Well I'm pretty new here so I'm trying to bring some order to the creative process of board game design to help me in designing games.
1st - I need to acquire knowledge of the complete subject.
- Seen a lot of Rahdo vids on YouTube to revisit the scene after a 35 to 40 year gap... things have changed a lot from the days of Kingmaker :)
- Purchased some of the best games (to my mind) and in the process of playing them many times. (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert, Roll for the Galaxy and Paperback)
- Browsed Amazon books to get some ideas on good board game design books to get. Also solicited help from my initial Welcome message to BGDF. Already purchased 'Dice Games Properly Explained' by Reiner Knizia.
2nd - I need to organize the process
- Thought of using software called Scrivener to help pull together all thoughts and research material into one place, for each game idea.
- Also (coming from a software development background - 28 years experience) I thought that there seemed to be a correlation between components of a game and objects as in Object Orientated Analysis. Design and Programming. That is, an Object having attributes (data fields), methods (actions they perform in the game) and relationships (between other game objects). I wonder if anyone has abstracted this in a similar way to assist in games design.
- Now I am thinking if play-testing can be automated by creating a software program that literally plays through 1000's of complete games per second, checking every game permutation based on game rules, mechanics and probabilty permutations. Then I thought, try to discover how many possible unique game permutations you can get from playing Forbidden Desert. Initial feeling is that this will be huge number because of tile layout permutations coupled with move actions and the storm deck (especially when deck causes tiles to move into more permutations).
Well, that's enough ideas for now lol :)
Comments
Forbidded Desert Game Permutations
Ok, so I sat down and started to calculate ALL possible game permutations but (as expected) stopped pretty quickly when I was blown away by the numbers... they are beyond huge!!!
2 Players
6 Adventures Cards
4 Flying Machine Parts
1 Flying Machine Model
12 Equipment Cards
31 Storm Cards
24 Board Tiles (double-sided)
48 Sand Markers (double-sided)
1 Sand Storm Meter
Adventurer Cards = 6 x 5 = 30 combinations
Equipment Cards = 12! = 479,001,600 combinations
Storm Cards = 31! = 8.22283865417792281772556288e+33 combinations
Board Tile (faced down)* = 24! = 620448401733239439360000 combinations
* excludes empty tile space for eye of storm
So I stopped here, scratching my head and wondering "How on earth do you FULLY playtest a game like this?"...
Mind maps
Have you tried using mind maps to help put things into chunks that you can move around & link to multiple other chunks? I use them so I can map all the linkages & make sure I test them when I make changes to stats etc, that way I don't miss (as often) those little ones that only happen occasionally. When it works it can cut down on the number of edge cases.
I find that dumping them clears my head up so I can look at the visual representation & find other things I wasn't able to see before.
I have done some sort of a
I have done some sort of a similar (100000 times) play testing. But then I only tested certain situations. To see what the actual numbers are in regards to win-draw-loss.
It helps with balancing parts of the game. Not the complete game itself. For that, even a simulator is too simple.
In that case, I too suggest a mind map. Actually, make a physical map of how the game works. Than you can test smaller parts, with less combinations. And combine the results to a bigger whole.
I believe...
I think you can acquire some great ideas by playing bad games as well. Bad games aren't necessarily unusable, it's just games that started out with great intentions, but just got lost along the way. I truly believe there are even greater gems in some horrible games than there are in great games (everyone wants to make a game like the great game).
Yeah, it's a grind playing through those games, but I don't think great game ideas are only in great games.
Mind Maps and 'Not so good' games
Never thought of using mind maps but it totally makes sense, thanks for the advice.
I understand that much can be learned from many games regardless of how good they are. With a limited budget and coming into the scene again, I guess I wanted to do some research and be selective when buying board games. I can definitely see how this could be done by joining a play testing group where you cannot select what games you are given to test. I will certainly be on the lookout for this when I join such a group.
Look at conventions for the bad games to try for 'free'
I'm not sure what it is like where you are but getting to conventions isn't always that easy here as distances are quite large but when I can I got to conventions no matter what size they are because they always have games libraries. This way I can play a lot of games for the cost of the entry which is usually way cheaper than buying all the games I want to try. It's especially useful for trying 'bad' games or ones that may be good but are not in a style I would normally get to the table back at home.