Here were the parameters in my head when I started trying to hash out the design for Solo Dice Quest:

• Like in To Court The King, you start with 3 dice and gain both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities.
• Both dice-adding and dice-modifying abilities should be necessary.
• Unlike in To Court the King, in the course of a single “round” the number of rolls you get is fixed. This should make dice-modifying abilities relatively more useful. One problem with TCtK is that no dice-adding ability is ever worse than “reroll all your dice.”
• The final goal will be to try to roll a large n-of-a-kind. The number required will be decided during the game.
• Half the “rounds” will be “quests” in which you try to match one of a small number of patterns. When you match a pattern, you take its card and gain the associated ability. (This is like TCtK except that not all of the patterns are available to you on any given turn.) The power and difficulty of the quests increases as the game progresses. Getting abilities from earlier in the game should make the difficulty of later quests manageable.
• The other half of the rounds will be “trials” in which you attempt to fulfill a certain condition. The catch is that this condition becomes more difficult as you get more dice, such as “all of your dice are 4 or greater”. Thus, choosing only dice-adding powers and eschewing dice-modifying abilities means you will fail at trials. Failing at trials has no immediate consequence, but it increases the difficulty of the endgame.
• The win rate should be 30-50%, increasable by some kind of “easy mode”. Winning should feel like an accomplishment even for a seasoned player.
• Winning a “round” as the game progresses should be expected but not guaranteed. Losing 0 or 1 rounds total should make the endgame very manageable–as long as you didn’t take only dice-modifying abilities and now you don’t have enough dice to win! Losing 2 to 4 rounds should make it dicey. Losing more rounds should make winning the endgame a long shot.

Near future: The outline for a multiplayer game based on the same framework, and the problems it is going to have; also, refinements of these ideas along with specifics; where it went when I started taking Sharpie to cardbord.

The exile has returned…

I haven’t even been away from boardgaming; I’ve been largely posting my thoughts at the ‘Geek, in many ways a better place to write because the audience is larger and individual writings can be smaller. But I don’t want to let Rule 0 die! After some thought, I’ve decided that I’d like to turn Rule 0 into a design journal. After making this decision, it was just a matter of waiting until I had another design that excited me…

The inspiration came when I played To Court The King. Capsule summary: Yahtzee with card that give you extra powers, like rolling more dice and changing the dice you roll. It’s a fine game, quick and playable (2+++ I think) that suffers from a couple of flaws:

• It’s pretty much non-interactive. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.
• You get so many chances to roll that die-manipulator effects are embarrassingly poor next to die-adding effects.

But I found the actual playing pretty compelling, so I set off to create a design that meets the following parameters:

1. Solitaire. This will be an explicitly solo game.
2. Will follow To Court The King’s basic pattern of starting with a small number of dice, and using them to make ever-bigger patterns and gain additional powers
3. Both die-adding and die-manipulating powers should be important
4. The game should be winnable/losable; not just a score but a binary yes/no. The ending should be tense. Even a good player should not always win. A way to “dial down” the difficulty should not be difficult to add.

My working title for this game is “Solo Dice Quest”–something non-inane to follow–and there should be more updates in the days ahead.

The topic for today and Thursday is a discussion of the many ways games can end, and some of their ramifications. I intend to talk more about multiplayer games than two-player games, because I think the “end conditions” for two-player games. It’s hard to distinguish a Race from Elimination, for example. But if there are interesting points to be made, it may turn this series even longer.

Each one of these might be thought of as a mini-Pattern relating to a specific part of the game. And they’re important for the same reason that the end of a book or movie is important: you want the tension building to a climax, you don’t want to wait around for a foregone conclusion or think “whoa! it’s over?”

Elimination: I’ve already talked about this pattern, which is generally out of favor in Euro-style games but definitely still alive and well. Most of these games feature either a momentum-building effect (hotels in Monopoly, continent and card bonuses in Risk) or else attrition (Perudo and many others); without one of these factors, the game might drag on without end.

