The dissection of Thurn and Taxis

I took a break from the long days at work to go play some games last night.  I went to my friend Bryan's place and when I got there they were half way though a game of 7 Wonders.  I helped a newer player with his first game.  After that I drank way too much Rum and got my but kicked in Thurn and Taxis and Cargo Noir.  I should have stayed at work.

I am going to try something a little different.  Being that I am a game designer and an aspiring board game designer, it feels like I am doing myself and anyone interested in reading my ramblings a disservice.  From now on, I am going to attempt to give a re-cap the rules of the game and then dissect the game mechanics.  I think this will be a lot more interesting than what I have been doing.

Thurn and Taxis
This is a typical Euro game where you are building the first mail routes in Germany during the 16th century.  It has a similar feel to Ticket to Ride and shares some similar mechanics.  It is a light game at first and gets closer to a medium game as the game progresses.

At the start of a turn, Players MUST draw a city card and MUST play a city card each turn.  Players can draw a random City Card from the top of the deck or one of the 6 of the available cards out on the board.  Players may also use the special ability of one of 4 of the helping characters.  They give the ability to: Draw 2 Cards, Play 2 Cards, Discard and replace the 6 Cards on the Board, or Gain a carragie with less cities than normally needed (The carriages are point cards you gain when you close a mail route and have enough citires in a route).  After drawing and playing cards, the player can close his route to score, or pass his turn.

The entire game is a Perfect Knowledge game with the exception of the Cards.  This means that you can see everything every player is doing with the exception of the cards in other players hands.  The Cards is the only Randomness in the game, but its enough.  It makes it hard to build a stratagy or plan based on the cards that are on the board because by the time it comes around to you, the cards on the table are not very likely to be there.  Because the game is almost Perfect Knowledge, you sit and wait while the other players contemplate the best cards they can take for themselves while damaging your visible routes. This makes for longer turns and longer wait times for the other players.

Bryan teaches us the rules to Thurn an Taxis

Building a route is done by laying Cards in front of you.  This MUST be done every turn or you loose your entire route and do not score any points.  This is called a Press your Luck or Risk Reward Mechanic.  You keep adding onto something for as long as you want, but each time you do, you risk loosing more.  If you Score the longer routes you get Bonus Score Tokens, and can collect Carriages that required longer route to collect, but must be collected in order.  This creates an exciting sensation of risk for the player, they have to choose when to cash in or loose it all.  Basicly, it's gambling!  It also has a good chance of making players upset and feel disgruntled about their gaming experience.  In T&T it felt wrong, what is the reason for loosing the mail route if you don't add another city?  Don't know!  But thats the way it works because the designer decided it would be a good place to shoehorn this mechanic.

Early on I was doing very well, then I got unlucky and fell way behind.

Each City Card in the route must connect to the neighboring city on the board.  Once you have placed a City Card, you can only place another connecting City Card.  You can place Cards on ether end of the route as long as the Card connects to the adjacent city.  This is a modified version of a Mechanic called Pairing.  Players are trying to collect sets or runs of items.  This is most recognizable in games like Poker.  In T&T, players are trying to collect runs of Cities that must be connected by roads on the board.  This was the most interesting mechanic to me.

John, Bryan, and Ryan

Scoring happens when a player closes his route.  Before I explain this part of the game I should explain that the Cities on the Board are divided into regions that are colored.  Each colored area has a number of cities and a stack of Score Tokens.  In  addition, SOME of the colored areas are divided into two shades of the color (i.e. light blue and dark blue).

Note the colors of the province that each City is in.

To collect  the Score Tokens you must have a house in all Cities in an area.  When you close your route, you may choose to place a House 1 of Cities your route hits in each region your route passes through or, all of the Cities in a single region your route touches.  This includes the division of colored regions.  So, for example, if you choose to put all your houses in the green region, you will have to choose if it will be the light green or dark green part of the that region.  Are you confused about why the designer added this layer of complication to this game?  I am not 100% sure, but if I had to guess, I would say that the designer noticed that people would just focus on one region at a time, complete that, then move on to the next.  This would force players to use both mechanics of placing all houses in a single region and 1 house on each city in a region.

Thankfully nearing the end of the Game!

This was out first game and there were a few rules that we botched.  Because of that, I misunderstood a few things and as a result made several critical errors.  The distinction between the different colored regions was not explained very well and there were some mistakes made there as well.  This resulted in 3 bad turns in a row and loosing a route.  Because of this I spent the rest of the game trying to catch up.  By the end of the game I was feeling very frustrated.  The mistakes I made and the bad luck that caused me to loose my route made me wish for the end of the game to come quickly.  All in all not a bad game, but some of the arbitrary mechanics makes this game feel (despite there very specific theme) a bit abstract.  It would not be a game I seek to play again, but would play if asked.

Later we played Cargo Noir which, since this post went longer than I planed, I will cover in my next write up tomorrow.  I will try to have something up on this by Monday since I want to try and find time to work on Taipan, spend time with the girlfriend, and do this dissection as well.

And I thought I was soooo clever!

