Designer Diaries - Plotz

Being a jester isn’t easy. You have to entertain the king and queen by juggling, telling stories and jokes, playing music – all on demand! And what do you do when the king and queen ask you to design a game to play, right then, on the spot?! Well, if you’re me, and the king and queen are your 9-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter dressed up in medieval costumes, you design Plotz.

I was lucky – I’d been kicking around an idea for a more complex version of this game for a few weeks (involving territory cards, dice tokens, cities, and armies that moved around). But when pressed into service that day by my tiny liege lords, my brain coughed up the simplest and most streamlined version of the game from some deep recess of my subconscious, and Plotz was born, nearly fully-formed, right there onto our living room floor.

I pulled out a pack of playing cards, grabbed some “plus-plus” pieces for tokens, and sat down with m’lord and lady to try out the idea that had just flashed into my brain. I placed nine cards in a grid face up, dealt each of us three cards, and explained that we’d try to play higher-value cards than the ones shown in order to “claim” those “territories.” Play one, draw one, try to get the most territories. That was the whole game.

And something amazing happened – it was fun! The design process had taken maybe thirty seconds, and probably less. As someone who had previously spent hours and days and weeks and months tinkering with ideas, this was a revelation. I’m aware that all that time previously spent thinking about games and brainstorming ideas was what had made this flash of inspiration possible. Still, it gave me a new appreciation of the fact that good ideas don’t necessarily take a lot of time to produce.

There were some tweaks along the way. We realized that while Aces were high, they should be treated as “1’s” in the initial layout or else the 2 card would literally be unplayable. We eventually settled on a rule that said 2’s could always be played on aces, even high ones, and really liked how it played. And we decided the Joker would be the highest card in the game when played from the hand (this game was invented by a jester, after all), but would be a wild card when played in the initial 9-card “flop” (otherwise no one could ever claim a Joker territory). But these tweaks were mostly light housekeeping – the entire foundation had already been laid in that first moment of inspiration.

Obviously there was still a lot of work necessary to turn this simple game with a deck of standard playing cards into something unique, with its own set of cards. That’s where my smart, beautiful, and talented co-founder and graphic designer extraordinaire Hannah came in. The “design brief” for the cards was basically: “What would it look like if a game tile and a playing card had a baby?” Showing admirable patience with this very abstract request, Hannah and I worked together to dream up the basic idea for the Plotz cards, and she took the idea and ran with it, eventually creating an iconic set of cards with a beautiful card back and lovely graphics for the box.

The last elements to create are the tokens – we’ve been using glass beads lately but are looking for something more sustainable – and then my jester’s brainchild is ready to share with the world! They grow up so fast!

Plotz is a simple game with lots of player interaction, some strategy, some luck, and a surprisingly high replay value. We’ve gotten a lot of fun out of it, and I hope that you and your family will enjoy it as much as we have. Until next time, may you find a magical moment of inspiration while at play that brings you joy and success.

Designer Diaries - Stax: Galaxies

When I first started designing card games, I’d often begin by writing rules on playtest cards, either by hand on slips of paper or on the computer. I liked the freedom of starting with a blank canvas and crafting what I wanted, but this process also had some drawbacks. For one thing, it was time consuming, as I needed to create all of my game components before I could experiment, and if something wasn’t working, I had to spend the time creating new components.

At some point I decided to try experimenting with using standard playing cards to design games. When gamer designers are working on custom dice, for example, they don’t necessarily create the custom dice right away while they’re still iterating – more likely they’ll just use a standard d-6, for instance, with a table of values dictating what each number means (“1=run, 2=attack, 3-defend, etc.). I figured I could do the same thing with playing cards. 

During this process, Stax was born. The setup went like this: lay out seven cards in a row face-up (Why 7? It just felt right.). Then draw a hand of 3 to 5 cards (we tried various numbers, eventually settling on 5). You can play your cards in a “stack” below one of the cards in the row of 7, and once your stack’s value is greater than the value of that card, you get to place a token and claim that card. There are also rules about stacking your cards – initially, they needed to be low to high, although we eventually loosened it to ascending or descending. Each turn, you could play one card and move one “stack” of one or more cards one space to the right or left. Every time we loosened these “one play, one move” limits the game got less fun and strategic, so they’ve been in place throughout most of the design process.

