On Acorns

Acorns and humans go way back. These tough-shelled, bitter nuts aren’t a staple crop for most humans today, but across history, they’ve been vital to survival for many groups. Even today, they’re used to make everything from bread to noodles to jelly. They (and hazelnuts) are one of the main crops I looked to when designing the nut resources that are so crucial to many strategies for survival in Stonesaga.

As I’ve worked on Stonesaga, I’ve read a lot about human history and prehistory. One thing that research has reinforced is that the world has changed a lot in the last 20 thousand years, in no small part due to human activity. But sometimes the expanse of ages doesn’t feel quite so impenetrable and all-consuming. So today, we’ll do something a little bit different and talk about how to cook with acorns. I promise, this will come back around to game design!

This is a stock image because a surprise snowstorm covered up the acorns I was going to photograph today. Minnesota, what a state!

A Recipe for Acorn Crepes

This fall, my partner decided to make acorn flour from this year’s bumper crop that the local oaks provided. She has some interesting insights on the process:

The gathering itself was quite easy. We just picked up the acorns and put them in a bag, avoiding any that look moldy, cracked, or have holes (an indication of weevils). It was wet the day we gathered, and I thought it might be a good idea to let them dry a bit before processing so I spread them out on a wire rack in the garage for about a week (in the mean time we had gathered a large quantity of black walnuts and left them to dry on the same wire racks). This ended up being a HUGE mistake as we soon attracted a mouse to feast on the bounty. Since we didn’t love the idea of sharing our living space with a rodent, we quickly moved on to the next step in the process.

Shelling the acorns was tedious and a bit demoralizing. I imagine that in the past a hunter-gatherer would have pounded open the hard shells between two rocks. However, I am not super invested in historical accuracy and place a great deal of value on not smashing my fingers by accident. I used a vice-grip to crack the shells and then sorted them into a small bowl of “good” nuts and a large bowl of shells and “bad” nuts. Over half of the nuts ended up being moldy, buggy, or discolored. We might have had better yield if we had gathered a little earlier in the season. The “bad” nuts got dumped on a compost pile for the squirrels while the “good” nuts went on to the next step.

I pre-soaked the “good” nuts in water to soften slightly and then ground them to a course consistency with an immersion blender (again, I assume this may have been accomplished using rocks in the past). This worked ok, but to be honest the blender struggled a bit as acorns are VERY hard and just about the perfect size to jam between the blades.

Acorns are high in tannins, which make the raw nuts quite bitter in their natural state. Beyond the gross taste, tannins can block the absorption of nutrients and can also be toxic in large quantities. Because of this it is essential to remove the tannins before using the acorns as flour. We accomplished this by cold soaking. We placed the ground acorns in a large bowl with about a 4:1 volume ratio of cold water, covered the bowl, and placed it in the fridge (yet another modern tool). About every 12 hours we filtered out the ground acorns using a clean cloth, discarded the soaking water and refilled with fresh water. At the beginning of the process the water came out dark brown. One week and roughly 14 water changes later it was light yellow. We did one last filtration and spread the course ground acorn mash on Teflon sheets to place in the dehydrator for 1 day. This was a modern tool was essential to our success. This is actually the second year I have tired to make acorn flour. The previous attempt ended in massive disappointment and frustration when the mash got moldy while I attempted to dry on sheets at room temperature—I can only imagine how many ruined batches our ancestors had in the past.

After the leached ground acorns are dried, they can be stored or further ground to make flour.

This represents about 3/4ths of the total yield of course-ground flour (minus what ended up in the first batch of crepes) from a ~2 gallon bucket of acorns.

To make the crepes, I soaked 1 cup of course ground acorns in 1 cup of water and ground further in a magic bullet until very fine.

Here’s the final recipe:

• 1 cup cold leached acorn flour

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1-2 teaspoon honey (optional for a sweet version)

• 2 tablespoons melted unsalted butter or other fat

• 1 cup water

• 2 large eggs

The texture is firm and a bit chewy, but not tough. The flavor is pleasant but very mild.

I mixed these all up in a bowl then fried in a pre-heated cast iron skillet with hot oil. While one could make bread out of acorn flour, it does not contain gluten so I imagine it would be an incredibly dense bread and lack structural integrity. The crepes actually held up much better than I thought they would, probably because of the two eggs in the recipe. We made a savory version with toppings including oyster mushrooms form our mushroom logs, kale/garlic from the garden, eggs from our backyard hens, and tempeh bacon/parmesan cheese from the local grocery store. Even with modern conveniences it was quite a lot of work, and we didn’t have to forage the fat, salt, tempeh or cheese.

Very tasty with eggs, tempeh bacon, oyster mushrooms, and cheese!

My takeaways:

1). Past hunter gatherers likely had to be vigilant in protecting their haul from rodents. Outside, squirrels and mice will make quick work of the windfall around the oak trees. You have a window of only about a month to gather before nature cleans up. Even after bringing the acorns back to your living area you have to find a good way to protect them from insects and mice that would be happy for a free meal.

2). If one was relying on acorn flour as a staple food, one would need A LOT time as well as many bowls for cold leaching and storage.

The Little Things that Grow

So how does this relate to game design? In this case, it’s that practical experience can provide small insights you don’t get from research alone. From needing to deal with rodent raids to finding grubs in many of the acorns to the space required for leaching and storing acorns, there were all sorts of little details that rose to prominence when observed firsthand.

These sorts of details are where theme-first games like Stonesaga live and breathe. If the competing incentives are what keeps the game flowing, the intricacies are what draw people into the overall experience. These are the little moments people remember in immersive experiences. Taken together, these flourishes can inform the experience as much as the core mechanics. As I mentioned in my recent update to Stonesaga, I’ve been filling out the small-yet-important corners of the game, from the challenges and goals to the many secrets hidden in the codex.

What’s Next?

My schedule has kept me too busy to blog much of late, but I am planning to change that in 2024. I have been involved in three major projects that I am very excited to talk more about (Stonesaga and two others I can’t discuss publicly yet). And for all three, “thematic experience” are going to be critical watchwords. So I hope you’ll join me as we step forward into the new year to discuss these visions inspired by the past, aspiring to the future, and of things more distant and strange still!

World-Gardening: Building a Home for Growing Stories

For the last ten years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about stories as intellectual property, and I’ve been reflecting on this as Stonesaga’s Kickstarter phase has gotten rolling. By intellectual property (IP) here, I mean the conceptual sprawl between a “story,” a “setting,” and a “brand.” I don’t have any answers on how to optimize a profit from an IP, but that’s OK. Instead, I’ve considered how stories expand and grow as IP. Working on Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay (Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy 2nd Edition, etc) back in the day, this was one of the first lessons I learned: “good for the story” and “good for the IP” are often at odds with one another.

What I mean by this is that a plot beat or detail that reinforces the themes of an individual work can easily clash with the wider themes of the franchise. Look no further than the Black Library novels to see how this happens. The adventures of Colonel-Commissar Gaunt are fun to read and good books, but they often soften the 40k universe into a place that feels dangerously plausible. This is intrinsically kind of contrary to the excesses that define 40k as an IP. If 40k isn’t absurd, space starts to grow for someone to ask: “Wait, are some people in this setting justified in their actions?” To which the answer is a firm “No.” 40k is about atrocity. 40k only works if it’s clear that every institution is terrible, and every individual is either complicit or powerless. This doesn’t make for the best storytelling within most individual works, and it can be very frustrating when you’re the one trying to balance these needs while telling a good story. But the whole tapestry is woven around this idea, and every incidental work that strays from it loosens the threads. The more stories that make their own best choice in a vacuum, the worse the health of the overall IP.

I saw this play out again and again over the years: on Star Wars RPG products, X-Wing ships, and more. Not in the same ways, of course. Star Wars is made of different stuff than 40k. And I got to sit on the other side of the fence when I was on the Legend of the Five Rings Story Group for a number of years, helping to guide other creators on how to fit their works into the core themes of L5R. To be clear, none of this is to say that you can’t tell good stories while cleaving to a predetermined core IP. But it’s definitely harder, and some IPs make it easier than others.

So today, let’s talk about a few trends I have noticed that help set an IP up for successful growth through supplemental storytelling. This can be licensed works, but it starts with (and often remains) fan works that drive the growth of an IP through secondary storytelling. As I go through, I’ll also try to discuss how I’ve tried to weave each of these into the narrative DNA of Stonesaga. Have I succeeded? It’s too early to tell, but I’ll be tremendously pleased if someday, people are writing secondary works about this world, so I figure I might as well make it easy in case that ever happens!

Since Spring is on its way (slowly, as I live in Minnesota), I’m going to hard on the gardening theme.

Highlight Paths to Your Core Themes

Keeping to the path should be easy and intuitive.

Or, make sure people know your IP’s core themes as distinct from the mechanics and aesthetics of the origin work. I link to my article about the heart of a game experience a lot, and I’m going to do it again. Similarly, it’s important to remember that your IP also probably has a core kernel of something that makes it special. And ideally, that kernel aligns with what you intend the IP to be about.

It's undeniably easy for people to latch onto aesthetics but miss out on the underlying themes. If you want the IP to be able to expand organically, though, it really does need to communicate the underlying themes effectively. One of the great challenges of Star Wars is that a lot of people have latched on to its military science fiction trappings over the years. And sure, “war” is in the title, but is Star Wars about war? I would argue it isn’t. This isn’t to say that a war story can’t exist in Star Wars—Rogue One is one of my favorite installments, and it’s definitely a Star Wars war story, as are the strongest arcs of the Clone Wars TV series. But, importantly, both these succeed because they bring key themes of Star Wars (interpersonal connection overcoming oppression, individual responsibility to combat societal evils) to a war story. Merely making something a sci-fi war story wouldn’t make it feel like Star Wars.

Stonesaga’s Core Themes

In Stonesaga, we’ve made an effort to really center a couple of themes, and one is the connection between people, place, and time. When a society inhabits a place, each will inevitably shape the other. And time is the dimension along which this change occurs. In Stonesaga’s mechanics, this appears in its generational play and the epochs over which the campaign takes place. But in a stand-alone Stonesaga outing of some kind, the idea that the past is closely connected to the present and shapes the future would be important to express. In a story, this could take the form of a character connecting with their history or learning something about the past from their environment that helps them to overcome a conflict in the present. The stone saga—the story that becomes part of the land itself, and recorded artistically upon the stones by the inhabitants—should be in some way key.

Set Out the Tools for Original Creation

Leave them the right tools, and people will build whole worlds around two characters who once exchanged a longing glance.

One of the best ways to prime an IP to grow is to guide people to a little corner of it that they can call their own. And one good way to do this is to set out “gardening tools,” guidelines to help people get started within the themes you’ve established. The most concisely articulated example I can think of this is in RWBY, the animated web series created by Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth a decade ago. One of the show’s core, recurring themes (established fairly directly via monologue) is how individual expression is vital to a thriving society. And this is supported directly by the simple rules of character creation for the setting, shared early in its run via social media: each character in the setting is named to evoke a color and derived from a real-world myth, story, or legend of some kind. It’s a brilliantly simple guideline with just enough restriction to create a clear pattern and more than enough freedom for people to use it to make virtually anything. For both secondary works like the novel tie-ins and fan creations, it makes a RWBY character immediately recognizable to anyone who knows the pattern, and because it dovetails with a key theme of the work, it means all stories about original characters start from a point of considering that theme.

Stonesaga’s Tools to Encourage Creativity

Stonesaga’s RPG roots make encouraging original creations a pretty natural step. The fact that you’ll be creating your own characters and society makes some of this automatic, even. But how does Stonesaga bring the themes of the game into this walking path? Well, another of Stonesaga’s core themes is around the importance of cooperation. A simple theme, but one of the great strengths humans have in facing problems prehistoric and modern alike. The character creation process encourages cooperation by rewarding players for building a set of characters with diverse abilities and traits. The more widely varied the group’s competencies, the better it will fare against the generation’s challenges. This gives each character enough of an identity to see them as an individual, and start to wonder about their personal desires and motivations as distinct from their companions. Any given generation in Stonesaga could be the subject of an RPG adventure or short story, and the way the events play out will be different for many groups based on the characters they had at the time.

Leave Room to for Things to Grow

Ask yourself “If it weren’t my garden, what spaces would seem best for planting?”

Just as important as setting out clear instructions about core themes and encouragement to create along preset paths is leaving people the space to create something meaningful of their own and bring their own ideas to the work. This is a delicate balancing act, and some IPs support it better than others. Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere is an excellent example of setting a foundation that can be built upon in a variety of ways. While the interconnected worlds of the Cosmere have a few strong recurring themes, each world has a distinct feel, from war-torn Roshar to the intrigues of Scadrial. And perhaps most importantly, the stand-alone stories feel weighty in their own right. This means there are as many imaginable worlds as there are genres of fiction, most of them are open for exploration, and it isn’t necessary for a work to address the “big events” of the setting to feel meaningful. A galaxy is a big place, and equipped with this idea, it’s easy to find spaces to imagine a new story fitting alongside the existing material without contradicting core ideas or events. This stands in contrast to another galaxy-spanning IP: Star Wars. While Star Wars certainly can be expanded in fun and interesting ways as discussed above, the Skywalker Saga tends to loom large over any story. Exceptional efforts must be made to escape its shadow, such as the Old Republic stories or the High Republic stories. This method does work, but it underscores the core issue that a single story so thoroughly dominates the IP that it’s hard to fit anything else in edgewise without going into the distant past.

Stonesaga’s Spaces for New Stories

Stonesaga has a major advantage here, too. Every campaign will be unique, especially in the details of how it plays out. This means that, when considering future expansions of the IP, there aren’t a lot of hard lines that would interfere with other storytelling. There isn’t really even a single timeline, since events can occur in a semi-fluid order based on player choice. So anything that wanted to take Stonesaga’s core ideas and spin a linear narrative would have space to make the best choices without “contradicting” the game. On the flip side, this does mean any work in the setting either needs to commit to a single vision of how events played out (as the Mass Effect tie-in novels do, for instance), focus in so tightly on single events that it isn’t an issue, or assume a (textual or metatextual) multiverse approach. This is also a place where, were Stonesaga to expand beyond the single board game to other works, there might be important choices to make. Perhaps the best thing for the board game (fluid, flexible story development) wouldn’t be the best rule for the IP moving forward. The board game attempts to express the IP’s themes effectively, but, like anything else, makes concessions to its medium.

Of course, as I like to say, we’ll burn this bridge when we come to it. If we get to the point where Stonesaga needs an IP bible, I’ll just count myself happy that we’ve gotten that far! In the mean time, if Stonesaga catches your interest, check out the ongoing Kickstarter!

Stonesaga: Going with the Flow

This is an expanded version of a designer diary posted on BGG. Hopefully folks find the extra commentary interesting!

Whether you’re designing a competitive 1-v-1 game, a cooperative story game, or a roleplaying game with a GM and players, one of the most crucial yet elusive parts of game design is finding your game’s ideal flow.

In broad terms, flow is the pacing of the game, the way in which one action runs into the next to form a cohesive and (hopefully) satisfying experience. In chess, the flow is a series of back-and-forth actions that cause the board state to progress. Each action has tactical ramifications, and in aggregate, all of the actions have strategic consequences that eventually lead to the game’s outcome. The fact that chess includes rules to prevent repeating board states indicates that each action changing the board meaningfully is important to the flow of chess. It isn’t enough that an action is tactically interesting, it must also contribute to the strategic progression of the game.

Flow(chart) of Priorities

Obviously, Stonesaga’s flow isn’t going to look much like that of chess.  Stonesaga is cooperative, highly evocative rather than abstract, and grapples with very different themes and concepts from chess. But, like chess and a lot of other board games, Stonesaga does present a player with multiple needs at once and numerous ways to address them. Chess’ different needs are tactical (how to the most out of one move), strategic (how to progress the board state favorably over multiple moves), and interpersonal (how to learn about the opponent through the strategic progression), and the toolbox a player has to address them are the many different moves each piece can execute.

To understand Stonesaga, we need to begin by looking at what it encourages players to achieve during each game. Stonesaga’s competing needs can be mapped as follows.

Immediate needs include taking care of your own character’s basic requirements. This means gathering food and water to recover energy, finding shelter to ward off the elements, and making fire to protect yourself from the valley’s icy nights. Fulfilling these basic needs will usually consume at least some of your group’s energy.

Time pressures come in the form of activity (which increases each night, can trigger new events, and eventually end the game), unrest (which increases when you and your society are at odds), the behemoth, and goals you can only complete in your current game. These give you incentive to act on a more strategic level, avoiding problems or completing goals to progress toward the end of the game on your preferred terms.

Finally, curiosity and progress provide a third pillar of motivation to continue exploring the world, investigating omens around you, and crafting new items and structures that will persist into future Challenges, giving you a leg up in later games.

There are other ways one could break down these needs (such as with a hierarchical model), but just thinking about these three categories helps underscore why the choices in Stonesaga often become difficult. Do you want to make progress on a future accomplishment at cost to your current status? How do you manage the time pressure against your immediate needs while still learning more about the valley and its secrets? These are the questions that make for hard but interesting choices, reward players who consider their options carefully, and will ultimately make different players’ experiences quite varied based on what they chose to prioritize and how this shapes their society and world.

If immediate needs are basic upkeep, activity is the clock that keeps people moving toward their Goals, and curiosity is the force that draws people to step off the path to learn the game’s hidden secrets, the Day/Night cycle is the arena in which these motivations compete.

The Cycle of Play

Each game of Stonesaga (a Challenge) takes place over multiple Day and Night phases. Days are the character’s chance to act on the board by spending their energy, while nights both gives character a chance to recuperate and also toss new problems their way that reward proper preparations.

During each day, characters can take actions that contribute to filling one or more of these needs. Each action costs 1 or more Energy, and characters can take multiple actions per day so long as they can pay the energy costs.

Characters can explore the map to find new terrain features, which gives them a wider range of options for gathering resources. Some resources, like food and water, fulfill immediate needs. Others help complete Goals before the activity track ends the game. And still other resources are needed for crafting new items and structures.

However, it’s hard to fulfill all of these competing needs in a single day. This is where choices get interesting. Gathering water reliably provides 2 water for 1 energy at a water feature like a river or lake. But foraging and fishing, which cost 2 energy, can provide water if the character gets lucky, and might also provide other resources at the same time. Players must weigh the risk against the potential return of their action, as well as the options that are available in their current hex and nearby hexes they can reach in a few moves. Additionally, while gathering water is safe and reliable, foraging and fishing can provide insights into the valley’s secrets that the safer, lower-cost action can’t through investing omens or reading codex outcomes.

