Among game designers there is disagreement about the importance of the theme. Some say that it should come before everything else and drive the design of the mechanics; others, that you should come up with the best mechanics possible and then put on an acceptable theme.

Here I’d like to argue a point that only sounds trite at first: The theme should be added as soon as it is needed. So, for instance, if the designer is inspired by a certain theme, well, then that theme should be there from the beginning. Goodness knows the inspiration is critical! If the designer is inspired by a certain set of mechanics or idea in the game flow, and the game can be designed entirely without a theme, then the game can have a theme added at the last minute or even left abstract.

In the design of Tactego, I now find myself with many ideas for units to use, certainly many more than can comfortably fit into a game. Doubtless a decent game can be made with several combinations of these; but who has the time or inclination to try every single one of them out? Even if we could, that wouldn’t tell us which is best or most fun. Therefore, I believe that this is the time to pick a theme, and let that help guide my choice of which pieces to use.

(Reader Ephraim Glass’s favorite units also sound like a good place to start to me; we’ll probably start there.)

As for what theme to use? The Napoleonic theme of Stratego definitely doesn’t excite me. I’m a big fan of fantasy but I think it’s overdone. One idea I kind of like is rival bandit lords fighting over stolen treasure in pre-Renaissance Europe. Another is a much more abstract game focusing on competing tribes of animals (cats are stealthy, wolves like being in packs, elephants are just big, etc.)

More thoughts about Tactego.

Memorization: I don’t like having to remember what my opponent’s pieces are. It feels too much like work. When pieces are revealed in battle, they will stay revealed.
Bluffing: On the other hand, the bluffing element of Stratego is neat. Some pieces will be face-down so an opponent doesn’t know what’s coming, and there will be the opportunity to turn more face-down during play (along with the chance to mix them up so it’s not just a challenge for the opponent’s memory).
The Role of Pieces: I do not intend for this game to be “chess-like” or to compete with Chess. However, it has certain similarities: pieces exert a certain amount of power by their very presence, but only one can be moved at a time. Thus, like Chess, having material power on the board is generally good, but having your pieces well-positioned is also important.
The Number of Pieces: 12 to 16 per side seems about right, with 3 or 4 “kinds” and 3 or 4 strengths within each kind.
The Moves: Players alternate turns, of course. On a turn you may move one piece twice or two pieces once each, but you may only attack once. (The attacker already is taking the initiative–we’ll avoid a blitzkrieg effect.) You attack by moving a piece into an occupied square. You may not have two pieces on the same square, but if you move the same piece twice it can move over a friendly piece. (This is a response to the cramped feeling of Stratego, in particular. Chess has a lot of deep strategy relating to the fact that you need to not cage yourself behind your own pieces, but we don’t have a thousand years to come up with good strategies and balance our game perfectly.)
Where’s Defense? OK, this kind of lets pieces run around everywhere. To remedy that we’ll use a “zone of control” rule that I first encountered in Civilization (the computer game) but have seen elsewhere: You may not move from an enemy-adjacent square to an enemy-adjacent square unless you are attacking. This lets you move a unit out to screen units behind it. And it allows for a special unit power to break this rule.
What if that unit is face-down at the time? To avoid confusion and the possibility of inadvertently breaking rules, we’ll say whenever you use a unit’s special power, you have to turn it face-up.
Powers: We’ll need to brainstorm some powers. There will definitely be more here than I would consider using in the game; I expect to use no more than 4 distinct kinds of units, each with one or possibly two powers.

• A unit that can turn itself, and another adjacent unit, face-down. When it does this you get to take the pieces off the board and switch them if you want. As such, this will take two moves, or one if both of the pieces involved have this power.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking. It might lose power when defending.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking face-down
• A unit that ignores zones of control
• A unit that can move 3 instead of 2
• A unit that can move directly over an enemy unit without entering combat
• A unit that can reveal the identity of face-down enemy units without entering combat
• A unit that doesn’t die if it loses a combat it starts
• A unit that gains power from nearby friendly units
• A unit that gains power from nearby enemy units (BERSERKER!)
• A totally expendable unit
• A unit that you gain some benefit when it dies
• A unit with no special power that happens to be naturally stronger than other units
• A very powerful unit that moves more slowly
• A unit that can’t be disengaged from (anything touching it is immobile)

I haven’t played Stratego in some years, but I dreamed about it last night. (I used telepathy to find my opponent’s flag, but lost my Marshal to his Spy. I was planning out how I was going to get a Spy-supported General across the board one move at a time when I woke up in boredom. I swear I am not making this up.) Anyway, thinking about the game, such as it is, gave me the inspiration to design another game.

