Taipan Testing and Design Changes

This past Thursday I got to play test Tiapan.  It was a good group of players including my friend and fellow Game Designer CW Karsten, the creator of the recently Kick Started game 'Dragon Valley'.  I have been trying to get him to play Tiapan for a while now.

The game played well and we played all the way to the end.  Things seemed to play quickly and despite a few big problems and lots of little ones, there were no game stoppers.  Also, I got one of the best compliments I could ever get.  'I like this better then Merchants and Marauders'.   If you have been following this Blog since the beginning you know that M&M is the game I frequently referenced early on in the development o Taipan.  So for one of the players to say that was a nice ego boost to hear.

After the initial Set-Up, the game is underway.

For the first few turns things played really well.  Right off the bat, players scattered to the four corners of the board, so that felt like a big win since early versions of the game everyone always went straight to the top closest ports.  I think one of the things that helped with this is the new City Cargo Values and players getting the Free upgrade of their choice.  

Things are about to start going very bad.  Let the Brokenness commence!

And then the first big problem happens.  One of the players draws an Event Card that doubles the sell price of a random type of cargo.  A cargo he just happened to be carrying, and in the city he just happened to be going to.  This let him sell those 2 Rice Cargo for 10 each instead of 5 each.  This got compounded when he took that money and upgraded his ship twice, a rule I will need fix by saying players can only upgrade once per port visit.

To fix this problem I am changing the card to a +1 per cargo sold.  I was going to do a +2, but there are also City Modifier cards this card might stack with making to the total possible bonus to be up to +4.  This feels like too much of a possible bonus, so I am keeping it small.  This is a good general rule about using multiplication in game design.  Unless you have some way of controlling it, don't use it.  The numbers get too big to fast, so its always better to use smaller additive bonuses.

CW trades in some Cargo to Upgrade his Ship.

The next big problem game a few rounds later when the same lucky player (John) drew the 'Gift in Hong Kong' event card.  This allowed him to pick a single cargo of his choice.  Before the last round of big changes this wouldn't have been that big of a deal since the most value he could have got would have been 8 coins (still broken but not as bad).  With the new changes I made to the City Cargo values, he got a value of 12 coins, and if he wanted to take an extra turn moving to another City he could have got 15 coins.

A gift in Hong Kong? What a coincidence, I just happen to be in Hong Kong!  =)

After the game, we discussed the problem of 'A Gift in Hong Kong' and came up with an interesting idea.  Players can sell 2 cargo of the same type and get 1 of the next highest cargo for free.  What I like about this is that it forces the player to have to do something to make this happen, it doesn't just happen for showing up in the right place at the right time.  The down side is that if a player sells Black Powder (the highest cargo type), what does he get?  Now I have to come up with some special rule for that?  I think I will revert to what it was originally 'Players gain the Ship Upgrade of their choice' with the added mechanic that they have to sell 2 Cargo of the same type to get the benefit.

John (the guy on the right) just got lucky and goes on to with the game.

After this it was clear who was going to win.  He had gained so much money there was no real way to catch up, but everyone was happy to keep playing to see what they were able to achieve before the game ended.  Near the end of the game I realized that my Captain's special ability required that I get into combat to use it.  He can repair 1 damage once between Port visit.  Bus since there were a total of 4 pirates the whole game, it never really got used.  I am hopping this will get fixed in the next game when I have more Pirates starting in the game, and make some adjustments to the Event Deck to fix some of the unevenness.

My Captain is only useful if I get into enough combat that I need to repair a lot of damage.

Other issues included: Not enough pirates, some copy paste errors and poorly phrased descriptions that made understanding some of the cards difficult, Cargo Token colors not matching the Cargo colors on the cards, and Players being able to buy more than one Ship Upgrade a turn.

Some challenging problems and lots of small, easy fixes! I just wonder how many I will find in the next play though.  =)

Dissection of Cargo Noir

Last Friday, after playing Thurn and Taxis, I played Cargo Noir.  I have played this game several times and have really enjoyed it.  It's a simple, elegant game, with a great theme and art style.

