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Progress: Rebuilt the game board, reprinted the cards (rather than one copy of each) in B&W for cheaper home printing, found tokens for humans/blood and explained the game to several people and played some mock turns. Lastly, I wrote up a complete rules and background story sheet.
What I learned this time around…
#1) Explain Assumptions
It’s so very easy to forget which pieces of the game play, and story, have become second nature to you and thus become assumptions. Each time you run the game past new people, this actually gets worse. Don’t forget even things like: “take turns in a circle” and “roll two dice to move around the game board” …are super important to new people.
#2) Provide Visual Queues
You can add “decoration” to a game board, cards, etc. that are not directly part of the game but imply how it is played. Simple examples would be arrows or dotted lines for movement direction, this can also mean providing the aesthetic background for where the most active elements live in the game’s universe. From the beginning I put several icons on the playing cards to reinforce their meaning, as well as background colors to signal positive or negative effect. All good, but I needed to take this farther and make the game as easy as possible for new people plus provide quick tools for repeat players.
#3) Remove extraneous information
In my game there are places where some elements of the economy are not for sale. In draft one I put these items as price zero where not available which instantly confused people. Are they free here? Why are they listed? Gone.
This does conflict a bit with the above information about removing superfluous elements, however you have to make some tough calls. Ask yourself: does this marking make the game more confusing? do I need to add some decoration to help inform? Guess why this isn’t easy.
#4) The end and purpose
Every game needs an ending… or it’s definitely a one-timer. I’ve been stuck on just a specific value of “money” that needs to be reached, which does make sense in the story. However, we discussed two other models: collaborative winning (like RPG or Pandemic) or driving the other players to loose (like Monopoly or Risk.) My current model is more of race to riches, which can continue after a first winner.
It seems with a collaborative approach it’s important to have multiple goals which can tackled by different players to reach the end for the whole group, something my game doesn’t have (yet.) Driving other players out would require more scarce resources (something I just spent time trying to overcome) or some other concept of a resource to control, like land… which my game doesn’t quite have (yet.) All worth thinking about.
#5) Provide even more background
Some people love backstory. I started with a backstory and built the game from there so I’m feeling ok; however, there are still plenty of opportunities to continue. I my game there are 5 planets with different “economic characteristics” which is SUPER easy to translate into a cultual story. I’m going to work up some mythical symbols and names, which should really bring more life to the game.
That’s all for now. My todo list is full.
