I have been working on a boardgame off and on (I am currently in the ‘off’ phase) for what must have been the past two years or so. That may sound like a lot of time, but let me emphasize the “off and on” bit. My work with this has been spotty to say the least. I am making this game for fun, and frankly I have very little incentive to work on this other than for my own enjoyment.
With that out of the way, making a boardgame is great! With no need to program or mess with a computer, you can make something relatively quickly and get very immediate feedback!
Let me tell you about my boardgame! It is a tactical game set on a square-grid where you summon fantasy monsters to fight and destroy your enemies’ bases. Think of a mix between a tactical-RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics, a variable card game like Magic the Gathering and the motions and game space of Chess. Key features include a base that you can move around and use to summon monsters, a monster “pool” that all players take from to pick their armies, and umm…moving monsters (the pieces) around on a grid. There is a battle system, a light build-your-army mechanic, and some features that try to facilitate smooth play. All of this probably sounds like a lot of gibberish, and frankly most of these features do not make any sense without going into a little more detail. Without further ado, let’s go into further detail!
A Brief Look at the Boardgame I Have Yet to Name
Ah, that’s right: I don’t have a name for my game yet. I was thinking of something like Clash of the Summoners (or maybe jokingly call it Sorcery: the Summoning), but I would rather worry about the name of the game after I feel done with the damn thing. I am far from done with it, but I will get into that later. For now, we will call this game Boardgame.
Boardgame is a tactical game. What does that mean? It means it is like Chess (or one of my favorite games of all time, Dungeon Twister). You move pieces over an area, in this case a square grid. Much of the game is about area control and situating your pieces over the right positions on the board. In Boardgame, you have a lot of pieces you could potentially control (currently up to 17 pieces of your own on the board at once). At some point, having enough pieces on a board would turn this from a tactical game to a war game, a game where you control a large army over an area, but I would say due to the smaller scale of Boardgame this is a tactical game.
Unlike Chess (but like Dungeon Twister), there is a combat mechanic in Boardgame beyond “bump into a piece and win.” If you have a piece in range of an enemy piece you can engage in combat, which is very similar to a Magic the Gathering style of combat. Your piece has a combat value; you deal damage to the enemy based on this value. If the value is equal to or greater than the enemy combat value, that enemy is defeated and taken off the board. You can have group battles, which is actually a big part of the game due to the large amount of pieces on the board, and there are rules for that system. I won’t go into those mechanics here; this is only a preview after all.
Another element in Boardgame, one that I think makes it kind of neat and unique, is an army-building mechanic. This mechanic is similar to drafting cards in a collectible card game, except the drafting is part of the actual game instead of an outside meta-system. Each ‘army’ in the game (a type of unit), is given a drafting card. During the course of play players take drafting cards and officially ‘own’ that army, making it so only they control the pieces of that army and no one else has control of it. I like this mechanic a lot because it allows for me to add tons of weird pieces to the game without worrying about having specific team colors. It also adds these elements of thinking ‘which army will work best against the other player’s army?’ and ‘how can I cut off the enemy player’s build with what I choose?’ But mainly I like the idea of taking all my left-over miniatures from long-lost boardgames and having them fight each other.
The goal of Boardgame is to destroy your enemy’s (enemies’) base. The base is where your new units are placed on the board. The base can also move around, but it cannot defend itself or attack. That is what units are for. The base is equivalent to ‘the player’ in Magic the Gathering. It is the ultimate target that you must build your army to kill. You must defend your base with units like you must defend ‘the player’ with creatures in Magic, and you must attack the enemy base with units like you must attack ‘the enemy player’ with creatures in Magic.
That is the gist of Boardgame. Build an army, move army around to kill enemy base while defending yours. Now that you might have some basic understanding of what the game is about, I should talk about the history of this game and the changes I have made. I will do this…now.
The History of Boardgame and the Changes I Have Made
Two years of boardgame-making, despite being ‘off and on’, is a lot of boardgame. I have revised, edited, adjusted, balanced and revised this game dozens of times by now. Going into every single change would be far too in-depth and would require more words than I have time to write. A simple history will suffice.
