Category: Reviews

One Night Ultimate Werewolf versus Blood on the Clocktower

I loved the social deduction game Werewolf in high school. On various school or club trips, I would try to get other people to play it in our free time. My interest in Werewolf began to taper off in college and disappeared when I discovered One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW). I’ve tried numerous social deduction games – Two Rooms and a Boom, Secret Hitler, Coup, etc. – but none came close to dethroning ONUW.

The biggest reason I liked ONUW is that even good-aligned players have incentives to lie. Since your team can change without your knowledge, part of the game involves figuring out your team, and if you always tell the truth, you may find yourself without an alibi when the Troublemaker reveals that they swapped you.

Another reason I liked ONUW is how short the games are. A game of Werewolf feels heavy, while ONUW feels light-hearted. Because each game is such a small time investment, you can try all sorts of silly strategies without worrying that you will spoil the experience of other players. If you try a crazy gambit in Werewolf and it doesn’t work out, your team may feel like you are wasting their time.

Of course, the elephant in the room is player elimination, which is a weakness of Werewolf and noticeably absent from ONUW. Sitting around to watch because you are dead is often not much fun. The penalty of dying also skews incentives by making players less willing to die for the good of their team, which limits the sort of strategies they will try.

Recently, I encountered Blood on the Clocktower (BotC) by watching Let’s Play videos on the No Rolls Barred Youtube channel, which was recommended to me by a friend. It is very entertaining to watch, and I was curious to see how it would play. Mechanically, it is a lot like Werewolf but with a few twists that make a big difference.

The most visible change is that dead players still participate in conversations and get a “ghost vote” that they can use once per game. Dead players usually save this vote until the last day of the game, where it comes down to choosing between the “final three” players alive. One problem this solves is giving living good players a way to win even when outnumbered.

A more innovative change is the storyteller’s role in the game. In most Werewolf variants, the moderator resolves night actions mindlessly. You could replace them with a machine and see no difference in the game. In BotC, the storyteller chooses what information to give players and has the explicit agenda of providing a balanced game (which in practice means making sure the game reaches the final three players).

The game has numerous other clever ideas, such as madness and its notion of scripts, but dead votes and the storyteller’s role are the most defining features. After watching lots of games of BotC on Youtube, I decided to try it out myself. I joined the unofficial discord channel, learned the ropes, and played three games.

In my first game, I was the Butler, a good-aligned character that must choose a master and can only vote when their master does. It was a relaxing role because it simplified things a lot; I didn’t have to think too hard about who to vote for and could focus on trying to solve the puzzle that the game presents.

In my second game, I was the Godfather, an evil-aligned character that knows which “outsiders” are in play (outsiders are good characters with harmful abilities) and gets to kill whenever one dies. I had a lot of fun with that role and ended up winning.

My third game made me the demon (the evil character the good team needs to kill to win) and was a bit of a train wreck. My team lost early on, but the game dragged on due to the Good team’s paranoia. Playing as the demon was nerve-wracking in a mildly unpleasant way, and it made me feel bad because it felt like my misplays were responsible for my team’s loss.

I have mixed feelings about BotC. What I enjoy most about social deduction games is the feeling of solving a puzzle when not all of the information you have is reliable, and BotC delivers on that. However, the night phase can drag on a bit, and the game length overall is a bit much. The one thing that BotC does brilliantly is to make the storyteller role fun rather than rote. It is so popular that the Discord server I played on has implemented queues for people wanting to story-tell.

Compared to its most immediate competition in the sub-genre of social deduction games where people die, BotC is the best game I have played, and I will happily play it when given the opportunity. However, ONUW is still my favorite social deduction game overall. Both ONUW and BotC beat out the competition by providing logical puzzles to solve rather than just relying on social cues.

The one shared element of ONUW and BotC that I dislike is how long the night phase takes. It is more tolerable in ONUW because it only happens once, but it is still something I wish could be shortened. As a game designer, this suggests unexplored design space in finding ways to eliminate the night phase while preserving role-based information.

Granularity and Combat Mechanics in Tactical CCGs

I have never played Hearthstone, but I have played some of the games it inspired. Back when its servers were still active, I remember enjoying Duelyst a lot, in particular. Duelyst was an online CCG where players drew creatures, items, and spells and played them to a grid. Essentially, Hearthstone but with spatial positioning. While I don’t often care much about graphics, I found its pixel art style one of its most compelling features.

