Author Archives: Martin

Global Game Jam Board Game Rundown

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After joining my fellow twin cities IGDA members at the global game jam a few weekends ago, I was all fired up about the board games that were made that weekend. In fact, I spent a good chunk of the following weekend going through all one hundred and two “non-digital” games in the Global Game Jam database from 2012. With the exception of a few that I skipped over categorically (mostly roll-and-moves, but I apologize if I missed any cool ones), this post contains my paring down of those hundred-plus games to just the English ones that are ready for print-and-play. Keep in mind that I would guess at least one-in-four had absolutely nothing on the game page at all other than a name and sometimes a description. There were also probably between three and ten that were just totally miss-categorized, as well as a similar number that weren’t written in English.

After doing all that research, I meant to post my thoughts on all these playable games ASAP, but it took me until tonight to find the time to sit down and actually do it. So without further ado, here is a list of all the games that, at the time of my research, had all the files and instructions necessary to play them available on the Global Game Jam website, along with some (brief) thoughts on each one.

First, there were fivefour games I managed to get to a playable state by our IGDA meetup:

  1. Eat Thyself – (printing requires color) – I would of course be remiss if I did not put my own project first. My friend and fellow board game designer August Brown did an absolutely fantastic job on the artwork for this, (and he wasn’t even signed up for the Game Jam!) I’m very excited to mount the board I’ve printed to posterboard sometime in the not-so-distant future. It’s an abstract strategy that plays 2 or 3 players in probably around ten minutes. I’m calling it a “light” abstract because there’s not a whole lot of brain burning. The game admittedly has some problems when played with 3 players, but I’ve got some ideas for fixing it, I just haven’t tested them yet, or posted them anywhere.
  2. Saprobiont – (requires color) – The artwork on this one is absolutely fantastic. It only plays with exactly four players, and each player has variable player abilities, and also score victory points (called biomass) in subtly different ways. It’s lightly war-game-ish, but with such simple (and balanced) combat that it feels more like an abstract strategy game. This game pretty much dominated our IGDA recap night, and was played at least five times in the course of the evening. I had someone ask me for advice about making their own copy a few days later. At least one of the creators is active on Board Game Geek, and has created an entry for Saprobiont there as well.
  3. Aion: A Game of Serpents – (requires color) – This two-player tile-laying game has extremely well designed rules, with lots of illustrations and examples. I am sad I didn’t get a chance to play the version I made for our meetup. I’m not even sure that anyone played it!
  4. Ouroboros – (B&W is probably fine) – This was actually the first of the GGJBGs that I played. Sunday afternoon, I was hanging around the Game Jam, watching everyone else frantically finish up while I wrote blog posts and read twitter. Eventually I got bored of that, and started surfing games on the Game Jam website that looked ready to play. This one jumped out at me because it was one of the only other games tagged “Abstract Strategy”. It was also playable with a pile of lego pieces (which I had on hand), and on a 6×6 gameboard I was able to draw in 10 seconds. I convinced another Jammer to play with me, and we were both quite impressed. Lots of thinking, and the game didn’t turn out at all the way we’d thought it was headed, so surprise twists at the end of the game are possible (not something I look for in an abstract, but it was refreshing at the time).
  5. Cult Wars – (B&W) – looks to be an interesting card game for 2 to 4 players, and it has absolutely fantastic black and white artwork. Unfortunately, I got the cards all printed and cut, and had everything ready to go before I really started looking into the rules. I think there is some clarification needed on some pretty major points. (For example, which cards do you start with, and which do you draw in the course of playing?) The rules need some major work, IMHO, and unfortunately, the game is not really “ready” to play without making some stuff up as you go.

