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TEEL: I haven’t played Dominion in a long time… Must be several years, now.
EDISON: That’s no excuse, and neither is beginner’s luck. I beat you fair and square.
TEEL: Oh, I’m not denying that. Just reminiscing. Have I told you that Dominion, in addition to being the first real deck-building game in the world, was my first deck-building game? It was one of the first handful of modern board games I was exposed to, too.
EDISON: Is that why it was the second deck-building game you wanted me to play? To walk me along the same path you did?
TEEL: In a way, I guess. I mean, you said last time that you wanted to actually get a chance to play the games we were talking about, right?
EDISON: Of course. What sort of reviews do you suppose we’d be able to write if only one of us had ever experienced the things we were reviewing?
TEEL: Honestly? As good as any. You’re a stuffed animal.
EDISON: That doesn’t mean I can’t form my own opinions about things. Or beat you at your own games.
TEEL: You haven’t played any of my published games yet, Ed. Wait and see.
EDISON: I’m eagerly anticipating it.
TEEL: Anyway, you remember the gaming group I mentioned before, who I got to play through my entire Scrabble collection over several months?
EDISON: Sure.
TEEL: They were originally my friends through NaNoWriMo, plus a few friends-of-friends of theirs, and they largely introduced my wife and I to modern board games. I mean, we’d played Settlers of Catan and its many expansions, and a couple variations on Fluxx, but we were relatively inexperienced when this began, five or six years ago.
EDISON: And now look at you, with your ridiculous collection of games, including a couple you published yourself.
TEEL: Sure, but even before I got back to the point where I thought designing games was a good idea–
EDISON: Got back to? You’re not talking about the terrible prototypes you were cobbling together back in ’02, are you?
TEEL: Yeah, that, but I was also working with friends on developing their card games in the late 90’s, and I definitely designed a few games back in High School. Plus, there was way more work on games in ’03 than in ’02.
EDISON: As you may recall, I wasn’t actually around for that
TEEL: Sorry.
TEEL: Anyway, ’02 wasn’t the first time I was thinking about game design. I’ve probably roughed out dozens of different games.
EDISON: Nothing worth reviving and publishing?
TEEL: There are very few records from my life prior to … let’s say the Y2k bug … and as I’ve recently re-discovered, large chunks of my digital life since then are completely missing. I spent a couple of hours last night digging around in my computers trying to locate any trace of an old art project I was working on in 2003, but it was lost without a trace—though at least one other project from 2002 was still there, along with several things from 2005.
EDISON: What about your memories? Can’t you remember what the games were like and reconstruct them? Didn’t you save any paper copies?
TEEL: You watched me digging through my filing cabinets—I have a fair amount of totally disorganized paper remnants from my various creative projects, both later completed and never finished, but significantly more have left no discoverable trace. And my mind is a bit like a sieve, but much more like the Swamps of Sadness.
EDISON: Where Atreyu died?
TEEL: Exactly.
TEEL: Regardless, I definitely have a lifelong history of intermittently designing and developing games, both physical and digital. But before this most recent and sustained period, there was a while where I didn’t even play many games. And then I started getting invited to a regular game night, and was introduced to games like Agricola, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Dominion—among many, many others.
EDISON: Is that why Agricola is on the table? It doesn’t say it’s a deck-building game like these others.
TEEL: I’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about Dominion. It was the first deck-building game, and plenty of people still consider it the best deck-building game. There are something like 9 expansions for it, each adding hundreds of new cards to randomize into the setup, none of which I own.
EDISON: So I can’t comment on them.
TEEL: No, I suppose not. But the base game; what did you think?
EDISON: Well, it played a lot like Paperback, which you taught me last week, except it was a lot more restrictive, and felt very limited. I mean, there were only 10 different potential action cards to choose from, and only 2 or 3 of them were worth buying. I mainly just bought silver and gold so I’d be more likely to be able to buy victory points. I guess that’s why it needs all those expansions, right? To add variety and interest to the game?
TEEL: In a way, but you always only have the 10 buy piles, and they’re supposed to be randomized.
EDISON: Sounds awful.
TEEL: Combinatorics says that even in the base game there are thousands of potential combinations—more than you’re likely to play through in a lifetime. With all the expansions included there are millions and millions of possible setups.
EDISON: But how many of the different cards would you actually want to buy? If 80% of the cards aren’t very good, are they only there to confuse new players who don’t know any better?
TEEL: It’s that variety you were wishing were there; all the cards are potentially useful, especially in specific combinations.
EDISON: But what are the odds the right cards will even be out, unless you stack the deck in your favor during setup? Look at Paperback, where every single card is useful, because they’re letters—there’s no letter in the dictionary with a blank page instead of a list of words!
TEEL: But not all the extra abilities on Paperback’s cards are useful.
EDISON: Sure, but at least they’re still letters. At least they still serve double-duty as currency! So what if I don’t want to trash the top cards of two offer stacks? A ‘Y’ is still a ‘Y’, and it’s still worth 3¢ when I use it in a word.
TEEL: Paperback is a bit of an odd duck. It’s harder to explain why until I show you Ascension.
EDISON: So show me Ascension.
TEEL: May I at least get to the part of the story where I first played Ascension?
EDISON: Must you?
TEEL: I must.
EDISON: *sigh*
TEEL: I’ll try to be brief. As I said before, several years ago I had a weekly game group Mandy and I could attend and where we were introduced to a lot of modern board gaming. Then in 2012, after publishing Never Let the Right One Go, I began seriously to work on games development again. I’d played a few different deck-building games (my friends had all the available Dominion expansions, and Nightfall comes to mind, but I’m sure there must have been others) and really liked the mechanic, so was trying to think of what new things I could do in combination with it.
TEEL: My first thought was to add things like area control and resource management—I really wanted to have a big map involved, where the cards you drew from your deck had an impact on what you could accomplish on the board. I was also fooling around with the idea of making it a cooperative game, since I’m quite conflict-averse. I had some budget (from book sales) which I could invest in board games for research, and I picked a bunch of different games to investigate their differences and dig into their rules.
EDISON: Is that what this stack is?
TEEL: Partly. I ordered a copy of Dominion, partially because I’d never seen the actual rule book, but mostly because it was “the first”, which seemed like a good starting point. I ordered a copy of Nightfall, because of its drafting and chaining mechanics, plus the integrated combat system. I ordered the Star Trek and Resident Evil deck-building games because I thought I’d appreciate their themes and was looking to see how they’d adapted familiar themes into their mechanics—I was hoping they’d have interesting narrative arcs built via gameplay. I also ordered Thunderstone, partially because it was highly-rated, but mostly because the actual description of the game said specifically that it had a coherent narrative arc built into the game mechanics—despite my aversion to that flavor of fantasy. I ordered Ascension and Eminent Domain because they were among the highest-rated deck-building games on BGG (a site I wasn’t at all familiar with at the time, and was barely bumbling around), while also promising significant mechanical variation from Dominion. I ordered Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers vs. Evil because I’ve been reading Penny Arcade since forever, and wanted at least one game I was sure I had a chance of wanting to play.
EDISON: Did you?
TEEL: What?
EDISON: End up actually wanting to play the Penny Arcade Game?
TEEL: Well, unlike most of those games, I haven’t sold it, it isn’t in my to-sell-or-trade pile, and I actually bought the expansion.
EDISON: But do you play it?
TEEL: A couple times a year, yeah. It’s not amazing, but I consider it worth keeping in my collection.
EDISON: But you got rid of the worst of them? Eminent Domain, Star Trek Deck Building Game, and Thunderstone were terrible?
TEEL: No, no, not terrible… and I think I just forgot to pull Eminent Domain off the shelf; we love it, we’ve got the first expansion integrated into the base game and wouldn’t play without it, and we’ve pledged for the second expansion on Kickstarter. Eminent Domain is great.
EDISON: Wonderful. When can we play?
TEEL: Soon, soon, hang on.
EDISON: I’ve been hanging on. You just spent, like, a million words just listing off all the games you bought without saying anything meaningful about them. When do we get to play another game?
TEEL: If you’d give me a chance, something meaningful was about to be next.
EDISON: …and then we play another game, right? You aren’t just going to keep talking generally about the games without giving me a chance to try them out, are you?
TEEL: That isn’t the plan for all of them, and I will let you try Ascension, but we don’t need to get into Nightfall or Resident Evil, and can’t get into Star Trek or Thunderstone.
EDISON: Because they were terrible.
TEEL: That’s not what I’m saying. It’s more that … they weren’t for me. I suspected when I ordered Thunderstone that, even if it excellently implemented a narrative arc into the mechanics of a deck-building game that I wouldn’t enjoy it, and I was right. That sort of fantasy, with the elves and the dwarves and the dragons and magic and knights and delving into dungeons and blahblahblah, I don’t care! Ugh. I’ve tried to read Lord of the Rings at least three different times, and I’ve yet to “get out of the Shire”; it’s just impossibly boring. To me. Other people are welcome to enjoy it, and I do not begrudge them that joy; in fact, Thunderstone was the first of my deck-building games which I sold to another player—who has since gone on to buy nearly every one of its many expansions, since they quite love that sort of fantasy setting.