Players are smugglers traveling the world and trading in illegal goods.  At the start they each receive  3 ships and 7 coins.    Each player takes his turn by placing all of his ships on locations around the world to make a Bid of no less than 1 coin on the goods located there.  This is called Worker Placement.

WORKER PLACEMENT

The Worker Placement mechanic is very common and there is nothing unique or special here.  In many games, the spaces that workers are placed can only be used once or have limited space requiring players to make the hard choice of choosing one thing over another because, once each player has gone around in order, the thing you want to do might not be available.  However, in this game there is no limit to the number of players that can occupy a spot.

Players may also choose to go to the Casino space or they can go to the Black Market space.  Then it's the next players turn.  That player has the same options of placing his ships where he wants.  But now if he wants to bid on the same cargo as the first player, he must outbid him.  Play continues like this until it is the first players turn again.

The first player, at the start of his next turn, recovers his ships in any order he wants.  If he is the olny bidder in a world region at the start of his turn, he pays his coins to the bank, recovers his ship, and collects the cargo and places it in his warehouse.  If another player has outbid him, he has must choose to up his bid or pull out.  If he ups his bid he must sit there one more round and hope that no one out bits him again.  If he pulls out he gets his ship and his money back.  This is called Bidding.

BIDDING

Games that have a Bidding type of mechanic often do it all in a single turn where all players participate in the bids.  This game has an interesting twist on the Bidding Mechanic because players must decide if they want to spend an action to keep their ship in that spot, increase the bid, and hope they are not outbid again, having to wait until their next turn find out if each player in turn will jump in on the bidding action of that space.  This makes staying in an auction costly and should only be done if you absolutely need the cargo at that location.

If a player's ship is on the Casino he takes his ship back and gets 2 coins for each ship on the Casino. Any ships on the Black Market are recovered and allow him to choose to ether draw a random cargo from a bag or trade any one cargo for any one of the eight cargo there at the black market. Once he has collected all his ships, cargo, and coins, he starts placing his ships in hand back out on the board again like he did on his first turn.

My warehouse has too much in it.  I must spend it or loose two cargo.

Collecting all this Cargo is great, but there is a problem.  You can only hold 6 cargo after our turn is done.  If you dont spend it you loose it.  Before the player's turn ends he may have as much cargo as he wants and he can spend the Cargo before he looses it.  The Cargo value is a little tricky.  In the image above I have collected 3 Jewels, 3 Alcohol, a Uranium and a Gold.  Looking at the chart at the bottom of my Warehouse you see the scoring chart. Three Cargo of the same type is worth 9. Two Cargo of different types are worth 3.  So I have a total of 22 points (3 jewels = 9,3 Alcohol =9, Uranium and Gold = 3) to spend on victory cards.  This mechanic is called Pairing.

PAIRING

Pairing is the act of collecting many of the same type of item, resource, card, etc.  Many games have this and is most familiar in games like Poker.  The interesting thing in this game is that the Pairing mechanic is coupled with a scaling value system applied to it.  This makes it more difficult to collect large number os the same type, but also a lot more valuable if you can do it.  The nice thing is that they have an alternative scoring mechanic if you cant make the more valuable Pairs.

In addition to victory cards there are 3 cards that affect the game.  Syndicate cards give you 2 coins if you are ever outbid.  The Warehouse lets you hold two extra cargo.  Cargo Ship gives you one more ship token to place on your turn increasing your actions each turn.  Each of these cards are great but will not win you the game alone.  This gives some nice perks but if you spend your turn buying these thats one less turn focusing on wining the game.  Its a balancing act that has to be evaluated carefully.

The game is elegant but there are some problems.  As the game progresses it starts to slow down.  Each player that gets more Cargo Ships adds to the duration of their turn and decision making.  In addition it is a perfect information game where you know everything out on the board and in each player's warehouse.  This can create long waits between turns if you have players that are very analytical who evaluate every player's option and likely direction.  This is the one bad thing about this game.

