Post-playtest report

So, last week we did a playtest of the basic game with six and then later four players.

So just to review briefly, the basic game has each player with a hand of cards, discarding into their own discard pile and drawing to replace from their own draw pile. Everyone acts simultaneously to try to lay down sets and runs from their hand to match customer cards that are worth various amounts of points. Customer cards are drawn from a deck that moves around to each player, one at a time.

As was expected, the first playthrough or two was horribly broken, though gave enough insight to tweak the rules into a pretty good state. I won't be exhaustive about all the changes yet, but we removed all upgrades from the special deck (making into the "customer" deck), we allowed people to pass the customer deck without drawing to reduce the build-up of customers, we increased base hand size to seven, and rather than making the player to your right discard their hand when their discard pile is empty and you need to draw, you just grab the first non-empty discard pile, going around to your right. It worked out alright with six players, but once we reduced that to four, it was genuinely pretty fun, and held people's attention for several hours.

Playtest take-aways

1. The game is actually kind of engaging
2. The pace was about right: hurried but not grueling
3. There was a lot of variance in the difficulty-to-reward ratio on various customer cards, which was no surprise
4. With the current customer deck, low-cost, easy-to-complete customers are by far the best
5. People can get stuck with tunnel-vision, trying to match the card in front of them. Perhaps more risk of outside interaction would be useful?
6. Play needs to build a bit more, so games have a more dynamic arc
7. There is little interaction between players. While direct competition isn't what I'm going for, it would be nice to have a bit more going on.

Runs were more difficult than sets by a long shot. While we noticed that it's easier to draw strategically to complete a run than it is to try to get a pair (since you might have 2 out of 3 for a run, but simply be forced to hope to pair something that was in your hand), the difficulty difference was vast enough that this didn't really help out those poor customers who wanted a run of three red toppings. In the rules we were playing, runs all had to be of one suit (though some players didn't realize this at first), but in retrospect, they almost certainly shouldn't be.

It didn't feel like there was a lot of drama in trying to score the bonuses on the cards. Since no one else can steal your customer, the question of whether to go for the bonus is simply one of whether it is more economical to do that or to finish that customer and go on to another. While this is a perfectly valid and interesting strategic choice, it doesn't reinforce the experience to a great degree. I'd like to tempt players to push their luck and reward creativity, if a very limited form of it.

Shane introduced me to Pink Godzilla Dev Kit, which is a card game about making videogames that has at its core the idea of playing components out of your hand to build a game that fulfills certain requirements and then potentially exceeds them, yielding bonus points. In it, other players can clone your game before it is done to gain a reward when you complete it. While this is not a mechanic I intend to copy, it gets at the basic idea of the dynamic I'm looking for -- tempting players to push their luck.

One solution I'm considering is a fairly radical departure.

There is one customer in the middle for each player. The customer deck sits off to the side, not being passed around. Each player has a hand of four or five cards and may play cards down on the table at any time in addition to having the option to discard, meaning played cards do not count towards your hand total. Players may not claim a customer until they have a hotdog that fulfills the customer's requirements, at which point they are paid out as before. The player may discard the partially-constructed hotdog at any time, but must discard the entire thing. Once a customer is fulfilled, the filling player must draw another customer to replace it. In this case, if two players lay claim to a customer at once, the customer favors the vendor to whom he is worth the most. If there is still contention, I'm not sure how this would be resolved -- probably by card rank on the toppings.

Additionally, when we played, we moved purchasing upgrades to be an auction between rounds. While this worked alright, I didn't think it added much. I'd like to see the game feel like it has more of an arc within rounds. One idea is to replace some or all bonuses on customers with draws from a separate specials (without customers) deck, which might contain one-time-use cards as well as upgrades. Many of these would likely still cost money and could be traded, but it would allow players to try to make calculated risks to acquire resources which would give them bonuses later in the game. Some of these would likely have direct and indirect negative effects on other players, such as the Health Inspector which would cause everyone to discard their hand (or in the above variant, their prepared dog), or allow you to replace a customer card in play.

In general, while it's not supposed to be a directly competitive game, I'd like to veer slightly more away from multiplayer solitaire.

On playtesting

The combination of marked-up playing cards and index cards for toppings and customers respectively worked pretty well. The big drawback of the playing cards was that at least one player kept thinking in terms of red and black instead of the three suits. The yellow marker on the spade cards didn't show up very well, which I'm sure compounded this issue, but ideally, custom cards will remedy this entirely.

The photos I got of the playtest were staged after-the-fact, since I was too busy playing during the playtest. While it's essential for me to play the game, I should probably also make it a point to sit out a few rounds as well. In general, I need to be better to not get carried away, and instead to observe more closely. It's tough to think like a player and a designer all at once, but it's a skill I need to get better at.

There was also some definite rules confusion. It wasn't until most of the way through the night that we figured out some people thought sets had to always be of the same suit and others didn't realize runs had to be the same suit.