EDISON: What have you got against fantasy?
TEEL: I don’t know; it’s just a matter of taste. SciFi tastes good to me, and that sort of Fantasy doesn’t. I also don’t enjoy cilantro or okra or modern pop country music.
EDISON: Wait, is there some sort of country music you do like?
TEEL: Uhh… I’m not much good at music, but … old-timey bluegrass, maybe? Some of what Johnny and Rosanne Cash do—though not all. Certainly all of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. But I also like gospel music and hymns.
EDISON: This is so weird. You own every disc released by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson–
TEEL: And Radiohead, They Might Be Giants, Third Day, and a lot of David Bowie, plus most of the non-children’s music by Lisa Loeb, Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin, and Suzanne Vega. I actually like all the dubstep I’ve heard, and have considered trying to figure out how to listen to more. I honestly listen to a lot of different music… when I remember to listen to music.
EDISON: How do you forget to listen to music?
TEEL: Depends. For example, I can’t usually listen to anything with words while I’m writing or otherwise working on the written word—so most of the last decade has been without much music. Writing books, editing books, recording audiobooks, doing marketing… it’s all work requiring silence or, at most, instrumental tracks.
EDISON: There’s a lot of instrumental music out there.
TEEL: Once one gets into a habit of silence, it forms its own inertia; this is the forgetting to listen to music I was trying to explain. Even when I would remember to turn on music at one point during the day, as soon as some small writing task interrupts the music, it’ll easily be hours or days before I again remember that music even exists.
EDISON: That’s ridiculous.
TEEL: Did I ever claim to be anything but ridiculous?
EDISON: …
TEEL: Now don’t pretend it’s only me getting us off the track of talking about games and what we think of them.
EDISON: But this is really interesting! Is this why we’ve never done music reviews? You don’t remember to listen to music?
TEEL: Probably. I’m not sure I even like music in the same way other people do. I mean, sometimes I’m certain, but other times I have the distinct impression that other people are having a wholly alternate experience to me when listening to the same piece of music.
EDISON: Can you give an example? You’re making me really curious.
TEEL: Well, for the longest time I was convinced that I could never enjoy or appreciate attending a live musical performance—but we’re not here to talk about music, Edison; we’re here to talk about deck-building games. I played a couple of them, I liked the idea of the mechanic, I wanted to develop my own, and in accordance with my research technique for the last couple of my books at that point (wherein I would read through a big stack of related books before sitting down to plot out & write my own; e.g.: read a bunch of Y.A. dystopian/romance books and Y.A. adventure books before attempting to write my own) I bought a big stack of games with mechanisms similar to what I wanted to work on, to study before beginning.
EDISON: So no more music talk?
TEEL: Not tonight.
EDISON: Alright, alright, I’ll go back to feeding you leading questions until you let me play another game. sigh So, how did your research go?
TEEL: Alright, I suppose. I studied the rule books. I studied the cards; both their text & mechanics and their designs & layouts. I studied the boxes, their inserts and organization systems (or lack thereof). For the games I had never played before, I played—most usually solo against myself, playing multiple simultaneous decks, but occasionally I managed to get other people to play along with me.
EDISON: What happened to your gaming group?
TEEL: It had begun to break down by then, but I was also trying to work at a fairly serious clip—it was effectively my full-time job to be playing & thinking about these games, but most of my friends had day jobs & couldn’t really keep up. I’d also found and lost a potential business partner around that time—before I went forward with my plans to work on games, before I ordered hundreds of dollars’ worth of games, they had agreed to work with me on game development; within a matter of days the whole thing fell apart and I ended up without a design partner, and with a big stack of games to play by myself.
EDISON: Probably for the best that it fell apart quickly, rather than getting dragged out, or having one of you drop out after partially or completely designing something, right?
TEEL: *shrug* Maybe. They later came back as a significant financial supporter of my game designs, helping me get Teratozoic in front of reviewers before the Kickstarter, which really made a big difference in the number of people who saw the game. I’d still liked to have been able to work with them on a design, and perhaps someday I’ll get to, but yeah, I guess for that particular project it’s alright that their dropping out came before the design had much begun. On the other hand…
EDISON: What? What ever happened to that game design?
TEEL: Exactly. It never went anywhere. I couldn’t crack it. I think I was doing too many things at once. Deck-building, plus area control, plus resource management, plus combat, plus it was a cooperative game versus a mean boss deck. I think that at its peak complexity the game had players trying to manage as many as a dozen different currencies—each of which was functionally identical to one another, only provided by different controlled areas and required to purchase different types of cards. Plus it was a ridiculously unbalanced mess, mathematically. That’s solvable, but with all the other problems, it wasn’t worth it. And then we had to move.
EDISON: Which didn’t exactly make it easy to find you, once I’d escaped.
TEEL: Don’t pretend it was hard; my brother and sister still live at the address in North Phoenix we moved here from.
EDISON: When we left for Maui, we lived in Tempe.
TEEL: Oh. Yeah.
EDISON: Yeah. Three addresses later, here we are.
TEEL: Circumstances change! When we left for Maui I had a stable job earning the most money I’ve ever earned in my life doing a job I enjoyed, living in a house I loved, and beginning again to work on writing for the first time in a long time. A month later I was laid off, and within a couple more months of fruitless searching for work my grandfather’s cancer came fully out of remission and I decided it would be best to move up North to help take care of my grandparents.
EDISON: Which I suppose was so distracting a set of circumstances that you consider it reasonable not to have noticed I’d been replaced with a stuffed monkey.
TEEL: You are a stuffed monkey! How was I to tell the difference?
EDISON: I didn’t seem abnormally quiet to you?
TEEL: …I was distracted?
EDISON: As I thought. Shall we get back to the question of your first attempt to design a deck-building game?
TEEL: There’s not much to say. I’d produced a couple prototypes (only disassembled in the last month or so) but it didn’t work and I knew I needed to spend more time thinking about it before moving forward, so I shelved it. And then we had to move. Which led to a couple of months of house-hunting, a lot of stress about money, even more stress about the actual home-buying process and the concept of home-ownership, a difficult move, and then moving in and … ugh. Anyway, it was so stressful I didn’t accomplish much, creatively, for several months.
EDISON: That’s not so bad, I guess. I’ve heard it can be a year or more for people to get over a big life change, and I know you’re particularly fragile.
TEEL: Way more fragile nowadays than before you left—but that is another story, and will be told another time. Suffice it to say, the game I’d hoped to design has not yet been developed, and may never be—though I’d certainly still like to revisit some of the ideas. Ooh, did I mention Trains? I think I forgot to say about Trains.
EDISON: What about trains? Should I have taken a train to find your new place? I did notice you live pretty close to the light rail, now…
TEEL: No, no, it’s a deck-building game called Trains. So I thought I had come up with a brand new idea for a game, combining deck-building mechanics with map-based play where the cards you buy & draw into your deck are the source of your ability to influence and act on the map—this was back in the late summer and early fall of 2012. Then in late 2012 I heard about Trains for the first time. It was a pretty big hit, emotionally, and I’m sure it was a meaningful portion of the reason for shelving the game at that time—at least until I’d gotten a chance to play & analyze Trains for myself.
EDISON: Let me guess, is Trains a deck-building game with a map, and you use the cards in your deck to carry out actions on a map? Probably laying train tracks to connect cities?
TEEL: Did I not say? Yeah, exactly. We’ll play that later, too.
EDISON: Will we? There’s been a lot of talking about games and not a lot of playing them, and so far I’ve only played two deck-building games.
TEEL: Oh, hold on…
EDISON: Wow, that was a lot closer than I thought it was going to be! You were way ahead of me on gems. Err… Honor points?
TEEL: Yeah, “honor points”, or as we normally call everything like that, VP. I’m actually surprised you didn’t win; you were focused a lot more on getting the high-value cards and I … well, I didn’t intend to have much focus, but ended up going heavy into military might. I forgot to buy any Mystics, so I often couldn’t afford more than Heavy Infantry.
EDISON: I was just trying to do the same thing that worked in Dominion; I bought the higher-currency cards as quickly as possible, trashed the starting cards as often as possible, and focused on buying as many VP as I could as quickly as I could.
TEEL: And you would’ve won if I hadn’t done a re-count—you only lost by 2 points, and you’ve never played this game, or any Ascension-style deck-builder, before! What did you think of it?
EDISON: Having to read all the cards upside-down wasn’t the best, and it was only exacerbated by the fact that there were so many different cards. In Dominion I only had to read the 10 cards that you put out in setup, and in Paperback the important part was just one or two letters—or at most about 5 relatively-readable words explaining the extra powers of the letters. In Ascension there were dozens and dozens of different cards, each with at least a couple lines of tiny text. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for two or more people to play; I’m short and I was sitting right on the table so I was pretty close to all the cards, but humans are big and sit back in chairs—how do they do it?