Recently, partially out of nostalgia for Duelyst, I tried out a similar game called Cards and Castles 2. I stopped playing after only a few minutes because I found the granularity of the combat mechanics to be unbearably high. Just as with Duelyst, each creature has an attack number and a health number. Attacking lowers your target’s health number and also prompts them to counterattack. However, the range of numbers used commonly goes into the forties and fifties. Worse, to see the current attack and health, you have to mouse over a unit, making it very difficult to understand each creature on the board at a glance.

Funnily enough, Battle for Wesnoth has similar combat mechanics and granularity, but I don’t mind it in that game. I think this is due to expectations. Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game often played against the computer, so you expect to consider each move carefully. Cards and Castles 2 presents as a CCG suitable for quick matches against other people, so the amount of processing required to understand each unit is more noticeable. Duelyst, by contrast, keeps most numbers under ten and displays them clearly beneath the creatures.

The moral of the story is that large numbers make it harder for players to grasp the game state because they make the arithmetic harder and less automatic. Another related issue with Cards and Castles 2 is that the abilities of the cards use percentages; “this unit gets 20% damage resistance” or “this unit takes 70% less damage when attacked from the front.” A percent value works for probabilities but serves as a barrier to understanding when it requires actual multiplication. The only percentages that most players can multiply without effort are 50%, multiples of 100%, and (to a lesser degree) 10%. Abilities phrased in terms of small integers are a lot easier to grasp.

In contrast to board game design, I think it is tempting when making computer games to assume that complex calculations carry no cost because the computer is performing them. But this isn’t entirely true – even though the computer can crunch the numbers, the player may still want to understand what they mean.

After my disappointment with Cards and Castles 2, I still felt nostalgic for Duelyst, so I tried another similar game; Stormbound. I was pleasantly surprised. The game takes place on a four-by-five grid where the objective is to damage your opponent by marching a certain number of units to their side of the board. Unlike other tactical CCGs, it is an auto-battler – you cannot issue commands to your pieces once placed; they move forward by themselves every turn.

Another unusual feature of Stormbound is the deck size – 12 cards. Most CCGs have decks of 30-45 cards, but Stormbound instead recycles cards so that you have no discard pile. You can have exactly one copy of each card in your deck and see all of them several times each game. Lucid works the same way, so I am well acquainted with its advantages. Among other things, this makes constructing a deck much less daunting since you only have twelve choices to make and don’t have to worry about how many copies of each card to include.

The most novel feature of Stormbound for me was the stats of its armies. Instead of the typical Attack/Health, each card has Strength/Movement. The first number is how many units you gain when playing the card; the second is their number of immediate moves.

When two opposing armies fight, they both lose an equal number of units such that only one remains. I have not seen combat mechanics of this mutually-destructive sort before; the closest thing I can think of is combat in Neptune’s Pride. My natural inclination before seeing Stormbound was that it wouldn’t work because it eliminates the possibility of one side gaining an advantage through combat – for each unit you destroy, you have to sacrifice one of your own, so what is the point?

I think I understand how Stormbound makes it work, however. Most units created are just a byproduct of effects that occur when you play cards. For example, playing a card might deal one damage to every unit in a line AND create a two-strength army at the origin of the line. Some units do have persistent special effects, but most do not. It doesn’t matter that your units mutually annihilate in combat because the game is all about where you play your cards.

The idea of having one number combine attack and health doesn’t seem quite so radical to me anymore. In Duelyst, combat hurts both parties as well; the only difference is that both might survive. It might be different in a multiplayer game where both suffer to the benefit of the other players; then again, this is already what happens with more than two players.

I don’t recommend Stormbound as a game. It allows players to level up their cards to make them stronger, which means that a player who has spent more money might have a better deck than a new player even with the same cards. But it has does have some unusual mechanics worth checking out that challenge the orthodoxy on digital CCGs.

What I Learned from Slipways

Slipways is an excellent take on the 4x genre, streamlining the formula to create a game that you can play in 1-2 hours. I used to like games like Civilization, Master of Orion, and Alpha Centauri, but I no longer enjoy them because they take too long and require too much micromanagement. After dozens and dozens of playthroughs, these are my biggest takeaways as a game designer.

Debt creates goals

The most innovative mechanic in Slipways for me is the way it handles converters. “Converters” are things that accept resource inputs and produce other resources for the player. The brilliant thing about converters (colonies) in Slipways is that they yield their first outputs as soon as you build them before receiving any inputs. If you urgently need a resource, you can set up a colony to produce it immediately.

