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Commentary and processes of J C Lawrence: systems architect, contrarian, theorist, sailor, hacker, virtual world designer, linux-user, aquarist, disquisitor, cat breeder, raconteur, game designer, ludophile, bibliophile, numismatist, speculator and theologiser

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Hippodice round 2

Subject: B: 'Ohana Proa
From: J C Lawrence 
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:39:25 -0700
To: autorenwettbewerb@hippodice.de

J C Lawrence would like to submit 'Ohana Proa to the Hippodice
competition.  He is the sole designer and his email address is
XXXX@kanga.nu. 'Ohana Proa is designed for 3-5 players, age 10+ years
and lasts about 150 minutes.

Please find attached a description, the rules and a player aid.

--
J C Lawrence                        They said, "You have a blue guitar,
-------------------------(*)                        You do not play things as they are."
XXXX@kanga.nu                       The man replied, "Things as they are
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/          Are changed upon the blue guitar."

Falling off the train

I posted this as a comment/reply on BGN, but it seems worth preserving:

My most common internal question during design is: How can I make this decision point more nuanced, more subtle and less obvious? Obvious decisions are non-decisions. Early decisions should only make later decisions more difficult and less obvious. Ideally every decision in the game should be a challenge, a challenge both to determine that the decision is present in the first place as well as to decide on a good answer for that decision.

Future millstones

Assuming that Capitalisation (or control of Capitalisation) remains the most attractive early action in the game (an argument I’m having difficulty supporting):

Total actions performed: 9

Total actions per player: P1:2 P2:2, P3:3, P4:3

Now let’s assume that P1 recognises the action race and changes tempo:

Total actions performed: 11

Total actions per player: P1:3 P2:2, P3:2, P4:4

Interesting.

Let’s assume that P4 wins one of the early share auctions with his cash lead and thus has more he can develop:

Total actions performed: 12

Total actions per player: P1:3 P2:3, P3:2, P4:4

Now let’s assume that P1 is cash poor, diluted on both sides and that P2 in similarly incented towards a fast dividend:

Total actions performed: 8

Total actions per player: P1:2 P2:2, P3:1, P4:3

This is fascinating. The players have no choice but to focus on Expansion next turn as there’s just no opportunity for any more Development. What interesting rhythms!

Footnotes
  1. Guarantees next turn ↩
  2. Assuming only one share held, nothing left to develop ↩
  3. Fastest route to an addition turn ↩
  4. Also ↩
  5. Selected in order to guarantee a dividend ↩
  6. Guarantees next turn ↩
  7. Most populous action, doesn’t drive dividend. ↩
  8. Guaranteed not to get another action before the dividend. ↩
  9. Instant dividend ↩
  10. Almost certainly in a corner, needs a dividend fast but can also get two Expands, which could (unlikely) be better ↩
  11. Also doesn’t want to push it? ↩
  12. Expects to not get another action before the dividend ↩
  13. Instant dividend ↩

Moving categorical confusion

Ooops. I just noticed that one of the side effects of nesting the game-project categories is that the RSS feed URLs for the categories have now changed to represent the nesting. Arghh. Sorry guys. If this is a real problem please comment below and I’ll stick in some Apache rewrite rules to handle it.

Grassy bleed

A more tactically interesting turn:

Total actions performed: 12

Total actions per player: P1:4 P2:3, P3:3, P4:2

Note that the round ended due to exhausted actions at the same time as it ended for total action points. This may be deceptively convenient, in which case the reins will need to be drawn in a bit. More interesting is the turn-penalty for being late in the turn order. How curious! Is this the coat-tail-riding forced-alliances of Preußische Ostbahn, or is it just bad to have cash? How very appealingly curious. It might be time to build a small AI to model a few basic player incentive assumptions and see how this pattern plays out.

Footnotes
  1. P1 assumes that P2 will Capitalise, and so goes on an expansion offensive, certain that he’ll get another turn either way ↩
  2. P4 merely follows the expansionist suit ↩
  3. P1 again expands while the expanding is good, trusting that P3 will end the round for a dividend ↩
  4. P3 obeys ↩

Cud cyclotrons

Somehow I seem to keep returning to the action selection and turn order mechanism in Muck & Brass. The current Pampas Railroads and Wabash Cannonball is a little unstable when employed for the very cash and share-sensitive Muck & Brass. I’m not convinced it needs changing, but I’m also not convinced it doesn’t. An unpleasant kettle.

I’ve been looking at a variation on the previously discussed and dismissed model, but losing the sliding concept and using a fixed tie-breaker for collisions.

Possibly the turn order tie-breaker, after the first round, can instead of cash be the reverse order of total action points used in the last round; the implications aren’t obvious to me.

An example opening round using the format Player-ActionCost/ActionTotal followed by a summary of how many of each action are left is listed below, one line per re-ordering:

Total actions performed: 13

Typical total actions per round in Wabash Cannonball: 8

Typical total actions per round in Pampas Railroads: 9-10

Total actions per player: P1:4 P2:3, P3:3, P4:3

I’ve made little attempt to make action choices logical. This is just a thought model. Most noticeable is that the rounds is longer (more actions done in the round). This may be acceptable, albeit at a cost in game length. My surface sense is that the tactical choices in this ordering are interesting and rather tweaky.

