Day of the Vacuums

Thursday was Day of the Vacuums, it's like Day of the Triffids, but more mineral than vegetable. It was Games Night that evening and Gav had expressed an interest in playing Codename: Vacuum again, and I'd arranged a Vacuum playtest for the lunchtime too. I managed four games of Vacuum and learned a lot and got a load more ideas :).

The lunchtime playtest session was with Dave (one of my core Vacuum playtesters), and we'd been discussing the idea of a fixed number of rounds that had come up the previous week with Paul. I'd suggested that we try out the fixed number of turns that lunchtime, and picking a number out of a hat, said to Dave: "How about 16 rounds?". Dave was convinced that would be way too short (we never track the number of rounds, so neither of us had any idea really), so Dave countered with: "Why don't we play a game where we both race to finish it and record the number of turns it lasts, if it's really quick, we can always play another game straight afterwards."

So that is what we did. We played a game where we both were consciously racing to bring in the victory conditions early (and hence end the game early since the game ends when a given number of victory conditions have been chosen). The game lasted 23 mins and only 13 turns. Dave crushed my Italian empire, through military might (his standard tactic!). With only 23 minutes gone, we decided to press on and play again, this time we were going to not rush, not drag it out either, but neither of us would go for the conditions early. The second game lasted 19 turns and about 50 minutes. It felt a bit slow to be honest. Dave won again, against my Italians again, and again he had gone military. There are some very powerful military cards in the game, the 'Armada' a fleet of advanced warships which can nail pretty much anything else in the game. The Armada is a level three card, of which there are only four copies in the game, so Dave's strategy is to get at least two of them as quickly as he can. He does it every game, so I know it's coming and when facing Dave I try to do the same to ensure I'm not outclassed. I got the first one, and then Dave got another. I was sat looking at my hand a few turns later, knowing that I could get a second Armada on my next turn - ensuring I would be on level playing field with Dave. Then Dave got two that turn, before I could get my second. Dave now had three to my one, and I was cruising for a severe bruising. Unsurprisingly, Dave played aggressively, stealing my territories and won handily again. I really didn't enjoy the game that much. Getting beaten to the drop on the Armada's pretty much stuffed my game right there at the start. And to be honest, that was largely down to luck of the draw. This was something that needed addressing. Interestingly, my guess at 16 rounds for the fixed game was right in the middle of the 13 & 19 rounds of the two games we played (Dave was suitably chastised!).

That evening at Games Night, Gav requested to play Vacuum with me, and The Nefarious Doktor M (my boss from work) was happy to join in. They had both played before, several months ago, and Gav had previously enjoyed it, but Doktor M had seemed less keen. We played a three player game that was over fairly quickly (I think about 35 minutes from memory), and had much less to do with the military, Doktor M got two of the Armadas, Gav and I one each. There were a few scuffles, but nothing major on the combat front. When the game finished, the other table was still only halfway through their game of Thurn and Taxis, so Gav requested to play Vacuum again, and Doktor M acquiesced. The game was heavily trade based, since that was what the advanced cards favoured. In this game, none of us got an Armada, and only one of us got the next rung down: a Warship. The military didn't really feature at all. I won both the games in the evening, not surprising, since I'd played at least 65 games of it, and Gav and Doktor M had played no more than five each, and those several months ago at that. Bizarrely, I was Italy for the third time that day in the final game.

It was great to play Vacuum four times in a single day (a first!), and to really get a feel of several different strategies. I was glad to see the two evening games were very different from the lunchtime ones. It was nice to see the military feature so heavily in the first games, and then hardly at all in the evening ones. I don't want it to be a killer strategy that if you don't play, you lose.

After the games we all had a chat about Vacuum and the various strategies, and yet again there were loads of really good ideas floating around. I want to do something to either stop players getting all the Armadas, or to reign in their power once they've got them. We had a bunch of ideas:

• Increase the number of level three cards, so it's much harder for one player to mop them all up.
• Require a level two card when purchasing a level three card - this would slow down Dave's rush for all the Armadas.
• Armadas have an upkeep that means you can't afford to support loads of them (unless you're very wealthy).
• You need a given number of locations or population per Armada.

I'm keen not to clutter up the rules with more special cases if I can help it, or more requirements and fiddliness on the actions. Ideally the game would become more streamlined as time goes on, not less so. I'm leaning towards trying out the increased number of cards as a result. Initially I chose four each of the level three cards to artificially force players to follow different strategies (in a five-player game you can't all get one!), but that was ages ago, and I'm not sure there's a good reason to limit them any more. In addition, the feedback I got from the Newcastle Playtest session last month included a request for more level three cards, so I've got external support for that option. Of course, I don't want to increase the component count by much either.

At the end of the evening, people were still discussing Vacuum. I was knackered - it was gone 11:30 and I'd been up since 5:20am, so I kindly requested that they sling their collective hook so I could get to bed. A few minutes later I got a text message from Gav: They were still outside the house discussing Vacuum. :)

In other news, the Newcastle Playtest sessions are now on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month. So see you at The Bridge Hotel from 6:30pm this Tuesday?