Dominance: This pattern looks similar to Elimination, but victory is achieved when one player controls a certain fraction of the available resources, instead of having to eliminate all opponents. At the point Diplomacy calls the game by Dominance, the dominant player could probably brute-force a victory even against all remaining players. By contrast, in A Game of Thrones, the winning player has to be doing well, but the Dominance victory threshold is well short of the level where the winner could fight off a concerted attack by all opponents.

Race: The winner is the first person to achieve a certain condition. This might be a fixed number of victory points (Catan, Blue Moon City) or to reach a certain goal or destination (Elfenland or even Sorry!). In a common extension of this pattern, the turn is finished up to make sure that all players have the same opportunities. For example, Power Grid is won when a player reaches 21 cities, but if more than one player reaches this number in the same turn, it’s won by the player who has the most. (This is very possible.) Ties are broken, in this case, by the amount of game currency remaining.

Fixed Turns: The game lasts for a predetermined number of turns. The turns may be tracked explicitly, as in El Grande or Risk: Godstorm, or it may be implicit, such as in Carcassone (ends when all the tiles are gone). One advantage of this pattern is that it gives the designer very tight control over the flow and pacing of the game. (And the players won’t be surprised by the length of the game.) The corresponding disadvantage is that the end of the game can be anticlimactic, since its approach is seen all game.

X Through the Deck: This variant of Fixed Turns applies only to card games. You play until the deck is exhausted, then reshuffle it and begin again; the game ends when this has happened some number of times. The world’s best bean-oriented game, Bohnanza, uses this mechanic, and I have used for a couple of my own games as well.

Teaser: The titles for next time include Total Points, Secondary Condition, Variable Fixed Turns, Exhausted Moves, Hybrid, and Unlimited.

Discussion point: Am I on track to miss something? Let me know so I can look good by including it next time. Also, are there any neat intricacies about two-player games that I’ve missed?

Previous entries in the series here.

Name: Partnership

Problem: You have a game concept that benefits from coordination between two people being part of the challenge. Alternatively, you have a two-player game that doesn’t translate well into a larger number of players, but you’d like it to be playable as a group activity. (In this case, playing with six can sometimes work as well.)

Discussion: The two different kinds of games listed in the Problem description are actually pretty easy to distinguish. Call it Type 1 if the game would be significantly different if one player played both parts, and Type 2 if this is not the case. As the shining example of Epic Duels demonstrates, Type 2 is not worse!

Examples:

• Bridge, a Type 1 partnership game. Clearly there is a large amount of coordination required to make the bidding work well. Even once the play starts, the defenders benefit by playing as a partnership; sending each other signals by card choice, playing to maximize the use of the cards partner likely has based on his bidding and play, etc.
• Sequence, a Type 2 partnership game.  The game works fine with two people. With four separate players, the board would be far too cluttered to make any progress. In two partnerships, the game is basically the same as two-handed; you don’t know what half your cards are, but that information wouldn’t really help anyway.
• Pinochle, a Type 1 partnership game. Although the bidding isn’t as intricate as Bridge, having the cards separated is very important. First, it keeps you from knowing exactly what melds are available to your team. Second, during the play, you have to try to picture what your partner has or might have and adjust your own play accordingly to make the best use of partner’s cards.
• Epic Duels, a Type 2 partnership game. Reader Alatar reminded me about this game recently, and I should probably devote a full article to it at some point; because as a Star Wars licensed game, it’s way more fun than it has any right to be. For the purposes of this discussion: The game is reasonably light, and you’re able to table-talk enough with your partners that being separate people really doesn’t harm your ability to coordinate strategy at all. But the ability to trash-talk people, play in a social environment, and share the inevitable stories (Jango Fett killed three Jedi!) with more people makes the game much better with four people than two..

