NaGa DeMon 3: The First Play

Before making Zombology available to the PIP-hunting masses I wanted to play it at least once first to give me a chance to iron out the worst of the problems.

I'd worked hard over the weekend to get the first prototype's graphic design done on the computer, then get it printed and cut out ready for the first of two Newcastle Playtest sessions in November, last night. I was excited to see how it plays, but a little concerned about the complexity of the scoring.

As people started to arrive it was easy to sell them on a ten minute game that we could all play, so we sat down to a six-player game. After a quick run through of the rules that made it clear that the scoring was too complex (lots of questions along the lines of 'run that by me again', 'so which cures score?' And 'hoojamawhatnow?'), we set off. The game played as quickly as I had hoped and was as chaotic and vicious as I had intended. People seemed to get their heads round the rules pretty quickly.

I had first had the idea for this game nearly two years ago, it was going to be themed around the science of proteomics and would be something that we could possibly have as a scientific conference giveaway for my employer. The initial idea was played once and really didn't work so it died a death and stayed that way.

However, I've been toying with how I could transform it into a working game and on my weekend walks taking The Daughter for a nap in her buggy I've occasionally considered Proteome as well as Vacuum. In the last couple of weeks I've thought that card drafting à la 7 Wonders might be a good fit for the science theme. As the game progresses you'll get to hear on the grapevine/at conferences what sort of things people are interested in and build up an idea of what's hot and likely to be successful. I ditched the proteomics theme and instead though of curing a disease. And that led to Zombology - curing zombyism.

I created a game with 12 different possible cures, each containing the same range of evidence (positive valued cards) and attacks (negative valued cards). Seeing as you'd never play with the full deck, even with the posited maximum of ten players, some of the cures would end up more powerful than others. The more powerful ones would change every game and at the beginning of the game you wouldn't know what would be best - it would be a journey of discovery that you could shape as you choose cards to play. Much like science.

I wanted players to score points for backing the most successful cures, and I thought it would make things interesting if they lost points for backing the least successful cures. So my initial scoring idea was that at the end of the game you would add up the total of each cure across all players and the ones with the highest totals earnt their players positive points and the ones with the lowest totals earnt their players negative points. The attacking cards earnt you negative points so if you attack the winning cures you lose points and attacking the losing cures won you points. In addition, the attacking cards cancelled a positive card in the same suit.

Before I went to the playtest session I was concerned the scoring was over complicated, and my fears were realised - it took almost as long to score the game as it did to play it! Afterwards I asked for feedback, and in addition to a load of interesting ideas, the main complaints were the complicated scoring and that twelve suits was too many, making it hard to keep track of how the game was progressing.

So we took out five of the suits and played again, and it went much better. The scoring was still too complicated, so I need to think on that. What that reminds me of is prototype decay, the idea that prototype components have a lifetime that changes rapidly at the beginning, so it's not worth investing too much effort in them. I've now got to make a new prototype with all new cards in six rather than twelve suits, and re-think the scoring.

I've only got a month though, so I'll need to move quickly...

NaGa DeMon 2: The Premise

As I mentioned last week, and in Saturday's post, this year I'm going to try to take part in NaGa DeMon. Last year I thought about doing a game themed on the old Populous computer game, but gave that up as soon as I heard they were try to make a new Populous via KickStarter. I've decided to go zombie science, with a working title of Zombology: The Science of the Zombie Apocalypse. So here's the premise:

I feel the Zombie genre tends to focus too much on the survivalist with a shotgun (or axe or chainsaw). As I'm sure you're aware, the real heroes of any zombie apocalypse will be the scientists who slave day and night over a lukewarm microscope, trying to discover a cure to this dreadful plague. But the poor scientist doesn't get any love, no - no shotgun, no genre representation. So I've decided to redress the balance and come up with a game about the science of the zombie apocalypse.

Scientists are a competitive bunch, and come the zombie apocalypse, their preferred yardstick (peer-reviewed publications) will have disappeared - it's hard enough to get a decent review from an unpaid scientist who considers the work he's reviewing direct competition, so imagine how hard it'll be when the only thing the editor, reviewer, typesetter and printer care about is where their next brains are coming from. In the absence of publishing, there's only one way to prove yourself the best scientist: cure the plague! Ideally, before you run out of test subjects.

