I swear that these will be my last changes to Prolix

18Jan10

Yes, I made two more Prolix tweaks. I swear that these will be my last!

The first is straightforward. I’m changing the order of the columns on the board to go 4-4-3-2 instead of 4-3-4-2.

The main reason behind the change is in the 1- and 2-player games. In those games, letters move two columns every round instead of one. With a 4-3-4-2 board, the letters in the first column will automatically be 4 points in the third column. The 4-4-3-2 layout keeps things interesting. As a bonus, players in the 3-5 player game find it more intuitive. Win-win all around!

The second change was a tougher decision. It applies to the four-player game only. Under the old rules, at the end of a 4p game, each player crossed out one regular word for each interrupt he or she made. Now, each player crosses out one fewer word than the number of interrupts he or she made. So if a player interrupted 3 times, she will cross out two words.

Alert readers will recognize this as the 5-player variant. I decided to copy it to the 4-player game because I noticed too many 4p games dragging.

Players want to interrupt. Why deprive them of the chance?

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Prolix   |  4 Comments

Pax Robotica Retheme vs. The Cringe Rule

12Jan10

Hello again.

After BGG.CON, I thought Pax Robotica wasn’t playing right.  It had some minor issues, but its biggest problem was that it wasn’t playing like a robot fighting game.  It really played more like a typical Euro cube-grinder.

Publishers and designers don’t like Euro games with American themes, so I decided that I’d American-ize Pax.  But I liked the game as it was.  So I figured I’d split off the current version as a generic Euro city-building game.

I just had my first playtest of the game this weekend.  And it broke the Cringe Rule.

What’s the Cringe Rule, you ask?  Simple.  If I cringe while teaching the rules, even a little, something’s wrong.  All game designers know the cringe.  You’re up at a point of the game rules you’re not 100% confident about, and you figure that if you speak a little faster, or maybe mumble that bit, the players will just nod and you can move on.

More likely than not, they’ll ask that you repeat the cringeworthy part, and then you’re stuck in a positive cringe loop.  Nothing worse than that!

So I cringed a whole bunch during the game, and I decided midway through the first round to go back to some kind of war-profiteer theme.

Now I’m not sure what to do.  Do I continue with the American-ization of the game (which seems to have stalled, out of typical lack of time)?  Do I go with some silly fantasy war theme for the game currently known as Pax?  It is possible.

We shall see.  For now, I’m happy going back to fighting robots.  It’s a better theme.  People like it.  And I promise you, folks: I will never again think of designing a game about city-building, or constructing a castle or cathedral, or trading silk in the 16th Century Mediterranean Sea.  I promise.

Filed under: Board Games, Designing, Pax Robotica   |  10 Comments

A new focus

04Jan10

It’s been a few months since I’ve updated this blog.  My apologies!  It’s not that there hasn’t been a lot going on.  In fact, the reason I’ve been so silent here is because there’s been too much to do.

Well, now that I’m all moved and settled-in, I’ll be updating more.  One thing that’ll help is that I’m splitting personal stuff away from this blog.  My personal life is in a bit of an awkward stage right now, I will focus this blog on my gaming and game design thoughts.

For those of you who want to know more details about my non-gaming life (and for those of you who enjoy slowing down when passing car wrecks), you can follow my new Tumblr blog.

I have a lot to write about in terms of my old and new games, so keep watching this space!

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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   |  2 Comments

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