Weird City is headed to Gamestorm 2013 in Vancouver, WA. In tow will be all the Homni-friends and lots of excitement is planned. Not only do we have wacky outfits, we will be doing a ton of game testing, our own, others and already published games, attending panels and meeting other designers. Little Pig will be tested in the Gamelab and we will be working on prototyping and brainstorming games with the group. Check back in a week for a full recap and rundown of Gamestorm.

Little Pig has been rebooted and has rules finalized for Gamelab at Gamestorm. My good friend Lukas was in town last week and we got many chances to test out Little Pig. All in all the game is working well, lots of minor tweaks and adjustments will be needed but the foundation is there. Wolf cards now have special abilities, special building cards are divided by type and your houses (except for brick) can be blown down. All in all the wolf is more deadly but you are able to build up your house with friends, tools and jobs and you can gain a new pig upon completion of a house.

I am excited for some heavy duty design feedback at Gamelab and then for a reboot in time for submission to Kublacon Design Contest.

Other exciting news is Lukas is working on some concept art and the current idea is to design the game as much like a fairytale as possible with cards including rhyming verse and watercolor or pastel drawings a la Beatrix Potter. Check out our games Section for a rules overview.

Wiz

Weird City Games has undertaken research of the most popular card games and I have just received my first batch of games. Last night I had the pleasure of playing Lost Cities by Reiner Knizia, with my mother. Upon first opening the box I was taken aback by the oversized cards and the board, thinking them mere gimmicks or ways to increase the price of the game. However, the cards were nicely illustrated and of good quality and the size proved very effective for the game. The three aspects of this game that stood out to me were the aesthetic value of the game, the simplicity of the rules and the sense of time.
Aesthetic Value – While initially turned off by the over sized cards they actually worked very well with the theme and as the handsize is always 8 cards it was easy to manage the larger size. Also due to the games elegance it was nice to have quality components to set that off.

Elegance of Rules – Play a card: either add it to an expedition or place it on approriate discard pile. Draw a card: from draw pile or a discard pile. These are the essential rules of the game with only a few qualifications and some scoring that is only mildly cumbersome. out of these simple rules comes a very deep game that involves a lot of guessing, risk management and various strategies. This is the most recent and one of the best examples of I have seen of what is referred to as elegance of design and the resulting emergent strategies.

Sense of Time: One of my favorite qualities of this game is the sense of time. At the start of the game you have plenty of time and are beginning many expeditions at once. In the middle you start getting stressed and at the end you are scrambling to finish your expeditions. It is simple, easy and fun but really gives a fun sense of progression that feels natural and exciting.

This game is easy and I feel I could teach it to anyone in under five minutes but I feel I will enjoy playing it time and time again.

The continuing adventures of semi-structured entrepreneurial lifestyle

Being self-employed is awesome except that it requires continuous dedication and focus and good time management skills. I have decided to dedicate the first 3-4 months of 2013 to my very own game design school with myself as the sole student, teacher and member. Well there might be some other game designers/playtesters but they won’t be graded. In the spirit of games I hit on the idea this evening of offering points for various assignments and the completion thereof. Henceforth I will be awearding myself 1 point for every chapter read/blog post posted/game reviewed/ game brainstorm write up, 2 points for every book review, prototype completed, outside playtest done etc. Multiple points can be scored by combining activities and creatively solving problems. Once I have enough points they can be spent with rewards such as buying new games, going dancing or playing magic online. These are all mental structures but that is what games are after all right. Okay back to game land and the quest for magical points.

Hello Game World,
Been busy being sick and designing games and getting lost in the wealth of information available on the internet for game design, publishing, kickstarting and more. It is a well researched and discussed topic as gamers are geeks and geeks like the internet. Bonus for me. So got Weird City Games grant money approved and so am now moving into purchasing phase. First up is the completion of this website by the one and only, super talented, Ben Eisner. Then we are purchasing printer and die cutter and start making more elaborate demos and print and playing lots of people’s games. There is the work of about ten people ahead and lots of it is computer work but I am getting organized, keeping my eyes on the prize and ready to work, play, work, play. Blogging is going to become much more serious as of now and I have a good deadline of Gamestorm on March 20th to have Little Pig and maybe another game ready for demoing. Yay let’s make games. The more I learn about game publishing the bigger a task it seems but I think the key is to be aware of the big picture and also to take it one step at a time. Okay more soon Red Wizard is preparing for this site to go live. Keep on gaming.

More news from Weird City. Actually just more discussion of topics from the book mentioned previously.

In the Art of Game Design – the author breaks down games into four elemental components and stresses that they should all be balanced and support each other and the overall theme of the game. The more coherence betwixt the four the stronger the game can be.

Mechanics – how the game works, the rules, the mechanisms that determine how you play, how you win, how you lose, interact. Example mechanic is in Cribbage how the points are scored – pair is two, run of three is three etc. This sets up how you are able to move your pieces around the board. One of the most interesting mechanics of cribbage is pegging in that you count your hand once for interactive play and once by itself.

Story – The story of the game. What is happening in the game. What do your player tokens represent. How you can be involved in the story and how flexible the story is. This is the key to immersive game play and allows players to buy into the game experience.

Technology – The medium for the story, mechanics and aesthetics. How the game is represented physically. Cards, Boards, character sheets, dice.

Aesthetics – This is the presentation, the flavor, the art of the game. This meshes closely with story but is less concerned with narrative and more with look and feel. We have all  played Settlers of Catan and who doesn’t like just playing around with the roads and buildings. They are nice wooden pieces that are pleasing to touch and can be put together to form many different shapes. This is an aesthetic choice that really draws players into the world – even before play begins.

More of the holy quatro latro.

Okay so I have a lot of ideas about games myself but since I have been reading this game design book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, I mostly want to discuss the new ideas he is presenting and review them to get them in my mind and yours.

Themes – A game theme is important for multiple reasons. Primarily it helps players to enter into the make believe realm of the game. When playing a game we all enter into a pretend state placing value on outcomes that would have little or no value outside of the game. Themes can be shallow or deep depending on the design. Some games benefit greatly from themes and others, abstract games, games of chance do just fine without them. Chess is a great example in that it is a game based entirely on skill and requires logic and risk analysis. The pieces could easily be abstracted and the game would still offer a deep strategic experience but by assigning each piece a corresponding name that loosely matches their power players are able to identify with the pieces more and for me at least that helps me to think about the overall game. Themes are especially important for learning a new game as they give players a way into the game world. If chess pieces were all abstracted, this tetrahedron is able to move diagonally, and don’t let your rhombus be captured, we could still learn to play but the connection would be just that abstract.

Another example. Cribbage is one of my favorite games and has only a very loose theme. I tend to think of it as some kind of race but beyond that I am just counting points. It is very fun to play and not difficult to learn but I think it might be both easier to learn and more enjoyable if it had a concrete theme. A horse race and horse shaped pieces is an easy step. Then hand names could be called by different horse racing techniques. The naming of hands might be too much overlay and what might be better is to build hands and scoring that somehow reflect the horseracing theme.

So there you have it gemini Tim sometimes theme is important, sometimes not. But if building a game with a theme I think it is essential to have the various mechanics, structures and scoring of the game reflect the theme as much as possible.

Until next time.

Tim