Author: RogerDoger

Retired Machine Designer turned Board Game Designer

Board Games as a Negotiation (Part 1)

2023-03-31 / / 0 Comments

I recently picked up an interesting book by Herb Cohen called “You Can Negotiate Anything”. It is an in depth look at how humans negotiate, and the underlying power struggles. I originally thought that this would provide some insight into player interactions, but I began to see that it was much more than that. Not only are there occasional negotiations between players, but the interaction between each player and the game itself could be perceived as a negotiation. This shines a new light on player behavior and portrays the board game as one of the parties involved in an ongoing negotiation.

I will go through this book with you, summarizing what I believe the author is explaining, then explore how it correlates with board games. This will be my interpretation, of course, and may or may not be what the author intended. I strongly recommend reading the book yourself because it is a worthwhile journey. I hope you can get something from this slightly askew view of a self-help book.

The beginning of the book

The author opens by defining what a negotiation is. “Your real world is a giant negotiation table” is the very first line and I can definitely see this as being true with board games. That stubborn piece of cardboard in front of you, has something you want and you may have to wheel and deal to get it. Not only do you occasionally have to deal with players, but you may have to outwit the dice and cards or try to outmaneuver other players on a player board.

The author also explains that almost everything is negotiable, even certain things that we assumed weren’t. You can’t affect the result of a die after it is thrown, but can can alter the odds by choosing to throw multiple dice or deciding when to throw the dice in order to maximize your return for the risk you’re taking. This can be viewed as a negotiation between you and the game. Cards are even more subject to manipulation, or negotiation. Once you have an idea what the other players want, know what cards have been played, and know the contents of the deck, you can make a good guess as to how the cards are going to come out. This translates into a subtle shift of power to you as the cards become more and more predictable. This, in a way, is like a negotiation between you and the game, where you are gaining the upper hand.

Cohen describes the three important elements to any negotiation:

  • Information – understanding the needs of others in order to gain leverage.
  • Time – a high time investment makes people less likely to back out of a negotiation. This relates to the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”
  • Power – The actual or perceived power held by an entity in the negotiation.

All three of these are present in most tabletop games and I will explore them each further in future posts as I read this fascinating book. I hope you can enjoy it too as you follow along.

The Queued Action Pool

2023-03-12 / / 0 Comments
Queued Action Pool from the Arachnid Game

I may have been accused of losing my marbles in the past, but I’ve found a really neat way to use them this time. The mechanism shown above is what I’m calling a “Queued Action Pool”. As far as I can tell, nobody has done this yet. There have been ordered queue’s using cards in programming games like Colt Express, and many shifting queues in tableau form. There have been action pools, like the early chit-pull systems in war games, the constantly flowing marble trough in Gizmnos or the bag of actions in War Chest. This one embodies bits of all of these mechanisms, but puts them together in a new way.

In this simple action pool, each marble represents an action. The player, on their turn, can take out a marble of their color from anywhere in the trough. The remaining marbles shift down to close any gaps because the trough is angled. As the pool is depleted, colored bars representing actions are revealed triggering certain events in the game. It is easy to add more actions to the pool and to draw multiple actions out. When the track is completely empty, it could be refilled to start another phase of the game.

This simple and elegant mechanism solved a number of problems I was having with the Arachnid game. Originally, each player had their own action board and a number of action tokens to manipulate. Since Arachnid is a Cooperative game, it was necessary to keep track of other player’s boards as well as yours because events were triggered periodically based on the state of each player’s action boards. This was very confusing and hard to track. Events were being forgotten and it was so fiddley that it interrupted the game flow causing thematic breaks. No matter what I tried, the mechanics were still clunky.

I toyed with the idea of a rondel, but that didn’t give me the flexibility I needed because I also wanted to eliminate the heavily structured turn order. I experimented with shared action pool, but I needed a way to trigger events throughout the game. Finally it hit me. Why not change the action tokens to marbles and put them in a trough like in the game Gizmos. The trough, of course, would have to hold a finite amount of actions, and would work sort of like a thermometer, revealing events as the pool is depleted. This new mechanism showed the current state of the pool clearly, gave the players a way to plan for the upcoming events in the game, and cut down the administration to almost nothing. It was easy to tune as well. Just by shifting the positions of the events, I can ramp up the tension, mess with the narrative arc, and even add push-your-luck elements to the game.

The action system in Arachnid is now working like a swiss watch and I’m currently doing little happy dance. I know I’ve said this before, but it looks like I am finally at the tweaking stage of the game design. That means that I’m about 10% of the way to completion. LOL

More Better Bugs….Arachnid version-27

2023-01-24 / / 0 Comments
Arachnid Version 27 on TTS

I have finally gotten the core game loop running smoothly and revised the turn structure so that it is easier to follow. The game theme is also changed to something that fits the mechanics more closely and is a bit more palatable. The original theme of spiders triggering a nuclear war was novel and punchy, but it was an awkward fit for the game and a bit of a depressing theme. The spiders are now living in a secret military lab. They’ve grown intelligent and learned how to get along without eating each other. The “Hoover-Bot” is still getting closer and closer, threatening a “Hoovergedoon” but the spiders have gained enough intelligence to build an EMP. Can the spiders find enough spare parts and to build and trigger the EMP to destroy the Hoover-Bot?…. You’ll have to play the game to find out.

You can check out the Tabletop Playground Simulation of this game Here.

Arachnid on Tabletop Playground

You can check out the Tabletop Simulator workshop module of this game Here.

