The results of my previous Pax tweaking…

25Oct09

…are more tweaking.

I sat down and played Pax with Heather and Gerald.  Both had played Wag the Wolf several times.  Heather had seen a previous version of Pax, so she was pretty familiar with it.

We played two games, both aborted mid-game; the first in Round 2, the second at the end of Round 3.  This isn’t a sign of failure or a bad game. It’s quite common to stop a playtest early, if it looks like the players are getting driven into the ground, and the designer has gotten enough feedback.

Gerald and Heather made a whole lot of suggestions.  It’s funny that Heather doesn’t enjoy playtesting, and yet she gave me no less than three incredible suggestions.  I’ll start with the no-brainers, and work towards the more contentious ones.

* There is clearly a problem with the early auctions.  The player who folds will always get more bots on the board, and will always make more money, even without scoring bots during sales.

The solution for now is to have all the “A” government cards give out $5, as well as VP.  That means bidding in the first two rounds will be higher, which is exactly the effect I want.

* The Level 3 Bots weren’t tuned quite right.  I had them at a $10/$12 Build/Sell price, but that made them way too powerful.  I’ve moved them to $10/$10, which is more lucrative than in the past, but not such a threat to snowball.  (The day after I wrote the last post, I set Level 6 Bots to $15/$15, which works much better.)

* Heather suggested that income from Demand Chips be immediately available. How awesome! This makes them even more valuable, so it’s more of a decision to not build a bot in an area before the Demand Chip comes out.  It also helps get the poor players put more Bots out, which is always a good thing.

* Heather is always good with component feedback, and this one is a head-slapper. She suggested getting rid of the plastic stands for the Bots, and replacing them with flat tiles. Players can mark Bot ownership by placing a token or a cube on top of the tile. Simple, cheaper, and no problems with Bots blocking players’ views!

* Heather observed that as the poorest player, the handicap mechanism wasn’t doing enough.  I want to try detaching turn order from the auction. In other words, at the end of a round, turn order is determined by income, and stays that way until the end of the following round. That should give the handicap more teeth.

* Gerald felt that with random Tech cards and a fixed board, the game isn’t as replayable as it should be. He suggested flipping it: randomizing the board and keeping the Tech cards static. I was skeptical at first, but the nice thing about this is that it keeps weird Tech distributions from locking the game up. I’ll probably try it.

* There was really only one suggestion that I’m not really sold on. Gerald isn’t so sure the Wag-style auction fits into Pax Robotica. He thinks it can be replaced by something more streamlined. I promised him I’ll think about it, but for now, it seems that replace the auction would create a completely different game.

I think Pax has the potential to be a great game with the Wag auction, and I’m not convinced that taking the auction out will result on a better game. It will be a different game, but I think the move is more likely to be lateral than vertical. I’ll keep the antennae out for a brainwave, but it’s unlikely.

Now, with all this criticism, it’s easy to adopt a defeatist attitude. But I can see how Pax will become a significantly better game once I implement all the changes.

There’s only one negative. Ubercon is in two weeks, and I am scheduled to run Pax. There is no way the game can run in its current condition. I need to sprint to get it ready.

I’m asking around, seeing if people can give me a hand with the game’s playtesting. I’m scrambling to see if I can enlist my friends for this. I’m pretty confident that I can get at least two playtests in by Ubercon. Hopefully that should be enough!

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Pax Robotica   |  Leave a Comment

More Pax Robotica tweaking, plus a Prolix renaming update

11Oct09

Let’s get the Prolix renaming update out of the way first.  The new name will be: Prolix.

That’s right.  None of the candidates really grabbed me, and I figure that if I put the game out on the iPhone, I can always call it “Prolix, from [REDACTED GAME COMPANY].”  Or “Gil Hova’s Prolix.”  Or “Reiner Knizia’s Prolix.”  (Hell, he’s got so many games, would he really notice another one?)

So, that helps with logistics.  Hopefully I can get some blind test copies out this week.  Of course, the challenge is finding blind testers who will actually play the game, which is easier said than done! That will be this week’s task.

Onto Pax Robotica.  I’ve had three playtests in the past two months, and there have been some small but significant changes.

