[Stacked] A different kind of game
After a 3 year hiatus in designing games, I’ve finally returned with a new game design — and it’s very different from my previous game! Fantastic Factories is a puzzly multiplayer solitaire style game. While I love exploring game systems and min/maxing my turns I discovered that it was actually quite difficult to introduce Fantastic Factories to friends and family and get it on to the table. These days most of my gaming (aside from playtesting prototypes) happens at conventions, and when I’m at the table I want to be seeing, interacting, and bantering with people. I still feel Fantastic Factories is a great game, but its heads-down experience just wasn’t a joy I could easily share and create moments with.
When I’m at the table I want to be seeing, interacting, and bantering with people.
So the next few blog posts I’ll focus on my journey of designing a drastically different kind of game — and in many ways the antithesis of Fantastic Factories. To that end I set a few goals:
- It must be highly interactive between players
- There should be some element of mind games to make the game replayable and a new experience with each different group of players
- It needs to be easy enough to introduce and play with people who are not hobby gamers
Immediately I had a game mechanic in mind. A few years back I was visiting the Bay Area and decided to attend a game design meetup in Berkeley where I met Glenn Cotter and played his game, Fickle. It’s a beautifully illustrated game about forming fairy alliances. Fickle had a number of things going on, but within it was a push your luck drafting mechanic that stuck in my head for all these years (description pulled from BoardGameGeek):
In each round, you are dealt three cards; you look at them, decide on the order in which to stack them, then pass that stack to another player. You’ll receive a stack in turn, which is in effect a “press your luck” deck created by an opponent. You look at the top card, then decide whether to keep it or discard it and draw the next card, which you can also discard in favor of the third card
I thought this a really fun way to gain cards. Are your opponents going to put the best card first or at the bottom? Or is the final card something you don’t want at all? There was a lot of opportunity for mind games and trickery.
I decided that I wanted to hyperfocus on this mechanic and make my game completely about it. Since this was the novel part of the game, I wanted to make the rest of the game as simple as possible. What motivates you to pick one card over another? One of the simplest answers is that some cards are worth more points than others. Set collection is one of the oldest mechanics in board games and is generally well understood, so I decided to go with that and validated the idea in the fastest way possible.
For my first playtest, I didn’t make ANY components at all. Instead, I used the cards from Sundae Split (designed by Nate Bivins) and simply dealt out 3 cards to each player to stack in a particular order. Of course there were some very rough edges, but it ended up being promising and the idea had legs.
Later I built an actual prototype and gave it the working title of STACKED. Next blog post I’ll talk about what that prototype looked like and how the design evolved quickly.
