Designer Diary: Rolling Random
May you always roll sixes… or should you? In many board games, the higher you roll, the better the result. I wanted to challenge that assumption. People love rolling dice but hate the results. In Fantastic Factories, it’s less about what you roll and more about how you utilize the outcome of that roll. To reference Gil Hova, it’s all about input randomness instead of output randomness.
Equal Opportunity
During the design process, one of my guiding principals for Fantastic Factories was to make sure no one particular value of dice was better than another. That philosophy courses throughout the entire game — reflected in the starting player boards and many of the factories. You need high values to mine for metal, and you need low values to generate for energy — you’re going to need a little bit of both. There are some factories that actually prefer low values, and in general most factories just care more about equal values.
In Fantastic Factories, you can build training facilities that allow you to manipulate your dice. These training facilities help to mitigate the luck of the roll and transform each turn into a mini-puzzle of how to place and alter your dice.
One of the questions I get occasionally is why cards like Gymnasium and Fitness Center don’t “wrap” around (i.e. +1 to 6 turns into a 1 and -1 to a 1 turns into a 6).
That restriction is very intentional. Another design goal of mine was to make sure there were many viable paths to winning. Some strategies require high values and some require low ones. I wanted the strategies that players pursue to be an intentional and conscious decision. If you’re playing a low value strategy, Fitness Center would be useful and Gymnasium would be not so much.
Every Card Has Its Place
Just as with the dice rolls, I wanted every card to be useful in one way or another. I didn’t want some cards to be better than others — only different. I wanted each card to feel exciting and get players’ minds churning as to what creative ways they can utilize the card. No single card is universally useful, and each card has specific strategies or scenarios in which they shine.
In Fantastic Factories there are a lot of different ways to win. It’s not at all uncommon for a game to finish with very close scores or even tied scores and still have every player pursuing a different strategy. I think that’s awesome because it means there are multiple viable paths to victory. Every player can play their style of game and still win. Or a single player can play Fantastic Factories over and over again and never have to play the same way twice.
Dice AND Cards?
Early on in the design, I was concerned that there were too many random elements within the game. There are many games out there with dice or cards as the primary random element but rarely both. Too much randomness can take away player agency and make it difficult to meaningful progress towards your goals.
However, despite having both dice and cards, Fantastic Factories is less about luck and more about exploring the opportunities presented to you. Because of the design of the game — no particular dice values or cards are better than any other — it matters less about what you are given and more about maximizing the usage of what you have. The game favors the player who can figure out the best way to combine certain cards and place their dice in the optimal way.
Winning In More Ways Than One
In the end, I think that Fantastic Factories is awesome game because the input randomness doesn’t dictate how well you do in the game. Instead, it may take you down a path you’ve never traveled before — a strategy that you hadn’t thought of trying. Each play of the game will be uniquely different but at the same time within your own power to achieve victory!
Fantastic Factories is coming to Kickstarter on May 29th, 2018. Check out an overview video and sign up for the mailing list to be notified on launch at www.fantasticfactories.com.