A Breath of Fresh Air

This week has been a busy one. It started in Bristol, leaving my parents' house before 8am on Monday, then a five hour car journey to York where we spent a few days staying with my friend Paul and his family. I was primary carer for The Daughter while The Wife attended a conference for work (it's alright, everyone survived!). Then finally back to Newcastle in time for a work team building event on Thursday (I found out that I'm good at archery, but rubbish with a shotgun - so stick with someone else come the zombie apocalypse). To round it off, Saturday we had four friends and their four kids under five round for dinner and Christmas homebrew bottling - a busy and slightly chaotic day!

It was nice to get out and about, to see my family and The Wife's family in Bristol and then Paul and his family in York (for the second time in just under a month). The team building day was fun, the homebrew bottling is always a fun day if very busy - I'm looking forward to a quieter week next week though.

As I mentioned last week, I've recently introduced some changes that speed up the game (particularly for two or three player games), and the first feedback wasn't great. Dave and Chief, my two main playtesters who play most weeks on a lunchtime, were both not fans of the shorter game, feeling that it was too short to really get into the strategies available.

On Tuesday, after a few games of X-Wing Miniatures, Paul and I sat down to a game of Vacuum. It was the first time Paul and I had played since July last year. I'm not sure if Paul had played in between (he has had a copy since April, and several people from his Games Night mentioned it, but I don't know if Paul played with them or not). We played the new faster rules, and after the game, Paul admitted that he too did not like the shorter game - he would have liked a chance to get more done during the game. Paul's not a Race for the Galaxy fan, and he saw a number of parallels between Vacuum and Race. He had a number of criticisms, things about Vacuum that he prefers games not to have. He didn't like that the game could end with so little warning, and that he didn't know how long he had left before the end.

Despite the fact that I'd been up since 4:45am that morning, and the game of Vacuum didn't finish until about 11:30pm, we spent the next hour or so chatting about ideas of things we could change to improve the game/make it more to Paul's tastes. I was almost asleep on my feet (well I suppose on my bum is more accurate!), but we discussed a whole range of ideas from fixing the game length to making the victory conditions a random selection that are revealed as the game goes on. It was a very useful conversation. The next morning while I took The Daughter for a walk to get her to take a nap my mind was buzzing with ideas either discussed or triggered by the previous evening's conversation.

Upon my return to work I discussed a few of the ideas with Chief and Dave, and I think I'll try out the fixed number of turns shortly. I've also got some feedback from the Newcastle Playtest session I attended a few weeks ago. Both playtesters have sent detailed feedback emails that I need to go through a few times to really take on board, but interestingly, both of them mentioned that the game felt very abstract, with little tie-in to the theme. We played the basic game that night, and I think the advanced game is a bit more themed, but it's certainly something I need to be aware of, since I've been aiming for a tightly themed gaming experience with Vacuum. The fixed number of turns could be implemented with a turn track that counts in years, which might help tie things together.

In other news, we're probably going to make the Newcastle Playtest sessions a bi-monthly thing, with meetups on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month, so hopefully I'll get another chance to get some feedback shortly...

Finally, I gave my copy of Vacuum to Paul this week (I didn't have time to make a new one for him as well as update the rules), so my goals for this week are buy more ink for my printer and then to make a new copy in time for Thursday playtesting and to try out the turn track at the same time...

The (Erroneous?) Need for Speed

Some of my favourite games are quick ones. I've played well over 200 games of Carcassonne & Magic: The Gathering, over 100 games of Race for the Galaxy and getting on for a hundred games of 7 Wonders. What do they have in common apart from being great games? Speed. They can be played quickly enough that you could play several games back-to-back. And in the days before The Daughter, The Wife and I would frequently play these games over and over.

One of my stated goals for Codename: Vacuum is to make it quick to play, so that if I ever get it to the point where it's a great game, people will be inclined to play it over and over. Over the last few months, even playing with Dave and Chief (who've both played over 40 games of Vacuum) the play time was around 25 minutes per player (50 minutes for a two-player game, 1:15 for a three-player game). Not only did I struggle to juggle my hours at work to fit these games in, in my mind this was failing to hit the sweet spot. I can play a two-player game of Race for the Galaxy in 20 minutes. I can play a three-player game of 7 Wonders in less than half an hour - these games benefit from simultaneous player actions, and as a result can be very fast with experienced players who don't suffer from analysis paralysis. That is hitting the sweet spot in my personal opinion. So over the last couple of months I've been trying to tweak the rules to Vacuum to pep it up a bit and decrease the play time.

The August version of Vacuum was finished in time for the inaugural Newcastle Playtest session at the beginning of the month, and since then I've been crafting the re-written rules ready to give my friend Paul in York an updated version of Vacuum, replacing the version I gave him back in April. Paul was up in Newcastle a few weeks ago to visit us and meet The Daughter, and during the visit I asked about their experiences with Vacuum. Apparently it had been played a number of times, but one of the major criticisms was that at around 45 minutes per player (!) it felt too long for what it was. No doubt! Clearly it needs knocking up a notch.

Well, we're in York for a few days this week for The Wife's work, so we're staying with Paul and his family, experiencing the wonders of his Games Night (which I used to attend twice a week regularly back when we lived in York). I've done the new rules, and though I didn't have time to make a new copy of the game, I can give him my copy, complete with new rulebook, and then I'll make myself a replacement on my return (once the pressure's off!).

