Yeah, so, the old House of Slack site was hacked. I think I was running a version of Ghost that had a vulnerability, some bot found it and exploited it, and it nuked the entire site and replaced it with two copies of the same spam blog post. All the text and images were gone.

That totally sucks!

It sure does! There’s an asymmetry around spam (and basically all sorts of anti-social online behaviors) where being a bad citizen (and gaining from it, even if only in tiny increments) is orders of magnitude easier than defending against the behaviors as well as repairing the damage. The site was nuked by some automated process that was launched by somebody, probably running on stolen compute. It can be automated because the process it goes through is mechanical and the same every time: find a site that it knows how to exploit, blast it to smithereens, and then plant the same rancid billboard it always does. Repeat forever. No person has to do anything once the bot is launched. Meanwhile, the site owners are all doing their own thing. Recovering my site costs me, a person, time to reconstruct things back to the unique state it was before.

In my case, the recovery process was frought. I discovered that I fucked up creating my automated backups, so the most recent backup that I had was missing all of the posts on Napoleon, Blown Apart. Those posts were available through the Internet Archive (love you guys!), so it wasn’t all totally lost, but it meant more work to go grab that stuff and fix up the links in those posts. So it was a bigger hassle than it needed to be. It all led me to thinking about doing this stuff differently.

OK, what did you do?

Well, I didn’t want to go back to Ghost. I did like Ghost - Markdown is nice, their editor is pretty good, the tagging stuff worked well, publishing with it worked well for me, the email stuff worked well, etc. But the site admin side of things was pretty miserable. That’s probably on me, but the process of self-hosting was always kind of painful, upgrading never seemed to go well, I was constantly having to monkey with file permissions and things to get the command line tool happy, etc. It had enough friction that I would just put off upgrading, and, well. We know how that story ended. So I wanted to do something different.

The previous version was actually the fourth version of the site. I had a very old static site with an old provider, then I ran things on three different versions of Ghost, all running self-hosted. The static version was fine, but the tools were kind of primitive and that’s why I ended up looking to Ghost. I wanted something more modern, the Markdown stuff seemed helpful, and fuck Wordpress. I don’t regret trying out Ghost, but at this point, it was time to go with a different way. I actually kind of wanted the old static site experience.

This is when I thought about the very good Infrequently Noted blog by Alex Russell. In particular, his piece on alternatives to React, part of his series on how the frameworks people use to develop for the web are destructive and wasteful. In that piece, he talks about several static site generators as strong alternatives for informational sites. That’s what I am writing here. It’s not interactive and never will be. It’s just me writing my thoughts, and hopefully people reading them. If people have input, they can reach me directly, comment on rules, whatever. But it’s just a static site. So maybe one of these would work.

I read some about several of them, and Hugo seemed like it would fit the bill. The truth is, my demands here aren’t crazy, and most of these generators would probably work fine. But reading a bit of the docs, it seemed like Hugo made sense, so good enough. I could re-use the Markdown from the previous version of the site and mostly could get things put together quickly, hopefully. I looked at some site themes, picked a nice and minimal one, and started converting the old site.

I had to extract the markdown from the old posts from the JSON backup, add the missing posts in, fix up all the links to match the new site structure, get the images fixed up, and figure out some nuances of Hugo to get things working properly. All told, it probably took me maybe 10 hours or so? I wasn’t really counting as it was mostly kind of fun learning a new system and working through things. In the end, I think I have everything working again, but some stuff might still be messed up. If you happen to notice anything, let me know!

How is it looking now?

Well, there are some big advantages. One, the site is now just a github repo. I don’t have to worry about backups or anything, because it’s just a ball of source. That’s very cool. And I can still write in Markdown, so the process of writing a post is basically the same as it was before. Neat. Publishing is now all set up to automatically update whenever I push to GitHub, so that’s pretty cool too.

But also, the site is just a static site. Not only is there not some backend rendering things, there’s no interactivity at all. Not even Javascript. It’s just html and css. Pure web content. I think that’s kind of important. Things that are just information should be created this way if they can be. It’s so fast and pure. My friend Jack Grimes has an open source project called Free Website that also gets at this: the basics of web technologies work and work well. You don’t need a whole bunch of stuff layered on top of it to get something usable. And it’ll be in your control. Is Hugo the right solution for everybody? No, probably not. But it’s worth the time to try and figure out if some kind of system like it is.

Anyway, the site is back up, and this is the first actually new article posted here. I’m going to try and keep publishing here, and I hope the new version lasts for a while. I haven’t yet figured out email publishing, but I’ll get that worked out soon enough. But RSS still works in the meantime, and I’ll post links on Bluesky. I will probably also want to convert Five Random Songs over, which will take more time. In the meantime, that site is also turned off until I’m sure it won’t get hacked as well.

You can read the articles I’ve written about the development of the game here, read the latest rules here, and download a print-and-play of the cards here and here (both decks are needed to play).

When I last left that design, about ten years ago, I had created three major versions of the game. I didn’t actually end up documenting them all here, because I was pretty discouraged with how things were going. The last post I put up here was after I put together a full prototype of the first major version, with a full set of content. This was a bad idea, probably - I put a lot of effort into all of that, and it turned out the game didn’t really work.

There were parts that worked great, though. In particular, the combination of class + skill resulting in a character was neat, the way that you had a pool of dice that were your health was cool, the way they could either absorb damage or be spent for special abilities was a very nice resource tradeoff. The combat system, based (very) loosely on Cribbage was working pretty well for the first fights. So what was the problem? Scaling.

The way that basically any dungeon crawling game works is that everything gets bigger. The characters get more powerful, the monsters get more dangerous, the loot gets shinier. KMATTS is no different. I don’t want to buck the conventions of the expected fiction. I want to make a game that gives players some real resouirce management challenges, sort of the same kind of feeling as a classic roguelike, but in a very familiar package. Anyway, in KMATTS, you pile up loot and become more powerul, resulting in rolling more dice and fighting monsters with more dice. But that’s where the problems came in.

The way combat worked, roughly, is you roll a pile of dice, the other side rolls a pile of defense dice, the defense dice cancel matching attack dice, then you score the roll. Echoing Cribbage, you score damage for pairs, for runs of three, and for two dice that sum to 7. But, as your dice pool gets larger, you get more and more combinations, and kind of any die becomes useful in some way. Defense dice also frequently match, so they don’t really have much impact. It just became a chore, and the number of dice kind of blurred out the importance of any one die. The central limit theorem hauled everything into the same groove in the last couple fights, and it just made you wonder what was the point.

Well, I tried some alternate systems, two more major revisions, and neither of them worked either. So onto the shelf it went, massive pile of content and all, and I just stopped thinking about it. Until recently. I had a bit of inspiration for the original, Cribbage-y combat system (which was the most fun of the three major revisions). Specifically, what if runs were all that mattered, but length of the run in particular? Your runs would be more fragile, so defense would be more significant, and you could differentiate characters by how many runs they scored. You would need some luck to get a full run of 6s, but it would be a big result. It would still feel like dice combos were critical, but you wouldn’t get that slot machine thing of scoring thirty different small combos and the tedium of counting it all up.

It seemed promising enough to try out. And so I did. There are rules available. There’s a Screentop prototype. I’m back, baby!

By the way: do not play this. It’s going to be bad. This thing is going to need a lot of revision. But, dammit, it’s nice to be working on it again.

First, the new platform. I had been using playingcards.io, which I really do love. It’s so easy to get things working with automations, it’s a fantastic platform for getting a card game going quickly. I certainly had no trouble getting an expansion for a game of mine working on there quickly. However, I did run into a problem with PCIO for playtesting this game, which is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to model the Reserve in it. It only has the notion of one hand per player, and there’s no object you can place on the table that hides things from other players, because stuff on the table isn’t owned. So, alas, it just wasn’t going to work.

Time to find an alternative. You couldn’t pay me to use Tabletop Simulator for anything, so that’s out. I’ve used Tabletopia before, and the best thing I can say about it is that it’s not TTS. However, I think anything with physics in it is just braindead for this kind of thing, resulting in a miserable playing experience. I had heard nice things about Screentop, so I decided to give it a try. Short version: it’s pretty neat, and certainly can model the ownership stuff that I need. The documentation is pretty sparse, but I found my way through it. I’m not sure how to make it pretty yet or anything, but I think it’s functional.

That sorted, it was time to actually get some updates for the four-player game in. I always knew it was going to be a partnership game, which is certainly appropriate given how many times during battles when there were multiple forces maneuvering on each side. What I wanted to capture was a little bit of action with your partner besides just trying to win tricks with them. There are a lot of little things from battles that I could evoke, but one thing I wanted to capture was some asymmetry between the side having Initiative and the side without. It would give some more texture to the game, further differentiating each Battle from one another.

The way I went about that was to permit the side with Initiative to perform a “pre-battle deployment”, exchanging a couple of cards with each other. It allows them to adjust their hands, potentially giving them an advantage over their opponents to compensate for being behind. I did want the side without Initiative to also have something special, so they can “march to the guns”, optionally sending cards to the first player on their side that plays an Artillery card. By deferring their card transfer until later in the hand, and making it one-way, it differentiates the two sides, which hopefully provides additional interest.

Finally, I added the notion of combined arms, which boosts both cards that a side played if they are from different suits. That’s just a nod towards history, a vague gesture really, but it does provide for some surprises in play as well. When you combine that with the new bonus tokens, players should have more options during card play to tilt things in their direction.

Overall, though, the game should largely flow the same, and so the testing here will largely be around seeing if the three special rules work well or if they’re just extra fiddliness without an additional befit. Draft rules are available, and there’s a virtual test set for it on Screentop. If anybody tries it out, please let me know!

The first is the Rout threshold has been lowered to 7. I hadn’t seen any Rout wins for a little while in my own testing, but hadn’t really noticed that problem until a tester noted that the threshold seemed too high to them. I’d like a Rout win to be a real threat, but not the most common way for games to end. If one in six games ended in a Rout win, I’d be happy with that ratio. That would be something frequent enough that you have to account for, but not necessarily dominant. I’ve adjusted this threshold repeatedly during development, so it’s not a big surprise that it’s still being tweaked. The truth is that the other changes in the game are going to change how easy or hard it is to score Rout points, so this threshold will need continual attention. I should probably just have a development item once the game settles down to double-check the Rout wins to make sure they’re in the right proportion (somewhere between 15%-20% of games or so). But for now, seven. Why not?

The second change is around the mix of battles. With two Massive battles in the battle card mix, there’s only a ~36.4% chance that you’ll see even one Massive battle in the layout. Since the Massive battles are the most different of the battle types, it’s kind of a shame that only about a third of games will see even one. What I did was take two of the 10 Standard battles and move them to 11 Massive battles. The “massive” line was always an arbitrary one, so this doesn’t even really upset the “historical” analysis that I did, it just moves down the line a little bit of what counted as one of the big ones. In the end, I’ll sacrifice historical fidelity for better gaming for this game, the theming is mostly a way for me to think about the systems, so I’m not too worried about this. Now, 60.7% of games should see at least one Massive battle. Better!

Finally, a problem that I’ve encountered several times throughout the testing was brought up by a tester, and it’s time to tackle it. You can sometimes get some real garbage in your Reserve. Mostly, I didn’t worry too much about it in the past, as you could still use those garbage cards when they’re in the trump suit and maybe dump another suit. Not totally useless, but still kind of a bummer to see 1s and 2s in your reserve. I thought about several possible options:

• I could set it up so you draw extra cards for your Reserve and then discard down to the target size. This requires a bit more faffing around during setup, which isn’t great, and the choice here feels like it’ll be pretty obvious. Like, maybe there’s a borderline call where you need to think about whether to keep an Artillery 3 or an Infantry 5 or something like that. Still, not a terribly challenging decision. And when I used to just have a single deck that established the Battle Sites, and you had to deal cards and discard ones out of range, that was kind of annoying. So I don’t really want to bring that kind of thing back.

• A variation here would be a Magic-style mulligan. This is a tried-and-true mechanism, forces players to think about the utility of the stuff they got, and has more of a decision than the previous one. But with a relatively short Reserve, I might need to increase its size before this becomes a viable option. And it doesn’t really solve the faffing about problem (although there’s more thinking involved here).

• Provide an alternative use for Reserve cards. There are a few options here, such as something like the Scout ability, or forcing a discard, or something else. A problem with this is that it kind of dilutes how special the Scouts are, so that’s not a great direction. Getting to cancel a card play by an opponent is kind of neat, but I was sort of hoping to potentially reserve that for an alternative Commander play.

• Perhaps adding another resource. You could discard Reserve cards to gain this resource. And, maybe there’s something else I could do with this new resource. Generally speaking, there’s a balance in adding new resources in a game, in that it gives you some more design levers and parameters, but there’s additional overhead and complexity for players. Add too much of this kind of thing, and players find it difficult to remember and reason about things. And this is, at heart, a card game so I don’t want to lard it up with too much extra stuff.

I’m going to go with option four for now. You can now discard cards from your reserve to get +2 tokens, and you can spend a +2 token to bump the rank of a card by two during resolution. You have to make the decision to discard Reserve cards at the start of the game, so it’s a little decision players need to make early, which adds some tension to setup. You have a little extra in the resolution of tricks, which is nice. And I can use that currency for a bonus, which is that the player that is behind gets one after each Battle, just to give them a little boost. It seems like it should be a lightweight addition, but give players a little bit more control of things and potentially disturb the card play at a crucial moment.

So those are the changes. I’ve updated the PCIO file for use with playingcards.io and the draft rules, which also include some tweaks to the wording. The four-player version is still kind of baking in my brain, but I think there will be some fun stuff coming in it.

But! I don’t just have the rules. I put together a PCIO file to play the game on the fantastic playingcards.io, which will allow you to play the game against someone. It’s possible there are still bugs in the file, but I’ll sort that out as we go. I have to stress that it’s a pretty early version of the game, so I’m not sure I would actually encourage anybody to try it. But if you’re really curious, there it is. You can download that file, upload it into a new room on the site, and give it a try.

My next task with this project is to really focus on the 4p version of the game. The rules linked above have a rudimentary 4p version, with a shared Reserve for the two players, but I want to do more. I’d love Scouts and Commanders to do more in a partnership game, I’d love to have the ability to send cards back and forth between players, and I’d just like to add some more partnership dynamics to the game. The 4p game is the one I really wanted to make, so it’s time to really knuckle down and make it awesome. But for now, the 2p is, I suppose, available. Kind of scary to take this step!

I went through all of Napoleon’s battles and read a little about each of them, seeking to first capture a notion of the size of each of those battles, and then at least a little bit about what might make the battle out of the ordinary. Every battle, of course, had unique circumstances associated with it, be it the location, the strategic situation, the terrain, the forces involved, or whatever else. But I was really trying to see if there were large factors that might allow me to sort battles into some buckets. I took some quick notes on what I thought was the most exceptional thing for each battle, and wrote that down for each along with the size of the battle in a spreadsheet.

I then went back and read through all of those notes and there were a couple of categories that seemed pretty obvious. One is that the truly massive battles were kind of their own beast. Of course, the line between the really big ones and the regular battles was somewhat arbitrary, but obviously Leipzig, Dresden, and Wagram were in. I counted Borodino among the group by virtue of being such a bloodbath. Aspern-Essling seemed like a more normal battle to me, so the question was what to do with Bautzen and Waterloo, the two battles inbetween Borodino and Aspern-Essling in size. Waterloo is certainly famous, but it doesn’t strike me as exceptional in how it played out, nor did Bautzen, so that’s my line. Four massive battles that had their own rules.

With that line determined, the next obvious category was sieges. There were a fair number throughout Napoleon’s career, with some called sieges and some that revolved around fortifications that might not have been called sieges. In all, I roughly categorized 15 of the 77 battles in my list as either sieges or siege-ish. Basically, battles where artillery was center stage, infantry did some grunt work, and cavalry was really not very important.

The remaining battles, 58 of them, needed to be broken down a little bit more. Having at least one more category of significant seemed like it would be important. Reading through my notes, what stood out was that there were a number of battles where cavalry took center stage. These ranged from pursuits, to meeting engagements, to some of the battles in Egypt where the Mamluk side was mostly cavalry, to rearguard action, to some battles where things were decided by large cavalry charges. There’s a little less tying all these battles together compared to the sieges, but grouping them together pulled 19 of the 77 battles together. That left the remaining 39 battles, basically half, as sort of the “standard” battles.

With my categories more or less figured out, at least for now, I needed to express them in game terms. The commonality among the categories is that each of them had differences in the importance of cavalry, ranging from the most important arm (in the pursuit/mobile battles) to the least important (the sieges), with the standard battles in-between. That translates nicely to just changing the ordering of trump suits. Standard would be my standard artillery/cavalry/infantry ordering, mobile battles would be cavalry/artillery/infantry, and sieges would be artillery/infantry/cavalry. There’s kind of a neat little thing there, where artillery always beats infantry, which just kind of feels right.

As a digression, there’s some real “design for effect” going on here in wargame terms. That is, in Eylau (for example), did we know ahead of time that it would feature one of the great cavalry charges of history? The initial conditions of the battle weren’t necessarily ones where we would have expected that to happen. The causes of why cavalry played such a big role in that battle aren’t probed at all in this design. The game captures the effect, that Eylau was dominated by cavalry, without really explaining any of the factors that resulted in that. It’s an approach to designing historical games that I would normally shy away from, but this is only barely a historical game. I think it’s totally fine for something this abstract, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

So, finally, what to do with the massive battles? My instinct is that they were such big affairs that each arm had its role to play, and so maybe those battles should be played at no-trump. Why not? The other nice thing is that the counts of each category, turned into percentages, come out to roughly 5% massive, 20% sieges, 25% mobile/pursuit, and 50% standard. That can easily turn into a deck of a multiple of 20 cards. I’m going to go with 40, because I want to preserve the possibility of two massive battles in the layout. And so: 2 massive, 8 sieges, 10 mobile/pursuit, and 20 standard.

The last thing was looking at the sizes of battles. If I assume 8 different sizes of battle and bucket the battles into those sizes, the buckets are pretty asymmetric. The first 8th and second 8th of sizes comprise more than half of my list (20 and 23 battles), so a straight mapping probably wasn’t going to work out that well. But it does suggest skewing the sizes down some. In particular, the sieges tended to be small, with the sieges falling mostly into the two smallest buckets, three in the third-smallest, and only one in the fourth-smallest. No sieges were above the median. The pursuit/mobile battles were larger, with Eylau and La Rothière in the second largest bucket. That suggests some asymmetry in the battle types with regard to sizes. The sieges will mostly be the smallest battle types, the pursuit/mobile battles a little bigger, and the remaining battles will skew larger. And, of course, the massive ones will be, uh, massive.

