DarrellHardy.com

Much to the amusement of my fellow attendees at the local IGDA chapter, I followed up last month’s rant about a board game of “human brains inside tanks” by arriving at the meeting carrying a prototype of just such a game. Here’s the cover:

(Images swiped from the Internet and used without permission or malice, but with a bit of ironic glee. Don’t worry, folks, this is strictly placeholder art. No one’s trying to rip you off.)

After a fun and enlightening presentation on camera-controlled video games (both in Flash and on the PS3) from our super-talented friends at PUNY Entertainment, I asked if anyone wanted to playtest Think Tank.

There was a moment of silence. Sure, it’s fun to talk about a game of brains in tanks. But to actually play it? Then the moment was over and I had two playtesters and enough spectators that my ego was suitably salved.

The game didn’t catch fire and kill us all. (I didn’t expect it to — alpha testing usually catches that sort of terminal meltdown before the game sees the public — but you never know.) It didn’t suck. It was even somewhat fun. And those who played it would be willing to play it again.

In other words, it was pretty good, but not great – and therefore not good enough.

That’s fine. That’s why I do playtesting. And that’s why, after a game of Twilight Imperium on Saturday, I make one of my friends play Think Tank with me.

This time, I was the player getting nailed by the bad cards. My tanks were spinning in circles and running into walls, taking damage with each hit until they died. It didn’t look like that part was fun when Chris at IGDA was suffering through it. And it didn’t feel like fun for me either.

We did away with the random cards, and that made the game more fun. But it also made it more… obvious. Now, “obvious” might not seem like a bad thing. It’s very close to “intuitive,” which is always good. But here’s the difference:

When a game or mechanic is intuitive, players say, “Of course that’s how it plays! Brilliant!” and are surprised that no one has thought of this before.

When a game or mechanic is obvious, players say, “Of course. And… then what?” They’re left waiting for the twist, the innovation, the extra something that says they couldn’t have whipped this up themselves during their lunch break.

I’m mulling some ideas. Maybe a mana-like resource for playing cards. Maybe keeping the card play the same, but add more interaction to the board. Maybe add variable powers to the tanks themselves before or even during the game (mmm… power-ups…).

I’ll try to have something worked out by next month’s meeting. If nothing else, Martin might want a rematch.

Welcome back to the Think Tank log. I’ve been meaning to return to this since about a week ago, but any spare time I had was spent doing battle with a plugged floor drain in the basement. When I broke down and hired a professional, he spent five hours pulling something like five pounds of tree roots out of my sewer pipe.

One the one hand, it cost me over $400. On the other, I no longer felt like a loser for being unable to clear the clog myself.

Anyway… Brains in Tanks!

After the first iteration let me a little cold, I decided to change the card part of the game:

• You have a hand of 7 cards.
• At the beginning of the round, you may play as many as you want. Again, you can assign multiple cards to a single tank if you wish. And again, any tank left unassigned is given a random card from the deck.
• You don’t draw cards automatically. Instead, you have to skip your turn (and not activate any tanks) to discard whatever you want from your hand, then draw back up to 7 cards.

In order to make it matter, in my little one-player prototype, that you’re skipping a turn, I put three enemy tanks on the board and moved them each one space closer to my side each round. If they reached my side of the board, I would lose.
And while I had been able to mostly keep track of which tank corresponded to which card slot, for this iteration I cut up some labels, and labeled the tanks 1-5. That made things easier.

The results? The game was much more satisfying to play. Working from a larger hand, I was able to better guide my tanks, while paying the price (with random moves) for ignoring some of them. Now I just had to try it with two players.

Iteration Three: Doubling the Number of Players

For a two-player game, I set up both sides of the board symmetrically. Each side got five tanks and one HQ; the object of the game is destroy your opponent’s HQ (since that’s where the master brain lives, of course). And I threw some terrain in the middle, so the tanks have something to steer around.

An HQ takes 5 damage to kill. And I figured out what the “three stars showing on your cards” does: it causes “brain strain” and gives your HQ a damage. Suddenly, you really don’t want to be playing random cards if you don’t have to.

With two players, it now matters who goes first. And it matters when you allocate your cards, since the other players will know which of your tanks are on random auto-pilot.

To keep it as simple and fair as I could, I came up with this initiative system and turn sequence:

1. Randomly choose a first player at the beginning of the game.
2. At the beginning of the round, the first player allocates all his cards (including the random ones from the deck).
3. Going clockwise, each player does the same.
4. Once the cards are allocated, the game round begins. The first player chooses and activates one of his tanks, revealing and executing the tank’s card or cards.
5. Going clockwise, each player does the same.
6. Play continues until all players have activated all their tanks.
7. The round is over, the activated cards are discarded, and a new round begins. The role of first player passes clockwise to the next player.

I’m not thrilled with this. For one thing, having players take turns allocating cards means there can be downtime. You sit there twiddling your thumbs, waiting for me to decide whether to play two cards on Tank 3, or three cards on Tank 2.

