Theory: Rules for Player Powers

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After hammering away at Lines of Questioning for a while, I feel that the latest variant is a great foundation for a “basic game.” However, it’s also incredibly difficult; saying that playtest victories have been elusive is somewhat like saying that one doesn’t often see a unicorn.

My thinking at the moment is that the core gameplay mechanics are solid, and that the difficulty issue can be addressed with role or power cards that give the player a little boost. Legal analysis teaches that a free-ranging quest for good ideas is less effective than following reliable guidelines, so I thought that as a first step I should try to create those guidelines. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Player powers in cooperative games (which can include solo games for our purposes here) come in two types: weighting and unique. Both serve to make the game easier, and hopefully more fun as well. However, they accomplish these goals in very different ways.

Weighting powers make the player better at a game action everyone can take. The player might pay a lower cost for the action, or get a bigger payoff, or be able to take it when other players cannot. However it happens, the power weights the player’s choice; it puts something heavy on one side of the scale that balances the options.

Perhaps the quintessential weighting power is the Medic role in Pandemic. The Medic can do all the things the other players can do, but is the best in the game at treating sick people. Since treating sick people is absolutely necessary to win, and the Medic does it better than everyone else, the Medic player’s evaluation of how he should spend his turn is always going to be tilted in that direction.

Unique powers, by contrast, enable the player to do something outside the normal game rules. Instead of making a choice more appealing, as in the case of a weighting power, it adds a whole new option. Players without the power cannot replicate it, even inefficiently. Recent implementations of the idea include Forbidden Desert’s Climber, who cannot be buried under the game’s shifting sands, and Space Hulk: Death Angel’s squad-specific action cards.

Admittedly, the distinction between these categories is not always a bright line. Having a unique power does tend to weight one’s choices; the Climber can move to the same squares as every other Forbidden Desert character, but her additional safety can have a substantial effect on the choice of destination. Similarly, weighting powers can be considered “unique” insofar as they enable players to break the game’s normal rules.

I nevertheless feel that it’s useful to think in terms of powers as coming in two flavors, because they work out somewhat differently in play. Weighting and unique powers produce different behaviors in players and can be used for different purposes.

Weighting powers have subtle, but important, impacts. First, they provide guidance to the player. By making one choice more appealing, weighting powers signal to the player that that is a good choice and he should go in that direction as often as possible.

Think back to Pandemic. If you take a group of people who have never played the game and give them each a role, the players will naturally gravitate toward whatever their roles tell them they’re good at. The Medic will start treating the sick; the Researcher will try to get cards to the Scientist; the Operations Expert will build research stations. All of those are useful contributions, and so that inexperienced group will make progress in the game.

Compare that to what would happen if Pandemic had no role cards. Should everyone treat the sick? Maybe the best strategy is for everyone to build research stations all at once, and completely ignore the cards? Who knows! New players would be completely at sea, and might suffer through many frustrating games while they figured out a reasonable distribution of labor.

That thought experiment points toward another benefit of weighting powers: they are an easy source of player satisfaction. It feels good to treat sick people as a Medic, because each treatment is a little chance to be top dog. No one else can treat people like the Medic can.

As the game goes on those opportunities can even build into something especially satisfying, a reputation for competence and accomplishment. When the table comes to rely on the Medic, trusting him to keep them in the game while everyone else does their behind-the-scenes work, it gives a taste of what it’s like to achieve a position of responsibility in the real world.

By contrast, unique powers offer neither of those things. They do not generally help players decide what to do; if anything, they make in-game decisions more complex. In Space Hulk: Death Angel the purple squad has the ability to move the evil aliens around. It’s difficult to say whether and when that’s better than just attacking them; the choice is highly context-driven, and nothing about the ability itself signals which way the player should go.

Nor are unique powers always going to be wells of player satisfaction. Frequently they just create agita as players struggle to decide whether they should use a power now, or save it for later, or use the power in a different way. We have all seen people frustrated at the end of a game because they were so afraid of wasting their Cool Thing that they never actually did it.