Well, its been a fun week.  I have been working late every night as we try to meet our deadlines.  It seems that working 12+ hours a day does tend to cut into your Play Time....who knew?  That Said I did manage to get a basic art layout for all of my cards.

From left to right: Cargo, Captain, Damage, Cities

I am still using the test art for the Captain and Cargo Cards but that will be changing soon. You can see the difference in visual quality on the Cargo and Captain Cards compared to the City and Damage Cards.  I will have to go back and rework them so they look like the same art. Thanks to my good friend Ben and his fantastic info about how Public Domain works, I should have most of the art done in the next week or two.


Now for this weeks lesson:  DO NOT ADD ANY ART until your game is much closer to being done.  There are a many, many....MANY reasons for this:

1.) Cards Change and so does the Art.  There is no point in making art that will get thrown away.  You will be driven mad by how often you will change stats, layouts and cards.  Save your sanity. 

2.) Printer Ink Costs are not cheep.  There is no point printing out all the ink and colors if the balance of the cards are broken.  Save your money. 

3.) Until you have an artist hired, your art will be inconsistent and look like its from different games (like my cards).  Save your time.

4.) Once you add art, you have invested a significant amount of time and money into your game.  Now you will be less likely to make the changes that your game needs because it will mess with all that work you put in, making you more resistance to change.  Save your creativity.

5.) When you finally bring your game to a publisher, and persuade them to publish your game, they will hire an artist and have all of the art redone.  This can be very frustrating since you grow attached to the work you put into your art.  The Publisher will have other ideas about how best to market this game they are taking a chance on and will (unless you are a world class artist) insist on changing the look and layout of the art.

In the end, you should resist adding art.  I know it makes it all look better and gets others more excited about it, but you will only kick yourself.   Making art is very time consuming. Unless you are an artist, you will be better off using stick figures and focusing on making the game play and mechanics fun.


I know all of this and I still do it.  Almost every game I have ever made I started piling the art on almost from day one.  Maybe I am starting to learn since this time I waited a full 2 months to start in with the art.

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.

The Last Gaming of the Year

I am sure you are all looking for some news or an update about Taipan, and it is coming, I promise.  There is just not a lot to show or talk about just yet.  In between playing all these games, I have been working on updating the rules (which you can find HERE)  and creating all new cards to replace the old ones that done work with the new rules.  I should have all new cards printed and ready for playing by the weekend.  Until then, here is the latest version of the Far East map with the latest corrections.  Enjoy!

I went to my friend Bryan's place last night to play some games.  We played Merkator a ponderous game that is too complicated for what it is.  So complex in its game play I barely know where to begin.  Players can buy and sell Bonus Cards and Buildings at the start of their turn.  Then they can travel to locations to collect resources and when they do this, the adjacent locations connected by a rope (don't ask) on the board gain 1 addition resource on their location.  They can also travel to these locations to complete Contracts.

Players start the game with 4 contracts ranked 1-4 and are only allowed to keep 5 Contracts.  Contracts can be completed over and over multiple times.  Each Contract has a location and a set of requirements the player must deliver to that location to complete the contract.  If the player completes it, he gets money and a new contract 1 level higher than the level of the Contract he complete.  Players have to travel to these locations and depending on the location ether takes a Time Token or pays Time Tokens (its all feels very arbitrary).  When the player takes a Time Token for traveling to certain locations they flip it over and the Letter on the back is the Column (on the players warehouse) that all players must discard a Good from their warehouse.  Also, other players can then pay that player time tokens to travel with him to perform actions on their turn.  This makes it important to know that focusing on one area or one set of Contracts is the wrong way to win the game.

The game ends when all the Time Tokens are depleted or a player scores the single Level 14 Contract.  Bryan crushed us mostly by cheating (Unintentionally).  He was keeping more than 5 Contracts and several round went by before we caught him.  But he also just had the most options of things to do at the most locations.  I focused on two really good combos, but it cost me too much time to do those combos over an over to be worth it.  Bryan was getting a lot done on our turns and doing a lot on his own turns.

I like the concept but there was so much abstract, vague, and arbitrary rules and mechanics that, In the end, I just did not have a good time playing.  It was all of our first times playing and we discovered several rules that were over looked, or lost in the original translation that we were all just guessing at some points. I would be willing to try it again, but we would have to go another round on learning the rules and check the errata online first.

After a dinner break we came together to play Age of Empires III.  This was sold to me as a 3+ hour game.  In that sense I was not lied to.  It took just over 5 hours to play.  Let me start by saying this is not my type of game.  I could have played 2-3 games in the time it took us to play this one game.  Bryan taught us the Rules and after 40 minutes we started.

This game is big and Epic.  To try to explain it all here would take forever.  Here is the Abridged Version.  Each player is a European contry trying to expand and colonize the New World.  You do this by placing colonists on one of many possible actions.  Colony Ships let you move your people to any place that has been discovered.  Trade lets you take one of the 4 trade goods that are available. Trade Ship acts as a wild card for your trade goods (you only get money if you have 3 of a kind), Construction lets you spend your money to buy buildings. Discovery lets you send a group over to try to open up a new area for colonization. Specialists lets you get one of the special characters that have additional abilities depending one where and how you use them.  And last is Warfare that lets you attack other players.

