…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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking about both of these things lately.

Let’s start with the meteor strikes.  A current popular theory, called the “Giant Impact Hypothesis,” or more colorfully, “The Big Whack,” posits a massive strike just as Earth was formed.  The object, a planetoid the size of Mars that scientists call “Theia,” hit Earth at an oblique angle.  The nifty part is that our planet’s orbit actually caught debris from the collision, which coalesced into the celestial body we now call the Moon.

Fast forward about four billion years.  We’re now at the end of the Cretaceous period, where a meteor 6 miles wide smashed into the Yucatán peninsula.

Now, understand, even a relatively small object hitting the earth can cause some pretty serious damage.  From Wikipedia…

The impactor’s estimated size was about 10 km (6 mi) in diameter and is estimated to have released 4×10^23 joules of energy, equivalent to 100,000,000 megatons of TNT on impact. By contrast, the most powerful man-made explosive device ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of only 50 megatons, making the Chicxulub impact 2 million times more powerful. Even the largest known explosive volcanic eruption, which released approximately 1×10^21 joules and created the La Garita Caldera, was substantially less powerful than the Chicxulub impact…

The impact would have caused some of the largest megatsunamis in Earth’s history, reaching thousands of feet high. A cloud of super-heated dust, ash and steam would have spread from the crater, as the impactor burrowed underground in less than a second. Excavated material along with pieces of the impactor, ejected out of the atmosphere by the blast, would have been heated to incandescence upon re-entry, broiling the Earth’s surface and possibly igniting global wildfires; meanwhile, enormous shock waves spawned global earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The emission of dust and particles could have covered the entire surface of the Earth for several years, possibly a decade, creating a harsh environment for living things to survive in. The shock production of carbon dioxide caused by the destruction of carbonate rocks would have led to a sudden greenhouse effect. Over a longer period of time, sunlight would have been blocked from reaching the surface of the earth by the dust particles in the atmosphere, cooling the surface dramatically.

This was, of course, the last hurrah of the hardy dinosaurs, who had 160 million years to call the Earth home (by comparison, Homo sapiens has been around a mere 200,000 years). The dinos who weren’t incinerated in the blast died out from the new, harsh environment they found themselves in.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that we confirmed the terrible power of a possible meteor strike.  In 1993, astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker, and David Levy discovered a comet that orbited Jupiter.  This is odd, because most comets tend to orbit the Sun.

Even stranger was the fact that the comet didn’t have a single nucleus, but had split up into many small fragments.  It had evidently passed too cluse to Jupiter, and the gas giant’s gravitational field had broken it apart.

Scientists crunched numbers, and found that sometime in July 1994, all the little bits of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were going to smash into Jupiter.

Well, what was going to happen?  Jupiter’s a massive planet.  Some astronomers wondered what kind of threat a tiny, rinky-dink comet posed.

The answer: A lot.  The first impact blast was about the size of planet Earth.  The largest fragment collided with a force equal to 600 times of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

Bill Bryson, in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, marvels in amazement that our race never had the misfortune of being wiped out by a meteor strike.  He had a propensity for hysterics, but I admit there’s a part of me that is astonished every moment we’re not blown up by some cosmic rock.  It’s a wonder we ever survived this far.

I feel the same way about dating.

There are rules to the way single men and women interact (I won’t go into man-man and woman-woman courtship here, not out of any disapproval, but simply because it falls outside the realm of what passes for my expertise).

Now, these rules are generalities, and I’m sure there will be plenty of exceptions.

Also, I disagree with these rules, and I’ve even come to detest them.  Yet, they exist, and I think we all have to acknowledge them.

Rule #1: The man is expected to pursue the woman.

If a man in interested in a woman, society expects him to initiate contact.  If a woman thinks a man is attractive, it’s unusual for her to outrightly ask him out.  She has to drop hints.  If he doesn’t pick these hints up, she won’t amplify the hints, or ask outright.  Instead, she will assume he’s not interested.

