Excalibur's Zone

Tonight was a revelation. It was another two-player test for Die Civilization with my friend L and I playing the game. I implemented a bunch of rules changes based on feedback and ponderings and we were able to reach the very last technology card in the stack! That was AWESOME! The points weren’t simply a runaway and the game was pretty close when we stopped. Even though I was the first player and we finished a full round for the end (the store closed early this week), the final points were very close. Oh, and it was done within 2 hours! Tech Level 5 in 2 hours is a HUGE jump in the speed and flow of the game since it took that long to get to Tech Level 2 in the past.

This has caused me to realize that I now need to figure out an end-of-game trigger for the technology race. I believe it’ll be: When you attempt to draw a new technology and can’t, the game ends. I think that’s appropriate for the game through this route. The winner will be the one with the most Victory Points after you take all the score modifiers into account.

What was changed in order to make this dramatic speed increase happen? Well, a couple of things happened tonight:

• The number of techs per level was equal to the number of players.
• The number of techs on display was equal to the number of players.
• Dice ramp happened more quickly.
• Players could spend research die pips to purchase a success.
• An icon bonus was introduced to allow for reduced success cost.
• Failure success purchases were modified.
• Purchase points for techs were modified.
• Slight improvements to the turn order were implemented.
• Changes to victory points were implemented.

Let’s address these in order. Previously, I had double the number of players for the techs in the deck and display techs equal to the number of players. I also had a number of techs equal to the number of players +1 in the deck and the number of players -1 on display. I also tried different permutations of the number of techs in the deck and on display as well. This one hit the sweet spot. Due to this, neither player felt overly challenged to get a tech, though I did fall behind slightly due to bad luck. Some of the above changes happened through the course of this playtest. There were some techs that were left behind because they didn’t generate as many VPs as the next tech level cards did. I think with Wonders fully implemented in the game, this won’t always be the case.

Due to the completion of techs, new tech levels came out faster. In other playtests, the player needed a cube on the new tech in order to roll the extra dice associated with the tech level. This time, as soon as the tech was displayed, the players got to roll more dice immediately, starting with the next player’s turn. This turned into a wonderful way to offset the VP difference between players. The player whose turn it was got to roll more dice immediately following the completion of the tech, which allowed them a greater chance to complete a tech in return. This also sped the game up since players were now able to roll more dice for purchases and production. This was an excellent change which is marked for final implementation.

It gets to be very frustrating when you’re rolling dice and you cannot use something that you’ve rolled. This was apparent in every playtest to date. So today, players were allowed to do a few things to mitigate this issue. First, they could apply face values that were not a success to purchase a success at, say, 10 points. So you could save up die faces in order to purchase a success but all of the production points had to come from dice that matched the icon color you were purchasing. After a few times doing this (very successful, btw) we decided to make it more expensive based on the Tech Level the icon was sitting at. Now, it became apparent that it would be cool if there was a way to lower the cost of this fee based on how many icons you had already researched. After all, research isn’t all done in a vacuum since you build upon prior knowledge. So, the production cost was reduced based on the number of icons you “had a cube on”. This meant that any tech you purchased previously counted as having a cube on each icon on the card. So if it had 3 wealth icons, if you were trying to purchase a wealth success on another tech with points, the cost of that success was reduced by 3. In the above example cost of 10 points, it would cost 7 points which is slightly less expensive. There will need to be a minimum, probably the tech level plus the number of icons of that type on the card. That’s a good place to start anyway. Due to this new rule, I felt that failure purchases (you claim a certain number of failures plus production stores to purchase a success) were too expensive. So I lowered the production cost. It worked pretty well at first, but then I decided to add the tech level to the cost and it hit that sweet spot. It was challenging, but not overly so and easy enough to pull off if you pay attention to what you’re doing.

After this, I tackled purchase prices for techs. Basically, it is tech level times a certain target number. So we had Tech Level 1 cost the base amount (say 10) and Tech Level 5 cost 50. We also felt that one of the dice involved during the purchase (when you actually take control of the tech) should be the same color as the tech. Each tech will match a color of one of the research dice. This was just a way to make things challenging and not meaningless. So now you need to have a particular colored die in your production pool for the last amount used to purchase. It worked out pretty well.

The turn order and how specific actions worked were slightly modified. It has always been that if you spend production stores to purchase a success by using failures, or whenever you purchased a tech, your production stores reset to zero. There is a problem when you purchase a failure success and then attempt to store production afterward. To clarify things, purchasing of a success, any success, is done after your main phase. Applying dice to production stores is now done strictly during the main phase then you move on to production purchases and finally to tech purchases. This makes decisions a bit more difficult and in many cases, you’re losing the use of many dice. This was very effective and caused both L and I to think critically about what dice to use for which purpose. Very nice!