TEEL: Depends on the people. Some people like to play the same game over and over again, so they’d tend to memorize the cards and know what they were at a glance. I’ve played games like this with other people who simply pick up every card that comes out, whether it’s their turn or not, to read all the text. I suspect that a lot of people simply suffer.
EDISON: I’ve seen you playing the Legendary games with Mandy—you both sit on the same side of the table, so you can read all the cards. This is what we were talking about in the Scrabble review, where you wish Legendary had a deluxe version with a lazy susan.
TEEL: Well, I don’t know that I “wish” it did, only that it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about what other games could really use that feature. It’s all Ascension-style deck-building games which go heavy on text on their cards. It’s easy to read small text like that when a card is in your hand, but if other players are expected to be able to read it from halfway (or all the way, with cards like Ascension’s constructs) across the table, the tiny text is a real pain.
EDISON: So there are Dominion-style deck-building games and Ascension-style deck-building games. Are there other styles?
TEEL: None so popular as to have a sub-genre named after them, but there are plenty of variations which have come out over the years. Paperback is an excellent example of a cross between the two, since during setup you lay out stacks of cards–
EDISON: Like in Dominion, but not really, since you don’t randomize anything; you put out all the stacks in Paperback.
TEEL: Right. Plus, each stack, while having things in common, is like its own Ascension-style deck; a pile of unique cards. You have two cards available from almost every stack, so there are more options than most Ascension-style deck-builders, but every time you buy a card something new and never-before-seen is going to come into view, which is just like Ascension-style deck-builders.
EDISON: I definitely noticed that the letters were pretty random, but clearly divided into groups of similar letters.. All the double-letter cards were in the first couple of piles, and didn’t have extra abilities, and all the really challenging letters like ‘Q’, ‘J’, ‘X’, and ‘Z’ were in the last pile or two—they cost a lot, but had some of the highest values and most powerful abilities. It was a really smooth arc, growing from super-basic words to big, complex words with a wide variety of letters over the course of the game.
TEEL: Which is more similar to Dominion than Ascension; in Dominion you start out only able to afford the cheapest cards and the whole game is ramping your deck up to be able to buy the really-expensive VP cards, with the moderately-expensive random cards in between. Same thing in Paperback, but it’s the moderately-expensive (and also harder to play) letters in between you and the high-value VP wilds.
EDISON: Alas, Ascension doesn’t have that satisfying arc. I mean, I know my deck kept improving as I bought better cards, got out some constructs, and got rid of my starting cards, but the cards on offer were so random—we spent six or seven rounds with nothing to attack in the center row, and your deck was almost all attack power, and I couldn’t do much to help the situation because the cards that were out were so expensive I could only afford one or two of them a turn. Of course, then in the final round five monsters came out and five other cards costing only one came out, and we churned through more cards than the prior five rounds put together.
TEEL: Yeah, its a problem found in almost every Ascension-style deck-builder; with the main deck completely random, there’s no opportunity for a proper power arc. Worse, due to random opportunity, players can get an early (and frequently unstoppable) advantage—I have a great little Ascension-style deck-builder called Star Realms which a certain type of experienced player can see within the first couple of rounds who will almost-inevitably win.
EDISON: Then why do you say it’s “great?”
TEEL: First, I’m not that sort of player. I don’t like to do that sort of analysis, I haven’t set aside any of my mental capacity for it, and even when I read people’s descriptions of problems like that, my mind won’t parse it into something comprehensible; I only retain that there is a problem, not the specifics of how to see and/or exploit the problem.
EDISON: If you aren’t doing that sort of analysis, how can you develop balanced games? Won’t there inevitably be exploits and problems you haven’t identified?
TEEL: *shrug* Maybe. Probably not.
EDISON: …
EDISON: You can’t just say, “Maybe, probably not,” and leave it at that. What are you doing to prevent it?
TEEL: Honestly, it’s mostly like everything else I do: I think about everything involved for a long, long time before I take any action. I study things—in the nine months before I put together my first functional prototype deck-building game (after shelving the first one), for example, I studied that first set of games I had purchased, plus one more Mandy got as a gift, the DC Comics deck-building game. I read all the rules closely, I read all the cards, I analyzed how each card functioned individually, classified them, studied distribution of the different classes of cards & different types of actions, made spreadsheets with the data and crunched the numbers further, looked at the currencies and economies in the games, the graphic design, the iconography, the font choices, and really internalized all of it.
EDISON: But you don’t think you like to analyze games?
TEEL: It’s a different sort of analysis from what a player is doing when they’re playing the game, thinking about strategies and engine-building and optimizing victory-points-per-action and really “playing to win”; in fact, for most of the games I was studying, I didn’t play them at all. The game of Dominion we played earlier is the second game of Dominion I’ve played with that copy; I did one solo run-through in September 2012, since I’d never actually played with only the base set and wanted to carefully read through and play out the rules, and then never played it again.
EDISON: I’m guessing you don’t really care for Dominion any more.
TEEL: Not really, no. When it was the only deck-builder I’d ever played, and when (for free) I had access to the game and all its expansions, it was great. In fact, if I were playing with one of my friends who 1) loves it and 2) has most or all of the expansions, I would be glad to join. But it’s been in my to-sell-or-trade pile as long as I’ve had one—I’ve moved on.
EDISON: Because you’ve found better deck-building games?
TEEL: In part, yes, better for my tastes, but in a large part that has to do with theme—Dominion is effectively theme-free, totally abstract. The names of the cards and the card art are almost entirely there as mnemonics, rather than meaningfully having anything to do with the effects of the cards.
EDISON: I can see that. I mean, it isn’t entirely true, but it’s a fair point. The moneylender had a picture of a moneylender and the effect of the card was on your currency cards. The mine card had a picture of a mine and let you invest one type of precious metal to get another, in a way. It’s not totally abstract.
TEEL: Okay, and how many of the less-abstract cards were also the useful ones? What about the feast card which effectively let you spend four money on one turn to get something worth five money on a future turn? Are you going to spin me a tale about social capital and non-tangible returns from social engagement?
EDISON: Sure, or of the greasing of palms with in-kind contributions.
TEEL: Well, that’s all fine, but it didn’t work for me. Same with Nightfall, which I felt had a pretty pasted-on theme; it was better than Dominion, but I didn’t even play my copy of Nightfall once. I’d played it before buying it, at a friend’s, and I studied its design & implementation, but I didn’t play it—largely because I couldn’t get anyone to play it with me; presented with a big stack of fairly-similar games, Nightfall wasn’t the game of choice, even with my wife (who did a thesis on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in college, and loves all that supernatural stuff!).
EDISON: Is there something wrong with it, mechanically? Can we play it, now?
TEEL: Oh, there’s nothing really wrong with Nightfall, but the chained-actions mechanic works best with higher player counts, as does the card drafting during setup. I also found the way character cards were deployed and discarded to be unsatisfying and odd, and thought that the chained-actions mechanic, while really interesting from a design perspective, failed to have a strong connection to the actions themselves—it generally didn’t make sense why action A might cause action B which might lead to action C, at least thematically.
EDISON: I’m taking that as a no, then? We aren’t going to play Nightfall?
TEEL: Nah. At this point it’s in my to-sell-or-trade pile, sleeved brand new, and I’ve never actually played it—why start now, right?
EDISON: You’re so weird. Any others you won’t play with me?
TEEL: Well, Thunderstone and the Star Trek and DC Comics deck-builders, which I no longer own, and the Resident Evil deck-builder, which I didn’t like.
EDISON: Fine, tell me about them—but try to be brief! We’re already up to almost the entire length of the Scrabble review, and you haven’t even gotten past the games you bought in 2012.
TEEL: I’ll do my best. First, Resident Evil and Thunderstone. They’re both Dominion-style games, where you select specific and/or randomized stacks of identical cards during setup—though they both also have a randomized monster deck that you fight against over the course of the game. In both games, on each turn you first decide whether you’re going to work on building up your deck by buying and upgrading cards or you’re going to use the cards you have to attack the monster deck. They each attempt to create a compelling narrative arc by simulating the gradual improvement [of your party in Thunderstone, and of your inventory in Resident Evil] and pitting you against stronger and stronger monsters as you go—they both include a mechanic where a monster you’re unable to defeat is returned to the monster deck, if I recall correctly. They’re both ripe for being co-op games, but failed to be so—so instead of working with the other players to defeat the monsters, you’re working against the other players to be the one to defeat the most/best monsters and win.
EDISON: Aren’t most games competitive? This isn’t the first time you’ve derided playing to win the game.
TEEL: Earlier I wasn’t simply talking about playing with the intention to win, but with a specific style of play known as “playing to win”, which is pretty awful as far as I’m concerned. It’s a step beyond dick-stabbing, for most players.
EDISON: Wait, what? Dick stabbing? Who in the… What?
