Game Design

The Game Design tag identifies content focusing on game design in general; whether at Opie Games or in the industry.

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John Parker

Generally, in an actual game, players are often aware of the habits/tendencies of their fellow players which can impact their own strategies. They may react anywhere along a spectrum of:

  • Ignore – hold to their principal tendencies.
    • Even though every time they open the door they get a bonk on the head, they keep opening the door.
  • Adapt/Morph – change their tendencies to mitigate the effect of their opponents’ tendencies.
    • Every time they open the door they get a bonk on the head, so they stop opening the door.
  • Respond/React – change their play style to counter their opponents’.
    • Every time they open the door they get a bonk on the head, so they jump through the door with a shield raised, swinging a mallet.

This dynamic is hard to simulate, so I stick pretty much to an initial Player Type regardless of the other Player Types in the game. (Though some Player Types have adaptation built in, they aren’t changing type). This is one of many reasons why real playtesters are important.

John Parker

Since I (like anyone designing games, I suppose) have to do significant solo playtesting – simulating multiple players – I have identified several player types to emulate. Unfortunately, “Player Type” is not a very descriptive term. You might think of the “Alpha Gamer,” “Sore Loser,” or “Sore Winner” as player types, but I would call these Gamer Personality Type. There are other uses of the phrase, but the term as I am using it might best be described as “Player Engagement Type” which I will explain.

John Parker

Playtesting is a critical part of the game design and development process that is apparently given less attention that is healthy to the hobby. (I say that assuming that game designers don't set out to produce broken or awful games and end up there primarily due to a lack of playtesting). This notebook will document some of the research, efforts, and insight I make in playtesting.

Objective

Study playtesting efforts of my own and others and post any research and insights regarding:

  • Playtesting Methods
  • Prototyping Tips and Tricks
  • Playtesting Tools
  • Playtesting Resources

Hopefully, you will find the resources here interesting and helpful to your own playtesting process.

John Parker

Glossary

In addition to the standard card playing terms, I have derived a few new ones for this makeover. Not all are used right away, but I will keep a running glossary in a separate post that can be referenced at any time. This may look like a lot of terminology for a simple game, but it is intended to be used intuitively. Defining terms helps that happen.

John Parker

Imperfect Record:

In comparing the rules as I have learned them with what I have found online, it is obvious that I am working from an imperfect record of the original game.

Traditional Game Rules

Most people learn the rules for games from someone else, never have to read the rules, and therefore don’t really know if they are playing the game according to the rules.  This lack of rules knowledge is even greater for traditional games where the rules have been “handed down” verbally many times without any reference to the actual rules if indeed they exist. It is interesting to compare rules for the same game with someone who has learned them through a different genetic tree.

Like comparing documents derived through different paths from the same origin, one might reconstruct the original document. Don’t worry, I won’t go through all that, but an interesting side exercise for my Game Makeover of Nines is to compare some rules variations. I located several rules sets online, but for expedience will stick to a comparison of the rules as I learned them (hereafter known as the “JP Document”) to the rules recorded in BGG (hereafter known as the “BGG Document”). Let’s compare and evaluate the variations and maybe speculate a little as to why the variants exist. My assumption is that variations probably represent house rules made over time to tweak the game in different ways to make it shorter, easier, more fun, etc.

John Parker

Initial Assessment

Before doing a makeover of the game, I want to consider "what works" and "what needs work" in this initial assessment.

John Parker

Introduction

I hope to spawn some dialogue about the redesigns described in this Game Makeover blog. However, in these first few entries much of the work described has already been completed and my actual efforts will probably be ahead of the postings for a few weeks. I don’t want this to discourage commentary, but I also don’t want my responses or lack of direction changes to be an indication that I am not listening to feedback. I figure that most of you reading (someone is reading, right?) are catching these much later than when they were posted anyway, so no harm done.  On to the makeover!

John Parker

Description and Rules

“Nines” is a simple set collection card game for 2 or more players played in a series of hands. The game is played with 2 or more standard decks of cards (jokers included), depending on the number of players. We play 2 decks for 2 – 3 players, 3 decks for 4 – 6 players. (I have not played with more than 6 players, but presumably the game will scale with more decks – it just won’t be fun.)

John Parker

This is the first in the Game Makeover series.

From this page you can learn about the original game, read about the background to some of my decisions and methods, or jump right into the makeover.

There will be images displayed throughout the series. You can see the full Nines Makeover Image Gallery here.

John Parker

Not that I don’t have enough to do in working on several original designs and concepts, but the brain is always looking for creative distractions to “recharge under load” and to break out of neural pathways that rut so quickly. Who knows, maybe this process will result in something worthwhile itself as well.