I played a lot of EDH a while back. This was a format of Magic: The Gathering made up by a few guys in the middle of nowhere to entertain themselves, where the card pool was very broad and decks were initially built with the intent to use cards that were typically worthless. While EDH eventually was transmogrified by the horrific tendrils of Magic's NWO into the abomination known as Commander, EDH was really interesting for a few reasons. A big one was that before corporate sunk their awful teeth into it, it was expected that players would locally negotiate with one another about what kind of game they wanted to play and collectively set boundaries on power levels and acceptable ways to play. This isn't a new convention in gaming. I think, prior to the internet, the vast majority of games are played in this manner: local environmental factors trump everything else. As a result, a lot of games have plenty of leeway for allowing abusive tactics with the sort of safety valve of social pressure. If a given strategy is boring or bullshit, you can be called out and maybe ostracized, and then the problem is kind of self-correcting. It does require very basic social skills, but without a commodified tournament structure that forces you to play with random weirdoes, most people are doing this already without knowing it. However, EDH was kind of interesting because it springs from a game that is expressly designed for that sort of transactional tournament structure and because of it, is (allegedly) designed with abuse in mind and has a department of professionals trying to curtail that. It's interesting to see how these design philosophies contrast: the "abuse in mind" school where the rules are meant to be water-tight, playable as though they are a computer program, and the opposite where rules are a bit looser and players are expected to negotiate some hurdles themselves. To some extent this is like the hobbyist vs consumer divide, but that's a discussion of game audiences; this is the game designers. My wife and I have started playing Aeon's End, a co-op deck building game. We mostly play co-op games together, and not games I design. I don't know why I don't leverage our game time to test games, but I don't. Maybe if I make a game about flying dragons around frying things with a light dating simulator aspect to it, she'll be really interested in something I make. But that's not the point of this post. Playing Aeon's End immediately brought me face-to-face with one of my old enemies: single-point tokens. In Aeon's End, they're used for counting health points on enemies. I fucking HATE these. I'm really into campaign games. I love playing something where one game has a consequence on the next session, even if they're very mild or mostly just perception. The continuity of a campaign makes each individual game the greater than the sum of it's parts.
As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about them because I also do a lot of developing them. And something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the way that you score in these campaigns, the way that score is distributed throughout the course of playing it, and how this influences the experience. In this post I'm just going to discuss a few of these ideas in a typically harebrained manner as I attempt to make sense of these thoughts and distill them into something potentially useful. I am incapable of designing a game that is respectful about consuming small amounts of space and still being interesting. I don't generally like games that use the very artificial-feeling "one page" restrictions, but that's not even what I really mean; I'm referring to the amount of physical space a game needs when played. Maybe it's because we just end up using whatever space is available, but it seems like every game I own ends up taking almost the entire kitchen table over when I play it, regardless of how much space it seems like it might require. I remember when I was initially writing Split Second thinking "this game should have a pretty small footprint!", but then with four range bands stacked vertically, that was certainly untrue.
So this is something else I'd like to explore; designing games that don't always use tons of space. I've discussed that I think support for solitaire gamers is important. Part of this is that I'm a big solo gamer myself: I just don't like videogames all that much anymore because I'm sick of looking at screens all the time. I love physical games because they tend to be run off simple engines that are transparent, and don't come with a lot of the baggage of modern games like grinding, lootboxes, and microtransactions. Usually, when you guy a game, it's complete, and to play it you have to understand it, so it can only be so complex.
But I also like designing player-versus-player wargames. I've only written one "pure" solitaire game, Split Second. All my other solo projects are modules for player-versus-player games, which makes them harder to design. But when I write a game from the ground up and test the two in concert like I'm doing with Afterglow, this creates an interesting bit of tension where the one aspect of the design can potentially influence the other. In a previous poast I discussed some thoughts on deployment in wargames where spacing was employed. The previous ramblings focused on the sequence in which players put assets into play. Here, I'm going to move on to the second part of deployment: position. Where do the assets go when they get put into play? This makes a huge impact on the feel and flow of the game, as well as on which rules matter and which don't. I have been thinking a lot about "pregame" parts of various types of game--mostly wargames where maneuvering is involved in more than one dimension. If this kind of movement is going to be a factor int he game at all, then the way the board is set up is also going to be a huge factor. So it seems surprising to me that so few games have tried to do much other than either "all at once" or "alternating" deployment. Alternatives open up a lot of variables that make a game harder to balance, but on the other hand, they also make the game a lot more interesting. I'm going to think out loud about deployment systems here a bit, looking at systems from other games and rough sketch ideas I have. Most setups for wargame scenarios have two intersecting systems: placement timing and position. There's kind of a miscellaneous aspect as well where other systems can be a factor, but these two are the biggest elements. You can fiddle with the two to create "new" systems. In this post, I'm going to go over the sequencing aspect and muse on those systems. As you can see from my splash page listing all my games, I'm a very fancy and productive game designer. Placeholder Productions is a one-person operation other than playtesters and proofreaders; I do everything, for better or for worse. Since I started being reasonably serious about developing games with Plamo vs Plamo around two years ago, I have had dozens of game ideas and some of which I've developed into more than ideas. I've developed a process for this now which seems to be working I'm going to discuss here. As you can see from the image on the right, I have a lot of potential projects at various stages of development (most are just rough ideas right now). But at some point I have to actually focus on a few and make them into games. I don't know if most people will get anything out of this, but I really only write this stuff to help clarify my own thoughts, so I guess it doesn't really matter. I like solitaire gaming and consider it to be an important part of my projects. This is because I think a lot of games that are designed to be multiplayer end up being solitaire regardless of what the initial intent was. There's a lot of room for solitaire games and there's clearly demand (hen a new product is announced I often see "is this solo compatible?" asked as one of the first and most frequent questions). I also personally like playing physical games more than videogames, despite the obvious barriers to use (setup, components, manual calculation) because I like the look and feel of game pieces in front of me. It's rewarding.
But solitaire games present unique challenges, and one of the most fundamental ones is providing an appropriate challenge. The essence of most games is trying to reach the victory state as a preferred end condition. But ensuring you have the right end state in a solo game is hard! I have a long-term fascination with air warfare and games about it. It's probably noticeable because I talk about this genre of game quite a bit and someday I'd like to make one. Aircraft are just kino. That's the way it is. But while exploring the (still somewhat disappointing) range of games about tactical air warfare in the early jet age, I came across Foxbat and Phantom, a game from the golden era of SPI published during the best era of combat aviation. While the game itself doesn't seem to be all that well-regared, while looking for more information on it I came across this very interesting article in .pdf on it with one line that really stood out to me: "SPI isn't trying to produce spoon-fed consumers, but active hobbyists who have the imagination and ability to alter the games they play to suit their own tastes." I have never seen a modern game company articulate this sentiment, and it raises the stark contrast between the consumer and the hobbyist. |
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