Looking at my latest iteration of “Fight Night in Canada”, I keep picturing that lady in the old hamburger commercial yelling “Where’s the Fun”. It’s in the game somewhere buried under a pile of pasted on mechanisms and ill fitting fixes. It’s time for some drastic measures, time to “Kill my Darlings”.
Lets’s start at the beginning. I came up with a really cool system of resolution conflict, combining dice and a type of area majority/worker placement. I had to find out from some local game experts if this has ever been done before, as well as show off my my new toy. “Fight Night in Canada” was born. I made a quick prototype and showed it to Moe and Sean (Of TabletopBellhop Fame).
It turned out that this is likely a new idea and it could be fun, so I decided to pursue it. After man play-tests and redesigns, I found myself at version #7, an over-complicated, sometimes fun, but way too complicated mess.
I thought I had nailed it on version #2f, when I wrote the full rules with illustrations, but certain issues kept rearing their ugly heads, and no matter how many ways I tried to rework the attack dice. I just couldn’t give the players enough interesting choices without introducing too much complexity. After all, this game was nothing more than a simple two player “dice chucker”; a 45 minute teach was not acceptable for a 20 minute game. My last attempt (version#8) to streamline this mess helped a bit, but not enough. It’s time to take some drastic measures.
I looked at what worked well and put everything else, including the attack dice which were part the original foundation of the game on the chopping block. In design circles, this is known as “Killing Your Darlings”, a brutal but sometimes necessary part of a game design. I am keeping the defense dice but I’m “Chucking” the attack dice and any other component which is not working or creating complexity. Version #9, here we come!
I will post the new version as soon as it is completed so you can judge for yourself whether or not I was successful.
Recent Comments