Not so long time ago a had a pitching session with Ravensburger. It went rather badly (perhaps that’s a topic for another post). One of the games I pitched was Staking the Throne. It finally dawned on me while I was trying to explain to the editor that “the game is rather simple” — the prototype had a big problem with its rules.
The Google doc of the rules had 8 pages. There were examples with illustrations, so it wasn’t that dense… but still for a filler game which takes 20-30 minutes that is a lot. So I pondered over the design’s mechanisms… what can be cut, simplified, or altered for clarity:
- The design featured “double-blind-bidding”: you made a blind bid (with a card) to qualify to make another blind bid (with a dial) to actually score some points… since the first bid was effectively just to single out the last player, I decided this wasn’t worth the hassle.
- The rounds “crew bigger” and evened out tiebreaking… but this was done awkwardly, which complicated both the setup and the gameplay. With some tinkering, I could achieve the same effects in a more straightforward fashion.
- Letting players have “infinite Gold”. Previously Gold was one resource to players to manage, but handling accidental overbidding was an annoyance. And with the limited Gold it was necessary to distribute Gold back to the players every now and then (i.e., effectively a bookkeeping shore).
- I added a unique tie breaker number on the bidding cards. This makes the components per player asymmetric and possibly slightly unbalanced… but this should be fine as long as they are perceived fair (although I’m sobbing a bit within). I did scale up the bidding a bit to make ties less likely.
In the end, I think, the playing time was shaved and the rules were effectively halved. So it took one bad pitching session for me to be “pushed” to make changes that probably should have been done a long time ago… hence… to the playtesting grounds and beyond!