Every night, characters must face consequences of their decisions during the previous day. First, characters rest and recover energy. The more of their immediate needs they met, the more energy they will have available to use the next day. Further, meeting these needs helps characters recover from disease and injury, and generally prepares them better for the next day.

Characters must also draw a Night card each night (or possibly more than one, if they have spread out on the board). This Night card showcases the dangers of the valley: blizzard conditions, dangerous predators, and unexplained happenings can all befall the characters. Many of these cards have bonuses for making the right preparations, however. Clothes, shelter, fire, and other tools can be key to coming out of the night unscathed. The Night card also changes the omen and increases activity. This can trigger new events that might impose difficulties on the characters and pushes the Challenge further toward its inevitable conclusion.

Finally, once it is present, the behemoth acts at night, pursuing whatever agenda it may have in the valley. As the characters’ society grows to understand the behemoth better, the players may devise methods to minimize or even benefit from the disruption this massive creature can create. Many of the long-term projects characters can pursue over multiple Challenges, like the acquisition of lore and creation of items, can help make dealing with the behemoth easier or open up new options that did not previously exist. This is one of many ways the game rewards the pursuit of player curiosity, as there are more options to address the challenge the behemoth presents than that it might seem at first, but uncovering these options requires diving deep into the secret lore of the valley or inventing new technologies to circumvent problems the behemoth creates.

The Tug of War

One other key element of Stonesaga’s flow of play is the competing incentives between clustering up in the same hex to cooperate and the desire to expand outward and discover many hexes.

Spreading out has some key benefits. It gives players a chance to find new things that help solve the group’s problems. It also fulfills a desire many players have to explore. It creates a wider net of option for the group, which can make acquiring specific resources and achieving particular Goals easier (or even make previously impossible Goals possible).

Further, it distributes risk, as each character is unlikely to be affected by the problems the others encounter as they explore and weather harsh nights. It also decreases the risk of failing to find key assets. If the group really needs a forest to harvest a particular resources, spreading out is far more likely to uncover that feature quickly.

However, there are also critical advantages to staying close together. Being in the same hex allows characters to share resources and use beneficial abilities on one another. It also lets characters share helpful assets like shelter and fire, meaning the group can dedicate less energy to fulfilling these basic needs for everyone.

It also provides lower activity increases, as fewer Night cards are drawn. While there is a chance all players will be subject to a particularly rough draw that affects everyone, the group will have more time to finish their Goals before the game ends if they end every Day phase clustered up.

A Work in Progress

Stonesaga’s flow of play hasn’t yet been perfected. While playing the Beta has made me feel very confident about the overall concept, the devil of such things is always in the details. The balance of activity rewards, Night card effects, density of features on terrain hexes, and activity tracks on Challenge cards are still under close evaluation. If you’ve had a chance to try out the Beta and have thoughts on the flow of the game and how to polish it even further, please leave us a feedback form about it or drop a message here. There’s still a lot we can all learn about Stonesaga as we move toward the best version of the game we can make together!

User Questions

Overview: This is part of an ongoing series of articles on the design of a new board game that I am working on in partnership with Brendan McCaskell and OOMM Games. Throughout these posts, I want to give readers a sense of my design process, as well as some of the ruminations that came out of work I was doing at each stage. Check out the introduction to this series here, and my discussion of the game’s minimum viable prototype here. Today, I’m answering some basic questions about the mysterious Codename: Lithotaph that people have asked me so far! 

Q: What type of game is it?

A: It’s a cooperative exploration and survival game. Players take on the role of members of a hunter-gatherer society moving into a glacial valley recently opened by thawing ice. They must work together to achieve shared goals, navigate perils to their civilization, and survive the massive, immortal beasts that have also entered the valley. As they explore the valley, new hexagonal tiles are added to the valley to represent the locations they explore, and this map persists from game to game by fitting into the game’s custom trays.

Over a campaign of linked games, players chronicles events in the lives of new generations of characters, creating a tapestry of connected stories over numerous generations and several epochs.

Q: How many people can play?

A: At present, the game supports 1 to 5 players. These can be the same players over multiple games, or players can come and go on a game-by-game basis.

Q: What is the complexity level of the game? What age range is it appropriate for?

A: The game is targeted at what I’d term middle-high complexity. What does that actually mean? I’d say it’s comparable to Betrayal at House on the Hill or Pandemic – it has a relatively simple core loop of characters moving around a map and taking actions, but a lot of emergent events the game presents that someone needs to read and understand. In terms of age range, I’d say probably “recommended for 12 and up?” But I’ve met a lot of ten-year-olds who would do fine with it. Like a lot of co-op games, if one person is very familiar with the rules, they can make the experience smoother for others who are newer to the game.

It’s also a campaign game, intended to be played over numerous game sessions. While individual game sessions are meant to be more stand-alone than a typical Legacy game, it is best enjoyed through repeat plays in a persistent world.

Q: What are the key ideas behind the game?

A: The key concept is one that arose from the original discussions of painting on a cave wall: it’s a game about leaving your mark. More broadly, it’s a game about how humans change their environment, and how they change to adapt to it. The choices you make will affect how your society’s culture develops, which in turn will impact future generations and the challenges they face and decisions they must make.

Q: What do you do in the game?

A: Each turn, your character moves around the map, interacts with terrain nodes by playing various minigames to gather resources, crafts new items and buildings, or pursues specific goals set forth by the game scenario. Over the course of a game, players must work together to attempt to complete key societal goals and prepare for the coming of a titanic, primordial creature that might threaten their people if left unaddressed.

Q: Mini games?

A: Resource-gathering, crafting, and even inventory management take the form of minigames. For instance, foraging consists of a simple trick-taking game of finding supplies in the woods while avoiding the attention of lurking predators. Meanwhile, inventory management requires physically fitting your supplies and craftable materials into the bag outline printed on your character board. Each minigame is intended to engage different types of players, so that everyone can find some area they really enjoy!

Q: Why have a generational gap between each game?

A: This game is about societies, environments, and their relationship over a long period of time. As such, I feel it’s important that no single character play too big a role within the story that unfolds over numerous games. A character who is “young” in one game might be “old” in the next, but after that, they’ll cease to be playable. However, they based on their actions, they might continue to exist as a saga, becoming a story that inspires new generations.

Q: How many play sessions will it take to complete a campaign?

A: To play through a single campaign, players should expect somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve to sixteen game sessions. These game sessions are divided into several epochs, each of which consists of 3-4 games.

Q: Why divide a campaign into epochs?

A: First of all, it’s a way to add gulfs of time, creating an even more substantial scope to the story. While there might be 20-50 years of in-game time between each game session, epochs could be separated by centuries or even millennia. This allows the glacial valley – and the people within – to undergo radical shifts, adding further variety to gameplay and storytelling.

Second, it creates a set of neat “break points” at which a group can shuffle its members or even just take a week off to play something else. Each epoch can serve as an “onboarding point” for new players, and each one serves as a soft reset during which the consequences of players’ past decisions play out to shape the new epoch.

Q: How does the game evolve across multiple gameplay sessions and epochs?

A: In the first game, your goals are simple: find sources of food and water in your new home, create a stable encampment, and survive your harrowing first encounter with a primordial creature that has made its way into the valley at the same time you did. However, as the game goes on, your society will be presented with choices based on the results of past games. These choices will affect future goals. For instance, if you are given the chance to choose between reinforcing a settlement or fleeing from a threat, the former might lead to a game where you need to batten down the hatches and survive a siege by a primordial beast while the latter might require creating tools you can use to move your encampment somewhere safer.

Across epochs, these choices will unlock larger divergences in your society, such as giving you access to different technologies, ways of organizing your society, and means of subsisting.

Q: Is this a legacy game or not?

A: It has many similarities with Legacy games, but there are several key features that differ from the way the model usually works. We’re calling this model “persistent gameplay.” While players do permanently mark a few components such as a character cards and their journal, most components can be rest to their original game state. For instance, the board uses interlocking tiles held in trays to create a persistent map – but if players wish to fully reset the map, they can do so by popping out all of the tiles. The components that are permanently altered are those that can most easily be replaced – character cards and the journal.

Q: Where can I get it?

A: The game is still a ways off from being available. OOMM Games will be running a crowdfunding program for it sometime in the future, But don’t worry, I will be absolutely, intolerably vocal about it once the campaign begins!

Q: Will it have miniatures and/or a hobby component?

A: The game will have some miniatures, which likely will be unpainted. Additionally, some of its components will be plastic rocks with a texture for players to feel (this is a necessary gameplay element), and could be visually spruced up with a base coat and drybrush.

Q: What is the world of the game like?

A: The game takes place in a fantasy world that bears some similarities to our world during the Mesolithic era, but with a decidedly fantastical bent. There are unfamiliar creatures that populate the world, strange materials with properties like nothing on Earth, and giant, immortal beasts that roam the land, sea, and skies. We wanted players to feel like explorers in this valley just like their characters, delving into a wholly unfamiliar ecosystem and finding their own place within it.

Q: What is your favorite mechanic so far?

A: It’s not one mechanic, but the flow from one game into the next is the set of mechanics that are most important to the game in my eyes. With that said, I am also very happy with how the crafting system has come together, especially with Luke Eddy’s contributions.

Q: Can I playtest it?

A: If you’re interested in playtesting, details will become available with the Kickstarter in Q3 of this year. However, if you’re really gung-ho to play, you can send an email my way!

Bonus Questions about Other Things:

Q: What is your favorite piece of design from the Razor Crest for X-Wing?

A: The Child. That card took a shocking amount of work to get right, but I think people will have a lot of fun building various baby carriers.

Q: What other projects are you working on?

A: Oh, that’s such an interesting topic! I just [the rest of this entry has been redacted]

Q: Where's that Journeys RPG adventure you promised on Twitter?

A: I’m working on it, along with an updated version of the Journeys rules (the current version is available here). I promise! I’m in the midst of spinning up the playtest for both.

Q: What games are you most excited about right now?

A: I recently picked up a Kill Team set, and am looking forward to getting more games in. I also have been getting into Saga: Age of Magic with my old WHFB Tomb Kings. I played a bit of X-Wing with some custom ships earlier this week, too! Brooks Fluguar-Leavitt has also gotten me quite hyped to try Osprey’s The Silver Bayonet.

2021: A Year in Review

Well, if 2020 wasn’t the year I expected, 2021 was… a year in which the only sure thing seemed to be instability.

What did I get up to in this year of predictable uncertainty?

Freelance Work

I’ve done a lot of freelance work in 2021, primarily on three projects, two of which I can discuss.

The first is Adventures in Rokugan, Edge Studios’ project to bring the world of Rokugan to the experience and mechanics of 5e. This project was a lot like the job I did for years on the RPG team – coordinating with (fellow) freelancers, with Sam Gregor-Stewart, and with the folks at Edge, designing a few core elements for a mostly complete RPG system, and developing a ton of content for said system.

Adventure!

I had never professionally developed in 5e before (though I’ve played in it plenty), and it’s an interesting challenge. The syntax for its mechanics is quite elegant but very subtle – it works as hard as possible to create repetitive structures while seeming as much like natural language as possible. For example, did you know that 5e makes heavy use of contractions? It’s almost always “can’t” instead of “cannot.” This might not seem surprising, but it’s fairly uncommon in games technical writing for whatever reason. Similarly, when presenting an idea, 5e almost always explains the concept, then carves out exceptions after explaining it. If an ability can’t be used on spells “with multiple targets,” it won’t use a parenthetical or inset clause to explain that concept. Instead, after giving the short version, it will include a full explanation carving out the exceptions with examples. This means explanations tend to be wordier, and if you stop reading the paragraph early, you’ll miss key information. Both of these choices create a conversational tone, which is especially noteworthy because of how much it departs from the mechanistic, concise wording of 4e. I’d been playing 5e for years, but until I developed in it, I never consciously realized these things.

The second freelance project I’ve spent most of the year working on is Codename: Lithotaph. I’ve been chronicling my journey working on this game in a design series, but designing a board game from the ground up has been thrilling, to put it lightly. It has been especially amazing watching the game come to life with art, graphic design, and content design falling into place as Brendan and I have assembled an awesome team for the project!

It’s amazing what getting actual artists and graphic designers about does for a game!

One interesting thing I’ve learned about freelance projects, overall, is how much of one’s time as a freelancer ends up dedicated to the logistics needed to make projects happen. This isn’t intellectually surprising to me, but a lot of my freelance design time was spent on pitch decks, reviewing legal documents, talking to lawyers, and communicating with clients. I happen to find this work pretty stimulating, but for those looking at getting into design as a part-time or full-time project, my advice after 2021 is “build more time than you think you’ll need into your schedule for the vital task of document prep and review.”

Game Design Blogging

My game design blogging was, to put it generously, frontloaded toward the first half of the year. This is at least partially because I was busier with the actual design work I write about in the second half of the year. It is also partially because my initial pace was creatively unsustainable. After nearly a decade at Fantasy Flight Games, I had a ton of bottled-up ideas about design I wanted to share but had never had time to publish. I churned through a lot of that backlog early on.

Still, I’m pretty happy with my output across the year. Here are a few highlights (I’m cheating in a few from late December 2020 because they were hits):

• My perspective on the competitive mindset in games, especially X-Wing

• How too many “good cards” can choke an ecosystem

• Design techniques to motivate players to use (and enjoy!) your game mechanics

• An ongoing design series about one of my current projects, Codename: Lithotaph

Personal Game Design

Between the above two categories, I’ve found less time for publishing free games than I imagined I might have back when freelancing was a new, shiny world of possibility. I did manage to to get my X-Wing/RPG Compatibility Guide together and out, though! It’s also a guide for making custom homebrewed pilots, if that’s a thing you want to do.

I have a number of mostly finished simple roleplaying games sitting on my computer that I want to put on my website and perhaps on itch.io for 2022. I just need to hit them with that last bit of polish, which is of course always the most protracted step and even starting it can be intimidating. Still, I’m curious to get a bit of insight into the logistics and economics of Indie RPG PDFs. It’s obviously a vibrant artistic space, but one I’ve always observed at a distance. I’d like to put a few of my concepts out there to get a sense of the field.

I’ve also been working on the Journeys campaign I’m going to run in the new year, including an update with some new features. Like punching!

Any excuse to raid the Getty Open Access Collection.

Hobby Stuff

Ha ha hah. I have been looking on with envy at everyone getting incredible pandemic armies together for Warhammer 40k and other games while my sad Space Wolves sit, not-quite-finished. It turns out I got 60% of my painting done as a social activity and the other 40% in wild, pre-tournament sprints. With casual indoor hobby-shop gatherings off the table most of the year and no tournaments, I got almost nothing done in this sphere.

The best thing I can say to defend myself (wait, why do I need “defending” from not having pursued my hobbies sufficiently?) is that I made some homebrew cards and dials to go with the Battlestar Galactica ships I painted as a gift last year. I also got in the game with them I’d promised, even!

The battle did not proceed well for the Cylon Empire.

Personal Life

The pandemic remains trying, but I’ve been very lucky so far. I’ve been able to get vaccinated and boosted without horrendous waits, for which I count myself very fortunate. I have a job that doesn’t require me to leave the house, and can minimize my risks in most contexts. I miss going to events – running con games and seeing the X-Wing, Armada, and Legion Communities with their stuff on display was always a lot of fun. I look forward to getting back into the swing of things… someday, but I’m also not holding my breath that it’ll be soon. It’ll happen when it happens.

Overall, I’m well. I don’t get into a lot of personal life specifics here and I’m not going to start now – this is fundamentally a website for my professional life – but a lot of folks I’ve communicated with this year have made it clear they care about me as a person, not just about my work and output. I appreciate that! I hope you’ll keep reading and keep reaching out as we move into 2022 and see what this new year brings!

Minimum Viability

Or, Design Series Part 2.

Overview: This is the third of several articles on the design of a new board game that I am working on in partnership with Brendan McCaskell and OOMM Games. Throughout these posts, I want to give readers a sense of my design process, as well as some of the ruminations that came out of work I was doing at each stage. Check out the introduction to this series here. Today, we’re delving into the creation of a minimum viable prototype of a board game, and how to avoid doing to much, and what to do when you do too much anyway.

What is a Minimum Viable Prototype?

Pictured: Everything but the kitchen sink, which is behind me.

For board games, I define a minimum viable prototype as the set of the fewest number of components that are needed for a player to have the experience of playing that game. For a minimum viable prototype, I am taking as an assumption that you, the designer, will be at the table, and can act as a living reference guide. This means that only the components that you cannot adequately act to replace on the spot are needed. This is somewhat subjective, and deciding whether an element is superfluous or vital depends on knowing what you want the heart of your game experience to be.

For a concrete example, a minimum viable prototype of chess would likely be a board and differentiated markers with piece names written on them. As the designer could explain each piece’s special rules and the general rules for the game, a rulebook would be superfluous for the minimum viable prototype stage. The designer would have to decide whether or not aesthetics are an integral part of the experience they wanted to create with their new game of “chess,” which would determine whether or not some sort of graphic simulation of the eventual pieces would be needed – but given what we know the experience of chess to be today, I think one could reasonably dispense with them and use just text to differentiate pieces.

For Codename Lithotaph, pictured above, one example of planning to the needs of the minimum viable prototype was laminating the terrain tiles. Suddenly, any token or marker could be replaced by simply writing on the tile with a dry-erase marker, saving me needing to make tons of tokens for the various terrain types, statuses, and other elements the terrain tiles might take on during the game.

As a sidenote, if you’re building a minimum viable prototype on Tabletop Simulator, substitute “digital” for “physical,” but if you intend for your game to be physical in the long run, I personally find it pays to actually go through the arts-and-crafts early, for some reasons I’ll discuss below.

When Is Going the Extra Mile Necessary?

The numbers are because there is a 0% chance I’d have glued the fronts/backs together correctly without them. Know your strengths and weaknesses!

A key objective of the minimum viable prototype is to be… minimal. It is right there in the name, after all. Why is that important? Because if your design process is anything like mine, you’re going to iterate a lot at this stage. The image of a squirrel digging through a dumpster, haphazardly tossing half-intriguing scraps in every direction, springs to mind. So getting each version’s minimum viable prototype to the table quickly is important, and any given element you spend a lot of time on might not be worth keeping.

But sometimes, you need to feel a specific component in your hand to know the experience it’s going to create. That’s where you occasionally need to risk overdesigning a bit because it’s important to the game’s core.

