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Famine: Inception to First Playtest

Player Card

I've made a couple topics about specific mechanics in this game and now that I've actually had a playtest session of the game I thought it time to share the game with some people, hopefully get some feedback.

For starters let's begin with the initial concept. Any board gamer knows that when you start the game you start with very little and you have to build up your empire/city/army/money/etc. This is just standard fare. You are always growing your game state. And in particular, a game like catan for example, has you constantly collecting resources so that you can afford stuff in the game. I wanted a game where players started with resources (or at least some resource), and then spent the game trying to lose the least.

Since the mechanic was bottom up I had to think top down for a while and come up with a theme before really progressing. At first blush it was a horror-survival game where you had a limited amount of ammo with no way to gain more and the last man standing wins. It was a little trashy, but a game idea I might come back to. Next it was a space colony game where your Oxygen scrubbers were broken and you had to try to survive until rescues. Again, hard to really build around.

So finally we came to a tribe of people trying to survive a famine in their land. They knew the famine was coming and have some food stockpiled, but not enough for what they'll need. I had to get a little creative and some creative writing later it came down to this blurb:

"The mystics foretell of a 10 year famine to cover the land, a punishment for the sins of your ancestors. You are leader of a small tribe, one of many in this land, and you have spent the summer stockpiling food for the hardships to come. You have aspirations to one day become the largest tribe and possibly unite the lands under your rule. But for now you must survive the famine…"

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So the idea of the game is that taking no actions uses less food than taking actions. But taking actions might give you a leg up when it matters to survive certain random effects or even other tribes. So the player is forced to decide and balance what is more valuable: now or later. Or even better yet, "when do I try to push for the lead?" If you try to go too soon you run the risk of running out food at the end of the game, if you wait you may have lost the chance to catch up. This dynamic of balancing "action vs idle" and "now vs later" is central to the game.

So at my initial mock up I had players start with 100 food (see my previous thread about large pools of resources) and no way to make food outside of one-off effects. This worked well but it was very isolationist, and it was basically a game of solitaire, not what I wanted. So the idea came to allow you to make an warriors and go and try and steal food from other players. This was nifty I thought, but after some good counsel I decided against this model. For one I really wanted to make a more pure euro game than I have in the past (I'm very much a war gamer), and two it was described correctly as "ameritrashy." Basically you rolled dice against each other (with some modifiers) and the biggest die wins the food! Really boring, and caused problems of ganging up the weakest tribe. All bad things in any game, let alone euro games.

Then my aforementioned good counsel had the idea to allow players to compete for resources directly. This worked great for the theme of the game. Players weren't in direct competition with each other but were still competing for the food they needed to survive the ten turn game. This fixed two major issues for the game. First, it allowed me to start players with less food (initially lowered to 50, through testing lowered again to 40), so I didn't have the issue of having quite as large of a pool of resources, and since I could using some math figure out on average how much food each player would be gathering each game, adding that to the starting figure gives me an idea of how much food an average player will have (even if starting the game a player doesn't know what they will exactly gain or spend). Secondly, it allows the game to be much more dynamic. Since now players have to try and earn their food the idea of when to invest and when to save becomes crucial from even the early stages of the game.

With this change I ran the risk of ruining the theme of the game though, the "don't spend the game collecting resources" idea that I began with. So I was careful to do a few things. For starters, it is incredibly unlikely for any one turn to gain more food than you spend. In seasons where there is a good gathering phase it's possible, but still highly unlikely (a lot of good dice rolls need to go your way). And to combat this even further, as the game progresses there is less and less food to harvest. So early in the game you may make 5-6 food per player a hunt, where as late in the game the same number of players are competing for as little as 5-6 total! This adds great flavor and sense of urgency to the game, something I enjoy in board games (a sense of escalation as the game nears the end, some games just end with no real reason: e.g. Carcasonne).

So the ground work for the main mechanic is laid, the math has been run and it works well on the spreadsheets, now to fleshing out the rest of the game, in brief. Players have civilians that they use to take actions. Each action you take costs extra food compared to not taking the action. These actions include producing secondary resources (stone and wood), building structures with said collected resources, or training to become hunters (which go gather food). Structures are the main way to win the game. They grant special effects as well as grant VP at the end of the game, but man do they cost a lot of up front food to construct. And this is one of my favorite mechanics, for every two civilians that you leave idle, you make a civilian at the end of the turn. So you aren't simply choosing idle/active. There are actual reasons outside of being frugal to not take actions. But if you do this you run the risk of becoming too populous and eating through your food reserves. I tried to make a game with lots to balance, but never feel overwhelming since you can always set short term goals (e.g. "I want to build a storehouse" or "I want to gain 2 more hunters").

So the game was ready to test (after a few card design issues). I spent $17 at a craft shop purchasing wooden cubes and colored them with sharpies (very high budget), about $2 on paper and ink for the cards needed, and all together about 3 hours of cutting, coloring, and pasting to build the prototype. All in all it was a great lesson that even a game with lots of components (I have like 250 wooden cubes of various size), can be prototyped very cheaply.

I attached an image of a player card in use, and will post some more pictures of the game in action. I failed to get any pictures of the hunt phase of the game, but I will next time we play. The testing went great, and the best feeling of all was that by the 2nd turn I had players who a) aren't boardgamers at all, b) never played a game like this, and c) never played this game in particular helping each other play through a turn, and all I did was recount the rules of the game from memory to them in 2 minutes. So it seems easy to pick up and learn, with rules that are intuitive enough that even non gamers grasp and retain them quickly, and at the end of it all, they were all very satisfied and wanted to play again.

Color this designer elated. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, or want to possibly help me test a game blind I would love your feed back. Thanks for reading (if you didn't just skim to this part and read the last sentence, than that's okay too I guess, it was long).

Comments

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Awesome

Sounds like a great game concept. When can I play?

First if all, I really like

First if all, I really like the concept. It seems like a fresh take on resource collection/management with ever increasing player urgency and tension. The diminishing food resources is an extra tasty(cheesy pun, sorry) mechanic that melds perfectly with your theme. Kudos to you.

You mentioned that building structures was the main mechanism to win. Themewise wouldn't having your people survive the famine be more important than your buildings? I was just thinking that you could apply your concept of a diminishing pool to your tribes people as well as its resources. Perhaps this is already built into your game. Anyways, just a thought and good gaming!

The idea is that the winner

The idea is that the winner of the game is the player with the strongest tribe at the end. And so the victory points at the end of the game counts how much food you were able to save, how much population you have, and how many structure you have. Which in total I think make a good measuring stick for how to compare which tribe of nomads is better than the other, or at least which is better at surviving a famine.

You could probably not win the game without building structures, since they are permanent points, where as civilians and food is more fleeting, but still matter. So you can score a lot of points by being frugal and having a high population, but unless you have the permanent settlements to really make your tribe special, you'll still lose.

Plus structures provide crucial benefits to players, so not building them doesn't really make sense.

Thanks for the interest guys.

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