Tag: board game design

Randomized Victory and Alliances of Doubt

In Oath, there is a mechanic in which at the end of rounds five through seven out of eight, the Chancellor player rolls a die to see if they win, provided they have fulfilled their victory condition. The probability of victory starts at 1/6 and doubles each round up to 2/3.

When I first encountered this rule, it felt out of place – clunky, even. After playing a game as a Citizen and another game observing the behavior of a Citizen, I think I understand why it is there; it is key to the entire dynamic between Citizen and Chancellor.

Citizens, in Oath, are players that are ostensibly allies of the Chancellor. However, unlike other games such as Dune or Eclipse with official alliances, they do not win together. Instead, the Citizens have an additional victory condition. If they have achieved their goal when the Chancellor wins, the Citizen wins instead; otherwise, they lose.

In practice, this can lead to strange conflicts between allies. If it looks like the Citizen will meet their condition, the Chancellor might attack them or even self-sabotage to prevent the game from ending. If the Citizen has not achieved their personal goal, they might attack the Chancellor to do the same, as I did in the game where I was a Citizen.

Enter the victory die. Both the Citizen and Chancellor need the Chancellor’s goal to be met for either to have a chance of winning, but if they know for sure that they will lose should it be achieved that round, they would have no choice but to self-sabotage. But because the Chancellor or Citizen is not guaranteed to win at the end of rounds five, six, or seven, there is enough doubt that they can work together even though they know who would win if the game did end early. Their alliance works because the losing member thinks the game might not end until they can achieve their goal.

The illusion of hope is crucial to designing games because knowing they will lose effectively eliminates a player. Traditionally, official alliances require shared victory because who would cooperate with somebody they know will win when the game ends? Oath demonstrates a different approach by adding enough uncertainty to enable teamwork between technical enemies. I still think the mechanic is clunky, but I also think it is needed.

I can already think of mechanics to support a similar dynamic for other designs. Instead of randomizing the end of the game, what if we randomized the winner of the alliance instead? For example, suppose you have a system where official allies put tokens into a bag according to their contributions. Then, at the end of the game, the winning alliance draws to indicate which one wins.

Or another option: allies could gain hidden victory points, and if their team wins, then the player with the most points is the sole winner. Rex: Final Days of an Empire does something a little like this with its betrayal cards, where each player has a secret condition which, if fulfilled, steals the win from their team. The problem with its system is that the default is shared victory, so stealing it feels petty and spiteful. If only one player can ever win, this goes away.

I don’t think shared victory is a bad thing, though some people do. It can introduce problems like freeloaders or power imbalances, but there are solutions to these. However, as Oath shows, there is a viable alternative for games with official alliances; you need to make the sole winner uncertain enough that allies keep hoping that it will be them.

Evolution of Dungeon Rancher Monsters

Early on, we knew that the monsters in Dungeon Rancher would have abilities if only to differentiate them from each other. There are four resources players use to feed monsters. Since each monster uses two resources, this implies a total of 4 choose 2 = 6 monsters. We gave the Dragon and the Golem simple resource production abilities to start with while testing other aspects of the game.

It wasn’t too long before we added abilities for the rest of the monsters as well. One useful principle we discovered is that abilities that don’t require keeping the monster around are unthematic because they make the monster feel more like a resource card than like something to raise. For instance, one version of the Golem’s ability allowed players to discard it to build a room for free, so players treated it like a “free room” card and always used it immediately.

We settled eventually on the concept that each monster would have a different scoring ability. After some experimentation, we further determined that such scoring abilities should always force the player to take on risk for more points. For example, the Dragon scoring ability increases its value for every ‘6’ on it, making it much more difficult to tend. Under this system, creatures represent different ways for the players to challenge themselves to increase their score.

The newest addition to the monster mechanics rewards players for placing monsters with matching “personalities” in adjacent rooms. For example, placing a creature with a food symbol on its right in a room to the left of one with a matching food symbol on its left produces a single food resource, which is automatically useful since you have two monsters that require it. The objective was to make monster placement more interesting. Adding this mechanic costs very little because it echoes the existing mechanic that adjacent matching rooms produce magic resources.

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.