For Project Lithotaph, I knew that I would need a set of board tiles that looked at least decent to get the feel for how the game would come together. Exploring the valley is a huge part of this game, and placing tiles together to form a map is the main way the game draws players into this experience. I am not a (good) graphic artist, but I have basic knowledge of a few image editing programs, so I drew up these tiles.

I then spent a lot of time printing these out, cutting them , and gluing them onto punchboard before realizing the really obvious problem…

Making the Best of Going Too Deep

So you screwed up creating a regular hexagon…

One thing I’ve found is that sometimes I need to overindulge on details at this phase. Or maybe it’s more apt to say I’m going to do it whether I intend to or not. But whatever the case, the experience of the sort of games I make comes alive in the details. What do I do when I’ve made some component, spent two hours cutting, gluing, and cutting again only to find the hexagons don’t fit together?

This is where I had to decide whether the remedy to my screwup was decide it’s good enough for now or reuse what I can but cut my losses.

A lot of the time, good enough is your friend for a minimum viable prototype. When I changed the name of “stamina” to “fatigue” before the first test even happened, I didn’t reprint the components corrected, I just told people “stamina is fatigue” when we played. When I eliminated whole systems from the prototype because I realized they weren’t core at this stage, I just crossed out references to them on components I’d already printed. These issues were nuisances that didn’t interfere with the core experience. Aesthetics are important, but so is getting the prototype to the table.

But the tiles not fitting together was a bit different. I could already see the writing on the wall that that was grit in the machinery of a key system, and it was going to cause real friction that the final game obviously wouldn’t have, distinctly changing the experience of playing the game. Since I was after seeing how well the desired experience I had in my head came out of the game I had drafted, I knew I needed tiles that actually fit together. So I pivoted: what was the least amount of work I could do to make the irregular hexagons work? I initially cut one down to a regular shape (always repurpose when you can!), but that proved to be more effort than remaking them entirely, so I ended up cutting my losses and remaking them and tossing the last set back into the Big Box of Prototyping Components for some future project. Who knows, maybe I’ll even need irregular hexes someday.

What’s Next for the Codename Lithotaph Design Series?

Next article, I’ll be taking a break and fielding some questions! Curious why the Codename is “Lithotaph”? How I organize a my files? Designers and games I find inspiring? Whether I like cake or pie better?

Hit me up at my email, or over on Twitter, with your questions about my game design process, this project, or other topics!

Wilderness of the Unwritten

Or, Design Series Part 1.

Overview: This is the second of several articles on the design of a new board game that I am working on in partnership with Brendan McCaskell and OOMM Games. Throughout these posts, I want to give readers a sense of my design process, as well as some of the ruminations that came out of work I was doing at each stage. Check out the introduction to this series here. Today, we’re delving into the early stages of design, and the importance of guiding documentation in game design.

The Sphere and the Cone

It's a common refrain that “restrictions breed creativity,” and in my observation this is true for most people. But why is this the case? What is it about working within a framework that makes it easier to create, and not harder?

My friend David Koh is also a designer by trade, though he specializes in software systems. We did design some Magic cards together back in high school and, sadly, I don’t have them anymore. I think we even explored a day/night mechanic that we dismissed as “too conceptually weird.” Ah well, hindsight.

Reminiscence aside, David likes to describe the process of design as a search through a dense wilderness. You’ll find interesting things if you start traipsing in basically any direction, but they might not be what you actually need. The only way to determine if something you’ve found is useful or merely interesting is to first define what it is that you actually need. This means that it’s vital to set the scope of your search: focusing the area you are looking from a sphere to a cone (or a circle to a wedge, in my crude illustrations). By placing restrictions on where you look, you allocate a more manageable area to explore. Further, you give yourself the ability to assess the potential usefulness of each idea you uncover before spending lots of energy developing it. A vision document is one means of setting your cone.

Left: Too many ideas to explore thoroughly.

Right: A manageable number of ideas to explore.

Lines of Vision

But first, what is a vision document?

For a quick and dirty definition, a vision document is a brief that sets out the key features of a product for all parties involved in its creation. It differs from a pitch document because its intended use isn’t solely to explain the specs and appeal of the product (though it should do these things), but to communicate the core ideas of the project to everyone working on it. Formatting can vary as needed, but it strive to be pithy and easy to read. It should be a living document that evolves with the project. Here’s an example from the document I constructed with Brendan for Codename: Lithotaph (thanks to Kara for reminding me how cool codenaming things is).

Remember how I said not to get attached to the working title last week? Yeah, don’t get attached to any other details, either.

In addition to keeping all contributors on the same page, though, a vision document can be used to define your search cone. It does this in two primary ways:

• Setting Practical Restrictions: Practical restrictions are restrictions that revolve around the product’s physical and conceptual scope. Essentially, what do you want the product to be, and what role do you want it to fill in your portfolio? Practical restrictions may be more or less malleable depending on your workflow and distribution method. If you’re making RPGs to sell as PDFs online, you’re not going to care about page counts; if you’re making a printed book, you need to know exactly how many pages it’s going to be, because that will affect your production, profit margins, and the like. If you’re crowdfunding the project, practical restrictions may look very different from a project you’re funding up-front.

• Setting Thematic Restrictions: Thematic restrictions are restrictions that revolve around the artistic ideals of the project. What are the ideas you want it to convey? What are its politics? What should this game ask a player, and what should it say to them when they answer? What do you want players to experience? The thematic restrictions you set should revolve around these sorts of questions.

While it might seem like practical restrictions are more concrete and thematic restrictions are more intangible, they’re equally important to define, and thematic restrictions are often the ones that are harder to change as a project progresses. In my experience, finding clever ways to get around a practical restriction is a lot easier than getting around a thematic restriction. If your game’s mechanics or flavor try to double-back around its themes, it’s almost always noticeable and distracting to players.

A vision document should clearly define a game’s practical restrictions as well as its thematic core. If you’re making a new game, you  might not know how the mechanics express that thematic core, but identifying it is still vital.

Watching the Periphery

As you make progress in your design, you’ll sometimes spot things in your peripheral vision just beyond the edges of the cone you’ve set. If they’re interesting, they’re almost always worth noting, but you’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether you should expand your cone to include them.

This is another case where your search parameters in the vision document is extremely helpful. Whenever can identify that you’ve strayed outside of them, you know that you’re choosing to do something that is in some way at odds with the way you’ve defined your design so far. So you have three choices: you can walk away from the idea (perhaps noting it down for use in a future design), you can adjust your parameters of search to accommodate the thing you’ve found, or you can accept that it falls somewhat outside of your cone but is still worth including in the design.

The cone isn’t meant to be a hard line, but rather a tool for self-guidance.

Let’s look at one quick example of each:

• Stepping Back Inside the Cone: Codename Lithotaph has had the thematic restriction of “Leave Your Mark” from the start – continuity between games is a key part of the concept. However, it has also had “strong visual table presence” as one of its practical restrictions from the start. Early in the design process, I delved deeply into the idea of a drawn map. This clearly fell within the thematic cone, but what about the practical? To find out, I played several drawn-map games such as Once Upon a Castle for comparative research, and while the games were a lot of fun, the maps I made in them never had the table presence we felt Codename Lithotaph needed. So after a quick discussion, we decided to go in a different direction for the map, marking out drawn maps as something for a different project.

• Adjusting Parameters: Remember how I said some of the restrictions set out in the original vision document had already been adjusted? Yeah, as the design has developed, basically all of these have changed because Brendan and I have decided to revise what the game should be based on playtests. After our last test, for instance, we felt the mechanical complexity of the game was higher than originally projected but was justified, which necessitates reevaluating the components and cost.

• Accepting a Detour: For accepting a design detour, I’ll need to turn back to an older game, since it’s too early in Codename Lithotaph’s design cycle to say much with certainty. Fortunately, I have lots of examples from X-Wing! When Alex, Frank, Brooks, and I were working on X-Wing 2nd Edition, we set our design cone with the parameter that we wanted to create more levers to pull as designers, to give ourselves and future designers as much space to make interesting new cards as possible. However, many fans have noted that X-Wing’s dice are quite simplistic in their outputs, especially compared with Armada and Legion. Nonetheless, we decided to leave the dice as-is, despite them being somewhat at odds with the overall philosophy of “lots of levers for designers.” Players were already used to the existing dice with their various strengths and foibles, many had dice from tournament prizes from past events or lovingly-crafted custom-made dice, and ultimately, we felt we had enough other levers to get by.

Practical Advice

So, what should your vision document look like? Ultimately, as long as it works for your team, the specifics of formatting aren’t that important. However, in my experience it pays to include the following:

• Basics. These should include details like player count, game type, comparable products, and a (very) rough estimate of price point based on the components included and comparable products.

• Overview. A brief synthesis of the game’s core appeal to players and gameplay flow in 1-3 short paragraphs. If someone reads only this part, they should understand what the game is about.

• Core Themes and Features. This section should go into more detail about what the game is trying to express to players.

• Mechanics Summary. A high-level explanation of the sorts of mechanics the game will use. This shouldn’t be a System Reference Document, just a quick run-through of the way you envision the game being placed. Will it use cards? Dice? Reference books? Miniatures? How will players interact with these elements and the ideas they represent?

• Components List. A rough estimate of the components that need to be in the box for the game to be played (as you currently envision it).

Additionally, remember how I discussed that a vision document is a living document? This means that it should be updated when thinking about the project changes. Hmm, on that topic, how does my vision document look? Is it still in line with where the game is at? Uh…

I’ve got some updating to do!

I hope that this has been helpful! In other news, I’ll be taking questions about Codename Lithotaph, my design process, and anything else folks want to hear about from now until September 27th, so send me an email or hit me up over on Twitter if there’s anything you’ve been burning to ask me and it might show up on here in the coming weeks!

Design Series: Introduction

This is the first of several articles on the design of a new board game that I am currently designing in partnership with OOMM Games. Throughout these posts, I want to give readers a sense of my ongoing creative process, as well as some of the ruminations that come out of each stage.

Part 1: Some Background

Several months ago, designer Brendan McCaskell of OOMM Games contacted me about a potential collaboration with OOMM Games. Fresh off the success of the Stars of Akarios Kickstarter, Brendan had a simple concept he wanted a designer to explore: a fantasy game in which players guided  a prehistoric civilization through numerous generations. The hook? The box lid would feature a cave wall, onto which the players could visually depict their stories in the games.

I was immediately taken with his concept of a game that embeds memory into itself by altering the components. Legacy games are nothing new, but the idea of a game in which past playthroughs become the myths and legends of the next era is something a bit distinct. Rather than it simply being a continuous story, this sort of persistent game could reflect a world where prior inhabitants affected the lives of the current denizens, whose actions in turn would shape future generations.

Over a series of brainstorming discussions, we spun out all sorts of exciting potential ideas, resulting in a vision document. I’ll discuss the importance of a vision document in a future article in this series, but for now, just know that its purpose was to define game’s physical and conceptual scope and it looked something like this:

Don’t get too attached to that working title

Part 2: Peaks and Valleys

Glacier National Park, from the US Park Service

As with most freelance projects, the flurry of initial activity wound down and there was a bit of a lull in activity. Contracts had to be drafted, reviewed, and signed. All that good stuff. Brendan had lots of stuff for Stars of Akarios and Mythwind to keep him busy, and I had my own irons in the fire: in addition to the blog, I had some cool [STUFF REDACTED] for [COMPANY REDACTED] under way. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about it soon.

This is very much part of freelance game design life: each project tends to go in waves. Whether you’re a designer pitching a concept to a company or joining on to fulfill the company’s pre-existing design goals (this game falling somewhere in the middle), there are usually blocks of time where any given project is waiting for something before it can move forward at full steam. This limbo time is where I started my research. I had taken a class on prehistory back in college, but human prehistory isn’t an area of expertise of mine, fantasy prehistory arguably even less so. I read some books on the history of our species, and how it was shaped by factors like geography, geology, and topography. I dug back into The Stormlight Archive and some other epoch-spanning storytelling I had read for ruminations on how fantasy elements might play into this. I started reading about Glacier National Park and other similar formations, eventually settling on a glacial valley with ice that recedes over multiple games as a basis for the setting for the game world.

Part 3: A Map into the Wilds

A world in progress

So, what can I tell you about this game? Well, it’s still in progress – it doesn’t even have a finalized name yet! I can tell you what it’s about: civilization, history, and memory. About leaving your mark in continuous, ever-changing world. It will have a board, and probably some cards and dice, so I guess that makes it a board game. It won’t be an RPG or a miniatures game, though it will probably draw inspirations from both. Beyond that, the exact form it will take is still being shaped.

Over the next five weeks, I’ll be embarking on the journey of writing up the steps of the process my design process so far. I’m really excited to share my creative steps with the outside world for the first time! These will include:

• Creating a vision document

• Making a minimum viable prototype

• Break for questions (published on here, see below)

• Balancing the creation of the game’s “chassis” against the “engine” that will make it go

• Assembling a vertical slice

During each of these articles, I’ll include design anecdotes, unexpected takeaways, and my thoughts on best practices for that step. I will also take a break in the middle for a few user questions about my process and design philosophy, so you can lob those at me over on Twitter, or by emailing me!

This is a bit of a shift from my usual content, but hopefully people enjoy seeing under the hood of my creative process for a few weeks!

On Player Frameworks

Well, it has been a bit of a long hiatus, hasn’t it? One of the greatest joy and deepest annoyances of freelance life is getting/having to say “I can’t tell you what has been keeping me so busy, but it is really cool! And you’ll get to hear about it… someday! Actually, I have no idea when it will be announced!”

Fortunately, my work schedule is returning to a more steady pace. Oh, I’ve still got some cool projects on the horizon, but I should have more time for blogging again. In fact, blogging will be playing a role in one of those projects…

But for today, let’s talk about the lenses through which players see games.

Why Lenses?

The Wonderful Universe Explorer, refracting telescope at Lick Observatory, 1902

Lenses are a common framework by which the inherent context and assumptions of a piece of literary analysis can be assessed. To give oversimplified examples, a gender studies analysis of a book might compare how gender identity and societal gender norms impact the lives of the characters, how this compares to these topics in other books from the same time period, and how norms from the book’s period of writing differ from contemporary thoughts about gender. A Marxist analysis of the same book could focus on how economic factors impact the lives of the characters in the story and how the economic system of the day shaped the writing of the book. A Freudian lens would focus on how the work maps onto the ideas and archetypes presented in the writings of Sigmund Freud, probably leading to a few things being called “phallic.” These lenses are obviously more nuanced than this quick gloss, but essentially, each one is a way to delve into a particular aspect of a work by establishing a context for comparison. A lens lets a critic narrow their focus to explore a particular topic deeply. Works of literary analysis don’t always profess to use a particular lens, and many compare and contrast multiple lenses to interrogate a work from different angles.

Game design also frequently puts things in terms of lenses, especially thanks to the widely read book The Art of Game Design, a copy of which Andrew Fischer was kind enough to lend me years ago. It looks like the book of lenses comes in a deck of cards too now - this post is not sponsored by Schell Games, I just think it’s neat that they’re challenging the form of the codex. Schell’s book focuses on the different experiential frameworks through which one can look at a design decision. As with literary lenses, Schell’s book doesn’t offer any one framework as the be-all, end-all route to some greater truth, but rather that each one offers unique insights.

But what about the lenses players bring to the playing of a game?

What Are Player Frameworks?

Eclipses of the Sun, W. & F. Langenheim, 1845

I would define player frameworks in much the same way as literary lenses: a player’s inherent assumptions and context by which they understand their experience of playing a game. Most players don’t think consciously about the lens through which they are perceiving a game, but they nonetheless have a significant impact on the way they process new games. For most people, these frameworks are a set of expectations amalgamated from the games they have played most in the past. Unsurprisingly, this means that the most common frameworks are those that stem from the most widely played games.

Within the hobby market tabletop game space, the games most commonly contribute to people’s sent of lenses are probably Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40,000, Dungeons & Dragons, and perhaps Catan for board games. Of course, genre shapers also like Dominion or Seven Wonders often become baked into players’ assumptions for later games in the genre. Really, any game can be treated as a framework that affects people’s experience of playing other games, but some are more commonly used this way than others, mostly due to the wide exposure people have to them.

Hobby market games as a whole can also be seen as a framework. What are some of the commonalities of hobby market games that influence how people see other games?

• Exception-driven gameplay (simple core rules with complex exceptions for individual game pieces)

• Use of a syntax (with varying degrees of consistency, intentionally or otherwise) to create a logical system by which answers can be derived

• Heavy emphasis on novel and/or refined aesthetics

• Expectation that the rules will reflect a theme in a substantive way

• Limited or very deliberate use of dexterity and memory mechanics

When working within the hobby market niche, it can be easy to forget that these points of context aren’t necessarily shared by everyone who plays and enjoys board games. Every time I play a game with my parents, I’m reminded that their primary games framework isn’t hobby market games at all. A lot of the base assumptions of my predominant player framework simply aren’t part of the framework they think about. Instead, my parents tend to think in terms of classic board games like chess, card games like bridge, and (gasp) sports. They look at games through a different, no less nuanced lens I’ll broadly term “classic games.” And what expectations define this framework?

• Complex rules with few context-based exceptions, which must be memorized to play correctly

• Information conveyed purely symbolically, with no “syntax” to use for interpretation

• Aesthetics tend to be defined by tradition

• No expectation of theme in the rules

• No convention against interweaving dexterity and memory mechanics into games freely

Another major framework for experiencing board games is, of course, video games. “Video games” as a category are vast and varied, of course, but there are still some expectations they tend to foster in people who have played a lot of them, such as:

• Complex rules for adjudication are presented relatively more simply to the player thanks to the computer managing the back-end

• Heavy emphasis on novel and/or refined aesthetics

• Expectation that gameplay outcomes (rather than “rules,” which are hidden from the player) will reflect theme in some way

• Dexterity and/or memory mechanics are often at the forefront of gameplay

While obviously people don’t necessarily expect every game to behave according to the paradigms they already understand, many people understand their experiences with a game through the terminology and mental framework they already hold. Most people don’t spend a lot of time interrogating this framework deeply. After all, games are (mostly) played for fun.

Why Does This Matter to a Designer?

Wilson Bentley Photomicrograph of Stellar Snowflake No. 332

From the perspective of a designer, understanding player framework is helpful for the same reason any other design lens is helpful. Just as knowing about psychographic profiles like Bartleby’s taxonomy (explained nicely here) can help assess the diversity of enjoyment experiences, thinking about common player frameworks can help a designer assess the diversity of intuitions about game convention that different players will have. Your game will always exist in conversation with other games. If you’re going to make a design choice that defies the expectations of a lot of your audience with a game, you want this to be intentional.

