The State of the Zoo

Grab Bag Zoo is a game I have been co-designing with Mike Harrison-Wood since before Covid hit us. Literally just before the pandemic - we had our first playable prototype in January of 2020, with the lockdowns in the UK starting in March. This would have been problematic for most projects, but this one had the extra problem of being a game that relies massively on tactility to work (with players feeling in a cloth bag for the token that they want), so an online version just isn't viable for the foreseeable future.

As a result of all this (and the difficulty I have had in getting regular in-person testing set up since the effects of the pandemic have faded), the game has made very slow progress, but we have managed to iterate steadily, and while we are regularly finding issues with it, the game always seems to entertain.

The current Grab Bag Zoo prototype.
So compact compared to what it used to be.

When we first started, there were over 50 animal tokens in the game and each player had their own bag. This swiftly reduced and we now have a single, shared bag and only 24 animals.

The game has a fast and frenetic style of play, but we wanted to include some way to make multiple plays rewarding so, for example, if you win a game once, your next play is more challenging. We've tried a staged "campaign" style play, a set of elements that get added to the game depending on whether you win or lose, and so on. They all seemed OK, but not quite right.

We've now got to a variation where there are a small pile of challenge cards, each defining how many animals that you need to collect, how much time you have to do it, and any other special rules for that challenge. There is a simple one to start with, and then you can simply choose a challenge you want to try next, with the overall objective to eventually complete every one. This seems to be working well and with a minimum of fuss, though I am certain that there is some fine tuning to be done on the various challenge cards.

The game is also fitting into an ever smaller box.

At the moment we are taking a bit of a breather, but have the great news that a publisher (no, I'm not going to say which) is currently taking a look at it. This is just the first stage down the publication road and that road has very many off-ramps, so it is still most likely that nothing comes of it, but we hope that at the least we should get some useful feedback. Fingers crossed.

Sympol Numbers

I've had a few tests of my cooperative game, Sympolis, over the last month or so and am now pretty comfortable with the overall shape of the game, but of course, the devil is in the detail and now I am trying to get that devil pinned down. 

So here's the thing: if you make a competitive game, the players provide a lot of the balance; in a cooperative game, the game systems have to do all the work. I'll unpack that a bit. If I want a cooperative game to feel challenging to experienced players as well as newbies, the mechanisms, set-up parameters, etc. need to provide that challenge and have a way to scale and adapt. With a competitive game, an experienced player can usually get more challenge by playing against other experienced players.

One of my traditional blurry photos of a recent playtest of Sympolis.

The last few playtests of Sympolis have all been won by the players fairly easily, with a period of perceived pressure mid-game, followed by that pressure easing off until we reached a relatively straightforward final round that felt more like a victory lap than a finale. The level of that feeling has reduced as I have tweaked settings, but it hasn't gone away. One of the focuses of the game is the pair of "wrath tracks" for each player, which indicates the level of trouble you are getting from the gods and the people of your city respectively. If either track gets too high, your city falls and everyone loses the game. In recent iterations, if the tracks go too low, you gain complications due to the people being too lazy and hubristic, or the gods getting jealous of the pampered people. It turns out that the "high wrath" situation is currently too easily managed, which reduces pressure far too much.

In essence, the game asks players to walk a tightrope, but that tightrope is more of a footbridge, with handrails that look insubstantial, but are actually pretty solid when you test them. 

And that's what I'm trying to deal with now. My usual approach of making games is to just make general guesses about numbers, quantities, and so on, and then revise as I get a feeling for how a game plays out. I think that in this game, I may have got to the limit of how far I can go by doing that - or at least, further progress will be slowed massively unless I adapt.

So that's what I am attempting to do at the moment. I have a spreadsheet page counting up numbers from my main card data source, which is another page in the same document that I use as an input into a nanDECK script in order to build my card decks. This is giving me a decent view on the state of my card decks, but there are things that aren't easy to capture automatically, like figuring out the number of dice that are likely to be required to complete any given challenge card, or even group of cards. 

I think that a potential approach would be to come up with a system to provide a rating for each challenge card, working initially on the expected number of dice needed to complete it, maybe boosting it a bit if there is some complicating factor like requiring precise numbers. In fact, I could extend this and rate the production use of each card also, maybe with production of a die giving 1 point, and provision of some die or card manipulation ability having probably some fraction of a point. Then I should be able to analyse the likely production rating at any given time and compare it with the likely challenge rating on a given turn. Once I have that information I will be better placed to tweak numbers to get the game to the challenge level I am looking for.

Dining, coffee, side, trestle...