As you may have noticed, I’m usually a fan of multiplayer games with mostly indirect interaction–Euros, as it were–and the idea of a deeply strategic, confrontational two-player game doesn’t really get me going. But I had some ideas that seemed interesting. So I’ll lay them out here; I have no promises to ever finish or even prototype this game, but we’ll see where it goes.

Codename: Tactego
Players: 2
The Promise: Like Stratego, a skirmish-level confrontation between two equal sets of units. Also like Stratego, there will be an element of hidden unit identity. Unlike Stratego, unit mobility will play a much greater factor, allowing more tactics and less strategy (hence the codename.) Also, because I dislike the memorization aspect of Stratego, units will spend some of the time revealed.
Desired Play Time: 15-25 minutes
Setup: To reduce total time and the learning curve, initial piece locations will be predetermined or mostly predetermined. At least some, perhaps all, will start face-down.
The Board: A grid about the size of Stratego’s–10×10, say. Diagonal movement will be allowed, unlike Stratego. If we get as far as a prototype and hexes seem like a good idea, we’ll try that as an alternative.
The Goal: I like the “capture the flag” idea, but to create a more dynamic game with fewer pieces, we’ll make the flag piece weak but mobile. Since pieces will be more mobile in this game, we may need to give it some kind of resilience, too.
The Pieces: Clearly pieces will need to have some kind of innate combat power that determines who wins a combat. To add flavor and a hook for theme, they will also have some additional abilities, probably either relating to mobility or situational attack power adjustments.
One More Decision With The Pieces: At the risk of adding a small bit of complexity, we’ll divorce the raw combat power from abilities. For instance, in Stratego, all 8’s are miners and all 9’s are scouts. In Tactego, if there’s a piece called, say, a Knight, with the ability to jump like a chess knight, we might have one with a strength of 3 and one with a strength of 1.

Next time we’ll consider, among other things, some ideas for pieces.

A little while ago Mock the Vote was rejected from the first company I submitted it to. Alas! The quest continues: I have some ideas for a way to bring it up to four players, which should make it much more approachable, and then I’ll try another company.

Still, it stings, and one of the reasons I find it hard to get my games off my shelf and into a publisher’s hands is all-too-familiar to me: the fear of rejection. I don’t believe the problem is that my games aren’t good. The problem is that “good” isn’t anywhere near good enough—good is easy to find. I have to not only have produced something special, but I have to manage to convince someone else of that too, someone who’s seen a lot of games, and is shoots down ideas that are just good for a living.

Wish me luck.

One of the things that struck me about the two games I just discussed is how different it is explaining the rules. The rulebooks are about the same length: Memoir ‘44 is 18 pages, while Goa’s is 12 (with slightly smaller text). Memoir ‘44 seems to come naturally to people. It goes something like this:

“Infantry move 1 and attack or move 2 but don’t attack. Their attack strength is 3, 2, 1 as the distance increases. Tanks move 3, can still attack, and can shoot up to 3 away at full strength. You get points by eliminating enemy units. Every turn, you play a card at the beginning, do what it says, and then draw a card at the end.”

Now, there are other wrinkles, and I usually take the time to explain them: the concept of “ordering” units can be a little confusing, it seems, and one opponent seemed averse to reading the cards. (He would play it and then ask me what it did!) There are other complications, too, but they’re all… intuitive and seemingly easy. Forests stop your movement but provide cover. Flags on battle dice make you retreat, unless you can’t, in which case you lose a figure. If you attack someone at close range and force them to retreat, you can move into the square they vacated, and even shoot again if you’re a tank.