Dissonance from expectation can be a powerful tool if used properly. For example, while legacy games may be old hat to most now, many players reported being instructed to “tear up a card” as being almost “sacrilegious” when they first did it in Risk: Legacy. There was a lot of power in that moment of uncertainty, getting the player to ask “am I even allowed to do this?” A designer who understands the unquestioned assumptions of the players can create powerful experiences for them.

On the other hand, dissonance from the unspoken expectations of potential players can narrow the appeal of your game. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but obviously it’s a choice a designer should make consciously.

Of course, this can sometimes be a paradox. Different player frameworks will perceive different design choices as orthodox or heretical. Many dyed-in-the-wool Magic players see “RNG” (“Random Number Generation,” in this case, used to mean any randomness placed AFTER making a decision) as a terrible slip-up in design. Talk to even a competitive miniatures gamer, though, and dice rolls are just accepted as a cost of doing business - and too much post-decision certainty can be a downside leading to stagnant play. If you’re making a game, you’re not going to be able to optimize everyone’s happiness. And that’s not even getting into how a player of non-hobby market games might see exception-driven play as burdensome, while hobby market gamers are often quickly frustrated by games with fewer thematic concessions than they expect to see.

Being able to shift your own lens while designing can help you understand why something that works for players of one framework will bother players from another, and better understand the groups to which your game will feel natural and the ones to which it may be a bit more of an uphill climb to learn.

What Was That About Blogging a Future Project?

Some high-fidelity visuals right here.

I’m working on a new game, and I’m going to be blogging about my design process over the next few weeks, from concept to vertical slice. I won’t bore you with every single nitty-gritty detail (mostly because trying to type them all would make my fingers fall off, probably), so each week will be organized around a design lesson or interesting anecdote that relates to or stems from the work I was doing.

I’ve never had a chance to do a game design “in the light of day” like this before, and I’m excited to have you all along on this ride for me!

New Ways to Motivate Them: Three Design Techniques for Getting Players to Pursue the Fun

There are a lot of different ways to view game design. One helpful lens I want to talk about today is viewing game design as “the art of aligning player motivation with player interest.” In other words, if you reward the things people enjoy doing, they’ll like your game more. I’ve talked about this general concept in identifying the heart of a game experience and on its pitfalls in the risks of fun eutrophication. Today, I want to get into the nitty-gritty technical side with three specific techniques to create motivation for players to engage with the fun parts of your game.

Abundance Incentive (aka “You Optimize by Using It Up”)

I wanted to use a cornucopia, but do you have any idea how hard it is to find a public domain image of a cornucopia? Anyway, enjoy the dated meme.

Luke Skywalker is one of my favorite X-Wing cards, and the reason for this is really simple: his ability encourages you to play like a cocky kid who doesn’t see any challenge as insurmountable and always trusts his own instincts. When we were designing him, we wanted to use him to highlight the fun of the new mechanics for the Force. And we also wanted to do this while keeping one of the best parts of his First Edition ability: the fact that he can comfortably spend resources to attack while still having a solid defense. Luke’s Second Edition ability means that more than almost any other Force user, he will be spending a lot of Force charges. It was a good way to introduce people to a mechanic that could easily fall prey to one of the challenges of resource-based mechanics: the tendency to hoard.

It’s a common joke that if you give a gamer an exhaustible item, they’ll hold onto it the entire game, asking “What if I need it later?” well past the point where it is actually relevant or useful. In competitive multiplayer games, people usually spend consumable resources as efficiently as they can, because their desire to win outweighs their desire to hoard resources. But even so, the choice is often difficult and perhaps satisfying, but not especially fun. Even if spending a key resource keeps you in the game, it can feel like a serious loss to expend it.

So how do you get people to want to spend a resource? Make it so that they can only optimize the total amount of that resource they have over the course of the whole game if they actually use it. Force charges do this by having a low maximum (2 or 3 for most characters), but recharging every round. If you spend a few Force charges every round, you’ll likely spend a lot over the course of the game. But if you hoard them, you might only get to spend a few the entire game. Spending the resource is how you earn more of it. A game piece like Luke (one of the first pilots most players have access to) encourages them to try using the resource frequently in a low-risk environment, further breaking them out of the “never use valuable things” mindset many new players get trapped in and making the resource feel rewarding to use.

Pressure Incentive (aka “The Shrinking Circle”)

Image courtesy of the Fortnite Wiki, because I am far too much of a geriatric millennial to actually be hip to what the kids are up to. Are they still really into dental hygene?

The meme goes “the only way to win is not to play,” but much more of a real problem is “the only way to win is to drag out the early stages of play as long as possible.” In any game where both players have significant control over the terms of engagement, the initial pass is often crucial to determining the outcome. This means that each player will want to do everything possible to make that initial engagement favorable to themself. And while some amount of jockeying for position and head fakes can make for a lot of excitement, if it goes on for too long, it can suck the fun right out of a game. After all, unless the game ends after that initial engagement, it probably isn’t the most fun part of the game. In X-Wing, players’ early decisions are certainly important and exciting, but the game really comes into its own when the ships are in the scrum, dodging and weaving each other by narrow margins in a cinematic space battle. If both players feel the pressure to engage is too low compared to the risks of an imperfect engagement, the game can stagnate.

The shrinking circle is a form of pressure that highly incentivizes players to get to the core loop of the game. In X-Wing, the shrinking circle is time and, in theory, the Final Salvo tiebreaker, which usually favors one player or the other. These have generally proven sufficient to keep X-Wing games moving, but there have been notable exceptions, when both players felt better going to Final Salvo than actually risking an attack. Of course, these are pretty soft forms of the shrinking circle (which is why they haven’t always worked perfectly). The peril of ignoring them is low, and the amount of time you can potentially ignore them while hoping your opponent will give in first is high. In the popular digital genre of Battle Royale games, the shrinking circle is just that – a literal shrinking circle – and it moves quickly. A team can’t sit waiting for the perfect ambush because they know the map will shrink unpredictably, eventually killing them if they stay in that place for too long. A bit hamhanded? One could argue that, but it undeniably gets players to the action of running and gunning that most of them wanted in the first place when they showed up for the game.

When I designed the rules for dueling in the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game, I knew I wanted a strong pressure to engage. Duels are an activity undertaken by two players, and therefore almost always put one player character in the spotlight against a non-player character while relegating the other PCs to the background. So they have to resolve quickly enough that everyone else isn’t rebelling against the GM for ignoring them by the time the duel gets done. However, duels are also high-risk, high-reward affairs – a PC is far more likely to actually die in a duel than in a battlefield skirmish (fitting with the cinematic tradition that inspired L5R). To this end, I added the Staredown. This mechanic works as a clock that gives each player strife (a resource that can reflect stress, excitement, and nervousness, among other things). The amount of strife received increases each round, and if a character’s strife exceeds their composure (a stat that reflects capacity to stay alert under pressure), their foe has a chance to make a special finishing blow, potentially concluding the duel. The math works out such that taking a defensive strategy can work for a few turns, but inevitably, a player needs to make an aggressive move if they want to win. This keeps most duels in the 2-4 round range, which is about what most groups I had observed would tolerate in terms of watching one player fight alone.

Even if there isn’t an audience of other players to keep engaged, though, a shrinking circle can do a lot of good for a game by highlighting the core loop for players and leading them back to it when they go astray. Without it, they can get stuck in the land of analysis paralysis or attempts to win by reducing gameplay to the absolute minimum.

Risk-Taking Incentive (aka “Failing Forward”)

If it lands on 35, everyone gets a free drink. Does it cover the cost of your bet? Of course not. But hey, free drink!

Most games require risk-taking to win. But risk-taking is also where the biggest frustrations crop up for many players. Some days, if you need to make an average roll of 7 on 2d6 for a charging unit to reach the enemy in Warhammer 40,000, you just can’t see any outcome but that damned 6 (or snake eyes, if fortune has really decided to make the game a farce). But making risk-taking necessary isn’t the only (or even the best) way to incentivize it. Enter a popular RPG design turn of phrase, “failing forward.”

“Failing forward” refers to ways a GM can have a player character’s failed roll nonetheless move the story forward. It doesn’t mean player characters can never fail, just that their actions rarely do nothing. While some games benefit from failing forward and others are stronger without it, it’s a popular concept for a reason: for players, risks that are interesting from a story perspective can still seem very daunting if you’re likely to fail. Swinging on a chandelier during a swashbuckling duel is iconic and cool, but if you need to roll a 17 or higher on a twenty-sided die to avoid falling flat on your face instead, a lot of people will squash their creativity and say “Eh, I’ll just make a standard attack.” Some people love tossing the dice for the thrill of a low-probability gamble, but a lot of people find the risk too off-putting. However, if the player is confident that their chandelier antics won’t prove to be a waste of time – and even their fall will somehow factor into the story in an interesting way – then for many people, the risk becomes a lot more tolerable.

There are various ways to incorporate this concept into wargames, as well. Loss-triggered abilities are one example. These are abilities like Hate, that activate upon suffering damage or having some other bad thing happen to one of your pieces. After all, in an ideal game, your ship with Hate would never be shot. But if it’s going to get shot (and it probably is), at least you get something to help offset that negative outcome, opening up new possibilities for you by giving you back a valuable resource.

Another way to engage failing forward in competitive games is with ancillary results. In the Runewars miniatures game, the surge icon is such a result. Surges are a result on die that don’t contribute directly to success, but can instead be used to trigger other abilities and effects. While rolling surges won’t usually get you exactly what you wanted when you rolled, it opens up a new set of choices. Sometimes you’ll still roll all blanks, but when you’re picking up the dice for a risky roll, you can imagine not only the unlikely success, but also the more-likely option of having surges to spend on secondary abilities. Engaging the player’s imagination is just as important as giving them options to work with after the fact, and together, the two can be a powerful motivator to take high-risk actions that many players might otherwise find unpalatable.

A third option is abilities that reward you with some secondary outcome when you fail. These are a bit of a tougher sell in competitive games, in which nobody wants to imagine failing when they roll dice. They tend to work best when they are small abilities attached to more substantive effects, or highly thematic abilities. That way, they feel less like insurance and more like an extra option if your best plan doesn’t work out. Compared with loss-triggered abilities and ancillary results, these are the weakest of the three for competitive games, but rewards for failure can work when applied in the right circumstances.

Risk-taking incentives also have another benefit: they encourage players to build the flow of the game into their plans. Not only does this mentally prepare players to take some losses, but it also frequently improves the game for their opponent, as to fully optimize, one must allow that one’s opponent will likely gain some ground. Encouraging fair play behaviors in design is a topic that deserves its own article, though, and since I’ve wandered into a new article topic, that’s the sign that we should wrap up for today.

Reflections on the Role of Community in Games

I won’t bury the lede on this one: if you’re wondering why things have been a bit quiet here, it’s because I’ve been working on a small personal project! I’ve made a conversion guide for making an RPG character into an X-Wing pilot card, with some guidance for running space combat using the X-Wing rules. This is a little fan project I’ve been cooking up for a while, and I think players of both games will get a kick out of it. Check it out in the Games for Download section!

With that out of the way, I want to delve back into a topic I’ve touched on a number of times in the past: the role of community in games. I’ve discussed how fan works can affect the way that games exist and are played, recontextualizing and transforming the original work. But I haven’t gotten much into one of the most influential ways fans impact most games: community-building.

I started reflecting on this because Shane Mok and Gerentt Chan of the Fearless Gundarks were kind enough to invite me to on to a panel discussion they were holding with community pillars Dee Yun and Ben Doyle. The topic was Tournament Organizers, rules adjudication, and judging, and you should go check out the episode if you are curious - Gerentt, Dee, and Ben all speak very thoughtfully on some complex topics of rules authority and community good and I don’t make (too many) rules gaffs! I’m not going to rehash this conversation, though. Instead, I want to consider something more basic: what are the structures (physical, social, digital) around which a game community can form and be sustained?

Platform and Function

1913 illustration of HG Wells playing Little Wars, courtesy the BBC. Read about it here!

The type of platform used by a community matters, and will shape the way it forms and grows. If the community is local and spreads by word of mouth around a local game store, it will tend to function a bit like a club, with particular traditions and tendencies that are perpetuated from veteran grognards to newer entrants. Additionally, players will tend to play “at the same level,” using community standards to enforce balance to some degree. This can range from light social pressure not to take “cheesy” lists to full-on banning of certain game elements or lists that are viewed as being too influential. In this way, the meta in a physical community will often self-curate away from the worst play experiences, even when they are optimal.

By contrast, if the community is centered around a digital platform like Facebook, Discord, or similar, it will often grow in a very different way. Decorum and rules of engagement won’t generally be as universally enforced through social pressure, and there will be far less pressure not to bring lists that make the opponent groan - after all, the opponent isn’t someone you’re likely to have to deal with next week at the store. But on the other hand, the community itself has the potential to be more accessible. Because everyone doesn’t need to be able to reach a single location, a digital community may draw people from geographically diverse backgrounds. Digital communities can also help break down some of the behaviors that make game store crews behave like a clique. A lack of shared group traditions and history makes the community much more approachable. This isn’t to say that digital communities can’t be toxic (ask anyone who has played a video game or been on the wrong Facebook group), but if well-curated, digital communities can be more approachable in some ways than many friendly local game store (FLGS) playgroups.

Most tabletop wargames have a mix of physical and digital communities, which interact in various ways (or, in some cases, don’t interact at all). For many years, Armada’s “Vassal Meta” was well-known to be completely different from its physical space meta due to the precision with which it could be played and the fact that many players stuck purely to one or the other. Warhammer 40,000’s highly competitive digital play community is similarly segmented from its physical space community, which tends to be very hobby-oriented.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, X-Wing has moved to a Tabletop-Simulator-oriented meta. In some ways, we saw tension arise around what was a physically-oriented game entering into the digital space. The rise of the 6-Nantex list would likely not have been so oppressive if it hadn’t coincided with the shift to a digital meta, as the monetary cost to actually buy the list is high and the social pressure not to be “that player” can be even higher. Both of these factors were ameliorated by the digital-oriented tournament scene. On the other hand, X-Wing made some incredible inroads during this time, with numerous large-scale successful events despite a global pandemic. Many people I’ve spoken to have appreciated being able to expand their regular playgroup beyond their FLGS, and really valued the friendships they’d developed from digital events. Still other groups have stopped playing entirely during this time, waiting out the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how the community re-congeals (or doesn’t) once in-store play is safe and accessible again.

Pillars of the Community

Notice how it’s still standing because there are a bunch of them.

On the stream, one thing that stuck out to me was when Dee discussed how he never really set out to be one of the worldwide leading voices on X-Wing rules adjudication, or even a TO. He stepped into the role because he loved playing the game, and the job was open and needed filling. This resonated with me not because I thought it was unusual, but because I’ve seen this happen time and again in wargaming communities I’ve been a part of.

In my observation, at least for miniatures games, a lot of work tends to fall on a few individuals in the community because they’re the ones energized to do it. Ambitious events that draw large amounts of players require prime movers willing to organize, rent space, prepare prizes, and (for many games) paint loads of terrain. While some groups do a good job with delegation, it inevitably seems like a few people end up especially pivotal to the event actually happening. Because community events for non-professionalized games usually aren’t professionalized undertakings, they have all the hallmarks of any volunteer-based organization: the really passionate people make them happen.

For a community to persist, though, there always need to be energized people in these roles. When these roles are vacant, the community fades. When I graduated high school and left the Magic: The Gathering club to a disinterested successor, it quickly disintegrated. I later watched this happen with a local Warhammer Fantasy Battles community shortly after the end of the game’s publication. While there was no particular reason the community couldn’t have continued to run events (it’s not like Games Workshop was formally sanctioning anything they did anyway), the people who had been those prime movers decided they wanted to take the opportunity to step down, and nobody moved in to replace them.

The important thing to remember here is that, on the community side, and nobody is under any obligation to put their time towards anyone else’s enjoyment unless it’s something they want to do. No individual can be asked to do everything, or even one specific thing, forever. This means that if the members of a community want it to persist in perpetuity, they must make the conscious choice to invest in the future: nurturing new players, preparing for succession of responsibilities, and allowing people to shift in roles based on their needs at the time.

Size Matters (Not)?

Nobody wanted to admit it, but after day three of training, the Dagobah dejarik meta was already getting stale, and not just because Yoda was cheating.

Gerentt mentioned during the stream that the Singapore community isn’t especially large, but it has produced some powerhouse players despite its relatively small size, including 2017 Worlds winner Justin Phua. I thought this was also a pretty interesting observation, because it speaks to something I think a lot of people worry about unnecessarily - community size, and whether their community is growing or not.

For a game community to thrive, it needs to be at or above replacement rate for its high-energy roles (as mentioned above). It also needs new entrants to the community, lest everyone get totally sick of playing against their available opponents. But beyond that, a community’s absolute size doesn’t necessarily determine its viability in the long term (and, as evidenced by the Gundarks, doesn’t determine the competitive strength of its players). A small but highly energized community can have a large impact on a game’s worldwide scene. And a minis game can also thrive in an individual store even if the members never go on the internet to discuss it with others. An RPG can thrive at a single table as long as someone is willing to GM it.

Every year at GenCon (except this last one, for obvious reasons), you see evidence of this. People who travel from hundreds of miles away to play BattleTech editions that have been out of print for years, or the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars minis game. West End’s Star Wars RPG is older than I am and regularly has as many sold-out tables at Gen Con as its modern equivalents. None of this would happen without a solid community that wants to engage with the game, but these communities aren’t huge, either - just sufficiently energized and engaged to keep the flame alive.

There’s obviously a lot more to say about games communities. But I think it’s important to reflect on how games exist in the playing, and communities make a lot of this playing happen. Thus, the community often sets the tone for the way a game exists and is perceived in the wider world.

How to Give Great Feedback on Your Friend’s New Game

I've written before on best practices for playtests (it turned out to be a meaty enough topic for a two-parter, actually). The earlier articles covered both sides of being involved in a rigorous playtest, with testers playing the game numerous times over multiple iterations of design. But there was a consideration that I didn't really cover in those articles: the relatively common situation (at least, in my line of work) where a friend or coworker has asked you to try playing their game with them to give feedback.

