After many play tests and rule changes, we finally finished our board game project. In our case it turned out to be a pure card game. During the process of creating this game we learned many lessons about game design, what is fun and how theoretic assumptions work out in the real world. In the following few lines I want to point out the most important ones.
The Play Tests
During the creation of the game we had several play tests going on. In most cases we tested the game among our self to figure out the right balance of numbers and resource income. But we also had play tests with people outside of the project – and those where really valuable. First of all people who have never played your game before, have a completely different approach to it and new strategies emerge you might never thought of. It’s really important to have big diversity among your play testers, but on the other hand it also turned out that an experiences group of players is very valuable. We had one group who played our game nearly from the beginning on and that was very important to us, because it allowed us to see how players push the game rules to their limits to gain the maximum out of them. Also it was very easy to try our new a complex rules with them, because they already knew the basics. Nevertheless novice players are important as well, because they help you keep an eye on accessibility.
Emotions are Fun
One of the most important things we learned, was that emotions regardless of what type they are, are simply fun. It doesn’t matter whether the player is upset or happy as long as she feels something. We figured that out because, one of our event cards – the robbery – got really popular. Basically this card is about stealing resources from the other player and rolling a dice determines if you steals from the other player or she steals from you. The malicious joy you get by completely ripping of the other player is just tremendous satisfying. Similar things happen with the war event, where all players have to pay a high amount of resources Every time someone draws that card one is able to hear a long “Nooooo” among the players. The opposite effect occurred with the peace card, where players gain a high amount of resources. The joy is even bigger when the peace card at the end of an era just gives you the one resources needed to prevent you from getting kicked out of the game.
Teamwork is Fun
When a war occurred, in most cases players start to act cooperatively to get rid of the war (a good lesson between the lines), by offering the player who has drawn that event resources to prevent it. This kind of cooperative behaviour was really interesting and added an additional social aspect to the game. As preventing a war is non-exclusive (if it’s prevented no one has to pay regardless if the player has helped to prevent it or not) it adds some additional strategy possibilities. Should I help and may build a good relations ship to the other players, or should I follow a more aggressive strategy and saving my resources. After we added the rule that you can prevent events, we realized that war will never occur, because it is always cheaper to prevent it. Therefore we added the rule that you can only get the chance to prevent a war as you have to roll a dice now. This also added some extra emotions to the game. We thought that more possibilities of teamwork would improve the experience of the game. At that time we also had a problem regarding the final outcome of the game. Often there was a player far ahead and it was clear that she will win the game – which is just boring for everyone. Therefore we decided to give the player the opportunity to team up against another player. This way poor players can form an alliances against a rich player and catch up with him during the game, which creates more close outcomes. Basically we didn’t have to change the rules much, we just allowed players if they form an alliance to look in each others cards to plan their building order cooperatively. We were also thinking about trading building cards on hand, but we decided against it because the advantage of alliances would be too strong.
The Maths
During the play test sessions we did recordings of the resource shifts, especially in the early stages. The problem was we constantly changed the rules, so we couldn’t us all statistics together to get some reliable values out of them. In most cases simple mathematical assumptions predicted the game play outcome pretty well. During the creation of the game many interesting conflict scenarios emerges. Game theoretical models of those conflicts, helped us to predict certain outcomes and tweak the game mechanics and avoid dominant strategies. One of the most interesting conflict scenarios was that one between cooperative and aggressive players when trading. This scenario could be modelled as social evolutionary version of the hawk and dove game. Game theory predicted that in average there will be 50% of aggressive players in a group of players during a game. Also when the group of players is to 100% aggressive they will face the worst outcome of the game. This has been confirmed during play tests.
a... Percentage of Aggressive players
APOa... Average pay-off of an aggressive player
APOp... Average pay-off of a passive player
APOa = a * -1 + (1 – a) * 2 = 2 – 3a
APOp = a * 0 + (1 – a) * 1 = 1 – a
APOa = APOp → 2 – 3a = 1 – a → a = ½ = 50%
Critics and Future Stuff
One of our biggest problems I think is accessibility. The game is about numbers, economics and resource management and those are topics which are not very easy to get into it. Once you got into the game you may different strategies emerge and every game is different. The problem is the first game where people have to pick it up. Some where just overwhelmed with the rules and the resource management. One future idea to improve this would be to start of with just a fraction of the rules and try to add in more rules during play. This would increase the complexity of the game dynamically. Also we were thinking of adding more social and team elements to the game. As the most popular card was robbery, but we just had that one type. We were thinking of adding a charity card which would somehow force the richer players to help poor players. This would also result in narrower victories.