I’ve heard of women asking men out, but it’s awfully rare.  It’s rare enough that as a single guy, I cannot realistically expect a woman to ask me out.  Though if I found her attractive, I certainly wouldn’t object.

Rule #2: The more interested Person A is in Person B, the less likely Person B will be interested in Person A.

The stereotype is that two people “fall madly in love,” but this is as rare as, well, a meteor strike.  Instead, if one party blows it and admits his or her limerance too soon, the other will smell the ugly stench of desparation.  It’s apparently unattractive.

Now look at these two rules.  Look at how they interact.  Note the secret here.  The man has to pursue the woman… but not too hard. It’s walking on a tightrope, and it’s the reason dating is as fun to most people as drinking a nice warm jug of bleach.

So instead of the stereotype of two lovers running towards each other with open arms across a vast open cornfield, we have this strange, crab-like dance.  He steps forward.  She steps sideways.  He steps sideways.  She steps back. He steps forward. She steps forward. He steps back.

Throughout this dance, you are not allowed to say your true feelings, especially if it would risk a Rule #2 violation.  You wrap everything in code words.  The night after a date, you go over everything your partner said to you, the way a spy agency would go over an intercepted communique. Every look, every smile, every frown becomes a clue.  Does she really like me?  Is he really into me?

Naturally, these clues will contradict each other.  No one is sure of anything.  There’s awkward laughter and crossed legs.  She will wonder why he is so nervous.  He will wonder why she is so theatrical.

At the end of each date, he will ask her if she had a good time.  If she did, she’ll say, “Yes, we have to do this again!” If she didn’t, she’ll say, “Yes, we have to do this again!”  Men who can’t tell the difference between these two statements are in for a rough time.

How across Heaven and Earth do people actually create geniune, long-lasting romantic relationships?  Looking at the way things work now, I’m just as amazed that two people ever lower their defenses as I am that humanity hasn’t been incinerated by a giant rock from outer space.

I suppose the answer is the same in both scenarios: volume. There’s a reason it’s called space.  There’s so much damn room for meteors to fly around, the chances of a significantly-sized rock hitting our planet are quite small (there’s also the matter of Jupiter acting as a “cosmic vacuum cleaner” and sucking up space debris that would otherwise have our name on it, but that has no place in this analogy, so I’m ignoring it).

In much the same way, a person meets so many people in his or her lifetime, at some point, one will meet another who is simpatico.  Civilization is big enough. My mom says, “Every pot has a lid.”  I’m not that romantic, but I do believe in numbers.  Every once in awhile, stumble out of the house and meet someone interesting.  In a very small subset of these cases, that someone interesting is attractive to you.  In a laughably smaller subset of that subset, that someone is actually available.  And in a ridiculously miniscule subset of that subset, that other person might actually like you.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if splitting like amoeba wouldn’t have been easier.  To hell with genetic variation, at least we don’t need constant mindfucks to find our better halves.

Well, yeah, it’s inevitable that any part-time blogger falls off the wagon and stops updating.  In my defense, things got really hairy in my life for awhile.  They’re starting to come together.  In no particular order…

July is always a crazy month for me, because I have to get my games ready for Dexcon and Protospiel.  Dexcon was fantastic, but also busy and stressful.  Since I’ve also been busy and stressed at work, I’ve been a little burned out.  I’m hoping that I’m recovering from that now.

Protospiel was also great.  Feedback on Prolix was overwhelmingly good, with a couple of tiny nitpicks.  We also broke a four-player game of Pax Robotica, which is actually very good!  I’m at the stage of testing where I still want to see things not work.

If you’re curious, players bid low and spent lots of money on bots, so that there were only two Level 6 bots available in Round 5.  It was rather anticlimactic.  Also, there wasn’t nearly enough carnage in the first three rounds.

