Report: Pacificon 2022

Pacificon Guests Sarah Moore and Damon Vanhee testing Coat of Arms!

I went to Pacificon this weekend, had a great time, and made a new game!

About Pacificon

Gabriel “Mondo” Vega runs ConQuest, a series of conventions up and down the Pacific Coast. One of these is PacifiCon, a con which usually (but not always) overlaps PAX West. When it doesn’t, about once every four years, I try to go to both. 

In the before-times, I usually opted for PAX over Pacificon. I love both shows, but PAX is local. I could probably go on about the advantages of larger and smaller shows (both are great for different reasons), but mostly it was easier to go to PAX because it was in my backyard.

But since Covid, I’ve got less interest in larger shows. I don’t want to be packed into a crowd. So this year, I opted to miss PAX and head down to Santa Clara for a cozy little weekend of gaming.

COZY GAMES

I spent a good chunk of the weekend in the Protospiel room, testing new games with their designers, and rapidly prototyping a work in progress. I also showed off a few of my own games, including a few that are more or less finished.

Bitin Off Hedz: I gathered my years of notes on Bitin’ Off Hedz (three pages worth) and gave that game another spin. I know many people would love to see a new edition of this Cheapass Games favorite, but I’m slightly annoyed about the current rules. If gamers try to break the game, they can make it last forever, and that’s not good for anyone. So this weekend I tried a few changes and… the jury is still out.

Witch Trial: Speaking of juries, I got to play Witch Trial with brand new cards from DriveThru, which showed up at my house the day before I left. I played three really fun games of it, as well as a half-game that got interrupted by scheduled events. Players were all like “why haven’t I seen this!?” and I’m like “Because I’m bad at marketing!”

Other Games: Got to show off some games in the back catalog, including several hands of Holdout, a few rounds of Powderkeg, one game of Copper Creek, a late-night game of Young Jacob Marley, some hands of Lobo with programmer Greg Whitehead (who built the online version of Hens and Chicks, and is working on an AI player for Lobo), and a few hands of Up and Down to close out Monday afternoon.

And Something Brand New! Pictured above is a brand new game called Coat of Arms, which came together almost from scratch this weekend. I built the core components last week, without much in the way of rules, and at Pacificon I made three revisions of a core deck, played six or seven times, and came up with a foundation that I really like.

It’s likely that Crab Fragment won’t post a print-and-play of this game in the short term. The goal is to have something to pitch to publishers by next Spring, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But I can still talk in general terms about how I got this one off the ground.

MAKING A NEW GAME

About four months ago, my friend Eric wrote to me and said “Why aren’t there any games that teach people about heraldry?” Honestly there must be some, but in any case we decided to make a new one. I will write it, and he will market it. A perfect plan.

So I wrote a rough draft for a game called Coat of Arms and we agreed it was a good starting point. Then summer came, and a million things stole my attention. 

Last week I wrote to Eric and said, look, I may be too busy for this, let me see if I can get you something by the end of September or we should reconsider the plan. And that was apparently enough to get me started.

Prepping for Pacificon, I mocked up a set of components: Frames for heraldic devices, with some moving parts, and bags of tiles that fit into those frames, so people can build their coat of arms. Really just pieces without a game. This took me most of three days, just to design, cut, and finish the pieces. And there wasn’t really much of a game, just some components that fit together.

I am pretty good at writing original games with existing components (new games for the poker deck, for example), just starting at nothing and seeing where it goes. But for Coat of Arms, I needed these basic components in place. I figured I might be able to put something together at the show. So I packed some sharpies, blank boards, blank cards, dice, money, the usual generic stuff.

On Friday evening, I sat down with some friends at Protospiel, and told them what I was trying to do. We sketched out a basic framework with blank cards, writing numbers as necessary on the cards as we played, a few half-games of this rough idea. We made a deck of about 10 cards that recycled a few times, just to imagine the flow of the game. As a proxy for another component, I used the Island Deck, which happened to have six suits that were fairly close to the blazons in the heraldry. It’s nice to have some generic decks of different types, especially when they get shuffled a lot. (And we carry several at DriveThruCards!)

Saturday morning I demoed the build to a game designer friend, and we fine-tuned some of the core mechanics around the two-player experience. We captured some ideas for special cards, and made some changes to the core rules. 

Saturday afternoon I mocked up a full set of cards and played it with some new people at Protospiel. The game was not very well-balanced, but we learned a lot, so that was a successful test. We decided that the abilities on the cards were probably too much noise, “too much meat to see the bones,” obscuring the central mechanics with too much power in special effects. So I scrapped the abilities and built the deck again.

On Sunday and Monday I played four more times with the new deck. Each test helped me fine-tune elements of timing, numbers of cards to draw and play, and so on. Some players had great suggestions about ways to handle problem areas. Other players showed me the pain points by getting stuck in places that I thought were clear. By the end of the weekend, I had a solid core game, and a pretty good idea of what I need to build next.

So sometime this week, I’ll write up a first rules draft, make a deck to replace the Island Deck, and rebuild the core components to fit the newest rules. Starting from nothing at all, I have a working game to change, and that’s always the hardest step.

Small conventions are great for this kind of work. I got to show the game to eight different test groups in three days, make adjustments after each game, and came home with a set of rules and components when I had almost nothing at the start. This feels so much more effective to me than making something complete before the first test, because the more finished something gets, the harder it is to change.

Also, with hand-made rough components and a clear statement that we are just getting started, testers are more willing to suggest fundamental changes that might seem harder with a more finished prototype.

Now, to be clear, not all projects require this step. If you’re basing your design on a similar game, then you probably don’t need to spin up a new core mechanic, because the existing game acts as your rough draft. But if you’re creating something new, you need to put it in front of people fast, before it has a chance to gel.

At least, that’s what I think.

NEXT YEAR!

Yep, I’m already on the guest list for next year. So if you missed Pacificon 22, I’ll see you there in ‘23. If you’d like to know where I’ll be playing next, check out the official Crab Fragment Schedule page.

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and I’ll see you at the table.

James

A core deck in process, Saturday afternoon