Minneapolis: Work and Play

Hello from sunny Minneapolis!

I'm over in the US for a week to attend a conference for work. It's going to be a long week, I'm working morning till night three days and all day for two more (no time for sight-seeing!), but I'm not letting that stop me get some gaming in. My boss, Ian and I flew over together. Ian is a Games Night regular, so I brought my iPad loaded up with games and we play a few on the way over. I imagine we'll play a few on the way back too.

But that's still not enough, no, no. So I've arranged with a couple of guys on BGG to head over to the  FFGEC on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for some more gaming! It's alright, they both promise they are not axe-murderers.

I dropped Fantasy Flight an email to see if any of their design team fancied meeting up, but I've not heard anything since a 'I've forwarded your message on' email from their Customer Care team, so I'm assuming that's not going to happen.

Clearly, I'm developing a gaming problem again.

In other news, we tried out the new version of Codename: Vacuum one lunchtime last week. I want to make some more changes (as with the last new version a couple of months ago, the first stab at major changes often needs some early changes to fix unintended behaviour). But, in essence, the new, more complex, bits work. One of my playtesters was very excited about them. But then, he is quite excitable!

I Take It All Back

It's been a busy week at ex-Reiver Towers. We were away last weekend with all my family and on our return The Daughter came down with a stinking cold, followed by a stomach bug. This weekend has also been our first weekend with all of us at home without any guests for nearly two months, so we've been trying to catch up on a few things while washing the sick out of everything we own :(

Anyway, back on topic! Next weekend I'm off to America for a week with work so I'm trying to make some Vacuum progress before I go. Last week I had a game at lunchtime with Chief, trying out a couple of new rules that I'd thought of following Tim's feedback. They worked. I'm not yet sure that they are better, but they are interesting. I'll try them a few more times before making a call whether to stick with the old ones or switch to the new ones. The new ones work with the current version as well as the next one, so I tried them out with the current version, pending the new version being constructed.

The new version, is now complete on the computer, ready for printing and cutting out - it's just waiting for me to find the time to get it manufactured. I've got another playtest session on Wednesday lunchtime - in an ideal world, I'll get the game made in time for that session. I've got two nights, it might be possible, fingers crossed ...

To the subject of this post, I was talking a few weeks ago about having Vacuum pretty much working and now needing to focus on simplifying things. Scratch that. It's time to knock it up a notch. BAM! One of the endgame conditions that you can try to score is for exploring the Solar System. In the current version exploration is pretty bland: you get points for exploring locations based on their range - the further away they are the more points you get. But all the ones at a given range give you the same points. Therefore, you always explore at the furthest range you can, but other than that it doesn't really matter which location you explore. Bland. Beige. Neutral. Tim spotted that it was boring. My playtesters at Beer and Pretzels spotted it, but I was clearly too close to it to spot it myself. When I started hearing 'boring' from multiple playtesters, it obviously needed some thought. So I've gone back on my word and started making things more complicated. I've given each location an exploration score that they will give the person who explores them. They generally increase with range, but at each range there are multiple options - so there's an incentive to explore early, and to choose one location over another. In fact, the locations are also being upgraded in other ways to make them even more interesting. Of course, until I try these ideas out I don't know whether they'll make things more interesting or just more complicated. Hence the need for testing and getting the next version made.

With all the trips away we've had over the last few months, I've had this version on the cusp of ready for a few weeks now, if I don't get it ready this week, then I've got to wait another two weeks until my return from the US. The suspense is killing me. I need to get it done in time for Wednesday!

Beer and Pretzels

Last weekend I went to Beer and Pretzels, a games convention in Burton on Trent in central England. The convention is held in the Town Hall, a grand old building, and fills the main hall and a couple of other function rooms. There's a cafeteria serving hot and cold food and a bar serving drinks (including beer) and the organiser, Phil who owns the Spirit Games FLGS in Burton puts some pretzels on each table.

I had attended B&P twice before in, I think, 2008 and 2009. Those times I treated it as business as I was running Reiver Games at the time, so I arranged in advance to co-opt a table (and bless him Phil gave me a good one at the entrance to the bar/cafe) where I sat during the day trying to find people to demo my games to and then hopefully close a sale. I spent the evenings just hanging out playing games though, and then spent the night at a pub nearly which had single rooms over the bar for £20 a night!

This time things were very different, I had nothing to sell or demo so I was just there to play games and catch up with people from my Reiver Games past. Instead of two carrier bags full of stock I was hoping to sell, I took only one game: Codename: Vacuum for playtesting and showing to anyone who was interested, but I wasn't on a hard-sell mission, it was available if people were up for it.

I decided to push the boat out and stay in the Holiday Inn up the road (if I'm away from The Daughter, the last think I want is a night's sleep broken by the sounds of drunken revelry from the bar below!) and at the penultimate minute I heard the my friend Terry from Bedford would be attending too - a great opportunity to catch up - I'd not seen him since last July.

Saturday morning I was woken by The Daughter at 5:30 (bless her cottons), and was just about to drag my sorry carcass out of bed when The Wife asked: 'Are you taking the car?'. 'Yes...?', I replied lsightly quizzically. 'Can you not?'. 'Yes', I confirmed slightly pained. Cue 45 minutes of frantically running round trying to get ready, organise a taxi to the station, find out train times and pack a bag.

Aside: After taking a couple of short holidays with an eight-month old baby, there is something really liberating about going away with a washkit, a change of clothes, a laptop, a game prototype and nothing else. You really appreciate travelling light once you have kids.

I spent the three hour train journey working on a new version of Codename: Vacuum inspired by feedback from my friend Tim the weekend before. On arrival I did a quick lap and said hello to a few people (including Phil who I'm pretty sure didn't remember me) and was just settling down to a game of Race for Adventure with Paul when Terry arrived. Terry joined us, and so every game I played all weekend was with Terry (and others).

Saturday ended up being a marathon 12 hours of gaming, featuring 9 games, five of which were new to me: Race for Adventure, Police Precinct, Terra Mystica, Tzolk'in and Snowdonia. I enjoyed them all, but Snowdonia was my favourite new game - a fairly quick worker placement game with an unusual theme and some nice ideas and mechanisms. In addition, Patrick, who worked for a company that my previous employer (Travis Perkins) bought out while I was there, came and found me and wanted to try Codename: Vacuum, so we gave that a 5-player run through. Patrick and his friend Rob seemed to enjoy it (Patrick's wife Jo less so) and even 5-player, with three new players it only lasted about 1 hour 45 mins which wasn't too bad.

Sunday was a shorter day as I needed to get a 4pm train back, but I still managed to squeeze in another five games including another Snowdonia, the new-to-me Love Letter and another game of Vacuum with Steve and Neil (and Terry). This Vacuum play was over amazingly quickly. I'd explained something badly, so Steve raced to finish the game expecting to score something that he couldn't. I was just getting going and it suddenly came to an end. I still managed to win, but it was Steve and Neil's first play and only Terry's fourth so that's not that surprising. It lasted 35 minutes. One of my goals for Vacuum is a short play time, so I've got to see what I can get from that game to help me speed it up - a recent game with three experienced players lasted over an hour by comparison.

As ever I enjoyed B&P, it was great to catch up with people who I'd not seen for 4 years or so and Terry who I'd not seen for several months. It's rare for me to play games that aren't in my collection (which usually only contains games I know and like before purchasing), so it was also great to try a few games that I'd not played before.

The return journey was split between more graphic design on the next Vacuum and writing last week's blog post. All in all a great weekend :).

The Joys of Critical Feedback

And I'm not being sarcastic!

So last weekend as I mentioned last week, my mate Tim was up for a long weekend with his family. During the day we all hung out together and entertained the kids, but once the sun had set and the kids were in bed it was gaming time. We played a few games with our wives and then, later on, just Tim and I burnt the candle at both ends. Included in that were a couple of games of Codename: Vacuum.

We discussed the game and how it was taking shape, but by that point it was very late and some beer had been consumed, so I asked Tim to let his plays sink in and send me some feedback via email in a few days once he'd had a chance to pause and reflect.

I've known Tim since we were fifteen, we were best men at each other's weddings. He knows me well enough to let rip without fear of offending me, so it was great when an email arrived on Wednesday lunchtime with a brief note about how he liked the game, it had some novel elements that made it interesting and then two or three pages of criticism of the bits he didn't like and some ideas of how to address them :).

The current version of Vacuum has been un-changed for over a month, I've played it ten or fifteen times, it works, it's reasonably good and I was beginning to get stuck in a rut. It seemed reasonable, there were no glaring problems or imbalances and I had no idea what I could do to help it progress from reasonably good game to frickin' awesome game of legendary-ness (that's a word right?). Nothing. I was drawing blanks.

Tim's email fixed all that. He sent me some ideas and his criticism has given me some more. I've spent the two train journeys to and from Burton on Trent for Beer and Pretzels doing the next version of Vacuum that will encorporate some of those ideas. I'm firing on all cylinders again. Thanks, Tim!

