Category: Board Games

When game procedures inspire new mechanics

Game procedures are what I call the various maintenance tasks required in any board game to keep the game going, such as reshuffling decks, sorting the supply, or counting up victory points. They are the sorts of things that would be automated in the computer version of a game. An important part of board game design is streamlining procedures so they are not noticed by the players, since they do not contribute anything positive to the experience of the game.

Sometimes, in the course of improving game procedures, you find a new twist on your mechanics. This happened to me recently in Dungeon Rancher. I had been using six-sided dice to indicate monster levels, and one of my playtesters remarked that in the real world it is inconvenient to have to find a value on a die – in TTS, of course, you can just press the corresponding number.

I had not been intending to use dice in the actual game (the level die was a placeholder), but this got me thinking – how could dice be used to represent levels in a way that didn’t require the onerous procedure of locating a face? As it happens, when players are tending to monsters in Dungeon Rancher (a task that requires assigning a die that equals or exceeds the monster’s level), they tend to place the die on the monster to remind themselves that they have tended that monster. This inspired me to use the number of dice as the level, rather than the maximum die.

Each time your monster levels up you have to assign it a die matching or exceeding its highest die. The die you assign remains on the monster, increasing its level and potentially increasing the required value for the next time you need to tend to it. The required procedures are very smooth because they already match what the players needed to do; no additional steps are required.

This in turn led to some new mechanics revolving around rerolling dice – both dice used to tend monsters and dice already on the monsters from previous rounds. Thematically, this works very well – if you give the monster high-quality food, it becomes spoiled and will want high-quality food in the future, but you can attempt to tame it and reduce its pickiness. The mechanical process ends up feeling very rewarding, as players must balance caring for their monsters now with keeping their monsters as docile as possible for future rounds.

The lesson I take away from this is that sometimes the best source of mechanical inspiration can be coming up with ways to remove mundane chores from the game.

Cutting mining mechanics from Dungeon Rancher

Recently I oversaw a playtest of Dungeon Rancher in which rounds took 20 minutes (the target is 6). This was an increase of 4 minutes per round from the previous week, so I focused on determining why it was taking so long. It turned out the main culprits were the new dice-selling mechanic (which has since been removed) and the Mining Phase.

The Mining Phase was the mechanic I was most excited about going into the project initially. In games like Dungeon Keeper 2, there is a mechanic in which digging into a gold vein is likely to reveal further gold veins because they tend to be grouped. I wanted to replicate this feeling without any spatial elements by having decks of cards where certain cards allowed players to change the deck from which they drew.

We removed the mechanic of needing specific cards to switch decks after a previous playtest but left the four decks with different resources, each coded to one of the four needs of the game. The red deck had the least challenging monsters, allowing players to save minions for use generating red dice. The green and yellow decks provided green and yellow dice directly. And the blue deck provided tunnels and blueprints for building the rooms that passively generate magic each round.

Unfortunately, the mining phase takes too long. Players have also said that it feels very swingy; this is probably due to the threat system where resource cards have threat symbols that increase the strength of the next monster encountered if its color matches. Running into a lot of monsters means you won’t have time to gather resources, and finding many resources means the first monster you encounter will probably wipe you out.

The other cost of the mining phase is in explanation time. Between the threat system, the differences between the different decks, and capturing monsters, it adds a lot to the explanation time and some aspects are difficult for players to remember, such as the nuances of each mining deck.

As much as I wanted the mining mechanics to work, playtesting indicates that the cost is too high for what they add to the game. Therefore we are removing mining from the game. The core fantasy of the game is raising monsters, which does not require the mining minigame. To replace it, we are adding a Drafting phase in which players draft monsters, resources, and rooms into their dungeon. Drafting solves the problems that led to the removal of Mining because it takes very little time to explain and can be done quickly and simultaneously.

Drafting will hopefully also address feedback that the game lacks player interaction. The difficulty with player interaction is that it can lead to longer playtimes and is often not compatible with simultaneous gameplay. Drafting interactions are one of those rare exceptions.

Could fixed prices solve lengthy trade negotiations?

Trading mechanics are a powerful way to introduce player interaction into a game. However, freeform trading can massively slow down the game depending on how much players negotiate. If players are allowed to trade anything, they might argue over the proper exchange rate. Even in Sidereal Confluence, where exchange rates are explicitly defined, it is unclear how much the loan of a converter card is worth.

