Makin' games

Putting other ideas on the backburner

So, it probably seems like I’m very unfocused, but I’m pretty unconvinced by my current game ideas. I have 2 educational games I want to make, and a children’s game. But I don’t really have anything meaty. Over the last few days, a meaty game has presented itself to me.

It’s a game about the Hansa, a medieval maritime trading league in Northern Europe. Each player takes the roll of a business-person in one of the towns of the Hanse, and has to develop the town. To win the game, the player has to build all of the production buildings, essentially making their town the richest. It is a trading and negotiation game, with elements of pick-up-and-deliver. There will be pirates. Hopefully, this will be heavier and more thematic than your average euro.

Game overview at the moment:

• Each player is a business-person in a town. They start the game with a ship, 2 factories (1 producing primary goods and the other producing secondary goods), a house (provides workforce and income) and a warehouse.
• Each player has his or her own board for their town. There is also a simple map board in the centre of the table. The map is of the Baltic Sea, divided into a few large regions. Players will move their ships between these ‘sea-zones’ to trade with the other players.
• Players produce goods in their town from their production buildings. Production works on a two tiered system. For example, Clay Pits produce clay, Kilns produce bricks but require clay. So what if I have a kiln but no clay pit? I will have to negotiate with a player who does have a clay pit and import their clay. Perhaps I offer them half the bricks I produce, or maybe I offer coins.
• The tier 1 goods are used to produce tier 2 goods. Tier 2 goods are actually useful in some way. For instance, bricks might aid buildings. (I’ve not fully worked out the function of each good).
• Things take multiple turns to complete. For instance, new buildings are played on their side, and then placed upright on the next turn. Trading will involve moving your ship to another player’s town. Also, there are investment cards, which are expensive to play, but have a return a few turns later.
• The game will not be a boring waiting game, however. After the first 3 turns or so, old actions will be completed and new actions will begin on every turn.
• PIrates, you say? Privateers will be investment cards, which will allow you to steal goods from your opponents. Be careful though - you have to trade with your opponents. Pirates are a mechanic to allow a player who is being excluded from the negotiation (perhaps because he is winning, or has no goods in demand) to still succeed.
• Players can build new buildings (for more production) and ships (for more trade).

So, what challenges do I currently have to deal with?

• Building costs etc. Game balance.
• Turns might be quite busy, so simultaneous turn-taking?
• Ways to take money in and out of the game. Considering all kinds at the moment.
• Ways that tier 2 goods can be made useful, but still worth trading. For instance, I think bricks should be used to make buildings cheaper. But if player A gets a 2 coin discount per brick when making a building, why would he trade it for any less than 3 coins? And why would player B buy them off him for more than 2?
• Balancing the game for different numbers of players. Really big one. Since I want every player to be producing a unique good at the beginning of the game (to encourage negotiation straight away)… you see the problem?

New parallel project: music education game

I’m very passionate about music, and I’m also an aspiring teacher. Part of my goals is to implement playing games into the classroom environment, without falling back on simply a quiz. I think it would help the kids get into a subject, particularly ones who might not be as academic in the classical sense (I’ll probably write a report on this one day after I’ve actually had some classroom experience with games).

I have a couple of game ideas going around. One is a set collection game in which the objective is to complete an orchestra or other musical ensemble. The other was suggested by my significant other and is the one I’ll probably run with first.

Essentially, the theme of the game is the children take on the role of composers competing for the position of court composer in a kingdom. The objective is to complete as many commissioned pieces as possible. Now, the children will not actually be composing any music in the game, but rather, they will draw a selection of cards with musical forms (structures). Then they must draft, play and discard cards with different musical features on to complete the form. At any point they can draw more commissions, but any uncompleted pieces at the end of the game are worth negative points.

The players will have a hand limit imposed on them, which means when they have a card they need, they must play it as soon as possible. This is so the other players can guess which forms they might be trying to create and draft the cards appropriately (to block).

Players will be able to draw from either a selection of face-up cards or the face-down discard pile. Possibly also face-down cards from the deck (will have to playtest). By keeping track of what the other players have drawn/played, it will be possible to guess when the cards you need are in the discard pile.

This shouldn’t be too hard to make. I’ll probably work on a prototype tonight.

‘Open for business’

The Business phase of the game is the last part of each round. During this phase, the primary resource of Visitors (probably represented by PR style Worker discs) is redistributed among the players. There are some criteria I wanted to achieve with this phase. I currently have 1 main idea that seems to work. This should give you an idea of the design philosophy for this phase, as well as the ‘visitor’ system.

Criteria:

• Partially luck based.
• Still favours shrewd play.
• Good balance between chances of one player monopolising the visitor pool for a round, and other times it be more balanced.
• Players get at least a small number of visitors every turn.
• Amount of available resources increases over the course of the game - don’t want someone to get 50 resources on their first turn!
• Easy to work out and quick to do.