On the subject of Beer and Pretzels, it was a great weekend. My friend Terry from down south made it at the last minute so it was great to catch up with him, plus all the other people I knew there: Steve, Neil, Paul, Nick and Patrick. It was also nice to meet some new faces: Barry, Nick, Richard and Jo. I think I'll post a proper convention report next week...

Short Term Goals

A brief post this week as we've had friends up for a long weekend, so I've not had much time to write this - too busy playing games :).

Next weekend I'm attending my first games convention in three or four years - I'm off to Beer and Pretzels in Burton-on-Trent. It'll be my third time attending B&P, so it'll be a great opportunity to catch up with the friends I made there while running Reiver Games. It'll also be nice to be there without a 'day-job' of demoing the games I was trying to sell, though I will have Codename: Vacuum with me for testing on some more hardcore gamers.

I've got just under a week before the convention, and only three free evenings: Tim, one of the Best Men at my wedding, and his family have been visiting for the weekend and head off home tomorrow morning and then there's Games Night on Thursday. In fact, it'll be less than three free evenings as I desperately need to catch up on some sleep after a few late nights! I'm hoping to get a new version of Codename: Vacuum printed and cut out to take with me. I had wanted to try to get Codename: Proteome done too, but there's no chance :(.

The main difference for Vacuum is some new artwork (see below), a couple of wording tweaks to the strategy cards and some changes to differentiate the locations from each other. Proteome would have been a complete re-write since the version I made over a year ago, so I really don't have time for that too. It's destined to be a small filler card-game in the vein of 6 Nimmt! but with a tenuous science theme.

Here's the new 1900s card art for Codename: Vacuum. What do you think? It's still a word in progress - I want to improve the paper area in the middle further.

Update: It turns out that after sorting out a few things that got put off over the weekend I've only got one free night before B&P, and there's a bunch of things I'd like to go into the next Codename: Vacuum, so I'm going to try to get Codename: Proteome knocked out on Friday instead. The best laid plans and all that.

Winning Against The Odds

There are a few things I like to see in a game:

• The most experienced player usually wins - the game rewards time invested in it as an experienced player will learn the available strategies and play them better than a newbie
• It's not clear from early on who the winner is - it's no fun playing a long game if you know in the first ten minutes you're gonna get hosed
• A spirited after-game conversation - if the game was fun you'll want to discuss what went well or badly or how you could have done better if you'd made different decisions

I've been getting a good feeling about the latest version of Codename: Vacuum for a number reasons related to the points above. In this version, there are five possible end game scoring conditions:

• Conquest: Points awarded for capturing or otherwise absorbing locations into your empire
• Exploration: Points awarded for exploring the solar system
• Reproduction: Points awarded for the size of your population at the end of the game
• Greed: Points awarded for having amassed wealth through trading
• Knowledge: Points awarded for developing futuristic technologies

In each game, the players pick which three of those they wish to score in that game. In an ideal world, each player would score their chosen strategy - but it's always three that are scored. That has a few implications:

• In a two-player game, one player will chose more conditions that their opponent
• In a four- or five-player game, some players will not get their chosen strategy scored
• There's a race of sorts to ensure the strategies you want are scored, which curtails game time
  
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The biggest worry I've had about this is that if your chosen strategy isn't scored, you've lost. Game Over. But recent evidence hasn't borne out that fear. We've played a few games where the person who choose the fewest conditions has won!

• A few weeks ago I play a two-player game with Dave, my chief playtester. I raced ahead and chose two of the three conditions, while he mopped up the third one. In the very last turn of the game he made a gambit for some extra bonus points and pulled it off (with slight luck of the draw) and ended up winning the game by a point :)
• At the last two of my Games Nights I've played a game with Hoops and Gav, both of whom have a few plays under their belts. In both games I won, despite choosing none of the conditions!

After the last of those games, the whole of the Games Night crew had a fairly long discussion about winning strategies and how I'd pulled a win out of the bag (I was still fairly sure I'd lost going in to the final scoring).

These games have also been fairly tight score-wise (a good thing in my book) and if I'm playing against anyone other than Dave (who has played about 25 games) I (who have played about 50) almost always win. So the most experienced player thing is panning out nicely too. Dave has a win ratio of about 50% against me, or possibly even slightly higher.

It's results like these that give me a good feeling about the current balance of strategies and cards. The next step is to simplify things further without ruining that balance and find the certain je ne sais quoi that moves it from being a reasonably good game into an awesome one.

Holidays! Yay!

I'm back now from my week's holiday in Norfolk (which it turns out is a very long way from Newcastle when you've got a baby in the car!).

We went with the entirety of my in-laws, which was great as my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law and her husband are all often up for games. We played a lot of 7 Wonders (including my 100th play!), plus Thunderstone (including my 75th play!), Carcassonne the Castle and I finally got my teeth into all the X-Wing Miniatures stuff I'd bought at the beginning of the year :) I also got a couple of late night games of Codename: Vacuum in with my sister-in-law's husband (aside, is he a brother-in-law too? A brother-in-law²? Something else? I've no idea).

I was keen to play Vacuum of course, and he's a big steampunk fan, so I thought the theme would appeal to him. He plays games less than my regular playtesters, he'll play games when I'm around but doesn't attend a regular weekly Games Night, so I thought he'd be an ideal candidate for trying out the simple, first-play rules I had in mind.

One of the main criticisms I'm getting at the moment is that the first few times you play Codename: Vacuum you're not really sure what to do or why - it's too complex. There are thirty different cards available to you in a standard game of Codename: Vacuum. Like most deck-building games some of those are constant and available in every game, but some change from game to game. There's a lot to take in, and the second time you play, there's a lot more. Confusing.

I thought a way to simplify the game for the first time you play would be to reduce the number of cards. Just keep the twenty that are in every game, and not use the additional ten that change from game to game. But I had no idea whether it would work, or whether it would feel anything like the real game. So I turned my brother-in-law? into a human guinea pig.

The good news was that it felt like the real thing, and Matt picked it up quite quickly (he even won that first game). He then requested a second, and we played the full game which he also seemed to pick up quite quickly. Good stuff. I won that game (good stuff too ;) ).

Matt enjoyed it, it's a reasonably good game. Now I need to do the work required to make the jump from good to awesome. Still aways to go.

In other news, I've started tweaking the border artwork a bit more. I'm starting with the first age cards, trying to make them look a bit more steampunky.

In still further news, through judicious application of wicca, neuro-linguistic programming, voodoo, jedi mind tricks and hypnotism, I've managed to get The Wife to arrange to a weekend pass swap. Which means I get to go to Beer and Pretzels in three weeks time. It's a games convention in Burton-on-Trent in May each year. I've been two or three time before while I ran Reiver Games. I'd spend the day demoing and trying to sell copies of my games and then the evenings on general gaming. This time I get to do the general gaming all day (and evening :) ). It'll be good to catch up with people I knew back in the day, and also get to try out some new games. We play my games on Games Night, and I don't often buy games without trying them, so new games often pass me by.

I Need To Buy This Game!

Aside: I'm on holiday at the moment. I've posted this automatically and I'll respond to comments on my return.

Back to the matter at hand. 'I need to buy this game!' is how the exposition for a game should make you feel. The exposition of a game is what I'm calling the short description of the setting and mechanics that you use to summarise a game.

When I ran Reiver Games I used the exposition for many purposes:

• A brief summary of the game at the beginning of the rulebook
• A description of the game on the back of the box
• The first paragraph on the game's webpage
• The summary of the game on its BGG page
• On posters at conventions
• In adverts in trade magazines
• Sellsheets to send to shops and distributors

If I decide to KickStart it, the exposition would be the first paragraph of the KickStarter page too.

Clearly, it's important. I've agonised over the exact wording of each of my games' expositions. They've been through several drafts trying to get them to a honed sharpness of hook. The exposition should leave you thinking:

That sounds fricken' awesome! I need that game. So badly that I'm willing to sell my family to fund its purchase.

Writing them is very hard. I'm not a copy-writer, or a master wordsmith. I'm just a software engineer and occasional board game designer. Moulding the English language to my will does not come naturally. I did an average job on the Reiver Games ones (scroll down a bit in the links below to read the Description sections):

• Border Reivers
• It's Alive!
• Carpe Astra
• Sumeria

They're functional, but not particularly exciting. They didn't work very well either. The number of you who sold your families to buy the games was considerably less than the number of games I bought from the manufacturers.

For Codename: Vacuum, I've got an early draft that tries to cover the steampunk to sci-fi transition and the deck-building nature of the game. But it's not very exciting yet:

It’s 1897 and the discovery of the anti-gravity metal Cavorite has the world powers are poised on the edge of a Space Race to claim the Solar System. Lead your nation to victory by building a deck of strategy cards that will shape your empire for 300 years. What will be the defining features of humanity at the dawn of the 23rd century? Conquest? Exploration? Reproduction? Greed? Technology? Choose a strategy. Advance your technologies. Race to ensure your choice is scored.

