My Stonemaier Games Top Design Regrets

hey this is jamie from stonemaier games and today i'm going to talk about stomar games themselves specifically i'm going to talk about my design regrets and really it's my design and development regrets because i work quite a bit as a developer for games that i don't design at stonemaier games but i also do design some of our games as well so i'm going to go through each of our games in chronicle chronological order and talk specifically about um well about design regrets focusing mostly on mechanical elements of the game but maybe i'll bring in a few other uh non-mechanical elements and i'm going to focus on the core games not the expansions here so and also i want to note up front that none of these regrets are so big that i would change them in a future printing or future edition actually i don't want to say that globally but um these are usually these i mean these are regrets but they're smaller rights they're things that i've learned from and i don't think they ruin any of these games by any means if they did then i would then i would issue some sort of errata or variant and a few of them i had issued official variants for the things that i'll mention here today let's start with viticulture viticulture has actually evolved quite a bit over time because there was the original viticulture in 2012 then there was the second edition and there was the essential edition in 2015 which is the that is the addition of the game that's what i refer to when i say viticulture these days there are two little things that i think of when i look at the viticulture board that i regret a little bit one of them is the sell grapes action uh this action has now been boosted because now you can not only sell grapes to that action but you can also buy or sell fields and i think that makes this actually much more appealing than the original version of that action which is just sell grapes but looking back at it i kind of wish i had made it buy or sell grapes maybe kind of an early version of the trade action that shows up in tuscany because it's pretty rare that i would ever really want to sell grapes like i hardly ever use that action it's really a dead action um or that part of that action but if i could buy grapes i would definitely consider that because there are times in the game where i really wish i could just buy a grape that that i need at that certain point in time to turn into wine and that would be really helpful so i kind of wish i had made that a buy or sell grapes action also in viticulture the original board i actually really liked the original board for teaching the game uh to new players and even just for playing viticulture i i while i can see why players mostly prefer the tuscany board i do enjoy the original viticulture board and i would recommend it for teaching new players i would say that however the one thing i really regret about it is that i didn't put any bonuses on the one to two player action spaces the far left action spaces spaces uh they are bonus free all the bonuses on the original board are on the middle action spaces so you can't access them unless you're throwing a playing a three plus player game and i kind of wish i had um i think i was a little bit too worried about symmetry in terms of having all actions structured the same way whereas there are some actions where you probably could have that that bonus on the first action uh in a two-player game in particular and not have it be overly overly imbalanced like the uh the action of of giving a wine tour making three dollar earning three dollars or three lira instead of two lira is not a big that's not a game-breaking thing if you happen to be the first player that round to get that bonus uh basically i was kind of avoiding giving too much power to the player who was going first for that round uh or that year but uh i think i could have chosen some actions to put a bonus on the one to two player action space so that's viticulture euphoria was our next game to release another jamie stegmeier design and uh my regret for this game definitely is that when you roll pairs in the game it feels really good because by the euphoria rules the original euphoria rules if you roll pairs and you have or you have at least a pair of dice dice that show the same exact number at the beginning of your turn you can place both of those dice on your turn so it gives players a reason to go after more dice and to retrieve more dice even though there's a risk to that as well because they might end up at the beginning of their turn with multiple dice of the same number so they get to take more than one action on the same turn which feels really good it's it's a i think the the the spirit of this mechanism is really really good the problem is it can definitely lead to certain players getting lucky more often than other players simply by the roll of the die and so the variant the official variant that i think is great and it is now the rule of the game when you play with euphoria ignorance's bliss the expansion is that if you start your turn with say a pair of sixes and you want to place the second six in your turn so you place the first six if you want to then place the second six you need to pay one morale um to do that so even though there's a little bit of luck involved there's also a cost involved so you have to manage your morale better if you want to have the potential of placing more than one worker in your turn i think that's a great variant i wish i had thought of that for the original game that's my regret for euphoria for between two cities between two cities is a very streamlined game in game and it isn't one that i designed this is designed by ben ross and matthew o'malley i feel like i'm a little more forgiving for games designed by other designers than i am on myself i'm much more much more harsh on myself as i really could not think of a mechanical element between two cities that i would change other than maybe um if we had thought of the the uh the little maps that you put in in the expansion if we thought of that and put that into the core game because they make the game much more colorful and that actually ties to my regret which is that um i think my art direction for the game could have been a little bit better i love beth sobel's art in the game especially the variety that she put into into these buildings but um the effect and this is a very specific but the effect of having tiles with gray cobblestone borders next to other tiles with gray cobblestone borders is that you end up with a lot of gray in front of you and we realized later through a localization partner that you can reduce that effect by making the tiles bigger and a little brighter and making those borders a little thinner too because if you do that then there's less gray once you've built your city on the table and so i kind of wish we had we had realized that up front and had a little bit less gray on the table as a result of those uh of the multitude of thick bordered thick gray bordered uh tiles in the game so that's between two cities inside i have a few regrets i'm really happy with how scythe worked out but i have a few little things uh there's one that's talked about fairly frequently and that is the end of the game inside whenever a player reaches six stars the game ends immediately and the spirit of that is hey you need to pay attention to other players that's really important it's not a total surprise