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| W - map, player aids |
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| Swing state |
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| Map overview |
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| Another map overview |
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| Texas - the most Republican state |
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| The fight for Florida |
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| "I will campaign in California..." |
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| Preparing to roll the dice |
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| Last turn decisions |
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NSKN Games blog has moved: blog.nskn.net
Showing posts with label play-testing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label play-testing. Show all posts
Friday, March 15, 2013
W in images
Last week we play-tested W - the Board Game along with Praetor and, once again, it's easier to let the pictures "speak" ...
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
Praetor in images
You may wonder what happened, how come we haven't posted anything in so long. And that's a very legitimate question. These days we've been travelling to meet various friends and gaming groups and to play-test our latest prototypes.
I would tell you a lot more, but the testing sessions are not over yet and some say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so ten of them will account for 10,000 words if my maths is right.
This is Praetor, a worker placement city building game...
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| 2-player game after 2 turns |
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| City, player board, available tiles and Caesar tiles |
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| Play-testing with... cats |
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| 4-player game |
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| Workers (dice) in the city |
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| After 7 turns |
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| Thinking hard... |
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| Placing workers in the last turn, fighting hard to become Praetor |
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| The city at the end of the game |
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Thursday, January 17, 2013
Board games: designer vs. publisher
There is a clear distinction between how do board game designers and board game publishers think and what are their expectations.
When I first started as a game designer, back in 2010, my goals and aspirations were crystal clear. I wanted to make good games, if possible brilliant, for people to enjoy and play every day. From the very beginning I knew that I will design gamers' games, the kind that won't be on everyone's table every evening and I went for no compromise.
One year later, I made the decision to go also into publishing. I must take a short detour here... As a freelance game designer, the competition is fierce and there are probably 100 times more designers that are still waiting for their big break than published designers. Even those who innovate and create very good board games can wait for years until a publishing house takes their games and for most designers this never happens. Now, coming back to the main story line, my decision to go into publishing was backed by a few friends that offered to help and get involved and I was going to quit my job anyway and this looked like a great opportunity to do what I really like and have the freedom to publish my own designs, thus circumventing all the constraints that bind other designers.
I am going to take a big step forward through time to the end of 2011. This is when the conflict between the designer and the publisher really started. What I had not realized before is that game designing is light years away from publishing in terms of thinking, effort and understanding the industry.
As a designer I always started from an idea I liked. I would then create the theme, the game mechanics, take it to my friends to play-test, improve it, test again, without ever worrying about the market value of the game. As long as the game was interesting and enjoyable, I had no concerns about how the game would sell. As a designer I was oblivious to the demands of the board games market and I assumed that if game is good, it will sell.
The perspective of a publisher is completely different, or, at least, it should be. The main focus is understanding the industry and the market trends. Based on these, there is a decision making process which could take months or even years regarding what kind of gamed have a chance on a very competitive market.
When I really started to understand the market, NSKN was already one year old. Back then I understood that there will always be a conflict between the publisher and my alter ego, the designer. And there's no easy way to find common ground.
Last spring I attended a designers convention in Gottingen. Inside the huge hall there were may tables with designers on one side, presenting their creations and publishers on the other side, moving from table to table, listening to hundreds of different ideas and choosing two or three to evaluate for publishing. I acted as both, I took some time to see what people have created and I also stood face-to-face with the representative of a major publisher in my attempt to better understand the market. It was then when I realized that there was a big gap between the two.
Each publisher comes with his homework complete - a market analysis which tell what kind of games will sell in the upcoming year - and this is exactly what they're looking for. Anything that does not follow all the requirements is immediately rejected. It's all about business.
Designers have a different approach. Maybe I am taking this a bit too far, but making board games is somehow like art (or maybe it is art) and an artist cannot or will not easily accept constraints. To end up with a good game one must have the freedom to experiment and innovation is usually killed by the limitations imposed by the market.
I believed that by doing both design and publishing it would be easy to find the golden middle. As long as I use my business knowledge to guide guide my creative side, the results should be amazing. Reality showed me that this is not the case. Most of the time, knowing what won't sell stopped me from venturing into dead-end projects which would consume a lot of time and be a money black hole, but more often than that thinking about the business side impaired by ability to let ideas fly and work freely on a project that could have had potential. So, I tried to separate them. I did not want to stop designing games - that what I loved in the first place, but I did not want to give up publishing either.
If the designer's work is not a continuous flow, there's no break from the business side. I can rarely find a day without some email to answer or some request to fulfill. However, this puts me in the 'publisher mood' which tends to be a big punch in the face for creativity. So, I started separating my weeks and even my days in design time and business time. As long as there are issues to take care of on the business side, they take priority and I am trying to fill the whole day only with that. This way I should be able to free up the next day or the day after that to work on design only. If that's not possible, I am trying to at least keep the afternoon or the next morning completely free from all money related issues.