I’ll be adding more bots in the 4-player game to address the first problem.  For the second problem, I’m thinking of adding a modifier to the number of cubes you pull out of the bag every round, based on the number of cubes in the bag.  The more cubes in the bag, the more come out.

I’m hoping to make an exciting public announcement about Prolix, but I can’t yet.  For those of you who know, please don’t tell.   For those who don’t, this is called a “teaser.”  Isn’t it infuriating?

Finally, on a personal note… I am attempting to start dating again.  Emphasis on “attempting.”  There are a lot of things I’m good at, but dating isn’t one of them.  However, I’m a different person that I was ten years ago, and I think that’s a big plus.  You’ll see some random posts and observations about this sooner or later.  Aren’t you lucky!

I got to playtest Prolix and Pax Robotica on Saturday. It’s rare that both my games hit the table in the same day, so I was quite flattered.

Prolix tweaks
For Prolix, I was specifically testing the 5-player variant. As I discussed in my last post, I wanted to try a variant where each player crosses out one fewer Regular Scoring word than the number of times he interrupted. So if a player interrupted three times, he’d cross only two words out instead of three.

The upshot of this is that players must interrupt at least once, plus once for each zero they were forced to take, in order to maximize their score. It seems that players were frustrated by the lack of interrupt opportunities in a 5-player game, so I hoped that this would open things up.

And it did! In the last 5-player game I saw, the guy who eventually won didn’t really have a practical interrupt opportunity after Round 3. In this game, we were all paying rapt attention to the board until the last round. It felt much better.

The final scores of the game were pretty thrilling: 103, 102, 102, 101, and 96.  It was quite close!

The only problem was that one of the players was new to the game, and he didn’t really grok the scoring system. I’m probably going to recommend that new players start with the 3-4 player game before going to 5 players.

So I’ll be sending a blind test copy of the game this week with this 5-player variant, plus the 2-player variant I talked about last week.

The next change I’m going to make is to change the timer length to 45 seconds. Right now, players use a 1 minute timer for everything except for the 2-player game, which uses a 30-second timer. I’d rather include only one timer with the game, and one minute is a little too long anyway. 45 seconds seems like a nice compromise.

The only problem? I don’t seem to be able to buy 45-second sand timers in any quantity less than 100. Hmm. I’m not planning to make that many blind test copies.

Pax Robotica tweaks
Pax Robotica got some much more significant tweaks. I was concerned about the relative value of the bots, so I sat down and did some math. It turns out that it’s better to buy two Level 3 bots than one Level 5 bot. I didn’t like that; I wanted the big bot to be a real hammer. Two Level 4 bots should be about equal to a Level 5 bot, and that’s not even close. It seemed that some re-juggling was in order.

I scribbled like crazy in my notebook, and came up with some better numbers. There are now only three levels of bots: 1, 3, and 6.

It’s neat, because the numbers represent three things:

• The number of Tech symbols you need to build a bot of that level.
• The amount of VP you get when you build the bot.
• The battle value of the bot.

Now, the highest bot is about even with two of the lower bot.  If you do the math, selling two Level 3 bots gets a tad more VP than one Level 6 bot because they’ll be getting twice the survival points.  But the Level 6 bot is cheaper to build, more likely to survive, and more likely to swing the endgame VP bonus to its side.  So it’s no longer a slam-dunk decision.

In our game, we never got to build Level 6 bots, because I found I need to make the Tech deck more dynamic.  I’ll probably split it into A and B cards like the Government deck, and put 3x Techs among the B cards.  That’ll make tech growth much more explosive.

Bot quantities were another thing I found I needed to tweak (which didn’t surprise me, considering that the best I can do before a playtest is guess).  For the next game, I’m going in with 6x Level 1 bots of each type, 5x Level 3 bots, and 2x Level 6 bots.

I’m very excited about this change, because it streamlines a lot of rough edges.