Other games I believe are ready to play but that just didn’t make the cut in my first pass:

  • Alpha & Omega – (requires color) – A tile laying game with player pawns that need to be positioned optimally for scoring at the end of the game. The rules PDF has some formatting issues, but I’m still interested, and would love to try it out sometime.
  • destination earth – (B&W) – 2-player card game with science fiction theme. The hand-drawn art is pretty cool, but the cards look fairly dull to me. I really have no idea how it plays.
  • Escape from Infinity – (requires color) – I noticed this game also has a BGG page now. This is a racing game… the innovation here is that before anyone moves, you choose a card for each player, and on your turn, you chose one of those players to move the number of spaces your card represents. Seems like there’s ample opportunity for screwage as well as nail biting as you hope so-and-so doesn’t screw up your card choices. When all the cards have moved, the round is over, and it all starts over again.
  • floatsam – (B&W) – I didn’t quite understand the rules here at first pass. They probably deserve another look, but it’s somehow a “competitive maze game of skill and luck for 2-4 players”.
  • The Frightening Temple Of Set – (requires color) – This game has a sweet looking hand-drawn gameboard. It’s a roll-and-move, but with some rather complex rules that might make it fun for a certain kind of person.
  • Lines of Nazca – (requires color & Legos!) – I actually think this looks awesome. You construct a secret puzzle goal out of three lego pieces that you hide from everyone else and are trying to duplicate as you play the game. Meanwhile, you are also moving a pawn on the gameboard by playing lego pieces.
  • Magnum Opus – (requires color) – Looks like another tile-laying game. I’d need to “dig in” before I truly understood this one, I think.
  • Moebius slider – (B&W) – This incredibly simple dexterity game should have made “the cut”, but I just didn’t remember to make it at the very last minute.
  • OUROBOTOS – (requires color) – You are assembling some kind of giant robot. How much cooler than that is even possible!?! Apparently there is resource management. I haven’t fully examined this one yet.
  • Rapush – (technically not B&W, but looks to be okay with it) – This appears to be a pretty straight-forward abstract strategy game with the “pushing other people’s pieces” mechanic.
  • Stranded – (B&W) – Interesting seeming card game with rather lackluster art. The game’s setup could use some additional explaining.
  • tailbiter – (B&W) – I can’t quite tell if the very minimalist rule-set would be enough to grok this game. It sounds almost war-like.
  • Your Genre Sucks – (technically needs color, but would probably work without – requires standard deck of cards) – Fairly interesting story-telling game where everyone plays with a different genre and must keep pulling the story back into their type of story.

Bonus Game!!!

  • Obsolescence – (requires color) – This game wasn’t available when I did my earlier research, but I noticed it tonight, and am intrigued. Here’s the description the designers gave it: “Tile Laying game in which players develop, upgrade, and recycle successive generations of Apple gadgets by laying tiles representing components on a circuit board, connector edge to connector edge in order to form closed loops consisting of newly laid and previously laid components.” Sounds right up my alley, doesn’t it? I’ll have to try this out sometime soon.

    Honorable mentions list #1 (Games that would be cool, but look too hard to construct):

    • Entagon
    • pandemonium
    • Sugar Crush

    Honorable Mentions list #2: (Not all files are available, but would possibly be really cool if they were!):

    • Cowroboros
    • Blue Print
    • Centrix
    • Gaeon
    • Goons & Guns

Shibumi Game Design

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In the past month or so, I’ve quite enjoyed designing and then entering at least one game (ok, technically two) into the Shibumi Game Design Challenge. Shibumi is a board game “system” that uses spherical balls of three different colors that stack into a 4x4x4 pyramid. Partly as a result of this challenge, there are now lots of games for the system. I made my own set out of some marbles I bought online. I made a gameboard out of posterboard that looked like this:

Eventually I replaced that by buying a copy of the excellent abstract Pylos (which is also a game played with spheres on a 4×4 grid). My marbles work great on the Pylos gameboard, so I’ve basically just scrapped my original posterboard now.

My first game for Shibumi was called Spice, (all games need to start with “sp”, standing for “square pyramidal”). It was actually just a port of Nick Bentley’s interesting abstract Ketchup. So I guess there really wasn’t much design there.