I know it's a long shot, but this is the only way I can do both with a decent chance of success. In the early stages of designing a game, I try to never think how much would a component cost or if it's realistic to even consider a complex plastic miniature. I let myself dream and create, without worrying about the consequences.
Complaining aside, there a certain advantages in doing both design and publishing. Once a game has undergone some testing and it shows potential, the publisher mentality kicks in and I focus on the ergonomics of the game, removing useless components, adjusting sizes to fit in a box, rewriting rules so the reader will not get bored or angry and so on. It the latest stages, the business side takes over and I evaluate the production costs, the market value and see if the whole game represents a sound business concept.
However, there is always this conflict between how a publisher think and how a designer does. The risk of doing both is big. On one hand, you can be blinded by a game concept you like so much that you fail to see that the other might not or it might be too complicated/boring/expensive. On the other hand, there's always the risk of boxing an amazing idea which could be the next big hit on the market because the evaluated production costs are too high or the game is too language dependent.
From my short experience of game designer and even shorter one as a game publisher, my advise to all those who do both is ... not to do both if possible. If that's not possible, try to think like a third party who is always right - the gamer.
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Wednesday, February 1, 2012
#1 - The beginnig
I know I started this topic on this blog a while ago, now I am coming with a different approach. So, enjoy :)
Warriors & Traders is a pure strategy historical game, which combines several mechanics, including area control, taking actions
My first game, Warriors & Traders was released in Essen 2011 and I want to share the story behind the development and the things to come.
The kick start
In my group of gamer friends, I was usually suggesting changes to make games either more strategic or less dependent on dice or in some way different from what the original idea was.
The idea to design my own board game was laying dormant inside me for a while, but a friend gave me that final push that made me start working. He gave me an actual challenge, telling me that within one year I have to come up with a board game that all of the people in our group will enjoy playing without complaining. So, a few weeks later, I started putting my idea on paper. The one that seemed to be one step ahead of all the other ones was of a historical game independent of luck. Once I chose my winner, I also came up with the name and the gaming paradigms I was going to abide to no matter what. And so the story began...
Design principles
I had to write down what I wanted to make out of this game, which I decided from day 1 to call Warriors & Traders. I had decided not to make any compromises and laid down all the important things that I care about and I believed make a game with potential:
- Euro game mechanics
- deeply strategical
- a war component
- lots of player interactions
- layered long-term decision making
- historically accurate
Drawing the line, I realized that it will be hard to combine all these in a game playable in less than an afternoon, so I chose my priorities.
First, I decided to put the play-ability before the historical accuracy, but without making severe compromises. This is why I chose the setup in the Dark Ages of Europe, when empires were forming, putting the bases of nowadays European countries. At some point in time, every country was covering roughly the area which is drawn on the game board. And I make here, now this promise, to come back with the details behind placing each single country on the board!
Another key point in game design was the decision to leave every single aspect of the game untouched by any element of luck. That means no dice, no event cards, no random whatsoever. At this point, the major decision was whether to go towards an economical game or a war game, keeping the "NO luck" paradigm. At first I was tempted to go towards the Euro side, it would have been much easier to balance economic decisions in a random-less environment, but I did not gave up and decided to search for a way to put together armies, war and solving battles without rolling the dice.
The place where I compromised a little was the player interactions. Having a fixed (non-modular) map, it was obvious that gamers would find more ways of interaction in a 6 players game rather than in a 2 players game. This seemed like the least amount of distance from the original idea.
Version 0.0
Once design paradigms fully covered, I started to mentally make order in the game components and mechanics. I had to always keep in mind that I was my own harshest judge and I would not go on easy on myself if not following my core design principles.
First I wrote down game components, most of which you'll still see in the actual box of Warriors & Traders:
- game board, with the countries in Europe, each country divided into provinces
- army units, player and neutral; all defined by power (deal damage) and toughness (absorb damage before dying)
- resources: weapons and gold to build armies, food to keep them alive and products as a generic "currency"
Then I wrote down the mechanics and the main aspects of a turn:
- tech development that applies to the entire 'country' a player controls; three
- actions - each player takes action(s) each turn, developing a technology or building armies
- simultaneous army movement, followed by combat and clean-up
- strategic resource management, using resources before gathering; this required strategic planing for at least 1 turn ahead.