And after that long digression, I arrive at the next iteration of the design. The main deck will be the same as last time: infantry cards (2-10 x 3), cavalry cards (2-10 x 2), artillery cards (2-10), four commanders, and four scouts (2 x 2, 3 x 2), for a total of 62 cards. The battle site deck will be 2 massive cards (2 x 12, played at no-trump), 8 siege cards (2 x 2, 3 x 2, 4 x 2, 5, 6), 10 pursuit/mobile cards (2, 3, 4, 5 x 2, 6 x 2, 7, 8, 9), and 20 standard cards (2, 3, 4, 5 x 2, 6 x 2, 7 x 3, 8 x 3, 9 x 3, 10 x 4). Commanders count as the lowest card of the highest suit for the battle type, scouts can either add to the rank of a card (and then draw) or be discarded to draw cards equal to their rank (choosing one and discarding the rest). Finally, the number of battles is 8, you win if you score 9 Rout points, and the number of cards in the reserve is 6. If all that is confusing, well, I’m mostly recording it here for my own memory. But if this works, I’m going to put out a full set of rules for the two-player version and maybe it will make sense.

Coming up next, testing this thing out, updating the formal rules to reflect all these changes, and then starting on the four-player partnership version. I actually think that that version might be the most interesting version of the game, I’m excited to start on it.

I played three games with the new setup, and the changes kind of worked. Kind of. There was some more dynamism with the switches from attacker to defender, and there was more thinking about “do I really want this to switch right now, I can’t really follow-up on the attack?” And it’s nice to have that decision, but it felt kind of bad as well. You shouldn’t decide to stay on defense just because if you went on attack you’d lose even more. That decision worked very much against the fiction of the game. It should be a good thing to go on the offensive, and often the decision here was that it would be bad to do so.

I tried tweaking the rules around how you win skirmishes, letting the attacker play any card when the attacker role switched, but that just felt really artificial in the other direction. It just felt wrong. I finally realized something that I had been overlooking in my enthusiasm for trying a combat resolution systemt that wasn’t trick-taking: Durak-style gameplay relies on larger hands, and the narrow hands that I was using for the battles was essentially incompatible. The interesting decisions in skirmishes should come from large hands and allow you to kind of predict where things would go, and those decisions just couldn’t happen in a low hand count situation. It was a fundamental mismatch, and it was time I recognized that.

So, I punted. I switched back to trick-taking, with the modification that there was a strict hierarchy of suits: infantry was lower than cavalry which was lower than artillery. Scouts would basically work the same way (can discard to draw cards equal to their rank and keep one, or modify the rank of a played card and draw a card), commanders would be the lowest card of the next suit up. This wasn’t exactly the same game as the last time I’d done trick-taking. The deck was different, and the trump rules were intended to better match the setting of the game. And you know what? It was excellent. It was fun again!

The lesson here, fundamentally, is that sometimes game design goes down a blind alley. I had an idea a while back, it led me to some exploration, I made a bunch of tweaks and larger changes, and the new system just didn’t work. It was a mismatch for my design goals. But, some of the changes I made were a positive thing, I learned stuff about commanders, scouts, and the composition of the deck, and I could switch back to trick-taking in a better spot.

The focus, though, now turns to the Battle sites. If I’m not going to change trump based on the choice of Battle site (which I no longer want to do), there still needed to be something interesting about the different Battle sites, something that might push you to choosing one vs. another. It’s time to go to history. My next design task is to go through every one of Napoleon’s battles and do some quick analysis on them to see what made them interesting. How big were they? Were there factors in them that made them exceptions to the usual way that 18th/19th century battles went? When I complete that analysis, I can use that to shape the Battle card deck, and then maybe we’ll really be somewhere.

I assembled my new deck and played out a couple of games with the rules, without tinkering, to see how things would go with the new rules. And I’d judge it to be a mixed bag. Some notable things are that the attacker bias seems to be gone. Of the Battles that I played through, roughly half were won by the attacker, which felt pretty good. I was sticking with the Battle chooser being on attack to start, as it felt like a more natural structure for things, but I could set it up so that player chooses attack or defense at some point. Different hands might be better suited to one or the other, and giving the player the choice might be another way to privilege the player that is behind. But that’s a piece of complexity I could add later if I think it’s necessary.

The second notable thing is that Routs were back. One of my games actually ended with a Rout victory, with one player winning Routs in a 7 and 4 sized Battles to score the win. The previous version basically was impossible to tally a Rout in, and it was nice to have that come back into play.

There were some small things as well. There these extra little bits of drama whenever you drew a card from a Scout that were kind of fun. Fishing through the Reserve to decide what to pull into your hand felt like a significant decision again. The range of Battle sizes seemed pretty reasonable. Overall, things were in decent shape, and the game was interesting again. I was starting to get a little fatigue in my purely solo testing, which will eventually happen. I was going to start losing my ability to judge fun just on my own soon.

There are also some issues to address in this version. The first is that Commanders are a bit of a problem. Their ability to always be played on defense is super powerful, but they’re pretty iffy on attack. Sure, you can extend the skirmish, but they mostly didn’t help you if you were in trouble and only amounted to improving your opponent’s reward for winning the skirmish. In addition, scouts were totally worthless on defense. On attack, they felt good, but on defense, they were absolutely worthless. Both of the special cards would need some work.

But the other major issue with the game is that it felt a little bit static. Most Battles would consist of a big skirmish at the start, pushing back and forth, and whoever won that skirmish would almost certainly win the Battle. There was decent drama in that skirmish, but the rest of it seemed a little bit like an anti-climax. There needed to be a little bit more to things, a bit more of push-and-pull throughout, and a few more tactical choices to the resolution.

So those are the problems to fix: get the commanders and scouts into a place where they’re useful in both positions, and get a bit more tactical interest in the game. Scouts seemed to have a clear potential fix, permitting a player to discard a scout on their turn to draw a replacement. It was a weaker version of their ability to help on attack, but it meant they weren’t necessarily dead cards. A potential improvement is that you could make them draw-two-keep-one when discarded, which would give them a different utility for the two modes.

Commanders were a little trickier to fix, and perhaps thinking about the static nature of things first would make a fix obvious. One potential change would be to swap the attacker/defender roles during a skirmish. As it stands, when a player trumps to a more powerful suit, the skirmish can’t drop back down unless a commander is played. But a possibility would be instead to make the players swap roles when the suit changes. That would actually change how commanders work as well, and you could always shift roles on play of a commander. The ability to seize the initiative in a battle might result in enough dynamic play that it could change how things work. It wasn’t clear if I needed to retain the inability to drop back down suits, I’d have to test it both ways.

That, then, is the changes for the new version: attacker/defender roles swap when the suit changes or a commander is played, and scouts can be discarded to draw-two-keep-one during your turn. I’ll test this new version and then re-evaluate where things are. Potential things to update in future versions are the composition of the deck, the power of commanders (I’m pretty happy with scouts), the size range of battles, and the attributes of the battle cards. And, of course, there are various numeric parameters to fiddle with when things settle down more. It still feels like the game is making progress, although not as quickly as the early versions.

Essentially, at the core of it, the previous versions of the game were very elaborate setups to get you to a hand of trick-taking. The rest of the surrounding armature of the game was to set up different scoring situations, have some jockeying with how you strengthen your hand, and some other positioning, but at its core, this was a trick-taking game with a couple of twists in the cardplay (the commanders and scouts). But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Battle/Rout/Reserve components would function fine (probably!) with some other type of head-to-head card resolution system. I read through a bunch of card games to draw on some inspiration, and while some ideas seemed like they might have some promise (what about Guts, which is basically three card poker?), the most promising was a Russian game called Durak (“Fool”).

You can read the rules to it there, but roughly speaking, Durak is played in “bouts”, where the attacker plays a card, the defender plays a superior card (higher rank or trump), and the attacker can continue the attack by playing any card matching the rank of any of the played cards. It goes back and forth until one player concedes. In Durak, you then pick up those cards, and the game is lost by the last player with cards in hand. Because this is related to trick-taking, but is modeled around bouts, I thought it might be a good fit for the martial thing I was trying to put together. So I adapted Durak and created a new resolution system.

The basic idea is that each bout would represent a skirmish. The attacker (the player who selected the Battle site) would play any card, and it proceed as in Durak. However, I would have a heirarchy of cards (infanty < cavalry < artillery) allowing stronger suits to trump weaker ones, and once you move up the heirarchy, you couldn’t move back down in the same skirmish. Commanders could always be played, but would reset the heirarchy, so any card could be played in response to them (respecting the restrictions about having to play a duplicate rank on attack). Once someone won the skirmish, they would take all the cards from the skirmish, and at the end of the Battle, you would count captured cards and whoever took more cards scored the difference. A Rout would be if you took cards and your opponent took none. Scouts? Well, I would figure those out later. The last thing I did was bump up the Battle sizes by two across the board, so instead of 2-8, they were 4-10, because you needed some larger hands to make a skirmish even work. I also made it so that the suits were irrelevant for Battles, at least for now. I would revisit this later if the structure worked, I wasn’t worried about making the Battle sites interesting if the core of the game worked.

I started out by just dealing myself some hands and running them against each other. It seemed like it might work ok - I had to do some thinking to play the hands out, which was all I was really looking hoping to see. So, I set up a full game, dealt myself hands, and there were some details that clearly needed to be worked out. What ends the Battle? Because a player might not be able to respond to a card, you can end up with unequal hands, and the ending condition for a Battle wasn’t always obvious. As a special case, what happens when both players run out of cards at the same time and there is an active skirmish? Whatever rules I applied here would make a big difference in how the game worked, especially in the smaller Battles which only featured a few cards. I tried a few variations of things here, and nothing quite felt totally right, with some real complexity in how to compute things ending. Either it was too hard to win cards and you might get a Rout with only a couple cards, or it was too easy to manipulate the Battle ending resulting in some artificial-feeling gameplay, or other strange situations that kept popping up.

Another problem cropped up after I played a few games. I wanted to try and keep things stable because I wanted to really get a feel for the new resolution system. I didn’t have the same ability to do a snap evaluation of this as I do straight trick-taking, so I didn’t want to judge the new rules too quickly. But as I played, it became clear to me that the defender had a huge advantage in the structure of the game. Generally, the way things were playing out was that the attacker would push as much as they could in the first skirmish, but the defender would usually win out because of the challenge of matching ranks as the skirmish wore on. That first pile of cards was often enough to win the small and medium battles on its own, with the rest of the Battle determining if it’s a close win or a big win. The alternative, of the attacker conceding after one card each just to go on defense, felt even worse. Flipping things so that the Battle selector is the first defender seemed like it would help with the point imbalance, but I fundamentally couldn’t let the defender have such a huge advantage, as it would distort game play.

So that’s where I was: the structure seemed interesting, the boundary conditions of Battles were fuzzy and high-impact, and there was a big defender bias. All together, there was promise, but some substantial fixes were needed. I decided to think about a small problem for a bit, and maybe the big problems would have some suggestions come up. Sometimes that sort of narrowing can help. I decided to think about scouts.

The scouts were respresented in the current deck by two 2s and 3s of Spades. I kicked around several ideas but decided to focus on one of the things giving the defender advantage: it was hard to match ranks. What if the scouts helped with that? You could play a scout with another card, and adjust the rank by up to the scout’s value. It would allow the attack to continue the skirmish while being basically useless to the defender. There weren’t that many scouts in the deck, but it would be a positive adjustment to the balance and add some more tactical options. Seemed promising.

However, it would exacerbate the Battle ending problem, because it would cause a player to spend an extra card in more circumstances. I had to fix that. What if you also draw a card when you play a scout? It’s now hand-size neutral, it potentially gives some more help to an attacker (with some luck!), and it wouldn’t make the Battle problem worse. It even was kind of thematic - the scout found a way to pull in some reinforcements by getting them to the battle? It is also an improvement over having to look at your Reserve in the game, which could slow things down. Again, it seemed promising.

But that idea suggested another fix. If I’m comfortable adding cards during the Battle, what about losing cards? What if you had to discard a card whenever you passed on a play as a defender? Call it additional losses from a breakthrough, whatever, we can justify it in the game’s fiction. But it would stop hands from getting imbalanced (an attacker that cannot attack doesn’t need to discard a card as the number of card plays are equal at that point). It further clarifies the end of Battles: a Battle is over when both players are out of cards. If the defender played on the skirmish, nobody wins, otherwise the attacker wins it (after the discard). Suddenly, the boundary conditions would go away and there would be clarity. Nice!

The final thing that I thought about was revisiting the deck. The asymmetry in ranks which was intended to work well with the no-trump Battles in the previous iteration was, on reflection, causing problems with this version. Especially once things ratched up to artillery, the exotic ranks were extremely hard to match for the attacker, leading to some of the defender bias. It also had some strange side effects. 8s were some of the best cards for the attacker, because there were six of them in the deck, with 5-7 next best (five copies), while Ks and As were extraordinarily valuable on defense but almost useless on attack. What was intended to provide some fun texture was causing me pain. I could get rid of that pretty easily.

Overall, then, I have another major version to try. I’d keep hands at parity throughout Battles, I’d re-arrange the deck so that cards were all 2-10 for all suits, and I’d try out the new scout rules. I’m optimistic that the new rules might work out well, and perhaps would finally get me to an asymmetric deck with Napoleonic flavor, some more combat-related semantics for resolution, and a fresh feel for card play compared to pure trick-taking. That’s what I’ll report on next time. And if that works, I’ll fine-tune the deck, maybe try and get some more Napoleonic flavor into it, and then take a hard look at making the Battles distinct.

My first thought was that there should be three major suits, representing infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Those are the major components of armies of the time period, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to represent. I figured a few things would also be nice to capture: infantry is generally the weakest but most numerous card type, cavalry is next up the ladder with fewer but more powerful cards, and finally artillery should have the strongest cards but should be the least frequent. I got out some decks of cards and started stripping them and Frankensteining something together. I pulled out 2-10 of Clubs from three decks for the infantry (figuring that no face cards made sense for the weakest suit), 5-Q of Diamonds from two decks for cavalry, and 8-A of Hearts from one deck for artillery. I followed the Bridge heirarchy of suits here because it’s internalized for me, so it’s easy to remember the types of each suit. An observant reader might notice that the range of cards narrowed with each type, and my thinking there was that I wanted the range to be larger for infantry to capture all the crappy infantry units that might be present, but also sometimes asymmetry in itself can be interesting, so why not?

That left me with 27 infantry cards (2-10 x 3), 16 cavalry (5-Q x 2), and 7 infantry (8-A), for a total of 50 cards. I wanted the deck to be a litle larger than a standard 52-card pack, and I wanted there to be some cards representing commanders and scouts. So I pulled out the six jokers from the three decks that I was using, and then the 2 2s and 2 3s of Spades for the scouts. That was 60 cards, which was a nice round number, which seemed like a fine place to stop. The deck seemed promising: asymmetric suits, a little bit of special flavor, every card representing something from 18th/19th century warfare. As a starting point, it seemed totally reasonable.

I just needed some rules for what the commanders and scouts would do. Commanders seemed simple enough: I could make them always trump, but always the lowest trump. That would make them always reasonably useful, but not overwhelming. Good enough for now. The scouts were a little trickier. My first thought was to allow you to swap the Battle card, which would change the trump, representing choosing the site of the battle better. Seemed scouty? But I avoided that for two reasons. One, it was too much like the 3s from Fox in the Forest, and I didn’t want to repeat too many ideas. Two, what happens to the size of the Battle? My next thought was to make scouts always lose a trick, but you could swap a card from your hard with the Reserve. That would be useful both to beef up your current hand but also if you had something good that wasn’t useful this hand, you could save it for later.

The final element I wanted to change was how Battle sites were generated. The asymmetry in the deck would result in wonky Battle sites (what would a King Battle site even mean?), and I wanted Battle sites to be roughly equally common across the three suits. So I created a separate deck for Battle site cards using a different color back of cards. 2-8 of each of my suits provided 21 cards, and then I had an idea. I took 2-10 of the other suit for Battle sites, figuring those could represent a sort of no-trump. My idea was that for these Battles, the trick is won strictly by the highest ranking card, but you still have to follow suit. It would make the higher ranks of Cavalry and Artillery relevant, and would change things up from standard play. That gave me a 30 card Terrain deck, and I could test things out from there.

The game has now evolved enough that I wanted to provide an updated summary of the two-player rules for folks to follow along with the design discussions. As before, you can’t really play with this summary, as it elides important details, but provides a framework to understand the decisions I’m describing.

Napoleon, Blown Apart is played with two decks, a 60 card Troop deck and 30 card Terrain deck. Deal 8 Terrain cards face up as Battle sites. Deal each player 6 Troop cards for their Reserve. For each Battle, deal each player 2 cards, and then the player with Initiative picks one Battle site. The number on the site is how many tricks will be played in the Battle, and the suit is the trump suit. For Battle sites of the extra suit, play is at no-trump. In all tricks, for a tied top card, the first card played wins. Deal each player cards to fill their hand up to the correct number of tricks, then each player in turn may discard cards from their hand to take an equal number from their Reserve, freely chosen. Tricks are played with normal trick-taking rules, where you must follow the lead suit, and the highest trump (if any) wins otherwise the highest card of the lead suit. For no-trump, you still must follow the lead, but the trick is won by the highest ranking card regardless of suit. Commanders are always trump, even in no-trump Battles, but are considered the lowest trump. A Spy always loses, but permits the player to exchange a card from hand with a card from their Reserve. If a player wins all the tricks in a Battle, they take the Terrain card to record their Rout. If any player ever has seven points in Terrain cards from Routs, they instantly win. Players otherwise score one point for each trick they take more than their opponent, with a bonus point for each Commander taken. If no player wins on Routs by the end of eight Battles, high score wins, but if the point leader loses a Rout in the final Battle, deal a new Terrain card and play another Battle until someone wins.

All right, that’s dense, but should be good enough to give an idea of how the game is currently played. And enough talking, how did it go? I got things shuffled up and played the game against myself, and it didn’t feel great. The suits felt strange, the commanders seemed too strong, there was a mismatch between the frequency of cards in the Troop deck and the frequency of things in the Terrain deck that felt off, and everything just seemed really awkward. I hadn’t really changed that many rules, I’d mostly changed the composition of the deck, and it just threw everything off. But it was my first game, and I’d played the game quite a bit with a standard deck, so perhaps this was just a clash between the current game and my memories of the way things used to work. This actually happens fairly enough to me during game development, where I get some dissonance between versions.

I stopped that day and tried the next day, to let the new version marinate in my brain a little bit. And still, it felt bad. Another day, another couple games, and nothing was changing. Overall, I played the game with the new deck five times, and at the end, I still liked it less than the version I had been playing with a standard deck. The new deck was a failure, and it wasn’t just mis-tuned. If it was in the right direction, but the suit counts were a little off or whatever, I’d still have had fun. But this just was a step back, so something needed a lot of adjusting.

That was actually an encouraging sign! It meant, among other things, that the game was originally fun enough that I could meaningfully detect a step backwards. For a game I had been exclusively playing solo against myself, that means that the previous version was actually pretty darn good. More than anything else about this step, this was an incredibly reassuring thing to realize. I’m still on the right track with the game, broadly, even if this deck is a mis-step. Dead ends happen!

