Considering Cooperatives

 I've found myself interested in cooperative business models of late. I'm not going to pretend I've garnered anything close to expertise on the subject, but it seems like it would be a very good model for a board game publishing company or design studio. Although, probably not one named after a specific person such as I've set up mine as. The basic premise is that all members get a vote on business decisions. And only one vote, regardless of how much they individually have invested.

Depending on exact structure, members could anyone who uses the cooperative from end customers to game designers and everyone who touches the project in between. Or, even other companies like distributors. And with everyone getting a vote this could lead to some interesting development pipelines. 

For example, say a cooperative had 100 members; 4 that were part of the development team, and the rest were passionate customers. So, mostly customers. There is an opening in the development pipeline and it is time to choose a project. First, submissions and in house designs could be filtered by the development team into likely candidates, who could then put together some kind of pitch package for each potential project. Then pitches could be sent to every one of the members for a yay/nay vote. If an individual project doesn't receive over a fixed percentage of the votes, say at least 50% of all members, it will not be made. If multiple project recieve more than 50% the one that received the most votes is pursued, and the others added to a future project queue, but not pursued yet. The advantage of this is it gives a much better sense of how a project will be received by the public at large than an average publisher could with a small team (or in some cases a single person) deciding if a game is a good bet. And, as membership grows, that indication becomes that much stronger. And customer members see the games they want to see.

And you could have members opt in to help at various stages. Maybe not everyone wants to take part in the project selection process. Some members may want to help out with proofreading while other don't. Or likewise for playtesting, etc. There are many steps from submission to publication and Members could theoretically opt in to participation on any of them.

Of course this is asking a lot of members, and they need to get something back beyond games existing that they are likely to be interested in, since I don't think most people are hurting for options. The obvious answer is deep discounts from direct sales, say distributor rates (60% off). The ability to buy shares (but not votes) and maybe dividends?

One of us isn't wearing a costume

I've come up with a card game I'm currently calling "One of us isn't wearing a costume..." and would like some feedback on the concept and maybe some play-testers.

It consists of 54 cards, including:

• 1 setup card
• 21 "rules cards"
• These carry the bulk of the rules weight and sort of control the flow of the game. Each has a binary choice and a direction they should be passed when complete.
• 10 monster cards
• Each of these has two traits shown.
• 10 weakness cards
• One for each monster
• 12 trait cards
• Two each of Claw, Fang, Strong, and Magic plus 4 Blank.

The setup card has the players set two random Trait cards aside, before being assigned a random monster and shuffling the remaining Trait cards with the Blanks and the weaknesses and dealing those out face down to all monsters evenly. Then whoever is setting up says aloud something to the effect of "This is a Real Time Game. If you have any rule cards it is your turn. Whenever a rule card is handed to you it goes on the bottom of the stack of rule cards you are working through. The game ends immediately when all monster cards are face down." Then they hand the stack of shuffled rule cards to any player they want. The back of the setup card has rules for the end game.

The moment the rule cards are handed of any player with 1 or more rule cards acts in real time to work through their cards and hopefully figure out who the monsters is and how to best insure their survival. When the game ends the set aside traits are revealed, and if the monster associated has their own weakness they lose. Otherwise the monster wins, but whoever has the monsters weakness card is safe.

Party game idea

I had an idea for a party game while on the bus yesterday. A simple concept that I feel like must have been done before, or there must be something at least similar to but I can't think of it.

Basically, the game is inspired by AMAs (ask me anything). In fact, I'll probably call it AMA if I do anything with this.

The way I see the gameplay is pretty simple.

1. Each round one player is giving an AMA. They draw a card (or maybe 2 and choose 1) that represents who they are.
2. Then the other players get the chance to ask questions. Probably a limited number of them. I'm thinking something like starting from the player to the left and continuing clockwise, each player may ask one question and have it answered or pass until 5 questions have been answered or all players have passed.
3. Then the players write down there guess of who is giving the AMA and if they are right they get 1 point. If everyone is right the person giving the AMA gets 2 points.
4. Continue until either everyone has had the chance to give an AMA or someone reaches an arbitrary score, say 15 points.

Postcard Games

A while back (almost a year now), I experimented with Postcard games. Specifically, I made two games. The first game was a simple conversion of one of my abstract games, Symmetric, to a postcard game without any gameplay changes. And Second I made a very simplified version of Dawn of the Zeds. We ended up handing out copies of that Dawn of the Zeds postcard game at BGG.con last year.