I'm aiming for a 6 Nimmt!-like experience: a short game (under 20 minutes) for up to ten players with lots of shafting each other and getting hosed.

Here's the exposition as it stands now:

It finally happened. The Zombie Plague has arrived, decimating entire continents and turning the masses into drooling, stumbling, brain-munching hordes. You're not that bothered though, you live and work in a high security government facility, and for you the plague is an opportunity. It's your chance to finally prove that you're a world-class genius in the field of curing diseases, not like that chump Dr. Gimlet at the CDC, what a tool! Seriously, the guy's an absolute idiot, as if DNA retroviruses are a credible cure for anything.
You've got a few weeks to come up with a cure before you run out of the test subjects you need to show that your cure is the best. Back a method or a few different ones and then quickly gather the evidence you need to prove your genius.

This is actually based on Codename: Proteome, but since the theme has changed beyond recognition and the mechanics are also totally different, I figure I can count it as a new game, which I started making on the weekend - safely within the November window. I've got a copy ready to take to the Newcastle Playtest session at The Bridge Hotel this Tuesday for its inaugural outing. Once I've tried it out I'll post the rules and a P&P download so you can start trying it out yourselves and earning some playtest PIPs.

I'll keep you posted about how it's going, in the meantime, any feedback on how to make the exposition more enticing? There's PIPs available...

TGWAG: League Table

So as part of NaGa DeMon, I'm running The Game Within A Game (TGWAG for short) to encourage people to give me the feedback I need to make a game of above dreadful quality with only a month of time available to me. As part of that I promised to keep track of playtesters' scores and keep a league table. Of course with only three volunteers so far I look like a bit of a spanner doing it, but that never stopped me before, and I'm good to my word. So here's the first of my Sunday night league tables. Remember, the top five (i.e. everyone at the minute!) will get a free copy of the finished game, signed and numbered at the end of the month.

Playtester	PIP Score	Level	Free Copy?
Tiffany Ralph	4	Intern	Yes!
boardsandbees	3	Intern	Yes!
Frugal Dave	3	Intern	Yes!
You?	0	N/a	Yes!
You?	0	N/a	Yes!

NaGa DeMon: The Game Within a Game

I've decided to take part in NaGa DeMon this month. So I'm going to create a 20 minute, chaotic, vicious card game for 3-10 players on the theme of 'The Science of the Zombie Apocalypse'. I'll be posting a bit more regularly than usual, and will need some help playtesting the game.

So I'm running a game within the game (gamification-tastic!):

I've a small daughter, so not much spare time, so if you help me playtest the game, I'll award you Pointless Internet Points™ (PIPs). I'll keep a league table of everyone's points and award achievements for certain levels (who wants a PhD in Zombology?). In addition, at the end of the month I will hand-make, and post free of charge a signed and numbered copy of the final game to the people with the top five PIP scores.

How do you register for this exciting, yet pointless, opportunity? Post a comment on this blog post using a registered account (anonymous users are not valid). Every time you post a comment using that blogger account on any of my NaGa DeMon blog posts, I'll award you some PIPs equal to how helpful I find your feedback, I reserve the right to be capricious and unpredictable in my awarding of points, so no quibbling if you disagree.

Applications below please!

Update

Achievements for the game-within-a-game:
1PIP - Intern, you can clean the glasswear
5 PIP - Undergrad, you know almost as much about Zombology as the cleaner
10 PIP - MSc, you get to call the faculty by their first names
20 PIP - PhD, congratulations! Now get published.
30 PIP - Tenure. That's the last time you have to do any work! Yay!
50 PIP - Chair. You're a Professor of Zombology, you get to wear a fancy hat. 

A Weird Week

It's been a strange week, this one. The daughter was ill last weekend and the early part of the week and on top of that we're changing childcare providers. The Wife and I are both very busy at work with deadlines looming, so we split up the childcare while we introduce her to the new nursery. So Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I was in charge. On my own.

Thankfully, we'd had some practice at the beginning of September when The Wife had a conference to attend for work so I was in charge for a few days, but then I had the help of my friend Paul who we were staying with, who has a nine year old daughter of his own, and hence is far more experienced than I. But this time it was just me.