The next thing that I realized is that part of the problem here was a mismatch between the diagetic meaning of the suits and the results in play. In particular, in an infantry battle, you would have infantry able to trump both cavalry and artillery, which feels very wrong. And given that infantry cards are the most common cards, you end up in this situation pretty often. But more broadly, the properties of the different suits are irrelevant 2/3s of the time (roughly) as they only come into play in the no-trump battles. And even there, they might not work properly. My intuition of how 18th century troops should work, born from reading a bunch of books about the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic wars, was utterly useless in thinking about the game. While I wasn’t designing a simulation here, it shouldn’t work against my intuition.

Beyond the problems of the game’s trappings working against the mechanisms, the game was just a more predictable thing. While there was room for clever play in the previous version, the current one felt more rote. I think that’s mostly a consequence of roughly half the deck being infantry, but it ended up feeling pretty same-y in practice.

It was time to figure something else out. There were, roughly speaking, two paths forward. The first was that I could change the way that Battle definitions worked. While I liked the sizing of the battles, the way that trump was defined could be changed around. Perhaps trump suits were always fixed, and there was something else about the Battles that changed conditions. I wanted there to still be a decision of consequence alongside the size of the battle, something that the first two dealt cards would condition, but there were potentially other options there that I could modify. Perhaps something relating to weather, terrain, or other factors. I could look through Napoleonic battles to pull out some of the factors and reflect them to the cards.

The second path was potentially more interesting. I love, obviously, trick-taking games. I’ve designed more than one, I met my wife playing Bridge, I’ve been playing trick-taking games longer than any other type of game. It’s a warm hug for me, an incredibly comfortable genre. But does it need to be the center here? Roughly speaking, this game was a representation of a campaign, with the Battles being, uh, battles, and the individual tricks representing clashes within that batle. But the overall structure of campaign and battles could be preserved while replacing how those clashes are represented in the game. The more interesting path forward here was to swap out the basic trick-taking of the game for something else that would make use of number/suit cards.

I wanted to take that path. Partially because I don’t want to be just known as a trick-taking guy, but also to stretch myself a little bit and get out of my comfort zone. So that’s what I was going to explore. The first step here was to get out my trusty copy of David Parlett’s Penguin Book of Card Games and read about a bunch of card games for inspiration. It worked for Fox, I assumed it would work here.

Next time, we’ll explore what I came up with and see how I can push this game towards history. At least a little bit.

For the last set of tests, the big change was going from treating the Reserve as a small deck to an auxiliary hand. After the Battle site has been chosen, setting the size of the Battle and the trump suit, you could go through your Reserve and replace cards in your hand with cards from the Reserve. The very first thing that happened is that I forgot the new rule right away. This is a hazard of game development - you start becoming so familiar with your own rules that you forget how they work, or you blend versions together, or recall old rules. It’s a real mess. Anyway, after a restart, I had a go with the visible Reserves and immediately liked the effect. You had a lot more control over how particular hands would go, you could make a decision on when to deploy your good cards in the Reserve, you could decide to make a big push or lay back in a particular battle.

There were a few secondary effects that popped up. First, the ergonomics of it were a little awkward. On one occasion, I got my hand mixed up with my Reserve and ended up getting stuff horribly crossed up. I’m slightly worried about that, but not worried enough to do anything about it. I think it will probably prevent me from making the Reserve very big, but that’s probably fine. And it’s unclear how much of a problem this will be in practice, since I’m running multiple positions and it’s easy to get crossed up and that won’t be true of players of the final game. One thing that might help is keeping captured tricks face-up, giving one fewer thing to get confused with. It’s something to think about in the future, but not something I’m going to tackle right now.

The second thing that emerged is that there were opportunities to bluff. If the player who picked the Battle doesn’t draw from their Reserve, they might have an exceptionally strong hand. They might convince their opponent to over-commit, and burn some of their Reserve unnecessarily. Bluffing as an emergent property of the Reserve is delightful, and I’m very happy that it’s popped up.

The final observation is that you might end up with useless cards in your Reserve and never really get to use them. It’s not a huge problem, but it can be a bit disheartening to have a 2 in your Reserve (or a couple 2s!), realize that that suit isn’t available as trump for the rest of the game, and know that that card is almost certainly worthless. I’m considering giving each player a point for each leftover Reserve card if the game ends on points instead of Routs, which might fix things. I haven’t decided if it’s necessary or not yet, but it would provide a bit more incentive to manage your Reserve carefully.

Overall, the open Reserves are very neat, add to the decision space, and provide for some fun opportunities to confuse your opponent. Even if your opponent is yourself. Yes, I did successfully bluff myself.

The other two changes were both successful as well. Having the player behind on points pick the next Battle seemed to work pretty well, in that being able to match the choice to what your first two cards are is a small advantage. There’s a little bit of a drawback in that you sometimes don’t want to play the first lead card, but I might change it so that the person who selects the Battle gets to choose who leads the first trick. It’s a little bit of extra complexity, I think, and I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it.

Finally, the “you can’t win on a Rout” hasn’t come up. But I’m happy with it anyway, as a bit of a Hail Mary thing in the game. On a theoretical basis, it’s pleasing. Overall, the game is progressing nicely, and at this point, I think it’s time to tackle adding some additional flavor, get some more Napoleonic stuff in there. In particular, I want to evolve the deck from a classic French deck to one with suits for infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and have commanders and scouts mixed in. Creating a custom deck gives tremendous opportunity to really shape how the players interact, and it opens up the next big stage of development. The custom deck for Fox in the Forest is super important to how the game works. I’ve got my 12-pack of Bicycles ready, and I’ve got a first draft of the deck, and it’s time to give that a whirl. For next time.

Napoleon was largely inspired by a mechanism, which is kind of an odd starting point for it, at least for how I think about games. But that has helped it accelerate quickly and forced me to think about the direction sooner than usual. As I chip away at it, a few targets have emerged that I’d like to adhere to. Those targets will define both how I approach development and maybe the sorts of players it might appeal to and what the final product is like.

First, I want it to be a card game. I don’t want this game to evolve into having a board for tracking state, and I don’t want the fight to end up on a map. Partly, this is to avoid comparison to Richard Sivél’s masterful Friedrich and Maria, which take trick-taking into a war context in this rough time period and do it fantastically. But even beyond not wanting to make a pale imitation of games I admire greatly, a map would very much be at risk of becoming the focus of play in any kind of wargame. Even one as heavily abstracted as I’m working on here. It’s natural - the position of forces within space is of course a critical part of simulating any conflict, and a map would exert an inevitable gravity on the game to become the center of things. And I don’t want that. I want the focus of this game to be the hands of cards that get played during the game.

The second goal that I have is that I want there to be some resonance with the subject matter. Not so much that I want this to be a serious simulation of Napoleonic warfare or anything, goodness knows there are plenty of games that have tackled that to varying degree of success. I don’t expect that anyone will really learn anything about how battles worked by playing this game. Instead, what I’d like to get is a sort of broad sense of how things worked baked into the design. Roughly, if you know something about how Napoleonic warfare worked, the special rules and interactions in this game should make sense to you and not make you recoil. “Oh, sure, that makes sense,” should be what you think as you read these rules.

The third thing I’m keeping in mind is that I really want the player count to work for two or four players, and I really, really want the 4 player game to be a partnership one. I’ve written before about my love of Bridge, but I’ve wanted to make a partnership game for forever, and dammit, I’m going to do it here. This is just a design parameter for me, not something that can drift, but if it comes down to a set of rules that works for 2 and doesn’t work for 4, I’m not done yet. Note that I’ve skipped 3 players here. If I need to, I’ll sacrifice the 3p game to make the other counts work, but I suspect strongly that I’ll be able to get that version to work just fine.

My fourth thing to keep track of is that I want there to be both strategic decisions of significance as well as tactical decisions. In the context of this game, the strategic layer is how you’re allocating your resources across hands and the tactical layer is how you’re playing the cards in each hand. If you think about card games that take place across multiple hands, mostly there aren’t resource allocation decisions you have to make. Your approach to any particular hand might be different based on the current scores in the game, such as bidding differently in Bridge or Spades, but that still is just changing your approach to a particular hand, rather than being a strategy you execute across many hands. In this game, I want there to be decisions you make in a hand that could have impact across many hands. That framework is relatively unusual in card games, particularly card games that hew towards traditional mechanisms, and I think it could be something pretty unique.

So those are my rough parameters, for now, the things I want to keep an eye on as I iterate through the game. Notably, I don’t necessarily want this to be a trick-taking game. It can be, and it certainly is right now as of this writing. But that’s just a thing that I started with, and there’s no guarantee that it’ll still be there at the end of development. If I come up with some other core mechanism that will work better, I’ll cheerfully use it.

I’ll try and check in to this list periodically and evaluate how I’m doing against things, to make sure that I’m keeping myself honest. As for how I’m doing now, there’s no map or any kind of positional information (good!), there’s very little fidelity to 18th/19th century European warfare (bad!), the player count is frankly unknown right now because I’ve been exclusively testing 2p (incomplete!), and there’s a real sense of strategic decisions now (good!). Not bad! My main task, then, is to improve the impressionistic depiction of warfare that I’m going for, and then to make this thing work for two partnerships (and, I suppose, three players).

The tests with the changes went well. The ergonomic change, of discarding a card after drawing a Reserve card, worked great. The additional layer of shaping your hand by discarding was a fun little decision that was occasionally consequential, and it was nice to not have to count the tricks as carefully. The Battle is over when you run out of cards, simple. There was one small modification, which was that initially I was discarding the cards face up into a discard pile. That had two problems. One, I didn’t like exposing the discarded card to the opponent, it gave more information that I wanted to to the second player, who could shape their hand in response. I didn’t want quite that much sensitivity to player order. Second, discarding face up led to potential confusion between the discard pile and the current Battle card. I changed to discarding face down, and that worked better.

The changes to scoring were pretty solid. The Rout points system is working to provide a realistic alternative victory condition, one that I’ve had happen in a couple of games. It’s certainly a big improvement on just three Routs winning. The change to make each round score equal to trick difference is fine. I’m still not totally sure it’s the right thing to do, but it’s working for the time being, so I’ll leave it in place for the time being. It’s not really a problem to address right now.

The other change, of dealing the first two cards before selecting a Battle, is working great. It’s not a ton of information, but now selecting the Battle site involves a few variables, and it’s not a trivial decision which one to pick. Each player’s Rout points, the state of each player’s Reserve, the two cards you can see, and the remaining sites on the board are all inputs into the strategic decision, and that feels like a good direction.

So, what are the new problems I’m seeing? One is that the Reserve is too random. You’ll get a hand that’s bad for the current Battle, and draw on your Reserve to help out. It feels really bad to draw, say, an off-suit 9, a card which might have been really helpful if it matched the trump suit but is otherwise probably a waste. Your Reserve is very short, and wasting even one of your precious draws feels bad. In some ways, this mirrors the problem that I previously had with Battle selection. The randomness of Reserve draws was swamping the strategic decision of when to draw. It felt like you weren’t really adjusting the course of the game as much as you should be, and given that managing the Reserve deck is one of the critical things tying the Battles together, players needed to have some control over the Reserve.

This is a decision that I ended up sleeping on. One thing that I strongly considered was making the Reserve deck a fixed set of cards. I already had it seeded with two Kings, after all. Incidentally, that decision to add Kings to the Reserve was made before I first played it, for a couple reasons. First, Kings score a point when taken and I wanted them out of play at the beginning of the game so later Battles on average would be more valuable. Second, at some point, I’m going to want those cards to have some special effect, as they’ll represent commanders on the battlefield, so I started by seeding them to players to make sure the special cards were evenly distributed. Finally, as the second highest cards, it adds some cheap drama when you pull one of your precious Ks from the Reserve and it gets beat by an Ace. I am absolutely not above trying to create some artifical dramatic moments.

Anyway, a fixed deck of Reserve cards potentially could be interesting if those cards were all special in some way. If they were all decent to strong cards, and all had their tactical uses, then you wouldn’t have the problem of a dead draw causing you pain during the game. Ultimately, I decided to not move forward with this for now. I think it’s an idea I might revisit when I create a custom deck for the game, but for now, it would make setup more painful and make the Reserve more predictable, which isn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go.

However, I got somewhat stuck on that solution to the problem. This occasionally happens with game design, that you see a problem clearly, and a solution that doesn’t quite fit the bill, but it can be hard to shake yourself out of that solution to move to a better one. You get trapped in that local optima and it can be difficult to move to another part of the design space to find a better approach. In this case, I used an old standby: thinking about the problem as I fell asleep. That method has its risks, of either coming up with something and forgetting it or thinking you have it only to have the light of day demonstrate you’re a bozo, but in this case it allowed me to see a potential new path.

I had been treating the Reserve as a deck of cards. A deck of cards, of course, has an implied set of rules. A deck is face down so you can’t see what’s in it. A deck is ordered. A deck is accessed one card at a time, from the top. It’s a useful construct for many games, and these implicit properties and rules help people quickly understand how to interact with common design elements. But, those implied rules are ones that are worth examining. Was the Reserve using the right design construct?

There’s a parallel to a problem in software engineering, of choosing the right data structure for a system. Thinking about how the data will be organized, how the data will be used, how often data will be retrieved, added, or removed will inform what the is the right data structure for a use case. Similarly, it’s worth considering whether you’re using the right game element in your design, given what you want it to accomplish and the role it plays in the design relative to the other elements.

In this case, what occurred to me is that maybe treating the Reserve as a deck was the problem. The Reserve was small, and the decision to draw a card from it was very high impact, one of the most important ones the player would make during the game. Given the centrality of the Reserve to the decision space for players, it seemed to make sense to provide them with more control over it than they currently had. The thing I needed wasn’t a deck, it was a hand. If the Reserve was a hand of cards, the player could choose a card that they knew would be helpful in the current Battle. They wouldn’t ever waste anything, and they could deploy their resources meaningfully. As the game was already fairly random, this piece of control would help adjust the balance towards skill. I would include it in my next set of tests.

Another problem I wanted to tackle was a mirror of a problem that I had in Fox in the Forest, at least the early versions. The player on-lead in early versions of Fox had too much control over the pace of the game. The biggest decision you make in that game is the choice of lead, as the response card was more constrained, and it was too easy for a player to keep a stranglehold on the lead and therefore the big decisions. The introduction of the special powers on the 1s and the 3s was my solution to breaking that cycle and giving the following player the ability to change the tide of the game.

In Napoleon, Blown Apart, the decision of what Battle to choose rested with the winner of the previous Battle. Since that player now had access to some information about what Battle to choose and could tilt things towards their own hand, it provided a bit of the same stranglehold problem. Once you won a Battle, you were more likely to win the next and keep the ball rolling. In Napoleon, it’s easier to fix than it was in Fox. I could have the player with the fewest points select the next Battle. This would provide the trailing player with a minor advantage to assist in catching up, and didn’t really have a downside, so it was an easy change. It’s also easy to kind of squint and see how it matches with the theming, as the player that is behind is presumably on defense, and the defender choosing the ground for a Battle isn’t an unreasonable reflection of historical patterns.

The final thing to consider was a largely hypothetical problem thus far. I wanted the Rout point mechanism to provide hope for a player even if they’re down on points, with the idea that they might still be able to Rout their way to victory. However, with the current scoring, there’s a possibility that a player might be drawing dead going into the last Battles of the game. If there are insufficient tricks left in the Battles on the board for a player to win by Rout, and they are behind enough on points, their position might be hopeless or effectively so. Unfortunately, the computation to figure out if your position is hopeless isn’t trivial, so I couldn’t put in a rule saying someone is eliminated under certain conditions. I think it’s a bad property of a game to have a player be in a hopeless spot but not have the game end, so I wanted a fix, ideally one that might permit a comeback.

I settled on the idea that you can’t win if you were just Routed. That’s a simple fix, easy for players to understand, and it leaves the possibility for a comeback win at all times. No matter how far you are behind, if you can string together Routs to get to 7 Rout points, you’ll win. If the final Battle of the game is a Rout against the leading player, deal a new Battle site and keep going.

These fixes togther increase the amount of player control in the game. It’s a card game, I don’t want it to be a perfect chess match. But I do want players to feel like their skill matters, and I want them to feel good if they make a strong play and it leads to victory. By increasing the decisions around the Reserve and giving the trailing player some advantages, it should lead to a higher skill ceiling and closer contests. And overall, the game was still showing promise, which is very exciting.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt a Reserve, which consists of two Kings for each player plus four more random cards. Eight cards are then dealt as Battle sites, with each card being from 2-8. The game then starts, with the lead player choosing one of the Battle sites. The number becomes the number of tricks in the Battle, and the suit is the trump suit. Each player can then draw as many cards as they want from their Reserve, one at a time, and then the Battle is played out as a standard trick-taking game, with following suit required. If a player takes every trick in the battle, it’s a Rout, and the player scores points equal to the size of the Battle. Otherwise, whoever took the most tricks scores a single point. Play until one player wins three Routs or until all Battle sites are done, in which case high score wins.

Now, one of the obvious things that needed to change from this first version is that the scoring didn’t quite work. While the reward for a Rout was certainly appropriate, and worked thematically with the overall Napoleonic battle idea, in practice they were difficult to achieve. Three Routs, in particular, was not an especially relevant winning condition. I’m very much a fan of multiple winning conditions, as it can provide a way to enable multiple strategies and potentially provide for surprise endings to the game. But in my first playtests, getting three Routs would almost certainly put a player far enough ahead that they would very likely win on points anyway. The idea was to potentially enable a sudden death win, so that even a player who was behind on points still had a path to victory, but this configuration of scoring wasn’t really going to enable that.

So, I changed the scoring to be the difference in tricks taken. So in a 6 trick Battle, a 4-2 split would be worth 2 points, which resulted in a greater difference in scores and some more nuance. I also switched it so that you scored Rout points, and if you got to 7 Rout points, you would win. This was possible in a single Battle, and winning a Rout in a 7 or 8 trick Battle would be akin to shooting the moon in Hearts. But it would provide for hope for a player that’s behind, as 7 Rout points was a more achievable target. Between them, these changes gave a more dynamic scoring system, it made each trick matter more, and it provided for more potential drama for come-from-behind victories.

The second problem area with the game is that the Battle selection felt too random. The suit contributed nothing to the decision space, because you had no information about what might be a good choice for you or a bad choice. The size of the battle might be relevant, especially if you already had a Rout, and the size of the remaining reserve for each player might factor in to the decision. But overall, the selection of the next Battle felt very rote. This was intended to be a strategic decision for players, where they could evaluate the current state of the game and make what they think is the best decision for the next fight. That element was just not there, and it was to be a key part of what makes the game interesting.