While organizing my computer today, I found the files for the Symmetric postcard game.



I really like Symmetric, but it didn't do all that well for me and the publisher gave me the rights back. I'd like to expose more people to the game so I want to find a way to self-publish. But, abstracts don't sell very well in my experience and given the mechanics, any theme would feel very tacked on. So I can't really justify to myself trying to raise money for a print run.

So, I'm considering selling the postcard instead. Postcards are inexpensive to print even at low quantities so they could, in theory, be a very cost-effective way to publish simpler games.

I would welcome any thoughts on the matter. Would you ever consider buying a postcard game?

Drinking Games :0)

A while back a friend and I started talking about drinking games. We kind of half started a concept for a drinking game subscription service. (half started as in we talked about it a lot... then didn't start it.) During the discussion, we did come up with a couple of games though. Not at all flushed out and likely not something I'll ever come back to, but I figured I could put them out there.

Game 1) Miniature War Shots

What you need

• 2 or more players (if more than 2 players, you will play in teams)
• 10 shots, divided evenly between players/teams
• 12 Round Coasters, divided evenly between players/teams
• A flat surface on which to play. We’ll just call it a table going forward

How to Start

Each player sets up by placing 5 shots on coasters somewhere on their side of the table, in any way they want. One player should use the coasters face up, and the other should use the coasters face down. Each player will have one coaster without a shot; this is their starting movement pool.

What you do

Starting with the oldest player (or the team with the oldest player), each player takes turns moving their shots in an attempt to force their opponent(s) to drink them.

To make a move, place one or more of the coaster(s) from your movement pool so that they physically touch the starting coaster, then move the shot from the starting coaster to the coaster that was just placed. If this causes you to have two of your coasters (with shots) physically touch a coaster of your opponent, the opposing player must drink the shot. If at any time a team only has 1 shot remaining, they must drink all shots left on the table. Any coasters that do not have shots placed on them are removed from the table and go into the movement pool of the player/team that owns them. The opposing player now gets to go.

Game 2) Wenches & Flagons

What is it?

Wenches & Flagons is a drunken role playing game.

What you need

• Beer, bottled. Lots of it. All different brands. The caps will represent your character stats and the dice you will roll.

• Some sort of container for each player to hold said bottle caps (we recommend a large glass). These are basically your character sheets.

How to Start

Each session/campaign starts with character creation. Each player assumes the role of a character, and you will drink a beer for each attribute or skill you want to purchase. We recommend starting with one attribute and one skill (meaning you should play this game when you are on your second beer). An attribute is something core to your character's being that helps you do things. A skill, on the other hand, is a learned behavior. In this game, there are three Attributes and three Skills:

• Attributes
• Physical
• Mental
• Social
• Skills
• Sneak
• Fight
• Sing? (This might be fun to do when drinking)

What you do

As it is a role-playing game, one player has to take the role of a Game Master (GM), and the rest are players. The GM will set up a situation, and the players will make decisions based on that situation. The GM will have them “roll” to determine the result of the decision.

How to “Roll”

To roll, a player takes whatever bottle caps they have that match the situation and shake them up in their hands and plop them down on a table. Any bottle caps that end up brand side up are considered successes.

Failing a roll

On a failure, the GM takes a cap from your pool of caps. Before he or she does, you have the option of opening another beer and adding its cap to the roll. Of course, you have to finish your current beer first, since we know you wouldn’t DARE break the following rule... right?

The UNBREAKABLE Rule

You may not open a new beer until you finish your last beer. You may only use bottle caps from beers you are drinking or have drunk previously during a session.

The Party Foul Rule

If you spill a beer or otherwise waste a beer, the GM may take a bottle cap away from you.

Should I try Kickstarter again?

I'm considering trying to do another Kickstarter.

I'm hesitant because of my last attempt, Draftcar, which was a pretty dismal failure. I had 33 backers in total, 21 of which were in at the full game level while the remaining 12 were in for a dollar. This would have netted a total of $452 before KS took their cut.

With printing in China, I was looking for $13,000 to fund Draftcar. That was for 1000 unit print run, accounting for shipping, and getting it demoed in stores as part of the post-Kickstarter marketing plan. I probably shouldn't have included the demoing in stores as part of the base level, but even without that, I was looking at about $10k. And I fell drastically short of that as well.