Our game was less than stellar.  Coming off of Thurn and Taxis which didn't go that well for me, and John didn't seem to enjoy it all that much, there were a general feeling of unhappiness.  I thought this game was light enough and it would play fast enough to be OK.  Unfortunately, there was an important rule that we over looked until mid way though the game.  When cargo tokens are removed from the board they are immediately replaced from the bag.  Well, we were mistakenly putting the tokens that we were spending back in the bag.  It should not have been done this way, the rules say to remove the Tokens from game until the bag is empty.  Removing the tokens makes for a more balanced distribution of the cargo allowing players who are collecting one type of cargo know the value of the cargo out on the board.  i.e. if you know there is only one more of a token on the board it can be a lot more valuable depending on if another player is trying to grow his set of that cargo type.  This might encourage other players to out bid him to prevent him from getting a large scoring set of cargo.

This was the worst game of Cargo Noir I have played and I think its because of the mistake we made about putting the cargo tokens back in the bag.   There was another issue that only seemed to be affecting John.  If you are out bid and remove your Ship and Money, you are not allowed to place your ship back on that spot to out bid another player.  John kept forgetting where he pulled his ship from and then got hung up on it.  His frustration was palpable about half way thought the game.  To solve this, we used black wooden cubes from another game as markers.

I love the theme of the game and the art style captures this magical time of 1920's through the 1940's, but at the same time it feels modern.  All of the characters look like they are straight from a movie that I cant quite put my finger on (except the americans...that would be the Godfather).  They do skirt the edge of the offensive racial stereo types...but I also think that adds to the charm.

The last point I am going to make is that while I love the theme, its very abstract.  There is no reason it had to be smuggling.  There is no law officers trying to bust you.  No port authorities you have to bribe. No thugs with guns or attacking other players.  It could just as easily had been a merchant trading and biding game, but the theme makes it much more interesting.  I feel like it's fairly clear that the game was designed, played, and balanced, long before it was a smuggling game.  It just goes to show how a theme can carry a game idea and really make it shine.

A first look at the Cards

I have my first prototype of what the Cards will look like so wanted to share it with you.

The new Hotness!

It has taken a lot longer than I originally thought, partially because of work monopolizing my time, all the gaming I have done over the Holidays, and the complexity that my Data Sets have taken on.  In addition, while working on creating the new Data Sets, I became unhappy with some of the Event Cards.  I have been struggling with how to make the old Event Cards, which only affected an individual player, work on a Global Scale to affect all players evenly.  Many of the Cards just didn't work, so I had to scrap them and create new ones.  Some of the ones I kept needed to have their mechanics changed.  

The Deadly Storm.

The Storm Cards were the most problematic Events.  Where they once just hit a single player, they now needed to affect an area.  I played around with dividing the map into 3 section, north center, and south.  To make it simple I even thought about making Storms affect the whole map, but this felt cheep.  Instead I choose to use the same mechanic that I use on a lot of Event Cards.  Draw a Cargo Card to choose a random city and then any ship up to 2 spaces from the city at the end of the round will receive damage.  This lets players avoid the area and escape it if they happen to be caught in the area when the storm hits.  This way, if a player takes damage from a storm, in most cases it will be their choice if they want to risk the storm.

The Pirate Bounty, a dangerous way to make some extra cash. 

To complete the Data Sets I needed to include the pointers to the Images that will be on the cards.  Once I had the place holders for the images, I couldn't stand looking at the empty Data Sheet "Fill Space" where the image would be placed when the Data was called.  So I got to work on inserting the image references into the Data Sets.  Even with the much faster process for creating the Art Images, it is very time consuming trying to find images that fit the theme and time period, and are free and/or Public Domain.  This is why it is always good to make a game themed to a fictional setting so you don't need to worry about being historically inaccurate. 

This photo for Ship Upgrades does not look right and will be changing.

It is very difficult to find images that fit for the cards I need to represent.  It has forced me to choose a few images I am not happy about and will be changing the first chance I get.  This image doesn't fit the other images because its built from a photograph.  This is one of the images I will change when I find a suitable replacement.

Mansions of Madness

We got to play Mansions of Madness tonight!  If you like Arkham Horror you will love this game.  It's a co-op game where the players are all working against a single player called the Keeper.  The Keeper sets up the game based on a set of specific information.  It's a bit complex to set up, but once you have done it a few times I can imagine it wont be too bad.  The rules them self appear, at first glance, to be very overwhelming. Thankfuly, once you get into the game, it plays very smoothly and flows well.