Making the auction more important

I’ve noticed that most winning players follow the same pattern: Ignore early auctions and get lots of Bots out on the board.

Specifically, I found that a player who folds early has a financial advantage over players who participate in the Round 1 auction.  If he gets lots of Bots on the board, he’ll get a head start on revenue that he can ride the rest of the game.

I want a successful Pax Robotica player to have to juggle both auctions and Bots.  You won’t be able to win every auction, so you have to time your charge properly.

I also want the auctions to be absolutely bloodthirsty.  They should be the most competitive part of the game, with bids going no lower than $11.  But lately, I’ve seen winning bids of $7 and even $5.  This will not do!

Most Government Cards were about 3-5 VPs.  I realized that with a $10:1 VP exchange, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bid much higher than $11 for a card.  So I raised the High Bid bonus from 3 to 5 VP, and I’ve roughly doubled the values of the Government Cards.  They’re now worth between 5 and 10 VP.

I tried this last turn, and it worked out pretty well.  But players still weren’t investing in the auction like they should.

So I have a twofold change lined up for the next playtest, and a significant one at that.  First, Bots will no longer score when they’re sold.  They’ll only score their VP at the end of the game (plus war scoring for surviving Bots).  This means that most Level 1 bots won’t score.  It also has the ancillary benefit of no longer requiring the scorekeeping player to constantly remember to score Bots, which was an enormous amount of fiddly work!

Second, I’m going to change the profit level of Bots.  Right now, a Level 3 Bot’s base revenue is $2 less than its cost, and a Level 6 Bot’s base revenue is $5 less than its cost.  Players can potentially turn a profit on these Bots, but only with a good combination of Government Cards and Demand Chips.

My original thinking was that the high-level bots should provide a form of negative feedback on the economy.  If the best bots offered the best profit, players who built them early would gain an insurmountable lead.

It’s turned out to be a sour note in the game.  First off, it doesn’t actually work.  The players who build Level 6 Bots early still cruise to victory.  Second, it’s a false choice.  There’s never an agonizing decision whether to build a lower- or higher-level Bot, which was my original intent.  Third, players found low revenues for their best Bots athematic.

So I’m going to make Level 3 Bots more profitable than Level 1 Bots, and Level 6 Bots more profitable than Level 3 Bots.  The idea here is to make the Level 1 Bots pure revenue generators.  Most of them won’t survive, so you won’t score a lot of points from them directly, no matter how many you build.

High-level Bots will score you points, but the main VP source of the game will now be the auctions.  That’s good, because the auctions also act as a money sink.  The richest players will spend their money, and hopefully give a chance for the poor players to catch up.

As always, positive feedback mechanisms have been a sore spot of the game (as with most economic games), so I’ll have to keep an eye on these changes to make sure things don’t snowball out of hand.

Cube pulls

I used to have a number of cubes coming out of the Battle Bag equal to the current round number. 1 in Round 1, 2 in Round 2, and so on, up to 5 in Round 5.

Players didn’t find this bloody enough, as significant bot loss tended to only happen on the final round.  So I changed it to 1-3-3-3-6, then 1-3-3-6-6. I’m going to go a step further next game, to 1-3-6-6-6.  I think players enjoy the additional bot turnover and the extra scoring opportunities.  It also makes a card like “Scrapyard” more appealing.

I’m also happy with the 1/3/6 scheme.  It mirrors the Bot Level numbers, so it fits with the rest of the game’s numerology.

Starting cash and folding for free

I originally balanced players’ starting cash based on their (randomized) starting position.  Each player started with $2 more than the previous player.

Remember the first-player-folding issue I mentioned before, where an early folder would buy more Bots and build a financial buffer he could use the rest of the game?  Imagine if that player is also the one who started with $6 more than everyone else.  Yeah.

So, players now start with the same amount of cash.  To balance that out, I’ve changed folding for free a little.

Previously, the players who folded for free only had the advantage of not spending any money at the auction.  But this didn’t help poor players all that much.  I’ve now changed the Bid Track so that the first player to fold for free gets $5.  In a 4-player game, the second player to fold for free gets $3 (although I haven’t seen that used all too much yet, so it may not stay).

