One goal I have for all of the games I design is to keep things simple. That's a great motto and is useful to keep me on track, but some recent changes in my card game have made me realize that there's a lot of ways to simplify a game and sometimes simplifying a game in one way will complicate it in another.
One of the goals of my card game is to make it cheap to produce. If I can keep the card count at or below 99 cards, then I can put the game in a smaller and cheaper box. So I've constantly been on the lookout for ways to cut down on the number of cards the game requires. At first, the game had a whole lot of simultaneous actions taking place, which required everyone to place cards face down to select said actions. For one phase of the game, there were 4 different options players had, so they each had 4 cards. The game was designed for up to 10 people (another goal of the game was a large player count), which meant that phase of the game cost me 40 cards immediately. There is also a phase where three players vote for other players, so there are three stacks with 10 cards in each, which puts my card count at 70. This means that if I wanted to stay under 100 cards, players would only have 29 cards to actually play the game with, which is way too few.
Also, after numerous playtests, I was starting to see a trend that that first phase was confusing to a lot of players and there wasn't as much strategy involved in it as I had expected. So after some careful consideration, I cut that phase of the game. This saved me 40 cards and made the flow of the game simpler. However, every decision has its costs and cutting that phase ended up making the game take a lot longer to play (which I knew was going to happen) and it took out a lot of strategy from other portions of the game (which I didn't foresee). So by simplifying the flow of the game and reducing the card count, I introduced two large problems that needed to be fixed.
I'm still working on fixing these issues and a couple others (and the game seems to be getting farther from print to play rather than closer), but this has made me realize that I should be just as wary and careful about making the game simple as I am about making the game complicated.
Having never played your game, nor even read rules for it, let me make a suggestion :-)
ReplyDeleteIf that first phase is confusing to players, but removing it makes things take too long, perhaps you can change the starting state of the game to reflect a game AS THOUGH the first phase has already been played.
I'm sure you thought of it. Give me some rules. I'll fix it for you.
I was planning on posting rules and a print and play version, but the game is going through some changes, so I have to delay that plan.
DeleteMy solution was to further simplify the first phase by cutting 2/3 of it (the confusing and less interesting/strategic portions). Not quite eliminating it entirely because it is an important part of the game.