[GDS] MARCH 2014 "Make Mine Random" - Critiques

Congrats to the winners! Here are some notes from my review of the entries. I actually wrote a bit more than this in my notes, but wanted to focus these critiques on the most salient aspects of the games that most influenced my decision to vote or not vote for each. Take these comments with a grain of salt, as I'm sure that even the least promising sounding ideas could be developed in really fantastic games.

Critter Scramble - Suspicious about mixing a timer with use of spinners. Also not a big fan of the grab-as-many-as-you-can dexterity element.

Time is Money, Money is Fame - Would have liked to have seen the spinner used for more than tracking time.

Bubbling Bees - It wasn't clear to me whether the bees could actually block the spinner from spinning past them. And honestly I wasn't sure whether that would make the concept more or less fun.

Hostile Robot - I really liked the idea of having interchangeable modules within the spinners. Less excited about the take-that battle system built around this mechanic.

Black Hole Vortex - Sounded too roll-and-move-ish, or I guess spin-and-move-ish to me.

Arctic Dissection - This is the only medal I voted for that didn't end up in the top three. The cut and choose style mechanic sounded interesting, although I did have some concerns that a Dominant Strategy might appear after a few plays(?).

Gaja Moon - I thought this seemed really promising, but I am certainly biased by having designed it :)

Word Drop - Seemed like it might be very hard to strategize about where to place cards around the spinner, which seemed like the most novel part of the design.

Do or Dial - Reminded me of math dice, but with dials. I liked the randomized challenge/goal aspect of this idea the most.

Fishing Float - Seemed like a decent game built around a somewhat questionable mechanic to me... I'm not sure about the idea of using a spinner as a dexterity element, especially in how this design ties that spin to both type and number of fish caught.

Tornado Town - Great pairing of theme, and somewhat reminded me of the game Survive. A well deserved win.

Warriors of Spinaria - Spinner seems to automate a war-like battle mechanic that is further complicated by a bit of extra math.

Exo Prime - I really like how the random spin result can trigger multiple destinations that workers are working in. The cards that help manipulate the spin result are another nice additions. Another well deserved win, IMO.

Fate and the Wheel of Fortune - I'm not a big fan of how this game constantly beats players up, and only provides them with limited protection from those beatings via cards.

If I had to use one word to describe this GDS, I'd say "dumbstruck". I mean, here I am entering the contest for the very first time, and I get the most medals and the highest score to boot. I was literally speechless when I read the results. Thanks to everyone who voted for my entry!

I'll keep my personal thoughts on my entry to myself for the moment so as not to influence the feedback. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say. Don't be afraid to give negative feedback. As long as it's given with good intentions and some form of politeness, I can take it :)

I like that you put effort into analyzing spinners for this challenge. You came up with the same observations as I did. After that we both took very different paths. I thought you had an interesting idea on the use of the spinner. The roulette wheel style of the game makes things interesting and fun. Of course, this function could be replaced with a polyhedral dice, but I think the spinner makes this mechanic work better. Tension will build as the spinner is slowing down, just like in a casino. I suppose it would be better to have a roulette / life style spinner for dramatic effect.
The big issue I had with this game was the weather control mechanic. Thematically, you are saying that a species has the technology to occupy, terraform, colonize and exploit another planet and control the weather. But they can’t control the machine that ‘controls’ weather? To make this more thematic consider changing the concept of the spinner from weather control machine to hand of god. OR try an ant farm theme, where you send off workers, etc to create a large ant colony. As the human overseer you would also have more control over the weather than you would by gong to another planet. Just a thought.

Good use of the spinner, both the changing of tops, and the random landing spot. Just missed out on bronze for me. I think there is too much randomness for the type of game.

Tornado Town:

This was my silver medal. I thought this was a great concept...and did work very well with the spinner. I agree w/the movement critique (moving in groups/solo) that it was inverted. I would love to see a balance form between movement and shelter, i.e. once shelter is found, only the group that finds it can hide there. So while smaller groups could find shelter faster, if you break up, you have to find more shelters, where a large group could all hide the same place but it might take longer for them to find it.

Aside from that, the violence aspect was a turn off, but I'm sure could be adapted. A little less Cormac McCarthy...otherwise, it sounded like a fun game with some interesting decisions to be made.

Exo Prime:

This game - for me, anyway - might have been the victim of the word count restriction; it didn't medal for me. I feel like it's the start of a concept that, once developed, would be really complex and interesting, and I like the way you really looked at the mechanic of a spinner. I am a huge fan of the idea of being able to change the spinner.

