Game #67 - Tempest by Justin [Updated 4/2/06]

I read in your document that players find the game too simple, and that it could use some extra strategic depth. You suggest adding new types of units and resources to achieve this. I think that is the wrong way to approach it. You don't add strategic depth by making a game more complex, you add strategic depth by making the choices more difficult, which is actually not the same thing at all!

Turn structure

This is a good example of a game with the "big turn" approach. Play goes around the table and during their turn players perform a lot of different actions. This approach almost invariably fails. The game will be chaotic and there will be a lot of downtime. The game will also be very tactical and there will be a lot of min/maxing during a player's turn. A better approach would be to chop up the turn into smaller bits. For example, instead of letting a player possibly perform all five actions per turn, restrict them to only two or even just one action per turn. This makes it more important to plan ahead and reduces downtime considerably.

I think you also somehow want to restrict how many units a player can move during his turn. This would make it easier to track which units have already moved and it would, I think, add an interesting choice. Perhaps a player has to play a card to move units. The number on the card would dictate how many units he could move, and perhaps the suit or the color of the card would dictate which kind of units he could move. Using cards for both moving and fighting would add an interesting choice. Do you save a good card for a battle, or do you use it for movement?

Interaction

Where's the player interaction in this game? Sure, players could build cyborgs, or what have you, and attack eachother, but why would they? There's no real incentive to go out and attack eachother. Perhaps there's some competition over resources, but otherwise I think this game would be a logistical optimizing exercise. I don't think that is what you want, is it?

Scoring

The scoring seems very contrived. Why do I score points for having a harvester on a metal tile at game end? Why do I get points for having 6 Cyborgs on the same tile at game end? How does that make sense, thematically? Scoring motivates players to make certain choices in a game. In this game the scoring seems to award things that seem out of touch with the rest of the game.

Some suggestions for more sensible scoring:
- Add a building that does nothing except score points at the game end.
- Divide the board into several sections (say 5 or 6, or so) and award points to the player who controls the most cyborgs in that section. This promotes building cyborgs and promotes interaction between players.
- Award a point whenever a player destroys an opponent's unit. This promotes interaction and attacking.

You might also consider additional scoring rounds, for example whenever the deck is exhausted there is a scoring round for majority of cyborg in sections, while the buildings only score at game end. If you balance this properly there will be an interesting choice between choosing to build cyborgs early and quickly occupying some sections, and the long term approach of harvesting and building up towards the big building bonuses at the game end.

Other stuff

Right now, all units need both toxic waste and metal. I think it would be nice to change the cost of some units to needing only toxic waste and others to only needing metal, while others need a combination of both. This forces players to make a strategic choice for which kind of units they want to go. A side effect would be that a player isn't totally screwed when he can't get a resources of a certain kind, because there's still something he can build.

I understand why you want the storms in there, from a thematic point of view, but they don't really seem to add much to the game. My advice would be to leave them out, at least for the time being, and see if you can make the game working without them. You can add them later if you feel the game would be more interesting with them, but make sure they actually serve a purpose then and that they are not just a randomly added element.

Good luck!

Maybe there would also be more concrete goal to the game. I mentioned this idea in Seth's 3 Kingdoms before.

There would be tiles on the board that would represent some kind of cities (or something) and players would try to protect these which give them more points. The Shiners would go after these cities and try to destory them. You could either protect them, attack the Shiners going for the cites, or attack other "real" players going or protecting a city themselves. Each would give you a different amount of VP's.

Earth is a toxic mess, right? What's the point of battling for a toxic mess? How about something like this instead: Your goal is to restore as much greenery to Earth as you can. Opposing you in this effort are Bad Guys. (These might be NPC units like your "Shiners," or you might let some of your players be the Bad Guys, whose goal is to make a bigger mess of Earth because they're aliens who prefer it that way.)

Now you have a theme-driven goal: create Land tiles, getting VPs every time you succeed, and perhaps more VPs at end of game for each Land tile you created and kept that way. Bad Guys (if they are players) get the same deal, except that their goal is to create Toxic Waste instead of Land.

Other benefits: the conflict will prevent too much of the board from becoming uncrossable Toxic Waste, so the board will remain viable to the end of the game. And Good Guy players will have to choose between converting Toxic Waste to Land to get VPs, or leaving it in place as a resource supply.

I do see one problem: if players play Bad Guys, you need an even number of players to balance Good against Bad, or else some clever idea to balance a three-player game.

On another topic, I agree with others that you need to reduce the length of a turn. Give players fewer things that they can do in each turn, and force them to make difficult choices. Another possibility is to let each player build units, then let each player move units, and so on. This breaks up the big, multi-part turns into small single-part turns. Shorter downtime, and players can respond more readily to the actions of their opponents.

I've been working on a light wargame of my own with interesting similarities to yours. In mine, the planet's terraformed ecology and weather systems are breaking down, and the colonists are warring to control the remaining arable lands and to seize control of the government in order to be in charge of the reclamation. My game (Brimstone) is all about the war, but playtesters have suggested to me that reclaiming the badlands (my board has a lot of swamp and desert tiles) would be cool and enhance the theme. I'm not going to do it, but I see no reason why you shouldn't. :-)

I'm hardly qualified to make TWO comments (I've been farting around for two years on a mediocre idea in a dead-horse genre [fantasy]) so it may not be in your best interest to take my comments too seriously. Despite that, our coincidental emphasis of items from zaiga's post indicates to me that we're on the same page, but I perhaps have not been clear enough or persuasive enough. Or perhaps I'm just wrong. Either way, I hope I'm not belaboring points you're willfully disregarding for whatever reason. So I'll say this stuff again and then shut-up about it.

