Descent of the Dragons

This past Sunday I went to the Dragons of Tarkir pre-release for Magic: the Gathering. The set comes out this coming Friday, so this weekend was everyone's opportunity to preview the set and to play in a tournament using the new cards. Players were given sealed packs of randomized cards, as well as a faction-specific pack of cards, and from that pool built a deck to use in a series of best-of-3 matches.

The previous Magic pre-release, for Fate Reforged, was the first event I had attended at this particular game store, and I had a great time. For that tournament I had chosen the fast, raiding faction, called the Mardu, and the deck I built matched their style; I was constantly on the offensive, Dashing in creatures from my hand and killing anything that got in their way. I hit hard, and kept hitting. I really liked how my deck played, and by the last round I had gained a reputation as 'the guy with all the removal'. I lost a few rounds, but overall did pretty well.

This time around, the factions were slightly different; what used to be the Mardu had been replaced by the dragon brood of Kolaghan. It was still a fast, aggressive faction, though, and given how much I had enjoyed the Mardu I decided to do the same thing again. I had greatly debated this; I knew that if I picked this faction I would end up comparing my experience at this pre-release to the previous one, while if I picked a different faction it would probably feel more fresh and new. While there were other factions that looked interesting, I was still hard-pressed not to try and relive my glory of the last tournament. So Kolaghan it was.

After deciding on my faction, it was time to look at my pool of cards and build a deck. Just because you pick a certain faction, it doesn't mean that your pool will be best suited to that style of deck. My pool was actually fairly divided between several styles; I could build the fast, aggressive deck with a decent amount of removal that I had planned, or I could build a deck full of flying creatures that would have a lot of evasion but would have a harder time dealing with my opponent's threats. I even had other options, and I could have tried combining these strategies, but ultimately I stuck to the plan. The deck looked very similar to what I had done at the last tournament, but I wasn't as happy with it this time.

In round 1 I was paired against a player who remembered me from the last pre-release. I beat him then, but I lost here 2 games to 1, with both of us suffering from bad card draws. I made some tweaks to my deck after our first game, which helped, but not enough. I would have plenty of time to do more tweaks in round 2; I had a bye. I debated changing up the deck entirely, but decided against it. Round 3 went better, and was my favourite round all evening; I won 2-1, but the games were very close. Our decks were very similar, and it was only by luck and slight gains that either of us could win. I won round 4 quickly 2-0 against a different style of deck, filled with buffs and tricks from a different faction. Finally, in round 5 I was paired up against the player in the lead. Here, like in round 3, our decks were similar; we were both using the Kolaghan faction, but he had two advantages over me: his pool of cards was stronger, and he had a better idea of what he was doing. I made a few strategic mistakes and faltered against him. I don't know if I could have won if I had played better, but I suspect I would have struggled regardless. The final round wasn't much fun for me, but my opponent was nice and polite.

I would have preferred ending the tournament on a high note, and while I did finish 7th out of 27 players, I didn't enjoy myself quite as much as I did at the last pre-release. It was still worth attending, though, and I look forward to the next one. I'll pick up some of the new cards when the set releases on Friday and see what I get. Probably a bunch of dragons.

13/13

Gifts from the Past

Past me has been sending present me a lot of gifts lately.

I back a lot of projects on Kickstarter, and a few of them arrived in the mail this week. Most of what I back are board games, but a few are miniatures, or video games, or other geeky things. Crowd funding is a strange format; you pay for a thing, then have to wait for months (or in some cases years) before you get anything. The joke is that you pay to read endless updates about production delays, and that's not far off from the truth.

The projects with the most delays are usually the ones that are incredibly over-funded; they hit all of their stretch goals, and the project balloons well beyond its original scope. Creators now have learned from their predecessors, and are much better at tempering their enthusiasm with stretch goals, and at estimating how long a project is going to take, but this was certainly not the case a few years ago.

