Category: Arachnid

The spider game.

Arachnid ends up on the Scrap-Heap

2024-10-14 / / 0 Comments

After much deliberation, I finally decided to scrap this game. It just wasn’t viable in my opinion. It had many fun features but it occasionally fell flat on its face. The economy was balanced on a knife edge between scarcity and overabundance. When resources were scarce, the tension was high and the decisions were interesting, and difficult. Then the balance would shift to overabundance, resulting in a very boring game. There was also an obvious dominant strategy of keeping the web clear of Critters, which was often easy to do, since they were randomly generated at a fairly constant rate. Overall, I thing the game was too determinate, lacking the flexibility needed to handle the negative events and the fluctuations in the economy.

What I’ve Learnt

The main take from this experience was that you can’t force it. Like pushing a rope, it simply doesn’t work when you try force a game to be fun, or force it to be like some initial idealistic vision you had for the game. The harder you push, the further you tend to get from your goal. A couple recent games of mine come to mind.

The first is Nova-Raiders. It is a fast paced, dice driven, space game inspired by Backgammon. The first few attempts didn’t work well, but there was definitely a game in there somewhere. Playtesting proved this out. After a few more iterations, the game seemed fairly solid and players enjoyed playing it. I’ve recently tweaked the User Interface, modified the scoring and have tried to mitigate the arbitrary Take-That features of the game. It seems to be humming along very well. This was only possible because my core mechanics were sound and people like playing the game. The game, in a sense, was pulling me along, rather than me trying to push it. This is, I believe, the way a proper game design should work.

There are always surprises, of course. Fried dice is the second game I would like to mention. It is a simple roll and write game with an interesting dice mechanism which I came up with to entertain my young nephews. It turns out that it didn’t interest them but the adults sure had fun with it. A game could take you to unexpected places, but as long as it’s taking you somewhere, it’s probably a viable game.

The Bad, the Good and the Not so Ugly

We’ll start with the Bad:

  • The game started out competitive, but I switched it to cooperative because I couldn’t overcome the politics of one player sitting back while the other players duke it, depleting their resources. This was the wrong reason to make a cooperative game.
  • The game isn’t going anywhere until the core mechanics are solid and robust.
  • Adding more stuff doesn’t fix any problems and tends to make the game worse. I had to take a hatchet to the game and do some serious trimming down more than once.
  • Players need interesting choices, not obvious ones.
  • Mismatched mechanics that don’t reinforce the theme can cause dissonance and thematic breaks. This can ruin a good game and make a bad one worse.

Now for some Good things:

  • The marble based action selection mechanism I came up with in one iteration will make a really good core mechanism in a future game.
  • The various card based action selection mechanisms that I experimented with will definitely be useful in other games.
  • I’ve worked with many other game designers while developing this game and made a few friends.

The Not so Ugly

  • I’ve really honed my digital prototyping skills and have become proficient at designing and desktop publishing.
  • I still can’t draw worth a damn, but my graphic design skills have come a long way.
  • I worked with a professional printer and managed to have some very nice prototypes made.

Overall, it’s been a good experience, but I have to recognize when a game just isn’t working and pull the plug earlier.

Lesson Learned.

Arachnid gets a Reality Check

2023-11-22 / / 0 Comments

Designing Arachnid has been a long learning process. Just when I think I’ve made every possible mistake, I managed to make a few more. The most notable mistake was being blind to the flaws in my game. I also became too attached to one of the cool new mechanisms I came up with which resulted in me losing my objectivity. These major flaws were finally brought to light in a recent play test with other game designers. They were honest and forthright with their observations and I thank them for that, The consensus was that I have to put down the scalpel and bring out the axe, some things in this game have to go.

Arachnid Version #31
The above Image is version #31, with more mechanisms than you can shake a stick at.

The concept was sound, the theme was good, but the mechanics were horrible. The worker placement and action selection system was very fiddly, causing players to constantly disconnect from the theme. The action queue, using marbles in an angled trough was a cool mechanism, but it was ill fitting and under-utilized for this game. It was the first thing I decided to remove. Everybody liked the marbles, and they will definitely be used in some other game, but not in this one.

A really cool but misplaced mechanism. It will be used in another game.

The next thing to go was the awkward bug event deck, this will be replaced with a simple chit-pull system used in the earlier iterations of the game. The action queue was also used to trigger certain events in the game, but this tended to divert the players attention away from the core actions of the game. These actions will be integrated into the turn structure instead, and hopefully provide a smoother game flow. 

Also gone, is the movement tracking system because it was fiddly, and players constantly forgot to reset their movement tracks during the opponent’s turn. I had noticed players disengaging from the game, so in the last iteration, players would have to rest on the other players turn by moving their action markers back one space. I thought this would keep the players engaged between tutns and focused on the game. The exact opposite happened. Players struggled to remember to reset their action token, causing them to disengage from the game more than before. I guess that didn’t work.

Arachnid version #32, a cleaner and simpler design.

The player boards are gone, now that the action system is being reworked, and the auxiliary board with the hospital and nursery are no longer required. Eliminating all this excess junk gave the game a much cleaner look. The only items on the table are;

  • The main board as well as tokens for webs, flies and Critters
  • The spider university, a market where spiders acquire new action cards.
  • The scenario board which controls each of the four scenarios.
  • A bag of event tokens
  • A deck of action cards which the players use to perform their various actions throughout the game.
  • An Alpha Spider token used to indicate the first player each round

The actions the players perform are the same, but the old worker queue and placement system is replaced by a deck of cards. Players simply select an action from a hand of 6 cards. The movement is tracked by discarding cards face down from the hand. The finite amount of cards forces players to choose their actions wisely and move efficiently. 

The critters move after all the players have performed an action and the bug events are determined by drawing a token from a bag whenever the players refresh their hands. The peril advances after each action round and hand refresh. This will hopefully make for a much more streamlined game. The next play-test will tell me if I hacked off too many parts of the game. It’s time to put the axe down and carry on.

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”.