Mostly Game

The “Themed Rummy Design Contest” over at BGG just completed. There were 24 designs entered by the Dec 7, 2009 deadline, including three from me (Wu Xing Rummy, Nobles of Venice, and Cold War Rummy) and one from Brian (WW2 in Europe Rummy). Preliminary judges graded the games and chose nine finalists, announced in January, including CWR and WW2. These finalists were then sent to Mike Fitzgerald, a well-known and respected game designer (in gaming circles, anyway) of many card and board games, as the final judge.

Yesterday, the contest sponsor, Cate108 on BGG, announced the results. Mike (and his playtest team?) graded the games on four criteria — rules (10 points), concept (10 points), creative elements (40 points) and gameplay (40 points). Brian’s WW2 game finished ninth overall and my CWR game finished second overall. The top three were actually very close in points:

WILD KINGDOM = 70 points total

• Rules = 7, Concept = 8, Creative elements = 30, Game play = 25

COLD WAR RUMMY = 68 points total

• Rules = 8, Concept = 10, Creative elements = 25, Game play = 25

GASTON GAME = 66 points total

• Rules = 8, Concept = 8, Creative elements = 30, Game play = 20*
• * GASTON GAME would get more points as a game to be played with small children, which is its target audience. This ranking is as a game between adults

I emailed Mike just to say thanks for judging the contest and got a nice reply back from him:

Thank you for letting me see one of your designs. Very creative and playable. I love Twilight Struggle as well but would never have been able to come up with a card game like you did.

I also received very good feedback on all three of my games from my first round judge, Sean Ross (of the Game Artisans of Canada). I will probably tweak all of them eventually, but for now I’m focusing on CWR as it is my favorite game of the bunch and had the best feedback from multiple sources. In fact, I already took some suggestions from Sean and have ordered 21 replacement cards from Artscow for updated cards in the next version. I plan to playtest them here and then send them to Dan’s gang down in Austin for more external playtesting.

Oh, this contest also had awards. My second place finish was worth $30 and 70 GG (geekgold, a virtual currency on BGG). This brings my lifetime design income to $280:

• 4GxG Project = $100 for a winning mechanic.
• Small World contest = $150 for a winning special power.
• Rummy contest = $30 for second place.

Not that I’ll ever make much at this, but I like to think this offsets some of the costs of paper, cardstock, ink, blades, bits and components, etc. I’m excited about working CWR up to the point of publication, be that via a publisher or a POD/self-published route (being ideal for that as a card game).

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Yeah, I’ve got a gimp wrist right now. Carpal tunnel or RSI or whatever… it’s my own fault. I’ve been writing a lot of documentation and reports the last couple weeks at work, plus I’ve been typing like a mad man on game design. It’s not just a matter of over-doing it, though, I think it’s also when I don’t sit properly and/or type with the laptop in an awkward position.

Now my wrist hurts quite a bit. I’m sitting with my forearms flat on the table so I don’t have my wrist at a funny angle (”It was at a funny angle!”), and I’ve been dosing up on ibuprofen and staying away from the Xbox. I just can’t stop working on game design, though. I might have to type one-handed for a while, or maybe switch to a notebook while working early stuff.

Ugh, so annoying.

You know, having more than one blog is giving me existential headaches, at least in terms of writing. I have this personal blog, which has no real theme, and then I also share a game design blog with Brian over at Royal Steamwork Society (RSS). I’ve even jumped on the Facebook bandwagon not too long ago, which is sort of a miniblog, really. When I have something I want to share, sometimes I don’t know where to put it, heh.

Take, for example, a recent contest run by publisher Days of Wonder for their game Small World. Looking back, I see I only posted about that over on RSS and not here. Anyway, they officially announced the winners today and I am pleased to announce that I am one of them! They awarded 3 grand prizes, 1 special prize, and 9 secondary prizes, and I am a recipient of one of the secondary prizes for my special power “Historian.” The prize itself is $150 and 12 copies of the mini-expansion containing my idea, but really, the thrill of seeing my name in print and getting emails and phone calls from CEO Eric Hautemont is worth way more, haha.