While these big projects do have a lot more to look forward to, several projects also compensate for the inevitable delays by providing regular updates showing their progress. Not only do these projects reassure backers that they are still working on their project, but they also provide a fascinating look behind the scenes; videos of the cards being printed (like updates for The Agents) or work-in-progress images of miniatures with notes on what changes are being made (like updates for Kingdom Death) really help show what the process is to develop and to publish a board game from start to finish. These snapshots are, for me, one of the more rewarding aspects of Kickstarter, and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it, even if I'm still waiting on projects I backed well over a year ago to finish.

One project that I feel has excellent updates like this was Xia: Legends of a Drift System. While this game was delayed by several months, the game designer posted regular updates detailing everything that he was doing to get the game made. Moreover, he would regularly ask for feedback from the backers to make decisions about the game. By including us, I was far more excited for this game to arrive than most other projects I've backed. I was not just a backer but was part of the team, voting on what to name certain ships, or what the logo should look like, and so on. It was not just a behind the scenes look at the making of a board game; Xia invited backers in to get involved. And it was fantastic.

All of this talk of delays is not to say that projects cannot ever ship on schedule. As I said before, project creators are getting much better at anticipating exactly how long it will take to finalize everything with their printers, and how long to expect shipping to take. I was taken aback at how quickly my copy of Stuff and Nonsense arrived, and I have found that the Dwarven Forge projects (Dungeon Tiles and Cavern Tiles) shipped in a timely fashion as well, especially given their scope.

At the end of the day, I back projects because I'm excited about them. The updates let me peek behind the curtain to see how the gears turn, and when I get a chance to contribute, even if it's just a vote, I'm all the more excited. And as time goes on for these larger projects, and the delays seem endless, it becomes less about receiving something in the mail, and more about hearing what the current hurdle is. And I mean that in a positive way; even if it's an update explaining why printing was delayed (again), I find it interesting to see what problems can arise when making something like a board game. The updates tell a story, and I'm eager to hear what happens next.

Plus, future me will be really happy when he finally sees what I got for him.

13/13

Legacy

In recent years a number of 'legacy' games have been coming out, with Risk Legacy being the prime example. These games all have the interesting mechanic that each game you play has an impact on subsequent games. Risk Legacy popularized it, but it certainly wasn't the first game to do that. Legacy game play is nothing new, the market is just seeing it implemented in new and interesting ways.

Role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are perhaps the quintessential 'legacy' game. As the story progresses, the player characters gain experience and level up, and the plot moves forward. It's the story that really drives good RPGs, not the mechanics, and the best stories are always the ones that are derived from the narrative. Sure, tales of amazing dice rolls (both good and bad) are fun, but without the narrative these moments blur together over time. “I rolled a 20!” is great, but “I beheaded the dragon!” is better, and will be something players will talk about for ages.

There have been several good 'role playing without the role playing' board games out there that capture much the same feelings as traditional RPGs. The ones that stick out the most to me are the ones with campaigns, though. Good mechanics are important, as they are with any board game, but what sets a good RPG-style board game apart from an OK one is the ongoing story. Descent, Myth, and games like it that have chained adventures which help to highlight the epic deeds of the players by giving them a bigger context; an overarching story makes these actions both more memorable and more coherent because the players' actions have consequences. What they do in one game will be remembered not only for being a memorable moment in its own right, but because things are different in subsequent games because of it.

Table top strategy war games, like Warhammer, have also had campaign modes for what seems like forever. When these are done on the scale of an entire army, the deeds of individual units tend to get lost, but at a smaller skirmish level, like in the now defunct Necromunda, the scale is more manageable for keeping track of specifics. When the scale is reduced far enough, then the distinction between war game and role playing game begins to disappear; if each player is only controlling one character they are essentially playing an RPG. Even when players are controlling a small handful of models in a war game, it's a small enough scale for those good RPG-style stories to develop.