The shortcomings I saw here were that there *were* no rules - it was just the concept without an explanation of how it works. So I really felt like I had no idea of how the game play would actually work and whether it would be fun/challenging/balanced and couldn't evaluate.

That said, I would be an avid follower of the Exo Prime Game Journal.

Ok, I am not sure you understand what is meant by abstract game. An abstract game has no theme and its mechanics do no lend itself to theme. Your game has the deep space theme and, therefore, is not an abstract game. The gravity theme makes sense as you have no control over gravity just as you have no choice in strategy for this game. And I think that’s the hardest part of this game to deal with.
The division between the randomness of the players moving towards the center and the other players moving wherever they want is a little hard to understand. Are the players sucked towards the black hole also able to move one space? How would anyone actually get knocked out?
You will also have to do a lot of prep work to make sure that players can’t just move back and forth towards points.

Four of the games this month scored 15 or 16 out of 20 points in my scoring system and I took a closer look at all of them to determine who got my medals. In the end Exo Prime received Bronze.

I liked how the spinner had multiple effects once and how things deteriorated over time with each depletion of the card pile. It makes perfect sense that the weather would deteriorate when it is constantly being pulled around and influenced by the different players.

It lost some points on theme, because I'm not a fan of space games in general. And I can't help but think it might have ended higher if the entry included some specific rules and gameplay rather than the lighter pitch it has become. Please continue developing this. With some more work, I think this could be a fun game. Also, maybe the ant colony theme suggested earlier is worth considering. I'd like the idea of something like this since it's a relatively rare theme.

Scoring:
Spinner: 4
Theme: 3
Mechanics: 4
Clarity: 4

Black Hole Vortex

I think the use of the spinner to draw a sector in towards the black hole works, but I think the game needs to be more centred around the idea of avoiding being sucked in to the black hole. There ought to be more of a dynamic where you are trying to stay away from the vortex while forcing the other players towards it.

Hostile Robot

I liked the idea of cutting wires to disable the robot and the use of different spinner configurations. I wasn't sold on the hostile part. What if each player has their own robot? This could add the dynamic of choosing between sabotaging someone else's robot versus repairing your own. The players could earn points for being able to perform more complex movements and maybe have the option to upgrade the robot to do even more.

Neither one of these got my medals. Tornado town got my silver and Exo prime my gold. Sorry I missed that day of commentary!

I still quite liked one aspect of these:

Black hole vortex

I liked the spinner hitting the pieces and making them fly off the board. Granted this will probably mean players whacking it as hard as they can if none of their pieces are in range, but it was a unique use of the spinner as a physical object rather than just a randomizer. I'm quite biased of course because my entry approached spinners in a similar way.

The reason I didn't vote for it is because everything else felt quite random and undefined. Why do you even have your own cubes if all cubes on a space move? Do you take actions with any person's cubes if you land on a space? Do the actions really have much impact other than moving cubes towards or away the spinner? And is that really a choice since you'd obviously want to move yours away and others' towards, or if you can always score points. The options of movng other player's pieces sideways also seems largely irrelevant because whether they get moved or not in the future is random anyway.

Hostile Robot

I liked the semi-cooperative nature of this, and that you could ignore that if you wanted and just try to disarm the robot without anyone taking over a certain amount of damage.

Then again, that is also the part that I think needs to change to earn a vote. SO random. A player spinner used only at the start of the game? Seems superfluous, but not a detriment. I liked drawing the random insert, but it's still random - your one of two choices in the game is whether to spin on the current insert or the one you drew. Assuming they share some colors but the distributions are different there would be a right choice each time since you are probably aiming for a particular wire or wires to cut.

Or are you?

Since the wire color you can cut is almost random, and the robot function that activates is random, it doesn't matter which wire you cut. Basically, you can't predict or influence which function activates so why deactivate one over another? This means that it doesn't matter what wire you cut so long as you don't spin a color that is no longer available. And that makes a clear choice (to pick an insert with the most colors that are available to cut).

In the end I liked this game as aimed at kids that are learning to make decisions in games and know their colors. They can feel like they are making choices and feel the tension of that choice when spinning the Robot Function spinner, even if their choice didn't matter much.