TEEL: I can only explain it second or third hand, but it’s a common term in my old gaming group, apparently going back to the old days of an online game they played together, Kingdom of Loathing. I don’t know much about KoL, but I can explain the context I originally heard the idea of a “dick-stabber”.
EDISON: I’m all ears.
TEEL: It’s basically the description of a certain type of hyper-optimizing player, about whom could be said, “Given the choice between making love to a beautiful woman to earn 9 points and stabbing themselves in the dick to earn 10, they’d rather stab themselves in the dick.”
EDISON: So they care more about winning the game than they do about role-playing, or theme.
TEEL: Not only that, but I guess in the original context of KoL it derived from an odd series of situations where players could have done something in one step for a small amount of currency, or accomplish the same thing in a ridiculously complicated and convoluted near-exploit of the game’s mechanics for a tiny amount less of the same currency (plus a heaping helping of their time and effort), and because of the strict limits on that currency’s availability (and the strong community emphasis on leaderboards tracking efficiency, I guess), large groups of “dick-stabbers” formed the core of the game’s player-base, sacrificing one sort of efficiency for another and foregoing all coherency of theme and character.
EDISON: Oooo-kay. And you’re saying these “playing to win” people are a step beyond that.
TEEL: Right, because you can be a dick-stabber without really affecting anyone else. When it’s bad, it usually means they’re likely to suffer from AP as they attempt to figure out their optimal moves. With the “playing to win” people it’s equally important that all the other players lose as it is for them to win, by definition, and much of their strategies and philosophy revolves around leveraging every opportunity to hurt their opponents.
EDISON: So rather than being dick-stabbers, they’re dicks.
TEEL: Alas, dick-stabbers generally only stab themselves in the dick, so they won’t cancel each other out if you make them play together.
EDISON: Sure, fine, but can you go back a minute and explain “AP”?
TEEL: Analysis Paralysis. It’s when a player gets so caught up in trying to be sure they make the best possible choices on their turn that everyone ends up waiting for them. I get it pretty often, myself. I see it a lot, actually. Mostly because I’m very cult-of-the-new, but also because I don’t have a stable gaming group right now—either way, there’s a lot of first-time playing at my tables, which is where AP tends to be concentrated.
EDISON: That makes sense.
TEEL: Alright, that was AP, and dick-stabbers… and Thunderstone and Resident Evil. I guess I should cover Star Trek and the DC Comics deck-builders.
EDISON: I hate to draw you out any further, but what did you think of Thunderstone and Resident Evil? I get that you might have preferred them to be cooperative, but you own plenty of competitive games; why get rid of them?
TEEL: Theme. It’s all theme. For a while, Thunderstone was my best narrative-arc-providing deck-builder, so I kept it around. But it’s fantasy, and we had a whole tangent about that earlier; it isn’t for me. So as soon as we got the DC Comics deck-building game, Thunderstone stopped getting played. It also provides a relatively-good narrative arc, despite being Ascension-style, partially by having a sorted monster deck and partially by getting you through most of the main deck in a four- or five-player game. It wasn’t my favorite, and thematically it was fairly incoherent (e.g.: you would play “as” the Flash, but the cards you were buying were a combination of random powers & equipment from all the heroes (heat vision, the Batmobile, and a lantern ring could all come up in the same hand) and the villains you’d defeated… so along with the Flash’s heat vision and Batmobile, he might use his … Suicide Squad?), but super-heroes are better than generic fantasy. Which meant that the DC Comics deck-builder replaced both Ascension (since it was mechanically the same) and Thunderstone in one fell swoop.
EDISON: And yet it’s also gone. Good enough to replace two games, not good enough to keep.
TEEL: Legendary, a Marvel deck-building game, replaced the DC Comics deck-building game quite handily. But I’ll get to that later. First a quick word on Resident Evil.
EDISON: We’re way past a quick word.
TEEL: The Resident Evil deck-builder is out for basically the same reason as Thunderstone: The theme. I enjoy the Resident Evil films, but I’ve never played the Resident Evil video games. The overlap is apparently very weak; I didn’t know the characters, the monsters, the referenced tropes… the whole experience fell flat. Additionally, the rules for setup made the game into a select number of carefully specified scenarios—it didn’t have Dominion’s randomized setup, or Ascension’s randomized main deck. It played less disappointingly than the rules made it seem, but it didn’t grab my interest at all.
EDISON: Can we move on, yet?
TEEL: Not quite. I almost forgot about Star Trek.
EDISON: Not altogether, on presumes. *rolls eyes*
TEEL: No, no, you know what I mean. The deck-building game. It turned out to be very similar to Thunderstone, Resident Evil, and the DC Comics games, in that you have the main set of cards you build your deck from and you also have a separate monster deck which you fight against. For Star Trek there’s an Ascension-style main deck of crewmen and technobabble-inspired abilities, and the monster deck is a mix of Q-intervention-style events and enemy vessels which you get into stat-based ship-to-ship combat with. It was thematically coherent, it was a theme I’m a huge fan of, but it just wasn’t fun.
EDISON: Did it have the sort of narrative arc you seem to crave?
TEEL: Not really. No more than Dominion. In the beginning you can only afford the cheaper, less-powerful cards, and you gradually improve your crew, their abilities, and your ship. At this point I don’t even recall what triggered game end—probably something uninspiring like passing a certain value of defeated ships. The art wasn’t great—it was mostly still-frames from TNG, apparently photos of a TV showing a paused VHS tape of the show, and the colors weren’t even corrected enough to be consistent from card to card. Additionally, many of the cards had a total disconnect between what a card was called (or who it depicted) and what it did.
EDISON: Same as your beef with Dominion.
TEEL: Exactly. But it hurt the game a bit more here, because I know Star Trek. I love Star Trek. There’s so much good material there to work with, and someone who was a big fan of the show could have done a much better job of it. Anyway, it wasn’t great. We played it a few times, but quickly lost interest.
EDISON: Which, I believe, brings us to the end of the deck-building games you bought in the fall of 2012. Are we ready to move on to the part where you started building your own deck-building games, or the ones you actually intend to keep?
TEEL: Yes and no. I also bought Eminent Domain in that first batch, and we haven’t discussed it, yet.
EDISON: *groan*
TEEL: Hang on, Edison It’s a good one. Here, let me show you.
EDISON: You really drew that one out as long as possible. You could have won almost an hour before the game finally ended, with infinite points. Why didn’t you?
TEEL: It feels cheap. On one hand, the card in question is a promo card—not part of the retail version of the game; originally just for Kickstarter backers, but sometimes available for purchase at conventions or via the BGG store. I got mine from the BGG store (along with the Fruit Fucker boss for the Penny Arcade deck-builder—which reminds me that I forgot to talk about the Penny Arcade game, too; probably because it’s also good) with some other rare Eminent Domain cards, and I’m not a huge fan.
EDISON: Toward the end, there, I was starting to try for the military goal on the other side. It seems much more challenging. You have to have three battlecruisers, and the rules say explicitly you can only ever have at most one battlecruiser. The requirement to acquire the other two battlecruisers is to get two different three-planet, seven-research-cost technology cards from two different planet sets into your hand at the same time while you also have an actual battlecruiser in play.
TEEL: It is a bit more of a challenge.
EDISON: A bit? Between when you stopped collecting VP tokens (because one more would have given you infinite VP) and when I finally ended the game, you could easily have scored another two dozen VP tokens. Probably a lot more, considering I could select neither Trade nor Warfare for my Role without forcing you to win with an infinite number of points—and at that point my deck was mostly built for warfare.
TEEL: Warfare, yes, but on Trade I could have elected to Dissent.
EDISON: You dissented from trade every single turn from when you reached 11 VP tokens, on; you had a planet with the effective ability of “Trade 2 resources for infinity VP.” You had a technology card that let you get double VP tokens when trading 1 kind of resource, and 3/4 of your planets produced only silicon. You kept discarding them! The game lasted forever.
TEEL: Not fully forever, or we’d still be playing it. Luckily, there were a finite number of cards in each stack.
EDISON: The only reason we “ran out” when we did is because it was impossible to Survey any more planets without ending the game before they could be colonized.
TEEL: Not true. There are two different technology cards which allow you to play two different roles on the same turn; you could have worked on your deck until you researched one of them, gotten it into your hand, and then done the final Survey followed by Warfare.
EDISON: If I’d selected Warfare for a role, you’d have had infinity points.
TEEL: Oh yeah.
EDISON: Yeah. Anyway, despite taking forever because you refused to win, I can see what you like about Eminent Domain. It seems relatively solvable, though, doesn’t it? It’s the same cards every game, the same action cards, the same set of tech cards, every player starts with the same deck and the exact same potential in every game. There’s some randomness in the shuffle & draw, but I really liked the way you shaped your deck not with overt purchases of cards, but by what actions you actually carried out; the more you colonize planets, the better your deck gets at colonizing. Or in your case, the more likely you’re about to draw yet another hand with five or more Research in it.
TEEL: Yeah, I like it, but I have trouble managing it. The same part of me which wants nothing to do with analyzing the meta of a game or developing an optimal strategy has little or no handle on the “building an engine” part of these engine-building games.