I spent quite a few weeks thinking (obsessing) about Shibumi, and one of my other ideas was to remove “tetris shapes” from the gameboard after you (or your opponent) make them. I called it Spolyominos, mostly just because someone had already called their game Spetris earlier in the competition.

Additionally, I had some other ideas for Shibumi game mechanics that I never really turned into a game. One idea was moving the pieces like chess pieces. I was imagining all red pieces move like knights, all white like bishops, and all black move like rooks. I even made some images to show how the pieces could move:

The goal with this was wanting to create gameplay that “feels like” the great chess variant Tic-Tac-Check, (which plays super fast and is a lot of fun), but in that game, players have pieces of their own color, (and they’re trying to connect 4 of them on the gameboard). I didn’t really figure out a way to have the three colors correspond to the three types of chess pieces, and also have pieces that are either one player’s or the other’s.

Partly as a result of my Shibumi game design obsession, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about modern abstract game design. And as a result, I really wanted to play more modern abstracts. I decided to set up a board game meetup to play some of the abstract games I own, but hadn’t gotten a chance to play, and it went really well! We played a ton of Shibumi games, as well as many of the GIPF project games that I rarely get a chance to put on the table. I also got to play Ketchup for the first time (not on a website). The next minneapolis abstract strategy game day is scheduled for a week from today, and I’m hoping it’ll be equally entertaining.

Word Puzzle Mashups

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My friend Jason clued me in to this match-3 like word game that was featured by apple this week: W.E.L.D.E.R.

Then a scant day later I stumbled onto an interview with Zach Gage, who recently launched SpellTower, a tetris-attack style word game. The interview is pretty cool, and he says a lot of stuff I feel about missing the innovation present in the early days of the app store. I’m a bit disappointed that SpellTower is iPad only, but I may still pick it up to check it out.

I thought it funny that (in the same week) there were two new word game hybrids to add to my list of interesting word games. (Bookworm, Imangi, WordSolitaire, Word Jong, WordFu, AlphaBattle, and Wooords are all the previous ones I’ve played with any regularity, I think.)

UPDATE (1/28/2012): I would be remiss if I didn’t add a link to my latest puzzle obsession, PuzzleJuice, which is an absolutely fantastic tetris-word-game-mashup. Pieces fall with varying color parts, and when three or more parts of the same color touch at the bottom of the gameboard, you can touch them to switch them to letters. (When a whole “row” is made, ala tetris, those also change to letters.) Then you drag/draw a word from the letters to remove them from the board. Draw a large enough word, and other pieces around them will also be removed. Good stuff!

Three quick Chess-related links

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Hipsta Chez
Is there room for more than one chess-based puzzle game in the app store? Of course there is! I just discovered the TouchArcade post about Hipsta Chez (front-page, no less… it was posted over a week ago, I could easily have missed this!) Hipsta Chez is game in the same family tree as Fuzzle, LinkLines, Gems 3D, etc.. only the twist is that the pieces are chess pieces, and move accordingly. I have only played the first game mode, and only one game so far, but it took over an hour, and I am now 18th on the Game Center leaderboard for that game mode. You can check out a promo video, but I think it’s definitely worth picking up. Hats off to Vasiliy Popov, who appears to be the app’s creator/developer.

Chess@Home
I am not 100% sure how I came across this blog post by one of the developers of Chess@Home, but if it’s to be believed, a few weekends ago, (at Node Knockout, a node.js 48 hour programming competition), a team of four guys created a distributed chess AI using javascript. They’re calling it Chess@Home. The blog post is pretty fascinating.

The forthcoming Octagon Theory app
I read about The Octagon Theory over at my reliable iphone board game blog on BGG. I’m not 100% sure this is chess-related, because I haven’t played the game yet, but it’s an abstract strategy game for the iphone anyway. One of the more interesting things is that they’re soliciting developers to create AI for the thing. I’m tempted to sign up, as that sort of thing is always fun (and I’ve been meaning to learn some lua) for AGES), but there are so many of my own games to work on… we’ll see.