Upon reading that, I'm decidely meh. My family are safe. Needs some work methinks!

An Interesting Conversation

It's been a busy week at Pope Towers. We had a friend's wedding (Chief, one of my core Codename: Vacuum playtesters), The Wife's birthday and then a busy weekend of among other things homebrewing. Despite all that, I've managed to get a game of Vacumm in, and made some more changes.

The April version of Codename: Vacuum is proving... transient. The last couple of versions have lasted a month or so without any changes, but my attempts to simplify things (addressing a common criticism) have been fairly sweeping, and fairly bad. I've tried a couple of things and they've come out incredibly un-balanced. I've had to quickly swap them out with new versions that rein them back in. Having said all that, I'm now feeling fairly confident about this new third version of the April edition - I think this one might be the best version yet. And, I think, the simplification attempts are bearing fruit too.

So anyway, to the subject of this post.

At Chief's wedding I was having a conversation with Gav (another Codename: Vacuum playtester). I don't remember exactly what we said, but I think I can piece together enough of the conversation (corrected for drunken blathering and weak memory). Gav was chatting to me about Games Design (my hobby) and iOS app design (his). He asked me a couple of interesting questions:

Is the Games Design itself what you enjoy or is the goal of a published game what drives you?

It's an interesting question and one that I answered in a more drunken, slurred version of this: I really enjoy the design. I love spending time crafting the hand-made prototypes and doing the layout and graphic design on the computer. I loved making the hand-crafted versions of Border Reivers and the first edition of It's Alive! - it was great being able to look at those finished copies and know that I'd made them, from scratch. Having said all that, I've given myself some goals and I'm working to get Codename: Vacuum finished. I want to get a game on the shelves, an awesome game that people will sing songs about in years to come. I want to be able to look at it and know that it brings hundreds or thousands of people pleasure. Which brings me on to the second question:

Why don't you think Codename: Vacuum is an awesome game yet?

Gav has played Codename: Vacuum five or six times. He seems to enjoy it, but he's not clamouring to play it. For him it's not gaming crack. And that's true of most of the other people who've played it too. They enjoy it. But they'd not play it for forty-eight hours without sleep or food. It's alright, not awesome. I think it's getting towards a good game (which is a curse in itself), but there's still a way to go before it's awesome. That's brought us on to the subject of why Gav is not clamouring to play it. As far as my hazy memory recalls, Gav said that he enjoyed it, but it found it hard to spot where he went wrong in a game and how to improve for next time, hampered further by the fact that each time he's played the game has been different with new cards and tweaked rules. There were aspects of the game he loved (like being really excited to take his next turn after the last one finished and the way your shape your strategy by crafting your deck and play area), but even after several games he didn't feel like he knew how to play better or what he did wrong.

I'm hoping that the newer simplified versions will go some way towards alleviating this problem and that if or when Gav plays again, things will have improved to the point that he can craft a strategy and then see what could be improved next time, or how someone beat him with a better strategy (not just the un-balanced game favouring someone else's strategy). Maybe what we need to have is a dedicated playtesting night when we can play it a few times to really get a feel for it without changes in between. I'll have to try and arrange one for after our upcoming holiday.

But also, I want to introduce Gav to some other deck-building games so he can see what Vacuum is competing against and note that the bits of the game he loves are not anything original or unique, others got there first. On that note, we're going to play Thunderstone (one of my favourite games) at my next Games Night on Tuesday.

P.S. Gav: I hope my poor memory and correcting for drunkeness haven't misrepresented you!

Moving the Goalposts

Back at the beginning of the year, I set myself some goals. My next major target according to those goals is to get copies of Codename: Vacuum to playtesters around the world by the end of May. Which is just over a month away.

That's not going to happen. Not even close. The last couple of weeks we've had my parents up for a week and now my father-in-law up for a week. In two weeks time we're off on a family holiday for a week and we've another long weekend family holiday at the end of May. For the last couple of weeks I've not made much progress on Codename: Vacuum for all these reasons (excuses again!) and it's clear to me now that I'll not get those playtest copies ready by the end of next month. In fact, after the rulebook disaster, I'm not even sure I'll manage to get the rulebook re-written by the end of May, let alone the playtest copies constructed.

So, I'm moving the goalposts. I've got a work trip to the US in June, so it's unlikely to be done by June either, but maybe July is achievable. In the meantime, I've just printed the April version for myself which I now need to cut out and I'll need to make update packs for Terry and Paul who have the March version. I can also be making boxes and box inserts for the playtest copies already. The other components will change between now and the end of July, but the boxes won't so I can make them ahead of time.

The other thing I need to be thinking about is who gets the playtest copies. I want people who can give really good feedback, people who like deck-building games and people who are prepared to play it several times to make the cost of sending them a copy worthwhile. I've a few ideas, friends I made during my Reiver Games days. But I think I want to send out maybe fifteen copies, so I'll need to find a few more playtesters. I feel a BGG post coming on, nearer to the time...

In other news, I've been having some more ideas about Codename: Proteome. Maybe it's time to make another version of that and get that tested too.

TableTop Day @ Newcastle Gamers

I moved back to Newcastle about a year and a half ago. We'd lived here for three years between 2001 and 2004 and ever since we left we'd being saying to each other 'I loved Newcastle, we ought to move back there at some point'. Since we moved back things have been pretty busy. The first two months I was here on my own during the week, then going home to the south on weekends, then The Wife joined me. We rented a house for six months, and spent a decent amount of time trying to find one to buy. Then we moved house again. And on top of moving house twice, we had a baby seven months ago.

All these excuses go some way, I hope, to explain why in the eighteen months since I moved back to Newcastle I've been to Newcastle Gamers (which is on twice a month) not 36 times, but 3. That's right, I've been less than 1/10th of the available opportunities. Can I refer you again to the excuses at the beginning of this blog post?

The third of those attendances was this Saturday just gone. Newcastle Gamers usually runs from 4:30pm until late, but since someone had declared Saturday International TableTop Day, Newcastle Gamers started at 10:00am, which coincided nicely with a kids birthday party The Wife was taking The Daughter to, so I got a pass!

I took Codename: Vacuum along, hoping to playtest it with a few strangers and get some feedback not coloured by personal affection. On arrival I was invited to join a game of Munchkin with Gareth and a few others. Gareth used to run Newcastle Gamers and used to come to my Thursday Games Night too, until he moved down south. I wasn't expecting to see him there, so it was a nice opportunity to catch up, and it made Munchkin a little bit more bearable (I'm not a fan!).

Afterwards, Gareth wanted to play Codename: Vacuum, so the two of us sat down to a quick game. I had to leave before too long, so we didn't have time for a learning game for 5 people, so the other players of Munchkin started another game and Gareth and I just did a two-player game. Gareth hadn't played before, and was keen to try it out. We set off after a brief explanation (which I hope makes more sense than the dreadful rulebook that I still haven't gotten round to re-jiggering) and got cracking. Gareth is a proper gamer, so despite the fact that he's a friend and so won't be able to give entirely un-biased feedback, his feedback will be very useful. He's much more experienced than the mates I've been playing it with at Games Night and at work, so his knowledge of other games will be useful as a yardstick to compare it with.

As it was, Gareth seemed to enjoy the game, and I'm hoping he'll get a chance to give me some more considered feedback once his play has sunk in. He said some very positive things and gave me a few nice ideas to work on.

After Vacuum, I had very little time left, so we had a quick game of The Boss, which was new to me and reminded me of Brett Gilbert's Divinare. Interesting.

Seeing as I've not been to Newcastle Gamers in ages, I wasn't expecting to know many people there and for there to be little knowledge of who I was or Codename: Vacuum. As it was, I recognised more people than I expected, and knew a couple of them very well. Plus someone (whom I'm sorry to say I didn't know/remember, or think to ask his name) came over and asked if we were playing Codename: Vacuum! When I said yes, he asked about progress on the new rulebook! Apparently, he lurks here! I'm famous! Yay! (Anyway, please introduce yourself, dear lurker, to make up for my poor manners/memory!).

It was a nice trip, and my first Games Club visit since I went to Beyond Monopoly last summer. It reminds me that I need to get out more!

Streamlining

Not a huge amount to report this week, I've had my parents up for the week plus I was away for a couple of days on a work trip. As a result I've not made much progress on Codename: Vacuum.

It's not stood still though. I had a playtest game at lunch time one day last week and I've got the first session report from my playtesters in Bedford. As I mentioned last week, they had some issues with the first draft rulebook, but they managed to overcome my inept rulebook writing and played it last week. They've found a bunch more small errors in the cards and rulebook which I'll correct this week. Their game was a long one. There were four players, all new to the game and they were learning it from the (crap) rulebook and it ended up lasting over two and a half hours. It's always the case that a learning game with rules explanation and rule looking up will take longer, but that's still significantly north of what I was hoping for. Having a more structured rulebook that more clearly explains things will help, but the game will need simplifying too. I was hoping for more of a Race for the Galaxy play time than Twilight Imperium. Since Codename: Vacuum doesn't have simultaneous play it'll never be quite as fast as Race, but it can play fairly quickly, and with my experienced players at work we can usually get a game done in under 20 minutes per player. We even got a five player game with one new player done in 1 hour 40 minutes a couple of weeks ago.

