Back pats all around!

As I had mentioned in a previous post, I have been working with 3 other talented individuals on a board game project for Brenda’s Game Crit class. We received our evaluations from her on the project and they were… wonderful. Of course, she disliked the name, but that’s alright; an easy fix.

I was glad to work with Brian, Dave, and James on this project, and am continuing the adventure with our newest design for our final. Not much can be mentioned about that at this time, BUT I do have the fantastic post-mortem Dave wrote for Klepto Kapers.

In addition, Brian has a look at our first out of team play experience with the final product.

Dave McDonough’s look at the project.

Brian Shurtleff’s Keeping the Faith.

And as mentioned, here is Dave’s penned post-mortem submitted with the project.

“Aesthetic” Board Game Project – Klepto Kapers

Postmortem

Designers: David McDonough, Dan Wilkins, Brian Shurtleff, James Caskey

Our group identified several aesthetics, including “paranoia” and “guilt” and debated the merits of each. Guilt was ultimately abandoned because we felt a negative emotional response would not encourage player enthusiasm, and because guilt was too subjective a response to be reliably modeled in a formal system. We chose “paranoia” as our aesthetic and defined these ten situations that we felt fostered or were symptomatic of such:

 

1. Being Followed­ – self-explanatory.
2. Being Watched­ ­­­­– self-explanatory.
3. Others’ Unknown Motivations­ – being unsure of the motivations of others and unable to confidently deduce such from observing their behavior.
4. Perceived Hostile Environment – Feeling powerless to stop or control environmental threats.
5. Out-of-Character Behavior­ – ­­­­­Perceived inconsistent and/or irrational behavior in others.
6. Stereotype Perception ­– Making decisions or judgments based on flawed understanding informed by stereotypes.
7. Involuntary Isolation – Feeling cut off from vital relationships and information and powerless to restore these connections.
8. Inability to Protect Valuable Assets – self-explanatory.
9. Guilt or Remorse – self-explanatory.
10. Perceived Violation of Privacy – self-explanatory.

 

After some initial discussion we identified those among the list above that we believed would best serve a formal system. Our particular favorites were “others’ unknown motivations,” “out-of-character behavior” and “inability to protect vital assets.” We grouped these into a “not enough information” category and used that as the core objective from which to develop the system.

Design progress was slow and unreliable. Our earliest game models were hampered by a lack of common vision over the style or genre of play: we imagined games that were similar to Clue or Risk, as well as variations on classic card games and well-known tabletop RPGs, such as Greg Costikyan’s aptly-named Paranoia. Our first near-complete model was a variation on the basic gameplay of Clue, but took place in a middle school gymnasium in which players traveled around the board during a school dance attempting to play pranks and pin them on their opponents without getting caught by the vice principal. A number of mechanics were developed, but every combination we tried either had major holes and could not hold together in practice, or they did nothing to foster paranoia in the players. For example:

• We imagined a system in which players travel among seven zones on the board and lay down prank cards in each zone. After a randomly generated round length, all cards on all zones are simultaneously revealed and whichever player is present in the zone gets pinned for the pranks accumulated there. This ultimately failed because, since each player travels more or less randomly, it was impossible for players to specifically target each other and thus impossible to form suspicions about who might be targeting whom.

We iterated on this idea to form a system in which players move from zone to zone via a simultaneous reveal of destination choice, still to play pranks wherever they travel. Getting caught was handled by a vice principal token that travels around the zones, revealing the cards and catching the players on whichever zone he lands. His movement was driven by drawing a destination card from a random deck each round, but players would have the opportunity to peek at and rearrange this deck, enabling them to “path” the vice principal to zones of their choice and catch the players they were targeting. This, too, failed when it became clear that it did not solve the problem of unpredictable player movement. Additionally, neither of these systems had well-defined goal or win conditions, and no suitable suggestion ever emerged.

After much frustration, the middle school dance prototype was abandoned. We developed a new idea, in which players explore a hallway-shaped board composed of hidden tiles, each either safe or trapped, attempting to reach the end. A gamemaster managed the game by placing the tiles and recording safe routes, and he would select a goal for himself at the start of the game—something like “Help Player 1” or “Kill All Players.” He would then pass notes to players during the course of the game with questionable information that they could choose to follow or not. The idea was that players would become paranoid about the gamemaster’s intentions and suspicious of the veracity of his notes. We created a simple prototype and tested this game, and found that it the decision-making was random and meaningless, the gamemaster ultimately pointless, and the entire experience no fun at all. That idea was scrapped, and a third system was created.

The new game involved players acting together to move a single token across the board. Not far dissimilar from the previous idea, players would need to navigate a board strewn with obstacles to reach the end, but they would have to collaborate to do so. Our paranoia dynamics were generated by two mechanics: simultaneous anonymous reveal and loyalty cards. One of the players would take the role of a traitor and seek to hamper the team’s progress by lying about their intentions and pathing the token into obstacles or tricking the team into moving it backwards. With a simultaneous, anonymous reveal, the traitor’s actions would be sufficiently masked as to engender suspicion.

After the initial playtests, we added two mechanics: first, a voting mechanic in which the players could vote one of their number to sit out a round and not contribute a card to the common effort. We found this offered the loyal players a chance to shield themselves from the traitor’s constant meddling and an opportunity to test their suspicions, but also created further paranoia as players wrestled with the implications of accusing and nullifying the wrong person. Second, an “encroaching element” or enemy token than would start after the players’ token reached a certain point and move one space a turn towards them. If the encroacher ever caught the players, the loyal players lost and the traitor won. Further playtesting was done and the loyalty cards were altered such that there was one more loyalty card than there were players, ensuring there was always one but possibly two traitors in the mix. We applied our color—thieves stealing a safe from a museum, pursued by the night guard—and refined the board to provide a balance of obstacles and safe paths. Lastly, we added a little flavor by designating some obstacles as “priceless antique urns,” which when bumped into by the players would fall over and break, providing the night guard one immediate free move.

 

In retrospect, we set ourselves a real challenge with our choice of aesthetic. As mentioned above, the team developed numerous game systems, but none that were both cohesive and generated paranoia—usually one or the other, never both. When we finally found a system that appeared to work, we found that playtesting was the most valuable tool we had to ensure it was solid. Many of our assumptions about how the game would play were proven inaccurate, and many of our changes were made in response to the results we gathered from testing. Our second idea sounded fine in discussion, but testing proved it to be a mess, and our third idea had numerous revisions made before we were satisfied. However, despite the frustration constant failures, we are pleased with the final product.