So, I design games too. It’s not for the fame or fortune, and unfortunately, it’s not for the babes. It’s because they play themselves in my head, banging around, and eventually I have to create them. It’s like my art, the closest I can really come to artistic expression…

Consider this column the first in a series, although they won’t be sequential.

This is the skeleton of the game I want to create…

Think of El Grande, but without the strange and unpredictable action cards. Instead of a static board, the regions are hexagons that can be rearranged from one game to the next. When a given region is scored, whoever has the most “markers” in that region gets points. There are two kinds of points: the ones that count toward victory and ones that are used to bid on favorable “order cards.” More on that later.

Every turn, you get a certain number of “action points.” You have cards that allow you to add markers to the board and move your existing markers, or other players’, from region to region. Cards cost a varying number of points depending on how powerful they are—the more pieces you can move, the more they cost. Moving your opponent’s pieces or moving pieces more than one region also costs more.

At least some of the regions are scored at the end of every turn—I’m not sure how it will be determined which ones. Because the scoring is at the end, making your moves later in the round is better—you can optimize your moves to narrowly edge out your opponents. To even things out, players who go earlier in the round get a couple of extra action points, so they can deploy or maneuver more markers. Since the relative value of moving last vs. having action points may shift as the game goes on, players will bid on the right to choose first.

Each region is worth a certain number of points. Whenever that region is scored, whoever has the most markers in that region gets a certain number of “gold points,” which are used to win the game. Whoever is second gets the same number of “iron points,” which are used to bid as described in the previous paragraph; and the third place might get a small consolation prize. Then, to prevent the number of markers from inflating wildly as the game goes on, some number of the winning markers are removed from the board.

I intend for the game to take from 30-40 minutes, so I’ll make the game go for either a certain number of turns or until a certain number of points are scored (depending on the number of players), whatever works best.

…And I’ll let you know when I get it prototyped.

I played the Lord of the Rings board game (the big one by Reiner Knizia) for the first time in a couple of years yesterday. We started with Sauron on 15 (the easiest “difficult level”) because one of our players had never won before and ended up winning with no casualties. Had he started on 12 (“normal”) we would have taken a casualty but still prevailed. On 10, probably not.

As you’ll see if you read the reviews on BoardGameGeek, people are pretty hotly divided on the LotR board game. And with good reason. In many ways, it’s more of a group activity than a game, kind of like The Forehead Game or Telephone Pictionary.

It’s cooperative but it’s noninteractive. A cooperative game brings people together, which is cool. People like playing in teams with friends. Part of the draw of playing the game is the chance to hang out with your friends. On the other hand, there’s very little interaction between players—you move the same markers and have a couple chances to trade cards around or use them on each other. Having an extra player or one less doesn’t really matter at all.

It’s tense and challenging but you might as well be playing Solitaire. Given that all the players are working together against the game, the game had better pose a challenge; and it delivers. I’d be surprised if even one group in 10 manages to win their first game. Once players work out the strategy, it goes much better. One problem is that the strategy isn’t all intuitive. If one player is very familiar with the game, he’s likely to try to command the entire team, much to the frustration of everyone else (who resent being told what to do at every step, especially when it doesn’t make sense) and himself (who is frustrated by the many ultimately destructive plays). The rule that forbids you from showing your hand to the other players is a Band-Aid for this artery wound.

The theme is excellent but the game wouldn’t stand on its own without it. The Lord of the Rings is modern literature familiar to pretty much everyone, especially gamers, and popular with many. The game feels faithful in mood and pacing to the books, and the art is (mostly) great. On the other hand, my sense is that without the Lord of the Rings logo and Knizia’s name, nobody would give the game a second thought.

The “competitive” game is painful. Ostensibly, although everyone wins when Sauron is defeated, you count your shields up at the end to determine the winner. I’ve never seen this done. If even one player is willing to play badly just for the chance to pick up some more shields, the forces of good are doomed; if that doesn’t happen, the “winner” will be the player who doesn’t happen to need to toss in his shields for events, hiring Gandalf, or whatever’s necessary. As a result, I’ve never seen shields counted. It may be the real point of the game is proving that there’s “no ‘I’ in ‘team’”, but that removes the last factor that might have added a little spice to the game.

Nobody wants to talk about auctions…ok.

There are very few games that don’t have a theme. Card games are among them, as well as word games and some very abstract board games like Blokus. But otherwise, from Monopoly to Catan to Bang!, every game has a theme. As well they should; there are many good reasons. Listing only a few will take me the entire article:

·        A theme attracts players. Both when purchasing a game and cajoling otherwise-reluctant friends to play, a theme that sounds interesting can lure people in. Lunch Money isn’t, truth be told, a very good game, but the idea of Catholic schoolgirls beating each other up holds interest for many. On the other hand, Bohnanza (the “bean planting game”) is fantastic, but you have to twist people’s arms to get them to play. Exotic locations (Tikal, Puerto Rico, Taj Mahal) seem very popular.