Now if we could just get a full game published in the near future, we’d be rocking.

I may have made passing reference to a couple computer programs I use, Dropbox and Debrief, so I thought I’d post about them.

Dropbox is a file sync’ing utility. There is a small install on each computer you want to share/sync files between, and then Dropbox loads from your Startup folder. It creates a folder called “My Dropbox” inside “My Documents” and everything inside that folder is automatically replicated up to the Dropbox website and, from there, replicated back to every other Dropbox client that has access to that folder. Folders are private, unless you share them with other Dropbox users.

I have a private folder where I keep some miscellaneous documents, resumes, etc. I mainly use it for my game design documents, though. I often work on them from different computers and it’s nice having it “locally” available in the same folder structure on whichever computer I’m using. Also, since it is saved on the web server, I can even grab files from any web browser without having the client installed; you can also upload directly to the web server and it will then replicate to the other clients.

Me and the guys also have a couple shared folders. We have one specifically for joint RSS projects or notes, and one where we share things like patches, FAQs, game utilities, character/campaign notes for RPGs, etc. It’s very handy. Hm, in fact, I think I need to get the D signed up so we can share some documents easier; it’s very handy for use between work and home, for instance.

This also servers as a simple, light backup solution. The Dropbox server keeps X previous copies of the files stored there (I can’t recall off the top of my head); I’ve gone to the web site to redownload a couple files I’d deleted a few days earlier and decided I needed back.

The basic Dropbox account is free and comes with 2.0 GB of storage. You can upgrade to a pro account that runs $10/month for 50 GB, or $20/mo for 100 GB. You can also earn 250 MB for referrals; the links in this post include my referral code, so if you try it out, try it via my link so I get some extra space out of it, heh (I just use the free account, so I’m currently at 2.25 GB of space, which is plenty for my design projects).

The other utility I use a lot now is Debrief. I already wrote about this once over on the RSS blog when I was first looking for a note utility. I ended up purchasing the Pro version of the application. For all versions, you can install it like a regular app, or you can get the “portable” version which does not require an install — perfect for simply running it off a USB drive or, in my case, my Dropbox folder. Between the two, I have easy access to all my offline game design documents and notes from any computer with a web connection, and everything is sync’d between my PC, my laptop, and any other computer I decide to work on.

I think note-taking or brainstorming software is subject to very personal tastes, but if you read the other post I made about Debrief’s features and want to try it out, it does have a free, full-featured 30 day trial. (Unfortunately, no referral program for them, heh.)

We’ve had our first official game design challenge in the Game Design Concepts class. I don’t think the class forums are open to the public, and I don’t want to double-post, so I’m going to be pasting my class work over on the Royal Steamwork Society blog rather than here.

We also got in a package of prototypes from the Flywheel guys down in Austin, so hopefully we can start playing those tonight or this weekend.

Rock on!

A game design teacher named Ian Schreiber has launched a free online class called Game Design Concepts. He comes primarily from a video-game background, but the class is supposed to aim at fundamentals of game design irrespective of the medium, and all assignments are non-digital. He’s got a class blog, forums and wiki set up and I’m very excited about participating.

There’s also homework, some of which I need to complete before tomorrow’s “lesson” is posted, heh.

Someone linked me to the Alice and Kev blog the other day. A British game design student named Robin Burkinshaw is running an “experiment” in the game Sims 3. He created a man and his daughter, gave him the traits of inappropriate and insane, and made them homeless — they live in a park, they don’t have any income and must scrounge for food, or in Alice’s case, eat at school when possible.

Anyway, the writer does some literary interpretation of the events in the game, and of course is able to influence certain things if he wants, but all in all, it’s a very fascinating look into simulating something probably not intended in the game originally. And, it very likely will make you think a bit.

Highly recommended.

Brian and I are really getting more serious with our game design this year, apparently. We’re getting active in the monthly Game Design Showdown, and the forums in general, over on BGDF. We’ve resumed our weekly game design night (Thursdays at Fuddruckers, heh). We’re in the middle of a brainstorming/development exercise. We’re getting ready to send some prototypes to the Flywheel guys for playtesting. Brian actually has two games under review by a fellow who works for ZMan. We’re even being more active on our Royal Steamwork Society blog.