On the other hand, trying to explain the rules of Goa to someone who’s never played it before is an immensely difficult task. Even experienced gamers have their eyes glaze over with confusion. There are just too many elements. Furthermore, there’s no way of fully explaining one element of the game without bumping into terms from one of the others. Let me try: Most of your points will come from advancing down these “technology tracks.” You advance technology with ships (how do you get them?) and certain combinations of spices. Spices come from plantations, which you can get in an auction (what auction?) or from a colony (what colony?) Well, colonies give you points too, and you get them by using an action (what’s an action again?) and flip two cards (What’s on these cards again?)and add your colonist technology bonus and making up the difference with loose colonists, but if it fails, you get another colonist for free, but that’s probably bad…. I’m getting confused just writing this. Don’t even get me started on the tiles, each of which has to be explained individually, or the exploration cards, which I just advise people to ignore on their first game. Most players seem to figure it out about halfway through the first game, which is frustrating for a game that’s as unforgiving as Goa. Choosing the wrong plantation or colony can give you a maddeningly hard time of advancing your technologies in a useful way for the middle half of the game.

And it’s strange, because Memoir is not really a shallower game than Goa, or not much. But I would give Memoir a shot with a friend who wasn’t much into board games, but would never in a hundred years play Goa with someone, no matter how brilliant, who wasn’t already used to Catan, Puerto Rico, etc.

I think a lot of the strength in Memoir ’44’s ease of learning comes from its theme. Not only is the subject matter familiar, but the game follows the theme very strongly–although it’s highly abstracted, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call it a simulation of World War II battles. Goa, by contrast, is a theme added to beautify an abstract game. The ideas of exploration, competitiveness, and exploitation do come through in the play, but it’s not at all clear how the rules facilitate any of this.

This is not to say that Goa is a bad game. Far from it, and because it lets more people play, I’ve been able to bring it out more than Memoir. However, the ease of learning Memoir is really startling, certainly a reason to recommend the game and certainly a goal to aim for in design.

Suppose you need to keep track of victory points or some common resource using tokens or chits. Suppose, furthermore, that you would like to have two denominations—a single unit token and some higher value. To minimize the number of chits that have to change hands, what values should you use?

I’ve created two tables. Both show the number of chits that must trade hands as a function of the higher denomination (across) and the number of chits traded (down). The top table assumes that change cannot be made, while the bottom table assumes that it can.

Things to note:

• If players usually won’t be able to make change, and transactions are fairly small, 3 or 4 is likely the best choice. Assuming transactions evenly distributed in size from 2-10, the average transaction is 2.4 chits.
• If players are often able to make change, 4 and 5 are better choices, with an average transaction size of 2.2 chits. Denominations of 2 and 3 do not benefit at all from change-making.
• Large denominations like 10 are probably only a good idea if your transactions tend to be very large, or if players will be accumulating many dozens of points.

I played another new-to-me game the other day: the Spiel des Jahres winner from a few years ago, Torres. It’s definitely a solid game, and one of the mechanics reminded me again that I need to write this article. The topic: Building vs. Ownership.

In most games, when you, on your turn, put a piece onto the board, that piece is yours forever. Often it is even your color. Settlements in Catan, Caballeros in El Grande, trains in Ticked to Ride… these all stay yours. Or there might be another means of tracking ownership, like the deeds of Monopoly. In other games, like Puerto Rico, you even have your very own board.

By contrast, in Torres, you can take actions to place or heighten towers, but the towers and castles can be used by any player. (Torres is Spanish for “towers”.) You can also deploy knights which establish your stake in towers. The number of points you score for a given castle (collection of adjacent towers) is the height of your highest knight in the castle, multiplied by the surface area of the castle. Knights keep other players’ knights from sharing the same space, but as castles increase in size and value, it becomes harder to keep opponents from climbing up on the unused sections of “your” castles and gaining points.

So what do you gain by placing towers? Two advantages. First, because you add the towers on your turn, you get the first chance to move a knight to a good spot on that tower. Second, you can make sure to add to places where you will have the advantage—ones that may be difficult for your opponents to take advantage of, or you might, for example, add to the surface area of a castle where all players have a knight, but yours is the highest.