I've now played the August version three times, once with two new players at the Playtest meetup (the impromptu second one, I missed the inaugural one), once with Dave a couple of weeks ago and once with Chief last week. The first of those games (with the simple rules) lasted about 45 minutes - 15 minutes per player. The second lasted 34 (17 minutes per player) and the third only 20 minutes (10 minutes per player). Awesome!

Or is it?

After I played with Dave a couple of weeks ago he expressed concern that the game was too short now. It felt less epic to him and he missed the chance to fully explore his chosen strategy (which is inevitably raining plasma doom on my inocuous backward empire with a wave upon wave of overly aggressive Armadas). His fear was the shorter game would strip several strategies of their usefulness, since you wouldn't have time in the game to get them started before the game's swift conclusion.

This week I played with Chief. He won. For the first time in approximately forty games. Dave and I were beginning to wonder if it would ever happen. Was he intentionally taking it easy on us? Did he have a phobia of winning games? (what's that even called?) Had he been lobotomised as a child, and had the winning parts of his brain removed? It turns out none of these. He won. He beat me at a game I'd designed. And he did it in 20 minutes. Schooled.

Dave's thoughts on his epic victory, after finally crushing the designer at his own game? He felt the game was too short!

I'd really enjoyed the game. We'd been flying through it. Each player's turn regularly taking a handful of seconds. Almost no downtime. It felt like playing Race for the Galaxy against The Wife or 7 Wonders with Terry and Andrew. Blisteringly fast. On top of that, Chief had chosen the Exploration strategy (which can be quite slow) and had got as far as Proxima Centauri, which is quite an achievement as it's particularly hard to reach and requires a real concerted effort to get there. "Ha!", I thought, "See Dave, even in twenty minutes, Chief managed to reach Proxima, the shorter game isn't too short."

Then Chief pissed on my chips and agreed with Dave that the game was too short. He enjoys the chance to explore a wealth of strategies and diversify your deck - possible in the longer game, but not in the new shorter version.

So here's a question. I've reduced the game length to my 'ideal' length. I enjoyed the feel of it the three times I've played it. But the two guys who've played it more than anyone else, who play it week in, week out at work, both don't like the changes. Do I cave in and extend the game again, to increase the epic feel, and the wealth of strategies you can explore in a single game? Or do I stick to my guns and ride with the shorter game, possibly admitting that the only two people who will regularly play the game with me might not be the target audience for the game?

I'm going to have to play the shorter rules a few more times, with Dave and Chief if they're up for it to see if they come round to the shorter game, but also with more people, to see if Dave and Chief are in the majority or the minority...

In other news, the second Newcastle Playtest Meetup is this Tuesday in The Bridge Hotel again. I'll not be there, but don't let that put you off!

Parenthood and Games Design

This Friday just gone marks a year to the day since The Wife and I passed our genes on to future generations (it was The Daughter's first birthday :) ). The last year has been a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work. The Daughter is in every way awesome (said like a true parent). There's nothing as cool as being able to say: 'Give Daddy a cuddle' and feel her tiny little arms reach round your shoulders, her head rest on your shoulder and then her give you a squeeze!

When it comes to sleep however, The Daughter still has some skills to learn. Some babies apparently sleep. We've some friends whose daughter has slept through the night since she was eight weeks old. The Daughter, on the other hand, has only slept through twice in her first year, and both of those were in the last couple of weeks. Why do I bring this up? I've decided to make this week's blog post about fitting designing games around life as a new parent.

As many of you know I started designing games in 2004, I started publishing them in 2006, I quit my day job in 2008, went back into full-time work in 2010 and shut Reiver Games down in 2011. When it comes to designing and playtesting games, I have some experience: I've sold 8,500 of them. Parenthood however was new to me. All my friends with kids told me it was life-changing, and I expected that. Your child becomes the most important thing in your life (as they should!) and you want to spend your time very differently. During The Daughter's waking hours we spend our time entertaining and playing with her, plus feeding, changing and bathing her. I had imagined, before she arrived, that once she had gone to bed I would have my evenings much as before: to spend hanging out with The Wife or working on Codename: Vacuum. As such, I had expected that I would make pretty good progress on Vacuum this year.

That's not quite how it's turned out! A year of getting woken a few times during the night, coupled with frequent early starts, means that early nights are a survival strategy. As such, I have limited time in the evenings, and I've chosen to prioritise regular blogging (to try to build up an audience here) over working on Vacuum - hence letting the rule book re-writing slip from April till the end of August!

Now that she is starting to sleep better, The Wife and I have started to get out a bit more. Games Night has been running the vast majority of weeks since three weeks after she was born, but other than that, we've not been out much. Now that we're getting more rest, I've been trying to make it along to Newcastle Gamers a bit more often and we've set up the Newcastle branch of Playtest UK. I imagine, that over the next couple of years, as The Daughter starts running around she'll sleep better, and so will we - and as a result I'll get more time in the evenings. A few years after that my evenings will be running her to Brownies and Guides, music, sport and dance lessons (plus Tae Kwon Do!), and then a few years after that I'll have long evenings to fill with games design, while I wait by the phone for the call asking me to pick her up from the pub!

