Designing Race for the Galaxy: Making a Strategic Card Game

[Music] today we're talking about race for the galaxy where I don't want to spend a lot of time on the game itself I want to talk about what went into the design and hopefully help you design your own games just to help me calibrate things a little bit how many of you have played race for the galaxy ooh very nice now how many of you haven't don't feel free to get the hands up helps me calibrate you won't hurt my feelings all right we'll have a brief intro then I'll do an overview of race to give you enough structure to hang the design on and then I'll get into the design stuff the takeaway that I hope you have is some ideas to help make your own games more strategic alright my name is Tom layman I'm the designer of race for the galaxy my first game was published in 1992 I've been a full-time freelance designer since 2008 I've done various board dice card and wood matt leacock he brought me on board to do the pandemic expansions with him and so I've done some coops as well the game we're talking about today race for the galaxy is a card game a tabletop card game it was published in 2007 by Rio Grande games it's for 2 to 4 players and typically takes 20 to 40 minutes it's had 5 expansions so far with another one that's been announced greenlit for next year it's also had three spin-off games role for the galaxy which is a dice version of race and that itself has had two more expansions rivalry will be out in June it's had jump drive an even simpler introductory card game and then new frontiers which is a board game which will be out late summer it's you can play it online in a browser at board game arena they have over five million games of it played on that site there is a free open-source PC version that if you have any interest in AI and neural networks I recommend that you take a look at the source that began as an AI project by Kelvin Jones built on top of that is a mobile app by temple gates games which supports both AI and Internet play there's a steam version as well and they added a really nice UI on top of it so about the game the it's a card game and the cards are two different types there are action cards that you use to select the phases and there are game cards which are the cards you actually play to build your space Empire you start with four cards in hand out of a choice of six and you have one start world on the table as the start of your empire during the game players select their actions secretly and simultaneously there are five possible phases but only the selected phases will occur in each round when a phase occurs everyone can do it so if I call develop everyone can place a development and the player who selects a phase gets a bonus in it so for example in a three player game if players a and C both chose develop it'll only happen once everyone can place a development but a and C will get the bonus then everyone will have a chance to settle and B will get the bonus one of the consequences of this is that every round tends to be different so we might have a game that starts out in the first round would develop and settle then in the second round its floor and consumed and then in the third round its floor settle and produce when the three players all choose different actions you explore to find new cards you develop and settle to build your empire so develop is how we the game cards are divided into developments and worlds and development is how we place the ones with a diamond worlds with the circle are placed during the settle phase the grey worlds are essentially like developments in that they provide powers but the colored worlds and there are four colors of worlds are worlds that can have a good on them a good is just a face card facedown card taken from the draw pile and placed on top of the world and in the computer implementations you can see that they can color-code those according to the type of the world it's on which determines what type of good it is produce is what creates the goods on the production world and consume is how you convert goods into VP chips and card draws so here we have to consume powers this one will take any type of good and turn it into one victory point chip this one will take any type of good and turn it into a victory point chip and a card draw obviously the second power is better but you can only use one of these powers on one Goods so if you had two Goods you'd get two victory points in one card draw so that gives us two phases in which you're building out your empire two phases in which you're producing and consuming goods and this leads to two different ways that the game can end it can end when any player gets 12 or more cards in their empire or when the communal victory point pool is emptied in that case we add these ten points ships to the pool so that everyone gets all the chips that they're entitled to in both cases we finish out the round and then we score it up there are three ways to score victory points there's the victory point chips that you earn during consume there's the value the victory point value of the cards in your empire cards in your hand not score and finally there are the VP bonuses from the six cost developments here we have a six cost development alien tech Institute and it pays off for all the yellow worlds in your empire plus any cards with the alien tag such as alien tech Institute itself and then whoever has the most victory points is the winner so that's race for the galaxy in the nutshell hopefully that'll be enough to let you hang that is the design discussion on it it's a game with simultaneous action selection you're finding cards that fit together to form strategies you're doing empire building you're building VP engines and you're trying to score those six cost bonuses so now we're going to dive into the actual design the first thing to notice that is that unlike many euro games this game does not have a set number of turns that instantly produces strategy along the lines of how fast do you do something do you do a quick tableau rush where you're putting out lots of keep worlds and developments to try to end the game quickly before someone else gets going or do you try for more expensive but denser with more victory point worlds and developments