For another, I’m not sure when or how to declare that you’re skipping your turn to draw cards. If you do it during the allocation phase, then your opponents can take advantage of that knowledge by either attacking or skipping their own turns. (This is how I played it.) A better idea might be to declare it at your first activation – just discard all your cards from the board and announce you’re refreshing.

But it works. It worked, when I played it. And even though I was just playing by myself, it was still pretty fun.

What’s next? I think it’s time to test it out with another player. Because as brilliant as I am, I’m as blind to my design flaws as the next guy, and I need someone else to help point them out.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I finally got a chance this weekend to prototype and playtest the core mechanics for Think Tank.

This would be a good time to mention something I hinted at during the IGDA meeting, namely:

Hardy’s First Law of Prototypes: If it looks good, you’ve spent too much time on it.

The theory here is that your first prototype is going to be bad, so there’s no sense it making it pretty; you’re just going to scrap it and redo it anyway.

There are a couple exceptions:

Exception 1: Unless your client needs it pretty before he’ll look at it.
Exception 2: Unless you’re making a game about tanks, and you have a copy of Memoir ‘44 lying around, begging to be put to use.

Making the Prototype

Since I had a copy of Memoir lying around, full of tanks and featuring an attractive board full of hexes, I pulled that out to provide tanks and a board. It also provided terrain for the map, which I hadn’t thought of before, but was pretty obvious once all the pieces were laid out.

I decided to follow the First Law when it came to the control panel, and just play the cards on the table. I could keep track of which “slot” corresponded to which tank in my head.

As for the 100 cards, I just whipped up 20 of them, and printed them twice. I put them into a table in Word, then used the Mail Merge function to output them to a custom label (2″ x 2.5″), which let me put 20 on a page. I printed them on pink paper because I thought it would be more opaque thank white, so I couldn’t see through the “back of the card.” I was wrong, but realized it didn’t matter since I could just draw from the bottom of the deck. Mechanically, I kept the cards super-simple, with just a word or two on each telling what they did.

Grabbed a tin of dice from the game closet, and a notepad for taking notes, and I was all set up.

The First Iteration

The core rules I was testing were these:

• You have a hand of 5 cards.
• At the beginning of your turn, draw up to fill your hand.
• During your turn, assign up to three cards from your hand to up to three tanks. You may assign multiple cards to a single tank. (The multiple cards on a tank was a suggestion from Ryan on Saturday night. Thanks, Ryan!)
• Any tank without cards assigned to it is assigned a random card from the deck.
• You can activate your tanks in any order.
• When a tank is activated, it will Move (straight ahead one space) and Attack (straight ahead) by default. Depending on the card it gets, it might Move, Turn (one hex side) or Attack again – the player decides in which order to do these actions.
• Move and Turn actions are required to be executed, but the tank doesn’t have to Attack unless there is any enemy in range. (I might change my mind on this, but while “trying to control my chaotic tanks” is fun, “shooting my own tanks because I got unlucky” is not.)
• Some of the cards have stars on them. If you have three stars showing on your control panel, Something Bad happens. (Not sure what yet.) The idea is that the stars are mostly on the really good cards, so you don’t want to play too many of them, since you don’t know what stars the random cards may have.
• Tanks have 5 armor; 5 damage will kill them.
• To attack, roll a d6. If the total is equal to or greater than the range from the shooter to the target, give the target 1 damage. A roll of a “1″ is always a miss. Tanks can only shoot straight ahead. Terrain and other tanks block line of sight.

Not that I had written any of this stuff down (the First Law refers to rules-writing too), but this is what I had in mind as I set up the playtest. Because I was focusing on the core mechanics, I decided to just do a one-player game. For an opponent, I tossed three enemy tanks on the far side of the board, and decided that destroying them was the goal of the playtest.

I played it for about 10 minutes. It was okay.

Remember, I was testing the core mechanic of playing cards to control tanks, with the added twist that some of the cards are random. The rest of mechanics hanging off that core (attacking, number of tanks, what actions are on the cards) didn’t really matter (though they seemed to be working fine).

I found that playing three of the five cards in my hand each turn felt a little unsatisfying. I didn’t want to play all five, since that would mean playing everything in your hand (not a lot of tactics there), and if you can hold cards back for a future turn, you can plan a little long-term strategy. And playing just one of the five would remove too much player control. I’d hoped that playing three would be a middle ground, but it still felt like I was playing everything I drew each turn. Meh.

Okay. Scrap it. Next iteration!

According to the message I preached at the IGDA meeting, the next step is to refine the core mechanics of the game.

As I sit down to do exactly that for Think Tank, I realize I skipped a step. Before you can refine, you must first define the core mechanics. You must examine your game idea and discover its beating heart.

The core mechanic for Think Tank is this: “Players play brain cards to control tanks on the board.”

Now, you could build on that heart a couple different ways. My original idea had the player choosing cards from his hand and using them to “program” his tanks’ actions. Thinking that such a system might be a bit slow, I considered doing away with “programming” and just having the player activate the tank immediately with the card (so more Memoir ‘44 than RoboRally). I’ve also been thinking about forcing the player to use some random cards from the deck to activate his tanks, to add some chaos and luck-pressing, and to reinforce the theme that you’re not in direct control of these rolling death machines.