You’ll notice that some of the mechanisms are similar to Plotz, and these games were designed right around the same time. However, while Plotz is a fun family game, it quickly became clear that Stax had a lot of strategic depth, which is what really makes this game a blast to play. At first I played mostly with my wife (and Good Idea Games co-founder), although the first person to really playtest with me was my 9-year-old son.

As we playtested, we added some rules. Since face cards didn’t have numbers, we decided that they should have a special ability, and the “fortress” was born. This card went through a lot of evolutions to get where it is now. Initially, J, Q, and K were all fortressed, but it soon became evident this was too many. So we changed the J so that it could be played as another “10” on a stack, and also had a special discard ability where it could destroy a card in an opposing stack (like a knight).

We didn’t know what to do with the Ace at first, and tried a few things before eventually concepting it as a “mountain” with a value of 30 – very difficult to hold. Also, since limitations breed creativity, it was decided that no fortresses could be played on a mountain (the Escorial notwithstanding). We also tried the Ace with various discard abilities. Eventually, once the shift was made to custom cards, the Ace’s function split in two, becoming both the “black hole” worth 30 where nothing could be played and the “spy”, or 1 card, which has the ability to take over any “station” (fortress).

The Joker was another tricky bit. We eventually just played it as a desert, meaning no one could claim it or play a fortress there, but once we made the jump to custom cards the Joker was actually just removed from the game entirely.

Around this point, it was decided that the game needed some flavor. Hannah has been pushing me to avoid some of the typical fantasy-game tropes like “King” and “Queen”, which are becoming increasingly dated in this democratic age and which are over-used anyway. We tried several different themes before settling on a sci-fi/planet/spaceship theme. It just felt right for the 7 cards to be planets in a solar system and the stacks to be fleets of ships moving around, and “Stax: Galaxies” was born. Because the rules system can accommodate any theme, we made an intentional choice to leave design space open for other versions in the future (“Stax: Naval Battles”, “Stax: Orangutans”, “Stax: Breakfast Cereals”, etc.)

After playtesting for a while, it seemed like there was a need for the low value cards to matter more, since we often skipped playing them in favor of cards that would add more points to our stack, which we limited to four cards early on in order to make the math simpler, avoid moving huge piles of cards, and build in more strategic decision-making by limiting what could be done.

The discard abilities on the Jack and Ace played nicely, and so the “Scout”, “Freighter”, and “Transport” cards were born.

With so many discard abilities, we needed to figure out how the rules accommodate them. We tried having them replace a play or move action, but this felt too restrictive. We tried making them unlimited, but this led to huge swingy turns in which you could chain three or four discard abilities, which undercut a lot of the careful strategy and decision-making which had made the game fun so far. Eventually, I settled on just allowing one discard action per turn. This felt clean, since it functioned the same way as play and move actions, and it also felt like to appropriate power level.

Regarding the tokens used to claim planets: these went through one very important iteration along the way. At first, each player had their own tokens, and you’d replace the opponent’s token with your own (just like in Plotz). At some point we realized, hey this is a two-player game – what if the tokens were double sided and you could just flip them over. Hannah designed some awesome looking chits with little spaceships and nebulae on them, and the Stax tokens were born!

After a bit more playtesting, it was on to making the cards look beautiful. Hannah took my concept and applied her graphic design magic until we arrived at the gorgeous-looking cards we have today.

There was one more addition that I requested juuuuuust before we were going to print our first prototype (and after Hannah, bless her, had already begun to upload cards for printing). I’d been thinking it looked weird for the discard effects (“Scout – draw two cards”) to appear as just a text box along with the image of a planet, since they didn’t have anything to do with one another. The text boxes felt very inert, as well as being confusing. (Was the planet the scout?) The big challenge with the Stax card design had always been that the cards had multiple functions depending on their in-game use: they could be planets in the initial 7-card “flop”; they could be “spaceships” as part of a “fleet” (stack); or they could represent the specific kind of ship keyworded in the discard ability.

