Design Tip of the Week #16 (Lessons From Published Games)

Your published games?

That would be nice, but neither of our games have been published yet.  Both are with publishers, but in different stages of development.  Hopefully they will both be on Kickstarter early in 2015.  I am talking about what we can learn from other published games.

Like stealing ideas?

Well that is one way to learn from published games.  Borrowing mechanisms is a way to build on ideas of the past.  That is why I believe we are in a golden age of gaming right now.  People borrowing good mechanisms from each other and building upon them.  Look at the BGG top 100.  Most of those games are derivative in one way or another.  I will get into that more next week.

This week I will focus on what I learned from ALMOST liking a few games at WBC (World Boardgaming Championships).  I will use a few examples to illustrate this concept, and show how it can help exercise your "design brain".

First up Thunder Alley.

I liked this game a lot.  This was almost my game of the show.  I think the first 90% of this game is fantastic and very thematic.  After playing it 5 times it always had the same problem though.  The end game was very unsatisfying because it always came down to a Kingmaker situation.  You wanted to sit to the left of the player that would put you in position to win.  Either because they were out of it and trying to get into a better position, or had no choice due to their card.  But it always came down to someone else putting the winner in the catbird position.  It may not have been as big a problem in a shorter game.  But after 2 hours of very fun gameplay, it was a very unsatisfying end.  This happened in all 5 games I played, and I just soured more on the game as the convention went on.

Lesson Learned: The endgame is very important.  You want to leave people on a high note.  Not with a sour taste in their mouth.

Next up, Voluspa.

This is basically a tile placement game.  Very abstract in the fact that you are just trying to get the highest tile in a row or column to score that row or column.  I am usually not one for abstracts, but the Art on these tiles was fantastic.  The theme on the tiles was pretty good too.  They all had special powers that matched the theme of the tile.  So what went wrong.  When playing with two players the game played long.  Not that it took long, but it felt long.  There was no scaling based on the number of players, so you played the same number of tiles as you would in a 4 player game.  And some of the tiles replaced tiles on the board, so the game didn't progress toward the end on those turns.  I think it would have played better with 3 or 4 as you would have less turns, so you wouldn't have as many active turns in the game.  This is easily fixed by removing a certain number of fixed (or random based on your preference) tiles to reduce the playtime.

Lesson Learned: Scale the play experience to the number of players.  You don't want a game to feel like it is outstaying its welcome.

Lastly, Lewis & Clark

I loved this game.  It was definitely my game of the convention.  The racing element combined with engine building was great.  Every time you pulled off a cool combo it made you feel smart.  So what went wrong?  Nothing in our games, but I did notice there was a way to go backwards at the beginning of the track.  At first I thought this was odd, but then noticed that there was no other penalty for building up a lot of resources and saving them for when you have better travel cards later in the game.  The other day I saw a thread on BGG saying that there was an official "fix" for this problem.  I still loved the game, but it is definitely something to be aware of if designing a game where your engine gets stronger as the game goes on.  They could have easily fixed this by making the track behind the start position longer.  They obviously realized that this could be a problem or they wouldn't have put those spaces back there to begin with.

Lesson Learned: If you have an engine that gets better as the game goes on, make sure the players can't just store resources that do the same thing better later in the game.  If you do, make sure there is some incentive to use the resources early, or there is a strong enough penalty for keeping them.  Make all options viable, or don't have them as "fake choices" in the game if one strategy is clearly better.

Bottom Line

I don't want to make is seem like I am picking on these games.  I liked them a lot and bought 2 of them.

There are lessons to be learned from games, even in their weaknesses.  When playing games, don't just look at mechanisms you can use in future game designs, but also think about the lessons you can learn from their less strong parts.  This will help you avoid a lot of time making the same mistakes, or help you see these things earlier in your designs.

What's Next?
That's it for this week, next week I am going to talk about building on the greatness of other games.  Until then, I am Peter, keep designing great games.