This sort of first-impression, informal test doesn't usually involve the same level of detailed reporting or data aggregation as a formalized playtest, nor does it take as long. As such, it usually isn’t compensated (except in appreciation, and perhaps a “time trade” for that person’s help with your own projects). It can also be a bit intimidating to be asked to give feedback on a friend or colleague’s game. If someone cares enough to ask your opinion, there may be a lot of emotions riding on your answers. But it’s important step nonetheless: a designer needs to know how their game will be received by a newcomer, after all, and this sort of playtesting is an excellent way to get much-needed fresh eyes on a game.

These are a number of the methods I’ve found for giving great feedback on this sort of informal peer-to-peer test, and delivering that feedback in a way that doesn’t end friendships.

Tip One: Always Take a Note

J. Walter Weatherman didn’t die for you to forget.

In my experience, the easiest way to tell a seasoned game designer at a playtest table is that they save their comments to the end. Blurting out every concern as soon as it springs to your mind leads to two things:

First, it disrupts the flow of the test and probably drives the designer up the wall. Trying to explain a game, especially an unfinished game, is difficult. Trying to explain a game while simultaneously justifying your decision-making to three different people is especially harrowing. While explaining things and answering clarifying questions, most designers aren’t in the right place to process and weigh feedback properly.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, getting stuck on a detail can prevent you from seeing the big picture of the game. Sometimes, an unintuitive element or unconventional design choice has important ramifications across the whole game that you won't be able to perceive initially. It can be hard to tell if something is actually a problem or if it will click into place later until you have a sense of its role within the full game. Alternately, the scale of the problem might be very small, leading you to spend time belaboring a point for something that is actually quite easy to change. For instance, if the game is at the minimum viable product stage, chasing typos in text might cause you to miss more fundamental problems that affect whether the game is actually fun or not. That text probably won’t survive to the final incarnation anyway.

If you need to know how something works to play, certainly ask those questions. The designer might ask you to try to figure it out (to see what you do differently than intended, thus exposing where their instructions have weaknesses or their decisions were unintuitive), or offer an answer so the test can move forward, but questions of procedure are generally helpful.

But what do you do with your critiques and comments? That’s why you were asked to play the game, after all - to see if it’s fun! Take all of these reactions or observation you have and write them down, to address with the designer at the end. Typos, nitpicks, personal preference matters - write them all down! You can always scratch them off the list if you decide they don’t matter later, but this way, you won’t forget, and you can present them to the designer when they’re most open to feedback: when they’re not also trying to keep the test moving forward.

This also leaves a written record of your feedback. While you probably aren't going to type up a formal report for this sort of test, you can still tear out that sheet and give it to the designer (or text over a picture, or whathaveyou). Comments delivered only orally tend to disappear into the void, but comments with a physical record often stick.

Tip Two: Level-Set Your Input

It’s a delicate balance.

Asking calibrating questions can help you understand the purpose of the game, its intended audience, and the designer's goals. This is something I covered in detail in my articles on playtest design. For more informal tests, this can take the form of a few quick questions. “Who is this game for?” “What do you want to communicate with this game?” “Is your goal primarily commercial or artistic?” Knowing why someone is making a game should guide the feedback you give.

If a friend is making a card game for fun in their spare time, the most important thing is probably that the act of creating the game makes them happy. If a fellow professional is asking you for input on a game they want to pitch as a product, the most important thing is making something that will sell to a commercial audience of some sort (though there are many different types of commercial audience, with different desires).

You can level-set your feedback, too. For instance, if you think your friend’s spare-time card game has real commercial potential, but only if it drops some of its main features for a tighter gameplay experience, you can present pros and cons as part of your feedback: “Streamlining the game might make it more marketable, but if you’re not planning to sell it, that might detract from the experience you want to present.” This lets the designer know what to actually do with the feedback you’re offering. It expand open their horizons to something they hadn’t considered before for the game, or it might help them narrow in on their vision for the project - and they can make that choice with full information if you explain your premises clearly.

Tip Three: Focus on Experiences, Not Specific Solutions

There are a lot of ways to depict the moon, all true.

Left: Full Moon, Limache, Chile, by Alfredo Helsby Right: Moon and Autumn Plants, by Sakai Hoitsu

Game design is more art than science, and the thing about art is that two different artists are unlikely to handle the same fundamental problem or question in the same way. This is, in my mind, what makes art interesting: seeing a window into how someone else perceives and experiences the world around them shows you a world you might never have considered. From a technical standpoint in games, however, this means that there are essentially as many different ways to "solve" a problem in a game as there are people who look at the problem. While there are certain best practices that generally work out, ultimately, the only thing that really separates a good solution versus a bad one is how much the intended audience accepts it. And more importantly to our discussion here, there are likely numerous good solutions.

When helping test a game, it can be easy to fixate on the various virtues of your proposed solution to a problem you’ve encountered, or your way of emphasizing a part of the experience that you really liked. It's yours, after all, and you want to feel like you contributed something to the project. Just remember that the greatest value you provide to the designer here isn't in identifying one possible solution, but in spotting the need for a solution, or a place where something good can be elevated further.

Of course, people may ask for how you would solve a problem (I often do, when testing with friends). In that case, certainly elaborate as you see fit. Just remember that there’s a good chance they’ll move forward with a different solution than the one you proposed, due to the way iterative development works. But whether or not your solution is implemented in the end, the bulk of your contribution was identifying the importance of finding it.

As a small sidenote, there will be no new article next week. Instead, I’m taking the time to work on some games, so look forward to new content in the much-neglected Games for Download section in the next few weeks!

Complexity Pitfalls: The Weight of Learning

The RPG community has this recurring debate that crops up every few years: why do so many groups favor Dungeons & Dragons and its derivatives, even when d20-based mechanics aren't necessarily a good fit for the story or themes that group wants to explore? There are tons of great concept-based RPGs out there, all easily available on sites like DriveThruRPG and Itch.io, the question goes, so why pick a game that needs tons of homebrew to deliver the same experience?

The answer to that question is really simple, and it's the same reason I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard: continuing to use a tool you already understand is almost always less complicated than the process of learning to use something unfamiliar. Let’s get into why, and what it means for a designer.

Unlearning is Unfun!

Mavis Beacon’s lessons did not prepare me for the eventual realization that QWERTY is optimized for non-optimization. The betrayal still stings…

I first ran into this phenomenon as a designer when working on the mechanics for Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition. When testing the core mechanics early on, one piece of feedback I frequently received from L5R RPG veterans was that the new dice system was too complex. But interestingly, groups of newcomers to the game rarely reported this problem, instead responding very positively to the dice system’s flexibility and speed of resolution. At the time, I was kind of perplexed by this conflict in the reports. So I put both the new dice system and the prior edition’s dice system in front of people who had seen neither. Generally, those people reported finding them about equally complex to learn, slightly favoring the new system.

To understand the feedback from the L5R veterans, I was looking at the problem all wrong. The issue wasn’t that the new system was too complex in a vacuum, but rather that the actual act of unlearning and then relearning the core mechanic was daunting and unpleasant. When designing, I thought of how complex each system was to a user approaching the game with no preconceptions – how many choice points there are, how difficult each of those choice points is, etc. Comparing the two, it seemed like the two games were about equally complex. But this model of comparison leaves out one important fact: the user who already knows how to use one system efficiently will have a different experience. It’s actually more complex for a returning user than a totally new one. The returning user has to actively fight against the way they they’ve learned to use the system; the new user just has to learn it. It’s like how if I picked up a Dvorak keyboard, I’d be struggling against years of muscle memory to hit the right keys. It doesn’t matter if the Dvorak keyboard is more optimized to a new user, because I am optimized to function in terms of QWERTY. My past experience raises the barrier for me to learn.

This is not to say that you should never ask your players to unlearn things. We decided to go ahead with the new dice system in L5R 5th Edition, and it was the right choice. The new dice system provided things the old system couldn’t that were important to the vision Katrina Ostrander and I had for the game, namely emphasizing the role of a key story theme, choice and consequence, directly into the core mechanics. The game’s strategic vision was to create a different L5R experience than had existed prior, and this meant fundamental changes. Even if we hadn’t needed to change which dice were used, we’d have needed to change the mechanics behind the dice to achieve that design goal, which would have had much the same effect. So we deemed this worth the additional complexity that would be created for a portion of the users.

Budget Your Complexity

For a professional pilot, this level of information is probably necessary to do the job. Trying to model all these factors wouldn’t be a good fit for a lighter game like X-Wing, though.

I like to think about game design in terms of budgets. Maybe it’s because I started my career in games as a producer (essentially, a project manager), for which managing the budget for each game is a key task. So I think about complexity in terms of a budget, too. Of course, a complexity budget isn’t as clean as a monetary budget – complexity is something that different people experience in a variety of ways, and can’t easily be quantified. Still, if a mechanic is being reported as complex, it’s both important to understand why and consider whether that complexity is actually justified by an offsetting benefit. As a producer, I wouldn’t put money toward a really cool art piece that had nothing to do with an adventure I was commissioning. As a designer, I try not to include complexity that doesn’t make the game better. And if I add complexity somewhere, I try to cut it somewhere else. Of course, not every game has the same complexity budget, and the desired overall complexity impacts this.

This connects to the matter of unlearning things in an important way: if a design element requires the user to unlearn a prior system to use it properly, you should think of the “complexity cost” for that element as being about two times what you’d consider it to be in a vacuum.

For a concrete example of a time when the complexity cost was deemed “not worth it,” I turn to X-Wing 2nd Edition. Over the years, many people have asked me why we didn’t change the dice during this reboot. There are so many things that could be added to the dice system, after all. Commonly cited examples are accuracy results on the dice (like the ones in Armada), or different types of dice for different damage probabilities (also like Armada). These are all cool ideas that could work really well (they work really well in Armada, after all).

But when we sat down to design X-Wing 2nd Edition, it was a really easy decision to say “We’re not changing the dice.” And the reason for this was simple: we had a ton of other things we knew we needed to change to create a version of X-Wing with the real longevity we wanted. The action system needed to be revised. The card base needed to be turned over completely. Pilot skill needed to be compressed into initiative. There needed to be dynamic points and upgrade slots. By contrast, the dice were working pretty well for the game as we envisioned it. The burden unlearning the previous set of probabilities to learn a new set of dice would place on the existing player base just didn’t justify itself to the mission of the project this time.

This is a short article, so I’ll keep the takeaway pithy, too:

• When evaluating a game element, remember that deviating from expected convention is neither good nor bad intrinsically, but it does carry additional weight for any user familiar with that convention.

• When balancing your game’s complexity budget, remember that its total complexity isn’t assessed in a vacuum, and is experienced differently by different people. A “simple game” might not be so simple if many of its users are unprepared for its conventions.

Agency and Futility: Three More Studies in Board Game Existentialism

Last week, I discussed the matter of Candy Land, existentialism, and how agency does (and doesn’t) factor into the experience of that game. But the term agency itself can be a bit of a buzzword, ascribed different meanings as context requires. Particularly in discussions online, “agency” can end up meaning a lot of things to a lot of different people. And almost all games set out at least some parameters confining the behavior of the participants and possible outcomes, so what even is “agency” within the context of a game? And perhaps more importantly, what design choices can make people feel like they have lost it?

The definition of agency that I work from is this: agency in a game is the feeling that you had the ability to make a meaningful choice between options presented to you by the game.

The key word in this whole setup is feeling. What people describe as agency isn’t as simple as “your choices influenced the outcome,” for a couple of reasons I’m going to get into below.

Options and Impact

Although if video games have taught me anything, maybe I shouldn’t trust the offers of free cake…

Feelings of lost agency (or “futility”) aren’t limited to Candy Land (where you have no choices) or to scenarios where the choices you make don’t actually influence the eventual ending enough for most people’s tastes (Mass Effect 3’s ending). They can also arise from situations where you make choices, but the options aren’t constructed to make those choices feel meaningful.

If you can choose between three things, but one is obviously the best choice, it hardly feels like a choice at all. Candy Land actually contains a variant rule “for older children,” which allows you to draw two cards and choose. This is interesting, because it unquestionably adds agency in the dictionary-definition sense to the game: your choices now influence the outcome. But would an adult feel like that choice was meaningful most of the time? Probably not. The correct choice will almost always be obvious immediately. While having an easy correct choice in a game is fine sometimes (and can even be good in small doses), if the entire gameplay loop is easy correct choices for all players, it’s going to feel just as inevitable as the one-card version because nobody is going to make a mistake. This is the Tic-Tac-Toe problem: once a player becomes good enough at the game to always make the optimal move, the only way to win is not to play. Mind you, this doesn’t make Tic-Tac-Toe a bad game, just one with a limited lifespan for most players. This is also why many games with staying power have some amount of randomness (cards, dice) or uncertainty (simultaneous hidden choices) ingrained into their formula. Like a little bit of salt in a sweet recipe, a small amount of randomness can actually enhance players’ feelings of agency by making the “correct” option harder to determine and thus make the choice more satisfying to untangle.

Expectation and Feedback

Yeah, technically it’s what you were promised, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s in the spirit of the options presented.

Perception of agency can also be undermined when a player’s expectations for the results of an action fall out of line with the actual results. Even when an option you pick advances the game state in a substantive way, it can feel futile if it didn’t do what it advertised.

In games like X-Wing, sometimes you have choices that are tactically impactful but nonetheless feel like they didn’t do much for you. For example, the M12-L Kimogila’s “Dead to Rights” ship ability triggers only when attacking a foe in its bullseye arc. When you pick a Kimogila for your list or pick a maneuver on the table, you imagine getting to use that ability. But your opponent is likely aware of the ability, and will work to avoid it. If your opponent is forced to take otherwise disadvantageous moves to avoid you getting a substantial bonus, your prior choice was undeniably impactful on the outcome. Your opponent had to change their behavior, and you gained a benefit from that change. However, because you didn’t get the benefit you imagined, it can feel as though your choice “didn’t matter.” The game isn’t giving you the expected feedback that your ability “worked,” so it can be easy to overlook how your choice affected the game’s outcome. In this case, one player might even feel like their opponent’s effect was “oppressive” while the other felt it “didn’t do anything.”

For an ability to feel like it is making a choice meaningful, it must give the player feedback they can interpret – and players at different skill levels will interpret feedback differently. Inexperienced or less focused players might not be able to detect feedback from the game that veterans notice quickly. Of course, calibrating feedback can be a difficult line to walk in competitive game. Abilities that can be mitigated through good play by the opponent can feel futile for the player using them because the game didn’t give them any feedback that they had used the ability successfully. But abilities which result in a clear good for their user regardless of the opponent’s action create feelings of futility for the opponent. This isn’t really a “problem” that can be “solved” through a clever design trick so much as a scale that needs to be balanced.

Eyes and Beholders

This isn’t quite what I was thinking of when I said “railroading”!

When it comes to rules writing, form and function are hard to disentangle, and presentation matters a lot. Something as fundamental as the way the rules are presented can have a major impact on players’ feelings of involvement in their destiny. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and Apocalypse World provide an excellent example of how conceptual organization can affect players’ perceptions of agency.

In D&D 5E (and many, many other RPGs), the game describes how to resolve various example actions players might attempt during an adventure. Perform an attack, leap a distance, disarm a trap: each has a section of the rules that details how this might occur. It then gives the GM explicit permission to extrapolate from these examples. Whenever a player wishes to attempt something in the narrative, the DM refers back to the examples, finds the one that fits best, and either asks the player to do that or something similar, modified as they see fit by narrative circumstances. When the GM asks “What do you do?”, the player can describe whatever they wish. The player’s options are, theoretically, limitless. The GM then translates this into something that the game engine can process, and asks the player to roll the appropriate dice. The system rests upon “permission” of the GM, with players putting a large degree of their agency and trust in the hands of this individual.

In Apocalypse World and its various successors, the game describes to you how to do various things as “moves.” Each move encompasses a set of actions, such as performing an attack, leaping a distance, or disarming a trap. But critically, the moves are stated by the game to be a comprehensive list, and GMs are discouraged from allowing anything outside of the listed moves or from preventing players from using moves as-written. They are intended to be the only options. Some of these options are so open-ended that they could encompass virtually anything the players might conceive to do. But when the GM asks the player “What do you do?”, the player answers “I use this move to…” and then describe what they wish to accomplish.

From a certain point of view, players have considerably more agency in Apocalypse World. One of the traditional places RPGs suffer from agency issues is in the GM’s act of translating player desire into in-game activity. If the GM doesn’t understand what the player wants, or just fundamentally disagrees with it, the player may end up with a result that isn’t impactful, or that they didn’t predict (the problem cases discussed above). Apocalypse World explicitly limits the need for the GM to act as an intermediary between the players and the world of the game, putting that power directly into the players’ hands. Obviously, many people like Apocalypse World for this very reason.

But many other players report feeling as though they do not have as much agency as they desire in Apocalypse World, because if they ask for something the system did not account for, the GM does not have the explicit authority to simply make it so. For some players, the existence of a complete, preset menu of options is antithetical to the wide-open sky of possibilities RPGs are often said to promise. Even if you have an option that can “do anything,” being funneled though a set of specific options to reach it can feel constraining to some people. The theoretical set of possible outcomes could be very similar to an outside observer, but the process by which the players reach those outcomes affects not just their experience, but which options they pick and why.

What we have on display is two different forms of agency. The different frameworks give different kinds of freedoms and limitations. One favors the ability to create anything, but requires compromise on the final outcome,. The other offers the ability to create within preset confines, but without compromise. Which one gives players “more agency?” That answer is in the eye of the beholder, based on what they personally value. As a designer, you need to consider what forms of agency your game values most, whether those mesh with your game’s themes, and then how your game communicates that agency clearly to the players so that their expectations are not disappointed.

Keeping Sisyphus Happy: Agency and Imagination

The other day, I was discussing the nature of games with my friend David, and we came to a popular question: is Candy Land a game?

Obviously, most people define it as such. It comes in a box, has pieces and cards and a board. But it’s also a common refrain in the board game community that Candy Land is less of a game and more of an existential exercise. There’s a whole (brilliant) Existential Comics entry on the topic, featuring Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

As the comic explains, Candy Land is transparently a game without agency for the players. Since movement is decided by a deck of cards that has been set in advance and turn order is preset, not only do players not actually make any choices, but the future is verifiably fixed. As fictional Camus says, “it offers no illusion of chance.” A player in the target audience (children) might not realize this at first, but eventually, most people will come to the conclusion that their actions in the game don’t matter. And at that point, whether one wants to classify it as a game or not (which I’m not going to definitively answer today), most people stop finding Candy Land fun.