do you on the produce consume side you could put down just a couple of production worlds that have consumption not all of them do and run that for victory points immediately or you could put down production worlds and then nice consume powers in order to get more victory points so simply by not forcing a set number of turns you instantly get some strategy about the pace but you get even more strategy out of the fact that you have two different end conditions this creates strategic tension in the game as to whether you invest in a victory point engine do you invest in order to get the discounts to develop and settle and build an empire or do you try some sort of hybrid strategy between it two as a thought experiment what if hearthstone a popular digital card game or Magic the Gathering a popular tabletop card game had two main victory conditions ones that happened all the time so imagine that you the normal way you win in those games is you drive your opponent to zero health however imagine that they had a tower that they could build and if they got it to level 10 then they instantly won the game now suddenly you're going to think about well I could put minions that attack my opponent but I could also put out minions that build the tower which do I want to do I can put out defenders for myself so that they defend my health or I could try to defend those minions who are building the tower and in particular as the tower Rose if its height interacted with the various powers of cards or if they start to interact so if at say fifth level archers fired every turn instead of when they first entered the battlefield and you know at eight level ballistas worked and Dragons flew off the top of the tower and so on you could get a lot of interactions in the game I'm not saying that a game is better if it has two different winning conditions but if you have it it's the easiest way I know to introduced or teach attention into a game so how do you pay for cards in raise you pay for cards by discarding other cards so here we have a hand of six cards we want to place this development terraforming robot out of our hand and we have to pay the cost in the diamond so we have to discard 3 cards out of our hand to pay for it there's no mana the cards themselves are the money if we'd call develop then we'd have an extra card left in our hand because it gives the bonus for development is that it gives us a discount of 1 so one way to think about the cards in your hand in race is that they each represent an opportunity something that you can put into play or not put into play and this gets us to what economists call opportunity cost where the cost of something isn't just the resources spent but what you could have done instead so some examples from regular life in college and most majors you have a limited number of electives when you take an elective the cost isn't just a tuition and your time and your effort but it's also the fact that you could have taken some other elective and what you might have gained from that elective instead if you're at a seminar session the cost is well you could be instead of listening to me right now you could be in some other room listening to someone else and that's part of the cost that your pain and similarly job offers investments all these things have opportunity cost returning the games if you have a system that gives you mana so that you're spending mana the place your cards instead of spending the cards then you have a much smaller opportunity cost say I have four mana and I have two four cost cards well I can place one or I can place the other so there's still an opportunity cost there but after I place it on the next turn I have four mana and I can place the other one so the opportunity cost and those sort of systems is much smaller because you're merely postponing an opportunity as opposed to giving it up when you discard a card opportunity cost is often overlooked in games richard garfield talks about the fact that when he first started designing magic he didn't think he could have zero cost cards in the game he thought it would break the game and he came to realize that there's an opportunity cost in magic in that you want your debt to be as small as possible so that it's efficient and the combinations arise and that this cost is real and meant that he could have zero cost card in the game because when you draw an ornithopter that's a card that you drew instead of some other card and that some other card might have been more useful for you so even though the cost is zero there's still the cost of the slot in your deck and we know that that cost is at least as much as a zero to flying artifact creature returning to race in a typical game of race players draw about 30 to 50 cards per game but they're only building 8 to 12 of them this card sifting mechanism allows for a lot of varieties and strategy in the race base game you have 114 cards 91 of them are unique so you can have many different strategies because if you draw a card that doesn't fit your strategy you just throw it away using it to pay for some other card now there are other approaches to variety in a game that construction the problem there is that you need a deck to play that's an investment of time in advanced drafting if it's the if it breaks up the play if you do it over several rounds like in seven Wonders then you have this I play then I draft and I play then I draft and that can take people out of the game sometimes or alternatively it must be done before play in deck building as a Dominion you have a large variety of Kingdom cards it's possible to be played but you're using only a subset in each game debt sifting integrates variety into the gameplay and the other benefit of it is that instantly hands adds a new class of decisions hand management you have a bunch of cards in your hand at the start of the game you can play them all to put down a big purchase but then you won't be able to do anything for several rounds until you republish those cards furthermore if you have cards that you want to save for the endgame they have a cost they're like a boat anchor in your hand because you can't spend them to pay for something else there are some criticisms of debt shifting one is that some players find it too angsty