TWENTY!

I realised on Saturday that I started this blog 20 years ago this month.

On the 5th February 2006.

After designing Border Reivers during 2002-04, I decided I wanted to self-publish it in 2006.

This blog charts a design and self-publishing journey of 20 years.

1,365 posts by me and a few others.

Starting and running two companies.

Designing 10s of games.

Of which nine will have seen the light of day once Gal4Xeon is released in May.

None of my games have been real breakout hits, but that’s still a huge achievement.

My Shelf of Pride, containing some of the games I’ve (self-)published.

Thanks to all of you for coming along on the journey too!

Habits

I have a list of daily tasks I do.

To protect my health.

My mind.

My body.

But also to hone my craft.

Games design is one of them.

I do a bit every day.

Building my skills.

Making my games better.

I have a broad definition of games design.

Title ideas. Theme ideas. Mechanism ideas. Writing rules. Creating prototypes. Playtesting. Graphic design on a prototype or final version.

But a bit every day.

Sometimes a tiny bit.

Sometimes several big bits.

But each day I am practising.

Getting better.

And my games are moving forward.

Yesterday it was helping Daughter the Second with a game idea she had.

The first page of the Gal4Xeon rules taking shape in InDesign

Then a bit more work on the Gal4Xeon rules.

Today is my day off.

I'll make more progress.

Onwards! 

Broken

As I've mentioned before, I have a set of daily tasks.

Things I do every day.

Some are things to benefit my physical health.

Some are things to benefit my mental health.

Plus games design.

Which I think benefits my mental health as well as helping Eurydice Games.

And I'm a data nerd. So I track it.

Last year I managed 176 days in a row of doing all my tasks.

I took a break over Christmas.

We were away with family, I was out of my routine with less time by myself.

I started again on the first of Jan.

I've already broken it twice this year.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Once on the 17th Jan and then again last Wednesday.

After 96 days in a row :(

I'd done everything but games design.

I sat down at the computer to do it in the evening.

Just a little bit of graphic design on my latest prototype.

But I got distracted.

Did some bookkeeping.

Sorted out a few of the overcharge stragglers.

Went to bed.

Didn't realise until the morning.

Today I hope to get to 5 again... 

Reset

I've a chain of daily tasks.

Including game design, exercise and a walk outside.

I keep track of how many days I've kept it up.

At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of a 100 day chain.

I'd done that by March.

I broke the chain on a family holiday by accident after 123 days.

I thought I'd done my stretches but, in hindsight, I think I forgot.

I started again.

I got to 176, before last week's COVID did for it again.

Several days where I wasn't fit enough to exercise.

And shouldn't leave the house.

Now I'm feeling better I've started again.

It's day 5.

I want to get to 200 this time.

It's really good for me.

Back

I'm back from my holiday.

Refreshed.

Rejuvenated.

Raring to go.

I kept up my games design streak while I was away.

Making progress on my new roll and write.

Working on Wizard a bit.

Coming up with a newer roll and write.

New roll and write sheet scribbled on the back of another roll and write sheet!

Now I'm back, I need to crack on with the Gamefound page for FlickFleet: A Box of Pirate Flicks.

Exciting times...

Mornings

I’ve spent the last week in a big house in the country with the entirety of my clan.

Nineteen of us. Aged 14 months to 77 years.

I’m still waking up early.

I was up first every day.

I did my chain of daily habits.

Then turned to games design.

Evolving rapidly

I finished the first Codename:Troll prototype.

Soloed it a couple of times.

Found a bunch of things to change.

Made a new version.

Soloed that a couple of times. It’s better.

Made some changes to Siren.

Tried them out.

They showed some issues.

I need to figure out how to address them.

Feels good to be prototyping.

Finding flaws.

Making progress.

Make games design a daily habit has been amazing.

My progress this year is night and day from the last couple of COVID years.

I have more headspace though, without the worry of that hanging over me.

Zombology: A Game in Three Acts

After reading very positive reviews on BGG and getting agreement on Twitter I bought the Kobold Guide to Games Design by Mike Selinker. It's a series of essays by gaming giants (Richard Garfield, Steve Jackson, Dale Yu, Rob Daviau, Andrew Looney and several more I'd never heard of, but should have!). I've only just started it, but already I've coming across an essay by Jeff Tidball (designer of Pieces of Eight) about how games should be formed in three acts, like a story, book or film.

Jeff's conceit is that the three stages of a game correspond to:

1. Setting the stage: The first act sets the boundaries of the conflict, allowing players to work out how and where to focus their efforts,
2. The meat of the gameplay: The players will be competing trying to get into position for a push for victory,
3. The push for victory: The player's will be attempting to strike for a game win, or stop others doing the same.