I'm loving being a dad, it's great fun - watching The Daughter change from a baby to a little person with a personality of her own is an amazing experience. It gives you a new appreciation for your own parents (I'm one of four - I've no idea how my parents survived!). I love games design too, but some things are more important :).

In other news, it was my quarterly trip to the hospital in Sheffield this week, so I had a couple of hours on the train to work on the rulebook re-write. I'd have had another two on the way back too, had I not bumped into my parents on their way up to visit us. I've also been trying out the new rules at work in my lunch break. The changes I'd made to speed the game up worked, in that we played a two-player game in under 35 minutes (about 17 minutes per player, close to my target of 15 minutes per player). However, Dave whom I played it with wasn't enamoured of new rules. He's a massive fan of Vacuum usually, and very excited with it too, but he found the game too short to be satisfying. In the game I had to react to a strategy he'd chosen, change my plans and then race to end the game before he could crush me utterly. I succeeded, and won, but he felt the shorter play time meant that several of the strategies might not have time to really get going. He wants to get a few more plays in with the new rules to get a bigger sample size - but on first blush, he preferred the longer game.

Playtesting Success and Mobile Development

After missing last week's inaugural Newcastle Playtesting session due to a tough week last week, I arranged with Dan (the real organiser, I'm just a dilettante) to hold an impromptu one on Tuesday so I wouldn't have to wait until October for my next fix (it's on the first Tuesday of every month, and I'll miss the September one).

It started at eight, an hour later than the last one, which caught Paul and John out (they turned up at seven, and didn't know each other :-( ), I arrived, met John and had a look round for Paul, whom I didn't know, but knew was there from his Meetup.com message. Then Dan and his mate Mark turned up, and Dan knew Paul, so we were all set.

We tried to settle on a game to play, there were five of us, and Vacuum goes to five, but it would be a slow game with four newbies, and I knew that Amo was turning up fairly soon, so we opted for two three player games instead. Our table (Paul, John and I) sat down to a game of Vacuum. We played the basic rules to keep things simple, using just the five standard decks, not some of the advanced ones as well. The game lasted about an hour and ten minutes (so about 23 minutes per player - not too bad for a first game). John seemed to grasp the strategies very quickly and was playing a good game, Paul seemed to find it a bit heavier going. I asked the guys for feedback afterwards, and there was a conspicuous silence. So I asked them to email me with some feedback once they'd had a chance to digest their play. John has since posted a review of the evening (including a complimentary discussion of Codename: Vacuum).

After Vacuum, we played Paul's game 'Mad Monks', it was a much lighter game about monks racing through the abbey to get a barrel of beer back to their cell. The prototype was beautiful, the art had been done by someone with real comic-style art skills, and the player pieces were laser-etched wood. I enjoyed it, but it was a bit lighter than my usual fare. I made a few suggestions to Paul, it'll be interesting over the next few months to see what (if anything) he does with them.

I really enjoyed the evening, and I'm keen to increase the frequency of the meetups, so that if I miss one, I don't have to wait two months been attending. Maybe twice a month?

With a game of Vacuum under my belt, I skipped playing Vacuum at lunch this week. Instead, I've been making a Windows Phone app for Codename: Vacuum in my lunch breaks for my Nokia Lumia. First I made it pick a random selection of advanced decks for a game of Vacuum, then the second thing was to set it up to record the length of a game. The next step is to get it recording the information I current scribble on a sheet of paper after a game into a database instead so that I can start easily querying it. I'm inordinately pleased with the little progress I've made so far.

A Tough Week

As I mentioned last week, Tuesday was the inaugural Newcastle Playtest UK meetup at The Bridge Hotel. "How was it?", I hear you ask. By all accounts, very good. "Wait, what now? Weren't you one of the organisers?", I hear you ask. Yes, and therein lies a story.

Monday night had been tough, The Daughter wasn't well so we had all been awake for a good chunk of the night. The next day she seemed a little better, and despite hideous sleep deprivation, I was determined to make it along to the Playtest meetup. I soldiered on through work mainlining coffee directly into my veins, but all for naught, as we ended up having to take The Daughter to the out of hours GP that evening instead. A far more 'exciting' evening than either of us had been hoping for, and one with far fewer games than I had anticipated.

The Daughter's fine now, thanks for asking.

In other news, it was Newcastle Gamers' 100th meeting on Saturday, so there was all-day gaming for free :) I managed to make it along about 7:30pm, and got three games in. I'd taken Die Speicherstadt, K2, X-Wing Minis and Codename: Vacuum. I ended up teaching Die Speicherstadt to John and Christine, followed by K2 to Michael (with Michał) and then Die Speicherstadt again, this time to Michael and Michał. A great evening's gaming plus a chance to catch up with Gareth, who used to run Newcastle Gamers and come to my Thursday games night :).

I've also arranged an impromptu Playtest meetup at The Bridge for next Tuesday to make up for missing the last one (and in fact I can't make the next official one either - we're away in York that night). I'll take along Vacuum, but play what people fancy. I've changed the number of endgame conditions you score back to similar to how they used to be, in an attempt to reduce the play time and add some urgency (and rushing as a valid strategy), Paul's talk of 45 minutes per player game time has spurred me on to speed things up - simplifying things will help there too, so I also need to keep that in mind.