Unique powers are nevertheless still valuable despite those weaknesses because they are an effective route to new decisions and different play experiences. As an example, take another look at Forbidden Desert. Most of Forbidden Desert’s players operate in an environment characterized by water scarcity. The Water Carrier, on the other hand, can have as much as she pleases if she’s willing to spend the time to dig a well; for her the game is all about opportunity costs. Having a unique power fundamentally changes the experience for that one player, which helps keep the game fresh and interesting.

These, then, are the rules I’ll be using as I design player powers for Lines of Questioning:

First, follow the rules here for when player powers are useful, and in what amounts.

Use a weighted power when (a) the power should help players, especially new players, decide how to approach the game; and/or (b) the power is meant to add satisfaction to the game experience.

Use a unique power when (a) the goal is to create a new set of decisions; and (b) the power will not frustrate players by being difficult to use correctly.

On Monday I’ll be back with first-draft ideas.

Theory: Decisions in Physical Games

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Miniature golf is fun, even though there’s only ever one right move: to hit the ball in a way that results in a hole-in-one. The same is true of tennis (players should hit unreturnable serves that land perfectly in the corners), baseball (it’s always best to swing the bat along an arc that will produce a home run), and many other games that turn primarily on physical accomplishments rather than strategic calculations. All of these games work, despite their tactical simplicity, because they still have compelling decisions; they simply fold those decisions into the physical performance involved.

Let’s look at one of the first games many people play: catch. The only “move” in catch is to throw the ball back and forth, with the goal of making a good throw directly to the other player. There are no decisions to make, no opposing players to outwit or special moves that score more points. Catch has absolutely no strategic depth.

Yet, people of all ages play catch. It could be that they do it out of obligation, as practice for other games, or as something to occupy their hands while they discuss other things. I’m sure that in some cases one of those is exactly what’s happening. However, given the number of games of catch I see played between people who aren’t members of competitive sports teams and who seem focused on what they’re doing, I think there’s a better explanation: catch, despite being strategically simple, involves a lot of interesting decisions.

Consider what goes into that “good throw.” The amount of force on the ball must be correctly judged; too little and the ball doesn’t get to the other player, too much and she has to go chase after it (or, perhaps, the thrower has to chase after it!). One must tune one’s arm motion to produce that amount of force in the correct direction. Last but not least, one has to find just the right point at which to release the ball—too early or too late will spoil all the other work.

Each of those decisions involves selecting, without complete information, the best option from many alternatives. They are interrelated and must be made in a time-pressured environment. A variety of factors play into them, and one must weigh those factors appropriately. Those decisions are, in other words, interesting, for the very same reasons that decisions in board games are interesting.

Another example of interesting physical decisions comes out of first-person action video games. David Sirlin once described the primary skill in these games as “aiming:” moving one’s mouse, joystick, or directional pad so that the targeting reticule is over the enemy. That doesn’t sound all that enthralling, but millions of people play these games every day. Why?

Part of the answer, no doubt, is AAA graphics and sound. Part, though, is the simple fact that aiming is hard. Like making a good throw in catch, it’s a physical act with many decisions bundled up in it. How exactly should the mouse move, given that the player is also running diagonally forward and jumping and the opponent looks like he’s going to rocket-jump but hasn’t done it yet? It’s not trivial to work that out in less than a second while everything is in motion!

I get the same feeling of satisfaction from a really good throw in catch as I do from a really good move in a board game. That’s not surprising, because in both cases I’ve made a series of tricky decisions correctly. In the end, physical games are games, and they draw their fun from the same well of interesting decisions as their more sedate counterparts do.

Theory: Funnel Design

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A funnel design is a game in which the players’ varied activities feed into a single, central resolution mechanism. Funnel designs have two distinct components: the things the players do, and the resolution mechanism that aggregates their choices to determine the impact they have on the game. That can be an extremely valuable and even necessary function, but just as a bad cooking funnel can squeeze off the ingredients needed for a recipe, a bad game design funnel can choke the fun out of a game. It’s important, therefore, to make sure that funnels in games are well-implemented, with due thought given to issues of balance and with care taken to avoid unduly limiting the design.