It struck me while reading the essay that that description neatly fits the way a game of Zombology plays out, despite the fact it only lasts ten minutes!

The first act is the first couple of hands - you're playing the game blind at this point - you've no idea which therapies the players are supporting, or even which ones could possibly lead to a victory. At this point you have a crazy optimism of a crackpot scientist who believes it is possible to cure the Zombie Plague with Homeopathy, or A Nice Cup of Tea. With everyone in the same position, it feels like a co-operative game - we can do this! We can cure the plague.

This phase can last a different length of time for different players - in a game with fewer players someone might start with the Cure for Healing Crystals, and hence know this is a good therapy to back, while others might not see a high valued card for several rounds.

As new and better cards come into the draft you start to build an understanding of what is possible in this game - which suits are being backed and, as you start to see the 4s, 5s and 6s going round, which suits have the potential to lead to a victory. In the next five or six rounds the battle lines are drawn. It's very unlikely that you can win the game as the only player to have played the winning therapy - you have to work together to get the evidence required to cure the Zombie Plague. As the game develops you start to see teams forming, as two or more players back one therapy while others back different therapies. Some therapies may not have been backed at all, or only by a single player - these will wither and die as the players focus on the therapies most likely to effect a cure.

You now have shifting alliances - it has morphed into a team game (where the teams are changing as people get into therapies that have potential). Players will work together to help a cure they can win in, or fight tooth and nail to scotch a cure that will lose them the game. Players will be keeping track of who has the Cures they've seen and whether a player is likely to play one this turn. If so, can they share that victory? Or do they need to try and stop it?

As the game nears the eighth round and the prospect of total annihilation of humanity looms the pressure builds - is it possible to cure the plague? Can you win, or must you doom seven billion souls to save face?

The final act is the when a player has the Cure in hand and is in a position to play it and win. They may have already done what they can to protect themselves from another player's spoiling, or they may be relying on others to help protect them for the shared victory. Others might be trying to stop them, ride on their coattails to victory or trying to see if there's a double (or triple) Cure that they can back sufficiently to also share in the success. The player with the Cure is excited - can the card be successfully played? Is there too much risk (you might know who has the ability to stop you with a well-timed zombie attack)? Could you even feint and play a different card, trying to draw out the attacks early while passing the Cure to the next player who would also play it?

The three acts analogy is an interesting lens to view a game through, and I'll definitely be considering it when I return to working on Vacuum.

2017 Aspirations!

For the last few years I've set myself some goals at the beginning of the year (2014, 2015, 2016), I've never aced them, but last year was weak, especially where games design and blogging were concerned.

2016 In Review

My new job, which I started in October 2015, took up a lot more time than I was expecting. It was my first time leading a team of any reasonable size and so I had a lot to learn in terms of leadership, budgeting, strategy and people management. On top of all that I ended up doing a lot more travel than I was originally expecting (four trips to the US, 20-30 to Manchester - often overnighters, and a frantic week-and-a-half long tour of Taiwan, China and Japan), which sounds great if you're not doing it, but it's very tiring and all you really see is offices, airports and hotels. This led to a double whammy of less free time and wanting to spend that free time with my wife and daughter, so I had a lot less time for games design-related shenanigans. I only made it to Newcastle Gamers once (out of at least 24 opportunities) and Newcastle Playtest probably only five times our of twelve. I've not played a prototype since September!

I failed both my blogging goals, giving up regular blogging as I had very little progress to report, most of it about designing mobile apps rather than board games (I've been coding since I was ten, the lack of coding in my new day job meant I fancied doing more of it in my limited free time, to the detriment of my games design) and doing nothing in November for NaGa Demon.

Gaming was the one area I aced, I played a lot of games in 2016. This was helped by starting a games club in the office on Wednesday lunchtimes (when I'm in the country!) and my weekly games night, plus a few trips with Ian (including to the US twice and round Asia) and my trusty iPad full of games. I even played 24 new games in the year (three of those on Dec 29th - games I got for Christmas!).

I did get the hand-made limited edition of Zombology finished in January and the print on demand version up on Drive Thru Cards in March/April (copies sold to date: 3!), so that was Games Design passed, but other than thinking of some rules tweaks to Zombology I did very little games design after that.

I didn't even finish my German language app that I wanted to wrap up. I made a lot of progress on it, but it's still not even ready for a beta release. I did tweak BGG Last Plays at the end of the year though - someone on BGG with a collection of 3,500 games tried it out and found it crashed on a collection of that size, so I fixed that and tweaked a couple of other things. He's got another couple of requests and so I'll do another version of that shortly. It's still my most popular app (150 downloads - on Windows Phone!), and if you've got someone keen enough to engage with the creator you should try to keep them happy!