Finally, Victory Points were changed up. The points for completing first didn’t change, but the points for finishing second did. I will need a 3-4 player game to test the VPs for those numbers, but I think we did a good job with this new formula. This caused the current winner to flip flop from one side to the next each turn. In the end, when we ended the game, the score was 41 for L and 39 for me. A nice grouping, but more testing is needed for this.

As for lessons learned, I found that it was best to limit pink dice so that their abilities were limited to production dice or research successes, rather than any free success. It curbed power creep for the die and allowed us to really make use of it. It also limits all successes, even purchased ones. So your failure purchase or production purchase of a success was also hampered if you had a bad pink roll.

This, however, brought another issue up. Throughout the game, we ended up stockpiling ONLY the pink die. There were times I stockpiled a white die, but we rarely, if ever, stockpiled any research dice. There has to be something to curb this and I think there are two routes. 1) You cannot stockpile pink dice. Due to what they represent, it is rather absurd. 2) Perhaps stockpiling will allow you to use 2 faces for success instead of just one, for instance a 5 or a 6 is a success instead of just a 6.

During the post-game conversation/questionnaire, we talked about wonders and how they could make or break the game. As it stands, the game is cool and all, but there’s a certain something missing. I think bringing wonders in would be the first step. Secondly, I think the lack of technology powers is also what’s causing some empty feeling for the game. The game needs a cheat sheet as well.

Final thought: I think I have another way to mitigate the success issue and I’m going to test this next time I do a playtest. I think it’s a good idea and it will provide a bit more of a speed boost as well as a variance to the game.

Next steps:

• Design Wonders, how they are “built”, and what they do to modify the game.
• Work on Technology powers/rewards.
• Write more of the rules. It’s getting easier to explain them so let’s get that down on paper.
• Work on a cheat sheet for what the dice represent and their abilities.
• Work on the above additions/fixes and find solutions to some of the problems discovered.
• Redefine what successes and ability activators are.

I think that’s a good place to go next! Also, I will have some alpha-quality docs with some formatting to them for when I playtest next. When I get to pre-beta stage (most game components designed), I will start looking for players to start blind testing.

Until next time…

You may have already seen the announcement of Episode 1 and I’m here to confirm that, yes, I am going to be running through Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition! The first episode is going to run a bit long since I’m going to create my character and go through the opening tutorial/story stuff. Future episodes will hopefully only run 20-30 minutes each instead of the hour that the premiere is set at.

This Let’s Play series is going to be mostly unabridged since there’s a lot that goes on in the game. I will be recording 99.9% of everything with exceptions of interruptions, taking time off, family, work, etc. jumping into break up recording (and my current chest cold).

I plan on going through the complete main campaign and as much extra stuff as is humanly possible. After I’ve finished everything for Baldur’s Gate, I will move on to the next  game released chronologically by Bioware. At least by series. For instance, some games had extra content added via expansions after other games were released. I’m going to ignore that bit and go with the base game’s release. So here is the list of games that I’m going to play in order. If the game has an Enhanced Edition, I’ll be playing that version.

• Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition
• Planescape: Torment
• Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
• Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
• Neverwinter Nights
• Icewind Dale II
• The Temple of Elemental Evil
• Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone
• Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard
• Neverwinter Nights 2

I may go on to retro games such as the Gold Box series of games put out by SSI in the 80’s Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness. In addition to the Krynn and Savage Coast games, Eye of the Beholder series, etc.

That’s the current plan, anyway! We’ll see if we can keep this going since I don’t have to wait on a server or other people’s schedules to put this out! 😉

Well, that’s the working title anyway.

As I’ve said before, Die Civilization is a dice game. You roll dice in order to obtain successes or points in order to purchase technologies, build wonders, and meet achievement requirements.

Dice are used for two purposes: The first is to determine research or production successes. A research success allows you to complete a part of a technology or activate an ability. A production success allows you to purchase dice or gain additional successes for either production or research. Research points (the values on the dice) allow you to mitigate luck by storing points on a research in order to receive a research success. And production points allow you to purchase technologies as well as success through failure. Your pink production dice limit the number of successes you can use each turn.

It is planned that technologies, once completed, offer an added benefit that manipulates the basic rules in some fashion as well as victory points, requirements for wonders, requirements for achievements, and an extra die for your next turn.

Each die can be used for several actions with the two major ones listed above. All dice can be used to increase your production warehouse stores (with limits based on your white dice), stored in your die stockpile, or recorded as a failure. The trick is that you are limited to one die choice for your die stockpile and one failure each turn. Your production warehouse is limited by your white production dice.

The problem I’m having with the game so far is how long it takes to do anything. The main issue is that due to bad luck rolling successes, the acquisition of technologies is severely hampered. It takes about an hour to get through 3 cards in Tech Level 1! That’s a bit lengthy, even for games meant to take a long time. When techs taking so long to acquire, it really bogs the game down. While you might have fun at first, seeing a die roll anything other than a success was tiresome and irritating toward the end of a half hour, let alone one and a half!