The odds are you’ve played a funnel design. Most wargamers will be familiar with combat resolution tables, which boil relative strengths down to dice results: at 3-1 odds a 4-6 on a single die means the defending units are eliminated, while at 2-1 odds only a 5-6 eliminates the defenders, etc. Players maneuver their units, decide which supply centers to call on for logistical support, weigh the odds of the weather improving in a few days, and make many other decisions all to get an advantage on the game’s combat resolution table. Then the table produces its result, and play continues.

If you’re not a fan of wargames, you might have played Sentinels of the Multiverse, a card-driven game about superheroes that uses funnel design. Each player stands in the shoes of a particular hero, playing a deck full of unique cards representing that hero’s powers. However, most of these cards feed into a basic mechanism in which the players inflict damage on an arch-villain by making, and then modifying, attacks. Thus, a player might play a card that causes her character to punch the villain, and then modify that attack with other cards that inspire the character to greater effort and encase the character’s fist in a ball of fire; the game’s underlying math recognizes the punch as a 3 damage attack, modified by +1 for the extra effort and +1 for the fire, for a total of 5 damage. The same math engine does the same translation into numbers for gunfire, artificially induced hailstorms, and every other form of superpowered aggression.

By way of comparison, consider a game that doesn’t use funnel design—say, the popular deck-building game Dominion. The goal in Dominion is to acquire victory cards, and one normally does that by getting treasure with which to buy them. However, treasure is not an intermediary system evaluating the players’ performance; it’s a game element that players can directly manipulate. They can buy it, find it, steal it, trade it in for better treasures, and in some cases ignore it entirely. Playing well does not directly and always mean more treasure. While treasure is important, then, players’ actions are not funneled through it while playing Dominion the way they are in the examples above.

Similarly, having a score at the end does not make a game a funnel design. It’s true that a score serves as an overall measure of player performance. However, a score does not operate on a player’s choices, mediating between the player and the game, in the way that a combat resolution table or Sentinels’ underlying math does. Scoring systems can impact the designs of their games, but they don’t pose the same issues as a funnel operating during the game. To put it another way, funnels are used while cooking, while final scoring is akin to the bowl in which the meal is served. Both are important, but they’re not the same and shouldn’t be conflated.

True funnel designs are interesting because they have two very different, yet nevertheless interrelated, parts: the players’ actions, and the funnel mechanism that interprets those actions. Often the two parts do not look, or work, anything like each other; a wargame’s tactical map-based play is replaced with die-rolling when the combat resolution table comes to the fore. Neither, however, can be understood in a vacuum. The players’ actions are all taken in light of the funnel, and the funnel is unimportant without their actions.

Having two vitally interconnected parts to a game can have substantial advantages. First, it creates what Magic: the Gathering’s developers sometimes refer to as “knobs:” values that can be changed to achieve game balance. If one of the choices available to players is too strong or too weak, the designer can either manipulate the choice directly, or alter how the funnel treats the choice. That alternative means of accessing the game’s inner workings can be very useful.

Second, a funnel can summarize very different and complex interactions, allowing a variety of pieces to interact in a consistent way. Actually simulating a battle between tanks and infantry involves measuring their very different strengths: the tanks are sturdier, but the infantry can more easily take advantage of terrain. The tanks are stable firing platforms, but the infantry might be better at getting advantageous angles. Well-designed funnels translate those disparate capabilities into a single system, making it easier for players to evaluate what’s happening and speeding resolution of dense, multifaceted situations.

These advantages do not mean, however, that funnels are invariably desirable or good. Since players must interact with them constantly, their flaws are magnified. A boring funnel can color the entire experience; an unbalanced funnel unbalances everything; an overly complex funnel slows every single turn and renders the import of player choices opaque. Errors in a funnel’s design have multiplicative effects, which makes funnels something to be implemented only when necessary and only with caution.

Moreover, even correctly designed funnels can have unintended and undesirable effects on a game’s design. Some things will be easier to fit into the funnel than others. Inevitably, this encourages the design to move in the direction of including more of what the funnel readily handles, and less of what it does not.

A quick thought experiment demonstrates the impact of a bad funnel. Suppose someone designed a wargame whose combat resolution table said, for every entry, “the defenders destroy all attacking units.” That game would be unplayable; since taking any sort of initiative would be punished by swift destruction, no one would ever want to do anything!