Reaching a Climax

The last few weeks have been exciting, with several things, both games related and not, coming to a head. On the gaming front, I've had the combination of my mate Paul from York and his family up this weekend, and Tuesday is the first Newcastle Playtest Meetup at The Bridge Hotel from 7pm.

On the subject of the Playtest meetup, it looks like we're going to have around 8 people, with at least four designers trialling games on the night. I was hoping to take a new version of Codename: Vacuum (the July version) and possibly Codename: Proteome too. Sadly, what with visitors and everything else, I've not got a new version of Proteome ready to go. But the July version of Vacuum was finished off and then corrected last week (with a couple more corrections to come tomorrow night I hope!). I'm really looking forward to introducing Vacuum to some more people, and getting the feedback of other designers. It's at a point where I think it could benefit from an injection of new ideas.

On the subject of Paul's visit, we got a few games in on Saturday night and during The Daughter's Sunday afternoon nap. I introduced Paul to X-Wing Minis and Pergamon and he introduced me to Hanabi. Hanabi's a great fun little game, I can see it being popular as a starter for ten or a closing game on Games Night, so it's going on my wishlist. I loved both the 'cards in your hand are hidden from you but visible to everyone else' mechanism, and the way you have to try to inform the other players while imparting only very limited information. I also got a second chance to try Love Letter. Definitely still interested in that one too...

We played until one in the morning, which considering I'd been up since five am with The Daughter was a late night! I was practically falling asleep during Pergamon, so I had to stop there. On Sunday I asked Paul if he'd like to receive another playtest copy of Codename: Vacuum. He'd received a copy back in March at the same time as my friends in Bedford. He'd acknowledged receipt of it, but then I'd not heard anything - no feedback forms or reports or anything, so I'd assumed it hadn't been played, so I didn't want to send him another copy if he was just going to shelve it.

Paul said that he was interested in another version, that the version I'd given him back in March had been played a few times. People weren't wowed by it, but they didn't hate it either. Yay! More ambivalence :(. He gave me what criticisms he could remember from the games they had played (not all including him). It was really useful stuff, even though the version they're playing is very out of date now. They liked several of the mechanisms in the game, but found them a bit too much all in one game. The wealth of cards (meant to introduce re-playability) was too confusing and made it harder to learn. It took too long to play. Military was overly strong.

Several of those points I've addressed in subsequent versions, but the most telling one was that their games last 40-45 minutes per player!. Ours, with very experienced players, last about 20-25 minutes per player. But I think I'm aiming for 15 minutes per player once you know the rules and the cards. Still more work to be done on that front, even in the latest version. Back to the drawing board.

In other news, I'm going to stay with Paul and his family in early September for a couple of days. I'm going to set myself that as a deadline to get the August version done, printed, corrected and the rules finally re-written. There. I've said it. You can hold me to that!

Playing the Percentages

After printing out the next version of Codename: Vacuum last week, I got it to the table on Thursday lunchtime. The new version had some minor tweaks to reduce the Population strategy's dependence on capturing locations, and some changes to the Trade strategy to the same end. To reflect the new trade rules I also changed several of the advanced decks to make them fit better with the new Trade rules.

The new version was well-received by my playtesters, Chief and Dave though due to the selection of advanced decks available to us none of us chose to pursue the Trade strategy - so it's hard to say how well balanced that one is.

Despite getting no feedback here last week on the new level three art, Dave was appreciative (though Dave is very excitable, so his responses need to be calibrated to take his general excitement into consideration). Certainly I prefer it to the really crappy last version, and the new art didn't detract from the game or make it harder to comprehend.

Anyway, to the subject of this post. I've now played 60 games of Codename: Vacuum. It's predominantly been played with Chief and Dave (probably 40-odd games each), plus a bunch of other people have played it I'd imagine on average five times or less. Pretty much all the players have been close friends of mine, so any feedback I get from them is coloured by their friendship with me. If I had to grade them into three categories, I'd say that two of them really aren't fans (though apparently it's not their sort of game), one (the aforementioned excitable Dave) is a big fan, and everyone else is ambivalent. They've usually played it a few times but there's little interest in playing it again. Clearly it still needs lots of work (though in fairness, most of the ambivalents haven't played the last few versions).

I'm keen not to try to publish (either self-publishing or trying to get someone else to do it for me) unless I think it's genuinely great. I've some experience publishing games that didn't get enough people excited and the last thing I want is to be the proud owner of games mouldering in a warehouse for years again. I could make a hand-made run - I'm pretty sure I could sell one hundred copies of the game as it stands - but I want to be really proud of it, not just publish it for the sake of publishing it (I've done that already!) and spare time is precious now that I'm a father. So I need to keep working at it to change those percentages. It needs to be simpler and quicker and more fun. It needs to leave you wanting another game, and then another. It's not there yet. I need to work those percentages until most of the people who play it are big fans or hate it. Ambivalence is the worse of the three!