In order to fix that, the different suits had to be relevant to the decision. In order for that to be true, the player needed to have some piece of private data that pushes them in one direction or another. The easiest way to do that was to provide some kind of preview of their hand. Because the Battles ranged from 2-8 tricks, I could give each player their first two cards in order to fuel the Battle selection. They’d have a limited amount of information to push them in one direction or another. In some ways, this reminded me of a three-handed version of Bridge that I used to play in high school, where six cards of the dummy is exposed before bidding, allowing you to hopefully make an informed enough bid. There were always enough surprises in the remaining seven cards to generate lots of drama, and we ended up calling it “Falling Off Bridge” as a consequence. From that experience, I knew that partial hands would be a fun addition to the game.

Finally, there was an awkward piece of ergonomics in the game. Ergonomics very much do not show up until you try something on the table, which is a valuable side effect of actually getting a game to the prototype stage quickly. The specific thing I was noticing is that when you draw Reserve cards in your hand, you no longer had cards equal to the Battle size. That resulted in a change in how quickly you’d run out of cards in suits, which is a mixed bag for the game, but it could also result in playing the wrong number of tricks if both players drew on their Reserve. On one occasion, I played an extra trick in a Battle, and on another occasion, played an extra card from one hand before catching it. Given that I was paying a ton of attention to how things were going because I was testing, I thought it likely that players would get this wrong sometimes in practice. A fix here is to have players discard a card (face down) when they draw from the Reserve, which also has the nice side effect of letting them better shape their suit distribution, which meant even low ranking Reserve cards might still be useful.

With these fixes in place, I could try out some more tests and find the next layer of things to change. Mechanically, the way that I capture these things is just taking quick notes of problems as I play, without trying to fix them on the spot. It’s more valuable to just keep going, taking raw notes of observations as I go, and then consider what I am going to change holistically. That way, fixes can work together. If something is really obviously wrong, sure, it might be worth fixing on the fly. But usually it’s better to just complete a game and then consider the changes later.

My goal at this point with the game is to get to a core structure with a standard deck of cards that I’m happy with, one that presents challenging, interesting, and fun decisions to players as they play. I’ll focus on the two-player version, as the easiest to test, and then confirm that the rules carry over to the three- and four-player versions just fine. Once I have that core game working well, I’ll add some more thematic flavor to the mix. In particular, I want to customize the deck to be more Napoleonic, with suits corresponding to different types of troops, with some notion of commanders and scouting, and potentially some ability to choose your ground for fighting (and potentially modifying the Battle sites). Adding thematic touches is an easier thing if the basics are already in place, because judging the impact of those additions is easier if you know the game is already fun. “That made this less fun” is easy to percieve, and is a reasonable way to judge the chrome you bolt onto a game.

Coming up next time, the results of these tests and the further changes I make, as I continue working on the title.

And so it’s gone, for years: promising ideas or themes or approaches, with some notes written down, and I just haven’t been able to see something neat come out of any of them. I was genuinely starting to think that perhaps my well was dry. Had I invented all the games I had in me?

And then something changed. As I mentioned in the last post, I left my job, and the sudden freedom started getting things moving. During a family vacation, I was looking for a new card game to teach to my daughter and nephew. I wanted to play a trick-taking game with them, but it needed to be something simple. Hearts or Spades were certainly possibilities, I’ve played a ton of both, or perhaps something in the Oh Hell family. Euchre wasn’t an option with only three of us. I started thinking about Whist and its variations, as kind of the elemental trick-taking game, and remembered playing Knock-Out Whist a long time ago and thought it might work. I looked up the rules to Knock-Out Whist on Pagat, taught it to them, and off we went. They loved it, immediately wanted to play again (and again and again), and we played it quite a bit during our visit.

A couple days later, while driving, a thought just popped into my head: the structure of Knock-Out Whist, where all that really matters is taking a single trick, is one worthy of exploring. What if that basic idea was applied to a larger structure, a more sophisticated game? Just as reminding myself of Piquet and Écarté helped spark Fox in the Forest, playing Knock-Out Whist had fired my brain.

When I got back from vacation, I pulled up Docs, and in one sitting wrote a set of rules that would be playable with a regular deck of cards. The basic idea is that you had a set of battle sites, each of which specified a number of tricks and a trump suit. You fought through each of these in turn, scoring a small number of points if you take more tricks, and scoring a lot more if you take all of them. Basically, providing an incentive to try and take all the tricks. I also provided the players with a small number of “reserve” cards, which they could add to their hand in order to augment their hand during a battle, if their initial hand looked like a woofer. By having a resource that extended between hands, it put the players in position to try and balance risk and reward.

My usual initial testing process involves trying to play a game with myself. I’ll play every position of the game, doing my best to evaluate what I should do in each position honestly. What I’m generally trying to figure out is if the game play is obvious, which is a very common trap for a game, especially early versions of it. The tradeoffs that you picture and write in the rules may turn out to be very simple to resolve once they’re on the table. So, by just setting up the game and viewing the state through the lens of each player, I’m able to usually judge if there’s anything beyond trivial decisions facing the player. In short, I’m usually able to judge if a game is boring by trying it solo. I might not be able to tell if a game is actually good, because that really only becomes clear as other players get involved and you see if the game is capable of surprises and novel situations.

It wasn’t long before that first test provided results. There was genuinely something here. I played it through all the way to the end, a rarity for a solo test, and even enjoyed myself. That’s a surprise for a first draft, and something I hadn’t really felt since Fox in the Forest. There were some obvious changes that needed to be made, but the core idea seemed sound, and there’s real possibility here. I needed a name, though. Since I was theming it around battles for now, picturing Napoleonic stuff in my head, it should have a name reflecting that. So, for now, the new game will be called Napoleon, Blown Apart. Join me as I design this and hopefully get the game out into the world, and I’ll try and document my decisions here.

In the month or so since I left that job, I have actually written the rules to a game and even put it on to the table for multiple tests. This is the furthest I’ve managed with a new game in years and years. And with that success, that optimism of a game that is actually fun to play, I wanted to resurrect this space to permit me to journal some of my design thoughts. Writing about design can help clarify my thinking, and placing this information on my personal website gives me control of it. Should I put this into a Substack? Yeah, almost certainly. But whatever. The process of writing it all down is more important to me than if anybody actually reads it, so even an audience of zero still allows me to accomplish my goal.

I did need to spend some time upgrading Ghost, and I’m sure there are still rough edges here and there, but I’ll sort those out. Apologies if you try and read this and cannot. And thank you, by the way.

Anyway, uh, we’re back! And just to make sure that things are different this time around, I’m actually writing the next post immediately after this one. It’ll be about the game I’m calling Napoleon, Blown Apart.

Foxes had its origins in the early days of Hocus. At the time, Grant and I were thinking that we could possibly do a suite of games in the same box. We thought, OK, we’re going to have this deck and these tokens, what about variations on the theme? What about other classic card games with spells? I decided to try Cribbage with spells, and Grant was looking at Blackjack with spells. The product vision for Hocus moved, as that game became stronger and we felt like more stuff in the package might just muddle the intent, but I didn’t want to let Foxes go. I’ve always loved Cribbage, it was the first serious card game that I learned to play well, and there are precious few games that start with it as a base.

The first couple versions of Foxes (then known as Wiccage) hewed pretty close to a Cribbage formula, but as I tortured my friends with it, it became apparent that really, it was just worse than Cribbage. That realization was a little disheartening, but I tried to rally by sitting down to read about some classic card games. It’s a good practice for me when I’m stuck for inspiration. Two things really struck me. One, I was reminded how many games out there used smaller decks than the standard poker deck. Outside of Euchre and (maybe) Pinochle, American players seem to encounter very few games that are played with smaller decks. But if I was going to design a two-player game, a smaller deck would present players with different possibilities, and might give me some interesting design problems.

Second, I was struck by Écarté among a few other games, as being two-player trick-taking games. It’s a category that’s virtually unknown in the US, outside of a brief heyday for Bridgette (which made the Games Magazine Hall of Fame), but it’s a category I’ve personally wished was more common. Trick-taking games have been a part of my life for a long time. I met my wife Megan playing bridge, but of course, that requires four players. I used to have lunch with my friend H.P. (a fellow bridge player) in high school all the time and we would try and cook up two-player trick-taking games. It’s an itch I felt needed scratching, and once I combined those ideas of trimming my deck and pivoting towards trick-taking, things started taking shape.

From there, the game was really driven by a few impulses. One, I wanted the deck to be interesting. One of the things I love about folk games, particularly European ones, are the bits of character you see in how the deck operates. Special rules for Jacks, strange orderings, quirks and exceptions that add a ton of character to the game. I wanted to combine that with a modern sensibility to permit such character and texture in the deck but without the memorization that’s required. That was the imptetus for the odd card powers: with my own deck, I could print the rules right on the card, but allow for the cards to be unique. But, I didn’t want them to come off like event cards or collectible card game cards. I wanted the powers to be inherent to the rank, and to feel like they’re natural. I also wanted to play with some surprising consequences for the ranks: that’s where the top rank forcing plays, the 9s being cross-suit, the 1s stealing the lead, and the other things in the deck came from. I wanted to make sure that the deck held some surprises, with consequences for the way people approach playing.

Second, I wanted the game to appeal to serious fans of classic card games. To a certain extent, I’ve known from the beginning that this was a niche product. It’s meant to fulfill a need that I’ve always felt, and I wanted to make sure that it would be interesting even to relatively serious card players. Open minded Bridge players, say. That’s not to say I’m uninterested in accessibility, of course, and I feel like the presentation can make a big difference in the approchability of the game. But I want the game to be one that is worthy of serious play. I want it to be a game that provides a rich, challenging experience to players who invest their time in it. I want it to be a game that doesn’t feel like a compromise, that doesn’t feel like a cut-down card game, but instead is fully satisfying. I would love for players to feel like they can truly become expert in the game.

Third, I’ve been trying to keep my mind focused on things which add interest to the game without necessarily complication. Again, that comes from the impulse to make a game like classic card games. Those games are successful because relatively simple rules interact in interesting ways to challenge players. It’s why I eventually dumped all the last vestiges of the old spell casting from the original inspiration in favor of fixed abilities on the cards. It’s why I’ve wanted the ability to swap what is trump, to provide a lot of texture to the card play and the opportunity for well-timed plays. It’s why I’ve tried to focus on tools for the player who is behind to regain control, but in ways that feel natural and not cheap.

In the end, what I’m inspired here is a category of games, rather than a specific theme or mechanism. I’d like this game to be a love letter to traditional trick-taking, and a revelation of a type of play that most people wouldn’t consider for this category of games. I want it to simultaneously feel modern but classic. I want this to be the game that 15-year-old Josh would have played in the lunch room with his friend, when they didn’t share a lunch with any of their usual card game crowd. I want this to be the game that I could have played on train seatback trays across Europe when I was bumming around with a friend, or on a vacation with Megan. I want this to be a game that I always have with me because it’s compact but always satisfying. I want players to play it and feel recognition at the familiar elements, but to also see new and surprising things.

• No more card drafting! This is, by far, the biggest change. This was suggested by a partner I’m talking with, and he’s already tested this a fair bit and likes the change. The idea here is to simiplify the game a little bit, while trying to retain the tactical interest. This is the change I’m going to examine most carefully. If it works out and the game still retains the richness I want, it’s a big win for the playability of the game.
• A new rank! One thing about the old arrangement of cards is that I wanted the top card of the suit to have the forced play ability, but it was causing me trouble with the “all odd ranks have special powers” thing. Adding another rank with the old scheme doesn’t work, because then you end up with an odd number of cards. Adding two ranks doesn’t help, because then your top rank is even again. And on it goes. But, with the new scheme of not dealing the whole deck, I can add an 11 rank, and move the former 10 ability up. As a bonus, this gives a little separation between the 11s and 9s, which means the off-suit top ranked cards are a little more powerful, and not just for pulling out 9s.
• Some changes to scoring! Under the new scheme, you aren’t guaranteed to have all 7s played, so the majority scoring for them no longer works. But that’s OK, I’ve long been considering having them each worth a point. I also moved the two trick scoring things up to two points, which helps balance them against the 7s and the goals a bit better.
• New Goals! Because you’re now holding a larger hand at the beginning of the game, the Goals needed be tougher. I also made a change I’ve long considered, which is giving the even cards a purpose - there are now goals keying off them specifically. The goals are also worth fewer points compared to the end-Round scoring.
• Re-deals! In order to give people a little bit more of a decision on re-deals, and because they’re more of a hassle than they were before, they’re limited to once per-game now, per-player.

That’s it for now. Please take a look and if you give it a try, I’d love to hear from you.

Second big thing is that I’m working with somebody who has suggested a variant. If you’ve tried the game, I’d love to get your opinion on which set of rules you prefer. The new rules are modified as follows:

• When dealing, deal 12 cards to each player. Ignore all references to Draft cards in the rules. Place the extra 6 cards to the side, we’re calling that the Vault for now.
• A few of the cards need small changes:
  • The 1s, ignore the reference to draft order.
  • 3s can now switch Trump with any card from your hand, not the draft cards.
  • 5s now work totally differently: Look at any two cards in the Vault, and you may exchange one card from your hand with one of them.
• The scoring is largely unchanged, but if there’s a tie for tricks or 7s, that point isn’t awarded.

This is mainly to test if this direction is fruitful. There are changes that I might want to do if this seems like a good idea, such as modifying the number of cards set aside, updating scoring, fiddling with some of the powers, etc, but I’d like to get people’s impressions of this basic idea versus the drafting one.

If you try this out, let me know!

I also simplified the deck by renaming the Witch cards to just being 10s. They’ll still be illustrated with witches, they’ll still be clearly the face cards of each suit, but this simplifies rules expressions across a lot of places. In particular, I had to keep mentioning in places that the Witch was the highest ranked card of each suit. And that’s just a waste of time. So, 10s they are.

But the biggest change was an update to the goal subsystem. Previously, each hand had a goal card dealt out from a separate deck. It felt a little bolted on. I liked the concept, and the balancing of trying to get a scoring combination in your hand while also preserving the viability of your hand as a play hand was great. But, there wasn’t really enough variety in the goals, and I didn’t want to increase the size of card count just to add some more goal cards. I also was missing a previous iteration’s ability to change the goal, and wanted to find a way to get that back in.

After thinking about it, I realized I could put the goals on the cards themselves. After all, we’re dealing a trump card, it could easily pull double duty and could express a goal. Now, we’ve got a nice property: there are basically 28 combinations of goal/trump suit that can happen (the 9s are all identical), meaning each trump card you pull is kind of a different game. It’s a fun property. It also enabled me to increase the goal count to 10 without adding to the component count. Finally, it also added goal switching back, since there is a spell to switch the trump card. That spell was a bit too specialized, so this gives it more opportunities to be useful.

I do think I’m going to change the name. The game has drifted from Cribbage a fair bit, people don’t seem to get the name, and I think the art is going to go in a more fairy tale direction. I’d love suggestions.

All in all, I’m happy with the changes. I’d like to find more testers for the game. If you’d like to help the rules are here and the cards are here. It’s now even easier to build: 30 cards and a couple reference cards. I’d love to hear any feedback!

If you’d like to try a two-player trick-taking game that has bits of Cribbage, elements of Whist-style games, some shades of Piquet and Bezique, and its own unique character, I’d love to hear what you have to say. The rules are available for anybody to comment, and the straightforward card file (only 40 cards!) is a PDF available here. I think it’s a pretty unique game, and I’d love to find out your take. It’s not a finished design, but I think it’s already pretty fun, and I think with some active playtesters, I could finish it fairly quickly. The best place to leave feedback is to drop a comment in the Google doc. Thanks for looking!

Another problem was a little more subtle, but once a player started getting ahead, they could draft cards and just keep snowballing. It was a bummer to be on the wrong side of that, and just sit there getting hammered. The spells were intended to help out with breaking that cycle, but they were doing a poor job of it, so the runaway leader problem was still present.

Another issue was that the deck, while I liked the number of suits and the size of the deck, needed some more going on. The special powers of the Queens/Witches were fun, but the rest of the deck was just a stripped poker deck. It seemed like a missed opportunity.

Finally, the scoring system just didn’t work. I greatly admire Roma, and Roma’s scoring system, but without the points loss that Roma has, it just didn’t make sense. The rules weight of the scoring subsystem was too much, and it just was too complicated. This, at least, was an easy problem to fix - just go to keeping score normally.

As for the rest, the idea was sparked by a playtester mentioning that maybe spells should be a lot more limited. Well, what if that is the angle? Then I thought, what if casting a spell was triggered by playing a particular card from the deck? That would limit it to three spells a hand, which seemed like enough to be important, but not enough to steal focus. But if I were going to put stuff on the cards, maybe I could put more things.

In the end, I made all of the odd-ranked cards special in some way. It gives players more tools to control the flow of the game, gives more texture to the deck, and it simplifies the spells while also making them more important. Now, you have to think about if you want to use one of your precious special cards. Is it the right time?

After trying this version out several times, I think there’s a game here. It’s a long ways from done, but it’s entertaining already, and much improved over the last version. Dumping two entire subsystems (Runes and Mana) makes for a sleeker game, and there’s more room for skillful play. If you’d like to look at the rules, you can check them out here and even comment. And you can download the print-and-play of the cards here. It’s a pretty easy build, just forty cards in total. Take a look!

Mystery Rummy #1: Jack the Ripper. Still probably the best of the series, this is a tense, tight game with a dark, dark theme. I initially thought death metal, but after thinking about it while making dinner, decided that’s not quite right. You want more menace, more atmosphere. The streets of London, choked with despair, poverty, terror. You want black metal. Yes. That’s the stuff. How about Altar of Plagues’s brilliant swan song, Teethed Glory and Injury? Perhaps the frigid, distant, howling peril of Emperor’s In The Nightside Eclipse?

Mystery Rummy #2: Murders in the Rue Morgue. This is a much more mannered theme, of deduction, not of terror and blood. Sure, it’s still a murder mystery, but it’s not the same kind of visceral thing that #1 is. Something sinuous, twisting, even puzzling might work here. Part of me thinks something mathy, like Don Caballero (For Respect, maybe), Burning Airlines (Mission: Control!), or Polvo (Exploded Drawing) is the thing here. But you could also go with a really literate rap album here, something with a winding lyrical approach. Say, Blackalicious - probably Blazing Arrow. That’s a reach, but it might work.

Mystery Rummy #3: Jekyll & Hyde. A two-faced game like this requires a two-faced sort of music. A kind of schizophrenia is really what we’re looking for, the sort of thing that leaves you starting at its starts and turns. I sort of want to say Naked City (Torture Garden), but that’s kind of cruel. Also, really, that’s only Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll. Plus, it would be kinda hard to play a game to that racket. Perhaps Boris, with their doom laden drone and garage rock collisions, perhaps Akuma No Uta. Finally, you could spin some drum and bass or something similarly glitchy. Say some classic Squarepusher (Music is Rotted One Note) or Prefuse 73 (Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives).

