#merlouf

[24h2019]

Mathilde et Claire

[24h2019]

N’oubliez pas qu’il aurait pu faire 21cm sur 2,80m ;)

Mathilde et Claire

[simonabitan]

Merlouf: Post Mortem of a Board Game (Part 2)

In the first part, I wrote about the development and how complicated it was. Even if the game is – in my opinion – currently good, there are still a lot of little details to change due to a lack of time at the end of the development.

There are currently two main problems in the prototype:

The graphics, which are not very important for a prototype!

The balance, which has much more impact on the game experience. I’m going to focus on it!

As I already did in the first part, you can read the rules in this booklet (EN). It’s not an obligation of course, but if you want to fully understand the lines below, it would be better!

Now, it would be more interesting to directly look at the game. Because of the time we spent to find the good harmony between accessibility and complexity, the final prototype is, even now, lacking balance. Not big rules to change but just some values to adjust in order to make the experience more enjoyable.

First point, the 3 brotherhood members – Gnowise, Gnoball and Gnomagik – the player can send into rooms to steal Merlin’s objects. The problem here is that they have imbalanced abilities. Each character can do a number of actions, carry a number of objects and use a special power. Here is the current setting: 

These 3 components currently incite players to use Gnoball for his ability to do a lot of actions – 3 per phase – and to carry a lot of objects in his large pant (3 + 2 using his power). The playtests showed us that Gnowise was appreciated too, because he can carry 3 objects and, above all, can use his power to see hidden objects when entering a room. His useful power allow players to avoid – or not if it’s a special objective – enchanted objects. Unfortunately, Gnomagik was often on the sideline, ignored because of his weak “Action” and “Pant” abilities. The only way we found was to give him another special power allowing him to get “trap” cards in the attic. The problem is that about one week before the deadline, we decided to put the “traps” system in a variant to make the game easier to play. The result is simple: Gnomagik is weakier than the two other gnomes for a large part of players.

When I’m looking at the settings today, I think we could balance the results in that way:

Gnowise: Action= 2/placement; Pant= 2; Power= can look at 2 objects per phase.

Gnoball: Action= 2/placement; Pant= 3; Power= can carry +1 object when his pant is full.

Gnomagik: Action= 1/placement; Pant= 2; Power= can’t be spotted by Merlin.

With these new settings, Gnowise can carry 2 objects instead of 3, Gnoball can do 2 actions/placement instead of 3 and can carry +1 object when his pant is full instead of +2. Last but not least, Gnomagik can carry 2 objects instead of just 1 and keep his advantages for the ‘trap’ variant. I can’t say that solution is the best, but I think players would more hesitate when choosing the gnome to send in the different rooms, simply because now Gnomagik can carry 2 objects without being worried about Merlin.

The most important rule to score a lot of points is to achieve micro-objectives. At every round, all the players take an objective card. There are 3 objective types to score big:

Color type: the player has to loot at least the number of objects with the same color as mentioned on the card to get the reward in points.

Specific type: the player has to loot a specific object to get the reward in points.

Special type: the player has to achieve the special objective indicated on the card to get the reward in points.

This structure allowed us to put various objectives while each card was balanced giving to the player 3 types of objective. Our main problem is that we didn’t spend enough time to balance them correctly. Here are some of the errors:

We decided that each card could give a maximum of 18 points if all the objectives are achieved. However, some cards mysteriously give 16 points instead of 18! Even if it’s very difficult to achieve all the objectives of a card, it would be nice to proceed to a little verification.

Secondly, some of the cards have 3 objectives while some other have 4. It becomes harder to achieve them all, which is the main goal of each player, so it could become frustrating.

Last but not least, each objective gives an amount of points which depends on its complexity: the more an objective is hard to achieve, the better is the reward. Well, that was our intention, but regarding the actual settings, some objectives are easier than others, but their reward are equals. For example, stealing 3 blue objects gives a 6 points reward while stealing 2 enchanted objects does the same. It seems logic, but during a game, it’s objectively harder to get 2 enchanted objects because if the player steals just 1 object or more than 2, he loses 3 points per error. To realize that objective, players have to take risks, so the reward has to be clearly better.

Above: a card with 2 'specific' objectives

Another mechanic would be fair as a reward to the most expert players: to give a bonus of points to the players who can achieve all the goals of a card. The challenge is hard but not impossible, and this mechanic would be appreciated by expert players, but only if all the cards are well-balanced.