right that the thought that they discard a card that two turns later they realize oh I really wanted to keep that card you know for them is just a total turnoff and the other one is that experienced players have a technology advantage they know what's in the deck so they know some of the combos they could wait for and that informs their discarding decisions now the experienced player issue comes up in all games whether it's a co-op whether it's a two-player competitive game or many player competitive game so I'm not that much worried about it but I do note it so where does all this come from there is a euro game called Puerto Rico by andreas Seyfarth and it was a very popular game and Stefan brooked the head of Alea the publisher of Puerto Rico felt he wanted a card game and he had a very limited time to produce one to capitalize on Puerto Rico success and ondrea's Seyfarth prototype wasn't working so he contacted several designers including myself and asked us to essentially become backup Andreas a farce and who design games independently that if Andres couldn't get his prototype working that he would then publish instead so I designed the Puerto Rico card game I spent three months I went through three major iterations I collapsed Puerto Rico's cost structure from one to ten the one to sits I figured out a bunch of things involving this card sifting and I presented it to Stefan at the gathering and friends we played it for a week we made some small tweets and at the end of it he said Tom if it was up to him he'd offered me a contract but andreas was involved so he took it back to under ass andreas looked at it said oh this solves my problems but I still want to do prototype and so Stefan Brook combined ondrea's Seyfarth prototype my cost structure that I developed and his own ideas about market slips together to form San Juan I get a royalty from San Juan but it was a bit disappointing not to see the game that I had design actually published well San Juan came out it's a perfectly fine game but I felt it had not pushed the variety button the way I thought you could push it in particular San Juan has 29 unique cards out of a deck of 110 furthermore I had an unpublished collectible card game called dual from the Stars that I felt would be a very good setting and I had evolved some new action selection ideas over the year and a half intervening and those are the three things I put together to form race for the galaxy after getting permission from Alea an offering and first right of refusal so the thing that had bothered me about Puerto Rico's action mechanism it's a classic euro game the play goes clockwise it's not simultaneous and the interactions between the player are very much this you constrained the next player as you go round the table you block you limit their options you block them in particular when you pick a role which is their turn for an action you block it for the rest of the round no one else can pick it you all get to do it but you don't get the bonus this phenomena in which you are affecting the next player downstream the most Casey Laurence has termed left-right binding and it was beginning to bother me in particular I played a number of five player games of Puerto Rico in which I had a player upstream of me who would just hammer me and make it so I could never win now if that player had won I wouldn't be upset but he never won either right you know but his attitude was that was how you play the game he just squeezed the next player as hard as possible furthermore I had played some five player games where we had four experienced players and one novice player and in those games the player downstream of the novice player always won and so I was really getting to the point where I was going I don't like this left-right binding and what if the actions were instead picked simultaneously doing so gives a greater sense of player agency if there's an action you really want to do you just pick it it eliminates the left/right binding problem and the game can now go in many more directions because you're no longer forced to pick different roles you can have all the players pick the same role as I showed you in an earlier slide once I made that decision then I started going well what if the build tempo per round was zero to two instead of zero to one in Puerto Rico you only have a single build action so the buildings which is one of the ways the game can end only grow at a certain rate what if we had both develop and settle so that you can potentially go zero to two times then I started wondering well if I'm going to improve the Empire building what am I going to do about the produce consume stuff what if the consume bonus was double the victory points none of this dandy can be you know just plus one extra VP in the captain role in Puerto Rico and from those ideas I began to think about a game where the players had much more control over how the game evolved the if you would doing simultaneous action selection is that you want all the actions to be equally viable to be called in the early mid and late game it's not very interesting if you have some action that's only going to be called in the late game because then you know there isn't a lot of bluffing or so I started looking at the five actions its floor was easy you're always looking for cards that fit together sometimes even on the final turn you're doing a Hail Mary you know all you will explore and hope to draw the one card that will save my position and pull out the win développé was looking pretty good in that you often want to build some technologies early get some powers down on the board and you want to build those six des in the lake but what about the mid-game in both Puerto Rico and San Juan the buildings that give you bonuses have no powers they're just for scoring points at the end of the game I said what if I put powers on them so now I had a reason to build them before the end of the game so here if I'm committed to doing a yellow strategy where I'm putting down lots of these alien worlds this - to discount makes it a lot cheaper and if I have three or four yellow worlds I'll actually pull a profit so now I have a reason to build this before the endgame and that sort of fits develop settle well you often want to settle in the