One of my all-time favourite board games is the Blood Bowl miniatures game, a game of fantasy football with Orcs and Elves vying for touchdowns. I've been playing it for probably close to seven years, and I'm enjoying it as much now as I did when I started, if not more so. The game play itself is great, but what keeps me coming back is the narrative that is created by the advancement of the teams. As they do well, 'players' gain new skills, but there is always a risk that these team members will suffer serious injuries or die. 'Coaches' have to make difficult decisions sometimes; is it worth trying a dangerous play to win a match, or should the team be more cautious to avoid injuries that could hamper them in later matches? The longer I have been using a team, the harder those decisions become, because I find myself more emotionally invested in the well-being of my players; if one of my team members dies, I feel guilty. But when they do well, I really do feel proud of them.

After Blood Bowl games, I've even written short little stories about what happened. Together with the other coaches in the league we have created a whole world full of whimsy and great memories. Because each match has permanent consequences, our world has continuity, and that allows the stories we write and the memories we create to grow and to expand that world.

13/13

Teaching the Game

I'm usually the person in my gaming group who teaches new games to everyone else. This is often because I own the game and have read through the rules already. I don't mind showing new players the rules of a game, but it does come with some unexpected challenges.

Most of the challenges with teaching a new game spring from the details: how in depth should I be when explaining a game? This obviously varies with the complexity of the game, but it also varies greatly based on the players. Some people I play with are happy to learn the structure of a turn and the victory conditions before diving into the game, learning the rest as we play the game. Some people, though, really don't feel comfortable playing a game unless they know how everything works.

The trouble is that games can get complicated, and explaining everything all at once can be both daunting and counterproductive. If I spend too long explaining every rule, players tune me out; they might not mean to, but they'll get bored with the long explanation and stop paying attention. Moreover, if I swamp players with information they may forget the basics and I run the risk of just confusing them. Of course, not giving enough information beforehand can also be problematic. Players get angry if you surprise them mid-game with a rule that hinders them, for instance. That said, I've often found that giving a brief overview of potential hazards that may come up is better than going into the specifics of what bad things will happen; a warning that certain actions carry risks is usually enough.

Oddly enough, the most difficult question I have to face when teaching a game to new players is not how specific I should be with my explanations, but whether or not I should try to win the game. I'll admit, I don't usually like losing, but more importantly, I don't want to feel like I've be patronizing to my friends; if I just let them win, their victory will be hollow. By contrast, they might not ever want to play again if I beat them. Usually I'm safe to try and win, but I it's always important not to be ruthless about it. Playing a new game should be fun regardless of who wins, which means that I can try to win, but I can't do so at the expense of another player's good time. This usually means I choose less optimal choices on my turn, which can be awkward for me, but I know it's worth it. Ultimately, a player's first game needs to be fun and memorable or they won't want to go back to it.

I've found that one of the hardest games to teach has been, surprisingly, one of the simplest to learn: Tsuro. Teaching the rules is very simple: Place a tile next to your piece and move your piece along the lines. If you fall off the board you are eliminated. The last piece on the board wins. Simple, right? The difficulty is not in teaching the rules, but rather in deciding whether or not to win. I've often found myself in a situation that would allow me to eliminate other players early on, but should I take them out? It's taken me several game nights to figure out a good balance with that game, choosing when to eliminate players. I found the best method to be to keep players in the game until right near the end of the game; at that late stage, if the opportunity presented itself I could eliminate another player, but only if the game was about to end anyway. This method gave new players a good taste for the game, and they almost always wanted to play a second round. Interestingly enough, keeping other players in the game longer is actually more fun for me than eliminating them early, which is a bonus.

Maybe I try too hard to win. And maybe I give too much information. I think I need to learn how to just have fun, and I know I need to learn to talk less. If I can learn to be more concise and to stick to the core rules, not only will it improve my ability to teach new games to people, but it will also improve my ability to write rulebooks for my own games in the future.

13/13

Designing Keet – Part 2: Artifacts

Last week I talked about my original idea for Slugfest Games' RDI 2014 Character Design Contest, and how I decided to change plans and build a deck for my goblin archaeologist, Keet.

When I started designing Keet's deck I had an idea for a secondary deck, similar to those found in RDI:3, but I wanted to do something different. I had an idea; archaeologists are always studying valuable artifacts, so why not replace Keet's gold with a deck of unique artifact cards?

