Check out Eggscape! I helped team Make a Game to make this reverse Tetris survival game this weekend, for the Ludum Dare Jam. It’s an online competition in which you are given a subject and have to make a game in 72 hours.
You can play it here.
Good job everyone!
This third playtest was by far the most successful one, but it started on a road bump. I got there and realized I didn’t print the new center board (the square one with all the numbers) and had to improvise one on the spot. It worked well enough, nobody complained. It may actually have lowered expectations from new players and eased them in.
At the start there weren’t that many people available for a game so I tried a two-player game for the first time. I didn’t really know if it was balanced or not. Turns out the game is a lot faster with only two players, but it’s hard to bring back dead crew members because the winning player can use the two cannons to attack, and score most of the time. I’ll test it out more and fix some of the rules for a fair two-player game.
The four player game was by far the most balanced yet and most fun yet. The new rules made it a lot more interesting, because going “all in” puts you in great risk. We cut cut the board short at 15 because it was really late, but that made the game more intense and I was very surprise when it brought a crowd in to watch the final turns.
More than that, the people who were watching were mainly people who hadn’t played it before and were curious about the rules. A couple players wanted to know what had changed since last time because both boards looked different.
It’s really getting there, and it will only get one minor wording tweak for the next playtest.
Big thank you to all the playtesters, you’re shaping my original idea into a good game!
Water’s leaking in! The new ship design update now features an area where the water level is rising. The players can order their crew members to the base of the ship, where they’ll throw water out and actually control the speed at which you’re sinking. It also turns “all in” bids into something risky and a gamble.
The “Attack” and “Defend” zones now have cannons which point in to other player’s positions (Defense was working pretty much as a second attack, no point in confusing players) with slots for the resources and the wheel that explains the rock-paper-scissors fighting logic.
I made a new central board that represents the amount of water that leaked inside each boat. The previous spiral board was meant to represent the player ships actually going down on a whirlwind (which also made every boat sink 1 square at the end of each turn). This is not intuitive and it’s easily forgotten, and ended up being more of an annoyance than welcome flavor.
Now it’s rectangular-shaped, so it allows the free space in the middle of the sheet to serve as storage space for spare crew members and resources. More than once the spiral made it hard to understand which way was “good” and which one was “bad”, and that’s why this gradient color scheme is there. Plus, it fits the theme and hopefully it will be easier to read.
Dice are most certainly out. I want the game to be played by player’s choices and failures rather than by a random element. Changed the attack effect to allow this, and created a situation where the players may wish to wait to a point where their attacks are more effective.
Now I’ll look at the ships for a couple of bus rides, fix what’s wrong and print in time for the Wednesday playtest session!
The second playtest was a lot of fun, but it was marked by the most game-breaking rule yet, “Sacrifice”.
My intentions were to create opportunities for losing players to get back on track, but I had no idea it would be abused as it did. As soon as I taught the testers about this rule I could see their eyes shine as their plans formed.
I knew I had made a mistake, but I let the game start like that anyway.
The players started using it on the very first turn, which is something I expected. What I did not expect, though, was to run out of crew tokens. This rule is out!
This lead the way to a new idea that increases tension and reinforces the game’s theme. Not mine, but Jorge Graça’s. I just adapted it to fit the game. Now you’ll have a chance to control the speed at which you are sinking by assigning crew members to drain the water out. Betting big on an action means you’ll have to take them out of there and risk sinking faster.
Also, there’s an 8 crew member limit now.
The arrows on the side of the actions were barely used as a reference at all, so I’ll keep the standard from left to right, up to down order and update them for reference’s sake.
I’ll give the players more opportunities to chose which other player’s crew members and resources are they affecting with the most expensive actions.
I have to mention Nuno Carreira found a design flaw and pounced onto it like a hungry cheetah, winning the game in a way I hadn’t thought of before. Thank you man! I’ll fix it in time for the next playtest.
Next up: both board redesigns and an updated prototype!
The first playtest sessions made me change several parts of the player boards.
First I rethought the relevance of some of the most expensive actions and added new actions which could be paid using any resource token. It’s easy to end up with duplicates of any given resource and not know what to do with them.