In many ways it’s not like you’re placing pieces that you don’t have any control over—it’s like you’re laying out your pieces and the board at the same time, and you get to try to make board configurations that are to your advantage. There are some other games that work in a similar way:

In Carcassone, any player usually has a chance to put a meeple on a field, city, or road, but the player who plays a tile that creates that region has the first chance to do so. To contest your ownership, a rival player has to put a meeple on a different field, city, or road and then connect them, which is usually pretty difficult. (Although it can certainly be worth it, especially for fields!) Also, as in Torres, you can try to enlarge the areas you already have some control over to try and increase their value.

Tigris & Euphrates has a similar mechanic, although I haven’t played that game in a long time. Part of my frustration with the game was trying to figure out how I was supposed to parlay all of my construction efforts into a good score.

A continuation of the previous article…

Total Points: The game ends when a certain total number of points are reached, no matter who scored them. This is kind of an oddball pattern used oddly by Killer Bunnies (at which point your chance for winning is equal to the proportion of points you’ve collected) and Shadows Over Camelot, which ends when 12 swords (either white or black) have been earned by the knights.

Secondary Condition: The game ends when some condition not strictly tied to the turns or scoring is met. For example, Puerto Rico ends when the colonists are all gone (usually) or when the VP chips are gone or one player’s city is filled. If a player wants to lock in a lead, that player can push towards one of these conditions, but that might not be the line of play that scores the most points. Likewise, Thurn & Taxis ends on the turn when one player meets one of a couple of conditions. Both of these conditions are worth points themselves, and there’s even a bonus point for hitting the mark first; but a player who’s been pursuing other goals very effectively could still pull off a victory.

Variable Fixed Turns: The game lasts for some number of turns that can’t be affected by player actions, but the players don’t know ahead of time how many turns that will be. This makes the pace of the endgame different, because it makes the shift from long-term to short-term goals blurry and an interesting point of strategy. For example, Evo lasts for 8 or so ordinary turns (depending on the number of players); at the end of the next turn, if a 1 or 2 is rolled on a die, the meteor lands and ends the game. The next turn, it hits on a 1-4; the next, on a 1-5, and in the one game out of 36 that it hasn’t ended already, the meteor always hits on the following turn.

Exhausted Moves: The game ends when no player can make any more moves. This might be due to a filling board or depleting resources or both, as in Blokus. The end of the game is typically a struggle to squeeze the last bit of points or other resources out of whatever’s remaining. The ending of Go feels this way to me, although technically you’re only running out of useful moves.

Hybrid: A game might have multiple end conditions; typically whichever one triggers first ends the game. A Game of Thrones, for example, ends after 10 turns if no player has won by Dominance at that point. Cooperative games often fall into this style. Shadows Over Camelot lasts until 12 Total Points have been gathered, but can also end by the elimination of all the players, or if 12 catapults ever wind up outside Camelot. The Lord of the Rings board game has a Race ending condition for the good guys, and a Secondary winning condition for the bad guys; Sauron could eat the Ringbearer without the other hobbits being in particular danger.

In what was nearly a grievous oversight, I at first gave only a quick glance to reader DrObviousSo’s comment on my recent article hashing out a game idea. After all, I thought, this was basic economic stuff, like the second chapter of an Econ 101 class.

Then I realized the inherent assumption he was making, that I hadn’t been. The assumption was that every player can perform a finite amount of work on each turn. I had been assuming players would gain full resources from every controlled territory, like Settlers of Catan or Diplomacy or Axis & Allies. That left me with the thorny problem of how to keep the game one of trading and tactical aggression, rather than conquest. However, if you can only exploit a certain number of regions per turn no matter how many you own, the impetus for conquest is gone!