That is, of course, an extreme example. A subtler question might focus on the impact of the die roll that is normally involved in getting a combat resolution table’s final result. Some players strongly disfavor random elements in games, feeling that they privilege luck over skill. Others feel that they simply have “bad dice luck.” (In my experience, this is a majority of people.) Is the die roll important enough to risk losing the former group as potential customers, and to risk frustrating the latter group during play?

There is no single, constant answer to that question, which reminds us that there can be no single, constant answer to the question of whether funnel design is a good idea. It is always a balancing test, a matter of deciding whether the funnel’s advantages outweigh its dangers. Just remember that, like many tools, funnels can be harmful if employed carelessly.

A New Workspace

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“I write when I’m inspired,” a quote I’ve seen attributed to several different authors goes, “and I see to it that I’m inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” I try to approach game design with that mindset: it’s a creative endeavor, but it still benefits from being carried out with discipline and efficiency. To make the most of my design time, then, I’m turning a corner of one room in my home into a design office.

Right now most of my game design is done wherever happens to have the space I need. That works so far as it goes, but it’s not very efficient. Tools are in boxes that live in different places, and those places don’t necessarily have anything to do with where the projects are being carried out. It’s messy, inconvenient, and sometimes leads to lost time or materials.

In addition, the catch-as-catch-can approach to work space makes focused, efficient work more difficult. As a lawyer I never check websites for fun on the office computer; that computer’s for business, and using it only for business helps avoid distractions. Maintaining that delineation in my game design work is much more difficult at the moment, since I might very well be working at the kitchen table or in a comfy armchair.

The new space is intended to resolve both of those problems. It gathers everything I use in game design–computer, prototyping materials, legal pads for notes, etc.–into one place, with enough table area to be able to use it all. In addition, the space can be dedicated to work, with all the mental benefits that result.

Talking about this sort of project can be the enemy of doing it, so I’m going to keep today’s post brief. I’ll be back on Monday–hopefully with a more efficient workflow. 🙂

Theory: Making Barriers into Benefits

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When someone purchases FFG’s X-Wing, this is what comes in the box.

Image from Boardgamegeek
Image from Boardgamegeek

When someone purchases a box of Warmachine, he or she gets this:

12-31-14 - Warmachine BoxLooking at those pictures, one would expect Warmachine to be the province of the hardest of the hardcore, true grognards–but it is instead, as of last time I saw sales figures, the second most popular miniatures game on the market. Part of that is simply because Warmachine is a superbly designed game. Part, however, is that Warmachine turns its barrier to entry into a strength, using it to generate engagement with the game.

Every game has barriers to entry. Usually they must be purchased, sometimes at great expense. Rules must be read. The game must be set up on the table, which is easy enough in the case of something like Tsuro but which can be quite laborious in the case of wargames and RPGs.

In general, these barriers to entry are undesirable. They prevent people from buying, playing, and enjoying a game. Minimizing them is thus usually viewed as strictly beneficial. Designers try to make rules easier to learn and publishers look for simpler, less expensive components, all in the name of lowering these barriers.

X-Wing is a superb and successful example of that process in action. The minatures are ready-to-play right out of the box, fully assembled and painted to a standard much higher than most players could achieve on their own. While the game is not exactly cheap, lots of starships are available at the $10 impulse-buy price point online. FFG has done as much as possible to make getting into the game painless.

Warmachine, on the other hand, makes few concessions. Its miniatures come unpainted and in pieces. Most boxes of Warmachine minis don’t even have an instruction manual; one is expected to figure out that this piece goes here and that these arms are bent just so such as to fit those torsos. It’s not uncommon for miniatures to have flaws straight out of the box requiring non-trivial modeling skill to fix; from the beginning of the game to today, people have been fixing the “Khador gap.”

One might expect that all of this would render Warmachine the nichest of niche games. Instead, however, it’s enormously successful, begging the question of how an expensive game that requires tremendous amounts of setup could ever overcome its barriers to entry. Warmachine is a superb game, yes–but many superb games fail for lack of players willing to invest in them. That alone did not propel the game to the heights it has now achieved. How did Warmachine manage its barriers to become a key player in the miniatures space?

