• closed information – Each player holds cards in their hands that are hidden to other players. Additionally, Action Card selection is hidden until all actions are revealed simultaneously.
• not a trick-taking game – Unless I drastically change the rules, this is most definitely not a trick-taking game.

Obviously the first point (partnerships) is the easiest to implement. For my design process, I focused on a four-player game, with two teams of two players each.

The only point that remains is to allow the players to communicate through play. Obviously there are a lot of other logistics involving how to players can play as a team, but I felt it was more important to focus on communication and let the details grow from that.

As noted above, there are primarily two aspects of the game that are hidden: cards in hand and the action selected by each player. These are what partners may wish to communicate to each other is some form.

When you consider a trick-taking game, usually the communication is open so that all players have a general idea what is being communicated. Leaving Bridge out of the discussion (as I am not qualified to speak to it), in many trick-taking games, players will play cards that do not affect the current trick to signal something about their hand. In RftG, if you are playing something that is ineffective, you are playing inefficiently and are going to lose. Therefore, another form of communication is necessary that does not require for inefficient actions.

I believe the best way to communicate with another player in RftG (without table talk) is to pass action cards and/or hand cards.

Action cards would be the easiest, as partners could share their planned action first, and then have the option for one or both of them to switch actions before playing them. This would require some verbal communication (“I’ll switch mine. You keep yours.”), but it would be a simple way for two players to act as a team. However, I think the uncertainty of non-verbal communication leads to more rewarding play. There are also other balance problems that would have to be worked with (Produce-Consume strategies would be especially strong).

Hand cards provide a variety of methods of communicating. Players could exchange cards, show their partners their discards (and perhaps allow them to exchange a discard for a hand card), or players could even openly discard as a way to openly cue their partner.

Unfortunately, the ways to communicate hidden information is not the most problematic portion of creating a partnership game out of RftG. Larger issues of balance with two players working together would need to be worked out. If I were pursuing this more seriously, I would consider setting up the game like a 2-player game with 2 actions per turn, and each partner is selecting an action. A shared tableau between partners is a possibility, but only if a system can be devised to determine who gets cards from trades and consumes (perhaps the one who chooses the phase IV action?).  There are several routes that this could take, but lots of playtesting would be needed to determine if the game ultimately breaks when two players are able to share information.

However, for a partnership or team game to be successful, there needs to be the ability to cooperate without one person running the show. One night, 6 of us sat down to play a game of Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights, in order to shorten the game length, we decided to play teams. We didn’t change the gameplay drastically, so one key strategy was to balance your cards and your partner’s cards at the end of your turn so that you stayed below the hand limit.

What ended up happening is that one player (me) on the winning team basically ran the game for both players since the other player was fairly new to C&K. We overran the competition, and it generally wasn’t any fun.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really a team game because there was no team play. We didn’t need to communicate, cooperate, or otherwise by “in sync”. These are the aspects of a team game that differentiate them from individual games.

Although I’m speaking from limited exposure to the wealth of existing games, the partnership or team games that I have played (or have otherwise been exposed to) seem to fall primarily into three categories: trick-taking cards games (e.g., Bridge, Euchre, Spades), semi-cooperative games (e.g., Shadows over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica), and party games (e.g., Taboo, Pictionary). I recognize there are  probably more that I don’t know about, and I would love to hear about them. Inkognito seems to fall outside these categories, and does interest me. However, it seems that it would have some of the problems I have with semi-cooperative games, which I will describe below.

Unfortunately, these three categories feel a bit stale to me:

I love trick-taking games. However, I find myself more and more wanting to have a richly integrated theme in my games. This is an entirely subjective point, and I couldn’t even begin to explain why, except that I find myself enjoying a game more when the actions a more tightly tied to a theme.

Additionally, their mechanics are so similar that I usually don’t care whether I play Euchre, Spades, or Rook (or whatever other trick-taking game you want to teach me). But I’m definitely not going to quit a game of Euchre and switch to Spades over some other game.

Party games are fun for a social gathering. I usually don’t find them intellectually challenging, and many times the teamwork is more about having a breadth of talents/knowledge than it is about working together.