Mystery Rummy #4: Al Capone. I feel like we need some sophistication here. We’ve had blistering blast beats and screeching, twisty guitar lines, and glitchy, twitchy stuff. A more straightforward approach is called for here, something smoother. Jazz, obviously, is the ticket. That game’s era isn’t my wheelhouse for music, but hey, whatever, I’ll just ignore that I’m picking stuff from totally the wrong decade. You can never go wrong with Coltrane (Blue Train). Perhaps even some really jazzy ska, maybe The Skatalites (Foundation Ska is the best collection around) or something from the third wave, like The Articles (Flip F’Real - $.15!).

• Aces and Kings have all four suits on the back
• Queens, Jacks, and Tens have three suits (one correct) on the back
• Nine through Four have two suits (one correct) on the back
• Threes and Twos have their suit on the back

This limited information about cards can open up new dimensions of gameplay in traditional games. We’ve posted rules for a series of games designed to take advantage of this deck:

• Foresight, a trick-taking game including a unique bidding system and a special way of playing cards
• Heartburn, a Hearts variant featuring a very fun scoring rule

A document with rules for all the games we’ve posted so far is available here. You can purchase your own copy from DriveThruCards, or check out the Android versions if that’s your thing.

The game has been sitting at stage 4, first stage prototype (going off my stages of game development post), where I’ve tinkered with things enough to recognize that there’s a game there, but it’s not really a game I could show to other people. What became apparent in my tinkering is where the focus of the design should be, which is helpful. My small scale tests showed that most of the interesting decisions in the game came from managing the risk/reward of spending dice for abilities. It’s a game about constantly dealing with probabilities, about judging the right time to fire off your limited supply of powers, and deciding when you can afford to take a big risk.

Having that focus helped me a lot with moving to the next stage, having a game I could put before my local gaming group to see what they think. What excites me about the game is that there’s actually an unusual property to it: while the game has a lot of randomness due to the huge number of dice involved, the game play presents more like a series of puzzles with the player having a wide variety of tools to bend probabilities in their favor. It looks like a dice-fest, and it still has a bit of that in its soul, but it’s also a thinky game with a series of situations to crack.

What the game needs, though, is content. There needs to be enough variety in the game that the scenarios the game pops up are continually novel and interesting. My basic setup, of a single character and a few monsters, was fine as far as it went, but it wouldn’t support multiple players and certainly wouldn’t support long term play. But was there enough design space here? Could I make a collection of characters, skills, and monsters here that felt different and fun to play given the constraints of manipulating a bunch of D6s?

To find out, I set off to try and knock out a bunch of content. I thought about stopping once I had a subset of my planned content, but I decided that I needed to be able to create a full set of content if this was going to be a viable game. I didn’t know if there was going to be room for that much variety. Was the premise too constrained? Frankly, the process was painful. I stared at my spreadsheet, and just stalled out. I had designer’s block. I needed to fight through if this was going to happen.

I tried several things, none of them really successful. Going back and forth between different types of content, setting myself a mandatory two-card-a-night limit, looking at other games - I was just stuck. Finally, I decided to skip mechanics at first, and just name everything. Every card, every ability on the cards, it all got named. That was creative, it was fun, and gave me a direction for filling everything out. After that, things moved reasonably quickly. I eventually ended up creating 12 characters, 12 skill sets, 60 monsters, and two treasure tables. Creating that content, with only a few repeat abilities (which I was able to eliminate during an edit pass), convinced me that there’s plenty of design space here.

That work is done, at least for now. I printed things up, cut out some cards, stuck on some sleeves, and at last had a second stage prototype. It was time to get some table time with other folks.

If you’re curious about the game, I’ve made the current rules public. This is still very much an early stage of the game, but I’d love to hear about any thoughts. I’ve also put the cards up as well, which means that if you’re crazy, have a ton of D6s sitting around the house, and have time to burn on a super early prototype, you can play the game at home. I don’t really recommend that yet, mind you, but you could try it.

Ambush! is a World War II boardgame set at the individual soldier level, published by Victory Games in 1983. It was designed by Eric Lee Smith and John Butterfield, both of whom have reached new levels of hobby fame as two of the folks behind Shenandoah Studios, producers of what is still probably the best iPad wargame, Battle of the Bulge. But both have been veteran wargame designers for quite some time, and Ambush! is one of the very best games either has worked on.

Ambush! holds a special place for me, being the first serious wargame I ever played, unless you count Axis & Allies, which I don’t, not really. I bought it during a family trip to New York City from the Compleat Strategist (which is amazingly still there) when I was probably roughly 11. I devoured the rule book in the hotel that night and set up a scenario on the floor. My family all thought I was totally bananas, but I was riveted. For a kid who had mostly played RPGs to that point, it opened a new world.

Ambush! is, in some ways, pretty close to an RPG. To start a game, you create a team of 8 soldiers, spendings points on Initiative ratings (and commander ability) and rolling for a bunch of other statistics, such as marksmanship, perception, and morale. You also then equip your soldiers using your equipment points, subject to some fairly restrictive encumbrance rules. They even gain experience and improve as you play through the campaign. After generating your squad, you then select which scenario to play from among the eight in the box. The scenario will give you some special rules, setup instructions, and what your victory conditions are for the scenario.

The game presents like a standard hex and counter wargame, with one major exception: the paragraph booklet and sleeve. Each mission has a set of sheets of numbers that you slide into a sleeve, which has little windows in it. That allows you to slide it back and forth and check certain columns at certain times, which will reveal different paragraph numbers. Those, in turn, will reveal things that happen during the mission. Terrain events, triggered events, random events - they’re all driven by this opaque system. And surprises abound in it. I’d love to talk about specifics, but they’d be unfortunate spoilers, and I hope people get to experience them properly.

But it gets even better. Each mission has different “conditions”, which change based on events during the mission. A condition might change when particular units show up or are defeated, when the player’s soldiers perform certain tasks, or other things that happen on the board. Here’s the nifty part of conditions: you change the sheet inside the sleeve. That, in turn, changes all the event triggers and what the reactions of the bad guys are. So if something momentous happens on the board, the game responds to it.

When you combine all that stuff with intelligent rules for how the Germans behave, you get this amazing solo experience. It really at times feels like there’s another player you’re struggling against, even though the game is purely solo. I’ve actually had some of my best times with the game playing it as a team game, since you then have a friend there to share your triumphs and failures.

Even with all of the recent interest in cooperative and solo play in board games, I’ve still never played anything that generates quite as convincing a narrative, that feels more alive, and that can be as gripping as Ambush! If it has a drawback, it’s that the missions aren’t super replayable. Once you’ve seen the surprises, you’re going to be able to plan for them. But what a ride! And, wait a few years, and it’ll all seem fresh again. Plus, there are expansions as well as a Pacific Theater version (Battle Hymn, which is really hard), so there’s plenty of gaming available in the system. This game is such a unique experience, everybody with interest in WWII gaming should track down a copy.

I got my friend Jarrett to sit down for a test of this latest version, and things went much better than before. Having the scoring integrated into the card play worked just as intended, giving a coherent feel to the goals of the game. There were certainly avenues for some control over the trick play, which Jarrett demonstrated by throttling me pretty thoroughly on the first hand. Even the new spells worked pretty well, giving the player who was behind some options to try and scramble back on top. I even had an encouraging sign, when I made an egregious mis-play during the game and suffered for it. I wanted Wiccage to be a game of skill, after all, so this was a good thing.

The game, of course, was far from perfect. It was a too easy for a player to get a lock in play, which meant that the loser of tricks was getting a double-whammy: few choices to make for cards and the loss of two Runes. The income for Runes at the end of each hand felt too punitive. The spells needed some work. But, for the first time, I didn’t feel like the entire structure needed to be replaced, which was new. Anyway, Jarrett clobbered me pretty good, and I took the findings back to make some more changes.

This time, I didn’t have to do a ton of work. I replaced one spell which seemed useless with another one, designed to help a player who was getting beat up by giving them the chance to invert the winner of a trick (for a substantial mana cost). I changed it so that the leading player got 3 Mana each turn with the trailer gaining 2. This softened the positive feedback loop I had been trying to cultivate, but the structure of the game was making that feel unpleasant and claustrophobic instead of dramatic, so it had to go.

Two more changes remained to make. The first was a change to give even the loser of a trick a choice of card. They could either take the leftover face up card or could take a face down card (if any remained). It’s a way for a player who is getting beat up to have a possible path to a surprise. The final change was to reduce the bonus for winning the majority of tricks to one Rune, but to give a Rune to the final trick, which adds some drama to the final plays of cards which can be missing.

With these changes, it was time to head back to the table. If they panned out, the game would be ready for some outside testers to start playing around with it.

It wasn’t a trainwreck like before, but it still wasn’t very much fun. With only a seven card hand compared to four suits, and less than half of the deck being dealt, the amount of control that players had for skillful play were extremely limited. The card drafting was kind of fun, but also usually pretty obvious. The new spells didn’t really work at all to give back interesting levels to pull. It was just a leaden experience.

Not only that, but the hand scoring part was still disconnected from the trick/drafting part. It was kind of fun seeing what hands we came up with, and it was sort of interesting seeing how the Frankenstein did, but it just felt like a part of another game that had drifted in, not a coherent thing. The whole thing just still didn’t work at all.

Discouraged, I went back to the drawing board. What made things feel so disjoint? One of the primary tensions I hoped to create in the game was having two different things pulling on the players, wanting to draft cards that were good for trick-taking and cards that worked with your Cribbage hand. Being dragged in two directions is often a lot of fun, striking a balance between opposing goals. Here, though, the choices were too narrow. Most of the time, your choice of cards was too obvious. It was too rare that both cards were useful but for different things. Add in the lack of space for skill during the play and the cribbage showdown just felt arbitrary. You were rewarded not for your skill but just for arbitrary card drawing.

How to fix it? My original inspiration had been to start with Cribbage, but it was time to think about making another even more radical shift away. The phases of the game had to be more coherent. I pawed through my collection of games, read the rules to more traditional games, and just thought. I decided I needed to have only one phase of the game.

One day, I was idly contemplating poker hands and cribbage hands, and the underlying similarity between them. After all, they’re composed of pairs, straights, and flushes in various combinations. Cribbage has 15s as well, but the hands in both games are more alike than they are different. And, when viewed like that, you could break down those goals explicitly. This hand, you’re going for straights. Next hand, pairs. And so forth. Once you’ve decomposed Cribbage like that, it seemed obvious that I could take the next step: you pursue those goals during trick play, not afterwards.

Creating the new sequence of play was straightforward at that point. I could take a cue from Bezique and let the winner of each trick play one combination from their hand to score a Rune. The scoring would become more dynamic, more integrated into the trick play, and should be a more coherent game. Of course, at this point, I’ve lost almost everything from Cribbage from the game, but it would hopefully be worth it. I also had to dump my Frankenstein crib rule, which was a shame, but maybe that would show up in some future game.

If I was going to have the game be just the trick-taking phase, it was important for that to be more interesting as well. I therefore wanted to play through the whole deck, which opens up a lot more skillful play. With 40 cards, though, that meant 20 tricks, which seemed like a lot. Why not remove a suit? Four suits is familiar, but this game didn’t need them. Dropping to 30 cards would limit the number of tricks, make trick play more interesting by making voids in suits less likely, and would give more ability for players to channel play. Seemed like a winner to me.

A few more details remained. I simplified and re-wrote the spells, giving just four spells for the players to worry about, all of which applied during trick playing. I also finally dumped the “buy a Rune” spell, which I liked but had terrible play consequences. I added in a bonus two Runes for the player that wins a majority of tricks, just to keep players on their toes. Reading the rules, it again felt pretty fresh. The game had evolved into something pretty different, but I was once again optimistic. I’d been bouncing around stages 5 and 6 a lot with this game. Maybe this version would allow me to advance?

I had mentioned reading about Écarté last time, and trimming my deck down. It was a start. I started thinking about Bezique as well, which has a structure that somewhat mimics Cribbage in some ways. With my newly stripped deck, perhaps adding some trick-taking would be a good idea (I’m not obsessed! I swear!). One of the issues with the first revision of the game is that the individual hands had too much of a swing to them. In Cribbage, you play enough hands that luck is given more of a chance to even out. In the first revision of Wiccage, hands were more consequential and thus the luck of the draw played a bigger part.

The next idea, inspired by those two games, seemed clear: add a trick-taking phase before you show off your hands, replacing the normal Cribbage play phase. It would give a new avenue for skilled play and more places to cast spells and change your circumstances. By having the players draft their cards as they won tricks, I could provide further places for player skill to apply. It would also allow players to perhaps use their unique hidden information in fun ways with the cards. The idea seemed to have some merit. I also added scoring potential for taking the majority of tricks, which meant that there were now two major ways to score points: taking tricks and building a big Cribbage hand.

This was a big conceptual leap, and a huge departure from the structure of Cribbage. By replacing the play phase of Cribbage with an entirely different type of card competition, it significantly changed the character of the game. It was becoming its own thing. Perhaps this would be the boost the game needed to have an excuse for existing.

A basic trick-taking structure was simple enough to write: the up-card from Cribbage served dual duty as the trump suit, with a simple rule that players had to follow the led suit. Winner took their choice of two face up cards into their hand and leads the next suit, after the loser takes the other card and two more are faced. I chose 7 tricks as a way to give both players a chance to improve their Cribbage hands while not taking forever to play out (and also being odd to ensure somebody won the majority). It was a basic chassis, but it seemed like it would work.

A few embellishments followed: I added a couple wrinkles to the trick play to add some unique character (some forced plays as well as an additional way to score points); I converted what used to be the dealer’s crib into an alternate hand that you had to compete with (sort of a Frankenstein’s monster, which I loved conceptually); I wrote some new spells. The new, improved Wiccage was ready for a playtest, armed with an entirely new phase of play and a structure that I hadn’t really ever seen in a card game before. And a Frankenstein’s monster rule.

Next time, how that playtest went.

I’m pretty Justin will speak to me again at some point.

Problems were showing up so fast that I was having trouble writing them down quickly enough, and I just stopped taking notes after a bit. The first, and probably biggest problem, was simply that of pointlessness: the overwhelming feeling that we should just be playing Cribbage instead. While there were certainly changes, none of them really improved the game. I had mostly just taken this classic, beloved game and ruined it. But there were more specific problems with the game as it was structured as well:

• The scoring system in play, while simplified on paper, was fiddly and unpleaseant to deal with at the table.
• The spells were mostly obvious as to when to use them, and even in our first game, using them was basically rote.
• The ability to purchase points using Mana provided a bad disincentive to cast spells, which theoretically is one of the calling cards of the game.
• The positive feedback mechanism wasn’t really working particularly well.
• Trying to track all this extra stuff and still play a reasonable game of Cribbage was just not working.

Basically, the game was a total mess. I wasn’t actually sure there was going to be much to salvage. It was time to go back to the drawing board. I started by looking through the smoking ruins of the game to see if there was anything that wasn’t a total loss. The thing that had come through the best was the tug-of-war for points, which seemed to work more or less as I designed it. That was good, I could keep that. But the rest all needed retooling, at a minimum.

I retreated and settled in with David Parlett’s Penguin Book of Card Games to see if I could find any inspiration. I actually ended up reading the whole thing from cover-to-cover (again), which of course filled my head full of ideas. One game in particular struck me: Écarté, a two-player trick-taking game. A few things struck me about the game. The first is the fact that it simply existed. There aren’t really any popular two-player trick-taking games these days, and the only one I had played alot was Bridgette (which is excellent). The category seemed worth exploring.

The second thing that hit me about the game was the truncated deck. Trimming the size of the deck for a two-player game keeps things manageable in terms of keeping the variance on hands reasonable. It seemed to be something worth thinking about for my game. I also started thinking about the magic number of 15, and how it imparts such importance to 5s in Cribbage, due to the way it matches up with the face cards. What if I dumped the face cards, leaving just numbers for adding up. That might be simpler and feel different.

That lead me to another thought: I would need to change the Cribbage magic number if I trim the suits. But, the number would have to stay odd. If I made it even, you’d have a single card where you could hit the target number with two copies, and that’s double-dipping with pairs. So, odd it is. I also wanted the target number centered in the suit values, to make each card equally valuable in achieveing the target. That suggested an even number of cards in the suit - an even number meant I could just average the ends of the suit and get an odd target number. Removing the court cards seemed promising, as it fulfilled these criteria. In fact, if I treated the Aces as 11s, the center of the suit would be 13, a suitably magical number. Nice.

Then, I had a bit of inspiration. What if I dump the Aces instead, and keep the Queens. They could still count as 11 (or as 1, as in Blackjack, because why not?), and I’d still have the desirable properties from above. Keeping the Queens meant I could call them Witches, and thematically it would make a nice pair with the Wizardly shenanigans of Wozzle. I mentioned this to Grant, and he came up with the entertaining name of Wiccage (it had been called Thaummage as a working title before).

The trimmed deck already promised to be an improvement. But I still had work to do on this revision.

My immediate thoughts went to Cribbage. I’ve been playing Cribbage since I was in elementary school, a game that most of my father’s family played. It hadn’t occurred to me until the moment Grant asked me to start thinking about another game, but there are no modern Cribbage variants that I’m aware of. It suddenly seemed like a ripe area for exploration. So, I had a starting point: “Cribbage with spells.”

But where to go from there? Where would the spells fit in? There are a fair number of moving parts in Cribbage, which basically breaks down into several phases: discard phase, play phase, and show phase. There were farily obvious manipulations that could be performed in each of these phases, which meant that it would be straightforward to come up with spells. But that’s not enough to really distinguish this new game from Cribbage.

The next thought was to consider simplifying things. Cribbage can be a little difficult to learn for new players, so where could things be simplified? What about the scoring? Cribbage has the somewhat fussy part where you’re constantly accumulating scoring through the game, a complex enough procedure that most people use a specialized piece of equipment to solve it. While cribbage boards are nifty, they’re also kind of a kludge.

I started daydreaming about scoring systems that I like. Many scoring systems, particularly in modern board game designs, are designed to have a fair bit of gravity built-in. There are mechanisms for trailing players to catch up, and breaking away can be difficult. Cribbage, my inspiration, has what I would describe as a neutral scoring system, where the current scores of the players have no influence on future scoring. What about the other direction? What about a game with a positive feedback mechanism, such that a player in the lead actually gained momentum.

Roma is a game with an example of what I was thinking about. While the positive feedback doesn’t strictly come from scoring as much as from the board position, it still embodied the dynamic I was hoping to create. Roma is a game of unsteady equilibrium, with the players jostling for position against each other, each move carefully countered. At some point, the circling ends and one player gains a dominant position and the game usually rapidly reaches a conclusion. That knife-edge balance is something I’ve always admired about the design, and I decided that I’d try and seek out that same feeling in Wiccage.