A few years ago I challenged myself to draw something every day, and I managed to keep that going for a full year and have a pile of sketch books as a result, with pages bearing artistic endeavours ranging from a 2-minute pencil scribble to several hours of pen work. This felt like a big achievement and while I'm still not a great artist, I was feeling a lot more confident with a pencil at the end of the year than I was at the start.

I figured the next year I wouldn't do another similar exercise (or continue the drawing), though a couple of weeks in I started doing DuoLingo, which almost counts.

Then Covid.

As part of my attempt to sort myself out, I have started a new challenge. Inspired by recent tinkering with roleplaying games, at the start of the year I began to create a "random table" every day. This is something that is a staple of some types of roleplaying games, where the game master can roll dice to determine a random encounter, loot, or any other twist to the game. Random tables are not to everyone's taste, but they can be a lot of fun for some games and can introduce new twists to a narrative as well as help bail out a GM who needs to come up with content on the fly.

The point of this for me, apart from to build a positive habit, is to address something that I have noticed over the last couple of years. I used to be able to come up with what I will describe as "content" pretty well, by which I mean small elements to fit into my game designs, like names and descriptions for thematic items within the games. I wasn't exactly world class, but I could do it well enough for my purposes. Lately I seem to have got out of the zone for this sort of thing, and it just feels so much harder than it used to be. 

Of course, the classic way to get better at this sort of thing is just to do it, repeatedly, often. 

So that's what I'm doing: every day, coming up with a theme for a table (sandwich fillings, names for fantasy taverns, contents of a desk drawer, etc.), making a list of items fitting that fit that theme, and sharing it online. If you'd like to follow along, I have been posting on my main Mastodon account and on BlueSky - I decided not to post absolutely everywhere that I could.

I'm now 49 days in and it seems to be working. I'm spending less time agonising about what I put into each table, or even what the theme for each table is, so hopefully in a few months' time I'll be able to rattle these out even more easily - or be producing more interesting content. 

A couple of people have already suggested that I could compile all the tables into a book at the end. I suspect a minority of the tables are likely to be of any interest, and the good ones will need a load of editing and rewriting, but a load of them seem to be naturally falling into being part of a slightly whimsical, medieval fantasy world, so maybe I'll be able to combine those ones and polish them into something coherent I can share. We'll see - it's still very early days.

Newish Year, 2024 Edition

While I have done a lot better at blogging over the last year than I did in the previous couple, I still get myself caught in a trap of not wanting to write anything up unless I have something significant to say, and then worrying that the posts I do write and publish aren't "worthy" in some way. 

But that was never meant to be the purpose of this blog - it was meant to be a place for me to write things down in public, whether they increase the sum of human knowledge or not. The act of writing and publishing helps me solidify thoughts and somehow builds a little accountability into the way I do things. 

And actually, I do get comments and feedback from a few people, occasionally on the blog itself, but more often on one of the other social media platforms I share it on. If you are one of the people who has responded in some way, thank you, it's really appreciated.

Anyway, we are now a few weeks into a new year and, while I'm a bit late, I guess it's time for a little reflection and looking forward.

I do feel I turned a corner in 2023 and started getting back into the swing of game design work. I'm still moving very slowly, and being very bad at organising playtests, but it's better than nothing. So this makes for an obvious action for this year: to do more playtesting, especially face-to-face. I have a couple of people in the area who have expressed an interest in helping out with this sort of thing, and I need to get back in touch with a few old contacts, and maybe something can start happening.

I've also done some more proofreading, mostly for game rule books, but not a huge amount. This is something I enjoy doing, which improves my own rule writing (I think), and seems to be appreciated by the people I do the jobs for. I feel that this is a handy side-hustle too. I'll plan to keep doing this as and when the opportunity comes up, maybe pushing myself to do a few more jobs through the year.

Over the last year or two I've also got back into reading roleplaying game material. I've been playing a bit, but mostly reading. This is something that has always been the case for me: acquire what I can, read lots, play some. The thinking is that reading rules, game philosophy, world building, adventure or encounter design, etc. all feeds into the melting pot of ideas. The same goes for board games to an extent, but the playing aspect feels a far more efficient way to absorb the ideas in that case. 

The whole RPG reading stuff has actually got me started on a new "do something every day" project like I did in 2019 with drawings. This time I am creating an RPG-style random table every day, the sort of thing where you roll a die and it tells you something random in a given category. I'll probably write a post about this later, but I feel it is actually giving me some exercise in one of my current weaknesses: creating thematic content. At the time of writing I'm 21 days in and doing OK.