2017 Aspirations

Seeing as I did so badly last year I'm going to change things up this year. No goals. Just some more vague aspirations:

• Get back into Games Design. Maybe Codename: Vacuum (I've a few ideas floating around in my head - it's probably been a couple of years since I last touched it, so maybe that distance will help when I come back to it)
• Blog when I have something to say. No regular weekly schedule, just talk when I've something worth discussing. Hopefully at least once a month.
• Code. It's been a passion of mine since I was a little kid and my day job for 13 of the last 16 years. Release apps. Enjoy it.
• Game. I only managed 36/52 possible Games Nights due to my travel schedule, but I want to game on Wednesday evenings at home, at work during Games Club, on the iPad on trips and also try to get to Newcastle Gamers and Newcastle Playtest more.

Fingers crossed...

A Goal I Might Hit

This year has been a weird one. My new job has required a lot more travel than I originally expected and as I result I've had a lot less time to spend with my family and on my hobbies of board game design and Windows Phone app programming. Up to this point I've only managed to make it to one of the bi-monthly Newcastle Gamers and I've missed loads of the Newcastle Playtest sessions too. With little to talk about I've cut back on blogging and NaGa DeMon is looking unlikely at this point too.

As a result, the goals I set myself at the beginning of the year are mostly looking impossible with the exception of the 366 plays (nailed it already!). So it was good to get down to York this weekend and spend a weekend with Paul and his family. I used to attend Paul's bi-weekly games night when I lived in York and he has a much larger collection of games than I do, so this was a perfect opportunity to get a few new-to-me games under my belt towards my 24 new-to-me games this year goal.

As it was, Paul was quite ill and I was knackered, so our late night gaming never materialised, but we did manage Rhino Hero (9 times!) and Imhotep, plus a load of games I already knew during the days. Rhino Hero and Imhotep took me to 21 out of 24 new-to-me games, so I just need three more  before the end of the year. That's a possibility, especially if I make it to Newcastle Gamers next month.

It was great to see them all and get some games in. We played Istanbul, Port Royal (still firmly on my wishlist), WobBally, Loopie Louie, Jenga and BANG! The Dice Game. A great weekend.

I've now got only eight days until the start of November with no real plan for NaGa DeMon. This is compounded by the fact that I'm off to Asia for a week and a half for work on the 26th Nov, so I'll miss the end of the month and want to focus on my family before I go. I think NaGa DeMon this year is a bust :-(

Find The Fun

A couple of weeks ago someone on twitter linked to this video by Eduardo (Edo) Baraf: So you want to make a game. He talks about game design in terms of six headings (see below).

I found the video very interesting, very thought provoking and it made me think about my games design efforts both past and present. During the six years I ran Reiver Games, I started out making games by hand, and then made the leap from time-intensive hand-crafting games in my spare time around a full-time job to quitting my job and running a professional publishing company as my full time job (spectacularly badly, by the way).

Over the last three or four years I've got back into games design and last year I made another hand-made run of a game with Zombology. Back to my roots. Once again I'm doing it in my spare time around a full-time job (and a young family as well this time!).

Edo's six points each made me think of why I spend so much of my free time designing games , so I thought I'd go through my thoughts on each of his points here:

Know what you're good at

I'm not a particularly good game designer, and I'm a pretty pants artist. I think all the evidence of Reiver Games goes to show that I'm rubbish at advertising and marketing. So what am I good at? I think the thing I'm best at is actually the hand-crafting of games. Ten years after Border Reivers was released I'm still proud of the physical quality of the games and the components and the effort that went into making them (3 hours each for those 100 copies!). And I'm proud of Zombology too. It's simple, but it's well done. Lovingly hand-crafted.

Know what you want

I'm not in it for the money, or the fame. I don't want to do a KickStarter, or run another publishing company. I'd like people to play my games and enjoy them, but even that's not the be all and end all for me. I enjoy the process. I like designing games, doing the graphic design in InDesign and Illustrator, playtesting with friends and at Newcastle Playtest, and I love making the games. Both the one-off prototypes that get played a couple of times and are then superseded and the hand-made runs like Border Reivers and Zombology. I enjoy hand-crafting games - I find it relaxing and therapeutic.

Find the fun

This is the bit I need to improve at. My games are fairly esoteric. They are never going to be mass-market hits, they aren't good enough and don't have wide enough appeal. But there are people who enjoy them. Mal loved Border Reivers (even more so once he finally beat me at it!), Paul from Newcastle Playtest gets very excited during Zombology. It's great to know that I've created something that brings other people joy, even if it's just a couple of them.