Ok, so as mentioned briefly in the first post, visitors will come to your theme park during this stage of the game, which can then be spent each turn. To make sure something happens during this phase, a rule will probably be enforced that all visitors have to be spent or otherwise removed from each player before this round, unless the player has a Hotel building which will allow them to retain a small number for use next turn. This is simply an anti-hoarding mechanic, since if one player hoards, everyone else is out of pocket (resources are shared).

Ok, so this is what I have so far. The bank into which visitors are paid is divided into N+1 areas, with N as the number of players. Then, when a player makes a purchase (in an earlier phase of the round), they go clockwise around each area, adding 1 visitor each time. So with 3 players, the bank would be divided into 4. Then if a player makes a purchase which costs him 6 visitors, he would go clockwise around the 4 areas until the purchase is complete (bank 1 would have 2v, bank 2 would have 2v, bank 3 would have 1v and bank 4 would have 1v). Every player makes their purchases until all the visitors are spread around the N+1 banks.

Now, during the Business phase, the first bank area is the ‘community bank’. Starting with the 1st player on this round, each player takes 1 visitors from here until the bank is empty. This guarantees that everyone gets at least a few visitors to work with next round. The rest of the banks, however, are up for grabs.

We now move on to bank 2. The game comes with 6 dice. Each player rolls 1 dice for every ride in his or her theme park (there will be a maximum of 6 ride spaces). The highest score takes that bank, providing their park has the capacity to contain this many visitors. If it cannot, the remaining players re-roll for the rest of the visitors in that bank.

Then play moves on to the next bank, until all the banks have been given to a player.

The number of visitors available expands every time a player purchases a ride (this mechanic still very sketchy). When a purchase is made, 1 visitor is added to one of the banks from the box. As the game develops, the stakes will be higher!

What does this achieve?

• Having a bigger park with more rides gives you a higher chance of getting a good turnout.
• Even if your park is smaller, you could still win a good number of visitors.
• There is good tension - dice rolling, while frowned upon as a movement mechanic, can be really exciting when used to pit players against each other.

What are the flaws in this mechanic?

• Too strategy based. Wait, what? Well, what I mean is that strategy plays a much larger roll than tactics. There needs to be more options to make more tactical moves to influence this phase. Maybe, on the turn on which a ride is built, it could give a specific bonus, meaning that timing your buildings well balances the need to build quickly. Also, perhaps there could be chance cards you could use to gain an edge in this phase.
• MIght take quite a while with many players. The number of dice-rolls made during this phase would be N^2 or greater.

Critique is welcome on this phase. Thanks for reading.

Where am I up to?

Hello, welcome to my blog.

The first game I would like to talk about is a theme park management game. It is a light strategy game (eurogame/german-style/designer), which due to its theme I think would make a nice family game.

Game objective: to be the first player to complete his or her roller coaster track. The roller coaster track is simply a thematic victory point track. Currently, the roller coaster track is simply bought, with each section of track costing slightly more each time (the track must be 10 spaces long, with the cost for a space starting at 1 and ending at 10). This may change to a different system.

Game elements:

• Building. Players can expend resources on building new attractions to their theme park. The attractions are: roller coaster track (victory point), ride (increases your park’s visitor capacity, increases your chance of getting a large number of visitors each turn, and each ride may provide another bonus), small attraction (cafés, coconut shy - increase visitor capacity, provide other small bonus) and a hotel (allows visitors to be retained til a later turn).
• Shared resource pool. The resource in the game is visitors. Rather than visitors giving you money of some kind, simply using the visitors as money cuts out the middleman and simplifies the game. Now, here’s the trick - there is a limited number of resources, and after everyone has had their turn, these resources are redistributed among the players, based on a combination of who currently has the ‘best’ park and luck. This means that on one turn, a player could be extremely lucrative and cripple his or her opponents by getting the lion’s share of resources, while sometimes the resources will be evenly spread out among the players. Of course, the tension arises when on one turn, you get a huge turnout of visitors and are therefore rich, but next turn your opponent could build a new ride and the tables could turn!
• Chance card deck. A player can buy a catan-style development card, which would allow interesting and fun moves like sabotaging opponent’s rides, improving park advertising and other thematic moves which could affect the gameplay.
• Casualties. If there is a casualty on a ride, until you ‘pay off’ the damages, you make it less likely that you will attract visitors to your park.

Flow of play:

One player takes a Puerto Rico ‘governer’ type role for each round, allowing him or her to take action first. In a round, each player can spend their available resources (visitors) or rides, buildings and chance cards. Visitors spent are added to a central ‘bank’. After everyone has taken actions, then everyone’s park is ‘Open for business’ and the players compete to get the highest number of visitors out of the bank back into their park. After the visitors in the bank have been shared, the next player takes the ‘governer’ role and play repeats until one player has completed their roller coaster, making them the best theme park.

There’s a little breakdown any way. A little later I will explain my current ideas for mechanics in a little more depth.