Category: Arachnid

The spider game.

Arachnid Reboot – Successful

2025-08-12 / / 0 Comments
Arachnid Version 41b

Preliminary tests of the new competitive version of Arachnid show much promise. I was never able to implement the Chit-Pull system (Inspired by Wonderland’s War), but the unique Action Track system  works well.

The game is mainly a challenge of area control between the players. This is where players score the most endgame points. This seems to work well because players enjoy laying down webs even more than hunting down invading Critters and eating them.

The energy economy is very tight. Players swing between feast and famine as I had always wanted. This switch between a Scarcity mindset and an Abundance mindset adds some richness to  the game. The food based economy allows for some strong incentives for the players to take risks.

The battles between players are more of a shoving match whenever two spiders meet. The loser has to retreat, but also loses some food, which can be a very scarce resource. Battles are more about attrition and tactical maneuvering than player elimination.

The dual roles of Commander spider and Soldier spider, as well as a unique special ability for each Soldier spider adds a nice variety to the game. I have to work on making these rolls more unique, because the Commander is currently under-utilized. The next iteration, hopefully, will solve this issue.

There has been some confusion with the unique action track system because players haven’t seen anything like this before. I believe that; with some streamlining, a better explanation, and a clear user interface, this won’t be a problem. This is the only truly unique mechanism in this game, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

The latest iteration is ready to test digitally on TTS and in physical form. I am currently refining the core mechanics of the game before adding some cool additional features I have in mind. I can’t wait to see the results of the upcoming play tests.

A new Dawn for Arachnid

2025-06-25 / / 0 Comments

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided to give Arachnid one more chance. It will be a competitive game like I had originally planned. I believe I can now solve the political problems and dissuade players from “Turtling”. (sitting back while other players battle it out) There were a few things which players enjoyed in the game throughout its development:

  • Spinning webs to enlarge the spider’s territory was fun.
  • Fighting, pouncing and biting critters (Or opponents) was fun.
  • Catching flies for food was really cool and sometimes challenging.
  • Acquiring skills was satisfying.
  • Being part of a colony was comforting.

In the competitive version, each player will manage their own colony of spiders, acquiring skills, expanding the web, and growing the colony. Some traits will be unique to each spider in the colony, but some will be shared. One spider in each colony will be the leader which will acquire the shared skills and command the other spiders. The other spiders will have various roles and unique abilities, but can also use the shared skills when necessary. The colony will work together to grow, learn and defend the web. As the colony grows and expands, it will inevitably clash with the other colonies.

Early Version of Arachnid

The Nuts and Bolts

I was thinking of a simple chit-pull system for resource management and conflict resolution. It would be similar to the chit-pull system used in Wonderland’s War, with a few twists:

  • The chits will generally be publicly displayed.
  • Some will be shared while others stay with the specific spider.
  • Some will represent energy resources.
  • Some will represent talents and skills.
  • when a conflict arises, the chits are placed in a bag along with any shared skills and drawn out to resolve the battle.
  • Some chits like energy and shared skills can be lost in battle.
  • Some chits like talents cannot be lost.

I will try using a hex based modular system where the hexes can be stacked to represent stronger webs and give spiders on the higher hexes a tactical advantage when battling.

Of course, what would a the game be without a few NPC’s running around wreaking havoc and a global catastrophe or two. These, of course, would be added later if the game appears to be working well.

I will put this game on a short leash. If it doesn’t seem to be working in the first few iterations, it will go back onto the scrap pile permanently. It would be cool if I can pull this one off. Fingers crossed.

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 variability in the negative events and lacking the extreme fluctuations in the economy necessary to keep the players engaged.

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 wasn’t going anywhere because the core mechanics were never solid and robust.
  • Adding more stuff never fix any problems and tended to make the game worse. I had to take a hatchet to the game and do some serious trimming down more than once.
  • Players needed interesting choices, not obvious ones.
  • Mismatched mechanics that didn’t reinforce the theme caused thematic 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