when the game ends if you pay attention to other players and see that there is the possibility of the game ending at any time that's really important i think it's good inside that you need to pay attention to other players throughout the game um also the the key to the reason of that is that i want to give a player a strong reason to actually end the game because in many play tests of scythe before we had that rule we found that players would prolong the end of the game and in the hopes of getting a slightly better score um and then all other players are kind of doing the same thing and so you're extending the game beyond its welcome if you do that so i wanted to give players a strong reason to end the game and the reason here is if you get your six star no other players can take a turn that's a huge advantage for you however there i mean are some downsides to it it can feel a little sudden you might have one last thing that you really wish you could do but you can't do it and so i kind of wish in hindsight that the rule had been that after a player triggers the end of the game all players including that player get one final turn but they are not allowed to move they're not allowed to take the move action uh this being really key to that idea of being the player to end to end the game because oftentimes i think scythe works really well when it ends with a climactic moment of a player involved in usually combat or some sort of territorial control where they spread out and they do something big and they don't want other players to take another turn because that would greatly decrease uh the impact of of their of their big play and so i i that's kind of one regret that i have there that i that i didn't think of that rule or that idea of letting each player take one more turn but they're not allowed to move and we do implement something like that and really a variety of end game conditions and triggers and rules in the wind gamut expansion so if you don't like the end game for scythe try the wind gamut i bet you'll find a resolution tile that you really like the other little thing besides that is not discussed all that often but it is a question that comes up frequently and i should mention that as i was creating this list i looked through the faqs the frequently asked question lists for each of these games to see what players are actually asking a lot about to see if it could remind me of any of my design regrets and this one is that inside one of the most common questions is about producing workers and i think part of the reason for that is that workers are produced in a different way well workers are producing the same way as resources but because they're pulled from your player mat and there's there's a cost involved and it's the produce action that they're pulled from on your player mat that there's some confusion about the timing of like how much am i actually paying for these workers am i paying for what i'm revealing and i think the rules are pretty clear but we still get a lot of questions about that so i kind of wish i had not associated workers with production and instead created the enlist action around enlisting workers or maybe you've changed the name of it and so basically i'm saying that you you would not produce workers at all if you want more workers you have to take the enlist action instead i kind of wish i had done that that's maybe my my biggest design regret about scythe next up is charterstone charterstone has definitely by far the biggest faq about any of these games maybe tapster being second the second highest but charterstone has a lot of questions in the faq and so i kind of wish in general that um that not only would the rules be clear but with the rules kind of constantly reinforce these ideas because all these ideas are in the rules for charterstone but i think players in a legacy game need uh reminders of various rules as they play and uh but there's one variant uh that that we've created for charterstone that i think is a good variant and that is uh the rule in charter student is that if there are any tokens on a building you can't construct a building on top of it so you can't take a sticker and you can't put it on top of that sticker and charger stone and the reason for this is that you know there's kind of there's stuff in the way and um of you putting that sticker down so physically it like makes putting a sticker down more difficult and it adds to weird rule situations where a worker or token meant one thing on the building when it was a sticker a but now if you put a new sticker on that and you still have those tokens on it what do they mean or do they go away what does that mean it creates you know all these other rule complications but i kind of wish i i think those complications may have been worth it because there are certainly there are frustrating moments in charter stone where you really want to put a building on a place but there's something in the way of you doing so and usually it doesn't matter like like there's no negative impact if you were just allowed to do that and so my variant if you're playing charter stone in person is if it doesn't create any weird situations go ahead and put the sticker there like and just put the tokens back on top of that building or even return them to the the player if it's a player's work or something like that return their worker to them just do the more fun thing in that instance the other little thing about charterstone is i tried to balance so in charterstone you have these it's kind of this building tech tree that's under the surface you can't really see it but it's there so as you construct a building that building can create some paths that you can then open a crate that can let you build a one building or another building and and those buildings might have paths as well that you can branch out to and so you're getting there's this progression of buildings that branch out from a simple building to a complex more futuristic building and i kind of held my i kind of rubber banded myself in terms of how powerful those later buildings were by making their costs higher in fact there are a number of buildings in charter stone that are strictly better versions of previous uh previous buildings or they they should be strictly better they are better for better in terms of their benefits but their costs are also higher and i kind of wish i had just made them strictly better just give them better benefits and the same cost or a slightly different cost but not a higher cost uh i think that would have felt better because there are times in charter stone where i'm like well i have this building that's not all that expensive to use and the benefit's pretty good or do i put a very similar building on top of it that has a marginally better benefit but is then more expensive to use and it doesn't always feel good to do that so i kind of wish i just let myself make later buildings strictly better that's charterstone now we're on to my little side we're kind of in an era of of uh of estimar games here where very few games were designed by me my little side is one of the first ones and by far i would say the most common question i get about my little scythe is uh how movement works so if you aren't carrying if your units aren't carrying around a character if your characters aren't carrying around any resources in my little side they can move up to two hexes however if they're carrying around resources they're kind