early game in order to get your card flow going in order to put down worlds and get some goods on them and sell them in order to get more cards they're also obviously you want to build them in the mid game in order to set up your VPN gents but why would anyone want to settle late from duel from the Stars I always had this idea that there would be two ways to place worlds that you could both settle them peacefully or you could settle them by military conquest so I decided to take that from deal from the stars so here's how military works you here I have a start world that gives me two military I put down this development that gives me three more and that lets me overcome the defense of this card which in turn gives me another two military which lets me put down the seven card which is worth a lot of victory points okay now when you do the big military strategy you often don't want to be calling settle in the middle of the game you don't want to help the people who are doing these VP engines build their engine so you'll save your worlds and then slam them down at the end game because you don't have to pay any cards to place the worlds that you do with military the non-military worlds are essentially placed exactly the same as the developments you have to discard cards equal to their cost and the bonus the only difference is that the bonus is you draw a card after you place the world instead of giving it a discount so now I had settled working produce had the opposite problem in both San Juan and Puerto Rico produce looms too large it has a who bells the cat issue when you call produce particularly in Puerto Rico then the players after you in the turn order they get first crack at selling for goods for shipping them for VPS and you don't get much for calling produce so everyone wants someone else to call produce so I decided to solve that and I did two things the first thing is I move produced to the very end of the round so if you call produce then next round you like all the other players can now call an action that benefits from it the second was I introduced windfall world's all the world's I've been telling you up to now were solid circles this one has a halo which is a windfall world the production world's only get goods when produce is called the windfall world's get a good upon being settled and so now you could settle a windfall world sell it this alien good for a large number of cards and don't call produce however this is a sort of a two-sided a two-edged sword because the windfall worlds don't get goods during produce they need a power or the player has to call produce for its bonus which is to produce a good on one of your windfall worlds so I both gave away to avoid calling produce and an incentive to call produce and with those two changes now produce was being called it wasn't so dominant the way it is in Puerto Rico but it was still being called throughout the game for consumption it's double VP bonus works well in the late game but why would you ever double your VP's in the early game we all know for engine building games that you want to build your engine then score the victory points from them so consumed trade is the bonus that we use to sell goods and it only sells the goods for that player now this may seem very inconsistent with the rest of the game right when you call develop everyone gets the place to develop when you call settle everyone gets the place world but when you call consume trade only you get to sell the good for cards well why is this going on two reasons one is the one I've already alluded to so that the consume is called early on but the other is to solve the rich gets richer problem and this is a problem in many games so in race if you have an alien production world and it automatically produces on produce automatically gets a good on produce and then if you could automatically sell it when anyone called trade then you would have this huge advantage over other players in the game would be all about getting the big world down first so to prevent rich gets richer I say trade is a bonus now this rich gets richer issue is an issue in all of these games and they all solve it but in different ways Puerto Rico has a trading house and your sales are often bought so if someone sells coffee to the trading house in front of you you can't sell coffee they're high that good if there is coffee left in the trading house from an earlier trade phase you can't sell it San Juan uses lower sales prices those are those market slips I mentioned earlier and introduces compensation they have buildings such as the poorhouse which if you have the poorhouse and not very many cards you get extra cards and that's very much a sort of casual euro approach to this issue roll uses lower returns when you factor in the cost of the producer and chipper dice and weigh waaahh boosted its floor tremendously as an alternative to the point where some people don't even bother trading goods to run their economy and roll they just use its floor race gives you the largest return but requires player action so here we have one issue solve four different ways each way in character with the game itself its floor also has two action cards with different bonuses allowing you to either get one extra card or to go deep into the deck to try to find the card you really want simultaneous actions led to some very interesting player interactions first off there's bluffing and gambling in the actual calling of the phases so for example if I have an alien good and my hand is full with 10 cards and I look around the table and I see someone who's likely develop and another person who is likely to settle I might just call trade so that I refill my hand after I both place a development and a world but those other two players might go hmm tom has an alien good and a handful of cards we'll just call it Splore he'll sell that good for a bunch of cards and then have to discard him because he's over the hand limit and so he screwed himself and so you get a lot of this doublethink bluffing interactions you also get gambling interactions on the final turn you might have oh I have the development in the world they'll let me win the game but I need both phases called and then you look around and go that person's likely to call settle