While a colony will produce resources without receiving its inputs, it does so at an escalating cost to happiness, an important part of the scoring formula. Furthermore, while satisfying its needs eliminates the unrest, taking too long to fix it results in a penalty that stays forever.

What makes this work so well is that each planet both solves an existing problem and provides the player with a new goal to pursue (and a time limit to complete that goal). Each colony you build is a loan that you will need to pay back, and the neverending quest to pay them all back is the primary driver of the gameplay.

The summary of this game design pattern is: 

  • To provide a goal, give players an immediate reward tied to a penalty. Allow them to eliminate the penalty later by accomplishing some specific (but optional) task.

Upgrade converters when used to encourage interaction

Providing input to a colony does more than just removing the happiness penalty; it also upgrades the planet, creating new needs. Each level results in both more outputs and new challenges, ranging from finding markets for the exports to improving nearby planets. In this way, the player receives a natural-feeling stream of goals.

A big problem that converters often have is that they feel too one-dimensional. In many games, it is common to see converters sitting idle when their outputs are not needed. Upgrading a converter when used is a brilliant side effect that gives the player a sense of progression. Maybe you don’t need any wood right now, but wouldn’t you rather have a logging camp instead of that pitiful little forester?

The summary of this game design pattern is: 

  • To provide player progression and encourage players to use converters, include a side effect in your converter designs. After using a converter a certain number of times, it upgrades.

Discourage completionism by gating off low-level options

Slipways does something interesting with its tech trees that I haven’t seen before. At any given time, you may research technologies from your current tech tier or the previous one. Completing research causes your tech level to advance, providing access to new technologies while also cutting off access to old ones that you never got around to researching. Thematically, the justification is that your scientists have moved on to more exciting projects.

The effect of this design decision is that players must think carefully about which techs they need from each tier because they can’t take them all. This discourages degenerate tendencies towards buying obsolete tech simply because it is cheap relative to the player’s current science production.

For the game designer, this makes balancing technologies a lot easier. Even early game tech can be impactful because you don’t have to worry about the player picking it up at no opportunity cost later. It also improves replayability because the player can’t just always take all of the early technologies.

I think this principle applies to any system where the player chooses from options across several tiers with escalating costs. By locking early options as you unlock later options, each item the player chooses becomes more meaningful.

The summary of this game design pattern is:

  • To enhance replayability in games where the player buys new abilities from a tiered list, lock earlier tiers as the player advances.

Use marginal increases in upkeep rates

The most jarring and unpleasant part of Slipways for me relates to administrative upkeep costs. As you add more planets to your network, there are thresholds at which your empire “size” increases. Each time this happens, the number of credits you pay per planet in upkeep increases by 1. I am often shocked when this happens because building a single new colony causes a massive drop in income.

I found that such abrupt changes in income felt artificial because it didn’t make sense that adding one planet would suddenly make the rest of them cost more. This led to situations where I didn’t want to build a colony because it would drastically change my costs. I prefer marginal upkeep systems like the one in Eclipse where each colony costs progressively more to maintain than the last one.

My main takeaway from this aspect of Slipways is to avoid springing massive upkeep changes on players just because they crossed some threshold. There’s no design pattern here, just a cautionary tale.

4X games don’t need combat

Slipways has no combat, a departure from the genre (the fourth X stands for “exhale” instead of “exterminate”). While it is a single-player game, its focus on trade would work very well in a multiplayer board game, trade providing healthier player interaction than war. The emphasis on commerce over combat is one of the things I like a lot about Sidereal Confluence, and Slipways demonstrates that you don’t need to abstract everything else away to get it.

What Loop Hero Does Well

I beat Loop Hero recently. It is an excellent game with a core gameplay loop that is addictive and engaging. You play as – or perhaps, manage – a hero in a world that has been forgotten (literally) and walk around a circular path placing tiles. Each tile provides both opportunity and danger, often in the form of enemies to fight. The hero automatically battles monsters (with no input from the player) and receives equippable loot that modifies their stats. Once you die or retreat, you return to your camp and use resources acquired during the expedition to improve your base. Then you embark on another journey.