The players then take turns moving though the mansion trying to uncover the clues to solve the mystery.  Meanwhile, the Keeper is spending Horror tokens to use event cards, summon monsters, and play injury cards to impede the players.  There is a really fun Puzzle Mechanic where the players need to use their Intelligence to solve mechanical and object orientation puzzles to open containers and doors that lock some rooms.   The players had a lot of fun with the puzzles and being terrified of all the nasty abilities the Keeper could play on them.

It was our first time playing but I would say that it feels like the Keeper has an advantage to winning.  I made lots of mistakes and had many opportunities to do some other nasty stuff, I just didn't realize it until the last two turns of the game.  Even with a bunch of actions that I wasn't taking advantage of, I won fairly easily.  The only reason it was close was that I chose to put the final bad guy close enough that the players could reach him.  I could have put him anywhere I wanted and that would have made it impossible for the players to reach him in time.


All in all, it was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to playing it again.  As much as I enjoyed Arkham Horror, there is something a bit more personal about this game that I think I like a little better.  Maybe after a few games I will have a better feel for the game and give another write up to share my thoughts.

Do your research!

I have a new lesson for you today.  Make sure you do your research before you get locked into a project.  You don't want to launch a game that is grounded in real history to be historically inaccurate.


I played a game on the old TRS-80 back in the early 80's called Taipan. The player is the Captain of a ship trading goods from the Japanese city of Nagasaki to many ports all the way down to Batavia (know known as Jakarta).  The game was inspired by the novel Tai-Pan and I am almost positive that the game inspired future games like Sid Meier's Pirates.

For years I thought Taipan meant Captain.  But I just recently discovered that I have been wrong all this time.

tai·pan

¹    [tahy-pan]  Show IPA

noun

(in China) the head or owner of a foreign business establishment.

Because of this I am going to make some minor changes to the back story.  Also, the Captain Cards I was working on will have a much wider variety of looks.  Now I can have them be English, Russian, as well as any of the Asian nationalities from Japanese, Chinese, and Thai.


In addition to this I have decided to allow you to give me some feedback on what you think.  I have created a Poll that you can add your voice to what themes are interesting to you.  Feel free to select multiple entries.

Dragon Vally visits me...

I am good friends with indi-board game designer CW Karsens of Diamond K. Games.  He has some of his games up on The Game Crafter where you can buy them now.  Most recently he got his game Dragon Valley funded through Kickstarter and has been keeping me up to date with the latest news.


On Saturday, CW stopped by my house to show me the very first Print of his game Dragon Valley, fresh of the plane from China.  He took some time to hang out and talk about Dragon Valley with some of my friends from work who were there helping me test my game Taipan.

CW showing off the box of his game Dragon Valley.

We talked about Field Hospital, the first game of CW's that I played, it's a lot of fun.  Mystic Cauldron, a great connect 3/tic-tac-toe type game with very deep strategy.  Trifectus (never released to buy), a Rock, Paper, Scissors game of the rise of the Roman Empire.  But mostly we talked about Dragon Valley.  Sadly CW could not stay to test Taipan with us, but he has promised that we will get together some time soon to do some play testing.


From Board Game Geek:
"Times are dire here around Dragon Valley. We're fighting off waves of orc armies, goblin war machines and even the flying lizards themselves. For now the mountain pass remains secure but our scouts have reported large gatherings in the valley and we're expecting a full scale assault before the season's end. If that wasn't enough to worry about, our neighbors are also preparing for war and petitioning the king for his troops and supplies which are already spread thin. It seems you'll not only be fighting a war of steel, but one of words as well."

Dragon Valley is a great game that has elements of Tower Defense.

Game Play:
Players take turns dividing items such as knights and archers, building materials for blacksmith shops and towers, special powers and even attackers. The attackers consist of dragons, orcs and battering rams that emerge from mountain passes into each player's lands. After dividing, other players select the group of items they prefer and leave the remainder with the player who did the dividing. After that, players use special cards to interfere with each others plans. The last step each round is for players to setup defenses, destroy the attackers or laying siege on the orc strongholds scattered throughout Dragon Valley.