Blind Detective

So, I had an interesting game idea while I was sleeping last night. The basic premise is this; one player is a blind detective who is called to a crime scene, all the other players are characters who may be at that crime scene. All of the players except the blind detective can see the crime scene via an 8.5x11 page they can pass around. They also all may have exclusive access to one or two extra pieces of information. Information which they are only allowed to share if directly asked.

Roll and Move Fighting Game

So... I think I've come up with a good idea for a roll and move game (something I never thought I'd say). Roll and move as a fighting game. Here's how it works:

The board has two sections; an outer section with spaces for the players to move an action pawn around, and an inner section where they carry out actions.

Inspiration can come from some strange places...

So, about a week ago I came up with two game ideas on a road trip to RAGEcon. Both mechanically very similar but thematically quite strikingly different. They were both inspired by the song Suicide is Painless (the MASH theme), as performed by Marylin Manson. I'm going to be looking to test both of these soon. If you are interested in either or both please enquire. If you want to just try it out and not give feedback... well the images you need are below.

Idea for a Dice Game.

I have dice game mechanism running through my head and I feel like I've seen something similar to this before, but I can't for the life of me think of where. If you know, let me know. But in any case, here's the basic idea:

A drafting game skeleton

I was showing my game Draftcar to some kids at Strategicon (Gamex) this weekend, and one of them asked me what it actually means for a game to be a drafting game, since he played in or was going to play in a Magic tournament which was a drafting tournament and didn't see how drafting there was anything like drafting in my game. I'm not sure if my explanation actually made sense to him or not, but basically, I said something along the lines of "drafting is basically anytime you have to make a selection from a limited subset."

4X Euro Space game, part 2

In a previous blog entry, I discussed ideas for a Space themed 4x "euro" design. Mostly in that blog I covered really broad strokes kind of stuff. Games that inspired me, the basics of the movement mechanisms, resources, ideas about leadership and building stuff. And that great, but today I want to really dig into the idea a bit more. A lot of stuff is still nebulous but some of the elements have solidified nicely and I want to talk about both.

Euro 4x idea

My absolute favorite board game is easily twilight imperium. But, it's so hard to get to the table. Primarily, I think, do to the length and perceived complexity of the game. I'm also quite fond of Eclipse, particularly its economic system, which is quite a bit faster in terms of gameplay. So you would think that at some point I would have tried my hand at the genre. I have not because I've never felt I had something to add and make a better game.

Roll and Rondel

I've been a bit enamored by rondels lately. There is something very elegant about the whole concept. So, of course, I've come up with a few ideas centered around them. Today, I'm going to discuss an idea I had for a dice placement variant. So, very loosely, the mechanism works as follows:

1. Roll a number of dice (determined by number of rondels in the game)
2. Assign those dice to the rondels (you may assign multiple dice to a single rondel or spread them out)
3. Move your pawn/token on each rondel you assigned dice a number of spaces equal to the total of the dice assigned
4. For the rondels which you assigned dice, carry out the actions on the rondels
5. Collect and pass dice to the next player.

Business thoughts part 3

In my previous business thoughts, I loosely figured what I would need as a Kickstarter goal to print Draftcar, and came up with a couple of unorthodox stretch goals.

Today, I'm trying to think through the best means of driving traffic to the Kickstarter.

I know it's important to get an initial surge of backers so that other potential backers see the project as likely to fund. And I know it's common to spend a few months or a year building up an audience to get that initial surge. At the same time, though, I am fairly certain I can get at least get a shout out from the upcoming darkest night Kickstarter. That by its self may be enough to get a significant initial surge. If it is it is probably worth it to spend a bit less time driving an initial audience so I can time my launch to coincide with the end of that campaign.

Assuming I can get a good initial surge, the next goal is to get those people to tell everyone they know. I'm not sure what percentage of Kickstarter backer actually post about them to social media. Based on the limited data I've seen, at most 5% of backers actually bother to make those social media post. I'm willing to bet there are ways to increase the percentages a bit. I know some campaigns have social media stretch goals. I'm not convinced those actually have any effect, though. It seems to me that the best way to get people to post is to give them something now as opposed to after the Kickstarter. One thing I've been toying with is using a service like pay with a tweet or twitter payment to give a print and play version away during the campaign. I don't think I've seen that on a campaign before. There may well be a good reason for that... but it sounds good from a marketing perspective.

I did an experiment with pay with a tweet a while back (a few years now actually) in which I gave away a PnP version of my game Pew Pew! At the time, I only had maybe a dozen followers. I had well over 100 downloads and to my surprise, the game even got a mention on Purple Pawn. So I think that with a large enough shout out seed of backers this could easily help a project go viral.