Scheduling

Finally, this is obviously coming pretty late in the month. I have no intention of letting deadlines slip, but since about half my month got eaten up by work (including the evenings) and even less fun stuff, The Hotdog Cart Game won't be getting quite the iteration time and finishing time I'd like to give it. I guess this is just one of those learning experiences.

Still, I'll get a final playtest and final post up, including pictures and the rules right around month's end. Stay tuned.

Hotdog Cart prototype

As I write this, I recently got back from some discussion about the hotdog cart game with my friend Shane. Though it shouldn't come as a surprise, it's always useful to have a smart friend to bounce ideas off of and make you justify your decisions.
The prototype is coming together and should be ready for a playtest, hopefully tomorrow. So let me introduce you to my silly game.

You been daydreaming about it -- serving steamed tubes of emulsified god-knows-what to families at the ballpark. I've seen you lookin' at eBay listings for "street-legal hotdog carts." Well, let me let you in on a little secret. Forget street-legal! You want in on the real cutting edge  action? I'll tell you where the real action is.

It's underground hotdog carts. Way underground. The newest flavors. The hottest dogs. Too raw for Sunday afternoon.  You'll come home each day, forearms covered in steam burns, eyes burning from the accrued salt and mustard and kraut juice, and you may wish you'd never gotten into this business. Some days, you won't know if you're slinging franks or just in the midst of an drug-addled dream.

But one thing's for sure. You ain't never had a 'dog like this at Nathan's.

– Tim Simmons, owner and proprietor of "The Raw Dog"

 (With appologies to Chris Onstad)
 
Hotdog Cart (the current working title) is a fast-paced game designed to capture the frenzied life of an underground hotdog cart vendor. It's a game of constant action and thinking on your feet designed to be played with 3-6 players over a short time period. The intention is for it to be easy to learn, fast, short, and silly.

In more concrete terms, I've decided to go with a card game using a custom deck, where the core mechanic is that everyone is simultaneously trying to fill orders from customers by playing sets of cards representing toppings from their hands. Customers are worth different amounts, largely based on their requirements and how much you go above and beyond with what you give them.

I've always really liked the idea of analog games without turns, but they often end up with lots of bent cards, hands colliding, and then the adjudicating that results when it's not clear who grabbed what first. While thinking about this, it occurred to me that the issues are very similar to those we programmers run into when writing concurrent programming, and some of the same basic solutions apply.

Basically, the key is to minimize the situations in which players contend for a shared resource, in this case, cards, but also any event that would cause play to stop or otherwise effect what other players can or cannot do. I do this largely by giving each player their own resources. So in this game, each player has her own draw pile and her own discard pile. Additionally, there are clear rules for when a player can or cannot access a customer. Finally, no one player can hog all the resources, starving the other players of resources.

The pieces

The game consists of two decks of cards, the toppings and the specials.  The toppings are 24 cards per player split into three suits (red toppings, yellow toppings, and green toppings), each of which has a card of each rank. For the prototype, I just bought four decks of normal playing cards and pulled out 2-9 of each of three suits, hearts for red, spades for yellow, and clubs for green. Diamonds, and ace through ten are unused so far. I went through and used markers to color-code the faces to minimize confusion between spades and clubs. Eventually, I intend to print custom cards for this, but more on that another time.

The specials deck is comprised of customer cards, which list their requirements and any bonuses that can be earned as well as a value when the basic requirements are met, and upgrades, which must be purchased, but which confer lasting bonuses to the player, such as increased hand size or the ability to discard a customer.

Finally, there are money chips. I'm just using cheap plastic poker chips. When a player completes a customer's order, they keep the customer card in their money pile, and it is worth its face value. However, if the player earned bonus money on the customer, or if the player needs to make change of a customer card due to purchasing an upgrade, they use the chips to represent that money. Money is also used as victory points at the end.

The table is laid out with a draw pile and space for a discard pile for each player. Additionally, the player has space in their tableaux for a special card in play and two upgrades to their cart, hotdogs, or buns. Finally, there is a shared space in the middle with the specials deck, any unclaimed special cards, and a shared trash pile for all cards that are taken out of the game.

Gameplay

Each player has a hand of five cards drawn from her draw pile. She may never have more than her max hand size in play at once, but she may discard and draw whenever she likes, so long as its not her turn to draw a special. When a player's draw pile is depleted, she takes the discard pile from the player to her right and turns it over onto the space for her draw pile. It does not get shuffled.

Cards from the special deck are drawn in turn, and once the player to your right has drawn a card from this deck, it is your turn to draw and you may no longer draw from your toppings deck until you have drawn from the specials deck. Special cards are drawn to the space in front of the drawing player if no other card is there, otherwise they are drawn and placed in the center of the table, in the shared space. Players may only act on the special card in front of them, but may put their card into the center and pull one from the center and put it in the vacant spot in front of them at any time.

If at any point, a player is touching two specials at once, has too many cards in her hand, draws multiple cards at once, or has an empty discard pile while the player to her left has an empty draw pile, any player may call out, "health violation!" and that player must discard her entire hand of toppings immediately.