Game Design, and the Search for Emergent Complexity

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Elegance in Game Design
Wikipedia says elegance is “the attribute of being unusually effective and simple”. I think the word “effective” here is very important. Essentially, if a strategic game is our goal, the more strategy we can create with the fewer (and thus more “effective”) rules, the more elegant the game design. Obviously, fewer rules equals a simpler design. Thus a simple game with complex strategy is elegant.

When I say a video game is elegant, (or board game, or a piece of art, or music), I actually mean it is deceptively complex. It may seem simple, either through simple rules, or simplicity of design, but through the interactions of those, it turns out to have some hidden complexity. For example, the rules for chess are fairly simple, a child can learn them, but the strategy that emerges from these rules is incredibly complex and there have been literally hundreds of books written about it.

When I play board games or video games, I have always appreciated this simplicity that leads to complexity. So far, even without necessarily thinking about these concepts explicitly, I have also attempted to incorporate elegance into my own game designs.

Emergent Complexity vs Rules Complexity
There is a whole camp of board games that doesn’t even attempt simplicity. If you’ve played a lot of board games, you probably know what I mean, rule books that are 20 pages long are not all that uncommon. I would generally have called them ‘ameritrash’ before today, (although the term is stupid for many reasons, not the least of which is that not all games with that monkier come from america) but then I read the board game geek page on ameritrash, and realized that I’ve been thinking of that term slightly differently from its commonly accepted use. The wiki page emphasizes the importance of theme in these games, and luck. It’s probably the luck I have a problem with, though that is not in opposition to simplicity and emergent complexity.

Anyway, let it suffice to say that there are a whole crap ton of games out there with what I’ll call now ‘rules complexity’, by which I mean that the game is complex, but that complexity comes more from complicated rules than elegance of design.

360iDev Game Jam
This last week I had the pleasure of attending the 360iDev Game Jam, where I designed and spent approximately eleven hours creating an iPad game I call ColorWheel. I had a simple design, one that I do hope will turn out to allow for some complex strategy when it’s all said and done. In case you haven’t visited the site yet, here is the description I wrote for the game:

Essentially, this is a two-player game, so you play on one side or the other. On your side are six fairly large buttons, one for each color. The colors that are situated across from one another are opposites (in the standard color wheel, google for “color wheel” if you don’t know what I mean), and they cancel each other out when they contact. You press a button, to select a color, and then touch in any of the six rows to “send” a piece down that row. The gameboard is only 6×6, so it’ll fill up pretty fast. Right now I’m thinking two game modes, both limited to 100 moves, or “sends” of pieces across the board. Mode 1 will be “real time”, where you are basically sending blocks as fast as you can to out-race/color match your opponent. Mode 2 will be “turn based”, where you make a move, then your opponent makes a move. When the 100 moves are over, whichever side has the least pieces on it is the victor’s.

I actually think the jury is still out on whether this game will have emergent complexity. There are a lot of choices at any given time (well, 36, I guess–maybe that’s not so many), but the problem as I see it is that for every move you make, your opponent has exactly one move that will counter it. The game, especially in a turn-by-turn mode, could easily stalemate. I haven’t really thought of a good “fix” for that problem… then again, it was made in a night.

iCade Review / Thoughts

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I got my iCade last weekend, and am extremely pleased with its design and functionality so far.