It would be easy to conclude that the reason people stop finding Candy Land fun is that they don’t enjoy games when they have no agency and end the interrogation there. I don’t think that assessment is wrong, but I do think it’s incomplete. So today, we’re going to get into questions of agency, imagination, and certainty, and what in particular makes Candy Land so reviled by people outside its target audience.

The Importance of the Imagined

I can’t prove the ancient Greeks weren’t playing D&D.

Courtesy the Met Open Access Collection.

So why isn’t this a simple open-and-shut case of “this game has no agency, and therefore isn’t fun?”

Well, for starters, as Existential Comics makes clear, for our friend fictional Camus, the preset deck merely makes the inevitability transparent. We can’t look at the deck of our life and divine the outcome, but Camus’ brand of existentialism dictates that we’re moving along a path of inevitability all the same. We’re not as likely to end up in a swamp made of melting candy, but I did go to Star Wars Celebration in Orlando during the summer once, so I know it’s not impossible.

Setting aside the worryingly big questions about determinism, free will, and the possible coexistence of the two, though, every time you pick up the dice in a game of chance, you’re subject to the whims of fortune. You might have the agency to pick from multiple options (for example, the ability to choose between a high-probability shot and a lower-probability shot in a miniatures game like Warhammer 40,000 or X-Wing), and a better choice might be more likely to work out in your favor, but you could still roll badly. You could do everything right and watch your preparations roll down the hill like Sisyphus’ boulder. And if you play these sorts of games enough, you will see yourself take actions that end up being futile time and time again.

Arguably, the dice took away your agency in these moments (or at least, made your choice retrospectively irrelevant, since your “good” decision still led to the same outcome as the “bad” decision – so there was no reward/punishment for choosing correctly/incorrectly). But games with post-choice randomness are popular (and indeed, I’ve discussed the importance of post-choice randomness in the past). So obviously, many people are willing to accept a game sometimes negating the meaningfulness of their choices as long as they felt satisfied with those choices in the moment. When the choice was made, it looked like it could still matter. In retrospect, the choice was in fact illusory, but at the time, it felt real.

But I actually think there’s an even clearer example of something that has exactly the same amount of agency as Candy Land, but has an undeniable pull (badum-tshhh) for a lot of people: slot machines. And while I personally don’t find slot machines much fun, I do enjoy opening packs of Magic: The Gathering cards, which is basically the same thing from a psychological standpoint. Like Candy Land, there’s only one choice in these scenarios: “play” or “don’t.” After that, there’s no agency. There are superstitions people have (personally, I like to look at the cards one at a time, checking the rare last), but there’s no agency, just discovery. Again setting aside whether or not these are games, they are activities that can for many people elicit some level of fun.

In both of the above scenarios (dice rolls and random pulls), in the moment before you make the key choice, you imagine possible outcomes. That’s where the fun exists. Once the dice are cast, you have to live with the outcomes. Once the pack is open, you can never go back to the moment when it contained infinite possibility. But there is a thrill at the verge between uncertainty and outcome.

Candy Land is, in theory, the same deal. You could look at the deck, but you’re not supposed to. It’s supposed to be a surprise, in which you go from a state of uncertainty to certainty. In theory, that should contain some excitement. So why does Candy Land get such a bad rap?

Don’t Bullshit Me

Fortunately, these days, this sort of “kick up” usually happens on the internet.

Kick Up at the Hazard Table (Thomas Rowlandson, 1787). Courtesy the Met Open Access Collection.

I’ll get to the point: Candy Land really sucks for adults because it doesn’t respect your time. A slot machine takes your money, but a pull is mercifully over quickly. The payoff is commensurate to the period of anticipation. But if you understand why the outcome isn’t based on any decision-making, Candy Land is slow and repetitive for most people. It makes you watch the boulder roll down the hill over and over and over again. It even has a skip-a-turn mechanic, which can really feel like licorice in the wound. While young children are often entertained by the enjoyment of seeing a (highly simplistic) story unfold and the actual playing of the game can provide a challenge, most adults just aren’t engaged enough by these elements to make the game enjoyable to play.

What does this teach us about choices, agency, and player satisfaction? I’d say there are a few things to consider here:

• The more your game is determined by randomness, the shorter each play cycle should be. Example: Blackjack has a pretty simple set of inputs for the player. They can continue (hit) or stop, and reasonably often, the cards dealt mean the “right” call doesn’t pay off. But the game plays quickly, and you don’t have to linger on any one time your choice was irrelevant for long.

• Give people incentives not to make choices that are likely to end up being irrelevant. Example: In Warhammer 40,000, you end up taking “futile shots” fairly often. These are attacks you know to have a very low probability of success, and they usually happen when one of your pieces has no high quality shot available due to positioning or other considerations. And you can waste a lot of time considering which “futile shot” is the least futile, but they’re all likely to end in “you missed.” However, the most recent edition of the game has added a number of battlefield actions that one can take in lieu of attacking, which often contribute to the final score. This helps players remove irrelevant choices from their games by giving them something to do other than spend time considering which bad target is the best bad target and then missing the attack roll anyway.

• People attach “ownership” to randomness and conflate that with agency, and changing the way that is presented can feel like a loss of agency even when there was never any to start. Example: In 4th Edition D&D, the game did away with the previous edition’s mechanic of saving throws. Suddenly, instead of rolling a twenty-sided die to resist a harmful effect of some kind, characters simply had a static value the harmful effect rolled against. In neither case does the defender have meaningful agency, but because players were accustomed to rolling their own saves (rather than having their defenses rolled against), many players felt as if their agency had been taken away. They used to “have a chance” to respond to being hit with a spell (by rolling a die, which is not actual agency but can feel like it), and now they didn’t and it seemed “unfair.” Unsurprisingly, 5th Edition reverted to the prior model of saving throw, which was generally well-received. Sisyphus was never going to keep that boulder on the hilltop in any edition, but at least when he was rolling his own Dexterity save it felt like he had a shot.

• If Candy Land had dice, it would still be awful to play as an adult, but we wouldn’t have a great comic with Camus fighting Sartre. Example: I don’t really see anyone out there dunking on Chutes and Ladders, even though it doesn’t have any player agency, either.

The Lethality Trick

I’ve written a lot about miniatures games in particular recently, and so I want to dip over to a more general game design subject subject today: how does a game tell you that you’re dead, and why does the means by which it delivers this message matter?

All The Ways Death May Find You

Much like its digital predecessor, the card game adaptation hands out death randomly and without recourse, like some twisted Candyland with dysentery.

Obviously, not all games involve one’s character dying (and hopefully no games involve the player dying). But if a game is going to kill characters, whether it be a video game, a tabletop RPG, or a miniatures game, the way that death is delivered is an important choice for the designer – more important, I believe, than the actual probability of death.

Let’s go through a concrete example from tabletop roleplaying games. Here are two RPGs with very different relationships with lethality: One is Dark Heresy, a notoriously grim and gritty game of Inquisitorial Acolytes woefully unprepared for the horrors of the galaxy they must face. The other is Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, a game about epic heroes fighting monsters, getting loot, and rolling to seduce dragons winning glory.

In Dark Heresy, death works like this: Characters suffer damage, and when their wounds reach 0, they begin to suffer critical damage. This involves rolling on big, splattery tables of critical damage results which send limbs flying, spray gouts of blood everywhere, and are even sometimes merciful enough to kill the character outright. Based on the way damage works, powerful weapons, like a lascannon or the cursed blade of a Daemon Prince, can easily kill a character in one shot on a high roll. Even low-damage weapons can, in theory, deliver a fatal blow to most characters with a sufficiently good set of rolls. Characters do have one last line of defense, however: if they are about to be killed, a character can permanently expend one of their Fate points (representing divine fortune or dumb luck) to miraculously avoid certain death. A blade slices through their hair instead of their neck, or a slug embeds in their Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer instead of piercing their heart. Each Fate point burned away puts a character one step closer to their eventual doom.

In Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, death works a bit differently. Characters have hit points, and when those hit points reach 0, they become incapacitated. Most characters can shrug off a few hits before their HP starts to dip toward 0. Once it is 0, they must make successive death saving throws each turn, each one a 50% chance to remain stable or check off one more mark towards demise. If they fail three times, they die. This counter refreshes each time they rest a full night. Characters can also be killed by “massive damage,” a damage roll that deals an exceptionally large hit to them, but only a few things do enough damage to reach this threshold.

So, which game feels more lethal? Dark Heresy, unquestionably. With tables full of grisly things that can happen to your Acolyte (gory details included), numerous weapons that can (in theory) reduce an Acolyte to paste in one shot, and a general atmosphere of darkness and doom, Dark Heresy makes it feel like death is stalking you around every corner. Even weak foes can get a lucky hit that might put your character in their grave!

And yet, D&D is definitely more likely to kill your character in an unceremonious twist to make George RR Martin proud. Why? Because of Fate points. Barring some strange circumstances of character creation, a character always starts with at least one Fate point. And that Fate point is a get-out-of-death-free card. In D&D, no such safety net exists. If your character gets dropped to 0 HP in the fray of battle and rolls poorly before their allies can reach them, they just die. If an enemy wizard catches them in a Fireball and rolls high, massive damage might instantly incinerate them. These events are, independently, less likely than having to burn a Fate point in Dark Heresy. But the probability of a character’s survival in Dark Heresy (the first time they would die) is 100%. The game makes you forget by telling you that your character explodes into a red mist… and then reminding you to burn your Fate point to have your unlucky NPC comrade suffer that demise instead. In D&D, there’s no such safety net. Obviously at higher levels, D&D has cheap and easy resurrection, but until you hit a certain level and income threshold, dead is actually fairly dead. And if you play enough, over the long term, you’ll start to see the shocking twist deaths pile up in D&D. A fighter Disintegrated here, a thief bleeding out surrounded by skeletons there. And the GM is often as surprised by it as the players. A trend emerges that characters tend to either live forever or die without recourse by their player. In Dark Heresy, because of the sense of progression Fate points create and the weight of choices around them, death rarely comes as a surprise.

Show, Don’t Fell

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice telegraphs particularly dangerous attacks with a clear warning sign, so that you know an attack could have killed you without having to go through the trouble of running back from the last sculptor’s idol. Courtesy my friend Kory, who is actually good at video games.

So does Dark Heresy feel more lethal despite players actually having much more control over the incoming lethality than D&D? I would say it actually feels more lethal because of the control players have over lethality through Fate points. The system presents damage and death as a series of actions and reactions. After damage is rolled, after you see the critical damage that will kill your character, you have a chance to burn a Fate point to keep them alive. Death flashes before your eyes, and then is averted. By giving the player information and giving them a chance to act on that information, their attention is focused on the act of survival. The mechanics reinforce the lethality of the setting by making the act of survival part of the gameplay, and the game shows you the death your character is trying to narrowly avoid at each step.

So let’s jump to a theoretical example: How would I make X-Wing feel more lethal just by changing its presentation of damage and death?

In X-Wing, when one ship attacks another, it rolls attack dice against that ship, trying to get hit and critical hit results. The defender then rolls defense dice, hoping to evade results that cancel the attacker’s dice results. Players can spend certain resources to modify the dice. Then, any hits are turned into facedown damage cards, and any critical hits are turned into faceup damage cards.

This already has some effect of drawing the defender into the act of their pilot’s survival, as they must choose whether to spend resources to improve their defense results. You see the laser cannon bolt that will hit your ship, then see it swerve away at the last moment.

But just for the sake of the experiment, let’s push it further. What if damage cards were drawn, revealed (when dealt faceup), and put in front of the player (but not yet dealt to the ship), after attack dice were rolled, but before defense dice were rolled? The defender would now be operating with more information about the doom coming toward their ship. Suddenly, that critical hit on the die wouldn’t be an uncertain critical hit from the deck, but a specific critical hit right in front of you. A decent portion of the time, it would even be the dreaded Direct Hit, which simply deals two damage cards – often the difference between being shot down and surviving.

Setting aside any impacts it had on the outcome, this would make the game feel quite a bit more lethal, as certain death would be sitting on the board in front of your ship much more often than it does in the current iteration of the game. The defense dice would weigh heavier because they were truly the last layer of defense - you couldn’t envision the possible good fortune of the damage deck passing you a Panicked Pilot even after the dice were cast.

The takeaway here isn’t that I think X-Wing should actually do this. X-Wing is almost certainly better off as it is. Putting aside that this mechanic would bog down play, the uncertainty of critical hits fits with the heroic vision of Star Wars: sometimes R2 gets hit instead of the fuselage, and Luke manages to swoop in, damaged but alive, to deliver the torpedoes that destroy the Death Star. Whether it is chance or the inscrutable will of the Force, sometimes the heroes are lucky.

Instead, the takeaway is that where you put player agency in the game matters, because that tells your player what the game is about. If lethality is an important theme in in your game, then survival needs to also be important. So, oddly, to make a game feel more lethal, let people struggle that much harder to survive. If you can’t see death coming and you can’t do anything about it, you’re playing Oregon Trail.

Designing Wide: Viewing Card Viability across the Long Term

A few weeks ago, Simon Engmalm was kind enough to invite me to commentate on several matches in the Swedish Open. At past events I’d attended, I’d found myself with other tasks that kept me from doing commentary on stream (and honestly, I’d always been a bit nervous to try), so this was an novel experience for me. Fortunately, when the event actually happened, the matches were excellent viewing on their own (a round six game on Saturday, and the finals on Sunday), and Simon was an excellent host who kept the commentary moving, so I don’t think I bungle things up too much despite being new to the actual commentary game.

The finals took place between Niklas God and Johan Bisenius, with 5 Inquisitors with Foresight flying against Zam Wesell, General Grevious, and Berwer Kret, each with a number of upgrades including Treacherous on each ship. As a viewer, I was struck by the very skilled technical flying by both competitors that lead to a nail-biting match (well worth a watch, when it goes up on Targetlock TV’s youtube channel). As a designer, what struck me most were the inclusion of two cards: Foresight and Treacherous. Both were critical at various junctures during the match. Foresight provided the Inquisitors not only with extra attacks (and a serious area threat the Separatists had to work to avoid), but also with a way to negate defensive range bonuses against enemies in their bullseye. And Treacherous was at the heart of several key plays that kept the match in contention by negating several hits and even a crit that could well have put Berwer Kret out of commission, in a beautiful play that saw an Inquisitor left holding the strain.

Why is this interesting enough to write an article about? Because at various points in development and even after release, the most common feedback I saw about these cards was that they “wouldn’t see play.” Foresight was frequently reported as too weak compared to Snap Shot due to its more limited angle of attack and cost of a Force charge, and consensus was that it wouldn’t be chosen as a result. Treacherous was seen as too much work to set up on enemies, and not rewarding enough when used to sacrifice allies to save one’s skin. And, what’s more, at the time I received or observed this feedback, I thought the people who made these analyses were very likely correct.

So today, we’ll be exploring two questions. First, what happened - why are these cards seeing use now despite a lukewarm reception? This is a question veteran X-Wing players probably can quickly guess the answer to, but I think it’s worth going over for those readers who are less familiar with this particular game.

And second, and more interesting: Why did I let these cards go out the door knowing there was a distinct chance they’d be written off as “binder fodder” (cards people leave in their collection binders rather than playing) in the first place?

Format Determines Function

What’s in this image? Only what you take with you.

First, a little context about how X-Wing events work for those who aren’t already deeply immersed in the game. X-Wing sharks, I’ll ask your patience here.

There’s more than one way to play X-Wing, with two major formats (Extended and Hyperspace) supported for tournaments and a third for more narrative, large-scale play (Epic Battles). It’s important to remember that the 2021 Swedish Open was a Hyperspace event. Hyperspace is a curated format, where only select cards are allowed and most cards are unavailable. Additionally, the list of cards in Hyperspace changes over time to keep the format fresh. The most powerful lists in the game generally don’t appear in Hyperspace.

Further, keep in mind that X-Wing has an official currency for cards in your list (points). But cards aren’t really judged on their points alone, they’re also judged on their perceived value, which is distinct from points. Value is instead a communally held reflection of how good something is for its points cost - in other words, how much bang you get for your point.

But even though the card lists in Extended and Hyperspace are different, the points costs are the same. This means that the relative values of each card are somewhat different in each format (because the pool of options is different), a card that is not “worth its points” in one format may fairly priced, or even undercosted in another.

This is very much something Frank intended in X-Wing 2nd Edition, and is the main reason I’ve generally been against the occasionally lobbied suggestion to price cards differently in Extended and Hyperspace (even if I thought it was feasible to implement correctly). The fact that a card’s single points cost doesn’t reflect the same value in both formats can actually be a good thing for the game, giving different cards different niches in which to thrive. If every card was carefully calibrated to provide exactly identical utility for its cost across all formats, then there would be far less incentive for players to seek out context-dependent value and find uses for cards they had written off before.

So, the answer to the first question, of “why are these cards seeing play” is pretty straightforward. These cards were a poor value proposition in most formats at the time of their release. Due to the addition of new cards to the game overall, changes in points costs, and changes in Hyperspace lists of cards available in Hyperspace, they became contextually efficient. Value is a product of context, and when the context changed, the values changed. This is pretty open-and-shut; X-Wing’s modular points and rotating formats worked as intended to give cards that were once “weak” a place to shine (eventually).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the interesting stuff!

Building for Uncertainty

A pombaline cage model, of the design used in the rebuilding of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. Courtesy wikipedia.

But going beyond this, let’s imagine X-Wing didn’t have points changes and Hyperspace rotations. Could there still be an argument that it’s good for the competitive scene to occasionally create content that isn’t competitively viable on release? To answer that, we need to get into a big question: philosophically, what is the value of a new piece of content in a game?

Fundamentally, I believe that a new piece of content should make players excited to continue playing the game, and there are a couple of common ways it can do this:

• Intrinsic: It is exciting to the players in and of itself.

• Emergent: It creates exciting interactions with other pieces of content (usually those that already exist, but sometimes it can foreshadow future interactions and build excitement that way).

• Breath of Experience: It widens the pool of content that exists in the game, adding new tools or ways of approaching the game.

It’s also worth noting that a piece of content can provide excitement on a wide variety of axes: artistic expression, theme, mechanics, competitive viability, just to name a few. For the purposes of this article (and to prevent it from expanding into a treatise any more than it already has), I’m going to focus purely on excitement generated by competitive use, which is almost always a product of a card’s perceived viability. I don’t think it’s necessarily the most important axis (I don’t think any one is most important), but that conversation is definitely out of scope for this article.

