Board and Card Games

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12:24 PM

Hmm. That Trucker game brings up a game I played a few years ago, just once, that I have bad memories of and which for me is a learning experience about game design.

It's a game where you play spaceships flying around between planets. Each planet has a good it wants to buy and another one it sells, and supply/demand varies, so sometimes it's selling high and sometimes it's selling low, and same for buying.

The main point of the game is to fly around between planets: buy here, sell there. You can also attack other players' ships and steal their cargo. There are NPC ships, and there is an NPC bounty hunter that tries to hunt down anyone who's attacked a ship.

You have coins. The coins are your entire point total. You use them to upgrade your ship (so it can store more cargo, have more defence against attacks, or have more attack power _for attacks) or to buy goods. Once you buy goods, you might have zero total points in the game until you sell them again!

Here's the bad memory I have: I was doing fairly well when I suddenly happened to be beside the planet selling the most expensive cargo in the game. They were selling it at a discount. The planet buying it was nearby and would be buying them at a premium when I reached it. Nobody was anywhere near me so they would not reach me in time to intervene. So I dumped all my points into buying that cargo.

Then, before I reached the destination planet...... another player drew an action card. The action card said "choose any ship, and suddenly all of its cargo teleports into your hold." He chose me and dumped all the cargo that he needed to.

I was still in the game, but now had no way of winning. The only thing I could do was use an activated ability that hurt another ship anywhere in the game, so I just flew around using that on his ship every time I could. I had literally nothing I could do other than that, and I had no reason to target anyone else. Plus I was mad.

He didn't win, and I don't think he even managed to sell the cargo because another player flew in and destroyed him before he could. I just dragged him down with me out of spite basically.

There's personal learnings in that. There's gameplay lessons, like that this is a game where you can never afford to put all your eggs in one basket, because the game might make that basket suddenly vanish at any time. But also game design lessons: I feel like that whole situation was basically bullshit and the game should not have permitted it, and I know from other games that I would feel way even if I had been merely a bystander.

doppelgreener

12:46 PM

Game design lessons I took away:
1. Don't print once-in-a-game cards that can immediately wipe out all of a player's progress in completely unforeseeable ways. Risks should make sense. The balance of power between players should shift in ways players can anticipate and understand. For example, a card that deals 1 damage could also wipe out a player's progress, but the player would have to have been flying around in a heavily damaged ship, which makes the risk something relatively foreseeable.
2. If a player can be virtually eliminated from the game, have the decency to also make sure they a…

doppelgreener

1:03 PM

But, also: if your game can suddenly turn awful in the first game because of a completely unexpected random thing, the players may know better if they play a seocnd time—but they may be very unlikely to play the game a second time.

5 hours later…

murgatroid99

5:34 PM

You're talking about game design, but your point #2 covers one of the major issues I have with some decks in EDH

It's the reason I pretty much refuse to play against prison. That issue is not just a possibility, it's the whole game plan: make it so that the other players are still in the game, but can't actually do anything.

2 hours later…

JonTheMon

7:37 PM

@doppelgreener So, interesting thing about your issue in Catan. In the original, the monopoly card took all of a stated resource. Which definitely could be feel-bad if it's taking 1/2 dozen cards from someone. They nerfed it a bit in Cities and Knights to 2-per-person.