The game started out with the choose-your-own-army mechanic, destroy-the-base goal, combat-values, and something I ended up scratching: dice-as-money. When I started out there was a lot wrong with Boardgame, and I wasn’t surprised. Of course there would be a lot to improve upon with my first build of the game! As a result, I tweaked the game. Then I tested again. Then I tweaked again, tested, and so on.
What I learned was that having dice did not work with the system I set up. I wanted to have dice in the game because I wanted to somehow incorporate all my table-top junk (miniatures and dice) into one system, but I didn’t want to have luck-mechanics like card-shuffling and dice-rolling. Guess what? Dice in a boardgame are meant to be rolled. Ultimately I had to choose between adding luck to my game or removing dice. I chose the latter.
Another problem I faced was movement. Boardgame has a player controlling on average about a dozen units on the board. How do you keep track of how many squares of movement all these pieces can move without being tedious and slowing the game down? I had tackled with this problem for a while. If you have a pool of movement points, moving multiple units takes far too long and moving one unit is far too easy. Ultimately I decided to add a new mechanic to the game: grouping units into a “squad.” A Squad is represented by a square tile. You place units you want to move onto the Squad, and move the Squad as if it were one unit. This allows me to keep track of moving units without too much busy work and also allows for some interesting mechanics with how you group pieces together.
The next big issue I faced was victory conditions. At first I had it so whoever destroyed the other players’ bases won. The problem with this elimination-style goal is that players who lose early suddenly are kicked out of the game, and this game has not been short. Elimination works for short games mostly, but for anything longer than 30 minutes makes sitting around and waiting for other players to finish really freaking boring. Not to mention, elimination-based games could go on at a very variable rate depending on how the game goes. Stalemates can happen in this scenario. Frankly, I am still working on this problem. I want to find a victory condition that gives the game a fixed time limit, but so far I have not found a system that I am satisfied with. I will let you know how this goes.
The last thing I have changed throughout the game’s history, of course, is the balance. Units that are in play, how fast the units move, how good they are in battle, what abilities they have, all of this has been changed an innumerable amount of times. Balance is the number one thing I have struggled with in Boardgame, for good reason. There are ton of variables in Boardgame, and all of them have to be tweaked to a point where the game is fair and unbroken. THIS IS HARD. I do not think I will ever be finished with balance; I can only hope to bring it to a point where I am satisfied with how the play of the game turns out.
Things I Have Learned About Making Boardgames from Making Boardgame
This section is just going to be a bunch of little tidbits I have found to be true thanks to my time spent making Boardgame. Take this knowledge with a grain of salt. I am an amateur with making games; these are just things I feel are important from my paltry amount of design experience.
Keep things moving
Downtime, time where a player is doing nothing, kills a game. It is your job as a designer to kill downtime. Two major things cause downtime: busywork and analysis death. Any time a player is fiddling around with pieces when they could be doing an action relevant to the gameplay is bad. Analysis death is also bad. Giving a player too many options can melt brains and slow a game to a crawl (although sometimes you want a great thinking game, like Chess, so A.D. is somewhat tricky to work around).
Buff > Nerf
When hearing about a change in game balance you will hear two words more often than others: buff and nerf. Buff is a term for making some element in the game more powerful, and nerf is the opposite, decreasing the power of some element. While sometimes a nerf is unavoidable, I always prefer buffing what I can far, far more than nerfing elements of my game. Buffing game elements makes for more exaggerated gameplay; people (at least me) like controlling more powerful elements rather than having less power and control. If something is fun but stronger than other elements of the game, the solution is not to cut that fun element out. The solution is to make the other elements better.
Do not get attached to the game
This one is hard. It is hard to realize an idea you have been tinkering with for weeks or months or longer will not work out, and it is even harder to part with that idea. The ability to critical of your work is probably the most important skill a designer can have. To know when something isn’t working and to know when to edit your creation is an invaluable skill. Do not get attached.
BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE
Easily the most time I have spent designing this game has been devoted to tweaking numbers to make sure no one thing is too good a strategy over other ways of play. It is vital, vital, to balance your game. In order to have variegated and engaging play you need the pieces of your game to fit together properly. You cannot have something be too strong or too weak.