of weighed down they can only move one hex the question that comes up is what if you move a character a character that's not carrying around anything onto a hex and they pick up something are they then allowed to move again or can they not and the answer is they can't they cannot move because they've already moved once but i can see how it's confusing as to whether or not they can actually do that so i'm not even sure exactly how i would change that in a revised version of my little side um yeah i'm not exactly sure but i might just get rid of that rule altogether just say that you can always move up to two spaces regardless of what you're carrying around um maybe that's more fun that way and less and definitely would remove this question about can i continue to move or not that would be the one thing that i changed about my little side otherwise i'm really happy with how it turned out another ben rossett and matthew o'malley design is between two castles and between two castles again i don't have many mechanical regrets at all about how the game turned out however i do have another art direction regret which comes down to me the art direction and that is i should have pushed for bigger text and bigger icons on the tiles because the the icons in particular are pretty small the icons that tell you how the tile works there are other ways to get that information there's a rules reference card that every player has that you can read but those icons you're meant to be able to play the game without using that card and if the icons were bigger that would be great and we did actually fix this in a future printing of between two castles where we made the icons and the text bigger on the tiles and i think it helped for a lot of people with especially in low lighting or vision impairment that's been a learning point throughout stonemart games keeping in mind vision impairment and low lighting for the font contrast and the font size in our games that's between two castles we're about halfway through here we're into wingspan and wingspan you know has done very well it brought people a lot of joy which is the goal here at stillmeyer games and there's really just one little i mean there are probably little things about specific cards that i might change a little bit um we there was there was a typo that impacted the first printing things like that always with any game there's gonna be little things like that but the one thing that i think i would change that continues to this day really is uh the phrasing of when activated and i think elizabeth and i had a little bit of a debate about this and who knows when activated could be the correct way to go but i think i would prefer for that phrase to be if activated because it's often confused at least by new players with when played when you play a card this ability activates versus when activated that's when you're taking your turn down a card row a habitat and you're activating the card and the reason i like if more than win is that it indicates that players have a choice as to whether or not they can activate that ability which is true every time you move on to a when activated ability you have a choice to activate that ability or not and we get a lot of questions about that like can i activate can i choose not to activate it if i want and i think if would indicate if if you have activated it go ahead and gain the benefits or do the thing um but you also don't have to activate it that's like that's just one little phrasing thing but it would have impact a lot of cards in wingspan so it's not something we're going to change at this point but i'm curious actually what you think about that if that would have been more uh clear to you if we'd use if activated instead of when activated that's wingspan for tapster i have a few things one thing is something that we've fixed in the arts and architecture expansion much to the chagrin of some players and that is that we added a rule saying that you are not allowed to activate the same advancement space twice on the same turn um there's certain abilities in tapestry that can lead to terms where you're kind of looping abilities multiple times in over really overpowered ways and that can feel good in temperatures good to do overpowered things in tapestry um but i think it's also good to close loopholes that can lead to things that are just too powerful especially with the sheer number of combinations of civilizations capital cities and tapestry cards and tech cards in uh in tapestry and so i kind of wish we had said that up front just as a global rule you can only activate each advancement spot space once per turn uh whether that's an income turn or an advance return i think that would have closed a lot of loopholes while still led to while still leading the possibility of a lot of kind of moments that feel overpowered at tapestry which i think is a good thing the other thing that i think i would change this is something that we still could potentially change if we wanted i think there are some house rule variants about it is the uh at the end of the military track you can gain a new civilization and you are meant to just draw one random civilization the rule is you draw one random civilization and you add it to your player tableau and i i probably should have said that players draw two and then pick one there are a few civilizations that say like if you draw this in the middle of the game discard it and pick another one uh which is one way to approach it but uh and but i i just think i i think it would have given players a little bit more like you you want players to feel really good when they get to the end of the track and and have real a really good powerful bonus um and i i kind of wish i i changed that and even as i'm saying that i'm remembering one other thing uh that i that i would prefer to change and that is near the end of the i think it's the nano technology action uh where there's a bonus of uh spending you have to pay a certain number of tech cards get rid of a certain number of tech cards three tech cards to gain 10 victory points and that trade-off isn't really worth it because at that point you are probably already getting income from your tech track based on the number of tech cards you have and so i kind of wish i had made that uh two tech cards instead of three tech cards yeah a couple little things to tap through there in pendulum so pendulum is a big one and i have a i don't know if this is i mean this is actually a tough one to think of a regret because i i really like what travis did with pendulum and i but i still understand that it didn't resonate with a lot of people i think a lot of that is due to the real-time nature of the game i think maybe i would have pushed harder to make pendulum a simultaneous game but not a game with timers um because i i really think that this everything else about pendulum is really really well designed uh and the time even the timer system is really well designed i don't want to take away from that but i think uh the types of gamers that resonate with the level of medium weight uh like middleweight euro style play and taps in pendulum the style of choices you're making there are not the types of players who want to be rushed into their decisions and you can end up feeling a little rushed in pendulum at times not all the time sometimes you have too much time but there are times where you can feel a little rushed and i think by making it simultaneous