Archive for the ‘Little Pieces – Artfully Arranged’ Category

Stones.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

The wife and I went to the beach this afternoon, and found a profundity of very smooth basalt stones.  She mentioned that ‘these would make great game pieces’, so of course I scoured the beach for a couple of handfuls.  The result:

beach stones

beach stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one drak gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach into the bag and draw out the stones for a conflict.  Grab as many as you want, but if you draw a white one (or more than one), you fail.

I’m also thinking about the arrangement above: the stones are laid out in a 5×5 grid, with the final pattern being significant in some way.

Now the question is: what’s the theme?  What sort of game would call for this as a mechanic?

Decathalon and Bluebeard: Rise of the Minigame

Friday, June 6th, 2008

On a recent episode of The Dice Tower boardgame podcast, the #1 response in a poll on what sort of sports-themed board game the listeners would want to see published was ‘the decathalon’.

During Game Chef, I was in a critique group (Go Hydra!) with a gentleman named SirElfinJedi, who created a game called ‘Masks of the Nautica’, which uses a mechanic based on a compass rose: the GM pics a direction (northeast, for example) and the player chooses a range of compass points based on the relative strength of their skills.  If they pic the right one, they succeed.

I’ve wanted to make a pirate game based around the Brethren Court introduced in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which was itself loosely based on the actual Brethren of the Coast, a loose coalition of pirates in the Caribbean.

What do these three things have in common?  Mini-games, baby.  More specifically, a cluster of mini-games sharing the same mechanical core.

Let’s start with the decathalon, which gives us the physical games to model on.  The events of the decathalon are:

Day 1: 100 metres, long jump, shotput, high jump, 400 metres.

Day 2: 110 metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres.

The next step comes from clustering them together by type:

Footraces: 100m, 400m, 1500m.

Running + Throw/Jump: Long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin.

Throw: Shotput, discus.

Now we can start to think of a way to model these games.  I’ll do that in the next post.

For the pirate game, I’ve already picked out a few minigames: mumbley-peg, the knife trick, shut-the-box, liar’s dice and the compass rose mechanic I mentioned above.  Each of these would perform a different task: mumbley-peg for duels, the knife trick for social challenges, liar’s dice for narrative control, shut-the-box for naval combat, and the compass rose for … a lot of other things.

Why do this?  And why do it in what is (ostensibly) an RPG?
It has to do with my idea of distributed play: that the form of a game influences the way that players interact with it.  Yes, I could just make one unified mechanic that would handle all of these things, but I’m interested in how player skill, and the difference in player skill, would play out in the choices of the players.  Someone who’s good at the mumbley-peg portion might use that to his or her advantage by bringing that mechanic into play more often.

What a collection of mini-games does, apart from adding a large dose of theme (always a good thing), is give players different paths to success.  Mixing that together with differences on the character sheet gives a wider variety of play for the game, and helps to support the unique, off-beat feel that I want to give the characters in Bluebeard.

Little Pieces, Artfully Arranged #1: Dice

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

This is the first in a series of posts about the bits and pieces that are already in games all around us. This series will first be an analysis of these pieces and the attributes that they have that we, as game designers, can exploit. Later on, we’ll start synthesizing these attributes into new mechanics – and hopefully, new games.

First on the list is every gamer’s best friend: dice. For practical purposes, I’m sticking to cubic (six-sided or d6, in the parlance) dice as a baseline (numbered or pipped), simply because they are far more prevalent. However, many of the attributes that I describe here will apply to other polyhedric dice as well.  I’ll also list the relationships possible between two or more dice, and I’m also assuming that the players have access to a number (if not a large number) of dice when describing relationships between dice.

For the sake of simplicity I’ve stopped short of talking about custom die facings – if you include any and every possible custom facing on the dice (or non-standard numbers of sides) – the list of attributes balloons out of control quickly.
So without further ado:

Single Die (d6) Attributes

Multiple Dice (d6) Attributes and Relationships

Orientation takes into account the sides of a die that aren’t the face value or the reverse value.  Take the following die into consideration:

Assuming that the 5 is the face value of the die (meaning that the 2 is the reverse value), let’s take the 3 as ‘North’.  That makes the 6 ‘East’, ‘South’ is 4 and the 1 is ‘West’.  If the orientation of the die is important, there are four possible orientations for a die with a face value of 5: 6 at North, 3 at North, 4 at North and 1 at North, with the other side values changing correspondingly.  This means that the orientation of a given die can hold four possible information states for each of the face values on the dice.

Note that any of the attributes of a single die can be integrated into the multiple die relationships.  For example, a stack of 3 dice could have different informational states based not only on the height of the stack, but on the color of each die in the stack, the face value of that die, and it’s orientation.

Discussion is forthcoming …