What I came up with was having a limited number of scoring tokens, in the center of the table. Players would compete to get all five of them on their side of the table, with each scored point either pulling one from the middle to you or from your opponent to the middle. That was broadly similar to the way Roma worked, with the exception that it was all-or-nothing, with victory only coming once you had all the scoring tokens. What I decided to add to that basic framework was to have each player’s Mana income be based on their points. That meant that whoever currently had the edge in scoring would be favored to continue to win the game. The goal wasn’t to make it an absolute, but to make a comeback also feel special. I thus decided to go with a formula of one plus the number of owned runes, such that a 4-1 lead would lead to a 5-2 edge in mana, which should be a big edge, but a 3-2 game would be a much closer 4-3 edge in mana, which could be overcome.

With the scoring figured out, or at least a proposal, how the player gained those points needed to be sorted. I kept the basic structure of Cribbage intact, but simplified things a bit. Basically, each combination hit during the play phase scored a point, with the player ahead in the phase gaining a Rune. Similarly, the show phase would earn the player with the better hand a Rune. Finally, the crib would earn the dealer a Rune if the hand was better than a certain threshold. Since there were three Runes in play in each hand, it would take at least two hands to win, but would likely take more.

What was left at this point was to figure out spells. I added spells to change the rank of a card as it’s played, change the target number of 15, manipulate the up card, draw replacement cards, and even gain a Rune. This last rule seemed like a nice one, reminiscent of Coup, although I hadn’t had that in mind when I made the rule. The menu of spells, paid for with mana gained for Runes, seemed to be powerful without being overwhelming, and seemed a decent way to translate a player’s progress into power at the table. It also targeted most of the areas of play in Cribbage, with the play phase in particular subject to more control by the players.

My “Cribbage with spells” (which wasn’t yet known as Wiccage) was ready for a first test. And that first test was a total mess.

What is it that I love about trick-taking games? I think it’s because, at their heart, they’re more like deduction than people realize. It’s solving the puzzle of how the cards lie, and how to get from there to accomplishing your goal in the game, whatever it may be. At each turn, your choices are typically constrained to only a handful of choices. But figuring out the possibilities, and how things are going to ripple through the rest of the hand, those are decisions that get my brain whirling.

But it’s beyond just those delicious puzzles, the joys of a well-executed squeeze play, or the delight in a well-selected lead. There’s depth to a great trick-taking game, of course, but they can still manage to be great games from the start. Novices can play and enjoy Bridge just fine. Learn a few mechanics, get the suit order down, keep a scoring table handy, and you can play one of the world’s great games. And while you can see how deep things can be, the decisions you’re making are still interesting, and meaningful, and enjoyable. You aren’t overwhelmed with choices, and you don’t feel like you’re playing the game wrong even if you’re a bit naive. The game molds itself to your abilities like beautifully tailored clothing.

What Bridge cannot do, though, is work for other than four players. There are variants, but they’re not very satisfying. That’s where we finally get back to Mü. Mü is played with a custom deck, which goes from 0-9 (with doubled 7s and 1s) in five suits. There are points on the cards as well, which gives the deck further texture. Mü features an interesting bidding process, where players are bidding not just for the opportunity to set the contract and pick trump, but also to be the leader of the opposition or vie to be on one side or the other. The fact that Mü features shifting partnerships means there are subtle political machinations beyond just the simple valuation of your hand. It also means that the game works well from 3 to 6 players, being particularly great with 5.

There are other clever mechanics in Mü, but that’s not why I love the game so much. There’s a cohesion to the game that is amazing to me. It feels like every element of the game is perfectly in place. The bidding thresholds, the mechanics of how bids are laid, the distribution of suits and points across suits, the way the two trump selections work, it all gives the feeling of a precision watch put together by a master craftsman.

For someone like me, who hopes to contribute my own work to the hobby and who reads game rules purely for entertainment, there’s another level to it. Mü is a soaring aesthetic achievement. It gives me pleasure just to contemplate how it all works together. The artistry on display is inspiring to me in the same way a great novel is to a writer. It gives me something to strive towards, a North Star guiding my efforts as a designer. Foresight, my first complete game, was directly inspired by Mü. I don’t anticipate ever making anything as great as it, but I’ll have a great time trying.

There are other games in the box with Mü, which makes it an even better deal. In particular, the latest version of the game comes with the brilliant Was Sticht?, which is an incredible game in its own right, maybe my favorite from the great Karl-Heinz Schmiel. I hope maybe some folks will check out the box and see what I see in the game: a guiding light that leads them to greater creativity.

As an aside, I just learned that there’s an iOS version of the game while I was writing this article. I can honestly say that I haven’t been more excited for an electronic adaptation of a tabletop game yet. I hope it lives up to my expectations!

“Surely whatever this is can’t be that amazing,” you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking that I’m overselling this astounding thing right now, that you’ll be disappointed when you look further down. Your skepticism is certainly rational, but by the time you’re done here, I think you’ll find that if anything, my words were simply inadequate to capture how stunning this thing is.

Now, I own a lot of games. No, seriously, a lot. What I get asked all the time is first “Have you played all of these?” (No.) But then, the next question is often “What is the best game you own?” That’s not an especially interesting question, as there are so many ways to answer it. I could talk about what the most important game in my life has been (Dungeons & Dragons), a game that changed my life (Bridge), the most intense game I’ve played (Magic: the Gathering), the game I’ve probably spent the most time playing (our homebrew version of Warhammer Quest), but none of that answers “best”. I could talk about most inspiring, most admirable, most impressive, and on and on until my interlocutor has wandered off and/or died of boredom, but “best”? No, that’s not a very good question.

But. Turn it around. What’s the worst game that I own? Well. That question most certainly does have an answer. And, to your great regret, you’re about to find out what the answer is.

Where to start with this game. Perhaps the most amazing thing is right on that cover: the price. They wanted $27.95 for this game in 2001, which would be roughly $37 today. That’s basically a full price for the game, which shows some serious chutzpah given the components. I ended up with this because I had a friend who was running an online game store, and he essentially ordered everything fantasy related that showed up in the catalog for me and just shipped things to me. Neither of us knew exactly what this was going to be, and my imagination was wholly incapable of guessing.

While bad, the cover only gives some hints about the perversion contained within. Every element of the cover is ugly, of course, but the best evidence of the insanity within is the person firing a handgun at the beak-faced hydra…thing in the background. I will give them credit, though, for putting the designer’s name on the cover, which wasn’t as common as it should have been in 2001. Of course, maybe it’s an act of violence to the designer, given the game. Also, special mention to the logo, which reads like “Guild Blades of” and thus really captures the zeitgeist of the company. Let’s see what we’ve got on the back.

Primary colors, that’s what we’ve got on the back. Beneath an amazing run-on sentence describing the game play, we’ve got some eye-watering portraits. It’s probably a bad sign for the contents of the box that the best of those portraits is the hawk with the dayglo yellow human arm growing out of its chest. Oh, and we get our first glimpse of the face-melting grandeur of the game board. And now, we can avoid it no longer, it’s time to crack open this box and plumb the depths. This is an example of what the rules look like:

The most surprising thing about the rule book is that there’s an editor listed. I can only assume here that “editing” involved mostly transcribing from the original napkins rather than, you know, editing. The rules give up information about the game grudgingly, slowly, a drip of information that serves only to highlight what you don’t know about how to play. If you read between the lines and squint hard enough, it slowly dawns on you that this is just Talisman with the serial numbers ineptly filed off. And, of course, every single thing the designer ever heard of bolted on. You can travel to both Heaven and Hell. You can travel to Vatican II and become a Space Knight, somehow. There’s a derelict ship because, well, of course there is. Money is called “sabers”, because that’s not at all confusing in a fantasy game. The game tells you that it’s deliberately unfair in the victory conditions, as you can see. Androids and Elves rub elbows. We also learn that a bunch of areas on the board are going to have their own boards in the future. Thank goodness for that! We also learn an astounding fact, which is that they totally forgot to put in the table describing the area that you try and win the game in, and had to include it as a separate errata sheet. Again, because it deserves emphasis: they omitted the winning conditions. This was edited, remember.

And then the cards. Oh, the cards. Almost every one has a “hilarious” statement on them. Like the one where you get to kill the “Health Nuts”, or the wry “drop the soap” joke on the fairies, or perhaps the delight of the endlessly farting demon. Just on and on, a non-stop cavalcade of top-notch cutting-edge anti-humor. Whoever wrote these was truly a comedic talent, able to loop carefully around true wit, never approaching it, but instead outlining humor by being the inverse. But I’ve saved the best for last. The box hints at how bad things might be, the rules suggest what the bottom of the barrel looks like, and the cards show the way towards the depths of the abyss. That abyss is this:

The first incredible thing is that the fact that it’s on a warped piece of cheap, thin cardboard is the least bad thing about it. I don’t even know where to begin. This board is on the inside of my eyelids now. In the darkest pits of my nightmares, that line of men in suits is waiting there for me in all their cruedly rendered glory.

That’s the last image I’ll see when I die.

This board manages to be garish and yet, at the same time, unclear. If form follows function, then the function of this board is not to provide a playing surface but to serve as a gate for the gibbering horrors of beyond. At some point, somebody involved in the creation of this monstrosity had a moment of doubt. “What if we shouldn’t try and make this as eye piercing as possible,” they asked themselves. And somehow, incredibly, that person was reassured that yes, of course they were on the right path. This really was the right way to present this game. Somebody chose this presentation and said, yes, this is what I want. Put my name on the box.

And that, my friends, is why this is the most astounding game you’ll ever see. Because this game was made this way on purpose. And it had sequels.

I was playing in a big tournament at the Wizards headquarters, and it was a little bit after Ice Age had come out, so 1996-ish. Necropotence decks were really just starting to take over the tournament scene. I was running a pretty novel deck, one based around Manabarbs, Glacial Crevasses, Stone Cauldron, Ankh of Mishra, Black Vise and whatever that card that replaced it was called, and other cards that punished you for trying to do, well, anything. Nobody expected to play in a game where trying to do accomplish anything hurt you, and just watching people’s faces as they tried to cope was just a delight. It also happened to be great against Necropotence decks, which counted on maintaining full hands and churning quickly to get stuff done. If your lands are bouncing back into your hand and you can’t gain off your Ivory Towers, you’re screwed. The contents of my deck are irrelevant to the story, of course, but I loved that deck so much, and now you all know a little about it.

Anyway, I was doing well, 3-1 in the prelims, having stomped three Necro decks so far and lost a close match to a different deck that I can’t recall. I sat down to my next match and started shuffling. Now, in those days, I was a rarity, as a tournament player who didn’t sleeve his cards. Why would I? Manabarbs was a buck, who cares? Anyway, I’m there, cheerfully riffle shuffling my deck, watching my opponent do that laborious “shuffle” where you make a bunch of painstaking little piles and stack them up. Over and over. I’m finished and waiting, and he finally wraps up his little sleeve dance. He reaches for my deck and tells me he’s going to exercise his right to shuffle my deck. Fine with me. I reach over to his deck and do a few quick overhand shuffles and hand it back. Meanwhile, he’s got my deck and he’s going through the entire thing, turning every card so they’re all facing the same direction, lecturing me about proper shuffling technique. At this point, the people next to us have finished their first game, and he’s still sorting my cards to face the same way. Argh. I ask him why he cares, and he says it drives him crazy to see cards facing the wrong way, and that if people are goin to play this game, they really should take the time to learn to take care of their cards properly. He finally finishes sorting, does a really fussy shuffle, and hands the deck back. I decide it’s time to be a dick, look at him, and give my cards a riffle shuffle so that they’re going to be 50/50 mixed the wrong way. I then re-offer him a chance to shuffle, as required by the rules. He got a panicky look in his eyes, and, shoulders slumped, merely cut after that. He knew he was beaten on that front.

For that entire match, when I drew cards, I just held them in whatever orientation I drew them, so half my cards were upside-down and half were not. I knew the deck well enough that it was no trouble to me, but he was literally shaking looking at the back of my hand. He lost the first game, and it wasn’t close. My deck was singing and he was making poor decisions to boot. He declined to even sideboard, didn’t bother touching my deck, and just mailed in game two in order to get away from my and my chaos. I would have felt bad about it except, man, that lecture. My sloppy, devil-may-care approach to shuffling may have won me a Magic game, which is all I could ever ask of a haphazard randomizing process.

Things evolved from that beginning, and the game took on bits of Bezique and Was Sticht? along the way, if that can be imagined. Oh, and spells, of course. After extensive playtesting, I signed the game with Foxtrot Games, where Randy Hoyt did an amazing job with taking the game to the next level.

The game is off to the printer, and will be available in summer of 2017! I’m so excited for it to get into people’s hands.

It’s worth examining, first, what sorts of things simulators can help with. The biggest area where I make use if them is if I have complex mathematical interactions in any of my designs. While I do have the background to sort that stuff out using real mathematical tools, those skills are really rusty. My programming skills are not, so it’s a lot easier to figure things out using a simulation. The next place I make use of simulations is when I’m sorting out the parameters in a game. Finally, I’ll use a simulator to test out alternative rules in an easier fashion than lining up an entire playtest.

Some examples of things I’ve tested recently with simulators (all example code here is in the public domain, knock yourself out if they help):

• Probabilities of oddball poker hands for Wozzle. While we didn’t end up using them, it was interesting to see what the relative probabilities of things like three-pairs and two-threes-of-a-kind were compared to existing poker hands. You can see that script, although like all examples here, it’s kind of rough.
• Looking at the average gains of pass and run plays in Gridiron Solitaire, helping Bill Harris balance out those functions. That code is available as well.
• A combat simulator for a tabletop adventure game, a big, complex beast of a thing that eventually would fit into the same basic space as Warhammer Quest or Descent. That game isn’t really ready to be discussed publically, but one day.
• Examining dice probabilities in KMATTS to try and weigh different dice combinations. That code is again available for download.

This last example is worth exploring in greater detail, in the hope it will help someone else out hoping to use similar techniques. First, all of these simulators are written in Python. Python is simply the easiest language to work in for this type of prototyping. The presence of a robust numerical package, not to mention simple data handling and rapid productivity make the choice something of a no-brainer. I’m afraid that a Python primer is somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but there are a lot of resources on the web for getting up to speed.

Getting beyond that, into the code, the KMATTS simulator features some simple command line arguments (look at the main() method in the code):

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-c', '--count', dest='trials', type=int,
    default=TRIALS, help='How many trials to run?')
parser.add_argument('-f', '--filename', dest='filename', type=str,
    default='output.csv', help='Output file name')
args = parser.parse_args()

I always make sure that my simulators have a count argument in them. I’ll run shorter trials until I have confidence I’m testing the right thing, and an output parameter allows me to compare runs of the program easily. After that, I open up a CSV file for output, and then I run a series of trials, with a number of dice ranging from 3 to 10. The goal there was to compare how the value of a reroll (or other power) varied depending on the number of dice I was rolling. The CSV made it easy to pull into Excel for additional analysis. You can see a Python feature that makes things easy in this section

        for base in ['Mean Scoring (w/ {0} defense choices)']:
            for title in title_row_gen(base):
                output_row.append(title)

This loop, using a generator, allows me to really easily create a header row for the output. The heart of the simulator is in attack_trials(), which contains a loop running over all of my trials. The code that I have on the site is when I was exploring the impact of selecting a value for a defense die on attack rolls, so it starts by setting up some housekeeping. It then accumulates results in a set of arrays, one for scoring, and one for each defense die count. After finishing all of the trials, it uses numpy to compute means:

    output_row = [str(dice_count), str(numpy.array(scoring).mean())]

Those are the basics. One of the interesting things about this script is that there are a lot of parts left in there for previous things I tested. You can see three different scoring variations (scoring_version_1, scoring_version_2, and, logically enough, scoring_version_3), nine different dice manipulations, two different types of defense dice (random and selecting), and four different dice combinations (only three of which made it into the system). By running the script, saving the output, and modifying as I went, I was able to slowly accumulate the data that I wanted to try and tune my system.

Using this simulator, I was able to quickly and easily run millions of sets of dice, and see what the effects of different choices would be. While it’s no substitute for playing the game, it still gave me a lot of insight into what some smart choices were as a starting point. When it’s appropriate, I will continue to create simulators to give me labs to change up the parameters and rules of my games.

Rules, when I’m talking about gamestuff, doesn’t really mean the rule book or text on cards, although those are the places that rules are expressed. Instead, what I’m referring to is the methods of manipulating the game state of the game. The rules tell the players what things they are allowed to do and not do in the game. This may seem like an obvious thing, but the more interesting part is what rules are not. The specific numbers within a game are things that I don’t necessarily consider part of the rules, nor are the specific cards, special powers, and other exceptions present in a game. Those fall into another category, and I treat them differently when working on a game.

The rules are the most important things to sort out early. Knowing that cards move like this, that dice work like that, that points are going to be won in these particular ways, these are the things that can make a design unique and interesting. If I can’t figure out what the rules are going to look like early, I don’t have a game.

Content is the collection of details of specific bits in a game. The content consists of the things that are manipulated by the rules, especially things that have unique properties. The manifest of cards in a design, the list of heroes, the details of spaces on the board, these are all pieces of content. They interact with the rules in many ways, and are obviously crucial to how the game works.

An important difference between the rules and content is that the content doesn’t need to be complete to evaluate the rules. They will change in tandem at times, but I can create a subset of my content and still use that to validate the ideas in my rules. I’ll usually create just the bare minimum of content initially to see if things are going in the right direction. I explicitly do not create anything close to what I think is the full content list until well into the design. I also assume that I’ll need to create at least twice as much content as I think I need, because I’ll end up throwing at least half of it away.

Components are the bits and pieces within a game that don’t have unique data associated with them. Usually, these follow in lockstep from the rules and content, and you’ll just need markers and counters to keep track of the game state that arises out their interactions. However, sometimes components can feed back into the other gamestuff you’re working with, and it can pay to work out your component list mid-way through your design process.

Parameters are the numbers that go into a game that can be changed independently of the rules and content. How many points do players need to win? How many cards do they draw in a hand? How many workers do they start with? If there’s a number I can change without having to re-write a bunch of stuff, that’s a parameter. I love parameters in games. They satisfy my mathematical side, so I find them aesthetically pleasing, but they also give me lots of levers to fiddle with for balance purposes.

I’ll fill my game in with some initial guess parameters early on, and then leave tuning those parameters until later in the process. Once I have a great feel for how all my systems work together, I will have a better idea of how to tune the parameters and, more importantly, how things will change in the system as those parameters are updated. Parameters are fantastic for making sure that different numbers of players work properly, for adjusting game length, and otherwise making the game hum perfectly.

This is the area where I tend to use simulation the most. Writing a program to run a bunch of “games” quickly can allow me to very rapidly measure the effects of changes in parameters. In some cases, the parameters are a matter of feel, and it requires testing at the tabletop. In others, I can often narrow down the range of viable parameters using computer assistance.