·        A theme can convey and help set the mood of the game. Bang! and Lunch Money are aggressive games that are all about fighting the other characters. The themes help you get into the mood and start trash talking. On the other hand, Carcassone and Puerto Rico are constructive game where you can often avoid confrontation. In Australia Rails, what are you doing? Building a railroad line, obviously; people come in understanding that the only conflict might be the race for the best land.

·        A theme makes it easier to teach and remember the rules. In Catan, you get wood from forests and grain from plains. Easy? Easy. And you build a city with stone (for the walls) and wheat (to feed the people). With its rules printed on every card, Magic might have the most complicated total ruleset of any game; but a glance at the card art can remind an experienced player of the name of a card and its powers without having to read it.

·        A theme makes it easier to distinguish between otherwise similar game elements. In my themeless takeoff of Clue, keeping the Spades, Hearts, and Diamonds straight was taxing. Nobody confuses Professor Plum for a Wrench. (And nobody will confuse Mephistopheles for Atlantis in Cabal.)

·        A theme can turn a game session into a story. We had a session of the Lord of the Rings board game where Frodo got eaten, but Sam managed to drag the Ring into Mount Doom and save the day. Sweet! Or you might remember the Risk game where a huge army in Iceland (Vikings, perhaps?) swept through all of the Americas in a single turn. A memorable game can occur in any game, like being dealt a grand slam in Bridge; but a theme gives you an easy way to talk about it. I can easily and evocatively describe the placement of armies in Risk or my opponent’s vast corn and indigo fields in Puerto Rico; it’s painfully boring to describe the locations of the missing face cards and trump in a hand of Bridge, even if I happen to remember.

·        A theme can be the entire point of the game. The more of a simulation the game is, the more this point applies. It applies less to board games, which tend to be abstract; but let me assure you that nobody would ever touch Axis & Allies if it weren’t based on a fascinating chunk of world history. A lot of historical computer games, like my pet favorite Europa Universalis II, follow the same pattern. Similarly, the economics games often played in classrooms exist to demonstrate how systems work, not for the general amusement of the players.

Subtitled: “Instant Fairness: Just Add Auction”

Over the last decade or so, software engineers have been talking a lot about “design patterns.” The idea is that you recognize a common problem that needs to be solved and automatically consider a solution that is known to be applicable. For example, if you know your system is horribly complicated, you consider constructing a simpler interface that talks to your system and spits out results in a manageable way. That’s the Façade pattern. We didn’t invent the idea, of course. The “Gang of Four,” who first started cataloging and naming the patterns, were inspired by architects (of the building variety).

So, I’d like to talk about design patterns, of course, in the context of game design. Consider the Auction pattern.

Name: Auction, or Bidding

Problem: You have various game elements which are unequal in strength, or there are not enough to go round. Assigning a cost to each one might add too much complexity. The elements might have different values to different players at different times.

Discussion: Clearly, this works best if you have some kind of easily quantified currency. For any game that scores with points, these points are an obvious choice. Otherwise, some kind of in-game money is usually used.

Examples:

• In Power Grid, some power plants are more efficient than others. Plants have a minimum cost, but good plants tend to go for far more. Players bid the in-game money, which is also used for buying the resources to power cities and stations in additional cities. Power plants may fluctuate in value depending on several factors including the progress of the game (small but efficient reactors are great to save money early on, but won’t power enough cities late in the game) and the plants other players are using (if everyone else has coal plants, they drive up the price of coal, which makes further coal plants unattractive even if they’re otherwise efficient).
• In Evo, every dinosaur race picks up an extra gene every turn, which grants extra abilities in the following rounds. Some are very powerful, others not so much. The bidding currency is victory points. When bidding, you have to consider how many points this investment will be worth between the time you bid and the end of the game.
• In Axis & Allies, the Allies are generally considered to have a significant advantage.  Players bid on the amount of extra currency units that would have to be given to the Axis to be willing to play them; the smallest bid takes the Axis with that much extra currency.
• In the A Game of Thrones board game, players secretly bid Influence for different privileges. All players have to spend the full amount of their bid whether or not they win; the pain of this is mitigated by the fact that the second, third, etc. place bidders get lesser privileges.

Notes:

• To have an auction before the game begins, you will need to either start the game with some amount of currency, or have a “reverse auction” where you bid on the amount of bonus resources you’re willing to let the other players start with.
• A “secret” auction, in which each player secretly makes a bid and the highest one wins, can speed up the bidding; it also adds a psychological element, because players want to bid the smallest amount possible to win what they want. For extra tension, like in the Game of Thrones game, all players have to pay the amount of their bid… whether or not they win.

Please add your comments with other uses and variations of the Auction pattern… I’d like to do a follow-up to this article in the near future.