Theme

Mal mentioned during last night's playtest that I've not mentioned the Roll & Write's theme on the blog.

We played three 3-player games

There's a reason for that.

The lack of a name is probably related to it.

The game works mechanically.

There's a lot of room for improvement, but in essence it works.

There's decisions to make.

A race of sorts, to collect resources before time runs out.

A few little decisions every turn: which dice? which direction? which distance? which resource to collect?

And one big one: do I have enough resources yet to profit more than my competitors?

Then scoring.

And more small decisions. 

Which trade to make? Shall I pass and the risk of an opponent blocking a future move? Or take the guaranteed lesser pay-out now?

The current theme is weak.

Interstellar prospectors. Collecting bounty for the Galactic Overlords.

It might change. 

I've not really used the theme to drive the mechanisms yet.

Because I'm not wedded to it.

Any ideas?

Major Changes Afoot

This week involved my quarterly visit to Sheffield as part of the clinical trial that I'm on for a new MS drug. It means four hours of train travel one morning, as well as the hospital visit, which leaves me stuffed for hours for the week at work. So no Vacuum playtest this week :-(

Of course, the wonder of modern trains is that you can sit in a fairly comfy seat, with a coffee and your laptop (plugged in, so you don't run out of battery after fifteen minutes!) and actually get something useful done. I choose to use these days to write blog posts (including this one) and do prototype graphic design :-)

Last week's blog post was my most popular so far this year, with the most interest on Twitter I've ever had - 5 favourites, 5 retweets and three shout outs - so there's some pressure on this week to keep the quality high! I had hoped to do an analysis of Reiver Games sales over time, but unfortunately I'd failed to copy the relevant files to my new laptop when the old one died, so I can't (at least, not today, I still have them backed up somewhere).

So instead, I'll be talking about Zombology again. At last week's Newcastle Playtest I'd played Zombology for the first time since the very beginning of December - it had sat unloved on the shelf for a couple of months awaiting the artwork for the NaGa DeMon winners copies (and my playtest copy of course). We played two games and afterwards I got a couple of pages of suggestions and criticisms from the very thorough discussion.

There was more criticism about the lack of zombie theming (which I've heard before from other people) plus criticism of the complexity:

• Multiple decks - it's not clear when to draw from which one
• I was the only player who knew how many rounds we had left and I had to count it each time someone asked
• Having two different types of cards in hand, some of which you were only allowed to use in specific rounds

Seeing as I'm pitching this up against games like 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! this complexity is a major problem, 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! are both very simple games that you can explain in a few sentences and are easy to pick up, even for non-gamers. Theme is less important in a 10 minute game (I've no idea what the themes of 6 Nimmt! and No Thanks! are, despite loads of plays). I think the zombie-flavoured artwork will go some way to alleviate the lack of theme, but there's more I can and should be doing in that arena.

One thing did get positive feedback though, the new scoring was much simpler which was a good thing - everyone was able to calculate their own scores (as opposed to earlier games where I worked it all out for everyone).

I spent most of Wednesday's train journeys working on a new version that addresses these complaints by:

• Adding a round tracker so everyone can see how far through the game you are
• Adding some zombie-themed events to theme it up a bit
• Removed the two types of cards complication
• Simplified the drawing of new cards

I've added some upgrade cards and some event cards to tie the theme in tighter (you can now get hazmat suits or suffer a zombie monkey ravaging your lab!) plus I use the round counter to introduce some urgency with decks that are named after how bad it's getting out in the real world. I'm hoping to add some art to the back of the cards which also brings that home.

It's a major departure from the last version, but at its core it's still a 10-15 minute game for 3-10 players that features drafting as its core mechanism. I printed it out on Saturday, now I just need to see if it works!

Which Came First? The Mechanics or the Theme?

With my earlier games: Border Reivers and Carpe Astra the mechanics definitely came first, and the same is true of It's Alive! one of the games I published on behalf of someone else. With Border Reivers I started trying to make a game like Mighty Empires that played faster and less randomly; I really liked the networking mechanic in the submission by Ted Cheatham that became Carpe Astra, though the theme changed quite dramatically. It's Alive! had been through several themes before I changed it to building Frankenstein's monster. So in my experience, mechanics first seems to work ok.

To further reinforce this, most of the many games I've started designing but failed to finish/lost interest in/couldn't get working started out with a theme first, which I tried to find mechanics that fit after the initial idea.

The theme acts as a hook for the game to interest people, hopefully enough that they want to play or buy the game. It's often possible to re-theme a game by picking something that roughly fits the mechanics and then tweaking the mechanics, action names or card wording to get the game to make sense with the new theme. In my experience it's often possible with very few changes to the game.