The answer is that Warmachine’s greatest barrier–the tabula rasa nature of its pieces–is a strength in the eyes of a substantial proportion of the player base. They become an artistic outlet; one is not just going to field pikemen, one is going to field one’s very own pikemen, with paint schemes and poses chosen in accordance with one’s taste. Many players end up involved the game just for the painting, playing only rarely as a way to show off their work.

Personalizing the miniatures in that way invites other forms of creativity, such as biographies and backstories chronicling the achievements of one’s troopers. Ultimately all of this can even feed back to the tabletop, with players devising campaigns in which rivalries between their armies are settled and new ones created. Again, these opportunities to craft something unique are the result of what would otherwise be a barrier to entry, and are an important draw for many players.

Not every game can do what Warmachine does, but it’s a possibility for more games than one might think. What if Agricola required players to build little parts of houses, instead of just using tiles? Would that lead to a greater sense of ownership over the homes, and more incentive to play? Would players be less likely to shake their heads at the depth of chess and give the game up if they painted the black squares on the board themselves?

Barriers to entry are always going to be a problem. However, it’s possible to approach them imaginatively, and ask how they can be used to encourage player investment.

Now you’ll have to excuse me–I have some pikemen to paint.

Status Report

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I’m wrapped up in end-of-year lawyer stuff, so I thought I’d use this update to provide a quick overview of where Law of Game Design’s projects are.

Over the Next Dune: the case study which was the focus of this blog for most of the year is not forgotten! Design work has been paused while I try to get enough playtesters in the room at the same time; it turns out that testing a game designed for five players is no joke.

To break that logjam, I’ll be working more aggressively to get Over the Next Dune to the table in 2015. A massive component upgrade is in the works, and will help with that quite a bit; the old components were very simple (and thus easy to change), but were almost completely abstract and did nothing to sell the theme. “Let’s try this game involving a number of circles and some squares” is a pitch that only another designer could love. The new components will be easier to work with and more attractive to the eye, which I hope will make the game more appealing to testers.

Lines of Questioning: this is my current focus, and I’ve been very pleased with how the game is working out. Feedback so far has been positive and the game plays well. There’s still lots of room for further refinement, but I feel that Lines of Questioning’s foundation is very strong.

In related news, the digital implementation of Lines of Questioning is coming along nicely. At the moment the game is in an alpha state; it’s playable, but not feature-complete. The road ahead is well-mapped, so I expect steady progress on this front. Unity 4.6’s new UI tools, in particular, are a tremendous boon.

Narrative-driven miniatures game: an older concept, but something I keep simmering on the back burner. Recently I started thinking about mapping power-ups to a three-act structure, gating power by having players guide a “leader” figure through the things a character in a three-act story must do. That would cast players in a different light than most minis games; rather than being a general or a battlefield combatant, the player would serve as author. Perhaps, just as authors must put their characters through the wringer, the player would then want to throw some curveballs at her own troopers?

More than anything else, this is the game that makes me wish for a 25th hour in the day.

Game for parents with toddlers: I haven’t been able to put as much time as I would like into this one, not least because the digital implementation for Lines of Questioning is eating into time that might otherwise have been devoted to it. With that said, I have more out-of-nowhere ideas for this game than I do any other. This is very rapidly becoming my “wake up in the middle of the night with an insight” game.

Moving forward, the priorities are:

1. Lines of Questioning, digital implementation: reach a feature-complete state and build an appealing digital experience.

2. Lines of Questioning, ongoing design work: continue testing and find the ideal variant.

3. Over the Next Dune, component revamp: build an attractive, functional prototype for OtND.

4. Over the Next Dune, testing: get OtND to the table more often, putting the current version of the game through its paces.

Theory: Making Losing Fun – Pinball

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One way to study how to make losing fun is to look at games that can’t, techncially, be “won.” Take pinball, for example. There’s no winning a pinball table; one never beats the game. In a sense, a pinball player is always losing, trying to accomplish as much as possible before inevitable defeat. Yet, good pinball games are just as much fun as they ever were, because pinball designers have mastered the use of sub-goals to create satisfying experiences.