• The bot values now stand for three different things, which is much neater and easier to understand.
• It’s no longer necessary to remove double Techs revealed in the first round.  That always felt kind of artificial to me.
• The Level 1 bots get less attractive by Round 3, because they’re so likely to get blown up.  So I don’t think I need to have a minimum bot value in the later squares of each battlefield.  Another fiddly rule gone!

The game showed a lot of rough edges of the new system, but a lot of potential too.  It ended on a tiebreaker, although if the Level 6 bots had come out as they should have, I think they would have been different.  I also felt that the auction was a bit more powerful than before, which was great; I’d seen players disregard the auction entirely and win on bot placement, which isn’t how I want the game to go.

Some interesting thoughts came up regarding the tiebreaker system, but I’ll save them for another post.

I have some big news about Prolix! You see, a couple of months ago REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED so obviously, I’m very excited.

So in other news, I’m trying to tighten up the various player counts. Here’s where we stand…

The “official game” is for 3-4 players. That seems to be tight as a drum.

The solo variant, Solix, is very good.

That leaves the 2-player game and the 5-player game.

I found that the 2-player game was missing pop. If it was just me and someone else, I would turn down a 2-player game of Prolix. That’s a bad sign right there.

The problem is that an interrupt in a 2-player game isn’t really as interesting as in the other games. 2-player games are pure zero-sum games. My gain is your loss. If you’re going to interrupt the other player, why not make it a straight puzzle game?

By “puzzle game,” I mean a straight, turnless game, where both players are trying to work out their turns simultaneously. I tried a puzzle variant at Protospiel 2007, and the result really wasn’t much fun. The problem with a puzzle game is that it tends to get unbalanced very quickly. Usually, a group will have one really good player and one very crummy player. Granted, that’s the case with most games. But in a puzzle game, and especially in puzzle Prolix, that good player ran away with the game, and the crummy player never got a chance.

Clearly, puzzle Prolix wasn’t the answer for a multiplayer game. I insisted on keeping it turn-based, and I’m very happy with the decision.

But I had a thought last week. What if I made 2-player Prolix a puzzle game, and put in a strong handicap?

So I hammered out Prolix Duel, a 2-player Prolix variant. Here’s the gist of it. There are up to 9 rounds, and each player is trying to get a “mark” each round. 5 marks wins the game.

You get a mark by getting the best word each round. To start the round, you lay out the board as normal, and then both players start thinking of a word.

If a player comes up with a word, he flips the 45-second hourglass in front of him, and secretly writes his word down. The other player now has 45 seconds to come up with his own word.

When the timer runs out, both players score their words. The higher-scoring word gets the mark. In case of a tie, the player who flipped the hourglass wins.

Here’s where the handicap comes in. The player with the most marks has a handicap every round. So if I lead you by a score of 2 marks to 1, my word this round will be worth 1 point less. If I manage to get a mark this round too, my word next round will be worth 2 points less.

The handicaps are what turn this from “meh” into a something with pop. I’ve played it twice now, and both plays have been really interesting. Today’s game was my friend’s first game, and she took me to the wire. I got the first 3 marks, but she rattled off 4 straight marks. I managed to sneak the last 2 marks in to win, the last one by 1 point! It felt much more like a game than the 2-player game has ever felt. So it’s probably good enough to hand over to the blind testers, at this point.

Now, the 5-player game. This one is a tougher nut to crack. I playtested this with 5 last weekend, and it didn’t go so well. One player fired off three straight 20+ point words, and interrupted twice by the third round. His game was effectively over, but he kept seeing great words that weren’t worth interrupting with. He was frustrated, and I can’t blame him.

Granted, this is possible in a 4-player game, but much rarer. It’s more likely in the 5-player game, where someone has to wait four turns in between his own words. That’s four interrupt opportunities. It’s a lot.

This player happened to be a very experienced game player; he developed for SPI in the seventies. He gave me some thoughtful feedback, but the changes he proposed would radically alter the game, and I’m not convinced they would completely eradicate the problem without introducing a different set of problems. Stupid elegant ruleset!