Happiness:

  • Aesthetics: Let’s face it, I wanted this in large part so that I could have a super-sweet looking iPad stand. This delivered in spades. I had a game party on Monday, and everyone commented on it. People couldn’t keep their hands off my joystick!
  • Ease-of-use: After one minor assembly SNAFU (I tightened a screw too hard, and cracked the plastic in a place that — so far — hasn’t had any repercussions), the iCade was super easy to set up and get running. There are really nice instructions for turning on bluetooth and pairing the iCade on the bottom of the “lid” that doubles as the top of the box. So you can’t really loose ’em!
  • Design: Do I acknowledge that it is dumb to play any games on the iCade in landscape mode? Yes. Am I glad they designed a slot/tray so it would be easy to do? HELL YES. Would I have preferred to plug the iCade in and have it charge my iPad while I’m using it? Yes. Was it “good enough” that they included a sweet little hole so you can run a cable up through the back and charge with your existing hardware? Yeah. (Would I have paid more for built-in charging? Probably not.)

Sadness:

  • Bluetooth: Perhaps the most annoying thing about the iCade is that it pretends to be a bluetooth keyboard. This means that, when you’ve got it paired, if you bring up a text dialog in ANY application, the iPad thinks you have a connected keyboard, and doesn’t give you a software keyboard. It’s possible there is a setting or something to disable this helpful lack of functionality, but I haven’t found it yet if there is. This is extremely annoying, as a LOT of apps require text-input at some point, and of course web-browsing is neigh-impossible. Most notably, searching the app store and finding additional apps that support the iCade, while the iCade is paired, is an impossibility.
  • The Atari App UI: While not a beef with the hardware per-say, the Atari app could really use some help when it comes to user-interface. For whatever reason, there is really no on-screen help when you are using the iCade in the Atari app. It mostly “just works”, but you do need to refer to the included sheet of controls for specific games. (There are 99 of them, after all, you can hardly be expected to remember which ones use which buttons!)
  • The Atari App Screen Real Estate: The Atari games I’ve played so far generally take up a little over half of the iPad’s screen real estate. The other half of the screen was used for the on-screen controls, (which handily disappear when you start using the iCade). Unfortunately, when that happens, the game-portion of the screen doesn’t expand to take up the rest of the iPad! So you end up playing the games on about half of the iPad. This is a terrible waste of space, and just feels wrong. I have some hope for this, as I’ll mention below…

So, given that I only just got my iCade, of course it is revealed today that Atari is working on an arcade joystick of its own. (I read this first at TouchArcade, although it was also widely reported elsewhere.)

One of the most interesting things about this announcement to me is the included image (lifted from the announcement link at the time of this writing). Notably, the image differs from the one that Touch Arcade (presumably) lifted from the site earlier today in the following ways:

  • The “Available soon!” text is now followed by logos for Target, ToysRus, and Walmart. This could mean a lot of things, but to me it means: a) these will be highly visible to the public, and widely available and b) there have been lots of deals already made behind the scenes, which could mean that “soon” really does mean soon.
  • The “Made for iPad” logo sends some serious credibility to this image, it’s lifted straight from Apple’s marketing materials, so unless there is funny-business going on here, this is officially licensed Apple Hardware. Is Apple finally beginning to sanction gaming peripherals? I sure hope so, and would absolutely love to see more like this in the marketplace.
  • To the right of the “Made for iPad” logo is some text that reads: “The first Atari controller for the iPad using the 30-pin connector, as it was meant to be.” This has a couple of possible negative implications: a) that (unless there is something clever going on that we can’t see in the hardware) this joystick will only function in portrait mode, and b) that it’s possible Atari could opt to phase-out support for the iCade in favor of their own hardware. I really hope the latter isn’t true, but who knows. I don’t know the extent of their partnership with ThinkGeek.

One observation based on the image that was also possible earlier today: In the screenshot, the game (which appears to be Centipede, although it’s lacking some visual elements, so is obviously doctored) takes up the full real-estate of the screen. This gives me hope that the Atari app could possibly learn to re-size when a joystick is present. I hope that’s true, as it would be sweet.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about iPhone control pads. It’s interesting to me that of those I covered, only one (AFAIK) has really seen a commercial release, and it’s definitely not licensed Apple hardware. The iPad has not been around all that long, yet we have at least two commercial products vying for attention, one of which claims to be official. iOS gaming has come a long way, baby.