A reliable mechanism for making a game fun even for a player who’s losing is to provide subsidiary goals. Such goals give players who aren’t going to win–in the case of something like pinball, can never win–something to aim toward and take pride in. They beat the boss/saw the next cutscene/got the Steam achievement/etc., and that feels good.

To work, these goals need to be independent of winning, measurable, and desirable. Being unrelated to winning is central; the player isn’t winning, but we want the player to be able to achieve these goals anyway. Measurability contributes to the player’s satisfaction by enabling the player to say decisively “I did X” without the benefit of an ending cinematic. Finally, desirability prevents these goals from feeling like booby prizes.

Modern pinball games have huge numbers of these goals. Consider this table, from Pinball FX2:

12-26-14 - Balance of the Force PinballIt’s hard even to know where to begin. Starting from the lower-right:

Every time the player starts the game by launching the ball down the wire ramp along the right side of the table, she can choose how hard to hurl the ball. Getting just the right amount of force causes the ball to fall onto the table at the exact end of the ramp, a “skill shot” worth lots of points. That (a) has nothing to do with winning–the ball ends up on the table either way, (b) is easily measured–the game announces skill shots prominently, and (c) is desirable, in that it improves one’s score.

See the ramp in the upper-right, that leads into a tree? Hitting that ramp several times starts a special game mode, with the opportunity to score lots of points. Hitting the ramp to start the special mode is, again, (a) independent of winning, (b) measurable, and (c) desirable for the points gained thereby.

At the center-top are Yoda’s hut and the Emperor’s throne room. They aren’t just for show. It’s possible to get the ball up there–a goal unto itself–to play a mini-game in which the player uses a smaller set of flippers to hit the ball into targets, with success being worth points. This particular table doesn’t do a perfect job of being (b) measurable here–it’s a bit difficult to tell how the mini-game’s reward works–but (a) one doesn’t have to win to get it and (c) if the player knows about the reward it’s certainly desirable.

Listing all the things to do on this table would at least triple the length of this post. See the “fights” listed in the center of the board, near the front? Each of those is an activity unto itself. The cutouts of Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Obi-Wan Kenobi are part of one of those fights; the goal is to hit Darth Maul with the ball while avoiding the Jedi. The pyramid to the left can be lowered to create a ramp that jumps the ball toward the upper-left platform. You get the idea.

The closest I come to being a pinball wizard is listening to The Who. However, I’ve never had an unenjoyable game of pinball. The constant flow of new sub-goals, all of them independent of winning, measurable, and desirable, keeps me engaged despite the fact that every single round of pinball ends–usually quickly, in my case–in “Game Over.”

Lines of Questioning: A New Variant

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Holiday time means time for playtesting. I’ve been fiddling with a promising variant of Lines of Questioning, tweaking numbers here and there to see if I can get it to a satisfactory state. While I haven’t succeeded quite yet, I think it’s getting there.

Two weeks ago we had identified four issues with Lines of Questioning:

1. The lawyer’s tiles are handled differently from the witness’ when lines end; this makes learning the game more difficult.
2. Picking up the lawyer’s tiles sometimes feels bad, as though the player’s effort has been wasted.
3. It’s often best for the lawyer to create a series of brief, two-tile lines, which takes away some of the fun of wrangling a longer line.
4. The endgame often involves the witness stacking tiles in the corners while the lawyer just stays away, having nothing to do but keep her distance.

A rule change addressed number 3:

Check whether the lawyer’s line can continue at the end of step 2. If not, the line ends immediately and the lawyer’s topmost tiles are removed. After this happens, start a new lawyer’s line the next time you reach step 1.

That wasn’t a perfect solution, since it reinforced problems 1 and 2. Lawyer tiles were still being picked up, and their ending was being treated differently from the witness’ tiles. In fact, it doubled down on problem 1 by making the end of the witness’ and lawyer’s lines as different as possible; now whether the line ended was being checked before the witness played and drew, but after the lawyer played and drew. Ouch!

For all its weaknesses that solution did seem to work, so I decided to leave it in place and look for answers elsewhere. If the rules for ending lines had become much more complex, perhaps it would be possible to simplify other parts of the rules. Problem 1 would still exist, but it would be less of a barrier to learning the game because it would be the only barrier; the player could invest all of his energy in learning that one tricky area.

