And Now It Is Summer
Time has slowed to a crawl. It’s July 2 2020 and we’ve been in quarantine for more than three months. It feels like a strange summer vacation, or a very, very long weekend. This week I finally learned to stop saying “when this is all over” because I realize that it never will be. I keep saying that I want to get more productive work done, and I really have no excuse not to work, but I lack most of the stressors that used to make me productive.
Nevertheless, work does proceed. This photo is from our most recent three-player test of After the Fog, which I continue to spread whenever I get a chance. It’s coming along nicely, and I’m sad to have so few chances to test it. The core redesign of 2020 has been to take two divergent tracks and fuse them into one.
In the 2019 version of this game, players basically had two avenues of development. You could buy extra ships, which gave you more actions, or you could buy cards, which made your actions more powerful. There are ways to mix these strategies, of course, but a new ship was so expensive that unlocking your first one took dedication (and avoiding “shiny things,” the temptation to spend money on just one cool card).
This game was predictably hard to balance, and the play time was wildly unpredictable. The timer was built into the deck of cards, so if nobody bought cards, that timer never ticked. In my own tests, I was usually the one buying cards. When I was not in the equation, the game had a chance to stall out.
Maybe a super-long game is exactly what we need right now. But really, the problem with a too-long game of After the Fog is that all the parts that are fun at the beginning become tedious and pointless if the game overstays its welcome. When this game came back with a rejection in March, I knew I had a rebuild ahead of me.
My solution was to redesign the mechanic for unlocking ships. Rather than “save your money for a ship,” the game now tells you “just build your power base. The ships will come.” Cards have resource icons in different flavors, and if you save up enough of those, you get a new ship for free. It suits the theme, I think, to say that extra actions are what you get for building up your power base, not the other way around.
My primary objective in this rebuild wasn’t really to fix the deck-based game timer. There are other ways to end the game. It was to balance two very different and basically unbalanceable game paths, by stitching them together into one path. And, along with a few dozen tweaks to everything else, this fusion seems to have worked. Games under the new system are almost always the right length, players feel like they get good value from the cards they buy, and ships do what they are supposed to.
A friend suggested building an online version so I can at least try a few sessions without gathering a group at my house, and while this is a good idea for more stable games, I haven’t felt like I’m there until now. Too much was changing to make that kind of investment worthwhile. But I think we’re close.
Meanwhile in back-story town, I’ve become distracted by a story for a completely different property. I sketched out an entire first season of a TV show last week, only to realize that the climactic final episode should probably be the first episode. So now I have a really good set of flashbacks, and I’m back at square one.
I really, truly, deeply, want to put something new and playable, or at least readable, here at Crab Fragment. But I think my brain is taking this chance to stew on some really big things, like writing a season of a TV show, while we’re all in quarantine. But the new Fog is working, and at least that’s something.