In other news, I've decided to make a little app for my Windows phone. It'll pick me a random selection of advanced decks for a game and I'm also thinking of making it store and explore the data I collect for a game so I can investigate how balanced the decks are by querying their popularity and how well they score. I'll need to get a few dev kit things together and then spend some time on it. It shouldn't be that hard though, it's programming in the language that I use for my day job!

Procrastination of the Highest Order

I've not made much progress on anything the last couple of weeks. The week before last ended with us all coming down with norovirus, one after the other (which for the record was awful, I can't recommend it!). This week, it's been a game of catch up as The Wife and I have tried to regain our strength while washing everything that we own, since The Daughter was sick on it all, followed by a weekend away with old friends.

Rather than putting the limited time I had to good use and re-writing the rules (which I still haven't done!), I've been fannying on doing unimportant stuff like art (which doesn't really matter for a prototype) and getting another version ready for printing (of rules that I'm not sure will work). My tenuous excuse for putting off writing the rules is that I'm still trying out a few new rules ideas, so things are in flux, but if I'm honest, it's a big job and a hard one, and I can't be arsed at the moment.

Monday was potentially a good night for Game Design, since The Wife was out at the theatre with a friend, but in the end once I'd finished cleaning up I was so knackered I just went to bed.

What little time I've had available I've put into doing a couple of things, re-doing the artwork for the level three (futuristic) cards, and getting another version ready for printing out and assembling. As I've mentioned over the last couple of weeks I've been messing with the trade strategy rules in an attempt to decouple them from needing to own lots of locations. Since I ought to be knocking up a new version this month anyway, I've taken the opportunity to take the new Trade rules I'm trying out and re-jigged all the advanced cards so that they fit with these experimental rules. I've also folded in the new artwork.

All I need to do now is get the new version printed, cut out and tested to see how it all works.

In the meantime, any feedback on the new Eclipse iPad game-inspired level three art? Old version first, with the new version below:

Come Join Us Playtesting in the North East

Since moving back to Newcastle in the north-east of England a couple of years ago, I've played a lot of games. Which is obviously a Good Thing™. But I've tended to play a small subset of my medium sized collection.

Since starting playtesting Codename: Vacuum in earnest last October I've played a lot of games of that too. Also a good thing. But almost all of them have been on a lunchtime at work with Chief and/or Dave.

Don't get me wrong, both of those things are awesome, but for a designer to florish he needs to be exposed to lots of different games to get ideas, and for a prototype to florish it needs to be exposed to lots of playtesters to get a wider range of feedback and ideas.

I've been toying with the idea of hosting a semi-regular playtesting night at my house, but to be honest it would be the same people coming who come to my weekly Games Night, and not all of them are up for playtesting, or enamoured of Codename: Vacuum.

Newcastle has a great games club that meet twice a month on a Saturday afternoon / evening: Newcastle Gamers, but due to family commitments and visiting/visits by friends and family I've only managed to get there a handful of times in the last couple of years. I managed to make it along a couple of weeks ago where I met a couple of other board game designers: Dan and Michał. Dan was keen to set up some kind of playtesting session, and had been speaking to Rob Harris of Playtest London about possibly setting up a Newcastle franchise to complement their existing regular London and Cambridge meetups. Playtest London have been running for the last 3 years, more recently branching out into Cambridge as well. They've test hundreds of games, and playtest members themselves have had some notable successes: recently Matt Dunstan's game Relic Runners has been picked up by Days of Wonder, and Brett Gilbert's Divinare has been put on the recommended list for the prestigious Spiel Des Jahres German games award. Playtest are looking to branch out with several new groups starting this year.

Over the last couple of weeks, Dan (with a tiny amount of help from yours truly) has created the Newcastle Playtest meetup, which will convene every first Tuesday of the month in The Bridge Hotel, Newcastle right by the train station from 7pm. If you live in the north-east of England (or fancy a day trip to sunny Newcastle) why not join us for our inaugural session on Tuesday 6th August?

Going Off Piste

This week has been a game of two ends, like football (that's soccer for my largely American audience).

In the first half, I've been chatting via email with the two designers I played a prototype with at last week's Newcastle Gamers about setting up a Newcastle playtest meetup once a month at a local pub. Dan seems to be very keen (and far more organised than me!) so this might actually happen, starting next month. I'm going to try to get both a new version of Codename: Vacuum and a version of my new Codename: Proteome idea together for the inaugural session. The Proteome idea is a complete reboot, significantly different from the prototype I made and played once in February last year, although bizarrely uses a very similar set of cards. The Vacuum idea would be a major change as I mentioned last week to separate out the Trade (and to a lesser degree Population) strategy from a dependence on owning locations and hence the Military strategy.

Which leads me on nicely to the second half - Ding, ding! Change ends.

The second half of the week has been all about the Trade strategy of Codename Vacuum. I've been through several ideas in my head some which add extra components, some which add extra complexity and some which simplify everything to the point of making the Trade strategy dull as ditchwater. The Trade strategy as it stands in my current prototype was designed to add another form of direct interaction between players on top of the Military struggle for controlling locations. As it stands it doesn't really succeed - you trade with the neutrals if you can, and the player with the least cash if you can't. There's not a lot of interesting decisions to be had there, or in fact, much in the way of player interaction.