This is why I have added the research point rule. How it’s going to be tracked is up in the air right now. Mainly a design issue at this point. But I hope that doing this will allow players to put those “non-successful” rolls to good use. They have the option of adding the value to the production warehouse or they can add the value to the research track of a tech. I am also leaving the success mechanic in place (which is a 6 by default). The research track will probably cost 9 points per success via face values and a 6 will be a cheaper, automatic route. I was thinking about 8, but 9, which is just slightly lower than average for 3d6 (it’s actually 3.5 + 3.5 + 3.5 = 10.5), seems like a good number to start with. Success through failure requires a minimum of 2 turns, recording 2 dice for failures and 2 dice toward the 11 points needed to pay for the success. This 11 points may go down to 9 as well since we found ourselves struggling to get to 11 quite often.

So, to recap:

• There is a lot of dice rolling in the game and therefore we need some way to mitigate the bad luck that some people experience with dice.
• There are a lot of research dice that need something to do if a face that is not a success is rolled. If not, the dice have no real meaning.
• The point costs for failures is disproportionate after having to wait at least 2 turns to utilize them for a success (of any color).
• The number of cards that are displayed don’t allow for players to move from tech level to tech level in an appropriate amount of time.
• There should be a winner at the hour mark or hour and a half mark with a 4-player game. Possibly sooner for 2 and 3 player games.

These are the things I need to fix first, before adding tech abilities, wonders, and achievements.

As I get closer to a game that can be put into “open beta” I will release a rough draft of the rules with instructions on how to set up a game using common components. With any luck, I’ll have a nice, “quick” civ-building game on my hands by then.

Today, I tried a few different things with the playtest, which was a 2-player game with my friend D.

1. I set the number of techs to the number of players +1 per tech level,
2. I drew a number of techs equal to the number of players -1, and
3. Extra white dice were added only when a player got a cube on the next level tech.

What did this accomplish? Not much that was good. First, the player who finished the face-up tech first was able to pull away with points much faster than the other. Second, this did nothing to speed up the game. At. All.

Also, some things where highlighted: while Production Dice had something they did whether they were successful or not, research dice did nothing. There was no use in the research dice at all except to use for other game actions.

It is of my opinion that dice need two functions. One that relies on successes and another that relies on face value. To that end, I’m going to utilize research dice in another fashion which will help speed up tech acquisition.

I think what I’m going to do is make it easier to acquire techs. I found it was rather difficult to score the number of successes needed, even with the failure mechanic (luck mitigation). Basically, you can store a die as a failure and after a certain number of failures plus an amount of production points, you can get a success of a certain type needed for the tech you’re working on. While this is awesome, in theory, in practice it was a bit slow.

Also, the number of successes and production points required for a card are a bit over-inflated. Basically, I want to be able to make tech purchases possible, but not dirt easy.

To make tech purchasing easier, I’m going to employ the first of the ideas bandied about tonight. You’ll be able to use the face value of the research die to use as research points if it is not a success. After a certain amount of points, you gain a success on the card. It might make it a bit faster since you’ll be able to stockpile the points on the card for what you’re looking to get if you can’t roll a success to save your life. I’m thinking the average of 2 dice, each rounded up. Since the average is 3.5, that would round to 4 x 2 = 8 points to buy a success instead of rolling a 6 to gain a success immediately. The points you can spend would be limited by your white dice as normal and you would still need production points (reduced from current levels) to purchase the tech.

So, you’ll be given a choice, use that research die to put into buying a success or use that research die toward production points to buy the tech when you’re ready. Also, white dice become more important. This also gives research dice added reason to be in the game.

We’ve found that white dice and pink dice (the two production dice in the game) work very well the way they’re set up as limiters and how successes are utilized. The dice are meaningful when they’re rolled and that’s what I’m aiming for with all the other dice.

So next playtest:

1. Research dice produce an automatic success (a 6) or
2. Research pips can be used to purchase success at a higher price, probably 8.
3. Number of techs in the deck is equal to 1 per player per tech level and
4. Number of face-up techs is equal to the number of players.
5. Production points to purchase a tech will be modified to account for the use of research pips as research points or production points.
6. The number of successes for lower-tier techs should also be looked at, maybe that plus #5 above will be tied together…

Victory points, Tech powers, Wonders, and Achievements will all need to be examined. I want techs, Wonders, and Achievements to be interconnected somehow and I want one achievement to deal with victory points.

For now, I’m going to concentrate on the 6 elements for the next playtest. I am also going to be doing a lot of single-player playtesting to see what kind of appeal this might have for solo gamers.

Hello, everyone!