It was lovely, especially once she got over her illness and was much happier, I wish I had more holiday so I could spend more time with her, but sadly, I've used this year's allowance up :(

As a result of the sleepless nights while she was ill, we didn't have a Games Night to give us a chance to catch up. Seeing as I was off work with The Daughter at the beginning of the week, I missed Tuesday lunchtime's Codename: Vacuum playtest session too. My parents came up last night, so I skipped Saturday's Newcastle Gamers session to prepare for their visit. So from a gaming point of view it's been a dry week.

The new Vacuum has had a lot of changes, so I really need to focus on trying them all out and finding and improving the weaknesses, so next week I hope to get back to lunchtime playtesting and then there's another Newcastle Playtest meetup on the 5th, so I'll take it along to that too.

In other news, I've been thinking about Codename: Proteome again, and in my head have made some sweeping changes. I'm considering giving it a go for NaGa DeMon, the game designer's equivalent of NaNoWriMo.

So not much to report this week, but stuff is afoot!

In other news, 700th post! Who'd have thought Creation and Play would last so long?

One Day Late

I hadn't played Codename: Vacuum for four weeks. During the Newcastle Playtest session a month ago I had some great feedback with cracking ideas from Paul and Olly. Then as I started making those changes, the power pack on my laptop died and with it any chance of getting those changes ready in time for the Newcastle Playtest session a couple of weeks ago. But I got a replacement power pack off the internet, and one week later I was ready to make those changes in time for this week's Playtest session. Sadly, it was not to be again. I had a couple of early nights to recuperate from a few sleepless nights and then got out the printer ready to print out an assemble the prototype the night before the Playtest session and ... my printer went on the blink :(

The next morning I tried out a few cleaning and calibrating cycles on the printer and managed to get it to play ball, but the prototype was printed before I went to work, not cut out and assembled, so it missed yet another Playtest session.

So instead, I went along purely as a playtester again, and played a couple of games by Dan, the other organizer of the group. First up, seeing as we were the first two to arrive, was Mainframe, a two-player game of head-to-head hacking a corporate network to steal its information. The prototype was fresh back from the White Goblin Games 2-player games competition where it had been a finalist (though didn't win). It was an interesting game which I thoroughly enjoyed. I gave Dan some feedback, with a couple of minor things I'd change the names of and some ideas to make it feel more thematic to me (with my programming background).

I found it interesting that as I was playing the game I was thinking what I would do from a graphic design standpoint if I was publishing the game. It took me right back to my thinking during my Reiver Games days when I received a prototype I liked. It also reminded me that a lot of the pleasure I derived from publishing games was working on the graphic design elements of the games to make the as easy to play, attractive and clear as possible. I'm not saying I did a particularly good job, just that I enjoyed doing it. I wasn't able to do the art (Border Reivers is proof of that), but I did do the graphic design.

After Mainframe, we played a couple of games of Samizdat, Dan's game about publishing illegal books in 1950s Russia. We'd promised to play each other's games - I'd play Samizdat and Dan would play Vacuum, but with Vacuum languishing at home, uncut, we just played Samizdat twice. It was another good game, a bit more involved than Mainframe, but everything tied nicely together. It was the first outing of this particular version, and we spotted a couple of things that didn't see much action (and hence were probably a bit weak) and Michał was keen to have the variable turn order reinstated from a previous version. Another enjoyable game, and both in pretty good shape too.

Since the weekend, The Daughter had been sleeping better, so despite a late night on Tuesday at the playtest session, and another late one planned on Thursday for my regular Games Night I went all out and had a late night on Wednesday too - three on the trot! - and cut out and assembled the new version of Vacuum. One day too late for the Playtest session, but it did mean it was ready for Games Night where Wilka, Dave and I played and also for the lunchtime session on Friday with Chief and Dave. Chief couldn't make it in the end so Dave and I ventured out again, just two player.

Early indications are that the new changes are a big improvement. The events make exploration more exciting - it can go alright, very well or really badly. I'm slightly concerned that there might not be enough locations any more though. To really confirm that I think I need to have a five player game...