Still, the feedback is reminding me that my design ethos definitely is make a complicated game and then simplify it, rather than starting with a simple game and expanding it. Vacuum isn't intended to be a streamlined euro like Sumeria, but there's definitely a lot of scope to simplify things. I'm trying to focus now on re-writing the rules to clarify things, and at the same time, work on those rules that are complicated to write or explain or ones that people often get wrong to try and streamline the game. The simpler it is, the easier it'll be to teach or pick up for the first time. Of course, while doing this, I've got to be careful not to rip out the heart of the game!

In other news, I was contacted a few weeks ago by a previous Reiver Games customer who was interested in playtesting Codename: Vacuum at a convention in Australia. I've been working to get a print-and-play copy ready for him, but in the light of the feedback about the rules quality, I've had to turn him down. I feel bad about letting him down, but I'd rather give him a hand-made copy later (even with the shipping cost to Australia) than provide a poor quality version now.

Epic Fail

The week before last I sent two copies of Codename: Vacuum to my friends Paul in York and Terry in Bedford. In both cases the games arrived in time for their Thursday Games Night, and that Thursday Vacuum got played at my Games Night - I was excited that it could be getting simultaneously by three groups at the same time!

Paul, who had played it once before about nine months ago, emailed me to let me know he'd received it and it all seemed fairly self explanatory, he just had one query - the rules contradicted themselves - which bit was right? It was an artefact of me creating a new 'simpler' version of the rules at the last minute, I let him know which bit was right and fixed the other bit straight away so the next printing wouldn't have the problem.

A week passed, still no word from Terry. Then last Friday I got an email from Andrew (who plays games with Terry, was also one of my key Reiver Games playtesters in my Bedford days and who accompanied me to my second Essen show in Germany). It turns out that my attempt at writing the rules had been an epic fail. Terry, Andrew and Stewart (all three very experienced gamers who regularly learn new games from their rulebooks) had set up Codename: Vacuum to play the previous week, read through the rules and then put it away! After reading through the rules, three very experienced gamers were so confused that they just packed up and played something else instead. That is a legendary rulebook failure. In the end, Andrew took the prototype home and has tried to work through it solo to get his head around it enough to explain it to the others.

Clearly, the rulebook needs a lot of work. The fact that Paul had played the game once before gave him enough of a frame of reference for the rulebook to work for him, but for both playtesting and game sales, the rulebook needs to be clear enough that you can learn the game from the rulebook. This was the first attempt at a proper rulebook for Codename: Vacuum, and the first attempt at a blind playtesting, where you learn the game from the rulebook. The rulebook as it stands fails to pass muster. I need to restructure it to give a better sense of how the game is played, what you are trying to achieve and how to achieve it. The rulebook was a fairly last minute thing done when trying to get the prototypes out the door. It needs more effort than that!

Just Collating Data As They Say

After each game of Codename: Vacuum I record a bunch of information, about who played, how long it took, who scored what in which category, etc. I've not made much use of the information yet - the game changes too frequently, so I don't have enough information about any one version to draw any useful conclusions.

Last week though, I sent out a couple of playtest copies to some previous gaming buddies who used to be my core Reiver Games playtesters. In the package with their copy of the game were a handful of feedback sheets, so they could record the bits of the game I am most interested in.

So what am I looking for? I'm trying to find the particular biases and unbalanced areas that the game is bound to be full of. The game has 15 decks of cards, 8 possible starting territories and five (or fifteen!) endgame scoring conditions. I've played it nearly forty times and that is nowhere near enough times to sort out all the balance issues between that number of variables, especially as I bring out a new version every month or so and so I effectively have to start again from scratch at that point.

Now that there are multiple copies of the game in circulation, I can get more feedback about each version and hopefully start doing something useful with it. Data analysis! Science!

The areas I'm most interested in to begin with are:

• Is there a first player bias
• Is there a last player bias
• Strong vs. weak endgame scoring conditions
• Strong vs. weak starting territories
• Strong vs. weak decks

Hopefully, getting my playtesters to fill in one of these will help me find those problems, so I can fix them:

Click the image to see a full size one

P.S. Award yourself 10 points if you recognised the Firefly quote in the title!

Honestly I'm Not Normally A Deviant, But ...

I'll get to the subject of that provocative title in a minute! Aside: this is my 666th blog post. Make of that what you will.

Just a brief update on progress this week, and a review of my card purchases.

At the beginning of the year I set myself some goals. Seeing as one of them was a deadline for last Thursday, I figured it'd be a good time to take stock of how I'm progressing against those goals. The deadline was to get initial playtest copies out to some close friends who were key Reiver Games playtesters by the end of February. I missed it, but only by a couple of days (I got them ready over the weekend, so they are ready for posting today). It was close, so I'm going to count that as a goal met! The only other goals relevant at this point are the blog ones. So far I'm on track for those too, I've blogged every Monday this year, the page views are above the target of 20,000 views this year and I've two new followers since the start of the year too. All good :-)

Setting the goals has really focussed me, I've worked quite hard the last few weeks to the get playtest copies ready, spending my evenings after The Daughter goes to sleep printing, cutting and collating to get the copies assembled. The biggest stumbling block was the rulebook, which I had to write from scratch in Adobe InDesign since the previous one was written in Microsoft Word, had no examples and was hideously out of date. The last minute change to simplify things that I thought of last week didn't help as that made changes necessary close to the wire.

Still, I consider myself on track so far this year :-)

As another aside, I recently read an article on BGG by Lewis Pulsipher, designer of Britannia among others, stating that to be taken seriously as a designer you need to be working on multiple games at once. One game makes you look like a dilettante apparently. I consider myself focussed, rather than a dilettante, but maybe others feel differently. Anyway, I've a family now and they come first, with limited time available the only way I can make any progress is to focus on a single game.

In other news, in making these prototypes I mentioned above, I've finally got around to using some of that card I bought a couple of weeks ago. I bought it from PaperCutz a supplier I'd not used before, so I thought I'd review the purchase briefly. I've used the card extensively in the prototypes: the box insert, deck dividers, cards and player mats are all printed on and made from the new card.

PaperCutz were pretty easy to deal with, I ordered over the internet, the card arrived in a couple of days. The card was fairly well wrapped and then boxed, but regardless both the 300gsm and the 240gsm were slightly dinged on one corner, probably as a result of exuberance on the part of the courier. It's not a problem, since I cut at least 10mm from each edge as part of the construction and I can feed the dinged corner into the printer last so it doesn't throw the printer out of whack, but still slightly disappointing.

I bought 25 sheets of the 300gsm for making box inserts and 250 sheets of the 240gsm for the cards, dividers and player mats. That's enough to make 15 games :-). Or at least it was until I fell in love with the 300gsm stuff. Honestly I'm not normally a deviant, but the silky smooth, unblemished exterior coupled with a firm core that kinks pleasingly when you caress its surface with a craft knife totally got me. I've used it for the box inserts as intended, but also for the dividers and player mats, so now I've enough card to make 3 more games. I need more. I'm going to get another 100 sheets of the A3 300gsm, which I'll use for the dividers and player mats and I'll also get 25 sheets of a more voluptuous SRA3 (a slightly bigger size) for the box inserts. It turns out that I can't do maths to save my life, and the calculation I'd done in my head which lead to the decision that A3 would be big enough for the box inserts was way out. SRA3 isn't big enough! But it's close enough and will do. After those purchases I'll have enough to make another 15 copies - so I should be sorted for the next wave of prototypes in the summer too :-).

Why Critical Feedback Is Crucial

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've finally got round to asking for some structured feedback from the mates who I've been testing Codename: Vacuum on.

I really don't want to be that guy who keeps nagging his mates to play his game that they'd rather pluck their own eyes out with skewers than play. I don't want them playing it to avoid hurting my feelings; I want them playing it if they want to play it.

Playtesting is different to gaming. You play a game that's often crap or broken, each time you play it the rules or components are different, sometimes you have to abandon a game halfway through because it doesn't work and then after all that you're expected to give feedback and constructive criticism. Not all gamers enjoy playtesting - and with good reason.

So the system I came up with to avoid being that guy, was to invite people to play Vacuum with me once. If they wanted to play, they had to email me. If they wanted to play again, they had to email me again. No nagging, no guilt, just helping out if they felt like it and enjoyed it.

Seven of my mates at work are on the Games Night email list (though not all of them come) so I invited them and left it at that. All of them took me up on the offer. Most of them have played between two and five times, a couple only once. Two of them want to play pretty much every week.

What I was most interested in was: why do the five who don't want to play every week not want to play every week? What is it about Codename: Vacuum that has left them feeling cold?

Most of them are Software Engineers like me, so they understand the value of critical feedback. I asked them for answers to a simple questionnaire, and for them to be critical in particular - no sugar-coating!