If there are some values to change, some of them were tweaked just in time. In fact, a main idea was to increase gradually fear into players’ eyes thanks to Merlin’s power. Currently, if Merlin enters in a room where gnomes are not hidden, then those unfortunate gnomes are sent in jail and all their objects are stolen. Cruel, isn’t it? Well, to add gradual fear, we tested the following system:

Round 1: we throw a die 1 time to see Merlin enter in 1 room randomly.

Round 2: we throw a die 2 times to see Merlin enter in 2 rooms randomly.

Round 3: we throw a die 3 times to see Merlin enter in 3 rooms randomly.

And so on!

According to that sadist rule, the probability to be spotted by Merlin – and by round – is:

Round 1= 1-((5/6)^1) ≏ 0.17 = 17%

Round 2: 1-((5/6)^2) ≏ 0.31 = 31%

Round 3: 1-((5/6)^3) ≏ 0.42 = 42%

Round 4: 1-((5/6)^4) ≏ 0.52 = 52%

Round 5: 1-((5/6)^5) ≏ 0.60 = 60%

Round 6: 1-((5/6)^6) ≏ 0.665 = 66.5%

If the results are correct, it would be advantageous for a player to test his luck during the 3 first rounds before to stop playing with fire. However, a part of the players during playtests felt that this rule was a little bit too punitive after the third round. In fact, when a gnome is grabbed and thrown in jail by Merlin, the wizard gets back all the objects the gnome has stolen so the player can easily loose an objective – and a lot of point! – Just before finishing a round. We knew that a casual target would score a lot of points, and not score near to 0 points the half of the game. After considering the problem a lot, we finally decided to put this rule in a ‘gamer’ variant to add challenge. The rule has been replaced by a simpler one: every round, a die is thrown 3 times to see Merlin enter in 3 rooms randomly (42%). Justice for all!

I could say a lot of other things about Merlouf, but I think I’ve written too much! To finish this first long post-mortem, here are 3 pictures of the game. Enjoy!

[simonabitan]

Merlouf: Post Mortem of a Board Game (Part 1)

This time I want to write a post mortem about Merlouf, a 'placement & negotiations' board game I created with 3 other game designers during our studies in 2010. It was the first time I could experiment pure game creation, so the 'board game' support was an ideal choice for prototyping quickly. Of course there were constraints – casual target, 2-6 players, one hour of gameplay and a fantasy universe – but it wasn’t as binding as I expected at first glance. 

Here's a little reminder:

In a Light Fantasy world, each player embodies a team leader of a gnome brotherhood and has to send his partners in the various rooms of Merlin’s house to steal objects. The goal is to reach objectives stealing good items in order to score a lot of points. Obviously, all the players are in competition, so an object is easily wanted by the others. As everybody can’t be satisfied during the ‘theft’ phase, players can become friends – or not – during the ‘negotiations’ one. Here, everybody can promise what he wants to exchange objects during 2 minutes. When time’s up, Merlin himself enters in 3 rooms randomly to catch all the gnomes that are not hidden and throw them into jail grabbing all their objects. After 6 rounds, the player who has the best score wins the game.  

Ok, it’s a little bit short, so if you want to know how the game really works, please take a look at the booklet (EN).

Unfortunately, the development was a little bit complicated, because it was our first experience of game creation and like many other beginners before, we had a lot of ideas that we wanted to put in the game no matter what. It was a fail making the game complicated to understand and to play. Yes, at the beginning – and even after – the game was boring. However, I can say today the prototype is pretty cool, so how did we improve the design? Reduction and simplicity, of course!

This scheme above represents the evolution of the game during its development. Once the concept is written, it has a level of complexity which depends on the number of game mechanics and how they interact with each other. In our case, we hadn’t the choice: game mechanics had to be easy to understand because of the casual target constraint. We defined that the ‘placement’ mechanic was good for tactics and the ‘negotiations’ one was good for its social component. At the beginning, the concept was broadly good.

Unfortunately, the more we worked on improving the game, the more we were focused on respecting the holy sentence ‘Easy to play but difficult to master’, where ‘master’ means emergence and tactics. As you can see in the scheme, game mechanics went more and more complex with time, even if we tried after each milestone to kill some parts to make the game easier to play. Finally, 1 week before the deadline, we decided to keep the most useful mechanics to put in relief the game experience, and we moved other cool ideas into extension rules, in order to add a second breath to the game.

That was the good decision! And now it’s funny when I’m looking at it today to see that the final prototype is closer to the initial concept – and much more fun – than all the other milestone versions.

Good ending? Of course not! There are a few things to change to balance the game.

To be continued in part 2…