Gamification, random reinforcement, and “the metagame”

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The following is in response to an article titled The Current, and Unfortunate, State of Gamification. It was written by my work acquaintance Dakota, who is a relatively new colleague of mine (though I don’t work directly with him). We have interesting conversations about board games, and he was the one who linked me to David Sirlin, (discussed in my last post). If you don’t go read his article, you’ll need to at least know that gamification (in this context) refers to enhancing websites with “game-like features”. I think Dakota’s point is generally that sites aren’t being creative enough in how they add gamification, and generally just add badges and leaderboards, but he touches on a lot of interesting topics while making it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article since I read it. Only a few days ago, so I’m late to the conversation, but this blog is stale, so I don’t feel bad posting on an older article.

Anyway, one point I’d make is that, as David [one of the previous commenters] touches on above, the definition of “game” is quite loose. Just as peek-a-boo is a game, full of delight for the extremely young mind (and a game that arguably evolved into the “hidden object” genre that some adults play), so is “collecting” a game that toddlers and adults play. Lots of people refer to collecting badges and getting highscores as the “metagame”. For many, (myself included), it’s not that I find a new game less interesting (far from it) it’s just that a new game is one whose mechanics I might end up taking or leaving, while the metagame is one I already know and love. The metagame is a game that we play in (almost) every game, and (increasingly) in every aspect of our lives! To bring back your ketchup metaphor, [Gamification was compared to food condiments, Dakota argued that its not required for a gourmet meal.] some people just LIKE ketchup, and they put it on everything, breakfast eggs included.

The heart of gamification for me is competition. Messages like “Your friend XXX posted XXX minutes ago” can be a reminder that they are playing against you. To me, even the metagame isn’t nearly as interesting if you can’t compare yourself to your friends and (at the very least) hordes of strangers. (Obviously, this is what leaderboards are about.) The harder it is to see your competition (who else has the badge that I just got?), the quicker you loose the hard-core metagamer.

I do take umbrage with comparing gamification to the Hawthorne Effect. The Hawthorne Effect is increased productivity due to external observation (and I’m no psychology expert, so I have no opinion about whether its effects are debatable). It’s possible that gamification causes people to “feel observed”, but I would argue that gamification is much more like a simple feedback loop, the psychological effects of which are not debated. (The concept was popularly lauded by this wired article in one of the last few issues.) If the Hawthorn Effect is external observation, feedback loops are internal observation (or self observation). One racing game example would be seeing “ghost” images of your previous laps so you can compete against yourself. I think this translates into knowing that you’ll get a badge after one more check-in, or more instantaneously, seeing the counter of how many characters you have left for your status messages on twitter.

This segues nicely into a rant about Random Reinforcement… (I thought I could just link to this, but amazingly, I haven’t immortalized this yet on the interwebs). Essentially, animal trainers know (and research probably shows, although I honestly haven’t looked too much into it) that using positive or negative reinforcement is not nearly as effective as randomly applied positive reinforcement. (Looks like Wikipedia calls this concept “variable rate” (VR) reinforcement. If you follow that link, the graph on the right sums it up pretty nicely.) The rational that I remember is that the animal (or person) is encouraged by the reinforcement they do get, but because they don’t get it every time the effect is that they try harder, thinking the fault somehow lies with their behavior. (The “rant” that I have been known to make is about how this is why people remain steadfast in relationships with partners who treat them badly, but I’ll save that one for later.) Anyway, I followed Kathy Sierra’s horse training link, and I’ll admit that it definitely made me want to read Daniel H. Pink’s Drive. (I’ve added it to my amazon wishlist.) I can very easily imagine that “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” are HUGE motivators, but I don’t see them as in opposition to the concept of gamification at all. In fact, I think there are direct mappings from leaderboards to mastery, and from achievements to purpose.