Partially in response to a little peeve Brian has going on, we’re going to be submitting our first games to the BGG database. I’ll be posting up the rules and downloads for a little print-and-play card game called Matched Blades, in which players use identical sets of action cards to cut and thrust their way to victory over each other. I think Brian is going to be posting his game Seventh Coalition, a set-collection card game with a Napoleonic theme.

I really hope I have the right kind of game developed to the point where I can enter Hippodice this year. All my current “middle-weight” or heavier games have petered out in development lately, which is a little discouraging.

Overall, though, I feel like this is / will be a good year for us as amateur designers.

I finally finished A Feast for Crows, so I’m officially caught back up on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Not that the next one will be out any time soon…

I caught part of an interview with Jennet Conant, the author of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. Roald Dahl, author of such children’s classics as James & the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was a British spy? In the our nation’s capital? Rubbing elbows with the likes of Ian Fleming and Ernest Hemingway? Super interesting stuff, so that’s what I’m going to read next.

Plus Brian and I have been discussing wanting to tackle a historically based game design; I think a card-driven game of espionage and diplomacy in 1940s Washington, DC, could be pretty cool, so I plan to take notes as I read this thing. I may get more books on the subject afterwards. I know Brian has been reading a lot for his 18 Brumaire game, so that’s got me inspired.

All this will be in between dealing with the arrival of Caroline and ongoing wrangling of Ryan.

Brian and I are big Bowen Simmons fans. His first game (discounting a magazine-published little game years back) is Bonaparte at Marengo (BaM), depicting, unsurprisingly, the battle of Marengo in which the French fend off and defeat an Austrian surprise attack.

The biggest claim to fame of the game is what Simmons calls “The Look” of the game. Most other wargames use either hex grids or point-to-point locations that dictate unit movement and define where combat occurs. As you can see in the pic below, Simmons developed a system for BaM that uses irregularly sized and shaped locales and approaches.

A sample locale (from SimmonsGames.com)

Terrain effects are abstracted into attack penalties on the different approaches into a locale. This is technically a block game, but unlike the square blocks used by Columbia and GMT, for example, it uses narrow oblong blocks. The combination of the locale map and the narrow blocks produces “The Look” quite nicely – playing and seeing a game of BaM develop looks very much like textbook depictions of historical battles.

Photo by "Vickers" at BGG

As if this weren’t terrific enough, the combat system is totally unlike any other wargame I’ve ever played. Combat is deterministic and assaults head to head are brutal. The most common attack in BaM, at least in our experience, is something called the maneuver attack. You can attempt to move into an enemy locale and if the enemy isn’t already blocking the approach, they must move up to block or simply retreat. The problem for the defender, though, is that if you have maneuvered your units properly, you can maneuver attack from more than one direction (or threaten to), requiring the enemy to block all those approaches. If he doesn’t have anyone left to block an approach, he is forced to retreat from the locale completely, and all those pieces he moved to block approaches take losses. A big part of the game is pinning down enemy pieces in approaches and then maneuvering additional troops around to force him from the locale, all without even comparing strength or resolving a traditional assault. It’s simply brilliant.

Brian and I came late to the Bowen Simmons fan party, but I ordered a copy of his next game, Napoleon’s Triumph (NT) as soon as it came out. We finally got to play it over the holidays – even better than BaM, I think. The combat system has been standardized into a single procedure that handles all types of combat; what BaM called maneuver attack, bombard and assault as different actions, are now simply resolved within a single framework as different steps in the resolution procedure: attack threat and feint, and attacks with or without artillery leading units. Head to head attacks are now more robust and offer more options, such as counterattacking, and yet maneuvering is still an important part of the game. It’s just awesome.

Anyway, the main impetus for writing about these games is that I’ve recently started reading the design diary for his next game, The Guns of Gettysburg. To say we’re eagerly anticipating this game is inadequate. The diaries are a fascinating peek behind his design process; the first several entries are devoted just to constructing the game map and you can see the obsessive attention to detail he brings to bear. Check them out:

The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary