Category: General

Categories
General Waltz of Fireflies

How to Sing

The one contest I still had an entry riding in was the 40th Boulogne-Billancourt designer Contest. My entry “Waltz of Fireflies” was a retheming and simplification of an older project.

No success this time either. There were 124 entries from which 30 proceeded from the “rules-reading” stage to the next “playtesting” stage.

I have been participating in different design contests for years with effectively no success. While the time I have for these projects is limited, I have had a longer design time span to somewhat make up the handicap. So why do these designs stay on the ground? To get some new ideas and perspective, I have lately been reading “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. The main question posed in the book is how a small movement becomes a big one… and how small insignificantly seeming things might cumulate to make the difference. The book has rather interesting examples and it is a light read, so I sincerely recommend it.

Looking backward, probably one of the reasons is my design goal of making more or less straightforward solid designs… while the “market” is overcrowded with solid designs already. Like the “Waltz of Fireflies” has its own uniques tweaks but nothing that special. I think I’ll have to raise my design aim from solid-and-good to extraordinary. So that the design “sticks” with those who have read about it. I’ll also need to be reaching out more since ultimately designing (and getting somewhere) is a numbers game: you’ll need to put in the hours and have enough mass to start an avalanche. YODEL-OH-EE-DEE!

Categories
General

Time Flies

So much to do… and so little time. Of course, this applies to life besides board game designing as well: the day job is carried out, bills get paid, groceries get bought (or delivered, as I use online order and home delivery nowadays), kids get schooled, baby gets entertained (and restricted for his own safety), home fixes/tunings are done, housing company shores are fulfilled… and one shouldn’t forget spending some time with your loved ones too, as that’s what ultimately matters the most.

One reoccurring topic in Board Game Design Lab podcast is that one can not manage time, but one can manage itself. Scheduling time to work on something and holding on to that schedule would be the key. Another time-related thought out there and recurring on BGDL podcast as well: “not having time” for a thing just means that there was something else more important… or more likely that the thing just wasn’t important enough in the first place.

When I started writing this blog I set a personal goal to write something once a week or so in order to keep projects moving on… but last week I wasn’t happy with this text at that point, so I didn’t post it (I probably started working on the text a bit too late). Things take time… so the lesson would be to book that time instead of just swinging it. Hence—In Schedule we trust.

Categories
General

Who Would Play This

I have been thinking about Community Anthology Challenge at The Game Crafter quite a bit… but time surely flies (40 days in this case) when you’re busy advancing other designs. Well… there’s still 70 days left to make the magic happen.

As the contest format is two sheets of paper and a predetermined component set, I’d like to proceed with two designs so that I could use both sides of the two allowed sheets. And I kind of have two concepts I’m pondering about currently:

The upper one is a turn-based abstract game in which players try to get rid of their all components. The lower one is a racing game with simultaneous action selection. The problem is that I doubt either of these designs would stand out currently from the flock… but as a design challenge perhaps they don’t need to. I guess this would be a good moment to design something, which my older kids (6 years and 8 years) would like to play… so to the juvenility, and beyond!

Categories
General Staking the Throne

Everybody was tie-breaking

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!