Footnotes
  1. Yes, Develop is cheaper than Expand: this creates both temptation and tempo ↩

Category management

In order to ease managment and overview of the site I’ve created a Game Project category and moved all my design projects under it. Aside from some resultant sorting and nesting of the category list, there’s also now an RSS feed for just my game projects. See the This Category link in the sidebar when viewing the category.

Warning: About to close the Winsome Games’ 2008 Essen Collection Order Line

I will be closing the order line for the Winsome Games’ 2008 Essen Collection in a few days. By rough estimation I’ll have the games by the second week of November and will be shipping them out then.

Rotary vortex

Turn structure

The base idea is a set of rounds, each round consisting of distinct phases executed in order by each player before moving onto the next phase or round:

Turn order is rotational. Start player moves back one space each round.

Construction

Players have 2 action points. Available actions:

Player’s travelling spaceships which are not advanced during turn are removed from the board along with the paths they explored.

Operation

The Operation phase is split into three steps:

  1. For each player in turn order:
    1. Produce products on all level-1 (input-less) factories
    2. Move products across network to consumers
      • Pay for network transit per colour
      • Owner of product pays market price (forced) for product
      • May not delivery to factory if an input of that colour is already present
  2. For each player in turn order:
    1. Produce products on all level-2 factories that have both inputs
    2. Move products across network to consumers
      • Pay for network transit per colour
      • Owner of product pays market price (forced) for product
  3. For each player in turn order:
    1. Produce products on all level-3 factories that have both inputs
    2. Move products across network to consumers
      • Pay for network transit per colour
      • Owner of factory received market price from bank

Resolution

The Resolution phase is split into three steps:

  1. For each colour of level-1 factories adjust the market price for that colour:
    • down if there are unshipped goods of that colour
    • up if all products of that colour were consumed to produce level-2 products
    • no-change if all products of that colour were shipped but not all were consumed
  2. Each player now exchanges promissory notes with their owners to reduce the number of notes in the game to a minimum (trade a player’s promissory notes with that player for notes they hold of other players, repeat until no further exchanges are possible).
  3. Each player pays all promissory notes other players hold of their’s.

Other

Preferably game ends when bank breaks.

I’m concerned that Operations and Resolution are horribly fiddly. Transaction density is a problem.

Snapping tendons

Basic patterns:

Getting the costs/values right will be interesting.

Race for the entrance

I’ve been noodling a game tentatively called Space Race for a few months now. Inspired by Clippers (which I’ve been playing a lot of), Indonesia, Wayfinder, ‘Ohana Proa and the 18XX, the intent is for the players to simulate a producer/consumer pipeline across an emergent transport network between nodes that the players also provide and define. A very free-form game.

A few of the other basic intentions:

Farewell lunch at Trends

Much of the old crew got together for a farewell lunch at Trends today. It was great to see everyone again, shake hands, eat good food and perhaps even to remember the late nights, all the projects we together carried over the line despite, and more than all that, what great people they are to know and work with. Thank you.

Sadly a few couldn’t make it (there was an All-Hands-On-Deck). Life happens and sometimes the bear does get you first. But never fear, we’ll have another lunch with them tomorrow.

Pursuit of employment

I was one of the 1,600 laid off from EBay/PayPal (I was on the PayPal side), so I’m on the job trail again. My resume is in the standard place (HTML, PDF).

Capstan turning chanty

The kula model is interestingly incestuous.

Changelog:

New rules for ‘Ohana Proa.

New Player Aid for ‘Ohana Proa.

Hey ho and up she rises!

Another playtest of ‘Ohana Proa last night using the knocked back rules (no reciprocal giving, shorter prestige track, single prestige for extra explore or extra proa etc). This time I got to sit out and watch them play rather than participating directly. Game-wise it worked well.

Notes:

Good stuff. Yep, gifts for gift-giving parties seem a fine idea. Now to run some models.

Revisions of review

We did a semi-blind playtest on Monday. I was there to answer direct questions but otherwise intended to be silent. As happens we also lost a player at the last minute so I also participated in the game which was regrettable.

They taught themselves the game from the rules, pretty much just reading it aloud in somewhat backwards order. This took roughly an hour. I can easily teach the game in under 15 minutes, but I also know it well. I’m a little unsurprised at the length involved as none of the players were prepared; they simply sat down, picked up the rules and attempted to learn the game from scratch A repeated complaint was the large number of forward and backward references in the rules. I’m not sure what, if anything to do about that. More distressing was that they did not use the introduction section to gain an overview of the game and thus provide context for the rest of the rules to fit into. Conversely I was pleased that there were no questions left unanswered by the rules and that all questions they did have were answered by the rules as written and roughly about where they thought that data would be.

The game also developed unusually. All initially claimed routes were adjacent in the initial exploration with many shared islands. Kahuna and a gift were purchased on the first turn of the game (first time ever for that). The game ended explosively with all players earning more than 30 prestige points in the last round. Final prestige scores ranged from ~56-75, which is a little ridiculous.

A few of the more specific complaints:

On the reaction level the summary roughly summates to:

Changelog for the new rules:

I also reduced the prestige costs for extra explores and proas so as to make those choices more viable and interesting.

Thorn polish

With Hippodice drawing near it is time to dust and prune about the edges.

The changes aren’t large. I’ve shortened the end-game in “Ohana Proa a bit, hopefully lopping off 10 minutes or so, and allowed a pass action and end-game qualifier for Muck & Brass. I’m not convinced the latter is necessary but it is at least consistent with the rest of the pattern.