Chosin next steps

I've read a few posts / comments online about potential other settings that could use my Chosin Few engine. The posts I've seen so far have all been regarding individual battles. And they certainly sound interesting so I hope some of the people talking about them pursue them. But I can't help but wonder if there is a good way to expand it to encompass a whole war.

It would require a couple key modifications. Let's try to detail these out one at a time.

1. The Order Deck

In The Chosin Few, the Order Deck is small and specific. Three cards that always show up in exactly the same order. This works well for a single battle because it allowed me to control the story told through the mechanic. I'm not sure it will work as well to have a static structured set of orders for a larger war with numerous battles. Ideally, I think I would want to come up with a way of giving the player their orders as relative to the current war situation.

For example, instead of having an order call for the player to take and hold a specific location, it would call for them to take and hold spaces of a category. Like a resource or enemy facility.

The other thing that Order cards do is tell you where enemies will be coming from in the form of Lines of Departure. I may want to separate that function out to a different deck. An Enemy Operations Deck... Which could also manipulate what kind of arrows they follow perhaps...

2. Activity Deck

The Chosin Few Activity cards always have 3 points that new enemies will come into play at, and two colors that will move and 1 card is drawn per turn. For a larger war, I think I would design the cards to have one or two enemies come into play per card with only one color moving, but I would have the number of cards drawn per turn varying based on the current enemy operation(s) in effect.

3. Loss Conditions

The loss conditions for The Chosin Few are all based on the idea of not escaping. For a full war that the loss condition is more likely to be about losing ground or resources.

4. Strength Tracking

In The Chosin Few, the player only has two units so it made sense to track each one's strength to a fairly granular level. But in a full war, the player may have numerous units to keep track of and each one having its own track would likely be cumbersome for the player. This will likely require a new combat system. It should be just as simple.

What I'm currently thinking is that I will add a conflict resolution phase. During that phase if any enemy units are in the same space as your units a battle happens. Some kind of roll will happen and units will be removed from either side as appropriate. Units that are in the same space as enemy units would be unable to move away until it is cleared of enemies. I think this will lead to a good simulation of front lines. But of course, it needs to be tested. For the roll, I'm currently thinking it should be a success system with loads of dice scenario. So for a starting point, for each unit in a contested space, roll one dice. Each 5 or 6 removes a unit of the opposing side.

In any case... it's a starting point.

5. Resource Management

It would be nice for a larger war if taking (or losing) certain territory had lasting gameplay effects. Maybe certain actions require oil so if you have no oil fields you can't take those actions. Or you can't launch planes if you don't control an airstrip. That kind of thing.

6. Politics or Public Opinion

Depending on the war, this can get complicated. Say it was Viet Nam as the United States. Public opinion would be crucial to winning. Possibly more so than the actual battles. But if it were WW2 as the Germans, the larger concern might be global politics. Trying to delay other countries entering as much as possible or get as much done as you can before they inevitably get involved.

For a WW2 scenario, this could easily play into how many Activity cards you draw each turn as each new opponent would give them an additional card draw to represent their added resources.

Commandment: the words of gods

So I recently discovered a game on steam called Crest. Crest is a "god game" of sorts but what is interesting about it is that you don't directly affect the world. You can only interact with the people indirectly by issuing commandments.

These commandments follow a structural pattern of <type of follower> <action> <target>. For example if you want the well fed followers to distribute food you would create the commandment "well fed followers, distribute food". This very simple system allows for a wide array of commandments.

But what is really interesting is how the people start to interpret your intentions. For example, make the commandment "well fed produce children" and you may see the commandment morph to "happy produce children" because the best fed people are probably also the happiest.

Now, me being me, I of course am thinking about what I could do with this sort of mechanism and how I could create it in a tabletop game.

The best solution I have so far is a game with teams of two, where one player is a god and the other his followers. A game would have 2 to 4 teams (so 4, 6, or 8 players). Each god would have a secret objective. The first team to achieve their gods secret objective wins. The gods would communicate with their people in a non direct way (I'm thinking the gods should be limited by a drafting mechanic but haven't worked it out yet) and the people have to try to interpret their gods instructions as best they can. Maybe a worker placement mechanism to show what they are actually doing in their gods name. 