The best part of the game for me was tile placement. What makes tile placement engaging is the interactions between tiles. Some tiles transform others; if you put a meadow next to something else, it will become a blooming meadow, increasing its healing by 50%. Other tiles complement each other very well; swamps make healing lethal, and vampires heal their allies, so it makes sense to place vampires by the swamp. With over fifty different tiles, exploring the rich heuristic tree of tile placement and synergies was what kept me returning to the game.

Tile design in Loop Hero follows the principle that every choice should provide both risk and reward. There are very few tiles that are pure upside; nearly all of them pose some threat to the hero, and the challenge is finding ways to mitigate the danger so you can enjoy the reward. This is a tried and true principle of game design, and it is executed very well here. I think my favorite example is the smithy, a building that consumes unused items to give you a defensive buff, spawning a golem after the sixth. The cleverest part is that killing the golem gives you six items that are often more valuable than the ones you lost, so you are punished for your greed but rewarded for facing the punishment.

The game also features three types of heroes to choose from, each with radically different mechanics. When I realized that the third hero was the final one, I was disappointed that there weren’t more. But as I kept playing, I came to appreciate the stark differences between them. Each hero has a central, unique mechanic, and the same tile might have very different implications for different heroes. For example, the first hero gets stronger the longer the battle takes, so a tile that reduces everybody’s attack speed is better for him than for the other heroes. The different hero-tile interactions added another dimension to the tile placement subgame, which kept things fresh even when I used the same tiles in each game.

Four Quarters made an excellent decision in using idle-style combat with no player inputs. Players will often fight dozens of monsters in a given loop, and having to make combat decisions would slow the game down to unbearable levels. Removing choices from battles leaves more time for tile placement. This is a useful general principle- whenever you have two subgames, and the first is much less engaging than the second, paring down the former gives players more time to focus on the latter.

I wish that inventory management had received the same treatment as combat, though. The hero has several item slots and the loot that you equip buffs different stats. You have to ask yourself questions like, “is 20% evasion better than 5% vampirism and 8 defense?” Each item has a numerical level as a rough guide to its strength, but sometimes your strategy may require a lower-level item with the buffs you want over a higher-level one irrelevant to your build. One benefit of the system is that it helps the player identify with the hero. Eventually, however, the constant need to compare item stats begins to feel math-y and tedious. I found inventory management to be the least compelling part of the game.

The other main subgame involves building your camp between runs. Much like expeditions, building your camp involves placing tiles on a square grid with placement mattering for certain tiles. For example, the Farm produces one food resource for each of its surrounding tiles that is empty. Constructing buildings is the primary way you spend resources gained during an expedition. Base-building is fun, but only in the same way that incremental improvements between games are satisfying in any roguelite. Players like progression and like seeing numbers go up. Letting them build a base to increase their numbers is difficult to get wrong.

Within the base-building subgame is another subgame where you can craft and equip special non-inventory “camp items” between expeditions. Initially, these confused me because the effects of each item were so weak. For example, the Loaf of Bread only gives you +10 HP (for reference, the total HP for the hero rises from the low hundreds to over a thousand by the end of an expedition). However, as you upgrade your camp you gain more and more camp item slots, so you might eventually equip 30 Loaves of Bread for a respectable boost of 300 HP. This is fun in the late game where it provides highly granular customizability to your hero but is less relevant early on when you can’t equip enough camp items to make a difference. Overall, I would prefer stronger items and fewer slots. I didn’t feel that I needed the level of control that the game gave me, and redoing my build was tedious.

Foreshadowing is important in single-player games, and Loop Hero does a great job of foreshadowing everything. Since players create the obstacles, they are very aware of what they will be facing. Progress bars provide clear reminders of how close the player is to facing the boss or reaching the next day, and the loop-based structure of the environment allows them to predict that the next loop will be similar in many ways to the last.

There is something powerful about loops in games. There is a great article about the roguelike game Unexplored that sums up why they work so well:

Interconnecting spaces are a good thing because they naturally bring you back to where you started, helping you to feel your character developing. When you return to familiar surroundings with a new item or weapon you tend to realize the difference between how you were before and how you are now, and get a handle on your hero’s journey.

Alex Wiltshire, How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons

In Loop Hero, each new turn around the map sees you facing the same challenges as before, but with new gear and new tiles to shake things up, providing a strong feeling of progression.

Overall, I found Loop Hero to be both rewarding and educational as an example of good game design. After beating the game and seeing almost all of the content, I don’t feel much of an urge to keep playing, but I am sure I will want to return if Four Corners releases any more content.