As I mentioned earlier this week after a conversation with The Wife a new game idea sprang into my mind almost fully formed. Theme and mechanics combined. Since then I've tweaked the theme slightly to distance it from a couple of similar new games (which I've added to my Christmas list so I can play them and ensure my game develops differently) and the mechanics have begun the long road of changes that will hopefully lead to a great game.

For me personally, I think the mechanics-first approach is the way to go. What are your experiences? Are you a theme-first or mechanics-first designer? How will my new game idea develop: theme and mechanics in lock-step, or will the theme change as time goes on? Stay tuned to find out!

Re-theming It's Alive!

I've been monitoring the comments on Yehuda's blog, the Board Game News story and obviously in the emails I've received.

Lots of people have been discussing the change in theme between Yehuda's prototype: The Menorah Game and It's Alive! So I thought I'd post here to give a little more background into my thought processes, rationale and whether or not I still think it was the right choice.

My Experience

Border Reivers is themed around the chaos and conflict on the Scottish Borders during medieval times. It's a pasted on theme, I invented the game way before I thought of the theme, but I thought the theme fit the gameplay pretty well. A lot of my Border Reivers customers have bought the game because they live in the Borders region, are from the Borders region or have a Scottish or Northern English heritage. In that sense the theme is good as it attracts people to the game. Still as a proportion of British people, those who live in the Scottish Borders are a small percentage, and as a fraction of a world-wide audience it becomes vanishingly small.

Why Re-theme?

First of all: I liked the Menorah theme. It's unusual, there aren't that many religous games in the mainstream and very few of those are Jewish - an unusual theme gets extra points in my book.

However, theme serves a purpose when you are publishing (as opposed to playing) a game. The theme of a game is the hook that attracts people to find out more, play the game or buy the game. What a publisher wants from a theme is something that will attract as many potential customers to a game as possible, while putting off as few customers as possible. Not every game has a theme - abstract games like Go and Chess make do without, but most modern games do. Once the customer has been attracted the game will live or die depending upon it's quality - so a good theme won't save a crap game, and a game that has an unpopular theme (or none at all) can become popular just by being a good game.

As I've mentioned before the majority of my customers are in the UK, which is a largely secular country with a small proportion of Jews. While the Menorah theme will appeal to non-religious people and non-Jews I felt a different theme might appeal to more British gamers. There's the crux of it - I wanted to appeal to as many British gamers as possible.

What Theme?

So the next question is obviously what theme do I choose? Here I was aided by my friend Dave who suggested during our first play of The Menorah Game that you needed something to cry out when you complete your set of candles - we used 'Menorah'.

That started the gears whirring in my head. The next step was to work out who I sell to. At the moment most of my sales are to fellow geeks over the internet - most sales of Border Reivers have come from BoardGameGeek. I also get a decent chunk from friends and family (who tend to buy because I made/published the game regardless of theme) and from playing the game at conventions. Most of my customer base is male, mid-twenties to mid-fifties at a guess and I'm guessing here: has a broadly similar set of interests to me: games, comics, sci-fi, computers and general geekiness.

I wanted a theme where you were collecting eight different items, the different coloured candles in Yehuda's prototype had the potential to ruin the game for colour-blind players - I wanted something that was clearly distinguishable even if you see in shades of grey. My brother and two of my gamer friends are colour-blind so it is always in the front of my mind when designing games. In addition, it needed the concept of a wild card (gold candle/coffin) and a thief (soldier/villagers' uprising).

I don't remember when I first thought of the creating a monster theme, but I instantly loved it, I thought it would fit well with the people I think my customers are, and the people I suggested it to thought it was great. The biggest problem by far was going to be getting Yehuda to agree to it. I'd taken his nice, stately religious game and turned it into a macabre game of grave-robbery and body-part trading. Gulp. They are poles apart as several people have noted in various forums since the game was announced. Fortunately, Yehuda was prepared for me to change the theme and was ok (not delighted!) with the theme I had suggested. I think he'd been hoping for something more urbane, but there you go.

Feedback

So far there's been a range of feedback. AndyB regretted the loss of the religious theme. Several people commented that the themes were wildly different (no argument there), and I'm assuming a mild disapproval in their cases but I may be wrong. Several people have definitely approved though, saying it will be easier to get others to play the new theme.

Overall, I still think I've made a good choice. Is it the best possible choice? I doubt it. But I'm new to games publishing, and if my theme is good enough for me to sell out I'll be happy.

Interestingly Mike Doyle has recently posted on theme, and while I've obviously pasted this theme on a game that has (according to Yehuda) had many different themes, I like to think that I've tried to fit the new theme to the game with some success.

What are your thoughts on the new theme? Why not rate me on Mike's scale?