Other than that, events I am planning on going to this year so far amount to the Bastion convention next weekend (for chilling out, kicking back, and actually playing stuff), a private game designers event in February, and UK Games Expo at the end of May and beginning of June (where I'll be mostly crewing the Playtest Zone). I'm sure other stuff will come up, but that's a good start.

So, in the spirit of getting this done and posted, I'll finish off here, before I end up... <fzkt!>

Dragons and Cities and Gods, Oh My!

 

Cast your mind back to the end of November and the beginning of December, and imagine a game designer who has spent the time since then not getting around to writing about what he did regarding game design that week. OK, scene set.

I actually had two playtests of my cooperative dice allocation game Sympolis over the course of that week: one was virtual, on Screentop.gg, and one physical, at Dragonmeet. 

The first test ended in a loss for the players, with a small chance of a win on the final turn, but that chance really required great dice rolling at that point, which they did not have. There was a sense that another play could have a better result, but also some frustration at some aspects of the game (for example, the players were only able to generate one of the "wild" purple dice each round, due to an unlucky shuffle), and while I am pretty sure there were some decisions that could have improved the situation, the problem was mostly that the players were screwed by bad card draws and dice rolls and not by poor play. Besides that though, the biggest takeaway I had was how energised and proactive the players were: they self-organised quickly, discussing how to solve the problems presented by the game, and while there were frustrations (and not always in a good way), the vibe was really what I want for the game. Now I need to figure out how to bottle that!

I made a few small changes to the game in between, which effectively game a little additional resource and control at the start of the game, partly as one of the biggest problems with the virtual test was due to a dearth of resources (aka dice supply) and vulnerability to bad luck. And then there was a load of printing and cutting of cards to make an actual, physical prototype.

On to Dragonmeet. If you didn't know it, this is a nice, one day convention in London that was traditionally, and is still, largely based around tabletop roleplaying games, though there is a load of board game stuff there, including some great traders and a playtest area organised by Playtest UK - and every time I have been to the event, I have spent most of my time staffing the playtest area (with the exception of last year when there wasn't official playtesting, but a group of us got together and did some anyway).

I failed to take a photograph of play at Dragonmeet, so I faked one here
with some red fabric and components laid out to plausibly represent play.

Anyway, as well as staffing the playtesting area, I had a slot to test one of my games, and I had four great volunteers to test Sympolis. Once again, the players came out of the gates hard. They seemed to get their heads around the challenges pretty quickly and were actively and pretty intensely discussing their options, and we had pretty much the same apparent engagement from the players as in the previous test. Both groups were experienced board gamers, so maybe not fully representative players, but again I am very happy with this. As it turns out, the combination of the changes I made and the different random elements meant that this group won the game with a full round to spare. I think the two groups seemed to be making approximately equally good decisions (though they had different priorities), so it was probably the game setup and play state that made the difference.

A major note in the Dragonmeet play was that none of the players had problems with their wrath tracks, which record problems in the eyes of the gods and populace and provide one of the ways to lose the game. If your wrath tracks are low, it means that you can take bigger risks more confidently in the knowledge that misjudgement at least won't result in the end of the game, and thus you have an easier time of it. I had a useful discussion with one of the players afterwards, and we talked about mechanisms that compensate for things going too well; I have built up a number of elements that can mitigate "bad" luck, but now we have the opposite problem. One thought was that there could be some form of "push back" coming from having low scores on the wrath tracks: if the people are too happy, they get decadent and make bigger demands, for instance. I am pondering ways to approach this, but I like the idea and think it could work well.

One little aside... The current version of the game has a "wrath" card flipped at the end of every round, and these add an additional stressor to the game, which can make things get out of hand if players don't manage them effectively, and these also provide a timer for the game: the last of these cards flipped over means that the game is over. In general, I quite like how these work, but we run into the hoary problem of there being an upkeep action that isn't directly linked in to the game and the players aren't actually motivated to do. In the virtual test, one of the players was very good at being in charge of methodically flipping one of these each time, but in the physical test at Dragonmeet, it got forgotten (and needed reminding) a couple of times, and the rest of the time it was remembered as an afterthought. This is not ideal, and I need to figure out a way to make it so that the game requires the players to flip this card in order to proceed: maybe it actually triggers the gaining of resources, or something. Or, of course, I could find another way to ramp things up through the game: this particular mechanism isn't set in stone.