I knew Keet was overly excited about mundane things, so it seemed natural that some of his 'artifacts' would be worthless, random pieces of trash that he had just found lying around. I loved the image of Keet proudly anteing into a round of gambling with an ancient shoestring, or being fascinated by a 'rare and mysterious' bent coin. I could just hear him: “It's not just any coin,” he'd say enthusiastically, “look at it it! It's bent!” to which his comrades would just look at him, unimpressed. Not all of his artifacts would be that terrible, but I couldn't resist the humour of it. Worthless items and cursed items were just entertaining. Of course, bad items also opened up the possibility of designing more powerful artifacts that balanced out the trash.

I liked the idea that Keet would have to carefully manage his artifacts, and cursed items played right into that. I've always been a fan of cursed items in stories and RPGs; I feel that they provide characters with a very difficult choice: are the bonuses worth the drawbacks? Keet's artifacts, even the good ones, would serve a similar role. Good items would have to be discarded to be used, meaning if Keet was running low on Gold it would be risky to use those artifacts. By contrast, Keet's cursed items would have a negative impact on his Fortitude or Alcohol Content, meaning if he was getting beaten up or drunk he would have to find a way to get rid of them.

With all of this in mind, I knew I had to give Keet specific tools to manage his artifacts. For instance, I knew I wanted the artifacts to start face down; I liked the randomness of not always knowing what Keet was using to pay the inn or ante into a round of gambling, but it wouldn't be fun if Keet had no control at all over which artifacts he anted. This meant that the deck would need some way of 'identifying' artifacts by turning them face up. This way, if the goblin was able to spend some time 'studying' what he had, he could pick and choose which artifacts to keep, and which ones to give away.

Keet's deck came together surprisingly quickly. Once I had a rough draft, I printed a copy and began testing as soon as I could. I scribbled notes on the cards with tweaks, corrections and more major changes. I did the same with the rulebook. After some feedback from testing, I added card types to the artifacts (Sometimes, Action, etc.) so that other decks could interact with them more, and I removed a problematic mechanic that turned face up artifact cards face down. Otherwise it was going very well.

One thing I knew I wanted to include were artifacts from the existing Red Dragon Inn universe. I loved the idea that Keet had 'discovered' treasures like Dimli's Great-Grandfather's Helmet and took them to study. Interestingly enough, these artifacts were the easiest to write rules for, since I was basically able to copy their effects from other decks. I also felt like adding them really put Keet in the RDI world.

I could go on, but I'll leave it here. I look forward to Slugfest's final version of my deck. They're making some changes, which is good. While I was pleased with my work, there is definitely room for improvement. I trust Slugfest Games to do a good job, and to take good care of my Keet.

13/13

Designing Keet – Part 1: Relic

Recently, Slugfest Games announced that I won their 2014 Character Design Contest!

When I got the e-mail letting me know that I had won I was giddy beyond compare. Heck, I still am! They asked that I not tell anyone that I won until they made their announcement, so I had to wait, but now that they've announced it, I can talk about it. Since the cat's out of the bag, I thought I'd talk a bit about the design process I went through to create Keet, the goblin archaeologist.

When I first heard about the contest, I jumped at the idea of turning one of my RPG characters into a deck. My initial plan was to make a deck for a completely different character than my winning entry: an ancient warforged named Relic. I had been playing this stoic character in a D&D campaign for some time, so I had a pretty good idea how I would translate him to RDI; I was going to make a tanky, durable deck that would win by attrition. It would be able to ignore drinks and fortitude loss very well, but would deal less damage than the other 'bashy' character decks. Relic was all about endurance.

With this plan in mind, the first step was to go through the existing Red Dragon Inn decks to figure out the card distribution of a typical deck; I knew that there were a number of cards that each deck had (“Gambling? I'm in!”, “Tip the Wench”, etc.), and each deck was 40 cards. How many of these common cards did each deck have, and what was the distribution of each other type of card? How often did the bashy decks deal damage, and how often did they prevent it? My girlfriend and I sorted all of the decks and I put our findings into a spreadsheet. I was surprised to find just how similar the basic structure of each deck was. This kept things simpler than I was expecting, which was nice; it meant that I had fairly rigid guidelines for the distribution of abilities in my deck.

