DunDraCon 2024

This weekend was DunDraCon, the President’s Day gaming convention in San Jose, where I spent three days working on new games in the Protospiel room with talented game designers from the Bay Area.

I played a lot of other people’s games in development, which I can’t discuss in detail because they are not my secrets to give away. But I will mention a few general things that I learned, and catch you up on random developments at Crab Fragment along the way.

Flying to Cali

I flew into SJC in the middle of Friday. In the air I made two five-second friends. Two teenage girls were polite to me, and even a little flirtatious, for about five seconds. This was a prelude to asking if I would swap my exit row seat with their dad, who was eight rows back. I did not want to switch seats, and suddenly they had no time for me. Not even a smile for the rest of the flight.

I mean, if they had been young children, I might have considered switching, but this was an exit row where they literally have to be adults. Well, fifteen, but still adult enough to take a 90-minute flight without their dad.

“Maybe your neighbor will swap seats” seems like a conversation that took place before we met.

Also, I keep noticing that the Chick-fil-A is the busiest restaurant at SJC. Or at least it has the longest line. I feel like this boycott we’re all waging is actually bringing them more business, which is not an argument against the boycott, just a sense of disappointment with the results. Also, why is the “f” in “Chick-fil-A” not capitalized? It’s supposed to be the first letter of “filet.” A sensible person would boycott them just for that.

Prudh

The big success of the weekend was Prudh. This new abstract game was already pretty good, I’d say 80% there, but there were still some questions. It’s a game of stacking pieces, but it seemed that we rarely made a very tall stack. This felt like a wasted opportunity and something we still needed to address.

Sometimes in game design we talk about “levers,” rules we can adjust to see what happens to the game engine. Our two levers were “what happens when a stack reaches the edge?” and “what happens when someone runs out of moves?”

For “reaching the edge”, my original answer was that stacks could change directions as they moved, so there was no reason to worry about a move running out of space. In that version, the best strategy seemed to be building one giant stack, and if both players did that, the game was mighty dull. We ended up with twin towers of height 18, and the first person who blinked lost a huge amount in a single move.

When we decided that stacks could only run in straight lines (this is logical of course), this raised the question of what happened when a tall stack made it to the edge of the board. The first answer was “they can’t move that way,” and that was awfully limiting, since a stack could shortly be tall enough to be trapped. Then for a while we tried “the extra pieces fall off,” then “no, they stay there,” and finally this weekend we tried “they go back where they came from.”

The problem with “they stay there” was that if you took a tiny stack with a huge surplus of pieces, you would either make a huge, seemingly unearned score (take them all with you), or you’d leave a stack for your opponent (take only one of the moving pieces, and leave the rest in place). At the moment we still list both of these rules as “regional variations,” but they both seemed too unbalanced for the core game.

Then we decided that the extra pieces could return to their point of origin, meaning that they still belong to the player who moved them. That’s the best answer we have so far, and the simulations bear it out.

For the “last move” question, first we tried awarding the player who last longer a bonus, which was the pieces that had moved off the board, back when pieces could do that. Losing the off-the-edge rule made a hole, and it didn’t seem satisfying just to end the game when one player ran out of moves. It should, after all, be an interesting strategy to try to last longer than your opponent. But how many points should that be worth?

We considered static options, for example a five point bonus for making the last move, but that didn’t feel right. There probably isn’t a perfect number. Then we tried “you score your highest stack,” which was more interesting. This rule has two components: Don’t run out of moves, and also, build a big stack so it’s worth something.

Greg Whitehead is local, and has been keeping up with these changes and updating his AI player every day. He and I played Prudh a good deal this weekend, and he ran simulations of our rules changes. The final draft seems to play very evenly (the first player wins roughly half the games) and the stack height numbers look good: a nice mix of taller stacks, with no apparent weirdness like the twin towers problem. 

So if you haven’t tried Prudh yet, please give it a shot. I think it’s close to 100% finished.

Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort is still in early development. I’d like to say I made a lot of progress this weekend, but mostly I just tried fixes to big problems that only made it worse.

There are some good mechanics in this game, but my first stabs at the core dice engine kept coming up short. The throughput is hard to balance, and under most versions it’s random who will place each city card. As long as that’s important, we should let everyone place an equal number of these cards, but my first attempt at that screwed up the throughput again.

My best guess is that the city tiles simply need to have fewer spaces on them, so that’s the next version I will build, but it won’t be for a week or two.

So Cold Comfort will be cooking for a while. We like some of the core game loops, until the engine starts to fall apart. I have a few pages of notes for the next build, which will see some big changes to the look of the city cards, and a few other things.

The Harvest

I showed The Harvest to some of the game designers at DunDraCon because I felt like they would appreciate it. I was not disappointe. I consider that game mostly done (at least until a publisher shows interest), but it was worth showing around for feedback. I still haven’t done much work on the multiplayer rules, even though it appears this is a fine way to play it.

I had a nice three-player game on Sunday and we talked through the different ways to end the game. If the winner is the high scoring player when the first player is knocked out, the game usually lasts down to the wire, because everyone picks on the player in the lead. On the other hand, if you say that the last remaining player is the winner, then players are more likely to gang up on the loser and knock them out. So strangely the game lasts longer when you’d expect it to be shorter, and vice-versa.

This is a known issue with any multiplayer fighting game, so I just need to play some more N-way games and pick my favorite version. Luckily the cards are already worded for multiplayer.

Papa

I brought a new trick-taking game for the Whispers deck, called Papa. This is Hawaiian for “table,” and I chose this name because I needed a word for “the player who has to pay a penalty despite being the lowest card on the table,” and in the first playtest we had been calling that card the “bitch.” So yeah, needed a new name.

Papa is somewhat akin to a trick-taking game, in which players each play one card, in sequence, on each round, and the high card wins. The wrinkle is that cards cost money, so the high card takes the pot as well as the trick. It’s an interesting format but so far this one is a little janky.

First I tried the game with just two players, and it was not great. Then I tried with six players, and it was also not great. The issue of “not enough control” is pretty huge for some gamers, so it’s hard to test a gambling game which literally relies on luck for a lot of its runtime. Also, one of them complained that it wasn’t technically “gambling” because he could not technically bet. I guess he thought it would be poker.

(See this design blog post for my thoughts on gambling.)

I still like the general concept, but I don’t think Papa is ready for the world. Whispers was invented at DunDraCon last year and it’s pretty solid, so I’d love to make another game that works with the same deck. Sadly, the colors in the current Whispers deck are too close together for any game where you actually have to tell them apart. So along with Papa I might be redesigning the art as well.

Worker Placement Game

On Saturday I tested a local designer’s worker-placement engine-builder. I found it to be bulky yet flavorless, arbitrary yet familiar, the Grape Nuts of tabletop games. 

I won’t go into details, since they are not mine to share, but the designer was asking us how he might make it simpler, even though the publisher had asked him to do the opposite. 

It’s a weird marketplace out there. People are buying super-complicated games with thousands of moving parts. These games make my eyes glaze over. I think it’s great that players can enjoy those things, but I would have real trouble making one. So I didn’t have much useful feedback on this one.

These games tend to use icons instead of words, which really doesn’t help me learn them. I think this idea has its reasons, and it can certainly streamline graphic design. But it can go too far.

I feel like the origin of this trend was to make more space on cards, and to make it easier to localize your games: if you print the game in five languages, but there is no language on the components, then you only have to print them once. But even in that case, using an icon language seems like a compromise. In the original Gloria Mundi, we had to remove about a third of the cards because there was no way to translate them into symbols. 

Fast forward 20 years, and these days it seems like, perhaps without meaning to, the symbolic language of games has become a gatekeeping mechanism. People who already play this style of game can work out what most of the symbols mean. They speak the language. But new players (or casual players, like myself) can’t parse it, so learning these games becomes unnecessarily hard. 