Just wanted to drop a short post about the new wiki! This is going to be a place where I can update episodes, series, and the like without having to deal with reddit’s posting issues. I keep having to moderate my own posts even though I’m logged in. They get marked as spam and I have to re-approve them. Quite irritating. So, here’s a wiki to keep you up to speed and to make things far easier for me to deal with!

Right now, I only have a few series up dealing with Magic: The Gathering under my “A n00b’s Guide to Magic: The Gathering” label. Just like reddit, the site won’t update any of my social feeds so you have to check often. Or you can use it as a reference later on.

I really want to make sure all my videos are indexed in a categorized manner. Hopefully the wiki will let me do that!

Until next time, enjoy playing games, check out my wiki! I am out!

Today, in addition to playing some FUN commander games, I was able to sit down with my friends L and C (until I get permission to use names, I’ll use letters for the playtesters) for another pre-alpha playtest. The focus of this game was to see how other players felt about what was going on with the core mechanics of the game.

The results? It took a few turns for everything to click, but luckily I was there to explain things. I believe the core mechanic is sound but there needs to be a concrete, documented explanation of the terms, zones, and actions that can be taken during a turn. I had to explain how the dice worked more than a few times and I kept going back to the core mantra that I set for the game. I was hoping it was a simple one…

The big hurdle was understanding what active dice were and how limiters worked. After a bit, we were able to push a turn around and go. There were still questions about what should be done with dice, what order things should be purchased in, what is the strategic value of this or that. But, after a while, I started seeing L and C start to think about where their dice should be spent, given their limited resources at times.

L said he had a fun time and enjoyed the game. C said the game was something he’d play if it was offered but he wouldn’t rush out and buy it. Mainly, C only saw a small portion of the game and we didn’t get to any of the stuff I’m still working on.

We were able to:

1. Gain 2 VPs each by completing a technology,
2. each research a tech,
3. use the Wonder cards for their start player effects,
4. and see all of the Tech Level 1 techs.

Some lessons learned:

• There are still too many technologies being displayed for each tech level in order for the game to be considered speedy.
• Players are initially very confused about the core success/failure mechanics and the value mechanic.
• Players are initially very confused about how to use dice as successes on technologies (as Research Dice) and when to use them for actions (Action Dice).
• Players are confused as to what can be done with dice if you don’t have any successes or are severely limited by the number of successes allowed.
• More of the game has to be designed (the technologies and wonders at the very least) so that players can have a better view of the game.

To that end, here is a short intro about the game I’m working on. Not the particular mechanics, per se, but an overall description of the beast:

Die Civilization is a game about civilization building using dice. Dice represent production, manpower, military prowess, espionage, agriculture, think tanks, and other aspects of a civilization. Technologies are cards that represent milestones in human development from the stone age to the medieval era. And finally, you can build the seven wonders of the ancient world.

You win the game in one of three ways: Collecting the most victory points by researching and acquiring technologies, finishing your wonder before anyone else, or by completing the majority of the achievements available at the end of the game.

I’m still up in the air about achievements. Initial plan is to have them face down and hidden throughout the game. You can use dice and production to look at them throughout the game, but I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.

The number of technologies available aren’t moving fast enough on a per-tech level basis. I think I’m going to revamp the initial deck to have less techs in the “play deck”. Currently, you draw twice the number of players for each tech level, shuffle them, then stack them with tech level 1 on top and 5 on the bottom. I think I’ll go to number of players + 1. That might be a better route to go and speed up the game. Everyone advances tech level at the same time–when a higher level technology hits the table. I think this is the most balancing way to do it, though the person who starts their turn with the new tech in play is going to have a small leg up over everyone else. But I have to see how well this works before I make the final call.

Technologies really need to be designed next. I want them to have two benefits that the player has to choose from when they complete it. Then they place their tech under their tableau in such a way that the benefit they chose is displayed. Other players still need to be able to research the tech as well. So I have to figure that one out. Technologies give a free die and 2 benefits for completing it. The die is for the one who completes it first. You’ll want to complete it for the benefits and possibly for the achievements as well.

Wonders need to be designed. They are an ongoing project which is another place to dump dice. Each has a number of stages that need to be completed and each stage provides something interesting to the player completing them. I was going to have players draft their wonders, but then I realized that may break balance if someone has played a particular wonder enough to figure out tricks and grabs it every time they play (to go first, second, last, whatever). Random distribution is the best bet here.

One last thing on the dice: I’m debating making dice a limited resource and it may enforce player interaction to gain those resources. I like the idea, but I have to figure out if it’s feasible.

I hope with the initial game that there is enough randomness and components that the game has a lot of replayability. The game is being designed for 2-4 players with a customized 54-card deck of cards, a number of dice, and 10 cubes (or meeples) per player. That’s quite a number of components. So I may look at going into a digital version first and a physical version after. Again, something I’m examining.

Back to dev and work! Hope my meanderings are somewhat interesting to you!