This also helps even out the starting imbalance of the first auction, where a player who starts late in turn order can choose to have a financial advantage.  But with the early auction representing a much higher amount of VP now, this hopefully won’t be a no-brainer decision anymore.

Income, turn order, and handicaps

Another common complaint was the fiddly nature of income.  When you built a Bot, you handed a bunch of bills to the bank… and then you just got those same bills right back to your income area.  It didn’t seem intuitive.

Also, there was an early rule where each player got $5 every round.  This was annoying to remember and do, and the $5 didn’t really help anyone but the poorest players.

So, out goes the $5 automatic income (replaced by the $5 First to Fold for Free rule).  Out goes the income area.  Instead, players track their income on the scoring track with a different pawn.  I had tried this before, but I wasn’t happy with how it worked.  Now, for some reason, it seems to work like gangbusters, and players feel that it’s much smoother.

Another benefit to keeping players’ income on the scoreboard is that it’s public to everyone.  That means that instead of inverting the turn order every round (fiddly), the order of drafting in the next round is now based on income, from least to most.

One adjustment I’ve made for this is that drafting Tech Cards only serpentines on the first round.  In every other round, players draft both their cards straight.  There are a few extra Tech Cards available, so the player going last isn’t totally hosed Tech-wise, but it does provide a decent negative feedback mechanism for the poorest players.

A subtle implication of keeping track of income on the scoreboard is that Demand Chips aren’t included when factoring turn order.  I may change this in the future, especially now that we’re no longer scoring Bots when they’re sold.  But it adds an interesting layer, at least for now.

Miscellany

There’s all sorts of extra tweaks I’ve made.

• Previously, if all cubes for a region were pulled out of the Battle Bag, that region was closed, and players couldn’t sell Bots to it anymore.  This has happened twice, and both times, it didn’t feel right.  I’ve eliminated the rule, and the result is a cleaner ruleset and a more fun game.
• New Government cards!  I won’t go into detail about all of them, but there are several new one-time-use cards that give you game effects if you flip them, but bonus VP if you don’t.
• Bot counts have changed, and continue to fluctuate.  I still want the number of Bots to be a limiting factor, but I don’t want it to be so limiting as to be frustrating.

Phew!  That’s a lot of changes.  My next playtest will likely be two Sundays from now.  I can’t wait to see how it plays.

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Pax Robotica, Prolix   |  Leave a Comment

Where’s the love for Labor Day?

07Sep09

We Americans are reverent about our holidays. We debate the role of religion in Christmas, we honor our brave, fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, and we gather for traditional dinners on Thangsiving. For all of our holidays, we usually have a pretty good idea of why we’re all gathered here today.

All but one.

How come no one talks about the meaning of Labor Day? One hundred years ago, we had to claw and scrape for things we take for granted now. The forty-hour work week. Weekends off. Lack of exposure to extreme heat, cold, or toxic chemicals.

In fact, the whole reason we Americans (okay, and Canadians too, even though you saddle the holiday’s name with an extra vowel) have today off to grumble about high taxes, American troops in the Middle East, and the impending creep of socialism in American goverment is because a century ago, a bunch of very brave people endured threats, beatings, and even assassination to force their employers, the richest 1% in the country, to give them benefits like a break or two every couple of hours, or the security that they can call in sick every once in awhile and not lose their jobs.

Now, the problem with all this, of course, is that labor unions today are just as noxious to deal with as employers. Having been on the ass end of a union deal myself, I know that many current unions out there deserve very little sympathy.

But does that change what happened 100 years ago? If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have today off. Or Christmas. Or Thanksgiving. Or our weekends.

And just as we don’t discuss the My Lai massacre or the firebombing of Dresden during Memorial Day, or the Catholic priest sex scandal during Easter, or the massacre of millions of Native Americans during Thanksgiving, why would the current behavior of labor unions obscure the meaning of Labor Day?

I’m not saying these other atrocities aren’t worth discussing. They most certainly are! But I find it strange that they all get a free pass, and Labor Day doesn’t.