I’ve been thinking about this lately after the first playtest of Dungeon Rancher. Trade in Dungeon Rancher serves the vital role of smoothing over randomness by allowing players to buy from other players the things they could not mine themselves. However, we aim for the game to last 30-45 minutes with six rounds, which means there is little space for lengthy negotiations. We previously let players trade monsters, dice, and rooms, but now we restrict it to dice, the most comparable resource. I don’t know whether this is enough, though.

Most games with trading mechanics don’t restrict what players can trade. In Dune, you can even exchange binding promises about future actions (modern games don’t allow this anymore). In a game like Sidereal Confluence where everybody is trading simultaneously, this isn’t too bad – as long as everybody is engaged, the only effect is to increase the game length. But in a game like Catan where a player can only trade on their turn, this can lead to significant downtime in the wrong playgroup. For this reason, I think freeform trade should seldom be turn-restricted.

But some games have an elegant alternative – fixed prices. In Imperial Settlers, players can build “Open Production” buildings that produce a resource and allow other players to gain that same resource (from the bank) by giving the owner a worker. Setting aside the question of whether this counts as trade, this is quick because there is no negotiation – the owner cannot even refuse the offer, and the rate is always one-for-one.

Root: The Riverfolk Expansion does something similar with its otter faction, which has three different types of goods and services on offer; in this case, however, they may set the price at the end of their turn. The player has more control over their sales but still cannot refuse the trade.

In both Imperial Settlers and Root, trade is indirect; the seller puts out an item at a price on their turn, and the buyer chooses whether to buy it on theirs. This can feel less personal than direct trading between players. A mechanic that I think could strike a middle ground is at-will trading with fixed prices. Say I want to exchange wood for stone; I look up the trade ratio for the two (1:1 for simple games) and offer another player the trade. There is no room for negotiation here – they must accept or reject my offer, avoiding a bartering session. Since the rules endorse the exchange rate, it is less likely that a player will feel ripped off.

I don’t recall seeing this mechanic in any published games. Fixed trade ratios are often used for trading with the supply, not directly with other players. But even when you set the terms of exchange, trades between players are interesting. Trading mechanics are good at compensating for bad luck and make specialization viable while also promoting player interaction. If that is possible without exploding the game length, I think it is worth trying.

Pushing your luck in Dungeon Rancher

I’ve started work on a new board game, this time with a collaborator. The game, Dungeon Rancher, is a push-your-luck game about raising monsters in a dungeon. It involves mining for resources and monsters, building your dungeon, and providing for your monsters. Monsters can be kept or sold after each round – if you keep them, they double in value, but it becomes harder to satisfy their needs.

I used to be indifferent to push-your-luck as a genre, but my mind changed after playing The Quacks of Quedlinburg. I think the great thing about push-your-luck is it provides decisions without an obvious solution; sure, you could compute the probabilities if you tried, but the optimal move is often fuzzy.

Currently, Dungeon Rancher pushes players’ luck in three ways:

  1. During the mining phase, the player chooses how deep to mine. As they mine they reveal monsters. If they reveal too many, the monsters attack their dungeon.
  2. When deciding where to house monsters, there is no limit to how many monsters may be housed in the same room. However, if any monster in the room rampages, the player loses all the monsters in that room, so cramming monsters into 1 room is risky.
  3. Monsters double in value every round, but the risk of them rampaging, damaging their room, and escaping also increases.

One possible issue with this is that both dice and cards are sources of luck in the game, whereas it is generally recommended to use only one or the other. Dice provide a straightforward way to represent an escalating risk. The player needs to roll above a threshold for each monster each round, and that threshold increases along with the monster’s level. Cards are a convenient way to have random encounters with monsters that can then be captured.

Right now, after one playtest, housing monsters has proven to be not that risky since players have little trouble caring for them and are able to build large dungeons. Monsters also do not rampage as much as predicted. The mining phase push-your-luck mechanics are working well, however.

One dynamic of Quacks that we borrowed is that pushing your luck too far is not completely punishing – it offers the player a choice of consequences. In this case, if monsters attack the dungeon the player can either defend the dungeon – abandoning any loot they collected – or keep the loot and allow the monsters to destroy a few rooms. I think this choice is important to lessen the sting of getting unlucky.