So I've spent my hours walking to and from work thinking of half a dozen new ideas to make Trade interesting again. The constraint being that if you get your arse handed to you in a Military beat down, you can still Trade effectively. I've gone through ideas featuring adding corporations to locations with little discs in the players' colours, taking corporation cards out and into play like locations, adding resource types to locations and a few others. I want try out a few of them, but ideally without coming up with significantly different art/cards until I'm happy with the idea. I played with Chief on Thursday lunchtime, trying one of them out.

Ideally, I want something that: separates Trade from a dependency on locations, adds player interaction, simplifies the game mechanics, doesn't make the locations too similar, oh and I want the moon on a stick. Surely, that's not too much to ask?

The first idea I tried on Thursday: letting players bring the corporations into play like locations, and then getting coins for them every turn with points for the number of corporations you had 'incorporated' at the end of the game. It didn't really seem to work at all, though Chief said he liked the idea. Back to the drawing board I think.

Anyway, all these ideas have got me thinking about significantly changing Vacuum. A fresh injection of ideas can only help at this stage: at best I'll introduce some changes that significantly improve things, at worst I'll try out some ideas and ultimately reject them.

It's Back In My Head

Just last week I was bemoaning that I'd not had a chance to play Codename: Vacuum for a couple of weeks. Thankfully I made up for that this week, getting a couple of games in at lunch with Chief. The first one was the first play of a tweaked version of the June rules, tweaked to fix a problem with the Population strategy. It went fine, and the fix seemed to be an improvement. So far so good.

The second game used the same rules. However, this one didn't go so well. I chose the Military strategy, and I crushed Chief underfoot. The Military strategy in Vacuum is a strange one. It's not overly strong in itself, but the Military strategy allows you to capture locations: either neutral ones or one from other players. It's the only strategy that allows you to steal points from other players: all the other strategies are purely cumulative - your points can only increase.

The only defence against a strong military is a strong military (in the basic game, and some advanced ones), so if someone's feeling imperious you need to step up and defend yourself. There are a couple of advanced decks that give you alternatives to defending yourself, but of course there's no guarantee you'll be playing with them. If you choose not to defend yourself then a win is still possible, but there's pretty much only one way to do it.

In the current version, there are five strategies, of which only three will score during any one game: Military, Exploration, Population, Trade and Knowledge. To win the game, you really need to score well in two of the chosen ones.

• Military rewards you for capturing high-value locations, and a strong military allows you to capture an opponent's locations if they are unable to defend themselves
• Exploration rewards you for exploring interesting bits of the solar system, it doesn't require you to have any locations at all.
• Population rewards you for having a large population spread across your locations, and in the current game, unless a particular advanced deck is in play, each location can only support limited population, so you need several locations to score well in it.
• Trade rewards you for earning lots of money by trading between pairs of locations. You get more money if you control the locations that are trading, so you need some locations to score well in it.
• Knowledge rewards you for developing advanced technologies, it doesn't require any locations to score well.

So if you don't want to go military at all, your only choice (assuming that the Nationalism and Cold War decks aren't in play which allow you to defend yourself against a strong military without a strong military of your own) is to go Exploration and Knowledge.

Don't get me wrong, I like that the Military strategy is important, being able to defend your territory fits the theme of a space race between competing empires nicely. But I don't want the game to be one where you either do Military or Exploration/Knowledge.

So I've spent the second half of the week thinking of ways to break the dependence of the Population and Trade strategies on controlling lots of locations, so you have more strategies available to you. Population is going to be trickier, but I've an idea in my head for the Trade strategy. Of course, it'll change the game quite a lot, add more components and make it less of a deck-building game. Once I've got it sorted out in my head, I'll need to work out which advanced decks need to change as a result, knock up another prototype and give it a try. It's exciting that the game is still changing so much, but it means I'm further than I hoped from it being 'ready'.

In other news, I managed to get along to Newcastle Gamers again for only the fifth time since I moved back here nearly two years ago. I didn't take Vacuum because of the concerns mentioned above, I just turned up at 8 and started looking for a game. A guy called Dan was loitering, waiting for another table to finish, so I joined him and a guy called Michael in playtesting Michael's restaurant-themed game. Dan also had a prototype he wanted to test later, though sadly I had to head off to bed before they started that. It felt a bit weird to be playtesting a game I hadn't designed - it was the first time I'd done it since the "heyday" of Reiver Games, and for once I wasn't trying to make a decision as a publisher about whether or not to take it further - just giving the designer a chance to try it out and hopefully providing some useful feedback at the end. It was the first time I'd met either Dan or Michael, and it wasn't until halfway through the game that the subject of my history designing and publishing games came up. Dan had heard of Carpe Astra and Sumeria and owned the It's Alive! iPhone app. He called me a 'veteran'!

It was good to hang out with some other designers, Dan was talking about trying to set up a Newcastle spin off of Rob Harris' Playtest UK network of UK game designers. Sounds very interesting, and it would be great to try Vacuum in front of some more people. I'd definitely be up for that (especially if it's in a pub!).

I'm Gonna Need Therapy

Jack: Hi, my name's Jack.
Everyone: Hi, Jack.
Jack: It's been two whole weeks since I last playtested Codename: Vacuum. I need help!

