Making A Boardgame — Week 3. Early in the first play test it became…
Tags: Game Design, Gamedev, Board Games, Board Game Design

Early in the first play test it became obvious that the game was hard to play since there was no clear win condition to work toward. Also, I came to realize the important role story plays in guiding and motivating the player.

The initial design for the game ending condition is to use a fixed number of turns. This ending condition requires a scoring system, and what I have so far is not nearly complete enough.

Let’s talk a little bit about using a fixed-length ending condition. Some advantages are:

There is no elimination, so players can play until the end

Knowing when the game will end gives players a fair chance to complete their goals

I favor this ending condition because those two features work together to provide a satisfying game experience regardless of whether you win. Pulling off a difficult strategy can be just as fun as getting a huge score and placing first.

Puerto Rico provides a good counterexample. With luck, some strategies can end the game extremely quickly, making it feel like you didn’t get to play at all.

Designing A Scoring System:

Most activities of the game should end up having some impact on the scoring system. Otherwise, why do them? The main activities of this game are:

Combat -> Allows you to level up, and provides resources

Gathering Resources -> Allows you to play cards

Playing Cards

Leveling Up

Based on these activities, one obvious scoring system is to have some cards that give points, and award points for player levels. For the next play test of the game, I will add many ways to get points from cards, and then see how balanced it feels at the end.

Breaking Down The Game Structure:

Just having a fixed duration and scoring system is not enough structure for the game, however. If there is never any feedback for the players until the end of the game, it can feel pointless, boring, or jarring.

For an example of this, take the 1980 game Titan. In Titan, you move two legions around a map recruiting armies of fantastic creatures. Eventually, you will encounter another player’s legion whose contents are hidden. If both legions include the player’s titan, one player will be eliminated. The first part of the game can last for 8 or more hours, but the game can end immediately at the first battle, creating an epic anticlimax. Gathering the army part is remarkably, inexplicably fun though.

Agricola is a fixed length game where players gather resources and build their own farms. Every few rounds, there is a harvest in which players must pay food and receive goods from their farm. Preparing for the harvest by gathering enough food and getting new farm production online provides short term goals for players to work toward, and it helps to keep you on track. If you’re doing well at each harvest, you are probably going to do well at the end of the game.

So here’s another big goal to work toward in the next week: How can we add enough structure beyond end game scoring? The other big goal I’m thinking about is coming up with a compelling story. The story will take longer to resolve, but I wanted to keep focused on making some progress on it since it’s so important.