Diversity Trumps Democracy

Second playtest

Tom and Jeffrey negotiate the corridors of Starship Rex.

The second public playtest of Starship Rex was held on Sunday, June 24th, 2012 at Guardian Games in Portland, Oregon. Whole sections of the rulebook were smashed, but in the end, we made the game way more playable. Thank you to Ken, Tom and Jeffrey who powered through to the end of game one and helped to confirm that the council/voting system at the endgame was just too, as Tom put it, "muddy".

I've suspected from the beginning that the council thing might add more complexity than fun, but that first game Sunday proved it. Ken remarked that the change of pace from map exploration and pod-retrieval to the council phase was too jarring. "They feel like different games," he said. He had a point, so I decided to try an alternative for the second game of the day.

Diversity over democracy

Rules revisions on the fly.

The second game was a three-player session between Jamey, Jeffrey/Sasha tag-team and me. Thanks to them, not to mention our cheerleaders and idea fountains Will and Paula, for helping me prove out the streamlined rules. For this game, I changed the endgame drastically from "nominating and voting on the colony council" to a system of "tabulating diversity". Points were gained by counting all of the unique traits in one's own set of rescued colonists, plus all bonus points gained during the game by venting Creeps out the airlock, plus all points gained directly from the bonus Bequeathment cards. The process was a welcome simple math problem, contrasting starkly with the chaos of voting/nomination we had before.

Pacing

The pacing of the second game was also changed to give each robot more actions per turn and to allow robots to roll through the "special rooms" instead of treating them as dead-ends. These two changes alone dramatically increased the number of Colonist and Bequeathment cards flowing into players' hands, resulting in more fun. Who doesn't like more fun?

Cooperation 

Jamey and Sasha enjoying the accelerated
pace and accentuated cooperation.

Also changed for the second game was a more direct emphasis on cooperative play. Instead of the implied vague notion that variety in Colonist traits was good for self/everyone, the rule was made clear -- the players as a group must accrue all of the Colonist traits, by rescuing Colonists, by the time the starship runs out of energy or everyone loses. The "everyone loses" concept is common in cooperative games, but I was hesitant to put it in the rules because many of the games of that nature end up being mutli-hour slogs. To have those many hours end in defeat for everyone is a bummer. However, if I can get Starship Rex down to under an hour, a we-all-lose scenario would be a lot less discouraging.

As it was, we easily satisfied the goal, getting all 13 traits long before power ran out. The goal for individuals then shifted focus to bolstering their own crowd of Colonists, diversifying their collection of traits. Venting Creeps also became important, as each Creep dispatched granted a victory point.

Moving forward

I'm so confident in these second game rules that I'm going to roll them through to the next playtest largely unmodified. There are some things that I might change to speed up the game a little more, though. The energy-drain of the ship slows to a trickle after players have rescued two or three colonists each and are assigning those Colonists to the "energy efficiency" task. I'm thinking of raising the energy drain rate and the minimum energy drain. It was also suggested that there be a wider variety of tasks for  rescued Colonists to engage in. I'll have to think about that, but it seems like a fun idea. I even have a concept that might slot nicely into that role -- steering the ship.

Setting sites

Steering the ship would require adding extra cardboard pieces the game, which makes me reluctant to pursue it unless it results in some quality fun. The idea is still gestating in my brainfolds, but the basic concept is that players could influence the actual founding site of the colony in such a way that it gives a bonus to their particular colonists' traits. The founding site would be represented abstractly by a set of traits on three parallel tracks. Players could task Colonists to move the tracks up/down/around, ideally lining up all three tracks in such a way that it closely matches one or more of their Colonists. Having the one Colonist that exactly matches the founding site will grant a victory point bonus, bragging rights, and the rights to name the Colony.

We'll see if it is worthwhile.

Flavor Art and Text

The first run of Starship Rex will feature my own artwork and graphic design.  This means drawing, maybe painting, 80 unique portraits for the Colonist cards.  Not to mention the Map Tiles and Bequeathment (power-up) Cards.