The solution to this issue was an example of a designer needing to “kill their darling.” This old adage says that sometimes the thing we’re most attached to will need to go, for the greater good of the overall design. In this case, the thing that needed to go was the game being played with a single deck of cards, which were used for everything. Hannah made the suggestion to switch to two separate decks – the planet deck and the spaceship deck. When I begrudgingly made that change, it cleared up all the confusing aspects of the cards and made the visuals directly align with what the cards do. While Hannah realized the need for this change early, I was more stubbornly attached to the original idea, and only changed my mind once I had the first round of prototype cards in hand. I learned that, sometimes, I need to really see something, and hold it, and play with it, in order to appreciate the strengths or weaknesses of a design. 

With that final change, Stax: Galaxies was finished – or at least professionally prototyped. It’s been a complex process to move from standard playing cards to a uniquely designed deck, but it’s been rewarding at every step along the way. We’ll be sharing it with our local playtesters at our next event, and I can’t wait to share it with all of you! It’s a fun and surprisingly strategic game with nice looking cards, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we have.

Until next time, may you enjoy the process as much as the result, and may your partner accommodate your craziest last-minute requests with the same grace as our own co-founder and graphic designer extraordinaire.

Randomness in Game Design

You know that moment – when you’ve carefully constructed your engine, built up your forces, prepared to strike that final blow and catapult yourself towards victory. You confidently roll the dice… and they all come up 1’s. No! How is this possible?!? It’s not fair! In a blind rage, you flip the table, scattering meeples and tokens hither and thither as you storm out of the room cursing game designers everywhere.

Ok, so maybe your experience wasn’t quite so dramatic, but we’ve probably all had moments in a game where randomness strikes and ruins our best laid plans. And we’ve probably also had other moments of randomness that were more positive – rolling a pair of sixes when we needed them the most. Top-decking just the card we need to turn the tide in our favor. These moments are fun, exciting, and keep us coming back to our favorite games.

So when is randomness good and when is it bad? Let’s talk about randomness in game design and how to use it for good…or evil (bwahahahahahaha!). Ok, actually just for good.

What does randomness do for a design? Well....

1. Randomness allows less-skilled players to win sometimes.

Chess is a game in which nothing is random. Pieces simply move the way they move. And chess is a great board game, right? One of the all-time greats, in fact, and still very popular today. However, it’s basically impossible for a novice chess player to beat an experienced player, in part due to chess’s total lack of randomness.

Compare chess to a game that is completely random, like “war” (or “battle”) in which cards are flipped over from two half-decks and the highest card wins. There is no skill at all in this game, and the victory probability is 50%. I don’t find this game very fun – but when my kids were five years old, they loved it! And, most importantly for this topic, they won (somehow seemingly more than half the time…).

Even in a game like Magic: the Gathering that rewards strategic decision-making, randomness plays a role. Sometimes even the best player will simply not draw their mana, and their opponent will win. While it can be frustrating when it happens to you, this feature – not bug – helps broaden Magic’s appeal and, I’d argue, is part of what makes it such a great game.

Having random elements in a game allows the less-skilled player to win sometimes. Maybe they don’t win half the time, but the chance is there, and this is a huge motivation for novice players that will keep them coming back to your game.

1. Randomness creates exciting moments

Drawing the perfect card, rolling the perfect dice number, spinning the wheel and getting what you need – these moments are exhilarating, creating an emotional thrill that certain gamers crave. And they are all made possible by randomness. Predictability can be nice if you want to have total control over things – but it can also be boring.

Think about a game like Risk (whether you love or hate it, this game has been hugely successful), and imagine what it would be like without dice rolling. Let’s say that armies simply removed one piece each until one army was gone, meaning the bigger army would win every single combat. Would this game still be strategic? I would argue: yes. Would this game still be fun? I would argue: no. Without dice-rolling, and with every combat pre-determined, this game would be drained of its exciting unpredictability. I believe it would not have been nearly as successful as it has been, selling millions of copies and spawning multiple spin-off editions.