Games can have different quantities of these types of gamestuff. Foresight has rules, a fair number of parameters (points per trick, points per bid trick, winning threshold, number of face down cards, number of bids), and a little content (primarily, what things are on the backs of cards). I actually ended up shaking out the content fairly early and not touching it, while the rules and parameters got a ton of iteration. Meanwhile, Ascension at Firepeak has about the same rules weight as Foresight, although those rules were in a lot of ways easier to sort out. But there’s tons of content (36 unique spells, 60 creatures) and really only a couple parameters (hand size, number of discards to research). Killing Monsters and Taking Their Stuff has a pretty minimal set of rules, an absolute ton of content, and so far has a few parameters (damage for different dice combinations, cost of levels). I’m hoping I’ll be able to add more parameters as I go.

Thinking about the different types of data that go into a game and when I should be working on them has helped me concentrate on the right things at the right time when I’m designing. Worrying about content too early leads to churn and frustration, and trying to pin down parameters while the content and rules are in flux is a waste of time, as I’ll just have to repeat that tuning work down the line. This taxonomy has been helpful for me, and I hope it can help others as well.

In thinking about traditional cards, I thought about games that I’ve enjoyed in the past and played a lot. Bridge and Pinochle were big parts of my high school experience, driving a lot of get togethers with my friends, and I’ll always think of those games fondly. For that matter, I met my future wife over a game of Bridge one day in college. I also used to play a fair bit of Hearts, including a variant that a friend and I called “Progressive Heart Disease” for two that we used to play over lunch in high school (not to mention Heartburn). And Cribbage was the family game growing up, which is what led me to try working on a variant of it in the first place. There are more games that I’ve played and enjoyed of course, most of them probably familiar to people reading this. But there’s one that probably is not.

At some point, one of my friends learned a card game from his mother, who picked it up from someone else, and we gave it a try. It was a relative rarity for us, a three-player trick-taking game, and rather than playing a Bridge variant that we had been playing that we’d dubbed “Falling Off Bridge”, this new game quickly became our go-to three-player game. It turns out that it wasn’t entirely novel to our group, as I did find a page describing something that’s close (especially the variant mentioned), but it’s not exactly the same, so I thought I’d spell out how we played what we called 9-2-5.

How to play

9-2-5 is played with a standard 52 card deck. Cut for seats, with the high cut becoming the dealer and the low cut sitting to their left. Deal 16 cards to each player. The dealer now declares a trump suit (or may call no-trump), picks up the remaining four card (called the kitty), discards any 4 cards, and then makes the first play. In 9-2-5, each player has a fixed contract: the dealer must make 9, the next player 2, and the last player 5. You must follow suit if possible, but are free to make any play if you cannot. Record scores for each player for how much they went under or over (negative scores are possible). The deal then rotates to the left, changing the contract each player now must make - the former dealer now must make 5, the previous 2 player is now dealer and must make 9, and the previous 5 player must now make 2.

After the first hand, things get interesting. Players who went over get to “bleed” players who went under. There’s a strict order to things, which is:

1. Deal out the 16 card hands and 4 card kitty.
2. The dealer now calls trump or no-trump.
3. Starting from the player with the current highest contract who went up last hand, they give cards to player(s) who were down equal to how far they went up. So, if I made 2 extra tricks, I’ll hand out two cards to other players - to one person or possible to both people. Those player(s) now hand back the highest card(s) from the suits that match the ones I gave them. They may end up giving the same cards back. If I gave them more than one card in the same suit, they must give me back that many cards from that suit. In short, this process cannot change the suit distribution of either hand, just the ranks. You hand out all your cards before you see any come back.
4. The other positive player from last hand, if any, also bleeds equal to the tricks they went up.
5. Finally, the dealer picks up the kitty, discards any four cards they want, and then leads the first trick.

Continue playing until someone gets to +15 or someone gets to -15, with the highest score winning. If there’s a tie, play another hand.

What makes it great

There are several differences in the way we played the game compared with the link above. The order of operations is more interesting, allowing for bigger swings in the scoring. In addition, adding in no-trump provides another option, one which can often really mess up a player who just had a big hand.

But here’s why I think this game is particularly great: the balance between the different contracts is really nifty. The 9 contract gets a ton of advantages, but even if you have a great hand, you’re going to rotate into the most difficult contract (the 5) which caps how well you’ll do. The 2 contract has a different mission: you want to try and pile enough positive points that you can rotate into 9 and then light the world up, so you can try and gain some positive momentum past 5. And the 5 player is trying to keep their head down, not get pummeled too badly, and just survive. But even if the 5 gets lit up, you’re the 2 next, which limits how much damage you can absorb.

And it’s this last point that’s particularly crucial. Since your damage in the 2 slot is capped at 2, you’re never going to be bled more than 2 cards as the dealer. Add in calling trump and pulling the kitty, and you can always turn the ship around in that slot. The ebb and flow of scores in 9-2-5 can be fascinating, with unsteady equilibriums suddenly collapsing in a rush to the finish. It’s in many ways like the pattern of one of my favorite two-player games, Roma, which can also feature that unsteady knife-edge followed by a rush to decision. All of that flows from the 9-2-5 order, instead of the 9-5-2 ordering. We also tried various other contracts, like 8-3-5, 9-3-4, 8-4-4 (terrible!), but this variation works the best.

Anyway, if you’re looking to try a three-player card game and want to try something a little different, give this one a go. And if you do, let me know what you think!

1. The elevator pitch. This will come to me at random times, and is the idea that so many people think is the most important part of the process. It’s not, of course: ideas are easy, execution is hard. But, this is also the bit where the ball gets rolling. “Dungeon crawling with a D6 system, using the dice as markers”, “Texas Hold ‘Em, with spells”, “Adventure board game, but you’re the people hiring the adventurers, not the adventurers themselves”, and “standard playing cards, but with information on the back” are all examples of games I’ve been involved with. At the end of this stage, about all that exists is a note somewhere in a document and whether or not I keep turning it over in my head.

2. The description of play. During this stage, I’ve taken something far enough to have an idea of some basic mechanic. This isn’t a rules set by any stretch, but it’s simply the basics of how you accomplish something in my design. It’s probably not even fair to call it a game yet, it’s more just a concept of how state transitions might occur. It’s at this stage that I start to get an idea for what resources are available to players, how some of those resources are expressed and manipulated, and at least some idea of what the goal is. I’ll sometimes trot out some bits and pieces at this point, roll a few dice, but I won’t always do that physically. Usually things are still simple enough for me to just visualize things. At the end of this stage, what I have is a larger note somewhere in a document, which is probably standalone at this point.

3. Proto-prototype. During this stage, I’ve got something that is arguably a game. I’ve probably fleshed things out enough to have a very rough sequence of play, some really primitive cards, maybe a crude map. I’ve put just enough effort into things to decide if there’s anything even vaguely resonating with the design. While I can eliminate a lot of dumb ideas for games long before this stage, usually because I can’t conceptualize how to turn the elevator pitch into something like a description of play, many designs reach this stage without any real idea if it’s going to be at all fun. What seems like an elegant, clever manipulation in my brain turns into boring drudgery on the table. Or the solutions are blindingly obvious. Or something else. What I’m looking for at this point isn’t so much what works, but to disqualify a design. If I can’t see where the potential fun is, there’s no point in proceeding any further. At the end of this stage, what exists is a very, very rough pile of components that are useless to anybody that doesn’t have direct access to my brain. Things fail frequently at this point.

4. First draft prototype. During this stage, I have a thing that can be accurately described as a game, for the first time. I’ve put down enough rules on paper to feel like they’re a relatively complete description. There are enough parts defined that you can set up the game and take turns (or whatever). Crucially, there is some kind of endgame condition expressed in the rules, which makes this something other than undirected wandering (which the previous stage often is). This isn’t a prototype that I’m comfortable showing to other players yet, necessarily, but instead something I can set up solo and execute some turns on. The goal of this stage is to take the learning I made in the previous stage and see if it tests out with more structure. Is the fun still there? Does it still seem like the original idea can be expressed into a structure like this? Can I see the outlines of a real game beginning to emerge from the primordial game-stuff? For me, at least, this stage involves a fair bit of computer prototyping, as I’ll whack together some scripts in Python just to test some probabilities to test if my ideas are at all sound. This isn’t true for everybody, but this is often a time savings for me. At the end of this stage, I have a rules set, some super basic components, and a subset of the final game’s content.

5. Second draft prototype. At this stage, I have a thing that I’m willing to show to my best gaming friends, people who will continue talking to me even after I hatch a dumb idea on them. This is even easier for two-person games, because I only have to hassle one other person. I’ve gone over the rules based on what happened with my first draft, and fixed any of the truly glaring stuff that I discovered. I’ve created enough content in the game to give the game a fair shake, even if I think most of that stuff will likely change later. I’ve got components in enough of a form that someone other than me can make heads or tails of them at the table. The goal for this stage is simply to see if other people can see the same spark that I can see in the design. Everybody at the table knows that this thing is far away, but can everybody also recognize the potential? The first outing for this game likely won’t terminate as the rules specify, since there is probably something sufficiently jacked up that I’ll need to call it off early. Nevertheless, I can see what people are reacting to, what they’re trying to do, what they like, and what parts are making them crazy. I’ll end up with a huge list of things to fix, and I’ll possibly just shelve the thing at this point if things look really hopeless. At the end of this stage, I have a set of stuff that I can keep in a box or baggie and plausibly call a game, complete with placeholder designs on components.

6. Rapid rules iteration. At this stage, if I’ve made it this far, I have a thing that a group of my good friends think is worthy enough of my time to keep fiddling with. This might actually be the most fun stage in the whole process. I’m making changes very rapidly, and I can frequently move from “total mess, with some promise” to “hey, that’s pretty good” pretty rapidly. A handful of playtests is sometimes all I need to quickly zero in on something playable and decent. If my game is being difficult or just has a lot of moving parts, this stage can take longer. But, regardless, I can move things along really fast compared to previous stages. I’m changing things quickly in all parts of the design, and most of my stuff makes the game better, because there aren’t that many parts I have to worry about making worse. My regular gaming group has probably played things quite a bit at this stage. At the end of this stage, I have more refined stuff in a box, and maybe some initial thoughts about functional design for components, in response to things encountered at the table.

7. Rapid content iteration. At this stage, I’ve got the rules far enough along that I’m feeling pretty comfortable about what sorts of content I’m going to need. It’s time to take a stab at most of that stuff. I’ll set some initial limits for how much stuff I’m planning on putting in, I have a good idea of what the definition of each piece of content is, and it’s time to strap on my thinking cap and fill that stuff out. My aim here is to create enough stuff in the game that I’ll have an idea if the scale of things I have envisioned is going to bear out. If my idea calls for 300 monsters to be created, I need to know if that’s realistic. Can I make that much stuff? Can I reasonably expect to balance that much stuff? If I can create a subset of my content without too much trouble, it gives me some idea of how hard the full set is going to be (remembering potential network effects, of course). I want to feed as much of this content into my home playtest group as possible so I can get an idea of where the trouble spots for content generation are going to be. At the end of this stage, I have stuff in a box that is more voluminous than it used to be.

8. First outside playtest. During this stage, my home gaming group has expressed the thought that my game is in pretty good shape. It’s time to get an outside opinion. To get to this stage requires a rulebook that has enough in it that the game can be learned without me in the room. The content and materials need to be complete enough that players can play things. The content needs to be complete enough to be able to call it at least the basic game - in other words, it should be a sufficient quantity of stuff that I’d feel comfortable with shipping that amount of content even if nothing were added. This is, in short, a complete game, albeit one that still needs a ton of balancing, re-writing, and tuning. My first outside playtest absolutely doesn’t need to be a bunch of strangers. It should probably be to a group that I know, that trusts me not to waste their time, and one that I know is going to provide solid feedback and not just ego-stroking (or existential horror). Is the affection my home group showed for the game just driven by my own energy and passion (and their affection for me), or can the game stand on its own merits and entertain an outside group? I don’t need a bug free product here, far from it, but I need to believe that at this point my game’s merits will be evident to the world. At the end of this stage, I have a complete game that an outside group can take and play. It might still be pretty spartan, but it’s functional.

9. Rapid rules iteration 2. The exposure to outside play groups will cause another explosion of feedback, as I encounter different ways of looking at the design. Tons of rules questions are going to pop up on things that were perfectly clear to my home group. Pieces of content I thought were pretty good are going to trip people up and/or annoy them. Subsystems that I thought were in good shape, which were not causing any trouble, are going to spring leaks. It’s ok! This ends up being another pretty fun phase, because by now, I have a strong feel for the design and what works, and I can usually patch most of this stuff up pretty quickly. I’m aiming to make my outside play group happy with the game, and I only get so many shots with them, but my rapid improvement here can make that happen pretty fast. At the end of this stage, I have a complete game that I’m comfortable with exposing to even more outside groups.

10. Multiple outside, friendly playtests. This stage involves discovering all the amazing ways my rules can get misread. I’m going to re-write all of them, and all of my content while I’m at it. I basically assume that I’m going to have to write twice as much content as the final design calls for. I’m going to go around in so many circles that I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to get past this stage. I’m pretty sure I’ve made a good game, but it’s trapped under the cumulative confusion of a couple dozen gamers attacking it at the same time. If I persevere, remember that these are groups that are inclined to like me and be helpful, and keep taking their feedback and improving, I’ll notice a huge amount of improvement in my game. At the end of this stage, I have a complete game that is ready to go to strangers.

11. Content iteration. During this stage, I have to get my ducks in a row on content. I’ve got a lot of confidence in the rules and the content I’ve already created, but I haven’t necessarily finished all the parts. Since my rules are pretty baked, it’s pretty clear how to fill out the remaining material now. I’ve been working on the game long enough that I have a good feel for things, so filling out the rest shouldn’t be too hard. At the end of this stage, my game is complete.

12. First blind playtest. During this stage, I’m looking to see what the reaction would have been if I had released that last stage into the world. These are going to be folks that aren’t necessarily inclined to see my game in a positive light. What’s the reaction going to be? Will people have fun? Are people going to just say “I’d rather be playing [x]”? This is a real acid test for me. It’s at this point that I actually like to have somebody else running the playtests - a developer if I’ve got one, a local volunteer who doesn’t mind collating feedback if not. This helps the blind playtesters give honest, unfiltered information that they might hold off if they knew the designer was directly watching. The goal here is to try and ascertain what the remaining problem spots in the design are. You can’t really count on blind playtesting groups to last for the long haul, so each blind playtest is pretty precious. Make great use of them! At the end of this stage, I have a game that is very close to a releasable state.

13. Remaining blind playtests and polishing. During this stage, I’ve fixed the stuff from the previous stage. Most of the issues at this point are probably more around the physical designs of components and other similar concerns, and not fundamental issues. If they are, I’ve really screwed things up. I’m attempting to really put a bow on things. I’m trying to clear up the last little bits of troublesome content, reword that sticky rule, fix the layouts of cards, and otherwise just perfect things. This kind of polishing is painstaking and difficult, but this effort really shows in the end product. At the end of this stage, I have a game that could be released, if the art and component design was complete.

Publication is its own set of steps, of course. Getting the physical systems right can be huge, and some of those steps should ideally be executed in parallel with the rest of this stuff. Blind playtests are crucial for hamering out the design of components as well as the systems, and you need to perform blind playtests with the final components just as much as the final rules. But those stages are for another day.

I started following Grant Rodiek due to a contest he participated in a while back, and then forgot about it. Towards the end of last year, I had run out of stuff in my RSS reader, and turned to Twitter for entertainment. I was only an occasional reader at the time, but this time I had the bright idea to cull out most of the people I was following who weren’t gaming folks, and Twitter suddenly became a lot more interesting. During a slow day at work, I answered Grant’s call for feedback on a card game he was working on. I exchanged some email, gave him what I hoped was useful feedback, and then headed into Christmas break.

About a month ago, Grant reached back out to me about a different game he had started working on. This one started with the premise of wondering if you could take Poker and add special actions and magic to it and get a fun game. He asked for my thoughts, saying it was was a simple print-and-play project to put together. I read through the rules, provided some feedback, played some playtest games, provided more feedback…next thing I knew, I was in a conversation basically daily with him on the game. I’ve now become involved enough in the game that I’m co-designing it with him.

There is a lot about the project that appealed to me. The first is simply that I’ve always had an affinity for games played with a traditional deck of cards. From learning Cribbage at a young age and playing with my grandfather, to my friends and I teaching ourselves Bridge and Pinochle in junior high and high school, traditional cards have been a part of my gaming life longer than just about anything else. Any time I encounter clever, new things to do with cards, I’m instantly intrigued. Foresight was my first real, complete, professional design, and it’s based on a deck of cards. I read things like The Penguin Book of Cards Games for fun. I’m a card nerd, I suppose. So, seeing spells added to a traditional card game had me on board right away.

The second was a bit harder to pin down. It had been a long time since I’d worked on a game like this. I had certainly created things in my spare time, but I hadn’t really gotten my teeth into a creative pursuit related to gaming in quite a while. Having the opportunity to contribute to a design, to flex my developer muscles and edit rules, to stretch my imagination in finding solutions to issues in the game, it was all a joy. I enjoyed the dialogue back and forth with Grant and I enjoyed very much contributing to a card game again.

What I found was that working on the game was giving me another, unexpected benefit. Having the habit of working on this game most nights meant that I was suddenly in the habit of working on creative stuff in my evenings. I found myself making progress on my own designs. I started blogging again. I started having more ideas for new designs to work on. I found myself in the zone, basically.

There were two big lessons for me. The first was simply that good habits can reinforce themselves. By having this project that required my focus, I was finding myself getting more done across the board. My positive work habits were sticking for my other personal projects. The second was the value of getting involved. Offering help, seeing what other folks were up to, and trying to get plugged into a larger community got me working on fun stuff again. I’m trying to stay in that habit as well, seeking opportunities to engage with other game designers.

Grant also asked me to think about designing a companion game for Wozzle, something that could be part of the same package for an eventual boxed game. I started experimenting with ideas for making more use of mana tokens with traditional cards, leading me to start thinking about what a magical Cribbage variant might look like. More on that design next time.

For this test, things played much differently than the first time. For the first test, game play was really static and player attacks were kind of futile. I was unable to really make much progress at all. After adjusting the player power up and monster power down, things went much better. Too much better, in fact. This time around, my additions to the treasure table were too aggressive, and my character ended up much too powerful before the end of the delve. By the time I hit the last monster, the Titan, it was trivial to bring him down.

I was happy with the balance in the first fight or two, but the loot was too strong. I added an adjustment that limited the amount of gear the player could use and adjusted a few values down, and things worked pretty well. Some more runs through and more fiddling with values, and this set of content was basically working. I had the validation I wanted that the game worked on a fundamental level.

The next step, though, was somewhat daunting. I now needed a lot more content for the game. The original plan called for 12 each of classes and skill sets, along with 12 treasure tables and 60 monsters. I also was going to try and create a dozen quests to round things out, but I was going to leave the campaign structure until later. Briefly, my idea for quests was to string multiple delves together, connected by town inter-phases and capped by a special final encounter after the appropriate number of delves. But that could wait to later.