so I'll call develop and hope it works then within the game there's also leaking and blunting effects so develop is the second phase here and if I see a player who's set up to do lots of developed calls if I put down this Bank I'll get my cut every time they call develop similarly if someone looks like they're going to call produce to refill an alien windfall then I can put down this lost species world here it gives me a gains good which is almost a good as good as an alien one and it gives me two extra cards on produce and this once I put this on the table the player who was thinking about calling produced probably isn't going to call it in future turns so I have blunted their advantage there's also pressuring interactions in the build tempo if I'm low on cards and my opponent's call both develop and settle do I put down to weak cards one strong card one weak and save every missed build is potentially incurring an opportunity cost because if the game goes out on the tableau and I don't have all my cards on the table every slot that I didn't fill is lost victory points so here we war finding all these interesting player interactions yet one of the criticisms of race is that it's multiplayer solitaire to some it said this is a self-fulfilling prophecy if you play the game very heads down if you never look at what's going on in the other players tableau if you never make any predictions about what they're going to call it will feel like multiplayer solitaire there's no forced interaction but strategy games work when all players do their best to try to win and the people who do pay attention generally do a lot better in addition to simultaneous action selection race also uses simultaneous play which can really speed up a multiplayer game so race plays maybe five minutes longer when it's a four player game as opposed to a two-player yet when you introduce simultaneous play that has a bunch of issues around it first off there will be times when you have to serialize play in order because you have some situation where if someone does something then the game may end and the other person needs that information because they may do something that could end the game and you have to resolve that timing if you somehow but as a philosophy you want to slow down play only when you need to and keep it going so two things that help you do that is one is to hide non-essential information soin race the discards are facedown that you use to pay for cards so that people can't go well I don't want to decide at what I'm doing till I see what you're discarding I just hide that information similarly you want to minimize your number of synchronization points if a race has one main synchronization point which is during the action selection and revelation then players who want to can go ahead with their turns while you might still be exploring and that's perfectly fine if you introduced to many synchronization points you will not get benefit from simultaneous play turning to the actual design of cards I knew I wanted multiple powers on cards so here we have this terraforming robot and here in the settle phase it gets a card on settl and here there's a consume power as well and so this card had worked with either a produced consume strategy or an empire building strategy and I knew I wanted these multi power cards in order to get the variety of strategy that I wanted to pack into the game however putting multiple powers at fire at different time is tough it really increases the cognitive load of the game and you want to be you want to make that decision carefully a lot of the you know some people refer to race not having a learning curve but a learning spike that the players get impaled on and a lot of that cognitive load that's blamed on the icons is actually due to the multiple powers this did influence the card graphics we added these little swooshes behind things so that players could easily look across the cards in their empire and see the powers another issue when you start thinking about designing a game a card game is well what type of powers do you want to put in the game do you want big effects where the game is mostly about assembling a combo of cards or do you want smaller incremental powers where it's mostly about gaining an edge and slowly getting more powerful than your opponent and this is a spectrum your game could fall anywhere between these things at the gain and edge things sort of the meta strategy is making lots of small decisions well in order to gradually produce win in the combo thing often the meta strategy becomes stave off the feat until your combo arrives in your hand and then play it just take out your opponent so for example in hearthstone you often see someone defending themselves they have some defender in front of them with high defense and then when their combo arrives it's like double their defense double their defense make the attack equal to their defense Wham take out their opponent right and that's example of a big combo I tend to like to make games with lots of tough decisions with good strategic tension so I'm more on this end of the spectrum here but it is a spectrum there's nothing about card sifting or anything that I've talked about so far that says it has to be gained in it right glory to Rome is an example of a game that uses big combos that lets people use the discard pile to assemble their combos and is notorious for teetering on the edge of control before suddenly someone puts in a combo and wins the game but I wanted to go with this smaller simpler powers and one of my other reasons for doing it was reduced the cognitive load as I'm sure the people here who haven't played race before have already noticed there's a fair amount that's going on in the game and so the powers and race are very simple they're like see an extra card and explore or get a little extra military or get a card in the middle of the various phases or add a new consume power they're all very small and incremental there are only three powers that really break the rules one of them is paying for military worlds in order to connect up the military game and the non military game I felt that connection was important another is to break that rule after having carefully built consumed trade as a bonus is to have