Related Patterns: There’s a pattern that might be called Cutthroat that turns a four-player game into a three-player game. The idea is that one player becomes the “declarer” (maybe by choosing a trump suit, getting to pick up extra cards, or whatever) and the other two players are temporarily united in a partnership against that player. Success is mixed; it works just fine for Pinochle but falls flat for Euchre.

After several lighter articles, I’m back to something a little heavier, third and probably not last in an ongoing series.

Name: Trick-taking

Problem: All players have an equal number of cards with two attributes, suit (or some other category) and rank. (Ordinary playing cards are by far the most common example.) The play is to take place in turns, with high cards more able to influence the flow of the hand. Also, you would like to take advantage of a common mechanic that makes your game easier to learn.

Discussion: Somehow, one player is chosen to lead to the first trick. For subsequent tricks, the winner of each trick gets to (alternatively, is forced to) lead to the next trick. Other players must play a card of the same suit, if possible, but usually may play any card if this is not possible. This proceeds until all cards have been played.

The variance in quality of hands tends to be very high in trick-taking games, so many hands are usually played as part of a single game. This smoothes out scoring differences and gives the players the chance to play many different kinds of hands.

Examples: From this basic model of game flow, the diversity of games that can arise is astounding. First, just look at the ways the first player can be chosen:

• Position relative to the dealer (Euchre, Oh Hell)
• Holder of a specific card (Hearts—and the holder has to play that card)
• Winner of the auction (Pinochle)
• Opponent of the auction winner (Bridge)

Even more remarkable is the wide variety of objectives:

• Take as many tricks as possible. (Euchre, Bridge)
• Take as many of a set of specific cards as possible. Pinochle follows this model, as do games like Skat and Schafkopf. (It seems to be common to German games.)
• Take exactly the number of tricks bid. (Oh Hell, and Spades, to a lesser extent.) Shooting for a higher number of tricks may or may not be scored higher.
• Avoid taking tricks, or avoid taking certain cards. (Hearts)

Within the “winner leads the next trick” model, a large variety of options is also available in the flow of play. Following suit is almost always required, but some games have a trump suit that automatically wins the trick if it can be played because that player is void in the suit led. Pinochle adds the restriction that a player must play above the card led or must trump if following suit is impossible. The commercial game Wizard adds to an ordinary 52-card deck special cards which are exempt from suit-following rules and can be played at any time.

Today, straight after work, I spent 4.5 hours after work in a soundproofed room with a white noise generator blaring at 70 dB, judging the quality of the amplifiers on firefighters’ masks by trying to distinguish between soundalike words. It’s for science! Well, technology anyway.

What this means for you is that I don’t have anything even remotely resembling the intellectual capability for, say, a Design Patterns article. What you do get is the meanderings of my brain in between words.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a game with the following theme and parameters:

One player controls a hero of legend, either real, mythical, or fantastic. He or she is pitted against a huge army of foes (monsters, thugs, or whatever) that are controlled by the other player or players. The hero is expected to fall in the end! The hero’s score is determined by either the amount of time he lasts, or the number of foes he takes down with him. On the other hand, it should be possible for the hero to squeak through—a memorable experience when it does. So the balancing should be tight—or at least it should be able to be balanced tightly.

If you are playing in a two-player game, switch roles after the first game and see who does better. To expand to more than two players, I would like to see the forces of evil allied, but competitive. Each one is trying to do more damage or in some other way outdo the others. If all of the evil forces worked together, they would be easily able to overcome the hero—but the temptation to backstab just a little to get a bunch more points should be so very strong…

I would tend to implement the hero’s and enemies’ resources in terms of cards that are drawn and played on a turn-by-turn basis, but that’s just because I find cards an easy medium to work with, and there’s no particular necessity for it. A dice mechanic might also be very useful, and certainly a series of well-timed rolls would be necessary for the rare hero victory.

Inspired by the popularity of design patterns in computer science, a couple of authors recently wrote a book entitled “AntiPatterns.” The antithesis of a design pattern, an AntiPattern is a commonly made mistake, an easy trap to fall into that might seem like a good idea at the time but turns out to have negative consequences.