Even leaving the quests out for now, that still left a lot of content to create. Counting the name, characters and skills had a dozen items to create. Treasure tables have seven, again counting the names. Finally, the monsters all had six items. That meant that I now had 732 items to come up with for the full game. Well, 671, since I had already created a few cards. Honestly, I kind of quailed at the thought and put the game down for a bit. An approach was needed to deal with this.

What I finally ended up doing was creating the names for everything. I have the names for all the things that I hope to create all sitting, ready to be filled out. That gave me thematic hooks to get started. Filling in the names of abilities next gave me ideas for how to attach dice manipulations to everything. Starting that way gave me enough to get five characters and classes to play with, enough to get started on a broader test. I needed about twenty monsters or so and then I could start running some broader tests. Would the combinations of different sorts of cards work, or would the balance be too much of a problem? Could I differentiate characters and monsters sufficiently to be interesting and provide different challenges for the players? Would the game still be fun as I kept playing it?

I needed to find a way to put more flavor into the characters. The intent was to include twelve different character classes in the game, and I wanted all of them to feel significantly different when playing. One easy way to include flavor would be to actually name the six abilities on the character. That may sound kind of silly, that keeping the same abilities but providing them with a name might make a difference. But it turns out to matter a lot! For a game like this, getting the players to buy into the illusion makes a big difference. Giving names to each of the abilities immediately made them a lot more interesting without touching how any of them works. It worked on me, and I designed them.

The second step was more significant. I decided that each character and skill set should have a unique special ability. That ability, which would always be on, meant that on every turn you got to exercise something on your character, even if you didn’t spend a die. Ensuring that you got to do something exclusive and thematic with your character every turn would support the immersion of the player into their role. It does provide an additional piece of data to create for every class, but it would easily be worth it.

The second flaw from the first test was fairly simple. I increased the number of attack dice for my character to get some more variety and action and fewer missed swings. At the same time, I adjusted the health of all the monsters down in order to bring them closer to being in balance. That took care of three of the four items on my list from the first test.

Finally, the issue of the treasure table. I had realized from the first test that everything couldn’t be one-shot items, like potions and scrolls. I added some weapons and armor to the table, to provide for things that would help on a continuous basis. That would provide that essential illusion of progress to the player. Keeping in mind the problem of a bland character, I also named all the treasure items, just to provide more flavor.

Those were the changes from the first test: more thematic characters from naming all abilities and having a unique ability per class, more reasonable monsters by adjusting health down, more in-dungeon progress through always-on magic items, and more fun for the player by increasing their attack dice. Putting it all together would allow me to run a second test and see how things worked now, which I’ll write up next time.

Currently KMATTS is still in very early development, but I’m going to try and document how things are going here. So far I’ve written the following articles:

• The genesis of the new design
• The initial design of the combat system
• Exploring different dice systems
• The first playtest
• Adjustments after the first playtest
• The next set of tests

I hope to get a print-and-play version up here soon, followed eventually by some kind of commercial printing.

Before I could work up his stat block, I needed to know what was going in it. I knew a few things for certain already: attack dice, defense dice, dice count, and six special abilities were things I already knew. One detail I hadn’t quite worked out was translating damage into death. Monsters were easy: do X damage to defeat the monster. For players, I wanted something a bit more sophisticated. After all, the player’s dice pool was going to represent their health, but having each point of damage translate into a die lost was going to result in either an absolute ton of dice or very low damage numbers for monsters. The solution seemed relatively obvious, to have each die in the dice pool represent a certain amount of damage. That would give another point of differentiation between characters, and would allow me to have very tough characters and wimpy characters. I decided to call that stat body.

With that sorted, I was ready to stat out my Fighting Man. I gave him some basic dice abilities representing parrying, blocking, strong and weak attacks, and disarming - basically everything you’d expect for your average man-at-arms. The skill set I threw together was a dual-wielding skill set, and I made a very simple treasure table. I cooked up a set of five monsters to fight, for levels one through five (Goblin, Lowland Yeti, Ogre, Giant, and Titan), and off into the dungeon I went.

I had no illusions that the test would go well. I had eight stats for the character, along with 18 special abilities. I also had four stats for each monster along with specials for each monster. That meant over fifty different pieces of data for a single, fixed dungeon delve. I was expecting a disaster, honestly. What I quckly discovered is that while 3 attack dice might mechanically work, it was really boring. Most of my swings were ineffectual, and I didn’t have an easy way to increase it. My treasure table was focused on one-shot items, and the larger monsters were just too large.

There were many conclusions from that first, aborted test. First, and most importantly, the player had to be given more dice to manipulate, which was a fun part of the game. Second, the treasure table needed to include some items which gave constant bonuses, not just one-shot items. That would give you a sense of improvement even within a dungeon, not just between dungeons (where I planned to implement an experience system eventually). The third takeaway was that the character was too bland. Finally, the monsters were far too large.

Essentially, everything was messed up. That’s OK! That meant I got to change everything, which is fun. The good news is that the problems with the game were details, not core. There are a ton of details that are going to go into this game, but the basic mechanic of pattern matching with dice along with the contextual placement of dice was going to work fine.

One of the most useful things to come out of this was yet another reminder of the power of the illusion of progress. The first test didn’t allow me to progress my character. Even though it would be mechanically possible to have the monsters become only very gradually better and have the character remain mostly fixed, that was going to be a bad play experience. It wouldn’t match the expectations of the player coming in, and it would give too much of a static feel to the game experience. By evolving the character, even slowly, it would present the player with a different sort of experience as the game moves on. That illusion of progress is powerful and important in generating interest in the arc of many games, and was clearly going to play an important part of this one.

Next time, the second test.

At any rate, I had concluded that a pattern matching system would provide for the most design space and variation for player powers. It was easy to envision thematic abilities in the wide range of manipulations available to the players, and in the targets they would seek. The next question became what those targets should be. I wanted to try and have a character arc built in to the game, such that characters would improve. I therefore decided that the system needed to be interesting even with only three dice to roll, and stay reasonable even with as many as 10 dice.

Having only three dice to roll constrained the number of patterns I could seek. The choices were pretty much limited to pairs, three-of-a-kind, and a run of 3. The question then became how to portion results. Does the player get a point of damage if they match any of these? Three-of-a-kind is hard to hit with only three dice, but pairs are too easy. Additionally, what was the result? A point of damage for each die used? It wasn’t clear how to map those combinations onto simple results.

There’s another consideration: I was going to avoid giving the player rerolls to start. Unlike most of the Yahtzee-like games, where the player gets multiple rerolls to try and hit their combination, I wanted that to be a result of player abilities. That further reduced the desirability of a single pattern being a desired target. I wanted low level characters to be incompetent, but not frustrating. There was a missing piece.

I was turning the problem around my head when it occurred to me that I really had two patterns I was thining about, pairs and runs. A three-of-a-kind was really just three pairs. That thought led to a realization that that was Cribbage thinking, and I followed that to the next thought: why not lift more from Cribbage? Another combination that I had missed was taking two dice that add up to 7. Combining all three possibilities - runs, pairs, combinations of 7 - and letting the player chase all three would give low level characters an opportunity to make some matches and let high level characters get impressive scores.

The next thing to check out was what the relative probabilities of things were. Specifically, what kinds of scores could I expect from different numbers of dice, and what should each combination be worth? As usual for me, I answered these questions with a Python script. I wrote some quick loops with different numbers of dice to measure relative probabilities. After looking at how often the different combinations happen, it looked like 1 point each for pairs and 7s and two points for runs seemed to balance things with each other.

The next step was to judge the relative values of different abilities. I tested flipping dice to the opposite side, rerolling dice, adding one, adding two, adding or subtracting one (or two), and choosing a face. The values of these ranged from .79 points to 2.24 points, which seemed like a decent spread to work with.

The next question to answer in the design was how defense worked. I wanted the ability to design monsters that had higher defense than others, to create berserkers as well as tanks. Therefore, there needed to be some kind of significant defensive attribute. The simplest thing to do would be have a single number that is subtracted from all incoming attacks. The problem with that is that it didn’t provide for a lot of additional design space, since there are few manipulations that can be performed on that number, and all of them could just as easily be expressed as modifications of the attack number.

I then began to search for other ideas. The other extreme would be to perform the same sort of multi-die roll and search for patterns. However, rolling a bunch of dice for the monster and matching things up just for defense seemed cumbersome. I wanted to find a middle ground. I settled on the monster simply rolling a small number of dice, and eliminating one attack die for each defense die that matches. That system has the virtue of being quick to execute, being non-deterministic, providing room for some interesting powers, and giving space for defining different monsters.

Defining what a monster attack looked like was pretty simple. I wanted a variation of the same system, so monsters roll a set of dice like players and have a smaller menu of specific combinations that each monster looks for. Monsters can have their own combinations both to provide a wider range of challenges and also because I don’t need consistency across classes and skill sets, like I do for heroes. Players would then use the same defense system as monsters, with again the opportunity to provide players with some manipulations inside of a quick system.

Figuring out these elements allowed me to fill out the remainder of my value table, after some more hacking around in Python. The different basic abilities, with their average value for low-powered characters (3-6 dice) and high-powered characters (7-10 dice) are:

• Add defense die: 0.74/4.05
• Flip attack die: 0.79/4.94
• Reroll attack die: 0.88/3.29
• Plus (or minus) one to attack: 1.29/4.97
• Choose defense die: 1.58/7.92
• Plus (or minus) two to attack: 1.67/7.22
• Plus/minus one to attack: 1.84/7.29
• Plus/minus two to attack: 2.18/9.57
• Choose attack die face: 2.24/10.31
• Add attack die: 3.39/9.72
• Additional full attack: 4.78/27.23

This table would help guide me in creating relatively balanced characters. The next step in the design was to try and come up with a single character and a few monsters and make sure it all worked together.

If anybody is interested in my hacky Python script, you can download it here. The code is a little disorganized, since I modified it several times just to test different hypotheses, but it might be helpful for somebody.

Knowing that D6s would have different abilities depending on where they were placed led me to what I thought would be the first source of decision tension in the game: spending D6s on character abilities or spending them on defense. When I think of a game, I try and think first of what difficult decisions the player is going to confront. In this case, I wanted the player to have to decide if they’re going to spend their dice to try and power through the dungeon faster at the cost of making their character less healthy. That is, the dice would now represent not just your offensive capability but would also represent your health. It seemed like a good structure to hang difficult decisions from.

Good enough, I now had some basic concepts for the game as well as a central source of tension. What I did not have was a combat system. On a player’s turn, I knew they would have to decide if they wanted to spend their dice for activating powers or bank them, but I didn’t know what would inform their decisions. Clearly, they would be fighting monsters, but what were they going to actually do on their turn? Roll dice? Play cards? Both? A physical system? Something else?

I already had D6s as an integral part of the system, and players were going to need a bunch of them to track health/abilities. As long as I was going to do that, I might as well go all the way and use D6s as the base for combat as well. I figured the game would be playable with one of those bricks of small D6s. That meant that if I had a couple players, each with 8 or so D6s to track their character, maybe 4 each for loot, that still left a dozen D6s to play with for combat.

I’ve encountered plenty of systems using D6s in the past. I thought about using a spot-the-number system, ala the block games from Columbia Games or the World of Warcraft Board Game by Fantasy Flight. The problem with that kind of system is that I wasn’t sure that it would provide decisions on the scale I wanted. A system using totals against a threshold seemed like it would even provide less design space. But what about a pattern-based system?

Lots of games have explored Yahtzee-esque systems, where you are seeking to roll certain patterns. To Court a King is an excellent example, with players rolling for certain patterns to obtain cards to give them special powers for future rolls. That seemed like a way forward: the different character/skill abilities would be dice manipulation, the patterns you seek would give you the combat result. It seemed like a promising path.

Next time, picking patterns.

Foresight is also an engaging trick-taking card game, using that special set of cards. The bidding system is at once familiar, a simple system of bidding how many tricks you are going to take, and different, in that you get to bid multiple times. As befits a game with as much uncertainty as Foresight features, you get to place several bets, rather than be locked down into one bid. And once play begins, part of your hand is obscured even from you. Managing your information and your crucial hole cards is a skill that is unique to playing Foresight, and it’s a fresh challenge that card players everywhere can appreciate.

Getting the Game

Foresight is available from DriveThruCards. You can get it as a PDF there, or get a printed deck of cards. A PDF of all the rules I’ve added to the site so far is available here.

Android version

Foresight is available on Android. It’s currently only solo play against the AI, but I think the AI can be pretty challenging. Check it out.

More

This is the first game published here using the Foresight deck, and we’ll be posting more. Click on the Foresight tag to find all the games.

Credits

Game Design By: Joshua Buergel

Developed By: Megan Hazen

Playtesters: Playtesters: Miranda Antonelli, Bayani C.R. Caes and the Carnegie Mellon University Gaming Club (the greatest playtesters in the world!), Lloyd Giberson, Bill Gilliland and the U.C. Davis Gaming Club, Mark and Barbara Jensen, Cory Loewen, Mike Loewen, Colleen Neddo, Justin Neddo, Michael Paisner, Paul Pendlebury, Dan Roulo, Deanna Rubin, Sheryl Weidner.

Heartburn is a new twist on an old favorite, Hearts, using that special set of cards. The game dynamic is at once familiar and surprising. You want to avoid the bad cards, but the scoring rules force you to take at least one. That dynamic tension at the heart of the game provides unique challenges for those who are used to Hearts. The addition of the Ten of Diamonds as a positive card also provides another difficult decision - do you pursue the Ten while risking taking more points?

Getting the Game

Foresight is available from DriveThruCards. You can get it as a PDF there, or get a printed deck of cards. A PDF of all the rules I’ve added to the site so far is available here.

Android version

Heartburn is available on Android. It’s currently only solo play against the AI, but I think the AI can be pretty challenging. Check it out, it’s free!

More

This is the second game published here using the Foresight deck, and we’ll be posting more. Click on the Foresight tag to find all the games.

Credits

Game Design By: Joshua Buergel

Developed By: Megan Hazen

Playtesters: Miranda Antonelli, Bayani C.R. Caes and the Carnegie Mellon University Gaming Club (the greatest playtesters in the world!), Lloyd Giberson, Bill Gilliland and the U.C. Davis Gaming Club, Mark and Barbara Jensen, Cory Loewen, Mike Loewen, Colleen Neddo, Justin Neddo, Michael Paisner, Paul Pendlebury, Dan Roulo, Deanna Rubin, Sheryl Weidner.

The Story

In Ascension at Firepeak, each player is trying to construct a pattern of creatures to be able to cast the Mighty Rite of Authority and win the game. Game play is simple, but with many options and surprising depth. Each turn, players may perform two Actions, with actions including recruiting new creatures, attacking the other players, rearranging their patterns, raiding dungeons and casting and researching spells. With nine different actions available along with a wide variety of game situations, the game is ever changing and constantly presents new situations. In addition, the spells can combine in many surprising and different ways, ensuring great replay value.

Overview of Game Mechanics

Each player has a pattern and a dungeon. The top level of the pattern is occupied by the player’s wizard card, with each wizard associated with a specific clan of creatures. The pattern builds down from there, with each card having up to two minions. If a player gets a total of ten cards in their pattern, they win the game. The dungeon is where players keep creatures they don’t want, as well as their spell components and creatures stolen from other players. Dungeons can be raided by other players, and must be guarded and used carefully.

Each creature in the game has a clan affiliation and a power rating. The power rating is compared during attack situations to the opposing creature. A die roll is added to each side. However, it’s not just that easy. A wide variety of modifiers, including spells, wizard powers, clan powers and other situations ensure that nothing is as simple as it seems. Creatures can recruit, capture, rescue, be brainwashed, be used as spell components, and otherwise abused in many ways.

More information can be found at the BoardGameGeek entry, where you can find the full rules. We also have a fantastic playmat created by one of our playtesters for Ascension, Walter O’Hara (thanks Walt!). It provides places to keep your Wizard, Dungeon, all the potential slots in your power structure (with the tiers clearly marked) and also includes summaries of the available actions. All in full color, too. Nifty!

Credits

Game Design By: Cory Loewen

Developed By: Joshua Buergel

Illustrated By: Aaron Williams

Playtesters: Chris Bromley, Bayani C.R. Caes and the Carnegie Mellon University Gaming Club, Robert Eno, Nate Fox, Bill Gilliland and the U.C. Davis Gaming Club, Megan Hazen, Ray Jankowski, Michael Keane, Alfred Lo, Michael Loewen, Dave Markley, Justin Neddo, Walter O’Hara, Heidi Osterman, Michael Paisner, Arron Pope, Katje Sabin, Nate Walker, Charlie and Sheryl Weidner, Aaron Teske and Time Warp Comics and Games.

Special thanks to all of the game industry professionals who helped us out, including (but not limited to) Tony Curtis of GMT Games, James Ernest of Cheapass Games, Dean Essig of The Gamers, and Aaron Wallach of Uncle Jed’s Game Shed.

Unpacking why dungeon crawling appeals to me requires far more personal background than anybody cares about, but I can at least enumerate why it appeals as a game designer. The first is simply that it’s a theme that everybody grasps. I don’t need a ton of motivation for the players or any kind of backstory, as anybody interested in playing the game is probably already on board with the premise. The second thing that it helps with is that the assumption of direct, possibly terminal conflict is baked in. There’s little doubt about where the tension is going to come from; it’s going to be wall-to-wall do-or-die combat all the way through. Along with the promise of battle, the conventions of dungeon crawling call for character advancement, which can present an evolving challenge to players, another appealing facet of the genre.

Beyond those attributes, there’s also the fact that players are willing to accept all manner of fantastical stuff in a dungeon crawler. The more surprising and rule-breaking spells and monsters are, the more interesting they are going to be to players. Justifying a wide range of unique and disparate effects can require stretching a game’s theme to the breaking point, but a fantasy dungeon crawl is infinitely malleable on this front. Players might complain about the balance of things, but they’re seldom going to argue that a particular effect shouldn’t even be present. It can be quite liberating to work in such a wide-open genre.

I’ve tinkered with dungeon crawling games for quite a while now, with a much bigger system continually on my back burner, waiting for more inspiration and time to work on it. But during a recent drive across the state, an idea struck me somewhat out of the blue: creating a purely D6-driven dungeon crawling system, where the meaning of the D6 was contextual. Each card in the game would have a list of 6 effects, and a die placed on the card would therefore have different possibilities. The same die moved to another card could have an entirely different effect.

Running forward with this idea, a character could be defined by three cards: a class (with 6 effects), a skill set (with 6 different effects), and a treasure table (with 6 possibilities). You would roll a certain number of dice at the start of your delve, and those become your dice pool. You can spend them to activate the ability on either your class or skill card, with the result that you would have a wide variety of possible characters with a pretty small card pool. The treasure table would mean that the things you pick up would also vary from game to game, again in a fairly organic, simple way.

It seemed like a workable idea, with a fair bit of variety and interest built-in from the combinatorics inherent in pairing up cards. Only problem was that I didn’t have the most important single thing in a dungeon crawling system: a combat system.