Arctic Dissection

I have to be honest. I would need to see this game in action to understand what is going on. The description feels kind of vague to me from the beginning. It implies there are several pairs of countries and the players just pick two of them. I'm not sure if this matters. The country thing seems like window dressing. I like the idea of picking and dividing regions but I cannot visualize this game play. Most importantly I don't understand what is on the spinner or how many regions there are on the spinner. I think it is probably a decent game, but I would need to see this in action to totally "get" it.

Fate and the Wheel of Fortune

Okay, I'm not going to critique my game, but I want to add a couple notes just to explain my thought process.

I understand the idea of dealing with random disasters destroying your populations over time doesn't initially seem like fun, but I think it is somewhat like life. We are all put here to die eventually some of us sooner than others. The idea behind the Fates is we all have some length of time and then we are done and that was what I was trying to capture in the game albeit through disaster. The player functions as a demi-god who is protecting his population as much as possible which I think mitigates the disaster marathon.

I considered and still consider adding action cards that allow populations to regrow just like they mitigate or aggravate disasters. The cards could do anything and my thought was to use them to balance the randomness of fate (the spins). Also, there could be cancel cards as well that deflect the altering of an action.

One idea I do like and will incorporate is the idea of having a class of action cards that would act as interrupts and allow the person to alter the spinner by moving it one or two spaces and averting the disaster or possibly ending the game by hitting that third peaceful period. Thanks to Sugar Pill Studios mechanic idea in their game for that concept. I really didn't consider it in my original design..

That was my thought process and of the three games I created for these showdowns, I have to admit I really like the potential for this one.

Arctic Dissection
Ok, I like the idea of the theme. The Arctic Circle is a very interesting area historically. It is actually patrolled by a joint venture of Canada and USA in this hemisphere. Ships as far away as Japan have tried fishing in the area. The history of the Northwest passage is also an interesting one. Did you know that magnetic north is actually in Canada. True North is the rotational axis. I encourage everyone to do a little research on the area. I think I will be doing some rereading on the subject as well. So, it’s a theme I like, but this game doesn’t do it justice.
Now, the actual game: I don’t really understand the map that is being used. How many “territories” are there? How do you define a territory. How do you use the spinner to pick two spaces to place the pawns? I don’t know if I am missing something in the game, but it seems like this is just a coin flip game with a map. Is there something in the scoring that I am missing?

This game scored 3 out of 5 on each of my 4 judging criteria, which was not enough to qualify for a medal.

I liked the idea of theming the game around a vortex, but I disliked how the spinner could throw pieces back out of the "black hole" center; thematically speaking, I wasn't expecting anything to escape. This could prolong the game more than it really needs. Make it definitive. If it's out, it's out.

Secondly, the option to move any piece sideways or down depending on the number spun was something I didn't like much. Most of the time, an opponent's piece will be moved down.

I think this game would benefit from a modular board where you can build the board from different rings so the tactics to get on (or around) specific spaces is different each time.

This game narrowly missed out on a medal because all the medal winners had 15 or 16 points, but this doesn't mean it's a bad game.

I found the theme a little weaker than most in this challenge, but the idea to place a spinner on the north pole and using it to determine moves was genius. I like the idea of chosing between points and keeping your turn.

I had similar problems as other mentioned with the clarity of the entry. Otherwise it might have received 1 or 2 points more for clarity.

Overall, a great entry. I'm looking forward to see what this can become with some nice materials and additional artwork. Maybe use some globe-like structure and magnets?

Score: 14 out of 20
Spinner: 4
Theme: 3
Mechanics: 4
Clarity: 3

Arctic Dissection

This got my Silver! I really liked the theme and the mechanic fitted really well. I think that it cleverly shows the political back-and-forth and has very simple risk-reward thinking.

With regard to the issue of the number of territories, I imagined it as being more 'free-form', so that there are no defined sectors, expect for those as defined by the black tokens.

My only query is what happens if there are two "Canada" territories next to each other - do you remove the black token between the two to make one territory?

It was a very close call for my gold medal but Tornado Town had more to it. However, the simplicity is what attracted me to this.

I could see this a a nice filler game in my house :)

Fate and the Wheel of Fortune

This was an interesting idea of destruction. However, I thought it was just a bit too random with so many spinners and random cards. Perhaps, a way of adding some depth would be turn it into a bit of a deck builder, so each player has their own deck of cards (or just a set few cards and the player chooses when to play each card, such as "Improper Vaccine", etc.) i.e. which card do I play now and which do I save...

Also, it would probably work with dice the spinners, or even cards (like territories in Risk 2210).

Overall, it has potential, so thumbs up.