Version 0.1 - plain paper
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| And here it is - the very first print out of ..hmm.. 'two weeks old Warriors & Traders' |
The map - I got excited and a bit carried away, trying to put every important European country on the same map, from England to Russia. It turned out to be quite crowded and extremely large, with no less than 109 provinces player were "fighting over".
Every province had 1 to 3 resources drawn on it, 1/2 of these resources on the map being Products, 1/4 Food and 1/4 Weapons, with Gold only available through trade.
The resource "tokens" were small square pieces of brown (Products), red (Food) and yellow (Gold) paper and some poorly drawn swords (Weapons) - somewhere West of the map, outside of the picture.
Provinces were Capitals (3 resources and starting provinces for players) and common (1 or 2 resources). In all of them there were Barbarians, some random armies who would fight the invaders and nothing more.
The development cards, nowadays replaced by the play-mats containing the technology tree, were divided into... countless categories. The most important ones were upgrading Trade Technology, allowing simply a better exchange rate with the bank for Gold, Production technology - multipliers for resources and Military technology.
This Military technology was the key to a random-less combat, so players were be able to to 5 type of army upgrades with 3 options each, so you could end up with any kind or army X/Y (x-power, y-toughness) with X and Y ranging from 1 to 10 !
After seeing the pictures above, you're allowed to lough (but not too loud 
)
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The game round was composed of four steps:
- feeding armies (yes, before getting resources)
- getting resources
- action - upgrade some tech OR build army
- armies movement and battles
First tests
The first two tests, actually two and a half, were done with just me and my girlfriend (again, big thanks for putting up with all that).
There were no two of the same army after 5 rounds and there were no victory conditions. We were just playing to see how the game works and what are the things that need immediate response.
The top of the list was the giant amount of army types and the Barbarians who had random power and toughness, conflicting with one of the core principles - no luck.
The first two game tests were conclusive, the game had potential, it worked, but it was too all-over-the-place. It required a lot of work to bring structure and a bit more effort on the basic design to make it user friendly. The last test, well... I sneezed in turn three and all the "tokens" flew away, concluding a night that I will always remember, The beginning of an amazing story that changed my career options and maybe my life.
So, stick around, I will tell you the rest of the story behind Warriors & Traders and much, much more.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Going places
First thing I did after Essen was sleep. I slept on the plane back to Romania, I slept a bit on the bus from the airport, and at home I slept a bit more. Then, for the rest of the week, I just went to work and then back home to sleep.
Then on Friday Alex was in town and wanted to play W&T...
We played a 5 player game on the Central Europe map and we had a very nice war in the Balkans. Serbia attacked Bulgaria early in the game and got it down to just one princess. However, in the process they left Vidin empty, and this allowed Romania (who had completed military development by then and was just getting unified with 7 provinces) to attack Serbia in most of their provinces and cut the retreat for some infantry. In the end, Serbia was left with just the capital and one princess and Romania got about 12 victory points in one turn. It turns out double strike is really effective against princesses and small armies.
After that, we played a few rounds of Wings of War, which I got back from Spiel'11.
I have no pictures from the W&T game (light was really bad) but here's one from WoW:
On Saturday, we played again: more WoW and finally I got to try World Without End, a game we had in the group since summer.
Sunday I went to the Red Goblin's lair to demo W&T. We played for a couple of turns and they liked it.
After the demo game, I stayed a bit more and played some D&D. I even got to met a dragon
And finally, today I got to visit Taraba de Jocuri where we played a demo game in which Mihai managed to wipe my country out completely ...
... and concluded the evening in Ceainaria Tabiet where I didn't take any pictures but promise to do so next time. I also noticed they have a copy of Shadows over Camelot in their library, which is on my "to be played" list.
Anybody want to join this weekend?
Cheers,
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Can you 'compute' the game?
During and after the amazing Spiel '11 Essen experience, many people came to us with one obsessive question: since there's no randomness in the game, can you 'compute' your way to victory?
The answer we always gave was no. For some that was enough, for others, well, they needed to hear the reason.
The simplest and funniest was "can you compute chess?" and if you're no Kasparov, the answer is most likely no. Even though Warriors & Traders is not and never aimed to be as complex as chess, it is still complex enough so that there's no guaranteed winning technique that one can apply in all games and have a 90% probability to win.
Through play testing, and I am taking about more than 200 tests, we balanced the game in such a way that no matter what path you're choosing, you have a chance to win. More than that, we've seen that no one was getting even close of determining the result of the game even two turn before someone actually won.
To conclude, for the skeptics the complete lack of random is a reason to believe that they can actually compute their way into victory no matter what... and this would be true if they played alone. But the truth is that any opponent can and will come up with surprises. So, just like in life, the acts of other create enough randomness so that the game remains non-deterministic and... fun!
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