Aside number 2... With cooperative games there is a common concern about an effect that is often described as the "alpha player" or "quarterback" problem, which is where one player takes control of the game and can sometimes just tell other players what they should do, meaning that less confident players can find themselves just sitting at a table, watching someone else playing the game on their behalf. This seems to me to be a problem with a group dynamic more than anything, but game systems can mitigate this to make it so that an alpha player is less likely to emerge - or even, can't emerge. Examples include having restricted communication, or a real-time element to the game (Magic Maze is an example that has both of these). My inclination at the moment is to just not worry about it for this game. With a good group, it isn't an issue, and the energy at the table from having loose rules that give the players a lot of freedom appears to work well, and I suspect that any attempt to add a mitigation would damage that dynamic I like seeing. That said, I'm now wondering what the game would be like with limited player communication and a strict turn order; it would feel very different, but could be good. I'm staying focused on my current path, but this is a potential alternative for later.

Anyway, I just about managed to get this post in before the end of the year, so I'll wish you a happy Yule, Christmas, New Year, or whatever you celebrate at this time of the year, and all the best for 2024...

Zoo In A Bag

I think that one of the most promising designs I have in the works is the one that I am working on with Mike Harrison-Wood, Grab Bag Zoo. We have already pitched it to publishers (no luck so far) but it still needs a load of work, and we have basically spent the last year with the game on the shelf as we took a break from it.

When you are working on a project that hits a point where forward movement becomes really slow, taking a break and getting some distance can be a helpful approach. If you don't get back to the game, then maybe it wasn't so great after all.

This is most of the components from the most-recently tested Grab Bag Zoo version.

As I mentioned in my opening sentence, I actually think that this game has a lot of potential to it. A conversation with a publisher who took a look at it helped us figure out what the game has going for it. To start with, the combination of a cooperative game (you all win or lose together), which is played in "real time", and involves feeling in a bag for things is an unusual combination. 

The essence of the game is to complete collections of different types of animal by pulling shaped animal tokens from a bag without looking. Players take it in turn to have the bag, but have to work quickly as there is a sand timer running. If you complete all the collections before time runs out, everyone wins!

There are a few real time cooperative games out there; Magic Maze and Escape the Curse of the Temple are two that immediately come to mind. Grab Bag Zoo has a different kind of vibe to it due to the communication that the game affords. In Magic Maze, verbal communication is banned apart from at specific times, and in Escape everyone is so focused on their own dice that it is often hard to get much information across to your co-players other than "help, I need an unlock!" In Grab Bag Zoo, only one player is properly active (with the bag) at any time, and watching groups playing, there is often urgent encouragement and advice thrown across the table. ("Just pull anything out, dad!")

For bonus points, the fact that it is based on animal shaped pieces feels like a win for a lot of people. I get the impression (but no supporting data) that most folk get a warm, fuzzy feeling from handling animal toys. Additionally, you don't need to explain to people that this piece is an elephant and this one is a giraffe, you just need a picture and everyone gets it.

That said, the game might work better thematically if players were trying to pull parts to fix a spaceship, or service a formula 1 racing car. The whole "collect this set of animals for some reason" thing feels a little weak at the moment, but I can't help but feel that the response of most potential players to that would be, "OK," rather than, "Why? That doesn't make thematic sense." I'm happy to be proven wrong.

So if the game has so much going for it, then what is the problem? Why isn't it already on shelves in my local game shop?

(Deep breath...)

OK, so fundamentally there is the trilemma of the cost to produce, what the game delivers, and the complexity of the rules. I will explain...

The game as we originally built it had 45 wooden animals, 5 each of 9 different designs, plus some cards, a bag, a sand timer, and maybe some other tokens. Working out an approximation of production costs, it turns out that the game would be likely to retail for something like £30 to £40, unless a publisher could do a huge print run in order to bring the costs down. That price is pretty fine  for hobby games, but the game play was a lot more like a family game, and most families feel that £20 is quite a lot for a board game. 

If we make the game more interesting for hobby gamers, we probably don't bring the price down, and we risk making it more inaccessible for families, who we would really like to be able to enjoy it. Having more to think about is likely to make the game harder to teach - unless we can come up with some really clever angle. In essence, we need to square the triangle of:

1. Reduce the cost of production as much as possible
2. Make the game really easy to pick up and start playing, even for very casual gamers
3. Make the game interesting enough for folk to keep wanting to play it

I think that right now a good starting point would be to deal with those first two points on the basis that if the game can be picked up, played, and enjoyed really quickly, then there can be optional additional challenges and wrinkles that can be added in later. Let's try to make the core as slick as we can.

First off, the number of components... We started with 9 different animals because it felt like a good selection, but then we ended up trimming this back for a starter game, introducing more types of animals over the course of a few plays. This wasn't terrible, but it did mean we still had a lot of wooden components and there was more sorting out of stuff in order to get playing, which pushes against point 2, which is to make it easy to get started.

