Yesterday I awoke without Internet. My devices were flashing and beeping, parched and panting for their data streams. Cycling the modem’s power did nothing. I had no choice but to call the cable company.
“I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid the whole area is suffering an outage right now. I’m sorry. We thought we had it fixed but… I’m sorry. We can text you when it’s back up if you’d like? Sorry?”
I was actually okay with a regional outage. It meant that (a) it wasn’t my fault, and (b) I didn’t have to sit around for 4-24 hours waiting for a technician to come out, grunt at the cable modem, call his boss, and just replace the thing like we all knew he was going to do anyway.
While offline, I took the opportunity to poke at the design for Spider Siege, the Venom & Silk board game.
As originally pitched, the game is cooperative: all the players work together to beat the invading giant spiders, who are controlled by a deck of cards and the game rules. That’s great in theory. But as I looked for ways to implement this analog A.I., I began to have second thoughts.
The problem is that spider game-play is very tactical.
For one thing, much of the spiders’ strategy is about choking off human resources, which means knowing where and when to invade. (“I could easily take this metal resource from the blue player, but he already has lots of metal on the other side of the board, so I’m better off focusing on his food production.”)
For another, the spiders have to regulate the density of their eight-legged troops. Sometimes, it’s better to have lots of spiders spread out thinly over the battlefield; other times, it’s best to clump the troops into just a few spaces.
While it’s possible to design a set of rules and components that can simulate these tactical decisions, it’s much easier to let another player handle the tactics, and give that player a bunch of fun decisions to make.
Easier isn’t always better, but easier is faster. And the faster you get a game prototyped and playtested, the faster you can start iterating it into a good game.