By far the biggest criticism that came back from everyone was that the learning curve was steep and the wealth of available strategies overwhelming. At the moment the game has five 'standard' decks which you play with every time and ten 'advanced' decks of which you play five per game. Each deck has an end-game scoring condition which represents a valid (though not yet balanced!) strategy. In any one game there are ten available, each time you play half of those change (and in fact for my playtesters, they pretty much all change every time they play as the game evolves).

People are finding it hard to take in the options and judge which ones are strongest for the given combination of available decks. It's bewildering. I understand all the scoring conditions, but then I wrote all the cards and think about them incessantly. My chief playtester Dave has got it (he recently royally owned me in a game!) but he's played it more than ten times. No one else has really.

I guess I had seen this in action most times I've tried the game out, but I'd chalked it up to learning games and beginners confusion without really paying any particular attention to it. Getting these written answers to the questionnaires has really brought it into focus and flagged it up. If you are too overwhelmed the first time you play a game, then there's not much likelihood of you playing it a second time and any hope of a hit game and good sales have gone straight out of the window.

But the concrete feedback has given me something to latch onto, and last week I had an idea in the shower. I going to try only five scoring conditions, one per standard deck. They'll be the same every game, and because there's only five of them, they can be simpler and easier to grok. The advanced decks will still exist, but they'll be there to help you in one or more of the standard scoring conditions.

Thinking about it, this simplification might help with a few other things:

• forcing players to diversify their decks since the standard scoring conditions are all quite different from each other
• it should make it easier to balance the game as I only need to consider those five scoring conditions
• it should also make the multi-player game a bit quicker, since you would play to fewer conditions

Time to try it out and see if it behaves like I expect. I've a playtest session on Monday lunchtime with a couple of mates from work.

Another advantage of coming up with it at this point is that I hope to get copies to my friends in York and Bedford in the next week or so. I can give them both versions (before and after this simplification) and get them to compare and contrast.

Rule book

Sooner or later, our children must fly the nest and strike out on their own. My daughter is only six months old so, thankfully, that day is a long way off for her, but for Codename: Vacuum it's much closer. Until now, every single game of it has been played with my copy, with me playing and explaining the rules. As a result, the rulebook has been fairly simplistic, and for the last three months or so, quite out of date.

After 15 months of internal development, it's time for Codename: Vacuum to see the light of day. The first stage of this is to run it by a few of my key playtesters from my Reiver Games days: my friends Paul in York and Terry, Andrew and Graham in Bedford. Knocking up a couple of prototypes isn't too onerous: just a couple of hours per copy. The big difference however is the rulebook. If I'm sending them a copy and they have to play it from the rulebook, then the rulebook has to be:

• complete
• up to date
• well-written
• comprehensive
• illustrated
• with examples

Sadly, until a week or so ago, none of these were true of the Codename: Vacuum rulebook :(. My focus now is on getting it ready, so I can send games complete with rulebooks.

First problem is that writing rules is hard. You need to be both complete, clear and unambiguous and also concise. You need to provide examples of anything that could be unclear, you need to expect that people reading it will get the wrong end of the stick. You need to have good grammar and the whole thing mustn't look like a dictionary.

Making this visibly aged me

It's really hard. When I ran Reiver Games I had my friend Mal proof-read the rulebooks for me, and I got people to play the games from the rulebook and then tell me what they thought was unclear so I could improve that section. I got more feedback from people who translated the rules into other languages, and still at the end of all that there are plenty of people playing the games wrong or asking for clarification on BGG. And these were simpler games than Codename: Vacuum.

This first draft of the rulebook won't be playtested before the guys down south get their hands on it (they are inadvertently doing the playtesting for me :) ) and it won't be proof-read, which just makes me more paranoid about getting it right. It'll be light on examples and illustrations too, but it's a step in the right direction.

As a general rule I try to structure a rulebook like so:

• Front cover
• Inside cover: contents list
• Exposition: A brief description of the setting and a very high-level overview of the game
• Aim of the Game: What the players are trying to do to win
• Setup: How to get ready for a game
• Play: Rules of the game
• End of the Game: when it occurs and under what circumstances
• Scoring: How the winner is determined
• Acknowledgements: Thanks to playtesters, proof-readers, etc.
• Credits: Artists, translators, etc.
• Back cover: Quick rules overview

For Codename: Vacuum I'm thinking of adding a description of all of the decks and cards between the scoring and acknowledgements covering exactly what you can and can't do with them and answering some FAQs.

My aim is to get the playtest copies ready by the end of the month. This week is my quarterly hospital trip which involves four hours on trains, so I should be able to make some progress and maybe even build up a backlog of blog posts. But even with the train trips I've got my work cut out!

Stationery Woes

For the last few months I've been making a new prototype of Codename: Vacuum roughly once a month. I'd play the last version a few times, come up with some new ideas to try out and then make those changes on the computer. Then it was time to realise it in physical form. I bought a Canon Pixma iX6550 last year and I've been very pleased with it. When printing cards for games I lay the cards out in a 5x5 grid on a sheet of A3 card. So, clearly, I need some A3 card. Codename: Vacuum is a deck-building game with 350 cards. So I need a lot of card.

For the last few months I've been nipping to Ryman Stationery or Hobbycraft to get more card. They both sell A3 white card in packs of 25, so with the 17 sheets of card per copy of the game, I'm getting through quite a lot of packs! Hobbycraft has been my preferred stockist, their packs are £5 and are 210gsm card - which feels a reasonable thickness and weight for prototype game cards. Ryman's conversely are £6 and only 160gsm which feels cheap and flimsy by comparison.

So why do I ever go to Ryman? Because Hobbycraft are often out of stock - Ryman has been my fallback position if I need card at short notice and Hobbycraft have failed me yet again.

Since I need almost a full pack per game and I'm making roughly a game a monthly, trips to Hobbycraft for the inevitable disappointment of no stock followed by a trip into town to get the flimsy Ryman offering are regularly required.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the year I'm hoping to get playtesting copies to friends this month and more out in the summer - I'm going to be making a lot of copies. It doesn't make sense to continue to buy lots of these little packs when I need sheets a hundred or more at a time.

Time to man up:

3 inch thick pile of card! Manly.

I placed an order online with PaperCutz for 250 sheets! I've also gone with a heavier weight than even Hobbycraft sell: 240gsm. Having such a large stock will mean I don't need to keep making these disappointing trips and mean that when I'm ready to make a new copy I've got enough card to print it straight away. I also ordered 25 sheets of really heavy 300gsm card making for box inserts. If you're going to do a job - might as well do it properly :).

More Visual Changes

After my very unpopular question for artists a few weeks ago (which nevertheless is now one of my ten most popular posts of all time!) I've been making a few changes to the layout off my own back.

The last version (which was wheeled out for the first time at the beginning of the year) had a few changes to the cards, a few changes to the rules and quite a lot of changes to the design. I'm now working on another version which I hope to get to the table this week (assuming I can find some card on which to print - I went to Hobbycraft to get some more on Saturday and for the second time it was out of stock :( ). This latest version further adds to the graphic design as well as trying out some very new card ideas and trying to streamline the rules a bit.

The first thing I've done on the design front is to try to differentiate between the three levels of strategy card. These levels theoretically correspond to 1900s, 2000s and 2100s technology, so I wanted the cards to have a flavour of that. Previously with the slight exception of a number representing the level in the top-right corner, the cards all looked the same.

Since the game starts in an alternative steampunk universe, I wanted the first set of cards to look steampunky. I'm no artist, so I've kept it simple, just a brass effect in the background of the card:

The Boffin steampunky 1900s card

It would be nice if this was a bit more steampunky, with cogs and leather and copper tubes, but I have to admit my limitations and keep it simple.

Next up are the modern day cards, around 2000s technology. Again, I've tried to keep this simple, I've a clean, modern webpage design in my head as the guideline:

The webpage-themed Consumerism card

The latest version, yet to make it into physical form also includes some border art for the futuristic 2100s cards. This is the weakest of the three to my mind, but hopefully feels vaguely futuristic!

A futuristic Armada card

So, you can see why I wanted an artist a few weeks ago - this is not my strong suit! But hopefully, this basic graphic design/border art gives a flavour of the three ages of cards.

I'm also trying to streamline the game a bit with this new version. One of the things that has been in the game for at least six months is that you have to pay upkeep on population above and beyond the basic population that a location comes with when you acquire it. At the end of every turn, you had to pay some coins if you'd settled extra population on any of your location cards. Despite this having been in the rules for ages, and having personally designed the game this was something I kept forgetting to do, let alone my poor playtesters, who also have to cope with a new set of rules and cards every time they play. I've taken it out in this version, in favour of limiting the number of cards you can settle on a location - I figure it's easier to remember a restriction on things you can do at the point you do them, then remember a little thing at the end of every turn for the rest of the game!

In other news, Mal suggested in the comments of the artists post that I approach the design school at the local uni to see if they'd be interested in offering the graphics design of Codename: Vacuum as a degree project. I think it's an excellent idea, now I just need to pull my finger out and get in contact!

