John Zeitler

Today was, as can be inferred from yesterday’s post, a very gaming-centric day. The morning saw me finishing up work on the cooperative crime card game I’m developing, and the afternoon held the first playtesting session of the same. It was… educational.

Developing a game is very much an iterative process. Initially you start off with a set of rules, a set of goals, and the tools that the players can use to achieve those goals. In a competitive game, the primary opposition comes from other players, therefore resources should be plentiful but finite. However, cooperative games pit all the players against a preset scenario or challenge, and as such the resources there should be scarce but valuable. Americans have an ingrained sense of competitiveness when it comes to board and card games, and as a result for beginning players, the concept of cooperation (within the game framework) can be a little tricky to understand; however, once that slight paradigm shift is taken, coop games become frantic, tense affairs.

In the session today, three friends and I made a ton of adjustments to the rules that I’d laid out a few weeks prior and codified a bit more solidly last night. It turned out that, while I had made some surprisingly astute and balanced choices in designing certain parts of the game, I made other elements of the game far more restrictive, to the point where a game could be made unwinnable within the first two turns. While I was a little dismayed to note that I’d basically hamstrung the players, it was observed that “it’s easier to loosen up restrictions than it is to tighten them”. Rather than being limited to only one card per turn, for example, players can now play up to their full hand as long as they don’t play more than one card “colorlessly”. (That isn’t a word, I know, but for some reason the spell checker isn’t saying it’s not. Odd.)

In the end, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to refine the game mechanics. It turns out I may need to create a fourth deck for fewer players; I totally messed up the card balance in the “bad things” deck; and there are general tweaks and errata here and there that need to be resolved before we can playtest a “beta” version of the game. Fortunately, I have time to do just that.

Maybe not tomorrow, as I have a pretty busy day ahead of me, but we shall see.

Oh, the zombies? Yeah, you can guess what game I played tonight with only candlelight beside me and the headphones on.