TEEL: I have friends who are amazing at it. In a game like Eminent Domain, every Role they select is planned out, and they carefully (but frequently) use Research actions to remove specific cards from their decks, and before I have a chance to really get much going they’ve got their perfect little engine purring across the table at me, pumping out most of their deck every round and driving them toward the finish line by leaps and bounds.
EDISON: Funny thing, that’s a pretty good description of how it felt for me to play with you.
TEEL: I’m sorry. I was just having fun. It’s been a while since I played Eminent Domain. *looks it up* Yeah, it says here I haven’t played in four months. That’s one of the little problems with having a growing game collection and a shrinking number of friends to regularly play with.
EDISON: So you clearly like playing Eminent Domain. What do you like about it? What about the same-every-time problem I mentioned? Also, is it a bit like Scrabble where people don’t want to play with you because you’re too much better than them?
TEEL: Okay, skipping the first question for a while, because I think the other two questions have a bit of the same answer. Which is that I don’t like experts. I don’t like games which give overwhelming advantage to experts, generally. If there’s a game which you can practice at, study & memorize, develop a skill for, and gain a significant advantage against anyone who hasn’t put in a similar amount of effort at that one game, then I mostly don’t want to play that game. Maybe once or twice, or only with other people who have never played, and then only until/unless I begin to develop expertise.
EDISON: Then how can you enjoy Eminent Domain and continue to want to play it?
TEEL: Exactly. It’s relatively solvable and it rewards expertise in itself; the more you play it the better you get at it. I have a friend who’s at least as much better than me at Eminent Domain as I was better than you before you played it for the first time. Playing with them is a sort of interrupted fun—because it’s partially a multiplayer solitaire, I can have a good time chugging along through the game, building my little space empire, doing my best, exploring new strategies & trying out new technologies, and then all of a sudden the game ends when I wasn’t expecting it—usually because they’ve just scored infinity points and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
TEEL: It’s got a bit of that “one more turn” feeling from the old days of playing Civilization; sure, they’ve won the game, but can’t I just have a few more turns? I was so close to achieving my goals and bringing my long-term plans to fruition. Possibly still not to a game-winning fruition, but certainly to fulfillment.
EDISON: Have you ever asked ’em whether they’d let you play a couple more rounds?
TEEL: It honestly hadn’t occurred to me to actually ask. It’s more of a silent nudging in the back of my mind while we pack up the game.
EDISON: Is that what you were doing with me? You got to the natural ending for the game, but wanted to keep playing so you refused to let it end?
TEEL: Possibly. It certainly wasn’t conscious. I think part of me wanted to give you your best shot at beating me fair and square.
EDISON: Maybe just don’t play with that card, any more?
TEEL: Maybe. But more importantly: Play with the Scenario cards from the Escalation expansion, which give each player a unique setup—usually a specific planet, a starting technology (or several), and a customized starting deck. Some of my purchased promo cards were also Scenario cards; I certainly haven’t played with them all, yet.
EDISON: How different do they make the gameplay?
TEEL: It depends on the players. If you have a specific strategy in mind before the game begins, most of the scenarios won’t stop you from pursuing it and some of them will give you a leg up. If you play like me, the starting Scenario you’re dealt will shape the entire course of your game. You either choose to run with it or fight against it—though most are not extreme enough that it’s actually much of a fight; more of a minor struggle for a few turns, akin to getting a few bad card draws in a row.
EDISON: You’re quite good at giving detailed non-answers. I thought we’d decided against going into politics.
TEEL: Definitely. I mean, if people want to write me in for President in 2016 I wouldn’t turn down the job, but I’m not about to start running.
EDISON: Again.
TEEL: Moving on, the other thing I’m looking forward to is the second expansion for Eminent Domain, which adds asteroids as a sort of mostly-less-good planet type and aliens & alien technology to the mix. Everything will still be all-available at the start of every game, but there’ll be more different paths to victory.
EDISON: And when does that arrive?
TEEL: Next Spring, I guess. *shrug* I’ll probably play the game once or twice more in its current state before then, and then a bunch of times in a short period after I integrate the new cards.
EDISON: Alright, I think we’ve given Eminent Domain a fair shake. Do we really need to say something about the Penny Arcade game?
TEEL: A bit.
EDISON: Are we going to play it? I haven’t read the comic in a really long time, but I bet I could keep up.
TEEL: I think we’ll be okay with another brief overview. Penny Arcade is a pretty straightforward game; it’s Dominion-style, with a moderate number of possible stacks of identical cards which can be pulled out during setup and a small number of expensive cards worth the most victory points for which to strive.
EDISON: “For which to strive?” Really?
TEEL: I’m running out of different ways to explain the same things over and over.
EDISON: If they’re the same, do they need to be explained?
TEEL: Mostly it’s the differences I’m interested in. For example, I think the Penny Arcade game (and its expansion) are the only Cryptozoic games in my collection. Cryptozoic seems to be primarily known for taking well-known brands and applying them thinly as themes over gameplay mechanics well-established by other companies. For example, the DC Comics deck-builder was mechanically almost a clone of Ascension, and the DC Comics theme was pasted on so thinly as to lose coherence. The Penny Arcade game isn’t much better—but a little bit.
EDISON: What makes it better? What sets it apart?
TEEL: I like the way they implemented the dual currencies. Unlike Ascension, where you have one main currency which is for buying new cards to your deck and a secondary currency which only fights monsters (which primarily reward straight victory points), in the Penny Arcade deck-builder there are two distinct tracks of cards, each bought with its own currency. So you use the red currency to buy red cards, and most of the red cards provide more red currency—with the same true for the green cards and green currency. Some cards provide both currencies, but you sacrifice big numbers for versatility. With the sequel/expansion they added a “gold” cards track, where each card costs (and provides) an equal number of both currencies, so that if you can get your deck really well-balanced between the two currencies you can get the highest-value cards in the game.
TEEL: Additionally, the two tracks of cards are fairly thematic—the green cards mostly help you and sometimes help protect you from “PvP” attacks, while the red cards are the primary source of “PvP” attacks, dealing out deck-clogging cards worth negative VP, forcing other players to discard cards, and worse. If you want to play nice, you can play nice—you just have to play a little bit harder, because none of the non-boss green cards are worth any VP and all of buyable the red cards are worth VP. I’m not thrilled that the game leans heavily toward encouraging players to play mean, but I really appreciate that there’s a meaningful difference between how the two tracks of cards feel to play.
EDISON: And the theme, is it “pasted on?”
TEEL: Mostly, but in a way which seems consistent with the comic; it’s all non-sequiturs, it’s all references back to the comics, and most of the comics have always been three panels in isolation, half-full of non-sequiturs. The art is well-adapted to the game, the jokes are relatively-appropriate for the card tracks they’re in, and there’s a light wash of “video-game-y-ness” over the whole thing. Still, if I play it once or twice a year I’m pretty satisfied.
EDISON: Okay, now are we finally out of the quagmire of “Teel’s first deck-building games?”
TEEL: Sure, but you know it’s deck-building games all the way down, right? Like the last one was all about Scrabble, this one is all about deck-building games.
EDISON: Well, at least we’ve gotten to some games you have opinions of, and enjoyed playing. What’s next?
TEEL: I was thinking of talking about one of my long-since-recycled prototypes, if you think that’ll be alright.
EDISON: I’m sure it’ll be fine. I assume it’s a deck-building game? What was it called?
TEEL: I’m not great at naming incomplete things. Most of my defunct prototypes never had names. Inasmuch as the one in question ever had a title, it was called “Tedium“.
EDISON: This doesn’t sound promising.
TEEL: Thematically, it wasn’t. The game was a sort of a simulation of daily life. Each card in your starting deck represented a four-hour chunk of time, so each hand of six cards represented what you did over the course of one day. The starting decks were all fast food work and sleep. I’m trying to recall all the details … I think there were several currencies, but at the least there were Money and Success, and you needed to have both in your hand at the same time to get the most valuable cards. The “good” end-game goal had your deck full of family, leisure, and high-paying work (usually management/C-level).
EDISON: Sounds like the opposite of escapism. As though you developed a concentrated form of living through the daily grind. I can’t imagine it would have been a big seller.
TEEL: Neither could I, which is why I stopped work on it after the gameplay tested out as solid and before I’d done more than a handful of illustrations. The game worked, it was interesting and satisfying to play (and fun, for most people who tried it), and it taught a moral lesson through its mechanics—which was one of my key goals for it.
EDISON: What moral lesson? Something Libertarian? Work hard and you’ll achieve success, something like that?