Then I switched the order of every action on the board and placed arrows on the lower corners of the actions so the players know in which order they get resolved. It was left to right, top to bottom the first time and players got confused. Now its order curves as you reach the edges, so they can follow a line from start to finish.
Even though the Attack and Defend rules changed from the first playtest session their titles didn’t change (yet!).
The boards were printed in slightly double the size to fit multiple tokens in the action zones – and that made the current board shields useless.
The previous shields were too small and light, and could easily fall down if you weren’t holding them in place, so I got new thick cardboard to hide the boards. Now every ship is a fortress! They’re seriously huge, heavy and look like Dungeons & Dragons DM screens. To be honest I’m sort of worried they’re too big.
This is how it looks now when it’s set up:
Next up: what did the players think of it?
I was warned by a veteran tester that most prototypes have really rough first playtests. A lot of them don’t reach the end because of some unforeseen design flaw, and some don’t even go beyond the first turn.
So, how did the my playtest go?
It went really well. Players enjoyed themselves and told me they want to play the next versions, so I think I’m off to a nice start.
It’s amazing how they’ll will ask questions and find out strategies you weren’t anticipating. I spent as much time playing with them as I did writing notes about things to change for the next time.
I played two full games and some of the rules changed between them. I corrected a couple of things in the game boards and welcomed four new players. The new fixed rules were taught and I let them play as I peeked around and took notes. One of them saw a loophole and tried to break the game using it. I was glad to see the current rules balanced it out by themselves and he didn’t end up winning.
I intend to take the dice out of the game. It can create some tense but unfair outcomes when the effect of an attack or tie depends on a random factor. Its ironic though, because the original idea for the game came up as I was trying to design an original dice game.
It’s hard to recover your position when an overpowered player constantly attacks you, so I’m going to try something new – a turn phase called “Sacrifice”. At the end of the turn a player may sacrifice its position on the board for new crew members. Sounds a bit unbalanced, but I’m curious to see what the players will do with it.
The board shields were way too light and small. The most obvious situation was when a player made a specially clever bid and proudly laughed while looking at his board. The shield fell down, and now everyone got a chance to look at his boards and change their bids accordingly.
It’s really good to see that people enjoyed it and gave me a lot of suggestions as they played and after the games ended. They are a very important part of it, and the game is taking shape with every question and strategy I see.
Onwards to the new set of rules and prototype 2!
After sketching out the rules I realized I don’t know a thing about protyping a boardgame. I didn’t let it stop me though, and started planning how to distribute the actions across the player’s board:
That night I turned it into this so I could easily print one for each player and modify it whenever necessary, along with a spiral board to track the ship’s situation.
I searched around for tokens and I remembered this game by Dom Quixote called “Mar Largo”. It had some nice colored coin-like pieces that I could use. The blue bead tokens are sold as interior decorating fluff to fill vases and aquariums but they work really well as game tokens. The shields are black thin cardboard and the dice are (very cheap!) warhammer dice I got from ebay.
This is what it looks when it’s all set up. Each player gets a ship and a screen to cover their bids, the resources and crew members are piled up and the spiral at the center of the table is used to track the ship’s state.
It’s ready for its first playtest.
With this I learned that making prototypes is not hard at all.
So, about that idea…what is it?
Well…in this boardgame you’re the commander of a sinking pirate ship and you must decide how you send off your crew to complete several tasks and keep you afloat.
You do this via a blind bid playing method. Players hide their playing board, place their bids on the several actions, all reveal their bids at once and succeed in the ones where their bid was the highest. That means you can get a lot of actions done for cheap if you pay attention to what the other players are doing – and bet on what they’re not.
This allows everyone to play in simultaneously turns, which keeps the game flowing.
It’s a tight situation where players have to make sacrifices, play tricks on others and attack them to survive, but you know how pirates are. They’re ruthless!
The last player to stay above the water wins!
I won’t write the detailed rules because they keep changing with every flaw I spot at playtest sessions, but stay tuned for the next step: prototyping!
I’m Manuel Correia and I make games.
An idea for a game crossed my mind and I started running after it.
This blog will document the process of bringing it to the real world and pave the way for new ones, one step at a time.