These two items you've isolated touch on the same two points I tried to emphasize in my earlier post:
1) Interaction: Your game seems to want to define interaction as fighting. People don't interact that way because they're distracted with collecting resources, building units, and controlling storms.
2) Scoring: Your game, as I understand it, has defined everything it needs in terms of game-end and winner: the game ends when one side is exterminated, and you win if it wasn't your side. Rewarding someone for having a lot of units encourages building units but discourages using (and possibly losing) them in combat. I think people don't like the scoring because it has nothing to do with winning as the game wants to define it.

Your idea of an overhaul is probably the direction I would go -- not with mechanisms or gameplay, but with storyline and purpose. Even in chess, the purpose is to check the king. What is the purpose of your game? To me, the evidence suggests that you've created a total elimination game. Nothing wrong with that, except that I don't think that's what you want. I don't think there are any quick fixes to these problems without first more clearly defining the purpose of the game.

It is seriously out of order for me to be making any more comments. I just don't have that much of a clue about this stuff...

I think this would be fine. I don't think you need a complete re-theme with paths and forests and whatever. I think you need a purpose. I think controlling cities is as acceptable as any other purpose; many games use the area control idea. My point is, if there isn't something for armies to fight over, then a wargame is simply me-against-you and the extermination and domination elements are what remain. And those are also fine. And I think that's where the game is right now. (I mentioned earlier that extermination is really what your game wants, but domination is also relevent for Tempest because players may not have time to exterminate all opponents due to the forced endgame rule.) And I just get the impression it's not what you're intending to do.

Your game has a lot of conditions for awarding VPs (all trying to gauge the relative success of a player's ending situation), but none of the conditions adequately convey what success means. If Tempest's victory conditions embraced its current design, I think it would only need two victory conditions: A) exterminate all opponents before the game ends, or B) award 1 VP for every opponent destroyed -- highest VP count wins. Do you want people to buy fighting units and put them to good use? Try that.

Trading does not seem like the best match as a complementary mechanism to combat. A yet to be introduced co-op element in Tempest would remedy that, I guess.

When working out what a game "is supposed to be", having a few "major" overhauls is okay ... at least they're not as bad as "complete" overhauls!! ;)

From our previous handful of direct chats on this design, and from what I've read on your prep for this GDW session, I have the following thoughts ...

1> Tweak your backstory a bit. If you want the major earth changes to happen in the near-future, make the date 2012 -- this seems to be a year pointed-to by cataclysmists, since that's when the ancient Mayan calendar runs out. Also, borrowing on what some of the other folks have been writing here, you might want the cause of the nuclear exchange to be a previously-unknown alien race who manipulate the people of earth into it. This would provide something that alien race would greatly benefit from -- perhaps, they require a high level of radiation in order to have enjoyable living conditions? This would also give you some "sides" for the players to take -- alien versus human. (Yup, it's been done before, but can be done again, if you do it well.) The humans ran away to Mars or the moon or simply remote regions on the earth or wherever and are now mounting expeditions back to reclaim the lost planet. The aliens, obviously, want to hold on to this new paradise they've just created.

2> Based upon your backstory, you should setup needed units and resources for each side, a way for them to get/make them, and the costs involved. Each side could also have differing special powers. The important decisions should be where to pay the costs now in order to setup resources and/or units for future turns. Also, based upon your backstory, you should be able to have objectives for each side -- these can possibly be different ... such as the humans having to push the aliens off of areas of the map and then bio-cleanse those areas. The aliens would probably want to retain control and/or grow their areas held and destroy the inbound humans. You could even provide different scenarios with different objectives.

3> Combat should be simplified and tied-in to the resources/units/costs balance. Do you have units that are cheap and easy to build? Bingo -- you now have weak cannon fodder that you can send in hordes against the enemy. Do you have powerful but expensive units? Hmmmm ... might be the best thing to send into battle, but what if it's lost?

I know you like the combat mechanic from "Bluntrock", but it might not really fit here -- unless the cards uses in combat are also used to pay for other things, such as raising resources, building units, or moving things around -- which has already been suggested. (I actually have to work on balancing that mechanic within "Bluntrock" before I prep that for P&P release.)

4> Storms ... I think they're cool, but you probably will want to get the underlying mechanics working together first. Then the storms can be the big, magical "game changer" mechanic that will add the gravy over the game's meat & potatoes. Obviously, with a name like "tempest", having a storm creation/control mechanic would be a requirement, imo -- just the concept by itself is really powerful. But you'll need the "rest of the game" to hold together first.

Okay ... I think that's all of the top-of-my-head thoughts that I've had. I think you have a strong concept here, but may need to take a couple of runs at it before you find the best heading. Don't be afraid to backoff from a path in order to take a new look at it from a completely different direction. Figure out what the core nugget of the game you want to have is, then keep whittling away. ;)

-Bryk

In Tempest there are 2 stats Strength and Defense. If I were to use your combat solution those would no longer be needed. Am I reading it wrong?

I was thinking Strength is for attacking, Defense for defending. Perhaps you could do away with one stat and just have one stat for both attacking and defending, further simplifying the combat system, but I like the idea of a unit having different stats for attacking and defending.