um without the timers i think that would have uh would have limited that concern the good thing though is that the game does have a simultaneous mode in the game like that there's there's a tile in the game that shows you exactly how to play simultaneous but not in real time and i think that's a good that's a very good way to play i think it's a completely valid way to play it's in the box itself but i kind of wish we had made that the default and then made the timer version the the backup to that if players wanted to try if they wanted to be a little while and do the timed version that is pendulum a few more games left here we have red rising so in red rising definitely the clear pick for me of the thing that i would change and and it's so clear that we have an official variant that says the following when choosing one or more opponents to banish potentially banish or steal a card from their hand without the immediate immediate ability to regain a card you may so that's the first phrase so that's that the idea of forcing an opponent basically to banish one of their cards from hand to get rid of a card to go from five cards to four cards or six cards to five cards um i'll continue here the variant is you may only choose players who have more cards in hand than their starting hand uh and we've phrased it this way because while most players start with five cards the house series player starts with six cards uh the the ruling goes on to say you can still deploy cards with such abilities but any abilities are related to choosing an opponent won't trigger so for example the first turn in the game i have a card that says target opponent uh banishes a card from their hand that can be a really big blow early on in the game i think later in the game those abilities are a lot more balanced if a player and they're meant to kind of keep certain players in check if a player has been really good at adding additional cards to their hand um a card that makes them banish one of those cards is really powerful and can be really important and those banished cards are balanced in other ways usually they're really good cards to keep in hand so you don't want to deploy them to use that ability things like that but it can be just really disheartening early on in the game of red rising to for a player to banish one of their five cards they're starting five cards and all of a sudden they're down to four cards and so i really like this variant and i would highly recommend that you play with it that's my regret from red rising in rolling realms there's regret that i had that i that actually didn't stem up until two of the promo packs that came about and i like that different promo packs and different realms and ruling realms are different uh difficulty levels and uh they range and and how many like how many dice that you actually need to complete that realm and to get a bunch of resources and to get all six stars however there are two promo realms where you can't there there are certain resources that they can't you can't earn them at all i'll actually show them to you so in terra mystica let's see what the terra mystica realm there's the retire there's the second one i'm going to talk about in terra mystica there's no way to gain coins in terra mystica coins are one of the three resources pumpkins hearts and coins and uh while i think it's interesting for one realm not to give you coins i kind of wish for any realm that you can get any of the three resources because uh i don't know i just like it better that way and the other realm not only is there one realm but there are two realms that do it in libertalia because you're these are pirates they're not giving up their gold to you but i think it would be a slightly better design if i had put a a pirate here that actually gives you a coin so that is uh that is my regret from rolling realms and it won't happen again in future promos or i can't guarantee you but i think it's highly unlikely that we would not just entirely not have one of the three resources in the game on one of the realms in rolling realms yeah so that's my regret from william realms and last speaking of libertarian we have libertalia winds of gale crest two little regrets here one again is an art direction choice that i made and that is uh i don't quite know what i was thinking here but the three dollar coins in libertalia have five sides they are they're they are five-sided uh tokens and so whenever i look at those tokens i think that is a five dollar coin five dollar doubloon uh because it has five sides that's how my brain works for some reason um and i'm guessing this is confusing for other people as well and so uh i wish it had been any other any other shape other than five because there is also a five dollar coin a five dollar doubloon in the game that is circular so i kind of wish maybe we had reversed those shapes and made the five dollar coin five-sided and made the three dollar coin either a triangle or a circle uh for more clarity there the other one is the question that i think i've gotten the most about libertalia is about the cook the cook says this unless you first gain a hook token and gain a second loot token from the current day and that confuses a lot of people the spirit of that rule is that uh one of the hook abilities and there are two hook abilities in libertaria which adds the confusion here but and only one of them says uh the character who gains the hook uh place discard that character place them in your graveyard they they they go away they die um and so the reason here is it's saying if your cook dies they don't also get to gain a second loot token um but we could have probably said that in a different way and i think it added to a lot of confusion especially since the hook doesn't always discard the character uh but the yeah the spirit of the cook is in most circumstances you are just gaining two loot tokens one by one it just so happens at that first token if for some reason the first token you gain is a hook the cook is just discarded right away but you're never going to do that of course right because if there is a hook that you need to take you'll take that second most likely and then take the other one although there probably are circumstances where maybe you're trying to have the hook avoid taking or the cook avoid taking a relic or a bad thing a cursed cursed item something like that um yeah but that it just added that wordy we and that's the odd thing about libertarian is we worked really really hard to get the wording as accurate as possible so there wouldn't have to be faqs and questions on board game deacon in the facebook group but even then some things slipped through and in our effort to avoid confusion we actually added some confusion in the instance of the of the cook so yeah those are my design regrets mostly mechanical things some of them are direction and and wording related and uh yeah i i don't know i hopefully you can get a sense for the types of things that i think about when i look back at my our games at stonemart games through this video and i'd love to hear your thoughts on the different decisions that we made i'm happy to answer any questions about design decisions that we've made your question might already be answered in the faq of that game feel free to check that but i'm also happy to answer here or i can copy and paste over from the faq if it's already there anyway let me know your questions in the in the comments below thanks

