Nova Raiders (AKA Pirates of the black hole) has gotten a complete redesign, both inside and out:
I discarded about half of the movement rules to streamline the game
Introduced the “Telleport” spaces
Re-structured the turn order so players wouldn’t fall asleep in between turns
Made the dice more prominent to encourage tactical play
Gave it a complete graphical face-lift
modified the end-game to increase the tension
opened up the movement rules to give players more flexibility
and gave it a snazzy new name.
I was a bit worried that I may have broken the game with so many changes, but it played fairly well in the last play-test. I would like to thank the game designers for the time they spent testing the game and for the frank and honest feedback. I managed somehow to maintain the fun parts of the game while fixing the bugs.
Of, course there were a few new issues as expected with such a drastic overhaul. It appears that I might have opened up the movement possibilities a bit too much, making the game a bit less challenging. I also had too many restrictions on bringing new player pieces into play. My next challenge will be to increase the opportunities to bring in more components, while at the same time, restricting movement just the right amount to make things more challenging. I’m gonna have to put on my thinking cap for this one.
The next issue is the counter-intuitive scoring system. There is some type of thematic or behavioral dis-connect that I have to iron out. The system works, but seems weird. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to sort this one out. There has got to be a simple solution, I just have to find it.
All in all, it was a great test. Only about a thousand or so more to go…LOL
Leveling up seems to be quite common, especially in RPG’s. It seems logical in a game or series of games, that your skill increases and the the game experience becomes more challenging to match. Does it actually reflect realty though? We all get older and slower as life goes on, but we do (hopefully) tend to get smarter which can more than compensate for our declining physical abilities. What if a game worked this way? A player starts out strong and gets weaker as the game progresses. They must master the intricacies of the game or learn new skills to compensate for the decline of their starting abilities. This could be accomplished with initial starting abilities in an RPG style game or possibly with a finite amount of Cash or Resources in a economic or euro-style game. Has anybody tried this in a game yet?
According to the renowned psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, we make bad decisions when we confuse Noise with Bias. Noise is a collection of random occurrences like dice rolls, or randomly drawn cards. Bias is a correlation between related events like the sun shining and the ground warming up as a result. We are wired to recognize patterns and correlations because it would be too inefficient for our brains to ponder every possibility for every little action and event. As a result, we see many patterns that simply aren’t there. This leads us to believe crackpot conspiracies and behave like irrational children by putting our dice into a “dice dungeon” because they are misbehaving. This irrational behavior is fine within the bounds of “The Magic Circle” of your current board game or RPG, as long as you remember to come to your senses when the game is over.
I remember one example which illustrates this confusion clearly. It is (or was back in the 80’s) a statistical fact that light blue and yellow cars got into the fewest traffic accidents. Could this be because they were easier to see? Before you go out and have your car repainted, lets take a closer look. It turns out that yellow and light blue are the most common colors for police cars and cabs. In other words, professional drivers are less likely to get in accidents than amateurs , which makes perfect sense. The yellow and blue cars were noise, and the true bias is the correlation between professional divers and traffic accidents.
Noise happens quite frequently in games and is often mistaken for meaningful events or patterns. It takes some effort to truly comprehend a random dice roll. How often have you thought “The Dice Hate Me” because you rolled a string of ones when you are expecting sixes. (“Bad Dice” “Lock them Up”). Streaks of the same numbers are are a common manifestation of random dice rolls. Most of us expect an even distribution, but this is not random. Random rolls include long strings of the same number as well as a mix of random numbers. The patterns we see are nothing more than wishful thinking and we tend to forget the varied mix of rolls because we are looking for specific numbers. We look at horse racing forms, trying to predict the next upcoming random event, as well as the previous winning numbers at the roulette wheel to try and discern some magical patterns that everybody else has missed. We seem to have a need to find meaning in random events; a meaning in all this noise.
This irrational behavior is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it might be used to generate a very entertaining game experience. Provide an interesting narrative, throw in a few random events, and with just the slightest nudge, you might send your players off on an interesting and unique adventure. Various game scenarios can seem plausible if players receive enough random information to start constructing a working theme or character roll in their imaginations. Players will naturally ignore what doesn’t fit and focus on what does fit the role constructed in their minds. There are probably many ways that a game or RPG scenario designer can use this strange human quirk to create a rich game experience.
I am not an expert, nor am I a successful in publishing games. (Yet!) I am just trying to figure things out and hope you enjoy my occasional rant. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree, or even if you just want to say hi.
One and a Half hours into the play-test of what’s supposed to be a 45 minute game, the players didn’t want to quit. It’s a great sign, when the players want to see the final outcome. In fact. was doing my happy dance inside my head when this happened. The game has a few kinks at this point, but it seems to be firing on all cylinders. Happy Days!
We ran into an energy shortage at the end of the game which intensified the game-play but also caused it to drag on very very long. This can be fixed. I will introduce a deck of cards which will control the generation of energy throughout the game. The end condition has to be tweaked as well as as the number of ships for each player and a few other things. The Pirate theme doesn’t quite fit so I will be changing it to scavengers or something more suitable. It is worthwhile to spend some time on the graphics to make it more clear and shore up the theme a bit, now that this game seems to function well.
I will also introduce different types of energy with special effects, as well as reworking the dice tokens a bit. The Marauders market mechanism I planned on adding may not be a good fit for the game. I can encourage more player interaction through other means so the player negotiations will emerge more organically. This will have be in later revisions, for now I just have to fix what’s broken.
It looks like the scrap pile is getting a little bigger. Fight Night has finally gone down to the mat and was counted out. The mechanisms were still really cool, and I’m sure I can re-use them in another game, but not this one. Fight Night had it’s moments, but there was a severe thematic disconnect which doomed this game to mediocrity at best. I’ve seen quite a few bouts, and I have never seen anybody squat down and punch somebody in the knee. This is what the mechanisms of the game were basically asking you to do. Although it was funny at times, this disconnect stopped the players from really immersing themselves into the game. The timing and the intensity may have matched a real fight, but the actions never seemed quite right. Lesson learned.
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