There are many “Eurogames” devoid of randomness, and that’s fine. There is a place for games like this. But just because a game contains random elements does not make it bad. In fact, those random elements might be what’s giving those games the emotional appeal that hooks players and keeps them coming back for more.

1. Randomness makes each game different

When everything in a game has a predetermined outcome, there is often a clear best strategy to follow. It might not be obvious right away, but skilled players will eventually work out what offers the best chances of victory. Excelling in a game like this often becomes a process of learning as much as possible about the most effective strategies. There can still be a lot of depth to the process, especially in responding to the other players and what they’re doing, but often there is a “correct” move and an “incorrect” move.

Again, Chess is a great example of this principle. The best players have memorized hundreds or even thousands of opening moves, strategies, and counter-strategies, and the high-level game is all about maximizing incremental advantages and seeing many moves ahead. This is great for some, but maybe not the most appealing process for every gamer.

By contrast, even something as simple as the process of randomizing the placement of starting tiles in Catan creates a wide variety of outcomes that makes each game feel different and fresh, crucial for replayability.

1. Randomness can simulate the real world

Let’s talk about reality. Not the kind you see on “reality” TV, but the kind we live everyday. A lot of smart people will tell you that the only things humans can really control, fully, are our own actions, or even our own thoughts. The world has a lot of randomness, but gives us the opportunity to mitigate the effects of randomness through our own thoughts and actions, and thereby determine the course of our life. I think that games should imitate this dynamic. In other words, the rules should include randomness where it would exist in the real world, and then give players control over the thematic aspects they’d have control over in real life.

For instance, if I’m designing a fishing game, what would be random and what would players control? Well, I think players should control where they send their boats and how they move, while catching fish should involve some element of randomness, or probability. (In fact, this is the approach I took for fishing in Cinque Terre). This feels realistic to me. Imagine the inverse – a fishing game in which fish were guaranteed to be caught at certain times and places, but boats moved randomly. That wouldn’t make as much sense, or intuitively feel as much like fishing.

When you’re deciding where to include random elements, consider your theme, and where randomness would occur in real life – and where a player would have control or choice.

Next time you’re playing a game, consider where and why the randomness occurs, and what it does for gameplay. I know that a lot of gamers consider randomness to be some sort of evil, but I’d posit that for many games, it’s at least a necessary evil that keeps things fresh and engaging – as long as it doesn’t feel too arbitrary. Finding that balance is what great game design is all about.

Until next time, may you randomly experience something that brings you joy.

Experiences With Gaming

Like many American kids in the 90s, I grew up playing games. Candyland and Chutes and Ladders in early childhood led to Monopoly, Risk, Oregon Trail at school. Games were so ubiquitous in American culture during my childhood that I don’t believe any of us thought of ourselves as “gamers” in the way that’s become an “identity” in modern culture. We just played games.

We were one of the original video game generations - I was born in ‘83, so I missed the Atari but I remember playing Duck Hunt and Mario on the Nintendo with kids in my neighborhood when I was 5 or 6, and Super Nintendo was a Very Big Deal. My first console was a Sega Genesis a few years later, and I loved playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, TMNT, Streets of Rage and many others.

Gaming experiences back then were often social and shared between two or more people. I was an only child, so for me social gaming happened at friends’ houses or with my dad. I also gravitated towards games that were still enjoyable with only one player. When I was in grade school I remember playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat at sleepovers. It makes sense in retrospect, since the quick game length, entertainment value for spectators, and winner-stays format were perfect for bigger groups. Goldeneye and sports games like FIFA, Winning Eleven, NBA2k, and Madden would also fill that multiplayer/social role as the years went by. Some of that social element has been lost, or at least changed, in modern culture where multiplayer video games are played over a network connection rather than by two people in the same room.