TEEL: Oh, no. Not more than in a surface way. The real lesson was deep—Tedium taught you, as you played it, not to be a dick. There were four colors/classes of cards. They weren’t explicitly labeled as parts of a moral lesson, they simply played out that way. The green cards were cards that helped you win—basic deck-building stuff, play these cards to draw more cards and get more currency. The red cards were cards that hurt other people—based on the “PvP” type cards from every deck-builder in my collection, they forced discards, added junk, and stole currency; thematically, the red card were all criminal activities; mechanically, they were all explicitly optional, e.g.: “You may [be a dick].”. The blue cards helped everyone—the person who played it would get a big advantage while everyone else got a small one; thematically they were things like teamwork, volunteering, and philanthropy. The black cards, which required the most Money and Success to obtain, manipulated and/or circumvented the rules of the game; again, these were based largely on cards I’d found in my collection of deck-builders; they did things like give extra turns or skip people’s turns, changed hand limits, duplicated other cards, or removed normal restrictions in other ways.
EDISON: It sounds like it ought to have been pretty obvious.
TEEL: That’s because I’m explaining the whole thing to you. When you were playing, you simply had a row of green cards, a row of red cards, and a blue and a black card (only the top card of each deck was available at any time) you couldn’t afford until mid-to-late-game. It was Ascension-style, so each player had to read every card that came out, just to see what it did. The theme was also so thickly applied that it did a good job obscuring the underlying manipulation—mathematically, you could win easily with green cards, easier if you added some blue, but buying red cards (though they seemed at a glance to be worthwhile) resulted in a net loss, slowly dragging your deck down—the more you tried to attack the other players, the less effective it would be, to the point that adding even just a couple of red cards to your deck would slow you down enough to keep you behind any player who never bought a red card.
EDISON: What about the black cards? It sounded like the’d be game-breakingly overpowered. Were you able to embed the lesson of “don’t try to break the game, stupid!”?
TEEL: The black cards were mostly amplifiers, so they made whatever your deck was built for work harder/better. If I recall correctly, they were extremely expensive and could only be bought with a hand full of red cards—so generally if you were being enough of a dick to even get the black cards, you were probably also the sort of dick who would want to break the rules (as long as it was in your favor). Of course, since a deck full of red cards worked against the player, amplifying that effect only served to be a second wallop to the side of the player’s head, “Hey, stupid! Don’t do that!”
EDISON: Don’t be a dick.
TEEL: Exactly.
EDISON: If I’m understanding correctly, your game was designed so that, on repeated plays, your game would teach “playing to win” players not to buy the red and black cards at all. Play nice or lose, right?
TEEL: Exactly, but bundled up in the long-term math of the game. Subconsciously.
EDISON: How many cards was it?
TEEL: Oh, hundreds! I believe there were almost (or exactly) four hundred cards in the final prototype before I shelved it.
EDISON: And how many were black and red cards?
TEEL: I know, I know. I designed a game which, played correctly, would have something like 125 or 150 of its 400 cards left unplayed. It was like the opposite of an expansion—once your group is experienced enough with the base game, maybe you’d like to cut 1/3 of the content out?
EDISON: But it wasn’t really intended for long-term, repeated plays by the same group, was it? You were making an experience, meant to be played a couple of times, learned from, and set aside.
TEEL: Sure, but I come from a background in fiction. An astute reader ought to be able to find almost everything there is to get out of one of my books in only a handful of close readings. They’ll hold up to repeated readings, but the intention is always to convey my entire meaning (even if mostly subliminally) in a single pass through the text. Plus, I don’t personally enjoy playing the same game too many times.
EDISON: How many times is too many for you?
TEEL: It depends on the game, but based on my gut feelings in combination with a couple of years’ worth of statistics from logging all my plays on BGG, most games seem to wear out their welcome well before double digits. A small number of really excellent games I’ve been okay with playing 15+ times and still want to return to, but if we restart the counting when I add an expansion, then the number of games I’m willing to play more than about ten times drops even further.
EDISON: Ten times!? That’s not very many times.
TEEL: Sure, but if you play more than that you’ll almost inevitably begin to develop the expertise I was talking about earlier. Personally, I’ll also grow bored with going through the motions of play—it’ll have been thoroughly explored, with nothing new or interesting for me to discover, and begin to feel rote.
EDISON: I suppose it’s a good thing you never attempted to get into sport of any kind. That’s quite literally the same game over and over and over again, week after week for years.
TEEL: It’s also a big part of why I’m not a fan of PvP in the MMOs I play; if you’ve played a map & format once, you’ve probably already seen everything it has to offer. When developers sufficiently incentivize, for example, doing a daily PvP mission for a big chunk of currency I want for something else, my response feels a bit like, “Yeah, for that much currency, I’ll gladly watch your rerun.”
EDISON: Do you even participate, or just AFK through the matches?
TEEL: Oh, I go out and have as much fun as I can—since I don’t care about PvP and get the same participation rewards whether I win or lose, there are absolutely no stakes and I can play entirely without fear or concern for stats. Depending on the game, it either tends to turn into a laugh-fest of all the wacky ways I can get shot in the face, or a really engaging challenge where I coincidentally happen to be one of the top players on my team. In a way, that’s how I sometimes approach familiar board games—come up with strange new tactics to try to keep things interesting, stop caring about winning or losing, and primarily focus on giving everyone involved a good time playing.
EDISON: Though presumably you don’t play with any of those “playing to win” people, who would simply see your non-optimal play as an opening to knock you down even further.
TEEL: Correct.
EDISON: Okay, so if you don’t like playing the same game more than a handful of times, how do you do play-testing for your original designs? How did Teratozoic ever see the light of day?
TEEL: It depends. By a lot of people’s standards, I don’t play-test my games anywhere near enough. I follow one designer on Facebook who has been playing and refining the same game for years, going through dozens (maybe hundreds) of iterations. I could never do that. I wouldn’t say I have anything approaching actual ADD, but more like a slow-motion time-lapse version of it, where I can’t stay focused on a single project for more than a few weeks most of the time, or a few months when I really apply myself and find creative ways to pivot the project.
TEEL: Here, let’s play a quick game of Teratozoic so we can talk about it in detail.
EDISON: Well, that was a nightmare.
TEEL: I don’t exactly know what it is; I tried to make the game random enough that less-skilled players could be competitive, but strategic enough to satisfy heavier gamer, but somehow managed to frustrate both groups—and most of the people I play with.
EDISON: It wasn’t just your winning that frustrated me, Teel. I mean, you’re the creator of the game, I know you’re going to have a leg up on me my first run through it. It was how powerless I felt to do anything to improve my situation. There was so much randomness that every hand felt like a roll of the dice and my card choices didn’t seem to matter. Except obviously card choices must matter, or how did you beat me by such a wide margin? You did all the shuffling; were you stacking the deck in your own favor?
TEEL: No, no, I’m nowhere near that good a shuffler. I just … I know the mathematics of the game inside and out, and how to improve my gene pool deck in nearly every single hand. Yours was one of the huge complaints I got about the game from a subset of the reviewers I sent it to—they didn’t feel like they had enough influence over the cards going into their decks.
EDISON: Exactly. Until I was no longer drawing from the main deck, most of the cards I saw were completely random. My earlier choices only had a small influence on my ability to win.
TEEL: *sigh* Yeah, I know it feels that way to some people, and I don’t know what to do about it. How a game feels is very, very important—and I missed the mark. In our play through, if you do the math, there were 50% more hands where the majority of cards came from your own gene pool rather than a majority at random—more than twice as many hands if you include the Teratozoic Era. If you count by cards it’s about the same ratio for the first two Eras (50% more cards from your gene pool) and over three times as many cards if you include the final Era. And you can always hold back at least as many cards as you get to keep when losing, so you never have to risk good cards on a bad hand.
EDISON: At some point in that paragraph your voice seemed to transform into a droning buzz, rather than words. Somewhere after you tried to explain that I shouldn’t believe how the game felt, since you’d gotten all the math right.
TEEL: Trust me, I understand, and I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t pay attention to your feelings—if you aren’t having fun playing a game, stop playing it. Say you didn’t enjoy it.
EDISON: I didn’t enjoy it. There were some aspects of it that were awesome—specifically the illustrations and the physical act of putting together the monsters. I mean, I could see you were suffering almost as much as I was with the actual winning and losing and going through the motions of a game you’re clearly burned out on—but even you were having little moments of glee as we put together all the different crazy little monsters! Some of them were super-cute.
TEEL: Yeah. It’s a little weird for me, though, because the game design was basically “everything except the art & the monster-building the art enabled” for so long, and so much of what I thought was great about the game during development had nothing to do with the art or the tactile joy of assembling weird little creatures.
EDISON: You mean the fact that it’s neither Dominon-style or Ascension-style, right? There are no offer piles, no currency, no discrete VP cards, no waiting for your turn—each player draws a variably-random hand of cards in part from a main deck and in part from their own deck, then they all play simultaneously to make the best monster they can with the hand they’ve been dealt, and the winner gets to take the best card or cards from any cards played by any player, while the losers only get to take cards that passed through their own semi-random hands. It’s mind-bogglingly different from all the other deck-building games we’ve played or discussed. I can imagine it didn’t go over well.