To that end, I’ve been trying out a variant that works like this. Play the game as normal (the rulebook is here), except:

1. Follow the rule change noted above.

2. Do not use the the rules for off-topic witness answers. Just ignore section II.g of the rulebook, and all references to it. Answer tiles are never added to the lawyer’s hand of questions by any means.

Playtesters overwhelmingly cite the off-topic answers rule as the hardest thing to learn in the game. Omitting it cuts the mental overhead required to play drastically.

3. Replace the first two paragraphs of section II.e, regarding how to win, with this:

You win by revealing four key facts. To reveal a key fact, you must build a stack of tiles in a corner space at least four-high, in this pattern from top to bottom:

Answer tile
Question tile
Answer tile
Question tile

It is not harmful to have more tiles in the corner, but tiles outside that pattern do not count toward revealing the key fact. (So, for example, if the bottom tile of the stack in a corner is an answer tile, that tile does not help reveal that corner’s key fact.)

Remember that the normal rules for playing a tile apply in the corners just the same as in any other space. In particular, answer tiles may not be played on top of other answer tiles.

Everyone has an intuitive sense that a question-answer-question-answer pattern is “normal.” The current rules, which allow (for example) an answer-answer-answer-answer stack to reveal a key fact, feel “game-y”–so much so that some playtesters assumed the “normal” pattern must be required, even though it’s (a) harder and (b) nowhere in the rules! This variant brings the game in line with expectations, again reducing the mental overhead involved in playing.

Removing the exception allowing answer tiles to be played on top of each other when the witness starts a new line also simplifies the game. Having the rules regarding how tiles are played apply consistently makes the new line rules much easier to learn.

Last but by no means least, this variant beats the stuffing out of problem 4. The lawyer has to be involved until the very end.

4. Replace the second paragraph of section II.f, regarding starting new witness lines, with this:

If you cannot continue the witness’ line in step 3, begin a new one by placing an answer tile in the first corner where an answer tile can legally be played, starting with the lower left and proceeding clockwise. (Remember that answer tiles cannot be played on top of other answer tiles!) This new tile must follow all the normal rules for playing answer tiles.

This final change brings this part of the rules in line with the previous change: no more stacking answer tiles on top of answer tiles in the corners.

Playing this variant is a very different experience. It’s much easier to keep track of what’s going on; the ministerial aspects of the game are greatly simplified. Winning, however, is enormously more difficult. Keeping control of the witness is a challenge, and the endgame is a tightrope walk, with few spaces available and each new tile critical.

If you’ve got some time over the next few days, give this variant a try. Either way, have a happy holiday!

Theory: Marvel Contest of Champions and 2D Fighting With Few Controls

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I like fighting games and I like comics, so I couldn’t resist giving Marvel Contest of Champions a try. If nothing else, I wanted to know what the control scheme was like; after years of playing fighting games on an arcade joystick, my thinking on how to control a game like that had gotten stale. To my surprise, I discovered that MCoC’s tap-and-swipe system works better than it seems like it would. There’s only so many things you need to build a legitimate fighting game, and tapping and swiping enable all of them.

MCoC is a 2D fighting game. That means each player controls a martial artist, and those martial artists fight back and forth on a flat plane. In this case the martial artists are Spider-Man and Captain America instead of practitioners of karate and muay thai, but the colorful characters don’t change the underlying gameplay.

2D fighting games have two core concepts that make them work: the attack-block-throw relationship and controlling space. MCoC features both.

Fundamentals of 2D fighting games

Almost every 2D fighting game I’m familiar with–I would go so far as to say every 2D fighting game released in the last 25 years except one–has rock-paper-scissors at its core.

Blocking (rock) nullifies the damage from attacking (scissors)
Attacking (scissors) does damage to an opponent who is trying to throw (paper)
Throws (paper) inflict damage on a blocking (rock) opponent

Much of the strategy in 2D fighting games comes from manipulating opponents into making the wrong choices, so that their damage is nullified by timely blocks and they are not blocking when the time comes for one’s own attacks. That manipulation is possible because the different choices have different payoffs; knowing what the opponent wants to do makes it possible to get into his head, predict his moves, and bait out the moves you want him to make.