Arachnid on Tabletop Simulator

Feel free yo check it out and message me if you need me to demonstrate the game. I would love to hear your thoughts.

A trip down Denial

2023-01-07 / / 0 Comments

Pack your bags, we’re heading for a trip down “Denial”. So far, I’ve wrestled with my creative muse, wrangled with game mechanics, and tackled the near vertical learning curve of computer graphic design. I thought I had this game design gig licked until I was derailed by the insidious specter of Denial.

Recently, the design of the Arachnid game was going OK. I was at version #24 when I decided to change things up.I modified a few things to make the game more interesting, which seemed to be working. I also decided to tackle the biggest problem, quarterbacking, which can be a serious issue with cooperative games like mine. I scraped the shared tableau where players selected their actions, for individual hands of cards for each player. It would work similar to the hand of action cards in the game “Concordia”. This way, the players can manage their characters on their own, without an alpha player constantly telling them how to play. This seemed to work….sort of.

I ran through a few simulations of the game, but kept getting hung up at a certain point in the game. I would tweak a few things, then try it again, just to end up at the same impasse. I kept tweaking, and running tests, but amazingly, something would always distract me or I would discover something else that had to be fixed around the same time that the strange flaw would appear during the game. I even put the game aside for a while, hoping the flaw would somehow work itself out. I was in a serious state of denial.

It took a lot of effort and a little soul searching to finally face the fact that the game was currently broken. My new fangled solution to the quarterbacking problem just didn’t work. Reluctantly, I scraped the new card based action system and replaced it with individual player boards with worker placement spaces. Not only did this get the game back on the right track, but it proved to be a more flexible system, while still reducing the quarterbacking issues. I had wasted a great deal of time and effort because I didn’t want to admit to myself that the game was broken. It was surprisingly easy to lie to myself, rather than face the possibility of a long hard path in front of me.

Designing, whether it’s machines or board games, can be a really fun and challenging endeavor. It can also be an arduous and tiring task. Those are the times when we’re tempted to overlook the flaws or settle for something that is just barely good enough. It is important to recognize these biases that arise during a design. Taking an impartial look at your project through another person’s eyes is a simple concept but it is definitely not easy.

I’ve gotten over myself and busted through the latest wall of Denial. The design is back on track. I hope, after all of this, the game works well. I guess the players will have to decide this for themselves. Just like Martin Luther King Jr said, I just have to “keep on keeping on”.

Fix’n Moonshine Empire

2022-12-18 / / 0 Comments
Moonshine Empire on BGG

I finally got my Kickstarter copy of Moonshine Empire. The components were top notch, the artwork was good and the game tray holding the components was very handy. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t as smart as it looked.

The characters in the game were portrayed a dim-witted country yokels with teeth missing. This was a a bit too cheesy for for my taste but I was willing to overlook it if the game played well. The movement mechanism seemed really cool because you could chain together various modes of transportation for some really great plays. In reality, however, it was very difficult to accomplish any significant chain of movements. The swamp tiles, which you get to explore, looked like fun until we realized that they tend to beat up on the players and some were so punishing that they could cost you the game. The rewards for exploring these tiles were minimal, so we avoided this part of the game. Finally, the randomizing of the turn order before each round was a real pain in the butt and had a very minimal effect on game-play. Overall, the game was very mediocre.

This game had many cool items and could potentially be a lot of fun, so my wife and I decided to tweak the game to try and fix it. The first thing we did was cut out some of the components we didn’t like by removing the following:

  • “Fix a Moonshine Still” tile – this tile trapped you until you removed one of your stills. This is a game-ender if you only have one still.
  • “Find an inventor who Needs an Idea” tile – this tile traps you until you discard an upgrade card. If you don’t have one you you’re stuck until you win one at auction, just to give it away. Another game-ender.
  • “Hire a Sneaky Thief” cards – Stealing half of another player’s cash just didn’t seem like fun for us.
  • “Steal an Upgrade” cards – These didn’t seem like fun either
  • “Mix it Up” cards – These allowed a player change the player order. They just seemed ineffective and not worth bidding on.

The first thing we need to do is tweak that really cool movement mechanism. During set-up, we decided that each player will get one additional vehicle which they don’t already have and place it anywhere on the player-board on the appropriate terrain. According to the current rules, whenever a vehicle makes it to Pappy’s Tavern, it is removed from the board. Instead of this, the player who is last in player order (last to move) will place the vehicle anywhere on the board except on the outer edges. These two rules should get more vehicles in circulation, which should make for some interesting moves.

The turn order is the next item to be simplified. In the original rules, the turn order is randomized each round. This is too often for something that doesn’t seem to have a strong effect on gameplay. Why not randomize the play order at the beginning of the game then alter it each time somebody makes a delivery to Pappy’s Tavern. Whoever made the delivery would take the position at the end of the queue which will let them go first in the auction and last in movement. All of the other players will shift down to suit. This should provide enough variability in player order, reduce the administration, an opportunity for the players lagging behind to catch up.

Finally, there should also be more of an incentive to explore the Swamp Tiles. After removing the two tiles mentioned earlier, there are still three red tiles left. These tiles should be included in the other tiles used each game while setting up. Each time a player reveals a red tile, they can take an Auction card from the top of the Auction deck. This might make it more worthwhile for a player to explore and flip over the Swamp Tiles.

Hopefully these changes will make the game much more fun to play. If anybody has tried these house rules, I would love to hear how it went. Please leave your comments below.