The other morning, I cranked out about nine of the Colonists as an exploration, trying to hone in on the style I'd like to use for the whole run.  Need something simple, but nuanced.  Want to make the faces of these Colonists interesting enough to bear repeated long-term viewings, and to all seem part of the same future world.  Once I get on a roll, I think I may be able to get through 10 portraits a day, taking about two work weeks to get them all into a finished state.

The Colonist Cards

Once I had some passable drawings, I immediately wanted to see them on a card.  I mocked up a template for the Colonist Card and put a few portraits in place.  Here are the results:

Four colonists of varying traits with portrait, name and flavor text.

All the usual disclaimers I do hereby spout: this is temporary art, nowhere near final trait icons, all names subject to change, any resemblance to persons living, dead or yet-to-be-born is news to me.

I picked the trait icon sets at random from actual cards and then picked a portrait mostly at random.  The name and flavor text easily flowed as I imagined a character based on the trait combinations.  Jesonyld Vankwesh has, roughly, the traits: agriculture, impetuousness and scientific-method.  It seemed appropriate for him to be taking such a whimsical leap of faith.  Miss Telekronos has: medical, creative and romantic.  And so on.  My hope is that the combination of portraits, non-specific icons and evocative flavor text will greatly improve players' enjoyment of the game.  Not just the one-time newness of learning about characters, but also imagining them together in a colony or on this starship.  How will their desires, goals and impulses intermix on an isolated world?  Maybe it'll just be reality TV with bubble helmets.

The traits serve two purposes.  One is mechanical.  The traits are the primary means of getting points at the end of the game.  The traits represented in the hotly selected colony council are the traits you score with by keeping one rescued colonist in your hand as the "chosen agent" of your secret agenda.  The other purpose of traits is to provide flavor, which hopefully provides story-telling hooks for the players as the game progresses and after the game concludes.

On Printing

I'm beginning to get hard quotes from various printing houses that cater to indie board game developers.  It's looking like I may be able to get the game down to $30.00 if I can economically forge the three-dimensional game pieces or talk myself into going all-cardboard.  I really don't want to do cardboard chits.  I want the robots, at least, to be figurines -- even if I have to go with wooden robo-meeples.  To make that happen, I thought about making molds and pressing the figures myself.  Insanity.  Maybe those hand-crafted parts, and the original artwork for the cards, will be the high-level KickStarter backer rewards.  In any case, I want to have the printer and parts specs locked in by the end of this month.  Wish me luck.

First Playtest

Mirth and merriment at the first Starship Rex playtest.
That's me on the far left. Photo by Will Lewis of PIGSquad.

The first sanity check playtest of Starship Rex was more helpful than I dared anticipate.  The colony council voting system stood up to scrutiny, but the original movement rules were stifling the pace of the game.  A big thank you to the PIGSquad members who were my playtesters -- Milan, Justin, Michael, Jeffrey, Sasha and Ryan -- who put up with abbreviated sessions, shifting rulesets, nameless colonists and unproven systems.

We played two abbreviated games in those three hours at Lucky Labrador.  Those sessions were much longer than the 30 minutes per that I intend for the finished game.  A playtest with new players automatically triples the play time, for sure, but the major element killing the pace of the game was how I had created the "robot action points".

The bulk of this post refers to specific rules of the game, which I realize might make little sense to those who haven't played it or read the rules.  Read on if you're interested in how playtesting helped me shape some core rules.  Suffice it to say, the process was encouraging and inspiring.  Contact me if you're in Portland, Oregon and would like to be a part of upcoming playtests.

Robomotion

The original draft of the rules stated that a player's robot may spend three actions per turn.  Available actions were moving one square, picking up a stasis pod and dropping off a stasis pod.  Each cost one action to perform.  Looked good on paper and in my solo plays where I wasn't a good judge of pace.  But in a game with four brains at work, spending three or more turns moving a robot from one end of the map to the other to drop off stasis pods was tedious and killed the pacing.