Tax Return :(

In the UK, when starting your own small company you have a choice between forming a Limited Company (known as Company Name Ltd.) which is a separate legal entity (I assume very similar to the LLC in the US) or you can set up as a self-employed person (either as a sole trader or in a partnership) where the company is actually just yourself earning some money under a trading name.

When I set up Reiver Games back in July 2006, after getting some advice from Business Link, a now defunct government scheme to give free advice to new businesses, I chose the sole trader route - technically, Reiver Games was: Jackson Pope trading as Reiver Games.

Since at the time I was only setting up the business to try and sell 100 copies of Border Reivers that I was going to lovingly craft by hand, I wanted to keep things as cheap as possible. Setting up a limited company required paying someone to incorporate it, and then paying every year for employees liability insurance and to get an accountant to audit your books. All costs I could do without.

Setting up as a sole trader was much easier: open some bank accounts, create a website and tell HMRC (our equivalent of the IRS) that I was now self-employed as well as an employee and job done. As a self-employed person I would also have to start filling in a tax return every year. In the UK if you are just an ordinary wage-slave, paying taxes straight out of your pay cheque every month (PAYE) you don't need to file a tax return, but self-employed people do.

We have to file our tax returns by the end of January the year after the tax year we're filing for. So at the end of this month I have to file a tax return for the tax year from 6th April 2011 to the 5th April 2012. Reiver Games ceased trading in July 2011 and I finally closed all the bank accounts in November 2011, so this is the last time I'll have to file a tax return I hope.

While I was running Reiver Games (especially during the period when I was doing it full-time) I tried to keep on top of doing my books as I went along, then filing a tax return wasn't too onerous: read some numbers of the annual totals and that was pretty much it. Once I went back to work and Reiver Games was clearly going down the pan it was a bit harder to summon the enthusiasm for staying on top of my books, so filing a tax return turned into frantically catching up on the books, then filing a tax return at the last possible minute. It was like that last January and again this year. I've been doing it during the evenings over the last week or two after The Baby had gone to bed and finally finished and submitted it last night. Theoretically, HMRC will notice I've ceased being self-employed and remove the need to fill in a tax return, though they might need some prodding...

Needless to say, on top of the books, I've got pretty much nothing done on Codename: Vacuum the last couple of weeks, but I've still been having lots of ideas to try out. Now these damn books and tax return are out of the way I'll have to give them a whirl.

Codename Vacuum: Belatedly Getting Feedback

I had the idea for Codename: Vacuum about fifteen months ago now. It got its first proper play at Games Night during February last year then nothing really until July when I played it with my friend Paul whose Games Night I attended twice a week for most of our five year sojourn in York. Since October last year it's been played at least once a week as I try to iron out the kinks and fix the balance issues.

The first play was, to my mind, disastrous: the game lasted many hours and the play was dragged out by numerous discussions about things that could be changed about it, most of which would have completely changed it, certainly radically altering it from the game I first had (and still have) in mind. The second went much better with my friend Paul who had been one of my key playtesters during my Reiver Games days.

Since then, I've tried to focus on playing the game a lot with friends at work and at Games Night (there is a large overlap between those groups of people). The focus has been on teaching people the game and me personally working out which decks/cards are weak. Every month or so I've printed out a new version of the game incorporating potential fixes to the problems I've found.

Wary of the wealth of wildly restructuring ideas I had at the first public test, I've not been asking my playtesters for much in the way of feedback - I've just been using them as opponents to enable me to test the game and spot potential problems/weaknesses.

Obviously, this is a pants way to proceed, but it got me over the hump of not playing the game and has allowed me to make three or four complete revisions of the game, each of which I think is slightly better than the last. But playtesting is not just for playing the game - it's also for gathering feedback and I've been doing very little of that.

My current playtest crew for Vacuum is a core of four people who seem genuinely keen to play it. Dave has played it getting on for ten times I think, and gives me a good run for my money, winning as many (if not slightly more!) games than I do. The other three have probably played two or three times each, and I don't think any of them have beaten me yet (though I might be remember that wrong!). I'm now asking these core guys for really critical feedback after games in the hope I can use this information to hone the game still further and address the weaknesses of the game as a whole.

Possibly more interesting and useful would be feedback from the five or six people who've played it once or twice and don't seem particularly keen to play it again. What is it about the game that they don't like or do they have any ideas what it is about the game that doesn't excite them? I need to gather that feedback too, but I need to do it without seeming to be pulling them up for their lack of interest. How to do that, I'm not sure yet.

The other thing about my process that's changing is that I'm going from making a new version every month or so to just tweaking a card or a deck and re-print those out for testing. Printing and cutting out a whole new copy is about an hour and a half's work, but I can do a single deck pretty quickly (especially since I changed the form factor of the artwork - why oh why didn't I do that earlier?). It feels like the game is coming on nicely and I'm still having plenty of new card ideas - at this rate it's going to have an expansion's worth before I'm ready to publish/hawk it!

Setting my goals for the year a few weeks ago has really focussed my mind on moving things forward - I'm driven now to get a couple of copies out to my previous gaming groups in York and Bedford (both populated by Reiver Games playtesters!) by the end of February, but before I do that I want to improve the game still further.

I also need to create a rulebook that's complete enough to learn the game from, but time is tight, especially as I have to do a Self-Assessment Tax Return for the last year of Reiver Games before the end of this month :(

What's in a Name?

For many years I've been referring to new games by a codename that stands as a working title while the game is in development. It's Alive! was Codename: Monster, Carpe Astra was Codename: Network and Sumeria was Codename: Ancient before their official names were chosen or announced. And now I'm working on Codename: Vacuum.

If I decide to hawk it to publishers, job done, I can send it with the codename, since the publisher will almost certainly want to chose the name (and the artist and tweak the rules) themselves. However, if I decide I self publish again I'll need a real name for it at some point.

I've been toying with a couple of ideas (one of which I posited here to a conspicuous silence!), and it got me thinking about what makes a good game name.

Lots of euro games go for the place name option, e.g.: Goa, Macao, Cuba, Santiago, Puerto Rico; while more themed games chose something a bit more involved: e.g.: Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition, Race for the Galaxy, Space Hulk.

I would want something that gives you a flavour of the game, but it also needs to meet certain criteria:

• There can't be an existing game with the same or a similar name
• It's got to Google well
• Ideally there's not a book/film/computer game with the same name
• It's got to sound enticing
• It ought to evoke the gameplay or setting

So Race for the Galaxy is out (taken) and Race for the Solar System is out (too similar). Sol is out (taken by a 2011 game, a forthcoming film plus brings back hundreds of BGG hits). Empire of the Sun is a film and book, Solar Empire is a 2012 game. So you can see there's a lot of competition!

Making up a word works in a lot of ways (it should be unique in the BGG database and should Google well), but it be awkward for searchers to guess the 'correct' spelling, plus it's difficult to evoke the theme, concept or mechanics of a game with a word that by definition doesn't mean anything.

I've been thinking about 'Full Steam to the Stars' or 'Steam to the Stars' for Codename: Vacuum. They both have a few things going for them:

• No competition: a BGG search of 'steam stars' brings back no hits and Google doesn't find anything with that phrase in the first page
• They both evoke the Steampunk initial setting of the game and the sci-fi finish with a sense of the transition in between
• Full Steam gives a hint of the race to ensure that your target victory conditions are ones that get scored

Of course, the downside is that I'm too close to them so I've no idea whether they sound rubbish or not. The name has to be interesting enough that if you saw it on a shelf you'd pick up the box or if you saw it in the BGG Hotness you'd click the link. I'm not sure either of those have that kind of appeal.

For Carpe Astra I ran a BGG competition to choose a name (the winner got a mention in the rules and, I think, a free copy of the game). I could do the same thing here, but it's a bit of a wasted effort if I hawk it to publishers and they call it something else.

What do you all think of (Full) Steam to the Stars? Got any better ideas?

Setting Some Goals

It's a time of year traditionally dedicated to proudly proclaiming a set of Resolutions about how you will improve yourself that inevitably fall by the wayside by the end of January as things settle back to normal after your Christmas blowout.

Rather than set myself some New Year's Resolutions in that vein, I've decided instead to set myself some Games Design Goals instead. I'm not promising anything, I'm not changing the way I live my life (no matter how short-lived!), I'm just going to state for the record what I hope to achieve with Codename: Vacuum this year. I might achieve them, I might not, but I'll certainly try and it'll be interesting at the end of the year to look back and see how successful I've been in meeting them.

Creation and Play Goals

My goals are pretty simple for Creation and Play, now I'm back, I'd like to establish myself as a regular blogger again. The aim is to blog once a week on a Monday morning. I expect to miss a few due to holidays and illness/laziness, but I'd like to blog at least 45 times this year. I've hit 60,000 page views for the blog now over its 3 year history of stats. I'd like to get above 80,000 by the end of this year with a few extra followers to boot.