Channel: Stonemaier Games

Views: 29,939

Keywords: game design, board games, tabletop games

Id: P3P70PrE8i4

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/black_daveth]

Scythe's endgame trigger is perfect, the problem is the size of the reward for doing so.

Obviously that person is going to have at least one more star than anyone else, often two, and that's already enough extra points to incentivise ending the game in most cases. That's fine, great even. But the "fan-out" advantage is way too strong.

Unless you're playing 5+ players, its usually not that difficult to seize five or six territories with your final move action and that is a lot of points. Almost certainly enough to make a close game feel uncompetitive in the final scoring when combined with your extra stars, unless you're two tiers behind the rest of the field on popularity.

It just feels so cheap when everyone has spent the whole game managing their map positions so carefully (we all must know that having workers sent back to your starting space without a mech is brutal) only for someone to be able to fling their workers across the map knowing they'll never have to defend those positions, and even if they did the popularity cost to any would be attackers is nothing short of punishing.

Interesting that Jamey mentions the thought of letting everyone take one more turn, but without taking the move action. With that caveat it wouldn't change anything IMO.

Once more around or equal turns sounds like a nice change, but I would definitely still allow movement, and I would also exclude territories only being controlled by workers from the final scoring.

[u/40DegreeDays]

I really disagree with Pendulum - the real time is pretty much the only interesting thing in that game, and taking it out would just leave the most bland imaginable resource conversion euro.

Interesting that he didn't hit on balance concerns (like the factions that needed to be banned in Scythe), but maybe that's more of development than design.

[u/Inconmon]

Enjoyable video, but really surprised on his regrets re Charterstone. He doesn't even address all the major issues they people complain about.

[u/EndersGame_Reviewer]

For those of us not currently able to watch the video, what are the key takeaways from what Jamey has to say about his design regrets?

[u/Ledvolta]

I assume this is a perpetual livestream?

[u/wa7ednafar]

I disagree with changing the game end condition in scythe. Yes it can feel too sudden and it gives a huge advantage, but it's also very exciting. Giving everyone one more turn would feel underwhelming. Using enlist for worker placement might be a good idea, but I didn't find the cost for using workers as confusing as he described.

I completely agree with the Wingspan change. It would've been a huge QoL improvement, because the idea that activating cards being optional doesn't feel very intuitive.

[u/gutshotgames]

It may be my perception vs reality, but it seems to me that Stonemaier moves on quickly. If a game isnt a hit, they dont seem to try to amend the rules or push out an expansion. This probably makes a good deal of business sense but to me they seem to move on faster than most.