It’s a good idea that didn’t turn out to have the massive impact of design patterns. But I’ve certainly seen games that make the same mistakes that have been made many times before, so here you go.

Name: Elimination, or Last One Alive Wins

Problem: You have three or more players. Every player has the opportunity to attack any other player in some way.

AntiPattern Resolution: After undergoing a certain amount of abuse, players are eliminated. The last person remaining at the end wins.

Issues: There are several. First and foremost, players who are eliminated have nothing left to do. In an online computer game, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—these players can just start the next game. Civilization 4 and Warcraft 3, for instance, have online free-for-all matches that don’t suffer from this problem. In a board game, though, the players have to look around for something else to do. Not so bad in a big party, but if you just want to gather the players to play a particular game, it makes it tough.

Second, usually, attacking taxes your resources. This creates an incentive to stall and hope someone else attacks and does your work for you—which causes the game to stall.

Examples:

• In Lunch Money, you have a hand full of attacks that you can unload on whoever you want. The game has theme but little in the way of strategy. You lose when you can no longer convince people to stop hitting you, and they decide to just finish you off. If you’re lucky, everyone else will be finished soon as well and you can get on to something else.

• In the board game Titan, you form legions of creatures that roam around an battle other players’ legions. The goal is to eliminate all other Titans, which are unique and fairly powerful creatures. The designers had some good ideas for of ways to mitigate the second problem. As you win battles, your Titan games experience, which makes it increasingly difficult to assassinate and eventually a powerful fighter in its own right. Also, winning fights earns you Angels, powerful creatures that can be summoned into other fights; bolstering your ranks with Angels helps make up for losing your other creatures in hard-fought battles. However, the first problem is pretty much insurmountable, in my opinion. The game is so massively complicated that it’s completely unsuitable for a party game; you’d have to gather a group of people specifically to play it. And if one player gets an unlucky break and gets killed off early, does that player just sit and watch TV for the next 3 hours?

• As I mentioned before, WarCraft 3 has a free-for-all mode. The first problem is mitigated because if you get eliminated, there’s no big deal; you can start another game right away. The second problem is mitigated in a fascinating way. You have “hero” units that can gain experience as you kill enemy units. With little experience, hero units are expensive and not particularly powerful; but with experience, they are overwhelmingly powerful. It’s important to fight a series of small engagements as the game goes on to build experience; but not so much that you are vulnerable to an overwhelming attack by someone else. If you do see someone in a weakened state and can finish them off, you are in a good position to take their resources for your own.

This is the second in a series. I want to talk about this one because I was thinking about a common “AntiPattern,” Elimination, and writing this would set the groundwork for talking about it. Coming Thursday!

Name: Victory Points, or just Points

Problem: You want to encourage strong or strategic play throughout the game while minimizing a “snowball effect” in which early winners cannot be defeated. Or, you want multiple paths to victory that can quite possibly be mixed and matched. You want all players to be able to play through the end of the game.

Discussion: The idea of using points to score a game is nothing particularly novel, of course. Most card games score using points of some kind. The principal difference between VPs, as I think of them in most board games, versus points in (say) Euchre,  Rummy, or a hundred other card games, is that in most card games, points are used only to keep track of cumulative score over a series of many otherwise-identical rounds; whereas in most board games VPs are accumulated over the course of a dynamic game.

Bridge is a sort of middle area because the scoring does affect the play of the game, in terms of vulnerability and willingness to bid a part score, and its strong influence over bidding conventions. If Bridge were regularly played to a certain number of hands or a certain score (instead of duplicate scoring, which is much more common) I’d be very inclined to describe its scoring as a VP system.

Victory may be decided either by the first player to a certain VP total or the player with the highest VP total when a certain landmark is reached. For instance, Settlers of Catan is won by the first player to 10 VP, while El Grande goes to the player with the most VP at the end of round 9.