Abstract: the abstract game

Recently Greater Than Games had a contest on their site for a ______: the ______ game contest. It was a cool exercise, and while I'm fairly certain if I had won I would have heard about it by now I'm not going to discuss any of my submissions in this post on the off chance that I'm one of the finalist. I submitted 4 games and when I'm certain I'm out of the running I'll likely discuss them at length. The contest was for a game they would be kick starting for April fools so I'm not 100% sure if it would be appropriate to discuss the games I submitted publicly before then.

Instead I'm going to talk about a game idea I came up with to late for the contest. Because I think it would have been a good fit for the contest it's working title is Abstract: the Abstract Game.

Component wise the game consists of 50 bridge cards. 36 of those cards are board cards which are randomly placed into a 6x6 grid. The remaining cards are the player pieces. These have one of 7 icons and are double sided with one player controlling each side.

As shown above, the board cards have 6 icons and 4 movement grids printed along their edges. The icons represent player pieces and the grids indicate how a movement pattern. The two taken together tell the players how their piece will move if it is on that card. And perspective matters. Each movement pattern is associated with the icon "above" it from the players perspective. And if the piece has an icon that doesn't have a pattern indicated then it may move one space forward (ie towards your opponent).

You win if either all the pieces left in the board are yours or if you opponent can't move on their turn (ie all off their pieces are on your back row AND their icons don't have a movement pattern on the card they are on). In the above example, the red piece would move by leaping orthogonally and Flipping pieces that it leapt over. The blue piece however moves like a rook in chess.

Anyone interested in testing this idea out?

Dialog in a board game

I've been fiddling around with a idea for a while now for a card driven dialog engine for a tabletop game. I see it mostly as a quest generation and merchant interaction mechanism. I'm sure it has other uses as well.

The basic procedure of the system is as follows:

1. The active player chooses to do something that engages an NPC
2. Another player draws a card from an NPC deck holds it so that the "Front" faces the engaging player and reads aloud from the "Back" of the card.
3. The engaging player would then choose a card from their own selection that had matching symbols, hold it so that the "Back" faces the player reading for the NPC and read aloud the section that matches.
4. The NPC player would then read the result that matches the symbol on the back of the card the engaging player read and carry out any instruction text.

In the above example, it would play out something like this:

1. Engaging Player goes to the Merchant. The player to his left draws a card from the Merchant Deck.
2. Merchant - "Friend! You'll never guess what I just came in! And i'm offering it exclusively to you. According to Legend this sword was forged by Volcan himself for Herecles. What do you say, I'm only asking 100 gold?"
3. Engaging Player selects one of their cards and reads "Seems like a fair exchange. I’ll take it."
4. The NPC player looks at the card the Engaging player choose and reads "A pleasure doing business with you." and gives the player the Sword of Herecles. The engaging player spends 100 gold.

So... any thoughts? Does this sound fun or just cumbersome?

Variable Phase Order?!

So I was listening to an older podcast today from Ludology about game structure and it got me thinking about playing with the core structure of a game during play, and how that could really be accomplished.

Imagine if you will a game with multiple phases, that at the start of the game are in a specific order, but during the game the order of the phases can shift. So, lets say we have a hand management phase, a board manipulation phase, a combat resolution phase, and a cleanup phase. And that they start the game in that order. We have a handy card reminder for each phase that says what happens during each phase and we have a marker to indicate which phase we are actually on. And we have a marker that indicates which "direction" the sequence of phases will move. And during each phase, there is some means of altering the other phases in some way:

Hand Management Phase

At the start of the game, it consists of two actions. Every player draws a card, and may play a card. The card may shift the phase order, replace/augment a phase card, be placed in front of the player to grant them some kind of special ability, modify the board, or anything else really.

Board Manipulation Phase

This could start as an area control mechanic/worker placement, where if you are in control of a given area it allows you to perform an action. These could be almost anything, but some at least should allow further card play.

Combat Phase

Maybe after a significant enough victory, a player can flip the direction that play proceeds through the phases? i.e. if the current phase order was Hand Management, Board Manipulation, Combat, Cleanup, they could flip it to Cleanup, Combat, Board Manipulation, Hand Management? And since they were in the Combat phase, they would effectively prevent the cleanup phase from taking place. Or maybe this choice could be made by a player who loses a conflict by a significant enough margin?

Cleanup Phase

Restoring resources to players, changing the first player, score victory points (VP), whatever. This is the one phase I'm not sure should have a phase altering system, but maybe if there is a VP system this could be how this is manipulated. Say the player with the lowest VP at the end of the cleanup phase can switch the position of any two phases.

In any case, just a crazy idea I'm working through at the moment...