As I grew older and we got our first personal computers, games were ever-present there as well. At first we had Dos games, composed of letters and characters. These included Space Invaders (my favorite), and an ancient text based RPG. My dad and I would map out the levels on printer paper to navigate around. Years later, my dad and I played Myst together, which felt very much like a spiritual successor to those early text-based RPG’s. When I was older, I played tons of SimCity and Civilization, and always loved turn-based and sandbox games more than realtime games like Warcraft.

When I was at summer camp in 1993, they had this game called Magic: the Gathering. Like many other American kids I’d collected baseball cards, and I immediately loved Magic. Looking back, part of what made the game so great was how perfectly the fantasy flavor matched the mechanical elements of the game. This made it super intuitive and resonant, and was something we could wrap our imaginations around. I also played role-playing games back then - mainly Shadowrun at Star Wars - and Magic definitely had a roleplaying element for us, in terms of being an outlet for our imaginations.

Mark Rosewater, for years the lead designer of Magic, has said that Magic is a game that teaches players game design. When you construct a deck, you have to make choices that determine the type of game you’d like to have. What’s more, players’ decks become an expression of their identity.

I’ve always had an urge to create, and for a while that mainly meant music and writing. More recently, I’ve begun to apply that creative impulse to game design, drawing upon my varied experiences playing games. In future posts, I’ll talk about some of the games I’ve been working on and share some of my thoughts about game design. Until next time, may you find the games that enrich your life and bring you joy!

Creating Games

Hey! You’re here. Yay; that’s just what we wanted. We wanted to bring better games to the table, and more games and we want to do this for you. We’ve been working together for a few years after over a decade of playing games together.

Our favorites? Glad you asked. We love Magic the Gathering, Parks, Catan, Takenoko, Risk, Carcassone, Sushi Go, Mottainai, Ecologies, Draftosaurus, Sleeping Queens, Seven Wonders Duel, Tiny Towns, and more. Sometimes we’ll talk here about games we like (and why!) while we describe our own design process.

How does our design process work? Well, generally Paul will come up with an idea and I’ll try my very best to break his rules. Eventually we sort out what works best and feels fun, competitive, and we look for that feeling, “I want to play again,” right after finishing each game. We create games that feel easy to learn, but deeply strategic with more familiarity. When we have found these feelings arising from game play, we start pushing our prototypes out to friends and our kids’ friends’ families to play test.

How did this all begin? We just LOVE playing games. Paul taught a game design class at a local school and that same year, entered the Great Designer Search. We both always have, from RPG to MTG and from Monopoly to Mottainai, we’re really inspired by and interested in how games work, how other people make them, and how we can win!

Preparing for Prototyping

Image Credit: Thomas Buchholz @tee833

When our game is ready, we’re pretty stoked to be printing a test version. Of course, we’ve been test-playing the game (codename=Lands), but it’s time to see how our graphic design choices will pan out on REAL paper with REAL ink. Whoo hoo!

I’m using gamecrafter because it seems to be really easy to use and here are some helpful links I thought I’d want to be able to quickly refer to later for use with our particular project.

Color Profiles TLDR: I’ll need to design in CYMK and switch to RGB right before printing. Ok, easy enough.

I’d really want to plan ahead for printed meeples, if “Lands” required them, so here’s a link for that: printed meeples.

DPI (dots per inch): We’ll be printing our prototypes at 300 dpi through Gamecrafter, so 1/4" equals 75 pixels. This will be especially important for noting bleed and “safe” zones.

Finally, card size (if applicable), is pretty important to get right the first time! Can you imagine receiving bridge-sized cards if you wanted classic poker cards? Yikes. These are the ones I like.

Ok, so that’s a good start. I’m feeling just about ready to plug in my designs along with the gamecrafter template and see how it all fits.

Good Idea Games

“It all begins with an idea.” That sentence was the default text for this section of our blog and yet it is still so poignant. Indeed, this all began with an idea.

Hey, what if we could make a game of our own?

What if we start a game company?

What if we publish our games and our friends’ games, too?

What if we all feel really great about getting our ideas out there?

This is a good idea. And there it was; Good Idea Games was born.