So today, while you’re grilling your burgers or relaxing at the beach, take a moment. Look at everyone else. Observe that they’re not covered in soot or missing limbs from gruesome factory accidents. Take a moment and be thankful for the folks that were. Doesn’t matter if a union screwed you over that one time a few years ago. We’re going further back than that. Think of a time when what you’re doing right now – relaxing, de-stressing, spending time with family and friends – could’ve gotten you fired and un-hireable.

And just as you’re thankful for those Pilgrims or our fallen soldiers, let’s spend a moment to be grateful for those who surrendered their time, their bodies, and their lives so we could even have an opportunity to be grateful.

Filed under: Romance/Meteor Strikes   |  3 Comments

What the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium can tell us about solid game designs

30Aug09

You might have heard some hubbub about the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium.  One of its distinguishing features is a giant four-sided HDTV that hangs from the roof.  The thing is a beast; it stretches from one 20-yard line to the other.

The problem is, it’s a little low.  It’s low enough that during a preseason game, a punter hit it with a kick.  The NFL hastily redrafted its rules to specify what happens when the ball hits the screen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the NFL orders the Cowboys to raise it by next season, which will end with the Super Bowl in the new Cowboys’ stadium.

Jerry Jones is the owner of the Cowboys, and the giant screen is his baby.  He’s a showman at heart, and he loves the attention he’s getting with this brouhaha.  But he also fought to keep the screen at this level.  He knew that punters were capable of hitting the screen, but he reasoned that during the game, punters had no reason kick one high enough to hit it.  He felt that punters wouldn’t be aiming down the center of the field anyway, so it wouldn’t be hit during the normal course of the game.

Nevertheless, during the first preseason game, Tennessee Titans punter A. J. Trapasso hit the screen during the game with one of his punts.  Jones argued that Trapasso’s punt wasn’t competitive, because he was actually trying to hit the screen instead of getting the ball downfield.

There’s a parallel to game design here.  You may find that a player will make an unsportsmanlike move that breaks your game.  Where’s the problem?  Is it with your game, or is it with the player?

In Prolix, I allow players to flip a timer to force the active player to take his turn.  But a challenge nullifies the timer, and for a while, there wasn’t any limit on challenges.  One of my testers pointed out that a player could intentionally say a garbage word to nullify the timer, and keep his turn going indefinitely.  I felt at first that wasn’t in the spirit of the game, but my tester was right.  It was an exploitable hole.

Master game designer Sid Sackson had the same issue in one of his games, Focus.  This is a 2-player abstract strategy game that plays like a 3-D checkers.  Sackson discovered that if the second player mimicked every move that the first player made, he was guaranteed nothing worse than a draw.  Sackson’s first suggestion was “not to play with him.”  But he also proposed alternative setup rules that introduced asymmetry into the players’ starting position, which would negate the mimic strategy.

Make no mistake: we designers can be resentful of people who play our games in a way that we don’t expect.  Here we are, creating this beautiful system for you to enjoy, and now you go along and snap it in two, just to say that you could.

In their textbook Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman break game players into five categories: Standard Players, Dedicated Players, Unsportsmanlike Players, Cheats, and Spoilsports.

When we game designers think of people playing our games, we think of Standard Players (most folks playing a game) and Dedicated Players (folks who intensely study the rules and try to master the game within them).

The other three types present problems.  Unsportsmanlike Players, Cheats, and Spoilsports will all try to break the game somehow.

Let’s start with the Cheats and Spoilsports.  Cheats will intentionally break the rules of the game to try to win.  Spoilsports will play arbitrarily, but they have no interest in winning.

The thing about Cheats and Spoilsports is that they’re difficult to fight.  For a Cheat, the best thing a designer can do is set up his game so that its components prevent cheating.  If you have a game with a lot of hidden information, and the components make it easy to accidentally reveal that information (like flimsy cardboard screens that always fall over), then almost anyone can cheat, sometimes inadvertently.

The problem with preventing cheating is that even the best player screen won’t foil a devoted Cheat.  So designers work to prevent inadvertent or casual cheating, knowing that if a player really wants to cheat, he will find a way.