For my part, even if a game might eventually have a set of symbols, I would rather put actual words on the prototype, because almost everyone will be playing it for the first time. Why would I add layers of confusion, if I just want people to understand my game?

Word Games

I playtested two cooperative word association games this weekend. Two games with similar footprints, but dramatically different feet.

If you know Just One and Codenames, you know most of both of these games. I’ll describe those published games so I don’t tread too heavily on the unpublished ones.

In the first game, the scoring system was all-or-nothing. Similar to Codenames, we each had to create single-word clues to indicate two cards in a tableau. But unlike Codenames, unless everyone’s clue was perfect, the final guess was just a guess, and we lost if anyone got that guess wrong. There was a lot of pressure to get everything right, and we could not make any progress if we didn’t. I suggested altering the scoring so that players could have “little victories,” small progress that might feel better than than “I got my clues right but we all still lost.”

The second game delivered exactly what I was asking from the first. It was like playing several rounds of Just One at the same time, each player contributing a unique word to a list of word-cluing words (it’s not as hard as I make it sound). In this game, we all got to discuss each clue in turn, and we got to check off all the ones we got right. So we could succeed or fail at each checkpoint, and even if we didn’t get all the words right, we could still feel like we made some correct moves. 

Trick Taking Games

These seem to be popular right now, and having made a few trick-taking games myself, I have some strong opinions about them. I expect a certain feeling from these games, a notion that if I play correctly I can control the action, read the moves of other players, and maximize the value of any starting hand. 

Designers seem to think it’s clever to subvert one or all of these pillars, and so by adding new mechanics they undermine the control, or the hand reading, or the planning.

For example, if you want to add bluffing to trick taking, what are you doing? Trick taking already has bluffing, or at least deduction. If you add a different kind of bluffing, but you keep elements like forced play, then how am I supposed to know whether someone is making a correct play, a deceptive play, or a play over which they had no control?

This is not to say that new trick taking games are bad. In fact, at the moment I’d say “trick taking” is being applied to a category of games that aren’t all quite in the category. But I’d advise against undermining any pillar of a genre without understanding why it’s there, and knowing what you’re going to replace it with.

And So Much More

There’s one game from this weekend that I really loved, and can’t tell you anything about. The designer wants to change the theme because he can’t get the license, but I thought that he should keep the theme but change all the names (think Star Trek / Galaxy Quest) and ship it exactly as it is. We’ll see where that goes.

I went to the Chessex booth looking for plain brown dice, which are always hard to find. I need them for Fish Cook, because I like to have a different die for each of the items in the market, and those resources are purple, brown, red, green, yellow, and white. Nobody makes a plain brown die because nobody buys them. 

Except, lo and behold, I did find some brown dice in the Protospiel room. They have a huge box of miscellaneous game components, extra game bits of all shapes and sizes. And sure enough, there were brown dice waiting for me. So I plucked a few and bought the other colors from Chessex, and now my Fish Cook set is complete.

And OMG, this game is still $2.50 at Greater Than Games so please go buy it. You will not be sorry.

I saw copies of some of my games, including Save Doctor Lucky and the Island of Doctor Lucky, in the avalanche of second-hand games at the edge of the dealer’s room. Sometimes I look at that avalanche and I’m glad I’m not adding to it. But sometimes I’d love to have one of those million-selling Kickstarters.

Meanwhile, over the weekend I chatted with a publisher who’s interested in picking up one of the Crab Fragment Games, as long as we don’t mind changing the theme and the mechanics. Heavy sigh. Yes of course, let’s do that, and add one more game to the avalanche.

So I’ll be re-tuning that game over the next few weeks, showing it off at my next few conventions. FInd me and say hello, and find out what I’m cooking up next!

Cold Comfort. Fun, but not quite working.