On top of all the special places you can place a colonist, there are 5 special types of colonists.  Soldiers, Captains, Merchants, Builders, and Clergy.  Each one can be used in different ways depending on where you place them.  Soldiers give bonus money when you used them for discovery and they are used in warfare as a colonists.  Captains count as 2 when bidding on the Trade Ship and when used for Discovery.  Merchants give 5 gold when they land in the New World and they count as 2 when bidding on the Trade Ship.  Builders make buildings cost 5 less and they make fortifications in a Colony that act as End of Game Victory Points.  Clergy count as 2 colonists when they land in the new world.

At the start of the game only the Caribbean is available to Colonize so it gets crowded fast.  In the image above you can see Orange and Purple have piled their people on there.  I got blocked trying to get the Trade Ship twice and I got blocked on getting the building I wanted. I ended up getting a lot of Soldiers, but no money or trade goods.  So I went on the War Path.  Half way through the game I was sure I was in the lead.  I was scoring so many points from the colonies that I had conquered, I knew it was down to Alex and me.

But in the end, it was Ben who pulled out all the stops.  He had generated enough money to buy some really valuable buildings that gave him score multipliers on how much money he had.  He had also got a ton of points from his trade routes.  Alex and I were dead last!  Once we understood what were doing and how all the different Colonists are used, the game started to pick up speed and play faster.  I think with people who really know what they are doing the game could be played in about 3 hours.

Its interesting that on the scoreboard, the two people who where in the lead ended up being last.  And the ones in last place on the board pulled all the way to the front.  While I did enjoy this game, I do not like 5 hour games, so it is unlikely that I will every play this game again, but I would consider it.

The age old question...

Fellow designer and blogger Jack, of the Blog Creation and Play, recently had a post asking the question: "What came first? The mechanic or the theme"?  Jack and I got into the discussion about our various approaches to game design and it got me thinking that I need to explore my understanding of what a mechanic is a bit more. 

I guess when I think of mechanics, I am talking about something more specific.  I love the Dice Altering mechanic of Kingsburg and would love to do a game using some aspect of that mechanic.  Attica has a great clean mechanic of placing tiles to make sets for points that is so easy to play yet impossible to ever get the same results.  In both of these cases, the theme could be anything.  Kingsburg doesn't have to be set in a Fantasy kingdom where monsters are coming to attack.  It could be a sci-fi alien world or Criminal Empires of the Roaring 20's.  Attika is so loosely based on building city empires during Ancient Greece that it could just as easy be Farmers competing over shared land in a wacky game of trying to plant their crops around each other.


In the development of my game I started with a pre-existing idea.  Taipan.  I knew the game was going to be about merchant captains in the Far East sometime in the historical 1800's.  With setting chosen and fairly well locked in place, I started thinking about what I was going to need.

• A Game Board: Knowing what that region looked like on a map made it obvious that there were going to be changes to the game.  
• Dice?: No, I wanted to do this game to be played without dice. I would use dice if I had to, but for now I would do without it.
• Decks of Cards:  I needed events like storms and pirate attacks to happen from time to time.  To balance that out I needed some good events to happen as well.  A deck of Event Cards seemed like an obvious choice.
• Combat: If I was going to have pirates attacking the player I would need to have combat.  I already decided that I didnt want Dice, so that meant some other way of resolving combat.  I settled on another deck of Cards.
• Cargo: I needed some way to represent each type of cargo that players were buying and selling. I also needed a way to gain random types of cargo. Cards seemed like the theme that was working so far.

So I had all my parts, but I still didn't have a mechanic.  Well, what is a Mechanic?  Wikipedia has this to say about it:

"Game mechanics are constructs of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game or gameplay. All games use mechanics; however, theories and styles differ as to their ultimate importance to the game. In general, the process and study of game design are efforts to come up with game mechanics that allow for people playing a game to have a fun and engaging experience.

The interaction of various game mechanics in a game determine the complexity and level of player interaction in the game, and in conjunction with the game's environment and resources determines game balance. Some forms of game mechanics have been used in games for centuries, while others are relatively new, having been invented within the past decade."

So the mechanics are everything from the rules to balance, and player interaction with the game, its parts, and other players.  So what this is telling me is....I dont have a game yet. Got it!

I started with movement.  I moved the ships around on the board and got a gauge of how many turns it would take to move around.  Next I started playing with Cargo and how cities produced Cargo.  This made me realize I needed City Cards.  Then I started intergrating when the player draws the event cards.  Now I had the mechanics of a game.  Event Cards, then Movement, then Combat (if the player encountered Pirates while moving), Port actions of buying and selling Cargo, and finally the End Turn where the clean up happens.

The game has changed since this humble beginning, but this was the slow process that brought the mechanics to my game idea.  Because I knew the game I was making, I guess knew some of the mechanics I wanted before I even got started.  I guess in that sense I did have some of my mechanics in mind before I started working on the game.

I think I have come back full circle to Jack's original Post: What came first? The mechanics or the Theme?