Author: jantteri

In games with simultaneous actions, it is often necessary to determine what happens first and to whom. I’ve got a bit of a personal case study in the subject known as “Staking the Throne”. The core of the design—simultaneous blind bidding and set collection—has persisted, but pretty much everything else has shifted back and forth during the years:

• “v0.1 Profiteers (2015)” was the very first version of the game: The players were allowed to choose when to win a tie or whether to save that possibility for later. The ties were common, so this slowed down the gameplay considerably.
• “v1.0/v2.0 Roar for the Throne (2015)” had basically the same thing for ties, but players were forced to cash in their possibilities.
• “v3.0 Symboletto (2016)” is the only published version of the game… well… if you count a small print run of 70 copies as “published”. The tie-breaking was streamlined a bit, but effectively this was still the same (i.e., check who won, update the order afterward). The bigger changes were in other mechanics, which reduced the number of ties quite a bit.
• “v4.0/v5.0 Bets and Bids (2018)” had no changes with respect to tie-breaking.
• “v6.0/v7.0 Staking the Throne (2020)” had ties broken by unique value (eliminating the need to update the tie-breaker).
• “v8.0 Staking the Throne” has no tie-breaking! This was enabled by having differents tracks for points as well as for sets, so now rewards could be given to all players involved.

The journey has been rather long, starting from a clunky solution to an issue, which in the end turned out not to even exist. This actually reminds me of a Ravensburger game design video I watched recently, in which one piece of advice was to “Instead of adding stuff to cope with something, fix the underlying issue.”

Getting back to the topic: In my humble opinion, there should not be tie-breaking during gameplay, as it breaks the game flow, complicates rules, and could be unfair. For instance, tossing a coin gets the job done, but that would not have anything to do with the game. And sometimes you need to break and shake things around until they fall into positions, which allow you to get through neatly. So join with me: No more ties! No more ties! No more ties!

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!