While I ponder these things, let’s take a look at the control panel, card deck, and the tanks themselves, all of which are central to the core mechanics.

• Your control panel is used to control your tanks on the board. There are five slots on the panel (each corresponding to one of your tanks), and probably a space to put damage tokens and other status markers.

• The deck of cards is made up of brain cards. Each card represents a brain that can control a tank. Some are excellent tank pilots, some are incompetent, and some are specialists (such as the brain that can shoot further, but can’t maneuver very well).

The players all play from the same deck of cards. When a tank is activated, what it does (or can do) is determined by the brain currently piloting it. After a tank is activated, its brain is discarded.

• The tanks each have a number (corresponding to its slot on the control panel). They also have a facing (that is, a direction in which they will move and shoot – I’m assuming a board with hexes on it) and some sort of armor value that tells you how many hits it takes to kill them. Eventually, they might have other stats (speed, damage, rate of fire), but let’s keep it simple for now.

When activated, a tank’s default action is to move one space forward and fire. The only way to do more (or less) than this is through the use of a brain card.

For the sake of testing the core mechanics, I’m saying that all tanks have an armor value of 5 (takes 5 hits to kill them), and fire by rolling a six-sided die. If your roll is equal to or greater than the range to the target, you hit.

Now I just have figure out exactly what the brain cards do (I’ve got some ideas), and I’ll be ready to start some iterative playtesting and refine these core mechanics.

Here’s an overview of my crazy “brains in tanks” game, Think Tank.

The Idea:

The idea here is a theme: that of sci-fi tanks driven by human brains. This theme implies a few game features such as, oh, I don’t know, tanks… probably on a board of some sort, probably fighting each other. The most obvious execution is that each player has one or more tanks on the board, and they fight. What’s the board look like? What’s the victory condition? Meh, those are details. We’ll worry about that later.

Target Audience:

I’m seeing this as a “light war game.” That is, it has the trappings of a war game (tanks blowing the crap out of each other), but lacks the complicated rules associated with traditional war games. Plus it has brains, which makes it a little “wacky” and off the radar of the traditional war gamer. Still, no matter how light and wacky, it’s still a war game, which means it probably won’t appeal to your mom or the Monopoly crowd.

So. Our audience is probably male, ages 12-30, who already play board games of this sort. We might refine this later, but for now, let’s aim it square at the heart of the hobby-gamer market.

Play Length:

As a “light” game, it shouldn’t go more than an hour. In fact, I have a feeling you’ll be able to play it in 30 minutes, so let’s say 30-60 minutes is our target duration.

Number of Players:

It’s always easiest to design for two players. But games that accommodate more players have a wider potential audience (i.e., can sell better). So let’s say 2-4 players, but design primarily for two players at the beginning. Once that’s working, we’ll worry about integrating the other two players.

Budget and Components:

Hmmm… Since there’s no publisher to set the budget, I’ll just take this opportunity to lay out the components I have in mind:

• Box, Rules, Insert – Standard stuff, with a box and insert large enough to hold everything, and rules no longer than they need to be.
• Tanks – Ideally, these would be plastic, about the size of Matchbox cars, in four different colors — but they could be cardboard for a lot less money. I’m thinking five tanks per player (so 20 tanks total in the game), and will design in such a way that it doesn’t matter if the tanks are plastic, cardboard, or marshmallow peeps.
• Cards – I always assume 100 cards. It’s a nice round number, and we can add or remove cards if necessary later.
• Board – Probably need a good sized board. I think I have a 22″ x 33″ board around for the prototype; let’s use that.
• Player Boards – I’m envisioning a “tank control panel” for each player. Probably card stock, printed on one side, about 8.5 x 11″.
• Punched Board – We’ll need tokens for damage markers and… other stuff. I’m sure I’ll think of something. Let’s call it one sheet of punched board, 8.5 x 11″.
• Dice - I’m not sure where I’m going with the dice, but know I want some. Let’s say four six-siders for now.

So we’ve got our rough idea and parameters. But how’s the game play? Good question, and I’ll get to that in my next post on the core mechanics.

While speaking at the local IGDA meeting last week, I needed a crazy board game example for some point I was making, and pulled from my metaphorical hat the idea of a sci-fi battle game with tanks piloted by human brains.

“Tanks! With brains in them!” I said. “It’s going to be huge!”

Yes, it was a joke. But being the hopeless game-designing geek I am, I couldn’t help but think about what such a game would look like. (And judging from the message board, it looks like others fell into the same trap. It also looks like Psychonauts beat me to the “Brains in Tanks” punch, but I’m sure the genre is large enough to support multiple designs.)

After mulling the ideas over the weekend, I’ve decided to try and make this game. Not for profit (probably), but just a public exercise in game design. It’s also an exercise in discipline, as I’ll be following the game design process I described at the meeting, which is a little more formal (i.e., better) than how I usually work.

One more thing before I dive into the design — the title for this odd little game:
“Think Tank.”

Of course. What else could it be?