TEEL: As always, Edison, you have an excellent imagination. *sigh*
EDISON: It’s alright. The game is … I don’t know if I’d say it was good, overall, but it works. It feels very repetitive to me. You said we were going to play a “quick game” and it took us an hour to get through it. Being frustrated by a game for an hour sucks. On the other hand, seeing all the monster art and getting to put together cute monsters was awesome, and …maybe with a different framework… I can see how repetitively putting together different monsters for hours on end might be really fun. Maybe the game you made would be fun if I were more experienced and could compete at the same level you were playing at.
TEEL: Maybe. I mean, I’ve considered trying to come up with some variant rule sets for the cards. Something based on poker seems reasonable, although the value distribution is wildly different from a standard poker deck so scoring would have to be similar to how scoring works in the deck-building version. I haven’t worked it out, yet; you’re right in thinking I’m burned out on Teratozoic. Across every version of the prototype, and especially if you include all the play-testing games I oversaw (but didn’t actually participate in beyond teaching & helping & taking notes), Teratozoic is my most-played game of all time.
EDISON: Even more than Scrabble?
TEEL: Almost certainly more than Scrabble. Possibly more than all the variants of Scrabble put together. Yet I’ve still not come close to play-testing it as much as the big publishers do for their games, or how much the general hobby games community is certain a game needs to be tested.
EDISON: Do you think more testing would have improved it? Maybe you could have gotten other people to run your testing.
TEEL: Getting other people to do the testing would certainly have helped; if I’d had to run more than a couple more games before ordering the review copies, the whole thing would probably have ended up in the recycling bin with my several other shelved prototypes. It was really hard to talk positively about the game in the emails & letters I was sending game reviewers along with their copies of the game—by that point I just about hated the thing. Having 2-3 months between ordering the review copies and having to deal with the actual Kickstarter campaign was very nice for my psyche.
EDISON: I can imagine. But you know I’m just going to ask each unanswered question again, so can you try not avoiding it for once?
TEEL: Which question, now?
EDISON: Do you think more testing would have made Teratozoic a better game? Could it have been improved with more time and more people?
TEEL: I’m not sure how. The problem of game length I was keenly aware of as soon as I added the third color of monster (back at version 0.6, I believe) and expanded the player count up to 6. Teratozoic really, really wants to take 60-90 minutes to play. I spent weeks and weeks trying to figure it out, but there’s a mathematical regression inherent in drawing out the main deck repeatedly with diminishing numbers of drawn cards per round which holds the number of hands played at a stable level—even when player counts change, the number and order and instructions of the Era cards change, even when you compare the two-color game with the three-color game; you can add 50% more cards, but the game only gets 10%-15% longer—and that works in reverse, too.
TEEL: The only way to really get the playtime down is actually the opposite of more board games—you have to play with more players. A six-player game, even with the full 3-color deck, but with only 4 Eras—it can be over in 30-40 minutes with experienced players. I’ve gotten through a 2-color, 4-player, 4-Era game in about 25 minutes. I’ve played a 2-player, 3-color, 6-Era game that took over two hours. If you follow the guidelines in the Instructions for how to set up the Era cards, the game length is surprisingly flat across all player counts. Player choices (like choosing to play the card which reverses the Era over and over!) have more of an impact than anything else, if you follow the book.
EDISON: You clearly did that on purpose. If there’s the possibility for variation as wide as the difference between 25 minutes and two hours and the book’s guidelines are all within 60 to 90 minutes, then you can’t say you didn’t have an influence on the game’s shipping duration.
TEEL: No, obviously, yes, it’s my fault. I wanted to be professional and offer a normalized experience across player counts, rather than publish a game with wildly, unintuitively variable play time. But time wasn’t my only concern—the changes you need to make to get the play time down require the number of played hands to go down, and every hand is the chance to improve or maintain your deck; the more hands you get to play, the more opportunities you have to fine-tune your gene pool. If I remember the math correctly, the number of hands an average player goes through in a typical one-hour game (played by the book) corresponds with going through their deck just over two full times before the penultimate Era—and the first time they’re only seeing the cards in their starting deck. That means each player gets roughly two opportunities to replace each card in their deck with a card better for winning individual hands, and then there are two Eras left.
TEEL: In the final Era, the Teratozoic Era, players only draw from their own gene pool, with no opportunity to replace cards or improve their decks (except by winning hands and stealing), but the end-game score isn’t based on your cards’ ability to win individual hands, but by your ability to construct big monsters without any loose ends—and in a typical game, the average player will be able to go through their entire deck one more time in the penultimate Era, selecting cards based on what will win them the game instead of what will win them a few more hands. It was meant to be like the rapid shift from building up currency in a game like Dominion to suddenly building up VP cards instead, right before the end.
EDISON: It’s clear you’ve given this a lot of thought. I can’t imagine how you could get a casual player interested in those sorts of details, or that level of strategy. They see cute monsters, they build cute monsters from what feels like random cards, and then they win or lose in a way which also feels random. Wash, rinse, repeat. People aren’t thinking about the number of opportunities they’ll have to upgrade each individual card in their deck over the long haul of the game, Teel. They’re thinking the game is out of control and taking too long.
TEEL: And I’m thinking more testing wouldn’t have solved those problems without gutting the core mechanics of the game. The simultaneous actions, the gradual (evolution-like) changes to each player’s gene pool based on their (not exactly natural) selections, and possibly even the basic idea of it being a deck-building game, at all. As I said, I’ve been thinking of developing some other game to use the cards for, since the art is great but the gameplay … well, it suffers.
EDISON: It’s really quite interesting to me how different a deck-building game you published, after playing and studying all these other games which ended up being so similar to one another. Like, wildly different. How many of your other deck-building games had you played before developing Teratozoic?
TEEL: Maybe Paperback, although that didn’t get here until the core gameplay of Teratozoic was already well in place. The rest, including Legendary, didn’t join my collection until after development was done or, in some cases, after the Kickstarter was entirely over. For example, Trains was added to an order of drafting games I was ordering, because I wanted to study them and develop another one. But I was certainly aware of how the different deck-builders worked long before I ordered or played them.
EDISON: Like when Trains derailed your first deck-builder.
TEEL: Or for example Epic Resort, which I’d backed on Kickstarter in the late stages of Teratozoic’s development—it isn’t entirely a deck-building game, it’s more of its own thing, with a deck-building-like element as one part of its several mechanics.
EDISON: Deck-building-like? Are you not actually building a deck of cards?
TEEL: Yes and no. You start with a deck of 13 cards and never have more than that many cards in your deck. Ten of the cards are upgradeable—you can trash them and spend currency to gain a more useful card, but those cards (with one exception) are not themselves upgradeable. The available upgrade stacks are set up Dominion-style at random, and there are barely enough to go around; half the players will likely still have half their starting cards at the end of the game.
EDISON: What about the other 3 cards?
TEEL: They can be trashed to avert an attack, if you have on in hand at the right time, but have no other use but clogging up your deck. The reason it initially drew my interest was that it promised to be a combination of deck-building and worker placement; in a way, it is, but both the deck-building and the worker placement aspects of the game are so different from the standard mechanisms as to be unique. The box even labels its deck-building as “deck evolution”, since you don’t really build it up. The worker placement is more like resource management, in my opinion.
TEEL: I’ve just realized I’m talking almost entirely in the abstract about the bare-bones mechanics of Epic Resort without talking at all bout how it plays.
EDISON: True. How’s it play?
TEEL: I really like it. Maybe we’ll play at some point. There are several different things going on, and while the optimal play style doesn’t entirely encourage playing thematically or in-character, the theme is so deeply and wonderfully enmeshed in the mechanics that you want to play in-character and really immerse yourself in the game’s fantasy world.
EDISON: Somehow the fantasy setting is okay in this game? You don’t hate it like all the other fantasy games and books?
TEEL: Nope. It’s just different enough (and off-kilter enough) that it doesn’t really ring any of the bells that put me off traditional Fantasy stuff. It’s become a key part of a growing sub-collection my wife and I have been putting together, entirely composed of games which play peripherally to the traditional Fantasy dungeon-delving gameplay. So in Epic Resort you play as a resort owner, trying to attract tourists along with heroes looking for a chance to relax (and spend their gold) after completing their successful adventures. I don’t have to do any adventuring, and if I don’t like a particular elf or paladin, I can let them get eaten by a dragon.
EDISON: Interesting. I suppose we’ll have a whole review going over that sub-collection of yours.
TEEL: Probably, and that would be when I’d play Epic Resort with you. Alas, there are some significant holes (at least one intentional) in that collection, so I’m not sure how long or satisfying a review they’ll give.
EDISON: After this monster, I’m sure our readers will want a break.
TEEL: After this monster I was thinking of moving on to drafting games.
EDISON: Are we about ready to move on, then? Is this review very nearly through?