some powers that break that rule and the third is normally you can only make victory points through your empire but there are some powers that like you spend cards directly for victory point Kipps and that breaks that rule those three I felt were important enough to put in the game but all the rest I went with very simple powers so with simple powers you have the choice of do you put text on the cards if you just have icons and we went with having a mixture here we have powers no text on this card here we have some powers with no texts that are pretty simple and then we highlight this phase and we have text right here for the more complex power something we didn't expect was that if you have some powers without text a lot of players then assume all the powers don't have text even when there's text right there on the card and so that was a bit of a learning experience our model would the Texas powers was to keep them you know similar to road signs just a couple basic shapes and a number this is normally a big mistake okay normally you want to do everything you can in a game to make it accessible because if people won't play your game then you know who cares about the replay value but with race we had noted during play testing that we had people playing the game hundreds of time even thousands of times before publication and so we backed off a little bit on the accessibility to emphasize the ease of road play most players who can handle the graphics I mean there's some people that it's just not the way their brain works but the people who can handle the graphics they find that the game clicks after a couple plays and then it allows them to play much faster and easier for the spin-off games these are geared to more casual audiences and there we put both complicated icons and the text right there similarly here this is from new frontiers and then for jump drive which has very simple powers we just put a few helper words in the middle of a power the icons pay dividends when race was ported to a device because you can actually see it pretty well on your phone and then the implementer added an expanded mode and you can do some actions in this expanded mode and everything gets text even the icons that in the base game didn't have text have text in the mobile app the card design evolved through many iterations so here is one of the original prototype cards this is the finished card this is all the same card on this slide these two are way was designs before he and I started working the other and these last two over here are after the art team gets involved and we're now testing their ideas on our players so you can see how it changed quite a bit so who's who on the race team way wahoo one who I've mentioned several times he did the prototype icons the car design some development assistance and he was the lead designer on role for the galaxy K Tumbleson is the public her the head of Rio Grande games and he's a huge science-fiction fan and in 2007 the German publishers were all convinced that science fiction games would never sell and so he supported doing it and paid for a lot of artwork from these three gentlemen he found the art team and cows and Martin do the covers the card art some of the 3d modeling that we use and the logos and Mirko Suzuki our skateboard and graphic artists he does the rules layout works on the card templates did all the icons redoing all the icons and does all the production work we've been working together for 13 years now which is a long time in any field and we work in a very collegiate way for role for the galaxy we talked to the art team and said you know how we wanted to position it as the dice version of race for the galaxy and they came back with this idea of floating dice in space with the race symbols coming out in red light which would help in yellow light which would help pick up the difference in the branding so you know they suggest ideas all the cards are actually designed from a thematic point of view but I don't tell the artist about it okay so here we have distant world and my model for this world my internal model when I designed this card was Iceland Iceland has a very isolated population they are the focus of numerous genetic studies going on in Iceland right now so that's why it produces it gains good and Iceland has one of the highest book reader hip book ownership rates cultural interest rates in the entire world and that's why they have this huge bonus for novelty goods do I expect any player to look at this card and go oh this is obviously a science fiction analog to Iceland no did I explain this to the artists no all I give the artist is the title and I let them do what they want to occasionally they'll ask me a question or two but mostly I do this so that they feel fresh and they bring their own ideas to the project race does have two thematic inspirations both of which I credit in the rules Fred pulls he key saga contributed the idea of a long-vanished alien civilization where the aliens all we see are their artifacts and then David Brin has the idea of uplift where alien races are being brought to sentience by other alien races I use nothing directly from these things but they were inspirations to ideas from optimization theory informed my card design to make a game more strategic you want to mind the gap okay so here I have new Sparta they want to put down this military world here and they have this card which gives them temporary military one-shot military it's cheap but then they lose a tempo or they have this one which is I can do this over hill it's more expensive than they want what they actually want is they would like to draw this card here but they have to make a decision when they faced in this situation as to whether they want to go into military as a serious strategy or as a one-shot get this world down get going and if you provide all power cost combinations in your game then it's possible for very tactical play whirring just about what you need to do right away to dominate if you start putting in gaps you force your players to make strategic choices random draws reduce this issue for card games because you may not draw the needed intermediate card when you're having when you want to use it but CCGs drafting and board games need to be very