Of course, after my three late nights on the trot, The Daughter came down with another fever, so Friday and Saturday nights were pretty bad, and the weekend was a bit of a wash out. I did fix a couple of errors I found on cards in the new Vacuum though, and started to make some improvements to the graphic design of the event cards.

Games/Life Balance

I now have the replacement power lead for my laptop, so I've been able to finish making the requisite changes to Codename: Vacuum. I didn't finish them until this weekend with the printing and assembly booked for this evening, since at the beginning of the week The Daughter was ill and not sleeping well as a result. In a bid to survive the working week we went to bed pretty early to try to get some sleep, which left me with very little time in the evenings to make the changes, print them out and then cut out and assemble the prototype in time for Thursday. I'd planned a playtest session on Thursday lunchtime and I'd intended to have it available for Games Night, but in the end I just couldn't find the time to get it ready. It's now been three and a half weeks since my last game of Vacuum, which considering I've been playing at least once a week for a year now feels very weird indeed.

All this reminds me of a blog post I've been meaning to write for a while about my balance of real life and games and how it's changed over the years. So here it is :)

In the early days of Reiver Games, I had a full-time job as a Software Engineer which morphed into a project management role. I was hand-crafting the games I was selling (four hundred of them between Border Reivers and It's Alive! first edition) and that took time. I was giving up weekends to go to conventions to sell the games and a good chunk of most evenings either assembling games, checking and responding to emails, doing some half-arsed marketing or designing games of my own. In addition, in the run up to a big convention such as The UK Games Expo, The Cast are Dice or Beer and Pretzels, I'd have to build up some stock to take and, seeing as the handmade games took 1.5 to 3 hours each to create, that was a significant investment in time - so I'd end up using some of my work holiday allowance to spend a couple of days working 12 hour days flat out making games. Games were starting to take over a large chunk of my personal life.

Following my MS diagnosis, and the subsequent life insurance payout, one of the driving reasons behind trying to get Reiver Games off the ground properly and running it as a full-time concern was that I'd get my evenings, weekends and holidays back, seeing as I'd be able to do all that stuff during the working day while The Wife was at work herself.

So now I was spending all day during the working week working on gaming stuff. Of course, as anyone who's run their own business knows, it's not that easy to turn off when you're the boss. So I still ended up spending a bunch of time on RG stuff in my 'free time'. In addition, all my friends in York I'd made through gaming, and my social life was twice weekly games nights at Paul's house, once a week playtesting evening at mine and frequent trips to Beyond Monopoly on a Saturday. My trips abroad were for Essen. Life was now heavily dominated by gaming. When we moved down south it was a similar story, my friends were all made through gaming, so my social life and my job were both entirely games related.

With the demise of Reiver Games I swung back the other way. With the exception of a weekly games night with my friends down south, I did very little to do with games. My work was once again software development, I spent little time gaming and no time designing games or playtesting.

Since moving back to Newcastle things have slowly started to swing back the other way again. I've started up my own Games Night once a week and bought a few more games so that I have a decent selection for people to play. I've been designing Codename: Vacuum, spending a few evenings a month doing graphic design on the computer and then cutting out and assembling the prototypes. I've been playing Vacuum once a week on a lunchbreak at work. In addition, in the last few months I've started up the Newcastle Playtest sessions and started attending Newcastle Gamers a bit more often too. Games are once again becoming a large part of my life. But I'm still a more rounded character than I was in the Reiver Games days. My work is software development again, and I spend some of my free time brewing beer and learning to play the guitar. Plus I'm a father now, so I spend a lot of my time entertaining and looking after The Daughter.

I often wonder what I would do with Vacuum if I ever get it to a point where I'm happy with it. If it ever reaches that point I'll have to decide - I toy with the idea of hobby publishing again like the early days of Reiver Games, or KickStarter, or approaching the other publishers I know through my days at Reiver Games. But what I come back to is that my family is a far more important use of my time.

In the meantime, I'm going to concentrate on getting the new Vacuum printed and cut out this evening, ready for tomorrow's Newcastle Playtest session at The Bridge Hotel, and then working on getting Vacuum to the point where it's 'ready'. That's plenty to keep me busy for the moment.