Examples:

• In Settlers of Catan, VPs are tied quite closely to your progress in settlement and city development. It’s very difficult to win without building a decent-sized urban base. On the other hand, Longest Road and Largest Army provide VPs that don’t help much toward production, but are relatively cheap to pick up. Most games go to a player that manages to build a good base for resources and uses it to snag one of these.
• In Puerto Rico, you get lots of VP for shipping goods back to the Old World, which otherwise gives you no other benefit. Buildings also grant VP, but even if you optimize to buy the cheapest possible, they probably won’t be enough to beat a dedicated goods-shipping player. A mixed strategy which attempts to buy many useful buildings while shipping as many goods as is convenient is a very playable strategy (that I happen to play myself, when possible.)
• In Carcassone, you get VP as the game goes on for finishing the roads, cities, and cloisters that your “meeples” patrol. The longer they hang out on the board, the more points they have a chance to bring you, but if you run out, you may not be able to take advantage of excellent opportunities that present themselves. VP are also available at the end of the game from farmer meeples, which can be difficult to play and are a gamelong investment, but which can give you big points if you get your fields and farmers connected to enough cities (and can get more power than your opponents!).

Subtitled: “Instant Fairness: Just Add Auction”

Over the last decade or so, software engineers have been talking a lot about “design patterns.” The idea is that you recognize a common problem that needs to be solved and automatically consider a solution that is known to be applicable. For example, if you know your system is horribly complicated, you consider constructing a simpler interface that talks to your system and spits out results in a manageable way. That’s the Façade pattern. We didn’t invent the idea, of course. The “Gang of Four,” who first started cataloging and naming the patterns, were inspired by architects (of the building variety).

So, I’d like to talk about design patterns, of course, in the context of game design. Consider the Auction pattern.

Name: Auction, or Bidding

Problem: You have various game elements which are unequal in strength, or there are not enough to go round. Assigning a cost to each one might add too much complexity. The elements might have different values to different players at different times.

Discussion: Clearly, this works best if you have some kind of easily quantified currency. For any game that scores with points, these points are an obvious choice. Otherwise, some kind of in-game money is usually used.

Examples:

• In Power Grid, some power plants are more efficient than others. Plants have a minimum cost, but good plants tend to go for far more. Players bid the in-game money, which is also used for buying the resources to power cities and stations in additional cities. Power plants may fluctuate in value depending on several factors including the progress of the game (small but efficient reactors are great to save money early on, but won’t power enough cities late in the game) and the plants other players are using (if everyone else has coal plants, they drive up the price of coal, which makes further coal plants unattractive even if they’re otherwise efficient).
• In Evo, every dinosaur race picks up an extra gene every turn, which grants extra abilities in the following rounds. Some are very powerful, others not so much. The bidding currency is victory points. When bidding, you have to consider how many points this investment will be worth between the time you bid and the end of the game.
• In Axis & Allies, the Allies are generally considered to have a significant advantage.  Players bid on the amount of extra currency units that would have to be given to the Axis to be willing to play them; the smallest bid takes the Axis with that much extra currency.
• In the A Game of Thrones board game, players secretly bid Influence for different privileges. All players have to spend the full amount of their bid whether or not they win; the pain of this is mitigated by the fact that the second, third, etc. place bidders get lesser privileges.

Notes:

• To have an auction before the game begins, you will need to either start the game with some amount of currency, or have a “reverse auction” where you bid on the amount of bonus resources you’re willing to let the other players start with.
• A “secret” auction, in which each player secretly makes a bid and the highest one wins, can speed up the bidding; it also adds a psychological element, because players want to bid the smallest amount possible to win what they want. For extra tension, like in the Game of Thrones game, all players have to pay the amount of their bid… whether or not they win.

Please add your comments with other uses and variations of the Auction pattern… I’d like to do a follow-up to this article in the near future.