careful in this area if you want to produce a strategic game the other idea from optimization is the notion of switching costs and how to overcome them you don't want your players feeling trapped by their initial hands so this is a very abstract diagram where these are the strategy hills and you can think of them as your players trying to climb the hill up to the top and so this might be symbolize the alien hill with the alien tech institute I've shown you a couple times this might be big military and this might be the novelty strategy and if your cards initially say go the alien strategy and then you don't draw any more of those cards and your cards now say go military you have a switching cost if you put down the six for this military it will score less because you have fewer of the military cards in your tableau so you need to come up with some way to compensate players for when they have to switch strategies in the middle of a card game and the approach I used is the six costs devs having both powers and victory point bonuses really helped in terms of their cost they are under costed when you consider both of these items but when you consider just their powers I mean we just saw that a development that gives you two militaries about to cost right their way over costed and this provides you a way of putting in compensation without putting in cards that are too powerful in terms of their in-game effects finally another consideration when designing cards is that you want cards to appeal to appeal to various player types Mart rosewater has a classic article describing magic player types and so when it came time to actually design cards I sort of I bore that in mind and I put in cards that were very efficient the spike players who really value efficiency and winning on a high percentage basic pilgrimage world which lets you win in a very creative way it lets you take all those goods if you had no other consume power and suddenly consume them in one big swoop and that appeals to the Johnnies type player who likes to win in a very creative ways and then Timmy big military provides the big effects that the Timmy the stereotypical Timmy player lights so that's something to bear in mind so what didn't work the deck size which was fine in the base game and became a problem when we got to about beyond the hundred and eighty cards as we added its mansions this is what statisticians call the sample variance problem the deck variance remained the same but the sample those thirty to fifty cards that a player saw started to vary too much and this led us to break the expansion's into separate arts so that you play the base game and you play with these three expansions that's fine and then you get rid of them play the base game with some other expansion that also lets me tell different stories which as a designer I like a few cards were a little too specialized and we turned out to have colorblind dishes in our browns and our greens and in jumpdrive we introduced these dots to try to solve the issue we actually had a play tester who is extremely colorblind and but the problem was he was an expert bridge player he just memorized the cards so we didn't realize that we had a problem right we said well if Larry can play it what's the what's the big deal here so second edition race is coming out it's at the printer right now and we are adding these dots into the blue green and brown worlds to help with the color boy it's not a complete solution but it's like a 90% solution and that's one of the things we're doing and as long as we were in the game I made the rules completely gender neutral they were mostly general neutral because that tends to be the way I write but there were two he or he's and 12 hisses that are now they in there we added new samples of rounds of play for new players we added the 6 promo worlds from the app that were designed for the app and added them as with along with optional start world choice and then we adjusted 5 cards that were a little too weak and we will make them available a separate promos through the bqj store so some takeaways I'm not going to read this in detail but these are things to consider when you're designing a strategy card game so we have about 10 minutes questions are welcome and remember to fill out your evaluations class hey Tom so I really liked what you were talking about about multiple different winning strategies one things I really like about magic is that it has that built into the deck building one things I really don't like though is the inevitability with certain strategies where you realize that there's no way you can win against that strategy because your deck isn't set up to do it some interests know kind of how you approach balancing different strategies for winning the game okay so the question is how to balance certain strategies particularly if one strategy starts to feel inevitable yeah so part of that is magic to some extent particularly at high levels when you're using lots of rares and so on is a game of big big effects and combos by making a game of smaller effects that gain the edge thing you get rid of a lot of that issue you don't completely solve it and in two-player experienced in race in certain conditions you can see a very strong developed developed strategy that can sometimes produce problems the other thing is it really depends on the length of your game if you can whip through race in ten minutes the problem is really not a huge problem so I'm curious since one of your major contributions to San Juan was the cost crunch yep coming down and that's remained in place I believe to some extent for for race I'm curious about what led you to that decision and how we can sort of approach holistically to avoid that problem when we're starting from scratch so the question is how did I come up with the cost structure in San Juan what led you to realize that I needed to be crunched yeah well one of the problems is simply physical right if the cost goes from one to ten and you have to pay nine cards or ten cards put down at the end that's a big hand and if you want to save some cards in addition now you're talking about 15 card hands right and so part of it was driven by aergon omits part of it is driven by the entire deck size if all players can have 