So I have decided to try simply reducing the number of types of animal in the play set to 6, with 4 of each, and created a set of collection cards featuring only those animals; the set isn't well thought out at the moment, but it's a start.

Aside from that I have a slightly expanded set of "helper" and "challenge" cards; the previous iteration also had these, with mixed results, and I want to explore that space a bit. Again, I have gone for a "throw it at the wall" selection that will allow me to try out various combinations of options and see what grabs people's interest.

Finally, I have changed the time track to be a small pile of cards which can be combined to provide the same effect, and I have done away with other tokens for the time being.

This all means that the game components are down to 24 "animeeples", 1 bag, 1 sand timer, 20 tarot-sized cards, and 25 poker-sized cards, which feels a bit more manageable, though, and actually gets the wooden components to fewer than classic kid's game Tier auf Tier, so that feels like a bit of a win.

I think I should have a couple of playtesting opportunities over the next couple of weeks where a game like this would be suitable, so I wanted to be ready as I have been very lax at this sort of thing over the last few years. But now, I'm ready... I think...

Getting Systematic For That Dungeon

It has been a while since I wrote about my solo dungeon crawl project, and to be honest, I've not done a lot of work on it in the meantime, but neither have I been entirely idle, so here's a catch-up on where we are.

You may remember that I decided to try making a solo journalling roleplaying game based on a fantasy dungeon crawl. So you play a character on an adventure in an underground cave complex, the game provides prompts, challenges, and situations to overcome, and you write a record of what occurs in the developing story.

I've been trying to figure out a game system to handle this, and last time I wrote on the subject I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to be light on rules and light on detail, leaving room for the player to fill in details. 

Since then, I have been leaning even further into the light touch territory. So here is an outline of the game system as I am currently writing it up. This is going over a fair bit of stuff I talked about in the previous post, but it feels to me like it is getting more solid.

If I were to make a dungeon crawl game, I'd be very tempted
to go for an unoriginal (some might say classic)
"adventurer entering a dark cave" image for the cover.

As a player, you control a hero and their sidekick. The narrative conceit is that you are actually the sidekick, recording the exploits of your more mighty companion.

Character creation is essentially rolling for (or choosing) some broad skills from a couple of tables, which could result in, for example, the hero might have athletic prowess along with a quick mind and knowledge of natural things, while the sidekick might be good at armed melee combat and solving puzzles. I have tables for generating this, but I don't think I have them "right"; they are, however, something to get started with.

You also have a number of health points (run out of those and the hero dies) and fortune points (run out of those and you can't escape any consequences of things going wrong).

When something happens to your little team, you basically have to decide which of your characters' abilities could be used to overcome the problem and write this into your journal. I won't provide detailed guidance about what is and is not applicable - it's a matter of deciding for yourself. I was previously thinking that there would be a limit to the number of times you can use each thing, but for now, not so much. Each thing that you apply adds a +1 to your ability to overcome it. Then you roll a die, add those modifiers, and if you meet or beat a target number, you succeed and write this up as appropriate. If you fail, then failure by a small amount results in the loss of either health or fortune as you sustain an injury or ride your luck to get out in one piece, or if you fail by a lot, you lose both health and fortune. 

I reckon you can probably award yourself additional fortune if you use an ability you haven't used before, or if you are able to write in a thematic link to something that you had previously encountered - in particular, omens, which I'm planning to introduce as part of the journey to the dungeon.

Yes, this can easily be abused, but having decided that this is more about writing up an adventure than it is about detailed Old School style dungeoneering (there are plenty of very good options it that's your jam), I feel freed and able to just go with the flow. Of course, once I share a playable version with other people, feedback could completely blow my assumptions, but we'll see. 

Just as a little aside, in board game design I would always advise that it's a good idea to just get something, anything that is even remotely playable to the table as quickly as possible, even if it is just for a solo test, and not spend too long "theorycrafting" and thinking about how best to create everything in the game. So why am I not following that advice in this project? 

Well, it just feels like the style of game this is allows me to just think it through and gradually write more stuff down. I can even try rolling on tables I create and think about what I do with the results, so in a sense I am testing as I go, but if I am honest, I am not doing that very much. I feel that what I should be doing is settling down for an evening or two and blasting out a first draft that I can then try playing through, but I think my brain isn't really in the right place for that yet. So I plod onwards, and every entry in every table that I create is a step in the right direction. We'll get there eventually.

I was going to go further with this post, but I feel that I would be better off just posting smaller bites for now and try to get the momentum rolling. Next up: travelling to the dungeon, omens and stuff, and maybe the start of the dungeon itself. And I'd better also actually get my working document into a state that I can share.