Newcastle Playtest Gaining Steam

This Tuesday was the fifth Newcastle Playtest session in The Bridge Hotel. With my laptop out of action and my sweeping changes to Codename: Vacuum still a work in progress, I went along purely in a playtester capacity. Although, having said that, I took Codename: Vacuum (the old version) because according to the Meetup page as I left the house that morning there were only three of us confirmed to be going, with me as the only designer. I didn't want the evening to be bizarrely quiet and there be no games there to test at all.

Thankfully, Meetup was underselling it. Later that morning, Dan the organizer confirmed he was going and Paul piped up to so there were going to be four of us, and three designers. Vacuum could safely stay in my bag. As it turns out, even that was underselling it. In addition to the three of us and Amo, we had several others who I wasn't expecting: Gareth from Newcastle Gamers came along, Alex joined us and three guys from the Northumbria University Gaming and Roleplaying Society had seen a poster Dan had put up in Travelling Man our local FLGS. So there were nine of us! A new record. And then Lydia joined us later after her other event had finished so ten in total.

I got my wish, and Vacuum remained in my bag, unmolested, since between Dan and Paul we had three games. Initially, there were just four of us, so we sat down to play 54 Jones, Paul's game of sci-fi sewage surfing!

As with Mad Monks, another of Paul's prototypes I'd played a couple of months ago, 54 Jones was a lovely laser-cut MDF prototype with laser-cut perspex counters too. It was a fairly quick, light fun game where you were racing to escape the sewers ahead a wave of encroaching sewage. I really enjoyed this one, and when more people turned up I requested a second play so we played it again while the other table broke out Dan's Samizdat - a game I've been meaning to play since the very first session two months ago. Both games of 54 Jones brought up some interesting ideas, we tried one in the second game, which I think improved it and Gareth had a really good idea after the second game (though that would have involved some component changes so it couldn't be tried out on the night).

At the end of the second game of 54 Jones (which slowed down a bit due to very aggressive play), we broke up again and swapped around a bit. I moved to Dan's table and tried his other game: Galactic Contractors. This is a very early prototype (I think Dan said it had only been played three times!) but already it felt like a solid game. There were plenty of options and some very interesting mechanics. From what I remember Dan said he'd come up with the mechanics first for this one, hence the theme being a little flaky at this early stage. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and would like to play it again.

All in all it was a very enjoyable evening, and after playing Codename: Vacuum twice at the previous session it was great to be able to go along and play other peoples' games. I'm also very pleased with the way it's taking shape, from Dan, Michał and my initial ideas and email conversations it's great to see more designers getting involved and lots of willing playtesters. I can't wait until next session on the 15th when Dan and I have promised to play each other's games: Vacuum and Samizdat. My replacement laptop power cord has arrived so I can crack on with making the new version of Vacuum, which I hope to have ready in time...

To KickStart, Or Not To KickStart ...

... that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The loss of all your Fortune,
Or to take Coin from a Sea of strangers?

There's not much to report on the Codename:Vacuum front this week, I'm in the middle of overhauling the locations and exploration as discussed last week, and now my laptop has died so I'm not even making much progress on that. I'll be going along to the next Newcastle Playtest session on Tuesday, but with no game of my own - just helping test other designers' games.

So seeing as I've nothing worthwhile to say about my achievements this week, I thought I would address a question I regularly get asked by other gamers, when they hear I'm designing games: "So, (when) are you going to KickStart it?"

Before I delve into my thoughts on KickStarter and how it applies to Codename: Vacuum, here's a little background on my experiences with KickStarter. I've only KickStarted one project, and it wasn't even a board game. It was a trade paperback of a comic that had previous been released as single issues. I liked the art on the KS page, the comic had won awards and I would get a trade paperback and a T-shirt for £25, which is a reasonable price. It arrived a couple of months later than originally envisaged (though the communication explaining why was alright) and in the end I was slightly disappointed, the art is nice, but the whole thing seemed a bit short and the story didn't wow me.