15 cards in hand and cards in the tableau then we need more than 110 cards so a lot of it was driven by external factors okay thank you mm-hmm hello my name is Steven I really enjoy role and I also quite liked race but roll has a aesthetic of accessibility that's much easier the way that the tiles line up in different phases yes yeah so that that's something that I feel that's really important to get people into the game whether new or old player a played race over and over and still can't quite wrap my head around each face that it's really annoying so it this is I don't know is there something that you might want to I don't want to say fix but like because they intrinsically very different games roll and race but the way the design and the presentation work makes roll much friendlier to read right so the question is why is roll easier to read compared to race and and is there anything we could do to make race easier yeah yeah yeah and largely roll avoids multi-phase powers in the few power in the few tiles that have it it's the same power that happens they occur twice and that means that you can have the text right there because it applies to all of the powers on the tile and the vast majority of the tiles in roll only have one power or one power that happens twice that makes it a lot easier it's the multi-phase powers I suspect that are causing you I mean everyone's different but I suspect that's what causing it to make grace harder to wrap your head around and I think it's just the nature of the game we are committed to the spin-offs in part because we recognize that there's a variety of audiences and so race we're sticking with the multi phase powers but new frontiers in role largely avoid them same with jump drive okay thank you mm-hm I'm interested in the balancing of all of the cards that you used in race and because obviously you are drawing cards and then spending them as a currency how did you how did you come up with the numbers of one cost to costs it cost cards in in a kind of balancing way that made sense because every time you play test it people could get rid of the different cards each time things like that it is tricky but part of it was the mind the gap thing you'll notice there's very few five cost developments because I wanted there to be a big step up the Sitz and that would be a strategic move some of it was identifying what my strategies warp I'm sorry I didn't repeat the question the question is how did I balance all those cards is that fair yeah by defining some strategies early on like the novelty strategy lots of cheap blue world's then that gave me the anchor points that then the other things could be interpolated to within okay I also tried to put in cards that were entire strategies in a card so that you would really when you drew a card and go ho I have consumer markets maybe I should go the novelty path so and then that was cost 5 because cost 5 is really tricky because for just one more you could have a six dev right but so I made those very powerful so I had a sense of where in the cost spectrum various things would fit and once I developed my over strategies that exists a matter of interpolating and then testing and revising with the sixes which seem like these really strong cards by how did you come up with the total number if 30 to 50 are being drawn did you always want someone to get at least one or two or three like some of just a little bit more mass or balancing how um are you asking about the points on though are you asking about the the proportion of them in the deck well as a strategic strategy led you to what card you wanted to design but the feeling for a player is to when I draw that how often that happened to them and it wit stages right so some of how did I sign the sixes so that and what led me decide some of them would be strategy in a box and some wouldn't if the strategies were well defined in other cards then the six could be a capstone and mostly just scoring if the strategies weren't so well defined in the sits then its powers needed to be stronger and its veep's needed they come down so for example the galactic economy and rebel versus Imperium expansion works with all different colors and so that's a very powerful power and we had to reduce the cost of the VP bonus to compensate for that so it wasn't okay yeah thank you mm-hmm I also have a question about optimizing and specifically balancing the cards when when you are starting out before you go through you know dozens and dozens of initial play tests how do you prefer to visualize all of the the cards in the deck and how they play into each strategy right so how do I visualize the cards how do I visualize the strategies before I start playtesting when I'm constructing the initial prototype well every designer is different in my case I sit in a tea shop and I write down potential names of cards that's how I start okay and I sort of start grouping them into categories and I get those names and it's I'm just working with the names first and then I distribute them among costs and so on from that but I start looking and go this is one strategy this is another strategy and I start circling strategies this is all before I've assigned numbers to the cards but by identifying strategies then it's a lot easier to I did a start thinking about well what are the components of this strategy for example novelty will be keep worlds alien will be density because I know I want density as a strategy and by identifying the key ideas of the strategy that guides me to putting out some numbers and in fact I had all the experience from doing those three Puerto Rico card game iterations race actually didn't change that much from the first prototype to the actual produced version so it was three wheats in a tea shop that may not be how other people are trying to do it but that's what it was for me great thank you yeah okay we are now I believe at the end of the session so I'm happy to have questions but we'll move across the hall to the wrap-up area all right okay all right

Channel: GDC

Views: 36,329

Rating: 4.9463086 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game design, board game, race for the galaxy

Id: JcyyeAww2wc

Length: 61min 49sec (3709 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018