I’ve been thinking about this proto-game more and now have many more points:

• Players have 5 or so “workers.” Production is determined by where you have your workers go (forest, hills, etc.), the quality of those regions, and possibly other factors. However, you cannot increase your number of workers. So conquest may allow you better choice of resources to produce, or the opportunity to maximize production of a certain resource, but it won’t provide you a momentum-building resource advantage.
• Moving workers requires some small amount of resources. If a region you are working is “captured,” that worker doesn’t help on your next turn, but you get to move it somewhere else for free.
• The resources might include:
• Wood: Easy to anyone produce lots of, but needed for many ventures. Produced in forests, obviously.
• Iron: The cheapest way to improve your ability to attack or defend. However, not all players may have ready access to satisfactory amounts of iron. Produced in hills.
• Food: Important in small quantities everywhere. Can be produced pretty much anywhere, but some players may choose to take advantage of fertile locations or economy of scale, make extra, and trade it around. Unlike other resources, food spoils—a certain fraction of it is lost at the beginning of your turn if not spent. Produced in plains.
• Books: An abstraction for research and logistical planning. Produced in cities.
• Some other resource—perhaps Commerce, Trade Goods, or some other physical good?
• Some regions might produce more of a resource than others. For example, there might be particularly productive mines, dense forests, or large cities.
• To win the game, you have to complete five sub-goals. Three are common to all players. Two are drawn from a deck. There is a certain order they must be completed in, although you might be able to spend, say, Books to waive this restriction.

Intrepid reader John Rhoadhouse pointed out that “research” makes a bad resource because, after all, if a city is attacked, your scientists could just leave the city rather than continue doing research for your enemy. I think the “workers” mechanic makes this okay—you can just move your researchers to another town. And after all, the “workers” is just an abstraction for “where am I putting the strategic tax-collection and logistical resources of my government?”

Now that I have another board game backed up in my head, are you likely to see a prototype for it any time soon? No. However, you are a lot more likely to see a working prototype for Invasion as I get increasingly guilty about producing nothing on that front. Stay tuned.

I’ve had the skeleton of another game kicking around in my head for a couple of days now, and figure, heck, might as well share. Right now it’s just a set of bullet points because I don’t have a clear picture for how it will fit together just yet. The working title in my mind is “Give Peace a Chance?”

• Players: Three to somewhere between four and six. The dynamics I hope for won’t work with two. As for the upper limit, we’ll see how much of an issue crowding and a long time between turns are.
• Setup: A board—either a hex or square grid or a large assortment of regions/provinces. I think I would like about 12-15 regions per player, so about 40-60 total. Like Catan, regions produce a certain resource and have a widely varying quality. Unlike Catan, regions are controlled and can be captured. Control is exerted through meeples which double as soldiers when it comes down to conflict—you can have more than one meeple in a region.
• The board might be fixed or might be randomized in some way. Randomization gives extra replayability to the game, which is good, but it might be at cross purposes with making sure every player has surpluses of some resources and shortages of others.
• Goal: Unknown. It may be to control a certain region or collection of regions, to collect a certain number or resources, or, preferably, something altogether more original. I would like the goal to be a race or struggle for a certain Thing, rather than a victory point showdown.
• Play Points:
• Different resources should be worth different amounts to different players at different times.
• To encourage players to specialize, there may be an “economy of scale” factor that makes it very difficult to produce just what you need of everything. You should have to either fight or trade to get all your needs met.
• Trade is vitally important, because you’ll have a surplus of some resources and want for others. However, you have to work to set it up—it’s not free. Perhaps you have to buy a caravan or convoy token; perhaps it’s easier if you share a border.
• Aggression is tactical, not strategic in nature. Wars of conquest aren’t worth the effort; you attack because you need a specific resource In A Hurry and can’t pay the price to trade for it.
• Being attacked should drive you to aggression yourself—perhaps it gives you a bonus to your own attacks in the immediate aftermath. However, because of the varying values of resources, the reaction to being attacked should not necessarily be “I want that back!” but “what can I best take, and from whom, with this offensive power I now have?” I would rather not include a heavy-handed “no takebacks” rule.
• Resource investment will not be military vs. industrial in nature but rather short term vs. long term. In other words, can I use this short term purchase to build the momentum to make bigger long term gains, or should I just start a safe investment right now?