Clout pieces. The vinyl boards can be written on with wet-erasable markers, so some variety can be imposed on the square array.

I was watching one group play their game, which involved troops retrieving pieces to bring back to their home spot. It was a little like capture the flag, but with multiple flags, and each side had their own set of flags to capture.

At some point I remarked that I couldn't figure out the pattern of "flag" placement, but it seemed to be working pretty well. The group admitted to me that their method of placement was to drop the pieces on the board at game start and let them scatter! My jaw dropped.

If all players started in the same place then random would be OK, as it wouldn't give an advantage to one player. But in this game, with set starting positions, a random setup could be so one-sided that there'd hardly be any reason to play the game, the winner would be fore-ordained.

Think about this. If you're the professional designer, you should work out a set of excellent and interesting positions for the flags, rather than depend on chance placement. Why trust enjoyment of your game to chance? Furthermore, why would a player, if he or she had purchased your game, want to trust their enjoyment to chance rather than to the skills of a professional designer?

Yes, it's more work for the designer, making up and recording the patterns of placement, playtesting each one multiple times. But the result will be a better game.

In other words, you're the designer, use your brain, let the buyer take advantage of your skills and smarts, don't rely on chance to make for a good game.

(If you prefer a small element of chance, you can subdivide a board into areas and randomly place (by die roll, not by dropping) the flag within the area. I have designed a game where I've done something like that. The additional variety increases replayability without giving too much advantage to one player over another.)

Speculation on Electronic Britannia

Speculation on Electronic Britannia

Some of you know that nowadays I teach in a college video game degree program (game design especially, of course). That and the recent question about electronic Britannia have started me thinking about what characteristics would be desirable in such a game. It seems very likely that sooner or later there will be an electronic version of the game (and of most well-known boardgames, in general).

So what would be desirable, what would be most important. I'll give my take, then I'm interested to hear what you think.

1. The game must be playable for one person, that is, you against three computer opponents. Or with two humans or three, and computer opponents to make four. Hence the most important aspect of the game will be the "AI", the computer opponent. The electronic versions of Diplomacy have suffered from awful computer opponents, as I recall, which is a little curious. There is more symmetry and simplicity in what the opponents do in Diplomacy than in Britannia, so I'd expect a computer opponent to be easier to write. My guess is either 1) really bad decisions by designers or 2) too much of a rush to get the game out.

2. The game should be usable for online play, whether with four humans or fewer.

3. I think it's desirable to include the shorter (6 turn) version of the game I'm working on, but this would increase development cost significantly, so it may not be practical. Perhaps it could be offered as a not-free expansion if the electronic version sells well.

Well, I've already run out of ideas. What I do know is, the "AI" will make or break the game; why would most people buy an electronic version of a boardgame if not to have computer opponent(s)?


Ken Agress has said he'd like to be able to play with four humans but have them roll the dice and input the results into the game, to display the board on a large-screen TV. (Or, I'd add, one of those table-like LCDs that Phillips and Microsoft have been working on.)


So what must the AI do? The best Brit players can look at the board, at a particular time of the game, and predict with some accuracy what the final score is likely to be. I don't know how a computer opponent is going to do that, but if it can, it should be able to play well.

Review of Britannia

I recently ran across a review of Britannia from Archair General magazine, published November 19, 2007, by Bill Bodden. http://www.armchairgeneral.com/britannia-game-review.htm

Quote:
"Now produced by Fantasy Flight Games in a stunning new edition, Britannia looks ready to continue on as one of the great titles in the world of games."

Wizards card game

Recently I played the card game "Wizards". I'd heard that this variation of the traditional game "Oh hell" had sold millions of copies. I played a German edition with strange pictures and symbols, which to me only made the game harder to play. Two suit colors were red and green, indistinguishable by the two color-blind players in the game. So we had to use the weird symbols that don't even have obvious convenient names. The designer is Canadian, and I suspect most editions are closer to normal cards.

We were using a weak translation of the German edition of the rules, so conceivably we did not play everything correctly.

I don't play cards much, and the only traditional card game I play is Oh hell, with my wife and in-laws. H is a trick-taking game, dealing increasing and then decreasing numbers of cards in each hand, trump randomly determined, must follow suit. You bid how many tricks you will try to take, and fail to score if you do not get exactly what you bid. You score 10 plus the number you bid if you're successful. Hence the game removes some of the chance factor, if you have poor cards, you bid low. I tend to bid rather low because it's easier to avoid taking tricks than to take them. "Quack quack" is often my bid (a duck, meaning a bid of zero--ducking).