Customer cards have requirements such a "One pair, no red," or "a run of 3 reds and another run of any suit," and toppings cards meeting the description must be played in order to fill the order and take the customer as money. Many customers also have bonus values such as "+2 for a pair" that add value if the player fulfills that portion of the order. This way, the player can attempt to make the best hotdog they can in order to maximize the customer's value, or they can try to fill orders as fast as possible -- its their choice. When the player fills an order, he or she must declare that the order is filled then place all toppings used into the trash pile.

A pair means two toppings of the same rank. A "set of three" means three of the same rank, and so on.  A "run" means a consecutive run of cards of the same suit. All or almost all customers require a combination of pairs/sets, runs, and possibly voids in one or two suits. If a card is used for one pair or set, it cannot be included in another, but may be used as part of a run. Similarly, a card cannot be used in two different runs for the same customer (e.g. it is not possible to have 2, 3, and 4 of green and 3, 4, and 5 of green, reusing the same 3 and 4).

Upgrade cards have a cost which must be paid to the bank in order to move them from the special slot into an upgrade slot. The card then has a description of its effect. Players may buy, sell, or trade installed upgrades with money or other upgrades.

The game ends when the customer deck is depleted. Players may fill the orders of any customers in the special slot, but may not draw new cards at this point nor move a special card from the center into their special slot. The player with the most money at the end of the game wins, but only if that is more than the total base value of all the unfulfilled customers at the end of the game. Otherwise, nobody wins.

Hopes and implications

The idea would be that the toppings get different names based on their rank and suit. The 4 of red might be "Ketchup" and the 9 of yellow "nacho cheeze." In this case, 9 of green would likely be "onion" and 9 of red would be "chili" meaning that a set of three 9s would make a chili cheese dog with onions. It'd be fun to try to set up some of these traditional combinations, but it becomes more interesting when the game results in sillier, weirder combinations. The intention is that every time a player fulfills a customer order, she should read aloud the resulting hotdog.

There needs to be an incentive to try to cycle through the customer deck reasonably quickly to keep the game going. The fact that everyone but you is moving through the toppings decks, discarding and drawing and improving their hand should be enough incentive to deal with it quickly. My hope is that the game will be fast enough paced to keep the pressure on, but not strictly a contest of card manipulation. The game needs to make you think enough that you're pausing here and there to weigh your options.

The initial concept had a specials hand that got passed around, and from which each player picked a card.  The specials hand would then be replenished when it was empty or at a cost of one dollar for each card remaining in it. The idea was that you would be encouraged to pick the card that is both best for you and best to deny the players who come after you in play. While I very much like the idea, I don't think this is the game for it, as it just seems unnecessary. Still, it's an idea to keep around for later games.

So far, I think I like how it's shaping up. I've got a bunch of customer cards to write up and upgrades to invent, but I think we'll be ready to play tomorrow, if I can get people together. I'll put together an article on the playtest along with some pictures or scans of the crappy prototype cards I'm using. I've also ordered some supplies for making the next version, which I'll go into more later, once I get my hands on 'em.

Introduction

Hello.

I'm Ben Cummings. I make games. I'm a game programmer, designer, and player. About 15 years ago, I decided I wanted to make videogames for a living, and today I've been doing that for a few years as a computer programmer at a big videogame company. In college, I dedicated my academic career to the pursuit of the deep game design truths as well as the refinement of my craft. I've always believed implementation and theory to only thrive symbiotically.

The point is, game design is important, and in order to get better as a game designer, it's important to make games. Unfortunately, due to the time and workload involved (not to mention your usual work-for-hire arrangements), it's simply impractical to make a large slew of videogames in rapid succession. While it's possible to make certain videogame prototypes in a matter of hours or days, I can work with board- and card-games much faster, including iterating on designs in the middle of test play sessions.

So, I'm going to be making 10 games in 10 months — one a month — and I'll be blogging about it. The blog is largely here so there's a public record of the committment, though hopefully it'll provide space for reflection and outside comments too. This is not a break-neck pace, and I know a lot of students who churn games out faster for classes, but this should fit in with the needs of my job and family, and the pace should allow for a slightly more slow and thoughtful path. The idea is that I'll work up a prototype early in the month, chew on it for a bit, make a mock up and have a play test, refine based on that, and finally have a reasonably finished game at the end. The production values will likely be non-existant, but we'll see how crafty I'm feeling.

In the next week or two, I'll be posting about my first prototype game for February, which I believe will be based on the theme of underground avant garde hotdog vendors (inspired by this ad website). I'll be using themes to the degree that they're helpful to get me working and working on varied games, so if next week the game is about the royal court in the Umayyad caliphate, so long as the initial theme got me there, it's been a success. Each month, I'll try to post at least one entry each on the initial design, the results of initial playtesting, and then at least one more entry after that. At the end, I'll post the instructions on how to play the game.

I look forward to making some games and sharing them with you, and I hope this will be of some interest to you.