Find your audience

This is something I always have in mind when working on my games. Zombology was always intended as a filler for the beginning or end of a games night. Something simple and silly to while away a few minutes before playing something meatier. You need to use the intended audience as a filter when receiving feedback to ensure the feedback from your playtesters doesn't take you in a direction that you don't want to go.

Your journey

As I mentioned above, for me the journey is the important bit. I don't really mind whether the game sees the light of day, what matters to me is the joy I get from the journey. Making the prototypes, doing the graphic design, playtesting with friends, and should it get to that stage, introducing strangers to my game. Making the game is almost more fun than having a final product that can be sold.

Their joy

Edo talks about this in terms of the multiplication of the hours you put in to the hours of joy that your audience will get from the game. None of my own games have had enough distribution to achieve that, I'd be very surprised to find that the hours I put into Border Reivers or Zombology were more than the hours of play from my customers. But to me that doesn't matter. I've enjoyed making them from start to finish, and if someone, somewhere has enjoyed playing them, that's just icing on the cake.

Thanks for the video, Edo, made me take stock of what I'm doing, why and who for.

Streamlining

Not a huge amount to report this week, I've had my parents up for the week plus I was away for a couple of days on a work trip. As a result I've not made much progress on Codename: Vacuum.

It's not stood still though. I had a playtest game at lunch time one day last week and I've got the first session report from my playtesters in Bedford. As I mentioned last week, they had some issues with the first draft rulebook, but they managed to overcome my inept rulebook writing and played it last week. They've found a bunch more small errors in the cards and rulebook which I'll correct this week. Their game was a long one. There were four players, all new to the game and they were learning it from the (crap) rulebook and it ended up lasting over two and a half hours. It's always the case that a learning game with rules explanation and rule looking up will take longer, but that's still significantly north of what I was hoping for. Having a more structured rulebook that more clearly explains things will help, but the game will need simplifying too. I was hoping for more of a Race for the Galaxy play time than Twilight Imperium. Since Codename: Vacuum doesn't have simultaneous play it'll never be quite as fast as Race, but it can play fairly quickly, and with my experienced players at work we can usually get a game done in under 20 minutes per player. We even got a five player game with one new player done in 1 hour 40 minutes a couple of weeks ago.

Still, the feedback is reminding me that my design ethos definitely is make a complicated game and then simplify it, rather than starting with a simple game and expanding it. Vacuum isn't intended to be a streamlined euro like Sumeria, but there's definitely a lot of scope to simplify things. I'm trying to focus now on re-writing the rules to clarify things, and at the same time, work on those rules that are complicated to write or explain or ones that people often get wrong to try and streamline the game. The simpler it is, the easier it'll be to teach or pick up for the first time. Of course, while doing this, I've got to be careful not to rip out the heart of the game!

In other news, I was contacted a few weeks ago by a previous Reiver Games customer who was interested in playtesting Codename: Vacuum at a convention in Australia. I've been working to get a print-and-play copy ready for him, but in the light of the feedback about the rules quality, I've had to turn him down. I feel bad about letting him down, but I'd rather give him a hand-made copy later (even with the shipping cost to Australia) than provide a poor quality version now.

My Juices Are Flowing...

Creative juices that is, before you get any ideas.

Reiver Games, my previous games publishing effort was formed after I got into games design. After years writing tiny bits of computer games I was in the mood for doing something that I could start, work through and finish. I'd played Mighty Empires with some friends for a weekend (and I mean a weekend - we played for 36 hours over three days!). I thought I could create something similar that was a bit less random (I'd been wiped out in a dragon attack after 24 hours of play!) and that played a bit quicker. Border Reivers was the game I created in that vein. On the back of Border Reivers and the perceived success of it (I sold out of the 100 hand-made copies within a year) I was in the designing mood, I started probably five or ten new games ideas, all sorts: an abstract game, an empire game, a beach-combing game and card game about the development of York.

After a year or so, I had another game out, designed by another designer and it was selling much better than Border Reivers had. With a little distance I'd realised that Border Reivers wasn't as good as I'd originally thought. In fact, I was beginning to think it was pretty weak. I'd played it with a lot of people by that point, and some loved it, some liked it and some were distinctly unimpressed. I could see there were flaws in the design, but as both the designer and the publisher I had no distance. I'd not played many games by the time I'd finished Border Reivers: Carcassonne, The Settlers of Catan and Citadels, maybe a couple of others. As I played a wider range of games I got a better grip on what a good game was. At this point I was trying to position Reiver Games as an independent publisher, and I was receiving more and more submissions to publish. The quality of those submissions varied enormously and it was clear that some designers really struggled to understand just how unfinished their designs were. As an independent adjudicator, I could clearly see these games were weak, but as the designer they were too close, too invested in their designs to see the flaws.

