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Hexploration - Rebuilding from Catastrophe

If you didn't read the previous post, I highly recommend you do so before continuing. It will really help clarify what I'm talking about.

First turns.

Game design can be a real roller coaster sometimes. There are moments of dread when you realize you didn't take something into consideration and it breaks your game. There are moments of elation when you realize that there is some interesting mechanic congruency that you hadn't intended but that worked out really well. There are even rarely extreme highs that happen when you put something on the table and everything just clicks. Hexploration has been all of these things for me. I wanted to write about it after last weeks test, I really did, but it was so unbelievably bad I even considered scrapping the whole project. Much like the design process, I have ups and downs. I struggled with depression in my teenage years and it has left me a bit of a pessimist. Sometimes pessimism leads me into mental funks that are hard to shake. During these periods I find it difficult to create and communicate. When the game fell apart after I "fixed" it, I lost confidence. I had a slump.

So, what went so horribly wrong?

In the last post, I discussed that the game worked, but I felt the money system was broke and the game did not play to my original vision. It is extremely difficult to explain to you what my original vision is without showing you the game, so I will focus this on the aspects of the financial system that I changed. During the first test, players had way too much money. The entire point of the game revolves around spending money to influence your tile draws. If every player has seemingly unlimited funds, that system breaks. I felt like the payout for playing tiles was too great versus the cost of purchasing new tiles and the pricing system for purchasing tiles from other players was based on the number of that tile remaining which made buying tiles in the late game a really bad idea.

The majority of the "fixes" I implemented were tied to the money system. I flattened the sliding scale for tile purchases and increased the cost to draw replacement tiles. I also changed the way players make money by paying for tile placement based on the size of the area the tile was being played in. I thought that these changes would reduce the income a bit and increase the outflow as there would be more incentive to buy tiles from other players and less of an incentive to re-draw tiles. What actually happened, however, was the exact opposite. Players had way more money right from the start, so buying tiles and re-draws was trivial. The big problem, however, was that the payout for having large mines did not decrease significantly while the payout for having little mines was crippling. So instead of players building little mines and moving on, it was better play to just start two mines and build on them for the rest of the game. There was no reason to ever leave.

Mid game.

In short, the game sucked. I could write about all the little details forever but I won't bore you with that. If you want to have a more detailed discussion about it, feel free to email, Tweet, or find me in person and I'd be more than willing to talk about the whole process. Instead, I'll write more about the fix! But first, I'm going to share the rules for all 3 versions with you.

This is the first time I've shared rules in this fashion. These are early test rules and because of this, they contain tons of ambiguity, mistakes, and various options I was working on. When I write rules like this, it is because I'm not sure exactly what I want to define. It is more like a stream of consciousness that I tailor like I'm trying to teach the game. You'll notice in the first set of rules, for instance, there are no values for any monetary expenses and gains. Everything is referenced as 2X or X simply because I wasn't sure how to scale the money.

If you really pay attention to the differences in the rule sets, you'll notice that I attempted to simplify the payout structure and reduce the number of fringe rules in the second version. At the same time, I introduced new tracking mechanisms to the market. I absolutely hated the market the way it was. It required the players to constantly count how many of each tile was out of the bag to be sure that the market values were adjusted accordingly. When someone would put a tile back in the bag we would regularly re-count and count again. It was one of the most frustrating aspects of the design.

In order to talk about the changes I made for the third test, you need to understand a bit about what I wanted the game to be. This game was born of a desire to build a simple tile laying game where the player could control the randomness a bit by paying to discard tiles and draw again. I quickly realized that this opened the door to a simple economic engine where the discarded tiles could be bought by the other players. Then I needed to figure out what these tiles would actually do. I didn't want to build paths or cities with them, that's all too normal for a tile laying game. I wanted something different. I realized that if there were only a few different tiles, the game could be all about building a map similar to those used in area-control games. A map-building game if you will. Now I had even more direction to open up the game play if I incorporated area-control mechanics.

What I didn't want was complexity. I wanted the players turn to consist of a few simple decisions: play or move. I didn't want area conflicts to be difficult or involve large numbers of resources that players moved around. Instead, I was looking at money being the key mechanism that drives the whole game. Money would be how players acquired new tiles. It would also be the reward for good placement as well as the determining factor in who controls an area. Instead of armies, we'd fight with money... and money is the ultimate victory condition so, controlled spending adds resource management. I wanted players moving around the board taking over other player's areas and exerting influence. So, to this point, I have an idea in my head for a tile-laying, area-control, economic, resource management game that revolves around only a handful of decisions each turn. That's a whole lot of things to balance!

Where I went wrong is that I took that idea and built on it. Instead of keeping it clean and simple, I decided to add all this odd tracking mechanisms and price fluctuations that overcomplicated things. I added fringe rules that encouraged attacking other-players areas and odd economic mechanisms that ensured there wasn't a run-away leader. Instead of having only a few minor problems to balance, I suddenly had all sorts of things I needed to consider for each change... and that failed.

Final board.

Version 3 went back to my original vision. I dropped the clumsy market fluctuations and went with a fixed price. I made the payout for areas cap once there were 5 hexes instead of... whatever outrageous number it was. I gave the players more score markers so they could freely move around and still score their areas. Essentially, I did the opposite of my normal design process: I cut things out. Most times in the past I start with a very simple game and add layers until it met my vision. For some reason, with this game, I went way overboard with unnecessary complication and had to just start cutting.

Big surprise: it worked! These little tweaks suddenly meant that the game had a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, players had very limited funds. This meant that there was a good deal of early jockeying for position and players were much quicker to abandon an area in favor of their tile draws. In the mid game, we had all reached the caps on our mines and it was a battle of moving about, taking over other peoples areas for little upgrades or simply just to take income from them. The late game was a flurry of tile placement trying to improve our positions and end-game score, but also trying to delay or speed up the ending based on our perceived position. The game played in a little over 90 minutes, and was engaging. There was lots of discussion about optimal play and we all stayed engaged the entire time. It was magnificent. Not the game, the session. It was such a bright contrast to the shockingly horrid session we had the week before. It renewed a bit of my confidence. If only I had trusted my original vision.

Playtesting.

Now, there are still problems, but the game is no longer completely broken. The play session revealed something very close to what I originally envisioned. Now we are just going to start tweaking things. Some of the stuff we have in mind is reducing the number of score markers, increasing the end-game payoff, increasing the price to purchase an area from someone, and a player-based market price. The idea for the player market is that each player can set the price of their discards individually. Setting the price to a fixed $5 was too high. There were very few tile purchases in the game and the consensus was that the payoff was not worth that price most of the time. There was also no risk for purchasing someone's area from them because the end-game score was exactly equivalent. I'm going to change that up a bit by increasing the end-game score, but also making the cost to purchase an area slightly higher than the end score. The playtesters didn't like this idea when I mentioned it, but I think it is necessary.

I also want to take a moment to thank my friend Andrew Tullsen at Print and Play Productions. Andrew offers a ton of awesome services and I was extremely excited to find out that he has a die cutter for hexes! I have him to thank for the awesome tiles you see in the pictures this week. The tiles are completely indistinguishable from thous you would find in a professionally manufactured game. They are beautifully printed on very sturdy chipboard. The best part is his prices. If you are looking to prototype anything with counters or tiles, he has a large selection of dies available that can make the process painless for you and your wallet!

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On to Part 3 >>

- August 3, 2012

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