When it comes to competitive viability, even during the design process but especially once it is released, a lot of weight is put on intrinsic excitement (“is this card good?”) and emergent excitement (“can I make an awesome combo with this card, or does it counter that card my friend always beats me with?”). Very little weight is put on whether a piece of content gives you new options or not, because new options generally don’t contribute to existing strategies that win you the game. If something is novel and immensely efficient, it is generally seen as “breaking the game,” and tends not to go over well because it disrupts existing, well-liked strategies. Thus, a lot of content that widens options available (rather than doing something established in a more efficient manner than existing options) tends to settle at a lower tier of efficiency.

To go to specific examples, Foresight gives you reactive attacks (something “new,” or rather, returned from First Edition), but only within a limited arc, and at cost. Treacherous rewards you for putting other ships into the line of fire, but to get the full benefit, you need to draw an enemy ship into the position you want, which is extremely hard to pull off in many contexts. Each one widens the breadth of experiences within the pool of content by rewarding new strategies, but both carry enough inherent challenges that make execution of these strategies difficult. For a player who is engaged primarily by the way the mechanics express theme or narrative play, these cards have obvious appeal, but to a player who is looking at each release to find the cards more efficient than the ones they already have, the costs and provisos are unlikely to make these an obvious choice.

But I don’t think this means that cards like Foresight and Treacherous are only for less competitively oriented players (even if this might justify their existence). In fact, I think cards that expand breadth of play serve a couple of important roles for the competitive ecosystem:

• Experimental: Even if a novel concept isn’t a hit on release, if the player base responds to it positively, that can be a sign that the design space it represents is worth exploring further. In especially long-running games, this sort of experimental content is sometimes even picked up by later designers exploring the more marginal concepts create by their predecessors.

• Setting Up Emergent Interactions: Creating a broad base of concepts not only sets up future interactions, but also gives players who like to experiment with combinations a wide range of options with which to experiment.

• Unexpected Tech: Giving the game tools that the players (and even designers) don’t know it needs yet can also be a benefit when dealing with particular dominant strategies. A wide base of content with different ways to interact in the game space gives a game a healthier “immune system” with which to combat problems that arise.

Ultimately, all three of these reasons stem from a more fundamental rationale: as long as it is being played, a game will continue to change. Even in games with no new content and no rotations (chess, etc), strategies evolve and tactics go in and out of fashion within the community who plays and defines the game. When trying to determine something’s value, it’s impossible to separate that value from the context. If a game will run for even a few years, it becomes too large to see the entire game in any single moment. A particular piece of content’s value across the life of the game can’t be fully expressed in any single moment.

Value and Value

Don’t get me started on games with speculation…

So, what’s the take-away here? “Max Brooke says go ahead and make tons of bad cards as long as they might someday be interesting?” Not exactly - or, at least, not without some caveats.

For starters, when making a commercial game, it’s important to keep your eye on where the value proposition to the consumer in your product predominantly lies. In an X-Wing ship expansion, that’s really the ship itself - the physical miniature, the ship cards, the dial, etc. If the ship is a dud competitively, consumers will be unhappy, and rightly so. So while the upgrade cards are still important, they’re not the core value proposition of the product. If one or two out of eight included in the product (or one out of thirty, in Treacherous’ case) gets ignored on release, that’s probably fine for the overall health of the game. To turn to the example of opening a pack of (15) Magic: The Gathering cards: if one of the Common cards in the pack has a really thematic effect that you couldn’t really see wanting to use, nobody will bat an eye. If the Rare card isn’t at least narrowly competitively applicable, people will feel they wasted their money. I suspect it’s no accident that Magic moved away from the relatively frequent “bad Rares” that used to be a staple of its design, and added the Mythic Rare tier to further emphasize the correlation between rarity and value: both of these decisions improve the value proposition of the unopened pack to the player.

So while not every product has to be competitively oriented, if a product does cater to the competitive crowd, it’s important that it be perceived good value on release. In the case of the products containing Treacherous (Servants of Strife) and Foresight (BTL-B Y-wing), I wasn’t worried about that one card tipping the scale.

The type of game you’re designing also matters. If you’re designing a game with 16 discrete pieces of content that players must choose between, you probably can’t afford to have too many of them be rejected by your competitive player base, because as a percentage of the game that exists, each card is much more substantial.

So I’d say the takeaway of this journey through the lives (so far) of Foresight and Treacherous is this: Initial assessments of value are relevant to a designer, but even an accurate initial assessment of something’s value is often deeply incomplete, and that’s worth keeping in mind, too. Put another way, nobody’s Foresight is perfect, so relying upon initial assessments can be Treacherous over time.

I’ll see myself out.

Regrets and Retrospectives

Last week, Ryan Farmer and Dee Yun were kind enough to have me on the Fly Better Podcast. If you’re interested, feel free to give it a listen for some insights on X-Wing design, testing, and competitive metagame development!

One of the last questions they asked me was (paraphrasing) “Do you have any ships you regret designing, or would design differently?” I had to think about it for a minute. But after some reflection, there was one ship that definitely sprang to mind: a ship from the second movie of a trilogy, with a brief onscreen appearance in a larger battle but a lot of marginalia about its unique functions from the visual dictionary accompanying that film. A ship I intended to be as much a position control piece as a fighting vessel. One that has even developed a degree of infamy in X-Wing as a result.

So today, I’ll talk about what I would do differently on that ship with perfect hindsight. That’s right, it’s the Resistance Bomber! What did you expect me to say, the Nantex?

A (Re)Design Challenge

A Literary Discussion in the Second Tier, Honoré Daumier (published in Le Charivari, February 27, 1864).
Courtesy the Met Open Access collection.
Ruined by me (February 15, 2021).

Let’s get a couple of caveats out of the way:

My regrets only pertain to the First Edition variant of the ship. When adapting it to Second Edition, fellow X-Wing designer Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt did a very solid job patching up the performance of the Resistance Bomber (newly dubbed the MG-100 StarFortress) through good pilot abilities, interesting crew/gunner options, and general quality of life improvements. The Second Edition turret mechanics also innately help to give it more to do during a game of X-Wing. Pilots like Vennie and Paige Tico have seen a decent bit of competitive success; with the points tinkering since its release, the ship is in a pretty good place these days. A lot of my reflections how to fix issues with the First Edition version are, unsurprisingly, drawn from Brooks’ successes in the Second Edition redesign. But today, I want to dig into what a First Edition redesign could look like, and it does have some really interesting design limitations.

Second, it’s not like Past Me was just asleep at the wheel or something. This ship has some creative mechanics I’m still proud of designing, a miniature that is easily one of my favorites in the range, and the seeds of some ideas that would become much more prominent in 2nd Edition. It’s not bad work or a bad product. But I think it’s completely fair to say that the ship underwhelmed in the competitive scene of First Edition, and not just because of its points cost - its issues, in fact, were much more fundamental than points. With hindsight and a lot more data, I can look back and see why it didn’t really take off competitively (or even become a sleeper favorite in the narrative or casual play bases, as many other “weak” ships did) during First Edition. And maybe even learn something from it along the way!

Why Didn’t It Catch On?

Pictured: Another Troubled Takeoff

There are couple of reasons I think the First Edition Resistance Bomber struggled to find its place in the X-Wing ecosystem:

• The dial is limited. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be done about this. Star Wars: X-Wing is a game bringing the experience of Star Wars to the tabletop. That means emulating the fiction. If a TIE Fighter isn’t nimbler and more maneuverable (in certain respects) than an X-wing, the mechanics don’t properly reflect Star Wars, which is important. And, as we see in the films, the Resistance Bomber flies like a dump truck.

• 360-degree turrets were a tricky space to navigate from a design perspective. When we set to making X-Wing Second Edition, Alex, Frank, and I all agreed that 360-degree turret ships needed to go - not just because they aren’t much fun to fly against (though they aren’t), but also because they’re less fun for (most of) the people who fly them. The core interaction of X-Wing is flying the ships to line up certain angles while avoiding others, and when a ship can attack in any direction, the player is deprived of this core experience. For most people, this makes the game less fun, even if they were the one who brought the ship that does this.

• The Rebel faction was enormous and there were tons of other, far better options. If it had been part of a smaller pool of options, creative players might have found a stronger niche for it somewhere. But there was no reason to look for that niche, because the YT-1300, YT-2400, U-wing, VCX-100, and other YT-1300 were all readily available choices that were more appealing. Players weren’t pushed to figure out what to do with this thing.

What to Do in a Do Over?

Yes, I know that the World Between Worlds creates a stable time loop and also this event would be in Ezra’s future, but until WandaVision makes the Time Stone canon in all Disney properties, this is the best visual Star Wars time travel joke I’ve got.

So, let’s imagine I was making the First Edition Resistance Bomber again, for First Edition X-Wing, but I had been somehow imbued with my current knowledge by, like, a visit from Ezra Bridger using the World Between Worlds or something. What would I do differently for this ship’s design?

Copy Off the Future’s Test

What worked in Second Edition Resistance Bombers? Playmaker abilities, that is to say abilities that give you rewards for making certain moves with your other pieces. Vennie’s ability is a great example of this, granting an excellent defensive bonus if you (or any friendly ship) points its turret arc at the attacker. This ability is strong, but maybe more importantly, it makes battlefield positioning key, creating a fun dynamic to build around. Bring some RZ-2 A-wings with turret arcs, and you can make it tricky for your opponent to land a knockout blow on the already durable Vennie by flying your ships correctly.

If this ship is going to be slow (and it is, canonically), it needs to be an anchor for your whole list, and reward you for flying your other ships in creative ways. Crimson Specialist and Cobalt Leader reward you for flying the Bomber itself successfully, but due to its limited maneuver options, you’re being rewarded for doing something that isn’t much fun. By extending that reward to your other ships, suddenly this ship makes your whole list more fun to play even if the Bomber itself doesn’t have the most exciting dial in the game.

A few small changes could have helped here. Extending Cobalt Leader’s ability to friendly ships (or perhaps friendly Resistance ships, spoilers for my next point) would have made it a playmaker for your whole list. Changing Crimson Specialist to trigger Rattled on an attack while the defender is in the arc of another friendly ship (and taking out the requirement to spend results) could also have the desired effect of rewarding skillful flying with other ships in the list. Obviously these would need to be tested, but they’re where I’d start.

It’s the Resistance!

I had the right idea with the upgrade Crossfire Formation, but should have pushed this further: make the Resistance card identity matter. Resistance ships were differentiable from Rebel ships in First Edition thanks to their different card frame, as you may recall. Perhaps some of the pilot abilities like the ones I proposed above should only have been active for Resistance ships.

Besides it being thematically apt, though, why do this? Well, that’s simple: restrictions breed creativity, for designers and for players alike, and rewards can function as restrictions if presented properly. Despite being a subfaction in First Edition and only having three actual ships, the Resistance had a decent number of pilots: a whopping 10 T-70 X-wing pilots and a handful of YT-1300 pilots. And several of them were very good, competitively; Poe Dameron, Jess Pava, and Rey all were quite popular at times. So maybe players had no reason to look at the Resistance Bomber as a Rebel ship due to the many large base options available. But as a Resistance ship, it was part of a much smaller pool. They just needed an incentive to think about Resistance lists as a thing they could be building. While separating the Resistance into its own faction wouldn’t be viable until Second Edition, giving players an incentive to build Resistance lists would have made it a lot harder to simply flip past the Resistance Bomber.

Much as making it a playmaker to reward you for flying more maneuverable ships skillfully would have given it a clear role on the table, designing the Resistance Bomber as a list-maker would have given it a clear role during list building. If it gave other Resistance ships something they couldn’t get elsewhere (and then rewarded you for using them well on the table), it would have a unique function people would likely be excited to try. Even if it hadn’t pushed Resistance subfaction lists to the top, this might well have been enough to excite casual list builders to tinker with it more.

Cat-and-Rocket-Mouse

X-Wing tends to work best when players commit to a series of choices based on uncertainties. You set your dial without the knowledge of what your opponent is setting. This was one idea behind the mobile arc when Alex designed it for the Shadow Caster - it fed into the cat-and-mouse game of trying to dodge the enemy’s arcs, rather than making avoiding attacks entirely about distance-control (as it was with 360-degree turret arcs). In First Edition, 360-degree turret arcs were already the standard for ships with as many outward-facing guns as the Resistance Bomber. Which was too bad, because the mobile arc would have been an excellent option to give the Resistance Bomber a way to play with the dynamic of guessing enemy ships’ positions, then seeing if that guess paid off.

So bear with me here: what if it had a 360-degree turret arc AND a mobile arc?

The Resistance Bomber can clearly fire in numerous directions at once. If the Millennium Falcon can fire in any direction, this thing needs to be able to as well; otherwise, the verisimilitude of the game kind of capsizes. But if it had a weak attack (say, two dice) that could fire in all directions, but a strong attack (say, three dice) that could fire only in its mobile arc, the Resistance Bomber would suddenly be making interesting choices about where to aim its attacks, even if its dial didn’t give it much room to maneuver.

This would have been fun, but alone, I don’t think it would have been enough to make the Resistance Bomber competitive. Thanks to Push the Limit, aces in First Edition could pretty much go wherever they wanted after maneuvering, which meant even if they flew into the mobile arc, they’d just boost and/or barrel roll out. So this is where I think a ship-specific upgrade might have needed to come in. Something that would punish aces for flying incautiously around this behemoth. Here’s what I’d test first:

Withering Salvo

After you execute a maneuver, if you did not overlap a ship or obstacle, you may perform a free rotate action. After an enemy ship executes a maneuver, if it is in your mobile firing arc, it gains 1 jam token.

This means that when facing a maneuverable, higher-initiative foe (a lot of First Edition ships), you have an interesting series of interactions for both players. The Resistance Bomber player has to decide where to send the ship, then where to set their arc (though, importantly, it doesn’t eat up their action, meaning their 3-die mobile arc attack still has some teeth). The ship’s dial means that it can’t maneuver very well, but when you combine the number of maneuvers and the number of arc positions, the options get pretty interesting. Meanwhile, their opponent has to try to guess this and decide where it is safe to move.

Both players have to think about where their ship could go (or point its most powerful attack), where their opponent will be going (and where their most powerful attack will come from), and how to make the best of this situation. If the opponent is outguessed, they are “punished” (with the jam token), but can still choose to boost or barrel roll away from the attack. Even when the opponent gets outguessed, the agency they expected they would have in the optimal outcome isn’t totally negated. But the Resistance Bomber player’s weak shot will be somewhat better, since it is coming at a jammed foe who can’t easily stack tokens. It creates a give-and-take.

This probably isn’t perfect, but it’s where I’d start my design inquiry.

Wider Lessons

Will people get the gag, or just assume their phone has screwed up the aspect ratio somehow?

If you’re still playing First Edition X-Wing, maybe it’s worth trying this stuff out as homebrew. Drop me a line if you do. But for most everyone here, I suspect this is a pretty academic subject. After all, these problems have pretty much been solved (in a completely different way). So what can we learn here that applies to design at large?

1). Not everything in your game has to exemplify the heart of your game’s core experience as long as it contributes to it. Flying the ships is the heart of X-Wing, but the redesigned Resistance Bomber wouldn’t fly any differently. But it would reward you for flying your other ships to create particular patterns, it would give you interesting choices when you try to guess where the opponent will fly, and it would create more interesting choices for your opponents when choosing where to fly. An individual piece can provide its value by enhancing the core experience, such as by incentivizing both players to engage with it.

2). Too many available, comparable options can make it hard to draw players’ attention. Narrowing the field of players’ choices can sometimes give a particular piece of content the space it needs to shine. This can be done through restrictions, but also through rewards both explicit (such as making the Resistance Bomber reward you for choosing other Resistance ships) or implicit (such as making the Resistance Bomber reward you for taking maneuverable ships with it by giving bonuses when you line up multiple shots on the same target).

3). In competitive games, design for all players’ experience, not just the user’s. For most players, content that is flat to play against will eventually become for them to play, too. Think about the give-and-take that a piece of content creates within the context of the core experience, and try not to leave any player without choices entirely, even in their worst-case scenario.

Life in the Margins: Three Stories of RPG Characters and X-Wing

A lot of X-Wing pilot names come from places you’d expect. They made a couple of movies about Anakin, Luke, and Rey, after all, and I hear they did pretty well. But if you’re a seasoned X-Wing player, you’ve probably noticed that not every name in the game comes from a pilot who saved and/or destroyed the galaxy. And while many of these characters are famous pilots from TV series, novels (both classic EU and new canon), and more, some of them are a bit mysterious.

When I first joined the X-Wing team, way back during the development of Wave 9 (First Edition), one of the first tasks I did to help lead developer Alex Davy was compile a list of characters who could fly these ships, particularly the Fang fighter, which at the time only had Fenn Rau as a canonical pilot. And while some of the names were pulled from Star Wars: Galaxies or deep cut EU novels, a decent number of them came from what I knew best at the time: RPG books. And RPG characters ended up working out well - their names had already passed muster for published works, but their limited appearances generally meant that these characters were free to fly whatever ships we needed them to. For many of Scum & Villainy faction ships which had short lists of pilots (canonical or apocryphal), this made RPG characters a great option. The list of RPG characters available to appear in ships kicked around for quite some time, and continued paying dividends well into 2nd Edition.

So today, I’m going to shed some light on a few characters whose names come from other published materials you might not have heard about!

Teroch & Roll

Speaking of “old,” this frame sure takes me back…

As I mentioned above, when the Fang fighter first appeared in Rebels, it was a ship with a very limited roster of known pilots. Because it was a totally new ship, it didn’t have any EU pilots to pull from, nor did it have an extensive list of pilots in its first appearance. In fact, Galactic Civil War-era Mandalorian pilot names were a bit hard to come by at that point, since we were still quite a few years off from them coming into focus in the ever-expanding canon of Star Wars television. But we did have one excellent resource for Mandalorian active during that period: an Age of Rebellion adventure entitled Friends Like These.

Written by Keith Kappel and Ryan Brooks, Friends Like These puts the players into the role of Rebel agents seeking allies against the Empire to save a threatened world. In one act of the adventure, the PCs must prove themselves to the Beroya clan of Mandalorians, whose members include Kad Solus and Old Teroch, and if they are successful, these skilled Mandalorian fighters prove to be a major asset in the final battle with the Empire. Written a decent bit before Rebels tread a very similar story, it was one of our best resources for Mandalorian pilots at the time. Little did we know how many Mandalorians from TV series we’d have in a few short years…

Teroch Trivia: In Friends Like These, Old Teroch can teach the PCs the history of Clan Beroya over a series of read-alouds. There was no space on his X-Wing card for read-alouds, but nobody is stopping you from breaking out Friends Like These at the table so you can regale your opponent with Old Teroch’s war stories.