Why haven't I KickStarted any games you ask? I don't actually buy that many games, and the games I do buy tend to be ones I've tried beforehand and really liked - things that I think will get lots of play at Games Night or with other friends. I don't collect games for the sake of it, I buy them to play. With The Daughter in the house now, I have less disposable income so, if anything, I'm more picky about which games I buy. Games on KickStarter have rarely been previously released, so you are usually buying a game you haven't tried and which there is limited information about - as a result the risk of getting something that doesn't meet your expectations is much higher than when you've already played the published game.

I can definitely see the appeal of KickStarting a game from a publisher's point of view:

• Your KickStarter listing is a great way to raise awareness among people who buy board games from KickStarter
• You get free advertising via things like the BGG crowdfunding round-up
• You get information about how popular the game concept is from the number of pledges you get
• KickStarter effectively manage your pre-order system for you
• You have to raise less (or even no!) money to fund the publishing of your game

And it's probably that last point that is my biggest hurdle with KickStarter. KickStarter has really lowered the bar to publishing games. Previously, you would have either had to get a publisher to pick up your game (very hard) and then suffer the changes that result from their development of your game or you would have had to stump up a lot of your own cash and take a punt.

There are far more designers and games out there than there are games getting published by the major publishers, so getting one of them to pick up your game is difficult, and even if you manage it, you cede editorial control of your baby to them. Which will usually improve it, but is often a hard cross to bear, especially when you think the game is perfect as it is.

The other option requires you to have a dirty wad of cash, to convince your family to part with said dirty wad and then to part with that and potentially lose it all. That takes some guts, and even if your game is great, you can fail (and lose your cash) if you're not good at the marketing side of things, regardless of the qualities of your game. I know, I've been there.

With KickStarter, those hurdles evaporate. You don't need to get in to the big publishers, you don't need to cede control and you don't need to stump up your life savings: you get a bunch of people on the internet to fund it for you. Yay! Cash flow problem fixed!

My concern is that those hurdles are necessary. It was best summed up by Scott Firestone IV (@firestone) on twitter at the beginning of this month:

@natebrett Most KS board games I've played were merely ok (or straight-up bad). I think the developer role is key, and they're missing that.

— Scott Firestone IV (@firestone) September 10, 2013

If you're publishing your own games, it's very difficult to achieve the critical distance needed to objectively decide how good it is. If you're risking your own money then decisions about what to publish are brought into sharp relief: "Is this going to lose me £15,000?" I rarely buy games without trying them, and KickStarted self-published games make me even less likely to because of my concerns about game development and quality. I've not got much experience of KickStarted games, so I'm probably tarring them all unfairly, but it's something I'm worried about, and it puts me off backing any of them.

So if I'm unlikely to back other peoples' KickStarted games, it's a bit rich to consider posting one myself. Especially since the more games you back the more likely you are to get reciprocal backing from those games' publishers. On top of those concerns, I'm not sure that Vacuum would be a good fit for KickStarter. I can't see sensible pledge levels, with a game with so many different cards (and hence so much art required) the entry level would need to be quite high - putting people off.

Of course, I'm not saying never, but certainly at the moment it seems unlikely.

I'd be interested to hear about your experiences with KickStarter, am I being unfair? Have you been delighted with the games you've KickStarted? Or disappointed? Let me know in the comments below.

Update (07/10/2013):

While no one has replied below, I've had a few discussions on BGG and offline on the subject of this post. The conversations have crystallised my thoughts a bit, so I thought I'd explain myself a bit more here. I think a couple of the things that have influenced my fear of KickStarter projects are:

• The occasional horror story, like those collected here, and
• Receiving 'finished' submissions while running Reiver Games.

Let me just expand on that last point a bit. While running Reiver Games I was mostly publishing other peoples' designs. So I received a lot of submissions of games that the designers themselves considered ready to publish (I received over 150 I think). Some of them were great. Some of them were just not my sort of thing. But quite a lot of them were poor, or in some cases rubbish.

Having seen a lot of these supposedly finished games, I'm more wary of self-published games with little objective information available. I'm probably more wary than the majority of gamers, and certainly more wary than the majority of KickStarter backers. Perhaps that's where my KickStarter reticence springs from.

