Pandemic: Legacy

Played the #1 game on BoardGameGeek ( :O ) last night and got to name this fine fellow “Bisu” which gave me quite a chuckle. The legacy mechanics are exciting and have made me want to play Pandemic really badly again, which is something I would have found hard to believe before playing.

Is this a good thing? Am I being psychologically manipulated to find out what is behind door #2? Dunno and yes! Enjoying it though!

Also quick notes on some reasons I think it’s working so well:

a) Pandemic is a simple enough base system to leave room for all the legacy stuff in your head.

b) The real-world setting really works well with the persistence/stakes (Chicago is in bad shape man…)

c) The legacy stuff (obviously) gives a hard limited shelf life to the game. However, I’m pretty sure my interest in base Pandemic waned before this hard limit anyway. So if you’re making a game where the depth might not outstrip 12-18 games, Legacy stuff seems like it works great. (So basically at some point during design you should decide what number of games of exploration your system has in it, to compare to see if adding persistence stuff makes sense).

“Default” Actions

I think one of the fundamental things that can make a game feel overwhelming while learning it (or even while playing it later) is a long list of “default” actions available to the player at all times. I was recently learning the board game Through the Ages (by the excellent Vlaada Chvatil) and was presented with this!

Note the long list of actions listed in phase 3 (I count 13!). The main problem I find with this is that it is hard for the player to compartmentalize all of these actions together, so frequently you will have to iterate through the list one by one, think about whether it’s a viable action to take, and then move on to the next one, comparing each subsequent action to each previous one in the list. If the list is long enough (and I would assume 13 is for most players) by the time you get to the end of the list you very likely could have forgotten your assessment of action #1!

So as not to harp on Through The Ages, lets look at another example from Android: Netrunner.

On the right you can see the list of default actions that the Runner player can take on each of his turns (limited by the resource “clicks”). This list is of a much more manageable size than that of Through The Ages, and there are some other benefits here as well. Drawing cards, gaining money, and playing cards from your hand (option 3 and 4) are very common game type actions, and easy to shorthand in your mind (there is no branching complexity in terms of gaining a dollar!). Another advantage is that the final action “Make a run” is fundamental to the game of Netrunner and done frequently over the course of the game, helping the player to remember it and develop heuristic shorthand about situations in which it might be useful. However, I would argue that that 5th action: “Remove a tag” is much easier to forget because a) it is not used very often over the course of an average game and b) it is not a core/fundamental/defining mechanic of the game. 

Some takeaways about default actions:
1) Try to keep the list at a manageable number (7 is probably a good max).
2) Actions that are common to lots of games are easier to remember (drawing cards, gaining money)
3) Actions that are inherently simple are easier to remember (gaining money)
4) You can get away with a few more complex entries, if they are fundamental to the play of your game and/or used very often!

SimpleWriter BrainGoodGames Descriptions

Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic XKCD and author of Thing Explainer has a cool web app that lets your write in the simple language of Thing Explainer (namely that you can only use the thousand most common English language words). So I’ve taken the liberty of writing out descriptions of the four current BrainGoodGames! You can work out which is which :).

1) This is a game where you need to grow food, gather wood and stone, and use it to build buildings (maybe even some big buildings). Every turn, you roll to see what things you can do, and then make the best of it.

2) This is a game where you use a group of three soldiers together to clear out important bad guys. Win three floors and it gets harder.

3) This is a game where you buy and sell goods at cities in the sky. You carry the goods in flying boats that you blow around by controlling the wind.

4) This is a game where you push back big groups of large creatures from important ground. You do this by making shapes with soldiers that your cards say you need.