The devil is in the details
This is closely related to balance. Most of the time you spend balancing, which itself is the most time-consuming activity I have come across, is going over the details of your game. The most problems you will have will be because you did not finely tune the little details in what you are making. I learned this lesson the hard way, and I am still learning this lesson. Keep a close eye on the details of your project, or they will end up biting you in the ass.
Keep players involved
This tidbit ties in with keeping things moving. Do not let the players spend too much time twiddling their thumbs. Ideally there should be no time where the player has to sit and wait for other players doing nothing. There should always be something the player can be doing, even if it is simply thinking about what their next move should be (i.e. if you are going to keep the player from actively participating then at least make your game complicated enough to keep a player thinking).
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
What an ancient truth! Do not try to change something if it works. Of course, what is “broken” can be subjective, and “fixing” a problem can often create new problems. That’s why you don’t fix what is not a problem. This is a simple but important axiom both in game design and in life.
The best answer is the simplest one
Overcomplicating things is bad when you can get the same things done in a simpler manner. Especially when you are dealing with a boardgame it is important to cut down on fluff that detracts from the experience you are trying to deliver. You are not working with computer that can keep track of huge amounts of processes. You have a board and people who can move stuff around. Keep it simple, stupid.
Keep the game on the board
Kind of close to the last tidbit, try to keep the core of the game at the center of attention. Do not let the rules stray too far from the play area. That will lead to people having to keep track of unnecessary stuff in their head when they could be spending time thinking about strategy and tactics and all that good stuff.
Offense > Defense
Not just a lesson for the player to know, you as a designer should keep the game lively and engaging. Defense is not good for this. Defensive play can lead to boring, repetitious moves, is not fun to watch, and will result in stalemates more than victories. Make sure to reward offense over defense, or the game gets boring fast.
Busywork is an actual thing you need to worry about
It may be easy to shrug off little bits of fiddling with pieces as okay, but it is vital to reduce the amount of work the player has to do to act. Try to make everything you can as painless as possible to get working. Don’t make a die a counter: it’s hard to find the right number to keep track of and stalls the game. Don’t make it hard to keep track of how many moves you have left on your turn. Busywork is bad and needs to be kept at a minimum!
Know technical writing or have someone else who knows
Want your rules to be clear and concise? Then you will want to know how to write a technical document. That is what your rulebook is. All game designers should take up this skill. It is damn useful to be able to convey to players how to play your game.
Elimination format games have problems in long play
Monopoly has a big problem: you can knock a player out of a game that lasts hours. What the hell are they going to do for that time? Eliminating is essentially making that player have nothing but downtime for the rest of the game. DOWNTIME IS BAD.
Listen to your playtesters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It may seem like the comments from the people playing your game are wrong, but chances are you are the one who is wrong. Listen to the people playing your game. Observe how they play your game. Do not force them to take an action you think they should do; see what the players will do with the game you just gave to them. Playtesting is a vital part of making a game, and you need other opinions to keep yourself from being too biased towards your game. Remember that spiel about not being attached to your game? That’s what playtesters can help with. Do not ignore them.
Clarify your ruleset
This goes with knowing technical writing, but you need to make sure your rules are clear. How can people play your game if they do not understand what to do?
Be wary of new rules
Similar to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” new rules are dangerous. Only implement new rules and mechanics if you think they are absolutely needed. Nine times out of ten, more than that probably, new rules bring new problems to the table. Do not go happy-go-lucky with adding tons of features or else your game will collapse into a mess of issues.
“Fun” > Perfect Balance (?)
Symmetrical, totally fair games are not the best thing in the world if they have no engaging play. Before balancing the game (even though balance is utterly essential), make sure the game is actually worth playing. When you’re far into making your game, it is easier to tweak numbers than it is to make something boring interesting.
Conclusions
Well, actually, this game is not finished yet. I need to revise, rebuild, and rewrite tons of stuff before I feel I will be ready to try to make a final product. So really, this game, Boardgame, is to be concluded at a later date. I still need to make a good name for crying out loud! I hope you found what I have learned so far to be interesting, and hopefully this will help you if you think to make a (board)game of your own. It is a rewarding experience.