TEEL: *chuckle* Not quite, Edison. We have at least a couple more games to talk about. I’ll give Paperback a pass, since we talked a bit about it earlier, and we can probably speed by Trains without going into much depth—the card game (at least in the base game) is surprisingly similar to vanilla Dominion; astute players quickly noticed that they could almost entirely ignore the map/board and follow their standard VP-rushing techniques to win. I hear the Trains sequel/expansion addresses that issue, incentivizing focus on the board. But I do want to run through a quick game of Star Realms with you, to see what you think of it.
EDISON: Isn’t that one you said was decided early in the game and largely a matter of chance?
TEEL: Yes, but it’s still been wildly popular. There have been a number of booster-sized expansions for it, the developers created a fantasy-themed version, and another publisher worked with them to put out a Cthulhu-themed version, which I’m quite keen to get my hands on.
EDISON: So you like it.
TEEL: Somewhat. It’s pretty good. That’s why I wanted you to try it.
EDISON: Alright, alright…
EDISON: That was certainly fast-paced and brutal.
TEEL: Yeah, I was pretty sure I was going to be able to knock you out of the game in just a few minutes. Apparently I’ve got no restraint; I ought to have stopped buying more cards while I was still hitting you hard every turn—or at least started investing in a couple red cards to thin out my deck.
EDISON: You really had me on the rails there for a while. Then only a turn or two before you would certainly have been able to grind me down, I suddenly had my entire deck’s functionality come together to create a reversal of almost 50 points in a single turn.
TEEL: Which is a bit swingy, yes?
EDISON: I was sure I was facing the same thing we went through in Eminent Domain, where you were inevitably going to win and I was only going through the motions of playing, without any hope of catching up. I just kept buying those outposts and hoping you’d keep drawing weak hands—which you did!
TEEL: Not intentionally, the way I kept not-winning Eminent Domain; like I said, I made poor purchasing decisions, failed to thin my deck, and ended up unable to buy any of the outposts for myself. It’s one of the challenges of any Ascension-style deck-builder; you can’t guarantee that the cards you need will be on offer on your turn, on top of the challenge of crafting a deck which delivers the currency you need in order to acquire them. That’s a large part of the skill set needed to obsolete the gameplay; if you can get to the point of always making optimal plays, the main deck’s randomization decides the game for you.
EDISON: I can see that. We’ve already talked about that sort of thing, though; can we talk about the pacing and iconography?
TEEL: Oh, absolutely. The iconography is why it’s so fast-paced. Most of the cards have little or no meaningful text on them, only icons and a simple color system, so players can see at a glance what they do and how they’ll fit into their decks. The same is true once the cards are in your hands, so playing the cards and buying cards and attacking your opponent are fast and efficient. It’s all very elegant. I believe I read that the new game, Cthulhu Realms, not only cut it down to only three colors (from four) to make it easier to acquire cards which work together, but also went to an entirely icon-based system with player aids which clarify all the new symbols individually for each player.
EDISON: That sounds like it would be almost too fast once you got all the symbols memorized. Just boom, boom, boom, turn after turn. It sounds exhausting.
TEEL: We’ll have to wait and see; I haven’t been able to pick it up, yet. I hope it’s good without going too far. If it’s in stock, maybe I’ll pick it up when I order Legendary Encounters: A Predator Deck Building Game in a few weeks.
EDISON: That’s really the name, isn’t it?
TEEL: They painted themselves into a corner right out of the gate with the first game, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game. I suspect they had no idea it would turn into a huge franchise when they published the base game. The title of the game is really just “Legendary” and the rest is a subtitle; somehow all the expansions and sequels have the same title?
EDISON: What about ‘Encounters?’ Looks like it’s the name for the Aliens/Predator games?
TEEL: Plus an upcoming Firefly game, if rumors are to be believed. At some point we may be able to team Ellen Ripley up with River Tam, get them working together with Groot and Doctor Octopus, and send them in with a Predator to stop Thanos and his hive of Xenomorphs from carrying out some evil plot.
EDISON: I get the feeling it’s the theme of the Legendary games that you like, more than anything. How does it play?
TEEL: It’s Ascension-style at the core, with a two big, randomized decks feeding out into rows of cards you buy or defeat with the two currencies of the game, though both decks are assembled during setup Dominion-style; you pick a few stacks of enemy cards to mix together with plot-specific cards for the Villain deck, and you pick a few stacks of hero cards to mix together for the Hero deck, so there’s a lot of variability from game to game, but within a game you have some idea of what sorts of cards you can expect to come up. There’s also a Mastermind, basically just a boss and mechanically not much different from the expensive VP cards in Dominion—you build up your purchasing power with one currency, use that currency to buy cards with a lot of attack power (the second currency), and use that attack power to “buy” four expensive Mastermind cards; buy all four Mastermind cards and you win.
TEEL: What makes it really likable for Mandy and I, aside from the theme, is that the game is semi-cooperative; the way we play it, it’s wholly cooperative. All the players are working together to stop the enemies from carrying out their plot and to defeat the Mastermind. Each player can build their deck with their own choice of focus, but we all have the same goal and we all win or lose together. Things go best when the players communicate their plans and capabilities to one another and then work together amicably.
EDISON: What’s a dick-stabber (or just a dick) to do with a game like that?
TEEL: Well, if they aren’t playing with me, they’re welcome to play by the “semi-cooperative” rules, where at the end of the game they’ll add up the VP on all the enemies they’ve defeated to see who was “the most Legendary hero”. In Legendary Villains, there’s a lot more opportunity for “PvP” style choices—forcing the other players to discard cards from their hands or trash their already-defeated enemies, stuff like that.
EDISON: So the option is there, and you choose to play without it. That seems reasonable. You seem to have quite a few boxes of Legendary, here.
TEEL: Mandy’s a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a moderate fan of Marvel comics in general, and I find it all highly preferable to generic Fantasy settings. I’ve also read decades of Marvel comics, myself. (Actually, in response to this year’s two big expansions for the Marvel side of Legendary, based on the ongoing Secret Wars storyline, I’ve embarked on a ridiculous journey to attempt to read almost all the relevant lines of Marvel comics from 1961 through the Secret Wars storylines of the 80’s and all the way to the 2015 event. Specifically so that, when we inevitably get the cards later, I’ll know what they’re referencing and who everyone is and what universes they’re from.) When we actually pull at random from all our different sets, we frequently end up with characters we’ve never heard of—and we’re almost always facing a plot or scheme based on a comic run we’ve never heard of.
EDISON: I assume the Alien game went over better, since you’ve definitely seen all of those films.
TEEL: Absolutely. In fact, I made sure Mandy and I set down together and watched all four of the Alien films before playing each of the corresponding scenarios in the game. We don’t usually have any trouble understanding or appreciating the plots and characters we’re unfamiliar with on the Marvel side, but the Alien game was a big improvement—not only because we knew all the characters, settings, and plots intimately, but also because of a few gameplay tweaks included in the release.
TEEL: I think the most important one was the change to the setup of the enemy deck. Instead of simply shuffling together a few enemy stacks, you carefully build an enemy stack with a definite three-act structure, so that a meaningful narrative with a clear escalation of tension and challenge will naturally unfold over the course of the game. It really deepens the immersive quality of the theme through the gameplay itself. Other changes like giving players limited health (which can be healed by anyone, depending on your cards) and adding a mechanism for players to assist the active player help keep people more involved in between their turns, and really enhances the cooperation throughout play.
TEEL: Playing across several years of expansions and sequels and different flavors of Legendary games has given me some interesting insights into ways to improve the players’ experience with a game through thoughtful implementation of systems and mechanics. The tiny difference of allowing players to discard a card (and draw a replacement) off their turn in order to assist the current player makes a world of difference in the feeling of cooperation and interaction between players. Everyone becomes much more involved in what’s happening to the other players in between their own turns, so they can help out when needed—or keep the card for themselves by planning together as a group.
EDISON: It sounds like you really like this one, and not only because it’s helping you think about different ways to improve your own future designs. Do you play it a lot?
TEEL: According to BGG, if we combine plays across all the different versions and expansions, I’ve logged 26 plays. None of the individual (sub-)titles shows more than ten plays, but it’s right up there with my most-played games, either way.
EDISON: And you aren’t getting tired of it? You’re eager to buy new expansions and replay with the cards you have?
TEEL: The expansions go a long way to preventing weariness, just as it was with Dominion, originally—the more sets you have, the more potential combinations exist, and the more unique play-throughs you can experience. With Legendary there’s a pretty big limitation due to the small number of Masterminds and Plots; each plot tends to lose its luster after a play or two, even when it’s different enemies trying to carry it out and different heroes trying to stop it. Luckily, every expansion so far has included multiple Masterminds and multiple plots, to keep things interesting. There are certainly still heroes and villains we’ve never played with, yet, and plots we haven’t tried—we aren’t particularly systematic about the whole thing. In general, yes. We continue to like the game, and look forward to adding more expansions to our collection.
EDISON: Shall we play, then?
TEEL: Not tonight, I don’t think. I’ve been awake about a day and a half working on this thing, and I need to get some rest soon.
EDISON: Until next time, then. Good night.
TEEL: Good night, Ed.