Codename: Vacuum Goals

I'm really pleased with the progress I'm making on Codename: Vacuum, the next stage is to get it out in the world. I'd like to get copies to my previous gaming buddies in York and Bedford by the end of February and then several copies to blind playtesters by the end of May. I hope that I'll be able to incorporate their feedback and have a print-ready game (sans artwork) by the end of November, when I need to decide whether the game is good enough to publish and if it is, what route to take to market.

There's a fair amount or graft needed to reach those goals, but if you don't set yourself something challenging you'll just fanny on interminably. Wish me luck!

The Year in Review

2012 has been a momentous year for me in a number of ways. I became a father back in August and that's been very hard work, but also very exciting and great fun already with the promise of lots more fun to come. I moved back to Newcastle at the end of last year so it's been my first full calendar year in Newcastle since 2004 and my first full calendar year in full-time employment with same employer since 2007. We bought a house in March and a car in December. And I visited Canada for the first time. But probably the most relevant thing in this forum is that it was the year I re-kindled my love of Game Design.

Games Design

I had the idea for Codename: Vacuum during a discussion with The Wife during a long car journey at the end of November last year. In just over a year it has gone from concept to a fairly solid prototype (with another almost ready to print), and interestingly it hasn't changed a huge amount. The concept is still the same (though the setting has changed very slightly) and the main mechanics and actions are still as originally envisaged. I'm pleased with how Codename: Vacuum is progressing and hope to get it to a print-ready stage by the end of next year when I'll have to make a decision about whether it's good enough to
proceed with and, if it is, whether to try KickStarter or hawk it to established publishers. Exciting times once again.

Back at the beginning of the year had an idea for a little card game (Codename: Proteome) to make as a conference giveaway from my current employer. After an initial burst of interest in the office this one completely fizzled out. It's a shame but, especially now that I have a daughter to look after, I'm very pushed for time so focussing on a single game is a way to ensure that something gets done rather than negligable progress on half a dozen things.

Finally, in November I had an idea for another game (Codename: Vengeance) which co-incided with NaGaDeMon. It was to be a worker placement/area control game conceptually based on the old Populous computer games. The announcement that Peter Molyneux was going to KickStarter to fund a re-imagining of Populous put paid to that idea too, but silver lining: I've only really got time for one game anyway, so Vacuum benefits from that idea falling by the wayside too.

General Gaming

From a general gaming point of view it's been a surprisingly good year. I've not got to any conventions or trade shows, but I've managed a fairly regular games night that suffered only minimal disruption around the house move and the birth of our daughter. I've played 328 games, a large number of which were on the iPad while travelling for work (I've decided rather arbitrarily that games on an iPad against human opposition count towards BGG play stats). My five and dimes were:

• 25: No Thanks! - One of our favourite fillers at Games Night
• 24: Race for the Galaxy - A perennial favourite at Games Night and with The Wife
• 23: Ingenious - All played on the iPad with Mal on our trip to Denmark
• 22: Codename: Vacuum - Getting somewhere with this
• 22: 7 Wonders - Still loving this, simple and quick, but still interesting
• 15: Carcassonne - One of my favourite games for nearly 10 years
• 15: The Resistance - Battlestar Galactica, but playable in an hour - awesome!
• 13: 11 nimmt! - Popular at Games Night
• 13: Hey, That's My Fish! - Mostly on the iPad on planes to and from Vancouver
• 11: Hol's der Geier - I'm loving this very simple, yet devious, filler
• 10: Stone Age - Popular at Games Night and with The Wife
• 9: 6 Nimmt! - Another Games Night filler
• 7: Ave Caesar - Vicious and quick race game
• 7: For Sale - Another Games Night filler
• 7: Guess Who? - With my niece over Christmas
• 6: Army of Frogs - All on the iPad
• 6: Coloretto - Bought in Vancouver at Starlit Citadel
• 5: Guillotine - Bought in Vancouver at Starlit Citadel
• 5: Lords of Waterdeep - Very popular worker placement lite game with a D&D theme
• 5: Lost Cities - Huh? I don't remember playing that 5 times!
• 5: Thunderstone - much prefer this to Dominion, themed up to the nines (and I've a boatload of expansions)

With the bigger house and my own Games Night for the first time, I've bought quite a lot of games this year: Coloretto and Guillotine in Canada, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Clans, Tigris and Euphrates and El Grande cheap from a friend plus: The Resistance, K2, Hansa Teutonica, Village and Divinare. I've also bought Army of Frogs, Ingenious and Through the Desert on the iPad. A disappointing number of the real games have yet to hit the table.

Blogging

After the fallout of Reiver Games, my blog had slowly withered and died over the last couple of years. I started it back up last November after having the idea that became Codename: Vacuum. I posted a few times through January and February, and then it went quiet again during and after our house move. I started it up again in August (the week before my daughter was born) and have been posting pretty much weekly ever since. I've managed 27 posts this year, including one that was picked up by BoardGameGeek News and then Reddit and went on to become my second most read post ever. That month (October) went on to become my month with the most page views ever, eclipsing the early days of my blog. Of course, after the Reddit storm died down page views are back to normal, but still ticking over nicely. My most popular posts this year have been:

• A review of Reiver Games (the one that was posted on Reddit)
• A dumbass question for aspiring board game artists
• A discussion about a possible commercial design (which is dead in the water)
• A first look at Codename: Vacuum
• A discussion of my gaming tastes and how that affects my games design

Here's hoping that next year will be as good! Until then, Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

Just a short one today to wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and get involved in the discussion, there'll be one final post before the end of the year and then normal service will hopefully resume in the New Year.

Artists! How does this sound?

If you've been reading my blog over the last few months you'll be keenly aware that the one thing Codename: Vacuum is missing is art. The cards have some rudimentary graphic design done, but no illustrations whatsoever.

Needs some artistic love, methinks.

The main reason behind this is that while I have limited graphic design skills, I have no art skills and at the moment my money is going on tiny clothes and nappies rather than hiring artists. Having said that, it would be great to have some art on the game before I send it out for playtesting. How do I reconcile these two positions?

I've been considering that question for a while now. I mentioned it to my Dad when he was up a few weeks ago (he's a retired art teacher and artist, though in a completely different style) and he started sketching out a few things. In addition, an old friend from junior school offered to help, but he's a professional animator and has a young family and needs to focus on earning a living not helping out a mate he's not seen in 25 years for free. So what to do?

I've had a slightly bizarre idea over the last couple of days, and I've no idea how it sounds so I'm going to run it past you guys to get some feedback before I actually try to implement it. So what's the idea I hear you ask?

I get aspiring board game artists to do it for me for free!

And there's my problem. How much of an exploitative arse do I sound about now? I'm thinking an unacceptable amount. But maybe not. I'll flesh out my idea, and then you can let me know in the comments whether I sound like an arse or not.

The problem of no art is compounded by the fact that I need a lot of it. I need:

• A card back design
• 50 location designs
• 7 location back designs
• 65 card front designs

That's an enormous job for one person, especially when I can't afford to pay them, so finding people to share out the work between would be a more realistic way to go. But I don't know many arty types, and certainly not enough to get that amount of art done for free out of personal goodwill.

Clearly, I would need to offer these generous hypothetical artists something in return for their hard work, even if it can't be real folding money. Otherwise I'd appear like an arse and I'd end up with an unenviable reputation and still no art.

So the idea I've been tossing around in my head is this:

I post on BGG a list of all the art I'm looking for and ask for aspiring board game artists to knock something up for some of those briefs for free. In return, they would get: an artist credit on the card(s) they've illustrated and a link to their portfolio in the rulebook. I'd also do artist profiles here on Creation and Play of the artists whose submitted work I most admire.

I'm hoping at some point to get Codename: Vacuum into print. If that never happens (a reasonable risk), then that would be the end of it. But if I decided to hawk it to other publishers then the artist's work and their portfolio link would go to those publishers in the setting of a real game. Alternatively, I might decide to try to KickStart it myself, in which case the artists whose work I like the best would stand a reasonable chance of getting their art into the finished game, and more importantly, I'd be paying them for it at that point (the KickStarter budget would include paying for art). If I end up publishing the game myself, I would only use art submitted for the prototype with the artist's permission if we could agree a price that I would pay them for it.

What do you think? Does that sound like a promising idea? An exploitative idea? An idea which is extremely unlikely to work?

Codename Vacuum Reaches Second Country!

Until recently, all the games of Codename: Vacuum that have ever been played were either at my house or at work. The game has never been played without me, and never outside Newcastle.

At some point, if I'm serious about getting it to market, it will have to spread its wings and fly the nest - it'll need to be played by other people, in other countries, by playtesters who have never met me and won't be biased by friendship with me when they come to give feedback.

It's been a quiet week or so, I went to Denmark with work last week (and missed Games Night) and we had our office Christmas party this week (on Games Night) so I've not played games much at home. In addition, we've a visit from my parents and I've had a couple of hospital trips this week and my main Vacuum playtester has gone to Australia for three weeks and so there hasn't been much time or opportunity for games at work either.