A potential solution occurred to me immediately: allow the robot to move any number of squares in a straight line by spending all their action points.  We didn't get a chance to fully test that change in the rules, but there was a consensus among the testers that it would be a welcome adjustment and that it thematically makes sense with "how a robot might move".  In rewriting the rules document, I modified the rule even more:


Robot action. Spend 2 Action Points (AP) for robot. Each of the following actions costs 1 AP:

• Move robot in a straight line until it reaches its target square. Cannot move through Creep if carrying any Stasis Pods. Cannot move through squares containing another robot. Cannot move through walls (duh). Cannot move into special map tiles (e.g. MORGUE). Must stop at unexplored edge of map.
• Move robot into unexplored map tile.
• Extract Pod from alcove adjacent to robot
• Drop Pod at bay adjacent to robot. Assess DROP-OFF.

Creep feature

Another rule that has been drastically altered as a result of Saturday night's playtest relates to what happens when Creeps attack the robots.  

Creeps are humans that are affected by what I'm calling "stasis anomalies" while in their pods on the ship.  Something happened to their stasis fields which turned them into trans-dimensional crazy ghosts, existing as entities smeared across dimensions/times.  Ghost zombies.  Anyway, they can only affect things inside stasis fields, such as pods the robots carry from the pod-alcoves to the special rooms of the starship.  

The rule was that, when a Creep attacked a robot, it knocked a pod from its inventory to the floor of the starship.  If that pod contained another Creep, waiting to break out, that Creep was immediately unleashed.  Otherwise, we tracked where on the map the pod was dropped and set the card for it to the side of the map.  Messy business with no real coordinate system.  I wasn't happy with the implementation of this.  Didn't want to add more pieces to help track these dropped pods.  In practicality, the attacked robots just picked up the pod again on their next turn -- resulting in only a minor inconvenience.

To alleviate the mess of tracking fallen pods, I changed the rule to make Creeps much more fearsome.  Instead of knocking a pod off the robot, the Creeps absorb a pod, removing the colonist inside from the game entirely.  Can't wait to see how that one playtests.

Energy drain

The "timer" of the game manifests as a slow depletion of energy from the starship.  When energy runs out, all colonists hop on lifeboats and flee to the surface of a nearby habitable moon or planet.  During Saturday's playtests, the energy drain was constant, though I changed the rate between games.  We never implemented the convoluted rules I'd written about rescued colonists powering down map tiles to save energy.  I immediately recognized the ideas I had about that were unwieldy and would (1) add little to the fun of the game and (2) add a lot of overhead.

However, I still like the idea of a flexible count-down clock.  I also like the idea of putting rescued colonists to work for you.  So I axed all the old colonist range/actions rules and cards related to them, and came up with another approach.  In my current rules, rescued colonists can be assigned to different tasks on a player's turn.  One of those tasks is "energy efficiency".  Each colonist "tapped" to work on energy efficiency will slow down the rate of energy drain.

Colonists may also be tapped to be on security squads that can stun a Creep, or tapped to work on monitoring pod systems to better a player's odds at getting the type of pod they want.  I'm excited to playtest this system too.  It feels far more elegant than what I had before.

Preparing to Playtest

Readable rules

Early version of Robot pawn.

Spent this morning refreshing the rules of Starship Rex to assure they're consistent and readable by other English-speakers.  This was a good exercise and helped me pare out a few extraneous rules by anticipating the "why's" for them.  I'm preparing for my first major play-test on Saturday night and I want to be able to pass around the rules to gauge readability and logic.

The play-test will be in Portland, Oregon, piggy-backing on an informal meeting of a local game developer group called Portland Indie Game Squad (PIGSquad).  The group is primarily video-game focused, but when I mentioned bringing my proto-game to test, there were enthusiastic up-thumbs.

Traits in Code

Using JavaScript to generate card sheets on the fly.

The colonists in the game each have three traits, one from each of three different categories.  The number of items in each of these categories is hovering around four, but they're far from set in stone.  The thought of making the card sets by hand each time I change the contents of these categories for testing was daunting, so I wrote a little JavaScript helper that would allow me to change the traits arbitrarily and regenerate all the card combinations in less than a second.  I can easily convert this page into a PDF for printing, or to mail around to remote play-testers.