But let me step back for a minute. It should be obvious by now that I disagree with at least part of the original Hide & Seek article. Specifically the premise that “neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game” seems pretty wrong to me.

I knew it sounded familiar, and after reading through the comments, I realized that I posted a pretty similar sentiment in the comments over there! Here it is for posterity:

Definitely agree with the your semantic argument here. “Pointification” is a better word than “Gamifcation”, and they are definitely different things, but I do not agree with the premise that points != a game.

Remember the meta-game! What about someone who buys and plays through an XBox live game they don’t even want to play, just to get those achievement points? Aren’t they playing a game? I think they are.

What Margaret (at Hide & Seek) is saying seems to be that we should remove all metagame elements from the definition gamification, and just talk about how you can modify the “core mechanics” of your website. (No more ketchup, only entree.) And maybe there is something there in the user experience realm that can approach gameplay. The feeling I get when browsing kickstarter, for example, looking for that next project to back… it’s akin to playing a game, maybe. But I’d argue that a site like Facebook is almost no longer applicable at that point, since so much of the facebook experience is the metagame. Maybe all of social media is the metagame. I know it feels like a game to a lot of people. We just need to remember that, like investment banking, it’s a game with real consequence.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, from a Game Developer’s Perspective, David Sirlin, and new deck-building games

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Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB) is one of those non-fiction books I’ve had on my shelf for years, but never really read. I tend to start non-fiction books, get a few pages or chapters in, and then let them rot. Mostly I just get rid of them after a while, but this is a book that I’ve always really wanted to read. I’m genuinely interested in the subject matter, being fascinated with the nature of self-reference, infinity, looping, and meta-fiction. (Hofstadter lumps a lot of these concepts together into what he calls “strange loops”.) So a couple of months ago I dove in for the second or probably third time, claiming that I was going to force myself to read this book, no matter what.

Turns out, the first chapter of the book was the most interesting part for me. (At least, of what I’ve read so far.) I ended up petering-out again after I’d only read only about 1/3rd of the book. There are weird zen-like short stories in between chapters, and those are interesting, but I haven’t (yet) skipped ahead to just read those. (And anyway, they tend to deal with concepts that were discussed in the preceding chapters, so I’m not sure that would be a worthwhile read.)

Most of what I read (and find mostly boring) after that first chapter is dealing with, and introducing more and more complex formal systems. I think one of the concepts that Hofstadter is trying to get at is that most everything can be expressed as a formal system.

This morning I had a sort of revelation. All games are also formal systems. A game’s instructions are the expression of the rules of the system. As a game designer, I sort of want to go back and read more of those “boring” chapters with an eye toward how they apply to game design. Especially with an eye toward how the rules of the system are expressed. It’s possible that I won’t find them any more interesting the second time around, but it’s also possible that this different perspective will give me new zeal, renewing my commitment to finish the book. (Realistically, I probably won’t go back and re-read, but maybe I’ll put the book back in my backpack. We’ll see.)

This revelation may have come after yesterday reading David Sirlin’s article on designing/balancing his game Puzzle Strike. This is a really interesting article and insight into the process of his game’s design. I also started reading some of Sirlin’s book Playing To Win, which talks about how playing to win is actually less common than you might (intuitively) imagine, even among so-called gamers! One argument that really rang true for me is essentially that lots of gaming groups play with unwritten rules like “don’t screw your neighbor”, or “don’t make moves that are ‘cheap’ or ‘mean'”. I think when my group of friends first started playing a lot of board games (maybe in 2005 or so), we almost always had these special rules. In fact, I remember distinctly getting a reputation as particularly cutthroat because I often didn’t abide by them. Sirlin’s argument is that playing by these unwritten rules isn’t playing to win, and people who let those rules get in the way will never be able to compete with people who don’t.