A Spoilsport is even worse.  This player’s one intent is to ruin the game.  He doesn’t care about the rules.  He’ll make the same nonsense move over and over again, or attack one player for no reason.  A Spoilsport lives outside a game’s rules, so there’s nothing a designer can do within the rules to combat him.  The best a player can do, to paraphrase Sackson, is to not play with him in the first place.

That leaves us with the Unsportsmanlike Players.  These guys aren’t like Cheats, in that they don’t actually break any rules.  Instead, they break the spirit of the rules.  To me, an Unsportsmanlike Player would say a garbage word to invoke challenge rules to nullify the Prolix timer.  Not against the rules, but not within the spirit of the rules.

It’s these players that we have to remember when we design games.  If the Unsportsmanlike Player can exploit a rule, it’s because the designer didn’t make the rule bulletproof.  There’s nothing in the original rules of Focus that says a player can’t mimic his opponent, but Sackson clearly felt that he was violating the game’s spirit by doing so.

And Jerry Jones’ video board?  Originally, the NFL’s rules said that if a ball hit a part of the stadium, the play would have to be re-done.  However, the time that ran off the clock wouldn’t be restored.

Time management is critical in football.  It’s entirely possible that under these rules, a punter for a winning team could continue to doink the ball off the scoreboard, over and over again, until the game was over.  Not fun, not within the spirit of the game, but perfectly legal.  A great example of Salen and Zimmerman’s Unsportsmanlike Player.

The rule the NFL hurriedly changed was this: if the ball hits a part of the stadium, the play is re-done, but time is put back on the clock.  It’s a complete do-over.

Now, there’s no strategic reason to keep hitting the board.  It’s possible that a player might do it, but it would either be an honest mistake, or a Spoilsport action.  Again, since a Spoilsport doesn’t feel bound to the game’s rules in the first place, there’s nothing you can do within the rulebook to prevent his actions.  In the context of football, the only thing the referee can do is to find some way to get the coach to pull him from the field.

The only question is now, will punters honestly keep hitting the video board?  If they do, and it keeps happening, then it becomes an annoyance to the Devoted Players that all NFL players by definition are, and to all the fans that follow them as well.  And that’s really the only question left in this whole saga.

In the meantime, we game designers are going to continue to be surprised at the degenerate ingenuity of our players, and hope that our playtesters have a demented enough imagination to prepare our games for all the Unsportsmanlike Players out there.

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Sports   |  5 Comments

Renaming Prolix, and Pax Robotica tweaks

21Aug09

I am renaming Prolix. I won’t get into why I’m renaming it, but I do have good reason to.

Just like with Pax Robotica, I asked friends on Twitter and Facebook to help me brainstorm.

For awhile, I wanted to base the title off the word “Lexicon.”  As I was getting into the shower yesterday morning, a name hit me out of nowhere: Consonance.  It has a nice ring to it, and it reflects the fact that the game is mostly consonants.

So, the leading candidates are:

• Consonance
• Lexicon
• Lexation
• Lexica

What are your thoughts?

Meanwhile, I’m still processing the four-player game of Pax Robotica we had at Protospiel.  The players enjoyed it, but the game stalled in the last round.  The battles also took too long to happen.

I might be able to test the game on Saturday, if my game group is willing to try it.  Here are the changes I’m making:

• Extra bots for the 4-player game.  Three more Level 1s, three more Level 3s, one more Level 6.
• One more Level 1 bot for the 3-player game.
• I’m tweaking the Tech deck.  Right now, there are A-level cards that come out in Rounds 1-2, and B-level cards that come out in Rounds 3-5.  I’ll tweak it so that the B-level cards come out in Rounds 3-4, and a new C-level card will come out in Round 5.   C-level cards will award points as well as Tech, so the Round 5 Tech draft won’t be useless to half the players.
• Changing the number of cubes to pull from the bag.  Right now it matches the round number: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 cubes from the bag depending on the round.  I’m changing this to 1, 3, 3, 3, 6.  This way, there’s more action in Round 2.  I also like keeping the numerology consistent with the rest of the game, so it’s easy for players to remember.  My one concern is that Round 4 may not be dramatic enough with this new scheme, but we’ll see when we playtest.

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Pax Robotica, Prolix   |  2 Comments