But despite all this, Vacuum reached an interesting milestone of sorts last week. It was played in a different country! The Denmark trip was with Mal, a friend of old who was my main Border Reivers playtester, so I took Vacuum (along with several smaller games and a few on my iPad) to while away the time we were spending travelling. Vacuum takes up a fair amount of space, so we couldn't play it on a plane, a train or in an airport waiting lounge, but we did find ourselves last Friday in a bar in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam with five hours to kill. So out came Vacuum (which Mal had only played once several months ago) and I proceeded to teach it to him again. We ended up playing a couple of games, while drinking very pleasant Belgian beers. The first game took a good hour and a half if not slightly more, the second was definitely less than half an hour!

Obviously, this isn't getting the game playtested in other countries by people unknown to me, but it felt like a milestone none the less. I've got a list of a few playtesters set up for when Vacuum is a bit more stable - but I don't want to send it out while it's still changing rapidly, because that shows that the game isn't yet good enough in my mind, so there's not much point in investing a lot of time and energy in sending out copies to other people who are also unlikely to think it's good enough.

Things are getting back on track now though, Games Night should be back on for the next couple of weeks in the run up to Christmas, and I've a three-player game of Vacuum lined up one lunchtime next week. I also need to find some time at home to concentrate on getting the layout done for the new version of Vacuum so that I've got something to test in the New Year.

I'd really like to get Vacuum stable enough by the end of March to send out playtest copies - so I've got my work cut out!

Design Lag

As I mentioned last week, I'm converting the art from A3 pages to card size ones. As part of that, I have to admit to myself that I'm actually creating a new version at the same time. It started out as some layout/design improvements, then a couple of card tweaks crept in, based on playing the new version several times during lunch break at work and at Games Night. As I get more plays of the newest version under my belt, I'm thinking of other things I could be adding, which cards/decks are weak and could do with improvements, which cards could be changed to better fit their theming, etc. I've now got to the point where almost every card will change in some way, again.

In the dim, distant past, before I became a father, I would knock up a new prototype whenever I had a new idea, so the cycle would be pretty much: play the game once, have an idea, make a new prototype, play it once, have an idea, make a new prototype, etc.

Now I want to spend my free time with my family, especially my daughter who I only get to see in the evenings and on weekends. But I also want to make progress on Codename: Vacuum. It takes time to do the card changes required when I have a new idea, and more time to print them out and cut them out. Probably about four or five hours in total and this time it's taking even longer due to the time required to change the document page size and re-layout all the cards.

I fit in making new versions when I've a bit of time when The Wife and The Daughter are asleep, usually early in the morning while I have my breakfast, but as you can imagine it takes several weeks for this time to add up to the several hours I need for a new version of the game. So new versions of the game are several weeks apart.

Of course, I'm still having ideas at the same rate - a few every time I play the game and I'm playing the game two or three times a week. So the ideas are stacking up. I'm going to call that 'design lag'.

As with anything, this has its pros and cons. To my mind the benefits are:

• I spend less time making prototypes that are only played once
• I get a good feel for the strengths and weaknesses of a version from 5-10 plays of it
• I don't rush to snap decisions based on a single bad experience
• New versions feel quite different, often like a big step forward

However, I think these are the downsides:

• I get to play a version that's got a particular problem several times, aware that I have a potential solution in my head/in my notes
• It's frustrating to have to wait a few weeks to find out if a potential fix works, or not
• I don't get to test changes in isolation which makes it difficult to find root causes to problems

On balance, I think the design lag I'm currently experiencing is a good thing. I'm focused on testing things not making new things all the time, and each version is more thoroughly tested as a result. Plus, it frees up time for important things like spending time with my family and trivial things like blogging.

One final thing. Codename: Vacuum is just that, a nickname to describe the game while I think of a real name for it. It's a game that conceptually charts 200 years of history, starting in a steampunk alternative universe circa 1900 to approximately 2100. How does: "Full Steam to the Stars" sound? Thoughts? Surely someone has got a better idea?

Changing Form Factor

In the early stages of making cards for a game I do the art on A3 sheets of paper, with the cards in a 5 x 5 grid. I've got a blank document ready in Adobe InDesign which already has all the document guides to line things up to and the cutting guides ready prepared on a separate layer.

Having the document with A3 print size is convenient for printing, and works fine at the beginning when the card count and mix is changing regularly, but once things start to settle down it is good to move to a new format.

For Carpe Astra and Sumeria I got the printing done by LudoFact one of Germany's big games printers. They want to receive the cards as a print quality PDF or PostScript file, with one card per page, each page the size of the cards themselves. So I had to make a document where the page size was 56mm x 87mm (a standard card size, apparently). This is actually pretty convenient for doing the rulebook too, as it's easy to place a page of another InDesign document as a graphic in a document, so I could place page 40 of the cards document to get a particular card for illustrating an example.

Switching to the smaller form factor too early makes thing awkward as you now have two documents to update before printing: Make the changes to the single cards document and then go to the A3 print document, update the links and delete pages and re-add them to make the changes to the card counts. But once the card balance is steady it's not bad at all. All you need to do is open the A3 print document, update the links to the modified single card-per-page document and then click print. In fact, in some ways it makes things slightly easier, as while working in the A3 print document I keep the cutting guides layer hidden so that I don't accidentally drag some of the cutting guides around with the card art. On at least two occasions I've forgotten to show the cutting guides again before printing, which means I need to either mark the guides on with pencil (a real arse when there's 36 of them per page and 14 pages) or print it again and waste loads of card. Having them separate means that I'll no longer be doing anything in the A3 document, so I can leave them permanently enabled.

Of course, seeing as I'm moving things around, I'm taking this chance to tweak a few of the cards again and do a little bit more layout/pictography improvement too. Barely a week goes by without me making some small changes to the game. Fortunately, I'm not thinking of backing out the bigger changes between my current version and the previous one - just improving the balance of some of the weaker sets of cards.

The next step after changing the size of the document and getting the print document to link to the new one is to do a proper rulebook. Initially the rulebook was just a set of notes for me. The current rulebook is a complete description of the (previous version of the) game (but without examples or any illustrations/clarification). I need to update the rulebook to the new rules and get it into a finished enough state that people can learn the game blind from it. Then I hope to send it to a couple of my previous gaming groups (which obviously requires making a couple of extra copies) and possibly to some of my far-flung Reiver Games playtesters (or I might wait for that until I've incorporated feedback from my ex-gaming chums).

The other advantage of the single-card per page version is that it allows me to set up an A4 print document that's easy to keep in sync as things change so that I can provide print-and-play copies to selected others (seeing as most people don't have an A3 printer).

(Lack of) Art in Prototypes

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some pictures of a few cards from the last three versions of Codename: Vacuum. The pictures showed small incremental changes to the cards over time with functionality disappearing to later reappear, or subtly changing over time.

But what was probably most noticable about all three versions was the lack of artwork. The cards were 90% white. Why the lack of art?

The name's Bland, James Bland

It's a combination of reasons, but the most relevant is that I don't have the skills, and nor do any of my gaming buddies in Newcastle. I enjoy doing the layout and pictography, but I just can't draw to any reasonably level. I could download some vaguely relevant clip art from the internet, but I'm not a fan of copyright infringement and for a lot of the cards I have a pretty good idea in my head what they should look like, and finding those images through a Google search would take days - time I don't have to spare.

For some designers, doing the art is as much a part of the game design as coming up with the rules and components, but not for me. Nor do I have anyone who can do the art for me as a favour or for fun.

As a workaround I could rustle up some home-drawn crappy art, but I figure that would look worse than none at all - at least a compelling name and a blank page will conjure up a picture in the players' mind's eyes, whereas a badly drawn and coloured picture that would cause my dad to disown me (he's an artist and retired art teacher, though sadly not in a relevant style) would just turn the players' stomachs.

I could get someone with the chops to do the art for me, but there's a lot required, and I don't have the funds to pay someone for that work (my money's going on nappies at the moment). I can't expect an artist to work for free, or for the promise of future funds if I publish the game because that's not fair to them - especially as the game may never get published and they may never get paid or get to see their art get published. I don't mind working for free for something I'm passionate about (as evidenced by five years of running Reiver Games), but I can't expect the same from others.

So Codename: Vacuum languishes in its stark, white beauty. I've had a chat on Twitter with an old friend from my childhood who I've got in contact with again recently, he's a professional animator (and hence artist) and has offered to lend a hand in his limited free time, but again, I don't want to abuse his generosity - he has a family to support too.

It's important to get art in there before phase 3: i.e. testing and blind testing in front of real gamers.

Something else to think about is:

• if the game ever reaches a 'finished' state
• and, if it meets the required levels of awesomeness
• and, if I decide to self-publish it
• and, if I decide to use KickStarter or IndieGoGo to raise the funds for that

I'll need at least some teaser art before I start the campaign to raise the funds, I'm sure seeing awesome art on the KickStarter page helps people to decide to part with their hard-earned dough.