I was only on Sirlin’s site because I am designing a deck-building game right now, and someone I work with suggested that Puzzle Strike is one that I should check out. I finally got it in the mail yesterday, and hope to play some games of it this weekend. Other deck building games I’ve been playing as “research” include Ascension, Thunderstone, and of course the granddaddy of them all, Dominion (we also have many of the expansions). I’ve ordered a copy of Eminent Domain, but it doesn’t sound like that’ll ship until sometime in October or November.

Playing Ascension on my iPhone/iPad was probably what pushed me over the edge into doing something about this particular game idea, but deck-building is only the latest aspect of the game’s design. Some other aspects of the game had been floating around in my head for months. I’ve definitely been wanting to design my own card game since I got my copy of (and subsequently played A LOT of) Glory to Rome in the last year. Another inspiration was simply noting an absence of (and wanting to play) deck-building games with science-fiction themes.

Eminent Domain also has a science-fiction theme, and I read somewhere that Glory to Rome and Dominion were both inspirations, so I was at first afraid it would share too many game mechanics with my game. But I’ve since read the rules — they’re on the game’s website — and there are definitely enough differences that I should be fine. It’s also worth noting that the game’s designer, Seth Jaffee, also has a blog where he posts interesting things about game design. In particular, I found this post on deckbuilding game theory to be particularly insightful. It made me think about whether my own game will have a viable (distinct) beginning, middle, and endgame.

I will definitely be posting more about the new game as it continues to be refined, and as it nears completion. So far I’ve only playtested a few times, but that led to some pretty major revisions. I’ve got a lot of work to do!

Sloppy Ports

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This blog post borders on gossip, but I couldn’t help but repost a rather long rant I wrote in the comments of another iOS board games blog post over on BGG. In it, the author, Gabe A. links to the latest Carcasonne app blog post by The Coding Monkeys, which ended with the following awkwardly worded dig:

Yeah, it sure takes us a lot of time to get these things done. We’re sorry for making you wait. We love the game and think it deserves the time to make it truly great, instead of doing a quick but sloppy port, like it unfortunately happens so often on other platforms and to others of our favorite board games. We want to do better. Thanks for having the patience to let us do so.

Gabe had this to say:

Strangely, they also the word “sloppy” in making a veiled reference to “others of our favorite board games.” Eh, what’s that about?

…and here was my comment:

I don’t think this is strange at all.

Carcassonne by The Coding Monkeys is to iPhone app board game conversions what the iPhone is to smartphones in general. Basically, it’s just a million times better. Sure, there are little nitpicky things that I would like to change (it’s impossible to please everyone), but overall, the experience is far superior to the competition.

Companies like Codito and Tribeflame should definitely be applauded for dedicating their development efforts to iOS ports of these games we all know and love, but they should also take a page from The Coding Monkeys playbook, and spend a bit more time and effort to polish those games until they shine before releasing.

I really wanted to like Through the Desert for iPhone. It’s one of my favorite (if not actually my favorite) board games in real life, and I was pleased as pie to be able to finish a game in half the time on my iPad as it would take to finish a game with all the physical bits. Unfortunately, that’s where the pleasantness pretty much ended. The game is not as buggy as EVERY SINGLE RELEASE FROM Codito, but the multiplayer has basically never worked for me, and another couple of weeks spent polishing the user interface would have gone a really long way, IMHO.

In contrast, Carcassonne was, for me, one of those played out games relegated to the back of the closet. Don’t get me wrong, I played a lot of the game back when I first discovered it in like 2004… but it hadn’t seen the table in ages. The Carcassonne app pretty much turned that around overnight. I play more Carcassonne now than I ever did before. And it’s certainly not because the game got better. It’s all about the awesome implementation — asynchronous play and ELO especially.

Now, I understand not every game is going to have the luxury of a year of development, and budgets obviously factor directly into how much spit and polish a game is liable to get, but I personally feel like many of these board games — especially the ones near the top of the BGG list — deserve better than they have been getting from their developers. These are games that have already stood the test of time. I just hope their app counterparts can do the same.