My current choices are…

* In the 5-player game, each player crosses off one fewer word in his Regular Scoring column than he Interrupted with. This has a nasty implication: Players should interrupt at least once to maximize their score, plus once for each zero they were forced to take.

This will greatly increase the number of interrupts. But that’s what we want, right? I may have to note in the rulebook that the 5-player game is the most brutal version of Prolix.

What I like about this ruleset is that it’s really only one minor change from regular Prolix. If this works, I don’t want to change anything else.

* But if it doesn’t work, I may have to introduce radical changes into the 5-player game. One of the playtester’s suggestions was that if a player is interrupted once, he flips the timer for his second turn. No one can interrupt him, but he must take a -3 for his word.

I actually had something similar to this rule early on, but I wasn’t crazy about it. I want players to be continually engaged every turn. Also, it’s a big change from the base game. It’s different, but not necessarily better. So I may try it, but I’m afraid I’m skeptical.

* Perform a 5-player-ectomy. In other words, cap the game at 4 players. This would be my last resort, but I’d rather limit the game’s player count than endorse a potentially lousy game experience.

I’ll probably get to try the 5-player rules in a couple of weeks at Recess. I’ll also be sending a blind test copy of the game to Atlanta in a couple of weeks. I’m hoping to have this thing zipped up soon.

I’ve never been much into religion, partially because I don’t think the universe can be sliced up into two neat groups of Good and Evil. The idea of taking something as complex and real as a person’s life, intertwined as they all are with loves, hates, mistakes, and regrets, and somehow judging that he or she belongs in Heaven or Hell is something that sets off my bullshit detector.

Nevertheless, I do like seeing interesting dichotomies, especially ones that are more interesting and that ring more true than the old, banal Good versus Evil. One that’s been on my mind is the difference between “Yes and…” and “Um, no…”

Let’s start with “Um, no…” because it’s what a lot of people are familiar with. You see it a lot on internet forums. One person will say something, and another person replies, “Um, no…” and refutes his point. Sometimes it’s good feedback. But very often, it’s anything from arrogant, reactionary burbling to pedantic grammar corrections.

You may not be as familiar with “Yes and…” It’s one of the first rules of improv comedy. If your improv partner comes up with an idea, you never shoot it down mid-performance. You take it and you build on it. Improv is all about construction, building, and progress. Destruction, contradiction, and regression kill improv.

So if we’re doing an improv scene, and you turn into a dinosaur, “Yes and…” suggests that I not say “That’s stupid,” and immediately turn you back, let alone breaking character to ask to start again. I can turn into a dinosaur myself, or a horseshoe crab, or a mammoth, or something that builds on your scene.

From here, it’s easy to pull these actions into a bigger paradigm. “Yes and…” and “Um, no…” are metaphors for common worldviews. When you read something new, or come across something you haven’t seen before, do you reject it? Do you pull it into your life?

Now, it’s easy to infer that we as a people (and especially those of us who post persnickety comments on forums and blogs) could use a lot less “Um, no…” and a lot more “Yes, and…” For the most part, that’s true. But like any other dichotomy, it’s all about balance. “Um, no…” is a vital skill in life.

Sometimes we have to call bullshit. Your friend who insists on staying together with her abusive lover needs to say, “Um, no…” Your relative who’s starting an asinine and clearly doomed business venture with a pushy, shady partner needs to say, “Um, no…” Anyone who’s lived a little can tell you that “Yes” can be an incredibly destructive word.

My recent life changes have got me thinking a lot about this dichotomy, and where I need to be. There are some people to whom I’ve said “Yes and…” too many times, and others to whom I’ve said “Um, no…” too many times.

I’m trying to fix this. I’m going out weeknights now, seeing friends and catching up. I’m also trying to be more forthright, telling people my honest opinions, even if it’s awkward and difficult.

“Yes and…” versus “Um, no…” Where do you fit in?