Naming those traits has also been a sticky issue, and I'm not completely happy with the list I have now.  Not sure if or when I will be.  At this stage of play-testing, since I just want to prove out the abstract mechanics of the game,  I decided to replace the trait names with vague pixel art icons.  The JavaScript I wrote made this very easy.  Hooray for scripting and CSS!  Hopefully, the players won't dwell too much on the icons, but if they do, they'll get a little taste of the flavor I hope to present in the more developed versions of the game.

Ultimately, I'd like the trait names to be evocative, but still open to interpretation.  Right now, they end up with combinations like "Authoritarian, Diplomatic, Farmer".  Can you imagine what type of person that would be on a new off-world colony?

Let's hear it forum!

A few days ago, I posted a thread on BoardGameGeek about the bidding/voting mechanic from Starship Rex's end-game.  The purpose was to explore any details or gotchas I might be missing, especially with the mathematics of the vote.  The responses I've been getting are very helpful, especially in illuminating the dilemma of how the "conspiracy" element will play when there are only two players.  The thread has also pointed out a few other space colonization games I'd love to sink my teeth into.  Sincere thanks to everyone contributing to the thread.

I scream social

In an effort to ramp up visibility for what will soon be a crowd-funding campaign to print the game, I set up the requisite Facebook page for Starship Rex, and a Twitter account for n-state Games -- @nstateGames.  Twoot me up or likenate me or something, I seek validation!  Oh, and since you're likely a board game geek, if not a BoardGameGeek, you can find me on BGG as "edsito".

Starship Rex

Nomenclature

I've changed the working title of my board game from Awakener to Starship Rex.  The original title was a good placeholder as I worked on the details, but I think the new one is more in line with the tone I want. Plus, it has personal homages, a pun and a double-meaning all wrapped up in a nice memorable package.

The "rex" part refers, in part, to the "king" of the colony, the ultimate winner of the game.  I'll let you figure out the pun on your own.

Winning

I mentioned the end-game in my previous post, and that the traits of each survivor colonist will play a part in tallying scores at the end of the game.  My current idea, which I've only tested on paper, is that there will be a "political tumult" at the end of the game, with each player spending colonists and glory points as influence to set up the final ruling council of the colony.  Each player will have an ideal set of three traits, secret from the other players, that they want to see appear as many times as possible in the traits of council members.  To this end, the players will take turns nominating one of their colonists to positions on the council.  Following that, a bidding war will ensue to vote for or against this nomination.  Colonists are spent, as are glory points won by venting Creeps during the rescue phase of the game.

Once the end game is reached -- likely when all but one player is out of colonists to spend or nominate -- the scores are tallied.  Traits on the council are added up, one point per occurrence.  So if "scientific" appears three times, 3 points is awarded to each player with "scientific" on their list of three traits.  Extra victory points given for left-over glory and colonists.  The winner becomes the "king" of the colony, with the council helping to provide the "story" of the colony.  Each character card will feature some flavor text that describe how that character would shape the final colony's future.  For example, some colonists would be interested in an agrarian utopia, while others would hope to set up a vibrant mercantile port.  The combination of the council and leader would seed the story in the minds of the players and they'd have a fiction to discuss at the end of the game.  Or they could just ignore it and start a new game.

Fate

It should be mentioned that my current approach for determining the "secret traits" for each player is to make the first survivor colonist they rescue be their "leader".  So, when the robot controlled by the player picks up a stasis pod, the character card drawn is kept face-down on their inventory card.  Once a player has rescued a leader, the character cards they pick up will be public information.

The fiction of this is that the robot is programmed to rescue the leader first, at all costs.  Works for me.

Map constraints

Placeholder sculpey guys demonstrate the opening move
of player one -- exploring a new tile that has two pod-closets
in it.  Each robot has three actions, that move was one. It can
now move two more times, potentially exploring another tile,
or pick up a pod and move (or move and pick up a pod).