Seeing this from the other side made me re-think my own designing. I was that designer too, too invested in my own games to see their weaknesses and flaws. I start to be much harsher on my games, equivocating, second-guessing myself and struggling to make any decisions. Aware of the flaws of Border Reivers and the problems a lack of impartially brought I stopped designing my own games, afraid I'd publish games of my own design, after blinding myself to their flaws. After It's Alive! I published Carpe Astra (with some design input from myself) and Sumeria, neither of which sold very well. As Reiver Games slowly crawled towards the grave I lost confidence in myself, even to choose other designers' games.

Needless to say, designing was far from my mind for all this time. Now, a year and a bit after I went back to work I'm in the mood again. I've got two different prototypes ready to go: Codename Vacuum a Steampunk/Sci-Fi deck-building and tableau driven game, and Proteome: The Drug Discovery Card Game, an idea that sprang into my head after a joke from one of the marketing team at work. What's next? I've a tile-laying game knocking around in my head too, themed around Lewis & Clark's exploration of the American west.

What I really need to do now is get playing them, so I can start the improvement/design/development process. I've a weekly games night that I don't really want to become all about the playtesting (as the games will be broken a lot of the time and not much fun to play), and there's a bi-weekly games club in Newcastle which I don't make it to very often. I'll be going to Beers and Pretzels in May, but before then I could do with a few playtesting nights to get the games into some sort of shape before showing them to the discerning public. I need to find some time in my busy schedule.

Codename Vacuum Gets an Overhaul

As I've mentioned in my last few posts, I've started designing games again. It's been a long time (for most of the time I ran Reiver Games I wasn't designing myself, just developing other people's submissions), but I've really caught the bug again.

I'm investing pretty much all of my games design free-time in Codename: Vacuum a tableau-driven, deck-building steampunk space opera (trying saying that ten time quickly!). The first playable prototype was finished a couple of weeks ago and saw action at one of my weekly games nights. It kind of worked how I'd intended but was too complicated and way too long (around two hours!). I'm aiming for the under-an-hour sweet spot that lots of games I really like (and a few I don't) hit. I'm thinking: Race for the Galaxy, 7 Wonders, Eminent Domain, Dominion.

It turns out that my design principles are to start off with something way too complicated and then simplify over time - which reminds me of something Grant Rodiek designer of Farmageddon tweeted last week:

If my rules don't get shorter after I incorporate my changes from a playtest, I immediately assume I took the wrong path.

It starts off well in my head: Steampunk!, Space Opera, with spaceships, and combat and trading ..., and then gets a little bloaty: ... and locations, and science, and tech trees and pirates and the passage of time ... and then gets ridiculous: ... and you can choose what weapons your ships have, and what clothes your admiral is wearing and and whether you are going to trade bauxite or Martian elephant leather.

In the carefully controlled environment inside my head the game works like a charm - fast paced, fun with just the right amount of player interaction and decision making.

Then you play it with real people and you realise that the world in your head has no connection to reality at all. The game is slow, there's too many options, too many rules, whole chunks are non-intuitive, overly clunky or just pointless.

So you try to take what you've learnt and start again. You simplify things, take bits out, reduce the options, streamline this and cleanse that. Make a new prototype and try again.

That's where I am now with Codename: Vacuum. I've spent a good chunk of this week redoing all the cards on the computer, ready to be printed out again. Pretty much every card has changed, whether removing options, stripping out unnecessary complexity, trying to get things to make sense or have a purpose or just trying to improve the balance between all the various options. I hope to have the second prototype ready for testing towards the end of the week, either at my games night on Thursday, or at Beyond Monopoly! a games club in York that I used to attend when I lived there and will be visiting again for a first time in several years on Saturday.

Fingers crossed I'll find time in this hectic week to get it finished, printed and cut out. Then get it to the table (I've already had a few people requesting a chance to playtest it for me :-) ). At which point I'll find out that this new, streamlined, balanced version incorporating everything I learnt from playing the last hideously-broken version is way too complicated, too slow and hideously broken. At which point I'll have to start all over again!

Playtesting and developing a game is a long hard slog, at the beginning it's a case of four steps forward and three steps back. But, hopefully, over time you make progress and get to the point where it still mostly fits that vision you had all those months or years ago, but is slick, interesting, fun to play and you have people clamouring to play it when they see you. Will Codename: Vacuum make the grade eventually? I hope so, but only time will tell.