Fortunately, that drought should come to an end at lunchtime today. I've a playtest session lined up with my office playtesting group of Chief and Dave, so fingers crossed we'll get our game on in a few hours' time.

It's been a fairly quiet week, we didn't have a chance to test Vacuum this week as I was called into a surprise quality audit (fun!) on the day we'd booked it, and I've not done much in the evenings as I've been hanging out with my family instead, seeing as I was away for the whole week beforehand.

All I have managed is printing, cutting out and inserting some updated cards for the June version of Codename: Vacuum last night and a start on the level 3 card art stolen from inspired by the Eclipse iPad app.

The new cards replace the old population cards, which have remained essentially unchanged for quite some time. The old ones however had some interesting properties:

• The are the only deck where you can get rid of a weak card and yet still get some benefit from it,
• They are the only deck where the level one cards aren't pretty much useless by the end of the game (all other level one cards are superseded by the level two and three cards more obviously),
• They are the only deck where level twos are almost as good as level threes.

It wasn't until I got my arse handed to me a couple of weeks ago in the first game of the June version that I noticed these things in combination made the Population deck a bit broken if you knew how to use it (it didn't help that I thought I did and was show otherwise by Dave!).

Anyway, I'll give the new ones a run out at lunchtime and see if they improve things at all...

All's Well That Ends Well

I spent a week in Minneapolis for work as I mentioned here last week. It was a busy trip, attending a conference on Mass Spectrometry and I worked long days and several evenings. But I got two nights off, and rather than spend them cruising the hospitality suites at the conference for free food and beer, I chose to spend them playing games.

In the run up to my trip I posted on BGG, to see if anyone knew of a good gaming venue in Minneapolis, and several people replied suggesting either the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center or The Source. I had no idea that Fantasy Flight were based near Minneapolis, but upon finding out I dropped them an email to see if any of their design team fancied meeting up. I would have liked to have taken Codename: Vacuum, not to hawk it to them (though had they wanted to pick it up that would have been awesome!), but just to get some feedback from some very successful designers. Sadly, other than the brief message from customer care, I didn't hear back from them. It turns out that even if I had, I didn't have room in my suitcase for Vacuum anyway.

The post on BGG led to a couple of offers from gamers who were willing to pick me up downtown and run me over to FFGEC so I could get my game on. The thread quickly devolved into silliness though as they insisted they weren't axe-murderers!

The first night, Alfredo and his mate Jay who worked downtown offered to meet me at my hotel and then drive me to FFGEC via a look at The Source. We got the light rail to where Alfredo had parked his car, then swung by Arby's for some dinner (apparently an authentic American dining experience :) ). We had a quick look at The Source, a huge store, the likes of which I've not seen in the UK - seriously, it was enormous! Then we rocked up to FFGEC. Ahead of time, I'd had a look through Alfredo's 700-odd games listed on BGG and offered to teach him the ones it looked like he hadn't played, but I knew well: The Bridges of Shangri-La, Aqua Romana and Hey! That's My Fish! In the end, we played those three games and Alfredo and Jay enjoyed Shangri-La and Fish, though Aqua Romana not so much. It was a great evening and Jay and Alfredo were great company.

The next night, Fred picked me up from my hotel and drove me out to Brasa, a nice little restaurant serving food which I can't categorise, but thoroughly enjoyed along with nice beer :) Fred even offered to buy my dinner, but it was on expenses :) We got to FFGEC where we looked at the library and I picked out a few things I could teach: X-Wing minis, Lords of Waterdeep, Race for the Galaxy and Lost Cities. They had a decent library of games: at least a hundred, and not just stuff they made themselves, games from a wide range of publishers. The games cost $3 to hire, but for some unknown reason were free that night. We started with a game of X-Wing, during which I provided rules support for the guys playing on the table next to us too! FFGEC had a range of play mats, a couple of space ones, plus one of the Death Star trench run, which was all moulded and looked awesome! After that we played a couple of games of Race. Fred enjoyed both games and, in fact, bought X-Wing at the end of the night to play with his kids. I also bought a couple of things: the X-Wing minis dice pack that I've been after for ages and the extra wonders expansion for 7 Wonders - which includes Stonehenge :). I could just fit them in my suitcase!

In addition to the two nights of cardboard gaming I took our iPad with me and spent the time at airports, on planes and in hotel rooms playing a variety of board games on it. I played Carcassonne, Hey! That's My Fish!, Ra Through the Desert and Eclipse; some solo, some with my boss Ian, a Games Night regular and my travel companion. I am particularly impressed with the iPad version of Eclipse, I bought it for the trip so it was new to me and it's very slick. It's also given me an idea for the level three Codename: Vacuum art. I've recently knocked the level one art up a notch, and I like the clean, webpage inspired level two art, but I didn't like what I've done for level three, and had no real idea how to improve it. Until I saw the Eclipse iPad version. Time for some plagiarism, sorry, I mean imitation.

I enjoyed my trip a lot, especially getting to meet gamers from across the pond and introduce them to some of my favourite games. It's a testament to the BGG community that I had two adventures that began with 'I met a guy on the Internet, he picked me up in his car and drove me to an out of town location...' and they both ended with a convivial evening of food and games, not a headline on national news!

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 :-).