Up until a couple of days ago, I was considering the map a constrained square with the MED BAY, AIR LOCK, MORGUE, and START POINT all on the perimeter.  Then I was showing the game to a nearly-3 year old and simplified it by allowing the map to simply grow organically... and really liked how it felt.  It simplifies the set-up and pack-in pieces (no board, or border-pieces) and emphasizes the exploration aspect of the game.  The map tiles are very simple, with only 0, 1 or 2 squares of 4 designated as walls/stasis-closets.  This means the robots can always move into a new tile if they decide to explore off the "edge" of the map.  To keep the special rooms from coming up immediately, they will be shuffled into the stack only after placing a stack of 5 "vanilla" map tiles to the side.  Those 5 tiles, guaranteed to be not-rooms, will be placed back on top of the map-tile stack.  This gives the players (2 to 4 of them) room to spread out before encountering drop-off locations.

Printing

Now that I have a pretty good idea about the pieces I'll need for the game, I've made some inquiries at printing companies for price quotes.  I'll be needing 30-50 double-side full-color chipboard tiles, at least 2" square, over 100 playing cards in full-color, an 8-16 page instruction manual and a full-color box to hold it all together.  I'm investigating other options for the counters, sculpted robots and "creep" figurines.  Ideally, I'd like to have the entire production done in the Portland, Oregon area -- but the two major contenders are now companies in Indiana (Package Right) and New York (Superior POD).

Onward

I'll need some of those printing quotes before I launch my KickStarter campaign.  Until then, I'll be rounding up people to help me play-test the rules I have and I'll be drawing portraits of colonists in an effort to narrow down the look of the character cards.  At the moment, I'm planning to do all the art myself -- though I fantasize about having enough money to pay other character artists to work their magic.  In any case, I'll have more art to showcase next time!

The Birth of Awakener

Whenever I play a good game, I'm inspired to make one of my own.  I imagine we're all like that in some way -- we read a good story, see some awesome artwork, hear a moving piece of music, and we want to do it for ourselves.  This first manifested for me in drawings and writing, and then in developing scenarios and maps -- oh the maps -- for Dungeons & Dragons sessions.

But that's history, let's talk about the present.

This blog has been created to journal my game development endeavors in both tabletop and computer games.  My current project is a board game that has the working title "Awakener".  It is an exploration of the concept of a robot on board a starship that must wake the humans from stasis to deal with an imminent calamity.  Some of the humans are fine, but others have died in their stasis pods.  And some are not quite... human anymore. 

The idea started as a concept for a rogue-like computer game.  The board game arose from a desire to "paper prototype" that idea.  As I pushed bottle caps and cardboard around the table, I started to think of it as more of a board game, so I decided to go with it.  Hopefully, the process of developing the board game will help me when I make the computer game. 

The board for Awakener is tile-based and emerges piece-by-piece to define the corridors and of the starship.  These tiles will also define the alcoves in which the stasis pods are stored.  The robots pick up pods and attempt to deliver them to the correct areas of the starship -- morgue for the dead, medbay for the living, airlock for the creeps (the once-human monsters).  Creeps in pods will escape eventually, so getting them to the airlock is priority.  

For the majority of the game, players are taking turns moving their robots around the board, collecting survivors and disposing of the rest.  The more survivors collected, the more influence the player has on the game board state.  Survivors can lash out of the medbay to stun creeps or toggle power to map tiles.  With each turn, power drains from the ship based on how many map tiles are active.  This drain can be slowed by selectively powering down tiles -- which destroys all pods in that tile and makes the tile impassable to any living creature (creeps and colonists).

There is a cooperative nature to this first, major, part of the game because a minimum number of survivors must be rescued to make the resulting colony viable.  Everyone's racing against the clock in a way.

To add flavor and an interesting end-game, each colonist is given a unique "card" with a portrait, brief description and, most importantly, a set of traits.  These traits come from a common pool and play a big part in how scores are tallied in the end and define the "story" of the colony that emerges.

But more on that later, after I've had time to get a dozen or so playtests in.

For now, I'll leave you with a glimpse of my prototyping materials in action --

Sculpey, bottle caps, beads and 2x2 square-punched frozen pizza-boxes.

[Edit: Attention!  The game's name has changed to Starship Rex.  Carry on.]