One Giant Leap For Vacuum

The last couple of weeks have been good to Codename: Vacuum, last week I played it four times on Thursday twice at lunch with Dave, one of my core playtesters, and then twice in the evening at Games Night with Gav and His Nefariousness (my boss). During the four games I was thinking about (and yet not quite trying out) some ideas my friend Paul in York had had when I visited him a few weeks ago. I normally play it once a week on a lunchtime in the office, so four games in a day was pretty awesome (and a first! Clearly, I've not taken it to Essen or the UK Games Expo yet!). It was nice to get some steam up, play it a lot and get a feel for how it can differ between games. We found a few flaws that needed addressing and I got some useful feedback too.

This week has been another busy one, with four games again - this time spread between two days. On Tuesday, I attended my second Newcastle Playtest session at The Bridge Hotel. Dan the main organiser was away, but it was looking like there would still be five of us. Sadly Amo was feeling ill, and Michał's daughter wasn't well, so it was just three of us in the end. Olly who had come along to playtest and Paul, who had brought a game which wasn't in a playable position at the moment, he was about to make some sweeping changes after the feedback he'd received at the last session. And me. With Codename: Vacuum. So we ended up playing it twice with a discussion of Paul's game in between. We started off with a basic game (since neither of them had played it before) and then, with plenty of time to spare and no competition, we played it again, this time with the advanced rules. Neither Paul nor Olly had much experience of deck building games, but they both picked it up quickly and seemed to enjoy it. Again I asked them to email me some feedback when they got a chance. At the end of the evening we spent some time discussing the game, with both Olly and Paul coming up with some good ideas. Then we left and Paul and I walked into town together, still discussing the game. Paul's ideas really got me excited and have led to some big changes in the works. It was a hugely useful evening. Playing every week with regular players is great, especially when the game has so many cards and options, it really helps to balance things out; but for a big leap, you really need to get your game in front of new players and get a fresh perspective.

After Tuesday's big evening, Thursday was playtesting at lunchtime again and then Games Night in the evening. At lunch, Chief, Dave and I tried some ideas for simplifying the Trade mechanism that had come from Tuesday's feedback (quickly received via email - thanks Paul and Olly!). They didn't quite work on first attempt, but seem to be heading in the right direction. In the evening, Dave (again) and Gav (after more since last week) and Mike (who'd not played in a while) settled down for a four player game - which hasn't happened in a while. Again, the Trade simplification was all out of whack, but I still think that Olly's comment about the old way being to complicated was right on the money.

What I'm really excited about though is the ideas that Paul had/triggered regarding exploration. For the last six months or more, Vacuum has had 42 location cards representing places in the solar system that you can explore, capture and trade with. To explore them, you'd draw a number of cards from a deck and pick the one you fancied. Fairly standard mechanism in a card game. But the cards were always the same, and there were only 42 of them, so there wasn't much excitement to be had. Each location was potentially worth some points for exploring, some for capturing and possibly provided population, trade and/or defence. You looked at the cards you had drawn and choose the one the best suited your strategy (or least suited your opponents') and then revealed it. It then sat in known space until someone captured it.

Paul's comment that triggered all these changes I'm now working on? "In a Steampunk game, I want to be attacked!" It made me think about the way new locations come out. You choose which range you want to explore at, and then choose from a random selection of locations at that range. Doesn't sound very thematically accurate does it? "I want to send a probe to the outer solar system, I'll decide what to look at when I get there!" That's just how NASA work, honest.

So, I've decided to completely change things. There will be fewer locations, and they'll all be available from the beginning. You choose exactly where you want to go and send you probe there. Upon arrival, you'll encounter a random event which might provide an alien population, or a fight or a deposit of valuable minerals, or the loss of your probe. I'm hoping this will make exploring more thematically accurate, more interesting and provide more replayability as each game the location's events will differ. I'm also hoping it'll add to the theming of the game as a whole. My aim is to make a thematic game, not a dry themeless one, and lack of theme was the main criticism of Vacuum's first outing at Newcastle Playtest.

I'll not be able to play it for a couple of weeks while I make all these changes and assemble a new prototype, hopefully in time for the next Newcastle Playtest, but we'll see. Of course, when the new prototype turns up it'll be much less well balanced/possibly broken, so I'll have to start playtesting again almost from scratch.

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!