It’s hard for me to complain about semi-cooperative games because I haven’t played them. I suppose one reason I avoid them is that they usually contain information that is only known by yourself (or a select few), and require bluffing to play well. Let’s put it this way: I don’t play poker for (a lot of) money for good reason. Bluffing stresses me out. I prefer games that I can play straight.

All of this generated a design problem for me — create a game with the following properties:

• partnerships — two players playing together as a team with a common goal
• closed information — each player has only partial knowledge of the entire game state
• communication through play, not table talk — partners can only reveal information to each about their knowledge of the game state through their own play
• not a trick-taking game — because there are plenty of these

Initially this design problem led me to explore partnership possibilities in Race for the Galaxy. Following that, I began exploring my own design that centers around actions triggered by set completion as a mechanic. My next two posts will detail these thoughts.

I grew up a fan of baseball, basketball, and football, but I never really appreciated the intricacies of the third until the past few years. The more I watch it, the more I understand, and the more certain subtleties become obvious to me.

Field position is one of these subtleties. The primary goal of the offense is to score points. However, if the offense is unable to score points, it does have a secondary goal of creating poor field position for their opponent. When making the appropriate play call, the coach has to take in to consideration a myriad of factors, field position notwithstanding. This is probably most evident in “3rd and long” situations where obtaining a 1st down may be a long shot. In some cases, it may be more desirable to make a safe call that will gain a few yards than to take a risky shot at a first down.

I’ve been thinking of this as a mechanic of the game of football, and am curious how such a mechanic could be implemented with a board game. Abstracting it out of the game of football can be a bit of a challenge because of all the different factors that play into the significance of the mechanic.

The integral part of the mechanic is opposing progress. This is when one player’s progress reverses the other player’s or players’ progress. This can be anything quantifiable. In football, this is the distance to the opposing team’s goal line. This is also seen in Othello, where turning over an opponent’s piece results in the player gaining a piece of his own.

However, in Othello the progress is towards the final goal of having more pieces at the end of the game than your opponent. In football, the progress moves you toward a sub-goal of the larger goal of having more points at the end of the game. To make it more interesting, there are actually two sub-goals: the field goal and the touchdown. The latter is more desirable as it generally results in more than twice as many points than the former, but the former is easier to obtain.

Finally, in an oversimplified view, there are two ways to progress in football. One is to run the ball, which is generally a more sure way to gain a few yards (less progress, less risk). The other is to pass the ball, which may not gain any yards, but tends to gain more yards than running the ball when you do gain yards (more progress, more risk). This is an important dynamic in the situations described above; the player must decide which action to take to not only maximize his own progress towards a sub-goal, but which will also maximize the backwards progress of the opponent.

In summary, these elements should be present to replicate the “field position” mechanic in football:

• Opposing progress – One player’s progress negatively impacts the progress of the opposing player or players.
• Sub-goals – There should be multiple sub-goals where the ease of obtaining a sub-goal is inversely related to the reward for obtaining the sub-goal (i.e., the touchdown versus the field goal). The progress described above should move the player closer to the sub-goals.
• Multiple actions – Each successful action should progress the player, but actions that progress the player further should carry a higher risk of either no progress or negative progress (i.e., the run play versus the pass play).
• Progress punt – The player should be able to “punt” (for lack of a better term) their ability to progress to drastically reduce their opponent’s progress. Implementation of this element is easiest when only one player can progress at a time, and the progress punt ends their turn at progressing.

While it is possible to implement a portion of these elements, I do not believe that you can create interesting decisions similar to the “field position” decisions on a football field without at least implementing the first three elements. The final element, which I did not discuss in detail, would create a more complete analogy, but it could also be eliminated if it proves difficult to implement or creates an imbalance in gameplay.

I also did not mention an important part of the mechanic in football. The teams are limited to the number of plays they can run because they must progress ten yards within four plays. In the case of a game where players take turns performing actions, this would not apply as the player would be slowed by the progress of the opposing player. However, if they were to take turns progressing with multiple actions (as it is in football), they would need to be limited in the number of actions they can take before their turn is over. This way, there would be a reason to use the riskier actions instead of only using the low-risk actions.

In a future post, I hope to mock up an example implementation.