Who the Hel is This Guy?

Man, Pilot Skill went up to 9? Wild.

In 2012, a solid 7 years before Din Djarin made the look iconic, Viktor Hel was the often bemused, always be-helmeted protector of a Force-sensitive child (and a bunch of other weirdos in his orbit). Created by the endlessly inventive Daniel Lovat Clark for an office Edge of the Empire game run by Sam Gregor-Stewart, Viktor Hel was originally intended to be a comic relief character, based on the intrinsic comedy of a “hard” bounty hunter trying to hide from his feelings behind a cool name and a beskar helmet. Of course, he instead ended up being the “party babysitter” to the aforesaid urchin thief, a megalomaniac droid, a Trandoshan doctor/chef, and "Lando Calrissian, if he was played by George Takei.” Despite Dan’s original intentions, Viktor almost always found himself as the sole voice of reason in his group of misfits. It was the best kind of RPG hijinks.

After that campaign, most of the characters from it showed up somewhere in the roleplaying supplements for Edge of the Empire at one point or another. Viktor Hel appeared in semi-retirement in a blurb in Suns of Fortune, then got pulled out of retirement for one last job in the introductory fiction to No Disintegrations, where he appeared alongside his mentor/rival from the campaign, Koshka Frost. They might also have dated? That was always a little ambiguous in the story, or at least the other PCs never believed Viktor when he denied it.

Viktor Hel made his way into X-Wing when Frank Brooks was working on Guns for Hire, an Aces pack including the StarViper and Kihraxz starfighters. Ever inquisitive, Frank came to me and asked who these people on the list were, and I gave him a rundown of each one. Frank really took to the idea of poor, put-upon Viktor constantly pursued by his inflated reputation from the successful franchise of holo-films using his likeness, and decided to use him for one of the Kihraxz pilots, giving him an ability that intimidates foes by causing them stress.

When 2nd Edition rolled around, we needed an extra pilot for the Firespray, and Frank and I knew exactly who it should be: Koshka Frost. We designed her ability to synergize with Viktor’s, rewarding her for attacking stressed targets and making the two a natural pair. Of course, the player is incentivized to use Viktor as bait and then have Koshka use the opportunity to bring down the target, reflecting their somewhat one-sided relationship.

Viktor Hel Trivia: The helmet stays on.

The Good, The Bad, and the Nom

Sure looks like he’s in that Kimogila’s bullseye… Not a great place to be, Nom.

Nom Lumb first appeared in the Edge of the Empire as Viktor Hel’s costar in the introductory fiction to No Disintegrations, but I first encountered him in an RPG campaign (again run by Sam Gregor-Stewart), played by my friend and coworker Michael Gernes. Nomb Lum was a Sullustan gunslinger, who lived recklessly and preferred to let the threat of his blaster or grenades do the talking. Though they didn’t appear in the same campaigns, when I was working on No Disintegrations, I chose to put Nom Lumb alongside Viktor Hel in the introductory fiction because they were a great comedic pair: a famous but reluctant fighter drawn back into the hunt by his obligations, and a pure mercenary willing to cut a deal with (or gun down) anyone for a payday. It was a classic Western teamup, and the right tone to start a book on bounty hunters.

This appearance got Nomb Lumb’s name onto the list, and when Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt needed a name for a scummy new pilot for the JumpMaster 5000 during 2nd Edition, Nom Lumb seemed like a strong option. Brooks had already designed an ability that caused the pilot to snap guns on target in response to fire, creating the feel of a high noon showdown, which was a great fit for Nom’s skills as a gunslinger. Sometimes, the name creates the mechanics, but sometimes, the mechanics find the name and fit perfectly.

Nom Lumb Trivia: Nom Lumb’s ship of choice in the campaign where he originated was a Z-95 headhunter, but a JumpMaster 5000 would be a logical ship for a bounty hunter to upgrade to eventually, if only because it would mean not needing to store captured quarry in the torpedo tubes.

Bonus: Unexpected Stardom

Who knew it was Jad Bean behind the stick?

This one doesn’t come out of the RPG, but is no less interesting a story. When 2nd Edition was in development, we decided to assign names, or at least callsigns, to all “unnamed” limited pilots. This meant that characters like Zeta Leader needed callsigns when they were updated to the new version of the game. “Scorch” was a First Order callsign that we came up with on the rationale that “it sounds like something someone in the First Order would call themself:” dangerous, edgy, and a little bit like a video game handle I’d have picked as a teenager, so it fit the bill. However, destiny had other, much greater plans for “Scorch.” When the TIE Fighter Owner’s Manual came out some time later, it revealed that “Scorch” is an alias of the legendary Jad Bean, and that he had joined the First Order after surviving the Battle of Endor, making the appearance of Zeta Leader/“Scorch” in X-Wing a small part of the larger Jad Bean Saga written across the margins of Star Wars history.

Jad Bean Trivia: Jad Bean became an instructor in the First Order, and has a speech to cadets in the TIE Fighter Owner’s Manual.

Exploring “Bad at Games”

Why does a person feel they are “bad” at a particular game? People say they’re “bad” at a given game all the time (I live in Minnesota, so you get a lot of this in general). I say it pretty often, usually as shorthand for “I lose this game often” or “I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that my being a game designer makes me good at this; please don’t be disappointed when you completely stomp me.” So this week, I’m going to take a look at a couple of ways I’ve personally felt “bad at a game” or encountered community discussions of “bad play,” and what considerations these experiences might raise for a designer.

Inexperience, a Time of Joys and Frustrations

Photograph of my hated enemy provided under Creative Commons Share-Alike Unported 3.0, courtesy Wikipedia

My Experiences: The first formalized game I remember playing is t-ball, at the encouragement of my dad. I was a five-year-old with underdeveloped gross motor skills and no practice at hand-eye coordination. Unsurprisingly, I could not hit the ball, despite it literally sitting still in front of me. This lead to me crying every game. I did not play t-ball for very long, and my dad learned a useful lesson about my prospects for athletic scholarships.

Why was I “bad” at t-ball? Because I was five, and had spent most of my life so far developing the ability to talk my parents’ ears off about dinosaurs. That did not help me hit a ball off a post in the slightest. I lacked the basic skills to engage in the activity, to say nothing of the emotional perspective needed to cope with failure.

Everyone starts off as this kind of “bad” when they start doing something totally new; they start out unable to execute sufficiently to win due to inexperience. When I got into Magic, I was “bad” at it because my cautious nature lead me to want to defend myself with life-gain and blockers rather than, you know, actually do things that make you win. When I started playing squash, I was “bad” at it because I didn’t understand the importance of holding the center of the court, nor could I reliably hit shots where I wanted. When I got into Warhammer 40,000, I was “bad” at it because I hadn’t memorized the relationships between ranges and ability to attack (although my friend Paul setting up his Tau opposite my Space Wolves on a flat, terrain-less table 48” long and 24” wide did not help me in my first game. Thanks, Paul!). These days, thanks to overall experience at games as a field of activity, I can usually fairly quickly assess why I am not winning at most new games I encounter. But even that capacity for assessment was a skill I had to learn over years of playing games.

But the funny thing is, t-ball aside, I enjoyed these games a lot during this period of “badness by inexperience,” because although I wasn’t good at winning the game, I was constantly discovering new things. The joy of the game wasn’t the thrill of competition, but the dopamine hit of novelty. Even as a teenager, I noticed that I had enjoyed Magic more when every opponent’s deck contained secrets unknown, and enjoyed squash more when I and my opponents were “worse” at the game but played more creatively as a result, using strategies and tricks that an experienced player would quickly dismantle with reliable basics everyone is taught to master.

And why was t-ball the exception where I was “bad” and also didn’t enjoy my time being bad at the game? It’s admittedly hard to cast my perspective back almost three decades, but I think it was because I wasn’t meaningfully playing the game. If I’d been able to get on base by hitting the ball, I might have been able to persevere long enough to develop basic skills (although who can say, really; I was five). Physically, I wasn’t ready to deal with the challenges involved, and emotionally, I didn’t have the patience or inclination to learn the basic skill (hitting a ball off a stick) needed to even participate in the game. The game wasn’t accessible enough for me to feel like I was playing. It just felt like an exercise in frustration. As an adult, I’ve bounced off plenty of other games with a high barrier to entry for the same reason (though usually with less crying).

Design Considerations: Almost everyone is going to start out to some degree “bad” at your game by virtue of their inexperience. And in terms of “how often do they achieve victory/whatehaveyou,” many people will stay there. Games are (largely) recreation, after all. I have a lot of board games, and I don’t play most of the ones I own often enough to consider myself “competitively good.” If your game can’t be enjoyed by an inexperienced player, it’s probably going to struggle to reach people. If it punishes the “badness” of inexperience excessively, it will drive people away. I don’t think that any game should strive to be everyone’s favorite game (and attempting this generally leads to a bland game with no real identity or flair), but striving to be at least playable by as wide a swath of people as possible is valuable. If people can play a game, they may even find new ways to engage with and enjoy it that you never considered - but that usually won’t happen if they can’t hit the ball off the tee at all.

Beyond this, it’s important to consider what unique perspectives inexperienced voices bring to a game during development. Andrew Fischer said it very well: “Fresh eyes are only fresh once, so welcome, encourage, and support them!” Much like an inexperienced player will play the game “badly” in ways they find enjoyable, an inexperienced designer will often explore a space without regard for boundaries or conventions, and this can lead to brilliant breakthroughs. Of course, there’s a value in tempering this with experience, but that can come into the project in numerous ways, whether it be design mentors, colleagues, or rigorous playtesting.

Mismatch between Desire and Outcome

Knights Templar Playing Chess, Alphonse le Sage, 1283

Left Knight’s facial expression says a lot, really.

My Experiences: One of the ways I most consistently feel “bad at” games I actually play often is when I want to play the game one way, but the game heavily incentivizes a different strategy or approach. In Warhammer 40,000, I want the heroes I field to play a big, exciting role in the battle. In the practical calculus of winning the game, however, these models are not special compared to any other unit in my army. They are numerically better at some things, but sometimes they die - and worse (for me), sometimes the right play is to let them die. Like a Queen sacrifice play in chess, sometimes the best play is to give up your coolest toy to make progress toward victory. To win, I should choose to give up that exciting play with a hero (or let them die an ignoble death) when it lets me make strategic gains. But these are characters I’ve invested time and energy building, painting, and creating stories about. I want to see them do cool stuff.

It would be easy to blame the game for this. I could say that it’s a poor match between theme and fiction, or that the game shouldn’t offer a certain fantasy (through giving heroes cool powers and equipment) and then let it be optimal sometimes to sacrifice them. But I don’t think that’s a fair reading of what’s really going on here. In a choice-based, competitive game, it’s important that both players have agency. And if something of mine is a powerful piece, it should sometimes be my opponent’s priority to try to remove it. If they do, then the choice goes back to me: should I try to save it, or focus my limited resources elsewhere. For it to be a choice whether to focus on preserving and using my characters, sometimes the optimal answer has to be “let them die.” One can argue over the specifics of how often this should occur, but the possibility needs to exist for the choice to have meaning. And that means sometimes deciding between optimal and desired play.

So really, the answer is that I make unoptimized choices too often due to emotional attachment to those choices. But these aren’t necessarily “bad” choices from another point of view. What are the moments I remember the most from Warhammer 40,000? They’re times like when my Wolf Lord shoved a Thousand Sons Terminator Lord and his Scarab Occult brute squad into a locker singlehandedly (I lost that game), or when my friend’s Inquisitor Coteaz sent a cyber-eagle to rip the pilot out of a gigantic Chaos Knight, bringing the mighty war machine low (we also lost that game). These moments didn’t happen because of optimal play decisions, but they were great experiences, which is really why I play Warhammer 40,000 in the first place.

Design Considerations: As I’ve discussed before, why people play any particular game is something you should strive to understand. And interestingly, I think the answer is rarely “to win.” People really like winning, don’t get me wrong, but if that was all they cared about, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing about how to make new games, because people can get their thrills destroying each other in lots of great games that have been around for centuries. They choose to seek out new games instead. In my observation, even the most successful competitive players are driven by a number of different motivations beyond merely obliterating the opposition. This doesn’t mean “victory*”-motivated analysis of a game isn’t helpful and important, but it’s not usually the whole recipe for success in creating a new game.

*Here I am using “victory” to mean whatever winning, getting big damage numbers, or generally “optimizing” entails; obviously you can’t win Dungeons & Dragons, whether or not it’s Advanced, but people argue about character optimization at great length nonetheless.

When you’re designing, consider what options people might pursue in your game other than “victory” and whether each one is an experience you want to promote. When someone finds joy in your game when they play it even when they lose, they’ll probably come back for more. If you’re a “victory”-oriented player yourself, you should find collaborators who will play the game less optimally and see what they are enjoying about it. If you aren’t especially motivated by “victory” yourself, fostering the joy in the play of the game is often something that comes naturally, and you might need to outsource the optimization stress-testing. As with anything, know your own strengths and interests, but remember that they aren’t universal and populate your team to accommodate a wide variety of perspectives.

Mismatch between Player Expectations

So, wait, does this go on pizza or not? That’s definitely going to start a fistfight.

Experiences: It’s hard to be “bad” at most tabletop RPGs in terms of failure to optimize or achieve certain results. Fundamentally, the exercise isn’t about winning or losing. If you’re having fun and everyone else at the table is too, you’re doing it right. But sometimes you hear or read about bad experiences with players/game masters and can’t help but think “you know, that person is, in fact, kind of bad at roleplaying games.” Unsurprisingly, no small number of these are truly toxic behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated in the community, but that’s not what I want to talk about in this article. The cases that I think are really relevant here are the ones that boil down to “this person wanted to play a really different game than the everyone else at the table.” Whether it’s the person whose hyper-optimized character stole the spotlight in every scene or the person who really wanted the campaign to be serious while everyone else was trying to seduce the dragon, I’ve heard and observed all sorts of problems born out of conflicting expectations. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to punch for the biggest numbers or tell serious character drama in and of themselves (and these are the “correct” ways to play in many contexts). But in RPGs, modulating your play contextually to make sure you’re not stepping on someone else’s fun too much is part of playing “well.” Reading the room and/or being open to feedback from others is an important play skill important in RPGs.

These sorts of conflicts are actually pretty common, I think, they just usually don’t escalate to the level of going viral online. And they extend beyond collaborative games like RPGs. Individual people play the games they choose to play for lots of different reasons, and this sometimes means that incompatible expectations collide. As an anecdote: when I was in high school, I was playing Scrabble with two of my friends, and one of my friends started using a denial strategy (the competitively optimal way to play). At the time, I was pretty peeved that my friend was refusing to play the game as I understood it (go for big words, open the board without looking at positional advantage) - and what is interesting is that I was actually in the majority at the table; the my other friend agreed with me. This doesn’t mean that I was “right” and my friend was “wrong” but, in some sense, we were both playing the game “badly” from the other’s perspective. I was playing in a suboptimal fashion (due to my inexperience and desire to stretch my vocabulary with large words that gave up vital positional advantage) in my friend’s eyes. But in my eyes, he was breaking the social contract by only playing short words that scored on multiple axes and closing off the board, which made it harder for me to play the game the way I enjoyed. I (and the other player at the table) had taken it as implicit that the point of this exercise was to win in a particular way, which he was ignoring. His way was more optimized, of course, so he won, but nobody really had a great time.

There are countless other examples of this. Whether it is the widespread stigma against unpainted armies in certain tabletop wargames, the ceaseless “roleplay versus ROLLplay” arguments, or the vast swaths of ink dedicated to the “correct” way to list build without crossing into “cheesy,” sometimes the majority of a community rejects raw optimization. In these cases, playing the game against the grain becomes seen as playing it “badly.” That might or might not be fair, but the perception tends to stick, and oftentimes these players are subject to varying degrees of shunning until they either change their behavior or find a community more in line with their own preferences.

Design Considerations: Well, we’re into some real “Death of the Author” shit now: what should the game designer have to say about the “proper” play of their game, and should the players even care about what they have to say? When someone decides to play against the grain of their community, who gets to say they have misinterpreted the text, and on what authority?

Some games have the space to offer a great deal of editorializing about how and why they should be played (whether this should be taken as suggestion or mandate is its own topic for debate). Most roleplaying games, for instance, include GM guidance to explain the pace of the game, and the spirit in which it should be run. Games Workshop has certain standards of hobby preparation and player behavior for its events, and to rebut this mentality, rival game Warmachine published a rather infamous purpose statement about the win-at-all-costs mentality its designers wanted to encourage. While most sports tend towards having an active rules arbitration committee, some, like ultimate [frisbee] have an explicit “spirit of the game” statement in place of a rules arbitrator. But, of course, this is a matter of debate within the ultimate community, and certain events are run with judges to maintain rules decorum. While the designer can set out their case for the game to be used according to their intentions, it’s not something one can easily enforce.

A designer might even fall into the category of playing their own game against the grain of the community that develops. Richard Garfield famously designed Magic: The Gathering with mechanics like ante to prevent simply buying the best cards from being the best strategy, and in 1994 (the linked article is a 2013 republishing of that article), wrote that “This is why there are no marketed lists of cards when the cards are first sold: discovering the cards and what they do is an integral part of the game.” Of course, in the days of frequent full-set spoilers before release, it is clear that the community has pulled in a different direction: one where knowledge rather than discovery is the main pull of the game. A player like me, who intentionally avoids spoilers before drafting a new set to experience the joy of discovery, is both playing the game “as intended by the designer” and “badly.”

There are other factors that can affect how a game will be played. If it is a game that receives official updates, new content and errata can empower certain strategies or remove others. An organized play program often sets the overall tenor of a game - if participation is rewarded over “victory,” then the community might develop in a particular way. If large sums of money become involved, the game will certainly move toward professionalization, which is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but has clear and significant implications. If self-appointed community members become the main rallying points, then their particular tastes and preferences will dictate the outcome as much as the designer’s intentions, if not more so.

If there’s a takeaway from this one, it’s that games may be designed, but once they are out in the world, they often grow organically. “Successful” play might not look like what you think it will during the design stage, or even playtesting. And it can be community and context-sensitive. Testing across a broad spectrum of players can help you project where this might go and guide the game in the direction you would like to see it grow, but nobody can perfectly see the future.