This game is a "randomized" version of OH. There are four "Wizard" cards that beat all other trumps and can be played out of suit. There are four jesters that are "nothing", but can change the suit that must be played in the rest of the trick (I may not be recalling correctly) in mid-trick. I suppose that by taking some of the skill out of the game, you make it more "family-friendly" for kids.

Further randomization comes from playing hands of up to 15 cards. You can't do much to plan with such large hands--I'm used to playing up to 7 cards, then back down to 1--so at that point you bid something a little below average, say three out of 15, and hope you can manage it. Of course, if you have a couple wizards and good trumps you'd have to adjust.

The scoring is different from traditional OH scoring. You score 20 if you make your bid, plus 10 per trick, and lose 10 per trick by which you miss a bid. This rewards trick-taking (as opposed to bidding zero) more than the traditional version. (I still played the Duck most of the time, and won the game.)

There were other variations, such as forcing bids in the round of two cards so that someone will miss their bid. There was something about, when you have one card, you hold it in front of you so everyone else can see it, and then bidding occurs; but this is so randomly unfair we canned it (you don't know what card you've got, so how can you bid intelligently except in obvious instances?).

I'll stick with the traditional form, though the scoring is worth considering.

The Mecca of Competitive Boardgaming

While I wrote this for a different venue, I may as well put it here...

At the Mecca of Competitive BoardGaming
Lewis Pulsipher

Early August in Lancaster, PA is the time for the “World Boardgaming Championships” (WBC), the Mecca of competitive boardgaming. Unlike Essen, the Origins Game Fair, or GenCon, WBC concentrates on tournaments in about 150 board and non-collectible card games, ranging from:
• simple games like Liars Dice (as seen in the second “Pirates” movie)
• complex 8-hour games like Civilization (the boardgame that preceded the computer game)
• two-player wargames
• well known “Euro” games such as Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, familiar to some video gamers through Xbox Live

There are relatively few exhibitors, who are there Friday through Sunday morning, though the convention begins Tuesday. There’s also the traditional game auction on Tuesday.

WBC was originally “AvalonCon”, in Camp Hill, PA and then Hunt Valley, MD (a suburb of Baltimore). It was started for Avalon Hill, the big board wargame company that was bought by Hasbro in the late 90s, and the convention is now run by the Boardgame Players Association and Don Greenwood, who was “Mr. Avalon Hill” to most of us even though he did not run the company. It is now at the Lancaster Host convention center that also hosts Historicon, the big miniatures wargaming convention, a week or two before.

Don told me that WBC emphasizes community rather than the commercial side of gaming, hence its concentration on organized tournaments that consistently attract reasonable numbers of players. This contrasts with conventions such as Origins, where an “event” can amount to a few people playing one session of a game. Further, you pay one fee (similar to the Origins or GenCon fee), then play in as many events as you can manage without further charge. In effect, WBC offers highly organized play, where other large conventions can be seen as “open gaming” cons with a few well-organized tournaments.

WBC has a core of 100 “Century” tournaments, modified each year by vote of the members of the BPA and a formula involving number of participants and hours played. A tournament such as Britannia, with more than 35 people playing in up to three 5-hour preliminary rounds, is solidly ensconced in the Century, though there are larger tournaments. There are also trial tournaments (again subject to vote), and tournaments organized by sponsor members or by game manufacturers, adding up to 150 to 160 tournaments each year.

To enhance the competition, not only are small prizes such as plaques and T-shirts awarded to winners, there is an overall winner for the entire convention, the “Centurion”, and a team competition. These awards depend on very successful participation in several tournaments.

Many of the players have been attending since the 90s, and are middle-aged, but there’s a strong proportion of younger players as well, and perhaps 20-25% of the attendees are female. There is much more a sense of community, of “coming home”, than at the much larger non-electronic game conventions, as many of the 1,300 or so competitors return year after year to play in their favorite tournaments.

This year’s convention was from August 5 to 10, next year will be August 4 to 9.

For information about the BPA and next year’s WBC, see http://www.boardgamers.org/. PrezCon, at the end of February in Charlottesville, VA, is organized much like WBC, but smaller: http://www.prezcon.com/.