2D fighting games also involve a battle to control space. When Ryu throws a fireball in Street Fighter, he takes control of the lower part of the screen; since the game occurs on a flat plane, the opponent cannot advance while the fireball is approaching. Thus, Ryu’s fireball prevents the opponent from taking the offensive. By controlling space, Ryu controls the game.

Not all 2D fighting game characters have fireballs, but they all have ways to control space. The player’s goal is to use each character’s unique tools to assert control over space, take control of the game thereby, and turn that advantage into a victory.

This video, made by David Sirlin, is a great visual explanation of controlling space. Take a look; the relevant discussion begins at 0:58.

The fundamentals in Marvel Contest of Champions

Everything one would expect from a 2D fighting game exists in MCoC. The rock-paper-scissors relationship is firmly in place; MCoC uses “heavy attacks” in place of throws, but the effect–damage inflicted on a blocking opponent–is the same. So too is the struggle to control space in evidence, with Iron Man’s repulsor beams standing in for Ryu’s fireballs.

What’s striking is how few “buttons” MCoC needs to accomplish those things. Movement is thoroughly simplified; players can only shift toward and away from the opponent by swiping left or right, with no jumping, sidestepping, or other movement options. Yet, “toward” and “away” are enough to create space for oneself and reduce the opponent’s space. Hitting the opponent is also very basic–tap, swipe, or tap and hold–but that’s enough to enable attacking and throwing, which are all that’s needed.

In some respects MCoC reminds me of Divekick, the “art game” of the fighting game world. Divekick is the one modern 2D fighting game without rock-paper-scissors; it’s all about controlling space, with a total focus on jumping into the air and positioning oneself to dive down on an opponent who’s trying to do the exact same thing. Although they play very differently, both games are about stripping away the cruft that has affixed itself to the 2D fighting genre in order to explore the essentials of how such games work.

(Well, MCoC is also about incentivizing spending using a freemium model.)

I’m always fascinated by the question of the most minimal thing that would count as a game. Divekick and MCoC are interesting because they push that boundary within a specific genre: they’re both trying to find the smallest number of elements one can include in a 2D fighting game while retaining the strategy and fun. The fact that they both use minimal controls to do so is surely interesting . . . .

Prototyping Materials: Chipboard

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So you’ve designed a board game. It’s working out pretty well, well enough that you want to make a nice copy–something you can show to people and have them focus on the game, rather than on managing terrible components. You need a material that’s strong enough to stand up to play, thin enough to stack and shuffle, and weighty enough to have a good feel.

You need chipboard.

Chipboard is my new favorite prototyping material. It’s heavier than cardstock or other papers, so it’s better for things like tiles that need to stay in one place during a game. I’ve also found it very sturdy; a copy of Lines of Questioning I built out of chipboard almost a month ago is almost good as new after many tens of games, with only a single tile “marked” by a damaged edge. At least one professionally-produced game in my collection has held up less well.

In addition, putting art on chipboard is trivially easy. Get the art printed on label stock, and then affix it to the chipboard before cutting. The label stock will adhere to the chipboard without any difficulty, and both stock and board can then be cut at the same time to give a tidy edge.

Perhaps most importantly, chipboard materials work well in play. 1/16″ thick chipboard is strong–it won’t bend by accident–but is still thin enough to stack without getting unwieldy. Furthermore, it feels great in the hand. One playtester specifically called out the satisfying heft of chipboard tiles as contributing to Lines of Questioning’s experience.

Unfortunately, the material isn’t entirely easy to work with. Chipboard is too strong to cut with scissors. You’ll want a rotary cutter, a steel ruler with a cork bottom to guide the cutter, and a self-healing mat to protect whatever table you’re cutting on. (All of those things are available at local craft stores.) Be certain to wear eye protection–safety glasses are about $2 at hardware stores–and kids should get help from their parents.

Still, the effort and minor up-front expenses are small prices to pay. Chipboard is inexpensive, durable, and well-suited to boards and tiles. If you’re looking for something nice to build a game out of, give it a look.