Interesting talk about how mastery is maybe the fundamental driving factor behind long term player engagement. The speaker raises points about how if you include potential mastery over several skill-sets (execution, strategy, teamwork, knowledge, etc) you can allow “Random Parallel Learning”. This basically means that players are able to jump back and forth between improving on different axes at will, and often subconsciously. It also raises the potential of an “aha” moment during a match (or in the case of execution the realization of a growth in proficiency).
Another point raised is that rouge-likes set up failure as part of the natural state of play, so it doesn’t feel so harsh. Keith Burgun has advocated that a 50% win-rate is ideal for learning, and I wonder if 50% is in the realm where failure is expected. (I sort of anecdotally think the loss rate might not be high enough to remove a lot of the sting at this level).
Just played Greg Daigle’s Hawaii for the first time (2-players), and wanted to jot down a few of my thoughts on it. In the game, players are given a certain number of “feet” tokens each round, and you can accumulate more by taking certain actions (it’s a worker placement game). The feet allow you to “walk” between action spaces, which gives the game a unique spatial element to the worker placement; now you have to take into account the distance between two worker placement tiles as part of your analysis of the best move. Very cool and simple to understand. During randomized setup, you arrange the different actions around the board as well, which scrambles your distance math for the next time you play. Awesome!
Walking around the island for fun and profit!
It also features a mechanic I very much like from a bunch of games where players compete in small contests, where the first player to do a thing gets the most reward (in this case directly VPs), the second player gets the second most and so on. It’s nice for players to be able to experience little “victories” throughout the game whether or not they win the overall game in the end. (I’ve seen this also in Troyes with the event cards and Dungeon Petz with the pet judging contests, among perhaps others).
I also like the way that each action is assigned random costs (and a random number of purchasing opportunities each round) as a nice form of inter-game ambiguity!
Something I’m NOT so fond of is the way the “wild” resource system (fruit) works. You can choose to use fruit to pay a cost, but not mixed with the original resource cost. This does lead to some interesting decision making, but it’s quite fiddly and in my opinion too easy to end up in a situation where you feel like you should be able to take an action, but don’t have the right MIX of resources. I prefer when wild resources help to “grease the wheels” and allow you to massage your plays to be more optimal while circumventing upfront calculation. In this more restrictive system, you really should be calculating more upfront to avoid messing yourself up.
Overall it has some cool ideas and I expect I’ll be playing it again soon! It’s super convenient to play it on BoardGameArena, which helps!
Patch 1.05 is live on Steam! It features a ton of balance tweaks and quality of life reworks, as well as a big leaderboard update and a second major end-game win condition in the Castle! Go forth and spread your buildings far and wide, and bask in the grandeur of your kingdom.
A mighty kingdom with you as king (or queen 🙂 ).
Balance Changes: -Chopped trees give 3 wood (from 2)
-Barbarians don’t walk on bridges at all
-Castle reworked:
-Gives 1VP/Worker die on construction
-Royalty VP face gives 1VP/5 player buildings
-Town hall card now gives 1VP/7 resources (from 1VP/6)
-Farms give 6/5/4/3 food, and are depleted at 3 rather than 2 (still gives 1 wood)
-Hunter’s Hut card “Move 2” -> “Move 5”
-Hunter’s Hut Spawn Rabbit ability now spawns a Rabbit within 3-4 spaces of a Hunter’s Hut (previously within 6-8 of a Home space)
-Killing Barbarian Spawners now gives 1VP
-Have a Church VPs: 4->5
-Have 2 Woodsmen VPs: 4->5
-Have 2 Masons VPs: 6->7
-Have 5 Roads VPs: 5->6
-Have 3 Farms: 7 -> Have 2 Farms: 5
-Fountain reworked:
-Added new ability to reroll “action objective” with Crusade face
-Fixed issue with Lumberyard Card (“Work then set to Gather”) rerolling die on board
-Reworked first phase scaling to cap out at 18 points (from 17)
Bugs/Quality of Life
-Added “Current BGG Update” link to Main Menu
-Added save corruption support
-High scores separated into two tables (“Current” and “All Time”)
-Rank updates on both tables when you win or lose, but “All Time” rank will never go down
-Top players page will show your global ranking
-Fixed a bug where quit popup would open multiple times if ESC was pressed again
-“Learn 0/3” text disabled if you’re past rank 1
-Fixed a bug where barbarian spawners would crash the game if there was no room to make a new one
As always, thank you so much for your help and support. Special thanks to Allan, Kenbutsu and K-Rez for awesome balance feedback, and to Gutsman and doiron5 on the Steam forums for submitting bug reports.
Leave a comment below or shoot me an email at braingoodgames@gmail.com with your thoughts and feedback. I’d love to hear it! Onwards and upwards!
Some very interesting discussion of the board game Food Chain Magnate by the GeekNight guys. I’ve seen these guys floating around doing GDC talks and a couple other places, but this is some particularly insightful commentary. Check it out!
Some game design talk about “big stuff never used”, “attractors”, heuristic tress, the learning process for games, and abstractly the information horizon!
In case you haven’t seen them, Jamey Stegmaier (designer of Scythe and Viticulture) has a cool bite size video series about game mechanisms. Jamey is a cool example of a rags-to-riches game designer success story via the sucess of his Viticulture Kickstarter, which is always awesome to see and is very inspiring.
Tom Francis (maker of Gunpoint) is a pretty cool games-journalist turned systems-driven game designer/developer, and he made a pretty cool thing you guys might be interested in. It’s a fairly abstract/minimalist systems driven game that looks pretty cool, and is available on Steam now. Trailer and steam link below, check it out!