During this grand sorting, and over the course of several days, I would periodically jot down ideas for card names and effects. While doing so, a few good phrases popped into my head that a different character of mine would say, and they sounded like they would fit into a Red Dragon Inn game quite well. In fact, they sounded far better than what I had been coming up with for Relic!

Keet, the other character, was one that I created for a short-lived RPG campaign last summer. We ended up only playing about two sessions, but I really enjoyed the character I had made for it. He was a hyperactive little goblin archaeologist, whom I described as “a bad Indiana Jones.” He was remarkably clever, and was a great researcher and appraiser, but he was also a handful. He was very energetic, and got extremely excited about the most mundane things, like libraries and ancient grain shipments.

In the end, I decided that I would set aside the deck I was making for Relic to focus my efforts on this new project. To be honest, I was unsatisfied with how passive Relic's deck was going to be, and Keet's personality would fit in far better in the Red Dragon Inn setting anyway.

Ideas for card names were coming easily for Keet's deck, but I still had a long way to go before I would have something playable. I had to work quickly, too; the deadline was looming.

Please join me next week for part 2 of Designing Keet.

13/13

Getting it Wrong

This past week I played a couple of games I had never played before: Five Tribes and The Ancient World. We read the rules, and we thought we understood everything, so we got started. There was just one problem: How were we supposed to score points, exactly?

In Five Tribes one of the ways to score points is by collecting resource cards in suits. We took this to mean several cards of the same type, so getting a lot of Grains was advantageous, but diversifying would not be as good. While playing, I started to notice small diamonds on the cards, and surmised that they must indicate how frequently you would see a given type of card. Gold, then, would only have two cards, while Grains would have several more. This didn't make sense, though. If that were the case, Gold could never yield as many points as Grains. Thematically, it was backwards.

I thought about it more and re-read the rulebook. After much head-scratching and discussion, my opponent and I determined that a suit in Five Tribes must actually be a collection of DIFFERENT card types: the opposite of the way we were playing. We discovered our mistake during final scoring, so we just calculated things the way it should have been.

A few days later, a group of us learned The Ancient World. Here again we were set collecting. Upon an initial read-through we determined that the scoring was similar to how Five Tribes was supposed to work: collect as many different colours of banners as possible. The scoring track was clearly marked on each player board, with points for sets ranging from one to six banners. We started playing, and all was going well until the second half of the game. By this time we had all begun to wonder what the sixth banner colour was, since we were all diligently acquiring as many different colours as we could, and none of us had gotten more than five different ones.

We had once again made a mistake. There was no sixth colour; we were supposed to be collecting banners of the SAME colour, and scoring simply capped at six banners per set. We still had a quarter of the game left to go before the end of the game, though, so we had to come to a decision: would we finish the game with the proper scoring, or would we finish with the scoring method we thought was correct at the beginning? We had a short discussion, and the table voted to use the proper rules, effectively changing the game for the second half.

We were lucky, all things considered; getting a scoring method wrong is far easier to correct than game play related mechanics. While it may have a larger impact on who wins, it has little effect on the flow of the game itself. I've certainly goofed with mechanics as well, whether with a new game or with a game that I haven't played for a long time. Almost always, the group chooses to finish the current round before making the necessary changes. If it's still early, and corrections to the board state can easily be made, all the better; doing these corrections is usually preferable to starting all over again. But this is always more complicated than changing the scoring method. The only problems I see with changing how to score is with competitive players. For them, it is likely better to finish the game with the scoring method agreed upon at the beginning; it will seem more fair.

These misinterpretations just remind me of the importance of good examples; even the best rules can be made clearer with them. Still, both these games were a lot of fun; I look forward to playing them again. Properly this time.

13/13